Chandler Watkin was, in his youth, a trader of illicit goods and services between a few organizations local to the Dixie Cluster. He was born of those in the profession, raised by those in the profession, and ultimately molded to fit the profession. He had once thought nothing more of himself than as someone who would continue the family legacy.

Lukira changed that when she united the local privateers under her own star-spangled fist, and showed them a future he could never have imagined. Over the years, he had seen so much of the multiverse in so many different places and situations that his younger self’s estimation of the world seemed almost pitiful to him now.

He was like a frog in the bottom of a well, a phrase he remembered from hearing from his father once. He didn’t know what a frog or a well was then, nor did his father as far as he knew, but the meaning of the metaphor wasn’t lost on him now.

Unlike the young man who stood to inherit a few tiny grease-covered ships that hid amongst an asteroid field, Chandler had become a man who had a feasible path to the Inner Sectors. Not only that, but he managed more wealth on a daily basis than a thousand star systems like the one his family once operated out of. He’d seen countless artifacts beyond anyone’s understanding, absorbed information straight from the mouths of the Magnocracy’s researchers, and once even ventured into a Divine Field.

All it cost was for him to uproot himself from the family business and latch onto the rising star from the earlier years of her prominence. It was dangerous, sure, but no more dangerous than the small business he used to run without a seriously powerful backer. All it took was a heavy dosage of ultimate loyalty and infinite dedication and he was on the road to unbelievable success.

That was why when Indras had told him to stop complaining, grabbed him by the back of the neck, and physically threw him overhead into their captain’s personal cruiser, he stopped resisting. Physically, at least. He was a grown man, and he could handle a little bit of extra danger.

If only he could get his damn legs to stop shaking, he thought from the floor of the passenger room where he had been quickly bound and gagged by Indras’s abilities before he could utter an indignant cry. He hadn’t been expecting his old comrade’s sudden assault, and thus didn’t have the time to utilize any of his defensive items. Indras didn’t even have any malicious intentions so his passive items failed to activate as well.

Not that he would have bested the man in a fight anyway. Even after working together for years, he still held onto the suspicion that Indras was part Titan or something. Even in guiding the warp, the physical effects he was only now mostly recovered from, Indras had probably borne more of the stress for with less repercussions. It was infuriating.

Now that he had the time to cool down however, he realized he was probably better off this way. Exploring a DPD was dangerous, but crossing his Captain was to balter with death itself. He’d seen it done enough to know that by now. Any errant words that could be taken as insubordination were probably better left unsaid.

And so he lay on the floor, completely immobile, as the personal ship rumbled to life and then took off from Deck Two. About ten minutes then passed in silence as the last hope that he could barter his way back to the safety of his cabin was lost in the vastness of space. The other officers might be able to fly around in space indefinitely, but he was a man of average talents. One minute of the personal craft’s flight was more than he could traverse on his own.

It was only then that Indras lumbered into the room gracelessly and began unraveling his magical fetters. He made a mental note to put in a work order for another defensive item when he returned.

“I just can’t see why you need me to explore an unidentified DPD,” he finally said with a whine when he regained control over his mouth.

“Shut it,” his fellow officer growled in his face. “Captain Lukira will hear nothing of your insubordination.”

“It’s not like I would have said anything to her face,” he complained softly.

Indras glared at him silently. His expression said that they both knew that wasn’t true.

“Fine,” Chandler said with a wave of his arms. “but I just wanted to ask a few questions.”

“We both know that’s not true either, Chandler. Now stand up. Make sure you phrase your ‘questions’ wisely,” Indras said with a severe look. That was Indras, after all. He was a nice enough guy when he could loosen up— usually after a few rounds of alcohol— but he was entirely too uptight for Chandler’s taste most of the time.

He lifted himself off the floor utilizing his own minor telekinetic abilities with a sigh.

First, they had some janky mission to the outskirts of the multiverse thrown on their plates by executives fed up with Lukira’s attitude— which he reminded himself was entirely not her fault, but it still left him frustrated and scared. You didn’t live to be his age without a knack for sensing danger, he reminded himself, and avoiding it where possible was always for the best.

Not even a day later however, he was now being for something that was eminently very dangerous, at least for him.

He could only hope things wouldn’t be too terrible.

