[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

[quote_gentle_unquote]

Susan considers the question seriously. "From what I've heard, I think some other people might have been sorry to meet the alternate... me," she says. "I believe some exchanges were more difficult than others to make sense of and reconcile." And frankly, if she had known Lancelot was going to be swapped, she wouldn't have put forth as much effort as she did to get to know the alternate versions of his friends and lovers. "But I don't believe I'd call myself truly sorry to have met them." She sets her pen down on her notebook and twists to look at Galahad straight on. "Did you?"

[onthewillowsthere]

"Magnus's Evil Twin was--" He fumbles for words to describe the wrongness of him, the lonely realization that Evil Twin Magnus was too removed and world-weary to care about him, or be someone capable of caring about him; that he was ready for the end of the world. That he didn't understand Galahad at all. "I didn't like him," Galahad says finally.

[quote_gentle_unquote]

Even though she doesn't share any measure of Galahad's affection for the boy, Susan is aware that Galahad and Magnus are profoundly close. "How dreadful," she says. Her assessing mind is already turning this over and over, but instead of charging directly into incisive questions on the subject, she glances at Galahad, thinks of how she might approach a similar conversation with Lancelot, and instead asks, "Would you like to unpack what was wrong about him?"

[onthewillowsthere]

"No," Galahad says. He's talked about Evil Twin Magnus with Claudius and Lan Wangji and Magnus himself; he knows what was wrong about him, even if he struggles to say it. He appreciates that she asked, though, which he hopes she can tell -- and after a moment's thought, he just says so. "Thank you for asking."

[quote_gentle_unquote]

Very well, then, she shall set her questions aside. "Of course," she says, and then offers: "I believe the most unsettling change I encountered was Laertes."

[onthewillowsthere]

"Why?"

[quote_gentle_unquote]

"He was..." she purses her lips. "Slippery. A curious mix of forthright, incautious, and tremendously protective."

[onthewillowsthere]

"You didn't like it."

[quote_gentle_unquote]

"It was an adjustment," she says, diplomatically.

[onthewillowsthere]

"I think it's better if you like Laertes the way he is. Since he's here."

[quote_gentle_unquote]

"I couldn't agree more."

[onthewillowsthere]

"Was there anyone you liked?"

[quote_gentle_unquote]

"I believe I might've liked Sagramore's other self the best," says Susan, after a moment's reflection. "Though there might be a primacy effect at play." She confides, "I was rather tired by the end of it all."

[onthewillowsthere]

"Yes," he agrees, since he was as well; he elects not to ask any questions or make any comments about Sagramore.

[quote_gentle_unquote]

Susan glances over her notes. "I suppose we shan't come to any conclusions without talking to more people first," she says.

[onthewillowsthere]

"We could make a survey."

[quote_gentle_unquote]

"Yes," she says, immediately. "Let's." She turns the page in her notebook. "Let's see. Perhaps we ought to have a series of questions for each - Evil Twin, you called them? - people met. ...Ought we ask about personal impressions, or just simple facts?"

[onthewillowsthere]

Unfortunately, there's no one they both met to use as a comparison, or he'd want to test how their personal impressions of the same person differ. "We could ask a short series of facts and one personal impression. There are surveys like that."

[quote_gentle_unquote]

"There are," Susan agrees. "So... point of departure, physical changes, personality changes..."

[onthewillowsthere]

"Shen Yuan's Evil Twin was just younger than Shen Yuan is, and Magnus's Evil Twin was older, but Lan Zhan was from a different world. He wasn't the same person. We should make a distinction."

[quote_gentle_unquote]

"Yes. There are multiple dimensions. The point of departure might be minute or quite large."

[onthewillowsthere]

He nods. He likes how precise Susan is. "Once we have the data, we can group it according to subject."

[quote_gentle_unquote]

Susan nods her agreement. "Perhaps we disambiguate. Is the difference merely temporal, or is it based on a specific choice or pinpointable moment of deviation, or is it by entire world?" She pauses. "From what Lancelot has said, I believe you and I both had a pinpointable deviation."

[onthewillowsthere]

"I lived. What was yours?"

[quote_gentle_unquote]

"I believe... It must be that Aslan didn't intervene," Susan says, and makes the connection: "So we both had somewhat of a broken promise from God."