Application: Acorna Harakamian-Li, the Acorna series

[lady_kirin]

Acorna isn't sure what to make of this. She looks around the sorting room - strange and austere, but even without the purifying effect of her horn, the air is clean and safe if a little musty, and she doesn't see any immediate danger - and turns back to the door she came in through, which looks nothing like any hatch ever installed on the Condor.

Comments

[psycho_vertue]

Either the girl had paid a lot of money at a good body shop, or she was some kind of alien or genetic experiment. Given the general weirdness of this place, Diana would have been willing to put money on the latter.

"What in the hell are you?" she asked in her ruined voice, deciding to get that out of the way first and foremost.

[lady_kirin]

This wasn't the first time she'd heard such a demand, of course, and in this case it seemed to be motivated by curiosity. Still, it was a little odd; although her people weren't a common sight in most areas of human-controlled space, it had been a few years since first contact, and that had not been particularly low profile. "I am Linyaari," she replied simply, with a slight undertone of confusion in her voice.

[psycho_vertue]

"That's not helping in the least." Diana fixed the girl with piercing blue eyes, matter-of-fact. "Wherever you came from isn't the same as where you are now, and there probably won't be people who understand what the hell you're talking about. So let me simplify it for you. Are you an alien, a lab experiment, a vanity project, or something else?"

[lady_kirin]

"Oh. Alien, I suppose," Acorna said. "My race was originally the product of genetic engineering, but we've been breeding true for generations."

[psycho_vertue]

It didn't quite sound familiar, since espers weren't a genetic experiment and the actual experiments were mostly intended to have limited shelf lives and not be reproductively viable, but Diana nodded. "Well, looks like you got less of a raw deal than some of the other labbies I've met," she said. "How have your people adapted for the hand thing?" She wiggled her own hands, still human baseline.

[lady_kirin]

Acorna glances down at her hands, which have two fingers and a thumb each, with a single knuckle on each digit. "I've never really noticed that it slows us down... Human-made things are a little awkward, of course, but I've had years to learn to use them, and most humans have at least as much trouble with things of Linyaari make."

[psycho_vertue]

"Fair enough." She had figured that it wouldn't take long for a society to adapt to its own needs, but curiosity had to be satiated.

Her eyes turned flinty, and her already unpleasant voice became harsher. "So what kind of a relationship do your people have with regular humans?"

[lady_kirin]

"Tentative," Acorna answers, after a brief pause. "It's only been a few years since contact was made, and there's some fairly strong xenophobic sentiment among my people, I'm afraid. Not really unreasonable," she adds quickly, "considering that in my lifetime, our home planet has been invaded and nearly destroyed twice, but humans had nothing to do with either invasion. In fact, it's only because of our human allies that we've been able to rebuild so quickly."

[psycho_vertue]

Diana set her jaw. "Good. Just because you're different doesn't mean that you're greater or lesser than anyone." There may have been the faintest gleam of fanaticism in her face, not solely a remnant of Jenny Psycho. "Were you around for the invasions? And sorry about the interrogation," she said, without a hint of actual apology, "but we're supposed to figure out where to vote you, and how else are we supposed to find out without asking. So. Invasions."

[lady_kirin]

"No, it's fine. I was a baby for the first one - it's how I ended up being raised by humans, actually. The invaders - we called them the Khleevi - were insectoid beings with no desire to communicate with the Linyaari and a penchant for torture," Acorna explains. "They nearly caught my family's ship, so my father was forced to deploy a defensive weapon that destroyed both vessels, after setting me adrift in a life boat. I was lucky enough to be picked up by a human salvage ship days later. The crew raised me, protected me from some misguided authorities who wished to 'correct' my 'deformities' surgically." She was barely old enough to remember the incident, but thinking of it still makes her shiver.

"The second time... we, my adoptive 'uncles' and I, managed to locate and contact the Linyaari only months before the second Khleevi assault," she continues, and quickly corrects herself, "Or rather, they found us; we were headed in the right direction when a Linyaari vessel came with a warning that the Khleevi were on the move and headed

Vote: Gryffindor

[psycho_vertue]

Diana shivered too. Nobody had tried to 'fix' her, but she had been under the influence of people who had tried to control her, and it was just as bad.

She straightened, jutting her chin out defiantly. "It sounds like you did well. I haven't been here long, but from what I've heard, Gryffindor might be where you should go. It's supposed to be a house for the brave. Don't ask me what the questions have to do with it; I haven't the faintest clue."

Re: Vote: Gryffindor

[lady_kirin]

Acorna nods. "Thank you, then."