Pick of the Litter

by Mess

The origins of Ramsus' female Element unit, with a dash of karma added in.

Pick of the Litter

When they came around, there were always lots an' lots. That made her happy! Well. okay, not reeeeeeally happy, but people should be happy because happiness is happiness and if you're not happy you're sad and that's bad, right? Right right! Mmmmm... cuddlycuddly. They gave them blanket when they brought theme here, because the people liked them to have blankets, since they thought the blankets made them happy. And they did! Happiness makes the world go 'round.

Nobody had named her yet, since naming her would make someone else happy. And that was good! Making happiness is better than anything else, that's what they said, and they should be right! They gave them carrots, too, and put them out on that place with all the glass so they could come and watch from outside. There'd be little kids - they'd be so happy and nice. And there'd be music too! It was in the other room, but that was okay, since she could her realreal well and so could her sisters and they were all pretty colors too and that's why Doctor said they were made special to stay in the box until they went away .

Sometimes, when they came, there'd be men that came into the room and say they were too young still to go to the house where they made soup, but she knew she was gonna grow up soon and be just like the pen doctor! The pen doctor was really nice. She gave her and her sisters shots, in this big shiny thing full funny stuff that looked funny, and they they felt really nice and better. She said it would make her strong when she grew up to help make other people happy! And that was good, because doing good things gives you the satisfaction of being good, which is good, so the goodness just gets gooder!

Her sisters were all the same age, since they were born on the same day. One of them was kicking her to close her eyes. That was silly! She should wake up since the people were here! Her sisters were tired of looking at the people and pretended to be asleep. That wasn't making anyone happy, not even them. Which meant it was stupid. Which was why she was standing up instead of curling up with all of them. They were purple and green and blue and dressed to match. She had pink on since pink is a great color and looked good on her! That's what the Doctor said, and Doctor was always strong and happy. Not like them. Sometimes they got taken away, her sisters. It sounded fun! There wasn't much to do here.

She pulled her pinafore down a bit, going up on her tiptoes. Sometimes they made her take her pinafore off so they would see what she'd look like when she was more valuable. She thought she was plenty valuable, since she knew the secret to happiness. But what did she know then? Silly people. They didn't know the grass-not-grass the Doctor told them not to chew on, or the little bed in back where they'd be allowed to sleep for real once the other people went to sleep too so no one would be seeing them. And they didn't know her younger sisters - her baby sisters that were kept the next one over and there were lots more of since they hadn't had the chance to know what she knew which was lots! And her big sisters, who always looked tired. Why did they look so tired!? There wasn't much to do here, since they had to save their energy. Even a six year-old knew that! That's why they were in the Shop - to go away and have lots of adventures so their baby sisters would have more room to be in the rooms and then their baby sisters would come and get taken and they'd all go off to the Homes where they were supposed to be. Shop wasn't like the other pens. It wasn't there to make people smarter or do funny things and write down what it meant, like when they cut those strange things up, they were here for fun fun fun!

This place wasn't fun, though. She hopped back and forth on the balls of her feet as was her nature, regretting briefly that circumstances made shoes so necessary she couldn't crunch the funny shredded green plastic plants that stuck to the floor through her toes. The floor was cold, but the lights were hot and bright. It made it kinda hard to see them passing outside her room - big blobs in relief against the shineshine shimmer-shiny silver of the little tiny wires in the clear glassy stuff.

A man tapped on the glass - or at least he looked like a man. He had funny clothes! Lots of them had not-funny clothes that were white and black and boring. That's why they needed them to be happy, she bet! Her sisters were all the colors of the rainbow!

Twitch.

She scratched her ear absentmindedly, and decided to do something to attract some attention. This was so boring. Even being a... a.... baby must be less boring than this, and that was saying lots since babies don't do much at all but gnaw and cry when their front teeth come in. Why? Why why whyyyyyyyyyy was nobody picking her? Her sisters didn't seem to like her, because she didn't lie there and look dead all the time, or star at the wall like sometimes people with other little kids would come staring at them. Tap tap tap. Tap on the glass. They'd' pass by with bags full of things, but instead of wanting to know what was inside or talk about why they had such funny heads with strange little ears and no fur, they just stayed there!

"Byebye sister! You're so lucky!" she waved, since that was a nice thing to do, and her sister was going and soooooo lucky luck lucky. Sister, who was purple, didn't look very happy back though. Sister was strange, like all her sisters!

"Sister, how can you say that? You know what they do to us out there. They do bad things.. bad things... I don't wanna..."

And she was crying while the Doctor took her out of the room, to the great bright white light shone and it was something warm warm warmer than in here, where it was always the same and the air didn't rush like that. Other sisters looked sad too, but just huddled up in the corner like they always did instead of going over to the swing like she did because swings are fun and she wanted sister to see a happy face seeing her off so she would cry less!! Why was she crying!? That made her confused. Sister probably wasn't listening to Doctor. Doctor told her they all had marvelous adventures when they left, and the other ones who talked to older sisters lots said she was stupid to listen to stupid fairy stories and everyone knew what happened but they didn't! She did! Since she nevernever was gonna give up on going out there to the bigbig world and then she'd get to carry a bag and...

Why didn't any of them want her?

It almost made her sad.

Then it was a longlong time, and she could hear the fans go whirr over her head, and all the funny things they said outside that sisters didn't wanna listen to since they said it reminded them of the bad things they cried about that were gonna happen if the men took them to be pets. No one wanted to play at all since they took purple sister today, and that was even mooooore boring than usual, since sometimes they'd realize that they should be happy like her (even if they called her stupid - meanies).

