"This cute little scale less one needs liquid! Triunis would be furious if he saw us not giving them the care they need!"

Joy, even through her slight delirium, had the strength of character to both bristle and flush in response to the lizard's dialogue. Her reactions answered to first the mention of her babyface, a sore spot for her, and secondly to the suggestion that she needed help. Although true, it didn't make the young child feel any more confident or independent.

When the flask was proffered, Joy smiled ditzily and reached for it with delicate hands. "This will suit me fine, I'm sure. I've drank form the cacti on our home planet. Granted, it is an acquired taste, and this is, admittedly, another planet altogether, but the plant life in deserts can't be all that different. Well, I suppose they can be, we have oases back home, in fact I live on one, but besides man-made --well, lizard-made I suppose-- Oh my, I don't know the proper term. You call us scaleless ones, so scaled ones? But I digress. Besides the ones you have built, there seems to be no special havens for wildlife. So our deserts are indeed different, but surely the juice cannot be so terribly discordant.."

Once she realized that she was rambling, Joy's childish face gained a reddish tincture and her fever slightly increased. She ducked her head into the flask and began to gulp it. The flavor was pleasantly tangy, tasting of sunshine and earth. For most, the plant-ish aftertaste would have been disgusting, but as Joy had mumbled, she had long ago acquired the taste.

And then the answer came to her question. Joy choked efficiently on the cactus juice, splattering some on her black shirt. Her eyes began to tear up while she wheezed and hacked. Eventually air found its way back into her deflated lungs and Joy was once again cognitive. Her eyes, however, blazed with something other than fever, but was staggeringly similar.

"K-Kurai? Kurai Gekkou?"

All sorts of feelings fluttered over Joy's untempered face. Her mask of mocking boredom was completely shattered, leaving her face naked. Disbelief. Confusion. Denial. Resentment. Anger. Pause. Hesitant. Caring.

Uncertainty.

At first every overtaxed, strained, aching muscle screamed to be released from its immobility. They wanted to leap, to tear, to hurt. All that escaped was a strangled cry that pushed its way past her chapped lips. It was not an choleric exclamation, but a pain filled keening.

Tears quickly amassed in the corners of Joy's sapphire eyes, threatening to overflow past her ridiculously long eyelashes to flow in rivulets down her tinted porcelain skin. But they didn't. This at least, Joy could control.

In truth, Joy was completely unsure of what to think. There were so many possibilities, so many ways to act, so many ways he could react. And she had no idea which one to choose.

For the first time in her short life, Joy hated her over-developed body. She was ten, for the Goddess' sake! Not nearly equipped for this encounter. Finally her crystal tears spilled over the trap her eyelids created, burning a track down her overheated skin. Her head was spinning, only partly due to the heatstroke. A few words parted her lips before Joy gave in to the blackness stalking at the edges of her blurred vision.

"He very nearly killed my mother... my godsfather."