#＆. delphine geneva ‚ study .

[endfght]

delphine has little to no concept of personal space. she was raised in a space where physical contact was rarely seen publicly, and especially within her family, it was non-existent. so, when she's on land and she sees people hugging or holding hands or kissing?? yeah, she wants to do that too. the first person she meets is getting a hug. when she watches a couple kiss one another hello/goodbye, she's giving all of her friends big kisses Right On The Mouth whenever she sees them next. she can and will insert herself into your life if given the opportunity whether you like it or not.

she was raised on the views that humans were less-than her people. she was taught not to fear them, but to be cautious. they were dangerous (but her people were moreso), but easy to defend against so long as you weren't caught off guard. to them, humans were monsters and poachers that wanted to capture delphine's people and perform vile experiments on them. stories told to frighten children and deter them from wandering too close to the surface.

^ her interest in them lay with her intrigue ; they were interesting to her: their customs, the things they ate, how they spoke, etc. everything amazes delphine. think ariel but like, creepier. she collects whatever human-thing that she can get her hands on, keeping an ugly, heaping pile of actual garbage within a hidden cove close to her home.

before she went on land for the first time, she was one of the few of her people that made frequent trips to the surface, or as close as others would allow. she only began interacting with others once she was on her own two feet, but she still quietly observed from afar for a long while before that.

the transformation in both gaining and losing her tail can be incredibly painful. for the first few hours after coming to land and shedding her tail (where the very tip remains, rotting away on the beach wherever she first shifted) her feet and legs are incredibly sensitive to most if not all sensations ; each step like walking over the sharpest glass and debris imaginable. the feeling fades eventually, but each and every time she returns to land is the same. for a short time it feels like she's suffocating, where her scales chip off and her gills begin to close up ― it takes a moment to get her lungs working properly.

her senses are far more keen than the average human. she lives primarily pretty deep in the ocean, with little sunlight penetrating all the way down there, her people adapted with an impressive sense of sight in little to no lighting. because of this, delphine can be incredibly sensitive to bright/flashing lights; similar to sharks, delphine and her people have an extensive yet somewhat limited sense of smell, detection depending on the magnitude of the source, its distance, and dispersal in the water overall; as far as food from the sea goes, delphine is a connoisseur. more than capable of passing a taste test blindfolded, she thrives with an excess of salt in her diet. sugar and caffeine have an intense reaction on her, giving her immense bursts of energy where she is overly excitable and harder to control; sensitivity to touch is inclined in general; her people oftentimes travel small, tight spaces using echolocation, and because of that, they have evolved with an enhanced sense of hearing than others of their kind.

[artandfeminism]

2019 WIKIPEDIA EDIT-A-THON SATURDAY, MARCH 2 AT THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART WITH HUNDREDS OF EVENTS INTERNATIONALLY THROUGHOUT THE MONTH OF MARCH

FEBRUARY 14, 2019 FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE PRESS CONTACT: MOLLY KURZIUS, molly_kurzius@moma.org

New York City -- Art+Feminism’s sixth-annual Wikipedia Edit-a-thon, an all-day event designed to generate coverage of gender, feminism, and the arts on Wikipedia, will take place at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Education and Research Building, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 4 West 54 Street, on Saturday, March 2, 2019 from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. The much-anticipated event features panel discussions, workshops, tutorials for the beginner Wikipedian, ongoing editing support, reference materials, childcare, and refreshments. People of all gender identities and expressions are encouraged to attend.

“This year we focused on growth, both in people and in focus,” said Art+Feminism lead co-organizers Siân Evans, Jacqueline Mabey, McKensie Mack, Michael Mandiberg, and Melissa Tamani Becerra. “We welcomed Melissa Tamani Becerra as lead co-organizer, we now boast thirteen of Art+Feminism regional organizers from Accra to Taiwan, and we’ve brought on Community and Communication Fellows with the goal of training the next generation of activists in the arts. And, in focusing our 2019 campaign on editing about non-binary topics, we made public our personal commitment to an expansive understanding of gender. This way, we can better represent the gender identities of Art+Feminism organizers and participants."

