Welcome to Gaia! ::

This wasn't what 'sad' felt like, really. This was not exactly mourning, nor depression, nor ill effects from waking up on this island riddled with idiots. There was no emotion that Mimsy could quite associate with this loss of purpose. But it was more than that: hours upon hours upon days upon weeks of handwritten research, of sleepless nights spent surrounded in journals, of the reasoning that kept everything neatly held together.

It was the need to discover the mythical creature of the Higgs boson that kept the shadows in the background. The hopes that they might be connected to something greater pressed out any worries or paranoia. And with what should have been exciting news came an unnerving unraveling and outpouring of frustration and emptiness and things that she had carefully learned to prevent.

Instead of the goddamn particle she'd come here in hopes of finding, she had some sort of real mythical creature living in her head. As far as she was currently concerned, the trade fell unbelievably short.

She was shaking as she looked up at Kostya, from weakness or anger or something else that she didn't want to acknowledge. Her lips were pressed into a thin frown and she had no desire to respond, but...she supposed she owed him that much. There was no reason to destroy the connection to her only real companion here - she didn't want to lose everything. She was lost. Not stupid.

"Yes." She cleared her throat. "I expend very little energy while sitting here. It would be a waste."

Quivering fingers curled around the snack he'd brought for her, and Mimsy held it near her chest, making no indication that she planned on eating it in the immediate future. She drooped, her forehead resting on his shoulder, head heavy as she let him carry a bit of the weight for a while.

"Long enough? Is there a metric for 'how long someone should feel worthless upon the extraction of their purpose'?" The inquiry sounded as if it were littered with sarcasm, but it was something she truly wouldn't mind knowing, if he had some magical answer to it. She didn't want to exist like this forever. It had to have an end somewhere.

"If this were an ailment, there would be a cure," she groaned, reaching to pinch the bridge of her nose. "I have no qualifiers for what this is. I had something I needed to do. I needed to be the first. I removed myself from a promise of steady research to be here so I could be the first. A team in Switzerland has succeeded. I have failed when failure was not an option."

She squeezed the bar, its rigid form crinkling beneath the pressure.

"I lost it. I lost the Higgs Boson, and someone else found it."