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Leviathan: Chapter Twelve

Justice

By Shalion

When Leviathan heard the familiar noises, the noises of the creatures who had attempted to hunt her -her!- and who had slaughtered her daughters - apparently for decades and at the cost of unknown tons of biomass - the adrenaline which pumped into her system was enough to awaken even Little Sister, who had been quite now for some time.

"What's frightened you?" She asked.

"Nothing!" Leviathan shot back towards her tail, keeping her secret thoughts close to her. "It's just those Splashers, those awful monkey-things. I'm... upset that they've been killing our hunter-daughters, all of that time and energy spent on their spawning..." And it was easy to be upset about that. Each daughter was an investment of her precious resources, their entire existence meant to gather this world's resources and feed her bottomless appetite. If the entire pinniped niche had been an abject failure as Leviathan suspected, the loss of the mass alone would amount to multiple fattened daughter-whales in addition to the calories spent shaping their bodies which cost Leviathan almost as much blubber as their biomass itself. Leviathan focused on the outrage as a distraction from the memory of when sharp, unknown things had thrust purposefully into her soft hide from above.

Another low moan escaped her, a vibration of the fluid-filled melon at the front of her head that enabled her echolocation. It was a feeble attempt to scare aware the creatures floating on the surface and as expected they gave little pause in their approach. As they began to hover around near the top of her head, Leviathan arched her back as much as it would go, cresting the water with the upper-most portion of her wide, wide snout. She wanted to crush these annoying ants. 'How dare they? How dare they take advantage of me? They're just bugs!'

The dark wooden shapes bobbed in the water, but for all her colossal size, with the inflexible nature of her body, she created more of splash than a tidal wave with her weak waving. Below her, the spur dug more deeply into the fat of her belly as she landed, slicing at least three yards into her now. The dark water around her thrashed with excited sea life. Leviathan could feel sharks greedily ripping larger bites off of the edges of her wound. She needed to get to deeper water so her army of daughters could make prey out of these parasites. But with the barb lodged even deeper inside the meat of her belly now, all her efforts seemed hopeless. 'How easy it would be if I could just roll over...' Leviathan reflected, yet with the width of her body and the relatively tiny size of her pectoral fins with their inadequate musculature, even that action was nigh on impossible for her.

Leviathan waited helplessly as the Splashers approached again and again. Each time, she rose her head up out of the water, but their resolve only grew even though she couldn't really get tired. It was not long at all before she had a halo of the wooden craft-things floating around her head. With the inky water rendering her blind, there was not very much she could do before she waited for the piercing stings of the creatures' barbs. And indeed they came because much like her, these creatures' hunger would not be satisfied by their earlier kill.

The water was so shallow above Leviathan's head that the Splashers did not even have to leave their wooden shells to poke down at her soft, dark hide. The skin offered very little resistance, but more than a few of the barbs quickly became stuck in the dense meat of Leviathan. These animals seemed to enjoy the entertainment value of sticking sharp things into her more than the actual aspect of a kill, which even in her current predicament bordered on the ridiculous. Even the deepest barb did not go more than a couple feet into her head, less than a quarter of the distance to her skull through the thick blubber layer. After an hour or so of this 'entertainment' even the Splashers seemed to realize the futility of their actions. Leviathan thought or hoped that they would get tired and return to land to nest or sleep or do whatever it was they did. However, when most of the long barbs were lost to her dense hide, the surface hunters resorted to even more sinister tools, their flensing knives.

Leviathan had no notion of what a knife was, of course, but she did notice when several of the despicable creatures left their boards to enter the water with her. Using their own stuck shafts as handholds, they clung to the flesh of her head and carved at her precious meat, hoisting large cubes and chunks away with more precision than a shark's hungry maw, not that they were done with the edges of her belly wound yet either. However, Leviathan held less animosity for the sharks than for the creatures on her head because she understood the sharks and made regular prey of them. The Splashers, however, these were the first animals on this planet since the very early days of her arrival to thwart her designs. For that, they could never be forgiven.

