<div class="floatleft">(https://i.imgur.com/TxRLbsD.jpg)</div><strong>NAME:</strong>Lor Zod<br/>(Optional)<strong>WEARING:</strong>Kryptonian Battle Armour (House of Zod)<br/><strong>DAY:</strong>Aug 22, 2020<br/><strong>TIME:</strong>Early Night<br/><strong>LOCATION:</strong>Secret Sanctuary<br/><strong>CONTENT:</strong>Showing Artemis The Old Sanctuary<br/><strong>TAGGING:</strong>Artemis<br/><br/><hr/><br/>She should not have been impressed. His actions should not have proven anything - Zod had not spared the lives of the Royal Flush Gang out of any moral conviction, it was simply out of convention. The wisdom she shared was certainly wisdom and Zod could remember his father instilling him with the same core idea, but he doubted it really applied here. But it was not worth debating.<br/><br/><strong>"I experienced pleasure in Blackgate Penitentiary. I slept on a bed with silken sheets and ate delicacies prepared by the elite chefs. They resorted to such temptations to secure my cooperation when other measures failed to bend me to their will."</strong>Zod related. It was perhaps not the pleasure that she spoke of. He did not understand why she would be sad about his upbringing - why she should feel empathy towards him. It was not something he was brought up to experience. Not something he was bred and made for. He was not incapable of empathy - it remained a desirable quality, to enable the military caste to desire to protect Krypton and all of its peoples. But he did not have the seemingly indelible human propensity to simply project it onto any living being.<br/><br/>Artemis's hands upon him had Zod's lips part to make a small sound of distress. His eyes looked rapidly from one direction to the other, taking in her arms while his senses were assaulted with all of the input of her touch. His heart rate increased, his breathing deepened, and his pupils and nostrils flared. It was not fear that Zod was experiencing, not really - it was a vestigial chemical response to unknown danger that remained within his DNA. He had control of himself and his powers and it was a very good thing for Artemis. If he were a different Kryptonian, one who had not cultivated the iron control that Zod had, things could have taken a very tragic turn in that moment. The impulse to take her hands off of him with all of the speed and strength his body could exert came to Zod and he stifled it before his body could act upon it.<br/><br/>"Take your naked hands from me." Zod said in a very quiet, albeit shaky voice. Hardly more than murmur, scarcely even a whisper. It was his only answer. He found her company otherwise agreeable, and her features aesthetically pleasing, so he was prepared to forgive her this trespass. It did not occur to him to think how nice it was to him - to be touched, bare skin to bare skin, was too alien and unknown to him to experience it in that way.