Trapped
Chapter 3: The Island of Misfit Toys
Entrapta never paid much attention to the war beyond her borders. Sure, she'd had concerns about Horde operations close to the edges, but she had ways of keeping Dryl's secrets safe. She'd had spy-bots take a look at some of the Horde tanks and flyers. She analyzed the information they relayed to her systems and took notes.
The young scientist was discovering many interesting machines as she was hiding around in the Fright Zone. Once in a while, she would exit the vents to chase down some little scavenger droid or to examine the structure of the wings of a grounded flyer on one of the airstrips before ducking away into the shadows to avoid being discovered.
The encryption programs on their computer systems were awesome. Unlike anything else she'd seen outside the borders of her kingdom, they were an actual challenge to hack, although she did wish that one of the passwords she'd found on one of them wasn't "HordakRules69."
Emily seemed to think that one was amusing, too.
It was only a matter of hours before Entrapta essentially had the full-run of the Fright Zone. She broke into the sealed kitchens to snatch food. None of it was particularly tiny and cute, so she had to improvise in dividing it up into such. She wasn't entirely sure what protein-sources they were using, and much of what she was eating was too bland for her to tell by taste alone whether it was animal-derived or plant-based. She would have analyzed it in a room that she found that struck her as some kind of weird combination of a biologics laboratory and a sorcerer's room, but crept back behind the walls when she saw the sorceress that apparently owned it entering.
Entrapta shivered. She could feel the shadows coming off that person. She watched in fascination from a ventilation shaft at the tendrils of smoke that curled up from the witch's feet. The hair on her arms stood on end, and not because she was willing it to. Her instincts told her to leave well enough alone and to get out of the area before she was sensed.
She'd found a sparse infirmary and managed to give her wounded leg better treatment. Later, she found herself observing a conversation in a darkened throne room. So that was Hordak. He was an imposing specimen.
Entrapta continued scuttling about the hidden areas of the Fright Zone like an oversized spider, covering her tracks. As interested as she was in everything, she knew that the first law of survival behind enemy lines was to not get caught. At least that's what Adora had told her. She'd read that… yeah, she'd definitely read about that at some point, some war-tactics book in her parents' old library. Adora was better at that stuff than she was. Entrapta was known to all as a clever girl – and as such, she was smart enough to know that she wasn't an expert in everything. Engineering, robotics and studies on the First Ones were her majors and main passions, biology and sociology and lots of other little bits in any given science-field were her minors and she basically left the advanced strategy and battle-tactics to Adora. The blonde had been raised since early childhood to be a soldier. It made the most logical sense.
They had worked well together. Adora had trusted her to handle the hacking while she and the other princesses had trusted Adora to tell them where to go. Despite all of their differences – and, perhaps because of them, they'd all worked well together – like the parts of a fine-tuned machine. Perfuma handled the horticulture, Mermista the hydraulics, Bow the weaponry and Sea Hawk the transport.
What was this feeling she was experiencing? Entrapta did not bother to keep a log of it as it was a sensation that she had felt seldom. Emily alleviated it a bit, but after endless time dodging in the dark, she was beginning to feel lonely.
Entrapta was almost never lonely, even though she was almost always alone. It was just the way she was – introverted by nature, always focused upon work and study. She considered the First Ones her "friends" of a sort, with how their artifacts spoke across time to her. Her robots took care of her needs, even the occasional need for conversation. Her "Mumsy" and "Daddums" units had voice-recordings taken from her long-gone biological parents. Whenever she'd missed having a family, she'd order them into whatever room she was in and let them dote on her or tell her to clean up her room or whatever.
Time alone gave her peace, a chance to sort out all of the thoughts colliding in her brain all at once. Inspiration never shut up and she rarely met anyone who could keep up with the speed of her connections. Occasionally, someone in the Etherian Maker's Community could talk shop on a high-level with her when she bothered to go to guild-meetings. She'd been compared, every once in a while, to a reclusive author. It was clear that some of her traits were shared quite commonly among creative-types of all fields. However, as comfortable as she was to be left alone with her history, technology, tools, code, languages and anything else she had an interest at any given time, nights could get dark in Dryl and the upper rooms of the high tower felt cold.
It was on these nights that she'd navigate the labyrinth to find one or more members of the staff to talk to. They seemed to be friendly and willing to humor her – particularly discussions of the chemistry of cooking – when they were at work making her snacks, making their own meals or cleaning up. They weren't so happy when she'd drop down from the ceiling panels of their bedrooms when she wanted to hang out and they wanted to sleep.
