Mcmolly

Amygdala Circuit

Roaki snarled, flinching back and swatting at Quinn’s hand. Humiliation was familiar to her now, and while she couldn’t let it slide from the lizard, she had no choice but to take it from the girl who’d bested her. Their spars in sims were one thing, but to actively fight back? The lion’s share of her knew she was unworthy of something like that.

Still, just because she was done trying to kill Quinnlash for the moment, didn’t mean she would blindly follow her commands, especially something so ridiculous as apologizing.

“I’ve torn out hearts for lesser slights,” she spat back. “Consider it a favor that she still breathes”

Across the room, Dahlia opened the fridge, where three pairs of shoes came tumbling out onto the floor. She muffled a furious shriek behind her teeth.

“Seriously?!”

Roaki bit her bottom lip, thinking hard. “I had an insult about cold feet, but you two took too long and I forgot it. Just—hey! Just pretend I said something biting! Maybe cry—you’re good at that!”

Dahlia held a shoe over the sink, shaking out handfuls of ice cubes. “What is the matter with you? Who does this?!”

“Next time maybe you’ll think twice about throwing me out of my own room!”

“Next time I’ll just throw you into the washer!”

“Then you can grab all your clothes from space after I airlock your whole closet!” Roaki snapped. “You don’t want to play vengeance with me, lizard. I'll win.”

Scooping more clothes off the floor, Dahlia went about replacing her things with a grimace and a flurry of grumbles. Roaki sneered victoriously and hobbled back to the couch.

“Well, did you figure your shit out?” she asked Quinn, entire debacle already forgotten. “All that blubbering better have been worth something.”

Amygdala Circuit

She didn’t know? Dahlia could have slapped herself; of course Quinn didn’t know what to do—how could anyone be expected to know what to do in a situation like this? Putting Follen’s apparent deception aside, there was modium in Quinn’s head and, apparently, it had been there a long time, perhaps since she was little. A nugget of the what was perhaps the deadliest material known to man, lodged inches from her brain and she was still breathing.

Dahlia disabled the scan, the constant warnings were making her anxious. She sat back on the bed, staring blankly as the dark returned.

What should they do? Follen was still held up in the hangar, and would likely be bogged down with paperwork and meetings for the rest of the day. Besca would be lucky if she saw the dorm before the weekend, but would most likely be spending her nights catching powernaps on the bridge until whatever new international storm was brewing passed on.

That left the two of them—well, technically the three of them, but damned if she was gonna count the creature. They’d have to weather this on their own for now, which was, well, unideal, but that was practically the definition of their job.

‘Well, you can’t just sit here.’ She thought. ‘You’re the big sister, act like it.’

Dahlia pushed herself up off the bed. Whatever the plan was, they couldn’t just coop up and cry in the dark until Besca came home.

“C’mon,” she said, taking Quinn gently by the wrists to get her to follow. “Lets have something to eat, give ourselves some energy to think with.”

She pushed the door open, letting the light back in. It did make things a little better, a little more open, and—

Her foot caught on something and she stumbled to the floor, managing to catch herself with her good arm. Kicking back, she saw it was…her…shirt? A little graphic T-shirt with the faded name of a band she listened to when she was little. But this had been in her closet, hadn’t it?

Crumpled up before her were a pair of shorts, which she was certain had also been in her closet.

So had the long-sleeve shirt on the table, and the four or five pairs of pants tossed over and around the couch. The dozens of socks. The undershirts. The sweaters, the coats, all twisted inside out or crumpled and strewn over the common area, the TV, even the kitchen—where the microwave was on and through the light she could clearly see at least two pairs of underwear rotating on the popcorn setting.

Across the dorm, another shirt came flying out of the open door to her room. Dahlia stared slack jawed as Roaki hopped out, holding a bundle of socks in her hand, and an expensive dress in her teeth.

“Oh my GOD!” Dahlia shrieked. “Roaki! what the hell?!”

Roaki spat the dress onto the floor and tossed the socks up to scatter across the room like rain. She held herself upright, and met Dahlia’s eyes with a fearsome glower.

“No one picks up Roaki Tormont without consequence!” she declared. “Mark my words lizard, your suffering will be long and brutal!”

