Scene #7775:

Owner	Pose
Liza Grier	Even though the Penguin Bay incident had been an absolute fiasco, they had at least done the job right. Something which Liza declares only counts for 'breaking even', but has finally just accepted and moved past, eager to get on with her life. Liza's ship takes off the following night. As far as ships go, it's a pretty far throw from the fishing boat Rita grew up on. It's hard to judge how much was originally there, and how much is new, because the transition from compartment to compartment is seamless, and the entire thing is in a state of good repair that easily matches the state of very mild wear that the additional fabrications come in, but even being conservative, it's far more for one person than was originally used by a family of three. In terms of raw volume, it might even be compared to a small mansion, however it will soon become apparent that the majority of it is turned over to working pursuits, and these are far more space intensive than just fishing and diving; especially since no open spaces can exist exposed to the elements. With a permanent roof, and lacking the rocking and bobbing of the sea, it's a little more like the Union Busan, but the bright lights, cozy corridors, and occasional strip window that gazes out into the bejewelled tapestry of space outside, are nothing like those dingy lower decks. It comes with the comforting hum of an engine, a constant presence just below the edge of awareness unless she focuses on it, and the occasional soft creaks and pings of elements heating and cooling beneath the floor and inside the walls. There's a hint of oil and solder on the air, but also floral things, and the familiar whiff of lived-in water. Of course, the room to get used to first is the teleporter, in the dead center of the ship; a tall capsule with a faintly luminous blue glass floor, filled with its own resonant, electrical hum. Around it, clean, warm, off-white plasteel floor and wall plates, striped dramatically with bright red, the small space occupied with the sight of potted plants, a mounted glass cabinet filled with tiny, dubiously precious items, and a photo of Earth pressed under glass, all of it clearly meant to be the first thing Liza would see returning from a mission for a reason. First things in order are for Liza to tell Rita how to work the teleporter keypad, and show her a couple of bookmarks, numerous of which are listed as emergencies, but a couple of which lead to places she says are perfectly safe to look and shop around on her own time; and one she is absolutely not to touch. Then it's something of a tour. The main crew corridor, the bulkhead to the bridge (which she promises to show soon), the stairs that lead to the upper deck, the stairs that lead to the lower, and separate of that, the direction of 'engineering' near the rear. Little wall lockers with first aid and fire equipment, as well as space suits and basic safety gear, and their codes. A steep ladder that goes into 'the armory', and finally, on the lower deck . . . Where the spiral steps come out into a cozy, large backyard-sized lobby of sorts. One with warm sunny lighting that overlooks an entire ten foot deep pool in the middle, futuristic looking furniture with black frames, plushy red cushions, and blue glow lights, and still currently empty tables, plinths, trays, and many glass tanks in the walls, highlighted in soft blue spotlights. Liza forgoes a lame attempt at 'tada' and simply says "I didn't really know what you'd appreciate most, but it seemed like it'd be harsh to go away from the sea completely. So I balanced some tonnage sheets, and reserved this. This is yours. If you want to keep fish, crabs, stamp collections, whatever. I'm not a landlord." She cratches her cheek. "Ah, but the pool is kept in place by gravity assist, so . . ." An awkward pause, then she just starts pointing to doors. "That's your room over there. Across, that's the freezer. And then there's the lounge. And just in case, that leads to a life pod."
