Turquoise

((This section will contain bits from my 2014, 2015 Nano writing for the Carramba High Road Rally, so if it seems a little confusing I wrote it a year ago and in bits.))

(( Also note that the rally consists of 5 locations to visit for a minimum of 10 hours with a checkpoint. Hoover Dam, Black Mesa Research Group, the Go-Cat Ranch (a Sanger ranch!), Wonder (the magical equivalent of Carramba), and Ensenada Esmeralda down in Baja. Plotting the course is only half the battle, particularly if the cars don't have a mage (to reach Wonder) or a friend who knows where the Go-Cat ranch might be this year. Yes, Go-Cat moves from place to place. ))

Carramba High was quite the interesting place. Turquoise and his 'siblings' (he would use airquotes for those who weren't actually his direct blood relatives, as quite a few of them did) attended their classes and ate in the lunch court, returning to their shared spaces after school or after events. But that one Summer event was much more fun than he let on. Like his sire, Turquoise was a bit more impish and even occasionally silly than he let on outwardly. He truly enjoyed kicking around with the folks that he ate lunch with, and it had been one of those that prodded him into putting his name and qualifications down for the Road Rally. He knew perfectly well there was a chance he wasn't going to be accepted, but then that year the sheer quantity of participants was off the chart.

Because it was ten people per vehicle, mandatory. He took it in stride when he was sent an e-mail to the effect of 'show up and we'll stick you on a team', equally when he went to find that team on the day of the Rally.

As they were settling in, the tall, slender, and pale skinned young man walked by the vehicle spaces. Careful in his movements, elegant but a bit stiff, he glanced toward the group and caught Ash’s eye.

“Oh hey, you!” She called to him and though he didn’t seem to want to talk, he inclined his head, and stepped toward her. “Heard you’re in the Underwood group!” Ash seemed quite excited about that, actually.

“I am,” Turquoise Lane said. “I … suppose that’s a good thing?” He lifted his eyebrow carefully.

“A good thing? Bro, you’re in for a freaking treat.” Her eyes almost had sparks in them, “I mean, they’re teaming up for one thing, Crane and Underwood? I mean, for real?”

Her ‘brother’ blinked once or twice, his eyes being the same shade as his namesake, hair just a shade lighter (and still turquoise), only slightly darker than his aqua and teal shaded suit. Yes, he wore a somewhat formal suit almost everywhere, like many of his kin. “You know that I have absolutely no goddamned idea what you’re going on about, yes?”

It hadn’t deterred his ‘sister’. “And, and oh my god, the music? Hello? DJ Zeets, you know she’s the coolest music teacher around, and Elkay-E the light musician? And the inter-dimensionally famous rock star Khyrus Dominican? Of the Mystic Stargazers? Helloooh?”

Turquoise blinked again, and then his smirk betrayed him. “I am aware, yes. I’m a bit more concerned about the others on board. After all this is a hovercraft we’re going to be using…” He glanced over his shoulder and turned to a telepathic frequency that his sister could hear but no other. We’ve got two supers on board, but one is right over there… He nodded toward his own team’s booth space, where one of the easiest people to spot had recently arrived: Rocky Ramrod, whose body was more often than not, made of solid living stone.

Ash drew in a breath and formed an ohhhcrap expression, rolled her eyes, and then echoed her brother’s smirk. “Well better your team than mine, then!” She laughed loudly as Turquoise sighed and strode away to sign in at his booth.

As he did so, the young genetically engineered man was met with exactly those three people excitedly yammering about which things they would be looking to play, what might make the best route, and why oh why had the heaviest member of the Carramba staff decided to put in for this rally?

Rocky seemed a little put off by that, but more so by the added presence of the gloomy familiarity of a fellow instructor. As Turquoise gently moved past the musicians, he overheard (he heard everything, let’s not mince words: he listened for things like this) the pair of instructors arguing.

“And you’re pretty sure that you’re not going to have one of your episodes?” Rocky said, his voice was rich and nowhere near as gravelly as you’d expect a man shaped like an upright stone sheep to sound. “Because I swear to the gods, Dane, if you go off around people, I will put you down.”

They went on like that for a while, as the rest of the group got settled in. They had an unusual group, even with the requirements making for some of that. Morr'gan was a Zekiran shapeshifting Steed - not a shapeshifter who turned into a steed, a steed that shape-shifted. He qualified for fur and wings, though they also had Una, another shapeshifter, the were-cheetah type, for their furry component. Well okay - Rocky qualified too, because he was a ram-morph. A solid stone, 300 pound unshifted superhero...

