Lemons

Amygdala Circuit

The unseeing panic in Quinn's eye began to abate as she listened to Besca baring her soul. Her rapid hyperventilation slowed, and while she was still breathing very hard and couldn't find the calm to take those three deep breaths as yet, she was at least calmer. Her nerves, though they jangled, no longer whipped and crack through her body, and the bottle of terror was plugged with a stopper again.

She...hadn't considered, really, how much Besca would have been affected by Westwel. Which was silly, of course; she and Dahlia were still tortured by memories of Hovvi, so why wouldn't Besca have beeen struck in the same way? Quinn still had a habit of thinking of her as someone infallible or invincible; but ever time she heard someething like this, it struck her how wrong that was more and more.

And yet, at Besca's insistence that she trusted nobody else over Quinn to try to do the right thing, she still felt a deep-rootedd glow. She was struck with a feeeling at once familiar and foreign, the same one that had taken hold when Besca had told her that she was her hero. An expectation but not a cruel one, and a hope that hurt her heart to feel.

As her breathing slowed and steadied further, she stared up at and past the ceiling, imagining herself peering through space and seeing the Aerie as it sailed above Runa. She closed her eye gently and finally took one, two, three long, exaggeerated breaths, the third of which was released in a long, drawn-out sigh. A moment or two later, she finally broke the minutes-long quiet with a voice that was very small and scared, like a lost child. "Besca?" The silence stretched for a few moments more before she finished the thought:

"Do...do you miss me?"

Lem's Stash

L Y N
L Y N

^{"Aaaaah! Why is this happeniiiing?"}

C H A R A C T E R P O R T R A I T C H A R A C T E R P O R T R A I T _________________________________________________________ C H A R A C T E R D A T A C H A R A C T E R D A T A _________________________________________________________ Name Alias: Lyn Real Name: Her Highness Princess Alessandra Lynseria Veronica Adelina d'Vastúre Age 18 Gender Femme Height 152cm (5'0") Appearance Fairly short, flat-chasted and petite with short pale blue hair, at first glance Lyn could be mistaken as a boy a few years younger. She has pale amber-gold eyes, set over a face often either expressionless or set in some stripe of anxiety. She is slim annd slender, with a fairly soft body and ill-defined musculature compared to most adventurers; she's not winning any weight lifting competition any time soon. She carries herself with what seems a constant low level of anxiety; head down, shoulders hunched, always looking around like she's watching her back for a knife about to find its way in. Rank 15 Class/Specialization White Mage Abilities Class Ability - Fate's Echoes - Lyn picks apart and reweaves the threads of life, causing or mending wounds through the influence of the Moirai. Heroic Ability - Rebuke of Clotho - A rejection of fate by the one who spins the thread of life. Lyn's Level 15 Heroic Ability allows for brief moments of intense restorative power. It will never resurrect someone, lasts for only a few moments, and of course it takes quite some energy out of her; but the level of healing it can output can be grand indeed.

B A C K S T O R Y - T H E R U N A W A Y B A C K S T O R Y - T H E R U N A W A Y ________________________________________________________________________________________ Daughter of Vincaladh, the tyrant king of Vastúre, Lyn is hiding in the guild from a betrothal that equates to being sold more than anything else. Growing up, Princess Alessandra was kept very much isolated from the nation that she belonged to the royalty of. She knew little of it, and especially little of the plights faced by the citizens. She was oblivious by all metrics, and remained as such until the age of thirteen, when--through plain teenage rebellion--she snuck out of the palace of Vastúre and into the capital city proper. It was not great. After that point, she gradually stopped engaging with her father and younger brother, spending more and more of her time with her mother Cosette, just as quiet and introverted as she was. Another few years passed in this strange liminal fashion of not truly believing she belonged in her home before, at fifteen, her father told her that as the daughter of a king, it was her job to be married off to form an alliance. For almost the first time Alessadra could remember, Cosette argued back against Vincaladh, and argued fiercely. Their daughter was not ready, she asserted, and while diplomacy important, so was ensuring that their daughter wasn't miserable. Perhaps he didn't care, she snapped, but she would not allow her daughter to be married off yet. More time passed, and one of Alessandra's greatest fears came to pass at seventeen: Cosette grew ill and her fever would not break, and so she wasted away before her daughter's eyes. With her death, Vincaladh--no longer restricted by his queen--immediately began to arrange a future for his now unprotected daughter: a life with high nobility in in an unfamiliar country to cement an alliance. And Princess Alessandra ran. P E R S O N A L I T Y - D A U G H T E R O F A T Y R A N T - K I N G P E R S O N A L I T Y - D A U G H T E R O F A T Y R A N T - K I N G ________________________________________________________________________________________ As a result of her upbringing, Lyn isn't exactly the best-adjusted of individuals. Quiet and relatively unexpressive on the surface of it, as long as you don't actually pay that much attention she can very much look the part of the dignified princess (if one that looks significantly younger than she actually is). However, a little more digging and you find a highly anxious and fraught individual, worried constantly about most aspects of her life, especially in how people see her. C H A R A C T E R A R C - M E T A M O R P H O S I S C H A R A C T E R A R C - M E T A M O R P H O S I S ________________________________________________________________________________________ Girl gotta come out of her shell, stop overthinking literally everything literally all the time.

