Author's Note: Yay! Another Chapter up and away! Which is good, considering how busy I have been lately. Yes, I would love to be able to rate this as a T so more people could read it, but unfortunately there is quite a bit of language spread throughout and some scenes that are already half or fully written that will be coming up in later chapters that are the main reason for the M rating. I am worried that if I tried to rate it T with those scenes, that it would get yanked and that would be heart-breaking for me. As always though, thank you all for the reviews (boy, you guys are very perceptive;-) and I will continue to update as I can!

Ormandria

Eleesa opened the door and walked into the house, barely making a sound. She had been here a few days ago so Mac could run some tests. She wasn't actually due back yet, but she refused to let that stop her. Mac had been worried, as had Shawna.

Looking around to see if there was any sign of Mac's wife or daughter, and seeing none, Eleesa slowly made her way to the back room where his office was. She could feel two people in the house and as she got closer, she knew it was her former Captain and crew mate.

Concern cut through her like a knife, leaving Eleesa with the sudden urge to throw something and yell. She hated the way people had begun to tip-toe around her. If they weren't afraid for her, they were afraid of her. Or even worse, they pitied her. It was that last one that really ate away at her. Oh, they tried to pretend they weren't, but she knew better. She could feel it all. She had been able to feel it all since the accident so many years ago.

It had been a relief at first, when she finally realized she wasn't going nuts, but that was before she realized how irritating it was to have other peoples feelings swimming around inside of her. True, for the first several years it hadn't been too bad. Her biggest problem at the time had been dealing with large crowds of people. Every time she was near more then a handful she would get so overwhelmed by the shear force of the emotions present that she would get sick, or worse, lose the ability to tell where she ended and everyone else began. She managed to keep suspicions away though by claiming that she had developed claustrophobia since the accident.

Still, she had been willing to deal with the negative aspects because her newfound empathy did have its advantages as well. It had given her a special insight into others. It definitely made it easier to tell when someone was lying to her, or trying to get away with something. Her friends had also started coming to her for advice. Then people she hardly knew began coming to her for advice as well. That was when it had started getting annoying.

She grew ever more irritated that people in general could be so idiotic as to not see what was right in front of their eyes. Why should she be the one that had to clean up everyone else's mess because they couldn't get their lives straightened out? It had been enough to start her snapping at people when her moods grew dark. A situation that had grown increasingly frequent as of late, because of her particular problem.

It had taken quite a few years, but she had finally begun to learn how to close herself off so she wasn't so over-whelmed by people in general. Unfortunately it was too little, too late, as it did nothing to cure the growing distain and jealousy she found herself feeling for the people around her, who despite everything they complained about, were actually leading what amounted to normal lives.

It seemed to Eleesa that everyone on the ship had settled down and accepted their fate. They had gone on to start families, create businesses, and set up a thriving commerce. Even Mac, a man that had always claimed to be too busy for such frivolities, had fallen in love and gotten married. He had a nine-year-old daughter now too. Something he had always said he would never do.

Voices drifted out into the hall as Eleesa neared the door to Mac's office. Sure enough the voices confirmed her earlier thoughts.

"I don't understand Mac. You're saying that she's perfectly healthy?"

"More than healthy, Shawna. Fifteen years and she hasn't aged a day! The rest of us are getting wrinkles, going grey or just looking worn in general, and she still looks like she stepped out of a Miss USA contest."

As soon as Eleesa heard them, she knew they were talking about her. Creeping closer to the door to listen she leaned in to listen.

"Yeah Mac, I know that already. And God knows I wish I looked as young as she did, but what I don't know is why she isn't aging. Mac, what the hell is going on?"

Eleesa heard a chair slide out from under a desk as Mac sat down.

"She's not human," he sighed. Eleesa stiffened.

"What do you mean she's not human?" Shawna demanded. "If she's not human, then what the hell is she?"

"I don't know. I ran tests to see if her lack of aging is possibly linked to some sort of genetic disorder. What I found was that her genetics have changed."

"I don't understand."

Rattling came from the room as though someone was shifting things around on the desk.

"Okay," continued Mac after a few moments. "Suppose this is a normal person's DNA, or their genetics, as it were. Now if I shift this here and that there it's changed. But if you were looking at it for the first time you might not notice. So now you need to imagine that while the balls changed position, the shadows remained."

"So that you can see where the balls originally were?" Shawna asked.

"Yes," explained Mac. "That's Eleesa's DNA. It echoed itself and then changed."

Eleesa felt a numbing chill bite into the pit of her stomach as she listened to the conversation.

"Eleesa may have been human once, but whatever she is now, it most definitely isn't human anymore."

"So what do we do about it?"

