Isopia couldn't remember the last time that she'd left the Edge. Was it during the invasion? Or rather, just after it? Was that truly the last time that she had walked away from the misty mountaintops? Looking at Zero, and recalling his insistence (as well as the tree's) that they not keep secrets from each other, she decided to share this thought out loud.

"I used to live here, you know." She began. Not that Isopia had ever been bothered by Zero's height, but today she was particularly glad for his short strides, for her body was still quite sore. "I was born in the Edge. I'm not sure if I had ever told you that or not."

Although she hadn't asked for Zero's support, she was surprised to find how much she valued having someone to walk home with - someone who wasn't just Ranjiri, or Asaavi. Having a friend by her side, regardless of what he thought about the challenge she had just completed, filled her with a sort of reassurance that previously she would have never thought that she needed. And especially with her memories of Volterra removed from her mind, it was a feeling that she had never experienced with anyone else but her lightning-backed friend. She wanted to tell him as much, but the word sat awkwardly upon her lips.

Why was thank you, so hard for her to say? Was it because it conveyed that sense of neediness that she so desperately tried to snuff out of herself? This life would have been easier if she didn't need anyone, but she supposed, if she was going to need anyone, she was glad that it was Zero.

"I could hear you sometimes, through the mists." She began, moving the words like awkward chess pieces. "While I was fighting, I mean. It was .." (just say it. it isn't a big deal. It's Zero after all.) ".. really nice knowing you were there." She concluded, swallowing hard and inspecting the way the grasses bounced back up from beneath her hooves, as if she had never even stepped upon them at all.

"No. At least..I don't believe that she does." Isopia was completely unaware that her mother had at one point returned to Helovia. She'd been greeted by more than a few members of the Edge - Alysanne being one of them - and no one had thought to tell Isopia of this. Despite the fact that Kahlua and her daughter always had a strange sort of relationship, surely one as bubbly and friendly as Alysanne would have thought it important  to mention? But no one had. So as far as Isopia knew, when Kahlua had left, she had done so for good.

I'm always gonna be there.

For a moment Isopia said nothing, she merely kept her golden eyes on the ground in front of her, gently taking one step after another and trying to nurse her wounded shoulder. Slowly though, a smile spread across her face. At first she didn't even realize it was happening until she felt a tightness in her cheek (unlike Zero, Isopia didn't really possess the muscles needed to maintain a smile, and so even this caused them to stretch uncomfortably). I'm always gonna be there. She let his words roll over in her mind, causing her smile to widen, until her teeth almost began to show through the lopsided crease between her dark lips.

And despite all that had happened, Isopia felt happy. (As happy as she could get, anyways). Guess that's what happens when you love someone, and they love you back.

"I knew Alysanne." She responded almost immediately, her smile dwindling slightly - but not out of anger, only because her face couldn't really sustain it and speak at the same time. "She and my mother were quite close from what I remember. I met her just shortly after I was born, and then a few more times after that." As for the rest of them? Isopia couldn't really remember. Surely some of them had been there (though perhaps not Iona, Temobvu or Erthe), but the others? It was possible. "I was born just before the invasion of the Falls occurred, and so most of the warriors and sleuths were out training or gaining information." She thought about that for a while, wondering if there was any other really relevant information. "After the invasion, I decided to live in the Falls, and Kahlua stayed in the Edge. I guess I thought I was supposed to live there, because of who my Father was and the purpose of my birth ... I didn't see Kahlua much after that."

Even now speaking about it, Isopia didn't really feel much. Perhaps there was some obligation that Kahlua had ignored with respect to her child, and so perhaps Isopia was entitled to be angry. Though likely most children would have been hurt as well as angry, though Isopia was neither. She didn't necessarily want to think of her conception as rape, though despite the fact that she couldn't imagine the God of the Earth forcing himself on anyone, it wasn't exactly like Kahlua was in a position to refuse. He was a God after all. That Kahlua didn't really care for her child wasn't all too surprising.

For all of her proposed intelligence, Isopia really was quite stunted when it came to picking up small social or emotional cues. And so as Zero casually posed his question, Isopia failed to pick up on whatever underlying implication there may have been in his voice.

"I-" She began, and then shut her lips as she realized that hadn't. When she was with Zero, she didn't try to coax out a well formed argument or thought before she began speaking. In his presence, she was more at ease (despite the fact that she likely appeared just the same as always. Though perhaps Zero, if anyone, was perceptive enough to pick up on the subtle way she relaxed in his presence). So she began to speak her mind. "In a way I suppose I have. At least, I understand that one purpose all living things have, is to reproduce. I am not sure that I am obligated to - perhaps my Father would know... Mesec and Aithinel have.." Her voice trailed off, brows narrowing slightly as she considered this. "I suppose there is something to be gained from the first hand experience of being a -" She stopped again, not wanting to say the word mother. For Iso, there seemed to be something distinct between being a vessel which gave life, and being a Ma, as Zero put it.

She shook her head.

"I suppose I would consider it." She concluded with a shrug. The physical making of said child or who with were not even a part of her calculations. In her mind, she pictured something like pollination - or the way trees dropped acorns.

"Have you?"

Isopia allows herself to smile at her friend's awful joke. Anyone else would have received a blank and lingering stare, but of course Zero wasn't anyone else. He was her only friend in this world and had firmly wedged himself in her heart so fully and without need for permission, that he had just become part of the landscape of her world. As he mentioned his brothers and sisters, Isopia gave a roguish shrug. She wanted to say that it was Ampere's job to look after them, but she could guess at the exasperation that would bring to her boyish friend, and so she kept her mouth closed, only saying, "I think being a parent probably feels different than being a sibling."

