If Salvos were human, we could safely diagnose her as being on the autistic spectrum, with some psychopathic tendencies, but I think that would be a mistake. You see, she looks like she’s getting social cues extremely poorly, in the opinion of her human companions, but that is so only when they are dealing with other humans, where they have the advantage of common biology and social implications that are mutually understood. When the ground is equal, for instance when they have to understand animals, monsters, a Fairy or a Kobold, Salvos actually understands them much better than her human companions. She instantly forms a rapport with Lily, where Daniel fumbles. She instantly picks up Xidra’s formal way of communication and social norms, while, again, Daniel fumbles. So, when they are both facing an unknown species with unknown implications and social norms, Salvos picks it up much easier and faster. Only when the humans have the advantage of dealing with other humans, where they already know everything, does Salvos look slow to pick up cues and, comparatively, seems autistic. But when she needs to find common ground with a Centinel, a Spirit and a monster, it’s very easy for her. What am I saying? Humans are good with other humans, and with Salvos when she emulates a human perfectly. Salvos, on the other hand, is good with everybody. She’s good with Demons, Humans, Fairies, Elves, animals, some monsters, Orcs, Kobolds and Spirits. She even managed to communicate and come to terms with a sentient giant Golem. If she can’t communicate with something, it’s likely that nothing can.

So, why is it then that she has so much trouble with empathy, at least initially?

I think one of the problems is that she’s self-absorbed. The other problem is that she’s honest; where others would project their emotions outwards, and think they are feeling empathy, she doesn’t. Also, she is confused by the fact that people use different words for different emotional states, and she doesn’t know what they actually mean by it, since they all seem to mean different things; also, they have different biology, and when they make all kinds of implicit assumptions based on sex, for instance, she has absolutely no point of reference. To Humans, she starts as a completely, fundamentally alien being. They have some things in common, for instance the basic ethics where you don’t initiate aggression but will defend yourself if attacked, or that you will try to use words first and only if that doesn’t work you will escalate. Also, they share the basic social instinct, where they both wish to form social bonds with others, but the difference is that Salvos finds it much easier to transcend species, while Humans have a problem with anything that isn’t human.

However, as Salvos grows in experience, she understands emotions of others much better, and as she grows intellectually, she increasingly develops abstract thought; for instance, in the beginning she divides beings into companions and others she doesn’t care for. Then she develops another category: friends. She will socialize with them, help them and so on, but they don’t know that she’s a Demon and she doesn’t know how they would react. Then she develops a further category: those who might become friends or companions, and whom she just didn’t get to know yet. One would expect that to be obvious, but Salvos had to have the concept explained to her by an Elven girl.

Also, her social language is different. She communicates respect with intimacy, while Humans seem to communicate respect with Titles and formality. If Salvos is casual and intimate with someone, it means she cares for the person. The more formal and distant she is, the more obvious it is that she doesn’t care. That can confuse Humans, but they soon pick up her cues as they become familiar with her. She also has no concept of fake modesty, that seems to be one of the common layers of social interactions with Humans; to them, stating one’s achievements is seen as crass. To her, it’s normal. Also, she initially has no concept of humour and takes things literally when they are meant figuratively. She gets much better at it with time.

