[She listens patiently as she explains her "before" times and "now" ones. Old coping mechanisms to new processes. Language is a funny thing, isn't it? How easily a positive can be spun into a negative, and vice versa... Stubbornness is the negative sister of determination, after all.

It all sounds like religion to her, in the end, though. And that is not the comfort she finds it is for some others. Perhaps because she never had any cause to believe in anything like it. Would her life have been any better, any easier at all for it? Yelena doesn't think so.]

And how exactly do you celebrate something like this? I... I barely got her back, and now because, what- some computer program decided it didn't want her any more, I just don't get to have a sister?

I don't think I believe in afterlives. I think... you're here. And then, there's nothing. No welcoming committee. No bright lights. Big, pearly gates. Whatever. It is just more children's fairytales told to people to make them feel better about something they cannot control. [She shakes her head a little.] It means nothing.