So, Haven's an interesting place. We're still settling in, and up until the happenings I'm going to relate, I had managed to avoid most of the dangers (though I was bitten by a cave spider, and that...was not fun.)
No one told me the electrified snakes on Haven had a winter form.
I mean, look at that thing. The fact that the eyes glow doesn't even register in their normal, desert-hide appearance. But patterned with slow gloss and dapple? Those eyes really stand out.
Thankfully, a friend tipped me to a Blue Sun product, the "Anti-Arc". You can just make it out strapped to my ankle. It gives off a low, not precisely pleasant subsonic hum, but it keeps the snakes away, and I'm perfectly happy with that.
In the meantime, the Duke had an interesting idea I wanted to test out. Considering we're pretty much limited by what we can ship past the UAP, legally, and what's on Haven itself, we're doing a lot of reconsideration on what we can offer the population that they'd want or need. And he suggested it might be possible to harvest Haven's toxic mushrooms and distill them into alcohol. First, it would clear patches of the fungus from places where people need to go, namely the mines, and second, we've done it before with toxic substances, subsuming the toxic elements in alcohol and aging the results.
I figured I'd be the perfect person to check on the toxicity levels, because I was still very comfortable with toxic mushrooms from the pregnancy potion. So off I traipsed to the mines to check. This...was not my best idea.
As it happens, the mushrooms are very toxic, even to a demifae, even to someone who spent the larger part of several weeks inhaling vapors from aconite, death caps, destroying angels and cloud agarics. And here's how it goes: stand too close, and your health drops by half (green to yellow). Stay in place, and it drops by half again. Still stand there, the health bar divides by yet another half and goes red...and that's when I started walking away, but I wasn't fast enough.
Dropped like a rock.
Now, thankfully, I'm still fairly durable, but it unnerved me a bit. I'll have to report back to the Duke that they're too toxic to brew, I think.
One more thing, though...and this one could get tricky.
Lady Justine is trying to teach me to mine asteroids (and I'm horrid at it, is anyone surprised?), but in order to stay completely within the force shield on the little rock hoppers Port Hope provides, she recommended I change out of Haven winter gear into something a little more close-fitting? Well, I happened to have a skinsuit, so changed quickly, but when I caught my reflection...
...I am definitely looking pregnant at this point. Which, to be fair, isn't that surprising--gestation for most leopards is 90 days, so if the Duke's genetics hold, it'll be the first week or two of January when I give birth. (Though if mine hold, as said, everything's out the window.) And that wouldn't be a problem, per se, except...
We're playing human on Haven. Because they have no place in their perceptions for a demifae ex-Phouka and a magically shapeshifting synthesized intelligence and occasional demigod. There's not even vocabulary that exists to explain.
So now, the big decision becomes--do I prop up my illusion spells again, as I've been doing at work, and proceed on as if nothing's changing? Do I just go with it but gently deflect questions? Because the one thing I do know, is the kittens cannot visit Haven. Not the least of which is that they will be kittens, at least until we figure out if they've inherited my natural shapeshifting, or not, and that will take some time for them to grow into whatever they'll become. And I do not want to field questions on why the human CSO of a shipping company has given birth to two leopard cubs. Thanks, but no.
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