Rita Ma	Rita has had no time to plausibly change out of her swimsuit, and 'plausibility' is important to her. A more salient benefit of not actually wearing clothes is that all her earthly possessions fit in the little leather satchel hanging from her shoulder. She's practically vibrating with disbelieving excitement, but simultaneously anxious and almost withdrawn, sticking close to Liza's side. Her arms are held tight against her own chest, bracing for the phantom bad thing that experience has taught her will follow the good. That irrational expectation of "the other shoe dropping" can only be healed by time. In the teleporter room, her attention's fixated on that picture of the Earth until Liza calls her attention elsewhere. It isn't hard to guess why. The "space diving suits" and windows to the stars naturally snag her eyes in passing, too, but once Liza starts giving the tour in earnest, it's easy to see that she's hanging on every word. Ms. Grier is already going out of her way for me. I don't want to be a bother by asking her to repeat herself! Where the spiral staircase comes to its end, Rita freezes. She doesn't make any attempt to hide her emotions, and even shaken this badly, her disguise instinctively maps them onto her outer face: slack-jawed shock, giddy happiness, a pang of guilt. Having this much room on a ship... are things like that really okay in space? On the Union Busan, something this extravagant would've made me feel sick. But... here, there are no lower decks. Nobody's suffering so we can have this. It's like heaven. A soft, marveling "ah!" escapes her, made a little rougher than her normal voice by raw emotion. Rita takes a half-step forward into the room, then looks back at Liza with a breathless quivery-lipped smile. Her imitation eyes can't cry. But tears from the real ones underneath seep out from between the wrappings. "Miss Grier, I... this is too much. Is it really okay if..." She tries to maintain an excruciatingly formal mode of speech, but transparently trips over herself both out of emotion and because she's unused to talking like that. Words fail her. So she runs back towards Liza and hugs her instead, burying her face in Liza's side and shivering slightly as she tries not to sob. I don't know why she thinks I deserve this. But I'll do my best not to let her down.
Liza Grier	Liza, too, has had no time to change out of her swimsuit, but doesn't seem to care. She has the relaxed energy of someone who will spend all day at home in a swimsuit without really thinking. Instead, her energy is focused entirely on Rita. She watches her with such a measured, carefully neutral stare, that it would almost seem cold or calculating, were it not for the fuzzy, unfocused, even reminiscent look to her eyes. She is wearing the face of someone who won't smile until Rita smiles. "Well, just because I don't work for a company anymore doesn't mean I shouldn't try to live nice. Hell, 'do what we tell you or be poor' is kind of their whole stick, right? This is-- all of it is something I own. I put it together, and it's mine. So of course I'm going to put a lot of effort into it. And if I want someone else around, it'd be a little sick if I just put them in a closet with a bed, right?" She thinks for a few more seconds before proceeding. "Of course it's okay. It's my ship. I wanted some more space anyways. I'll come down here plenty and make use of the space too, right? And besides, you're going to be helping me, aren't you? So, I'm declaring it's okay. You've had too little for too long, so allow me to try and make up for it as best I can." And then she is attack, hugged. Liza pauses, uncertain, for just a second, then turns and drapes her arms over Rita's shoulders in return, squeezing her gently up against her front. "Aha . . . don't do that; you're going to make me get emotional." she laughs, weakly, and hardly forbidding it seriously. "It's been a really long time since I was able to help someone by giving them something good, instead of just destroying something bad. And what you've been through --what you're going through-- I'm just doing what I feel like someone should have done for me when I was like you." Liza trails off into several full minutes of soothing head pats and hair ruffling, standing right where she is until Rita can stop that shivering. "You should have at least this much. Don't tell yourself otherwise." she says, softly. Once she can move again though, Liza still has things to go through. First, is what she's identified as Rita's room, which is significantly smaller than the 'lobby', but still within the realm of lodgings one would have at a reasonably upscale apartment. The furniture is still all on-brand with her apparently favourite colours (likely being what she has the schematic for) but the bed is like a dream. A standing wardrobe with sliding doors in place of a closet, a cushy little rug, a curved desk with an economic chair just egg-shaped enough to curl up in, lots of empty shelves, a sleek footlocker, and a computer keyboard built into the desktop and wired to the curved screen, which Liza has to explain is only really good for playing background sounds and watching movies right now --and then possibly explain movies. There's a cute little window out into space, but it turns out to be a very convincing screen, which Liza shows Rita how to reprogram into something else instead of the external camera feed. Also, she impresses on her to keep the room clean.
