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To know the ease of slipping off your hangover - the way you would slip off a bathrobe, or a well-worn pair of sneakers - was to know the finite gift of youth. One day her body, no matter how trained, no matter how honed, no matter how hydrated, would lose the ability to defeat her post-inebriation woes, the way that people lost hair or muscle tone or the ability to digest lactose. But until that day, Nicole would be there with her hip-holstered bottle of strawberry banana bottle, her half a cannoli, and she would be [i]boolin'[/i] her headache away.

It would be unfair to expect her less worldly teammates to possess the same grit. Before Nicole had led her down the booze-slicked road of sin, she'd never known Dana to drink anything harder than a fruit punch or a particularly fermented grape juice, and just because Penny [i]sounded[/i] like a drunken, bagpipe-wielding berserker didn't mean she had to drink the part too. It was Nicole alone who knew how to grapple the four-armed headache demon, Nicole who had guilelessly bought into the fiction peddled by other young partygoers that you could drink a glass of water or lemonade for every single shot you took and your body would find an equilibrium in the morning with no ill effects, Nicole whose muscles, through trial and error, had peddled together a skincare routine to protect her face ([color=ec008c]"It's a hot commodity, baby!"[/color]) from the dried-on makeup and dried-out pores that came with a night of poisoning herself in order to contort her body in new and unnatural fashions to Baeterran synth music.

So it would be up to the shepherd, who made her boldest fashion statement yet the morning after the party by trudging around the halls wearing a fluffy alabaster bathrobe as a mink, to tend her flock. She nursed her team even while afflicted, a plague doctor in all but mask, with the Hastan breakfast of champions - chocolate croissants lovingly microwaved to perfection, with freshly brewed cortada to really kick those brains back into gear. There was some initial rejection, probably owing to the lack of hot Hastan blood required to properly synergize with a hangover coffee, but overall she thought she was being pretty helpful.

Until Priya thought it would be a good idea to drop by with her own set of poisons - dihydrogen monoxide, the silent killer, and - calcium carbonate? What was the chemical formula for an egg? Was there one? When the flowery tongue of the poets failed, how could science hope to communicate through its cold, austere tongue? What was the formula for the grease, flipping her stomach the way the eggs had flipped in the pan? How to describe the olfactory Ides of March, when those flakes of pepper drew its daggers and hacked their way up her aquiline Hastan nose? What was the first language the devil told his lies in?

Thus spoke Cognoscenti: 

[color=ec008c]"dude i'm gonna frow up"[/color]

And she did, all morning and into the afternoon, all the good of her nonna-approved breakfast therapy undone. Good, as she had throughout history, had seen the face of evil and barfed.

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And now good and evil were clashing again, all through the skies of Palmyra, and there was no time to nurse an upset stomach. Nicole listened to the gale force outside, bellowing threats at Nova Lux's hall and its cathedral windows. She watched fat raindrops shriek and burst against the glass, drawing tears from Ars Magi whose faces had been rendered with the intent that they would never cry again. Her nails dug deep into her palms. It was only 4 o'clock, but it may as well have been midnight. The tears of her heroes drew a horizon between them and the world, and beyond it there [i]was[/i] no world at all.

There was a crash. Was that an airship? [color=ec008c][i]It sounds like it detonated.[/i][/color]

Should she be afraid? Once, she might have been afraid.

Was she going to die? She felt like she was going to die. Shouldn't she be afraid?

"Nova Lux is under attack. All of you, head toward the medical wing immediately."

Okay.

"The enemy...are Ars Magi." 

Okay. Shouldn't she be afraid?

She thought of the Ars Magi they had been tested against, of Ciara Gallagher, and realized with an odd, numb feeling that she wasn't feeling shock in the slightest. Of course there would be Ars Magi who had set out on their own, had fallen from grace. Their training had been the real death blow to the idealized image of the Ars Magi, to the two-dimensional, beautiful figures sobbing in the glass mythopoeia laid out before her eyes. Everything since then had just made this seem...inevitable. The only room for ideals left was the ideal [i]she[/i] would leave behind herself, her and her beloved girls, the day they were etched in glass themselves.

[color=ec008c]The wind is on my back. May my sword cut like my smile.[/color]

The true horizon was her smile - Nicole's face, her hot commodity, and the girls behind it, and the smile drawn across it, protecting all she loved from the dark. 

[color=ec008c]"Vi faccio vedere come lotte un Hastano!"[/color]

She turned back to Penny, grinning with the kind of sisterly ease she knew they needed.

[color=ec008c]"You heard the lady,"[/color] she said. [color=ec008c]"We show them what [i]we[/i] can do. And don't start telling yourself we're blind. We're not blind at all - we have home field advantage."[/color]