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Caoimhe was having a rough week. Really rough.

Her birthday party had been disastrous, leading to the injury of her friends and the soiling of Sati's sarong by urine. Not to mention the Holocaust of Horrors Caoimhe had witnessed in her little vacation to the underwater city of the Finfolk. She had yet to tell anyone what had happened to her there, or why she came out as a youth. Or, you know, how in the hell she was able to turn into a seal. After returning home to her seaside shack following her abrupt second departure from her party, Caoimhe tried to talk to her guardian and Mrs. Kates about what had happened... but she couldn't. It was too hard. After several bouts of vomiting, the two older women told her that it could wait, that they would always be there for her to talk to about it, and that she just needed to cheer up. Caoimhe doubted it was possible, but she would try.

Finding her bank account empty (and more charges from the angry owners of the house she rented piling up), Caoi just needed to think about someone else's problems. That is when she remembered what the Dude had told her before everything went to hell. There was another Fa'e, a lost Fa'e just as she had been, staying at the HQ. The youth promised to help find others too, but at that point, she was far more concerned with going to see the new face. Perhaps it would be someone from a more rustic planet like her? It seemed like everyone else came from technologically advanced places. Did no one else spend their formative years living like Tarzan? Sigh. Another depressing thought.

Shaking her head, she promised herself that she would focus solely on this new Fa'e. Caoimhe had hated her first year in Gaia; she cried constantly and felt totally alone. Part of her refused to let that fate befall another. Though she had only been a teenager weeks ago, the selkie Fa'e did feel strangely mature. Well. At least compared to how she used to be... which was practically a 4-year-old. The immaturity was not behind her, but for today, with her head wrapped up in pensive thoughts and her heart beating like a drum, the Fa'e was oddly calm, serene even -- if only to hide the turmoil lying just behind her eyes.

Pushing the door to the HQ open, she clenched her fists at her side. Hopefully, the new Fa'e would be the only one here; she did not want to face the others yet. Poking her head around the corner, she offered a weak, "Hello...? I'm looking for the Fa'e who is... new?" Well, she hadn't really gotten much more eloquent. At least that was the same.

Ah, it was a rather pale girl. With glasses. And clothes clearly made using machines. And she appeared to be capable of reading. Damn. Caoimhe had really been hoping for another back-waters, fought-to-survive Fa'e to share her struggle. This girl... well, she looked a bit scholarly. Certainly not someone who had grown up living in a jungle. Alas.

Crossing closer, Caoimhe folded her hands neatly behind her back, puffing up her full height, just shy of five feet even. But it was two whole inches! It was one of the best things to come out of all of this, really. She wore a long linen shirt that day and a pair of fitted leggings made of some kind of pressed animal skin. At her waist, her seashell-weighted throwing strip served as a belt, and wonder of wonders, she actually had on sneakers. Of course, the second she took two steps into the room, she slipped out of them, kicking them toward the far table. It was a habit -- and she didn't even notice she had done it. Hm. The word the pale girl said sounded vaguely familiar, but Caoi couldn't put her finger on it, even though the smell of fresh baked pizza wafted lazily into her mind. "Hi, yes, it's... you." Probably. A few moments of awkward silence passed. Caoi had entered the room with so much conviction, but now she found herself tongue-tied, unsure of herself.

So she just kind of rambled. "Well, I'm Caoimhe. I'm like you -- and more like you than some of the other Fa'e are. Um, most of them were born here," she made a vague gesture around the room "but we -- you and I -- were born in other places, other worlds." She paused. "I'm not sure if anyone has told you that. When I first came here, um, no one did. I thought all of us, you know, all the Fa'e had to be collected from the different worlds, but that wasn't true. It had just been me. Everyone else had been born in Gaia, kind of business as usual. It was a little different back then, I guess. I was the first one of the Fa'e who are like us, the ones that were kind of... misplaced." Caoimhe felt like she sounded stupid. And this girl had glasses and was reading voluntarily. Bubbles of apprehension rose in her throat, which merely intensified as her thought reeled back to the trauma of that week.

Nope. Can't think about that.

"More people know about it now, but um, yeah, if you have, like, a question about life here or anything, I could answer it. I never had any one to answer my questions, but... I could answer yours." Dear god, she felt ridiculous. The fact that she was trying to be helpful was strange enough to give her pause. Add to it her new body and the awkwardness of trying to be a source of knowledge for someone else? Yikes. They were soaring light years out of her comfort zone -- but Caoimhe had made a promise to herself. And she intended to keep it!

