102 minutes.
102 minutes was the period of time slipped gently betwixt the estimated departure and arrival times of the Berlin-Hamburg fast train, like a thin television remote between cushions on an armchair, a momentary inconvenience, something about which there was little to think.
102 minutes after the train left Berlin Hauptbahnhof, Hüriye was hauling Annika from the wreckage in a forest just north of the Sachsen-Anhalt border.
A tragedy preordained by the empress herself (and thus inevitable) before Schneider taught Triedel et. al. what Tom Swift's middle initial stood for. This was not a matter of contingency, to her. This was territorial control. Berlin was hers, and the city was not earth, nor was it infrastructure. It was people. Nobody entered or left without her saying so.
Therefore, when news came that two magical girls were trying to leave for Hamburg, and she had assigned a unit of disruptors to neutralize them, she decided yet a third party needed to be prepared.
"Another thing, Kahnwald."
Though she was bowed in reverence, Thekla's ears perked up.
"We have bared our fangs at one of our own. Even if she proves easy to manage, we risk our disruptors deserting."
"And the solution, my Empress?"
"Isn't it obvious?"
"I just! Think it would be more appropriate to hear it from yourself."
Contemptuously Alex eyed Thekla down. After a moment, she relaxed, satisfied. "Call in your most capable subordinate, anyone you'd stand and trust to sit in on the case in Hamburg."
"Not myself, or one of the others? I- I mean not to defy you, of course, I wonder only why our superior capabilities wouldn't do us well."
"You all have some personal attachment to Schneider or other. You think I can't see it but I know you pity her - like a dog pained enough to need euthanasia."
"You would prefer no emotional attachm- ?!" Her mouth snapped shut, but by no will of her own.
"Absolutely not. If we had more time, I'd permit you the opportunity to distance yourself from the situation. But right now, we are operating in a frame of minutes, not months."
The consonance of the words Minuten and Monaten was, of course, a very deliberate rhetorical device. Thekla knew this, but found herself no less spellbound by Alex's enunciation.
"I... see. Margin for collateral damage?"
"Either covert or no-survivors. I'll permit no in-between, but which is more appropriate - that, I leave to your discretion."
"I know the girl you need, then."
"Excellent. Appoint her. I have my own matters to tend to, Kahnwald, so I'll bid you farewell for now. Do not disappoint me."
If the result of this decision had not already been so forecast, we might laugh about it, and presume that Thekla had fallen prey to some ironic gambit which had no chance of succeeding. We know better, however.
Agneta was an imposing, muscular woman. True to the nature of Berliner girls one promotion away from counsel with the empress, this was not so much the 'hit the gym' flavor of imposing and muscular, rather, this was its 'father has taken us out to the countryside for horseriding' counterpart. When she was instructed to carry out her terrible deed, she answered merely, "Hm." By her standards, this was giddy enthusiasm.
Her briefing detailed that she would be tasked with the inconspicuous killing of any other magical girl who boarded her train. In the event of failing to do so cleanly or quietly, it was imperative that she switch operations to butchering every person aboard the train as quickly as possible. That being the contingency plan, she shivered with anticipation at the thought of something going wrong with her prime directive. She wanted so badly to prove massacre was beneath her, that she could make this entire train vanish into thin air.
The train passed now through a hillier crop of the countryside, all sweeping turns and age-old bridges. Annika, now returned to her seat, had found herself quickly bored. A girl of her standing was not raised to find her own fun, but to depend on others. Hüriye could not infer this specific aspect of her circumstance, but understood more loosely what she was feeling no less. They offered:
"Hey."
"Hm?" Annika had been gazing at what she had seen to be as a mostly unremarkable countryside until now. It was not necessary to sit up and forward to better hear telepathy as it was speech, but she considered it polite.
"So what is the deeplighter interest in the Holzknecht legacy, if I might ask?"
"What's not to find interest in?"
"I presumed all of her important writings were well-known by now. Why do they need to investigate a supposed descendant? And why do we need to beat them to it?"
Annika smirked. Something sinister lingered in her smirk. Old habits, they supposed. "Officially, she's a matter of national pride. We're a bunch of wealthy neoromantics, and there's nothing we'd love more than a collection of memorabilia."
"You mean they."
"Right. Right, of course. Nothing they'd love more."
