[P] Discovery

[Marisol]

 who's the fool who wears the crown?

Yana’s greenish-gray eyes narrow in suspicion, her body seeming to tense: Mari’s lips twitch in the faintest smile, both because she understands Yana’s misgivings and because she knows she would do the same in that position. Marisol herself would be caught off-guard. Her requests are rarely ever answered to so kindly—everything she has accomplished was a disaster in terms of paperwork.

She watches with cool, gray eyes, with a gaze so casual it nearly seems disinterested, as the swamp witch fumbles with a mountain of snarled white hair. It’s beautiful. Longer than Novus’ normal updos. It’s thicker, denser and somehow star-colored. But Marisol can’t imagine how much of a chore it is to undo those knotted curls. She’s never even thought about growing her hair out, though she realizes, with both envy and pity that she might like to; but this late in life the idea of it seems ridiculous, a thing she should have done when she still had the freedom of a child. The Commander with her mane not shorn?

It makes no sense.

Marisol lets out a little sigh as she listens to Yana speak. Not of exasperation, disinterest, or in fact anything negative—it’s a sigh of long-held tension that dissipates in the air as fast as steam rising up from water. She listens with intent, ears pricked. But she can’t (or won’t) pretend to understand everything. Yana’s mention of her mother sparks no expression but bland curiosity, nor does Mari understand fully what the witch means when she says—

Research,

Experimentation,

Specimen.

The tension in the room seems to grow. Marisol’s eyes are wider now than they were a minute ago. She watches, bewildered and stunned for a moment into stillness, without saying anything. Suddenly her of course seems foolish. It seems like the kind of thing only an idiot queen would say, the kind of dumb, unmeditated answer that can only be the product of laziness—the product of an aversion to digging further and deeper, or even vetting this bizarre-smelling stranger for proof of residence, or…mental wellbeing.

“So.” Marisol swallows. “You want my permission to… trap? Poach?” For the first time her voice feels—sounds?—a little tight. But she schools her features into practiced neutrality; there are only so many things you can’t take back, and she has always been a woman of her word, for better or worse.

"Speaking."

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