Oh. Perhaps she should get the girl's name. "Oh, and what's your name?" she added to the end, the words flowing in a rush.

Zaoll was lucky Caoi didn't spit in her hand and then complete the shake. No, Caoi was just fine not touching right now. She was a little nervous about what might happen, given the sudden emergence of a smattering of fun magical powers. The girl had been largely convinced that she would never get to do any of the cool stuff that other Fa'e did and then -- BAM! -- she had her own powers. It was the silver lining on the dark cloud.

After that long speech, Caoi didn't quite expect the response to be, "Sit with me." Weird. They didn't seem to be on the same wavelength at all. Oh well, Caoimhe liked sitting on floors, and so she plopped down with flourish, sprawling one leg out straight and curling the other one close to her body. Zaoll must have come from a world similar to Gaia. Caoimhe didn't even know what shopping was when got here. The first time she saw a toilet she thought it was a drinking fountain, and she ran from the room screaming when Gristla accidentally flushed it. Everything was terrifying and horrible. Caoimhe had never even seen a book before -- and Zaoll had brought her own.

Harumph.

Lucky for Zaoll, Caoimhe was very well-versed in shopping. Well, at least in Gambino Isle. "There are a lot of really nice boutiques in Gambino Isle near the beaches, kind of close to where I live actually. Yeah, they're a little on the pricey side, but it's cool because it's all independently-owned and stocked with goods created by local people. Today, they're having an open air market where some of the local vendors come out a sell a smaller selection of their stuff, but it's way cheaper. It happens every week, and they have fresh organic produce too." Usually, the selkie Fa'e always went, but things had been a little weird lately. Gristla and Mrs. Kates were worried about her, and she could feel like worry like a mist hanging in their home. After a moment of quiet contemplation, she added, "It's one of my favorite things here." Before Caoi met other Fa'e, going to the market was at the top of her social calendar. She knew the names of many of the vendors, and sometimes, she would set up her own table to sell her jewelry -- though she had to keep it secret from the boutique.

Tucking a stray piece of hair behind one air, she flickered her eyes up to Zaoll's pale skin. The texture was odd, but short of touching the girl's face, she would be left to speculate. "Good to meet you, Zaoll," she said in a rare moment of social appropriateness.

Gambino was an amazing place to live, if you asked Caoimhe. Of course, Zaoll didn't ask, and so, instead, Caoimhe just chewed absent-mindedly on her lip, eyes straying across the room. "Hey, what happened to the couch?" she interjected a moment before Zaoll posed her next question.

Having a charmingly brief attention span, Caoimhe hardly waited for an answer before she began to answer the next question. The selkie girl was not a particularly amazing mentor, but she was giving this quite a bit of energy -- considerably more than she typically gave to things that were not directly beneficial to her. "It's like..." she began, having no idea what words would follow. What was it like? Well, for starters, Caoimhe wasn't precisely sure what all Fa'e had in common -- aside from being reborn and requiring guardians. They all came from the same creative being too, Airi, but the youth had only just figured that out. In truth, she really had no idea what it meant, other than, well, what her specific life experience had been so far. Clearing her throat, she adjusted to sit cross-legged and then started again, "It's like being a part of a really... weird, dysfunctional family. I mean, we all look insanely different from each other and weird -- like your weird skin for example -- but then we all have a connection through this one lady named Airi, who is fairly cool -- don't know if you've met her. And I don't know about you, but when I run into other Fa'e, I can feel it. Like, I can feel that we are connected, even if I've never laid eyes on them a day in my life -- no matter how insanely weird and different they look from me." Zaoll's unique hair gave Caoi no pause. She had pearls embedded in her skin. Mortimer had chicken feet. Dustin had magical floating armor. Caoi had seen her fair share of weird around the Fa'e Family Dinner Table.

"And sometimes, you know, when a bunch of Fa'e get together, bad things can happen." Like my birthday party. "A lot of us have... enemies. And... we try to stick together to fight. Like, my friend Dustin. I don't know if you've met him, but one day, I just kind of ran into him and he was being attacked by a giant brass bull in the middle of the street. I'm not ******** kidding -- a brass bull." Speaking of Dustin (and not her own drama) made the girl more animated, her hands ballooning out from her body to express the thing's massive size. "I wasn't the only Fa'e there to help him either. Mik showed up -- red-headed guy with wings, if you've seen him -- and then a really powerful-looking guy with horns and this amazing weapon. I think his name is Roth. Anyway, we all worked together and took it down. Not because we had to, but because... I don't know. I felt compelled to help." She shrugged, incapable of perceiving how the delivery of this information might sound to Zaoll. Caoimhe didn't particularly care. Once you were a Fa'e... well, you couldn't exactly quit the club, so to speak.

