#forever young

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Lucrezia Mongfish wanted Eternal Youth. She wanted to be "Forever 21." She wanted that Second Breakthrough, that ascendance that was promised to her when the Geisterdamen called her Goddess.

But she's in her 40's, and she's shipped off Klaus so he won't cause trouble, and Aaronev's hair is thinning and he's looking at a political marriage, and she has the Heterodyne, but Mechanicsburg does not LOVE HER.

She is a Spark, and she is brilliant and ambitious and determined, and she has been studying mind-manilulation and transferance for years. She finds a Muse, in the catacombs of the ancient Heterodynes, and she successfully transfers a mind from machine to flesh, with the personality intact.

I'm sure there were many test-subjects, and many experiments, before she was ready to try it on herself.

I think something went wrong.

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Lucrezia Mongfish was once a woman with a singular body, with a heartbeat and breath, and appetites for cake, for sex, for power, for love, for adoration, for music, for jewels... She wanted it all.

But she still had to sleep, and hydrate. Take bathroom breaks. Experience boredom, and itches, the relief of removing restrictive garments, the minor pleasures and frustrations of being alive.

Then she made herself into a bodiless ghost, distilled "essence" that could-- in theory-- jump from host to host, or take on MANY bodies., so that she would never have to age, and never have to die.

Something went wrong, of course.

There are fewer compatible hosts than you'd think, out there. Her brilliant machines are delicate, finicky, and the processes were executed imperfectly by her devoted followers.

She wanted to turn back the hands of time. She found herself adrift, trapped outside of it, for untold ages. Stuck in a box, going insane, with nobody to rescue her from her own bad decisions.

She wanted a brand-new body-- but this one is inelegant, that one can't hold a Spark, this one is missing some parts-- like skin, or taste buds, or a foot-- and that one isn't PRETTY ENOUGH!

She's throwing a tantrum. She is the ghost of A Woman With Appetites, but she no longer exists in a body that can crave cake, or sex, or water, or sleep. She has the distorted memory of an emptiness inside, and she must force everyone to love her, to adore her, to OBEY HER EVERY WHIM so that she can feel right again.

She used to hunt cats for fun, on her family estate. Her father taught her to respond to pain by spreading it around. She was spoiled, and played both Wicked Schemer and Damsel In Distress, for longer than she should've gotten away with it.

Was she like Zola? Was she like Sephie?

Who was Lucrezia Mongfish, when she was a young woman with a father, and sisters, and a mother who is never mentioned, friends and frenemies and rivals from University, and dozens of handsome young suitors to choose from?

Who was Lucrezia, when she was no longer quite as young, when she was married, when she was pregnant with her second child, and ready to take the plunge towards Immortality?!