The Edit-a-thon at The Museum of Modern Art will feature a series of programs throughout the day. This year’s event kicks off with a conversation exploring visibility and vulnerability, featuring writer and archivist Che Gossett; performance artist, writer, and educator Alok Vaid-Menon; and Simone Browne, an Associate Professor in the Department of African and African Diaspora Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. The discussion is moderated by Danielle A. Jackson, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Media and Performance Art, The Museum of Modern Art.

The Edit-a-thon will also feature Gallery Sessions on feminist art; a discussion of the forward-thinking teaching artists who shaped the development of the Department of Education via materials in the library archives; a workshop on creating boundaries to combat implicit and explicit bias; and a teach-in on deleting and defending articles on Wikipedia. With the intention of making women artists and photographers of the African Diaspora more visible, The Black Lunch Table hosts their Wikimedia Photo Booth. Professional photographers Laylah Amatullah Barrayn, Andrea Cauthen, and Adama Delphine Fawundu will be on hand taking portraits for upload to Wikimedia Commons. Communal editing tables will be hosted by AfroCROWD, an organization that increases awareness of free culture movements among people of African descent, and POWarts, which champions the professional lives of women in the art world. Across the street, New York Public Library’s 53rd Street Branch will host Drag Queen Story Hour and offer a zine-making workshop.

In addition to the Edit-a-thon at The Museum of Modern Art, New York City will play host to events at a wide range of institutions, including The Jewish Museum (March 3); Kickstarter (March 3); International Center of Photography (March 9); Interference Archive (March 10); Bard Graduate Center (March 16); Columbia University (March 16); Pratt Institute (March 19); The School of Visual Arts Library (March 21); Hauser & Wirth (March 27). Internationally, edit-a-thons will take place during the month of March at hundreds of institutions such as Impact Hub, Accra; Kunstmuseum Basel; The Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus; Buni Innovation Hub, Dar es Salaam; Pand P, Eindhoven; Università degli studi di Salerno, Fisciano; MAMCO, Geneva; Asia Art Archive, Hong Kong; Cornell University, Ithaca; Musée d’art de Joliette; ICA, Los Angeles; Initiative for Indigenous Futures, Montreal; University of Nigeria, Nsukka; Mills College Art Museum, Oakland; Centre Culturel Suisse, Paris; Le Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, Quebec City; University of Nevada, Reno; Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Santiago; Womany Wonderland, Taipei City; Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, The University of British Columbia, Vancouver; Winston-Salem State University; Material Zürich; and online in a month-long Edit-a-thon led by Women in Red.  An updating list of venues can be found on the Art+Feminism’s website: http://www.artandfeminism.org/find-an-event/

On the eve of the March Edit-a-thons, Art+Feminism announced the release of new artworks from Wendy Red Star and Tuesday Smillie, created under the auspices of the Call to Action art commissions program. Established in 2017, artists are invited to create Creative Commons licensed works to be hosted on Wikimedia Commons; Divya Mehra’s Dangerous Women (Blaze of Glory) was the inaugural commission. Ashkaamne (matrilineal inheritance) (2019) by Wendy Red Star depicts the artist and her daughter, Beatrice Red Star Fletcher, reclining in matching striped shirts and blankets, with the words, “Apsáalooke feminist,” repeated in the background. Apsáalooke inheritance is based on matrilineal descent, tracing affiliation along with the mother-to-daughter line; the image represents a lineage, female empowerment, and the next generation.  Rage/Sorrow (2018) by Tuesday Smillie is an animated GIF. The text “RAGE” appears large, filling the square format from left to right. “RAGE” is quickly obscured by a cascade of rectangles and the text, “SORROW,” repeated in a smaller font. Rage/Sorrow, a born-digital work, suggests the role of technology and the internet in nurturing and exacerbating pre-existing social divisions. The endless loop of the GIF mimics a cycle of anger and anguish produced by the constant stream of horrifying news.

Founded in 2014 by Siân Evans, Jacqueline Mabey, Michael Mandiberg and Laurel Ptak, Art+Feminism is a do-it-yourself campaign to improve coverage of gender, feminism, and the arts on Wikipedia. Wikipedia’s gender trouble is well-documented; in a 2011 survey, the Wikimedia Foundation found that less than 10% of its contributors identify as women. This lack of participation has led to significant gaps in content on the world’s most popular online research tool. Since 2014, over 10,000 people at more than 800 events around the world have participated in our edit-a-thons, resulting in the creation and improvement of more than 33,000 articles on Wikipedia.