Liza Grier	From there, 'the freezer', she said, which is certainly pretty cold. The back wall is mostly taken up by a big, boxy machine, that looks more like a machining table, but Liza insists is a 'food processor'. It kinda looks like a couple of wall lockers are sized for a morgue, but the remainder are simply supermarket industrial fridges filled with the 'stuff that is going bad at this rate' Liza talked about before. Her coolers of excess ingredient clutter that she never intends to eat herself. 'Vine cuttings' of mystery meat sinews, stalked fruits that sure seem like eyeballs, bundled stalks of 'bamboo' that sure does have bone marrow. Liza tells her that this is all hers to do whatever with, but to definitely clean up if she takes it to the kitchen for prep. There is also a tall series of shelves with vials of what look like blood samples, and a full chemistry set, which she tells Rita is for 'other stuff' and to properly leave alone. Space isn't free, even in space, and a little bit of sharing is an inevitability. From there, she says that 'not counting what I installed on the upper deck', all these additions increase the ship's mass enough to hike fuel use by fifteen percent or so, such that if Rita really feels like she has to make up for it, she can help Liza with 'fuel runs'. She clarifies as far as the fact that she refuses to buy any from fuel stations, and does it 'the hands-on way', which she awkwardly compares to diving. Just in space. And now it's Rita's pick of where she wants to go next!
Rita Ma	It does, in fact, take a good couple minutes for Rita to voluntarily peel herself away from Liza. The generous headpats probably increased that span rather than decreasing it, but with how cute the soft noises she makes about the contact are, it's hard to begrudge her that. She sniffles, wipes her face with the back of her arm, and then nods resolutely. "Okay, Ms. Grier. If you're telling me I shouldn't feel bad... then I'll do my best to believe you. But I can't stop being thankful either way!" All of the furniture in her bedroom gets a thorough giddy once-over, from flopping on the carpet to test how soft it is, to hopping into the egg-shaped chair and seeing how it spins, to toggling through a few dozen options for the electronic window. She lingers for a while on a view of the ocean, but then toggles its display back to the stars outside decisively. "I don't think the night sky means much to most people," she says with a big smile, appreciating the view for a moment or two. "It's just kind of 'there'. But I wasn't allowed to see it until I was almost ten years old. That first time... we'd just gotten through some really scary things, and found a new safe place to call home. That's what it'll make me think of." And then it turned out not to be safe there either. ... No, don't think like that! This isn't the time! She swears up and down that she'll keep everything spotless, with that exact kind of earnest plucky seriousness that it's impossible to doubt. (In the coming days and weeks, she'll prove almost too enthusiastic about bustling around with a bucket and mop, hair tied back with a cute bandana.) In the 'freezer' Rita starts up her shivering again, folding her arms over her chest for warmth. The morgue-esque lockers obviously draw the bulk of her attention at first- are those what I think they are?- but as soon as one of those ingredient coolers is popped open, she leans over the edge in wide-eyed curiosity, peering in at its contents. "Ah...! Ms. Grier, is this..." Meat. Meat meat meat meat meat- Rita leans in further until just her legs, kicking in the air, are visible outside the horizontal cooler. About twenty pounds of near-expiry raw ingredient trash vanishes in five seconds, accompanied by way too many snapping, crunching, and slurping sound effects. It's like somebody went amateurishly ham with the audio production on a zombie flick. When she extricates herself from the cooler a moment later, she looks flustered and a little dazed, her brain still obviously rebooting. A single droplet of plant-meat-juice briefly escapes the corner of her mouth before being licked away too. "Um. Ah. Th- Thank you, Ms. Grier. I guess I forgot to eat..." Once she's fully recovered: "I'd like to learn about the fuel runs, Ms. Grier! I really want to help. Oh, but... you said you always mix some drinks after a job, right? Should we do that first?"