Eleesa couldn't stand it anymore. The discussion was making her sick to her stomach. They were talking about her as though she was a lab experiment. All the old stories of alien dissection ran through her brain in an instant and instinct took over. She slammed the door open before Mac could answer Shawna's last question, startling both of the room's occupants.

"How about you tell her?" Eleesa asked bitterly. "Or are people now creating secret society's just so they can talk about me behind my back?" The comment stung Mac a little more harshly then Eleesa had meant to, making her regret her outburst almost immediately.

"I'm sorry," she said, finding it hard to keep the sarcasm from her voice. "I came to see if you had the results yet. I didn't expect to find you two discussing them with each other instead of with me."

"Well," remarked Mac as he pulled a chair out from next to the wall for Eleesa to sit in. Eleesa ignored it. She could still feel the worry coming off him like sweat, but was in no mood to cater to it. "I was going to wait to talk to you tomorrow. As for Shawna being here, well hell Eleesa…. With the way you've been acting lately, I thought it might be a good idea to have Shawna there in case …"

"In case I lose it?" she finished for him.

"Yes," Shawna stated in a flat tone. "You haven't exactly been thinking clearly lately. People have been worried."

"People are afraid, Shawna. I scare the living hell out of them. Look at me. I mean really look at me. I'm faster and stronger then most. I don't like being in large crowds. I know more about most people around here then they know about themselves. I don't age, and I now I can't even control my own damn emotions half the time, let alone anyone else's!"

Shawna and Mac looked perplexed as they watched their friend continue to rant.

"And now," Eleesa continued. "As if all that isn't bad enough, I find out I'm a freaking alien! Pardon me if I seem a bit touchy right now."

"I didn't say you were an alien," Mac corrected.

"No. You just said I wasn't human."

"Eleesa, for Christ's sake, will you sit down and listen?" Shawna exclaimed in her Captain's voice.

Eleesa finally relented and sat, her anger only partially spent from her tirade. Shawna heaved a long sigh and looked at Mac as though Eleesa hadn't even interrupted and had, in fact, been there the whole time.

"Now, as I was saying," she eyed Eleesa warily. "What do we do about this?"

"Well first, I need to know how this happened," Mac waved his hand over his make-shift DNA model. It gave Eleesa the willies just looking at it, but she couldn't take her eyes off of it. She had seen a similar model before. It had been a very long time ago, but it still held as clear in her mind now as it had then. Her eidetic memory made sure of that. She swallowed hard to fight the rising panic.

"Eleesa?" Shawna asked, not realizing that Eleesa recognized the model. "It'll be okay. We'll get this sorted out and …"

"It's the plants," Eleesa said in a hushed voice.

Mac looked from Eleesa to the model and back again. Memories welled up from the long forgotten past. "Okay, Eleesa," he said as understanding dawned on him. "I think it's time you told us what exactly happened in that room."

Eleesa could only nod numbly as she began to pour out the details she had always avoided surrounding what had happened right before she blacked out in the room.

Mac and Shawna listened for what seemed like. They had always known that something had occurred in there that Eleesa didn't wish to talk about, but they had never, even in their wildest dreams, expected this. It was like some kind of bad horror movie. Had it not been for the tests that Mac had run, they wouldn't have believed it.

Shawna stared at her friend in disbelief.

"Why didn't you tell us any of this before?" she asked. "We could have helped you."

"Help?" Eleesa laughed incredulously. "Look at me Shawna! People are afraid of me! And with good reason too. I've become something out their worst nightmares! Frankenstein and his monster all rolled up into one glorious package!" She swept her hand across the table, scattering the balls to the floor, as her body shook in rage.

"I know how you must feel Eli," Mac sighed. It was a desperate hope, using her nickname from long-ago, but he thought that maybe it was just the ticket to get through to her. "No one is afraid of you."

"You don't know anything," she seethed. "I can feel it Mac. I can feel it all! Every emotion, every worry, every fear." Eleesa griped the desk below her, once again fighting the tide of nausea that threatened every time she was over-whelmed with emotions. Her voice lowered as she looked at the other two.

"I've felt everything that everyone else has, since the crash," she continued bitterly. "And they're afraid. And I hate them for that. I hate them all…."

"Shit! Shit! Shit!"

Lagur continued muttering the explicative under his breath as he made his way down the corridor of the sand-steamer. They hadn't even fully started their "project" yet, and already it looked like it was going to hell in a hand-bag.

He rounded a corner, narrowly avoiding one of the many workers that would surely have his hide if they found him. It wouldn't take long for the lug-nuts to figure out that he might have had something to do with that little sand explosion in the control room.

He looked around for a moment at the niche he found himself in and smiled. This would at least give him some privacy to think and possibly come up with a plan. Damn it though! He wasn't any good with plans. That was Kable's specialty.

