Welcome to Gaia! ::

A permanent flag of importance would always remain firmly glued to the concept of normalcy in Mimsy's mind, an infinite pilot light to ignite the necessity of pursuing such a thing. In the span of a year, she had made progress that would once have bordered inconceivability, but that did not mean that she had achieved some nebulous stopping point. There was always more to know, as with anything.

Despite this progress, all that she knew of the 'normal' state of a human was still nothing more than learned behavior, while her more natural state remained ever-present beneath that thin illusion of patchworked observations. Most interactions required particular attention towards maintaining appearances, just as she'd been taught to, but those efforts all diminished to negligible levels while she was at home. There was a comfort there that had otherwise only been present in the idea of Wonderland - on these grounds she was home, and it seemed entirely sensible that the distinction between 'house' and 'home' was the feeling of belonging for everything that made her who she was. Even the objectively negative portions.

For this reason, the pale woman that sat towards the edge of her yard was visibly more relaxed than the embodiment of rigid logic that she more frequently allowed to be seen elsewhere. Her bare feet were tucked against her rose-printed dress as she sipped a mug of tea, between intermittently stretching to gently touch the signs of life that grew from the small patch of tilled soil.

If there was ever a moment in which she seemed at all approachable, devoid of the repellents of her more typical demeanor, it was this one.

The wide eyes of alarm that darted towards him filtered slowly into to a curious stare as he spoke, and it was only silence and that slightly tilted stare that Mimsy offered in immediate response. Her body remained still enough to believably be frozen, but her gaze moved with the methodical fluttering of a hungry hummingbird over his features, as if she were searching, deliberating, calculating the result of some formula with each variable she collected over time. As much data as her eyes took in during this exercise, they never quite met his.

Whatever her considerations had been, they must have delivered her towards an anticlimactic result; her only action after a half-dozen seconds of silence was a deep breath and a partial smile, which had not been entirely painful to produce.

"Hello." The plants were temporarily neglected as she waved, then gestured a welcome. "May I greet you with 'neighbor', or is this an unsuited term at the present?"

Her head turned towards the house where America lived, in a display of unsubtlety, and a very brief glimmer of hope crossed her expression before she faced him again. As hard as she attempted to contain her motivations for asking, her thumb tapped against the ceramic in an apparent cue of some sort of excitement.

"These are of the genus cucurbita," she went on to explain, seemingly unprompted. "Pumpkins. Not a tumtum tree."

Pleased with herself, she concealed a grin within the mug as she took one long sip, then set it carefully alongside her.

Somehow, the negative response startled her more than his unannounced presence had, and she was almost embarrassed at the slight jump of her shoulders that had followed the 'no' like a reflex.

"Oh." The grin was gone, as were any signs of self-satisfaction. "I apologize if I have upset you, but I am pleased that you may soon be my neighbor nonetheless."

Her lips were pressed tightly together as she processed the remainder of the information that he'd provided. The reference to the location as the other house was perplexing, largely due to her inability to understand any active desire to separate the participants of a relationship into separate dwellings. Would that not be unproductive? Unless he was part of a second relationship, she reasoned, in which case she decided she simply refused to acknowledge that.

What remained was a familiar sentiment, if an uncomfortable one. Her gaze fell towards the soil as she mimicked the motions of counting the plants, but her eyes were blank with vacancy.

"Work alone has been an insufficient distraction for me too," she murmured, refusing to look at him. "My thoughts are permeated. I cannot evade the idea of them."

As someone whose primary exposure to smoking in any capacity was her repetitive readings of Alice's Adventures In Wonderland, it would have been nothing short of a cosmic miracle for the coiling cloud of exhaled cigarette smoke to be reminiscent of anything but the caterpillar. And connecting him with that caterpillar connected him to Wonderland, which coaxed a recollection to the surface, faint enough to be obscured within a haze not unlike the one right in front of him.

Just like its physical counterpart, the mental clouding began to clear, and she looked at the man behind it with a fraction of the same empty confusion that once met a man behind a broken mirror in a place that felt as much like home as this did.

The contextual mingling was difficult to separate as she tried to pay attention to his question. The only portion of the inquiry that made any sense at first was 'is it harder or easier living out here', a subject she actively tried to avoid, and it was only through the insistence of the more anchored segments of her mind that she attempted to decipher the remainder of the words.

"It's..." She coughed to create an excuse for the hoarseness of her voice, and stopped to sip her tea. It lingered in her mouth for much longer than she'd intended, but the taste of it had been so purposely reminiscent of there that it did nothing but sweep her into nausea.

"Please excuse me. I must have something in my throat." There was something, but the knot there was not going to be soothed by tea, so she persevered without a second sip. "Speaking as objectively as my experience allows, my evidence thus far definitively indicates that it is easier. I suppose it is beneficial to those who remain in the dormitory to foster the sense that they are a unit of like-minded entities with similar interests and aspirations, as with other dormitories, but..."

With a twitch of a frown, she turned her eyes towards him again as she toed a line of presumption, and continued to stare as she hopped right over it.

"That would be inaccurate for both of us, wouldn't it?" It took effort to contort the frown into any hint of a smile, especially with the bitter taste of bile on the back of her tongue, mocking her with her own tangled memories, but she found it necessary to make an attempt. "Nonetheless, there are new challenges, which you likely anticipate...yet I have never met one of these challenges and doubted that I chose correctly. In all that I despise of this island and its organization, living in this home with someone who loves me unconditionally and challenges me to salvage my remaining desire to succeed is worth my previous failures and poor decisions. And that freedom to move forward makes most everything easier than it ever has been."

