[open post -- winged and once-winged insects]

[onthewillowsthere]

Galahad has collected every insect guide he could find in the mansion's library, and now he is camped out in a laboratory it seems to have created particularly for him and Susan -- the room has its own microscope, so that he can stop borrowing Claudius', and every single shelf is filled with glass habitats or mesh tents for keeping insects.

With his single-minded determination, he has filled many of them -- the tents house carefully potted foot-high milkweeds with tiny butterfly eggs affixed to their leaves, or potato plants he hopes will soon harbor potato beetles, or butterflies resting on the mesh. In the glass habitats there are millipedes, gleaming tenebrionid beetles, huge and bumbling scarabs, the dogbane leaf beetle Lancelot helped him capture, shiny blister beetles, leafhoppers in every shade of green, a pair of picasso bugs, an mantis he found in the greenhouse pretending to be an orchid flower.

Many of these insects stay only long enough to be identified and documented. Galahad and Susan between them take careful notes, make drawings, take pictures. When possible, they identify to species; more often, they identify genera or family, country of origin if they're lucky. Then they let their subjects go again. Neither of them has the time nor the inclination to feed and care for the immense diversity of insects living on the mansion's grounds. Potato beetles are one thing, but catching other tiny insects for the tiger beetles every morning is unsustainable. Galahad doesn't mind. Once he has a picture and the notes, the insect is saved, even if they don't see it again.

In the morning he trains with Lan Wangji, so it's an afternoon now when he's perched on a stool in front of the microscope, inspecting a chlaenius beetle to see whether it's possible to confirm a species. Unfortunately, these beetles are too fast and squirmy to put on a slide alive, so he's ethered it first. Now he's working diligently on his sketch, his pale head bowed as he studies the tiny body.

[Open especially to anyone who needs to be reassured that Galahad is back after the mod event and he's just fine now]

Comments

[ninth_cavalier]

"Yeah," says Gideon. "I mean—I was pretty sure. But good to know." She hesitates. "I, uh, don't, either. For the record."

[onthewillowsthere]

"Good." He gets off the stool and comes over, holding out his hand to lead her. "Come look."

[ninth_cavalier]

Gideon takes his hand, because it's on offer and she's not an asshole. Any relief she feels about it is her own business. "Whatcha got?"

[onthewillowsthere]

He tugs her over to a glass habitat filled with dead leaves, in which a large cockroach is resting. "It looks like you," serenely.

[summerdude]

"Do you think it'll be different because neither me or Alex have as much, um. Experience? As Claudius?"

[kadewest]

"Anyway," Kade says, shaking himself and looking studiously at anything but all the bugs. "How's the makeup coming along?"

[onthewillowsthere]

"No. I have no experience, and I make--" He blushes and has to hide his smile again. "I make Claudius say wonderful things."

[summerdude]

"Wonderful things?" He's definitely waggling his eyebrows over his blush.

[onthewillowsthere]

"I like lipstick," Galahad admits, suddenly shy; he glances down.

[onthewillowsthere]

"It's private," laughing.

[ninth_cavalier]

Gideon cackles. "You little shit." She crouches down to look closer at the cockroach, but leaves two fingers still linked loosely with Galahad's. "You're not wrong, though. Ugly skull face. Hard as hell to kill." She looks up at him. "Hey, are all the animals and bugs and shit here from Earth?"

[onthewillowsthere]

"No. Susan found a firefly from Lumar. We've asked Tress for dead spores to feed it."

[summerdude]

"Fiiiiiiiiiiiiine," mostly teasing.

[kadewest]

"Oh, excellent," encouragingly. "Any favorite shades?"

[onthewillowsthere]

Galahad knocks against his shoulder. "Alas."

[onthewillowsthere]

"Go See Pearl Glam and Fortune Teller," softly.

[summerdude]

"How much more stuff do you have to do here?" Magnus asks then, leaning back against him.

[quote_gentle_unquote]

"Good afternoon," warmly, slipping into her preferred seat. Today Susan has an actual satchel; from it, she pulls out her field notebook and six labeled jars of soil collected from varying points around the grounds. It's a relief to get back to something so straightforward as science after the back-to-back weeks of the Mansion's latest nonsense, and with a little sigh, she immediately starts preparing a slide from each of sample of dirt so that they might search for microscopic organisms.

[onthewillowsthere]

"I can stop," Galahad says. He's trying to spend more time with Magnus, after their conversation over the falafel. "We can hang out."

[summerdude]

"I'm chill to hang out here," Magnus says. "I just need to, like, find Angus. Or Sunny. Dro is still in the hall." It's not that Sunny is now one of Dro's babysitters, it's that they babysit each other. "But I was thinking if you were done, we could go on a ghost hunt."

[onthewillowsthere]

He tilts his head curiously.

[summerdude]

"Try and provoke Shen Yuan into, like, interacting with us," Magnus clarifies. "I think passing out again just to see if he's hanging is, like, not smart. But he did the flowers for you, and he told Hanguang-jun sometimes he hears what I say to his new body, and I think maybe we can do something that makes him, like, show up and prove he's chilling with us. Maybe not being loudly wrong about Pokemon, but something." They have, by tacit understanding, not worked on their gift for Shen Yuan since he died, first because he was dead and then because the ghost could be anywhere, spying.

[untamedantinous]

"Oh! I am certain there are, but I do not know much about them. Combeferre would have."

[kadewest]

"Never heard of 'em," Kade admits. "Pinks? Reds? Berries?"

[onthewillowsthere]

Galahad doesn't think of Shen Yuan's presence as a ghost. Rather, it's Shen Yuan's soul that he imagines is watching and listening to them. Once Magnus has clarified, though, this makes sense to him.

"We could play Smash. We could choose the wrong characters."