Their 'car' was actually a racing hovercraft; quite large even as far as the other Rally vehicles went, though not the biggest in the race and definitely not the biggest ever in the Rally's history. Created by Orion Underwood, usually it would have been racing against the other driver's vehicle, but for this instance Jenn Crane served as the repair chief. Open to the air, it would be a noisy, windy race. Turquoise hoped that they had some kind of shelter for the sun, rain, or ... well, whatever else might happen. He settled in when the announcement was given, along side the others.

Once they'd gotten on the road (with a rather difficult mistake leading them down a narrow residential street they had to somehow get out of), and finally onto the open freeways, it was clear that the huge vehicle was well known by quite a few passers by. Still, the vehicle was big and bulky and actually quite terrifying to be near.

Particularly terrifying if you were in a little Volkswagen Beetle trying to get to Vegas… Zeets was the one who spotted the Bug struggling along in lane 3 (that’s next to the slow lane, they had been reminded by the officials before everyone started off: to avoid any confusion from not being ‘from around here’, they laid out the road information pretty clearly). The car was clean, but its glittery green paint job had been worn down by years in the sun and oxidized into a kind of purple shade. It was actually rather pretty that way, unlike some sun-faded cars. It had a couple bumper stickers (including a very clever one with a little image of a hamster wheel, that said ‘If I Go Any Faster, I’ll Burn Up My Hamster’) and looked to have at least three people in the back seat.

They weren’t competitors, not in the Rally, so Zeets gave Orion the heads-up. “Got a slug-bug on the right, try not to suck it into the intake, okay?”

“I can’t exactly plug the vent, Z,” Orion said, “but I’ll swing a bit into lane 1, it’s open.” There were notably no turn indicators on this vehicle, but instead an LED feed that crawled around the entire rim above the inflated skirting. Automatic messages usually displayed on them, such as ‘you are too close’ and ‘we’re going to slow down’, or ‘turning, please stay clear’. The messages were cleverly reversed along the front rim, to be read in rear-view mirrors more easily. At the moment, they read a typed in ‘sorry for the wind’ on the right-hand side, and ‘stay clear, merging left’ on the rear and left side.

As they passed the little VW, Zeets and Khyrus could see the white-eyed terror on the driver’s face, while she clutched the wheel, arms stiff, and stared straight ahead. By the way her arms moved with the gusts, it looked like the Bug had barely enough weight in it to keep it from flying away in the wake of the gigantic hovercraft. Stability on windy roads was not one of its strong points, even without their craft in the way. Of course, ‘aerodynamics’ was not a strong point of the hovercraft – it was rectangular and had absolutely nothing in the way of mitigation except for the fan spoilers on the back of it, to keep it from flying upwards.

The driver of the Bug finally aimed an insincere, worried, toothy smile at the team, and went straight back to making sure the little car didn’t drift off into the shoulder from the bow shock.

Her passengers on the other hand were quite eager to look at the massive hovercraft as it blew (literally) past them. They pointed and waved, noticing who was in the vehicle. One of the girls in the back made a little “heart shape” with her hands, and very nearly swooned when Khyrus smiled at her. He turned back to face his seat partner, with that grin still plastered on his face.

“They like me!” He cheered himself on.

“I swear your teeth are going to blind them,” Elkay laughed. “Not me this time, at least.”

The light artist had frequently been pulled over in her own car for having blinded other drivers. Completely unconsciously, she’d left a trail of accidents due to what the victims called “strobes, and wobbly bits, and explosions, and fireworks, and then that bass line started shaking the road!” Needless to say, Elkay didn’t have a valid driver’s license any more.

Sitting behind Elkay, Turquoise Lane made notes on what looked like a custom designed data-pad. While he wasn’t overly protective of it, he didn’t make a big point of showing off his notations to anyone. However, Morr’gan seated next to him occasionally glanced down to examine it. The Steed creature tilted his head and finally asked in his oddly gruff voice, “what are you writing about? If I might ask? And… what script is that? It looks almost Zekiran.”