Agneta sat in the exact central carriage of the train, and therefore, the closest on average to any other point. If there were other magical girls on the train, their scent was not strong. Schneider's, she knew, was permanently suppressed by the curse upon her severed arm, but her accomplice... her accomplice was a mystery. She knew not the trace of their soul, and would need to find it.
Annika tried to disguise a wince of disappointment. Hüriye knew she'd formerly been too proud to ever have to practice hiding such a thing. "But I imagine that's not the truth?" Desperately they saw a matter which demanded pressing.
She blinked. She had expected to be given the room to feel miserable, and had no idea whether or not it was good that she wasn't.
"If we're being asked to stop them. What did Holzknecht know that she never revealed?"
"Time paradoxes."
"Time paradoxes?"
"That is, in fact, what I'd said."
"You say time paradox, and my first thought is as they exist in pulp science fiction. Some sort of problem with the universe's sequence of events that threatens the fabric of space and time."
"Space and time are fine, it turns out it takes acts of extreme violence to damage those."
"Then what is a time paradox?"
She leaned her mouth on the index finger of a fist. "A terrible thing. A towering, bone-thin giant, with needle-fine teeth, and a sickening gaze, and a burning light from its fingertips. Legends suggest they feed off the thoughts of others, and-"
"Sorry, are you sure we're talking about the same thing?"
Telepathic signals operate at a speed significantly faster than speech. To communicate one idea takes an average of slightly over one-fifteenth of a second, and among magical girls with more sophisticated control over their own neurology, often less time still. To be able to butt in to someone else's line of thought demonstrates an exceptionally talented telepath.
"It sounds to me more as if you're describing a mythical creature."
"That's more or less what it is, correct."
"It's not a physical phenomenon, then?"
Annika chewed her lip over this one. "It's like... Marty McFly. You know how he was trying not to bang his mother?"
"You are off to a really strong start here."
"Well, suppose he'd failed. Suppose his mother had fallen for him and never gotten with his father."
"But how could she? If she had he never would have existed for her to fall in love with."
"So she would have gotten with his father, and he would have been born..."
Hüriye's disfigured mouth sighed into their faceplate.
"You have two conflicting realities which are totally irreconcilable, but completely reliant on one another. It's like saying that the next thing I say is true, and then that the previous thing I said is untrue. The strangest thing is it wouldn't be a problem if not for magic."
"So this is the one time magic makes explaining cosmology worse."
"Pretty much!" She smirked again, now with all malice, all cruelty gone from the corners of her lips. "Emotional energy doesn't work by laws of conservation like most physical properties do. That means you have two overlapping realities where the mass-energy content of the universe is slightly different. The paradox, 'paradox artifact', to be exact, is a living creature hungry for thoughts that would make up a quantity of emotional energy exactly equal to the difference."
The unmistakable scent of magic. Agneta excused herself to the old man sitting aisleside from her, and began walking.
"Why are they alive, then?"
"Hm?"
"These paradox artifacts. Why are they living, moving things?"
"Oh, who cares. I mean I doubt something that isn't alive can absorb emotion."
"Is that a fact?"
"I'm only guessing. I thought I'd try to wrap the matter up, because-"
Annika stood and caught the wrist of the assassin's gun hand.
"-I believe this young woman wanted to tell us something. Isn't that right?"
Her own prosthetic arm hung behind her, unresponsive. Quick mental calculations told her if the assailant broke free, she could at least swing her shoulder with enough strength to knock her out.
"The Attendants to the Deep Light say hello."
"They'd better keep their heads down. I might say hi back."
"And here I was always thinking you were the most peaceful of the auxiliaries."
Annika grimaced. "How far do you think I will go to maintain that peace?"
A knot coiled itself into shape in Hüriye's stomach. There was the Schneider they knew - but was that a good thing?
Well, if they were being attacked with a gun, the odds were yes. This was a fantastic thing.
Already innocents were clamoring from the headstone-arches of their seats. Most fled. Some tried to pry the fighters apart, but a building static charge stung anyone who put their hand near Annika. Her hair lifted itself softly from her head, in one breath, in the tick between one heartbeat and the next, Agneta's wrist was invited to complete the circuit. The electrochemical parity of each muscle's tension in her body was shattered, an instant pop of noise in her every tendon. She threw Annika off her. Against any reasonable assumption on matters of the weight force, Annika's body struck the cabin ceiling with an inhuman crunch. No sooner had the flare of bone breakage lit up her body's pain sensors than Agneta already had her gun trained on the gem upon her chest. Her finger rested on the trigger.