Leviathan could do nothing as the Splashers harvested her blubber by the armful from her head, filling their wooden shells with slippery, glistening meat. They left then but returned for even more just an hour later. All the while, Leviathan remained trapped by a tiny stone barb lodged in the belly she had been so proud of only earlier that day. The Splashers' second trip was not as long as the first, but that probably only had to do with the setting sun rather than any lack of desire on their part to continue hacking away at her endless mountain of easily accessible meat. For all their minute size, they had managed to hollow out a crater in Leviathan's head deep enough for one of the creatures to stand in and, indeed, far too close to the thick bone plate of her skull for comfort. This was hardly more significant than the damage she had done to herself by accident, but again, that wasn't the point. 'I'll devour every last one of them!' Leviathan vowed and though she meant to devour all living things she encountered, she wanted to make sure especially that this island was cured of its infestation of arrogant monkey-things.

Leviathan had little to do but stew in her own hate for the creatures responsible for all of today's hurt and misery as far as she was concerned. And she had little to look forward to but a full day at the sharp end of the Splasher's cruel knives. But during the night, an ocean eddy gathered force around her body, quite an inexplicable accident, but a fortuitous one for Leviathan. Though she never was able to figure out how to swim backwards as Little Sister had suggested, the eddy provided enough extra force to rip the coral protrusion the rest of the way down the side of her belly. With another guttural cry of pain, Leviathan was free and floating once again easily in the water. She turned her back to the island immediately and pushed herself free of it, carrying a cloud of organisms in her wake as her blood continued to dye the sea around her in a midnight blue cloud. That was the first night of her war on the island.As much as Leviathan wanted to linger near the island and execute her revenge on the monkey-things, she knew that there was nothing she could do for the moment. New daughters would be months in gestating and she would spend years in losing the scars she had gained that day; the barbs remaining in the top of her head would prove to be a constant source of annoyance as they caught the water and transmitted its vibrations to her skin and fat for a decade, just like last time.

Little Sister did not speak to her until two days after she had turned her head north, well after she had gathered her pod of fattened, old whale-daughters waiting patiently for their turn to be eaten. In her frustration, she had decided to sidle up to a likely looking daughter, a scarred behemoth in her own right with one milky white eye. She might have been ten years old or thirty, but Leviathan had eyes only for the other whale's waistline which was heavy with unused blubber. Leviathan could not help but want to add that to her own stores, especially with having lost over three tons directly between the sea life and the Splashers and still more from the blood she would have to regenerate. It was rather too early to be eating yet, her stomach still housing the meat of three full sized daughter-whales, but Leviathan wanted the comfort more than anything else.

And so, that was how she ended up with a massive, 200 ton whale-like creature stuck halfway down her throat, her stomach literally too full to accommodate the extra mass. Leviathan had been swimming along with the whale-daughter's tail hanging out of her mouth for over half a day when Little Sister decided to strike up conversation with her again. "You seem more content now." She said amicably, as though unaware of the travesty they had been through little more than 48 hours previously.

Fortunately, Leviathan did not need her mouth to speak to Little Sister; though it did make passive filter feeding impossible while her throat was otherwise occupied. "I suppose you can say that." She said derisively to the hind-brain. "I was wondering when you'd bother to emerge from ourselves again." She sent across the rage she was feeling and her desire not simply to devour, but to punish, something Leviathan had almost never felt before during all her long life. "I have much that I want us to do."

"I see." Said Little Sister, absorbing Leviathan's hate and outrage without an apparent effect on the coolness of her thoughts. "Well, it is a good thing then that we've already spawned our first wolf-daughters. They ought to be far more effective against land animals. Perhaps when we return next year, we won't need to do anything."

Little Sister, as always, made sense, but Leviathan did not want to be soothed right now. She wanted to take action. Her jaws moved a little over the trapped daughter's torso, drawing her in and increasing the pressure Leviathan felt in her aching stomach. The daughter thrashed weakly, still somehow alive despite having her head completely enveloped and indeed, already digesting. Little Sister had said that her daughters would desire to be eaten, yet this one after only a few hours of being partly exposed to the acids in her belly seemed to want to struggle with the strength remaining in her body. It was fortunate that, sapped of oxygen and only able to breathe through the skin exposed on her tail, she was not able to put up much of a fight. It'd be a different matter if Leviathan had swallowed her tail-first. Still, she was giving Leviathan a rather nasty case of heartburn to go with her still oozing injuries. She bit down harder on the squirming whale in her mouth, holding her in place.

