Tokyo Settlement, Area Eleven, February, a.t.b. 2015
Wilhelmina Einstein would hardly be the first person to claim that she had an interesting lifestyle. She rose from her bed at precisely ten minutes past the seventh hour of the morning, each and every day, and after pawing around for her glasses for a few nearly-blind minutes, she went to go check on the condition of her live rat enclosure. She'd hated the rodents when she'd first gotten them, of course, when she was much younger, but as she got used to the task of managing the little colony she'd gotten flourishing, it had basically been an inevitability that she'd grow somewhat accustomed to the little beasts. She managed them perhaps more meticulously than required—she'd made an effort to instruct herself in the nuances of veterinary science during one particularly egregious session of data compilation, for the sake of preserving her own sanity against the straining inadequacy of the computer, first and foremost, and so she kept careful track of the breeding lines of the rats, taking care to go out to buy more healthy specimens whenever they began to need some further biodiversity. It probably made no difference to Walter, whether the morsels he strangled to death and swallowed whole were inbred or not, but she liked going that extra kilometre for the sake of the first living creature she'd ever considered a friend.
Then, after briefly checking on the health of the rats, she selected one of them, fat and plump and well-fed as they were—she was diligent about staving off behavioural sink—and picked them up with her hands covered in disposable gloves; with it in her hand, she then moved over to Walter's enclosure, opened the top with one hand, and with the other, she put the rat gently down onto the newspaper bedding of the acrylic box that she kept under a heat lamp, which she then promptly switched up, to help Walter awaken. Today, she looked at his coils in the corner, and she recalled that he was nearing three metres in length now—perhaps it was time once again to increase the size of his enclosure. She pondered that as she stripped off her gloves, tossing them into the bin while she walked over to her desk, and logged into the terminal she'd put there. It was bleeding-edge cybersecurity—she should know, considering she'd written the programs they now used herself, at Milly's encouragement—for which she was thankful; it allowed her to be able to check her work from overnight before going into school, which saved her quite a bit of time that she could otherwise have spent making progress on her other tasks in the long run.
After a brief scroll-through of her inbox to confirm that she hadn't gotten any urgent news over the course of the time she'd spent sleeping, and further that there weren't really any notifications for upcoming developments she'd need to do prep-work for, she heard at last the frightened squealing of the rat as it finally realised its predicament, which meant that Walter had caught it without incident. She smiled with no small amount of pride; her boy was a clever one, and no dullard canine could ever even think to compare to him—and no, she didn't still hold a grudge over being told that a Burmese python was no pet for a lady, not that it was any of your business one way or the other.
(She didn't even know why it still vexed her as much as it did; she'd brushed it off when her parents brought it up, for indeed they had had the exact same criticism—but for some reason, when Shirley Fenette said it, it burrowed under her skin with a vengeance…)
Anyways. With that business done and seen to, she looked in on Walter, who was currently eating by way of swallowing the mangled rat whole (constriction was such a fascinating process, and she'd pull up a chair and watch from beginning to end if she didn't have somewhere she had to be today), and traipsed off to wash herself in the shower. She checked the length of her jet-black hair as soon as she was out, with it drenched to the scalp—she would have washed it, and used to do so every day, but at some point, Shirley and her insipid lectures about proper hair care had burrowed into her brain like the prior admonition had under her skin, and so now, Nina couldn't even wash her hair more than once every few days or so without her classmate's obnoxiously cheery voice nagging her in her ear—and wondered if it had gotten too long, if she should look into getting it cut again. She couldn't abide having hair that fell past shoulder-length, and all the effort and maintenance that went into all of that nonsense, whether she had Shirley Fenette more or less press-ganging her into giving a damn about hair care or not; that was where she drew the line.
When she was finished with her morning toilet, she donned her uniform and pulled up her hair into the tail-style she preferred, where only the most offending parts of it were restrained and the rest could fall freely wheresoever it pleased. Prepared as she was for school, she logged out of her home terminal, shoved her books, homework, and portable technology into her shoulder-bag, and then left her room, making sure to close the door firmly behind her.
She walked down the stairs and into the kitchen of the house she at least nominally shared with her parents, with an attached living room that featured a television, a dining room for all the guests they never had…and no sooner had she set foot upon the first floor, looking around the space, than did she huff and try to roll her shoulders. "Empty again… Figures."
Thankfully, Nina prided herself on her self-sufficiency: she'd long since learned the virtues of black coffee and toast with jarred fruit preserves or bitter dandelion honey, depending on the weather. It was easy, and it was quick enough that she could get herself out the door with a minimum of aid or fuss. She checked the cabinets for her personal supply of coffee beans (she needed to go out and get some more, she noticed, since she was in danger of running out), checked the bread-box for bread, ground the beans, prepped the fancy, high-end coffee machine that her parents had gotten but never used, and when she'd filled it with water and set it to do its work, she got a knife and cut herself two slices from the loaf in the bread-box, dashing them into the toaster with practised ease. She put the bread back and the knife into the block, moved to the pantry to get what she'd put on her toast, and then came back just in time for the toast to be finished—hot, but still light, and not too crispy. She'd been sensitive to tastes and textures for as long as she could remember; Nina had learned early how to work around them, and those skills still came to her aid even now, years later. She slathered the bitter honey over the toast and fed herself while she waited for the pot to finish brewing, and when it was done, she poured all of it into her large travel mug, grabbed her key, donned her coat, scarf, and hat, and was out the door.
It was snowing on Mount Fuji, and so too did it snow upon the Tokyo Settlement; but the chill was by no means unmanageable, especially with the travel mug to warm her hands, and the house was a stone's throw from the nearest monorail station—the infrastructure had been upgraded further with the funds once expended on food imports from other areas now that Area Eleven was all but self-sustaining—so she didn't mind nearly as much as she otherwise might have. The brisk air with the falling flakes of snow was, to her mind, really quite refreshing, actually, and she nursed her travel mug as she ascended the stairs to get to the onboarding platform for the approaching monorail. It was the morning rush, after all—so many people with an urgent need to get from home to work—and so she blended in with the rush of Britannian workers, both Homeland and Honorary, as she stepped into the rail-car, spotting a few other students in Ashford Academy uniforms in the process as they gathered with their friends and whispered with each other. Meanwhile, Nina indulged in the blessed peace and quiet, taking care to hold onto the bar above her, and privately relishing the fact that she wasn't expected to make small talk this early in the morning.
She took another sip of her black coffee. It tasted like solace.
The monorail she took first was the M line; she and her fellow students would have to transfer from it onto the P line at Yokohama Station, which would then take her and them the rest of the way to Ashford Academy's campus, or at the very least the station within walking distance to it. She made this routine transfer in silence, swiping her clearance card as she changed trains, and with how well she knew the station, she was able to get herself a seat on the P monorail, which then took her to the station adjacent to school. Throughout it all, she didn't make so much as a sound, unassuming and all but forgotten as soon as someone looked away from her; that was how she liked it, after all, and it left her plenty of time to drink down coffee until she felt at least a bit more like something that resembled a human being. The way the lenses of her glasses kept fogging up from the steam was a familiar vexation, and she greeted it like a particularly tedious old friend.
All told, it took her a grand total of thirty-five minutes to cross a decently-sized chunk of the Tokyo Settlement to get to school, going from where she lived in what was formerly Chiba, to where the Ashford Academy campus was located in what was formerly Kamakura, going across the bay. It was necessary with how central Ashford Academy had become for the youth of the Tokyo Settlement, which encompassed the whole of what was previously the Greater Tokyo Area, and it was scenic to boot; but it also served as a clear and unambiguous display of the wealth that was gathered here—all thanks to the mountain they stood in the shadow of, and its contemporaries throughout the island and the surrounding archipelago.
Soon, it would be more than just that, and the wealth of Area Eleven would be more than just what they were mandated to dig out of the ground—that was a shift that Nina herself would be part of, and she took no small amount of pride in that, in being a central part of such momentous events—but that was not now, not yet. The Core Luminous had been a breakthrough worthy of legend, and it had leap-frogged their progress ever since; but the trouble of upsetting an established platform was that it was necessary to have more than one arrow in their quiver. Maser vibration technology was part of it, to be certain, but even the Core Luminous hadn't been enough to get the Gawain's hadron cannons in working condition (she couldn't figure out how to get the particles to converge—none of them could, and she was beginning to think that it was just that they were missing a single critical piece of technology to make it all work together, without which they'd accomplish nothing more spectacular than floundering on that front), and the less said about the state of the test bed's purported flight system, the better.
Lloyd and Cécile were brilliant, both individually and especially as a team—both were geniuses in their own way, leaders in their fields, revolutionaries, visionaries, trailblazers, inspirations—but they were by no means dei ex machina, and nor were they miracle workers. They had their flaws and blind spots; one covered for the other, and vice versa, in most respects, but even still, there was a rather firm limit to what they could do on their own, either on their own, or together. They were her co-workers and her superiors, inasmuch as a proper hierarchy even existed at their level, and she looked up to and admired them; but she did not delude herself into thinking that they were more than they were. And usually, what they were was more than enough; but not now. Not this time.
The influx of students into campus, clad in their uniforms—bronze blazers and colour-coded tartan skirts that denoted their years for the girls, with black trousers and gold-trimmed black jackets that featured the school's seal on the collar for boys—and chatting amongst themselves was enough cover for her to slip in through the gate and onto campus; both Kallen and Milly were currently abroad in the Homeland, which was perfectly understandable since Kallen had actually somehow managed to wind herself up romantically entangled with Princess Juliette, of all people, and Milly had had her wedding all but ruined with the noble rebellion in Area Six, which meant she was left with only Rivalz to stand between her and Shirley to make sure neither of them killed the other (she was only being somewhat hyperbolic—on more than one occasion in the past, on a bad day, hearing Shirley talk had been enough for Nina to look down at her table service and contemplate the logistics of auto-lobotomy via soup spoon) so keeping her head down and not standing out would be her best bet at evading the notice of all the students in Shirley's sphere of influence, being as she was a social butterfly: thus, in the disastrous event that the bubbly strawberry blonde came looking for her, all of her admirers and thralls and peons who stuffed her locker full of love confessions on a near-daily basis would have to honestly respond 'no, they hadn't seen her.'
Thankfully, she'd been at this long enough that she'd been able to get from the front gate of campus and into the student council building without incident, and without her being noticed as anything more than an apparition in someone's periphery. She slipped into the building and closed the door behind her, shoving her back against it as she did so, and taking a few moments to get her breathing under control. To the best of her knowledge, she was safe.
"Heya!"
She jolted, nearly jumping out of her skin; a moment later, her mind recognised the voice, and that sensation of having her heart leaping into her throat was replaced with acerbic irritation. "What on Earth is wrong with you, Rivalz Cardemonde?!"
And sure enough, her blue-haired friend and the only male member of Ashford Academy's Student Council raised his hands in the universal gesture of surrender, his easy grin slipping from his face into a mien of concern. "Sorry, Nina. Bad day?"
The inquiry was enough to cause her to stop in her tracks; she closed her eyes, taking a deep inhale, and slowly counted to ten before she released it, controlled and steady. Already, she could feel the sound of her heart thundering in her ears retreating from the forefront of her mind to take its place among all the rest of the background noise her brain usually tuned out. With that breath, she released her flash of irritation, as well as her impulse to lash out when cornered; she wasn't angry at him, not really. Despite Rivalz's general dunderheaded demeanour, he actually possessed a shockingly acute sense of emotional intelligence, and he did his best to help her whenever he could. She appreciated that more than she could ever find the words to express, and so she shook her head honestly, hoping that he could read her apology between the lines of what she could bring herself to say outright. "No, nothing like that. Just…agitated, I guess. On edge."
He nodded, and left it at that; he would hear her out if she wanted to speak further, but he wouldn't push, not even to ask. He wasn't like Shirley, who seemed to have a compulsive need to know and dig and try to help, even when there was nothing to help and she was just having a bad day and she would really rather not have to explain herself to her and feel like she was being cornered interrogated prosecuted tried judged…
…So okay, maybe it was at least a little bit of a bad day.
"…Actually, maybe just a little," she revised, and he nodded acceptingly at that, too, content not to know, and with seemingly no impulse to pry. She'd mistaken that for a simple lack of curiosity, once upon a time; and while he certainly hadn't taken offence to that, neither at the time nor since, it remained a point of enduring shame for Nina personally, that she could so thoroughly misjudge someone.
It was a pity, in some sense, that she'd discovered herself a few years ago while looking at a picture of Princess Euphemia that she'd found in a magazine, and that she wasn't quite sure whether or not Rivalz knew what sexual congress even was, let alone if he had an interest in such; more than once in the past, she'd imagined that she would be lucky to land herself a romantic partner even half as understanding and considerate as Rivalz Cardemonde.
"Gotcha. I'll tell Shirley to try and keep her voice down," said Rivalz, and his smile was far softer than his usual gregarious grin. She was familiar with it by now, and it made her attempt a weak smile in his direction as well. "Do you want the back-up, or would you rather…?"
