'It's a land in despair with messy hair!' 'Your first step to glamor, Uncle Vought's Hair Treatment!' '......' The model picks her tail up, makes a proud show for the camera... It's amazingly blunt. No lenscraft to speak of at all. Anyone can see how forced she is. After the commercial's over, whether anyone will remember the hair treatment cream is unknown, but the tail will have been undeniably close to perfection, soft and yielding with a gorgeous luster. Even the arc in which it pointed up, idyllic. Provence hasn't been a model before; she's only a Catastrophe Messenger. There's something she often hears, at least along the lines of it: 'if you can't do your best, you can only do better next time.' 'Better' signals something to compare to, and that signals regret. No one dares say whether the info one gets scrambling across and monitoring the wilds is 100% exact, whether you can get word of a Catastrophe to the epicenter in time, whether you can relay it to everyone there. Regret is part and parcel with a Catastrophe Messenger's work, and 'do better next time' is how they comfort each other. So when Provence had managed to shelter the villagers she'd just brought back from the barrens, and turned back to see a village lost under the violent storm, a village with people still into it, and she wasn't in time to save them, she could only tell herself: 'Don't blame yourself, Provence, settlements are too scattered in the wild, there's not even a comms line, you're doing this on just your own two legs, this was bound to happen... you can only do better next time.' The next day, while she was resupplying at a town, she saw an engineering team. They were firm-hired, helping the local government install a local communications system, and they'd mounted electronic screens at some of the crossroads, so they could... put ads on them. Commercials worshipping quality of life bombarding people, one after another, while villagers in the wilds never even receive any life-or-death Catastrophe alert. Provence sought out the one in charge of the firm, and requested the local system extend its coverage out to the belt of surrounding wilderness. Even just a single emergency comms circuit more would do. 'Those mucks are starving every day, and you think they can afford a hair treatment? How is this going to do anything for us?' 'Don't give me that baloney about passing on hope. That's for you Catastrophe Messengers to worry about.' 'Isn't there any way?' Provence knew this wouldn't work. She was just hung up on how if that emergency line existed, if things could be... that little bit faster in future. Of course she couldn't do her best, but she could do better, and 'better' signals something to compare to, and that signals there's a possibility, so it was down to her to do everything she could. 'Did you just say your product was for hair treatment?' 'Maybe—we can work together on this.'