Leviathan responded at length. "I don't want to leave the matter to chance. I've seen far more of these Splashers than I ever wanted to. I want to use that information to make better daughters. Two years from now, there should be no more Splashers to bother us again." It still irked Leviathan that this was the minimal amount of time needed to see a substantial change unless she wanted to miss next year's feeding season. She almost thought she might be willing to sacrifice that to see the end of the Splashers personally, however, as the miles between herself and the island near her spawning grounds grew, it did become easier to let the anger die down to embers smoldering in her breast. The summer krill swarms loomed larger in Leviathan's mind as she finished slurping the rest of her daughter's tail down her gullet about a week into her journey, the dying daughter wriggling in her esophagus almost the entire time as the acids worked slowly at the distended layers of blubber she had worn.

Over the trip north, Leviathan fattened rapidly on daughter flesh, though the huge scars formed white knots that disfigured her otherwise smooth hide. Leviathan was most awake during the initial weeks, working with Little Sister more closely than she had ever done to improve the model of the wolf-like land hunters. Their seeds were already planted within the embryonic bellies of the larger seal-like mothers, a vegetarian model this time around, who themselves were nested in her standard, ocean-going carrier daughters. The tiny lives were microscopic, yet already forming even as Little Sister did her best to work on Leviathan's fuzzy observations.

"Are you sure you didn't see more than that?" Little Sister questioned for what seemed like the thousandth time.

Leviathan could have easily streamed her actual memory to the hind-brain, but of course, she was no longer capable of comprehending visual data very well. That seemed awfully convenient to Leviathan at times as she struggled to extrapolate from her photographic memory. Unfortunately, this did entail reliving the events of that horrible day again and again as she struggled to advise Little Sister. Somehow, she had imagined her tail doing most of the heavy lifting in this task as far as the mental processing went. Little Sister's brain was now at least three times as large as the one in the head, after all, and sported incomprehensible third and fourth lobes in addition to the two she'd had when Leviathan had first copied herself.

While Leviathan struggled to translate the senses of sight, sound and smell into a format her autistic hind-brain could understand, Little Sister was actually potently acute at their shared sense of touch and pressure. The tail did not need the head to understand the shape of the tools used poke and prod their soft, fatty hide. In fact, she was far more acute in understanding exactly how the tiny creatures had dug so deep into the flesh of their head.

"What do you mean by 'far too sharp' exactly?" queried the head as Little Sister struggled to explain herself.

"These strange claws or teeth used on us. They can't be keratin, wood or even stone flakes." said the tail. "Our flesh is very dense and tough and it was cut through too easily to account for these materials."

To Leviathan, the matter seemed almost irrelevant, but she knew it troubled her hind-brain greatly. It was a mystery she lacked the information to solve, which did not happen frequently. Unfortunately, Leviathan had little in the way to help her, especially since she had been completely blind for most of the encounter, and sitting directly on top of her head, her own sonar had been less than optimized to provide additional information.

In the course of their conversations, however, a clearer image of these strangely smart monkey-like creatures formed. Given their size and configuration, 'ape' was a more appropriate word than 'monkey' Leviathan realized, though that in no way lowered her disdain for the lowly, yet arrogant animals. The use of tools was also confirmed, though it had been a hazy speculation all along when Little Sister had first informed her that the wooden shells she had first seen had not actually been some sort of carapace. Leviathan was vaguely aware of the use of tools by some mammals and birds. She had enough of their essences inside of her to gain insight into the way that sticks and rocks could be implemented to achieve a goal rather than the adaptations of one's own body. But the whole idea seemed rather like a cheap trick to Leviathan who, through Little Sister, was in complete mastery of her own flesh and that of her thousands of daughters. Still, Leviathan wondered if their Splasher-hunters should likewise use tools against them.

Little Sister was staunchly against the idea, however. "It'd be such a fiddly and untrustworthy adaptation." she dismissed out of hand, "And a waste of brainpower." Leviathan understood through her tail's lengthy explanations that the size of their daughters' brains was one of the biggest, if not the biggest factor in their energy efficiency and ultimately how big a return they would receive on their initial investment in flesh and calories. Little Sister preferred their offspring to operate chiefly on pre-programmed instincts and behaviors which was hugely energy efficient and allowed their small brains to be well protected by thick skull plating. As a result of this planning, however, most of their daughters were no more intelligent than reptiles or even fish, but that had not mattered in the past.

