She tilted her head back toward the open sky, letting out a long, deeply exhausted exhale. She reached a leather-gloved hand up to massage the back of her stiff neck, working out the knots that had formed from three agonizing hours of standing perfectly still.
For more than a hundred and eighty minutes, those ancient, silk-draped nobles had done absolutely nothing but argue in circles, bicker over useless semantics, and throw thinly veiled, poetic insults at each other. The actual, pressing problems of the empire were buried under mountains of bureaucratic nonsense.
The air beside her head shimmered, and the tiny, holographic blue lion popped into existence.
[Host, that was entirely exhausting to process,] the System grumbled, its digital voice laced with static. [I recorded the whole story of that courtroom session, and honestly... 90% of it was just passive-aggressive filler.]
