Ahh, I'm so sorry for taking so loonngg! I hope y'all haven't forgotten about me! I'm gonna try my best to keep the ball rolling, I promise. Thank you for being so patient! Also, let it be known that I have NO FREAKIN' CLUE how Black Mages are made. Or Genomes for that matter. Sooo… yeah. Enjoy!
Chapter Twenty-Five
Processing
1.
The morning offered only the briefest of respites before the heavens opened again and shunned the promise of a sunny day. The clouds weren't so burdened though; the rain came in sporadic showers that left the air grey but fresh and thick with the scent of pine.
A voice had pulled Garnet out of a sleep too short and tumultuous to be called restful, less than an hour ago. She'd been having an unsettling dream anyway, too surreal to be organised for analysis, and even if she'd wanted to it vanished almost as soon as her bleary, disorientated vision registered the person standing over her.
"Zidane?"
She'd blinked again then shot upright so fast her head span. Only then, with the light of an early day throwing ethereal curtains through the windows of Mikoto's home, did she realise her mistake, and recoiled.
"Oh… sorry," she'd apologised to the Genome standing beside her bed. "I thought… I thought you were… Ahm, nevermind…"
The Genome offered her a mild stare and relayed a message from Mikoto, which all but ordered her out of bed. Upon learning that Mikoto had begun working on Zidane's condition without notifying her rattled Garnet into a sour mood. She forgot completely about breakfast and pulled on her stiff, dry pilot's attire from the previous night and one of Mikoto's ponchos on top of that, to ward off the chill.
Now the Genome was leading her along a well-worn path outside the Black Mage Village, apparently unconcerned by the prospect of being attacked. Any questions Garnet threw his way regarding Steiner, Blank and Zidane were ignored, so she resigned herself to brooding silence.
The path they took weaved between thickets of pine tree that grew so close together their branches interlocked overhead, letting through such little light that the woodland floor was bare of life. Eventually, the consistency of the larger flora thinned and thick, knee high brush rose eagerly from fertile turf instead, soaking Garnet's pants with their rain-slick leaves. Yet this went largely unnoticed to the queen, as there was something much more noticeable to consider.
Absently, she muttered, "So that's where it went…"
There was a clearing in the woodland ahead, possibly unnatural, and here was where the ground flora flourished. However, it was largely flattened by a less natural commodity that loomed like a slumbering beast in its cradle, the tip of its smooth surface rivalling even the tallest of trees.
The Invincible.
"She is in there," the Genome told her, and he pointed to one of many entrances/exits.
"Thank you," Garnet barely heard herself acknowledge before she approached the ship with some trepidation. Of all the transport Garnet had been on the Invincible was the most aweing, and her least favourite. However, it looked like it had been out of commission for some time; vines were beginning to creep up its hull and owls had nested in the alcoves of its exterior. It clearly hadn't taken flight for some time. But why would Mikoto bring her here?
Despite being grounded, it was fully functional, because Garnet was teleported up from beneath its hull. She fought off the sickness that accompanied the process of being broken apart into something implausible, though her empty stomach still attempted several handstands. Once she'd recovered she found herself in the familiar interior of an alien ship. The red eye of the Invincible still glowed behind her, humming a mechanical tune and tinting her skin with ghoulish highlights. That much remained unchanged, but when she walked into the cockpit the alterations were so great she felt quite disorientated, and the reason behind the Invincible's immobility became apparent.
The cockpit had been transformed into a makeshift laboratory. There were alien machines choked with Gaia's cogs and gears and crudely assembled production lines that trundled in circles; a fusion of foreign and familiar technology that ending up looking a little absurd. All were assembled around the cockpit and the vast, rain streaked window at the front revealed the forest outside, lending a peculiar backdrop to the mechanical genius within.
"Run while you still can," a voice hissed in her ear, making her jump.
She turned around and Blank was there, his arms full with an assortment of ambiguous tools. He looked harried and nervous.