Now though, Leviathan felt intuitively that conservation was not the right approach, especially not when she wanted these awful creatures wiped off the surface of the planet immediately for their crimes against her. She was not able to move Little Sister on the tool-using idea, a fuzzy concept still for Leviathan herself, but she was able to convince her tail to devote more resources to larger brains for their new quadruped hunters who ought to be able to organize simple packs with their greater brain power. They also received larger jaws, fangs and reinforced muscle and bone fibers according to the best recipes Little Sister knew.

"We'll be lucky to break even on our energy contributions to these wolves..." said Little Sister in reservation even as she spun their new DNA strands and saturated their microscopic forms with waves of mRNA that prompted new changes in their development as they slumbered inside the tight, segmented horns of Leviathan's labyrinthian uterus.

Leviathan acknowledged her tail's concerns, but was not worried about the cost herself. "This isn't about being prosperous." she told her other brain, "This is about..." she struggled with the concept in her mind for a moment, "... justice."

Little Sister still seemed skeptical, but did not press the issue. Soon, there was nothing left to do but continue to feed the hundreds of new life sparks growing and maturing inside her belly, already neatly nested and organized according to their life's purpose. Leviathan continued to swim on for the better part of a day in silence, the monotonous view of the open ocean already making her higher brain functions grow bored and sleepy. A strong part of her wanted simply to descend, to diminish and become an uncomplicated animal again. As a dull-witted giant sea-beast, she never got bored or was troubled with abstract concepts like justice or revenge. She simply was, and there was peace and comfort in that. Before that happened though, there was another thing she wanted to speak to her other brain about.

She sent a trepidatious signal down the long corridor of her spinal cord. "Little Sister..."

The other brain replied immediately. "Yes?"

Despite all the time they had spent together, Leviathan still felt the need to be cautious, to avoid miscommunication. Despite sharing a single body, Little Sister felt even more like a separate entity than ever. The length of their spinal column made the act of 'speaking' even more talking to a person in another room, an entirely different "I." Add to that how their interests had diverged, and it was difficult for Leviathan to be completely open; and she did not see how that could ever change at this point as their paths only continued to diverge further. "I..." she hesitated for half a second, "I don't think it is wise to continue with our current configuration, not after our accident on the reef."

"A reasonable conclusion." said Little Sister neutrally, but too carefully herself. Leviathan could still sense the interest rising from the other larger and more complex brain. "We have more than enough stored energy to make many changes and still keep on our breeding schedule."

Little Sister clearly had not altered her opinions in the last several decades of self-imposed isolation within their vast body and Leviathan was quick to answer. "Only slight changes are necessary." She pulsed that down the spinal column in an overly loud signal. "A longer frame and bigger fins..." Leviathan realized that she did not know exactly what she wanted, especially not when her titanic blubber stocks felt so sturdy and comfortable around her. Yet it only took the memory of how it felt having her precious flesh flensed from her to break the illusion of security.

"I can see the image clearly in your mind, Big Sister." said the tail and Leviathan calmed somewhat. For all her anxiety, Little Sister had so far never failed to take her considerations into account, no matter how irrational. "These changes will take a minimal amount of energy. Go to sleep. I will awake you after we are done spawning..."

Leviathan felt Little Sister's presence well up around her mind, a surprisingly comfortable mental touch. Her own mind grew smaller in turn, its complexities unraveling into a world of instinct where neither the past nor the future existed. It was like slipping under a warm blanket.Leviathan awoke little over a year later, though she retained her simple animal memories of her pregnancy, the long swim north, and the past feeding season. It was a relief to not have to consciously experience the stress of her week-long spawning, actually. The heavy muscular contractions, the sense of bloating and pressure and fatigue slipped by her reptile brain with barely an impression since she couldn't conceive either of how long the process would take or how long already she had been uncomfortable as the bodies passed through the small slit in her undercarriage along with a messy splattering of dark blood from shedding uterine linings and chaffing tubes.

She was still sore and hungry, but the actual work was in the past now. Leviathan indulged herself by quickly devouring two members of her waiting pod of fat, docilely floating whales, her first meal in months. Only when she was partially sated was she able to take stock of the changes in her own self. And the changes were subtle. Her stupid fish-persona wouldn't have been able to register the months of slow growing over the past year, even as her bones ached occasionally from the rapid microscopic alterations.

