Scene #9803: Eigensteel

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Lilian Rook	PHONE: Phoning Tamamo, Lilian Rook says, "It just seems like such . . . You know how these stories go. We're newlywed and making a home together. Now is exactly the time for me to ignore the oracle's advice and pay for it right before I see my firstborn child." PHONE: Phoning Tamamo, Lilian Rook says, "I'd feel a lot better about it all if you could be there." PHONE: Phoning Tamamo, Lilian Rook says, "It just seems like too much to scoff and say 'Tamamo will make a second miracle happen'. I think that wouldn't be taking our marriage seriously." PHONE: Tamamo says, "I should like to give you one miracle after another, ceaselessly! I would give you the world, and every service beneath it--! But, I cannot fault you for showing caution. If you wish to be rid of these traces, without awaiting another method, I will hold my jealousy that another is making the incision, and trust in Sakura's devotion to your wellbeing, should every other safeguard fail." PHONE: Tamamo says, "Whether this is something that should make you immune to those incantations, I do not know. We know very little about these things." PHONE: Tamamo says, "As to when to begin our work on that firstborn..." In the end, it seems there needn't have been such worry. But that is, as always, a judgement that can only ever be made in hindsight. Making up her mind to do it had given Lilian some temporary relief, and again once Tamamo had agreed to it, but between then and the very last moment before, she had worried about it quite a bit. . . . . . . . . Saturdays were already her 'designated' time for the Dragon's Garden. They're the day that marks her weekly obligation to say hello, check if anything was running low, tend the peppers, and then overstay her intended visit for hours; the lattermost of which was the objective of all the former. Though she'd lately fallen into the indiscretion (much to everyone's delight) of visiting once or twice outside of that time, Saturday was still the sacred day that she was 'allowed' to be here. So procastinating just before the front steps in, right at the last second, made Lilian feel especially lame and embarrassing. "It's going to be completely fine." she said to Tamamo, at one point, as if doing so would beam the reassurance back to her. "Nothing bad can even happen." made her wonder at how much her attitude had clearly changed since her days of self-treating with her own experimental alchemy.
Lilian Rook	. . . . . . . . "Aw shit. Fuck." "What is it now?!" "I forgot to go get latex gloves so I could do the whole snap thing! I had a whole bit ready!" "While it's very thoughtful of you to consider that we all might appreciate some humour, Ash, I must admit that I'm glad to avoid that particular kind." "You are?! How do you think I feel?!" "I'm not gonna answer that in front of ¶god and/your wife¶." "HAAA-HAHAHA!" "Nika . . ." "I know. ¶Them's jar-ing words¶." "You are literally being such a piece of shit right now!" "I'm literally being so nice. Now bend over--" "Is this how you would like to theme our time together? Really?" "No actually I took it back already in my mind." . . . . . . . . "I've been thinking it for a while, but you really do act very differently with a mask on." "I'm not wearing a mask." "Okay then. With your face hidden." "I'm not hiding it." "This is what we're doing?" "No. It's different. That's a flight helmet. This is my face too." "Ah." As much as she'd called it 'the surgery' out of a need for levity, Lilian never quite figured out what to do with herself throughout a procedure that didn't even involve much of a structure, never mind anaesthetic. She clearly appreciated Ash's caution enough to never complain once about the pace, but even with Tamamo and Sakura in the room, it wound up involving an unheard-of quantity of Lilian staring at a ceiling and doing nothing. The sensation wasn't exactly pleasant, and frequently stung, but never enough to be memorable. Occasional beads of blood would evidence the wisdom of magical healing by Tamamo as things went along, owed to pinhead vacuums of biological tissue left behind, but even that just reminded Lilian of getting her tattoo. Sakura was even more absurdly calm than always. Nika had gotten bored of watching before long. The stream she'd put on the television to listen to while 'programming' (much more like teaching a physical server rack the rules of a tabletop RPG) wasn't interesting enough to keep her attention away from Ash, nor the slowly increasing smudge of black metallic dust. . . . . . . . .