"What are you doing?" Garnet asked.
Blank's eyes darted round, then he leaned forward. "She's a fucking slave driver, that girl. She woke me up at the crack of dawn – the crack of dawn – and got me workin' on all these chores. Like, what has this even got to do with me? She's been on my ass all morning."
"She woke you up but not me?" Garnet seethed, hands planted on her hips.
"Think yourself lucky," Blank said, missing the point. "Even Boss doesn't work me this hard. He -"
"Blank?" a voice called sedately from the cockpit's (laboratory's?) doorway. "I thought I asked you to take that to the storage room?"
Blank cringed and threw Mikoto an impatient look. "Give me a chance, woman! Don't I get a fucking coffee break or something?"
Mikoto stared at him levelly until Blank sighed and stomped past her, muttering angrily. Once he was gone, Mikoto turned her attention to Garnet, who was fighting down a morning's worth of irritation.
"You could have woken me," she snapped, then because she was in no mood for an argument she continued, "Where's Zidane?"
"Over here, of course," Mikoto said, breezing past her. "You must understand this is largely experimental. And inconvenient. I had to postpone my current project to accommodate him, and due to its delicate nature I'll have to start again once he's been removed."
"Zidane didn't intend to get ill," Garnet gritted. "I don't know what you're talking about, anyway."
Mikoto stepped over a pipe larger than a man's thigh then around an unusual structure. She pointed at it and said, "He's currently accommodating the only Production Capsule on Gaia. Like I said, it's very inconvenient, but I decided it would be easier to monitor his restoration like this."
Garnet hurriedly joined her and gawped.
The structure was tall and concave like a fish bowl, with a similar purpose. Inside, Zidane was suspended in a gel like substance, hooked up to numerous wires like a puppet on strings. His eyes were closed.
"He'll drown!" Garnet bleated, and Mikoto's scoff was all the reassurance she received.
"I managed to scrounge together enough materials from various locations on Gaia, including Kuja's desert palace – trust him to build something so offensively superfluous – to construct one capsule, and even then substantial adjustments had to be made… especially considering the original blueprints Garland designed burnt with Terra…" She paused, as if allowing Garnet to acknowledge her feat, but the queen had her hands pressed against the glass, her concern entirely directed at Zidane.
"What's going to happen?" she asked. "What are you doing to him?"
"Rebooting him," Mikoto said, but Garnet didn't understand so she elaborated. "I'm restoring him to his physical former self. At the moment he's… shut down."
Garnet was unpleasantly reminded of the factory in Dali and the lifeless dolls hanging from hooks on a conveyor belt like slaughtered animals at a butcher's. It made her stomach knot and she was suddenly glad she'd skipped breakfast.
"The capsule is currently keeping him alive," Mikoto explained. "Inside there, he won't starve to death or succumb to exposure, plus I can monitor his brain activity and rebuild his system in a cleaner, controlled environment."
"You'll be able to wake him up?" Garnet attempted to translate.
Mikoto paused, eyes briefly skirting the cockpit, before she replied, "Yes."
Garnet didn't miss the hesitation. "But?"
She shrugged evasively. "There's no guarantees but I think I can get him functioning again. I oversaw the entire growth and production process on Terra, even if Garland was the brains behind the initial creation, but I think I can recreate and improve upon even that…" She shook her head. "Anyway, I think I can get him working again and erase any mental conditioning Garland installed, but I can't say the same for… for his memories."
Garnet threw her an alarmed look. "His… His memories? But… But that's what makes him… him! It's his personality, his soul, everything!"
Mikoto shrugged again and offered no words of comfort. "We'll see."
2.
The days trudged on. Garnet maintained a vigilant guard beside Zidane's capsule. Her presence appeared to bother Mikoto but even she didn't have the heart to send her away, unless it was on some important errand, though those were mostly left to Blank and Steiner. Mikoto offered no reassurances but regularly updated Garnet on Zidane's condition, which was apparently looking favourable.