Though not for lack of efforts, any capability of reading someone via observation that Mimsy possessed remained mediocre at best. Still, she tried again - and arrived at precisely nothing, but stored away all of the bits and pieces of data nonetheless. They were pieces of a puzzle that she could later attempt to complete, again and again until the picture grew progressively less fragmented and more comprehensible.

Then he spoke, and she listened, and an amused snort gave way to a very brief giggle.

"I surmise that you are referring to good fortune in this instance. You are welcome to correct me otherwise."

She did pause, but not nearly long enough for any actual corrections. If the assumption was incorrect, she had no intentions of speaking about the other subject.

"I do not believe that it was entirely by predestined routes or happenstance that I am in my present position." Other Mimsys did. She had seen them, and they were idiots. "While that would be a pleasant method of excusing my errors, it would negate a more significant amount of successes, and incalculable effort. I suppose that I could say that I feel fortunate that these efforts, and my dedication and decisions accumulated into such a favorable result, but 'lucky' does not quite suit the sentiment on the whole. I feel grateful. I feel relieved. I feel happy. But I..."

It very suddenly appeared as if she had tasted something intolerably bitter.

"No. Perhaps not." The words were nearly spat from her mouth, despite the admission being far from the cause of the problem. "I think that I might, if something inexplicable and wonderful occurred. I can follow it all from beginning to end, and I comprehend how we arrived here - but I have not been granted any momentous event that provides an allowance for me to feel lucky."

She slowly withdrew one arm to reach towards the tiny plants again, affectionately coiling the edge of one vine around her pinky finger.

"Not yet."

The mediocrity that cursed her skill of social observation was enough to remove any remnants of bitterness that she might have picked up on, and Mimsy appeared genuinely pleased for a moment as a result. It was nice to have external support for her and her relationship, as rare as it was. Even the saccharine praises of how cute they were became tiny treasures, stacked up in a portion of her mind reserved for evidence that she was getting this right.

"Do you?" she asked, with an ambiguity in her flat words and their lack of emphasis that extended even as she seemingly began to explain, her tone different than the one of her inquiry. "Would you say that you feel lucky?"

Her thumb passed back and forth over the vine that 'held' her finger, a motion that might have been comforting if it were the back of someone's hand.

"If not now..." Parenthood had a way of identifying the best and the worst, he'd told her in their singular private conversation, but that did imply the presence of something highly positive. That could be indicative of the feeling of luckiness. Maybe. "...have you ever?"

"Good," Mimsy murmured, the word carried on her breath as she slowly let it out. It sounded like she was testing its sound for the first time, or that it was somehow special in a comparable way. Adding another treasure to her cache of compiled confirmations brought another smile, which faltered and faded as soon as she returned to the context of their conversation.

"So why don't you make it more?" She seemed genuinely perplexed, and failed to recognize how derisive the question could have sounded. "Assuming that you are not, that is - I gathered by your choice of phrasing that you consider our position to differ from yours. A great deal of what we do comes as a result of caring about each other. You care about each other too. It's nice to see. It makes me feel happy."

The intention had been to leave it at that, but she couldn't help herself.

"Respectfully, though," she blurted out, tensing beneath her failure to withhold the commentary. "I do not believe that luck is imperative to what the two of you have. She is very kind, and is skilled at recognizing the good in someone, even when they cannot. I understand the impulse to fixate on one's own negative traits, but...Robert saw me differently, and though it took time to believe what he saw, I am better for it. I discarded the habits of my past to replace them with his encouragement. If you have historically squandered your luck, then that is historically unfortunate, but that is a deceased existence, and that is gone. It is data with no other power. The two of you are alive together here in the present, and she loves you. So do you allow yourself to see yourself, and the worth of what you have, through her eyes?"

Knowing she had crossed the socially acceptable line, she lowered her head and stared at the ground in front of her as soon as she finished speaking. Imagining his reaction was already a punishment, and she couldn't bear to actually watch it.

Though his reaction had not been nearly as distressing as she had anticipated, there were portions that latched into her mind as though they were covered in barbs, and the shift in his tone only served to drive them in further.

"More permanent? You want to break up soon?" The tiny, quiet voice in which she posed the questions would have been a better fit for a child asking about her parents' pending divorce, and not a grown woman speaking about her neighbor. She fidgeted as she tried to set that problem aside, attempting to fully comprehend what he'd said after it.

It didn't take long for her either. This was familiar in the worst sense.

"It is not unreasonable, and you do deserve things. And people, and their love," she quickly added, since that was what she'd really meant in the first place. "It is a fair line. Your love is important. I moved in with Robert in the basement before he built this home. I did not stay in the room that he once shared, and he did not stay in the room that I once shared. It is fair, and it is the right option."

The grass made an earthy tearing sound beneath her fingers as she dug her nails into the yard, which had not been able to stop her from reflexively clenching her hand into a fist.

"He'll leave her too, when you stay." She felt brave enough to look at him again, but her efforts at appearing pleasant were now lost in a soured darkness that she never really could get away from. "I know it. He cannot be trusted. It is nice to trust him, until it hurts, and it will hurt. So build your own house. Build it and...and tell her that without her, it is not a home."