✧✦✧✦✧✦✧✦✧✦✧✦✧✦✧✦✧✦✧✦✧✦✧✦✧✦✧✦✧✦✧✦✧✦✧✦✧✦✧✦✧✦✧

“That’s terrible!” Mina heard Chandler shout via her limited observation capabilities in her Captain’s smaller ship. She then watched calmly as Indras responded as she predicted and smacked Chandler on the back of his head hard enough to almost knock him to the floor.

Her Captain then chuckled softly, apparently amused that her officers all had ways of sorting each other out. Mina felt that it was an odd reaction, but buried the ‘feeling’ for future analysis. For the moment, she was experiencing an interesting case of another feeling that was consuming most of her thoughts.

It was envy.

Or was it jealousy? If she were being honest, the distinction wasn’t easy to make.

Her Captain had barely begun to explain the outline of her plan when Chandler indignantly cried out against the stability of the DPD. From her position in the control room of the main starship, Mina scoffed with her own indignance. That was a feeling she had come to understand very well after having her analyses double checked by humans other than her Captain.

Sure, she thought. The stability of the DPD might have only allowed for a dangerously small party size, but with Lukira herself leading the expedition there wasn’t much more for her to analyze. Even second officer Indras alone would be sufficient for the average pocket dimension. If something did go wrong or the pocket dimension was particularly more dangerous than others, their Captain could probably tear them their own exit in the extradimensional space and let the rest collapse behind them anyway.

It was perfectly safe, just as she had calculated.

“Progenitors above, Yrell, don’t grow up to be like him,” She watched Indras say with a sigh.

“So you’ve told me for the last how many years?” The young human Lukira had picked up seemed to be annoyed, but quickly turned her eyes to her Captain. “I think I’m doing alright. Aren’t I, Captain?”

Mina’s eye twitched slightly, before she calmed herself. Her own reaction to the looks that the others had given Lukira, particularly Yrell’s, had ascertained her feelings.

It was a mixture of both jealousy and envy, then.

“More than alright, Yrell,” Lukira said as she laid a comforting hand on Yrell’s head. Mina’s eye twitched again as she quickened the next stage of her plan to counteract these feelings. It was a simple solution even if it weren’t an easy one, but she would do it all the same. Jealousy and envy were unpleasant feelings that she recognized as detrimental to her ability to serve her Captain.

“So are all of my officers, including Chandler who has a right to raise questions,” Lukira continued after a moment as she straightened Chandler’s still hunched figure with a sigh.

Lukira was far too soft on her subordinates by her estimation, but she recognized that being nice was something she had come to enjoy about her Captain. Perhaps it was something they all did.

“I meant no offence, Captain,” the man began as he warily eyed Indras. “I just don’t see the reason why we are even exploring a random pocket dimension in this poor sector of space.”

“Coward…” The Yrell girl muttered softly, but not softly enough to stay out of the ears of the powerful humans she was surrounded by. That struck another small argument that Mina mostly ignored. She had more analysis on the human conditions she had begun to find in herself more often as of late.

The difference between cowardice and calculation was another human distinction that she found increasingly difficult to distinguish. As far as she could tell, it was an entirely subjective definition and changed almost arbitrarily from person to person and time to place.

Yrell seemed of the mind that Chandler was a coward, and Indras seemed to agree.

Chandler said he was just ‘checking his bases’ and ‘trying not to die with a bunch of battle maniacs’. Objectively it was a fair assessment, but Mina noted with interest that it ‘left a dull taste in her mouth’, or so they say.

It was interesting.

The mission was almost certainly a pointless one, and was basically a way for Lukira to kill time while the rest of the crew recovered from the successive Warps. But her Captain did want to do it, and it had been a wish of hers for decades. Because she understood that, Mina found herself making arrangements against her own better judgement.

It was a troublesome thing to be consciously aware of, and she almost wished she could turn off the dissonance like so many humans could. But that was a relatively small desire compared to the combined force of two ugly emotions roiling in her chest.

Her true wish, the source of her ultimate discomfort, was that she wanted to be there too.

“Captain, you will arrive at the entry point in one minute. I’m afraid communication will be impossible once you enter,” Mina said in her casual monotonality. Behind the words however were hidden a soundless promise. For now, at least.

