"Shit, don't even get me thtarted on my pthionicth," he says. "It'th like I'm mithhing a whole thet of limbth. Like a thet of armth controlled by my brain, and they got chopped off and left me with lethh than a thtump."

It's a sort of comfort, though, to commiserate about what they're missing. His voices may be what got him started, but the psionics he misses without caveat or complication. Those were awesome.

Again he shushes down to quietness for the sake of listening, though. He may not have met his ancestor, but it only takes so many mentions to make him curious of the whole. And god, but it's a lot to take in.

Slavery, helmsmanship, and rebellion he didn't all know about. He's only ever spoken briefly to the Signless, and both conversations went without the subject, ending in his own frustration for one reason or another. He may have to reconsider him, maybe give him another chance, but in the present moment his thoughts are on the story being told. It's a life harder than his own, that sentence unimaginable to his mind, and it makes it stranger still to think how somehow those two went and shaped themselves a diamond.

"Ath well ath I'm going to without meeting him," he murmurs at the end. His head lifts. "He thoundth... It'th more than I imagined. And he thoundth like me in wayth, but he went through more than I ever did and more than I can comprehend. I'm... fuck, I'm kind of at a lothh. I don't know what to thay."

It's strange, too, knowing now the part the Initiate - the Grand Highblood - had in his ancestor's fate. But they turned it around, didn't they? And he has his trust of his difference. He would not be sitting here live to hear this if he were the same troll, at the same path as he started.