Swinging the flat of their broadsword, Hüriye batted aside her aim with force enough to dislocate her shoulder. Annika landed on forearms and knees behind them. Agneta waved their stronger arm over Hüriye's blade, and its weight became unbearable. They dropped it. She healed her shoulder, took aim at them, and, with no fanfare, fired backward.
Tomas Göhler was a strange man, you would hear if you'd asked anyone who knew him. He seemed to have a constant fascination and enthusiasm for all that he saw and heard in life, and yet, if asked after his own interests, he would wave people aside and coolly change the subject.
He was an assistant teacher at the high school in his neighbourhood. The sternly firm kind, but no less one to laugh along to the jokes of the students. His appearance was off-putting to some - bushy beard, bulging eyes, tall, gaunt figure - but if one knew him, they saw not these things, they saw a man who nodded along to the radio regardless of what was playing. A man who seemed to have some obscure trivia factoid pertinent to every restaurant in town. A man who laughed deeply, but never in mockery, when a friend wasn't fast enough to cover their beer in the presence of a wasp.
And just this month, he had done it. Finally, he had developed a mechanism which would allow the sister of a friend of a friend - living with a motor disability, though he had the good graces not to pry - to reach the back of her front-loading washing machine. He had sent her the design, and she told him it worked well. Now he was headed northwest to meet her. He would have, and they would have certainly fallen in love save for the fact that on the train ride over, the warning shot of a rogue gunman had driven itself between two ribs and punctured his primary bronchus. He could be saved with immediate attention, but there was a common understanding among the passengers that staying to help would only double the body count.
He was only thirty-eight years old.
"And the rest of you! Tell the driver to keep this shit moving!" She did not look directly at her targets as she returned her aim to them. "Look, you two. I'm not here for a fight, I'm here for a job. If you're so intent on making a racket, that is not beneath me. You can stand down just fine and face no consequence, and this car will arrive in Hamburg with no complications, three bodies, and a crazed shooter who is immediately arrested by the authorities as soon as we pull in. Refuse, and everyone on this train dies."
If Hüriye could still scowl, they would have. "So you consider whatever's in Hamburg more valuable than the lives of every single person on this train."
"I don't care whatever's there. This is about the law, and you will submit."
They weighed her words deliberately. Morosely, they unclasped their own gem and held it to the light, about a centimeter or two above eye level.
"What are you doing?" Annika thought. "Do you have a death wish?"
"I think if we want to keep her from killing anyone else... we're going to have to keep up such a constant assault that she doesn't have a chance to do anything but defend herself."
"What, now?"
"Hold."
Agneta pressed the pistol's barrel to the gem.
"Be my guest," Hüriye confirmed, and let go.
With the executioner's attention upward and forward, Annika fired her rifle, unhesitant, squarely from the hip. Agneta spasmed. Fired her own gun. Missed. Hüriye ran their shoulder into her, full force, and caught their gem backhand. She recovered, pushed them off of her. They shot across the room, bounced off the back wall, and didn't return to the floor.
"A gravity manipulator?"
Annika had already deduced as much, or at least that some manipulation of weight was at hand. She didn't care. This revelation made little difference to a lightning elemental. She readied another shot. Agneta rushed for a glass of Orangina left abandoned by a young man in his fleeing of the scene and threw it into Annika's midsection as if it were some manner of handheld explosive. It smashed open upon her all the same, and the residue of the drink soaked into her undershirt.
The glass cuts were of little concern to her - those, she could heal. The trouble now became that a solution containing anyone's guess of ionized molecules was clinging to her skin. If she fired off another bolt, she could full well char the heart right out of her chest.
Hüriye weighed themself back down with a new broadsword. Fire already began to engulf its blade, and they began a slow, well-balanced march in her direction.
"Neither of you have given up yet?"
She pointed her gun into the crowd huddled in the next carriage over, the one in which she herself had been sitting in not long prior. This was a three-car train, and the front was too cramped now for a few stragglers too slow to run from the back. She eyed a boy whose age she estimated at nine.
