Part 3: The Myriad Plan



"Where've ya been, Xel?"

"Yeah, man, we've been looking for another Gormball player!"

Xelqued trotted up to the rest of the group of Alien Aisha. "Gormball? I was going to go work on something…"

"Probably going to work on getting some friends, looser?" A dark blue Aisha stepped out from the rest. Xelqued stared coldly at him.

"I happen to have more friends than you do, Derik." Xelqued replied simply.

"That's Derix IV to you, ungrateful snot." Derix began walking circles around Xelqued. "News has it that you've been paying surprise visits to the scientists, have you? Annoying them to no extent."

"Actually, I've made a discovery about…"

"Their experiment? Probably that it breathes… is that it, Scientist boy?"

Xelqued took a step toward Derix, but Dream grabbed his collar and pulled him back.

"Let it go. Don't bother wasting your energy fighting with him." She whispered to him. He nodded.

"I'm going to go work on…"

"Your myriad?" Derix laughed. "You know that thing will never work, it's a worthless piece of junk, just like your brain!"

Xelqued turned to Derix. "Now, let me see. Your head has swelled to 20 times the size of your brain, and so we should call that head squared by ten. That means that your brain must be…. About the size of a redwood seed, which is about a centimeter." He sighed. "I must say, I wonder what it's like to have a brain of that size." Then he turned and walked towards his quarters, looking into Derix's reflection in his headgear, his face was a look of shock. Xelqued snickered. Dream trotted up beside him.

"That Derix is such a jerk. I'm tellin' ya, he really gets on my nerves."

"YOU haven't had to put up with him since you were a baby." Xelqued grumbled. "He's been bugging me since before he could talk."

Dream went silent for a few minutes. She had come up into space with her family, but when her ship got shot at, the impact killed both her parents. Surprisingly, Dream, who was a baby, had survived and was found with a strange blue-green aurora surrounding her, lying on the ground, a gash in her head. She had come, ever since then, to live on Space Station V with the Alien Aisha, who took her in because she was very smart for her age.

"You've got a point."

"Yeah."

"I'd better get moving too, I'm gonna go look some stuff up in the library…" Dream took a few steps away from his door.

"Alright, I'll see you later then."

"See ya." She began trotting down the next corridor. Xelqued sighed and opened his own door. He looked around his room, a small bed, a table cluttered with books and pieces of metal, pictures on the wall of him and his family, a picture of his baby sister, Gallalaiha, a little green Aisha. Stretching, he went and picked up a particular piece of metal. It didn't really seem to have much point to it yet. Someday, I'm going to meet up with the Faerie Queen. And I'm going to get artifacts, with them I'll take parts of each and keep building my myriad… and it's going to be great. I'll show them, I'll show all of them, I really can be a scientist, and I can be a captain too… Xelqued thought, picking up a screwdriver and he began working on his beloved Myriad.



~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

Later that night, Xelqued went into the library, cloak on his back from the cold of the night Station. The doors opened, seeming almost grateful that someone was going through them so late, but in the same way, the shut on his tail, as if scolding him for being up so late. Rubbing at his tail, he kept walking through the mountains of books, finally getting to the right section: Unordinary Science. He turned and began searching for something, anything that would help him with his Myriad. Turning again, he found himself in the very heart of the library, and there was Dream, pawing through a book dubbed "Birth of Science."

"Hey," he said quietly, making her jump. "What'cha doin'?"

She stretched a bit, and then pointed to a page of the book; it showed a being in a test tube. "Looking up about Zee." Xelqued looked at the book.

"What does that have to do with Zee?"

"Didn't you notice?" Dreams eyes went wide. "She's an experiment. She was born like an experiment, not normal, in a test tube." She pointed to another picture, which was a sketch of the inside of a test tube. "There's the silvery stuff she mentioned to you, and the glass, and the grey all around. It was in a test tube, that was her first real image. I think that she's actually a lot younger than she lets on, our age in mind, but in body she's not exactly the same, or the scientists made her look the same forever, or something." She went back to the book. "I would have thought you would guess that." Xelqued was silent for a minute.

"Wait. Wait. So, what you're saying is that Zee… isn't natural?"

"Consider her like a robot."

"Robot?" Xelqued shook his head. "She isn't like a robot. She's my friend."

"Well, your friend is pretty much a clone." Dream looked back down into the book and added hastily, "That's what the book implies, anyway. Personally, I think that Zee's a great person. Really she is. Only, it's sort of strange. You know, considering she won't be around for very long…"

"Whaddaya mean, she won't be around very long?" Xelqued snapped.

"Well, she's an experiment, she's unnatural, she'll be used for awhile to be experimented on, you know, tests and such. Then all of them, the scientists, they'll get rid of her." Dream looked up from the book gravely. "You've seen them do it. They used to experiment on worms and then on snails, and then petpets… now they're moving up in the evolutionary ladder. Xel, if she keeps cooperating like this, they'll be done with her in a little over a month."

Xelqued swallowed loudly. "Uh… how will they… "get rid of her?""

Dream went a bit pale and coughed. "Well, the way they got rid of the others. They either threw them out into space until they ran out of oxygen, they threw them from a high place, splitting them…" she began rounding the ways of torture on her paws. "Then there was throwing lots of debris on them, or putting them in a pool of piranhas, or suffocation by either letting all the air out of her room, or by turning up the heat much too high for her to handle, drugging her…"

Xelqued was the pale one now. "EXCUSE ME?!"

"Shut up! You want us to get caught in here way after midnight?"

"I can't let them do that to her!"

Dream bit her lip. "We don't really have much choice, y'know? I mean, we're just kids, what are we going to do to stop it…?"

Xelqued pounded a fist onto the table. "We're GOING to stop it! You're Zee's friend too, aren't you?" Dream nodded reluctantly. "You don't want to see her die either, do you?!"

"No, but what can we-"

Xelqued's eyes glittered oddly. "We could make something that could help, we could somehow do some mind control on them, or… we could break her out."

Dream pondered this for a minute. "Well, we can't do mind control. No way. But… breaking her out sounds good. As for making something, we definitely have the time. But what can we make?"

Xelqued grinned. "I do have the myriad…"

"The MYRIAD?! Xel, buddy, listen, I know that you love that thing more than anything else in the world, y'know, but hey, I don't know if it can make anything yet…"

"Excuse me? I'm the captain of this project."

"YOU'RE the captain? Excuse ME, if I hadn't TOLD you that this was going to happen-"

"But I have the myriad! And I can make the plans to break her out!"

"Alien Aisha always have to be on the top of EVERYTHING, don't they?!"

"Look, if I'm going to prove ANYTHING to either Derix, Zee, OR the Commander, I need to be a captain first. And you don't need to prove anything!"

Dream looked him square in the eye and suddenly started laughing. "You don't LIKE Zee, do you?"

"LIKE HER?!"

"Well your trying to prove something to her you said."

Xelqued scoffed. "Yeah, prove that I'm smarter than she thinks I am!"

"I don't believe you!" Dream said in a singsong voice.

"Hey, leave me alone, alright? I'm trying to prove that I can be The Commander someday. And besides, Zee's my friend, I'm not going to let her die."

"Oh, just a friend is she?"

"Shut up. Lets go, we have to get planning."

"Why?"

"You don't know how Zee cooperates with them. They could be done with her in less than a month."

"Your kidding, right?"

"No. C'mon, we don't have much time!"