It also seemed that Garnet had severely misjudged Mikoto, who worked tirelessly. She ate what Garnet brought from her house with a great show of irritation, munching whole slabs of buttered bread in a few, un-ladylike bites while her hands were busy, always busy, fiddling with the technology that sprouted in profusion from every sleek edifice of the ship; Mikoto took multi-tasking to a new level. She often slept strewn across her work in intervals so short Garnet worried for her health.
But her time was not entirely consumed with Zidane's wellbeing. In fact, she spent very little time overseeing her brother's recovery, checking his vitals a few times a day and making ambiguous adjustments to the various tubes inserted within his skin. She seemed distracted by various other projects, one of which she was largely evasive of, though Garnet managed to deduce it was something to do with the Genomes. The other was no secret and took up most of her time, and was also Garnet's only enjoyable way of passing her own time when it was not spent at Zidane's side.
3.
"It moved!" Garnet yelled over her shoulder. "This is it, I'm sure, it's coming out today!"
She heard Mikoto huff impatiently from across the cockpit, where she was perched atop a contraption so tall her head touched the ceiling. Nonetheless, Mikoto nimbly descended to floor level (leaving Garnet wondering if Zidane's monkey-like agility was a feature present in all the Genomes) and approached the queen, wiping her oil-steaked hands on the front of her dress.
"This one," Garnet indicated.
Mikoto appraised it for a split second and said, "No. It's not ready. A few more days."
Garnet's hopes sunk and she rested her chin on the edge of the incubator, eyes staring imploringly at the five eggs inside.
This was how Black Mages were made. It was a new method that combined Kuja's techniques with Terran technology; the project had stemmed from Vivi's desire to see his race continue after Kuja's demise, and Mikoto's intellect. She seemed passionless about it (though it was so hard to tell with Mikoto) but Garnet knew Vivi had that effect on people. Not even Zidane had been able to say no to him at the best of times.
Vivi had allowed Mikoto to conduct a number of experiments on Mages who had Stopped, though this had to be done in secret for fear of upsetting the others, who were surprisingly more sensitive than Vivi, and who might have been happy to allow their race to pass away, not out of laziness but because they were happy to accept life as it was rather than seek out answers to questions they didn't understand.
It had taken some time, but Mikoto made the discovery that it was not Mist that gave the Mages life. The mages were similar to Genomes in the sense that they were living organisms produced from DNA (when Garnet requested an explanation on DNA, of which she'd never heard, Mikoto threw her a wide eyed look and simply shook her head), albeit substantially less advanced, but the concept behind their basic shell was the same as the Genomes, which led Mikoto to believe the Black Mage army had been directly inspired by the Genome Project. Mikoto also discovered that the Mist itself was the origin of their infamous powers. Now, with the Mist gone, the new generation of Mages were without magic. Garnet thought this to be a blessing in disguise. The atrocities previously committed using black magic could never be repeated, nor would anyone wish to manipulate the naive mages again for the purpose of war, though as a magic user herself she somewhat lamented the idea of any breed of magic becoming extinct over time, and wondered what other consequences the Mist's absence would have on Gaia.
Upon Vivi's wishes, Mikoto set up a small laboratory for the sole purpose of creating Mages. Garnet couldn't begin to understand how it was possible, though Mikoto simply told her it was 'much simpler' than creating a Genome. They started out in the Production Capsule as embryos, then were implanted into eggs like she'd seen in Dali, where they grew until they hatched like birds. Mikoto expressed that the egg procedure was 'unnecessary' and 'bothersome' but due to the lack of Production Capsules there was no alternative. Secretly, Garnet was pleased, because the thought of mini-Vivi's hatching out eggs was simply adorable, even if she had yet to witness it.
The egg she was fixated on wriggled and her heart leapt. She almost called out to Mikoto again but decided against it and waited patiently for any signs of cracking.