Before Agneta fired a shot, however, Annika leapt from behind and pressed the length of her rifle against her throat. Agneta knew well enough that guns were not light, but the amount of time she had before she estimated Annika would strangle her unconscious was alarming. The oxygenated blood her brain would normally use to animate the motor neurons leading to her forearms and fire her gun were suddenly lacking. Her concentration was divided. She could either keep Hüriye forced to such a slow pace, or loosen the grip around her neck, but not both.
Well, one of those choices would grant her neither. The force of the rifle held to her neck dried up quickly, and in doubling over, she threw Annika forward, right off herself. She fired a shot into Hüriye's gut. They doubled over.
"Annika..."
They struggled upon the hilt of a sword, but a pointed end made for a useless cane.
"I have a clear shot of the gem between her shoulderblades," she replied.
"Don't take it... If you miss you'll only hurt yourself."
"Do you have a better plan?"
Hüriye was shaking too much for Agneta to call this point blank. She amplified their weight. They crashed to the floor with the tremendous crack of ribs. "You know, gravity is the weakest fundamental force in the universe. The only reason it affects us so severely is we're stuck on a five septillion kilogram rock. Five septillion. Can you imagine? Because if you don't sit still, I can show you."
"Is there anything of sentimental value in your bag that you wouldn't hate to see destroyed?" They begged Annika.
"That's a contradiction, isn't it?"
"The threads of fate... build these karmic tensors whenever we ascribe meaning to something. And just like any other thread, energy is released when it snaps. That meaning can be anything - cultural, superstitious, functional, anything - it doesn't matter. But I thought given your situation, you might have something you love, but isn't worth hanging onto anymore."
"So what? What's this energy for?"
"That's my secondary power. Channeling the destruction of inanimate objects."
Agneta gripped Hüriye by the waist and turned them over. The gem on their collar was completely exposed. She stood one boot upon her stomach to keep them from squirming. Meanwhile:
"Th- there's an old photo of my parents, that- no... I had this friend, long ago, that- definitely not, no..."
"Anything Attendant?"
"Oh, for God's sake! Just burn the ticket stub!"
Hüriye procured the stub for this journey betwixt second and third finger. Understanding flashed through their mind, of this being Annika's first tangible proof of freedom. Agneta raised her pistol, and in an instant, a flaming sword shot from the gem her sights rested so squarely on. This was brighter than the one before, far brighter, and for just a moment it blinded her, long enough for Hüriye to drive it through her stomach. She staggered backward, stumbled, tripped over Annika. She landed on her back, and when the sharp of the blade met the floor, it decided to keep her there.
Annika recovered well and truly by now, stood to her full height, and kicked Agneta aside the head. To her dissatisfaction, Agneta had already anaesthetized her soul to keep away the pain of an injury far in excess. The short carpet of the aisle was crimson with blood - all Annika had achieved was rubbing half her face in it.
"Hüriye."
Hüriye struggled to lift themself by the table they'd been beaten under.
"Remove your sword, so I can kill her."
"What? No! Absolutely not!"
"If you don't-"
An ultimatum whose domain in the hypothetical was not to be explored. Agneta was going to die, and she still had yet to complete her task of keeping this train from ever being seen again. She called upon the most profound recesses of her strength...
Hüriye and Annika could immediately tell what was happening. Images and sounds of distortion wracked Agneta's body. They didn't need to see her soul gem to understand its current shade, but what she was about to become, they all knew, would be still in its nascence.
The entire train rose from its tracks moments before coming to a corner. The rail's curvature could no longer touch its momentum, and somewhere, in a dark coniferous forest, a three carriage train held impossibly over a steep incline.
Satisfied, Agneta flexed her deltoids as far as she could, and dashed her gem open on floor and under spine.
Hüriye grabbed Annika before the moment of the drop and pulled her under their table. They did not have the time to warn her what was happening, let alone instruct that she do the same to the screaming crowd up the other end of the vehicle. Hastily they erected a column of flame behind them to create an air cushion and...
By the time they pulled themselves from the wreckage, Hüriye barely conscious and Annika in shock, they saw no other sign of survivors. The former's last-second fire had saved both their lives.
"That's everyone. Everyone on board that train is dead. My God, everyone is dead..."
Hüriye blinked. "Everyone...?"
"Y- You- Y- had the chance to kill her, Sançar! Oh my God. Oh my God."
"I couldn't have."
"What do you mean, you couldn't have? You had the perfect opening!"
For half a second, they were asleep. They shook themself awake. "I'm sorry."
"You're sorry?"
