Mica Bluescale

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Mica is two years old and built like something that was assembled specifically to be charming, which she is, though whether she knows this is unclear and probably does not matter. Her scales are a bright, vivid cerulean blue, the kind of blue that looks intentional, deepening at her spine and fading to softer tones at her small hands and the broad planes of her face. Running along the top of her head is a spiky crest of pink and magenta, not scales, something softer, almost like down, that she cannot lie flat no matter what anyone does to it in the morning, and that her mother has largely stopped trying to tame. Small curved horns rise just above her temples, still more suggestion than architecture at her age, and the tips of her ears and the very end of her tail fade from blue to the same warm pink as her crest, giving her a gradient that would look deliberate on someone older. Her eyes are gold, not brown with golden notes but genuinely, completely gold, large and wide and carrying the specific expression of a creature who has decided that everything around her is interesting and potentially hers. She wears a belted linen tunic and has recently become very particular about the small leather pouches on her belt, which she fills with whatever she has collected that day and considers extremely important.

The most immediately notable thing about Mica in motion is that she is always in motion. She has been walking for several months now and has taken to it with the absolute conviction of someone who was specifically delayed and intends to make up for lost time. She does not walk at a pace. She walks at an investigation. Her hands reach for things before the rest of her has quite finished deciding to approach them, which has caused a number of small incidents in the kitchen and at least one memorable afternoon in Skitter's workspace. She wears a small green gem on a cord around her neck that Pip put there partly for beauty and partly because it helps locate her by sound when she has gone somewhere she shouldn't. Her crest flattens slightly when she is concentrating and rises when she is surprised or excited, which is a useful tells since she cannot yet always find the words for what she is feeling. She smells, faintly and permanently, of whatever Pip was making that morning, which is almost always something excellent.

Mica was born on Goldenleaf 10, 1304, the second daughter of Pip and Skitter Bluescale and the first child born while the family already had a real home, a real community, and a real reason to feel safe. Her parents had earned all of it the hard way, and by the time Mica arrived she inherited a life that had cost them years to build. She was named for the mineral, for the way her scales caught every available light in the room the first time Pip held her up and the midwife opened the window. Trinket, who had been informed in advance that she was getting a sister and had initial reservations, took one look and immediately revised her position entirely. Mica came into a house that was ready for her in every way that mattered. She has, so far, made excellent use of this.

Pip's kitchen is the center of the Bluescale household's gravity, and Mica understood this early. By the time she was crawling reliably she had established the kitchen as her primary territory, following the smells of whatever her mother was making with the single-minded focus of a creature who has correctly identified what the best room in the house is. She sits on the warm stone floor near the oven and watches Pip work with the focused attention that Skitter, charmed beyond all reason, calls "her studying face." She cannot yet help in any meaningful way and tries to help in every way regardless. She has tasted most of the ingredients in the kitchen, received detailed feedback from her face about all of them, and retained opinions. She knows the word for ice cream in both Common and the kobold dialect her parents use at home, and uses both, sometimes simultaneously, when she wants some. This is often.

Skitter does not bring Mica to his work sites, because Skitter is a responsible parent with functional judgment. Mica, however, follows him to the door and conducts a sustained and articulate protest every time he leaves without her, which he finds impossible to describe without smiling even when it is actively inconvenient. In his workspace at home, she is permitted to sit and observe, which she does with remarkable stillness for a child her age, watching his hands manipulate wire and mechanism with an attention she does not give to most things. She has her own small pouch of wire scraps he cut safe edges onto for her, and she twists them the way he does, with great seriousness and no particular output. He has decided not to interpret this. He has decided simply to find it the best thing that has ever happened to him, which it is.

The relationship between Mica and her older sister Trinket is not complicated. Mica has decided that wherever Trinket is, that is where Mica should be. Trinket, for her part, accepted this responsibility with a seriousness that surprised both parents and has not wavered. She narrates things to Mica, what they are looking at, what it is called, why it is interesting, with the patient authority of someone who considers herself Mica's primary educator, which she largely is. Mica responds to this with the devoted attentiveness of a student who finds her teacher completely credible. Trinket has taught Mica approximately forty words, several of which are correctly applied. She has also taught her a song about frogs that Pip has now heard several hundred times and that she maintains she does not mind.

Mica has never known a world that feared her. She has never seen her parents flinch at an approaching stranger, never been told to hide, never understood why her scales might be a problem for anyone. The people of Goodberry greet her by name. Customers at Pip's know her on sight. The Geodegazer household, sprawling and chaotic and full of children her own age and older, is simply part of her world. This is the life her parents built through loss and survival and years of careful, stubborn hope, and Mica inhabits it completely and without any sense of how extraordinary it is that she gets to. She is two years old. She is already home.

Mica's current objectives, as best as can be observed and inferred, are: reaching the interesting thing on the shelf, determining what it tastes like, adding anything promising to the pouches, finding Trinket, and obtaining ice cream. These goals rotate in priority throughout any given day and occasionally all present themselves simultaneously, which is when the household becomes most eventful. She is also working on sentences, with notable progress, and on the fine motor control needed to open latches, which Pip has mixed feelings about.

It is too early to say with confidence what Mica will grow into. She has her mother's nose for things, not just food, though certainly food, but the quality of a room, the mood of the people in it, the small detail that doesn't fit. She has her father's patience when something earns it and his hands, already reaching for mechanisms with the same unconscious precision. She has Trinket's fearlessness filtered through her own particular version of it, which is less about courage and more about a genuine failure to register why she shouldn't. What she will do with all of this is not yet legible. She is two. She is paying attention to everything. The rest will declare itself in time.