"I would love some back-up, please," she sighed, in a flash registering that she was still holding her travel mug and lifting it to her lips to gulp it down. "I'm feeling…a little weird today…"
"I can tell," Rivalz replied, and she scoffed and flipped him a rude gesture in response. He laughed, but that only lasted so long; he was never one to indulge in merriment when she needed help, and she liked that about him. "Will you be alright?"
She took a shuddering breath, checking over herself mentally, and then nodded shakily. "I…I think I can be, yes. It just… It snuck up on me pretty quickly."
"Alright," said the blue-haired boy with a nod—a young man, rather, old enough in the eyes of the empire to enlist or to get married—and he let her see his hands, giving her plenty of time to tell him to stop as he steadily moved to clap her on her shoulders. "If you need anything, let me know, alright?"
"I appreciate it, Rivalz," Nina replied, trying her best to smile again, and to force through her lips a phrase that she managed to say so woefully rarely. "Th…thank you."
"Ay, don't mention it," he said, brushing it off with his usual joviality returned in full force. "I'd be a pretty miserable deputy chief of security if I left our chief research analyst out to dry in her time of need, wouldn't I?"
And despite herself, she chuckled. "Yes, Rivalz, I suppose you would be."
"Feeling better?" he asked abruptly.
To her shock, she did. "Much, actually."
"Good," he grinned. "Let's get this show on the road, then, alright?"
"Agreed," she replied, nodding easily.
Nina wasn't especially known for being personable. She knew that about herself—it came across as stilted and awkward when she'd attempted to be friendly in the past, and that produced no desirable results, so at some point, she came to the conclusion that she might as well be as acerbic and sharp of tongue as she pleased; it was significantly more comfortable for her, she'd found, to not have to put on airs like that and to instead just try to be her naturally abrasive self. She was impatient and irritable, and over the years, she'd made her own peace with that knowledge of herself; but of course, that didn't mean that she was like that all of the time, or with everyone she met. Rivalz had been one of the first to see that in her, and in turn, she'd come to rely upon him. Theirs was something of an unconventional friendship—there were doubtless many people who looked at the pair of the school's resident power-lifting meathead, and Nina herself, the antisocial child prodigy, and scratched their heads over exactly what they might have in common; but they looked out for each other. Nina took it upon herself to help Rivalz pass his classes and study for exams, and in return, he lent her a helping hand on bad days, when Nina woke up and felt like she was in imminent danger of drowning in herself.
That was why Nina made an effort to listen closely as Rivalz chattered on, focusing more on the soothing tone of his voice than the contents of what he was saying—he spoke about things that interested him, like what members of his family were doing, how he'd broken his latest weight record when it came to the deadlift or the bench press, his performance around the track, how he'd done in the latest Knightmare simulation that she'd programmed for him (she made a note to dial up the difficulty in the next one; maybe he was even ready to start pitting himself against Kururugi Suzaku's piloting data), and all sorts of other things that perhaps Nina herself might not be able to drum up anywhere near the same amount of passion for of her own accord, but with every rambling, somewhat air-headed word out of his mouth, Nina felt just a little bit more normal.
She'd tested out of the requirements for maths and sciences, and so the only reason she came along with him to his own classes was so that she'd be able to keep herself apprised of to what level he was being instructed, so that she could avoid going too thoroughly overboard when she took it upon herself to teach it to him with the individualised method that she knew worked; the teachers, thanks to Milly and the iron grip she held over the school and its faculty even in her absence, allowed this oddity, especially since Nina was herself far from the most disruptive element in the classroom itself. It was no imposition for her, of course; she hadn't tested out of the humanities, after all, and it was there that Rivalz could run roughshod over her with his deep and abiding (albeit unconventional) grasp on nuance and literary analysis, so really, they did their best to help each other. But it also let her keep her distance from Shirley, with whom she certainly did not want to cross paths today of all days; Nina could only barely deal with her, and the confusing mélange of contradictory emotions that the strawberry blonde inspired in her, when she was treading water, let alone when the only thing that kept her from slipping into a riptide of her own mind was Rivalz's presence, calm and steadfast as it was even underneath his exuberant exterior.
The teacher that led Rivalz's mathematics class, a common-born man by the surname of Hartpence, was, Nina had to admit, an undeniably effective instructor; he spoke clearly and concisely, and so effective was his vocal projection that Nina had no doubt that he'd be heard clearly at the back of the classroom they were in, even if it was two or three times as long for some reason. She'd heard he'd been in media before, a contemporary of Diethard Reid (the journalist who was embedded into Her Royal Highness the Lieutenant General Princess Cornelia's armies in the European Theatre), and that background definitely showed in the manner of his teaching: his was a practical approach to the subject matter, and often he taught little tricks and shortcuts that weren't necessarily in the textbook, but that he professed to using in day-to-day life. In a way, Nina envied Rivalz; her own teacher in this same subject had not been nearly so effective, which had been what had pushed her to learn the material on her own in the first place—which then in turn led to her teaching herself enough of the material that she was able to test her way out of it. Perhaps she wouldn't have had so many sleepless nights a few years back attempting to learn this if her advanced class had been able to prevail upon the same calibre of pedagogy that Rivalz's more remedial-level class benefited from.
But that was in the past now; she had Doctor Croomy teaching her the finer points of linear algebra in between waiting for data or programs to compile in the background, and so she imagined she couldn't be too upset—and it also didn't hurt matters that Doctor Croomy was actually a very attractive woman in her own right (questionable sense of home economics besides), even if Nina honestly couldn't personally say that the brilliant scientist was actually her type, so to speak. She elected instead to be glad for Rivalz, that he was able to benefit from such an understanding instructor, even if she had to wind up teaching him all of the roughly half of the lesson that he just hadn't caught. In fact, she was reasonably certain that, if it were up to Mr. Hartpence, he might have allowed the arrangement that Nina and Rivalz had worked out even if Milly hadn't more or less unilaterally decided that it was to be allowed—and it went without saying that in her case, the long-winded hexagenarian who'd mumbled and stumbled his way through the mathematics lessons that she'd attended, in between leering at the chests of the girls in the front row (and yes, she knew that they'd been quite impressive when she'd been in class; but from a man like him, especially with him in a position of power, it was indecent, not to mention unprofessional) would definitely have puffed himself up and made a great big hubbub and production in a grandstanding protest of the 'grievous disruption' to the virtually nonexistent order of his classroom that even asking for such an accommodation must have in his small mind constituted.
She didn't doubt that he knew the material—he'd qualified to teach the class in the first place, after all, and Ashford Academy took its vetting process for new faculty very seriously (partly, Nina had come to suspect, because it was policy that anyone involved in the hire of an unworthy member of the faculty might come under investigation for negligence, and thus be forced to answer to Milly, upon the event of said unworthy member's inevitable sacking)—but she was by no means surprised to see a trio of teachers being sacked on his behalf alongside him come year's end.
She had been surprised at the fact that it'd actually been Nina's own complaint to that effect that had initially prompted that particular inquiry—an inquiry that had actually been what brought her existence and talents to Milly (née) Ashford's attention, and from there to her current position at Annwn, but the fact that such incidents wound up happening here and there ever since had ensured that the shock of it had, like the lettering on a desktop keyboard, worn away with time.
The grand bell in the campus clock tower sounded out the end of the period, its strong ringing across the grounds startling Nina back to the present moment with a jolt of electric panic, that she'd drifted off in the middle of a lesson and so wouldn't… She stopped, took a calming breath, and took a moment to quickly scan the chalk upon the blackboard; with a rush of gratitude towards Rivalz's teacher, whose own appearance she'd never devoted the mental resources to registering or remembering, she found that she was able to deduce from that much alone the point at which the class had left off with a high degree of certainty, which she took care to mark down into her notebook so that she didn't run the risk of forgetting it later. As the other students got out of their desks and chattered on with one another as they moved towards their next class, Nina closed her notebook, clicked on the end of the pen, and stowed both of them away in her bag as she waited for Rivalz to do the same.
He did, of course—Rivalz wasn't particularly inattentive, and nor was he all that prone to lingering when he had someplace else to be—but even then, Nina knew from experience that whatever notes he had taken in that notebook weren't worth the paper they were written on, nor the ink they'd taken to write. She had once wondered how someone could be so egregiously horrendous at taking notes, but by this point, she merely accepted it about him; any attempt she made at helping him develop the skill yielded only marginal benefits, and she imagined that even if she put her mind to it, by the time she'd turned him into an adequate note-taker, they were liable to have already graduated.
"Literature next?" prompted Rivalz, as he stood and took his own bag upon his shoulder, the leather strap crossing his chest. He jerked his head towards the door, his dark blue hair flying as he did so; and she dismissed the voice in her head as Shirley's even as it began to fill her mind with different, equally useless ways for him to wear his hair.
"At least the unit's on Austen," Nina sighed with a growing sense of creeping dread. She could read just fine, and even enjoyed it, in the case of long-form nonfiction and complex technical explanations that she'd seen most others consider dry and dense; but while she could get through fiction easily enough, and she could muddle through Literature when the authors her class was assigned to read left the allegory at the core of their narratives conveniently close to the surface, the more complex and layered human dramas that came with the course often had her staring at a blank page with a blinking cursor, wracking her head as she tried in vain to parse motivations both overt and covert, aims and goals and emotions, lies told to others as well as lies told to oneself… It was an unholy mess, and very often, when someone (Rivalz) helpfully laid it all bare for her, she found that she didn't exactly like what the books were about all that much more than she liked the fruitless process of attempting to decipher them (and for the record, while Lloyd Asplund was many things, and claimed to be many more, he was certainly not the type of person who could create a life only to then abandon it to suffer out of fear—gods below, he didn't even do that for the Lancelot, which was also, while a work of true genius, a literal piece of machinery (and yes, this was about Frankenstein, shut up!)).
Rivalz snorted. "No kidding. I half thought you were going to drop the course entirely while getting through that Brontë unit…"
"I halfway thought I was going to do that, too," Nina confessed with a blatantly insincere scowl in his direction, drawing a laugh out of him as they stepped out of the maths classroom together. "There was only so much of the sordid tale of Cathy and the good Mr. Heathcliff I could take, to say nothing of how Miss Eyre had zero concept of her own worth. Complain though I might about having to decipher it all, at least Austen's protagonists have some modicum of self-respect…"
"Well, I'm glad you're enjoying it," Rivalz said, completely sincere and bereft of even the slightest hint of guile. "Relatively speaking, of course…"
Nina smiled ruefully as her mood suddenly began to dip. She couldn't help but think to herself, I'm glad that at least there's someone who cares…
"What do you mean by that?" asked Rivalz, his eyebrow raised, his expression a portrait of open, albeit mild, concern.
…Alright, so maybe that thought wasn't quite as much 'to herself' as she'd hoped it would be…
"There you are!"
Nina wished she knew exactly who had first coined the phrase 'when it rains, it pours'; would that she possessed that information, so that she could somehow invent a mechanism to reverse time and wreak her bloody, fiery vengeance upon the smarmy twat whom, by way of pithy aphorism, she was quite certain was responsible for her current predicament.
"I've been looking all over for you!"
Against her better judgement, or really her judgement of any quality that she may or may not claim to possess, Nina turned to regard the young woman who addressed her with such an accusatory tone, while feeling her hackles begin to rise in the process. She was consciously aware of the tension as it wound itself more deeply into her frame, and at the other end of the crowded hallway through which Rivalz and she had been doing their best to make good time from one class to the next was none other than Shirley Fenette, the very woman Nina had been doing her best to avoid until precisely now.
Her delicate brow was furrowed, her full lips fixing themselves into a scowl, her eyes (which bore the same shade of green as some of the teas that Nina knew to be native to the area—an odd comparison, in truth, and it only entrenched her desire to be on her guard as swiftly as possible) burning with irritated ire. For all that Shirley was not herself highborn, she had some elements of the look: the way her face was such a contrast of gentle curves and sharp angles, the height of her cheekbones, the proportion of her gravid eyes to her slender nose to the aforementioned fullness of her lips…
In that moment, Nina, who had always known on some level that Shirley Fenette was a profoundly attractive young woman, was struck by the realisation that, more than any remote aesthetic understanding of form that might lead her to the conclusion she'd heretofore taken for granted, she personally found Shirley Fenette to be a profoundly attractive young woman—were she not so insistent upon beingso abominably insufferable, that is.
Shaken by that understanding and its fractalling implications though she was, Nina had fallen into this same pattern too many times intentionally to avoid doing so by rote now; even despite Rivalz's attempt at mitigation, effective though it might have been, the fact remained that her willpower was frayed, and her patience, her tolerance, was quite thoroughly stunted by the circumstances. She felt her brow lifting to her shrouded hairline, and while she could feel her lips moving, it was as if she was perceiving the lay of all of this through the veil of unreality that pervaded throughout the span of dreams.
Absently, she noted that her dissociation was an excellent sign that she really ought to have called in sick that morning, and stayed back home to watch Walter.
Not that such an understanding would do her much good in the here and now.
"Were you, now?" she felt herself saying—and yes, that was how she'd have responded under most other sets of circumstances, but even so… "I take it you must have been quite abysmal at 'hide and seek' as a child, then. It wasn't as though my ultimate whereabouts were particularly far beyond the ken of a trained monkey to predict with a high degree of certainty."