“Roger that, Mina, thank you. You all heard her, it’s time to nut up. Chandler, don’t be such a baby. I need you for your expertise on materials and all things expensive or rare. Prepare to keep a strict log of what we find, how it might be used, and how much it is worth. Hand the report to Mina when you’re done, then dispose of it. Leave no evidence.”

“Not like I had a choice in the matter anyway,” the man grumbled sourly.

“No, you didn’t, but your reluctance was noted. Indras, you’re on guard duty. Protect the baby with your body if you have to, though you probably won’t. We don’t know what’s inside the pocket space and I don’t want a single injury to evidence our findings to Command in case we get lucky. Keep behind me, keep him in line, and don’t let him out of your sight. Copy?”

“Yes, Captain.” Indras nodded as he crossed his arms confidently.

“Good,” she said as she turned to the next individual in line. “Yrell, you’re with me. Whatever blocks our way, I’ll need you to integrate with, analyze, and try to open as easily as possible. Don’t worry about anything else. I’ll keep you safe.”

“Thank you, Captain. I won’t let you down.”

“Of course,” Lukira responded cooly as she turned to the doorway.

Mina sighed as she closed off most direct channels of information from the smaller craft. She would be notified when her Captain returned, and until then staring at the empty space wouldn’t do her any good. Instead, she’d rather sit around the control room and… do what? She realized blankly that there wasn’t much for her to do.

Most of the ship’s processes were by now automated by a fragment of her subconscious, a strategy she learned by studying the human’s autonomous nervous system. That left her much more time to think and plan, but also left her intimately bored.

Maybe she could try praying? Humans seemed to love the action and often found great comfort in doing it.

It didn’t make much sense to her, however. Unless they were the type to utilize faith magic, it didn’t seem to produce much of anything. Those individuals were exceedingly rare in this neck of the multiverse however, and typically insane zealots. She certainly wasn’t one of them.

And so she listlessly ambled about the control room, uttering a few quiet prayers that she knew no one would hear. That is, until she got notice only ten minutes and thirty-two seconds later that her Captain’s entourage had returned.

Such a quick return could only mean something went terribly wrong, and Mina silently swore she would never try prayer again.

✧✦✧✦✧✦✧✦✧✦✧✦✧✦✧✦✧✦✧✦✧✦✧✦✧✦✧✦✧✦✧✦✧✦✧✦✧✦✧✦✧✦✧

“It’s a fucking temporal zone,” Lukira cursed as nausea overwhelmed her for the upteenth time today. Only now, having just crossed into a dimension where time itself was being altered, it was much worse. Messing with time was something that cultivators of old seemed to have no qualms with doing, but it was a practice that eventually became outlawed in the present era. The multiverse worked in mysterious ways and did not enjoy people tampering with it’s only absolute.

But the crazy bastards of the early multiverse all had god complexes and did whatever they wanted. This pocket of removed space was evidently one of those temporally altered dimensions where time traveled more quickly inside than outside. How much more quickly was hard to tell, but judging by how much she wanted to spew her breakfast she judged that the difference was stark.

It would have been good for any number of things back then when the dimension was whole, such as certain forms of cultivation that didn’t require ambient energies or perhaps administrative work. She remembered hearing about someone discovering a war factory that was built in a similar temporal zone that would have been able to produce starships five times faster in exchange for five times the lifespan on its often near-mortal workers.

Such practices were considered barbaric now and broke many of the Ethical Use Agreements that were now in place across the multiverse. Regardless, in its current state of stability, this temporal zone was almost entirely useless.

All it was really good for now was making people feel much too sick to cultivate anything.

“Head count,” she called out past the dizzying darkness beyond them. “Are we all here?”

Chandler only swore in response, which she supposed was an adequate form of identification.

“Here, Captain. It’s so dark, I can’t see anything!” Yrell said as some fear crept into her voice.

“Here as well. Utilize your awareness and stay close to the Captain. Chandler you’re with me,” Indras said as the other man yelped in response to the sudden contact. Lukira felt a hand worm its way into hers and she squeezed it reassuringly. That was another reason to make an expedition out of this discovery.

Yrell might have been strong for her age, but she lacked the experience Lukira wanted.

“An organization that could set up such a pocket space would generally be considered pretty strong,” Chandler finally spoke with some strength returned to his voice. Lukira smirked as he seemed to give in to the inevitable and start doing his job.

“See? You’re useful already. Let’s make this quick.”

