Quote Originally Posted by Hardcore View Post
The order want Serini as an ally, right? That can only happen by persuasion, right?
Rouges are good at lies and deception, right?
Serini is Rouge, and likely a good one.
Given her thinking it would make sense for her to betray the order to xykon.
Can the Order ever be sure she won't be an unreliable ally that stab them in the back?
1) The Order doesn't know very much about Serini's thinking, because she's refused to talk with them. They have every reason to think that she opposes Xykon, and no reason to think that she would work with him.

2) There's no reason for her to betray them to Xykon. She doesn't want them fighting Xykon at all because she thinks they'll wind up destroying the gate in the process (her thoughts on this are not very well developed- more on that in a moment). There's really no scenario that I can think of where betraying them to Xykon makes it less likely that this outcome will occur, especially given her stated belief that Xykon will easily beat them anyway. She'd just be making it more likely that Xykon finds out about her or that the Order winds up acting out of desperation. Keep in mind that she didn't attack the Order because they were about to ambush Xykon- she was just following through on a pre-existing plan of hers that she decided on well before they entered the dungeon.

3) A lot of what has become accepted as "her thinking" on this forum is a construct of this forum, not the Serini we see in the comic. Serini, in the comic, is acting irrationally, and most of her plans and positions clearly haven't been thought through. In order to try to represent Serini as being more rational and calculating than she actually is, people have invented a lot of reasons and arguments that Serini herself has not expressed, even when given the opportunity. The Serini we see in the comic is not a coldly rational schemer; she's prone to emotional outbursts, block-headed stubbornness, and short-term thinking. When V asked why she didn't respond to their sending, she didn't outline some concern that if they knew she was alive they might get captured by Xykon and he would interrogate the information out of them, she said that they were dumb and stupid and she didn't want to talk to them.

It isn't in Serini's nature at all to pretend to agree to work with them before betraying them to Xykon. Doing that would require her to consider the idea that they might defeat him at least strongly enough to pretend to believe that it's true and help them plan for it, and she's in the mental space right now where such a thought cannot be entertained at all.