Rivalz looked at her sharply—and damn her if she didn't feel at least a little flash of guilt over that right now—and did his best to step between them. "Err… Shirley, this…might not be the best time for this. Could you try to keep your voice down a little?"
"A trained monkey, am I?!" Shirley protested, incensed.
Well, in for a farthing, in for a quid, Nina thought to herself, shrugging her shoulders. "Well, if the cymbals fit…"
"Nina!" Rivalz hissed.
"Every time I dare to think that there's a single bone in your body that isn't wholly devoted to living out the rest of your life as an embittered shrew, it's as if you go out of your way to try to prove me wrong!" exclaimed Shirley, throwing up her hands as she stalked closer. "I don't know why I bother! It's like you're dead-set on remaining an anti-social shut-in just to spite me!"
The accusation might have hurt once upon a time, when she'd still harboured some misguided hope of being able to connect to people as easily as those around her seemed to, when she'd been more foolish and still saw fit to devote the mental energy towards being offended when others assigned intention to her actions; as it was, Nina scoffed. "Don't flatter yourself, Fenette. You can rest assured that what you think in no way factors into what I decide to do on a moment to moment basis!"
"That much is readily apparent," Shirley spat right back. "I try and I try to help you…do something with all of this! To get you out and about, to help you make friends, to give you advice on how to fit in and be normal for a change…!"
"How dare you," Nina snarled, even as she abruptly came to the realisation that the two of them had drawn around their spat an audience of considerable size. This, of course, did nothing but feed the fire, with how appalled she felt, and how hot her temper was running; she was incensed. "How dare you stand there and pretend, with the whole of your chest, that this was ever about helping me! All you've done is try and run roughshod over what I want, to erase it in favour of what you think I ought to want! Don't pretend that your intentions were noble, or even considerate of anything beyond how hanging out with the school pariah would reflect upon you!"
"…Is that…really what you think of me?" asked Shirley, the ire drained from a voice that suddenly sounded very small in its absence. "Do you really…? Is that why you hate me so much?"
The incensed anger that was fueling Nina began to roil and twist, the sight before her—Shirley in front of her, her eyes wide and her jaw agape, 'poleaxed' in the truest possible sense of the term—turning it into something complicated and painful… She mourned the loss of that simplicity as soon as it slipped out of her grasp, and what she was beginning to feel right then was the heady, perplexing mélange of prickly and contradictory feelings that had brought her such distress in the past, only now more potent by leaps and bounds; it was a bad combination, given that even on a good day she couldn't hope to disentangle that knot in her stomach at its normal strength—and so it was an act of self-defence, that this was a stronger form of all of that and on a bad day to boot, that drove Nina to open her mouth again. "I—!"
"Nina," Rivalz interjected, in a tone that brooked no argument. "Enough."
It was a testament to how thoroughly Rivalz had won her trust, and to her knowledge of the fact that she'd erred in some dire fashion by revealing that emotional truth, that drove Nina to force her jaw to snap shut right then, almost before she'd even realised what he'd said.
Rivalz nodded in acknowledgement of her compliance, but there was something that sagged about his normally very cheery demeanour that filled her with a sense of contrition for the part she'd played in bringing that exhaustion to the fore, regardless of whether or not anyone else was liable to pick up on that.
"Shirley, Nina, maybe it'd be better for all of us to have this conversation in private," he suggested, but Nina knew as surely as Shirley seemed to that it was in truth nothing of the sort. "We'll use the student council building, and we'll get there by separate routes. We should take the time it'll take us to walk there to cool all of our heads and try to reset our tempers. Alright?"
"…Fine," Nina conceded; and now that the wrathful wind had been taken from her sails, she could begin to grasp just how…well, uncouth of them it was, to have this kind of fight in the halls, in full view of all and sundry. She refused to show it, of course, but she was acutely embarrassed, not just by the way this had gone, but also by the fact that she'd seen the crowd they'd gathered (most of whom were still gawking, by the way), and in her anger, she just hadn't cared. She didn't even have the excuse of tunnel vision to fall back on over this debacle.
Shirley nodded, her expression increasingly sombre. "Very well. That sounds reasonable."
"Good," Rivalz exhaled with a sigh that was equal parts exhaustion and relief. Then, he turned to regard their gawking onlookers, who seemed to find it impossible not to stand there, with expressions from the gormless to the slack-jawed scrawled across their faces. "This is now official student council business. Clear out and get to class. There's nothing to see here. Anyone who lingers here, or who seeks to follow us, will have to answer to Milly."
Sometimes, it was incredibly convenient to have a boss who wielded such a fearsome reputation; and that much, the student council president and recent Princess-Consort Carmilla vi Britannia possessed in spades. She hadn't even done all that much to exercise her power in the school itself—and that was, as far as Nina had theorised, part of the reason why they were all so terrified of her. A lot of them had probably fantasised about what they would do with the authority over the faculty and the school's administration that the student council president wielded with such ease; and she personally doubted that the ambitions of most of them went very far past 'twisting the teachers' arms to give them full marks.' The fact that Milly didn't do that, and indeed had never abused her powers, never bending them towards the more frivolous ends that their classmates thought of as the natural end-point of a student possessing that level of sway, was, as far as Nina could tell, the point of origin that Milly's naturally intimidating demeanour and no-nonsense attitude had iterated upon until it got to the point where now, just the mention of potentially incurring her wrath had the rabble all but running for the hills. And when the scuffle subsided, the corridor that remained was more deserted than Nina had ever seen it during school hours.
Shirley looked at them with what almost looked like the glimmering of tears in her eyes (and what a punch to the gut seeing that felt like), nodded, and turned on her heel, stalking away.
Rivalz, on the other hand, stayed standing beside Nina as they watched the final member of their trio retreat into the distance. His presence, once a balm to her fraying mind, now resembled nothing more than the albatross that was hung about her neck, in every way that mattered.
"Let's go," he said suddenly, and Nina nodded, following mutely in his wake.
The student council building wasn't a place that just anyone could access—only the members of the student council actually had the keys to gain entry, and there was a state-of-the-art security system in place to take care of any would-be infiltrators (as well as a rotation of Milly's own mysterious agents on constant watch for anyone skilled enough to slip past it)—and so there was a reasonable amount of certainty behind the presumption that it would be a private place for them to hash out the continuation of that excruciatingly public conflict they had just engaged in, which would be the stuff of Ashford Academy's rumour mill for literal months to come, regardless of how, or even if, it was resolved. That much, at least, Shirley knew like she knew her own name.
While she'd hardly call her childhood 'idyllic'—she imagined that the fact that her father was away for months at a time growing up disqualified any accurate use of that descriptor, and even now she couldn't honestly claim that he was particularly warm and fuzzy, for all that he looked after her in his way—she had been quick to discover that with the possible exception of Rivalz, whose extended family seemed to all be at least somewhat tightly-knit, every one of her fellow student council members had a family situation that was immensely more complicated than her own. Milly seemed to celebrate happily the anniversary of her own mother's death, while her father was more of an advisor than a parent, from what she'd seen (not that she had much room to judge on that score, given that Joseph Fenette had lived the duration of Shirley's life more or less wholly apart from his family); Kallen was the result of some manner of star-crossed love affair that had just barely survived the vicious nuances of Britannian noble politics thanks to Milly's intercession, which was quite the oddity in its own right; and she'd never seen nor heard of Nina's parents, to the point where it seemed that either they were being deliberately concealed, or for all intents and purposes they did not exist in her life.
It was this knowledge that had led to her taking it upon herself to seek some manner of kinship with the black-haired child prodigy; both Milly's and Kallen's familial situations were wholly beyond the scope of her ken for various reasons, and Rivalz was…well, a Cardemonde, and therefore part of a veritable clan of soldiers and security personnel that she found equally unapproachable from the other direction (she had no idea if her father even had any siblings, and as far as grandparents were concerned, Joseph Fenette may as well have sprouted out of the ground fully-formed for all she knew)—so in light of all of that, she'd seen that Nina had two absent parents instead of just one, and figured, perhaps erroneously, that that would be the simpler gap to breach.
Of course, it had become clear upon the initiation of her attempts that Nina was…well, to call her 'prickly' was so severe an understatement that it nearly bypassed being politic and drifted directly into the territory of the disingenuous and the sarcastically disparaging; but Shirley remembered that she had known other children growing up who had responded in much the same way, at least prima facie, to such a fraught state of familial circumstance, and so she did what had worked so well for her back then, and persevered. Missing both a mother and a father as an active presence in her life, to Shirley's reckoning, had to have been the origin of how closed-off Nina was, and perhaps she'd never been encouraged to interact with other children and thus been left mostly to her own devices growing up, which made a great deal of her strangeness make sense—she'd heard tell that 'only children' tended to run the risk of maladjustment if they lacked proper socialisation in their early childhoods, after all, and so it'd seemed to Shirley the logical conclusion to draw.
So when Nina had seemingly dismissed her initial overtures at friendship, she'd changed her tack, thinking that perhaps she could try and supply what Nina had obviously missed in growing up as she had, a state of affairs that her normally solitary demeanour only allowed to continue and to run amok unchecked; she'd done her best to pull Nina out of her shell, to teach her how to do her hair, how to dress better, how not to be so strange and awkward around people, and a hundred other things that she'd chalked up to the same thing that had caused Shirley to seek to grow closer to Nina in the first place—that is, her status as what Shirley might put delicately as an 'emotional orphan'—with the presumption that she just needed to keep at it, and eventually, in a flash, Nina would realise all that Shirley was trying to do for her, and they'd be close friends, bosom companions, thick as thieves…
Only, that hadn't been what happened.
And as she took the long way around to the student council building, Shirley Fenette had no choice but to allow herself to confront, for the first time, the increasingly likely possibility that it never would.
She sighed heavily; the thought was morose, but she felt like she'd more than earned that, after she had elected to force the issue when they were in full view of nearly the entire student body, leading the both of them to humiliate themselves with the subsequent argument. She straightened out her skirt, adjusting her jacket as she climbed the steps to the student council building, and checked over her hair before she took in a fortifying breath, and gained entry to the building with her key-card.
The student council building's interior was as grandiose as ever—three stories and a basement, with a major portion of the floor plan taken up by an immense multi-story ballroom in which the student council held their meetings, at a long table in its centre. There were guest bedrooms on every floor, full bathrooms, a kitchen or two, and various other rooms for any number of other purposes, and though the facilities were hardly robust enough to effectively serve as a dormitory the way the actual dormitories did (one of which, incidentally, she called home for the larger part of the year), they remained impressive, and a testament to how Milly had spared no expense in the construction of what amounted to an elaborate façade, keeping the Ashford Academy entrance to Annwn concealed under multiple layers of security and deception. But when Shirley stepped through, she wasn't really in the proper frame of mind to appreciate how the verdant carpet felt beneath her penny loafers, nor how the cream-coloured paint on the walls lent the corridors a deceptive feeling of the overt and open, nor even the immaculate figuring of the light fixtures that lined the walls and hung from the ceiling at regular intervals. She sped past all of that, and rounded the corner in question to come face-to-face with the girl whom she'd considered, perhaps without even fully realising it, to be more of Shirley's pet project than she was a person in her own right—alongside an unsmiling and seemingly uncharacteristically sober Rivalz Cardemonde.
He could cut quite the striking figure when he wanted to, she realised; normally, he came across as energetic and thoroughly athletic, but he'd lacked the sheer gravitas that made his height mean something, to the point where she'd regularly found herself writing him off as a young man with far more muscle than brains; and during her less-than-charitable moments, she'd found herself wondering at the true nature of the relationship between Nina Einstein and Rivalz Cardemonde, and arriving, to her shame, at the conclusion, however short-lived, that Nina kept him around as an effective minion. But even if Shirley had not taken it upon herself to disavow that disparaging interpretation of their relationship, the image before her, of Rivalz standing tall and steady, broad-shouldered and well-muscled even underneath the black cloth and gold trim of his Ashford Academy uniform, and Nina, who seemed at first glance to be cute and small of frame, her features, hairstyle, and glasses giving off the impression of her as both bookish and shy (of which only one such description was actually true), shrinking into herself and averting her eyes in what looked like shame and guilt would have caused that cognition to shatter like so much cheap breakaway glass. It was clear that the two of them were friends, regardless of the momentary rift Nina's and Shirley's earlier altercation may have driven between them, and that this was in no way about Rivalz being subservient to Nina, as she'd be the first to admit she'd assumed when she was stressed and her jealousy at Rivalz seeming to attain with no effort what she'd been trying in vain to build for herself, however much she'd known it wasn't remotely true, even as she'd had the thought, had reached its peak.
"Shirley," Rivalz addressed her with a nod. He gestured to the oblong black table in the middle of the ballroom where the student council meetings were held, which was large enough to hold all five of their members with room to spare during the course of a meeting, and bade her, "Please, take a seat. That goes for you, too, Nina."
"Very well," Nina sighed in defeat; but without further protest, she did as she was told, slipping into her proper place. Shirley jolted back to herself, then, and mirrored the gesture in short order. Before long, they were seated across from each other, with Rivalz remaining on his feet, as if he meant to start pacing. It wasn't the most comforting state to see the normally unflappably cheerful deputy chief of security in, if she was being honest, but Shirley would struggle to claim that such was unearned. Previous public conflicts between Nina and Shirley were the sorts of things that could be passed off as friendly banter; the fact that they'd had a shouting match in the middle of a regularly-trafficked hallway, however, was very much the sort of thing that had the potential to bring the entire act crashing down upon their heads.