Turquoise gave a half grin, “it is ‘almost’ Zekiran, actually.” He seemed to delight in the subtle exchange of expressions on the long face that moved a little closer. Hardly anyone could read Morr’gan’s face, but Turquoise’s own father’s face was all but unreadable, so he had practice. Not, he chuckled to himself briefly, that he thought his father had a horse face. He’d been told he looked rather a lot like Keenan, except for the brightly aqua-colored hair and all…

“The letters are correct,” Morr’gan asserted, as his odd horizontally-pupiled eye focused on the electronic page, “but I do not recognize any of the words they make.”

That prodded Turquoise to grin even more. “Carramba has been a wonderful addition to our cultural exchange,” he told the Steed, “the Vortigaunts in our dimension lacked a written language, and the Zekiran script is extraordinarily beautiful. They seemed to go together well enough, so I introduced the idea. They seem to like it, the Vortigaunts I mean.” He got a strange, distant look as he glanced ahead and didn’t seem to be looking at the seat, the road, or even anything in that dimension. “Of course, that’s kind of a surprise, given how little they like my father, in general.” He shrugged, and continued to write. He assumed correctly that Morr’gan didn’t know Vortigese, and would be unable to translate even the faintly familiar words.

Though he hadn’t outright said what it was he’d been doing on the tablet, Morr’gan didn’t inquire again – he wasn’t sure about this particular Human. He had an air about him that said he was far more than he seemed. Much less intimidating than the dark-skinned somewhat insane superhero seated nearby, in physical ways. But in any other? Something about him made anyone, including a genetically engineered Steed shifter, a bit nervous.

Still, though, Turquoise did act a touch more sociable than he let off just by appearances, rather like his father as well. Plus, he didn’t seem to have forgotten that Morr’gan asked a question more specific than about the script. “I’m suggesting that…” he indicated the tablet and then nodded toward the black-haired man causing accidents by smiling, “that mister Dominican there has some form of power keeping his hair from looking out of place, even though it’s just as subject to the wind as everyone else’s.”

Morr’gan gave a very Human blink, and then looked up at that same man. It was true, though: Khyrus and his perfect hair might even lead one to believe he wasn’t even there, instead some form of projection or added in post-production. But his hair did move, it just didn’t… look at all wrong or out of place. Even when he turned at the sound of his name, and his back-length hair tumbled once more in perfect shining waves over his shoulders, it had the appearance that it wasn’t in the way. It more or less seemed like it was going in slow motion, really.

Turquoise rolled his eyes and chuckled, “see what I mean?”

“I do,” Morr’gan said, a bit weirded out. “It’s sort of creepy.”

“You’re talking about me,” Khyrus said with a tilt to his head and an adorable pout, “literally behind my back! I’m hurt.”

Another voice came through on their headsets, “you’re gonna be hurting if you don’t turn back around and sit like a good passenger in a barely-legal harness,” Jennifer said sharply.

Khyrus’s yellow-and-green eyes widened a little, he got a suddenly-cute guilty grin, and turned back around. His hair was still perfect.

“Does he do anything and not look … like that?” Morr’gan said in general, not expecting an answer.

“Like an adorable puppy with the eyebrows and pouty-lips?” Elkay suggested with a laugh, “no, he’s always like that. He’s got perfect teeth, perfect hair, those finely chiseled abs,” it sounded as though Elkay was quoting from some fan-club magazine or a sales brochure. “He’s ridiculously hot. It’s part of his charm.”

Without pause, Turquoise said, “they’re incredibly distracting, those charms. How do you resist them?” And almost immediately regretted it. Khyrus leaned back and gloated.

Thankfully, Turquoise was the only telepath on the team. Unfortunately, the only one of the others, aside from Khyrus himself, who didn’t automatically give off a mental – or sometimes audible – gasp, was Morr’gan. The Steed had very little concept of why anyone would do so.

Dane and Rocky, Turquoise noted, simultaneously stifled their faintly disparaging thoughts in favor of reminding themselves that it ‘took all kinds’. An intense curiosity and somewhat obscene bunch of images leapt through Elkay’s mind, and thankfully were not visualized in the air around her head as per her normal state of light-production. Zeets giggled, because her gasp was more or less the same obscenity-ridden thought process as Elkay’s. Una’s was more relieved, in that she herself was often found in the arms of her female companions as often as any male. The phrase ‘too much information’ drifted quickly past their driver’s mind, who concentrated on the road, and Jenn’s likewise. It seemed that those collective gasps meant entirely different things. Interesting.

He wrote that down, too. But Khyrus’s hair (and smile, and eyebrows, and those chiseled abs of his – or was it actually his shoulders? It was his shoulders.) were distracting.