As she sat watching, Garnet attempted to hassle an answer out of her sister-in-law regarding a past interest. "Mikoto?"
"Mmm?"
"What's the other project you're working on?"
"It's got nothing to do with you," Mikoto told her.
Garnet brushed off her tone easily. Garnet no longer took offense to her brusque mannerisms. She had learned that the girl did not mean things as rudely as she worded them, she was just uninformed about the level of courtesy required when addressing others. Garnet was still confused by the meaning behind her answer though, wondering if it was a literal statement or Mikoto's way of saying 'Mind your own business'. Hoping for the former, she pushed a little further.
"I'm just curious. Is it important?"
"I suppose it is."
"Do you think it's important?"
She paused. "No. N- Yes. I… guess it is. I suppose." She volunteered, "It's to do with the Genomes."
Though she was being entirely selfish, Garnet couldn't bear to hear anything else negative that might be related to Zidane, so she voiced her concern.
Not looking from the machine she was tinkering with, Mikoto shook her head. "No."
"Then what's wrong?"
For the first time since they began talking, Mikoto's hands ceased their constant activity and she sat awkwardly still, eyes fixed on the machine as she deliberated whether to open up to Garnet – to anyone, in fact. Uncomfortably, she said, "After Terra was destroyed I didn't see the point in anything, the point in my – or the Genomes' – existence. We were created for a single purpose, and that purpose vanished with Terra. I didn't even see the point in leaving Terra, I would have gladly died there and then… but Zidane – " She glanced over to her inert brother, but didn't elaborate. She went on, "Vivi used to say that Genomes would one day develop souls too, just like the Mages, but I discovered that that just isn't possible. They're not made that way. They are vessels. They must be given souls." Her lips twitched briefly into a wry smirk. "That's the only way Kuja outsmarted Garland's design, even if it was unintentional. His dolls actually created souls themselves after some time had passed. Maybe Garland could have made the Genomes that way too, but that would have been somewhat impractical considering their purpose.
"Anyway, when Vivi asked me to help him make more Mages in a sustainable way, I argued with him and initially declined. I… didn't understand why he wanted to keep creating something without purpose and it's why I…" Here she paused for a long time, and Garnet kept quiet, allowing the introverted girl to find the words that usually came so naturally to her.
"That's why I refused to continue the Genome line, as well," she haltingly admitted. "I didn't see the point. I was willing to let my race die out… But Vivi taught me a lot and showed me that… that it is worth it. It will be worth the effort, in the end." She gestured vaguely around the cockpit. "So if I use some of Kuja's modifications on Garland's original design, I might be able to create a new, improved batch of Genomes. See, the new collections of Mages are born with souls. I'm thinking that maybe… maybe the new line of Genomes could be born with them too." She sighed grumpily to cover up any suggestion that she might be soft under her hard shell, and went back to altering the machine.
Garnet fiddled with the ends of her hair, head cocked thoughtfully as she contemplated the ceiling. She wondered what defined a soul anyway, for though the Genomes lacked personality they possessed a flat kind of curiosity that drove them to ask questions and try new things, even experience alarm. At length, another thought came to her and she asked with a sense of foreboding, "If you don't find it impolite of me to ask… Can't the Genomes reproduce the… natural way?"
Mikoto was unbothered by the nature of the question. "Yes, for the sake of the Terran souls that would have inhabited them. But without a soul the Genomes lack the drive to procreate. They possess a dull version of survival instinct but won't act independently and I don't… " She paused, either momentarily embarrassed or simply looking for the right wording. "I don't want to… I don't think they'd…" She left it hanging and just shrugged it off with a simple, "I think it would be better to do it this way."
Garnet nodded sagely then had a sudden vision of miniature Genomes running riot around the village, all flaxen haired and stubby-tailed with eyes blue enough to shun a summer's sky. In a moment quite uncharacteristic to the young, busy queen she let out a sigh and said, "Urgh, I think I'm getting broody."