This in mind, Shirley intertwined her fingers upon the top of the table for a moment; in the next instant, she turned, then, to Rivalz, and asked, in as innocuous a tone as she could muster, "What, precisely, do we intend to accomplish here? Other than damage control?"
"A solution," Rivalz replied bluntly. "I've watched the both of you talk past each other day in and day out for years now, whenever you're not actively at each other's throats, and I didn't really think to do anything about it; it's not my place to try and judge people for how they interact with each other, and it also isn't my job to try and make sure that everyone likes everyone else. But it's clear that this has gone on for too long already, and it can't keep going, not if we're going to try and maintain any sense of unity, whether that's political, professional, or interpersonal. So the two of you are going to sit here, and you're going to talk to each other, for as long as it takes for you to work out the details of whatever problem you have with one another. Do the both of you understand?"
"…Yes, Rivalz," Nina muttered glumly, staring down at the table.
"I understand," Shirley replied, for her part.
"Good," he acknowledged, nodding gravely. "I'll be staying here to moderate so that neither of you get sidetracked with bickering, of course, but it goes without saying that what happens here today will stay in here today; not even Milly will have to hear about the details of this discussion, unless the both of you mutually decide you want to tell her yourselves."
Both of them nodded, then, in acceptance of these terms; and accordingly, Rivalz fell silent.
They sat across the table from each other, then, for several long and pregnant moments, neither of them quite knowing how to broach the subject of the vast rift, the ravening chasm, that existed between them—particularly in Shirley's case, given that she'd only just gotten an inkling of its magnitude not even an hour before then. The silence that endured was tense, and it was awkward…but perhaps, even despite or maybe because of all of that, it was also necessary.
It was Nina, shockingly enough, who was the first to break that terse silence.
"…You asked me why I hate you so much, Shirley," Nina began, her tone hesitant and more than a little uncertain, but seemingly determined to power through, fuelled by spite alone. "That's…not really a question I can answer, because I don't hate you. I can't hate you, Shirley, and I can't seem to manage to cultivate any sense of true indifference towards you, either—believe me, I've tried both. It seems to some extent beyond the purview of my nature to feel that way towards you, and that…aggravates me, in ways for which I don't think you have any appreciation. It would be so much simpler to hate you, or even to be able to claim that my feelings amount to nothing more than indifference towards you…and yet, I seem to be, much to my chagrin, categorically unable to do anything on that score but fail to achieve either of those desirable emotional states, often to a spectacular degree."
"Then…" Shirley began, and then paused, taking a moment to really try to think about what it was that she really meant to say, and how she meant to say it. It was clear to her that she'd been mistaken about a great many things regarding Nina, if the way her actions were interpreted being a surprise to her was any indication at all. "Then why do you seem…averse to my presence? The way you act towards me…well, I struggle to call it anything but 'hostile,' to be perfectly honest."
"I imagine you might think the answer to that question is 'envy,'" Nina chuckled without mirth; and strangely, without venom either. "And you can be sure that I don't 'envy' you, Shirley. I look at everything that you have, all those easy connections with the other students, and far from wanting that for myself, it's almost impossible for me to think of anything beyond how exhausted I'd be in your position, having to tend to dozens of inconsequential classmates and casual acquaintances…"
"It can get rather tiresome from time to time, I must admit," Shirley agreed easily.
"I know you asked in good faith for a positive answer, and I want to give it to you in that spirit," said Nina. "But it's…surprisingly difficult to phrase…"
"Take your time," said Shirley with a shrug that was more blasé than she felt. "It's not as if either of us are leaving here until we've finished talking, after all; and I can only guess from what Rivalz said that miscommunications are what got us here in the first place. So you might as well take as long as you need to say what you mean accurately, the first time."
"Mmph," Nina huffed in acknowledgement, staring down at the table as the gears of her mind were almost visibly set to turning. Shirley was abruptly taken back to memories of the young woman sat across from her making very nearly the same expression while toiling away at some work problem or other; she remembered thinking in those moments of how attractive, in a cute, mousey sort of way, Nina could be if she just put in the effort. Those thoughts, however, had only ever led her to double down on her seemingly doomed efforts to 'rehabilitate' Nina (and had she really always sounded this…paternalistic, almost?), and so in the here and now, she decided to try and strip from that thought the framing that her erstwhile mission had forced upon it: resulting in the thought that when Nina was like this, caught up and absorbed wholly in puzzling out the best possible solution to an issue that frustrated them all, she was in a strange way suddenly very attractive. "Do you remember the day when Kallen first came to Ashford Academy?"
Shirley blinked, startled and very much nonplussed. "…I beg your pardon?"
"I'm attempting to illustrate my point through a relevant anecdote, Shirley, do try to keep—" Nina snapped her jaw shut, working it unhappily for a few tense moments, and she took a deep breath; when she spoke again, she said instead, "Please, bear with me. Do you remember?"
"…I do," she replied, willing herself not to react to the thing that Nina had nearly said. Whether she had stopped herself so as to spare Shirley's feelings, or in an attempt to avoid Rivalz's sure disappointment, Shirley didn't care to litigate in that moment; what mattered now, she supposed, was that she'd done it at all. It was a gesture of good faith returned, and Shirley personally had no desire to spit on it.
"And do you remember what you said about Walter?"
"That…a serpent is not a proper pet for a lady?" she asked quizzically, and she felt her brow begin to furrow in response to her confusion. What she'd said then was the truth, after all—an innocuous truth, of course, but a truth all the same.
"Yes, that," Nina sighed, not in exasperation as Shirley might have been given to think otherwise, but in something more akin to resignation. "You still believe that even now, don't you? I can see it written across the whole of your face, so please don't insult my intelligence by trying to deny it…"
Shirley, despite feeling somewhat caught, and feeling her hackles begin to raise at being called out in such a fashion for a few moments before she managed to consciously force herself to calm, nodded. "I will admit that I've said words to that effect in the past, for what it's worth…"
"Well, I consider it to be emblematic of my entire problem with you," explained Nina. "Shirley, I never told you this because frankly, I didn't believe that it was any of your business, but…Walter is very important to me. I feed him personally, I care for him, I keep track of his shedding and keep doing research on a daily basis to figure out how to better look after his health and his comfort. He's…he's my friend. And when you derided him as 'unladylike,' you were making more than just some innocuous observation about the oddity of choosing a serpent for a pet; with that statement, you were assuming not only what I wanted, but deriding what I was in favour of what you thought I should be, or at least should want to be. I treat you with some measure of open hostility, Shirley, for more than just because the way that you make me feel is complicated and confusing and frustrating; it's because I don't particularly enjoy being made to bear the weight of the misconceptions that you project onto me."
"I…I'm sorry," Shirley stuttered, acutely taken aback. "I was unaware that you'd read so much into it… Had I known, I would have chosen my words with more care…"
"As I've already said, that much was only an illustrative anecdote," said Nina, her hand waving in a gesture of dismissal. "I wouldn't have had much cause to read into it all that much if the way you'd acted towards me up until that point hadn't already given me the impression that you felt that way. And…and it'd be one thing if I could hate you for it—I've certainly had no trouble with expressing my genuine disdain in the past for anyone else who's looked down on me for being an othermind—but for whatever reason, when it comes to you, I can't quite manage it, and it aggravates me greatly."
It took until the end of Nina's statement for what she'd said to fully register in Shirley's brain; that was why, at the end of her statement, Shirley could hardly piece together a coherent reply, and instead was in that moment able only to manage to gape at her openly. "Wait, wait, wait, hold for a moment! You said you were an othermind?"
Nina's hackles rose at the sound of Shirley's incredulity, but for all that the small, bookish girl was immediately and visibly defensive and on her guard, she did an admirable job of maintaining at the very least the trappings of civility. "That I did, yes."
"But…but…" she gawped, her brain struggling to reconcile two incredibly discrete images, one of which being the girl before her. "But you're so articulate…!"
"Oh, and otherminds are uniformly mute, dimwitted invalids who need constant help in performing the most basic of tasks, cognitive or otherwise, then?" Nina asked sarcastically, and the venom from earlier was back in full force. Shirley found herself wincing upon its return—but she took the fact that Rivalz had yet to personally intercede to mean that she had yet to err beyond all hope of recovery, and so she took that for the implicit allowance it seemed to be.
She nodded, reluctantly, and before Nina could jump to any further conclusions about what Shirley personally professed to believe, she said, "That is the sum total of what many of us are told about the matter growing up, yes—as you yourself have no doubt experienced. I… I've known, of course, intellectually, that the full scope of how the condition might manifest itself was quite a bit more broad than that depiction, for quite a bit of time now, but on a visceral level, well… What I'm trying to get at, really, is that it might well have never occurred to me, had you not told me, that you are as you've just said that you are—I haven't had the good fortune of encountering one of…well, forgive my phrasing, but, your sort in the flesh before now, and… I'm sorry, Nina, I thought you were strange because your parents were never around, is all. I thought you were deprived of socialisation, which was why… Well, it was why I pushed as hard as I did…"
"Yes, well, now you know better," Nina huffed, clearly still offended, but seemingly able to brush it off now that she knew that Shirley had meant nothing malicious or disparaging about it. "And, since we're on the subject, you have encountered another like me in the flesh before, if the way Her Highness Princess Justine invariably fixed her eyes upon everyone's noses is any indication."
"Really?" Shirley asked, not incredulous, but rather surprised and very much taken aback. In truth, she hadn't noticed anything of the sort at all—she'd been certain at the time that the princess made rather relentlessly direct eye contact without issue, but…had she been herself deceived? Was this a quirk of some specific form of legerdemain that only those 'in the know' were able to recognise at a glance? How robust was it, then? Was there an entire alternative language of behaviours and signals that let otherminds notice each other? Did they share thoughts? Were they clairvoyant? Did these languages of signal and sign cross the boundaries of spoken languages? Would a French othermind be able to recognise a Chinese the same way a Britannian othermind was apparently able to recognise another Britannian othermind? But she kept all of these questions to herself for the moment, and said instead, "I would have thought her a coldblood, if anything…"
"No, that's just Lloyd. Or at the very least, he claims to be. 'Born with a broken heart,' and all that," said Nina, brushing aside the dismissal of her own words as if it was nothing of consequence. "He could be like us as well, for all I know—apparently there's a deceptive degree of overlap between the two, at least in terms of possible observable behaviours. But even if I wasn't an othermind,Shirley, do you have any idea how ridiculous and…and quixotic it sounds for you to, what, attempt to make up for and mend the childhood trauma someone who grew up with absent parents might be carrying around with them? A-and even beyond that, do you have any appreciation for how incredibly invasive that is? Even if it was my parents never wanting to be around me and inventing excuses to get themselves out of the house, until they decided to stop bothering and just never return, that made me so irritable and short-tempered, that's no more your business to manage or to fix or to mend or erase than my status, my identity, as an othermind is."
"I…" Shirley had been prepared to be told that she was wrong, and she'd thought that she was at least prepared to hear about the magnitude of her error, but never before had she considered that what she'd thought she'd been doing would be seen as wrong on such a categorical level. "I just wanted to help…"
Nina sighed so heavily that it shifted her shoulders and shuddered throughout her body. "If it were this morning, I'd accuse you of doing nothing more noble than allaying your own sense of impotence with grandly paternalistic gestures of perceived social heroism worthy of Kipling. But unfortunately for my own acerbic reputation, if one thing's become clear to me throughout this conversation, it's that, baffling though it might be, you are acting from a somewhat genuine, if distorted, sense of altruism… And to think, I'd heretofore misjudged you as an entirely different sort of person… Merciless Hells is this situation a mess and a half…"
It occurred to Shirley, then, that she'd gone about this in entirely the wrong way; it hadn't been the first time she'd come to this conclusion today, of course, but by the same token, this time, the feeling of it was distinct in some difficult-to-articulate manner. She knew, of course, and was now faced with the reality of the fact that otherminds came in a broader array of forms than the caricature that had been carried down as a sort of generational myth, stemming from the age of eugenics that had ended with the catastrophic culling of the Emblem of Blood; but really, she knew nothing about how it manifested for Nina specifically, and while she might not have been the wisest of people, by her own admission (Shirley had, for her part, always been of the belief that it was of paramount importance to be aware of one's own flaws and shortcomings, as keenly as one was able), even to her it seemed a particularly egregious folly to succeed one set of assumptions that had nearly led them to ruin with another, even less well-informed set of assumptions, which would inevitably wind up being based purely upon her incomplete, and probably largely fictitious, understanding of the situation.
And so she did what she perhaps ought to have done from the very beginning of this whole sordid affair, and decided to put the proverbial ball squarely into Nina's court.