Liza Grier	Liza smiles with a little bit of a 'predictable' air to Rita lingering at the ocean, and then makes an 'Oh?' sound when she sets it right back to stars. "Not allowed huh? You're going to have to tell me more about that later. But . . . You should set up this space however it'll be so that when you wake up in the morning, you'll look around and feel good about the day." Liza decides, firmly. "And you'd better. Trust me. I'll absolutely notice if there's a missed spot. Especially after mealtimes. I have a nose for it." And then, in the freezer, like a solid year of fridge clutter disappears in sixty seconds. Liza stares for just a little while, and then brushes aside the Weird moment with "Damn. I guess I'm gonna need to hit up that goddamn meat world again on purpose this time. Never thought I'd see the day." Thankfully, there's still more left in the back, but not enough to last very long at that rate. "It gets easy to lose track of time here, so you're going to have to learn to start eating at regular times. I did, eventually. Helps keep your rhythms in check. Establishes normalcy." Then more of a smirk than a smile. "I did say that. Follow me." This time, it's upstairs, to the upper deck. This is where Liza introduces her newly installed 'lounge' with a cool skylight, between the dual spines of the ship. She also apologizes for it being half-finished, because she doesn't own enough stuff to fill it, but it has a cozy long sofa, neat backlighting on a sand garden feature, a hardsuit Rita has never seen stood up in a corner next to a decorative stand with a beat up looking gun and a mounted sword, a big holo TV screen, a round table surrounded with chairs, still covered in boxes, and a square one nearer the center, as well as posters and frames all over the walls, which largely appear to be Liza's own photography, as well as some for old bands, new movies, and a few featuring probably propaganda with a three headed snake as a logo. And a whole-ass bar. A real one, installed immaculately into the back, with its own neon lines, crystal counters, backlit shelves, complicated dispensers, an infinite variety of glistening glasses lightly magnetized to the right spots, and an infinity times two of weird, colourful ingredients lining the whole back wall. An absurdly rich night club would be envious, if it had space for a few more employees to work. Judging by the fact only half of anything has a label, the amount of hand-tooling that went into it is obvious. Liza motions Rita to seat herself on a stool, which appears to also be lightly magnetized into a neutral position, because overcoming that resistance causes it to spin frictionlessly with dizzying ease. And speaking of dizzying, Liza is a blur behind the counter. Rather than the kind of singular focus she shows in the field, she looks spaced out, humming something to herself as she flips half a dozen levers on and off that eject streams of clear and coloured liquids into a shaker over a heap of ice she crushes with the slam of a press, squeezes something purple into the bottom of another cup, effortlessly grinds up pungent flakes of something, shoots a tiny quantity of water into it, and drops a pair of tablets, before capping it, shaking it, upending it into the first glass, capping that one, and flipping it over a few times one-handed, absent-mindedly gaining air each time. Without looking, she slides out a tall glass for tropical drinks, matching the beach they were on, flips it, grinds the rim into pink sugar(?) she throws out over a glass plate, rights it, pours from a full twelve inches of height, and drops a helical stream of sunset pink and bloody red liquids into the glass, which swirl up, begin fizzling violently, and then separate out into something layered by colour and bubbling like a hotspring, which she tosses a teeny pink umbrella into.
Liza Grier	It's like how the sweet, artificial, candy version of actual strawberry flavour is still called 'strawberry', and is recognizable as such despite being a wholly distinct and separate taste, but for the taste of blood-- with hints of grape, apple, something cidery, and sea salt. It tingles to drink. "So, since you asked: fuel. This ship, like most around here, run on erchius fuel for the main drive. There are alternatives, but they're expensive and usually restricted; hard to get on your own. Erchius is something you can dig out of asteroids or moons-- ah, basically like islands in space. Floating rocks. The company I used to work for made unimaginable amounts of money mining and shipping it. I'm familiar with how to do it, so I do. But its really dangerous if you don't know what you're doing, and still pretty dangerous if you do. It's not that scary to handle, as long as you don't fuck around with it. But it only naturally occurs near . . ." She audibly trails off and grasps for words. "Monsters. The idea is to skim it without coming into contact with them at all. And usually you can. But not always. There's no telling how close the nest is, if it's empty, or full, and if they're asleep or awake. Plus, the stuff likes to play tricks on you. Mess with your head a little. And there's no air on these islands either; it's like diving. Digging and hauling is tough, since you don't want to screw up and get buried, and moving heavy things around-- fun fact for you: when something starts moving in space, it doesn't stop until it hits something, so there's a lot of ways to get bumped, knocked down, or squished." "But like I said, I'm a pro. If you're up to it, an extra pair of eyes, at least, would more than make up for the extra cost I'm running to keep the lights on." She sips her own drink. "You have to understand; I'm not paying the bastards I used to work for a single red credit. Not one. Not even for bullets to put in their heads. They won't make anything off of me."