Amygdala Circuit

Confused, and increasingly concerned, Dahlia nonetheless obliged and leaned close to Quinn’s face. A synthetic whirring echoed briefly in her ears before vanishing in her aural blind spot, and with a blink her eyes brought faux clarity to the dark. A seamless combination of night vision and rapidly-refreshing AI-generation took in and deciphered everything just as fast as the eyes she’d been born with. It mapped out Quinn’s face, twisted in pain and grief and anxiety, and then further, it lit up the empty eye socket.

It seemed normal for modium scarring. Discolored, gray flesh like water splashed on dry concrete. She knew from experience how uncomfortable it could be at first, but this was old and healed and as much a part of her as the rest of her skin. Then, further in, it highlighted something…else. Something small, hardly the size of a fingernail, lodged into the flesh at the very back of the socket.

Dahlia had never had reason to doubt her implants before, but when a preemptive scan warned her that she was looking at raw modium, she figured there must be a glitch. She blinked, the overlay reset, scanned again. Again it returned modium, warned her to back away. Dahlia gasped hard.

Her first thought was simple and animalistic—run. Quickly her human mind caught up and told her she needed to drag Quinn to Follen’s now because she was about to die. Then the logical mind followed, and reminded her that she should already be dead. Long dead, burst into a statue of volatile steel.

But here she sat, with her, both of them alive.

“What…” she mumbled dumbly. “That’s…but…is that from when you were little? But…but you should be…”

She recalled Quinn’s babbling, and a pit formed in her stomach. “He…? Do you mean…do you think…Follen knew?”

He’d have to, wouldn’t he? They’d have scanned Quinn before the modioscory, to say nothing of the numerous scans afterwards. There was no way Follen hadn’t known about it. So…so why hadn’t he said anything?

“What…what do we do?”

Amygdala Circuit

Progress came slow, but it came. Dahlia let go of Quinn and leaned back to sit shoulder-to-shoulder with her. She was intelligible now, which was good, but it didn’t make what she was saying any easier to understand—not a particularly uncommon thing either. Looked under her eyepatch? What could there possibly be to see or feel that wasn’t just…emptiness?

She saw the strands of hair in Quinn’s hands and a worried sound escaped her. She rubbed Quinn’s head gently, relieved that there wasn’t any blood to feel. For Quinn, there hadn’t been any pain to feel, either. Her silent passenger must have reached up to numb the roots. There was nothing else though, no other sensations or alien thoughts. She was often quiet whenever Dahlia was near. Listening, content, basking.

“Tell you what?”

The hand massaging her head snaked down to her cheek to thumb the tears away. In the dark, Dahlia’s synthetic eyes glowed with pale blue concern.

“What didn’t they tell you, Quinn?”

Amygdala Circuit

While she wasn’t comfortable using a word like ‘accustomed’, Dahlia had been learning how to handle Quinn’s lower moments as they came. She couldn’t always pull her out of them, but she had at least built up a better understanding of their severity. Frankly, it didn’t take much to wring the tears out of Quinn, so being able to differentiate between a mild upset and a breakdown was important.

This, for instance, seemed rather serious. The key tells were in her voice, her posture—she checked her arms for nail-marks and was relieved to see them unmarred—and most of all: the fact that Dahlia had no idea what she was talking about. Cohesion was not one of Quinn’s strong suits at times like this. She spoke in a thin babble and it was hard to understand her. Something about her eyepatch, something about someone hating her, not telling her something.

That was all fine. For the moment it didn’t matter what she was talking about, and wouldn’t until she could collect herself enough to say it clearly. What did matter was being there, giving her an anchor to pull herself up with.

“No,” she said, meeting Quinn’s rising aggravation serenely. “Of course not. Shh. No one hates you, Quinn. Just breathe for me, okay? Just try to settle, we can work through this.”

Amygdala Circuit

Oh, great. She was crying. Always with the crying—honestly, how did Quinnlash get anything done? She was important, right? Important people had tight schedules to keep, and Roaki was certain that if she could see Quinnlash’s, there would be slots dedicated to breakdowns at the top of every hour.

This was why people got betrayed. Quinnlash was bleeding and thrashing around in an ocean full of sharks, eventually someone was bound to come along hungry. God, but it had to be an act—especially after today, after what she’d done, killing all those Modir. You couldn’t be that strong and this weak.