"I know that this is perhaps a little foolish of me, after everything we've said to each other—today's tawdry dramatics included—but…perhaps it doesn't have to be the way it has been. I, for one, would much rather that be the case than to return to how we were before this morning," Shirley began hesitantly, by way of overture. She did her best to be careful with her words and her phrasing—it would be a particularly cruel sense of dramatic irony that would see her stick her proverbial foot into her mouth and thus bungle it all in its entirety, now as she sensed that she was drawing close to the finish line. "And I know that I have been a fool in the recent past, but…even despite all of this, I would like it very much if I were allowed to get to know you truly, Wilhelmina—if I might come to know you…and, well…if you might come to know me, in time… If you'd be willing to grant me that chance, of course."
In response, Nina propped both of her elbows up upon the table (Shirley bit down firmly upon the chiding admonition that came to her tongue in this situation with startling and remarkable ease, even as she sat with her back straight, and her hands folded in her lap, just as she'd been taught) and leaned forth across the table to doff her own glasses upon its surface, and dig the heels of her palms into her own eyes with a heaving, low groan. "Gods above and gods below, woman—I'm never going to be rid of you, am I?"
Shirley shifted uncomfortably in her chair, a hot flush rising up to redden her ears even as she did her level best to maintain her composure in the face of this unexpected turn. "W-would you like to be?"
That brought the cyclical rubbing of the heels of Nina's palms into her eyes to an abrupt halt, as all other motion in her slight body ground to an immediate halt. The silence that followed was tense, yes, but it was also considered, in a way that Shirley tentatively chose to interpret as a Good Sign. It was then that a heavy, shuddering sigh rippled its way throughout Nina's form, and when the girl genius looked up from it, she bore upon her face a close-lipped smile that was wholly devoid of mirth. "…No, I cannot honestly say that I would…"
When she heard that concession out of Nina's mouth, begrudging in its affect though it undoubtedly was, she couldn't help but grin, as if some phantom influence had taken hold of her facial expressions in the absence of her complete attention. "Words cannot express how glad I am to hear that."
"Don't push it," Nina snapped without any real vitriol or venom. "So. Exactly what is it that we're meant to do now, hm? Sit around and play cards, or some equally anodyne activity?"
"We certainly could do that," Shirley said errantly, but giving the suggestion no more consideration than it was due, given that its intent was facetious. It was, however, a quandary that she was herself deep in contemplation over: what activity might they pursue that could possibly come to appropriately symbolise the new leaf they were, in her mind at least, committing to turning over with one another?
And then, she had it.
"After classes let out today, and we're all meant to go home," Shirley began as the poetic genius of her idea filled her sails with wind, "I'd like to join you on your train ride home."
And it seemed as if old habits really did die hard, because there was no masking the flash of naked suspicion that flared in Nina's eyes as she asked, at some length, "…Why, exactly?"
"To meet Walter, of course," Shirley explained gaily. "After all, what better place to begin trying to understand you than with your valued pet and animal friend?"
Nina sat up straight at that, blinking incredulously. "You want to…come back with me, on the train, to my apartment so that you can meet my 'unladylike pet'?"
"Why not?" Shirley asked, her demeanour no less gay than it had been a moment ago. "If nothing else, it'll at least allow me to broaden my horizons. Don't they always say that that's an important aspect of self-improvement?"
Nina considered her with a suddenly inscrutable expression for several silent moments, but Shirley and the good mood her brilliant idea had placed her in were both unrelenting and undaunted; and after a little while, at long last, she conceded the point with another heavy sigh. "Fine. Fine! What's the worst that could happen, anyways?"
"I'll be on my best behaviour," Shirley chuckled; Nina scowled at her renewed merriment, but she couldn't help but find it cute on her. She mimed drawing an 'X' over her heart. "Cross my heart and hope to die, stick a needle in my eye~."
"I'll pass on the needle, if it's all the same," Nina grumbled.
Shirley giggled, catching the mirth in her hands as she did; she felt a great deal better now than she had walking in here a while ago, and so she didn't think much of throwing a teasing little wink in Nina's direction—which, given the intriguing shade of red the research analyst turned when she did that, hit her with quite a bit more impact than perhaps she'd expected. "As you wish."
"I'm going home using the P line at half past five," Nina informed her, maintaining her composure with a truly valiant effort of will as she stood from her chair—and given that Rivalz, who had done a truly admirable job of making them forget that he was ever there in the first place, made no move to stop her, it seemed to Shirley that they might well have resolved their issue to his satisfaction. "I'm going back to class right now. If you're not on the platform at the appointed time, with bells on, I'm leaving without you."
Shirley nodded, and stood from her chair as well. "I'll see you then."
It was exceedingly rare for Shirley to take it upon herself to leave campus for an extended period of time—especially given how demanding her schedule was, what with her position as both the star athlete and captain of the school's competitive fencing team—but for once, the fact that her mother lived alone, and that of herself and her father, only Shirley could really be bothered to put her life on pause and go home if she was needed, was to her direct benefit: she kept an overnight bag packed and ready to go at all times, which she made sure to update the contents of as her body changed, and her needs changed with it. Thus, after fencing practice, it was merely a task of swinging around to stop by her dorm room—and leaving a note for her roommate, who was similarly the star athlete and captain of the school's competitive swim team—to pick up that bag, which had in it a spare set of toiletries and everything, for her to be ready for a night over at Nina's place.
No, what very nearly unmade her entire plan was actually realising that she had no idea how to get to the Kamakura monorail station, and thus she underestimated the time it would take her to make her way there once she'd gotten directions to it.
She bolted up the stairs ten minutes later, and just in time: there the P line train was, approaching the station at a break-neck pace.
And yet, far from being on the platform, there Nina was, standing just to the left of the turnstile and making no moves to proceed, her arms crossed, and her penny loafer-clad foot tapping impatiently.
When Shirley, who was breathing heavily but not panting (because, of course, her heart and lungs, though unused to distance running as she'd just done, were nonetheless in excellent shape, and her legs, accustomed to the demands of short-distance sprints, troubled her none), cleared her way to the top of the stairs, Nina fixed her with a dirty look, equal parts irritated and unimpressed; but the fact of where she was at all was enough for Shirley to take heart. Despite her protests to the contrary—and indeed, Nina may well have gone through the turnstile and boarded her train without a second thought if Shirley were even a moment or two later than she was—she'd actually waited for Shirley to get here nonetheless.
It was why, even when Nina scowled at her, Shirley couldn't find it in herself to rise to respond to what, just that morning, she might have seen as an expression of open animosity; instead, she smiled, and her grin intensified as Nina grimaced and jerked her head towards the platform beyond the gate. "You were very nearly late. Now come on. I still refuse to miss this train on your account…"
Shirley couldn't help her giggle at Nina's enduring prickliness, which she couldn't help but see in a wholly different light after the row they'd had, and the revelations that had culminated in its resolution; but she did pick up her pace, approaching the turnstile and swiping her card to go through—and she didn't fail to notice that, despite starting out right next to the turnstile, Nina had waited to let Shirley go through the gate first.
Indeed, the child prodigy swiped her own card and stepped through the gate with a single smooth, practised motion; and they made it through the decent-sized but not unmanageable press of bodies onto the train itself with just enough time to spare to make sure they'd left nothing behind, even by accident, with a quick visual sweep of the path Shirley and Nina had taken. And when the monorail's doors slid shut, and it began its steady acceleration into the speeding-bullet celerity that would carry it all the way to Yokohama Station, Shirley turned to Nina, smiled down at the shorter girl, whose own dark eyes were very stubbornly riveted upon the passing scenery beyond the transparent door, and nudged her in the shoulder. "Hey, thanks for waiting for me back there."
Nina flushed crimson at that, turning her head away even further so that Shirley wasn't even in her peripheral vision, and said, "I-it's not… I couldn't exactly tell Rivalz I'd made a good faith effort if I'd…"
Shirley hummed, rocking back and forth on her heels as a warm feeling blossomed in her stomach; on a flash of impulse, she remarked, "You know, you're really quite cute when you're flustered…"
"Sh-shut up…" Nina huffed, lowering her gaze to the floor fully and then, Shirley was quite certain, glaring at it balefully. "You can't just say things like that, you idiot…!"
This time, Shirley giggled without shame; but she decided she might as well show some measure of mercy, lest she push too hard, and so she elected to keep anything else she might have said to herself.
It was equal parts pleasant and strange to be going home with Nina; she took two trains to reach the part of the Tokyo Settlement where she lived, and yet after that initial exchange, Nina didn't really do much of anything. She made no move to strike up a conversation with anyone, not even Shirley, and nor did she try to take out a book or anything of that nature. She seemed content to stand there throughout the entirety of the way to Yokohama Station, staring out into space; and when they reached the station, she was at once moving through the doors and tearing a well-travelled path through it to the next connection at the M line's platform, with Shirley struggling to keep up, being not only larger, but also much less experienced at the art of weaving through a crowd than Nina obviously was. This prompted Shirley at several points to call out for Nina to slow down, only for the bespectacled girl to huff in exasperation, but still stop where she was to wait for Shirley to catch up. Every time Shirley caught up, of course, Nina rolled her eyes before continuing, but Shirley felt as if she was steadily beginning to crack the intricate puzzle that was Wilhelmina Einstein: she might huff and roll her eyes, but if Nina truly minded having to stop and wait for Shirley, she just wouldn't have bothered with stopping, after all.
It was interesting, really, that after adjusting her perspective a bit, the same actions and expressions that had made Nina seem to Shirley like she was standoffish and unpleasant now seemed adorable to her in a way that she hadn't thought she'd have to be prepared to grapple with. She'd known that she found both men and women equally attractive before now, of course, but there had been times when she'd doubted that in herself, when she'd seen so many boys and men that drew her eye that she wondered if she'd mistaken her own orientation—and she wasn't sure what it said about her, really, that this process of travelling with Nina back to where she lived to spend the night, and being exposed to how Nina's actions were honest in a way that her words and expressions simply refused to be, was increasingly putting that niggling doubt that resided in her heart to perhaps its final rest.
In spite of Shirley's lagging behind, they made it to the M line's platform without incident, the rush of people moving to and fro proving no obstacle as they swept through the corridors girded in tungsten and titanium, floored with large, smooth granite tiles and walled in with panels of centimetres-thick reinforced frosted glass, through which only the vaguest suggestions of other silhouettes could be perceived. Concrete and plaster were used for maintenance tunnels, primarily because they were less likely to fracture and then shatter dangerously in the course of unforeseen circumstances, but the throughways they travelled were just as much of a monument to the absurd quantities of money that the House of Ashford's controlling, if soft and rarely flaunted, stake in the global sakuradite market brought the viceroyalty, which were then pumped into infrastructure projects and social programs for those who called Area Eleven their home, both Number and Britannian. Her father had once confided in her that this was not the way that other viceroyalties were run, and that situations in other Areas were far different, and Shirley genuinely did not understand that—it was as if they (that is, those ruling the other Areas) couldn't understand how Milly's prioritisation of long-term efficiency over all else created a sense of grandeur all its own. Who even cared that two-thirds of those she saw in this station, either dressed for work or coming back from it, were recognisable as both Numbers and Honorary Britannians? They did their jobs and did them well; and if their being treated well led directly to them doing their jobs even better than before, then what was the problem?
Her father had scoffed at her when she'd posed that question. Nina, on the other hand, hadn't, and it was perhaps one of the most pleasant interactions they'd ever had, however intense the discussion was that they'd had concerning the many differences between Milly's policies and the ones that were fairly standard throughout the rest of the empire's holdings. And at the end, neither had really understood the issue that her father and others like them had had with the sorts of people who made up many of their coworkers; it was a topic that had caused Milly to grin viciously when they brought it up to her in conversation, which meant that neither of them ever did so again.
The fact that Milly hadn't done anything to them or in front of them didn't make her mirth any less absolutely terrifying than her displeasure—fair or not, she was an incredibly intimidating person in general, for all that she was an undeniably effective leader.
These thoughts stayed with her as she and Nina boarded the M line, to the point where Shirley did not notice that the absolute silence and the lack of exterior distraction that had so perplexed her during their ride on the P line had continued virtually without interruption; before she knew it, they'd reached the very station that Nina apparently used to get to school every morning, and the dreary clouds overhead darkened, flakes of snow falling as gently as they had that same morning.
Shirley drew her bridge coat closer about herself—it was a moss-green garment, with brass buttons and a warm brown lining—but Nina made no move to adjust her own slate-grey Chesterfield coat, not even to close its iron buttons, nor to fiddle with the scarlet wool of her scarf as she took up her bags, though she did reach up to adjust her dark grey beret before she led the way down the steps. With the deepening chill, Shirley was beginning to regret foregoing headwear herself—but at the very least, Nina was herself looking very cute, (and, dare she say it, chic) with the combination of her glasses to complete the ensemble making the look she'd created, perhaps even unintentionally, unexpectedly very potent.
They descended from the platform and walked for maybe ten minutes, give or take, down the street, which was all but deserted given the weather, but otherwise might have been in use by cyclists, or perhaps by lorry drivers; but, at the end of that time, Nina drew up short, and looked up at a fairly well-to-do house. Shirley remained unsure of what the Einsteins did, exactly, besides the fact that it apparently necessitated leaving their daughter to fend for herself for weeks if not months at a time, but she supposed it didn't really matter all that much: working for Annwn, especially in the position that she did, would have made Nina individually very comfortably well-off, especially for a commoner. A house like this, especially in Chiba? Realistically, Nina could have afforded to buy the building using her own funds. Said girl sighed heavily, and gestured to the whitewashed brick of the edifice that loomed before them, with an expression that was somehow halfway between a smirk and a grimace plastered upon her face. "Home sweet home, I guess… Come on, let's get inside."