Lilian Rook	"So, has anyone thought about what happens to my brain?" "No need. Right between two major chakras." "We did, to be clear, check over Petra's and Dictum's work many times to be sure. If I didn't know what it was, I would believe it was a spell that reveals inner purity." "Charmer. But then isn't my right hand full of sin?" "And what? You only use your left side for footjobs?" "Oh for--" "Your own doing, Lilian." There were many other times that Lilian remembered Sakura smiling to Tamamo, but that was the one that stuck out. Mostly because it embarrassed her for miscalibrating Ash's odd shift in mood in her head, and then for Sakura commenting on her elevated heart rate. . . . . . . . . She had never mentioned before that point that Ash was very easy to read without a polarized helmet on. It seemed unnecessary, given the obvious reason why that would be so. With only Ash's face behind living layers of whitebody chromium and invisible glass, Lilian had expected something in the middle, and found herself unsconsciously trying to read her own reflection instead. It was much easier to tune out the swarm of floating 'eyes', after a while; despite their surreal, coordinated 'saccades' through 3d space, and the ever-changing series of symbols that she viewed as 'pupils', they didn't do anything but express where Ash was focusing their power of rejection at the time; exactly at the center of all twenty-some 'stares'. After a while of contemplating whether to say anything at all, Lilian decided that only being able to read 'herself' into Ash, socially, might be somehow 'metanarratively' relevant, and that she'd sound stupid if she did. Two minutes after that were spent lamenting the similarity of that thought to Petra's ideology, which were interrupted by her first moment of genuine wonder of what there could be to see from her, in the aftermath of a similar wounding. "Yeah?" "You can tell?" "Sure can. Reassuring, aren't I?" "I admit, beng a little bit detached and curious suits you. But I wonder how reassured I'm meant to be by the 'instinctive anticipation' of someone doing this for the first time ever." "Second, and very. Be more shameless and curious yourself. You keep wriggling like you don't know what to do with yourself if you aren't scared or mad." "Ow." "And we were being so polite, too." . . . . . . . . "Is it meant to be floating?" "Are you asking me if it's got neutral buouyancy in air or not? If I say 'yeah, yeah, sure, it's the negative mass', you're not gonna just nod and go 'ah' and pretend you understood; I know you better than that." "Okay well be that as it may, you still know more than me." "I'm not doing anything to it. So it's you or it just does that." "Thank you."
Lilian Rook	There'd been a certain rhythm established after most of a day. One where Lilian experienced very close to the same time as everyone else, Ash didn't care to play any sincerity games at all, and Sakura was happy to kneel there for long that Nika had to start fussing about eating and hydrating, between Tamamo's preempting and Ash's temporary disinterest. Though Lilian would have preferred it to last from sunrise to sunset if it was going to take this long at all, Ash gave the unceremonious "Yeah. Alright. Ask Petra for another scan if you want but I think we're done here." in the late afternoon. A hundred millilitres of lost blood, the lingering tenderness of diffuse magical healing, a solemn sense of pride that Sakura hadn't had to do a thing, and the stoic determination to skip lunch, resulted in a total extraction of mass that was very difficult to gauge, amounting to a loosely head-sized cloud of black dust, but very easy to identify, making the same soft-scraping sounds as the armour that used to be Aobheil's and had since become Lilian's after being 'corrupted'. At just the right angle, the flakes would catch the light in a way that glinted like a pale gold star; and that was that. "So do I just . . . ?" "That's you." "I wasn't going to suggest throwing it away; I just hadn't thought about afterwards. Is it safe to leave here? Put in a box? What?" "You spent, what, six years, with that shit wired in your neural map? It's not gonna bite. The only thing that changed is it's outside now. Figure out what you want to do with it yourself." "Hmm . . . Then I will tell Nika that we're ready to begin with dinner." "Oh right yeah. It's been like an hour and a half." ". . ." "Would you like to consult?" "Sure." . . . . . . . . Sakura had winked at Tamamo when she successfully lead Ash away, and closed the door behind her. That was thirty seconds ago. The present leaves them alone in the room together, Lilian's head resting in Tamamo's lap, with a fistful of slightly bloody gauze in a sealed plastic container, empty water bottles and tea thermoses, and the nineteenth episode of a Let's Play running automatically on the television. That, and a cloud of glittery black dust, which has been slowly settling back down to the plate at Lilian's left side, and very gradually condensing throughout. Briefly mesmermized by the vague similarity to 'cooling', Lilian loses interest in anything but staring up at her wife's face very shortly after. Given the first moment of total privacy in eight hours, the most clever thing she can think to say is "Hi~"
Tamamo	Tamamo had made some of her own preparations, of course, beyond having healing talismans available. There was hardly any reason not to, so long as everyone was comfortable minding the circles drawn on the floor. The array she finishes reacts automatically, letting her relax just a little bit more, even knowing there's bleeding. Linking it to Lilian's tattoo makes accuracy even more of a non-issue, identifying and filling in pattern-breaks as they occur, in the same mystic pattern of 'a human body' as her permanent ink knows to exist. That's not to say Tamamo doesn't do any fretting. Reasoning that anything so safe as Ash insists can't be hurt by another person being a little bit in the way, Tamamo holds Lilian's hand for part of it, but lets herself be shooed away again as time marches on. Thereafter, she spends most of the time sitting near Sakura, and trying not to say anything that would distract Ash. Almost absent-mindedly, she holds Sakura's hand in hers, squeezing to feel warmth without looking away from 'the surgery.' She'll speak for Lilian's sake, of course. . . . Finally, it's done, and they're alone, and Tamamo can let her seat be used for her wife's rest. It's a relief, even though it shouldn't be. She acted as if she were assured of all safety, throughout, but that doesn't mean she was without tension. Any operation would have to be so, perhaps. Now, howover... She lets out a breath, looks down into Lilian's eyes, and smiles. "Hi~" And then she can't help but giggle. A clink. "It sounds like armor." She thinks. "I never did ask whence you acquired your armor, that time ago." Fondly, gently, her fingers move, stroking Lilian's hair. She leans forward. "And how does it feel, now?" She has to ask.
