It wasn't normal for Darius not to notice Grace as soon as she was in the room. Generally, his eyes and attention were immediately drawn to her, but the revelation that this test seemed to think that he ought to be a politician, it was acutely upsetting. Politicians were people like Harris, people who were rigid and cold in the face of new information or cherry-picked the knowledge that they wanted to be true. People who would lock up someone who had managed to risk everything to bring two warring countries together for the sake of saving the world.

Darius was far from that. He wasn't a good man by any stretch of the imagination, but he tried to be. Grace, Liam, Gillian, they made him want to try to be a better man than he had been before, and he thought he was doing a decent job of it.

It was Grace's voice that pulled him back. Reminded him that he was in 'The Cooler' with a rather frustrating AI named LACUNA, and being tested for aptitude so she could better 'test' them in the future.

His footsteps slowed to a stop so she could catch up, and when she did, his hand immediately moves to take hers. They weren't able to do even simple gestures like this in their world, he was going to take advantage of that small luxury for as long as he could. "Nothing, it's just -" It took him a moment to actually say it, and when it did come out he sounded nothing but incredulous about it. It still annoyed him. "They said I should be a politician."