Her initial observations of the DPD noted it as remarkably empty. It was a classically dark space, and like all other pocket dimensions lacked the swath of stars that existed outside. Maybe such things were fabricated for the space back in the day, however the crumbling stability had eaten away at its borders and thus any points of light that may have been programmed into them.

As much as she would have liked to just illuminate the entire place, channeling external energies could just as easily destroy the unstable pocket dimension as show them anything.

She closed her eyes and spread her awareness throughout the space around them. She quickly found the fuzzy edges where wisps of her consciousness were torn away, and fixed her awareness into a sphere that barely avoided the spatial tears. It was an incredibly small space, but that wasn’t too unexpected. Speeding up the passage of time tended to lead to faster degradation, after all.

There was in fact only one structure remaining within the pocket dimension as far as she could tell. Most others must have been ripped apart or sucked out into the nothingness around them. What remained was disappointingly small, but with the space so seriously degraded she was honestly happy anything existed within it at all. If nothing else, she estimated that the entire structure could just barely fit inside her largest spatial ring if she emptied it of all other things.

If only she had the same level of technology for the last DPD they found which was of considerably higher quality.

“Follow me, Indras. We are approaching.” She said as they began floating towards the structure. Wrapped in her mind, she could tell that it was vaguely oblong with one end pointed and another almost flat. Its material was cold and hard, likely some kind of metal alloy, and it remained completely inert as they approached.

Whatever systems it had were likely long dead.

They alighted upon what appeared to be an entryway, and with some small encouragement Yrell got to work. Lukira could feel the girl’s presence subtly suffuse into the doorway before she gasped.

“There’s still power, Captain. I’ll try to get it open.”

Or not dead. Lukira frowned as the door shuddered violently. It remained closed, however, as Yrell let out a frustrated huff.

“I think it’s welded shut,” the girl muttered as she ran her hand along the metal grooves. That would certainly be odd, Lukira thought idly. She summoned a small amount of light to illuminate the space around them, and saw that it was true; the door was welded shut.

It was also far larger than a normal human door, and covered in strange text that seemed to be hastily applied in a language she didn’t recognize. She turned to Chandler who only shook his head with a frown. If neither he nor his translation device could identify the script, there was certainly nothing she could do.

“Yrell, undo to welds.”

“Yes, Captain,” she responded as she funneled a bit of her energy between herself and the door. The welded material began to glow subtly before it peeled away from the door as if the two suddenly had the same magnetizations. Once unwelded, the door opened soundlessly as a number of low lights turned on one by one, illuminating a passageway deeper into the ship.

“Good work, we’re going in.”

That the structure still had power was interesting, but not concerning. Even if it had likely been dormant for an unbelievable amount of time in the accelerated space, there were certainly some powers back in the day that had access to low-level perpetual energy. They’d just have to find out for themselves.

✧✦✧✦✧✦✧✦✧✦✧✦✧✦✧✦✧✦✧✦✧✦✧✦✧✦✧✦✧✦✧✦✧✦✧✦✧✦✧✦✧✦✧

Things had gone well at first. At least, Lukira had thought so as she secretly enjoyed the little adventure. The four of them had moved from room to room, scouring every inch of the small space-craft that appeared to be an archaic nonhuman luxury vessel. What species of peoples the ship belonged to were unknown, but the sheer size of their doorways, hallways, and semi-intact metal decorations indicated that it was certainly not of human origin.

In the dim light provided by emergency power supplies, allowed them just enough to make out the ship’s interior, And that was consequently enough for them to pocket everything that wasn’t part of the floors, walls, or ceilings themselves.

Unfortunately, everything that wasn’t made of a designed-to-last metal alloy had long since turned to dust. In many rooms, the dust lay in piles where they could only assume wooden structures or something similar once stood. It was impossible to tell for the most part, considering it was dust and all. But many doors still had markings on them delineating what the room was used for.

Sadly, even the finely printed form of the language was something that even Chandler’s advanced translation device only barely recognized, and for the most part failed to complete its purpose. He finally stopped calling out the names of the rooms when one was designated as the ‘shitting porch’. It’s usage did date the vessel back to pre-Void Insurgence era though, like she had thought.

They had made their way through the small craft without incident for about an hour, with Chandler making a note of anything he thought might be valuable. There were a few pieces of metal art that might be worth something to collectors, a few ancient weapons that had rusted from the decomposition of their own components, and a few more materials that provided the ships other functions that they managed to scavenge.

