“It was. When you’re a kid, you want nothing more than to be an adult. I felt adult. They took me to the head of the boss, he asked me what I wanted to do. Later he introduced me to other people. They respected me, and I got into that whole mess because my parents couldn’t. They were all, like, school, extracurriculars, curfew. Every time I tried to do my own thing or build social networks, which are kind of important, they’d ground me. I was a child to them and they made it one hundred percent clear they were going to treat me like a child.”

“Were they…?” Armiger asked, “Uh, Nazis?”

“My parents? They had beliefs,” Scribe said, offering an apologetic shrug. “At the time, I felt like they kept all the bad parts while ignoring the good parts.”

“And now?” Vessel asked. She looked nervous. She tucked blue hair behind the portion of her mask that covered her ear. “Sorry, nevermind.”

“It’s okay. I’m willing to talk about it, it’s just… it’s not like I want to go stand in front of cameras or write some public letter saying how dumb I was as a kid. We got an amnesty and that should count for something.”

“Sorry,” Vessel said. “Shouldn’t have brought it up. Pre-amnesty.”

“It’s okay! Really! To answer your question, do I still think there were good parts,” Scribe said, hunching forward a bit. “Not going to lie. You wouldn’t see anyone joining if there was nothing good about it. But now? I think there were way less than I thought then. Community, some desire to see things improve, even if they weren’t entirely right about how. I look anywhere else, I don’t see the same kind of drive or push that I remember from when I was in the Clans. Later in the Empire. So I want to keep that part of it. Loyalty, strong ties, d—um, drive.”

“Yeah,” Vessel said. She frowned a bit at the stutter.

Scribe had already been over a lot of this with Vessel and Accolade. Accolade was off to one side, smoking off his nerves from their earlier, brief encounter with the Red Queen, mostly staying quiet.

Armiger was the latest member of their group. She hadn’t had any late night patrols or hangouts with just him, so she hadn’t gone into it much.

“And the… other stuff?” Armiger asked.