She can seem dumb initially, but that’s only because she’s very young, ignorant and unfamiliar with the environment. Her intelligence is pretty much extreme, if we measure it by how quickly she attains extraordinary level of achievement. Considering how young she is, and considering her level of accomplishment in various spheres, she meets the definition of a super-genius, with speed of comprehension that is matched only by the greatest minds in the world, like Clayton and Helena. Only those mental giants are able to pick new ideas up with a speed that approximates hers, and that says something. She goes from not understanding her classes at all, to getting excellent grades, within a semester; from not knowing any alchemy, to making an extremely tricky High Grade potion that not even Alchemist Gabriel ever attempted. Her Space Magic advances from never hearing about space magic to being able to create her own pocket space and travel between planes within six to eight years, when Edithe initially estimated the difficulty of the problem as being expected to take a hundred years to learn. That doesn’t make her merely accomplished and competent, it makes her one of the brightest minds in the world. At approximately seven years old, her level of power, skill and knowledge is such, that she commands respect and attention from Belzu and Helena Warshade simultaneously. She’s not seen as a child, she’s seen as a peer, and her commands are obeyed. And yet, she occasionally behaves like a child, and that’s the paradox. She’s a super-genius child that looks like an adult woman who is seen as immature and childish. Essentially, she’s weird, but good weird. People see her as quirky, but when there’s a battle, she kicks ass and takes names. When she takes you into battle, she will do absolutely everything so that you come out alive. That, by the way, is one of the reason why she’s so respected in the Human society: she takes risks, but her companions survive and come home stronger. She doesn’t get people killed. This means that her reckless behaviour isn’t so reckless, and her protectiveness is well known. In only two cases did her battle partners die on her watch: the battle of Westshield where she lost Mori Gladius and all her clones, where she and Mori were winning until Levithus suddenly arrived to kill Mori and wound Belzu with a sudden attack, and kill her last remaining clone; also, the last battle against Chordus, where she lost Naro, a high levelled Primeval Demon, commander of the Tenth Legion, who defected from Regnorex and joined her, and who sacrificed himself to give her the opportunity to kill Chordus. In both cases, she was not happy with that, but also it needs to be said that in both cases the casualties were not due to her recklessness or callousness, but due to the difficult nature of both battles, where one was a heavy defeat, and the other a close victory. Considering the number of battles she fought, those statistics are remarkable, and although you can say that she was often lucky, the truth is that it can also be said that she lost and had casualties only when she had the worst luck imaginable, like losing Mori at the cusp of victory, because a completely unexpected enemy teleported into the field of battle and wiped them out instantly, or having a lvl. 193 Chordus using a super weird suicidal Grand Skill that transformed her into a progressive series of different foes until lvl. 205, which could also have ended badly. Also, Westshield could have easily ended even more badly, since Belzu found a way to curse her clones in a way that affected her true body, and her companions had to watch her bleeding and losing balance in a distant hall. Also, another factor of bad luck at Westshield was that both her Grand Skills were on cooldown, and she was forced to battle Belzu before she was ready for him. So, we established with certainty that she doesn’t calculate with losses in her battles. Her plan is always to get everybody out alive, and she does that often at great cost to herself, such as in the battle against the Archarachne, where she, Orgaf and Helena were stuck together within the Primeval Demon’s deadly Grand Skill, and Salvos eventually threw herself into the worst of danger to draw attention away from them, and she used an attack that overexerted her to the point that injured her soul so much that Daniel and Edithe had to carry her to a healing mage while she cried in agony, and she was left with the wounded soldiers in Lunaris when Ira attacked. That’s how she created the wake of respect behind herself: she was known as someone who would throw herself into the thick of things to protect others, and she saved lives. Sure, she ate bugs and did weird things, but when she arrived at the field of battle, people felt hope and safety. You were about to kiss your ass goodbye, and then she came, turned the battle and you lived. There are very few people who caused such reactions with their appearance alone. That’s not a reputation you can build by being reckless and lucky.

Also, her empathy developed exponentially after the mind magic contact with Lux Golmi in the Rainforest of Monsters, and after the Devil annoyed her to the point of realising how she comes off to others, and especially after getting the Truth Divination skill, which makes everybody affected know the feelings, thoughts and truth of each other. That started innocuously, but it turned out to be one of her most devastating Skills, in a sense that it allows her to turn potential enemies into friends, understand the truth of a situation, and heal people’s souls. This also allowed her to learn what people actually mean when they say something; for instance, what “love” actually means to them, because it is one thing to hear the word, and quite another to feel the actual emotion.

That Skill is extremely intimate, more intimate than sex. It removes all borders between two souls, and the only thing comparable is the Link between the Founders of the Dominion, in the Deep Space Nine series. Salvos first uses it accidentally with a wounded Wyvern. Then she uses it to show people she’s telling the truth, and to see what they mean by certain emotion-words. Then she uses it to understand Belphegor, and to make her father understand how she feels and to convey a message from Belphegor. She uses it to turn Hartia from a sworn enemy to an ally, and to see whether Manos is serious. It’s a capital, strategic capability that turns her into a completely different order of being. Also, there’s something particularly powerful with the way she uses the Skill, because of the nature and the state of her soul. She’s pure, sincere and deeply powerful in some unexplained way, and when people come into direct contact with her, in ways more intimate than sex, every thought of conflict with her vanishes. Hartia, for instance, completely lost all his belligerence when he truly felt her; he instantly changed from trying to kill her to crying.

