(Untitled)

[purplensparkly]

Trance had brought her tree with her into the rec room. Normally, she kept it away from people. It was far too precious to be out where everyone could see and touch. But she’d had an instinct and she always followed her instincts. Maybe he was feeling sociable. She stopped at the bookshelf and sighed. It was being picky today, offering her

Comments

[wormholed]

"Oh my god," John groaned. He threw himself into an arm chair, both legs swinging merrily over the side. "Nice day, and you're sitting in here with a book. Worse!" he said, spying the cover. "Non-fiction."

[purplensparkly]

"Do you even know what the Systems Commonwealth is?" Trance asked, smiling a little at John's antics. "How do you know whether I'm reading non-fiction or science fiction, hmm?" She gave him an impish grin. "Besides. I needed a little time out of the sun. I'm no longer lavender, I'm violet."

[wormholed]

"As long as you're not lobster red, I don't see the problem," said John, leaning over the arm of his chair to snatch her book away. "Nietzscheans, huh?" he asked as he flipped through the pages. "What is this, like, world history for you?"

[purplensparkly]

"John, I don't get lobster red." She yelped a little when he grabbed the book and stalked over to him. "Not world. Universe." She picked up the book and settled herself in his lap. There. See what he did with that. "The Nietzscheans are genetically engineered humans who live by the philosophy of Nietzsche."

[midgar_flowers]

She was feeling better. If by feeling better she had reigned in a desperate, maddening longing back to an aching need for the Planet and its presence. She did, so she was.

She wandered into the rec room because she disliked the Compound, and the only way she would overcome that was to face it. Repeatedly. She had done it with the sky, and she would do it with her memories of ShinRa's labs. It was one less way she would be the Aeris that Zack remembered.

The moment she entered the room, a song started playing in the jukebox, but she ignored it. Mostly because there was a familiar face with an unfamiliar plant.

She smiled brightly, and approached the violet-skinned woman, observing the tree curiously. "What is it?"

[purplensparkly]

"It's..." How to explain something that was an unsolvable enigma? Or at least nothing that could be explained in the words that Aeris could understand. "It's...my tree," she finally said, shrugging a little and glancing at it. "It's possibility and chance. Luck, you could say." Trance sighed softly. "It doesn't sparkle anymore."

It used to, back when she was a star and the universe was full of possibilities. Trance couldn't really see them anymore.

"It's one of a kind. Nothing else like it in all the universes."

Of course, the others of her kind used other focuses that did the same thing, but Trance had always liked growing things.

[midgar_flowers]

She gave a soft frown as she moved to pull up a nearby chair to sit. "No, I guess few things sparkle here anymore, do they?" In her world, the tree would sparkle. And it would sing and tell its stories. Certainly it had many interesting ones, if there were no others like it. Much like her mother's materia.

She smiled slightly, propping her chin on her fist. "It's unique? Then you must care for it a lot."

[purplensparkly]

Trance shook her head. "No. Not much does. There are all kinds of things that I can't do anymore. Or that the stars don't to me anymore. I'm not sure which." Maybe it was just that she was cut off from her sun, but she didn't think that was it. Maybe it was whatever this island was.

"It used to take care of me. Now I just make sure it stays alive."

[waltsnothereman]

Wanda was trying to be casual as she strolled in and hit up the bookshelf, but she was having some difficulty with that because hey, there was a purple girl philosophizing on the couch. Not her Purple Girl, of course, the resemblance didn't extend too far past the skin tone and, even accounting for the age difference, Kara didn't seem like the philosophizing type, but Wanda nevertheless kept finding her focus being pulled away from her goal of hunting down something to read.

"Sorry, I don't mean to stare," she said, giving up and turning to face the woman with a grin. The bookshelf wasn't giving her anything good, anyway. "That your tree?"

[purplensparkly]

"It's fine," Trance said, not looking up until the woman said something else. She glanced at her tree and nodded. "Yup. I think it wanted some company. At least when it was on the Maru, there were people always wandering around. Here, it's usually back where I live."

And she was far enough out of the way that she didn't get many out of the blue visitors.

