Mother, make me; Make me a big, tall tree so I can shake my leaves and let it blow through me.
. . .
Hidden Phantom bowed before the Mother Elf as she held chained and suspended near the top of her antechamber.
"Mother, I come with a request." Hidden Phantom said to the seemingly lifeless orb above him.
"Oh?" came the surprised voice although the face on the Mother Elf's orb form remained unchanged. "What is wrong my little tulpa?"
Phantom took this as a sign to stand up before continuing. "Dr Weil has requested my presence to a rather large gathering this evening that he was invited to. He wanted me, of all Reploids, to act as his guard against those who might try to do him harm."
"Isn't that an honor?"
"Mother..." Hidden Phantom shamefully whispered under his breath. "Mother, I can not accept the position knowing what he has done to you and… and her."
"And what has he done? She was resurrected, I stopped a deadly virus."
"We know full well that she was not truly resurrected." Phantom suddenly snapped, his voice raising in a shock induced anger. "And what good was it to stop a virus that has proven itself to be more of a cult movement than a disease? Mother, whether you are aware of it or not, Dr Weil has stripped you of your humanity as Aero Sephira and has confined you to a shell that lies chained inside a chamber regulated by the true Mega Man X's corpse! I may give allegiance to Tekiya in memory of Mega Man X, but I will NOT bow to Barlet Weil!"
The Mother Elf did not directly respond to this statement, although the air around them had become still and almost shocked. Slowly, the face on the Mother Elf's mainframe started to disappear as an arrangement of pixels started to form into the figure of a young woman in front of Phantom. The Guardian looked at the hologram with a still look, refusing to move or even blink, fearing that he was going to be in trouble. With her hologram to communicate with, the Mother Elf gave Phantom an expression that crossed between worried and concerned. He hated to see that look on her because it implied that he was weak- unable to face his own fears and hatred to do something that would last for nothing more than a few hours at the least.
Without saying a word, Phantom now believed that the Mother Elf found him useless.
The Mother Elf was also silent as her hologram appear to lull over some information on how to help, or to deem him unhelpful.
"My dear tulpa, could you… get me something?" the Mother Elf then requested softly. "Against the southern wall, there is a collection of various odds and ends your siblings give to me. There happens to be pocket watch, an older one with cogs and gears, could you bring it to me?"
Hidden Phantom nodded and did as he was told, easily distinguishing the white gold plated watch (the actual clock face hidden behind a simple cover) and bringing it back over to the Mother Elf's holographic form.
"It still ticks, doesn't it?" the Mother Elf entertained, as her hologram observed over Phantom's shoulder curiously at the watch. "It still ticks even though it doesn't want to, even though it has seen some things it didn't want to; and maybe, just maybe, it might have some fears about the time when it fails to tick and no one is around to fix it. What this watch might not know is that someone is already out there, getting ready for the day when this watch comes through to the repair shop. It might seem a bit morbid now, but they are ready for whatever problems this watch might have faced."
"Are you comparing me to a watch, Mother?"
"I'd like to imagine that you are much more smarter than the watch- but yes, I suppose the likeness is still there if you look hard enough."
Under his helmet, Hidden Phantom's face lightly flushed a lovely pink color that the Mother Elf pretended not to notice.
"Take it with you." she then insisted. "I think you could make more use with it than what I could."
The Guardian blinked before looking down at the still ticking pocket watch, then looked back up at the Mother Elf's hologram.
"Mother, wasn't this the watch that I gave you?"
The Mother Elf did not directly answer, but her hologram gave a wide smile and an innocent chuckle that did not ease Phantom's guess.
. . .
Hidden Phantom was expected to greet Dr Weil when his expensive transportation arrived at the formal meeting. The meeting itself was being held at the Neo Arcadian art gallery
He ended up late, for whatever reason, and had brought his son with him.
"There's been a change of plans." Dr Weil muttered to Hidden Phantom as the trio walked together into the art gallery. "You will not be watching over me, you will be watching over Albert instead. If anything happens to him, you can expect your parts to be scrapped. Do I make myself clear?"
"Perfectly, Dr Weil." Phantom agreed. The Guardian then gave a quick glance to Albert, who walked with his head held high like he was a rich senior who thought the world was littler than him. With a quick evaluation, the poor tulpa decided that being in charge of keeping young Albert safe was going to be a lot harder than keeping Weil safe.
Here's hoping the child was in a fairly civil mood this evening…
After making sure Weil was in union with the party he was supposed to meet up with, Albert and Phantom wandered through the art gallery looking for something to critique. Of course, Albert led the Guardian to the exhibits for the 'colorful' depictions of Reploids, Mechaniloids, and the like. There wasn't a single one that depicted the world of the thinking robotic creation to be happy or living their lives as a human. Several pictures detailed very high levels of individual circuitry that would have been taboo if having come from the guts of a human.
Albert stopped at a photograph that was taken inside a Pantheon production line. The simplified Reploids stood in neat lines- like soldiers taking a stance at the battlefield, ready to strike when the one in charge gives them the order. The picture had already proven to be authoritative, but on closer inspection when you noticed how the Pantheon's bodies simply sagged as a sign of them having yet to be activated, the scene became eerie. Humans would have likely seen nothing wrong with it, but Phantom considered the possibility that these Pantheons knew that they were going to die in battle some day and already mourning their demise.
"Tin soldiers." Albert remarked tonelessly. Phantom looked down on the child, noting that he looked deep in thought with his hands held behind his back and an expressionless face. The Guardian let the child continue his line of thought with utmost interest. "Father refers to the Pantheon drones as tin soldiers, particularly when they botch something up. He claims that they are nothing more than nerfed Reploids; unable to feel, unable to think, unable to hold sentimental value to trivial creations of nature."
In saying this, Albert make a swift moment toward Phantom that he almost didn't catch- and before the Guardian could stop the child, Albert had swiped the pocket watch off of Phantom's armor. The child held the watch in Phantom's face as if it were proof of a slanderous behavior that should have had him killed.
"You are a tin soldier." Albert then claimed, his voice so dark in tone that no child should have been able to produce it. "You are the one that all the scientists in Neo Arcadia brag about. You were to be unfeeling, unable to think, unable to hold value to human creations. Why do you have this?"
"Because I was reminded of its value." Hidden Phantom calmly told the child, picking his words carefully. "A clock still ticks even when it doesn't want to. It keeps time when others fail to show up. A clock does not hold anger toward others who have thrown it out of fury. I am like this pocket watch in particular; I have seen things I did not want to, I have heard information that could hurt others, and I have fears of one day being useless to the ones I care of the most. But here I am, still ticking- still watching over a child in need of therapy and desire to be noticed by his father, competing with the ghost of a human Weil decided to love instead of keeping it with his dead wife."
The scowl on Albert's face was venomous, but it kept the child from talking for the rest of the time they waited to Weil. Hidden Phantom liked this side of Albert better -even if certain glares could be read as wishes of one dying- and so he kept him that way until they departed for the night.
. . .
This chapter was inspired in part by deviantArt user terral's photograph called 'Tin Soldiers', for which the photograph Hidden Phantom and Albert looked at was inspired by. This chapter was also inspired by the song 'Mother' as sung by Florence + the Machine from their album How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful, to which the lyrics that inspired are featured at the start of the chapter.