[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

[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.

[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."

[ninth_cavalier]

"Hmm. Can't chalk this up as Pluto/not Pluto evidence, then," says Gideon, straightening up.

[onthewillowsthere]

"What kind of insects are in Pluto?"

[ninth_cavalier]

"These guys," says Gideon, knocking a knuckle against the glass. "Well, not these guys, with the makeup. If they showed up the nuns probably killed 'em for making fun of them or some shit. But roaches. Lots of roaches. Ants. Corpse-flies. Maggots." She considers. "That's pretty much it."

[onthewillowsthere]

"They're important. They help to eat dead things so they don't stay forever. Also maggots turn into something. Flies."

[ninth_cavalier]

Gideon grins, but it's not a very happy grin. "On the Ninth, the dead stay forever anyway."

[onthewillowsthere]

"What is the Ninth like?"

[ninth_cavalier]

"Cold," says Gideon. "Damp. Half of it's a prison and half of it's a tomb. The Tomb—the one we're bound to protect. And—mostly it's empty. There used to be more of us, but now it's me, Harrow, the old, and the dead." Maybe just the old and the dead, depending on how Gideon's counting herself and Harrow at the moment. "The only other guy even close to our age blew up trying to leave the planet."

[onthewillowsthere]

"Did you go there after you left the nunnery? Or is where the nuns were?"

[ninth_cavalier]

"Oh, yeah, no, that's where the nuns were. The nuns guard the Tomb so all the people who want to kill God can't get in there."

[onthewillowsthere]

"God is in the Tomb?"

[ninth_cavalier]

Gideon shakes her head. "God is on his spaceship, with all of the lyctors—the Saints. The—thing in the Tomb is supposedly the only thing that can kill Him."

[onthewillowsthere]

"It's different from the gun."

[ninth_cavalier]

Gideon nods. "The gun is just wielded by the guys who want God dead. A bullet would never even reach the Emperor or any of His lyctors. Bullets are for killing the Cohort--the non-necromancers who protect the Emperor."

[onthewillowsthere]

"Is that what Harrow is?"

[ninth_cavalier]

Gideon shakes her head again, this time grinning. "Nah, Harrow's a necromancer. The most necromancer of necromancers--my necromancer. If, uh, the thing I tried to do had worked, we'd've become a lyctor together. Joined God on His ship as a Saint."

[onthewillowsthere]

"Would you have martyred yourself?" He asks it with curiosity, not judgement.

[ninth_cavalier]

Gideon hesitates. "Putting it like that makes it sound more planned and holy than how desperate and stupid it actually was, but. Yeah." She rubs the back of her neck. "Tried to."

[onthewillowsthere]

"But it didn't work?"

[ninth_cavalier]

"I dunno. I showed up here instead. Maybe it did—maybe this is just a splintered-off bit of me, and the rest got absorbed into Harrow's batshit crazy little head and helped her kill Cytherea and get her and Camilla out of there. Or maybe it didn't, and they're dead." It doesn't hurt as much as it had, saying it to Tally. Maybe she's building up scar tissue. "I told the other you living in that maybe could make me go nuts."

[onthewillowsthere]

"I worry about Percival, now that I've given up the Grail," softly. His hand is still curled around her fingers. "I don't know what will happen to him. God punished him once already because of me. I'm angry when I think about it because there's nothing I can do."

[ninth_cavalier]

Gideon watches him for a moment. "King Galahad and I talked about him a little." She thinks. He technically hadn't said Percival's name, but she's not that dumb, she can put together clues.

[onthewillowsthere]

"What did he say?" His voice takes on the extra tonelessness it gets when he cares about something.