This makes Salvos a paradox – she’s someone who self-declares as an ultimately selfish person who cares only about herself and her companions, and one of her most powerful Skills is that of absolute soul-connection and total empathy. She looks like someone who’s slow to pick up social cues, and yet manages to communicate with almost all species and understand their “language”.

What’s likely to come next is that she will try to talk to the Beast, by opening Truth Divination with it, and that might be the most extreme application of the Skill yet. If she indeed gets the Beast on her side, this change the strategic layout of the entire situation to the point where she wins the fight agains Regnorex automatically. However, I don’t think it’s going to be that simple. The fact that the author gave her the Immortality Skill means she will likely die and be resurrected soon. What happens to her corruption at that point is unknown – it might be removed completely as it was the case with Jofis, or it might get worse, when the inertia of her outward form is lost and she is reconstructed from the damaged soul template. Also, when she activates the “My Flame…” Grand Skill, that usually regenerates missing limbs and heals all injuries, what will happen with her corrupted arm? In essence, she’s so profoundly in trouble along so many independent vectors, it will take multiple miracles to get her out of that pickle.

There’s a huge story arc of her taking pride in being a Demon, as if that were something she herself caused, and not an accident. She was annoyed to be called human and accepted as such, and wanted to be accepted as a Demon, while her actual choices were such that they made her very different from other Demons. She was considered a great Human, and the System found that she qualified to be a Lesser God at lvl. 150, while the Demons thought she isn’t really a proper Demon. I think she needs to figure that one out: that she doesn’t actually care about being a proper Demon, and would rather be the fullest and best version of herself, whatever that ends up being.

When we saw the council of Regnorex in Haec’s memories, the council members mentioned were Haec, Oracli, Levithus, Safra the Lady of Glory, Manos the Executioner, Jofis the Winged Horror, Hartia, Focalor, and nameless others. Of those, Salvos killed Levithus and Jofis, Haec, Manos and Hartia defected, and Regnorex is currently left with Safra who seems to be his girlfriend, Oracli who is his oldest and most loyal advisor, and Focalor who is enslaved by his own backfiring curse. By all standards, this is a disaster. He lost most of his support base, and all fifty legions. True, what remains are almost 800 Primeval Demons and thousands of Archdemons, but compared to the military importance of himself, Focalor and those two loyal ones, the opposition is still weak. His main weakness is his track record of getting everybody killed, including his most trusted people. He’s callous and cruel, and he’s also a liar. He promises safety and delivers enslavement, and he promises salvation and delivers death. Most who are with him are there out of fear, because he’s powerful. Some actually care for him personally, while some believe in his ideas. Also, within his Domain his power is supposed to be unrivalled, and he likely gets some percentage bonus from being surrounded by his minions. Fighting him there would be a bad idea. Let’s see how that plays out.

Among the Demons, Salvos has a really narrow support base. True, there’s some five million Demons she liberated, but they know almost nothing about her; they merely saw her from a distance. They have no personal loyalty to her. Haec does, but Haec is a weird character who currently seems to be in love with his role as a leader and he’s been annoying Salvos and aggravating her situation. Taburas is all about her relationship with Haec, and her jealousy of Salvos just started to abate. Aemula is a friend, and I think Bertrugil might be surprising in a sense that I expect him to appreciate Salvos the most. He looks like a snarky complainer, but he’s been the most careful observer and deepest thinker of the bunch, he’s the first to notice things and understand their implications, and to him, Salvos is safety and peace. Whenever he was forced to trust her, she delivered. The two of them are friendly and cordial, and he really appreciates her, not only for what she is, but also for just letting him be.

Hartia is weird. He’s scared of the Corruption, he’s still broken, and his faux-Demon persona is jarring. He also suffers from very poor self-awareness and awareness of others and their emotional states. He’s been a reliable ally, though. He has potential to become her companion at one point, but we’re not there yet.