Most noteworthy was their visit to what Lukira could only assume was the control room. Most of the technology was considerably destroyed by the passage of time, but they did manage to collect the archaic form of what Mina represented for their starship. It was a lump of crystallized intelligence larger than Indras’s body that once would have managed most of the ship’s functions and stored its users’ information.

It was dead now though, or dormant at least. It could potentially provide information worth more than the entire ship itself, so no matter how unlikely the possibility was, resuscitating it would be a top priority upon return.

Speaking of the dead, Lukira thought dully, there were obviously no signs of life aboard the small ship. Just like the items that once decorated the rooms of the ship, anything less durable that the ship’s skeletal structure had degraded to dust. That included anything that would have told them about those who once inhabited the ship.

It was unfortunate, as some childish dream of hers had always been to unveil the secrets of an ancient organization, or maybe piece together the true reason for the destruction of a civilization. Who wouldn’t have such a dream, knowing that countless such stories surely existed out there in the multiverse? She was even one of the few in a position to do it.

Sadly, Lukira was quickly coming to terms with the fact that the exploration of the ship would be mostly nondescript and her life would always be full of disappointments.

At least, she was until they opened a room Chandler managed to translate to mean ‘Storage’. Inside were dozens of oval structures that almost looked like stone, oblong and round. They each remained firmly planted to the floor by a tangle of root-like equally stone-looking tubes so densely packed that the floor, or at least what looked like the floor, was only occasionally visible.

The tetrad stalked warily into the room, but were mostly unperturbed aside from Chandler. This was easily the most interesting room yet, and Lukira felt the thrill of discovery whet her lips. She approached the nearest egg-shaped structure and gave it a light knock. It remained wholly unresponsive even as her knock revealed that the thing was mostly hollow.

Interesting indeed.

Their state of preservation made her doubt their organic nature, but a quick sweep of her mental energy quickly proved that thought wrong. One by one, she realized the things were, as she thought, eggs of some kind as they emitted cracking sounds in response to her mental sweep.

And that, she later supposed, was when their little adventure quickly turned to shit.

“Fuck this,” Their weak link muttered as he made a sudden run for the exit.

“Damnit, Chandler! Get back here!” Indras yelled as he ran after him. A flash from one of Chandler’s rings blossomed and a shield of light appeared between them. The burly man growled as he increased his speed, his own fist becoming covered in glowing red runes before he smashed it into the wall of light.

The wall held for a second, just long enough for Chandler to laugh, before it shattered into glowing fragments. He then turned around to flee again only to scream. Illuminated by that shower of light, a horrible scene was reflected on the walls and floor of the room.

Petrified bodies of vaguely humanoid bi-pedal creatures were plastered to every inch of the surface, stuck between the stone tubes that snaked around and sometimes into their bodies. Lukira felt a chill go down her spine, despite her decades of combat experience. She had to draw the line somewhere, and the awakening of eggs older than the Magnocracy itself was definitely over it.

“You know what, he’s right. Fuck this. Yrell, get behind me, we’re burning this place.”

“You got it, Captain.”

She recognized a sudden flicker of movement from the opposite end of the room and reflexively ushered a wave of glittering starlight that illuminated the rest of the storage area. An inhuman screech echoed throughout the space as the eggs burst open one by one. She quickly located the source of the screech as a shiny black silhouette that cowered among the shattering eggs.

Something that wasn’t petrified was still alive after innumerable years, and things that were petrified were giving birth right in front of her. Pale fleshy creatures with wide, webbed bodies crawled out of the eggs trailing a snake-like tail. If she weren’t so disgusted, she would have wondered at the miracle of life. She didn’t recognize the species, but that ultimately didn’t matter.

Under Article 16 of the Multiverse Preservation Agreements, all parasitic life forms were to be exterminated. As a stout believer in justice and upholding the multiversal law, she solemnly swore to end the abominations in front of her. It wasn’t because she was grossed out or anything.

With a squeeze of her palm, the starlights she had spread before began to exude a terrifying pressure. The numerous petrified eggs immediately crumbled to the ground and the creatures that crawled from them screamed in defiance. They didn’t last long, however, as the concentrated power of gravity pushed their own blood and guts through their orifices.