Lilian Rook	Lilian naturally keeps to herself her musings on lying on a detailed medical array feels compared to lying on a hospital bed with a lot of scary equipment. Not only is the comparison unwarranted, the only results are her associating feeling scared and vulnerable with her wife, or associating being soothed and distracted by a beautiful woman with medial instruments; both of which are bad. Instead, she focuses all her thoughts on Tamamo's handiwork into the productive avenue of praising her for every little bit of it, reiterating her glow-up-and-glaze every hour or so, until Nika starts finding it annoying. Despite finally getting exactly what they wanted, literally hands on with the subject in a very significant way, Ash is far less apathetic towards Tamamo than she'd expected, too. Lilian has to effortfully hold quiet while her wife is asked questions that begin as ostensibly relevant to the incident, and quickly become idle curiosity from there, like the magic conversational contract forged between driver and passenger on a long highway. Sakura is surprised at first for the attention, then embarrassed, then grateful, then more embarrassed. Lilian does a barely-adequate job at pretending not to notice at first, but genuinely seems to lose track before long. Sakura herself seems to wait for the thermocline before committing to resting her weight on Tamamo once she gets tired; something that brings on waves of renewed embarrassment that she still falls short of putting into anything but hand-squeezes. And then, 'Hi~' Lilian immediately cracks up giggling. The infectious nature of Tamamo's mirrored feeling causes it to bubble over into quietly rad-faced laughter. She brings her hand up to her mouth, rolls one way in her lap, then another, and then starts coughing from trying to hold it back, only to laugh again. 'I never did ask whence you acquired your armor, that time ago.' Breathing out with a lot more energy than her delicately supine posture seems to want to let Tamamo know that she has, Lilian touches her finger to her chin. "I mean, I was unconscious for most of it, back then, but I've gotten the idea ever since." She blinks up at Tamamo, then gets distracted staring into her eyes. "Oh, um. You used Aobheil's armour as a symbolic catalyst, right? One of the ancient ties. I'm all but certain that it soaked up all of what you cut off from me before. Like a transferrence? If my guess is right, then I was calling it back and forth with--" she tilts her head to the left. "This stuff. So I suppose I shouldn't . . ." Idle thought getting ahead of her tongue, she tries raising her arm while staring at the dust. Nothing happens for two and a half seconds, then the cloud (now more like cotton candy in density) squashes at an odd angle, and rolls closer in the bowl. "You know, I'm actually not certain I can get rid of it that easily anyways." She looks back up. "Maddening to think that I've been doing this twice as long as Petra and six times longer than Sundew, yet I might have to ask Dimo's opinion anyways." 'And how does it feel, now?' Relaxing into the hair-stroking with a close-eyed sigh, Lilian says "Soft as ever~" with a little smile on her face. "Slightly cold? A teeny bit 'naked'. Perhaps also a teeny bit like finally coughing up something stubbornly stuck in one sinus or the other, but that might just be placebo."
