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Seeing as how you weren’t needed here anymore, you made the executive decision to slip away while they weren’t paying any attention to you. It wouldn’t make much of a difference even if they did notice. Joy was the only one capable of catching you, and she didn’t seem terribly interested in doing so at the moment.
At the very least, your conversation with her gave her a few things to think about. And while she probably hadn’t forgiven the Stacy’s completely for everything they said, she was interested enough to hear them out. That was all that mattered at the end of the day. You got their foot in the door, and all you could do was hope for the best.
Only, you didn’t know what the best outcome for Joy would look like. Would that mean leaving the Morlocks and living with Gwen’s dad? Would she ask them both to visit her here in Central Park as often as they could? Would she try and patch things up between Warren and the Stacy’s? You truly had no idea.
Whatever it was, though, you would have to be sure to support them if there were any hitches along the way. You contemplated this whilst swinging through the park, keeping an eye out for the Morlock, Glass. Instead, you found someone else entirely.
Little Ester, an outrageously tall mutant girl with long black hair and a patchwork dress made to suit her unusual build, was currently kneeling in the middle of a patch of flowers that looked to be out of season for this time of year. The bright orange flowers seemed to grow from her presence alone. At the same time, her hair and nails grew slightly longer, a penalty of her inability to properly control her powers.
You couldn’t tell from a glance, but Ester was actually about nine years old.
Well…she would insist that she was “nine and three quarters”, and implying otherwise might risk upsetting her. And that was the last thing you wanted to do.
Doing so might result in one walking away with slightly longer hair, longer fingernails and toenails, or, god forbid, a couple days shaved off of your lifespan.
But there were benefits to being around her as well. Some Morlocks have attested to having improved eyesight after interacting with her. The older ones stopped complaining about muscle pain and creaky old bones, claiming that they felt their youth coming back to them. Others who were missing one or more teeth, ended up regrowing healthy ones, even when their mutations had no enhanced regenerative qualities.
There were some cases when secondary mutations developed during times of great stress, but that didn’t seem to be the case for these people. And there was this one time, you swear to god, you came home after spending the day playing with her, and you’d become a bit more muscular. It was a minimal change, but you’d noticed it.
Hanging out with Ester was a mixed bag, but the side effects weren’t normally that pronounced, so long as she didn’t grow emotionally unstable at any point during your interaction.
(Cont.)
