Lemons

Arknights: 5S

Ooooh, neato! Love the hippogryphs, dead nations unite!

Arknights: 5S

@Nanolyte Holy fuck I love her she's so EXTRA

Arknights: 5S

The first response to Jericho's question was a quiet but drawn-out groan of pain as the blue-white Vouivre sitting on a chair in the corner grit her teeth and opened her eyes. She reached her hand out in front of her, staring for a moment at the black crystal lesion that now sprouted from its back before dropping it back down again and glancing up at the clock that sat on the left wall. 12:43, it said; her next session with Polka wasn't until 1:15. She had half an hour to burn, and it wasn't like she was doing much good sitting here trying to ignore the feeling of the crystals growing from her body.

Rolling her neck as she always had, she sucked in a breath through a tight cage of teeth as a bone-deep ache shot through it. Right. Just another thing that she needed to stop doing as a result of her new...situation.

"Mhmm," she intoned softly, voice a touch husky from held back pain. She shook her head, cleared her throat, focused on the problem at hand instead of the pain of the growths. "Yes," she tried again, this time louder and clearer, as she hauled herself to her feet. She wasn't really that tall from head to toe, but her relatively imposing horns added several inches, and made her look both taller and more threatening than she at all was.

From force of long habit she tapped a finger against the handle of the sword strapped to her back. Perhaps she didn't need it here in Hisn-ul-Zahra; but after the years, she only felt comfortable when it was with her, so she kept it strapped to her even during her sessions with Polka. And as usual these days--the past few weeks--when she tapped the sword...

...Ah, there it was. The frigid wave rippled up her arm, even in the desert heat. Her...her Arts letting her know that they were still there, and did not much appreciate being contained and unused--she shook her head again like trying to clear cobwebs out, then reached up to rub the the temples at the base of her horns. Needed to calm down and talk like a normal person. Half an hour and then she could relax with Polka and relish the (relative) relief from symptoms that followed in the wake of her music.

"Yes, of course I'll help look." The lilt of her Taran voice shook, but held. "It would be bad if--" Her constant low headache pulsed and she flinched, reaching a hand up and pressing it to the side of her head briefly. Her symptoms were bad today. "Nghh, sorry. It would be bad if he went off somewhere and we couldn't find him." Left unsaid was a kind of guarded curiosity. She'd vaguely heard of operator Seven, but she hadn't been with Rhodes Island long enough to meet. Never let it be said that either Ash Girl or Aoife Eóganachta didn't like meeting new people; and this woman certainly looked interesting.

Arknights: 5S

<Snipped quote by Nanolyte>

Great, you can throw her into the character tab. I'll get a starting post up tomorrow hopefully.

I also wanted to ask both of you if there were any canon operators you would like to be NPCs in this RP?

@Stern Algorithm

I think maybe Firewatch might be neat occasionally, since she's the one who saved Aoife's life.

Arknights: 5S

Well god gee dang, I do love her and that personality is going to gel really strangely with Aoife's. Excited.

Amygdala Circuit

It took more than a few moments for Quinn to collect herself enough to lift her face from her knees. The eyepatch was still settled on her face, but it was noticeably out of position, had clearly been shifted around a bit. It took some more time to collect herself even after lifting her face enough to reply; and when she did, her voice was thin and reedy and filled with a deep, cold, miserable confusion as she battled to force the words out of her throat.

"I--"

"Deelie, I--I looked...felt, I...I..." She swallowed hard, like she could gulp the lump back down her throat as tears still leaked from her eye. "...I, under my eyepatch, I, I felt it, I--." The words decayed into rambling static, then lapsed into silence, as she tried and failed to keep a hold on herself, to stabilize all the emotions rampaging through her. She took a deep breath, then: one, two, three. Just focus on that. Focus on the breathing. Don't focus on anything else, just the breathing. It took her well over a minute of just shuddering against the wall to finally resume what she'd been saying.

"I...felt under my eyepatch for, for the first time ever" She was slowly beginning to uncurl as she grew slightly--slightly--calmer."Roaki looked at it. It's...It's--"

A part of her didn't want to say it. Like saying it would make it real. But that was stupid kid thinking. It was real, and nothing she could do would make it any less so. But even so, her voice dropped to a pained whisper, still cut with tears.

"Why? Why?" She reached up to her hair, yanking at her bangs as her voice grew once again heavily agitated. "Why didn't he tell me, Deelie?"

By the time she finished, she was almost yelling:

"Does he hate me?"

Heiseina: Memories Long Forgotten

---

"Wow, really? Yeah, I'll give you so many leeks you can't even carry all of 'em! Thanks a ton, Mi-chan!"

After holding the warm smile, she gave a little pout, though that smile kept shining through her eyes even still. "You're sure you won't come to the festival?" Haruhi had heard rumors about Mio; she had heard plenty of whispers about the girl whenever she'd been around her in the village. She hadn't really paid enough attention to figure it out and didn't really like listening to whispers and rumors to begin with, but that didn't mean they weren't there, and in the case of Mio they definitely were. So Haruhi well understood the misgivings that Mio had. When was the last time she'd seen her at the festival...? It was hard to even remember, it was so long ago.