If she'd known what it meant, the pink sister might have realized that she felt very very lonely. The swing was on the other side from the sleeping place, and they wouldn't all be given food in the center until later when doctor made them take their vitamins.

Then something happened.

She watched the outside alot, because the outside was full of lots of different things every day and not like here at all with three (two, now) sleeping people not being fun and the same silver roof and crunchy-crunch plastic all the time. There were all sorts of colors and sounds.. sounds they never had in here! Sounds that made her ears all twitchy, and went high then low then high all again and made her want to hope and bounce and dance or even sometimes cry like her sisters did when they left. Didn't they know that when they left, they might get to listen to that all the time?

But this wasn't like the other times.

Lots of times people would come up to the edge of the glass, but this one didn't. He was different from all the rest, just like her sisters were different from her and sure not gonna make someone happy like she would if they'd just give her the chance. When he stopped at the glass, everyone stopped. And he wasn't really at the glass, he was backback, and she was gonna go craaaaaazy wanting to know why, because nothing new ever happened here and she was gonna go crazy waiting anyway and she wanted to go nownownow!

There were tons of other people with him too, but she knew he was the most important, because they were all looking at him.

Oh please, oh pleasepleaseplease......

"That's disgusting. Those things... do people really buy them that young?"

He looked sad. Pick me! Pick me! She waved to him, and facing outwards could not see her sisters' hate.

"They're just animals, your excellency. Not even Lambs."

He wasn't colorful like her. He was just sort of copper, and sandy, and pale at the same time, with funny purple and sandy clothes. Purple just like purple sister!! Oh no!! But purple sister was already gone today. Her other sisters were still crying. She could hear that, like she could hear everything outside even when nobody ever was supposed to know what they could hear.

It looked like they were in a hurry and wanted him to leave down the path where they all left to other places that weren't here. She had never been in a hurry before. They must like it lots! They sure did it lots! The world must be really fun.

"Yes, oh course," he stiffened, glanced at the group in the corner (when had they let older sisters in to make her sisters less sad? That was nice of them) all huddled up and looking mean. And she waved and waved and waved and oh, didn't he see her on the other side of the room they were in? Didn't he!?

Oh please, oh please ohpleaseplease....

The big ones listened to him and looked very serious, and not even the background people were moving. He must have lots of adventures for everyone to want to look at him!

"Still...."

And he saw her. He did. He did!!!!!

"That one."

"Sir! Surely your tastes won't be towards... I mean.. of course I appreciate that sir wishes to be pragmatic, but Sir..."

One looked sad... come over here! I'm smiling, see! Sisters are sad and mean and mad behind me, and on the back wall instead of up by the glass to see you, just like you with all your people that are sad and you're sad too but you're just like me and I can help if you just let me out! I promise! It's my extra-special talent!

Doctor looked happy too, at least. Yay Doctor! Doctor was running out from behind the desk.

"Your Excellency! Pay no attention to this man. I assure you that we would be only too happy to grant to you, free of charge, any one of our humble products."

Wasn't Doctor nice?

"Good," he nodded..

Oh please, oh pleasepleasepleaseplease...

And he pointed at her. Not the cold air beside, or her sisters warm and cuddled and hating on the other side, but her.

"That one."

And then she was so happy, so excited for the adventures, that she wasn't particularly concerned with hearing anything.

"But sir!" the Doctor exclaimed. "That one... to be honest, we've had some problems with her. Surely you'd like one that's more docile with a higher intelligence score? I'd hate to see Your Excellency have to deal with that one. It was made ... we.... errrr.. of course, all of our children are quality products sold to good families as servants, and she's very healthy... and of course there's no flaw in the design process but... it's attention deficit, we hear from our vets, and she can't integrate properly with her peer group as you can see. She'd be breaking things all over. Scheduled for recycling soon. I really feel you'd be happier with..."

His smile looked funny, then, and then he was mad.

"Did I make something unclear about my order? "

"Sir! Of course not sir!

And they took her out the door. And it was warm and cold and blowy like the fans and so many things all at once...

"Would you like her delivered to your servant quarters, sir? They'll train her with the proper graces and your tastes in conversation and when Your Excellency requires..."

"Don't be foolish!" he snapped. "I don't play with pets like some stupid child or sick old man. It simply appears to be uncommonly lively and in good physical condition for this hackjob establishment."

"But sir, what else are we supposed to do with her?"

"Shut up. You - take that thing to the Jugend. That one will be the new Seraph."

Seraph...

"Wh-what!? But Your Excellency, there are top-level students in the first-class citizen's academies whose parents would kill for that honor! You really can't mean... I mean, Lord Krelian might not approve of..."

"Are you mentally stunted? You, over there, you're my new assistant, and I'm finished here. My old assistant, as he seems to feel that Lord Krelian is both preferable to and more powerful than the Prince of Solaris, will be transferred to Lord Krelian's project to be reassigned at the laboratory's discretion."

Oblivious to the aghast looks two-dozen guards and mid-level government officials were casting her (and the horrified screaming of one rather pompous bureaucrat being carried off by an officiously floating cube), Seraphita beamed and wavewaved good-bye.

***

She did not run into the table. Or, when pressed, veer boldly into the wall. They could not guide her over the edge, or into the operating room, without gentle hands shaking them free and a sphinx's smile answering their astonishment.

That was, in the end, the accident. It was cold up here. An abyss above ground. Contradictory, non?

Life, as they say, is full of accidents. Life itself is an accident. The one in a million chance that chromosomes will combine just-so, beating out all the other contenders, and produce the uniqueness of one's self. One blind, limited organism seeking another - running and falling into the miasma of a greater existence. All according to nothing resembling the whim of God, to whom most servants are interchangeable regardless of eye color or hair, and classifiable only by their proximity to the earth and the Truth.