She'd had quite a few staff-members quit her service over that… not as many who quit because they felt they were in mortal danger whenever she got the whim to add something fun to Castle Dryl or to make changes. She simply built more robots that could handle simple tasks to replace lost crew and didn't think much about it, with the final members left being the cook-staff because she hadn't yet figured out how to perfect a taste-sensory system. She had a soda-taster that was pretty close, but not quite up to her satisfaction.
In the end, everyone left her, she always ended up alone, one way or another, and so, she trusted better and related better to metal, code and glass.
She sat in a corner, curled up safe in a crawlspace. "Day 2, early morning…I think. Difficult to tell. Fright Zone Log: Gathered much intelligence on the Horde's operations. It seems my friends are still looking for me. I'm really looking forward to showing Bow the upgrades on Emily. He'll be so impressed!"
Being in the Princess Alliance had felt…new. Entrapta had joined mainly out of curiosity and as thanks for Adora, Glimmer and Bow saving her life and the lives of her cook-crew - and given the way her robots were acting all screwy and how the major grids of Dryl had gone down for a while – quite possibly the entire kingdom, so it was the least she could do. It was mainly professional. Still there was something special in the experience of being a part of a team. The fact that people started referring to her as a friend was a strange, new thing, something to probe and to explore.
Human contact – the final frontier?
In her short time interacting with each of them, she'd learned that they all had something fascinating to talk about. Entrapta had asked Adora multiple questions regarding her life training and conditioning as a soldier and for her part, Adora had agreed to some measurements of her strength both as herself and in the form of She-Ra. She never let Entrapta touch her sword, which the scientist and found disappointing, but she had been able to observe it in action, as Adora was compliant in demonstrating it's offensive capabilities on training dummies for her.
Entrapta remembered just about bursting at the seams in excitement when the girl had asked her to make her an obstacle course to train in. She got to equip it with some of her best traps.
Glimmer… well, Entrapta didn't really talk with her much. Most of the time, she just complained about problems in her home-life and Entrapta silently listened. The mother-daughter-relationship between living specimens was a most interesting area of study. Glimmer would show off her teleportation abilities to her. Entrapta openly wondered how she could keep her component particles stable. The princess of Bright Moon became most disturbed one day when Entrapta suggested that each time she teleported that she might, in fact, be destroying herself and creating merely a copy, essentially "dying" every time she preformed the act. Glimmer angrily assured her that it did not work that way. This warranted further study.
Sea Hawk and Mermista – her interaction with them consisted mainly of discussions of the properties of water and the engineering of ships. This resulted in Entrapta promoting the emergency reparative properties of duct tape, for which Sea Hawk was grateful. Mermista had just rolled her eyes.
Bow she'd been bonding with rather well. Entrapta was impressed by his custom arrow-designs. She'd found them clever and conveying this information had sent him into waves of excitement. The young man had a surprisingly good grasp of technical know-how for someone who'd grown up in the Whispering Woods. Entrapta, for her part, plumed him for anything he could tell her about the nature of its shifting landscape. She wanted to do an extensive study on the area. She had a theory that, collectively, the trees were connected by their roots and had networked themselves into not only a super-organism, but into a rudimentary consciousness. She actively wondered how this quirk of evolution – if indeed true – compared to artificial intelligence.
Perfuma, well… Entrapta had some problems getting along with Perfuma. She did not dislike the Princess in Plumeria in the least, but got the feeling that she disliked her. The flower-bedecked blonde expressed frustration with her many times, particularly when she'd wanted to dissect some samples from some of Plumeria's more sacred gardens, and of course when she started darting off her own way on the Fright Zone mission. Perfuma didn't seem to appreciate non-organic life as much as Entrapta did. So, Entrapta found herself bound in vines and dragged along, missing a golden opportunity. She might not be able to study the behavior of that little scavenger-robot ever again! Why did Perfuma pull her away? Right – the mission. Still, couldn't she see the opportunity to study a possibly-emergent rudimentary consciousness in an artificial construct?
Perfuma had never understood her when she'd used terminology like that, either, although Entrapta recalled that the fellow Princess once told her something deep when they'd had a stray chance to ruminate on the mysteries of existence. Perfuma had been talking about her views on the Universe, which she seemed to see as sentient and possessed of a morality-construct based on reward and punishment regarding certain acts on the parts of individuals. She'd been certain that the "arc would bend toward justice" and seemed to find a certain peace in thinking things would all work out in their favor. Entrapta had replied that she wasn't sure about that, as she was not entirely sure what Perfuma meant by "justice," since she had encountered many differing concepts of it in history books and in her observations of the behavior of sapient beings. Perfuma had then tapped her on the nose and told her that she was a piece of the Universe that was smart enough to contemplate itself, and not to waste that status.
