Gloria Craw

“Ian was too Captain America for my taste.”
― Gloria Craw, Atlantis Rising

“So you knew Jack growing up?”
“I had a bit of a crush on him through the years, but there was nothing between us until much later when I ran into him at Stanford. I was getting my master’s degree in art history there, and he was working at a teaching hospital. As destiny would have it, I broke my sternum in a fall from a horse. My human friends insisted I go to the emergency room to get checked out. Of course I knew it would heal on its own, but I humored them anyway. Jack was my doctor that day.”
“So you began dating and got likenessed, or whatever?”
“The dating part followed the getting-likenessed part,” she explained. “He walked in, looked up from his clipboard, and there was a complete…mental connection. That’s the only way I can explain it. Likeness is a melding of minds and once it happens it can never be undone.”
Doing a quick rewind of what happened between Ian and myself during lunch, I cried out. “Oh, no! No!”

What? Brandy asked, mirroring my alarm.
“I think that mental connection, likeness thing, happened to me and Ian this afternoon,” I replied in a panic.
She pulled to the side of the road. “Calm down,” she said. “I would have sensed it if it had. Hang on—I did sense something.”
I couldn’t catch my breath. I was started to see stars.
“It wasn’t likeness, though,” she stated with certainty. “Explain exactly what happened.”
“Ian used his joining on me during lunch. It was supposed to be a shortcut to show me how joinings work. Things started out fine, everything was all business, but then it took a turn.”
“So what’s the problem?” she asked.
“The problem is…it turned into some kind of weird mind-kissing thing. That sounds crazy, but there is nothing else I can compare it to.”
― Gloria Craw, Atlantis Rising