"It's even worse than that, she has her people wear them too," Perkins said to Sofiya, "if you want to get her a fashion designer before you send her to jail I'd consider it a public service."<br/><br/>"Oh, someone new to this planet! And a cute one! Pardon me for not introducing myself," she gave a half-assed cross between a wave and a salute at Ace, "Kanna Kamui, resident storm goddess. I hope you've been praying to me recently, or you might want to stay away from wide open spaces. My hero identity got outed ages ago so you can just call me Paige though." She flashed a grin at the heroine, which settled into a serious expression to get down to brass tacks.<br/><br/>"I've pieced together a lot concerning Ellie, you might even kind of call it my hobby. I would encourage you to think of her troubles... less like a natural disaster and more like a dam bursting. Now, a dam can stand strong for ages, and it can take a flood or an earthquake - it's built to. If it bursts, though, failure occurs along an existing weakness. Rrgh, no, that's a terrible metaphor. Let me try this again."<br/><br/>"So Ellie really gave her all on everything she did. When she was a hero, she was one of our best. When she set her mind to cybernetics, she was<em>almost</em>as good as me. Not bragging, just facts. When she put her mind to being a wife and a mother she was so adorable you don't even know," the Firewall heroine gave a wistful sigh. "All that worked out pretty well for a while. Then we found out about her husband. I was there for a lot of the aftermath so I'll tell you I spent a lot of nights being her shoulder to cry on, but we also spent a lot of time trying to figure things out so they could work out for everybody and coming up empty."<br/><br/>"So, what happens when someone that dedicated sets her heart on protecting the people close to her, and sets her heart on dealing with the Tiamat problem, and finds out that not only can she not do both, she can't bring herself to do either? Long story short, she made herself into someone who<em>could</em>. And then it got worse. Darclight's right that her experimental cognitive implants are only part of it, but 'mad from the revelation' implies that there was one realization that set everything on its head and everything was padded walls and pills after that. She was still<em>her</em>in the days after, just... less. Nobody completely sane is going to start rewiring their brain to get rid of things that they think are unnecessary, but from the outside, it still looked like that kind of quiet total determination she had before. She stopped going out, she got shyer, she developed a stutter before she got rid of that too. If she'd been throwing herself into walls and howling about the elder gods I would've known to help right away, you know?"<br/><br/>Perkins shook her head, "anyway, that was before all the murder. Today I don't think it would be as simple as giving her a hug or asking her to fix herself, I've done both and she tried to cave in my skull both times and I should emphasize that I used to be her best friend. Still, if you run into her, you seem thoughtful enough that I don't mind if you try and help, as long as you don't die."