“Well you can’t just do nothing!” Roaki said, exasperated. She stayed where she was, away from Quinnlash, just in case whatever cry-virus she had was contagious. “If he thinks he can get away with it he’ll keep doing it! It doesn’t matter if you’re strong or not, if people think you’re weak, they’ll treat you like it. So if you’re too much of a weichei to kill him then you should at least march down there and fuckin’ clock him in the jaw or something! He’s nothing—you’re a pilot.”

Deep within Quinn, there was the rare rumbling of agreement with the Helburkan girl. It seemed someone was still riding their bloody high from the battlefield. It didn’t get the chance to settle though, as outside there was the shuttering of the dormitory door, followed by a familiar voice.

“Quinn? You here?”

Footsteps towards Quinn’s room, then faster footsteps until Dahlia appeared in the doorway of Roaki’s. She seemed panicked, eyes settling first on the curled up, weeping form of her sister, then turning sharply to Roaki.

“What did you do?”

“Oh, yeah, cause normally she’s such a rock.”

“What happened?”

“I don’t fuckin’ know. She’s mad about that snake doctor—I told her she should just kill the prick but I guess she doesn’t wanna.”

Dahlia stared at her a moment, took a deep breath, and marched in. “Okay, I need to talk to her. Alone.”

“Yeah good fuckin’ luck with that. I don’t think she’s gonna—” Roaki lapsed into stunned silence as Dahlia lifted up by the armpits and carried her out of the room. Momentary silence. “PutmethefuckdownyoufuckingassholeIllripyourheartoutofyourfuckingchestwithmyteethdoyouhearmeIlleviscerateyouIwillbreakeveryfingeronyourhandsnoonepicksmethefuckupareyouseriousyouwillbegmeformercyIfuckingswear—”

She thrashed but Dahlia was stronger than she looked, and held her out far enough that even with half her leg she couldn’t kick back far enough to reach her. She was eventually dumped unceremoniously onto the couch with a surprised yelp, and could only watch as Dahlia strode back to the room and shut the door.

Inside, Roaki’s threats continued, muffled, before they faded into blissful yet also troubling silence. Dahlia didn’t seem to care, she just came over to the bed and sat down beside Quinn. Arms found their way around her, pulling her in close. Deep breaths, warmth, silent, lingering joy that they were both still alive.

“What’s wrong, Quinn?” came the quiet question, accompanied by a squeeze around her. “Talk to me.”

Heiseina: Memories Long Forgotten

---

Mio had been ready to consider this a pleasant, successful interaction. She didn’t get many of those, and while she had never had a conversation with Haruhi end poorly, a part of her was always ready for the possibility. She took the same extra care with the farm girl that she did with Tsubasa and master Tetsu, but it wasn’t beyond her to screw up and cost herself the rare, semi-frequent conversation.

Was she making just that mistake now? It was impossible to tell—she couldn’t remember the last time someone had insisted on her company. The idea seemed almost absurd. People liked Haruhi, had she grown tired of that? A few days publicly hanging around together would surely sour the village’s opinion of her. And maybe whoever Fuyucchi was, just by proxy.

Was it charity? Naiveté? Neither were fair, and a decade spent in this place had taught her to expect the worst of both in the best of circumstances.

“Uhm…”

But what if it was kindness? Was she going to turn that away?

“I’m sorry,” she said, not for her own sake. If it was kindness, then she couldn’t bring herself to inflict those consequences on Haruhi, even at the cost of upsetting her. “Things…break, during the festival. Someone has to stay here to fix them.”

Was that enough? Mio wasn’t stranger to disappointing people, but this felt differently bad. Perhaps that was proof Haruhi was being genuine.

So, a bit hastily she added: “I would like to hear about the fun, though. Tsubasa and master Tetsu always have good stories after. I’m sure you will, too.”

---

Interactions: Haruhi @Lemons

Amygdala Circuit

Roaki sat back, looking Quinnlash up and down. She was still mopey as shit, and she was clearly trying to keep herself in check, but Roaki knew the signs. Anger, confusion, grief, she could tell when someone was about to crack, and doing absolutely everything they could to hold themselves together. In her experience, that never lasted long, even in people who were emotionally stable. Quinnlash was not. Quinnlash was emotionally two seconds away from combusting, always.

Normally, Roaki would have found this annoying as fuck, but this time not so much. It was still pathetic, but she’d come to expect that from her, and anyway, it wasn’t like she wasn’t right there herself too. But it seemed obvious Quinnlash trusted this doctor, for some reason. She knew what it was like realizing for the first time what a mistake that was.