She was far less spherical now, regaining a configuration more suited to a terrestrial whale, albeit, an extremely fat one. She had gained at least a hundred feet of length, and perhaps closer to two-hundred. From the tip of her wide, blunt snout to the end of her tail, she was now around 1700 feet long and still extremely wide, almost four times as wide as she was deep, actually. This was especially true as her belly, once her most proud feature, was greatly diminished and streamlined. Great pleated folds of skin lined up neatly down her abdomen which was clearly able to expand and contract greatly like the skin of her throat.

For once, though, Leviathan did not dwell on her loses, at least not in her first minutes of full consciousness. Instead she waved her flippers curiously in the water, her large flippers. Rather than the stiff, inflexible fins that had once been, Leviathan tried out her wide, powerful-feeling appendages, cupping the water in their flat surfaces, dark-speckled blue on top, white on the underside. She discovered that her elbow joint had returned and that she was able to subtly change the shape of the fin with three recently unfused phalanges within the thick, flat surface of her pectoral flippers. The fat no longer puckered or folded over the base of her limbs as they had last year, her shoulders having been widened and adjusted, but there remained a subtle bulging which Leviathan hoped would signify her future gains. As an experiment, Leviathan bent her flippers down towards her underside as far as they would go. To her great surprise, they kept traveling along their arcs, eventually hugging the soft underside of her blubber-filled tummy. Though over half again as long as they had been, her flippers were still over 200 feet apart from touching each other for her tremendous girth and width, but that hardly mattered. Leviathan had not been able to touch herself like this for the better part of a century. It felt surprisingly good, even as she felt the knots of the long scar that extended from her chest to her pelvic region across the left side of her underbelly. It was a credit to the epic scale of the wound that the scar remained palpable even as it looked already years older than it should have due to Leviathan's healing factor. Being wide enough for two of her Splasher adversaries to lie across the white scar tissue side by side, the mere fact that it was even noticeable on Leviathan's massive form made the old injury loom large in her mind.

Struggling not to return to that place of anger and frustration at herself and the world around her, Leviathan instead tried out the rest of her body, finding it far more vigorous and responsive than the previous year. Her simple fish-self had never even thought to test out the muscles expanding all over her body, but Leviathan did so now, pulling on the new strong fibers for the first time. Pushing into the water, Leviathan felt like she was not just waving her newly lengthed and thickened tail, but actually swimming. Despite still being the size of a small island, she made good time, perhaps as much as 15 miles per hour. Since she was still close to the surface, she could feel small waves breaking over her head and across the sides of her back as she stroked her tail back and forth with a tireless strength. Leviathan's muscle-to-fat ratio must have at least quadrupled in the past year, and she felt remarkably powerful. She felt like she could actually hurt something if she tried rather than existing as a mobile landmass. And after her past experience, that was exactly what she wanted. She took a big gulp of sea water to catch her breath after her burst of speed. Given the sheer size of her, the few minutes of joyous exercise had probably cost her at least a dozen pounds of blubber. Her bus-sized heart thudded deep inside her breast to push her nutrient-rich blood to acres of hungry muscle fibers. Her half-full stomach began to growl with renewed need for sustenance and Leviathan turned her eyes towards one of the members of her pod, floating as placidly as a cow waiting for slaughter.

Though the huge blind spots remained around Leviathan's massive body, her sonar guided her easily forward as she opened her jaws wide for the massive, 400 ton meal. The blubber-rich meal fell with ease into her waiting stomach cavity which made Leviathan's belly bulge visibly with the addition now that her own fat layer was less than two thirds what it had been. Given the sizes and effort involved in moving so much meat, Leviathan rested for several minutes after getting the last bit of the tail down her eager throat, positioning her doomed daughter inside her cavernous stomach with powerful abdominal muscles that themselves consumed pounds and pounds of blubber to perform the work. Even so, Leviathan remained unsated. but in reality, this was her at her happiest. She was sating her sole drive in life while at the same time hungry for even more. That hunger gave her purpose, reminded her of who she was. She swam with no real purpose slowly forward, still passively filter feeding in addition to digesting hundreds of tons of fat-filled bulk inside her, her mouth hung open and not only to let the sea water in.

