Book of Death and Rebirth

Midori has long learned to be a quiet observer of the improbable and the strange, the quirky and the unexplained. She's grown up with a batty father and a witchy mother who between the two of them have about three-fourths of one whole parental instinct.

(You'd think that Yui's made her mind and self up to make up for Hyuga's lack. You really would. But then she goes and acts unpredictable, as well.)

Emeralda, meanwhile, has the excuse of her actual parents being many generations and incarnations away. Whatever wonderful Kim and Elly were like, Fei's Kim has no need of measuring up, and Elly's just Elly, here today.

There are rumors, murmurs, about a lighthouse hiding an elevator down to Zeboim, where Emeralda might be able to learn more about her past and how it connects to her present.

Midori finds that she likes Emeralda just as she is, however; all of her childish mannerisms, her lack of knowledge.

What they know right now seems to be evenly matched. Midori doesn't feel confident that she'll ever truly grow up. So if Emeralda never grows up, either...

When she trips and skins her knee, her nanomachines quickly scatter and regroup to heal the broken skin or grazed scabs quickly rising into an awkward bumpy pattern, just like the cells of any little girl with a scrape would do, except faster and more efficient (maybe even more immediate). Emeralda doesn't shout and sob about the pain of either the cut or its being addressed, but instead she goes oddly quiet. Midori does this, too, when minorly injured. She much prefers a moment of silence to screaming.

Like any healthy baby, Midori screamed to try out her lungs and to signal that she was in some sort of child-sized distress. She spat out food she didn't like and grabbed at the messy tray when it was something she found she loved. Those mechanisms of curiosity, she made great use of.

Now, too, Emeralda can be coached to share, to try new foods, to try out someone else's perspective. Fei and Elly don't have to do this work, seeing as their adopted Emmy so naturally supports them in everything, but Midori makes her best effort, always. Perhaps she treats Emeralda as she wishes she'd had the chance to be treated, since her peculiar set of parents birthed her as a miniature adult from the very first.

The real rub, however, is that Midori has no fellow playtime friends with which all to cavort and act like children. Neither does Emeralda.

(Emmy was never a baby, never anything other than the current heavy-eyed form she takes - besides the fact that she is a hammer, a chakram, a drill, a whip.)

So maybe it would be best if Emeralda did go on and grow up and leave her. And of course, it's hardly Midori's decision how that does or doesn't turn out.

She's reaching into the reflection in the pond, trying to make contact with the silent echo of herself wrapped in wild green tendrils of hair and a magic-carpet muffler for a scarf.

Midori supposes she's never been so personally interested in using her quiet psychic revelations to change a fate, to speak her unknown thoughts into the warped, unwaiting world.

She's never seen someone quite like Emeralda before. She's honestly afraid that she might never see anyone like Emeralda again.