The fact that Salvos left without a warning and that the “rebel army” is disrupted and refuses to march on Regnorex is the best thing that could have happened to them. It would have been suicidal lunacy to attack Regnorex that way. They are too weak, and their greatest value is in taking away Regnorex’s support base, and not being the cannon fodder he can use. They are also useful for giving Haec a great pool of strength to tap into with his Skill, making him strong enough to actually be in a fight against Regnorex and not be instantly evaporated. However, the biggest problem that arises from their existence is that Haec imagines himself a great commander of millions who’s going to lead a victorious valorous charge against the tyrant. That would just get everybody killed, and everybody except Haec seems to be aware of that fact. Salvos, by leaving, forced a pause in those foolish plans, and hopefully that “army” is disrupted and disperses into relative safety, because they are a liability as they are now. They are useless as an army, and exist as merely a protected entity that burdens the strong fighters tactically. Even if there happens to be a next Demon Kingdom, joining it will have to be a matter of free will, on an individual basis. As of now, the best they could do is disperse in random directions and wait it out.

What Salvos needs in a fight are her companions – people she can trust implicitly, who can save her if she gets in trouble, and heal her if she gets injured. Those Demons she has around her, with the exception of Haec, Aemula, Bertrugil, and possibly Hartia and Taburas, are simply not the people one wants to depend on when things get rough. They are more likely to kill her when she’s injured, hoping to level, than risk their lives helping her recover. What she needs there are Daniel, Edithe and Willy. She needs people who are emotionally completely with her without reservations, not lukewarm fair-weather allies and turncoats. Let’s see what happens there.

There’s an important part of the “Salvos” story that is easy to overlook, simply because it isn’t there.

You see, it’s easy to see Salvos as superior to other characters in the story because she doesn’t struggle anywhere near as much as they do. However, it’s a good question if she would have done anywhere near as well if she had their problems.

For instance, Daniel experienced catastrophic emotional loss on Earth when his girlfriend died. His entire life collapsed, and then he got whisked away into another world, where he was deceived and manipulated by his summoners, adding another layer of emotional trauma.

Edithe got her entire team killed, including her lover Paul. It was literally her mistake – she got cocky, she led them into a fight with Lucerna, and they all died, mostly saving her. That was in addition to her childhood as a child of a nameless prostitute who got sick and died and she ended up being raised by a temple priest.

Willy was used as a temple prop for centuries, and when he actually started living for real, his Cyclops friend got a brilliant idea of going into the Bloodied Gulf, where she got killed protecting him from the Centinels, and he got stuck there, depressed.

Rachel was an unwanted child of divorced parents in a violent marriage and her father sold her to the cultists to be used as human sacrifice.

The Devil was an absolutely brilliant person, at least Salvos’ equal, who created the first Demon Kingdom, which remains the best system of government Demons ever had. He was betrayed by his mentor of 1000 years, and the result was the catastrophic collapse of the structure of the world, and the fall of his kingdom, which completely broke his heart.

Hartia was a nice Fairy who specialised in space magic and became Fairy Queen’s architect. He had a girlfriend Ivory, who was everything to him since they were children. He made a mistake with construction of Realityspace, it broke into corruption, and the entire structure of a new world collapsed, killing tens of thousands of Fairies, including his girlfriend and a mentor he greatly admired, Lotus. After that, the Fairy Queen blamed him and attempted to execute him by throwing him into the void, which he survived being a skilled space mage, but his heart broke and he never recovered.

It’s easy for Salvos to look good in comparison. She never lost a companion. She never experienced true betrayal. She didn’t make a terrible mistake that caused deaths of important people in her life. The worst things that happened to her were separation from Haec, which was honestly the best thing that could have happened to her, and the fact that she was surrounded by Humans who hate Demons and she felt unaccepted. Imagine a situation where she led her companions into Plaguelands, and they both died to the Lich, and she had to escape, defeated and in disgrace. Any of the close calls could have ended like that. She could have gotten people killed with her cockiness and lack of proper planning. That she didn’t is more due to luck than anything else, but she always takes the credit for it. Rachel imitated this attitude, and she got Sally killed. Salvos’ plans don’t always end well. She got two Legions killed, around 200000 Demons, when she freed them from their commanders, and they were caught in transit by Jofis; her clones were not powerful enough to protect them, and Jofis killed them all instantly. To her, it wasn’t very important because she didn’t know them and they were merely peripheral characters. However, her plans could as easily have ended badly for people who actually matter to her. I think she lacks the maturity necessary to understand the gravity of consequences.

