Owner	Pose
Diana Prince	Donna would've likely looked in many different locations for her sister. Locations that were far closer to the palace, and far easier to reach. Likely even locations that would not have seemed quite so 'juvenile' for Diana to flee their mother's chamber to. But, it's true. this is where Diana is. She didn't want to be in the rest of the city right now, around other Amazons, she didn't want to flee in the Jet and make a huge show of her feelings just yet. She needed a quiet place to relax and let her tensions out. Thus, this quiet forested house built in to a mighty old tree. She stands at the apex of the 3rd building, the tallest of them. The balcony wraps around the whole of the tree, with a building built around its trunk. The building has art stations, and lounging furniture within it, including a corner setup with a grand Princess bed for Diana to sleep within. But, as of now, the Princess stands on the balcony, facing the deeper heart of the forest. She's just listening to the trees, the animals, the sounds of nature and the wind that breathes life in to most all of it...
Donna Troy	Long ago, when she was eight, before she had met Diana for the first time, Troia had found the treehouse out there in the woods. She hadn't questioned where it came from at first -- it had obviously not been used for years. It was just one more of the many mysteries of this island for her to explore. An adventure. For a short time she had thought about cleaning it out, fixing it up after the years of neglect, and claiming it as her own secret place, but the truth is that Themyscira is one huge adventure for a child, and any single adventure is easily forgotten.     In later years she had come to realize that Diana must have built it during her own youth, a secret place for herself. After Diana had returned to the island for the first time and the two sisters had met, there had been times when Diana was away and Troia would come here to sit quietly when she was missing her sister. She had noticed, from time to time, she noticed changes to the treehouse. It got cleaned up, the depredations of arboreal creatures repaired, dilapidated woodwork fixed. Proof Diana was still coming here.     Troia was much, much younger than Diana. They had never had the chance to be children together, but when they did eventually meet, they soon became close. They explored the island together in a way they might have when both were children, if they were of an age. They found secret places that they shared with each other and nobody else, but the treehouse was not one of them. Troia knew of it, and Diana must have suspected that Troia knew of it, but Troia never mentioned it, never asked. Diana needed her own places too, just as Troia had one or two secret places she never took Diana to.     Her search for her sister had taken Troia to a number of those shared secret places before it came to the tree house. She had been almost, but not quite, avoiding this one location on her search -- leaving it until later, anyway. That same mixture of wanting to find Diana and yet not intrude reflects itself in her approach, because she doesn't land on the balcony from the air, and nor does she climb the tree to see if Diana is wirthin. Instead Diana hears Troia's voice calling up from the forest ground below. "Diana? Are you up there?"
Diana Prince	The tree house(s) currently have a pictur-esque level of overgrowth to them. IF a photographer happened to be stumbling across this location, on some kind of Themysciran exploration exhibit, they would be striking a proverbial treasure trove of photo opportunities. From the child's jousting setup at ground level, with the little wooden horse that has leather suspenders for a child to wear, covered in green vines, to the archery stands, made of rope and old paint. To the houses themselves built in a stair-like setup, one higher than the last, and slightly more off-center rather than being built strictly atop one another. The site is just serene, and speaks of intense craftsmanship skills, as well as days where its use has long gone away... "I am." Diana calls back down from above. She emerges from one of the arched doorways, and stands at the railing of the balcony level. She peers down at Donna, and then looks over to the pully that she pulls the lever on, sending the wooden 'lift' down to her sister... Not that Donna NEEDS to ride the spinning lift back up to the highest level... But hey, it's fun? Right? The wooden lift spins down to the ground, gently settling on the foliage near to where Donna is, and a counter lever built in to it will send it spinning in circles back up toward where Diana is.
Donna Troy	Of course a photographer has stumbled across this location. Troia may be the younger princess of Themyscira and a capable warrior who has lately been showing signs she will grow into a capable leader, but Donna is a photographer. It's indeed possible that on some former visit, she had taken a few photos of this very location, though Themyscira is filled with photogenic locations.     It's not Donna the photographer nor yet Troia the warrior princess who is here right now though, it's Diana's younger sister, and Diana's younger sister rides the lift up with a faint smile as she comes to join Diana on the balcony plaftorm, resting her arms on the balcony to look out over the forest beside her.     "Hello Di," she says. "Good hiding place. I doubt anyone else could have found you here. If you want to be alone, then you only have to say so. I won't be offended. But I thought you might want someone to talk to. And if you don't want someone to talk to, you might want to be silent with some company."