That was what was written in the programs for biology class. As she had been top of her biology class, the girl really should know. She had also been the head girl of her school - tested for and confirmed to have an above-average etheric potential. It was speculated that she'd have been going to the Jugend next year - her parents had even bought her a uniform already. Anything for their little girl on the cusp of promotion to full first-class citizenship. The pride of her residential section, and the hope of her family. But she would never see the corridors and classrooms of the promised land now.

There was a very simple explanation for that. First off, she was sitting in mid-air on top of an automated transport drone programmed to lead her to her death. Secondly, she was blind.

The atmosphere was thin, and grown unnaturally thick with noise around her. Transports engaged, children shopping with their mothers, and young Jugend elite on drill. All blended into the constant mechanical hum of force and wind that made this place Solaris. She could feel the sun on her back. For she was above they, and they were most certainly above the clouds, which were not under them either, and would not be.

Hysteria. But not about falling. That was something she knew would not happen, and since the accident she had known many things. Like where the controls on the computer were to play music, and where her brother's electronic pet had curled up in the shade to run out of solar energy and go inactive.

Hysteria. That was not to be understood, and it galled her. She couldn't even read the books on psychology and mental damage - the ones they'd given her in cram school and she'd obediently stuffed into the soft grey new tissue of her mind.

Hysteria. Her walls were breaking down. Somewhere in the back of her throat she was sobbing.

She knew that there were people all around her, and that they did not see her but were on their way to more important things. She knew this because she had once been very much like that. Not jeering, not caring - just not seeing the defectives disposed of using the most efficient system known to man or divinity. They would hover, then scream and be left to the mercies of gravity. Hauled off to the laboratories for martyrdom to the cause of the jihad, maybe. But they were defectives, you see. You don't think about defectives. You don't register defectives on those pretty irises that sparkle and shine for your mind's corresponding eye.

Defectives were a burden on the life-support systems of their citadel. Better that the defectives be gotten rid of or put to good use than occupy a space that an able-bodied citizen might. It made perfect sense. Wasting resources on defects took those self-same resources away from the work towards the salvation of the lambs and the furthering of the glory of God.

Rationally, it made quite alot of sense.

The way to live with constant fear is to ignore it. And so she did because she did not want to think about falling.

Someone shouted above her. He was to be disposed of too? Defective. Why was he screaming? No one would hear. It was easier to stay sane that way. Like ignoring the Lambs, and the white noise of your sector power generator thrumming away your lifetime.

Higher now. She could feel it.

It wasn't fair, being defective, or that she couldn't cry. And it also wasn't fair that she could play it back in her head just like the latest public service drama, complete with special effects and surround sound. The delivery vehicle had backed out too early, and smashed into a small transport pod shuffling second-class academics to their weekend cram school. And the glass had cracked the world into a thousand mirrors, burning hot, and she could see such ephemeral sensations as stabbing. And waking. And hospital small and sheets and the knowledge that she was defective, and second class is not worth a first-class pair of new bionic eyes. Defective, defective, damaged and wrong. It was what she had learned. Her removal was the law. There was to be no room on the arc for defectives because they hindered the great work of God. Everyone knew that. The smart one in their work block, who got out of shifts with a special writ to study. Oh she knew that, she knew that did she?

Be careful when you're driving, children. Make sure someone else is standing closes to the observation glass. Or else you might end up a defective too. Wouldn't that be a shame?

She knew that.

And now the things she knew were from some unnatural contortion of her senses not gifted by God at birth. Defective. Deus had no more use for her, and the world was whispering her secrets, and it was all wrong.

They were reaching the outskirts. The screaming had stopped. Was he given to the labs, then? She was to be dropped oe're the edge, in respect to the efforts of her family. It... it was going to hurt. Mass times velocity is...

A strange sensation, weeping only in your sternum. Shuddering, feeling no moisture, poised on the edge of absurdity.

And then it stopped.

"You can save me," she knew, feeling something out in the darkness.

"Why should I save you? You're just a defect," he spat, the one she knew could save her, and she also knew that it meant more than the traditional scorn. For some reason of knowing, veering upwards as leviathan, it did not seem odd at all.

"I don't know. I'm just a defect. I don't really think you should save me. I think I'd like to fall now."

She had been going to Jugend next year, but there was no place in the heavenly host for her now. She had wanted to go to Jugend. The light at the end of the maze of work and work and work and death that trapped them all on the lowers. That ruthless monotony that killed them all, one by one, years before their own true deaths.

"I know things now. More than I knew before. Before, I mean, when I was going to Jugend. I..." was her voice small, then? Was that what that sounded like? Things rang in a much more three-dimensional way now. " You have to know alot, to go to Jugend.."

"I'm aware of that. What do you know now?" his voice was hard, but she knew, so it was alright.

Maybe.

"Things. They just... come to me. Compensation for lost senses by enhancement of etheric abilities, I suppose. There have been tests conducted on that reported in the scientific news. I guess I've missed those now, though, since they haven't taken me south to the labs. I'm even a defect for that," she slipped off the cube onto the ground, which was much closer now- a short leap that must have been his doing.

"Yes, I suppose you are. Be thankful for it."

"What would they do to harm a citizen in the labs? Routine tests..." she knew then that that was not something she wanted to know, or talk about, and thus unknew it quickly. There were too many secrets here for a person who knew things to attempt to fathom. "...Do you know how hard it is, knowing things? I'm glad that they'll be getting rid of me. I knew my brother was delighted to see me fall while he whispered words of condolence, and I knew my parents were so very very disappointed in me when they told me they were proud of their brave girl for not being sad about dying. I wish I hadn't had to know. I wish I hadn't. I wish I'd seen them smiling at me and lying about everything being alright, because I'm going to die anyways, so what's the matter with that? Couldn't I just have that? God has no love left for the likes of me."