Sitting down, Lagur took a few deep breathes to calm down. He had too. Being panicked was likely to do more harm then good in a situation like this. The black-haired man began to rub his hands together in thought. He did his best thinking when his hands were busy. Though admittedly, it was usually when they were busy creating something, not when he merely rubbed them together as though he were cold. Still, the important thing was to keep them moving.

He went over the bare facts that he knew, at this moment, to be true. The first was that Kreeker and the others were already on their way to New Maine. The second was that people going to New Maine without assistance, even those with compasses, tended to get hopelessly lost. The third was that he, Lagur, had already played his trump card in the sand-bomb, so another one to slow down the steamer was highly unlikely to work.

Chances were good that the driver and his crew would be on extra-alert because of that already.

So how was he going to stop this big honking thing to give the others time to get to New Maine. The answer, simply put, was that he couldn't. Not without calling major attention to himself and that was definitely not something he wanted to do. With that figured out, he'd have to start looking at other options. He needed something to ensure that Vash the Stampede stayed in New Maine until the rest of the Gunrits arrived.

Lagur's thoughts fell to the two woman in the passenger hold and a smile began creeping across his face. Lagur might not be a ladies man per say, but he didn't exactly hurt a girl's eye to look at either. The taller girl, with the long brown hair, seemed nice enough, though her friend left a lot to be desired.

It didn't surprise him though. He got the impression that she was Vash's girl. And if you're going to be the girl of the great Vash the Stampede, destroyer of cities, and the man who managed, somehow, to put a hole in the Fifth Moon, then you damn-well better be tough yourself.

Most importantly though, the woman listened to her taller friend, who appeared to be of the simpler mind. It would make for an easy opportunity to manipulate them. If he could get them to stay in New Maine, chances might be good for keeping Vash in town as well.

Lagur got up and, after checking the corridors, made his way back to the passenger hold, with no one the wiser as to where he had been or what he had been doing. He was about to approach the girls, but then thought better of it. His best bet would be to wait until the small, ticking time-bomb was asleep. Then he could talk to the other one alone.

He leaned back against the far wall, studying the woman known as Meryl Strife. He shuddered as he thought back to her outburst earlier. For a moment he wasn't sure which scared him more, facing the great Vash the Stampede, or facing her. He decided almost immediately that it was the latter. After all, no matter how bad Vash turned out to be, at least he was still a guy. And guys, Lagur understood.

Knives walked into the plant room. He had taken the vase upstairs to his room, placing it on the table that Eleesa had fixed the day before. Now he simply looked at the plants that filled the room, these plants that were a shadow of Vash and him. They were cousins to them and the siblings that still lived in fragile glass containers.

They appeared very well taken care of. It left him slightly curious as to how Eleesa would react if she knew that he and Vash were plants. Of course knowing her, which he was beginning to know her better and better with each passing moment, she probably already knew. She had been inside of him, after all.

He gently ran his finger along the fuzzy leaf of one particular vibrant plant. He could feel the life pulse through it, and its joy at that life. Yes, these plants did seem very happy, he had to admit.

He turned and went into the kitchen, sitting down at the table for lunch.

"You're plants like you," he said matter-of-factly.

"They do?" Eleesa queried. "And how would you know that?"

"Because they told me," he shrugged.

"Well that's good to know," she returned. "I'm glad they like me. I'm rather fond of them myself."

"I can see that. So tell me, why do you waste your talents here, in the middle of this wasteland, when you could be out growing beautiful happy plants all over the planet?"

"I like it here," Eleesa remarked, grabbing the plates for the table. "It's quiet."

"Yes, but don't you get lonely?" he mocked. Eleesa merely flashed one of her easy-going smiles, with a tilt of the head.

"Oh Knives, are you worried about me and my little lonely heart?" she mused.

He snorted. "No. It's simply been my experience that people who shut themselves off from the rest of the world tend to do so because the big, bad world scares them. So I find it funny that you should do the same, since it's fairly obvious that nothing scares you."

"I told you, I like the quiet," she sighed. Knives smiled in satisfaction. She was taking the bait.

"What can I say? I'm a loner by choice," she continued. "I don't much like being around large groups of people for my own reasons."

"Now why would a nice girl like you hate being around people?" he pushed.

"They have a tendency to irritate me at times," she replied, her eyebrow arched in a way that relayed this same feeling to Knives and his questioning at the current moment. Knives didn't let that deter him though and kept on pushing. It was the first time he had managed to wrangle the conversation toward Eleesa and he wasn't about to stop now.

"Yes," he smirked knowingly. "They do have that as one of their less noble aspects. I find though that if I simply kill them, I get rid of the irritation. You should try it sometime."

"I'm not like you Knives." Eleesa was about to set down the last of the cutlery when Knives grabbed her hand unexpectedly.