Entrapta had taken to that thought. She liked it. It was an interesting idea…that they were all parts of a whole in some kind of grand design even if she did not yet know the function of their particular collective machine.
She was still a bit misunderstood by the rest of their little group, to varying degrees, but she felt a part of something bigger. The Alliance provided her many opportunities for various studies, possible access to more First Ones tech (via Queen Angella's knowledge and She-Ra's connections) and… it seemed, a fresh purpose.
With them, Entrapta wasn't just surviving and inventing things on a whim, she was going to be helping people, people who had invited her into their circle, and she was going to gather as much data on this "having friends" experience as she could.
The walls of the Fright Zone were lonely without them around.
She stiffened as she heard noises outside the vent she was occupying. Footsteps, one set light, one set heavy. Entrapta deduced that it was the scorpion-oid and the person with feline features she'd spied on earlier. She'd met them briefly at the Princess Prom. The cat-girl had, in fact, been rather nice to her there, and helpful. According to Adora, they were Force Captains and to be avoided. Emily was following them, gathering data. She didn't think they'd pay her any mind since she was a Horde-sentry.
Entrapta, for her part, tried to stay still, watching them from the vent-slats.
The cat smoothly pawed open the vent and Entrapta tumbled out.
"Uh…Hiiii," was all she thought to say. A nervous smile, a wave.
Maybe they wouldn't kill her. She sure hoped that this wasn't the end. Life, up until now, had been too much fun.
The two of them loomed over her.
"One of the Princesses," the cat-woman said, venom on her tongue.
"In the name of the Horde, you are under arrest!" the woman with the scorpion tail said with a touch too much enthusiasm and not as much aggression as expected.
"Don't resist," the cat ordered, "or do…my claws are just itching to tear something apart."
"Ladies! Ladies!" Entrapta said from her sitting position, holding up her hands and her ponytails in the shape of hands "No need to get rough. I'll come quietly."
"Scorpia, bind her."
"Will do, Catra," the arachnid-woman responded. She was surprisingly deft with ties, given her enormous, cumbersome-looking claws. Entrapta had many questions, but she would ask them later.
Entrapta walked along in silence, following the orders of her captors. She was, strangely enough, not afraid. She'd always been curious as to what a Horde prison cell was like.
"Hmmm… I think we might need Octavia's cuffs for this one," the cat-person, Catra, mused. Keep a hold on that hair.
Scorpia leaned down over Entrapta. "I'm not pulling too hard, am I?" she asked apologetically.
"No, I'm fine." Entrapta answered.
They wended down into one of the prison wings. She'd been caught, but it wasn't a crisis, it was an opportunity. The Princesses would probably look for her in the dungeons if they thought she'd been captured. It was logical. Before she knew what was happening, they'd entered a sparse room and Scorpia lifted her up. Wall-cuffs slammed, locking her limbs into four-points and her hair was pulled up into an additional two. After that, the cat and the scorpion left. Entrapta had no idea how long they'd planned to keep her trussed up like this. She was just well-supported enough for the restraints not to act like a crucifixion – she could breathe just fine. The stray thought struck her that she was glad that she had made use of one of the latrine-areas just before she'd been caught.
She hung for at least fifteen minutes, maybe closer to twenty.
If they'd planned to leave her for a while, she might as well get comfortable, which meant getting out of the restraints. She couldn't decide whether it was better to go back to her work in the walls or just to wait in the cell in case her friends came by to check them. Either way, the locks were tempting her to pick them, just to see what manner of locks they were. She probed within her own hair with her hair and found one of the multitools she was storing within one of the tails. Her hair had always been stronger than average and she'd frequently used her ponytails as extra pockets. She had ways of keeping her screwdrivers and soldering irons from tangling up her hair. The strands always slid off smoothly.
One shackle loose. That was easy.
She immediately shoved her hair back into the lock, hid her tool and resumed position when the door at the other end of the room slid open.
Catra strode forward, announcing that "Lord Hordak" had tasked her with the interrogation. Scorpia reminded Catra of her name.
She played with the right hair-lock again. Catra shot a warning beam at her from a handheld device.
Ah, well, Entrapta thought: It's not like I haven't been electrocuted before…many times, actually.
Catra slid the thing up her neck and held her chin with it. "I don't care what it takes, I am going to drag the Rebellion's plans out of you," she threatened. For her part, Entrapta quickly grabbed the handheld beam-taser out of Catra's hands with a lock of freed hair, enraptured by it.
What a neat little weapon! She fiddled with the buttons and blasted a hole in the ceiling. The scorpion had some quick reflexes – she'd managed to catch the rubble and protect her partner.