Shirley nodded, and followed after Nina as they ascended up the concrete steps to reach the door; it was, Shirley couldn't help but notice, made of Area Eleven's native red pine, despite the efforts that'd gone into attempting to disguise its origins—and this, together with the whitewashing on the front of the house, which differentiated it from others that neighboured it, or even the cafés, bookstores, and restaurants down and across the street, painted in her mind a very unflattering picture of the Einsteins. The mimicry here of photographs she'd seen of the townhouses in the Noble District of the Imperial Capital was, to the best of her perception, completely intentional; and yet, she was certain that Nina would have mentioned if either of her parents had had careers in military service, so they couldn't even have risen as high as unlanded gentry by that method.
No, what laid before her was a domicile that had been built and maintained by aspiring social climbers who had intended to use their own daughter to advance their social standing by way of a marriage alliance; and then they'd up and abandoned her when she proved to be, for whatever reason, unsuitable for that kind of arrangement.
It rankled too much like what her father was for Shirley to feel much of anything save anger, and to no small extent frustration, at this realisation; and yet, she sensed that this was the sort of topic that, really, Nina would probably rather not discuss, so instead of expressing her ire, she elected to hold her tongue, and to keep her own counsel on that score.
Nina deftly palmed her keys, and it was with practised grace that she unlocked the door, opening it to reveal the yawning darkness of her unlit dwelling. She didn't reflect on it, seemingly wholly unsurprised, and so Shirley did her best to follow suit, closing the door behind her—and the darkness deepened.
"Hold here for a moment, I'll get the lights on," Nina sighed, as she walked further into the corridor as if every detail that was hidden to Shirley's eyes was the subject of pure muscle memory on her part; which, on second thought, made absolute sense given that this was…where Nina…lived… She elected not to give any sort of voice to that thought, and erased from her face any trace that she'd thought of it to begin with, and instead obeyed Nina's directive, staying where she was. There was an unravelling of cloth and a heavy shifting sound in the dark, quasi-blue featurelessness of the unlit house's interior, full of silhouettes and not much else. "I went out for a fresh pack of lightbulbs just last week, so they should all be working… Ah, there we go…"
The first thought that popped into Shirley's head when the lights came on, and she could see all the little details of the place Nina called home as clearly as if it had been illuminated by sunlight, was the word 'sterile.' There was very little personality or flair in what she could see, and as soon as the lights came on, she took it upon herself to walk more deeply into the house—pausing at the wooden coat-rack from which hung Nina's scarf, coat, and beret for a moment to deposit her own outerwear—only to find that each and every room she passed was quite the same: they were tastefully decorated and fully-furnished, perhaps, but also deeply, quintessentially lifeless, in a way that was much more easily felt than articulated.
It was clear in that moment that even if Nina's parents hadn't been perpetually absent, there would still have been no one who lived here; these rooms were no more for people to fill and occupy in the days of their lives than one might find in furniture showrooms: built to construct nothing more than a paper-thin illusion of habitation, an idea, a possibility, that was just vague enough in what it showed that a hundred thousand different people could see in its tabulae rasa all the things that it didn't show,and thus produce at least a hundred thousand wholly distinct rooms. And in such situations, the alluring ambiguity of the fiction was central to the advertisement, of course—but to see it here, it was all too clear that the space between the lines, where buyers in showrooms were meant to project their domestic fantasies, had been left wholly vacant and blank in a way that was at once both alien and alienating. The curtains were blue, yes, but that was all they were. There was no sense that anyone here had any kind of connection to the colour, or even that they liked it, or that it had been actively chosen in the first place; the curtains were just blue. It was a void of interpretation, of lived experience and emotion and truth, that just looking upon it told her that everything the edifice had told her about the Einstein family was exactly correct, if not an understatement.
"When you're done gawking, Fenette, come into the kitchen," Nina called out, shocking her out of her reverie so abruptly that she physically jumped. "It's just us tonight, to the surprise of absolutely no one, and the fridge and the larder were fully-stocked when last I checked. I hope you're not entirely useless with a knife…"
"I can cook," she replied as she turned away from the interior decorations, a bit of mirth returning to her in spite of herself. She did as she was bidden, then, and walked away from the cold, lifeless rooms as she followed Nina's voice into the kitchen itself.
"Wonderful," said Nina, as she doffed her uniform blazer, unbuttoned the cuffs of her white shirt, rolled up her sleeves to the elbow, and turned on the faucet in the sink to wash her hands. "Since you're the guest this evening, you get to decide what we'll be eating tonight. Please try not to make me regret it…"
"I'll do my best," Shirley chuckled, turning away from the sight of Nina washing up, which was in a way strangely domestic—she'd never once thought of what it might look like for Nina to do household chores, even though she knew, intellectually, that she must, given that she all but lived alone—and instead to the somewhat daunting prospect of the larder and consulting its contents. Searching her mind for some sort of direction one way or the other, and in the process coming upon a piece of trivia she'd picked up by way of osmosis on the subject of otherminds and how their condition might manifest, she called over her shoulder, "Do you have any taste or texture restrictions I should be mindful of?"
The faucet was turned off, she could hear, and a moment later, Nina asked, "…What?"
"Tastes and textures," she called back, refusing to be deterred even slightly. "I remember that some like you don't do very well with specific tastes and textures, that they're unpleasant or you simply refuse to eat them—to the point where your bodies can reject them outright. I'd like to avoid such unpleasantness, if at all possible, so to that end, do you have any taste and texture issues I ought to be mindful of?"
"Alright, alright, just…stop saying 'tastes and textures,' please," Nina cried out with some measure of audible distress. "At the rate you're going, you'll wind up stripping the words of all meaning and they'll just sound wrong…"
"So?" Shirley asked again, not even bothering to keep her tone from sounding expectant.
"…I don't like sweet things," Nina replied after a moment. "And nothing mushy, please, or even too crunchy…"
Shirley felt a 'there, was that so hard?' right on the tip of her tongue, but she chose to bite down on it hard, rather than let it leave her lips; so instead, she said, "Thank you for telling me, Nina."
She turned back to the larder, then, beginning to puzzle over what kinds of meals she could arrange that fell neatly within those restrictions; but Nina chose to speak up again, which brought Shirley out of her own mind anew (albeit much more gently this time) in surprise. "I… Well… Thank you. I was just… I was just surprised, is all. I…I don't think that anyone's ever actually asked me that question before…"
Shirley shoved down the flash of oddly protective anger that flared up in her at that admission, and instead, she softly said, "I wasn't speaking idly when I said I'd like to get to know you, Nina…"
"I didn't think you were," said Nina. "Just… I don't know—please, ignore me. I'm being silly."
"I certainly don't think so," Shirley replied gently.
"Yes, well, I do," Nina refuted, with a tone that strongly suggested that that was the end of that.
Shirley shrugged; she'd seen where pushing had gotten her, and so she didn't deign to revisit or to re-enact her past mistakes, instead choosing simply to let it lie.
Cooking together turned out to be a sedate and pleasantly domestic affair as well; Nina was a force of nature around the kitchen, a deft hand at every task she undertook, to the point where Shirley found that she actually had to work a little to keep up. It was mildly absurd to her that she was losing out to someone who hadn't even taken the Home Economics elective, but she swallowed that flash of competitive envy; if she wondered how Nina had gotten so good at what she was doing, she needed only look one room over to find out exactly why. Having to fend for herself had probably caused Nina to learn how to do all of this very quickly indeed, and one thing Shirley knew from working with Nina was that she did nothing by half measures; her research data was always thorough and dense, but she'd always gone out of her way to push forth a detailed, but much less exhaustive summary alongside it, for those whose heads started to spin after looking over the nineteenth spreadsheet and graph array in two or three times as many pages. The idea of Nina going onto the internet to look up cooking skill tutorials and culinary school coursework sprang into her mind almost immediately, and it was a much more pleasant thought than considering the vapid nuances of the environment outside of the well-lit and warm sanctuary of the kitchen.
Once they'd eaten at the kitchen table, not bothering with the dining room (the food was quite good, as well, which was pleasant, but by no means a surprise), they washed the dishes together in silence; once Shirley managed to clamp down on the impulse to make idle conversation for the sake of it, the quiet began to cease feeling awkward, and instead settled into a companionable tempo. It was…nice, for a change, and she hadn't realised how much stress she'd been putting upon herself to fill silences until she forced herself to stop feeling pressured to do so. It was a change of pace, and it was teaching her things about herself that she'd otherwise never have thought to even interrogate or discover on her own. Nina washed, Shirley dried, and once the plates were done, and all the kitchenware they'd used was spotless, the two girls took up their bags and ascended the stairway to the room that Nina called her own.
"Just drop your bag wherever," Nina called over her shoulder as she pushed her way into it; Shirley, however, stopped at the threshold, gobsmacked at what she saw. Nina's room was shockingly clean, but in a way that was subtly yet impactfully different from the immaculate sterility of the downstairs rooms. There was a lingering presence here, of someone who lived in this space and had saturated it with the authenticity of their being, to the point where the cleanliness of it, as well as the sheer lack of stuff and clutter, felt like a personal preference for minimalism and aesthetic austerity rather than anything barren or desolate. Really, it had never occurred to Shirley that a room could look and feel like this, with its walls painted in soft greys and other industrial colours that really had no business feeling as warm as they did, and as she thought back on how difficult it was to keep her dorm room clean, to the point where it was nearly always in a state of moderate disorder, she could feel herself considering the merits of adopting just a little bit of the sublime mundanity that Nina had infused into her living space into her own environment. But unfortunately, in her awe at what she was seeing, she'd somehow forgotten that she was not alone, and Nina, seeing her looking around with an astonished look upon her face, read something in Shirley's expression that had her hackles raising once again as she began to visibly close herself off. And yet, even in spite of this, she strained to hold onto the companionable civility they'd slipped into on the way here as she said, "I get visually exhausted if there's too much stuff around, and more than that, it starts to feel suffocating…"
Instead of leaping straight to placation, Shirley decided to respond to Nina's growing anxiety with blunt honesty. "Actually, I'm more so wondering about how much easier it would be to keep my own room in order if I tried to live just a little bit more like you… This is eye-opening, and I don't say that lightly… I like it a great deal, though. Practical, unpretentious… It's very you."
That seemed to be the right thing to say, because Nina stiffened, her eyes wide as her cheeks flushed crimson yet again. Just like on the train, an honest compliment had shattered her composure like a pane of breakaway glass, and when she spoke, she was increasingly, visibly, and obviously flustered. "F-Fenette!"
Shirley wondered if she was a cruel person for what she said next—not that that stopped her from saying it anyway, of course. "You know, Nina, if you keep saying my surname like that, I'm going to start thinking that you mean it as an endearment~."
The shade of red that Nina was turning, and the extent to which her eyes were widening, were both getting more than a little concerning, actually. "You are incorrigible, Shirley!"
She judged that she'd prodded quite enough, and decided to give the poor girl some time and space to cool down and catch her breath—Shirley hardly wanted to have to explain to Rivalz that she had caused Nina to suffer some manner of cardiac arrest because she couldn't help but…what was it that she was doing right now, even? Teasing felt like too mild a word, and flirtation carried with it implications that were very far beyond the scope of what she'd come here to accomplish tonight, however accurate it might have been. So instead, she simply smiled softly at her, which allowed Nina to scowl, still blushing up a storm, and turn away with a muted hmph. "I'm going to go into the bathroom to change out of my uniform. You stay here. Try not to break anything, please…"
"Like I said," Shirley replied with a half-suppressed laugh. "I'm on my very best behaviour~."
"G-good. Very good," Nina stuttered out, her composure paper-thin as she jerked her head in a stiff nod. She approached the threshold of her ensuite bathroom, and prepared to step into it with one last aside: "Carry on, then. As you were."
Shirley waited for the bathroom door to swing shut behind Nina before she let herself let out the giggle at Nina's antics this evening that she'd been keeping imprisoned in her breast. She wondered for a moment at how much of this endearing behaviour she'd missed over their years of knowing one another by interpreting Nina's actions the way she had until today, but she quickly shook her head to dispel from her mind the looming spectre of Might-Have-Been. There were many things less foolish than crying over spilt milk that she could be doing with her time, and so she turned her attention to disrobing herself, donning in its place a too-big sleeveless shirt that she liked to sleep in, discarding her brassiere in the process with a sigh of relief, and a pair of exercise shorts; that done, she worked to massage the soreness out of her breasts and shoulders (she made a note that she'd probably need to look into going a size up—they felt like they'd grown since the last time she'd checked; maybe she'd even take Milly up on her offer to get her fitted for a proper corset at this point), and as she did that, she moved over to the bay window that rested beside Nina's bed, which was, in turn, flush against the wall. This required her to climb up onto the bed itself to draw the curtains aside and look out of it, and she discovered, then, to her mild surprise, the snow was building up quite quickly indeed…
It was in that compromising position that Nina walked back into her room to discover her; the low, almost desperate whine that came out of the smaller girl, alerting Shirley to her presence, as well as to the fact that her shirt had ridden up her midriff a fair bit, was a sound Shirley had never heard her make before. It made her swell with a strange sense of pride and ego, to have drawn a sound like that out of a girl who tried so very hard to appear every bit as unflappable as possible, but again, flirtation was not what she was seeking to accomplish tonight, keenly aware as Shirley was that this new dynamic they were both working to establish between them was still entirely too new and nebulous in its boundaries and definitionto be prepared, even remotely, to withstand the stresses that physical intimacy or even romance would surely place upon it. So she didn't remark upon Nina's reaction to the wardrobe malfunction, and indeed she tried very hard indeed to ensure that no hint of her even having picked up on it in the first place showed upon her face or in her bearing, as she climbed off of Nina's bed, brushing herself off, and stood. "It's snowing quite a lot out there… Is your serpent going to be alright?"