The 2019 Wikipedia Edit-a-thon at The Museum of Modern Art is organized by Art+Feminism, led by Siân Evans, Jacqueline Mabey, McKensie Mack, Michael Mandiberg, and Melissa Tamani Becerra, in collaboration with AfroCROWD, Black Lunch Table, Women in Red, the Professional Organization for Women in the Arts (POWarts) and The Museum of Modern Art, New York and with support from Qubit New Music, Inc. and Wikimedia NYC.

Art+Feminism’s Regional Ambassadors are Mohammed Sadat Abdulai, Accra; Marta Delatte, Barcelona; Daniela Brugger, Basel; Walaa Abdel Manaem, Cairo; Medhavi Gandhi, Chandigarh; Amanda Meeks, Flagstaff; Dominique Eliane, Ivory Coast; Stacey Allan, Los Angeles; Amber Berson, Montreal; Linden How, Portland; Taryn Tomasello, Portland; Juliana Monteiro, São Paulo and Jessie Mi, Taiwan. The 2019 Fellows are Keon Dillon and Nina Yeboah.

The Art + Feminism Wikipedia Edit-a-thon at The Museum of Modern Art is supported by The Modern Women’s Fund.

The Art + Feminism initiative is made possible by the Wikimedia Foundation.

Education at MoMA is made possible by a partnership with Volkswagen of America.

[lobsters-on-their-heads]

Talk to Me, Chap. 3

This will be the last chapter of this story.  In putting this story together, I was struck by how much Delphine missed out on in season 4 and the beginning of season 5.  I’m assuming here that she didn’t have the chance to learn much from Felix in Geneva, since Adele said she was “all business.”  

You can read all three chapters here: http://archiveofourown.org/works/11697588

“Can you tell me why PT, or John, I guess, brought you to the island?  Why he saved you after you got shot?”

They were sitting now, with Delphine propped up against all the pillows that had migrated to the Rabbit Hole over the past several months.  Cosima nestled between her legs, her back against Delphine’s chest and a hand on each knee.  Delphine toyed with one of Cosima’s dreadlocks between her fingers and kissed her temple before answering.

“I can tell you as much as I know, or what I assume to be true.”

“That works.”

Delphine took the lock of hair in her fingers and brushed it against her own cheek, then held it under her nose and breathed in.  Cosima squeezed her thigh.

“Are you gonna tell me, or are you just gonna smell my hair?”

“I’m going to do both.  The man who calls himself Mr. Westmoreland knew I was the head of Dyad.  He knew I worked with clones, and he knew about my medical background.  Leekie told him about me, he said.  According to him, he’d wanted to get me in his circle for some time, but I don’t know how true that is.”

“Yeah, he’s kinda full of shit, isn’t he?”

“Mmhm.”  Delphine finally dropped Cosima’s hair and rested her hand against Cosima’s stomach.  “He is full of a lot of shit, but he’s more transparent than he thinks he is, for people who want to see.”

“People like you.”

“Yes.  And like you.”  She sighed.  “Van Lier knew that Evie Cho and some of the other Neolutionists wanted me out of the way, so he--”

“Wait.”  Cosima half-turned in Delphine’s arms and held up a hand.  “The people who... who got you shot, like, Duko and all them, they were Neolution?  But then Neolution saved you?  I’m confused.”

Delphine laughed and nodded.  “It is confusing.  There are different factions with various ties to Neolution.  Some of them know about their ties, and some of them don’t.  They all have different agendas, different goals, and different morals, as you’ve seen with Coady and Susan Duncan, even.  Some parts of Neolution wanted me dead; Nealon told me that.”

“Oh, shit, Nealon was Neolution, too?”  Cosima settled back against Delphine’s chest and readjusted the blanket over them.  “Maybe I shouldn’t really be surprised.  He’s the one who intercepted Rachel.  I guess he’s the one who sent her to the island, then.”

“I believe so, yes.”

