Vapor
Noa hesitated. People rarely had any fear of her, slight and small and sickly-looking as she was, and normally, that frustrated her—aid to the pirate queen, scourge of the seas as much as anyone on the ship; she should have made people nervous. Well, not like this. Discomfort, safe as it was, was Noa's least favorite feeling.
"Rosalie told me a story once," she said, slowly, in that usual wispy way of hers, but each word had a weight as she measured it, "about how when she was older than me but not too much older, her parents got very, very mad, because she loved a criminal and a fighter and a wanderer, and a lady who was all those things."
That had never been the part of the story which took Noa's attention. Instead it was thinking of their quartermaster—big and broad and beaming, spinning her sword and always covered in the day's grime—once suffocated by chokers and driven to madness by the clattering of jeweled necklaces and buried and drowned in ruffles on ruffles in skirts and sleeves. It was remembering herself the same way.
"So that lady decided since they already didn't like her, she may as well go in for a pound. So she docked her ship at the nearest port and when nighttime came she helped Rosalie out of her window and down the whole side of the building and they ran away, and then they sailed away, and now everyone who's ever sailed a vessel fears us—" (that us was most certainly a boast) "—and whenever I see them holding hands, Captain Evy gets very red and Rosalie laughs at her."
At no point had Noa ever wanted to be good at feelings, even if it were safe to be so, and she doesn't know if sympathy would ever be something strong enough to trigger the power gnawing at the back of her mind and nearly asking for an excuse to burst out of her. Frankly, she wasn't interested in finding out; sympathy seemed inconvenient at best, and mostly, she wants the awkward weight of the other Magnolia's nerves alleviated. More importantly:
"Anyway," one Magnolia said to the other, "going through all of that trouble sounds like a terrible bother. You ought to just run away."
Her go-to problem-solver.
Already, that Noa has taken her cloak and cape off to reveal the marvel underneath counted as a secret: she held her right arm in front of her—rather, the prosthesis that replaced it; coppery metal with seams where plates met each other, where joints connected and slid against each other with whirring within and grinding softly without as she flexed each finger and bent and unbent her elbow, rolled her shoulder backwards and forwards. For such a clunky-looking contraption, looking too large and heavy for something so slight as her, the thing moved with incredible precision.
"It's my own fault," she said, slowly, and stared at her own fingers slowly, delicately uncurling from a loose fist. "I was very, very mad, and I tried to throw something, and instead, the whole thing," she touched her shoulder with her flesh hand and gestured down her whole metal arm, "went, boom." The final word came out as a breath, accompanied by her flesh hand popping out of a fist to indicate an explosion.
Abruptly, she picked her cape up off the ground and threw it over her shoulders, using her teeth to help tie ribbons that wrapped the long end around her arm. With that done, she threw her heavier cloak over that to keep most of her figure—certainly the arm—obscured.
"Well," she said, in the same flat tone she always said everything else, "it was a great bother at the time, but it isn't like I'm upset it happened."