She waited patiently for the few seconds it took for Nina, who looked quite thoroughly stricken, to regain enough of her mastery of herself to even register that Shirley had asked her a question in the first place, let alone the nature of the query itself. "I'm sorry, what?"
"Your serpent," she replied without remarking upon the delay. "It's snowing profusely outside your window, and I was wondering if the cold would be a problem for it."
"N-no, Walter's going to be fine," Nina said, her voice uncharacteristically shaky—Shirley felt yet another flush of pride and ego-bolstering at drawing this side out of the smaller girl, and this much, but no more, she allowed herself to feel, but not under any circumstances express. Not tonight, certainly, however clear it might have been that Nina found Shirley at least as attractive as Shirley was discovering more and more that she found Nina. "I'll just need to leave the heat lamp on its current settings overnight. It's not a big deal… I do need to feed him, though—thank you for reminding me."
"Anytime," she replied easily, stepping back.
"Right," Nina huffed, rolling her shoulders and seeming to psych herself up. She'd come out with her hair down and dressed in a pure white nightgown that was otherwise devoid of decoration, so when she shrugged and stretched, the image was thoroughly incongruous with the sense of almost chastity that she seemed to radiate when she dressed herself in that way. She looked like a lily. "Right, now. I need to get my gloves on first. Walter's over there, by the way, so you can go look while I get his food ready."
"Is it an involved process, feeding him?" Shirley asked, for once allowing herself the cognitive and emotional space to be curious instead of judgemental. And she took Nina up on her offer, looking over at the large acrylic box—which was originally built to be an aquarium, if she judged correctly—situated in a far corner of the room, with a hinged lamp pouring warming light into the large enclosure; newspaper bedded the floor of it, and the top of it was sealed off by what looked like chicken wire. It took her a moment, just on account of it being so big that her eyes passed over it at first, but there the serpent was, heavy and thick in its body, with lustrous, healthy-looking, glistening black scales that shifted idly.
"It's about as involved as you want to make it, honestly," said Nina, as she snapped onto her hands what sounded like a pair of disposable surgical gloves. "Babies need live food, and some people thereafter switch over to frozen dead food. I never made that switch, and instead I made a side-project out of breeding my own rodents for him. He's getting quite large, so I might have to upgrade to rabbits soon—the pet store down the road and I have an arrangement, so just like when I weaned him off of mice, they should take the excess rats off of my hands and get me started with a crate of rabbits when I finally get around to it…"
"I'm sorry, did you say that you breed your own rodents?" Shirley asked, bemused, as she turned away from the enclosure for the snake (Walter, she reminded herself; it was important that she train herself to refer to the creature by its—by his—name, if only to erase the record of her own past sins on that score) to see Nina, elbow-deep into another clear enclosure full of very large and very fat rats, with fur ranging from brown to grey to white to mottled combinations of the above. They were about the size of rabbits all on their own, she couldn't help but notice, and with a brow furrowed in concentration, but no sign of any other emotion, Nina seemed to shift what she was doing, and seized one particularly rotund specimen, with no hint that she even heard its shocked and protesting squealing. Swiftly, she lifted it out of the enclosure with both hands, securing it in place and giving it not even the leeway to attempt to wriggle its way free.
"I do," Nina replied with a nod, jerking her head to the side in an unspoken directive for Shirley to get out of the way; she complied, of course—but not before she opened the wire lid of the enclosure, which Nina responded to with a grateful nod. "Unfortunately, attitudes like yours aren't uncommon; there isn't a lot of readily-available information on the specific details of reptile husbandry, so I have to scrape together what I know more or less through trial and error and intuition. To put it simply, I don't know if inbred rats are as good a food source as properly-bred ones, but I'd rather not take the chance. So I keep track of their breeding lines as something of a hobby. I did this for the mice before I got the rats, and apparently I did so well with it that now the aforementioned pet shop pays me a tidy sum to sell back my excess whenever I go to get new specimens for the gene pool. So that's a steady secondary source of income…"
"To tell you the truth, I had no idea that there was even a market for that…" Shirley confessed, with a spark of surprise that she could hear in her own voice.
"Yes, well, nobles love their hawking and their falconry," Nina explained with a wry smirk as she carefully lowered the fruitlessly thrashing rat onto the floor of the enclosure. "It was only a matter of time until some highborn scion or other developed some form of attachment to the animals used as live bait for training them, so rodent husbandry is as a result a much more robust and widespread field than snakes. It's to the point where I had to cobble together this enclosure more or less ad hoc from what I could find for a number of other, more common pets—which is a bother, for certain, given that Walter's still growing, and it was a struggle to find an aquarium this big to convert… I'm going to have quite the headache ahead of me to accommodate his growth, but, well…it's worth it, to look after my first ever friend…"
No sooner had Nina said that, than did she release the rat from her hands, and set it free inside the enclosure. She retracted her gloved hands from the box, then, and quickly, closing the lid after her, and then went about peeling the gloves from her hands, and unceremoniously tossing them into the nearby bin. She returned her attention to the enclosure, and lowered herself onto the floor, sitting herself cross-legged upon the dark grey carpeting as she stared past the acrylic.
Shirley, perplexed but willing to follow along, mimicked the motion, placing her backside down on the floor right next to Nina, to the point where their knees were a hair's breadth away from touching as they sat half-lotus. She filed away what Nina had told her for later reference, and instead, she asked lightly, "So, what are we meant to be watching right now, exactly?"
"Walter's going to catch the rat and constrict it before eating it," Nina replied, her tone moderately distracted and positively giddy. "It's fascinating. If I could, I'd watch it every time. I just don't usually have that kind of flexibility in my schedule…"
That sounded…positively ghastly to Shirley, of course, but she recognised it as a knee-jerk reaction, and shoved it down so that she could move past it. This was important to Nina, and she felt bad enough about having derided such by accident—it was unthinkable to her that she might elect to do so on purpose. And was this not the entire point of the exercise? To get to know Nina, to come to understand as well as she could how the smaller girl viewed the world? It wasn't as if she'd thought this would be an easy task, not for a long time; and in comparison to the uphill battle she'd thought she'd had before her this morning, was learning to appreciate a serpent strangling the life out of a rodent really any more onerous of a task, or even equally as onerous?
It wasn't as if Nina was the sort of person to like something without reason, of course—there was a beauty to what they were about to witness, Shirley was certain, she just had to open her mind a little, and unbind her perspective enough to see it. So Shirley nodded slowly, instead, secure as she was in the certain knowledge that Nina was too immersed in what was transpiring within that world of newspaper and acrylic to have caught Shirley's internal conflict upon her face; she turned her gaze onto what was happening, too, now determined to look past the surface and discover the beauty lying underneath such an act's harrowing surface…
The serpent—Walter, she corrected herself again—stirred from its (his) languor, sensing, it seemed, that food had entered his domain. He moved slowly, at first, as the rat's whiskers tittered in distress; maybe it was sensing the scent of how many of its fellows had perished here, devoured by Walter the serpent! But there was no escape: once the rat understood this, Walter lunged, subduing the rat, and beginning to wrap it up in his coils. The rat squealed and thrashed, but every thrash only caused more of Walter's thick and vital body to entangle it, as the clever creature wove himself more and more completely around the struggling rodent; and at a certain point, the rat was completely encircled, and at that moment, Walter began, subtly but visibly, to tighten his coils.
"A common misconception of constriction is that the goal is to suffocate the prey," Nina said all of a sudden, her gaze still fixed upon what was happening. "It isn't, though; the purpose of the act is to crush and collapse the prey's rib-cage for easier consumption. It doesn't die because it runs out of breath; it dies because every bone in its torso shatters under the pressure…"
Shirley still didn't see what was so great about what she was witnessing, in and of itself; she could admire, of course, the deftness of the animal, Walter, and the cunning he exhibited in using his prey's final attempts to save itself to only further secure it, but when she tried to attach it to Nina's excitement, the two simply refused to align. She was about to say as much, but before she could ruin everything they'd managed to get accomplished together this evening, she had an epiphany of sorts.
It didn't matter if she understood what was so great about watching this, she realised; what mattered was that Nina did. And she could readily admit, without having to understand it for herself, that the sheer rapturous excitement on Nina's face and in her voice as she watched her pet eat that large, fattened rat was comprehension enough.
So instead of attempting to fruitlessly comprehend why Nina enjoyed watching this, Shirley allowed herself to accept the simple fact that Nina did; and just like that, she found herself focusing on Nina's glee and excitement, to the point where she was nearly rambling about this or that about how her pet hunted and fed, with kindling embers of fondness starting to catch flame in Shirley's chest.
And they sat like that, with Nina watching Walter, and Shirley watching Nina, as the snow piled up outside the house, while they allowed each other's company to warm them.
A homely hearth in a nascent blizzard.
The next morning, it just so happened that classes were cancelled due to the snow build-up of the night before. At no point during the previous evening had Nina's parents returned to the house, of course, and so the two of them had worked together to shovel and salt the steps even as the municipality came by to clean off the foot-paths; then, they'd made breakfast together, before heading into Annwn by one of the alternative entrances, the existence of which was known only to higher-level staff (Shirley having actually begun to outperform her father in his job, and so Milly had her under evaluation to promotion over Joseph, thus granting her probationary access to these paths that even the elder Fenette couldn't claim) and getting to their offices in the main part of the subterrane by late morning.
They were working with a skeleton crew that day—only the high-level staff, and the people who lived in Kamakura, or even in dormitories within the subterrane itself could even have made it in, so that development was by no means surprising—which meant that Nina had spent the beginning of her work day taking compiled data and running dozens if not hundreds of tailor-made simulations. She'd designed along with her underlings in her department the engine that ran these simulations, and it was with the help of their labour that it was built, so she knew the specifications, both of its performance and its formats for the entry of data, better than her own name—Hell, she might even have seen it pop up in her dreams every so often, for all she knew. But it was drudgery and tedium of the very lowest sort, really, and while research surely required a healthy appreciation for tedium, as Doctor Croomy loved to remind her, the fact remained that even with the help of her morning coffee, by the time it was two hours past midday, Nina was struggling to stay awake in her office.
The abrupt slam of a mug on her desk sent her shooting upright in her chair, blinking blearily as she cursed herself for drifting off there—and a moment later, her vision cleared to reveal Shirley standing there with her hand still on the mug of steaming black coffee (which resembled nothing so much at that point as sweet nectar and ambrosia), favouring her with a sympathetic smile.
Heat rushed to Nina's cheeks at that expression, and she was too drowsy to quite figure out what to do with herself at the sight of it—she imagined she looked quite poleaxed—until Shirley saved her with a motion to the mug of steaming coffee. "Drink. It should be quite safe by now."
Dumbly, Nina nodded, reaching out to take the mug and bring it to her lips. The bitterness of it ran down her throat as she knocked it back—it tasted delicious, almost better than what she could manage to make herself on a good day—and at once, she felt glorious, miraculous life and vigour flow back into her limbs and her bones, reviving her in a rush.
"It was actually my first time making coffee," Shirley confessed as she sat on top of Nina's desk, an elegant hand coming up to brush an errant lock of strawberry blonde hair back behind her ear. The skirt she wore was criminal on her, professional in a way that made Nina think back, rather shamefully, on a number of fantasies she'd entertained in private—it was black and pin-striped, with the deep green of her blouse a sharp contrast that only further brought out the hazel in her eyes; and further down, her black stockings led to a sensible pair of flats, highlighting the shapely muscle of her calves… Nina shook her head, a motion as minute as she could make it, to clear the lurid visualisations out of her mind without letting on that she'd had them in the first place. "I asked Ayase from Accounting for help with working the machine, but I still don't know if it's any good…"
"It's perfect," Nina replied immediately, vehemently shaking her head. She had her difficulties with being open about a lot of things—her emotions in particular—but to her, it amounted to a cardinal sin to be anything less than completely forthright about coffee. "Th-thank you, Shirley. Very much. I…appreciate it, honestly."
Shirley smiled warmly at that, and nodded. "Then in that case, I'll stop worrying about it."