"You can probably fit another inside us." said Little Sister suddenly, breaking Leviathan's reverie. At the head's questioning expression, she added, "I've added pleated sections to our hide and digestive organs to allow for more stretching. I thought you might enjoy that seeing as we've become a lot leaner."

Leviathan found herself honestly touched by her other self's care and thoughtfulness. That too came as a shock as Little Sister so often seemed out of touch and full of herself. "I..." she started, "I think I'll like that a lot..." She thought this even as she angled herself towards another of her pod, her body flexing and twisting in the water far more than had been possible previously; she might have even been able to flip upside down now if she wanted. She was already bulging with her recent meals, but she trusted her tail and engaged in the little dance and maneuvers that brought her daughter whale into the right position to dive into the bottom of her wide, toothless mouth. The flesh-rich daughter herself was the end result of a chain of devoured daughters that scavenged entire ecosystems of their biomass, competing with the local fauna, and in some cases flora as well. The heavy meal still filled the majority of Leviathan's mouth, despite how she had grown, and Leviathan gently caressed her precious daughter with her tongue as she welcomed her back to where she and all the daughters she herself had eaten back home.

The distention and mild discomfort as Leviathan stretched her esophagus again and her stomach strained against its physical limits to accommodate another massive creature felt ludicrously good to Leviathan, almost orgasmic, in fact. As long as Leviathan got her daughters secured into the oxygen-poor environment of her stomach, they went down smoothly to their final slumber as well, almost happily, in fact. Leviathan had to shift around the other three massive bodies with her stomach muscles again to fit in the fourth onto the heap, the forms slick with sea water and digestive juices and felt the pleated folds on her abdomen stretch to accommodate the sudden influx of mass. So soon after being devoured, all four daughters were undoubtedly still alive, though rendered mostly inert already by a combination of pre-programmed instinct and lack of oxygen; even so, the slight squirming Leviathan felt inside her stomach was ever so indulgent. At the end of it, the great sea-beast felt bloated, heavy and sated. If she had still been a land-bound creature, she would have licked her chops in appreciation, instead, she appreciated how the water flowed around her enlarged abdomen, already as big and stuffed as it had been a week earlier prior to spawning.

"That feels good." Leviathan related to her hind brain, the thought filled with self satisfaction.

"I know it feels good." said Little Sister knowingly. "You deserved something nice."

Leviathan could not argue with that logic and continued to drift aimlessly for several hours, not doing anything more complex than counting the members of her calm pod of whale-daughters, the literal fruit of her investment from years previous. But even the sight of her victory over physics enabling her to be the largest single life form on the planet by a large margin could not make her forget why she was even awake now in the first place.

"There's still the matter of the Splashers." said Leviathan, approaching the subject carefully. Despite a year having past in various states of awareness, it was easy to get worked up about the old injury and affront to her dignity.

"The new hunters will spawn on land in a few days." said Little Sister, referring to the pinniped-shaped mothers who would crawl onto land to birth the new and improved terrestrial wolves; she would linger in the nearby waters for about two years as well until instinct prompted the wolf daughters to return to the shore to be devoured and return their flesh. "And it is far too soon for last year's spawn to have worked their essences back to us. We haven't even digested these four yet." Little Sister tsked, "I'm pretty sure there's nothing more we can do about them for a couple more years yet. After I have gained some new essences, we can evaluate the success of our hunter program."

Leviathan remembered Little Sister saying that they might see results in as little as two years, but let the manipulation pass. Despite having a reinvigorated, if slightly less efficient body, Leviathan was still far too large to explore the nearby island in any reasonable fashion. Yet it was so hard for her to simply ignore it. The fact that she was completely incapable of discovering what took place on land where these awful creatures dwelled was a new source of frustration. "We need smarter daughters to tell us what is up there..." Leviathan whined absently as she continued digesting her fattened daughters who, for all their own colossal size had brains the size of small grapefruit.

"Inefficient." Little Sister answered again simply, then she added, "And dangerous."

"Dangerous how?" Asked Leviathan petulantly, disliking having her ideas shot down out of hand more than she actually thought about what she was saying.

And of course, Little Sister spelled it out clearly. "Do you really want daughters smart enough to think for themselves and move around independently? It's hard for you to trust me and we share the same body. How could you trust a daughter who could think and talk with her own voice?"

For that, Leviathan had no answer.