---

Amygdala Circuit

For a moment, Quinn didn't know how to respond. Long enough to for the silence to drag, to be filled with a unpleasant anticipation. "I know," she began haltingly, "that being in Cantimine is supposed to be a...vacation for me, I think. But...It's just..." She clenched the phone tigher in a whitening hand and took a long, shaky breath, staring up at the hotel's unfamiliar ceiling. She was starting to get tired of looking at unfamiliar ceilings, and in that moment she wanted nothing more than to be back in the Aerie dorms where she could bury her head in Besca's shoulder instead of waiting a week for a phonee call. "The--the small town. The...street festival. The crowds. The water."

Her voice's trembling grew more pronounced, and she levered herself upright, wrapping her left arm around her knees and pulling them tight to her chest while she still held her phone in her right She sqeeezed her eye shut as hard as she could, trying her best to stave off the frantic tears that she could feel burgeoning--that she'd felt burgeoning for hours now. "And--and--then the s-sun started setting and...it was like...like--" She clenched her teeth tight, the sounds coming through the phone reduced to breaths rendered shallow by an almost atavistic fear.

"I don't...remember most--most of...that night," she said after some moments, voice a strangled whisper. "But it's...enough."

Having said that, she made some attempt to get her breathing back under control. In. Out. In. Out. In. Out. In--it wasn't working, she could't--and all at once, she surged into out-and-out hyperventilation as she reached a hand up to cover her face. The terror that she'd bottled up over the course of the day came rushing out all out once, and her tightly wound nerves snapped. "And it's like dark bitter water and sickness and the smell of blood and smoke and fire and a sound like thunder--"

She clapped her hand over her mouth, forcing herself to suck harsh breaths in through her teeth------

Lunar Dome 10

"Kaplan," Yingxue bit out as Holiday took down her dictation to send, "there's something seriously wrong with whatever this thing is."

She peered down into the microscope again for the umpteenth time, still someone hoping that she was wrong about this and...whatever the hell it meant.

"Its genetiic code has been tampered with and spliced to hell and back so many times I can't even identify provenances. It would be easier to think of it as a man-made organism entirely than a modified animal. So..." she paused, rubbing her eyes as she tried to string her tired thoughts and words together, "if it's so incredibly modified, then why? Why would LD9 make something that can sicken animals it bites, chew through concrete and metal..."

She sucked in a long breath through a tight cage of teeth, tilting back on her chair as she let her arm fall over her eyes.

"And how did it end up here, anyway? It'd need to travel across the lunar surface, and if something can survive in that level of hypoxic environment, as soon as it was reintroduced to more oxygen density it'd die."

A long, long sigh as she finally said what was bubbling in the back of her mind, letting her chair legs fall to the floor again as she started at the electron microscope in an oddly detached way. "I hope this is just me being paranoid, and it's not relaly my place to say anyway. But I'm starting to worry that this..." she hesitated a moment more, "...is some kind of sabotage. Let me know if you have any other tasks for me. Xi Yingxue."

With a quick nod at nothing in particular to prompt Holiday to send it, she slumped out of chair, eventually laying flat against the ground as she stared up at the sterile ceiling.

"...I don't like this."

Lunar Dome 10

Hey, sorry for the delay and the shortness of the result. Wanted to keep it brief because after all I don't know the result of the scan and wanted to keep it a Cliffhanger™.

Lunar Dome 10

With a long, low moan, Yingxue placed her head firmly on the lab table she was working on. Bitten. The cow was bitten. Why? By what? How? As far she she knew there wasn't anything like a real predator or parasite in LD10, so the only reasonable solution is that--

"--I'll bet Eel bit it," she muttered, doing her best to quiet the creeping unease. Unknown creature. And, important and no less discomfiting, its bite had sickened the cow. It must be ill itself, and she hoped to god it wasn't the patient zero of some mysterious alien illness.

"Holiday, does the dentition pattern match any known species that we have on board? Could be some grand accident," she asked with undisguised if desperate hope in her voice. She was pretty sure anything on board wouldn't start biting to begin with, so whatever was going on it was an anomaly of some kind. She finally lifted her head, rubbing her sore eyes tenderly as her attention started to stray back over towards her beanbag. She violently wrenched it back to shape, refocusing on the work in front of her. The Big Important Stuff had come in; the sterile equivalent of a q-tip the tip of which had rubbed on the bitemark had just arrived. The potential genetic information.

It wasn't certain that what she found would actually be whatever relevant to their mysterious guest, or if enough time has passed for it to decay and leave just the cow's genetics. But, of course, any effect would be better than no attempt. She mounted it quickly and had it underneath the electron microcop like she'd done it a thousand times (which to be fair, she definitely had), before finally looking into the viewfinder at whatever she might appear. A bit of observation later and she suddenly jerked backwardd like she'd been stung, staring at the microscope.

"What the hell...?" she breathed.

Lunar Dome 10

Hey sorry for ths long silence, lot going on right now. Will get out a Yingxue post befeore the end of the week, promise.

