Faces from the Ancient Gallery
Fairchild is not a man.
Nobody is quite sure what he is, and it's entirely possible that he's not entirely sure, either. All he knows is that he's alive, that life is for living, and that he is living his.
If you were to ask him about his past, he would answer with a series of fascinating lies. You would probably believe them, the way that you believe the sun will come up tomorrow morning.
He doesn't recall having a childhood. You could forgive him this. After all, he is impossibly ancient. You wouldn't be able to tell by simply looking at him, of course; the human skin that he wears in his travels around this world is spellbindingly handsome.
As far as he knows, though, he was not so much born as he just congealed. He simply walked out of the darkness one day--before there was such a thing as days or nights--and was.
He has no mother and no father.
He has no planet to which he swears allegiance, no star system that he calls his home.
He is not Chaos.
He is not Destruction.
He is not Death.
No.
These things follow in his wake, wherever he goes. But he isn't an anthropomorphic personification, say, or a creature born of a bleak, lonely destiny. Nothing like that at all. He simply is, and he is a creature with no reason for being, no reason at all. Most creatures didn't--he had found this out in his travels across the universe, during his long walks in the dark between stars--but liked to tell themselves that they did--from the bacteria-folk crawling in the entrails of beautiful creatures on lush, jungle-covered asteroids, all the way up to the silly little girls in little frilly skirts who fancied themselves the saviors of worlds, who would happily pretend that their idiot leader was worth dying for, or that the planets on which they lived were special and worth protecting.
He found this funny--that creatures thought that there were things worth dying for. He found that once you gave somebody a purpose, any purpose at all, they would happily, proudly march their way forth to destruction and death.
So he hadn't bothered finding himself a purpose.
Rather, he told other creatures what their purpose was, and he would steady them, positioning them on a long and merry death-march.
He had no ambitions for conquest or for power--he already had enough power for his tastes. No, he just wanted to have himself some fun.
Sometimes he would create a body and take their native shape. He would mingle amongst them, speak to them. He would tell them what they wanted to hear, and he would give them a face and a voice--false ones, a grim and dark parody. And he would give them exactly what they wanted. Of course they were never happy. There is an old proverb--"the hearts of the wicked never rest easily"--but the opposite is actually far more true. The hearts of the righteous--or self-righteous, as the case may be, and often is--are never restful at all. That was why they were pretty damn easy to manipulate. The wicked are too paranoid and jealous to accept that sort of manipulation, and won't stand for it. But people who are convinced that their cause is good and right… they would eagerly gobble up any ugly lie you told them, no matter how great that lie was. They were happy to be led around by their noses by a charming leader with a handsome face and passionate speech. If he said 'jump,' they would only ask how high. If he said 'we must assassinate the king,' they would go, 'poison, dagger, or gun?' If he said 'those people over there are looking at us funny and I think they mean to cut our throats before nightfall,' they would panic, and go, 'I think we should cut their throats and steal their treasures first!' Beauty. Any idiot could do it; it just took a little bit of ingenuity.
Sometimes he took a different route.
Sometimes he would merely carve his target's 'conscience' out, by means of a type of psychic lobotomy, and take its place as one of those famous Voices. They would never, ever know what happened. Not in life, not in death. Which was part of the fun. They would be disturbed by it, certainly, but they wouldn't know what had happened; they would stand over the broken and bloodied bodies of the people they loved the most and wonder why they had done it, without being able to figure it out at all (he jammed those thought patterns quite easily). They would tear themselves apart--figuratively and literally--and with their dying gasps and last thoughts, they would wonder why. They would ask the thing that they thought of as themselves, and he would not answer them, save with a cold, grim, amused silence. That misery and pain, that self-loathing, that hatred and fury… he found it fuckin' hilarious. Great fun.
And once he had discovered the secret of Sailor Crystals and Sailor Power… well! That had been a millennium to remember, hadn't it? He looked back upon it fondly.
The first sailor soldier that he had run into had been one Sailor Merope. She had been exceedingly easy; she was a woman in love. Your typical fairy-story bullshit, really--rebellious princess wanting to marry for love and not for position or power. Arranged marriage. Stable boy on the side. Her sisters had all been married off into their correct positions, so there was an unbelievable amount of pressure on Sailor Merope, the youngest. He had raked his icy claws through her brain, tearing out her rational conscience and tossing it aside, and he had comfortably taken up a spot there, speaking in the voice of her beloved; he would make her hear her beloved begging for an eternity together. Lies, lies, lies, all easily swallowed up by the one he fed them to. With only the tiniest of nudges, she had decided to kill her sisters and her father in order to be together with her beloved for eternity, and so she had transformed with the magic words--"Merope Star Power, Make Up!"