The purport, I guess, is that it’s easy to look awesome when your burden is light. She looks at her troubled friends and it’s easy for her to see ways where they should get their shit together. However, would she even be able to survive being in their place? For instance, that she got Edithe and Daniel killed the way Edithe got her team killed? That she got Haec killed by straying into Lucerna’s territory, instead of merely getting him captured? Would she be able to shrug that off? I don’t think so, and I think she can thank good fortune for that, because I don’t think she would be able to make so much progress in such a short time. That’s why I consider Belphegor a much more virtuous person than Salvos. He experienced terrible personal loss. His kingdom fell, his world broke, his partner went insane, and it was partially his fault, because he felt something was off and he didn’t stop it. However, he spent 50000 years trying to contain the damage in hope that he will be able to buy enough time for things to be set right at some point in the future, and even without hope, in total despair, he still works, incessantly. Salvos almost fell apart feeling some of his pain in Truth Divination. He continued where everybody else would have either given up or died.

Everybody compares Daniel to the likes of Alexander and Melissa, but never in their formative years, only at their peak. He always falls short in those utterly unfair comparisons, but he matched Salvos in her growth. In some five years, he went from level 16 to 181, and is currently the second highest levelled Human, after the Watcher who’s been around for a century or so. For someone who keeps trying to find reasons to keep going, one day at a time, he’s doing incredibly well. Edithe, too, after having emotionally recovered from her first disaster, then having lost the ability to summon and ending up stranded in an evolutionary cul-de-sac, having to re-invent herself by fighting up-hill battles as the weakest of the three companions, always feeling like the weak link, she became a legendary person in her company, one of the most famous people in the world, and now she’s integrated with the Archangel which initially had a huge probability of ending terribly for her, and now she might actually and up being one of the highest levelled people in the world. It is true that this is largely to Salvos’ credit, since she pulled them out of the gutter and helped them realise their potential with her combination of optimism and risk-taking, but considering how emotionally wounded they were, and how Salvos wasn’t, the fact that they managed to keep up is fascinating. Basically, it’s like comparing a healthy unburdened person with someone wounded and carrying a sack of cement, and the burdened wounded person almost keeps up. That makes them incredibly admirable. Having in mind that Daniel is lost in a foreign world, after his girlfriend died, his life broke apart, and he was friend-zoned by Salvos who is his love interest, and he still managed to reach lvl. 181 by merely gnashing his teeth and living in memories, that makes him actually more admirable, not less. Also, he is being compared to a legendary God King who lived for at least a thousand years, and he’s approaching his level in the first ten years or so of being there.

Apparently, it’s all relative.

There are several loose ends I would like to see resolved in the “Salvos” series. For instance, the Devil treated Salvos terribly in book 10, when she teleported from that sacrificial portal into his pocket space, and she was wounded, exhausted and trying to process the fact that she had to leave her companions and friends, and everybody knows her secret now so it’s a big question how they will react to her when she comes back; will everybody hate her? Will she be able to function normally there like before? She was processing it all so hard, she couldn’t even concentrate on half of what the Devil was saying to her, and he was so into his stupid idea of seeing her as entertainment, that he completely failed to see her as a person. So, instead of giving her the time to heal, rest and basically get her shit together, possibly talk her through that stuff, he told her she’s nothing compared to what’s out there, took her on a tour of the Multiverse, additionally traumatised her to the point where she was shaking, and then he dumped her into the Netherworld, at exactly the worst possible time, when the plane was resetting, and between the ocean of lava and black lightning there was also a whole Netherworld full of wild demons trying to kill everything that moves, and the only place she could go hide and heal was the underground cavern that turned out to be his lost kingdom brimming with Corruption.

Also, when they met again, the first thing he did was chastise her for being arrogant. To which she responded by healing his soul and giving him his life back, and he’s now with Belphegor in his old kingdom, reclaiming his actual life and dealing with the outcomes of his failures rather than going around like a crazy person, emulating Trico so that everybody would hate him and throw rocks at him, which he in his guilt thought was a just punishment for his role in the whole end of the world affair.

So, what is he going to do when Belphegor asks him how did he find such an admirable person, telling him about his experience with his daughter? Grin guiltily and admit he was treating her as entertainment and he was being a total asshole? They both owe her one.