All that being said...

"Are you suuuure you won't come to the festival?"

...That didn't mean Haruhi had to like the rumors, and she definitely didn't need to accept them.

"You can just spend it with me if you want! I can't introduce you to Fuyucchi since she'll be busy, but we can definitely have fun, I promise!"

Haruhi wasn't exactly sure why she--well, she was. She just...felt so bad for Mio, and though Haruhi couldn't quite place what it was--she was always calm, after all--there was something about her that always seemed so unutterably sad. And Haruhi didn't like seeing people sad.

"So? Whaddaya say?"

---

Interactions: Mio @McMolly

Amygdala Circuit

At Roaki's suggestion, Quinn jerked her head up and a funny kind of queasy nauseated look emerged on her face as everything inside her tried to reconcile what was going on, and the emotions that she was struggling to suppress fought her control harder. A sudden alien feeling from within her didn't help matters any; a bristling distrust, a girl on edge. It hardly did anything to clarify to Quinn what she should do. Though, she certainly knew what she wasn't going to do; carry out horrible violence on Doctor Follen for something that she had very little knowledge of. As suspicious as she was, there was a part of her that knew, deep down, that he was a good person.

...Right?

A moment later she realized that she'd thought that with a question mark. And it was that thought that finally did it, that pushed her over the edge; that brief moment, that split second of doubt. Doctor Follen had been one of her few fixed points on the Aerie, one of the few people that she'd known implicitly that she could trust with absolutely anything. That she had trusted with just about anything. All of the sadness, all of the uncertainty, that had come with her position; all of the deeply personal things that she sometimes even felt scared to tell Dahlia.

So how could she doubt him?

That control that she'd given her level best to exert over her feelings, so tenuous now, finally cracked and broke, and she felt hot tears of confusion and grief welling up in her eye. She curled in the corner where the mattress met the walls and pulled her knees up to her chest, then rested her face against them as tears and muffled sobs seeped out of her. And suddenly, shame joined the rest of the awful things going on in her head:

She didn't want Roaki to see her cry.

Amygdala Circuit

Quinn flinched as Roaki reached once again into her face, tapping against the fragment of metal once again. She resisted the urge to twitch at the odd sensation, but she was busy thinking anyway. Thinking about how she ended up with modium in her head. And, more importantly, Roaki was right. It was...weird. She'd never experienced the disastrous effects of modium herself, but she'd seen Dahlia in pain from growths; she'd learned that she'd needed to get her eyes replaced because of them. Even just looking at Roaki was proof that it was dangerous and aggressive.

So if so, then...how was it just...sitting there? If it really had been responsible for the loss of her eye, then it would have been there for years. And that didn't happen. Modium didn't just sit there. So now not only was she very upset, she was upset and confused.

"Maybe it’s not really modium? Has that freak doctor seen it yet?"

Quinn opened her mouth to reply, then...closed it again. Stilled.

"I guess...I guess he would've had to, since he's the one who..." He's the one that did the modioscory on me. Doctor Follen would've had to see it, wouldn't he? It was the only thing that made sense. Which...made even less sense, because if Quinn had really carried a piece of modium in her head since she was a kid, then that made being a pilot absurdly dangerous, right? Horrifically so, the second she got into the Savior she could've exploded into a pile of metal tumors. So...

She sighed heavily and dropped her head, tightening her teeth as she locked her emotions down so they didn't carry her away with them. Besca. She could ask Besca about it. About him.

Amygdala Circuit

Quinn held her breath, holding still as she could, as Roaki poked her finger into her mangled eye socket. It wasn't exactly the most comfortable experience, but it was an old, old wound now; it was mostly just scar and skin, not much pain to be found there. Then Roaki muttered something in Helburkan. Quinn jerked slightly. "Did you get shot in the face? Did I miss you getting shot in the face?" She opened her mouth to say that no, she had not actually been shot in the face, that was not what had happened, when Roaki leaned over to grab a penlight. She shone it into the eye socket. Then she spoke. "That…it looks like modium."

Modium.

Modium.

Of course it had been modium.

A part of Quinn wanted to scream, and another part of her wanted to laugh. Instead she clenched her hands into tight fists, once, twist, three times, four, focusing on the feeling of her fingernails digging hard into her palms as she tried to clamp down on her rising hysteria. A mocking voice hissed inside of her, cast through time, telling her that it was because she'd looked outside. But no, it had been modium all along, that goddamn modium collecting in her and finding a way out in her fucking eye.

She thought back to when she'd taken her eyepatch off for Dahlia, right after the duel, and the pale-faced fervent fury that she'd displayed. She hadn't thought much of it at the time, but looking back, well, it all made sense now, didn't it? She'd seen it. She must've. She'd seen it and she'd been enraged on Quinn's behalf. Everything fell into place there now.

"Oi, deadgirl, when'd you lose this?"

"I dunno," she muttered, voice shaking, as she tried as hard as she could to keep herself calm and not lose her mind, "four or five years ago?"