It was tough being a nova in Spain these days. Sure, Raoul Orzaiz was still popular with the social scene and N! was still rating well with the average person, but in person there was beginning to be a subtle discrimination and even faint unease on the part of baselines towards novas. Sometimes it was more blatant, like her cousin throwing her out on the street once her eruption became publicly known. Anna Alameda couldn't even rely on her Basque relatives because the only ones who wanted to know her were with the ETA. So she learned to dorm back into her old self and lived from handout to handout, venting her anger and anguish on the OpNet whenever she had access to it. For a woman who'd been a successful restauranteur before Ibiza was destroyed in quantum fires, it was a hard blow to take.

She wanted to be human again so bad that it hurt. But Anna was still a practical woman and already realised that it was never going to happen, that dorming was only pretending. She was glad that the weather was still mild enough to permit sleeping outdoors and that she was occasionally able to get a bed in one of the refugee shelters from a sympathetic aid worker. Amongst the other survivors, she gained the courage to speak about being at the mercy of an all-powerful nova demigod and the fear that she would die. But she could only do that dormed. She looked totally different now as a nova and had never really been close to anyone, so people from Ibiza Town couldn't identify her as 'that nova who got lucky where my parent/sibling/lover/friend/cousin didn't.'

To the resentful, she could confess her claustrophobia at being trapped for two days in the ruins of her restaurant, but how could she express her fear of losing herself? They were human, ordinary, baseline - what would they understand? The bitter, the grieving, the lonely and the injured - how could they accept? She wasn't human anymore. She couldn't relate to them, even when dormed.

Huddled in the alleyway between a restaurant and a building everyone knew was a brothel, Anna used her youth as a weapon to fight the other homeless people for the food thrown out each evening despite her crippled leg. She needed a shower and her brown hair was tangled, but none of that was more important than getting her stomach filled. When she was undormed, she was perpetually hungry. Hell, when she was dormed, she was perpetually hungry.

She managed to score a half-loaf of bread and some seafood. Eating it quickly, Anna curled up into a fetal ball inside a discarded box and fell asleep. These days, she had nothing left, not even her humanity. So what was the use of things like pride and dignity?