A/N: Hey guys! Yep, another new fic... rather than work on my old ones. Oops. But ah well. This is a strange one, but the idea just wouldn't leave me alone... the idea Shadow's memories weren't faked, but were still unreliable re: Maria, fascinated me.
She doesn't quite know what to make of the strange creature's looks towards her.
Maria knows a little about who he is, of course- everybody on the ARK does. The black and red hedgehog is some sort of experiment her Grandfather's working on, a weird sort of science thing that she doesn't pretend to understand, nor care about. That's the type of subject she happily leaves to all those old men in white coats that insist on ruffling her hair and shuffle her out of certain rooms for reasons she doesn't quite understand. To be honest, she thinks he is weird as well- aside from being unused to people who were short and furry- there weren't any others like him on ARK- the idea of a little person grown in a tube was more than incomprehensible, it was just plain disturbing.
Maybe, she mused, that meant he wasn't a person at all then. After all, he didn't seem to do many normal-person things from what she saw. None of the people she knew spent hours in long tubelike rooms running in loops, or throwing those weird lights at walls over and over while they had needles poked into them. And Maria was an expert on being poked with needles, so to think someone- something- had too many applied to them was saying something. And that explained the prefix of project to his name. Projects were like what she did in her occasional lessons, right? They weren't, she decided firmly, people.
He didn't even smile much, she thought. Or the opposite for that matter. He simply had a strange, blank and altogether resigned look on his face... except when he looked at her. That was where she stopped being vaguely confused and started to be- well. Curious, she supposed.
Now, Maria had spoken to him a few times, even if she didn't exactly know him. Smiled and even bobbed a half curtsey as she did to a lot of people on the ship- her parents from the old life had been old fashioned, and she took after them, a fact most of the older residents on the ship found charming. The introduction hadn't been long, but something in his eyes after she had done that had... well. Made her wonder if she should have, to be honest. He looked almost... longing. She'd attributed it to her imagination at the time and wandered off.
But ever since then, he had spent altogether too much time observing her, as if she was some great puzzle. All for a smile and a 'nice to meet you'. What was so special about that?
She just didn't get it.
