Side story: Round-table viewing (IX) (Vote for what comes next)

In response to Konrad Curze's question, the Narrator Machine merely summoned a mirror.

The man in the mirror looked disheveled and furious. His overlong hair had fallen loose, almost covering half his face, and the eyes peering through it were utterly bleak. That alone would have been fine, leaving the looks bestowed by his genetic engineering undiminished. Unfortunately, he had an animal-like habit: he was baring his teeth, his canines catching against his lower lip as it trembled incessantly.

"You had best calm down," the Narrator Machine said in an unusually mild tone.

The Nostraman stared into the mirror. After a long silence, he suddenly flashed a brilliant smile.

He lifted his head, casually swept his hair back, and returned to his seat with that silent smile, as though nothing had happened.

"Very good," the Narrator Machine said. "Your mental illness presumably hasn't become so severe that you've forgotten what I said a little while ago? None of these stories have anything to do with you. I know how agonizing it is to watch someone else receive what you've always dreamed of, but you really do lack self-control."

Rogal Dorn frowned and suddenly spoke up in Curze's defense. "You cannot expect him to remain calm after seeing all that."

"Then perhaps he should never have seen any of it."

With that offhand remark, the Narrator Machine successfully angered several of them. Its unquestioning sense of entitlement was something they had never experienced before, and it seemed perfectly aware of that, for it soon turned its attention to them.

"The same applies to you, arrogant princes so acutely sensitive to power and politics. I hope you will treasure this opportunity. Many who share your names and faces never received such help, even by the time they died. Let me put it