give my regards to soul and romance

Mirabilis, the examiner. Mirabilis, the inspector. Mirabilis, the Florid Conservator ever accompanied by a flock of miniature Ovis and Gerrids.

Mirabilis is apt to inquire into her surroundings and into her self because she was made that way. Curiosity, as a mechanism of self-motivation, is her chiefest and keenest trait.

But for every princess, there must be a bodyguard. For every lightbulb, there must be a switch.

Enter Yelv - the default, probably. They are soldiers, and he is a man (?), after all.

Yelv is motivated by the other; the larger-than-life mystery of where his former and forever partner has disappeared to. Who was he? What was he? And why this, of all things, to remember?

(Yelv does not have a title. Yelv is not curated, is not glamorous. Yelv has never so much as bothered to explain what may very well be a cloning facility steam-stamp exit tattoo. He may once have disclosed a theory, to his new pard, but in the grand scheme of things, it seems he really doesn't care.)

His brother, most like. Some kind of gnarly tight-knit adoption. His own personal ambiguous vial of closeness and imprint, dispensed not too much or too little but somehow, despite it being dosed all at once, inconsistently.

Just Eddie. No parents. Just Eddie.

No opps. No bullies. Just Eddie.

The opposite of neglect: overexposure. And yet.

Yelv's latching on and shoving off because he's been - he thinks, without thinking, as one's brain is wont to do - jerked around. Whole-hog yeehaw is all he does. And that works out just fine for him.

Eleonora treats him much as she might any other off-putting, reclusive young BLADE. Just as military officials might have treated any individual who joined up in order to find themselves some structure, and ended up finding out that that kind of intervention isn't what the army is for.

He's actually a nice man. He seems to be having fun! Oh, he's getting out of this experience exactly what we'd hoped for him. Exactly.

She made him offhand, by accident, spending more time simply ensuring that he didn't have a crew cut than she ever did experimenting with the jiggle physics of feathered hair.

But Mirabilis?

Oh, for Mirabilis the wonder woman Eleonora has slide decks, crowdfunding, peer review, market research, focus groups, conference rooms, and credit checks galore.

"As you can see," she begins, the most hermetic girlboss a pair of mimeosome veneers has ever seen, "the Mirabilis unit's enhanced hearing makes her invaluable to our exploration of a hostile planet. She may be able to hear what standard mimeosomes completely miss. Truly, she may indeed be the key to uncovering the mystery of this planet."

J-Bodies are express-made for combat, for numbers, for toy soldiers with unimaginably better aesthetics and flexibility than little green army men, or Milsaadi. Still, who's to say that the myriad life-engineering lessons they provide couldn't one day become a basis for solving the entire Lifehold memory crisis as humanity not-yet knows it?

If all of humanity could be modeled and augmented by these two beautiful, ethnically-not-so-ambiguous supersoldiers...

That's Eleonora. That's the secretary's boldest, brightest vision.

And even though Mimi cannot hear (no, really, cannot hear) the telltale spout of all these vaguely eugenicist talking points disguised as a masturbatory joint of transhumanist praise, she finds within herself the manifest irk that comes of not knowing you are disabled - having it insisted to you, in some ways, that you cannot be, that you are not by definition - and not knowing that your perspective of homosociality is a bit...different.

Not knowing that you have been bred, groomed, manufactured. Implanted without so much as a primordial womb.

She doesn't know, yet, that her bossiness, her impatient harrumphing, is a realization of a desperate need for control, itself a symptom of the panic caused by really not knowing who and what she is, where she came from and where she's going.

Well. She knows. But she doesn't realize.

She fails to connect her stubborn tryingness, her madcap preservation of the absolute utmost capacities of unnatural (how is that? who instilled her responses of alien fear?) beauty, with her simmering anger, that Eleonora should have such an indelible link to Yelv, and to her as well.

Something about that woman peeves her. She's overheard conversations Eleonora has with the real anonymous amnesiacs; the flirtatious overtures that always scurry themselves back to square one when it appears she's about to get caught being solicitous.

She's laissez-faire, non-interventionist, pro-evolution and loath to play the hand of god. She's just a liaison, you know? And liaisons are so dreadfully important, upon an alien planet like this. BLADEs source the data points, but secretaries tell them what to do with it.

Why is it that pink-shift Mirabilis has such an averse reaction to the thought of succeeding Eleonora, if she's so innocent?

Eleonora's innocent the same way Mimi is innocent, when she idly reveals her knife for a brainjack; when she exposes unsuspecting BLADEs to strange-new-world pests and pollen. When she grabs the nearest object resemblent to a bowling ball and launches it at Yelv's head.

Innocent. Nuanced. Complicated. Human. Inexplicable. Sacrosanct. Natural. Blame-free.

Or...or is she? Yelv's not just flying off the handle, Cluster-B style, and calling her for a meddler for no reason. She does, professionally, meddle. She does, openly, admit and profess to as much.

(Mimi doesn't want to know everything, right? Only a lot of things. Only as much as her curiosity can muster. Only up to the limit of what she is capable. Only things that no one else really wants to know.)

How can he ever learn to trust anyone? How could it possibly be his fault?

She must be seeing things. She must be manufacturing her own cross-contaminated counterpart resentment. She must be playing tricks upon her own broken-hearted eyes, to watch Eleonora's gaze narrow imperceptibly just as Yelv's affect opens and relaxes. She must not ever let herself be hurt by the thought that she would just like for Eleonora to approve, and them all to get along.

Eleonora wins when Mimi complies. She doesn't know how, but she knows that it's true. So be it, this is the nonessential villain of Mimi's still-progressing story.

Mimi doesn't want to write Yelv's story. She's not even necessarily struggling with the idea that he may not have been able to; that his memories of the past are lost forever, beyond all substantive reckoning. He can't know. He can't question it. Okay, fine. Maybe he doesn't want to. Neither can she.

(How does one go about hypothesizing that one lacks crus and helix, above unpierced lobes? How does one keep from flashing one's memory and going crazy?)

It's Eleonora's mere involvement that spears her. How long had Yelv known her, prior to the discovery of Mimi's pod? How deep had she gotten her hooks in?

What was Yelv wearing? What parts was he missing?

Why did Eleonora get to be there when he was Mira-born?

But these are such terrible, frightful questions. These are the weapon of the enemy!

As if there is a threat of anyone taking Yelv away from her now. As if Eleonora could take either of them in a fight.

Not very girlboss of you, is it, Mimi? Not very charitable and scientific. But it is wholly scientific and prudent to recognize an experiment's practicable bounds.

Mirabilis cannot repossess Yelv from their mutual insidious oppressor without abandoning precious individuality and emulating her in the highest.

So it's back to picking flowers and petting Terebras, one can only suppose.

and here is where i will put the link to the tumblr post i saw quoting in images a book or paper illustrating the point of how masculinity is considered inherent and benevolent while femininity is considered performed and fraudulent (ohhh the agony. but i found it. true!)