They sat in a comfortable silence for a few moments; Shirley just looked down at Nina, seeming not even to feel the need to speak, and this helped Nina feel at ease, too. She really wasn't any good with small talk, anyways—she understood the social mechanism it was devised to fulfil, as a means of gleaning from a person some sense of who they were and what kind of mood they were in, but it had never been one of her strong points, to talk in situations where the contents of what she was saying were very much not the point of the exercise. But all that was suddenly interrupted—a clamour seemed to erupt outside of her office, as a dull roar from far away but growing louder and closer. She sighed, looking away from her work (and what were the chances that she'd come across a viable method of getting the Float System working hidden away in these simulations, anyways?) and stood from her desk. "Well, I suppose we ought to go see what that all is about… It's bound to be better than just sitting here fruitlessly…"
Shirley nodded easily, slipping off of Nina's desk to stand on her own two feet once more. "I'd be lying if I said I wasn't a little curious, myself…"
"Just another day at the office," Nina sighed as she walked over to the door, noticing in a flash that Shirley had made sure to close it all the way when she entered. She was as touched by that small gesture as she was saved by the coffee, but she knew it would be silly of her to express such a feeling for something that ought to have been so innocuous, so she tried not to—but from the way Shirley's smile turned knowing at something on Nina's face, she must not have been very good at hiding it.
They exited her office, walking out into the stark, sterile white floors and walls and ceilings of this part of the facility, just in time to see, at the entrance to this wing of Annwn, the doors slide open to admit someone Nina had never seen before.
Two someones, actually.
Then a third person entered, and she amended that thought. Two someones, and Lloyd. With Cécile looking on from afar, but otherwise keeping her distance. It was probably the wisest thing to do right now, and Nina would have done the same, if the trio weren't coming straight for her…
The one in the lead, who was all but power-walking while Lloyd, his expression of distress almost comically obvious, scrambled after to try and stop her, was in fact a woman: a woman with Lloyd's colour of hair and eyes (though her hair was much wilder than his, and tied back into a thoroughly messy ponytail), only half a head shorter than him—not that the pudding-craving scientist whose frame might best be described as 'phrenologically destined to portray Victor Frankenstein' was really himself possessed of any great height—and about as slender and lanky, with very little in the way of curvature to speak of; it was perhaps fortunate that this was the case, because Nina privately doubted very much that what the new girl was wearing could have contained or protected the modesty of even a moderately more bountiful frame. No trainers or boots or even flats were worn to protect against the cold, which quickly became something of a running theme: a crop top, of all things, which seemed to have been made from an old short-sleeved shirt, left her midriff bare, and an equally shorn pair of denim pants (Nina vaguely recalled this particular style of shorts being referred to as a Duke Daisy's, or something of that nature?) was slung about the full span of a bony pair of hips, with no indication of any undergarments. Her feet, then, which were surely the source of at least part of the oddity of the clamour, were shod in flimsy-looking open-toed sandals with no real ankle support to speak of, seemingly designed with no concern save how quickly and easily they could be donned and doffed in mind.
Following in her immediate wake was a much more put-together woman—though, notably, not one who was all that much taller, not by any metric. She was much better-dressed for the environment, though; her dress was of heavy pewter grey silk with a hem that brushed her ankles, upon which were also fastened a very sensible pair of otherwise fairly nondescript brown leather boots, laced-up; in her hand, she held a well-loved pair of similarly brown leather gloves, and with her other hand, she was still in the process of removing a sturdy-looking shawl from about the span of her slender shoulders, and a pewter grey Gainsborough hat that was decorated with large, pale feathers and a netted veil still sat cocked upon her head, and had yet to be doffed. It obscured much of her face from this distance, Nina had to admit, but as the woman drew closer, it became clear that she was not nearly so fair as her companion: her skin was dark where the first woman's was pale, a honey tone contrasting against alabaster, and when she finally reached up to remove her hat, her hair was jet black, and pinned up into an updo that Alicia Lohmeyer's austere and angular Britannian features (as well as her bitterly unpleasant and utterly joyless personality, no matter her admittedly quite prodigious administrative and bureaucratic talents) made look severe and inflexible in the extreme—but on the dusk-skinned woman, it gave off more of an impression of the practically-minded, if Nina dared to engage in such frivolous surface-level analysis. She was beautiful, startlingly so (though not to the preternatural extent of either of the two princesses Nina had met when they went to Ashfordshire for the bridal shower into the wedding), with a heart-shaped face which framed a set of softer, gentler, more inviting features than the typically Britannian form of beauty, high cheekbones notwithstanding, large eyes that looked brown from a distance but up close became more and more clearly maroon, full lips that were left bare of lipstick but were nonetheless glossed, and a nose that Nina struggled to call anything but 'cute.' All in all, not Nina's type in the slightest, not really, but she could see the appeal.
It wasn't very long before Lloyd's unheeded protests (to which not even Nina herself was listening, not really) were echoed by someone other than the questionably-sane but undeniably brilliant inventor. The dark-skinned woman heaved a sigh through those full, glossy lips, and said, in a low voice that spoke of a great degree of operatic training, "Holly, dear, you really should slow down. For your little brother's sake, if nothing else."
Little brother…? Nina asked herself, feeling her brow furrow in her unspoken confusion.
The pale woman, Holly, grimaced, but she did stop, even as her shoulders slumped. "But Helen!"
"No, Holly," the dark woman, whose name seemed to be Helen, said, her tone rather more firm this time. "We are guests here, and you're being very rude."
"Fine," Holly huffed.
"Thank you, Helen," Lloyd groaned in relief as he finally drew up to them. Then, his eyes took the two of them, Shirley and Nina, in at last, and his demeanour swapped from 'weary relief' to 'bright mania' in the space of a breath. "Oh! Wilhelmina and Shirley! How fortuitous! Please, allow me to introduce both of you to Lady Holly, of the House of Asplund—my elder sister—and her beautiful wife, the Lady Helen. Holly, Helen, these two are Wilhelmina Einstein and Shirley Fenette—our Chief Research Analyst, and our new Chief Fabrication Engineer respectively."
Nina felt the urge to raise an eyebrow (which was by no means an uncommon sensation around the 'Earl of Pudding,' as he'd apparently been derisively nicknamed during his time at the Imperial Colchester Institute), and very nearly asked why, if this Holly was actually older than Lloyd, he was the one who bore the title of 'Earl.' But then she looked at Holly, who was fidgeting, and even when she was trying her very best to engage, was looking anywhere but directly at either Shirley's or Nina's eyes, and at once, it clicked in her mind. It made sense, really, especially given how she was dressed: acute sensitivity to the textures of clothing was one of the more difficult manifestations of their condition to conceal, after all.
Unlike Lloyd, who hid it well enough that he'd managed to pass his own status as an othermind off as the far more socially-accepted 'coldblooded'. Lloyd's own quirks and manifestations could be dismissed as mere eccentricity, which wasn't particularly uncommon among certain old highborn lineages that still reportedly suffered from some of the lingering genetic complications of incidental inbreeding being a central feature of dynastic power among the noble classes prior to the Humiliation of Edinborough; someone like Holly, who likely couldn't wear a proper set of clothes without it feeling like an acute and intimately invasive form of torture, would unfortunately not be anywhere near as simple to dismiss as only 'peculiar.'
"Well, I'd like to think I can speak for my colleague Nina as well as myself when I say that it's a pleasure to make your acquaintances, both of you," said Shirley, instantly and smoothly covering for Nina having lost the thread of the situation they were in. A rush of something warm that tasted like gratitude, cut with something else that she dared not name, flooded her from her core and radiated outwards, and she felt her cheeks grow hot with blood as it took hold of her—and of course, Shirley seemed to notice as much (she couldn't not have);but thankfully, she elected to speak nothing of it.
"It's…nice to meet you as well," said Holly, a trifle awkwardly. "So you're a fabrication engineer in this place, huh? I should go to you if I want any information on proprietary alloys and such?"
"I…" Shirley chuckled, uncertain and taken momentarily aback. "I'm afraid I don't quite follow…"
"My sister is every bit as brilliant as myself," Lloyd stepped in to explain. "But unlike myself, she's much more interested in innovations on a human scale. I told her about some of the developments we were implementing onto the Lancelot, and she insisted upon coming around to visit in person, so that she could gauge properly how applicable any of it is to new forms of body armour for infantrymen."
"Oh! Well then!" Shirley laughed, seeming almost to have been buffeted back by the prospect. "I'll be happy to let you take a look at what we have, certainly. The Lancelot's sakuradite infusion needed to be done on a molecular level, considering common modern smithing techniques tend to react rather poorly to the volatility of the substance in question, and the titanium alloy was made in-house, so I should be able to provide you with plenty of documentation on that front, never you worry."
A tension that Nina had missed almost entirely seemed to fly out of Helen's body at the observation of Shirley's reaction to such; she suspected that Helen had been commonborn and had a career in the opera in the past, because she'd been looking directly at the woman and still hadn't noticed the rigour with which she'd been holding herself until it was gone. Marrying a commoner—much less an actress—was the sort of thing a person of high birth who didn't stand to inherit could do without much fuss that a scion simply could not, so the thought made some sense to her, especially given that Helen's own dress sense was at once both more and less ornate than someone who'd been born to her station might possess by sheer virtue of dressing that way practically since birth.
"Ooh! I've wondered what material you used to insulate the finer circuitry from interference!" said Holly, who seemed suddenly as if there were two stars being born behind her eyes with how brilliantly they were shining with the same sort of questionably-sane mania that was behind many of her younger brother's office-famous week-long work benders, where he'd fly around the facility like a man possessed, fuelled by nothing more than triple shots of espresso and impressive amounts of banana and vanilla pudding cups (the lemon went untouched—it seemed his own aversion was to the tart, she'd noticed) and in the process make massive, meteoric headway on any number of projects. "Sakuradite in particular is so prone to generating repulsion fields when excited even slightly improperly that the residual electromagnetism wreaks absolute havoc on any sort of microcircuitry I've managed to cobble together in my lab back at home—Gefjun wave-form particles really are such pernicious little bastards…"
Shirley said something in response, Nina was sure—even before yesterday and last night, Nina gave the woman no end of credit regarding how good she was at every aspect of her job, from base metallurgy all the way to chemical and molecular engineering, so there was not a doubt in Nina's mind that Shirley was more than knowledgeable enough to keep pace with the conversation, regardless of how quickly and energetically Lloyd's elder sister began to ramble about the most minute of specifications—but for her part, she found herself acutely stricken by what the newcomer had said, and a single question rang like the bells of a cathedral in the forefront of her mind:
Could they really have overlooked the solution because they were overcomplicating the problem…?
Could it really be that simple…?
The sensation of intellectual euphoria—of eureka, if she dared say so—sent Nina's thoughts racing. If that was the case, so many seemingly-disconnected details about how and why different attempts at the resolution of their outstanding issues failed the way they had suddenly all began to lock together, and the implications of even one of them were… Staggering was entirely too small a word for it.
"If you'll excuse me…" she muttered, the hair on the back of her neck standing on end as all of this began to make a terrible and awesome sort of sense. Could she have done it? Now she had to know, and it was clear in the space of an instant that it absolutely would not keep.
At once, she turned on her heel and bolted back into her office space, as if the very hounds of Hell were snapping at her ankles. With a sweep of her arm and a terrifying, clattering crash, she cleared off her desk, cut the simulations she had running even as she slammed into her expensive ergonomic office chair hard enough that the sheer force of her momentum nearly sent her tumbling from it, and with the fervour of divine revelation, her ashen fingers dashed across the keyboard of her work terminal, setting an entire slew of new conditions and parameters. She had to know if she was right, she had to know, and it had to happen right this second. She had an errant thought that, if this was how Lloyd felt during his aforementioned work benders, then she could understand the madman just that much better—she doubted there was even a single narcotic in all the world that could replicate the manic high that suffused her, body, mind, and soul.
Distantly, she was aware of Shirley entering her office shortly thereafter, and instead of chastening her for having abandoned their guests so abruptly, she seemed almost concerned. "Nina, what is it?"
"Repulsion, Shirley!" was the only thing that Nina could think to say. It was the only thought in her mind right then that was anywhere near small enough to be able to be properly bound up in known words and coherent sentences. She giggled, and she was keenly aware of how absurdly unhinged it sounded even as it was bubbling up in her throat; but with so much of her being already occupied by the rapture that now suffused her, there wasn't enough of her left to devote any energy to care about it. "All this time…! All this time, and we overlooked it because it was just. So. Simple! But I have to know…!"
"Nina, I don't understand…!" Shirley exclaimed, seeming equal parts exasperated and worried.
"Oh, just wait…" Nina muttered under her breath, her eyes refusing to be torn away from her screen for even a moment. "You may not understand now, but I promise you, you will…!"
She set the simulation running, her mind already defining for her all the outcomes that would signal her success—and as the readings began to come back to her, landing precisely where she'd just predicted…
There was a girl that had once borne the name 'Wilhelmina.' Suffocated by expectations and by the ambitions of others, she had dreamed of nothing so dearly as the freedom of the sky.
The girl who had dreamed of flight—who had prayed for wings; it was this girl, thought dead or at the very least long-forgotten, who took hold of Nina's lips, her throat, her lungs, her voice. And it was her, and not the modern Nina, who, upon seeing the budding fruit of her fomenting vindication, cried aloud for all the world to hear:
"Choke upon my triumph, Daedalus!"