He had never before experienced such power, such delicious, unadulterated malice--though she (and many others before and after) would have called it "purpose." It had sent him into a month-long laughing fit. Her first sister, she had incinerated with star-fire. The next, she had fought in armed combat, and plunged a spear through the sister's ears. So on and so forth, until the last one stood, cowering before Sailor Merope and begging for her life, even offering up her child's life instead, desperate for her own to continue, even in the outfit of the supposedly brave and honorable soldiers of the universe. He had sat on the woman's brain with a heavy pressure, and, in a false, borrowed voice, whispered desperate-sounding deceits of love and longing. Her hesitation had ended there, and she had strangled the final sister with her bare hands. After that, he had slipped out of her mind and stood in the corner, invisible, but shaking with silent laughter, as the realization of what she had just done sank in.
And after that, she had snapped, with one final feral howl, and killed every living thing in the Pleiades group. She would have spread on to the entire Taurus constellation, had she not been stopped by one Sailor North Star, a crusty, seasoned older woman and an excellent soldier. Sailor Merope had crippled North Star for life, crushing her legs underneath an enormous boulder, but North Star had managed to send a bolt of blue electromagnetic energy directly through Merope's eyes, killing the mad soldier instantly. Then she'd passed out, alone in a desolate system of ruins. At that point, he had left, still shaking with laughter. A big system, full of life, decimated in the space of an afternoon. So much for the power of love. He was inclined to suspect, really, that if there was such a thing as the power of love, it had, in fact, wound up destroying the people of the Taurean system.
So he had tooled around and had his fun. Soldier, sailor, tinker, tailor, queen, prince, man, woman, child, tentacle monster, bacteria-man, stonefolk. It didn't matter to him. They all provided equally good sport. Some were just more creative than others.
For the past couple of millennia, he'd been hanging around in the general vicinity of the Sol system. There were numerous backwater hick planets out here, filled with interestingly fucking stupid life-forms.
What fun he had had there!
He had joined in the wars among the bacteria-folk in the Sirian systems, inciting them to overthrow the viral queens (citing injustice in the balance of power--and managing to mask the fact that they needed the viral queens in order to ensure the propagation and survival of the bacteria-folk) and kill the virus Sailor Soldier that had served them so well, protecting them against the protozoa-people in the previous bloody little war. Then, when he had purposefully let the truth slip, the common folk--who were all that remained--turned on one another in a panic and started slaughtering one another.
He had simply appeared on the planet Cykranosh--which, if he recalled it right, was now called Saturn, and had been since taken over by humanoids. But at the time, it had been Cykranosh. The people--billions of tiny metal spider-gods, called by the name 'Atlach-Nacha'--lived on the sparkling, opalescent core. Their kingdom was quiet and small and peaceful, unusual for the size of the gas-giant planet. It had been quiet and small and peaceful, anyway, until he'd gotten his eight spindly legs into it. The spider-gods had tangled themselves up into an impossible knot in the midst of their war and begged him to give them all the mercy of death. He'd watched them for weeks, crouched on his horrible misshapen haunches on the ground, enjoying the tiny agonized screams they offered him. They were starving and thirsting and dying, screaming and panicking and crying. He had let them die eventually, as they failed to hold his interest any longer. Most of them, anyway. But he had kept a breeding pair in a jar, just in case he wanted to use them for anything in the future. Four million years later, he had brought them out of the dust and dark and let them burrow into a man's head, weaving webs of his nightmares and visions, breeding and eventually bursting free for a short while.
But his favorite had been a trip to a silvery moon that orbited an ugly blue planet.
It had been the first time he'd worn a human's skin. He found it itchy, tight, and uncomfortable--in fact, he still did. That was why he sometimes simply walked Out of it--for a breath of fresh air. But he'd gotten used to it after awhile.
The people of the moon, who wore these skins, thought they were awfully important and advanced. They would constantly bleat and bitch about their art and culture, as if that were some sort of great accomplishment. Any halfwitted beast could do that kind of shit. Indeed, most of them did.
This had been another affair over such a stupid thing as a little lump of glass with magic powers. The people of the Sol system acted like their very existence depended on it. So he had decided to fuck with them a little bit.
Hilarity ensued.
He had stolen it--child's play, really; the people of the moon were the haughty, snotty sort of people who thought that animal weaknesses like greed and desire for power were beneath them somehow, the sort who fancied that they were living in some beauteous utopia, so they tried to operate on the honor system. Even the castle and the queen. He had duplicated himself on a temporary basis; half of him went to swipe the queen's Silver Crystal, and half of him went to speak to a group of peasants (riddle me this: if it's as utopian as they think it is, why are there still peasants milling about at the bottom of the pit? It was fun to watch them, like ants in a farm; the supposedly highly-evolved moon-people would simply go about pretending they lived in a utopian fairy-land and ignore every ugly or unpleasant thing, shoved it over onto the dark side of the moon, and the peasants were livid; if given the slightest chance, just the tiniest little nudge, the peasants would tear the moon kingdom apart) about inciting a riot and then a revolution in the afternoon. Both were damn easy, of course.
