Quote:
Star Pox (10) : Genetically modified fruits aren’t exactly new but every now and then something seems to be going on with them. This year, it’s star fruit. The entire batch from Destiny City’s largest supplier has a strange side effect; a few minutes after eating one, star-shaped ‘freckles’ will begin to cover the skin. While this has been colloquially dubbed’ star pox’, it appears to be a harmless allergic reaction. The freckles fade after a few hours and pose no actual health risks; they’ve become quite popular across social media. This might be your only chance to experience the strange trend! …Unless sales are good enough to bring them back.
Like a lot of grand projects by twenty-something programmers, Kosmochlor supposed, her most elaborate project plan had fallen by the wayside somewhere in the whole length of her Captaincy. Said captaincy was going on half a decade at this point; sure, she was fairly certain that if she really tried she would've been able to distinguish herself and finally make her way up through the ranks. Amazonite would've vouched for her. Other Intelligence Branch members would've probably vouched for her as at least not being the most miserable waste of the Negaverse's power to promote. It was something she could've pursued.
But why would she want to do that?
Generalhood came with implied responsibilities. Generalhood meant she might actually be expected to go out and do things for the glory of the Negaverse, instead of screwing around in laboratories and hanging out with Mauvians and going into the Rift with a full surgical kit. Which Kosmochlor wasn't supposed to be doing anyway! She hadn't even bothered with a project proposal when she'd started actually conceptualizing said project; the Negaverse was not particularly subtle about its overall feelings on youma grafts and biotech, which were generally 'no, we're not doing that'.
Which was very boring. Which was why it was really great to have an ex-girlfriend who'd been willing to hook her up with minor stasis tech, which means she didn't have to deal with silly things like 'youma weren't cosmically designed to have parts removed from them and sustained'. It also meant that if she got sidetracked for long, long periods of time doing something else -- and of course she was busy as of late, FFXIV expansions took up a lot of mental real estate and also actual time -- that nothing bad actually happened to anything she was poking at.
Right now she was only technically poking at youma things, anyway. Technically. Technically it was her arm, and it felt like her arm, and it looked like her arm, and it usually acted like her arm. Even if the inked details tended to run and blur and move when she was in uniform, the way she was right now. But come on: seasonal magic manifesting in a way that was physically testable, with these star-shaped freckles? Kosmochlor didn't even like starfruit much, but anything for a good cause. And the freckles were cute! So at least the starfruit had that much going for it. That put it a bunch of notches over the stuff that'd glued her mouth closed, or the rabbits who'd given her the flu. She didn't have any field agents besides her own damn self, and it got her out of the house and made her experience actual sunlight. For at least five minutes. And then she had moved to Negaspace, which meant she was getting probably less light than she would at home, but some was better than none.
They didn't seem to be objectively magical now that they'd appeared on her skin, or, at least, not any more magical than the rest of Captain Kosmochlor's entire self. They weren't raised, they weren't textured; they were, for all intents and purposes, freckles. Human freckles. Human freckles, created by unknown causes, and disappearing after a few hours. (Call her paranoid, call her conspiratorial, but it was the Star Festival. There was only so many times she could see strange things happening before she started chalking every city-wide strangeness of the season down to magic.)
"Aw," she said, and then, "but that's boring," and sighed. That was enough of that. Kosmochlor thought she was motivated, now, and that meant she could really get back to work for once.
It was starting to look like a visor at this point. If she could first-draft it, if she could make a working proof of concept -- then that'd be enough to push her the rest of the way.
[wc: 647]
