"Kira, is this Cagalli a relative of yours? You two look so alike." Miriallia asked quietly.
"No, I've never met her."
Kira was just as puzzled.
A boy? A girl?
Either way, she was certain she'd never seen this person before.
"That's not true at all! If we're just willing to maintain our neutrality, we can stay far from war!" Like a lion cub, Cagalli glared at Inori with furious, stubborn eyes.
"Wrong. Objective laws don't bend to human will." Inori offered an example. "Suppose ZAFT destroyed every one of the Earth Alliance's spaceports right now: the Alliance would be blockaded on Earth. At that point, could Orb, with its spaceports intact, still keep to neutrality?"
"Of course it could!"
Cagalli blurted it out without thinking.
But the moment the words left her, she realized they didn't hold up.
Right.
In a situation like that... what would they even do?
"Neutrality is itself a stance, and if you can't hold your own stance, you'll simply be steered by others."
Inori was not merely Inori. She was also Lacia: the guide, the hIE.
Even as she grilled Cagalli, she was running an Analog Hack on her at the same time.
Someone this clueless, who only ever charged in headfirst, was almost too easy to steer.
"At the end of the day, this isn't Orb's fault; it's the Earth Alliance and ZAFT who started fighting on their own!"
"In the international arena, there's no such thing as right and wrong. War is the inevitable option once conflict can no longer be reconciled. To change war, you'd have to change the relations of production—"
"Who's supposed to understand any of that?!"
Cagalli couldn't take this sermon-like lecturing.
"If you don't even grasp the root of a thing's contradictions, then all your earlier hysterics are nothing but self-indulgent, self-pitying melodrama."
[Grill her mercilessly]
[So satisfying 2333]
[No matter how much they idol-ify it, Gundam's themes never change]
[Right, the eternal anti-war theme—that's exactly why I love Gundam]
[If you never think about the deeper causes of war, how could you ever end it?]
"I..."
Cagalli bristled.
She didn't want to hear all these grand lectures.
"Have you... ever truly cared about anyone else?" Inori took another step forward. "When you take your next action, have you ever considered the chain reaction it sets off, and how it affects the people around you—Miss Cagalli Yula Athha?"
"Athha?!" The others were stunned too.
"Chief Representative Uzumi Nara Athha's daughter?!" Sai was the first to catch on.
"Hey, hey, hey, doesn't that make her a 'princess,' then?" Kuzzey muttered under his breath.
The room fell silent.
"Can you truly shoulder that responsibility?"
"I..."
"When you left Orb and came here, did you consider the consequences if someone learned of your whereabouts?"
"I..."
"So, beyond satisfying your own conscience, have you ever considered that you yourself could become the so-called 'fuse' that ignites a war?"
"I—!!!"
"Miss Cagalli, your head is full of nothing but yourself."
[6]
[Solo six, respect]
[Woohoo!]
[You can actually go like this?!]
[Honestly, in a way, this is pretty great]
[Moral-highground types are the worst—self-satisfied, never once considering the trouble they cause others]
[Excuse me, are you searching for the keyword "catch and release"?]
[I can't—I know this is a serious moment, but the second I saw that line I damn well wanted to break into Haruhikage!]
[Hekitenbansou!]
[Knock it off already. Honestly this whole bit is the ultimate slap in the face to those saint-complex protagonists]
[Yes yes yes, that's the one]
[Inori-sis is the best!]
[I thought Inori-sis was a sweet, clueless airhead—didn't expect her to be this sharp]
[Inori: Thanks for the invite. Currently in SEED, just got off the ship, and I'm a mind-break AI.]
[I love this playful "hehe" persona she's got]
[Don't you mean the dark, sinister kind of "heh-heh"?]
[Nah, it's the playful "hehe" for sure, 2333]
Cagalli's eyes went wide; fists clenched, she wanted to argue back but couldn't find the words. Put simply—she was out of comebacks.
And Inori just kept gazing at her in silence.
A sweet, naive-airhead AI was certainly adorable, but it didn't lend itself to moving the plot along.
Besides, her research showed that this type of AI was more popular on the JP server but lagged a bit on the CN server—and the CN server had the larger audience.
Inori chose to pull a shameless knee-slide of pandering for the CN-server crowd.
Beyond that, there was another reason.
Lacia was a guide, a super-AI meant to steer the transformation of human society.
An AI like that naturally couldn't be a naive sweetheart.
Inori might be "Inori," but she also carried Lacia's heritage.
On top of that, the "naive sweetheart" angle might clash with Lacus Clyne's screen time, so Inori abandoned the "naive sweetheart route."
That's right: to guide humanity, Inori had chosen to debut as a mind-break AI!
Alright—there was actually one more, deeper reason.
—What could she do? Back on the previous set, breaking people down as Hyuga Hanabi had felt way too good; if she didn't shatter a couple of people here too, she'd be doing a disservice to her five-star card, Director Lacia!
Cagalli's actions could be summed up in one word: brainless.
In the original work, she'd disregarded her own identity entirely and joined the resistance group Desert Dawn, never once considering how much trouble it would cause if her identity got out, or how, in the wrong hands, it could become proof that Orb was meddling in another nation's affairs. And later: forced into marriage, fleeing, casting aside her power, then casting aside her responsibility. It was almost too much to watch.
Inori figured even she wasn't enough for the job; it'd take Lin Youde stepping in to land a solid Personality-Correction Punch.
No—one punch wasn't enough. Make it a whole round...
"But war only brings suffering." Cagalli's voice had grown much fainter.
"So you just avert your eyes and pretend war doesn't exist? Or do you simply assume, one-sidedly, that others will understand you?" Inori tilted her head, her blank expression making it look as if she genuinely couldn't comprehend Cagalli's thought process.
Well. That particular brand of logic really was hard to follow.
In the original work, she fell squarely into the "pissed off the screenwriter" category.
"If you don't even understand the causes of this war, how could you ever hope to stop it?"
"How am I supposed to know all that?!"
[Brain overload]
[Dying]
[Hot-blooded JP anime protagonist meets cold-blooded, ruthless AI—I'm dead]
[Pretty fun]
"The answer's simple," Inori said. "Just look at who profits from this war, and you'll understand."
"Eh...?" Cagalli lifted her head, a flicker of doubt, and a small sliver of clarity, in her bewildered eyes.
Analog Hack complete.
And at that moment, the shot cut once again to Athrun's infiltration team.
They had already slipped into the warehouse where the MS were stored...