Rita Ma	"Meat planet..." Rita says with a peculiar kind of half-conscious dreaminess, and then snaps back to attention when Liza insists on cleanliness. "Oh!! Please don't worry, Ms. Grier! I have a nose for that too. I promise I'll make sure you won't be able to smell a thing!" (Even in gluttony, she is tidy. Does something in her saliva denature the proteins? It's hard to smell it even on her breath.) Upstairs, she turns around in the opulently vast lounge with open-mouthed amazement, as if trying to take it all in via panoramic view. "This is almost as amazing as downstairs!!" Of course she's drawn to the unfamiliar hardsuit with its gun and sword, marvelling up at it with hands clasped over her chest. "Where did you get this from, Ms. Grier? It looks old. Does it mean something to you?" Only when she glances over, anticipating a reply, does she realize her friend's at the bar. Rita races over and hops up on one of the seats; it spins around a good few times before snapping back to its magnetized position, leaving her obviously woozy and brushing some hair out of her face. The whole drink-mixing process transfixes her utterly; at first she desperately tries to keep up and memorize all the steps, but halfway through she gives up and just watches to take in the spectacle. Once the drink's handed to her, she listens raptly to Liza's explanation of the refueling process while sipping at it gingerly; a few seconds into contemplating the taste, her pupils constrict to tiny points and she stares down at it as if it's magic. Is this really...? No, I don't think there's any blood in it at all. Did Ms. Grier really know? Did she mix a drink to taste that way, just for me? Rita eventually manages to pry her attention away from the umbrella-festooned ambrosia, though it's still transparently obvious how much she loves the flavor. "Like islands? But without air? ... I don't know how much of that I understand. But I'll help however I can, whether that's being a lookout or anything else!" The anti-Letheia resolution gets a resolute nod out of her; she can evidently imagine quite well why Liza'd hate them. "This place still seems a little empty, Ms. Grier," she comments halfway through her drink. "Is there anything you'd like me to make for it? I can do most stuff- as long as it's all hard, and no moving parts or wires." To demonstrate, she reaches down as if grabbing something from beneath the bar counter and brings up a coffee mug. Written on it are the words: FISH LOVE ME CORPS FEAR ME
Liza Grier	Liza smiles distantly while Rita prods at the gear. "It's my gear from when I first got into nuclear operations. Beat to shit; you wouldn't believe how many times I fixed it up over the years. But I'm just not the kind of person to throw something away and buy something new once it gets a little worn, I guess. Nowadays, I have access to all the good stuff --the top shelf gear-- so it it gets a place of honour now in retirement." Indeed, it looks like the hardsuit, being a generic red model closer to the Redshifts, shows plenty of signs of being patched up, re-sewn, and having parts replaced. The gun has its paint worn from all its corners and gripping surfaces, and its bolt cover and stock are covered in scratches; it's also slightly bent at the back, like it was used to hit something very, very hard. The sword is a single-edged, matte painted, carbon steel chopping blade, with a foot of serrated work surface on the blunt side, and signs of constant re-sharpening. The grip is faded and worn bare around the edges. The only thing they lack is rust. "That one, by the way, is called demon's blood. Not many people are any good at mixing one though. Not right." Liza says a bit later. "An island is solid land in the sea, right? You can walk around on it, dig into the dirt, find things, build things on it, even drop anchor on it. It's the same thing. Just, you're surrounded by empty space, instead of water. And like the water, you can't breathe in it. Well, I can't at least. But you didn't just pull fuel out of the ocean back home, right? You had to go get it out of the ground. At least I assume." Liza sips through her drink for a little while longer, leaning cheek in hand and chest over the bar to stare around the room. "Yeah, it is. I had everything packed into fewer rooms before. I didn't exactly entertain guests before, and there was only so much extra furniture I could lathe that would be useful." Upon seeing the mug, Liza stares for a moment, then bursts out laughing. Taking it gingerly, as if worried it might pop like a bubble if she touches it, she even has to take a moment to wipe a tear from the corner of her eye. "I love it. Where the hell did you learn that one? Oh whatever. We'll work on the interior design as wel go. I'm a bit of a sucker for things with sentimental value, as far as clutter goes, and I haven't had this much space to pretty up before. Usually the idea is to cram something soothing into the space there's left." She motions towards the door, then points both ways. "By the way, my quarters are down the hall that way, and the garden is that way. Port and starbord causeways lead up to dorsal engineering, and the EVA --that's a diving hatch-- and gunnery, but there's no reason for you to touch any of that. Sorry we're on opposite decks, but there's only so much I could change. Feels even though, right? The space we'll both be using a lot from now on in the middle, and then somewhere I've always called my own up here, and something you can call your own down there. Of course, you can come see me any time. I don't mind if you want to poke around. Just be careful with the plants, and don't come in without knocking." Liza keeps thinking until her whole drink is finished. "The monsters, though. They're what I told you about. That the corp doesn't want the employees to know about. The purple tint. I've been thinking about how to explain it to you. In case . . . some things, ever happen again. But given what you're like, I still think there might only be one half-decent way to get it across. Safely, at least." Sliding out a teeny tiny crystal shot glass, Liza holds her finger over it, and bright cherry red blood wells up from her pores, dripping a shot's worth into the appropriate glass without so much as cutting herself. The thimble of blood quivers slightly, vibrating with its own, invisible tension, just a little, like picking up loud music that can't be heard. "Your call. I know it's weird, but I couldn't think of anything else."