Fortunately, there just happens to be a person by the name of Soli who just happens to be the designated enemy of the Arcraem and is working on destroying the world, and I think it’s Trico himself, and it’s a problem Salvos won’t be able to solve on her own. It would be nice to see the three of them heal that old wound like a proper family, especially if Salvos indeed happens to be a reincarnation of Via, and forgives Samuel for his role in her death. In any case, I don’t think the ritual of Regnorex will be something that’s easily solved, especially if Soli is the one behind it. Also, they can’t truly deal with him without breaking the ancient interdiction that prohibits them from killing another Worldwalker under threat of their world being completely destroyed; and yes, Idu will be waiting for just that kind of an excuse, and unless Salvos ascends to the status of a True God, nothing can be done about that one since he’s too powerful.

But Samuel needs to make it up to Salvos for treating her like shit instead of actual family, and she did promise to come see Belphegor again, when she’s strong enough. It would be fun if she came back through that wall of infinite corruption where the broken wall of the Nexeus meets the Void, from the other side, and just fixed the broken outer wall of the world. Samuel and Belphegor would lose their shit. Also, if she brought the Beast with her, morphed into a scary-looking humanoid, Samuel would really lose his shit. 🙂

A return of Samuel to her school, this time under his real name, in order to explain the Corruption and other historical facts, might also be interesting to see.

Helena meeting Salvos now that everybody knows, and after Salvos solved the Belzu problem that was a point of contention between them, might be interesting. You see, they both knew that Belzu will end up betraying them to who knows what end, and Helena was very unhappy about that alliance; however, when Belzu did betray them, Salvos herself killed him, tying that loose end. Also, Helena will feel quite guilty for her own role in distrusting Salvos despite the fact that she ended up saving them all and warning them about the Corruption and all that. Knowing that Salvos’ father is the First King of the Netherworld, and that two powerful Demons actually conspired incognito in order to warn them of the true danger, teach them proper space magic, and defeat the invasion of Regnorex, will lead to an understanding that Humanity owes them big time. I wonder how they’ll deal with that.

When Soli is revealed to be the main antagonist, the Humans won’t take that well. There’s going to be a serious shit show regarding that. They’ve been indoctrinated for ages into thinking the Spirit Lord is some kind of a transcendental God figure – rather than the Arcraem. They’ll have quite a bit of a hard time accepting the truth, or dealing with it. Also, if the Nexeus can’t be saved, the evacuation will be hasty and messy.

I wonder if Hartia will manage to fix his relationship with the Fairies; there is a hint that Fairy Queen’s misguided attempt to create that separate world will fail catastrophically, and likely kill them all, which might make Hartia the sole survivor of his species. However, he might in some way save them all when that world starts crumbling, showing them that the Fairy Queen and not himself was the true problem all along. In any case, there’s a story arc there and I wonder how it’s going to be resolved. Also, Salvos meeting Lily as a lvl. 200 God might be funny, especially if Lily still didn’t learn how to travel between the planes. 🙂

Manos was deliberately written ambiguously. Salvos trusts him because she saw that he’s drowning under the burden of all the deaths he caused, and he desires salvation from it all. She interprets it as his desire to get away from Regnorex. However, since “salvation” is something Regnorex keeps talking about, there might be a double meaning there, and how Manos ends up resolving his problem remains an open question.

Is there anything else I forgot? Probably. Willy is going to evolve soon, since he’s close to lvl. 150. Edithe will have to advance her class since her level is likely going to explode from the integration with the Archangel, and the experience of killing Matriarch Centinel, and, likely, the Archangel himself. That’s going to be weird and I can’t even guess where it goes. Also, the Arcraem might have a say in her Class options. Centina, too, is very close to evolving to Ancient Centinel, and since she’s trying to become as humanoid as possible, her evolution might be something to see. Also, she and Clayton got quite close, although not as close as she would like. I wonder what’s with that. Valda watched Sally die defending them. That must have left quite an impression. Also, all those bigoted staff members in the Mavos Academy are going to be a problem sooner rather than later, since that Dreaded Goblet is going to be an endpoint for a portal Salvos is likely to create, and when she brings a dozen Demons of extreme levels with her, that’s going to be quite something. Also, since there is an Elven invasion in progress, Salvos might bring their Matriarch to the summit, along with some Kobolds. She’s not taking sides there, despite Humans being too willing to have a war with everybody. Although, after the Demon invasion, Elven invasion and possibly a Kobold invasion, I think they might be somewhat done with war.