Warning: Some science stuff and attempted suicide.

I had always known that she was too beautiful to be normal. Come on; take on look at Mai Valentine. If you tell me she's plain, you either don't care about these things or you're blind. If you weren't one of those things, you deserved to have your brain taken out of your body and given to someone who could put it to better use.

            But there was one thing Mai had never told me before was her past, at least she never told me much. She told me she was adopted, hated her parents for how long they left her absent, and when she joined high-fly casino boats, she jumped at the opportunity, yet hated it immensely. I had prodded her day after day about who her real parents were, but she wasn't talking. She didn't say she didn't know, so I thought they meant she wasn't going to tell me.

            "I don't want to talk about them." She had said. "That bitch…that bastard…I'd be better off forgetting." She resolved. I looked at her, and I immediately felt her pain. I didn't like my parents, not much, either.

            "You shouldn't say that." I tried to be comforting.

            "I've got the right to!" She shouted. Man, I was getting nowhere; it was best to stop prodding for today.

            However, before I left, Mai told me to wait.

            "There is something…something I received today." She held up a sealed envelope.

            "The name on it says it came from the man who calls himself my father. I'm…afraid. Please, Joey, open it." I wanted to show no fear, but I couldn't help but be a little nervous as I took one of Mai's fancy jeweled letter openers and cut open the top. Inside was a folded piece of paper. It smelled vaguely of the jasmine perfume that Mai wore, but it was otherwise appeared very formal, a very short typewritten message. I read it out to her, and as I read I watched her beautiful face pale as if color was water and it was leaking out of a hole in the bottom of a cup.

Ms. Mai Valentine, or whatever you call yourself

            I'm sure you know who has written this, and that saves me some ink to explain that. You have questions about your own past, and if you want them answered, come to the abandoned hospital on Fourth Street. Bring whatever friends you want. Use that fake name I've provided on the envelope if you want to identify who I am, or you can just call me Asshole, it makes no difference.

            "Mai…" I reached out my hand to touch her cheek, unsure of what to say to comfort her.

            "I'm…I'm going to go. Come with me." She said pleadingly. I would have done anything for her, and in truth, I was so curious that I would have came if she told me not to.

            Mai drove down to Fourth Street. It wasn't the prettiest area of town, and we stood out among the crowd of derelicts, drunks, and prostitutes. Mai had wisely decided to dress, although not like a prim proper woman, not like trash. I think one drunk tried to ask us for money, but Mai just punched him out, sending the asshole flying into a brick wall. No one else came near us as we reached the hospital. The dark abandoned building appeared to have been vacated only recently, I could still see some pieces of equipment in the windows. Mai was nervous, so I took her hand and led the way inside.

            There was still electric power in the building, so the writer of the note was expecting us. Mai still looked timid when we searched through the rooms to try and find this man, the pseudonym he gave was David Alexander, but I held her hand the entire way, trying to think of something to bring up her mood, but I couldn't think of anything appropriate to say.

            "Joey, what do you think will happen?" She asked me.

            "I…don't know. I guess you'll find your dad and he'll want to make up to you what you been missin' out on. I'm kinda jealous, ya know." I responded, scratching the back of my head.
            "That's only one possibility, and I don't think that's what's going to happen."

            "What do…you think?" I asked her.

            "He called himself Asshole in the letter, I think he doesn't want me to come." She responded

            "Well, yeah, I was thinking of that." I shrugged. "But he wouldn't have set all this up if he wanted if he didn't want you to come." I said. Mai shrugged, and we kept walking.

            We had searched pretty much the whole hospital and found nothing. When Mai started to think it was an elaborate hoax, she turned to me.

            "Well, I guess some asshole needs to get some better hobbies. Thanks though, for coming." She said with a smile. I was about to say something back when all the lights went out.

            "Mai!" I shouted. There was still daylight coming in, but the sudden abruptness of the lights turning off scared the shit out of me.

            "Don't be so…" She started, but she was nervous too, her hand was shaking.

            "Welcome, Mai, and you too, little boy. Welcome to my parlor. It's taken you so long to find me, so I think I'll give you a hint." One of the doors near the back of the hospital opened up, and a red light was glowing from inside. Despite our fear, we walked like Dorothy and the Scarecrow from the Wizard of Oz. Entering the room, we almost felt a wind brush us by, as if disturbed souls were locked in that room, and now groped at whatever living things they saw.

            The first thing I noticed when my eyes got used to the light was the body. Mai found the light switch and flipped it back to normal, the power humming on as if it had never been shut off, while I went over to the body. It was female, and small, blonde hair blocking out her face. When I moved it to see if the child was still breathing, I nearly collapsed with horror.

            The body had Mai's face.

            "This…this…" I started, nearly gagging. When Mai came over to see what happened, she dropped to her knees and looked like she was going to puke.

            "Are you…" I started, but I knew the answer. The room was filled with these little dolls. A bunch of naked Mai's, ranging in age from infants to twelve-year-olds. Some of them were horribly scarred, or burned, one of them had dark purple skin like a demon.

            "And this, this, was my life's entire legacy!" A loud man's voice sounded from behind us. It was a man dressed all in black, and he reminded me of one of those televangelists. He spoke almost like a priest reading about the end of the world.

            "Asshole." I said, not bothering to use the name he had given us.

            "Don't speak, observe!" He said, waving with his arms to mention the entire room. Mai was still on the ground, gagging. I stood up and put myself between them.