Diana Prince	Diana watches Donna twirl her way back up to the upper house balcony. She smiles at her sister when she arrives. "I do not mind your company." She quietly replies then, her hands back gently to rest upon the balcon's railing. "And... I did show this place to Cassie a little while ago, so she might be able to find me here too." She notes with a side smirk to Donna. "I...." Diana starts then as she raises a hand up to run it over her tied-back hair. "Am merely looking for a place to quietly sort my thoughts. After... what... we just were told, I need a bit of time to recover, is all. Recovery that does not involve... questions from people who have known about all of this, for all these years, and kept it from me." The last part is the important part of what she says there, likely a window to view the emotional state of the Princess' heart right now. She too looks out over the forest, a glimpse of the stream that weaves between the trees visible up ahead several paces beyond the tree house yard. "I... am trying to decide how to process, all the things that I have been told, and all that which has been kept from me. What else might there be, that I have been deemed 'unable' to be told. What reasons, might those be too, to keep them from me for so long." She pauses for a moment as she draws in a breath, her eyes darting around at some fluttering native birds. "I spend nearly a thousand years trying to prove to our mother that I am as much an Amazon, as any other she has lived with, trained with, fought with, yet it often still feels like... she coddles me as one might a child..."
Donna Troy	"Maybe she wasn't keeping it from you," Troia says. "Maybe she was keeping it from herself." She turns to look at Diana for a few moments, then turns again to look out over the forest, sighing softly.     "Nobody apart from you and I know what it is like to be the only child on Themyscira. You might as well be the only child in the world. You are different from every other person around you. It's obvious you are because you are smaller, because there are things they can do that you can not. Because everyone treats you differently. But there's no context. No way you can really understand /why/, because there are no other examples. You can't put yourself into a category, because you have no experience of that category beyond your own experiences. You seem to be unique, and being unique is lonely."     "I... always knew I had a sister, but I didn't really know what that meant. Here on Themyscira everyone is everyone else's sister, so why did people tell me I had a sister who had gone out into the World of Men, as if she wasn't their sister just as much as she was mine? At first the only way I could understand it was that you and I were the same in ways that nobody else was. That Troia and Diana were the only two children in a world of adults."     She flashes Diana a self-deprecating grin before quickly turning her gaze back to the treetops. "Of course by the time we actually met, I understood things better. That you are my mother's daughter. And I understood that this mysterious sister I was going to meet would be an adult, not a child. That I would be meeting someone who was not the same as I was, but was someone I might grow to be like. And even then I was smart enough to know it would be very strange for you. That you would be coming back to the island not just to see your mother but also to see all your many sisters, but you weren't expecting any of them to be your /actual/ sister. I knew you'd be surprised, and I assumed you'd want to talk to mother about it, to ask her why she had chosen to have another child."     "What didn't occur to me until today though, is that you must have wondered not just why mother would choose to have another child, but... that you must have wondered why she would choose to adopt a child now, rather than back when you were young, so that you would have not been this unique, lonely thing."
Diana Prince	Diana turns around to lean back against the railing instead now, about half way through Donna's response to her. She folds her arms over her stomach, and listens like this. A light smile crosses her lips, her eyes going toward the interior of the tree house level that they stand on, staring at the paint set resting on the edge of a old table, the paints long dried up. Diana's eyes then go over to Donna on her right now, staring at her with a casual look. "You are the sister that I wish I grew up with." She says then back to Troia. "Maybe many decades ... late. But, that might be part of what is bothering me so much about all of this." She draws in another breath as her eyes look skyward now, the muscles in her neck flexing some as she closes her eyelids and lets some rays of sunshine break the canopy and cross her face. "I begged mother for a sibling back then, and she would not have it. She said what ways existed, were things she would not do. She said that I must learn to be myself, without anyone else my age. That I had bigger concerns to worry about. That I needed to focus on my schooling, my lessons... that I would have to earn my way on the island eventually, like all others, but not as a Warrior. She refused to let me even consider a life like that, back then. She was so worried about my safety..." Diana lowers her eyes then as she more grimly considers that. "I guess part of that makes more sense ... now, that we know what we know."