"Oh I think you are more like me then you want to admit," he sneered.

"Am I?" Eleesa grabbed a knife that lay on the table next to her and quickly ran it over Knives arm and her own in one swift motion. Knives sat stunned for an instant, not even fully aware of what she had just done until he saw the blood well up from both their wounds. He looked up at Eleesa, who was studying the wounds intently. Her eyes widened in wonder, her mouth opened in a gasp of shock, and when she finally spoke, her voice dripped with sarcasm.

"Wow," she said. "You're right. I mean, look. You're blood is red and … and … so is mine…. Boy, this is amazing. We really are more alike then I ever realized." She looked up at Knives in artificial concern. "Why, where ever will the similarities end?" Shaking her head, Eleesa pulled her hand from Knives and went to the sink to wash the blood off her arm and the knife. She also tossed a towel to Knives so that he could do the same.

Knives began laughing to himself. He had managed to get to her and the victory, and although it was a slight one, it was indeed a sweet treat. So engrossed was he, in his own triumph, he failed to noticed the small, shrewd smile that played on Eleesa's lips the rest of the day.

Night had fallen and the sand-steamer had started moving again. Meryl felt relief flood her bones. It was hard to believe that she could get so worried about a man that, a few years ago, she had considered nothing more then a veritable pain in her side. Her mind drifted to all that they had been through in the last four years. When she had first found Vash, she thought him a fool and an imbecile. True, he still acted like one at times, but somehow it had gone from being annoying to endearing.

Now she couldn't bring herself to think of never seeing him again. These past few months had been pure torture. She and Millie had no way of knowing what Knives might do to Vash. He had killed so many people and had taken so much from all of them already. It was Knives that had sent Legato after the girls, forcing Vash to kill him in order to save them. A trick that backfired for Knives, as all it did was reinforce Vash's need to save his brother.

Meryl shivered at the memories and the thought of Knives. What if Vash succeeded in getting through to Knives? Did that mean that Knives would be traveling with them from now on? And if so, could she and Millie handle it? She had watched as Millie grieved over Wolfwood's death. It had torn her apart for a very long time. The work in town had been a boon to lifting Millie's spirits. Still, the idea of either of them having to be near the man that caused all the destruction in the first place set her stomach to churning. Of course, if anyone other then Vash could forgive Knives of his crimes it would be Millie. The girl truly had a heart of gold in that regard.

It might end up being a moot point though. In order to answer those questions, Knives would have to be on the road to "recovery" as it were, and from what Meryl had seen from him, she wasn't sure that it was likely. Although she had made a promise to Vash to believe in him. She couldn't just turn her back now, could she? She shook her head in confusion. She cared about Vash a lot and had seen him do many amazing things. She couldn't exactly start questioning him now, could she? No, she couldn't.

"You should get some sleep Meryl. You can't go visit Mr. Vash all tired and worn out," Millie remarked with normal enthusiasm. Meryl laughed.

"I suppose not. All right, I'll get some sleep."

The older of the two girls settled down a bit more, getting into a more comfortable position.

Knives sat in bed, studying the cut on his arm. It had been deep enough to draw blood, but not deep enough to cause any lasting damage. Eleesa had gotten the pressure just right, even in her annoyance. Yes, she was the perfect person to help him build Eden. With her by his side he wouldn't even need Vash anymore.

Perhaps after he turned her, he should have her kill Vash. There was no doubt in his mind that she was capable of doing so. Best yet, was that Vash would never even see it coming. Knives smiled as he sunk down and closed his eyes so that sleep could take him.

Once asleep, his dreams filled with the wonderful cries and sweetly, sickening blood of the human race, dying in agony.

Lagur moved over near the insurance girls, once he knew that the short one was asleep. When he saw the other look up, he merely smiled at her and nodded. She returned the smile, her bright blue eyes sparkling in the dark.

"Want a sandwich?" he asked, holding one up to her.

"Oh, thank you!" she grabbed the sandwich and began to munch down on it. "I am awfully hungry."

"You looked it," Lagur smiled. "My name's Mitch, by the way. Mitch Johanssen."

"I'm Millie. Millie Thompson," she replied. She held out her hand, which he took and shook. He almost immediately regretted it. If he thought that the small girl had been tough in attitude, it had nothing on this girl's physical strength. Just when he was positive that she was about to break his hand, she let go.

"That's … quite a grip … you have there," Lagur gasped.

"Oh, I'm sorry," Millie laughed. "Meryl always says I need to watch it. I just don't know my own strength."

"I gathered that," he replied. Suddenly Lagur felt that whatever Kreeker and Kable were planning on giving him for his cut of the reward on Vash the Stampede, it wasn't going to be nearly enough.