Rita Ma	"Mr. Bercilak taught me!" she says, with a radiant basking-in-approval smile. Of course. It absolutely figures. "Sentimental value..." Rita nods in understanding. "The value of things is always changing. When you've used something for a long time, and it has a lot of good memories attached, it's worth more to you, isn't it?" Like Kana and her "snow-globe"! Or Bota and dad's sword. ... Did I ever have anything like that? I remember a goldfish, a long time ago. And that flowerpot on the Union Busan... but I don't have either of them anymore. "When I get things like that, I'll put them on display, too!" She glances along with Liza's pointing- first one way, then the other. The mention of a garden makes her eyebrows shoot up, but she nods eagerly. "It'll be a little sad, being so far apart. But as long as I can come visit, that's okay! And of course you can always come in my room, Ms. Grier." A little thoughtful pause, and then: "That still feels really weird to say. I've only had 'a room' once, and it wasn't for very long at all. This is a lot different from then, too." Her slight grimace implies that other time wasn't entirely positive, but the last of her drink washes the bad expression away soon enough. She falls into silence, propping her cheeks up in both hands, as Liza explains more about the monsters- first in simple respect, then in quiet awe as she realizes that's the monstrous incident Liza had to deal with, and finally in... something else. "What I'm like...?" she starts to ask, but the question's already being answered. Her pupils shrink to pinpricks again as blood drips into the shot glass, and her mouth hangs a little open, revealing teeth that are just slightly the wrong shape. "Miss- Liza, that's..." A shiver runs up her spine. With effort, she tears her eyes away from the blood to meet Liza's gaze. "Is this really okay...?" On getting the affirmative, she knocks it back instantly in a single gulp, then cleans the glass with her tongue.