Donna Troy	Troia gives a nod of her head. "She must have been terrified of the possibility of losing you, the way she lost Dione. Gods. It's... just using the word 'terrified' like that is... the idea that anything could /terrify/ Queen Hippolyta is... it's hard to come to terms with. But... you saw it. You heard it in her voice. How much it hurt her. How much nine hundred years later it still hurts her."     She turns to look at Diana again, studying her face in silence for a few moments before reaching a hand out and resting it on Diana's arm. "I suppose that explains why it was different for me. Why she encouraged me to learn to fight when I was very young, when she fought so hard to discourage you from learning to be a warrior. And why I was able to persuade her to let me leave the island when I was just sixteen. She was trying to preserve you from the fate that befell your sister, but me... for me she was hoping I would follow the same path as /my/ sister.     Troia's hand drops away and she gives a gentle smile. "Di... Antiope rejected mother's call for peace and fought a war of vengeance on Herakles, but when she finally abandoned that war mother welcomed her back gladly and they ruled Themyscira together. Penthesilia abandoned mother's cause to continue fighting in the world of men. She took Amazons with her, and none returned. Yet mother named me after the city she died defending. That Melanippe should have been subject to this /damnatio memoriae/, that her name is not spoken, that there are no statues of her... Mother wasn't hiding this from you. She was wishing that her sister Menalippe had never existed."
Diana Prince	As Donna speaks of the history of the Amazons, Diana steps forward, then walks around her to the lift again. She reaches out to re-center the lift, to lock it back in to place with a few more lever turns, and a spin of a wheel. Once its secure is about the time that Donna finishes her words, and Diana looks over at her, now on her right again, as she once more faces the forest, with the lift between them, on the edge of the balcony. "But. Yet. She did keep it from me. For nine centuries..." Diana dryly notes as she looks down at the wheel, and runs a finger over it, and its aged metalic shine. "I know the whys, and the reasons." She says, as she looks back up, and over. "But it does not make it easier for me to bear. I... could have helped her cope with it. I could have adjusted my behavior, maybe even strayed away from mistakes that I made, had I known the full bearing of my actions back in those days... Maybe, I would not have even left at all." She shakes her head as she shoots out an exhale. "Well. I probably would've still left." She says, looking back up and over to her sister. "Steve was very attractive." She says with a smirk, joking of course. Mostly. "Troia. I just need to know that our mother is not hiding anything, else, from me. From us, and I'm not sure how to believe her if we asked her even now."
Donna Troy	"And had you never left, perhaps that war you fought in would have been lost. Perhaps Doomsday would have never defeated. Perhaps mother would have never decided it was time to adopt another daughter, and I would not have been there to devise the plans that drove away Warworld or disabled Brainiac's defenses."     Troia takes her hands from the railing and rubs her tired eyes before coming away from the railing to stand in front of Diana. "Di... she wasn't hiding anything from you. She was hiding it from /herself/, because she did not want to have to face that pain. If she did not tell you it is because she could not do so without facing that pain herself. She didn't tell us this today because she was worried that we would find out for ourselves. She told us because she realized that something she thought was in the past and she would never have to deal with again was perhaps not so entirely left in the past as she believed. She told this to us now to ensure that we were prepared for what we might find in Wakanda, despite what it cost her to tell us."     She crosses her arms, briefly rubbing the skin above her bracers as if she was cold, and looks at Diana with an unhappy expression. "Diana... you are thinking of the sister that was lost. The childhood you could have had with her at your side. Mother is thinking of the sister that /wasn't/ lost. She faced the pain she has been hiding from all these years for your sake."
Diana Prince	Diana's hands go to rest around the metal crank as she hears the response. She purses her lips and looks down toward the ground below before she looks sideways over at Donna. She looks away once more, this time further out, out toward the stream beyond the trees around the yard. "Then my desire to know of Dione is rooted in selfishness. I would like to have known what my childhood would have been like, if I could have even known that I had, and lost, a sibling. But, what is done, is done. I will get through this. I am well aware that she has suffered from this, far more than I have, or I ever will. But finding out that you had a sister, and lost her, yet never knew of her... it is a lot to handle at once. I am not trying to short sell what our Mother has been feeling, for her loss. I just... wish I could have helped her through it, for the years, and years, we spent here together." Her eyes look to Donna again then. "Would you not wish for the same thing, in my place? To have shared the experience with her, rather than let her live with it alone?"
