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She was not, of course, wholly unacquainted with the idea of someone turncoating Chaos. But still, it was odd to consider, and she twisted her face up further into an expression of skepticism before realizing that this was neither flattering nor dignified, and letting it smooth away.

"I mean, I guess," she said. "Probably not a good idea to run them off if they wanna stick a knife in the Negaverse's back." And then, somewhat aloofly: "I don't know about living amicably, though. That seems like some real BS. I mean, do you wanna live amicably with them? They're worshipping something that eats planets. And they're feeding it people."

"If they wanna figure out how to stop draining people it's one thing," she said after a long, deliberating pause. Alekto wasn't used to exercising this much thought, generally. "But they're still working for Chaos. I mean like. Chaos keeps eating planets. You have to be pretty dumb to work for that. But maybe this guy isn't dumb," she concluded, in a spirit of fairness, "and wants to change teams. I don't plan on going in guns blazing any time unless it's to help someone, so."

Here she gave a little shrug, to indicate that she would not, on the off chance she encountered the guy, proceed to directly to attempted murder without passing go.

"But to be honest, I don't go out much like this anyway. I'd probably do it less if Creedence didn't harass me all the time. Sometimes I distract her with Dungeons and Dragons."

The real answers to that question were not worth giving for the most part, so she opted for only zeroing in on the least embarrassing one.

"Too busy," she said, with a vague wave of her hand that gave the aloof sense of someone who is, in fact, so busy that she assumes everyone around her is in the same boat, and will immediately sympathize. "I don't have time to sit around waiting for some guy in an ugly coat to drain some other guy who got too drunk at the bar most nights, and that's about all I run into besides a youma here and there." And then, confidingly: "I don't like being Alekto enough to wanna be Alekto when I'm not being useful to my fellow man."

This, too, was only part of the patchwork of truth. She did like being Alekto - liked the feeling of even uneven and unreliable power; liked looking as intimidating as she sometimes wanted to feel. Nor did she care about being useful to her fellow man as much as she probably should, let alone as much as she had just professed to.

But the pressure of failure - that sense that she was always scrabbling to be something she couldn't remember being, some Great Thing, and that she would never achieve it - well, she got enough of that in her daily life, and at least no one was dying when she failed - except herself, for a camera, under a pool of corn syrup.