"You think God has love for anyone? You're too naive. How do you presume to know the mind of Deus?"

"I know the minds of the chosen of God."

"That's true enough."

What would she do if she lived, anyways? The perfect country was doing her a favor, by erasing this horrible embarrassing scene from her existence.

"I tried, and I tried, and I tried so hard to make myself better so I could ascend, but," her voice broke," all those weekends working, never having a life which sounds so stupid and sentimental but I swear to you it's not. I want to read again. Reading was my life, do you know that? What good is a student who can't read? Everything comes to nothing now. I might as well not have tried at all."

The ground was rough beneath the hard patent soles of her shoes. This must be the so-called Prince of Solaris. It appeared in the milky mother-of-pearl endings at the dead junction to mainline nerves. Stone was a luxury of royalty, and surely that tenor was not the elusive Emperor Cain cloistered with his gospel.

Mortification, and not hysteria. In her last hour, she had played the fool. Embarrassing herself infront of an army commander. Thinking that there might be a point in... oh God.

Why did she even still care?

"Get back on the cube."

"Yes, sir," he would send her to the skies, now. The calm within her had sunk too low and too far and now she was not just a defect but pathetic.

Ah, but she could curl in on herself. Whirl down and disappear and erase this whole mortifying farce.

"I am known for my poor judgement, among other things," he announced, hating his sympathy with all the passion he could muster. "Cube transport, overide previous order. You are to deliver the citizen reclassified Cherubim to the Jugend."

When she arrived, they tried to replace her eyes. To call her family, give her old rank, greet her by the surname, to move the whole family lot to the residential parkland as was fitting - but she handed them a placid no on all fronts.

Do as she asks, dears. Kelvina will know if you haven't.

***

Sometimes, he came in for injections.

She knew this because she was always in here for injections. Or implantations. Or surgeries. Or uplinks arranged with wireless miracles originating from the silicon all around her. All around her. In her too. A little nip, a little tuck, and plastic here there everywhere.

He had been to the lab within her memory exactly fifty-two times in the past two years, preceeding which he had resided as a half-formed lump of flesh in one of the tubes directly south of her, as far as aolder building schematics suggested. Fifty three actually, if one deemed appropriate that the incident in which he had not entered the lab but hesitated and fled be counted. Generally, as it did not involve his physical presence, she did not consider this a valid example of attendance. It was of course in any case irrelevant and largely outside her designated boundaries of thought, but during lulls in the information flow it was a suitable placebo to mull over trivial facts and their status as per her own experience.

This was one of those lulls. The longest depression of activity she had as yet experienced.

A week ago it had started, when he had come in the sliding hiss of a door to receive the sterilized prick she herself was largely numb to by now. The veins in her arms had collapsed exactly five months, seven minutes, and twenty-two seconds ago and such chemicals as were deemed necessary to the maintenance of her wetware could be introduced into the empty sockets that her shoulders had become. Her arms had been removed once they became extraneous to laboratory convenience or essential function.

No, he did not flinch. He did not look at Krelian - Krelian himself - but stared blankly at the wall. A sensible boy.

She was, perhaps, watching him too closely this time. She had never particularly bothered with the boy (who was growing, she noted, at a rate entirely unsuited to Cain or Abel classes of the species Homo sapiens deus, and as such the likely reason for his frequent visits to the domain of Lord Krelian) before. Until a week ago there had been more neural distractions. Flows of data plugged into the ports at her cheeks, run through the wetware component of her processing center in hopes of providing Lord Krelian with scientific data. Said data had not been checked within that span of days plus five hours, seventeen minutes, and three seconds. This was disturbing, if she could be said to have felt something at the prospect.

Limbless, not breathing, and suspended in a vat of blue-ish ooze in which inhaling was an ill-advised impossibility, it struck her posotronic brain her with all the force of an electromagnetic scrambler that she did not want to die.

How very odd.

Those before her had very much wanted to die, or so she surmised from the pitying looks she was given by certain custodial staff when they sprayed down the equipment at the dead of morning. She did not except them to do anythign for her, as they had tails and extra limbs and several problems beyond her own, but it was still interesting to note that beyond that they could muster any sort of reaction to their own state. Her existance, more integral to scientific research than their own, was surely more fulfilling mired in calculations instead of dishwater.

She was, she knew with artificial instinct, the fourth version of her line and the only one surviving. The others had been previous prototypes and scrapped to improve upon the original design. Their bodies had likely been obtained from shipments of the groundbased humans designated Lambs who were not converted into sustenance or expendable-class citizenry. Perhaps she had committed some sort of transgression within the work detail, or been transferred immediately upon arrival in order to avoid unnecessary tissue damage to experimental materials. She really couldn't say - physically or in mental monologue. The details had been deleted from her memory banks, unlike those left within the cruder and less responsive hard drives of her ancestors.

Yesterday, they had brought in another, and her results were neatly inscribed on the electronic tablet that version four could make out with perfect implanted clarity through easily-ignored nutrient sludge.

Was she flawed in some way? Well, naturally. Or else there would not be a fifth version in the works. And yet... and yet...

For a guru of the threads of life, Krelian affected a deadness about him. Deadness in the boy being pumped full or stabilization drugs. Deadness in her body, and her eyes, and if she felt herself for the first time glaring out of the tank instead of flicking her eyes across the network with all the passivity of a silicon processor, then so be it.

She was not flawed.

Diagnostic check. She was NOT flawed.