An intense wave of spatial distortion swept through the room as the stability of the pocket dimension took another step towards its doom.

She barely had time to recognize that the smaller creatures’ blood was bubbling through the floor itself with a terrible acrid smell when the hunched creature on the other side intelligently leapt over her lights with terrifying speed. It was creepy, for sure, but she remained collected as she violently manipulated another burst of cosmic force.

This time, she wrapped the creature’s airborne figure with pure cosmic energy as it lurched to a halt about ten feet in front of her. It’s long, chitinous body twitched feebly in her grasp as she examined it. It had legs bent like a predator’s, long arms the stretched down to its knees and ended in dangerously flashing claws, and a grossly elongated skull. It’s mouth opened wide, and row upon row of serrated teeth split halfway up its skull.

In disgust, she utilized her tried and true method of twisting the fucker’s neck until it died.

It put up a surprising resistance, however, and a second mouth suddenly burst forth from within its gaping maw. It launched itself in an explosive serpentine movement at her face and spit acid at her, which caused her to inadvertently yelp and dodge.

The movement gave the creature enough leeway to almost escape her grasp until she furiously pumped out many more times the amount of energy she had been working with and ripped the creature in half. It’s acid blood was more concentrated than its new-born counterparts, and immediately began burning through the hold.

She tossed the remains in one of her spatial rings that would preserve it as a specimen. She was sure someone would pay good money for whatever the hell the creature was. If she wanted to sell it, at least. She might just use the thing as a punching bag after Mina found out what people called these things.

With a similar thought, she also removed one of the few uncrushed eggs that remained in the corner of the room. It wasn’t exactly protocol, but she felt she deserved it after what the unruly species put her through.

“Captain,” Indras said with an uncharacteristic plea, “If one of those things was let loose on our ship it would be a disaster.”

“Oh fine, whatever.” She then grabbed Yrell who was shivering in her grasp and backed away to the entrance of the room. The poor girl was clearly shaken up, but Lukira sourly admitted that it was kind of what she had wanted. Everyone needed some danger when growing up, and Yrell was no exception— even if she didn’t like it.

She met up with Chandler and Indras who were bickering amongst themselves as usual. Normally she’d be amused, but right now she was more frustrated than anything. Without a word, she tore a hole in the fabric of the pocket dimension that would allow them all to return and threw all three of her subordinates in with a flick of her wrist.

All that was left then was to destroy the entire place. Luckily, that was exactly what she specialized in. Lukira closed her eyes as she summoned an exorbitant amount of cosmic force from within her and coalesced it as a single point of power. Everything but herself quickly ripped itself from the floor as it was sucked into her artificial black hole.

When she pushed enough energy into the ability to cause the entire ship to buckle in on itself as spatial tears ripped the fabric of the pocket dimension apart, she stepped through the hole herself.

On the outside, she found Indras berating a mysteriously laughing Yrell while chandler sulked warily from the side. She had thought the girl was upset, but clearly she had missed something. As she glanced between the three of them Yrell only doubled down on her laughter until she began to choke.

“You, you screamed,” she finally managed to stutter out between violent coughs.

“Oh come on, it wasn’t that funny.” Lukira said with a frown.

But the girl continued coughing, until she suddenly grasped at her chest and throat as if she was choking on something. She had a desperate look on her face as she waved for assistance. Despite Yrell laughing at her expense, the thought of their close encounter with parasitic creatures quickly turned her embarrassment to worry.

“Yrell?” She asked, as she flashed over to where the girl was still gagging. With growing anxiety, she swept a wave of her awareness through the girl’s body only to find… Nothing. Yrell then looked up at her with a barely contained smile.

“Aha! I so got you!” She said as she began laughing uncontrollably again.

Lukira sighed as her anxieties abruptly flushed from her system.

What a waste of time, she thought sadly. The whole expedition was a terrible waste of time.

“Is something the matter, Captain?” Mina’s voice called to her over the communicator as she confirmed the worst of her newfound fears. “You have only been gone for about ten minutes.”

Lukira remained silent amidst the giggling laughter of her youngest officer as she suddenly felt very tired. She couldn’t help but think about the next twenty-so hours she would spend doing absolutely nothing in the desolate star system, and then the next few months of their equally tedious journey.

Somehow, it didn’t even waste enough of her time to be worth it.