Lilith wanted to go to MIT and be an engineer, but things never really moved that way-- she didn't thrive like some of the others when one big strange flying wrench was thrown in the gears so early in life. Was it better this way? Would she have been able to explain the way she made things tick in the end? Would she be able to see and keep up with the things that people told her were the real building blocks of matter? Her personal empirical evidence doesn't discount science. But perception is a lens that caters to what we choose to believe as our reality. This is where things get thick on account of the human condition.

It's late afternoon. The brunette is seated on a bar stool in blue lace-trimmed cotton panties and white t-shirt after a strip down to stay in for the evening, directly across from a three foot tall, potted and leafy Murraya Paniculata that isn't currently in blossom and bloom. It was a pretty bold purchase according to personal historical record and reasoning. She has guidelines about plants and animals co-existing in her place of residence and she's starting to break the fear that made them. Lilith thinks while she sweeps visual study in slow pass from stem to stem and acquaints with the potted piece.

Do you know the story about how we're all made of stars? It's kind of a beautiful way to tell a lie that's true-- humans are chunks of matter that want to matter, to be connected to the universe and something bigger than themselves. When Lilith flips her lens of perception to look at the potted plant through and through, she's seeing what's true and she's seeing the building blocks no one else sees quite the same. When she works with items, she constructs pathways to connect life to the inanimate, she's drawn pictures in the lattices of static matter, she's memorized the way it all shatters like fireworks and melds back together at her will-- so many explosions in the backdrop while others can only see the streaking results.

She could go on and on about what she sees if she had words for it. Violence and destruction is gorgeous as a method. That's a visual perception, though. Violence and destruction as an urge terrifies her for a few reasons. But she can't see the urges. She can't see the origins. She just knows what she feels in those moments. Are they real? Are they coming from inside Lilith? Maybe. Maybe it's the long shadows she occasionally catches herself casting. If the end result is the same it probably doesn't matter at all.

Sitting here like this staring at a plant, she realizes how many blinders she's put on herself with fear and loathing. She thinks about watching Dune in Tobin's house or no, was it Kevin's house this time? The books followed. The story was fine, but that wasn't her fascination. She drifts and considers The Bene Gesserit and how they formed their abilities to impact the world around them. There was no magic, they conditioned themselves. They changed and manipulated the matter of what was natural and real for everyone else through sheer control and will. She's envious of the control they had to learn first.

Control after the fact feels like leaning into a tailspin in the ice and snow. You can't jerk the steer and fight with it and sometimes you have to force your hands off to let ol' Jesus or whoever take the wheel. It's backwards, and from time to time she feels like a hopeless logical fallacy of self-made circumstance. Why did she really run? And what would she be now had she stayed with all this raw power? Dead like Carver's ghost sister? Missing like the others? Maybe a sociopathic megalomaniac for variety sake. What would she have been if she'd just talked about it instead of ripping out the only support system and love she ever knew at the seams, all in the name of safeguarding? Would she be happy with Byron in her Barbie Dreamhouse or someone else, somewhere else entirely? Honestly, she's leaning toward downright crazy. Probably with so many cats. How typical and depressing. But then she's just sad about not having a cat at all. Or a dog. Or, you know, even a goddamn hamster because what if one day she's upset and...

This is going places she doesn't want to go. But then she's charmed with herself and proud, besides. There's the litany. She remembers it all. Maybe she should use it.

Time passes. The brunette moves once to get wine and comes back. She's moderately aware that sitting here bonding with a plant on invisible levels via staring contest might get her committed if anyone normal were observing. But no one is watching. Lilith is accustomed to being alone as long as she doesn't think about it too much. What was that bit about blinders? Wine is happening again. Start over.

It's not that people and plants and other sources of living matter are fundamentally unfamiliar to her. Though she doesn't seem attuned to living nature in the same way as others with her shine, sometimes things aren't what they seem. She's tuned to it all fine without the same affinity, despite the fear. People aren't things, but she knows how to hurt them. They're made of the same blocks, there's just more to it in every facet. What Lilith sees isn't what you may see. During observance, she makes whole mental symphonies out of the complex chaos of living matter, she color codes the operating mechanisms to see where they malfunction.

Her eyes see the science of matter and why it matters and she also sees what doesn't exist in form to anyone else. In a place like this, these things matter twice as much. Unreal things will try to kill you and who you care for. It's madness. It's true. Is all of this constructed perception and everything she sees real? Yes and no. It's pointless to try and define what that entails. There's no ultimate way to piece out which realities have more rights and merits than others. Some realities are only observed by the few.

Lilith knows what she once constituted as reality, simplified-- it's the things that leave marks. But she doesn't have realities anymore because the unrealities keep leaving marks too. Instead, she has personal truths. And right now she's feeling pretty okay with that. It's kind of nice to feel okay with it. Maybe it's the wine, but she's suddenly damn appreciative to have another living thing in the loft with her. Even if it is a stupid overpriced plant that can't do a thing but live or die.

Two days later a fateful item comes into the shop below. Within fifteen minutes of the item's arrival, that plant upstairs is dead. There might be a whole lot of things blamed on that item in the coming days, but not the death of this plant. It's dead because Lilith was afraid and lost control on the shop floor below. At some point she weighs the pride involved in making a call to August with an irrational need to have -this- plant living again. The woman spent time bonding with that plant over wine and, damnit, she doesn't want a new one.

Fear might be a mind-killer, but it's also a plant-killer. They left that out.