[waltsnothereman]

Wanda wasn't in the habit of giving personification to plants, but after making the mistake of teasing Heather for it once, she'd grown far more tolerant of the practice. "Poor thing," she said, walking over and peering at it closely. Bonsai. Cute. "You big on gardening or something?" she asked, managing to avoid saying anything about having a green thumb. That veered way too close to tacky joke territory.

[purplensparkly]

"Oh, normal plants? Sure. I work in the garden most days and the clinic when I'm not there." Trance held out her hand. "I'm Trance Gemini. I don't think we've met before." There seemed to be so many new people on the island. Trance frowned. She was going to have to get out more.

[unit_girl]

"Oh, you have a tree," Jo said, as she entered the kitchen and spotted it. She'd seen plenty of trees before, but this one was inside. It said something about her that she noticed the tree before she noticed the woman who had it was purple.

"I've seen you around the garden, haven't I?" Actually, Jo was pretty sure on that point, unless there was more than one purple-skinned person around, and that seemed unlikely, given the number of aliens she'd met who were perfectly normal coloured.

[purplensparkly]

"Mmhmm," Trance said, smiling at the girl. "It wanted some company, I think. And that was me. I'm in the garden most days and in the clinic some days." She put her book down, leaning forward and offering her hand. "I'm Trance."

[unit_girl]

She shook Trance's hand. "Jo. I work in the garden some days too."

She pointed at the tree. "Is it sentient?" she wondered, peering more closely at the tree in question.

[purplensparkly]

"No. Not...exactly. It's special. And besides, any plant has desires. Water, sun, even company. Singing and talking to plants helps them grow in most cases." You always had the occasional loner.

[doesntlooktired]

Harriet wasn't a bigot by any means but, with the exceptions of the Doctor and Mr. Copper, her only real experience with aliens had been of terrifying invaders killing everything in their path. For this reason, she was somewhat leery about encountering other aliens and tried to avoid those who looked obvious inhuman. They were easy enough to spot and as far as she could tell there were only three of them; the green girl, the grey lizard looking man and the purple woman in front of her.

When she entered the rec room, to try once more to get some useful information from the bookcase and saw her, she almost turned around before she decided that it would be beneath her. The woman had not proved herself remotely threatening and, even if she were, Harriet would not want to give her the satisfaction of acting powerless and afraid.

She gave the woman a thin smile as she entered the room.

"Is the shelf being cooperative today?"

[purplensparkly]

Trance sighed. "No, not for me. I think it's trying to remind me of home." She held up the book in her hands. "And all the people I left behind. So if you're looking for something from home, it might decide to be cooperative. Or it could just be tormenting me and it'll like you just fine. I'm not sure."

Trance looked up and frowned. "Are you okay? It looks like there's something bothering her.

[doesntlooktired]

"I've been looking for history books mostly," Harriet explained with a cautious smile. "There was a war back home and I've been hoping to find out what happened after my part in it was finished. I don't hold a great deal of hope given that I've spent the last few weeks looking but you never know."

"I'm sorry to disturb you but you came from this 'Commonwealth', is that right? What was that exactly?" she asked as she moved away from the shelf to get a closer look at the book.

Ever since her first encounter with the Slitheen, she had been incredibly curious about what else existed in the universe. She liked to think that there were aliens out there who didn't start wars and conquer planets and saw humans as something else but slaves or victims.

"I'm quite alright, thank you," she answered in reply to the alien's question, because any concerns she had were best kept to herself, and held out her identification as she introduced herself. "Harriet Jones, former Prime Minister."

[purplensparkly]

"Well, Dylan was still putting it back together when I left, but it was this coalition of planets. Earth, Sinti, Tarn-Vedra. Far too many to name in any reasonable amount of time. I don't know where you're from, or when, but the island calendar says 2008 and I'm from about three-thousand years ahead of that. I don't suppose you've met the Perseid's, yet, have you? That would have been..." She bit her lip, doing the math. "22nd Century on Earth, I think."

She smiled and held out her hand. "Trance Gemini. Your resident purple girl and former star."

She shot the jukebox a quick glare.

"Which that thing likes to remind me of. A lot."