Welcome to Gaia! ::

The house was a sturdy one, built of stone and dark mahogany, bearing down upon a skeleton of beams of long-lost structures repurposed for a better life. It was a quiet house, in a quiet neighborhood, where no one came to visit any more. Family friends became strangers by the time she was seven, and family paid them no mind after her cousin finally destroyed her own life.

It was quiet. She could almost recall liking the silence, but it was such a strange thought, having opted for very, very loud.

She didn't know how she had gotten here, but that didn't really matter - this had been practiced over and over and over in her mind, a perfected equation of a conversation wherein she was the stability of the operators that could toy with the variables. It was a memorized anthem, a trump card, a prewritten conclusion, and its state of flawless refinement had come as a relief quite a while ago.

'Hello, father,' she'd say, capable of looking right into his eyes without the assistance of his hands on her face. 'I know what you have done. I know that you have lied. I know that I no longer require your guidance.'

The words danced through her head, energetic and jovial, but Mimsy's own motions were blank and mechanical. One step after another, one hand to push through the gate, one glance towards the house she had never called home.

There was no key hidden away beneath a flowerpot or rock in the garden, and there never had been. The door was unlocked, as if it simply dared anyone to enter who didn't belong. As careless as it seemed, the apparent negligence was always by his choice. There was no scenario worse than what already was.

One foot came to rest flat against the polished wood floor, then the other, the footfalls followed by the faint click when she nudged the door shut. Then she was quiet, breath held as she listened, waiting calmly for her turn to strike.

Through the small foyer and down the corridor was a room she scarcely visited, certainly not without permission, whose shelf-lined walls were permeated by an air of importance and well-earned superiority.

Through the small foyer and down the corridor was where Mimsy walked, validated in her choice of location by the sound of something tapping inside it.

She stopped just outside of the doorway, standing where the light fell across her as if it were striking her out of existence, identifying a wrong answer, an empty set. There she removed the constricting band of elastic from the end of one braid, then the other, and dropped them onto the floor before passing her fingers through thick sections of hair.

As she slipped inside the room, she no longer made any efforts to keep quiet. Her footsteps were heavy, almost clumsy, and the heavy door was much louder than the first as she closed it behind her.

"Hello, father," she greeted him, waiting patiently for him to acknowledge her.

Now he'd have to.

Finally.

Every bit of calm and confidence began to slip away at the sight of her, sitting where she had not been invited to sit, speaking where she should not speak, ruining what she had no right to ruin. If these things were more uncommon, just slightly more uncharacteristic, Mimsy might have been surprised - instead, she curled her fingers into fists, and tried to remember to breathe.

The same reaction she'd always had. Like nothing had ever changed.

"Surpass," she flatly corrected. "To surpass. There is a distinction. I am not satisfied with stopping upon achieving a goal. There is always more that can be mine."

Her gaze flickered to the boots atop the desk, passing silently over the papers strewn beneath them. Not even half a year ago, she would have reminded her how mad daddy would get at her. She would have run from the room to tell him exactly what Clerise had done. She would have gravitated near him like a good little satellite until she was assured of proper punishment.

None of those thoughts crossed her mind.

Now she only wanted what she deserved.

"Why have you come here?" She narrowed her eyes, cold and suspicious. "I am not going to search for you, Clerise. I will not help. I suppose that I could spare the time to dissect you, or dismantle you entirely, if you would like for me to do to you what I have done to your similarly late girlfriend."

Couldn't she? Her thumb passed slowly over six rings, one at a time, as she carefully considered what was and was not applicable. What would and would not be a lie.

The thin line of red around the dead woman's neck did not go unnoticed, yet Mimsy wasn't surprised at its existence, upon noting it; of course it would be there. That final failure, that inability to achieve the simple task of destroying a pest. Two decades of planning marked permanently by the red ink of one single mistake.

"No one is going to leave me. I refuse to argue pedantry with an imbecile." In spite of her words, her refusal to continue to play into this metaphor, her tone carried the heavy burden of inward denial.

"And of course I do not need to search for you," she muttered, incredulous and far past any point of toleration. There was an argument to be made for her actual intentions here, but that meant divulging more than she wanted her to know, especially where such a sensitive matter was concerned. "I have no intention of finding you, wherever you may be. I will not free you. I did not want to find you now."

Her eyes gravitated towards the fading light and the curtains that had almost certainly been more open a moment ago. A little seed of necessity somewhere deep in her mind began to sprout with a terrible itchiness, an urge to go get daddy, to plead with him to fix it - but that man didn't exist anymore. He never really had, but the remnants of all that he had done were stuck like splinters, like tiny burrs of infectious spores she couldn't simply will away.

The best she could do was switch frequencies until the dial made its way back again.

"I never comprehended how our peers stationed on the island actually enjoyed your presence, until I was informed that you treated no one else as you treated me. You cared and defended them. You offered kindness and support. And--"

--Clerise was likely considered family, she had a very sisterly way about her--

"--and treated them like family," she spat, her body tensing as though she'd barely overcome the urge to vomit. With a shiver of disgust, she wrapped her arms tightly across her chest and clutched her shoulders until they began to ache beneath her fingertips.

"I have a family now. You are alone." She hoped. "This evidence is so simple that even you can see that I have won. Your efforts failed, and in my moment of victory, I insist upon an explanation for the dramatic variance in your actions. Why did you despise me? Why did you treat me as one would treat someone who wronged them? What have I done?"