But there it was. Something better. Maybe it had a more docile emotions grid, was that it? When had she ever betrayed such human weakness as a processor? When? When had she ever!? How DARE he presume that she couldn't handle a higher network flow, or repress the remaining neurotransmitters unaltered by the nanotech!?! He was just a stupid, ignorant, wetware...

Oh no.

Flawed. Flawed. That was it.

Soon her remains would be flushed. She was unfit for the soylent by now, though her arms and legs had most certainly been removed to that location. Biological waste, was processor four. The facts suggested incineration.

The boy was talking to Lord Krelian, and he was more animated than most dared be in the scientist's presence. Motioning at her. Had he noticed her existance, then? Not likely. Sometimes she forgot that she, too, was just part of the wall. A portion of the scenery in this place, with the common blank misery that most had installed into them hardwiring her to the furnishings.

And Lord Krelian looked almost... perturbed? That couldn't be it. He was more machine that she was.

And the boy left the room, his stride having widened by a millimeter since she had last watched him pace out.

And then the fluid left. Coughing, the permanently detached majority of her mind latched on to the fact that her hippocampus had been left intact, and though she was unable to support herself of control the motion this must be the feel of breathing.

Oh, it was beautiful. The fluttering of her lungs felt so free...

"His 'Excellency' wants you reworked instead of recycled. Your designation corresponds to Thrones now, do you understand? You may want to access the files on the previous Thrones of Air once you are no longer incapacitated," the Lord's head shook in a wry sigh, as he pulled out a set of clamps and some fresh wire. "Consider yourself fortunate. He no longer requires my treatments to stabilize his genetic code and will not be visiting this office again. Sentimentaility pretaining to the situation of my test subjects coudl have applied to any of the residents here. You, my dear, are a whim."

"He says..." The wryness infected a small, imperceptible, phantom memory of a smile,
"one of your predecessors was dispatched the day he was born."

She then noticed that an orderly was also removing the painting of a lighthouse that had been beside her. Presumably to be taken to the Prince's rooms. He was dressed in the colors of the royal house, and thus must be the prince. She had had trouble distinguising color from within the fluid.

"Try not to suffocate, as I am too busy with the new processor to revive you. An assistant will see you shortly."

Slumped against a slime-coated wall and curiously divorced from the sudden feeling returned to her uncooperative torso, Tolone hacked an affirmative.

***

"Do you have a name?"

"You wouldn't know how to pronounce it."

Feh. Foreigner.

"You're not making this easy."

"Feh. Foreigner."

And so it went.

"Fine, then. I'll be rid of you soon enough. We foreigners get a proper upbringing. Enough to be grateful to people who pull us out of smoldering piles of rubble."

Until she spat in his face, that is. The pale golden tan of someone never quite out of the sun. Typical Solaris. She had been told never to trust them, foreigners, and when they had come they had brought fire from the sky.

Not this one. The other one. Demon foreigner all the same. Riding in on their war machines. And this one was going to carry her away from what was left of her home.

"Foreigner. You know nothing," she spoke with the lilting iron of conviction that only a twelve year-old can muster. "My whole family is dead now. You think you're going to fix that by taking me to some castle in the sky? You're pathetic."

Oh, it looked nice in here, didn't it? Didn't it? Feh. Foreign trickery. Foreign lies. Once they'd seen a foreigner in the city, and father had talked to him, and they had made a deal. That was when the foreigners were going to bring them money and business. But that wasn't now. Foreigners were not to be trusted. All they did was kill.

"Quite. But if you don't mind," he was angry back. That was good. A man who backed down from a challenge such as that was no man at all, her sisters had said, and she believed them. If he were a man, perhaps he was not inhuman. Excepting that he knew too little to be a real man, but that was because he was a foreigner. " I have to concentrate to pilot this thing. You're not the only person to have nothing in the world, you know."

Now, they were all foreigners.

The Elru do not cry. The Elru do not grieve. The Elru do not stare off blankly into the sky. The Elru are valiant. The Elru would want her to be strong.

She was being Brave.

"You have no family?" The little girl questioned. Bedraggled, dressed in rags.. the lot of it. She'd been living in a gutted suburban townhouse and subsisting off of rats for the two weeks since the incident, and looked the typical orphan waif. Strung out on rags and a tightrope with nowhere left to fall. Too damnably free. She hated that feeling. There was no place left to go but back, and that was nowhere now.

She hated memory too, but that was a thought to be forced aside altogether.

...and the clouds were on fire and they all were screaming. Elru do not scream.. wasn't she good? she was not screaming, father was going to be so proud when she went back to see him and she told him how brave she'd been about the devil in the sky...

"No," he said quietly. Almost gruffly. But he knew nothing but those stupid levels and buttons in this gaudy white and copper thing. Foreign wiles.

No one could understand her - legs cramped and defiant in the back of the cockpit, and staring out with defiant ambivalence at the nape of her would-be savior's neck. Maybe she would stab him, and staunch her wounds with his blood. No one could understand how she hated when the nights were still and whispering. They never had to live on their own in those great foreign cities.

She did not need anyone to understand her. She was Grown Up now. Father had said so while he lay dying, and she did not lament for him. The Elru were a proud people, he said. She was a fragment of their memory. The world of the Elru was on her shoulders now.

They were small shoulders, but she had been raised to be large.

"If they were killed you must take vengeance," it was a measured, almost ridiculous confidence in her ramrod posture. " I will take vengeance some day. The people of Elru have honor."

"I told you I had no family," the pilot repeated into the whirring of the war-machine fans. There. It was obvious. Everyone has kin ties. He knew nothing - too little, in fact.

"How old are you?" if she queried fearless, stuffed into a nonexistent backseat, it was because the girl had very little to lose, and a good deal of dignity to save. She fancied herself sitting like the late General Latecia.