A few moments of silence passed while Caoimhe contemplated something else to say. Drawing in a few breaths, she showed a glimmer of her new-fangled maturity. "Honestly, Zaoll, being a Fa'e is a different experience for everyone. There are some of us who know who and what we are and what our purpose is very early on, and then there are... well, there are others who don't want to know, who never seek the truth, who try to run from it and cut themselves off from the rest of the Fa'e. I tried it for a while, and it didn't work for me. It caught up with me." She idly picked at a callous on the bottom of her bare foot, flaking skin on to the carpet. "Good news is that there are a ton of us, lots of people to talk to -- like me, like other people too." Her stray hand reached up to her hair, tugging at a tangle of unkempt curls. She could say more, but the girl knew that it would be even more rambling than it was before. Instead, she raised her eyes to the pale Fa'e and waited.

The quiet way in which Zaoll spoke forced Caoimhe to listen much more closely than she typically might. It was a good thing, in truth. It ensured that she actually listened to the entire statement. Hm.. was it useless to try to get away? Well, it had been for her. So she said so, "It was useless for me. I don't know about the others. You'd have to ask them. I get the idea that it is really different for all of us, and we all grow at different rates. I was your age for a really long time." From the looks of it, Zaoll was around the age that Caoi was prior to her birthday party. So she just assumed it was true. Though Caoimhe could not even begin to fathom just how the Fa'e aged, she knew that it happened in a snap -- one day you were wearing a swaddling cloth, and the next, you were learning to wipe yourself with leaves in the s**t pit of the forest. Well, at least that had been Caoi's upbringing. She had never really questioned it, just as she never questioned why she breathed air, or why she needed to drink water and eat. It was as much a part of her as her hair or her nose.

"I tried not to deal with things for a while, and so I didn't, you know, develop for a while." Hm, this conversation was headed to a place where Caoimhe was not ready to go. She didn't want to talk about her own transition from teen or youth, or all the terrible things that had befallen her. Would it have been easier if she wouldn't have fought the revelations for so long? Who knew. Certainly not Caoimhe. Eager to change topics, Caoimhe stuck one hand out and tapped Zaoll on the wrist. "Weird," she said, breathy. It was really hard. Like... super hard. Much harder than she would expect skin to be. Caoimhe had cool skin two -- she had TWO skins, matter of fact. Before the compulsion to get competitive could burble out of her lips, the selkie youth was satisfied by Zaoll's willing admission of her helpfulness. A little ego-stroking went a long way with Caoimhe, and she puffed up, offering a crooked smile.

"I don't think so either," she said, not really taking the compliment as politely as one should. Instead, she dropped her eyes back to Zaoll's skin and tapped her again. "It's like... rock." Was that was marble was? Caoimhe had no idea. The only marble she knew about was marble cake -- and it was DELICIOUS. A curious thought struck her. "Wait -- so if I, like, punched you really hard... would it hurt?" She raised an inquisitive eyebrow, leaning a little closer.

"I wouldn't just punch you out of nowhere," Caoimhe said, holding her hands up in defense. Of course, this wasn't necessarily a promise she could keep forever, but in this situation, she had no plans to sneak-attack Zaoll. Though, had the pale Fa'e encountered Caoi a year ago... well, it might have been so. "I just meant... you're not fleshy. Like. I'm fleshy." She reached out and grabbed Zaoll by the wrist, forcing her finger to poke the bare flesh of Caoimhe's spotted arm. "See? If you punched me, it would hurt -- maybe -- because I'm not made of rock. But if you are made of rock, then... it wouldn't hurt you?" Aw, come on. One punch! It was game that Caoimhe loved playing with Amitai, but she was pretty sure he wasn't made out of rock. He was like... clay. Like a big hard clay man. Come to think of it, Zaoll should meet him -- two rock Fa'e, or whatever.

Giving Zaoll her hand back, she shared her thoughts and said, "You should meet my friend Ami. He has rock skin too." It seemed like a perfectly logical reason to want to get to know someone, sharing an odd trait. Still curious about the pale Fa'e's pain tolerance, Caoimhe ideally poked at the books of maps, finger tracing familiar lines. She found a map of Gambino and pointed her finger to the short stretch of secluded shoreline that bordered her house. "I live around here," she said, idly twirling a curl of her hair.

