It's nice that she can be helpful in this uncomplicated and pleasant way.

Lia eventually decides on a gag to order.

"Hey you two want me to join in?" she asks from the other side of the door.

"Uh, Lorica were you attracted to Lia previously?"

"I'm straight, but if she wants to and you want to -"

"I'd rather just stick with the two of us."

He lets Lia know this as well.

"Okay!"

Works fine for her too.

Eventually it is bedtime.

"If there's an emergency I can probably help with it and so you should wake me up. That make sense?"

"That makes sense."

Oh good.

He feels honestly quite a lot better with how this ended up than he expected which is probably a sign that he's a bad person but for now he is too tired to worry about that anymore.

They have a few very kissy days. It's not totally impossible to reason with her about what she wants like this - if someone announces that they're totally indifferent between two things but need to make a decision and want her help, she'll pick one; she's always ready to tell people she's not mad at them for doing basically anything to her, but will only sometimes independently announce that it was probably a good idea (taking her phone, for example, was probably a good idea); trying to get her to think of her unbacklashed self as a different person she needs to help doesn't really work, because she has continuity of identity, but it does basically work to ask her to come up with policies that would help other awakening espers with psychological backlash profiles resembling hers in some ways.

She's consistent on asserting that she would not have wanted to be backlashed. But that's not surprising, if you've met her. She doesn't have to do any original thinking on the subject to come to that conclusion.

After all, Lorica means "armor". She chose the name before she built the scale mail suit. Because people say "body armor", and they mean it in contrast to, say, "tank armor", but she always wondered, is there "mind armor". And there is, and she has -

- had. She had it.

Obviously it's gone now.

She has a new power instead of her old one. Her old ones.

She's unarmored and something got her.

And it'll wear off at the end of the week, yippee, but that's not the important thing. The important thing is -

They usually just kill people who trigger during Simurgh attacks.

And they're not wrong to do it. The Simurgh damages people, and she's a precog, and she plays a long game, and Lorica's -

- Bella's -

- been to more than her share of Simurgh battles, hiding under her armor, believing herself safe. But what if psychic damage was clinging to her, waiting, biding its time, turning her into a time bomb the instant she perished on the field and woke up in another body with another power?

Lucien won't believe her if she explains. He'll think this is her backlash in a new form, demanding self-sacrifice, but all the backlash is doing is demanding that she look right at the risk she's imposing on everyone in this innocent world to which no end has yet been brung. This is established policy straight out of the handbook from back home. They only let her live because nothing got through her armor, because every test they threw at her after London got the same result: impervious. Like she's not even there. Can't even tell they were trying to do anything. The Simurgh song is just annoying music.

She's not impervious now. The backlash got in. And Lucien won't understand, so - she can't try to explain.

She waits till he's asleep.

She vanishes out of his arms.

It's sort of obvious when someone that compatible stops cuddling with you, but it still takes him almost a minute to wake up.

Fuck he can't feel her tag it's been more than a few hours. Is she in the apartment - no, no, and no. And the windows haven't been opened and the front door door is still fully locked which isn't possible from the outside without a key. He should have gone with the waking up every two to retag her and kept someone in the room to watch her he was an idiot. 

"Lia wake-up Lorica's gone I have no idea what to do can you. I don't know. Tweet asking if there's a dimension hopper esper or something who can help us I don't know."

Yes she can do that and also hug Lucien at the same time.

It takes her a little while to work up to it. She waits in the void just one hop away from the esper world, thinking it over. She's guided enough to be afraid to die, and also she might still have the Butcher-power, since that's the one that carried her here. But if she shows up back in Bet where more people trigger as capes instead of the freak accident of Nikki - she'll have killed someone like she killed Nikki, but they'll know what to do with a Simurgh-touched cape who can't just be executed, there. And it might be a one-time thing, just like her armor was. And the damage, if the Simurgh did get her, did sing poison onto her protective shell in anticipation of the day that shell would collapse, would be so much worse than one death -

She forges ahead to the boiling sea, resigned.

It hurts, it hurts more than she was expecting, Leviathan was so quick it didn't hurt at all but this is -

- not the boiling world, she's in a void.

Why does it hurt. She did not get all the way to the boiling world.

...what the fuck was she thinking trying to kill herself without sitting with a notebook first. She could've done that while Lucien was asleep and then shredded the pages -

Why does it hurt!

She flings herself back into the apartment and collapses bonelessly to the floor and shrieks: "HELP!"

Lia is the one of them with experience inside dungeons. She knows first aid for... she's not sure what, there are no marks on her.

"What hurts?"

"Everything -" She coughs, at first dry and then more of a hacking wheeze. She clings to Lia far more agentically than she did over the past several days.

"Lucien kiss her now."

Wha-

No actually Lucien doesn't get to hesitate about this she can knock him off his feet from where she is leaning by Lorica and then grab his head before it collides with Lorica's chest and smush it against Lorica's face.