"Twenty-one."

"How old are you?" she repeated, undaunted at the rapidly approaching clouds.

"Twelve," he was quiet, and she did not know why, "if you must know."

Still. It explained much.

"I am twelve as well," she offered, with a General Letacia toss of true-platinum hair. " For twelve, you do not know much about honor. And you look too big. Foreigners are strange."

"I'm a special case."

Ah. That was good. To be taken by foreign savages that were all as her rescuer would be ...

Not frightening. Not frightening.

A pinprick of silver on the skyline loomed ominous before her. He too was silent. Even in death, the Elru had not been afraid.

The flight took a long time. There was no view. She did not go to sleep.

Solaris, as a place, was unnatural. Not just foreign as foreign places are apt to be, but strange in ways that manner of dress did not cover. It was to put it bluntly too alive. Every inch crawling with organisms. The decks woven together with fiber-optic vines teeming like and anthill with worker drones. Even the little gardens that pretended to be earth on the top were bare of anything but human life, and their paths were walked all hours of the endless day. There was no rest, no night, no stars, just constant motion under the unblinking sun running counterclockwise to the tide. These foreigners had no idea how to do things at all.

She had spent the night waiting, and it was not night but turning all the lights out. In Elru, the lights were yellowed and warmer in their glass. She had been glad when they were gone, though the blankets were thin as the air. And then he had come to take here away, parading her down the streets like some circus animal.

Hmph. Let them stare at the last Elru. Let their gazes run lies through their minds, twist her all around, let them look at her those bastards. Let them look.

Her pace was unresponsive. He pulled her hand. And then they came to a building that reeked of silence, and a man who reeked of foreign so much she could forget about the rest of it piled around her link dung.

Feh. Foreigners.

"I'm surprised - I see you've managed to locate one after all."

Foreigners don't know anything. Women like those who put her up last night in some kind of foster care - bob their heads and pretend they care to look merciful, when no one is ever merciful, and they should know that. There is no honor looking down on a world you'll never see.

flash! Behind her eyes, and she blocked by the body of a stranger falling falling in the parkway...

"I see I have," the pilot nodded. His name, he had told her, was Khar. A foreign name. Strange and much too solid.

She did not trust him. She did not trust the world not to end.

"She will be coming with me, then," the one with longer hair looked strangely like this Khar. Straw hair and skin and that raspy Solarian wheeze. "A shame that the entire gene bank had to be lost. We have so little to work with now."

And she shouldn't have hoped, should she, that someone she had been rescued? Maybe she never had. Would she be carrying a doll next? Faugh.

".. she's still in shock - it's obvious. And she's the only one with their lore left so I was wondering if a better use might be...."

No! She was not! She would die just like her father with this outland foreign doctor! She was grown up now ! She was.. she was...

"Ah - your new elements. Did you think you could resurrect that dead project? I've found a final candidate for you. The upper classes have been getting restless with your pageant, and the Van Houten mutt will do nicely."

Dead things. An Elru shows no fear.

"Stay back!"

And the knife was charged. She was small, but she could fling herself upon him with a precision honed not in the military academy but indeed by hunting rats. It was a little thing, a tiny thing, suffused with rage, and an Elru understands that. An Elru shows no fear.

Like a limpet on his back. Not so large now, foreigner boy!

"I'll kill him.. you can't take me in there, or I'll KILL him!" she screeched, blade at his throat as leverage. And they would kill her, and she would die with honor and not on some table, and an Elru shows no fear. They would feel the swift thrilled beating of her heart on their bullets.

A dare as a hex on you, foreigner. Will you show your cowardice? All this false courtyard is watching, and the dead one is amused. Will you feel my pain in this blade? Of course you will. I hate you, I hate you, you're too different and I... beg for your life, foreigner! We would never beg for ours!

Come, and disappoint me now.

"Caught off-guard by a little girl? Really, Ramsus, your ineptitude grows with every passing day."

The pilot gurgled. And yet he was not shaking.

"Kill me, then."

Wh-what?

His skin was surprisingly warm, for a foreigner's.

:"You heard me. Kill me now!," he hissed. "They'll kill you too. Isn't that what you want?"

And he wouldn't mind dying here, would he? All alone and just like her. There were no others of their kind, no others so strange.

The showdown might have been terse, if anyone had cared for the specimens. There were no birds in the trees of Solaris, and when the sun is always shining there cannot be high noon.

"Well, Elru? What are you waiting for?" and he was calm - too calm, so calm it looked not calm at all, which was just the right amount of calm altogether. A warrior does not shirk death. How did he know that?

... Perhaps he could be an Elru too.

"Honestly," then laughter from behind, and something deep within her burned raw at how perfectly light it was. "Let the child have his plaything as Dominion if it will make him happy, Krelian. We have more important things to think about than Lamb variant DNA."

"Very well, Miang."

Nudged away by his elbow, Dominia realized that with his greater mass he could have pushed her away at any time at all.

***

Sometimes, there were advantages to feeling like you were worthless trash that shouldn't be wasting the resources of the planet by continuing your existence. They were not many or very obvious to the trained eye, but they were there, in the way that they are there for most anything, and there are indeed people out there that enjoy eating large many-legged insects. Having had more than a lifetime to work with his own uselessness, Kahran Ramsus was fairly well acquainted with those benefits.

One of them was the ability to descend into a nice relaxing full-blown sulk.

It might be said that the fallen Prince of Solaris had elevated the sulk to an art form. That would be a lie, but still - it might be said. He certainly did look a sight - tossing and turning in a bedraggled bed bound to earth by rickety wrought-iron legs, some musty volumes for the propping of legs, and the chains of this Lamb-ish thing they called gravity.