Because he could easily sense them, Turquoise took a very brief stock of these thoughts of his teammates, and re-routed their memories just a bit. Overwriting their auditory track, gently removing the reasons behind those remarkably dirty imagined scenarios (but… not the dirty pictures, he left those), and letting them think they’d just seen some inappropriate bumper-sticker. Morr’gan’s mind didn’t need much prodding, he noted well that Una’s did.

That left Khyrus. Who just sat in vain silence, enjoying all the attention from that one little statement. Or maybe it was the attention from Turquoise.

I should absolutely wipe your brain clean of that, Turquoise thought directly to the performer. But I’d rather not, because I don’t mind having people wonder. He saw the tiniest corner of Khyrus’s lips curl into a smile. I thought you liked cats though.

Khyrus looked like he’d swallowed wrong. Turquoise grinned to himself and kept taking his notes. This would be an interesting trip indeed.

As the large hovercraft made its way through lighter and lighter traffic, half the team wondered whether they were on the right road or just what. Zeets clearly knew what she was doing, but when they heard on the Carramba feed that several others were heading in a slightly North-eastern path, even she seemed a bit unsure.

“Guys, I… gotta admit,” she said with a strongly sheepish look, “I’m not entirely sure where Wonder is.”

Though Elkay and Dane both sort of snorted and muttered to each other, the rest were neither surprised nor really angry. It was a beautiful day, and they had time. This vehicle could do 200 miles per hour easily – with or without a road – so if they got out in the desert or up here in the hills for a while? They would be able to make up time if they got lost. Knowing they would be heading through the desert and very likely straight through Mexico where speeding was just simply a way of life? They’d enjoy the trip and explore.

For instance: the trees here, scattered around the hills as they drove up the slow grade, were gorgeous.

“We’ll head to Hoover Dam first, then,” Jennifer suggested. The nodding around the passengers seemed to bolster Zeets from her guilty frown into a passable relief. Since Jenn and Orion normally raced and were all about ‘getting there now, first and looking better than anyone else, the fact that the engineer had said it at all meant neither of them wanted to make the whole team uncomfortable. While it was still a ‘race’, the Carramba Rally was supposed to be fun. Not a job.

“Plot a course,” Orion said to Zeets, “to… wherever we can reach Hoover and hit high speed for at least a good ten miles.”

Zeets gave a smirking salute, “aye-aye ma’am!” However she chose to do it, no one was sure. She didn’t have a map in front of her, and she wasn’t, at least to anyone’s knowledge, cybernetically enhanced in order to download maps from the Internet. But at some point she blinked to clear her eyes of something, and gave a thumbs up. “Take the third exit to the East, it’ll open up to a mountain pass. It’s going to be narrow.”

They didn’t travel quickly through the foothills, the roads were reasonably twisty and in some cases other vehicles had to back up into the emergency passing spots. At least if anyone freaked out while the hovercraft went by them, or if their car was in danger of falling off the sometimes-scary road, there were no fewer than three people who could easily leap to the rescue. They actually discussed it, while moving through those turns. Big and strong Dane and Rocky, flighted and shapeshifting Morr'gan, adept medical professional Una. The rest of the team seemed to be more 'entertainment' oriented - even Turquoise appreciated nuances more than raw power.

As they began to notice the grade of the mountain road had subtly begun to edge downward, they got a good view of one of the numerous agricultural towns ‘somewhere north’ of Talon and Crescent. That was where all their oranges came from, apparently. The conversation got a bit weird around then - considering Una's background and abilities, a contradiction in terms. Turquoise made detailed notes about how her 'monster hunter' mother and 'monster' father got together... But more that she was a CDC operative and had been educated at Miskatonic University...

Rocky was a bit put off when someone suggested that Una might know some 'fish heads' - but rather than a racist remark (he seemed a bit sensitive to such things, even though half the craft's inhabitants were either non-human or non-white) it got them talking about how the mutations found among people in that area of the country seemed to be viral and icky. Rocky wasn't lost when Una started going off about the details, everyone seemed to forget that even with his size and super powers, he had been a scientist before a superhero! Una's pretty form wasn't the only thing the others were interested in though, as Dane quipped that she was a shapeshifter with a side dose of divine intervention.

“Father’s line has also always fought off the evil that comes to our worlds. In effect… I got a double dose of it.”

“So in case of Shuggoth invasions,” Turquoise said with his own unique smirk, “you’re the first on the emergency call list?”