Lunar Dome 10

Yingxue let out a long, long sigh as she took another sip of her tea, pushing the second egg around on her plate with her fork. She was no longer hungry.

"Isaac," she said wearily, "I spent all night on this already. Genetically, there's nothing wrong with the cow." As people filtered out of the cafeteria, she was more comfortable with dropping her head into her hands in something approaching despair. "I don't know exactly what the oil is but it's not mutagenic. Unless you want me to look at some other part of it."

The despair only grew, because Isaac was probably going to tell her to take another look at it anyway. Leaving the egg carelessly on the table she stood, downing the last of the teea in an aggressive gulp. She'd already gotten rid of the thin section she'd been looking at. She'd need to get another tissue sample out from lab refrigeration and mount it all over again. Her eyes were already killing her from staring into the microscope all night; she rubbed at them again.

She was halfway to the lab again when she saw her reflection in a pane of glass and remembered what she looked like. She'd already lookedd at the stupid cow. Even if she had to look at it again, she was going to do it without looking like she was five step from tottering over. She reversed course, then headed over to the habitation wing. She didn't keep a lot in her room, but it was where she kept her makeup. Foundation. Concealer. Maybe some highligher and eyeshadow for further misdirection, she looked worse than usual. After the walk, she beeped into her room and retrieved her makeup kit from the spartan table.

In short order, she looked...well, not well. Not at all. But presentable. Taking a long, deep breath as she looked in the mirror, she gave herself a few quick slaps on the cheeks before hurrying out and down to the lab again. As she did so, she called up Isaac again. "Is there anything in particular you want me to look at? I'll be in the lab, can you bring me a sample of the affected grass as well so I can run an analysis on that too?" The lab door shunted open and she cast a mournful look at her empty beanbag before starting the mounting process all over again.

Once more into the breach.

Scion: The Prophecy of Anani

---

The ceremony at the Cathedral was unremarkable, as far as procedures went. Well, except for the fact that all six of the current Scions were concentrated in one place, but--

And then it was all seven. Axan stared like her eyes were going to pop out of her head. Sorrel Gran. Even if it had somehow been a case of same-name-itis, there was no way she'd forget that mop of bright red hair. After the surprise slackened off, a slow grin crept across her face, defying attempts to be a stoic, stone-faced emissary of the Goddess. What were the odds of that kid showing up again like this? One out of anyone in the world, and it ended up being Sorrel Gran.

Significantly buoyed by the news, she departed the cathedral--this time accompanied by Marque, at his insistence--and stepped into the waiting limousine. Putting her sword aside for the moment, she finally indulged in the long arm stretch that she'd started yearning for about ten minutes into the service, leaning backward to avoid bonking her hands into the limo's ceiling. Ahhhh. Much better. She nudged Marque playfully with her elbow as she brought her arms down and the limo slowed to a halt, grasping the sword again. "Guess it's time I go make nice with li'l Yuli, hmm?"

As she stepped through the grand door of the Giles manor, letting the cold slough away, Axan cracked her neck a few times, grimacing in satisfaction. Despite what she'd said to Marque--she'd get a smile out of him yet!--she had a few different options that she was rather split between at the moment:

First, she could go antagonize her cousin as was the plan. The man was obnoxiously obsessed with duty. If he'd shipped himself down to Juniperus and crammed himself into something that wasn't his military uniform, it was almost certain he wanted something out of her. To come back to Rodion, maybe. But whatever it was he wanted, she wasn't going to make it easy on him. Second, she could hunt down Sorrel! It had been a roundabout a decade since she'd seen him last, and the kiddo from back then seemed to have grown into a fine young man.

But, she reminded herself as she felt the pinch in her stomach, she hadn't actually eaten today, so the first order of business was getting some food in her. She'd just need to be really careful to avoid spilling anything; if she got sauce on her brand-new extremely fancy gown, she was going to just about detonate. She turned her head to Marque beside and a bit behind her, face the picture of serious sincerity. "You have a most important task to attend to, Templar of Fire." Unable to fully hold her straight face, she cracked a grin. "First, get me something to drink at the bar. Anything's fine as long as it's at least 30%, preferably higher. And second," her voice dropped a little lower, more gentle, "go have some fun or something. Eat some good food, have a drink. Relax!" Without waiting for him to respond--almost certainly to refuse his second task--she made her way carefully to the buffet table, keeping an eye out for either of her two targets as she went and not finding them, perhaps because of the crowd.

She was met instead by someone entirely unexpected beside her at the table: the new Shadow Scion Penne and her Templar. She gave her a playful bump in the side, picking up an empty plate and starting to load it with sauce-light foods like Rodion caviar and Rosarian sirloin steak, a bit of an endeavor in balance as she held her sword low to her side. "Penne, right? Think I only saw you at your accession ceremony. Axan Technically-Not-A-Real-Surname Sturke, Scion of Fire. If you've got any Scion-related problems give me a call, a'ight?" She turned to face the two and flashed a winning smile. "Good to actually meet'cha!"

_{Interacting with @Raijinslayer, @McMolly, and @Asura}

Lunar Dome 10

Please do not dunk her head.