Welcome to Gaia! ::

Care was not a feeling, but was the manner in which her pale little fingers sectioned the remaining half of her hair into equal thirds. It was with great care that she concentrated on braiding the portions together, precise in her aim for perfection, just as she had been taught. The methodical nature of the task provided her with a pleasant familiarity, which helped today in managing the audible irregularities that deviated from the standard noise of the mornings.

Upon completion, her inspection found her work to be unsatisfactory, noting several imperfections and an overall inadequacy. She removed the elastic band and worked backwards to unbraid it and begin again.

Greater care was taken to actively ignore the noise above her, acknowledging that it had likely been detrimental to her process, and that was the extent of the attention that she gave to it. She did not care about the things her mother felt that made her shout and cry in such a way, nor the well-being of her mother herself.

It was simply not that kind of word.

But her curiosity towards the woman upstairs had not yet fizzled out. Everyone had two parents, after all, and it was considered normal to have regular interactions with both of them. The most optimal circumstances for normalcy were not possible for her, requiring all three of them to be present in typical familial situations. Mimsy understood that families often ate dinner together, for instance. The families of her classmates attended their extracurricular activities and competitions. Occasionally, she saw families playing or picnicking in the park near her school.

The curiosity persisted in spite of the fact that these were not things that she desired or held an opinion about one way or the other. They were solely observations, noted differences that were quite distinctly separate from parental interactions as she knew them. They were not what she had, but she felt no sadness or longing at the thought of these things; in fact, she scarcely felt much of anything at all, though curiosity and a drive to accumulate knowledge were both ever-present.

Today was a day in early summer, in the first fresh weeks without school to attend. Camp or scheduled studies might come later, if they were deemed suitable for her by a criteria that had not yet been explained to her (if supervision was sufficient to allow her around other children, and that was the full extent of it). For now, she was left to pursue her own projects or interests at home. There were many, and she was glad to do so.

There was plenty of material to occupy her time and keep to herself. There was no need to interact with anyone. But she was so very curious.

“Mother?”

She was used to the sad and angry sounds that came from the room upstairs where her mother lived. Today they were a bit different, more varied than the usual repetitive wailing, so she had waited at the bottom of the stairs (after her braids were perfected, no sooner) to ask her father about this outlying data.

He had smiled in a way that confused her. It had even remained as he answered her plainly, in no uncertain terms. It was a smile that she couldn’t recall ever seeing before, and she wasn’t aware of anything funny.

“Hello, mother. This is your daughter Mimsy.” The polite introduction was directed under the door, cheek pressed to the dark wood of the floor outside it. One eye peeked through the gap between the door and the flooring, glasses skewed by her position.

“Nooo,” came the muffled sob of her response through the locked door. “No—god, no. Not today. Not today. No, no.”

An unimpressed look crossed Mimsy’s face in turn, questioning her desire to bother with someone who failed to grasp the most basic of facts.

“Yes, it is. I am your daughter Mimsy every day.”

“No! No, ohhh.” The subsequent groaning made her sound a bit ill. “Stop it—I know better. Oh god, please—please stop! Not now, I can’t take this now. It hurts. Hurts too much.”

No hint of concern was sparked within her as she slowly blinked, processing this information within the context that she had been given. Always formulaic, only differing in the variables that were moved or replaced. She could hear her crying again, and she did sound pained, confirmed to adequately match the data of prior observations in regards to how pain sounded. It could not yet be classified more specifically; more data was required to determine the origin of the feeling. Of course, she could attempt to circumvent this by asking, if the answer could be trusted when its source was someone in such an irrationally emotional state.

“Are you in pain as a result of losing your heart? Daddy says that your heart is gone. I am—”

A furious shriek interjected.

“NO—NO GOD DAMNIT VICTOR, WHY’D YOU—WHY.” Her wailing was increasingly distressed, but this was particularly panicked. Less sad, and far more afraid.

The intensity of the volume of her loudest yelling was nearly unbearable when she was so close to the source. Something heavy crashed against the floor, and a lighter shatter soon followed.

She waited until she could be heard again.

