Aura blinked up at Arthur, eyes wide and mouth full of oatmeal. Apparently trying to ignore everything - especially adorable kitty tails and slithery snake-women - worked<i>too</i>well. She swallowed slowly and tried not to blush. It didn’t work. “Morning,” she half-said. Arthur Dent was disarming enough<i>without</i>the element of surprise. Disarmingly wise, disarmingly handsome, disarmingly<i>cool</i>. That, and he was<i>human</i>. She wasn’t sure whether that made it better or worse. It was hard not to feel small near full humans, and she always worried that they looked down on her. Of course, a lot of them<i>did</i>. Arthur Dent<i>didn’t</i>, and that made him a better person than she was. She’d always looked down on transhumans from afar, and now she had to look down on herself.<br/><br/>“I’m… not great,” she said truthfully. Lying wasn’t her thing - even little meaningless ones like ‘I’m all right’ - and lying to Arthur Dent even less. He was the only person she could talk to, really, even though she felt like she was wasting his time. She took a long sip of orange juice and tried to look anywhere but into his eyes. “I keep… sleepwalking, or something. Waking up near a mansion not far from here. It’s… scaring me a little.” She let out a long, uneven breath. “But I don’t think it’s dangerous.”<div class="messageTextEndMarker"> </div>