Bella has been provided with a couch to lounge on during this meeting. For the sake of her recovery, of course. She'd been pushed beyond the brink already, so much that only the intervention of a god had saved her. Now she needed constant repose, so that her body could do all of the difficult work of stitching itself together over top of the new materials Redana had used to save her. To weave new and more powerful muscles out of the ones she had shredded, to grow denser bones that wouldn't shatter under the strain she'd just put them under, to regrow lost hair and fur, and to claim all the potential of an (outdated) Diodekoi from biological components that had never conceived of being put to such purpose.

For a week she has done nothing but sleep, and eat. Sleep and eat. Sleep and eat. For twenty hours out of every day, she has slept. The entire rest of that time has been devoted to devouring a staggering amount of food, heavy metals, and complex chemicals. She finds that she is constantly starving, and that even taking ten times her share of supplies in a day hasn't come close to satisfying. She is sick of it already.

But at the moment, she is standing up. She is healing well: so well her body has begun to itch. But more than that, the criticism of Artemis gnaws at her. The need to exert herself, to train her body to be up to the tasks she's about to put it to is overwhelming. So for the moment, at least, she rises and she paces around her little couch. Watching Vesper's thoughts arc through the air around her. 

Bella's body is strong: she has grown straight and even slightly taller than it had been before. In fact, in most every way she'd been put together not quite correctly. Like a sculpture of the idea of herself shaped out of a collective memory. She is hard and sharp now in places that had once known softness. Her hips protrude like knives and her shoulders like spears. Her fingers are elongated and even her face right down to her nose is harsher and more pointed than it used to be. Patches of fur grow thicker and rougher on her limbs, though not around the large and uneven scars across her thighs or her right shoulder. The jagged lines marking surgery around her ribs also shine like beams of moonlight on her cream colored skin.

But she has dressed to emphasize her old ideas of beauty. No more suits, no more of Mosaic's ridiculous failed appeals to the goddess she considered her patron. No more hiding from her past. Her name is Bella. She brings the Empire of Humanity with her wherever she goes.

"Are you kidding me? What kind of a question is that? Obviously they don't separate themselves from their surroundings, that's the point of the entire rest of the fucking empire. That's why we're being chased by a monster clown, and that's why Ves' plan makes any kind of sense to begin with. They don't do shit here except attempt the finishing touches on their art project. Isn't that the point of the Skies to begin with?"

She is wrapped in black silks. Luxurious softness clinging to her breasts from the clasps they are fastened to in the golden choker she wears around her neck. The strips of fabric widen as they extend, but the neckline they create plunges. And plunges. And plunges, not joining all the way into her skirt until the deep v crosses her belly button. The slashes in the sides of the skirt rise higher than that to the top of her waist, so that this dress of jet seems to splash across her body like a waterfall from the depths of Hades' palace. Delicate chains drape between her breasts and down her shoulders and her biceps where they join at a ring hanging at the bottom of her ribcage and more jangling chains all dotted with tiny bells wind their way around her hips. 

The dress pools around her feet like the tail of a fish, or since the material fades to crimson and gold along a series of rapidly conjoining hexagon shaped coins, a pool of wealth and blood. It follows her like water and spills fresh wherever she settles when she paces. Her every step is music. She clutches at the back of her couch with two hands covered in golden talons joined into a pair of gloves by links of black chain draped across her hands and stemming from a pair of bangles worn about her wrists. 

She fishes a can of cold, sloshing liquid of some sort off of her couch and throws it at the sheep's head. She leers at Vasilia, and laughs at her reaction. For old times' sake.

"Makes sense to me, anyway. Not like they're a bunch of vegetables or anything. But once you've been here, what else matters? That's why they'll stomach us showing up, but not the cogs we drag in from outside. Don't worry, Ves. I refuse to get stuck here. I'm going to Gaia, and I'm going to fix you. All of us."

She leans down again and plucks something else from the end of her furniture. In the midst of her regeneration, Bella's hair had decided it wanted to grow longer, as well. Rich curtains of blue-black softness draping all the way past her knees. She couldn't see the point in cutting it so soon. But Gemini had been disgusted with it, and pushed a pair of Silver Diver handmaidens on her who had woven these strands into elaborate braided loops atop the cascade of little silver chains pulling the rest of it into a semblance of cleanliness and elegance that would also keep it from catching on her feet. Even now these girls worked golden ribbons into her work, but Bella's addition is rather darker and more terrible. 

For the first time in a very long time, she wears the Imperial Regalia atop her head. She had no ability to function without her senses, no matter how overloaded Capitas might render them. But with this, and the help of her Auspex eye, she would be able to rapidly cycle between her senses, turning each one off and on as she needed them and not before (or after). It would be annoying and it would still render her slower and too close to helpless for her own liking, but it would mean she could do what needed to be done for as long as it needed doing. As long as she didn't fall apart first.

Bella yawns wide and loudly, only making a halfhearted attempt to cover it behind her talons. She slips around the edge of her couch and settles onto her stomach, propping one side of her face up with her sharp and slender hand. And watches the proceedings through half-lidded eyes.