Alas, his sulk was deep but fairly plain-looking. Faintly ridiculous on a grown man, actually -especially now that he was a grown man and not just playing the part. Not the type to excel, though, and that was exactly the problem wasn't it? He also knew that he must look ridiculous, having a penchant for overly analytical thought that had developed in his third trimester in the tube that had never quite gone away. This thought usually involved himself, as he was not a man above self-absorption. Specifically, absorption concerning exactly why he was not the type to excel.

And thus began the litany of the sulk (there was an order - he had practice).

Ramsus had been born trash, and he would die trash. Half-finished biological waste. Not a human being, not a Contact not anything even remotely useful to anyone but that bastard Krelian, who had apparently kept him around to manipulate and openly mock. This would give rise to righteous indignation if he were not actually, indeed, useless trash. Trash that was sitting in some stupid bed in a half-collapsed room instead of doing anything useful, while goddamn Fei saved the world since he was the real Contact anyways.

He tossed, preferring to remain in the rosy demi-darkness behind his eyelids. Dominia was sitting guard at the windowsill. He supposed they thought he might try to kill himself. If he'd thought about it, he might have stopped and wondered why exactly hey cared. As it was, he didn't feel like acknowledging the element right now. The sulk was soothing, in it's own way, like a disintegrating teddybear.

Trash.

The real difficulty with being trash was that it became so glaringly obvious the less you attempted to be trash.

Killing Fei had not gone well. Not well at all. His own pretensions of competency.. how humiliating to think he'd had them once. How could some halfassed creation like him measure up to the natural miracle of the true Contact? It was preposterous, of course. A pretentious little pose. If there was a God out there, did that amuse him? To create him as some kind of understudy for Fei'd destiny - was that fun? Well, of course it had entertained Krelian. And according to goddamn Fei, who rumor said had been sighted floating down from the sky with his one true love and babbling about angels, that wasn't too far from the truth.

The soldier himself had not heard of this, but as a nail in the coffin it suited fairly well. There was no particular reason to doubt Tolone's information-gathering abilities now.

Was he a masochist? He wanted to believe in it.

Trash, that is.

Turn. Twitch. Sometimes this bed got suffocating. A coffin in cotton if ever there was one. But he couldn't get up. Too weak, too fucking weak. That's what happens when you're designed by a lesser God.

It amused him to think of Krelian that way. Refuse just like him. Except he'd gone angel or some spiritual shit, so maybe he wasn't trash at all but just very very lost.

Dominia had opened the window. He'd told her not to. He'd ordered her to leave, goddamit. But why would anyone bother to listen to refuse like him, anyways. Solaris was dead, and he hadn't even known it was falling as it happened. Not one goddamn clue.

None of the 'heroes' came to visit. That surprised him. For all intents and purposes, the former element had thought they would wish to punish him. Must not be dangerous enough.

The former Commander of Gebler wondered, idly, if Van Houten would come. He'd never supported her inclusion in the project - he'd known she couldn't handle the drive, was born for better things. Wasn't that funny? She was too fucking good for Solaris, land of the chosen. Left it to him to protect and what had happened? Explosion at eight miles into the atmosphere. Crash and burn. Everything for nothing to create.

Well, it was no wonder he had no one now. Miang had never been a real person in the first place. Just like him. Mommy freak-of-nature preying on the baby one.

He'd never had anyone anyways. The defective clone of a construct. How comforting.

In the corner, Dominia sighed and shifted. What did she want from him? What the hell did she want from him!?

Maybe he'd go off soon. Disappear into the wilderness and off the radar screen he'd never been on (no one had invited him). All promises were gone now - all bets were off. Just a few rejects camped out in some rusted hulk at the end of the world. Run away and never return. His luck that the Contact would spare him (ugh) just so he could fade away.

Roll. The sheets were twisted, and driving him slowly mad. Should succumb to the inevitable and sit up - rise with a wheeze that was also destined to be, and quieter than it might have been. Dominia wanted to talk. Was looking his way. Fuck it.

"Commander. You're awake," Dominia said gruffly.

Ramsus gave a grunt of response, while repositioning the scarred remains of his back on the understuffed pillows. Through half-lidded eyes he could make the room more shadowed between his lashed.

Why had Krelian promoted him so quickly? Shot him up the ranks while those traitor elements were left in the dust? Sadism, on his part, to set the failed project up for greater and greater falls, only to

Probably. It couldn't possibly be on merit.

One nice thing about being created a failure is that you don't have to try, because the failing is pretty much assumed. And he was, now, a failure. Miang had helped him to accept that in her way. Things like them are destined to fail, because they have no destinies at all.

"Do you need anything?"

"Nothing you can give me. And stop calling me that. I'm nobody's Commander now."

Though Miang was good at being a thing. She'd had alot of practice. And it was funny, wasn't it, how little watching her blood run all over the pommel of his rapier had bothered his broken heart? Maybe he was numb now. Or maybe, like a dog, he'd taken scraps of affection from whatever bitch had deigned to be in heat near him.

Pathetic enough to fall in love with her.

So much for true love, hunh? So much for all his lofty goals. When Solaris fell, it wasn't a damn bit better than when he'd started. 'An idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.'

Sighing, and settling back into the soft down-filled melancholy of the ineffectual void that was his life, Ramsus waited for the world to pass him by. The ceiling fan was broken. So was the record.

Trash. Defect. Worthless. I was a failure even before I was born... I've never accomplished anything without being manipulated into it like some fucking puppy, and I probably never will. It's no wonder Solaris fell, with the Gebler commander that bloody stupid. I am essentially a nothing. A wraith. I have no meaningful personal attachments, and nor am I ever likely to. I am a waste of the....

