"I kind of liked it" she said.
The admission was quiet and slightly surprised, as if she hadn't known she was going to say it until the words were already out. She looked at the empty pocket on Raizen's chest, and the expression on her face was the expression of someone mourning something they'd only known for a few hours but that had, in those hours, made an impression deep enough to matter.
"It called me a stick…" she mumbled.
"It called your body a stick, but you mind- We talked about this!"
"It still called me a stick..." She paused. "And then it talked about more things… I've been thinking about that."
"It talked a lot," Raizen said. "Most of it was insults."
"But it wasn't wrong. About my Eon balance. About the bottleneck. It saw something in five seconds that I've been struggling with for years without understanding why."
