I think if you showed baru cormorant excel spreadsheets she would feel wonder at its arithmetic capabilities and profound pleasure at her command of such a quick witted tool but after a few hours sunk into playing with it the cold fist of dread that this was a masquerade tool - provided her to poison her figures? - would close in her chest and she’d queasily redo all the sums by hand just to double check and finding nothing would wonder if it wasn’t an exercise to steadily sow her faith in the technology and make her complacent in its whisperings so that one errant sum arced from the heart of the empire like an arrow could unravel the intestines of her lifelong work and she would come to the troubled conclusion that she could never trust their solutions meanwhile the apparitor is like you aren’t using Microsoft excel? and baru is like (lie) I found its results finicky, I trust my own hand better & apparitor’s like really now? You had trouble with it? Odd… And their brow furrows and the white hot knife of triumph like a darting fish flashes through baru’s mind like I’ve caught them guilty now! meanwhile exceedingly hot women are begging to have sex with her and she’s like don’t bother me right now I need to think on how to outsmart Microsoft excel














