I dunno, it might be perfect comedic timing to have a two-lines-of-dialogue scene like "Did you do it?" "No"








That's hard to say, too, because who's to say the alteration was't meant to happen? Every machine needs periodic maintenance, and the maintainer might not always be suspecting of their role.





I had one of those in progress last year, but I stopped posting it halfway when all the readers vanished. Not to punish them, mind you, but I felt silly continuing it if it wasn't interesting to anyone but me.





The other interfering factor is even if Faite knows she *might* push that button, she's often not willing to commit herself over an uncertainty. And since right up until the end, the chance was only 50/50, she wouldn't have done anything about it way ahead of time.

Yet still, if she saw the chance increasing, she might change some small thing that keeps the machine from working. That's also how she could be considered a suspect.

But as you noted above about changes to the universe being a negative, Faite does believe that there are consequences to every change she makes, on the scale of the Butterfly Principle. She can see those consequences, too, so she tries to limit the scale of the damage she's causing. And that could *eliminate* her as a suspect interfering with the Baroness, simply because whoever did interfere changed something way too large scale that caused widespread problems.

So she could have changed the Coefficient, if she felt there was no other choice. Then again, if there were other options, like making the button mechanism itself pick a bad time to fail, or the power source abruptly shutting down, she would take that instead.





That's what happens when you have you are your own editor.

I'm struggling with writing a PV story on multiple levels. It's supposed to be pretty short, and the goal is to use as few other poster-characters as possible (especially avoiding the ones I get in trouble with), and still be a good story that actually interests people here besides me. I've re-written most of it about 5 times now, and still not satisfied. So I'm not neglecting this month's call to post, I'm simply royally screwing it up.