Liza Grier	"Yeah, you've got it." Liza replies perfectly merrily to Rita. "I'm hoping you do. That much space is what we call 'future-proofing'. Instead of sizing it for what you have now, think of it as my hope that you gather lots of treasured memories from now on." she says. "Haha, far apart? Structurally, mine's directly above yours. It's a distance of twenty meters. That has to be better than across the Multiverse, right?" A sly, if tired, grin spreads across her usually much more expressionless lips. "I didn't realize you were that eager to be so close, though." She barely has time to nod before Rita is going in on the glass. She draws in a hushed breath, then says "Damn. I thought you'd be full by now. Or at least had enough." Blood is blood, and human is human, but there's something like an 'aftertaste' that immediately hits Rita as 'off'. As if Liza were very ill, or maybe something that isn't blood got into the glass. There's a slightly medical taste to it, but it's different from the drugs. It leaves behind a slight, unpleasantly tingly numbness on the tongue and roof of the mouth, and the impression of something unwholesome dug out of the deep ground, like licking ancient limestone, spent fuel rods, and the cold skin of some eyeless creature. And then, there's just one moment where she can feel it. A single second of some great eye blinking open from its slumber, somewhere immeasurably, incomprehensibly far away, and snapping right in her direction. An eerie, lidless gaze staring through miles of earth, the metal of the ship hull, even the lagging gap in time itself between them, as if they weren't there. In that moment, she can hear things, vibrating in the air. Like a chorus of whalesong, coming from unimaginably vast distances, calling across the cosmos from a thousand, thousand different places at once. A sound that has been playing this entire time without her noticing, meant only to be heard by whatever has the power to reply. The sense she gets lacks malice, lacks hunger, but contains instead a vast and boundlessly cold curiosity, apathetic to her personhood in ways that Liza certainly couldn't describe, like her senses are being handled by the clammy tentacles of an octopus manipulating a puzzle cube dropped in front of it. But there is danger in it. The unmistakable sense of an apex predator. Something that evolved a million million years ago and hasn't needed to change since. Whatever its hunting grounds, they are unknown to Rita. Whatever shapes are its teeth and claws, she cannot envision them. If there are new waters to watch, new dark shapes to find against them, she does not know how to find them. But if she listens very, very hard, she can hear that song. If she looks very, very hard, into the blackness outside the window, she can see the winking purple lights in the abyss, like the countless glowing creature of the deep and their sophisticated world of lights and darkness. Once the second passes, at least. Is that something Liza is conscious of all the time? At least a little. It's hard to imagine what strange urges could come from such a disease, if they don't involve the taste of human flesh and bones.
Rita Ma	Rita's face tinges with embarrassment at Liza's comment on her appetite. Her mouth opens as if she's about to answer, but the answer never comes. Her breath hitches in her chest. Her eyes open wide until they show more white than iris. There is the sense of being transported to another place, or maybe of having one's eyes opened to a place that always is. There is the sense of seeing something vast, and being coldly regarded by it in turn. There is the sense of being an unwilling intruder in some domain best left unvisited. The only reason Rita can hold herself back from screaming is because she's experienced this before. Back then the other presence regarded her with hatred, but also with fear. This one views her with neither. Rita doesn't know whether to be reassured by that, or further unsettled. Is she harmless to it? Or does it not yet recognize her as a poison? It sings. To her? She doesn't know if she could answer it in kind. She knows better than to try. When that brief vision ends, Rita finds herself pressing a hand to the nearest window, staring into those faint, faint glimmers of near-ultraviolet. When did she get up? The breath that had seized in her chest is finally completed as a gasp. Her clouded expression clears with a blink and shake of her head. Rita's voice is dull, laden with the expectation of deep understanding. "Does it see you too?"
Liza Grier	Liza watches Rita carefully until she's completely sure the poor girl is down from that-- well, whatever reaction she might have; even Liza herself has no way of anticipating what form that interaction will take. She seems to presume it done once Rita speaking and cogent, reaching out slowly to slide the glass behind the counter and blast it with the tap, more out of habit than it being the most practical solution. Her eyes don't look up from what her hands are doing for a moment. "Yeah. I think so." she replies, dully. "Compared to them, though I think I'm too small. Too quiet to be heard, and too dim to be seen, from very far. It's still dangerous for me; just a different kind of dangerous than what's behind people disappearing in mining 'accidents'. But it can't get you here. It can't come after you; you have to go after it. So don't worry about it." Clearly trying to find something to leverage for levity, Liza regains eye contact, to flippantly add "Come on. You want to go fuck around with my stuff, right? I'll show you my room."
Rita Ma	Lucid though she may be, Rita's head is still swimming. It's only slowly that she takes her hand off the window's cold glass, checking her own palm to make sure her disguise didn't lapse during the fugue. "It can't come after me," she repeats softly. Is that really true? What if I'm 'louder' than Ms. Grier is? What if it comes after me, like that other 'Queen' did? What if I have to leave this home too? What if- No. Stop. Don't make her reassure you. Hasn't she already done enough? Rita's dull expression melts to something emotional and trembly, and then abruptly shifts into a face of brave, plucky resolve. Her hand balls up into a fist at chest level as she turns to Liza and smiles. "Yeah," she says firmly, and for a brief parroted phrase she lapses from her apocalyptic creole into flawless English. "I want to go fuck around with your stuff, Ms. Grier."