"Sorry as in apology, since you believe the onus of failure is upon me. And sorry, as in sorrow, for how easy it is for you to consider that I could have just..."
Thoughts too heavy for Annika's head anointed it anyway.
"What do you mean? Don't try to deflect by acting like you've never wanted somebody dead before."
"Never. I'm..." They fell, hit the mess of scrap which littered the forest floor. "Mortified that you have to feel that way."
"I don't have to feel anything. I..."
The words came to her no longer. The faucet was dry.
"I..."
Nor did the thoughts.
"I..."
Was she crying?
No, of course not. That wasn't the kind of thing she did.
But here she was, certainly.
Irrefutably, openly weeping.
It took until late afternoon for the pair of them to regain their composure. Both were exhausted each in ways they hadn't felt possible.
"I still kind of blame us for all of that," Annika confessed.
"Why?"
"We could have stopped her."
"I don't think the onus is on us for merely trying to subdue her instead of kill her. I think the responsibility lies with her, for being some kind of hyperaggressive mass murderer. I'd say that's way worse than whatever you can put on us."
"How can you be so optimistic, after all that?"
A pause. Annika never expected to hear such a thing from Hüriye, whom she had only known as well-measured in speech and possessing a lightning wit, and nothing beside.
"I don't think I am. I don't think I'm ever going to forget what happened here. I just don't see why we should feel bad about beating someone to the brink of death, but no further."
"You aren't going to... judge me, for considering the option, are you?"
"What option, really? She was ready to kill us all the moment we had the upper hand."
"But that I'd even bring it up...!"
Hüriye put an arm across Annika's back. "You're still unaccustomed to living this kind of danger as anything but a deeplighter. I know. I know how hard it can be to reprogram your own self image so fundamentally."
"How do you- oh."
Their face creased as if they were laughing. She supposed it was a little funny, too.
"So what's our plan now?"
"I've been asking myself that exact question. You don't suppose we could just follow the Elbe?" They gestured vaguely southward.
"It runs through several towns. The Empress has her fingers in who knows how many of them."
"We don't have to stay long. If something goes wrong, we can come up with something else accordingly. Until then..."
"Until then, we're trekking halfway across the country, with no food, water, shelter..."
Hüriye nodded. "It should take us... weeks, maybe, but it could work."
"Grief seeds..."
"...Ah."
"Ah?"
"We'll figure something out. You know, why don't we start moving now? It's going to be night soon.
Annika had no objection to that. Hüriye led, and she followed, although she wasn't quite sure where.
"You did good work strangling that assassin too, by the way," they mused.
"Good work in what way?"
"Oh, you didn't notice? You used both arms."
"Righto, everyone. We're having a quick house meeting, if that's all good."
Hope asserted herself slightly above speaking volume (for herself, a feat) and tapped a spoon on the side of a glass permanently milk-stained from an old and ineffective dishwasher since discarded, and a butterknife off of which she'd only just polished margarine.
Heeding her call were her four oldest flatmates, with the addition of Danika and Thalia already in attendance.
Audrey rocked upon her heels. "What's the word, boss?"
"Well, I figured if any of you had anything to kvetch about, I'm gonna give you all that chance right off the bat."
Audrey, Denise, Erica, and Jane all took to viocing concerns from the querulous to the grim.
"The blinds in my room are getting stuck half the time."
"Well, I'm negotiating back pay at work. Can I chip into the bills double next month, or...?"
"My parents are in town, and they don't know I'm living in a place like this."
And so forth, of that sort.
"'S that everything?" Hope glanced around.
All present expressed some form of agreement, each in their own way.
"Right. Well, I've got a complaint of my own, that should be enough to get you to forget about yours."
Erica scowled. "What, so yours is automatically the most important?"
"Marie's been kidnapped."
True to her word, everyone did forget about their own problems.
Audrey drummed her fingers on the table. "Do you remember this time, about four months ago, when you said she was going to be living with us?"
"As a matter of fact, I do. I was there."
"You said you wanted to avoid pretty much this exact scenario."
Hope grit her teeth. "I know."
"And yet..."
"Just because it's happened doesn't mean I've ever not wanted to stop it from happening."
"So, what now?" Denise tried.
She cracked her knuckles and gestured at the two girls behind her. "I tell you bloody what now. I believe you've all met our girl Dazza over here-"
Danika waved, timidly,
"-but I dunno how familiar you lot are with Thalia."