Evolution into a youth had matured Caoimhe -- but only so far as a naturally immature person (as she seemed to be) could actually be. Her curious nature still prodded at her to poke, tap, and otherwise manhandle most of the concepts that eluded her. And hey -- Ami had let her punch him plenty of times! She'd even managed to bruise her knuckles once doing it. Though the selkie Fa'e sensed Zaoll's apprehension, she didn't let it stop her.

Straightening up, Caoi eyed the girl's arm. If she was made of marble cake, this could get messy, but judging by the pervading hardness of the pale Fa'e, Caoimhe merely assumed that this "marble" was yet another thing she was not aware of in this world. Hm, it could be added to the growing list. "Mmkay," she said, pulling back her fist. She let it fly in mere seconds, flinging a good chunk of force behind it (though not so much as that day when she had hurt herself punching Amitai). Her nose wrinkled instantly, a thin shot of pain smarting across her hand. "Wow," she said, mouth falling into a wide O. Okay, so, sure she had seen her fair share of weird with the Fa'e -- but that didn't make this any less cool. "I bet you're a real pain in a fight." Given Caoimhe's fighting style of choice, she wasn't sure how she would do against a creature like Zaoll. Perhaps she couldn't swim? Yes, the selkie could always drown her...

It was not a thought of derision, more like a simple mind game. Like some women might appraise others in comparison of beauty or grace, Caoimhe looked at all other people and considered how she would do in a fight against them. Fighting Zaoll would be an interesting challenge, but one that she did not seek to explore (at least today) beyond her single exploratory punch.

Lifting her eyes back to the map, she recognized the place where Zaoll pointed. "Ah, yeah. Barton's not bad. It's kind of suburban." It was unclear whether Caoimhe viewed that as a bad thing. "Gambino is more divided -- split between the high-end developments and the very old beach communities toward the South Shore." Which was, of course, where she lived with her feline-of-a-guardian. If the North Shore people had taken one look at Gristla, they would have never let Caoi and her even enter any property to look around. Plus, it was too expensive.

Feeling a dipping silence, Caoi ventured another question. "So... where did you come from? Like, have you been here long?" The selkie and her guardian had lived in the Fa'e HQ much longer than most of her kind, but they had to make a startling adjustment. It took nearly a year before they had the money, means, and understanding to actually search for their own place. But it had all worked out, hadn't it?

Caoimhe let out a sharp laugh, mocking but not cruel. She leveled her eyes to Zaoll's. "Everybody fights. Even if they don't call it a fight, everybody fights." Caoimhe liked to do it with fists was all. And it pleased her that Zaoll found her punch of impressive enough strength to say something about that -- duh. It was hard for her to fathom a purely peaceful creature. The closest she'd ever come to that feeling was being around the empathic Fa'e Shina.

Leaning forward toward the map, Caoi let errant strands obscure her eyeline. She did not note any confusion Zaoll might have over the word suburban. Her mouth and mind were already zipping ahead to the next question. "The beach is the best thing in the world," she said, as if it were pure fact. "If I can't see the shoreline, I am less happy. The ocean is beautiful. You should see the ocean at sunset. Or sunrise. Twilight is awesome too, how the purple light kind of turns the surface of the water a really blue... dark blue." She shrugged. The ocean was the heartbeat of the world, and Caoimhe could feel it pulsate in her veins. She could wax poetic(ish) about its wonders for as long as she had breath.

Earth. Caoimhe knew that place. It was, she had so recently learned, her place, where the largest concentration of selkies exist. Well, existed. She stomached a sickened chill, but it showed plainly on her face. The selkie youth had never been good at controlling her emotions, or even masking them. "I am from Earth too. Well, from before. My... life before. The Orkeney and Shetland Islands... near Scotland and Ireland. That area." It still felt strange to talk about her multiple existences so nonchalantly. All of this information was so fresh to her, a side of herself that had been opened up like a wound across her chest. However, knowing that she herself was from Earth did not help her recall where Rome was. "Is Rome near there?" she asked, voice a bit hopeful. It might be nice to have a Fa'e who might know more about her home... place.

She nodded along with Zaoll, head bobbing in an odd rhythm. Caoimhe had been conscious when she arrived, but she knew that it was different for everyone. She didn't inquire further.