“He played all of us.  He played us against each other.”

“He did his part.”  

Cosima thought back to her time with Dr. Nealon, her doctor for the months when Delphine was in charge of Dyad.  He’d always creeped her out a little bit, with his loose skin, watery eyes, and vaguely Mengelian outlook on life.  His treatment of her, though, had been nothing but professional.  She couldn’t remember ever seeing him and Delphine interact.  “So, what,” she asked, “did Nealon just walk into your office one day and tell you Neolution wanted you dead?  How’d that work out for him?”

“Not exactly.”  Delphine was silent for a few moments then, running her fingers over Cosima’s knuckles and wrist bones.  When she asked the question, Cosima’s tone had been light, but she knew it was a loaded topic.  “I found out that he’d replaced Rachel with Krystal Goderich, so I had him arrested, and when I interrogated him, he told me about Neolution’s role in things.  Fortunately for us, too, because I could then call Sarah and stop her from giving Kendall’s DNA to Ferdinand.”

“Oh, God, Ferdinand.”  Cosima curled her lip in distain and dug her fingertips into Delphine’s thigh.

Delphine arched an eyebrow that Cosima did not see.  “What about him?”

“Well, he’s a terrible person, for starters.  I’m not even sure I’d call him a person most of the time.  Not any more.”

“I see.”

“But, you were telling me about Nealon.  I’ll fill you on Ferdinand later.”  Cosima tilted her head back to give her a small smile.  “Your story is much more interesting.”

“If you say so.”  Delphine bent to kiss her, lingering on her lips a moment before sliding her tongue inside her mouth.  She did not give the impression of wanting to continue, so Cosima pulled away.

“Are you trying to distract me?”

“Not intentionally.”  

Delphine was smirking again, though, and when she bit her lower lip Cosima knew she was full of it.  “No, no, you don’t.”  Turning her whole body this time, she propped one arm against the wall and looked right into Delphine’s eyes.  “I have waited too damn long to have this conversation with you.”

With a sigh, Delphine dropped her head back against the headboard and ran her fingers through her hair.  “All right, but I have lost track.  What is it you wanted to know?”

“Nealon.  You said you arrested him and he told you Neolution wanted to kill you.”

“Yes.”

Cosima gently prodded the skin below Delphine’s sternum.  “Tell more more about that.”

“Well, first he offered me a position, a ‘one-time offer,’ as he called it, with Neolution.  He said they had a place for me.  I refused.”

Cosima frowned.  “Did he mean the place on the island?  You got there anyway.”

“I’m not sure if that’s what he meant.  I didn’t ask.”

“When did he tell you this?”

“The day I was shot.  The day Ferdinand was supposed to take samples from Kendall Malone.  He offered me a position, showed me a video of Rachel on the island, and when I called for the guards to take him away, no one came.”

“What?  Weren’t there guards around him already?  Around you?”  Cosima remembered Delphine’s days at Dyad, and how guards or assistants had never been too far away from the new director.

“There were, at first.  They should have come instantly, and when they didn’t, I knew something was wrong.”  She took a deep breath.  “And then Nealon attacked me.”

“He attacked you?”

“Yes.  He tried to strangle me, and this little worm-thing came out of his mouth, like he was trying to.... to attack me with it somehow.”

“Oh shit.”  Cosima sat straight up.  “Did it go in your mouth?  Did it actually....”  Not bothering to finish the sentence, she reached over and turned Delphine’s face from side to side, looking at her cheeks.  But of course, it wasn’t visible, and the light was low in the basement now.  She would need a flashlight or an ultrasound.

Delphine took her wrist and stilled it.  “No, chérie.  It didn’t touch me.  Don’t worry.”

With a slow breath, Cosima relaxed.  “Thank God.”  Then another thought occurred to her.  Delphine, after all, had been with Neolution before they even met, and if Leekie had a bot in his cheek without anyone knowing about it.... “You didn’t get one before, then?” she asked.  

“One of those worms?”  Delphine almost laughed.  “No.  Why would I get one, and how?”

“Well, Leekie had one.  Apparently it was all the rage for a certain sort of Neolutionist.  They put one in Sarah and she didn’t even know it.”