“I am presently wondering if this means that we are now alike, and hope to learn our classification,” she continued, as she cross-referenced with her mental notes. “If love resides in your heart, that is, then it seems reasonable to conclude—”

She was interrupted once more. The woman was apparently ignorant to the difficulty of speaking to her through all of her unnecessary screaming and sobbing, therefore finding it acceptable to increase that difficulty by responding so rudely.

“Go away! God, go away.” She could barely wring it out of herself, plea strained and agonized. “No. <********>. Coming to me like this. Today! No. No. No, monster. You monster! You can’t take me too. No, because I know. Oh, I know. I know you’re just pretending. Telling you again, I know. Real people aren’t like this. I notice. I know your lies, monster. Demon. Whatever. Know you can see me. No—no, I don’t—however this works, you can’t. I’m staying me. Don’t care how bad it hurts. I’m not giving up to a monster. Not gonna—won’t be a monster. Won’t.”

The remainder became entirely incoherent. Perhaps it was the human equivalent of a signal being poorly received; but that was impossible to determine with certainty while lacking in a requisite knowledge of neurological functions. She listened long enough to hear herself called a ‘monster’ several more times. That particular word seemed to stick in her throat, and she could not discern the reason why. That was not where words went.

“Okay.” That was the full extent of what could be a productive communication between them, she supposed, so she pushed herself up, smoothed out her dress, and opted to move on to another subject of interest. There were many, and frankly, her mother was not inherently one of them.

It didn’t bother her much to hear these things that she always told her. The words confused her in many ways, but did very little else, and today was all the same: as she made her way down the stairs, she looked just as blank and unaffected as per usual, as though the exchange had never happened.

It had not helped her feel less curious, but she was not more so either. She only wished that she knew why she was so noticeably a monster, and it disappointed her to find herself no closer to making any sense of it.

It was never silent for this long during daylight hours.

Mimsy paused in the middle of the foyer, staring suspiciously in the direction of the room where she and her mother had just spoken. She had even seemed quite vocally distraught at the time of their conversation; this was even more atypical than previously noted, and she could not say for certain that she welcomed this particular change.

There was no protocol for an event like this. Not one that she was aware of, at least, and she lamented the fact that she had not thought to ask her father before he left. Then again, this could not have been predicted with the use of any known model of recorded behavior. On a whole, this was an especially peculiar predicament.

Contacting her father to seek clarification was completely out of the question. His work was more important than anything remotely related to her, and she could respect that fact. He gave her his time when she was deserving of it. The only troubling aspect of this situation was that her inaction might be met with his disapproval, and she was not nearly knowledgeable enough to pursue any action. Ignorance was not something that her father would be proud of either.

A small sound of uncertainty escaped her throat before she could prevent it. She stilled and held her breath until she was reasonably confident that no one had heard her.

Lost in the temporary comfort of this assurance, she was entirely unprepared for the sight of her mother as she emerged at the mouth of the upstairs hallway. The woman was looking directly at her, as though she had already known that she would be standing there. The look that she cast down at her was something entirely unfamiliar to her, but she knew that it was not happy. This was why father said that it was best to stay away, and she had not, and now her rebellious conclusion that a suggestion was not a rule was going to cause the death of her.

If she had only listened to him better. If she had only been good.

She froze, eyes wide and astonished, standing so still and rigid that she appeared very literally petrified. Considering her position in plain sight, this was not the most clever of defenses, but it was the only one that she had.

Bright midday sunlight caught the tiny motes of dust stirred by the altercation. They captured and held Mimsy’s attention with the appearance of daytime stars, providing her with the solace found in counting them. She remained standing in the foyer until most of them had settled, long after everything had returned to states of safety and normalcy.

The sad angry sounds upstairs were normal once more. There was no one looking at her in very strange ways. The morning itself had been filled with outlying statistics, but the day now appeared to be falling into a more average range.

This had all been so odd. It was a pity that there was no one to tell, without risk of disapproval.

Without any other thought of it, she continued on her way, resuming her objective right where she had paused it. There was still much to be learned, and giving this any further attention would not provide her with any of it.

(Curiosity later led her to a mirror, where she found no apparent visual indicators of anything that one might typically consider frightening. Truly there was nothing at all to be learned from this.)