Folks around the Terraced Lake will talk. Naturally! That's one of the simple pleasures of life on [s]Gaia[/s] Earth. They share information. They provide their own opinions. The "phones" they have connect them across incredible distances - you can call someone on the other side of the planet, if you don't mind waking them up in the middle of the night. So perhaps it's not too much a stretch to imagine that one of these topics of conversation, besides the very big thing that dropped out of the sky (asteroid? bit of space elevator gantry? A Foxgirl Scheme?), is the people who have shown up and have made a campground.

Specifically, tongues might wag about Big Bella and Danny.

Because, right, hear me out: Big Bella's a [i]lot[/i] of woman. She's got a mouth on her that could turn milk blue, but she's tall, curvy, and proud: exactly the right blend to give her [i]fangirls.[/i] And not to put too fine a point on it, but her wife's tiny in comparison. Earth's not really the sort of place for this to get too out of hand, but folks might be wondering: what does a bombshell like Big Bella see in a pipsqueak like Danny?

Well. Eventually talk might start circulating. See, Danny likes taking runs in the mornings. She runs like she's trying to catch up with the sun as it rises. She runs like she doesn't know what grass is. She runs until she finds something worth pulling out her sketchbook for, and she'll wander around anywhere she finds interesting - doesn't matter if it's a little shrine or a Burrower ruin, she'll duck into either and look around with her green-and-blue and get this big smile on her face as she wanders about.

Then she'll end up back at Yue's place for a late breakfast, and you might catch Big Bella watching out the window as her Danny trots up, all sweaty and beaming like the sun (though if you asked her, Big Bella would tell you, firmly, that Redana's smile is [i]nothing[/i] like [i]that fucking asshole[/i], like the sun stole forty cakes from her or something), and then she grabs a bucket and trots right down to the river to dump it over her head and then shake shake shake like she's trying to make a swamp.

And if you saw Danny there, amber-yellow hair clinging to her forehead, eyes closed, top clinging to her delts, bag hucked over a branch, a hop and a skip away from true and proper peace, you might realize that Bella lucked out.

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"...and this Handmaiden was just trying to talk this horror of the underworld into submission, and every time she blocked one of its new limbs, I could [i]feel[/i] the blow in the ground. But she refused to hit it back, she just tried to hold it fast while it kept taking new shapes, like, like, um, that one king who could change shapes and was a seal originally? Procrustes[1]?" This is met with a serious nod from Yue, who is letting her breakfast get cold as she drinks this in with, well, seriousness.

"So I jumped in! All while it was wrapping her up in its tentacles! But she wouldn't let go, and I showed it how the Silver Divers fight things with too many tentacles!" It's not too hard to imagine her as an exorcist's assistant, is it? A two-fisted heroine who saves the damsel in distress. Yes, that's definitely the image she'd convey.

"But it turns out, when we eventually caught it, she called him her brother and said that he had caught and betrayed her a very long time ago, but she was just trying to stop him from carrying out his old duties, which were - well, you wouldn't believe it, but - he'd imprisoned a [i]lot[/i] of people in that Burrower Den, and she had to hold him fast while someone set them all free. So that was me!" She brushes hair out of her face, and then memory strikes her.

"And she told me to tell you, Yue, that Rosepetal says hello, and that she's doing very well!" She grins, delighted to have made a friend of a friend's friend. "But afterwards, she talked with him - it was all growls and clicks and humming - and she let him go. What do you make of that? All that fighting, against a brother who was seriously trying to hurt her, who kidnapped that many people, and she let him crawl away? I would have expected her to, I don't know, have [i]some[/i] way to stop him..."

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[1]: Proteus. A swing and a miss, Dany.