"I brought ice-cream!!!!"

Until something was thrust roughly into his chest, and the shock forced his eyes to open directly opposite those of an emerald hue and a manic gleam. Seraphita had a way of making whatever was happening in the immediate area - especially if it involved food, into the most important thing in the world, ever. And she was very very excited about it.

"I brought it!!! I brought it!!! Ice cream for everyone!" she bounced at the side of his bed, yelling for her companions to come join them. Ramsus had suddenly found himself holding a cherry-red tray, upon which were placed five slightly chipped glass bows full of strawberry ice-cream. With whipped cream. And sprinkles on top.

Bemused as much as depression allowed, he wasn't sure he really wanted to know exactly how Seraphita had found ice cream sundaes a week after a mid-level nanotechnology-prompted apocalypse. Especially with the hordes of mutants wandering about.

Still, he liked strawberries.

So while Kelvina glided ethereally in, Tolone had begun berating Seraphita for not remembering that highly technologically advanced cyborgs under no circumstances ate ice-cream sundaes, and was that idiot Seraphita TRYING to ruin her goddamn circuits? Ramsus did not feel the need to comment on the fact that this effectively gave Seraphita two sundaes, as he was fairly sure that she had known that all along. Also, he didn't care much, and was fairly engaged with staring in a resigned manner at his own snack treat.

... trash like him didn't deserve to be brought his favorite ice cream. This ice cream was a childish gesture, and wasted in a failure like him. There were people out there that needed the nourishment of this ice cream that the black, disgusting void of his existence had not touched, and they could surely...

Why were they all looking at him?

"You don't like my ice cream, Commander? I brought sprinkles..." the demi-human sounded hurt.

"I told you not to call me that. And you don't' have any obligations to me - you did this all on your own. Your the ones who worked through Jugend. I just got you there," Kahran blinked up at their strangely looming figures, "The first elements understood my flaws, and they all left - one by one. I tried to recreate.. something like I had, once, but you have no reason to disband at all. I was a fool - barely out of the fucking tube then. It was no wonder they betrayed me... I couldn't even see what a damn fool I was making of myself with those half-baked ideas about reforms when they knew we needed a revolution, and..."

"Commander Ramses?"

If it was 'Ramses', that must be Tolone. She sounded.. perturbed?

"Yes?" the ex-commander blithely replied.

"Shut up already, will you?" the cyborg rolled her optical sensors.

Kelvina nodded at Dominia, who nodded at Tolone, who nodded at Seraphita, who promptly turned back to staring at him like the rest of them already had.

Ah. The inspirational pep-talk. He'd seen this coming. What possible attachment they felt was beyond him, but he wasn't to be dissuaded from the truth of his own worthlessness by a few petty, saccharine, unfelt words of... Yes, lets take pity on poor Ramsus the second-class freak of nature,

"Who exactly do you think you're talking to?" Tolone .. well, bitched.

Hunh?

The Cherub looked disturbingly emotive, " are you forgetting what we are?"

Dominia took over while Seraphita was hushed, and he couldn't help but notice that she was advancing on him from the walls... "I'm not going to tell you that you still have our loyalty. Or that 'trash' doesn't lead the entire Gebler forces and engineer the takeover of Aveh..."

"That was all Mia..."

"Quiet. I'm not finished," a bronzed hand efficiently removed the tray from his lap. " I'm not going to spend hours telling you that yes, you are worthy, or you are uncommonly smart, or you are skilled. I'm not going to give examples of perfectly good things that have come out of those tubes, or other eminently worthy 'freaks'. I'm not going to point out, at length, the reasons why we - yourself and the Elements, 'rejects' - are healthy and Solaris is not. Because you already know all that. And it's a waste of our time."

A gesture to Tolone, and two robotic arms detached themselves from her torso and manhandled him out from warm and onto his feet. The former leader of the heavenly host rewarded this with a fairly undignified yelp.

"Hey! What are you..."

Seraphita shoved a glass and a spoon into his hands, and along with the electronic arms began to march their once-wounded leader towards his old Gebler uniform. Boxers would not do.

"Ice cream is good! Eat up, Ramsus - so we can go have adventures! And I can show you how to do pull-ups!"

"What Seraphita is too much of a complete moron to express is that we've been talking, and we feel that you're wallowing in self-pity and completely and totally missing the point here," armless Tolone, which was not as frightening to Ramsus as she by all rights should have been, was practically dressing him as she addressed him. It suddenly stuck Ramsus that alot of people probably found the Elements very imposing. Errr.. not that he did. But what the bloody hell did they think they...

"Get your ass in gear, Guardian Angel. You don't need Tolone to dress you so we can get out of here. You're not that far gone," if he hadn't known Dominia, and the way she barked most everything she said, he could have sworn there was a twinkle in her eye when he hastily regained sovereignty over his pants. Sometimes he forgot that they were actually the same chronological age.

"If you were, we would not have kept you as one of us - as our Commander," the water element added placidly, and she was wont to do. Maybe that was what made Dominia almost - almost - go something approaching soft.

"Do you understand, Commander? You don't get to choose us now. Because we've settled on you."

"... I've asked you not to call me that anymore," the scowl abated, for a time, once the amber-eyed man had the presence of mind to stop blinking.

"Very well... Ramsus."

He did not need to be ushered out the door.

***

Author's note: I do not own Perfect Works, nor am I ever likely to. And as much as I would love to adhere to every single point of Xenogears backstory (no, really - I am a continuity whore), it's so convoluted that I'm probably not. Apologies to the hardcore Xenogears fans. Erm.. call it 'artistic liscence' and please don't hurt me ^_^;?