Welcome to Gaia! ::

Today, Gemma had a very, very important mission! She was going to be making friends with a girl who was new to the Negaverse and needed some pointers and guidance and... honestly, she wasn't sure she was the best girl for the job, but the assignment meant that she'd been doing an okay job of hiding her uncertainty and keeping up with her quotas (it was easier now, with Melanite gone. Or Camlann. Or whatever. <********> him, she thought severely, and hoped god wasn't listening.). So, since they'd given it to her, she was going to do her best!

"Desdemona?" she asked brightly, finding a green-haired girl at the back of the library, halfway between sports biographies and nutrition, neither of which were topics that Gemma was particularly concerned with. Was - was Desdemona into that stuff? Would Gemma need to learn about it if they were going to be friends?That... that would be hard, but if it was part of her job and kept her below the notice of the Negaverse's higher-ups, then she'd do it!

(She hoped Zircon hadn't reported her treachery in the funhouse to anyone.)

(It didn't seem like she had.)

"I'm Gemma," she supplied, waving a gloved hand. The library had a furnace, but she hadn't been inside long enough to warm up or think about taking off her coat. "We, uh, we have some mutual friends?" Someone should have said something to her.

She hoped someone had said something, otherwise... how awkward!

"Comic books are that way," she said, smiling. "Do you want to go with me?"

Desdemona, Gemma recalled, had been among those senshi captured on New Year's, but she hadn't seen her then - the only person in that funhouse who she'd had any care for was Hvergelmir, and she still didn't know how that had turned out. Her friend had been absent from her park bench for weeks, and Astrophyllite was too timid to approach those who sat watch in her place - what if it was a trap? She hoped against hope that Hvergelmir was alive, but being on opposite sides, had no way of confirming.

Desdemona, on the other hand, had escaped the ordeal corrupted, like Quartz, and that made Gemma feel deeply sad for the other girl. Surely... surely her injuries had been inflicted by someone who now claimed to be her friend.

"This way," she said with a wave, refreshing her smile. Had it slipped? she worried self-consciously. Desdemona had been through so much already, and Gemma didn't want to make things worse for her by letting her own doubts about their side slip through. It was dishonest, and that made her stomach twist, but it would be much kinder to let Desdemona think her trauma had placed her on the right side. She could discover the truth in her own time, as Gemma had...

"What school are you going to?" she asked, forcing some cheer back into her voice. "I go to Saint Magdalena's." Desdemona probably wouldn't be going there, she thought. You had to have a reason for going there, and for someone with no history, there would be no reason. "It's... um... very strict. We pray a lot."

Gemma's stomach continued to do its dumb floppy nervous thing. She was roughly one-hundred percent certain she was going straight to hell.

Gemma nodded, feeling a little knot of jealousy rise in her throat and then subside. Meadowview had never even been an option for her. She'd been thirteen and anxious and shuffled back into foster care for a few weeks because Mom was sick and her case worker looked at her over his desk and said, oh, yes, I think a residential school might provide you with the stability you so desperately need. Let's see if Saint Mag's has an opening, shall we, my dear?

"Well, I'm... I'm a junior now," she said. She could have quit school last summer, when she turned sixteen, but that had seemed foolish. Gemma had no home if not for school, and leaving would only put her right on the path everyone said had been laid out for her. Teen motherhood and methamphetamine addiction, she heard Beatrice say in her ear. "I'll graduate next year."

And then she'd be on her own. The Negaverse would take care of her, she knew, if she stayed - it had many powerful members, members who would put her up in a job where she could be useful and give her a room in an apartment, who would take care of her like they are taking care of Desdemona.

But she didn't want to stay.

"They have the new Ms. Marvel," she said, changing the subject and reaching to take the book off the quarterly rack. On second thought, she wasn't so sure she was in the mood for superheroes today, but she'd already come all the way over here. "Um. So you really don't remember anything?" Gemma asked, smiling sympathetically at Desdemona. "I guess that's lucky, in a way. You get to read all your favorite books again for the first time. If I lost all my memories, I'd read Harry Potter again from the start."

Gemma smiled at Desdemona's suggestion, but she felt a bit awkward. Was it - was it too soon for that kind of promising? They'd only just met, and that seemed like Best Friend Forever territory, but perhaps she could see where Desdemona was coming from. After all, if Gemma woke up one day and didn't remember anything except for that her old life was completely gone, she'd be eager to make new friends, too! "Okay!" she said brightly, squeezing Desdemona's hand.

Except, she didn't know how much longer she wanted to be Astrophyllite for, and it was pretty clear to her that if she stopped being Astrophyllite, she'd stop being Gemma, too?

Actually, how many memories would purification cost her? She needed... she needed to speak to someone, and soon, she thought, slipping her hand from the other girl's grip. It wouldn't do her any good to go and tell Desdemona about her plans (if they could even be called that) - she'd only try to stop her. It would be cruel to them both.

She turned, putting the comic book back onto the shelf - they weren't supposed to leave the section, and if Gemma lost her library privileges she would probably cry forever. Or at least a week.

It would make her very, very, very, very sad.

"Let's go get Harry Potter books, then," she suggested. "It will be more fun than trying to figure out what's going on with Batman."

Gemma eyed the cast as Desdemona scratched her arm, considering its blankness. If she had a magic marker handy, she'd ask to draw on it and then maybe draw... fairies? Stars? Really, she hadn't decided, she'd just have to wait and see what flowed out of her imagination! ...But she didn't have a marker, so there went that idea. Maybe there would be one in the study area, with all the other pens and paper. She'd suggest it later, she decided.

Smiling, Gemma said, "Yes. It's my very favorite! I'm..." She paused, debating whether or not she wanted to reveal her academic troubles to Desdemona. They'd only just met, and so far they seemed to be getting along - would that still be the case if her new friend realized how stupid she was? (She heard Beatrice's voice there and cringed inwardly.)

"I read kind of slowly," she said, trying to make the statement seem as neutral as possible. "So usually I like it if there are pictures to help me along?" That was what made comic books so good - the only words you had to worry about were the dialog, usually. "But I love Harry Potter! I've read the whole series about six times. Here..."

She reached for a book and passed it over to Desdemona. "This is the first one."

Gemma smiled, feeling reassured by her new friend's confession. Maybe she'd explained her difficulties in such a way that they sounded perfectly normal - Desdemona seemed fooled, at least. "Yeah," she agreed. "Like drinking bubble tea really carefully so you always get the right ratio of boba to tea and don't have too much of either when you're done."

It occurred to her that someone with zero memories would probably have no idea what she was talking about, and that was a travesty. Gemma remembered that, in preparation for today's assignment, she had been given a crisp ten-dollar bill.

"Let's go check out," she said, grabbing a copy of Order of the Phoenix off the shelf. (It was her favorite, on the basis of personally identifying with Luna Lovegood, among other features.) "There's a Taiwanese cafe down the street that I really like. I'll treat, okay?"