This chapter takes place roughly after Chapter 30 in SFTD.
Something had happened, that day in the GTS.
Well, Eliza knew a few of the events that happened. A hell of a headache, for one. Jax thinking it was all his fault, for two. Of course, a lot more psionic power on her plate, for three. She didn't need to be told that when it felt like it was all buzzing around in her head like a swarm of particularly aggressive moths.
Over the course of a few minutes, Eliza had simply been inspecting herself in her room. After a round of hair-brushing had come away with more than a few white hairs, she took a few strands of her hair from either side of her head and brought them into vision. She knew her bangs had been steadily turning white from stress, but... these white streaks were a little ridiculous. Was the rest of her hair a bit lighter, too? She'd seen what happened to psions they brought up in the Psi Lab, so she knew there was precedent for this. She just... never really imagined it'd happen to her.
There was the matter of her psionics, too. When she'd pulled off that Stasis on Mordenna, she'd intended to do it from the very top of the Avenger, when she started falling. A good bit of her distress was only pulling it off the second before they both hit the ground and the terror that came with that. Now, in her room? Summoning a Stasis around herself came as easy as breathing—even if she couldn't breathe within it. Jax really had pulled off all the limiters. Watching the leftover Stasis energies bleed off of her, Eliza contemplated their color. Light blue. From the minute Marlene had pointed out their color, there was something that didn't sit right with Eliza. Light blue. In a world of purple psionics. The closest she'd seen to another color was Jax's weird, pink-red-purple psionics, and who knew why that was?
What had happened to her, in those twenty years? Mordenna gave her enough of a start; she didn't have to guess too hard what would've been done to her with a name like the Siren. Were her colored psionics a part of it? Nobody had mentioned them being possibly modified... in fact, nobody had mentioned them at all before Marlene did. Mordenna would've seen them before she put a Stasis on them, right? Surely Tygan would've found some hints during one of his routine checkups? Why did it fall to someone outside of her circle to tell her something about herself?
More than a little distressed, Eliza put her brush on the table and stalked off to her bathroom, coming face-to-face with herself in the mirror. She'd stared at herself in this mirror plenty of times before. It was habit; every time she started to question herself like this, she'd come in here to affirm just how off she was. It didn't take an eye like the Hunter's to point out she was fifty six and didn't look a day older than First Contact. Maybe a few more gray hairs before, but that was it. If she looked off-putting to herself... it wasn't a stretch to imagine what others thought, looking at their Commander.
And how that Commander was changing! Looking in the mirror, the hair situation was worse than she thought. Her bangs were now entirely white as opposed to the few streaks from before, and there were more bolts of white propagating everywhere else. Her own hair seemed a bit longer, too. Her gaze went down to her eyes. She'd seen them before all this—pale blue, with flecks of purple she'd written off as a consequence of being hooked up to a psionic Network for so long. Now they were the same color as her psionics: a brilliant light blue. She'd changed, so much. Was she the same person, now? Did others see her as the same?
Sighing, Eliza tucked a lock of hair behind her ear. "Look. I know we like to go down this rabbit hole a lot. Of how much we've changed, if people are just following us because there's no better option, I know. Doesn't change the fact that someone's gotta get the Elders out of here, and if that falls to us? So be it. We may not be the best fit for the job but better us than nobody, right?" Right. She was used to pep-talking herself every time she got into this mood. Most of the time it worked. Sometimes, it took a little bit more doing to stick, and even then... it really depended on the day. She was still unsettled by herself and stuck with a feeling like everyone else was, too—but there didn't seem to be much she could do about it.
Even still, she lingered at the mirror, looking over her features. It took getting psionically overloaded just to put a few more gray hairs on her and make her look just a little older, hair-wise. Didn't change the rest of her face. At least the bags under her eyes added a few years, right? Her mouth settled into a thin line, eyes still wandering over her face. She wondered if the other psions had to deal with the existential nightmare that was their own features changing right before their eyes. She wondered if they ever wrestled with sense of self. She wondered if they ever had that blue phantom behind them—
In a panic, Eliza wheeled around. The silence was palpable as she confirmed that there was nothing between her and the door. Her eyes had roamed far enough in the mirror to look behind her, and she could've sworn her psionics coalesced into something behind her. Whatever it was, it was gone now, if it even was there in the first place. Catching her breath a bit, Eliza stood up from her lean on the counter, holding her forehead.
"Eliza, Eliza, Eliza," she chided herself with, "the last thing anyone on this ship needs is you hallucinating any more than you already do."