Kwabba-an at the Tokyo Brewing Company Area @Cowboy
Listening carefully, the ant-woman nodded along as Sanda spoke. Soon enough, she was visibly relaxed again as she had something other than herself or Sanda's fiancé on which to focus.
"That is very unfortunate," Kwabba-an began, pausing as she organized her thoughts. If she had lips, they would have been pursed as she took on a dour expression.
"I think the issues of the «bad-uns» would not be solved by an increase of sex, so that counselor seems like she would be very ineffective. I had higher hopes for mental health professionals, now that Star Army has shown that it considers such health a priority."
As soon as she finished, her face lit up. Milk chocolate brown eyes the size of saucers went from being fully open and staring intently at her friend to barely able to remain open as her lips widened into a warm smile.
"I am so very glad that you have made new friends in my absence," she beamed.
"It has been my deepest regret that I left you alone aboard the Resurgence. You deserve someone by your side who will fight with as much conviction as you do, sister."
Thia at the Winter-Nights Lights Pavillion @Locked_0ut
"Cheers," Thia replied before taking a sip of the drink Vec handed her. It tasted sweet, sour, and bitter and she felt the physical heat in addition to the heat of the alcohol. On top of which, she tasted spices some of which she couldn't even identify. But the sensation was impossible to express by breaking it down into its components, because it presented itself as a unified whole that, although it evolved throughout to emphasize different elements, had nuanced interactions that were lost when isolated into parts. It was like a symphony playing a chord. Though it could be expressed as a set of notes on a scale, the chord had a distinct feeling that the notes lost when played one by one.
Thia had lived her life in a series of artificial spaces — megacities densely subdivided into lonely spaces barely big enough for their occupants, space stations that were much the same but enclosed into a single larger subdivision separating harsh vacuum from recycled air on orbit high above some place more organic, and most recently space ships that were essentially small stations with large engines that shuttled them from one orbit to the next. Despite this, the chord formed by the taste of wassail evoked in her the air sitting on a fur carpet wrapped in a thick blanket, her face warmed by a slowly dying fire in a stone hearth on one wall of a small wooden cabin outside of which fell fluffy tufts of snow ensconcing a pine forest miles from civilization.
"Wow."
Kari at the Tokyo Brewing Company Area
Like a second-order acquaintance she'd heard described and perhaps spotted across a crowded room, Kari was unfamiliar with fear. Injury, death, loneliness, obsolescence and other such things were simply facts of the life she had been given by the Empress, none of which she questioned nor resented. But when Pierre floated up in front of her and tilted her head back, she felt her body erupting with emotions that she could hardly even quantify, and the last intrusive thought she had that evening was:
this must be what existential fear feels like.
Then she closed her eyes and felt her lips press against Pierre's. It was only after she regained the full use of her digital brain that she was able to recognize how warm and soft Pierre's lips were against her own, and how they tasted vaguely, and pleasantly, of the sharp hops and sweet malt that they had both been drinking. In the moment, however, her reaction was pure emotion. In her mind, it was the thrill of an impending battle that would be hard fought and whose outcomes was far from certain. But at the same time it was the slowly dawning realization that her side had won the day and the enemy was retreating. And somehow, impossibly, it was also the triumph of returning home victorious and the anticipation of what would come next.
Outwardly as stoic as always, Kari reacted by freezing in place and gently exhaling through her nose with the softest moan, almost a gentle purr in her throat. Her tail almost seemed to float upwards until pointed almost straight up, before it curved at the tip like a question mark, but only for a moment before it straightened again.
