starter for @cursedcrest! random muse chosen: Vi!
“Fascinating.” That would be the word of choice Vi would opt to for her impressions of the golden doe before her. She wasn’t necessarily a people person, but as a woman of healing and of medicine who prided herself on her powers of observation, she had long gotten accustomed to spotting any number of quirks that simply stem from being human.
All of this was why Marianne, in her eyes, seemed... strange, but not ugly. Far from it, as even Vi would admit whether she found someone pleasing to the eye, and Marianne was very much the opposite of ugly! However, therein lied the problem. Marianne’s beauty was almost uncanny that something about their porcelain-like form seemed to set them apart from average men, but she couldn’t quite put her finger on why.
Offhand, the closest that Vi could compare Marianne to was—at least from the odd glimpse on one or two occasions—Archbishop Rhea, of all people. True, she held a deep grudge against Rhea and her ilk, but she dared not let her personal feelings spoil the objectivity of her research. Fact: both Marianne and Rhea were beautiful, almost unnaturally so with some surface-level overlap in their features. Was that simple coincidence, or was there a common ground between the two? As far as she was aware, Rhea had never mothered any children... Perhaps they are distant relatives?
Vi could sit and hypothesize all manner of groundless theories, but they all stemmed from one shared point: that her not knowing where that commonality lied annoyed her. That was reason enough for her to begin her experiment.
Hopefully Marianne would not notice the borderline socially inept Ashen Wolf observing and taking notes of their behaviours in her journal. If they noticed? Hopefully they would not mind her presence and simply carry on.