<em>Vanessa heads to dinner</em><br/><hr/><br/>"Uh huh," Vanessa grunted to her eldest half-brother as he wandered off.  She'd tried not to stare as Vincent exchanged the hugs and chaste kiss with Abigale.  Though their affection was fairly tame, such romances were a strange and alien thing to Vanessa.  She had had only a couple boyfriends back at home, both fellow students at her school.  One had some sort of nuero-muscular disorder like she did, only much more severe.  They had gone to the Grand Canyon together with his family when the Make-a-Wish people got back to him.  She tried not to think about him; all his pictures were ugly now.<br/><br/>It was something she had made for him which had developed into her current project.  Wanting a bit of privacy, she had created a laser motion sensor which sounded only when something without large metal components passed through the beam.  Altering the beam to be reflected internally by high-polished disks of celestial bronze, she had created a beam which could only be obscured by the divine or the monstrous.  Even though she didn't yet have an application for the laser, Vanessa was very excited by her creation.<br/><br/>She brought the laser's case to dinner with her, its mass making her pocket lumpy and bulging as she made her way to dinner.  Vanessa walked carefully, hoping not to nudge or crush her new creation before it had even been completed.  She sat at her table, tinkering with her device as she waited for the others to gather and get their meals.  Vanessa never minded going last, all the fewer people for her to jostle or drop her tray on.  The golden light of the laser flickered and shot randomly out into the crowd, passing through tables and trays to lay yellow dots on the half-bloods and satyrs already gathering.