For her part, Thalia did not take this as an invitation to greet anyone.
"Ah! Hello! Yes! This is Florian also."
Murmurs of interest overtook the room at the appearance of Florian. The attention flattered him.
"Now these two've done some digging already - bloody legends - and I think we've found our mate Marie. Daz?"
"Aye aye?"
"You got the map?"
Danika outspread a large sheet of paper upon the table, revealing the image Marie had marked of a rough dozen towns around the world, and what few hypothetical lines of connection she'd roughly sketched among them.
"What's this?"
"Telluric currents."
"Oh, I... I specifically meant the map we were looking at before, if that's alright."
"Of course. Yes. I was getting to that one. We're here." She tapped the location of Sydney on the world map and, one by one, knowingly locked eyes with everybody around the table. "So here, we've got... bear with me-" She laid upon it another map now, this one being an A4 low-quality scanning and printing of a street directory. Two points upon it were circled in red, and an arrow was drawn between them. She nodded, satisfied, and retreated.
"So." Hope rubbed her hands together. "Had some looking around down at the ol' depot. Thank Christ that place's floor's always chockers with dust-"
"A-"
"And before you ask, Erica, no. I wasn't exactly in a rush to get that stuff in my sinuses this time around. That's what my bandana's for. And healing magic, to boot. No. I just popped in for a quick squiz, and wouldja believe it, footprints. See, I got to thinking! I got to thinking, if they want Marie, they want somethin' old, too. Something only she can dig inta. So that's what this first red circle is."
"No prizes for guessing what the arrow coming off it and pointing to the other circle is, then," Denise shrugged.
"Spot-on. This was the harder half of the job. Thankfully these two had it covered." She snapped and pointed at the pair standing behind her. "Danika, master of disguise, can weasel her way into any old place, and those she can't - do mind this is an industrial neighbourhood, and you never know how much is derro for some tax purpose I don't get - Thalia can find a back door to sneak through. Got to looking through the area, 'bout as far as someone could get without probably being seen, and Dazza came to a building where she actually got called out on her disguise by the missus working security. So that's our spot. That'd be where they're showing their whatevers to Marie."
"And our plan?" Audrey crossed her arms uneasily.
"Remember what Deane Hutton used to say, on the telly."
"Bit before my time, Fearno. And before yours, but I'll bite. What did he say?"
Hope smiled, and flicked a tuft of seafoam-green hair from her face.
"Well, I'm glad you asked." - Deane Hutton
BLACK IS THE COLOR OF MY AMNIOTE'S HAIR
There come two types of pigmentation in the skin, hair, and eyes of practically every warm-blooded animal (sparing only certain birds) - the red and yellow pigment of pheomelanin, and the black pigment of eumelanin. But not all feather, or eye, or hair colors exist on a white-red-black range. How is that possible? Is there some other process at hand, besides pigmentation?
Well, I'm glad you asked.
There exist in humans (for reasons yet unknown to any manner of scientific inquisition, only in humans, and no other primates) particular genes which may affect not only the chemical makeup of human hair, but its structural makeup too. This phenomenon has yielded more conclusive explanation from the study of iridescent bird feathers, in which it is much greater in magnitude. It had long been known that there exists no blue melanin - that the blue pigmentation of, say, fish or arthropods arose from a different compound affecting their color. However, it has been a common misconception that this was accounted for by the effect of the Tyndall effect - the same effect which causes blue or green eye color in humans. The actual phenomenon, as demonstrated by American professor Richard Prum, was in fact that these feathers had much dark melanin within them, but, in addition, chemical structures which created an interference pattern with a frequency of blue light, thereby amplifying it.
Though weaker to the point of no noticeable iridescence in humans, this same effect is responsible for natural blue, or with varying degrees of intensity and ratio to levels of melanin, green, purple, or pink hair. If a blue-haired individual removed a singular hair from their head and placed it under low light, it would appear to be a shade of dark brown.
I...
I used to have blue hair. Back when I had a corporeal form.
I think?
You'd think I'd recall such a thing well enough. Maybe I'd been born around the cusp of evolving the...
Maybe? No. I definitely had - have, if I'm going to actualize myself this way! - Black hair, with a slight blue coloration to it. Why... why don't I remember that, though?
Uh...! Some sloths can develop green hair due to a symbiotic relationship with algae. Okay. That'll do.
