she found a little girl once, one who was an orphan, and dionysia went through the necessary steps to officially adopt her. of course, she knew that eventually this little girl would grow up, die of old age, and her mother would remain young despite this. so to prevent the girl, now a woman in her thirties, from discovering this, dionysia faked her death and changed her appearance and name for a while. but she kept an eye out for her adopted daughter, watching her in her bird form from time to time. she found out that she really wanted a child, and like how she was adopted, she wanted to adopt as well, to give an older child a home as many orphans who were older weren't as likely to get adopted. she was single, though, and it made the likelihood of adopting a child very difficult. so against her better judgement, dionysia changed her appearance again, this time to that of a young child, introducing herself as diana, making up a story about how her parents had died in a car crash in the middle of nowhere and she had been living on her own ever since. the state tried putting "diana" in the system once the woman took her in, but she insisted repeatedly that she wanted to be adopted by the woman, and with no next of kin, and the woman really wanting to adopt her, along with some magic on dionysia's part, the state finally allowed it. so for a while, dionysia lived a normal childhood for the first time in her life. unlike her real parents, she now had a mother who loved her, even if it was a strange relationship as she was now being "raised" by the girl she herself had raised from a child. dionysia went to elementary, middle, high school, and somewhere along the way realized that her decision to help the woman hadn't been entirely selfless; she had wanted to experience what a normal childhood was like. she was in clubs, she did sports, she had the support and love of a parental figure for the first time ever in her life. and then eventually, as she expected, the woman grew old, though it was a much more normal experience than it would've been had she stuck around in her true form. after all, a child outliving their parent in age was natural, rather than the child dying of old age before the parent did. still, dionysia still experienced the grief of both in that moment. she felt like she had simultaneously lost her daughter, and her mother. she went to another universe after that, and swore off building close relationships with humans, casting herself into a life of distraction and hedonism to ignore her immense grief that she didn't know how to process and couldn't explain to anyone.
