Aery rolled her eyes. "You would have just thrown the granola bar away and said you'd eaten it if I hadn't just stuffed it into your mouth. But seriously, eat that before you get back to tinkering."
She would brush past him, headed back to her lab. And then she nearly had a heart attack. Standing on top of one of her experiments, studying the terrarium intently... Aery blinked to make sure she wasn't hallucinating. A tiny girl with... wings? Dragonfly wings. Stood on one of Aery's terrariums, studying the butterfly inside.
"Okay, who are you?" Aery asked, reaching for the butterfly net that she kept in her lab lest one of her charges get loose.
The girl giggled. "Does it matter?"
"Yes, it does."
"My name is Antikythera. Most call me Kiki for the sake of their tongues." She giggled, flapping her wings and flying up to Aery's head height.
"Okay...? Kiki, then. Why the hell are you [i]here[/i], in my lab?!"
"To help you. Or rather, to help my people, and to help you in the process. You're a xenobiologist, right? Well, here I am, an example of another sentient organism. I'm a Lilliputian, if you must know. And I'm not going to leave you alone, Aery."
"Wha... You know my name." Aery said it very calmly, her hands trembling. Very calmly, very slowly, she left the laboratory to go find Charlie.
"Hey, Charlie, what would you do if I told you that there is a Lilliputian girl who has cybernetic wings in my laboratory, who happens to know my name? Purely hypothetically speaking." Her face had gone pale and she was clutching her holographic drawing tablet so hard that her knuckles were white. She was absolutely terrified of the little tiny girl.