“I am,” Una grinned back.

Turquoise saw the tilted head of the Steed beside him, “it’s … a very nasty extra-dimensional invader,” he said by way of explanation. That seemed to be all that was needed: Morr’gan had seen his share of those, too.

“Technically, so are you,” Zeets giggled, “I mean, you’re not from this dimension.”

“Well, that is true,” he said, pondering. “There are so many dimensions.”

“Then you are a nasty extra-dimensional invader,” Zeets crowed.

“I’m not nasty,” Turquoise rolled his eyes. “I’m devious.” He exposed his teeth with a wholly unnerving smile.

“You’re a deviant, what?” Khyrus laughed, “that, I’d believe.” For some reason, almost everyone else in the vehicle blushed.

They went on in reasonable silence for a few more minutes, while Turquoise kept his stupid stupid laughably over-sharing mouth shut.

As they went through the foothills heading northeast, no one was really sure when the trees stopped and the scrub desert began, as they whipped by in a blur. The warm air however was a clear blast to all of them. The hovercraft wasn’t covered, but while they angled toward a specific point that Zeets had suggested, Jennifer said they would be able to pull the security canvas over it if it rained. It was extremely unlikely to do so, obviously, in the middle of the desert, in the middle of Summer.

And yet – there were the clouds.

Right overhead.

“You have got to be fucking kidding me,” Jennifer said, “that’s a thunderhead?”

This didn’t seem to faze Morr’gan, who nodded, his long face easy to see in the corner of her eye. “It is, this area has many washes, it rains frequently but the soil is eroded. The wind comes mainly from the east, the temperature drops, and the clouds form against these foot hills,” he glanced over his shoulder. It was clear that Jennifer was a touch confused about how a horse knew anything at all about weather. She wasn’t quite rude enough to say that, but Elkay on the other hand was.

“How do you know all that?” She asked, and noted as the others did that Orion had slowed the vehicle down quite a bit. They hadn’t reached the point where rain was coming down on them, at least, that was still a little to the south-east.

“On Zekira I spent hundreds of years flying over the Kiran deserts, in places that look very similar to this. Sitting on a desert wash is dangerous, and flying in thunder storms is equally so,” he spoke without spite, either he didn’t find her tone offensive, or was used to the question among others. He faintly unfurled his dark, leathery wing; it instantly caught air and he had to force it down again. “For me, flight is life – so I must know the wind and air as well as how to land safely.” He again glanced out to the dirt, “this area would not be a good place to stop, see how the dirt is smooth and there are short walls?”

While there were a couple little, bent bushes they blew over, it was true that most of the area for around ten meters around them was effectively flat, smooth and featureless. After that, a short barrier or incline, on which grass and more sturdy shrubs took hold. A wash, in other words.

“The water comes this way, going our direction,” he commented, ears back, “I would not land here.”

After he’d iterated it twice, Orion got the idea. Turquoise watched the Steed’s body language change from tense and nervous, to more relaxed and observant. Orion pulled the hovercraft out of the wash and onto the slightly more rocky plain. While it was noisier, she noted, she could also see farther. The ‘little ridge’ around the edges of this wash got bigger as they continued near it, and would have obscured her sight within a few hundred meters. “That better?” She called from the driver’s cabin, and got his gruff whinny of approval.

“That loose dirt would be hard to land on, you’re right,” Rocky said, “I do a lot of leaping from rooftop to rooftop,” he grinned as the others either imagined it, or recalled having seen him on TV doing just that. “But sometimes I’m out at the beach or in the dragonry parks, and it’s hard to get good footing out there.”

“And you have only two feet,” Morr’gan said, “I will say it is easier for me with four, and the option to not land.”

Rocky laughed and scratched the back of his head, reaching behind his curved horn to get at a spot. “Yeah, once I’ve jumped, I’m kind of committed to landing at the end of that arc. I can maneuver pretty well,” he thought about twisting around but he knew better: the torque might actually affect the hovercraft. “Even in the air, but once I’m heading down, somewhere is gonna get hit.”

“Turn on the stone, right before?” Dane suggested, and Rocky grunted with a smirk.

“Only in a big fight, yeah – enough pressure from a meteor strike like me, riots stop.” He smacked his fist into his other hand, and the two heroes gave a remarkably similar chuckle.

