"People's remembered thoughts do twist and change, under such circumstances. Maillol now believes himself to have been thinking that Asmodia was a promising young lady whose coddling by the Project's earlier circumstances was threatening to entirely ruin her, that Asmodia had been led on with far too much mercy, making her believe herself to have a far stronger negotiating position than she did, to lose her necessary and protective fear of her superiors, to engage in openly traitorous speech and finally outright insubordination; and that he was applying a carefully measured correction based on a previous punishment in Ostenso which had not then broken her."
"I expect that what Maillol was actually thinking was that Asmodia had no way out even in death and no choice but to serve well or suffer worse, that she was being unbearably insolent for one who lacked the power to back it up, that she had completely lost track of reality, and that she needed to be put back in her place. This in fact would have been a completely unexceptionable belief in a world where tropes did not exist."