touchscreens | [audio] backdated to the end of the de-aging event

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[audio] backdated to the end of the de-aging event

[Fortuna begins a network call like normal. Well...sort of like normal. She sounds hesitant now, a little slower to speak and not quite so confident. Wherever she's standing, there's an echo.]

Hey Saeng Seong, you know what? [A beat.] ...no, never mind.

[There's a beep and a soft tap as she sets her commlink down. But the audio continues. She doesn't realize the button to end the call didn't register her touch.

She sighs heavily.]

Thought I'd convinced myself I wasn't ugly. But no, I had to go and look human again for a while. Didn't think I could pull a fast one on myself, but I guess I did. [Another sigh, softer, and a pause.] Now what? Now what... Keep telling myself other trolls have it worse? Right, like I'm gonna call all of them ugly. Living a double standard, that's what that'd be.

Drek...thought I was okay. I thought...

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[She still can't believe she didn't actually end that call. It was easy, with her large hands, to hit the wrong spot on the screen or to hit two buttons at once (and for the commlink to register neither). Normally, she was careful enough about it, but...this certainly wasn't normal.]

Didn't always look this way. Some of us trolls look human until puberty. For me, that was, hell, might have even happened again if it had gone on a few more weeks.

[If you can't tell from her wording, she's using a speech-to-text program. She can't be bothered to focus on the little keyboard, more aware than ever that her hands are just too big for it.]

you changed without knowing it would happen?

[He sure as hell knows how that is, in a lot of ways. Maybe the reason she's upset is because she wants to look like the way she used to be.]

*Close, but not quite. It's hard to say what she wants, really. She's aware other people consider her pretty or "pretty for a troll"; she does a pretty good job of convincing herself they're right most of the time while deep down believing otherwise. And then there's the guilt of realizing the parts of her that are pretty are the ones that look "more human", and the fact that trolls are big and imposing and have a reputation for violence due to the behavior of the traumatized initial wave of goblinized people, and just the general problems arising from metahumanity as a whole still being more than half human and trolls being the least like that image in general.*

Yeah. I mean my mom told me about my grandma's death once; happened a couple years before I was born. She had heart problems and the shock of goblinizing killed her. So the genes were there, but they skipped my mom so I didn't think it would happen to me, and she never seemed to think so either.

[He doesn't know if it's better or worse that it wasn't done by someone else and was just a genetic thing. ... It's not as if she can just cut her hair and go back to the way she was like he can. Then again, he's not even sure if doing that would be enough to go back to looking the way he was, arm aside.

But what is he supposed to say here? Should he try to reassure her or something?]

you don't have to be human for people to like you. you just have to be a person.

[She's ahead of him on that front, at least.]

*Too bad it's really not an issue of other people liking her...*

Pretty sure there are some unlikable people out there. [unintelligible sound - please edit manually] Don't know what that's supposed to mean. We're all people.

*Sorry you don't recognize the world's most deflated laugh, commlink. She's not going to bother with that manual edit, no matter how tacky it looks.*

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