Tamamo	Tamamo will probably embarrass Sakura more in the future, and not only because she does it so easily. She'll speak of old events and circumstance to Ash, too. But let us put that future aside, for now. She is watching her wife roll side to side on her lap, smiling, and waiting for another chance to stroke fingers through her hair. "It could only have been then, of course... though it was not an effect of the ritual I had foreseen. I suppose, then, that there was much that was surprising, the appearance of your 'other side,' especially." She wouldn't say 'pen pal,' much less 'partner.' "Hm..." She could stay like this for a long while. It's Saturday, and it's Lilian's time to be here. She'll have so much time for doing other things, later. She always does, as rare as times like today are, when she could only 'wait.' "It has been removed, but not eliminated. It still feels as if it is part of your 'self,' then. That is quite unusual... for a physical body, the connections are also physical. Usually." But it is different with the Silver. She's seen that. "Ms. Dimo might have an idea, though I should give you this word of caution, that one should not be surprised when unique circumstances have unique results. It would as easily be outside her knowledge." She thinks, then, of the time Candelario came to talk about Dimo. It'd be easy to get lost in reminiscence, thinking to the times back then. "When I sought the Wheel of Lugh..." She doesn't realize she murmured that part aloud. "To externalize it will make it that much safer, of course. You need neither bleed nor sweat silver." But even spending this long talking about something that feels far too much like work-talk, if not outright war-talk, is a little tiring. Just a little more stressful than she wants her time in the Garden to be. Tamamo can't help but want to shake off that feeling, so she leans forward again, takes Lilian's head between her hands, and plants a kiss to her forehead. She does not qualify the kiss with any word of its purpose. Her feelings are too pure to need justification. "It is well, just as we knew it would be. Whether it is better than well, I am certain we will soon see. Ah, but now, if you wish to be warmed, I am always available for this, as well. I am sure--" she makes it a pout, "--that many would seek the honor, but I--" she turns it to a sly smile, "--will always be the warmest Sun for you, alone, and all will know it."
Lilian Rook	'I suppose, then, that there was much that was surprising, the appearance of your 'other side,' especially.' "Have you ever thought how how bad she wants you too?" Lilian says, eyes tilted up, tiny smirk in place. "Because if she would, and I did, then that means that in all possible universes I fall in love with you~" she says, and sticks her tongue out. 'It has been removed, but not eliminated. It still feels as if it is part of your 'self,' then.' "I suppose so." Her gaze drifts again, in renewed fascination, as if Tamamo's attention made it interesting. "I suppose it's completely unlike the Silver, then, in that it couldn't have come from anywhere outside of me. I know Dictum thinks of it as a sort of fatal mutation, but the more I look at it, the more I just think of . . ." Lilian narrows her eyes, and tilts her head against Tamamo's lap. "Callouses?" She holds up one of her hands to the light, admiring her nail polish first, then flipping it over to stare at the ends of her fingers intead. "Or perhaps a tan." Once again, her eyes gravitate right back to her wife. "You know. Something that a human body does to adapt to something regularly acting on it. We build muscles from tearing it and burn fat when we're hungry." Lilian blinks. A frown lingers on her lips for only half a second. "I suppose you could call it a scar too." She has one of those. "But that means even less. Psyches get 'scars' too. Human minds adapt to things as well. Perhaps it's a callous for thinking so hard~?" She finishes singsong. 'When I sought the Wheel of Lugh...' "Hm?" Lilian blinks, waits, and forgives easily. "She's totally gonna be a pervert about it, yeah. But that's fine." The kiss on the head she gets right after is rewarded with a slightly started "Wah--?" and, seconds later, Lilian reaching up to grasp both cheeks and bring her back down for a kiss on the lips instead. "You're amazing." she says, about nothing particularly in the moment after. In the few seconds she had her eyes closed, the sooty haze has further settled into a lump of metallic black sand. It glitters a lot like a starfield under any light. 'Ah, but now, if you wish to be warmed, I am always available for this, as well.' Lilian surreptitiously glances towards the door, and makes a few quick calculations. "Now?" she whispers, on the edge between disbelieving and giddy. 'I will always be the warmest Sun for you, alone, and all will know it.' "Oh but my frail constitution!" Lilian giggles, already rolling onto her front and springing up. She says "I'm so woozy and delirious after the surgery! You have to be gentle!" in the middle of throwing her arms around Tamamo's waist.
Tamamo	'...then that means that in all possible universes I fall in love with you~' "You are such a sweetheart," she says, meaning it. 'Callouses?' "Oh, yes, I see what you mean." Instantly. She follows along, yielding to the impulse to take Lilian's fingers in hers once attention is focused on them, but doing anything about that will have to wait for another moment. "Mm~" This is more than fine. This is wonderful and perfect, and just as soon as she's released, those fingers are going to Tamamo's lips, too. 'Now?' Releasing again, in time for Lilian to right herself, Tamamo responds with a wholly improper giggle, and an even more suggestive, "I have been sure to ward even the outer rooms." Against what...? Or rather, whom? "Always, dear, just as you wish." Those elsewhere can think whatever they'd like about what happens between these two.