“Yeah,” she sighed. “I remember the first time someone tried to kill me. One of my older brothers snuck rat poison into my dinner. Made me spill my guts out, but I lived. Then he tried to knife me. Gets easier, you’ll get used to it.”

Ideas came to her, old and exciting. She snapped her fingers, a devious grin spreading across her face. “Y’know I bet you got all sorts of nasty shit onboard here. We could get real creative with the revenge.”

Amygdala Circuit

“Bullshit, no way. You should be, like, soup by now.”

But she didn’t offer much resistance otherwise. I mean, what was there to argue over? Roaki thought of herself as a realist, and the reality was staring her in the face, out of Quinnlash’s face. If she wasn’t shot—and yeah, sure, she’d probably have remembered if she was—then that meant it had to be modium. Or something that looked like modium. After all, if it was real, Roaki had just touched it. Shouldn’t her finger have been bursting with steel tumors?

So, she reached in and touched it again. Still nothing happened. She was almost disappointed.

“Weird…” she muttered, inspecting her own finger, squeezing and poking down her hand in search of anything amiss. “Should be super dead. And my hand should be gone. Maybe it’s not really modium? Has that freak doctor seen it yet?”

It didn’t make sense. Roaki knew modium, what it looked like, felt like, and most importantly, what it did. The little nugget ticked two out of three boxes, but she’d never encountered anything that didn’t just fill out all of them. Why wasn’t it killing her? She still didn’t believe Quinnlash’s story about growing up drinking the stuff, but how else did you end up with modium in your head if it wasn’t put there?

Amygdala Circuit

“What the fuck do you mean ‘what’s in my eye’? Your eye, dipshit. Unless you mean—” She turned from the screen, noticing that Quinn did in fact mean the other one. Frankly, that made even less sense. “Nothing,” she said, exasperated. “A hole.”

But Quinn didn’t relent. She had that same stupid, desperate, worried look on her face that seemed bolted on six days out of the week. It baffled her, honestly. How could someone go from mulching a handful of Modir to sniveling in bed in the span of, what, an hour? Maybe? Roaki wasn’t entirely sure what day it was, to be fair. Either way, unless she wanted Quinn to spray snot and anxiety all over her sheets, there wasn’t much choice but to play along.

“Fine,” she said, hopping over to where Quinn sat up. She leaned close, balancing herself so she could stay upright, but she still wasn’t tall enough. So she bent Quinn forward, not gentle but not like an enemy. “Don’t move. And don’t sneeze. That’s different from moving.”

Threat satisfactorily conveyed, Roaki hunched and guided an exploratory finger into Quinn’s eye socket. She wasn’t as slow or careful as Quinn had been, but this also wasn’t her first foray into wound-probing. Several of her own modium scars had begun as craters in the flesh, some quite shallow, others bone-deep. It had sated some grim curiosity in her to poke at them, but they were always fresh and the pain was prohibitory to her fun. Quinn’s eye-wound was old, and likely healed beyond sensation.

She tapped lightly around at the scarred flesh, and when Quinn didn’t immediately shriek in agony, she took that as the green light to continue. It ought to have been more exciting, like digging her fingers into the flesh of another Savior. She could feel that in her memory, in the phantom sensations that often lingered when she disconnected. Wet pulp in her hands, screams for mercy in her ears. This was…not that. It was dry, silent, clinical. Boring.

Then it wasn’t.

“Wie bitte…?” she mumbled. She didn’t know much Helburkan, not compared to a scholar, but she’d heard a few phases from the doctors who had operated on her. They stuck.

Her finger had hit something hard, sharp, like bone only there ought not to have been any bone there. It was cold, too, just barely. Like…metal.

“Did you get shot in the face? Did I miss you getting shot in the face? You’d have told me if that was happening, right? Don’t move—uh, keep not moving.” Roaki snatched a small handheld light from her bedstand and, leveling herself again, shined it inside.

Sure enough, she saw metal. A tiny bit, smaller than a fingernail, and buried in the tissue. She tapped it, and as she did, Quinn would feel that same, distinct sensation. No pain, but for a moment, until it faded, she would be entirely aware of something there.

“That…” she mumbled. “That’s weird. That…it looks like modium. But…but you’d be dead if that was modium. Your brain’d be a metal flower right now, even if you just got it. Oi, deadgirl, when’d you lose this?”