Once upon a time, awkward thoughts of zero in that way, had tentatively started to pool in Isopia's mind. But those were in the days when Isopia remembered what it was like to be with a man in that way. Without those memories, Isopia's mind had reverted to a more or less platonic virginal state. So unlike the whir of thoughts currently going through Zero's mind, Isopia was able to objectively think about the reproductive process that he was suggesting without any sort of sexual or emotional implications.

Pure P in the V. Simple as that.

Whether or not Isopia would like the process, seemed to be entirely irrelevant. After all, she didn't train her body to ignore hunger pains and extreme temperatures because she liked it. She didn't willingly submit to the will of her Father, or continue to go on living because she enjoyed it. It was just something she was supposed to do.

Her narrow shoulders shrugged.

MaybewecouldgoseeyourDaorsomething!

Her ears flicked slightly, not understanding his sudden increase in verbal speed, but chalking it up to him being him.

"But-" She paused, suddenly replaying something he'd said earlier. His bad joke about being a ma. Suddenly, it didn't sound like a joke anymore. "There are parts of being a parent that only the females understand. Like actually growing the child. I wonder if my Father could make you experience that as well. You wouldn't be a ma...but maybe you'd get the full picture."

Isopia blinked.

Had they ... were they doing this, then?

Egg?

Now Isopia stopped, looking at her friend intently. For all of Zero's youthful exuberance, she knew that he wasn't stupid. Idealistic maybe and sometimes naive, but not stupid. Still, why was he talking about eggs? From what Isopia knew of reproduction, while it was truth that there were eggs inside of her body, they grew into children, they didn't still remain in egg-shaped form. Had she not been born with wings, perhaps she might have made the deductive leap that winged-creatures grow from eggs, just as birds do. But she had wings, and had been born more or less in the way everyone else was.

"What egg?" She asked, trying to keep the incredulity out of her voice. In truth, Isopia knew comparatively little about reproduction (and even less now that she'd forgotten about her tryst with Volterra), and so it was possible that Zero knew something that she didn't.

But an egg? That just didn't square with her views of the world.

Then again, little did these days.

He repeats the phrase as if she's being stupid or unnecessarily slow. For Isopia the issue now has absolutely nothing to do with whether or not she wants a foal and everything to do with understanding just what it is her friend is trying to say to her.

Suddenly she remembers the whales and how slow their voices were, and she thinks of Zero a little bit like that. As if all he needs to do is say it again and again and her brain will somehow catch on.

But it doesn't. Thankfully though, he keeps talking.

Ahh..nope. That apparently isn't helpful.

She's never had a child before (wrong), but somehow biologically she just knows that if she did, it wouldn't leave her body in the form of an egg. Then he talks about laying it as if they are now a pair of seahorses or penguins who are wondering if they should bend the laws of nature and have the mother carry it, or if he should do as he is meant to and bear their children.

It's all so confusing.

Isopia had meant that perhaps her Father could make Zero somehow share in the responsibility of carrying the child, but she hadn't meant that literally. Or perhaps she had. She'd been thinking of acorns and how so long as they were planted in the right sort of environment, they would grow. She'd been thinking of this potential life as something external to herself from the moment of its conception, something that they could pass back and forth between the two of them until it was born. But ... now that she thought about it, birthing seemed to be an internal-to-external sort of procedure.

Isopia sighs, weary with confusion.

"Did you come from an egg?" She asks Zero, then looks sideways at Hubris for a moment, before returning her honey'd gaze to his sunbeam one. Hubris had come from an egg. Clearly she was the odd one out. "I didn't. I just thought ... that maybe my Father could .. do something. You wouldn't have to carry the baby, or the egg, or..whatever it will be, for the whole time. I just thought we should share in the responsibility. All the responsibility and-" She stops, swallowing hard. Now her mind is thinking about the actual making of the baby.

That thing.

Then she realized her assumption, and a dusky rose colour flushes to her cheeks as Isopia blushes incredibly uncharacteristically. 

"Even I needed a male and a female parent." She says dully. "I guess I just assumed, when you said that we could go see my Dad that you meant.." She stops, not even knowing what she's implying. Is it that he would, you know, do that with her? Is it that he would be the dad? Is he just a sperm donor? Is he there for moral support? 

Isopia is normally so careful with making assumptions, and now she's not only made an ass out of she and Zero, but she's potentially made parents out of them as well.

Unsure what to think of Zero's limited data regarding babies and eggs, Isopia is content to let the issue drop. It isn't the issue, now is it.

Oh no. They're now talking about something much more concrete and less theoretical than where babies come from.

Now they're talking about the actual making of them.

He mentions being a family together, and once again she has to stop and look at him. The idea ... it warms her. Something inside of her tingles and yields - it blossoms and opens at the words, and before she even is really aware of what she's doing, her deathly-marked skull is bobbing up and down in ready agreement. Like Zero, Isopia is firmly thinking along the lines of, there is no one else I"d rather do this with, and she doesn't even really think about if they ought to be doing it. It's a new experience, and like her friend, its an adventure she'd happily go on with him.

"Okay." She says, as if deciding to start a family is as simple as that. Just a word, a smile, a nod of their heads.

"I guess we should go see my Father."