Now it was Delphine’s turn to lean away and stare at her girlfriend with wide eyes.  “Are you serious?”

“Completely.  Here, I’ll show you.”  Cosima climbed out of bed and wrapped herself in a small throw blanket that covered her torso and most of her buttocks.  Delphine stayed seated in the bed while Cosima bounded over to one of the storage cabinets and returned with two glass vials.  “Did Nealon’s worm look like these guys?”

Even in the waning light, Delphine’s face paled.  She took one of the vials to inspect more closely.  “Yes.  Exactly like this.  Where did you get these?”

Cosima settled onto the bed.  “Well, that one came from Sarah’s cheek.  It was implanted sometime while she was held at Dyad, we’re not sure when.  Without her consent, obviously.  This one-” She held up the other vial. “-came from Dr. Leekie.  Apparently it was modifying his genes to prevent Alzheimer’s.”

“That was in Aldous Leekie’s face?  How....?”  With Sarah’s bot still in her left hand, Delphine pointed to the other vial.  

“How did we get it?”

“Among other questions, yes.  And why do you have that cheeky grin all of a sudden?”

Cosima’s grin widened, showing her tongue peeking through her teeth.  “Now, that is a funny story.  You know how Rachel told you Leekie died in a plane crash?”

“She said he had a heart attack on a private jet.”

“Yeah, same thing, total bullshit, nobody believed her.  We all thought Dyad just had him eliminated, like, in his house or something, right?”

“Right.”

“Well, he was killed, obviously, but not by Dyad.  Donnie Hendrix shot him in the head and buried him under their garage.”  Seeing Delphine do the same open-mouthed double take she herself had made upon learning that, Cosima giggled.  “Alison helped, of course.  With the burying, not the killing.”

“Sainte merde,” Delphine whispered.

“I know, right?  We had no idea.  Totally puts Alison and Donnie both in a whole new light.  It worked out pretty well, though, because once we knew Neos got these bots in themselves voluntarily, Alison dug up his head and sent it to us in an insulated handbag bag so we could extract this little guy for study.”

Still gaping, Delphine looked from Cosima’s smug face to the bots in their vials, and back to Cosima again.  Despite the gruesomeness of the conversation topic, or perhaps because of the contrast it provided, Cosima was again struck by just how beautiful Delphine was, especially with her hair so delightfully mussed.  The little voice in Cosima’s head reminded her that she still only had a few days with Delphine, which would even out to maybe less than 24 hours alone and awake with her before she jaunted off to France.  She pushed the little voice aside, though, focusing on the matter at hand.

“We should probably check that you don’t have one of these in you, though,” she said.  “You were with Neolution long enough, they could’ve snuck one in without you ever knowing about it.”

Delphine ran her tongue around inside her mouth, the same way Cosima had when she learned about the bots.  “I don’t feel anything.”

“Well, no one does.  It’s weird, because they’re not super tiny, but they affect the nerves inside the mouth just so that the host isn’t aware of their presence.”  Cosima rose again from the bed, took the second vial from Delphine, and put both of them back in storage.  “Come on, indulge me.  I’ll give you ice cream afterwards.”

“Eskimo pies?”

“What else?  I sent Hell-Wizard out to buy some the minute I heard you were coming back.  Come on.”  She dug around some drawers for a flashlight, but she was getting cold, so she dropped the blanket and pulled her pants back on.

Delphine, still in bed, pouted.  “You can check me if you want, but do we really have to get dressed again?”

Cosima checked her cell phone on the dresser.  It was just after 7, and there was a text from Scott inviting them to join him, Hell-Wizard, and Charlotte at Dave & Buster’s later.  She tapped a quick acceptance to the invitation and put the phone back down.  “Well, we’re getting dinner with Scott and Charlotte after I check your face for bots, so if you wanna be naked for that, I won’t really complain, but you might get arrested.  And you’ll be cold.

Delphine muttered something French under her breath as she climbed out of the bed, giving Cosima a great view of her ass as she gathered up her clothing.  “Let me pee first.”

“Whatever you need, babe.  We’ve even got a little room for that.” 