"What?" Mikoto said, frowning, and looked like she was about to say something, but then her eyes were drawn behind Garnet and she said, "What on Terra…?"
Garnet spun round just in time to watch the first broken segment of shell tumble to the base of the incubator. She shrieked in glee and clasped her hands beneath her chin, watching the egg that was now a map of cracks tremble and shudder. A few more pieces were pushed outward and she yelled again and leaned forward to help the little mage out of its prison by picking off a few loose parts. After a moment, the darkness inside shifted like clouds over a night's sky and two tiny beacons of light squinted up at her. The new born mage bleated sweetly. Garnet continued helping it from its shell, while Mikoto simply rolled her eyes and said, "Why is everything on this planet so unpredictable?"
3.
The new and early arrival of a Black Mage had the village in an uproar. Not even the wisest of mages understood the technologies behind birthing a baby mage so the entire community greeted the news with a joy that bordered on hysteria. Everything came to a halt and every mage (and the odd curious Genome) gathered around the base of the Invincible awaiting Mikoto to present the new arrival. The presenter in question approached this jubilant ritual with the same enthusiasm one would approach washing dishes, even though it was her handiwork that had birthed the baby in the first place. Consequently, she didn't mind when Garnet asked if she could carry the baby out to show everyone instead, saying it would lend her more time to work.
The baby in question had the gross muscular of a three year-old, despite being born just an hour previously, which Mikoto insisted was necessary to avoid complications and to increase its chances of survival. Garland had also dictated what aged body the Genomes would possess for the same reasons, and because raising children was troublesome when you're trying to take over the world. However, unlike the Genomes, limited information had been installed into the mage as the being was with soul and would learn things naturally, which was also something Vivi requested of Mikoto (and while this baffled her it meant a lot less work on her behalf so she didn't object.)
Now the baby (or toddler, Garnet supposed) was dressed in Black Mage clothing specifically tailored for the smaller variety – hat and all – and was clinging to her neck like a baby monkey, blinking round in fright and awe. On the way out, Garnet paused to introduce the mage to Zidane, though the baby seemed more interested in the flashing lights on the panel beside him than the inert Genome within, and of course Zidane did not acknowledge him. Garnet then boarded a teleportation pad and was transported outside, where a rabble of onlookers eagerly awaited the new arrival.
"Ah, there he is!"
"How do you know it's a he?"
"Look at his little hands!"
"I made that hat!"
"He's looking right at me, see? He likes me!"
"His eyes are so cute and his feet are so tiny!"
"He's looks like me, he definitely takes after me!"
"What shall we name him?"
"He was early so… Mr 3?"
"We can't give everyone numbers, silly. Besides there must have been a Mr 3 already because I'm Mr 56!"
"Let's just call him Early."
"No!"
"That's so silly!"
"Let's ask the nice lady."
"Yes!"
"What would you call him, lady?"
Garnet took a surprised step back, all but put on the spot by a sea of large, eager, amber eyes as the crowd fell silent in anticipation. She cleared her throat awkwardly and looked at the new arrival in her arms, who was staring wide-eyed at the trees above. She eventually said, "Well…. If you want the name to be something to do with being early… why not… why not name him Robin, because the Robin is the… the first bird to sing in the morning…?"
It was fair to say the mage community was overwhelmed by the originality of this name as prior to Garnet's apparent talent for naming people they'd only ever thought of numbers. Robin was then removed from her care and taken to the village where, she'd been informed, a grand party would be held in his honour. Garnet followed, curious about the nature of this party and how the baby would react to its first few hours of life.
When the weight of the child was removed from her arms she was struck again by what she could only presume to be maternal instinct. She turned back to behold the Invincible and sent a prayer to the Eidolons that Zidane would awaken safely.
She didn't notice Mikoto watching her from the cockpit, an anxious frown creasing her brow.