#lemonsharks

Salvation army store at Devon and Leavitt, Chicago IL. Yes, yes, I know, I feel dirty too. 12/15/2023.

Nicky, Joe, Andy, and Booker decide to hang some new wallpaper in the safehouse. Brighten the place up with some nice color.

They’ve invented some truly gorgeous new greens, after all.

And that’s how they die of arsenic poisoning.

I mean you get at least a little of that every decade, but yeah, late teens and early 20s have some very enjoyably weird transitional stuff going on. 

There were just like A Lot of different influences all happening at once and overlapping with each other -- the carryover lace and floaty silks and flowers from the teens, the medieval-inspired tabard dresses and the kimono-inspired jackets and coats, Egyptomania colliding with Deco, new technology making rayon a thing, making sequins easier to produce, making all this new disposable income that people could spend on clothes...

Someone always gotta be a rebel. How the hell does that fit the prompt format? :D I do love it though.

Since you cheated I will too and pick non-companions. I want Harritt and Dagna. One thing people don’t, I think, generally know about farmers is that they all have to be mechanics. I’d say Bianca, because, well, she literally invented revolutionary ag equipment but however much of a brilliant polymath she is, I do not trust her judgement. Dagna can reverse engineer it and then tweak it, Harritt can make it. (*not* Wade; I love him with all my heart but he is an *artiste* and sometimes they are best dealt with at a slight remove. I will leave the handling to Herren).

Ok but actual companions.

Literally no one from Origins. Nope. Honestly they’re all fighters to the bone. They all keep fighting after the game ends too, even Wynne. Interesting thought worthy of more exploration elsewhere.

Awakening: SIGRUN easy easy pick! I’m gettin teary here thinking about Sigrun presented with a sunny greenhouse full of seedlings, that special soft humidity, the dusty smell of wet gravel floor, the precious plants. She would be 100% there for my seed-worship nonsense. The idea of her tenderly cupping her very first flower seedling....T____T

Actually possibly also Nathaniel. I feel like he probably got a certain amount of training in running an estate, growing up, and might really enjoy a return to that without all the baggage. To thinking about the long view, about planting nut trees, thinning forest here, grazing sheep on the invasive shrubs there, quiet slow things that will pay off in twenty years.

DA2: VET ANDERS VET ANDERS. I think spending some time on relatively low stakes work, shepherding and birthing sweet little lamb babies, spending his time on bumblefoot and hoof trimming and bottle lambs, would be supremely healing for him. I do think eventually he’d feel the urge to get back to his bigger work though, whatever that might be in this scenario.

DAI: Blackwall and only Blackwall. And totally not because I’m suddenly picturing him shirtless, calling instructions to his helpers as he shoulders up a giant beam for the new pole barn, or standing in the sun digging post holes for the new fence. Working on the shaving horse making tool handles, curlicues of wood caught in his beard. Heaving bales of hay into the loft with a pitchfork. But I forgot the other reasons suddenly.

When Sarai says she’ll stay behind it’s...it’s not that everyone looks at her because mostly, the Enterprise Crew is well trained enough to not gawp and also everyone is on duty but she can feel it in the atmosphere on the bridge somehow. 

It’s not that she hasn’t talked about wanting to find her heritage again - she’d mostly let it go but Sarai herself had thought that would mean well, maybe she’d start going to the weekly Shabbat Dinner or Hebrew classes. Not staying on a science outpost at the edge of the known universe, even if it would count towards her own research. 

“It’s going to be an amazing opportunity mom - and it’s only a years secondment from the Enterprise - I’ll come back the most qualified xenobiologist in Starfleet” and it’s true enough. 

That isn’t why though. There’s peace in her heart at the thought of being able to be a place with her people, to fumble her way back to childhood memories and songs and stories that she had always thought she’d have to leave behind after she was adopted and left Earth for Mars. 

She’s found it again, at the edge of the universe.   

tbhhhh... I don’t really even have a favourite lichen but one that I’ve been thinking about recently is Hypocenomyce scalaris. It’s made up of these tiny lil adorable scales and is often found on charred wood.