New Miami, Ivor Prime, Stardate 2266.136

What Losha remembered most about Ivor Prime was the glass. Modern, angular, shiny glass buildings, glass solar panels, glass doors on the houses. When the sun was shining, it was reflected everywhere in the glass. When they'd first arrived on the planet, they lived in an apartment in one of those modern glass buildings. He thought the building had around twenty-five floors and they'd lived on the sixteenth but he didn't remember clearly; he had only been five at the time and they lived there less than a year. Much clearer was the memory of the day he'd cut his finger on the glass.

He had been playing with some other children in the small grassy area surrounding the building. The children were all human and until that day, he hadn't really understood there were significant differences between humans and Vulcans. Humans seemed no different than Vulcans except for their round ears. Actually, since he had met few Vulcans aside from his parents, he thought of himself, his parents, and those few other Vulcans as just humans with pointed ears.

He remembered the sound of the glass smashing as a ball flew into a small ground solar panel that powered the lights that lined the walkway between the building and the grassy area. Velekh had been playing near the panel and Jason, a brown-skinned boy who never seemed to wear a shirt, approached to retrieve the ball. Jason had a navel that protruded - strange that after all these years, that was another thing he remembered. The ball was only a few steps from Velekh so he walked over to pick it up and hand it to Jason. That was when he cut his finger. It was just a small cut on his index finger but it seemed to bleed a lot at first.

"Your blood is green!" Jason exclaimed as Velekh handed him the ball. He hadn't known how to respond. Why was this boy surprised that blood was green? "Hey, Christopher! Marie! Jerome! Hey, Anna! Come here! Look at this! Velekh's blood is green!" Velekh soon found himself surrounded by a small group of children gawking at him. He could no longer remember who said what. He didn't even remember all of the children who had been there.

"Eww, why is your blood green?" A girl made a face of disgust.

"Yeah, what happened to your blood?" Jason seemed puzzled rather than disgusted.

"Blood is green. It's supposed to be green." Velekh finally replied, still not understanding.

"No, blood is red, not green!" Another boy insisted.

"You're trying to trick me!" Velekh suddenly realized it was just a game and he'd finally caught on.

"No, blood is usually red. Look!" Jason picked up a shard of glass and drew it across his own finger. Red blood seeped over Jason's brown skin. How strange, he remembered thinking.

"Maybe it's because your ears are pointy." Jason concluded. "Do your parents have green blood too?"

"Yes."

"Then that must be why. If your ears are pointy, your blood is green and if they're round, your blood is red."

"Ewww, that's weird!" Another boy shouted. "You're weird! People with pointy ears have green blood! I'm going to tell my mom!"

It had seemed an unbearably long period of time that the children had surrounded him, staring and shouting. In reality it had probably been less than fifteen minutes before the group finally scattered when an adult approached and demanded to know who had broken the solar panel. Jason admitted his guilt and the woman asked to be taken to his parents.

"You should go home and get that healed," she instructed Velekh as she turned to walk away with Jason. He followed her advice, glad to be away from the other children.

"Ko-mekh," he said as his mother ran the dermal regenerator over his finger, "Jason cut his finger too and his blood was red. The other children said blood is supposed to be red."

"Yes, human blood is red."

"People with round ears have red blood and people with pointed ears have green blood?"

"Humans have round ears and red blood and Vulcans have pointed ears and green blood."

"Why?"

"Because human blood is iron based and Vulcan blood is copper based."

"What does that mean?"

"Our bloods have different metals in them."

"Why?"

"Because that's just how we evolved."

"What's 'evolved'?"

His mother sighed. "Does everyone look the same on the outside?"

"No."

"Well, everyone doesn't look the same on the inside either."

"I don't understand."

"You'll understand when you're older. Go back out and play."

"I don't want to go out. The kids told me I was weird."

"Just ignore them. They don't understand that people look different on the inside either."

"No! I'm not going back out there!"

"Then go play in your room. I've got things to do."

They had only lived in that apartment a few months longer before they moved to a small house several miles to the north. Velekh had been glad to leave. Although the other children had never seemed to care about his pointed ears, things had changed after the day they discovered his blood was green. Jason still talked to him from time to time - he was curious about the differences between humans and Vulcans - but the other children either ignored him or taunted him and Jason continued to spend most of his time with them. Velekh grew to hate them. From then on, he had avoided going outside, where he knew they would be playing on the grass, as much as possible. On their last day at the apartment building, he noticed Christopher's white sun hat laying in the grass. He picked it up and hid it among his things.