She got a swat on the arm for that, probably deserved, but she saw Delphine trying to hide her smile as she walked to the bathroom.  While Delphine was in there, Cosima finished dressing, and her mind drifted back to the worry about how they would remove a bot if Delphine actually had one.  Evie Cho was dead, and she had been their only option to remove Sarah’s bot safely.  Cosima thought she might be able to remove it herself, based on her observations of Sarah’s procedure, but that was a big might that could cost Delphine’s life if she was wrong.  

The flashlight was buried in the back of one of the kitchenette drawers.  She found it just as Delphine exited the bathroom, thankfully, since she really wanted Delphine to think that she had her shit together.  Delphine wore jeans and a T-shirt, her haired pulled into an “I don’t want to fuck with it” pony tail that matched her facial expression as she sat on the lab stool next to Cosima.

“You’re going to use a flashlight?” she asked.  “To find a robot worm inside my face?”

“That’s how we found Sarah’s.  Open up, babe.”

Looking inside Delphine’s mouth like this was an odd mixture of intimate and clinical.  Cosima’s tongue and some of her fingers had explored as much of that mouth as they could reach on various occassions, but Cosima had never spent much time looking inside.  In a moment, she noticed that Delphine still had her tonsils but not her wisdom teeth, and two silver fillings capped her back teeth.  More importantly, she didn’t have any bots in her cheeks.  She let out the breath she’d been holding since Delphine opened her mouth, and switched off the flashlight.

“Looks good, babe.  No bots.”

“Elch.  Thank goodness.”  Delphine rinsed her mouth a few times, then flopped back onto the bed.  “Do you feel better now?”

Cosima draped herself beside her and kissed her.  “I feel much better, yes.  To be honest, I have no idea how we would have removed it if you did have one, so this simplifies things a lot.”

Delphine jabbed her in her side, making her squawk.  “That’s very reassuring, chérie, thank you.”

“You’re welcome, babe.”

They lay side by side, looking into each other’s eyes with their feet dangling off the side of the bed.  “Have I answered all of your questions?” Delphine asked.  

“You’ve answered a lot of them.”

“Good.”

“Just one more, if that’s okay?”

“Of course.”

“What happened to Dr. Nealon?”

Delphine paused and raised her eyebrows.  “I shot him,” she said.

“You shot him?”  Cosima realized that she kept repeated herself, but she couldn’t help it.  She’d known Delphine had a gun, but she could not imagine her using it.  Or could she?  She had threatened Shay, after all.

“Yes, to get him off me while he was strangling me.  It worked.  He got off me, worm and all.  He died a few minutes later.”

“Holy shit.”  Cosima stroked her face, watching her avoid eye contact.  “That must’ve been awful.”

“It’s not something I want to repeat.”  Finally, Delphine met her eyes and forced a smile.  “I’m fine now.”

“Okay.  Not completely sure I believe you, but okay.  What about you?  Do you any more questions for me?”

“Yes, but most of them can wait.”

Cosima lifted herself up to look down at her.  “You sure?  We have a little more time before we have to go.”

“I’m sure.  They’re not even specific questions, really.  I just want to know what you were up to, what you did, what you thought about, while I was away.  I know you worked on the cure, of course, and you dealt with Kendall Malone and everything that happened to her, but I want to know about everything else, too.  Even the everyday, the banal things you did or thought about.  All of it.”

Cosima leaned down and kissed her, pulling on her lower lip.  “I thought about you.  Constantly.”

Delphine jabbed her again.  “Brat.”

“I’m serious!  Ask anyone that was here.  Ask Scott.  Hell, ask Mrs. S, she heard all about you, too.”

“I will.”

A tentative knock sounded from the top of the stairs.  “Cosima?” Hell-wizard called down.

“We’ll be up in a minute!” Cosima called back. Leaning her head next to Delphine’s, she sighed.  “Do you really have to go to France in two days?”

“I’m afraid so, yes.  But only for a few days.  I’ll be back before you know it.”

“And I can’t go with you.”

“Not with Neolution still looking for you, no.  I won’t risk it.”

Cosima wrapped her arm around Delphine’s midsection and pulled her close.  “I still love you.  You know that, right?”

Delphine kissed her forehead.  “I know.  And I love you.  Je t’aime.  Toujours.”