            "What the fuck is this, you sick bastard?" I demanded, my hands balled into fists.

            "You can't figure it out."

            "What the fuck is there to figure out?" I asked angrily.

            "This was the project: the design of a new type of vaccine. It would work by creating antigens in a child while the immune system was developing. In layman's terms, the baby pretty much received shots before it was even born. However, like experiments can do, it didn't go all that well. The children had their ages accelerated to monitor effects faster, and most of them died before they hit puberty."

            "So what does that mean?" I demanded. "You create a bunch of people that look like Mai, and it doesn't work. Nice work, asshole, but what does that have to do with her."

            "My, you're stupider then I thought. Mai is the rose! She is the flower that blooms from the corpses!" I looked over at Mai, and she averts her gaze, almost crying. "She was the one who aged normally, and all of the effects worked, an astounding success!" He shouted maniacally.

            "You sick bastard. Now what? Why the hell did you bring us here?"

            "I brought her here because it's time to end this project. Unfortunately, the government and its laws on manipulation are clawing at my ass, and so, I must destroy all of my babies. But first, I'm going to have to take care of the one that can get away."

            "You ain't touching her!"
            "I knew you'd act like that. I had her bring friends because I wanted you to watch her die. That bitch you're set on protecting destroyed my research and ran away. Now, she's back, and now, I'm going to eliminate my greatest failure. You, Mai Valentine." Mai still wasn't looking at me, so I angrily strode over and punched the guy.

            "Over my dead body will you kill her." Before he could react, I grabbed him roughly by the collar, and flailed at him with my fists until he was unconscious and his blood wept from my hands.

            "Mai." I walked over, she had finally stood up, and there she was, standing with a scalpel pointed towards her heart.

            "NO!" I shouted, diving towards her. Her look was one of pure sadness as she saw me as she started to move the thing towards her chest.

            I felt a wincing pain in my hand. I had moved quickly enough, and instead of the scalpel lodging in her chest, it was stuck in my hand.

            "What…are you…" I started.

            "I never…I never had anything at all. I destroyed all of this asshole's work to prevent more of these things from being created. But I'm still alive, his abomination still walks. And I have to end it."

            "NO!" I protested, ripping the scalpel from my hand and throwing it out the window. I grabbed her and hugged her close, keeping my arms wrapped around hers, forcing hers to her side and away from anything else here.

            "Joey, I…I should have never been brought into this world in the first place. I'm as much a human as the spawn of a demon."

            "Who the fuck cares about that?" I shouted, still bringing her close to me.

            "I do. I'm as abominable as the man that created me!"

            "No!" I shouted, my mantra. "You're not evil or anything. You're…you're…you're just Mai, and that's it!" I shouted, tears forming in both of our eyes at the same time. She paused, almost as if she was considering what I said.

            "You are he are not the same, it's not your blood on my hands. So what if you were made, you're a human too."

            "No, I'm not."

            "Then…then I don't want to be human either!" I shouted, even though I knew that statement was impossible. "If you're as much a human as a demon spawn, then I'm as much of a human as a pretty unicorn princess!" Mai still wasn't talking, but I could feel her heart beating, so she didn't kill herself.

            "Joey…" She said, she was finally talking.

            "What is it, Mai. I'll do anything, just please, please, don't do something we'll all regret."

            "I don't understand. How can you love this freak?" She asked.

            "I loved you when I thought you were normal, and I love you now. That means that I don't give a rat's ass about your history." I didn't care anymore, in fact, if it wasn't for the fact that I was still in the hospital, I would have forgotten about it. All that mattered to me about Mai was that she was alright.

            "You're…" She started.

            "I don't make a lot of sense, do I?" I said softly.

            "Shut…up…just…kiss me!" She ordered. Of course I wanted to, I was waiting for the right moment. So I laid it on, hard and smooth, my tongue meeting hers. When we were finished the twinkle had come back into her eyes. I was still worried about what she was going to do, so I supported her up and walked over out of the room.

            "Are you sure you want to do this?" I asked. Mai insisted that I call the rest of the gang over so that we could tell them about this. She said she understood what I meant, that maybe her past wasn't as important as the present, the gang had been really accepting, especially Yugi.

            "This is just like me and Yami." He said. "Not exactly, but it's just like it. It may not be normal, but it's not something freaky."

            "In fact, you're actually more human then you think." Serenity said. Mai smiled, even though it confused me. God, she was so beautiful when she smiled. We had doused the place in gasoline, and Mai was holding a lighter in her hands.

            "Yeah, I know what I'm doing." She said.

            "Do you think that those girls had souls?" Tea asked Yugi. "Will they be at peace?"

            "Well, the desire of anything living is to live, and they're doing that. Doing that in Mai. Maybe that will give them peace." Yami's voice sounded. Tristan, who had been silent the entire time, threw a flower into the hospital before Mai torched it.

            "Goodbye, my sisters, and my past. I guess I was afraid to come back here, but now…now, I'm glad…to have seen you." Mai said before chucking the lighter into the open door.

            The flames were intense, but we had to leave before the fire department showed up. I walked Mai home, and when we got to her door, she kissed me just like I did to her. I was initially shocked when she did this, but I was so pleased that I kissed her back. She didn't say anything as I walked her in, but I knew what she wanted to say. She may have been able to say "thank you" in her own ways, even "I'm sorry" had it's own meaning, but here, among the shadows of Mai's living room, I was finally able to conceive of what she was about to say.

            "I love you."