Khyrus said something about ‘crowd surfing’ and not knowing where he’d wind up on the wrong hand-waves. Turquoise laughed, “I’d be surprised you would make it anywhere other than the floor and under a pile of screaming fan girls,” he said.

“Well, that too, yeah,” Khyrus guiltily smirked. “It’s one of those things most people don’t have to worry about, I’m such the one-percent.”

“You’re such an ass,” Elkay punched his muscular shoulder, and then ‘smoothed it out’ when he pouted.

“Landing on soft soil in a rainstorm is probably slightly less dangerous than teleporting onto a ruin,” Turquoise muttered. “I have an advantage, in that I’m very good at it, but my father’s suggested there are some students in his teleportation class that shouldn’t have the option.”

“Wait, that’s a thing? You can do that?” Jennifer asked, “Well duh obviously you can, but I mean, how good are you at it?”

Turquoise blinked at her, eyebrow lifted exactly enough to convey just how crazy that question was. “I’m perfect at it,” he replied. “My father is the consummate teleporter, that’s why he teaches it.” He lowered his head a little and a smirk spread over his thin lips. “You want to know whether I can teleport the car, don’t you?”

Jennifer didn’t even hesitate, “of course I do!”

“I could, but where is the fun in that?” He said. His brightly colored eyes moved away from her, and upwards. “We’re about to get very wet.” He was going to say you’re about to, but where was the fun in dodging rain?

*** (( that's where the nano ends so far so this is bits of how else he is, and being Searched is part of the story overall. He would not be standing at Aneris until after the rally is done. )) ***

Since they head to Hoover Dam first, there is a good amount of fun they can have in the desert going east toward Black Mesa. The open road... roadless, traveled quickly but because it was an unsupervised area they get to do a lot more than just speed. Morr'gan and Dane fly about, and though they could make it to Black Mesa with reasonable speed, the 500 mile trek turns into a 2 day ride. But right about then, it occurs to Una that something might be a little weird. She clams up, and doesn't bring it up again for another couple days.

Their trip through Black Mesa however is quite entertaining for Turquoise. After all, it's one of his father's haunts. It's not his father's specific local incarnation, but he meets up with his own donor-father while they're doing a bit of a tour at the facility. They chat about this and that and Gordon Freeman and the unlikely possibility of an alien invasion, getting a good laugh out of it. Mostly because this Black Mesa doesn't do those kinds of experiments any more. It's actually Keenan that sets Turquoise up for bonding with Chemurth. While the elder Lane can appear rather stand-offish, he is absolutely thrilled with the idea that the Color Guard will be populating their world with dragons as well as descendants in the future. He and his gorgeous - if small - black dragon and attendant flitters and ravens will attend in the stands for Turquoise when he gets to the dragonry.

Until then however, there's a Rally to finish!

That weird feeling that Una was getting while they were allowing some of the scientists to get a look at the engine and design of that hovercraft came back when they began their trip to the Go-Cat Ranch. Of course she knew exactly where it was, being a Sanger meant that she was inherently able to locate that place - if nowhere else, since they all have a disastrous sense of direction otherwise. The problem? That Una was unusually subject to going into heat shortly before her menstrual cycle completes. While Dane (and ... well, pretty much everyone else in the vehicle) was more than a little interested in how that would play out, there was the complication that the full moon was in 2 days. And though she's otherwise intensely gifted - smart, very pretty, strong and strong willed, skilled and educated - her one curse is that she also transforms uncontrollably into her half cat form during the full moon. It was mere coincidence that her cycle and the moon were on the same days, but...

"Then shouldn't we call someone at the Ranch?" Rocky suggested.

Una's expression betrayed a strange fear. "Oh gods no, I can't go there like this!"

That confused even Turquoise. "But... why not? They'd know how to deal with it, wouldn't they?"

"Of course they would - but I'll be in heat." Her amazingly blue eyes were wide, contrary to the rest of the vehicle's passengers, due to the wind. When the blank looks on everyone's faces tipped her off, she added, "I am related to all of them."

Morr'gan nodded slowly, drawing attention to his long face. "I am not an expert on your race, but even my Zekiran friends - the humanoid ones - have expressed concerns about how closely related mates should be for the best outcome."

"Exactly," Una sighed. "But... I guess there's nothing for it, if we want to win this race."

They assured her that while they'd have to stay for a little bit, and those ten hours might be awful - tempting, dangerous hours - everyone would keep an eye on her. That was hardly difficult, according to Dane and Khyrus. After all she was a cat shifter...
***