Entrapta, of course, asked if she could have the device. It was too interesting. She didn't care about her present circumstances; she had to make it hers. Disappointingly, Catra grabbed it right back.
"And stop! I'm interrogating you!"
Without even thinking about it (right now she was only thinking about the pretty-shiny-boomy-toy that she wanted back), she offered "Well, okay then, what do you want to know?"
Maybe if she'd told them something – either a small nugget of truth or a few white lies, they'd let her play with the boomy… It was worth a shot. It wasn't like she wanted to hurt them with it; she just wanted to see how it worked!
"Why were you hiding out in the Fright Zone?"
Hair fully freed and expressive now, Entrapta casually explained her situation. "I was just waiting for my friends to get back. They had trouble finding me before, so I figured I'd make it easier for them if I just stay put right here."
Catra's expression softened just slightly. "They left you."
"No, no, they're my friends! They'll be back!" Her attention immediately turned to the one called "Scorpia." Pulling herself out of the restraints and putting her mask down, she approached her. "Say, your tail secretes some kind of paralyzing agent, right? Do you think I could have a sample to study?" She grabbed the tail with her hair.
Scorpia seemed most upset about this. "You can't just grab another woman's tail without asking!"
Catra started combing one of her hair-tails with her claws, stroking it gently… almost as if Entrapta's hair was… well, a cat, or some other small, furry animal. She spoke gently, wearing that same soft, sad expression that she first showed when Entrapta had told her that she had gotten lost.
"Some friends. They left you and they aren't coming back." She spoke of an apparent abandonment by Adora. She seemed to be offering, if just for a moment, something in common.
She twirled her finger around in a tendril of hair now, still speaking softly, with an ache in her voice.
"She got her precious Bow and Glimmer back. All these Princesses care about are people just like them, but you aren't like them, are you?"
Catra, for her part, did not know the circumstances for how Entrapta had gotten lost. She didn't know about what happened in the flame-port, but assumptions could be deduced. Again, Entrapta mulled it over, whether they thought her dead or alive, she had been certain that they'd return to search for her – to make sure that she was not in need of rescue and to rescue her if she was.
They had to be on their way… held up, perhaps. Maybe Bow and Glimmer had required medical attention. She-Ra would come, at least.
This forced Entrapta to contemplate the situation. They were her friends, right? They'd been working together. Then again, the rescue of Bow and Glimmer had been the mission. None of the others seemed to care about the side-quest opportunities that she was taking to gain more knowledge of Horde technology and operations. Even as she'd had people she was calling friends, she'd kept to the outside of most of the social interactions, studying them, waiting to feel welcomed. How many times had she been regarded with weird looks, or even outright fear? She remembered Glimmer's appalled reaction when she'd talked about theories of particle-principle in regards to teleportation. Her actions had disturbed Perfuma's calm many times. Even Bow and she had a few minor arguments debating practicality versus pure science. Mermista didn't seem to really like anybody. Adora, well… she didn't seem to make a secret that she thought of Entrapta as useful…
… Was she merely thought of as "just useful?"
Entrapta glanced at her timepiece. Was that right? She took out her recorder and made a log.
"Fright Zone Log, Hour 45. Is that right? I don't know if that's right. It was hard to tell in the walls. Hour 45, that's… that's too many hours…This angry feline-person seems to be correct. They're not coming back for me…"
The realization caused a twisting sensation in her gut. She lost composure and could not stop herself from tearing up. Maybe she was still here because they didn't care. They'd used her in the escape, but maybe they didn't want her anymore after that. Perhaps they thought she was dead and were glad of it – no more fear of her experiments gone array. It could be that they assumed her captured, and likewise did not care – because they'd had their contracts with Dryl and weapons in the working. It looked like she'd reached her annoyance-threshold with them as she had with most other flesh and blood people she'd met.
Eventually everyone leaves me…
Catra gently wiped her tears with a brush of her tail.
"You wouldn't have to pretend to be something you're not with the Horde," Catra offered. Think of what you can accomplish here, what we can accomplish… together."
Entrapta paused, letting her thoughts run. She had, indeed, gained more knowledge from fiddling with Horde-technology in the short time that she was here than in her entire life and she said as much.
Maybe these new people were offering her a new chance at the "friendship" experiment, maybe a new purpose. She decided, even if she couldn't trust them entirely, that as long as she was here, that she shouldn't waste the vast scientific opportunities presented before her.
They could give her access to shiny new toys.
At the very least, for the time being, she figured that if she remained compliant, they wouldn't kill her, or torture her… or try to cut her hair. Besides, they seemed most impressed with Emily once they were properly introduced, destroyed wall aside.
Every misfit was useful somewhere.
