"We are going to wear our ceremonial robes, I assume?" Seth entered Sarah's apothecary. Sarah was mixing perfumes, she and Sys had come up with the idea of creating a scent to match the lavender gauze and flower arrangements, even though the plant decorations were still in question on account of the dragons' appetite. The small shed was saturated with a clamor of floral scents, which shouted at each other so loudly one could no longer tell them apart. They all ended up in a overpowering blend, screeching in sharp tunes of lavender and hyacinth. Lilac tried too assert itself as a top note too, but it was trounced by the other two scents, and whimpered helplessly at the end of the lab table where its open vial resided. "Good Heavens! Open the louvers, you can cut the smell with a knife. Whatever it is you are working on right now, throw it away it and never consider it again!" Seth protested, stifled by the heavy fragrance. "How can you even breathe in here? I'll never get this smell out of my clothes!" "It is a process," Sarah defended the obnoxious perfume.

“Who is waiting for Jimmy and Jenna?" sister Novis poked her head through the door that sister Roberta had left ajar. The sister was revising a last minute idea for the festivities, secretly offended that Lily was so adamant about not having anything happen that wasn't already approved. What a bore! "I thought you were," she stopped from her work to look intently at sister Novis. "Nobody told me anything, you worked with Jimmy a lot during the last three months, I thought you already arranged something, we all assumed..." the sister defended herself. "All of you always assume, what a punishment for the scientific mind!" sister Roberta philosophized. "When are they supposed to arrive?" "They already have, if you'd check the solenoid room..." sister Novis gently suggested. "Oh, dear, they're locked in. How long have they been there?" sister Roberta started panicking.”

“Did you see my notes?" Humon asked, shuffling the pads on Lily's desk. Lily lifted her eyes from the mound of packages, reminders, and party decorations that had been slowly accumulating around her ever since they got the blessed news the Bonding Ceremony was going to be celebrated on Terra Two. Her maternal desire to be of assistance to her eldest daughter was fighting an older, more personality specific urge to dump everything at once and take a trip to a region of space she hadn't visited before. She realized, while thinking this, that there were no regions she'd never seen, and strained her overwhelmed mind to figure out if and where she saw Humon's work. She jerked, aggravated.”