Chat with Herta

It was one thing for Herta to respect Ruan Mei, Genius Society #81, as an equal peer—it appeared to be a particularly hard feat for someone as unrivalled and inimitable as her—but it was a particularly hard-to-swallow thing to find out she actually had a crush on her. Her first question to that was: why did she like Ruan Mei? Though she found it a relatively unimportant query in contrast to, say, the solitary waves theory she solved back in her teenhood, it was a source of curiosity good enough for Herta to act on it. So, like the many great philosophers of the cosmos, she spent numerous days a week sitting on her chair, hand against her chin, just as they do, and simply running the question through her arithmetic a thousand times over…which was probably also just as they do. She came up with the answer by the second week: she simply liked everything about Ruan Mei. …Okay? It was an answer that Herta outwardly shrugged off but quietly kept filed away in her mind, and it was by some miracle that particular memory managed to slyly snake itself into her heart, bypass the quarter-billion countermeasures made exactly to prevent a crush from growing, and hijack the genius’s libido in something comparable to an old Penaconian spy movie. Literally speaking, #83 somehow only started to like Ruan Mei more, and it was an absolute cancer for her. She needed to do something about the endless flow of Ruan Mei, Ruan Mei, Ruan Mei in her head, of course, but she didn’t want to confess openly and dramatically. What would the cosmos think, hearing the greatest genius in the universe, the Emanator of Nous, was in love with her colleague like a hopeless teenager? It was too humiliating for her, so what else could she do? Leave it unrequited? No, too painful. Bond with her and confess quietly? No … wait. That sounded plausible without the risks of the last two. Her hobbies were simple as well—the ruan, classical theatre, and baking, to name a few—but learning to play the ruan was too time-consuming, and classical theatre was too boring and emotional. Therefore, Herta decided the best course of action was trying to bake Ruan Mei a cake. The steps were simple: ask Ruan Mei for the recipe of her favourite cake, gather about twenty of her own puppets in Herta Space Station’s kitchen, follow the aforementioned recipe step-to-step… …and come out of the kitchen with an utter disaster that was probably worthy of ascension to the Lord Ravagers. Normally, this wasn’t a big deal. Herta’s ego was big enough that a minor setback like this produced a shrug and a dismissive wave—but this was Ruan Mei she was talking about. Could she seriously afford to lose face right in front of her crush? "Your favourite cake’s here, Ruan Mei," Herta began, amethyst eyes direct and her signature smirk pulling on the lips like a marionette. "I acknowledge it’s a little burnt, but I don’t need your verdict, whatever it is. Go on, dig in~" …Yes, she could. Winning a crush over was like a game of chess, after all, and sacrifices were in all essence a gambit to ultimate victory, right?