Donna Troy	"Of course I would, Diana," Troia says quietly. "What you're feeling... there is nothing wrong with it. Nothing to criticize. It's natural. It's just that it's not a line of thinking that can help, it can only hurt."     "Maybe I have a sister I don't know about too, who knows. I can't say I have never wondered about what my life might have been like. Oh... I am quite sure it would not have been as good a life as the one I have lead. I could not be anything other than filled with intense gratitude for the life our mother gave to me. For the /sister/ she gave to me. It's unlikely I have a family out there who are still alive, but there is some other world where they did not die, and where I lived a life with them, and whatever that life would have been there would have been joys in it that I have missed out on. But why dwell on it? Why dwell on what might have been instead of what is?"     "When I got to know you, and came to understand what it meant to have a sister... it meant more to me than I will ever find words to tell you. Those times when you came back to the island and we spent time together, just the two of us, exploring together, every second of it was pure happiness. But I always felt sorry... no. Guilty. I even sometimes felt guilty, that I could not have been there for you when /you/ were a child too. You gave me a gift I can never truly return. I wish you could have had Dione at your side when you grew up. And I wish Dione could have had /you/ by her side, when she grew up. It would have been a mutual thing, so it is not selfish."
Diana Prince	These words have Diana once more looking out toward the forest, tracking a bushy tailed Themysciran squirrel, with its golden blonde fuzzy tail, and its white striped tiger-like-pattern furry body. It leaps from branch to branch as it carries food in its mouth. A breath is taken in then through her nose as Di reaches up to brush her fingers across the tip, her bracers glinting in the sunlight shining from above through the trees. She leans over to bump shoulders with Donna then, and to wrap an arm around the other's back from behind. Standing there now, embraced with her sister, Diana smiles lightly. "We should head back." She says then. "We have company, after all." She notes as she then drops her arm and starts to turn toward the other side of the balcony. She does pause though, and look back to Donna. "Would you stop me if I started to wrap the lasso around her though?" She asks with a growing smile hinting at the playful undertone to that question. She didn't mean it. Obviously. Did she?
Donna Troy	Troia responds to Diana's playful smile with a playful smile of her own. "I may still be young Diana, but I have some wisdom already, and that wisdom includes knowing that nobody can stop Diana when she sets her mind to something. If you insist on subjecting mother to the lasso and forcing every last secret from her, you may discover things you do not wish to know, but I will not be the one to stop you."     She moves away from the railing, brushing dirt from her hands to stand by Diana as they consider their return to the palace, and she's still grinning with the remains of the smile when she comes to a halt in front of her sister. "Mother assumed you had a sister who was lost forever. " The grin fades again. "It is possible she is not. You may yet get to know your own twin, and late is better than never. But keep in mind what our mother must be thinking. If Dione still lives, Hippolyta will feel a terrible guilt that she abandoned her own daughter rather than remembering that she believed her own child was taken away from her and lost forever. We need to be there for her."     Troia makes a sudden, impulsive move forwards, her arms coming up to wrap tightly around Diana, her head coming forwards to rest a moment on her taller sister's shoulder. The earlier embrace had been nice, but apparently it was insufficient in Troia's eyes to let Diana know just how much she means to her.
Diana Prince	Diana was waiting for Donna so that they could take to the skies together, but the embrace instead has the Princess smiling at her sister's touch. She lowers her chin and then looks back over her shoulder. "If Dione is still alive... welll. She will have to deal with us. Which is to say that we will not take 'no' for an answer, when it comes to re-integrating her in to our very strange family." Diana replies then as she turns to put her arms around Donna to hug her again, but this time with both arms rather than just one. "So she better have spent a lot of the past nine centuries training, if she hopes to stay out of our good graces." She then laughs softly then, and steps back, putting her hands on the undersides of Troia's elbows. She gives her a big smile then before raising a hand up then to dab a finger against the other's nose. "Now come on, Shorty. I am going to race you back to the Palace!" And with that, Diana is up, up, and away! Shorty?!