In the former case, he had simply slid into the crystal castle--wearing the human skin, the human skin covered in a manservant's clothing--popped into the queen's bedroom, and swiped the crystal from her bedside table. You would have thought they would have such an 'important' thing at least padlocked up somewhere, or maybe hidden, but no--the crystal was merely lying on the sleeping queen's nightstand. So he had pocketed it and walked back out and waited for the riots and the revolution to begin, sitting on a green wicker chair outside of a little bar on the high street.
He had done a number of things to ensure the fiery, bloody demise of the moon kingdom.
First, he had researched a little into the troubles between the Earth Kingdom and the people of the moon. They were in the middle of a cold war, neither one wanting to make the first move, but constantly at each other's throats anyway. The reasons why didn't matter to him. There was massive unrest between the two realms, though, and that was what had attracted him. It was at that time that he had gotten the idea of stoking the fire and setting them into a real war, a bloody and miserable one, perhaps the final one for their worlds (but if not, that was fine, too, because he would be back anyway).
Second, he had stirred Queen Metallia. She was but a weak little pissant of the Night-Kind, codependent on humans for sustenance. But humans were weak little pissant creatures themselves, so she would do just fine. He had also sent her a vessel, an easily-manipulated idiot of a woman named Beryl. And so, Queen Metallia claimed, the Dark Kingdom would rise again. Not fuckin' likely, but what did he care? It would be more than enough to get an extinction war rising.
Third, he had spoken charismatically and convincingly to the downtrodden peasantry of both the Earth and the moon. He didn't honestly give a shit about their well-being or equality; in fact, he could not possibly have given less of a shit, and quite liked that they were so miserable. But if there was more fun to be had out of fucking with them, he was going to have that fun, even if he had to work for it first.
Fourth, he had stolen the crystal. The people of the moon had jumped to the conclusion that he had wanted them to jump to--that the sage Beryl had stolen it for Earth's people--and so they had attacked one another viciously, and neither the queen nor her sailor soldiers could stop it, no matter how hard they had tried. Failure was the only option. He'd seen to that. Then he'd slipped back in and returned the crystal to the queen just a moment too late, after her daughter, the princess, had been slaughtered mercilessly by Beryl.
"Bit of bad luck, that," he had said to her cheerfully, the only other living thing left among the ruins of the silver kingdom, and he had flashed her his famous crocodile-grin. He was enjoying every passing second of this. Two entire kingdoms wiped out in the space of an afternoon. And after this, an entire solar system devoid of life, with the once-grand kingdoms of the planets crumbling into the dust of the cosmos. There would be life again someday. Life had an annoying habit of, you know, living. It came back a lot, no matter what you did to snuff it out entirely. Bonus rounds in the game of stars. That was all they were. But no matter how grand the kingdoms of the Sol system had once been, they would never reclaim that glory again, never have the same power or majesty. History taught its lessons, after all.
She had only answered his sunny remark with tremulous weeping, curled up on the crumbling stone floor of the temple.
He had spent several years basking in the glory of what he had done that time.
And then, he had simply moved on for a thousand or a million or so years, all over the infinite amount of galaxies in the ever-expanding universe.
Genocide here, civil war there, strife and horror and destruction and misery everywhere else. He encouraged it, took an active part in creating it or keeping it going. He was the one who made sure that the daggers were sticking out of the proper spines, that the dogs of war, the dogs of chaos and ruin, ate everything in sight and pissed fire and blood on the rest.
Kept him entertained. Certainly put a smile on his face.
There's not much else to do, really, when you've lived for billions of years, with your death nowhere to be seen--when you're almost entirely unkillable--it's all you can do to keep yourself amused, and he had found the games that pleased him the most.
It didn't matter what the rules were.
He had been playing his game for billions of years--the game called havoc--and this was a game that would go on for eternity, for as long as there were stars, for as long as there was life.
No, not even those silly little girls in miniskirts could stop him.
They had tried several times already.
And they had lost.
So he was confident that they would go on losing. They would rise up against him, one by one, and he would stomp them all down into their proper place, under his heel. They could bleat on about the greatness of their princesses and the power of love and the atonement that friendship offered all they wanted, but they was all lies, told in quivering voices to terrified young women who had been unlucky enough to be granted Sailor Crystals and Sailor Power.
He enjoyed the sounds of their worlds shattering, sending reality shoving rudely into their fragile minds full of silly delusions.
Fairchild is not a man.
Fairchild is complete and utter madness.