<div align="center"><em>Vanessa gets some grub and distracted</em></div><hr/><br/>"Huh?" Vanessa said, glancing up at Vincent's chiding.  "Oh, sorry," she muttered, untwisting the wires until they seemed loose enough to not randomly connect.<br/><br/>After the lines for dinner lulled, Vanessa stuffed her newest project in her pants' pocket.  Even in the short year since arriving, Vanessa knew not to leave any projects lying around near idle hands.  The lines from the battery were still loose, and she didn't want to know how one of her half-siblings might do in an effort to fix the problem.  Not that they would break it carelessly as she might have theirs at some point, but merely that their idea of "fixed" could be very different than her own vision for the device.  She stood, grimacing at the oily dots she had accidentally left on the nice white and purple trimmed tablecloth.  It was rare that she and her siblings left their table very neat, but she was loathe to have soiled it even before she'd begun eating.<br/><br/><em>I guess that's why I can't have nice things,</em>she mused to herself, the cliche bittersweet in her mind.<br/><br/>The loose power line connected tentatively as she walked, flickering on and off with each careful step.  Too engrossed in not nudging into anyone as Vanessa made her way toward the brazer with her meal, the golden laser light popped on and off from under the fabric of her loose jeans.  Her dark bangs hung over her eyes as she dropped a hunk of cheese as large as her palm into the holy fire.<br/><br/><em>Please accept my offering, father Hephaestus.  Please, let this camera thing work out?</em><br/><br/>Vanessa closed her eyes in her silent prayer, then made her way hastily toward her cabin's table.  Despite herself, she gazed over at the Aphrodite table as she made her way past.  They were so pretty: all the girls with their rich colors and the graceful trails of their wavy tresses, all the boys with their body with all those smoothed edges like well polished wood glistening with prismatic raindrops...  And there was a new one among them, a dark, swarthy type with green-amber eyes and just enough stubble to be manly and unkempt but not enough to look too scruffy and deep tan skin whose color radiated from within like a low-burning, thick hunk of mahogany ...<br/><br/>Wincing, she knocked her shin on the bench of her table.