A/N: Dear Lord. See, this is what happens when I try to get another story on a posting schedule. Grrr. But now that my schedule for my chapter MR story is established, I can get on a schedule for THIS one. Whoo hoo! (Ahem...you should also check out said story. There's one and its sequel. And yes, I am shameless.)

Okay, so I have a bit of a problem with this. JP, according to you, the Director is 107 years old at the end of STWAOES because she has tortoise genes or whatever. I can understand genetic engineering in 2005 (where everything starts, if we assume it starts when book 1 was published)...but really? In 1898? Before they even had cars? But whatever. Let's chalk it up to 'they're way ahead of the times'. I'm going to ignore that GLARINGLY OBVIOUS PLOT HOLE and write about the Director. Who I'm having immense trouble with anyway.

ANYWAY...I'm going to stop rambling and give you a chapter.

One: She woke to flickering candlelight.

Her entire body ached, as if each nerve in her body was sending out waves of pain. Her eyes darted around the room that she was in. The candle illuminated only a small portion of it - the mattress she lay upon, the hardwood floor, and a table to her left. Her eyes widened in fright as she took in the tools that lay upon the table: an array of scalpels, a pair of wickedly sharp scissors, and a microscope to name a few. She looked around, hoping for a hint on where she was, but the rest of the room was consumed by flickering shadow.

A door opened and she jumped at the sound. A man approached her mattress. Her heart rate sped up and she tried to push herself upright, to get away, but her body was too weak. It didn't want to work. As he came closer, she could see that his face didn't look too menacing. She relaxed.

A little.

He knelt next to the mattress and began bending and extending her limbs. She could only look at him in fright. "Alright," he said to himself. "Let's do a little memory test." He looked up at her. "Do you remember your name?"

"Marian Janssen," she whispered automatically.

"Good," he asserted. "What year is it?"

"1903."

"How old are you?"

"Five." She didn't understand why he was asking these questions. She couldn't even remember how she had gotten there.

He put a hand on her neck and counted for sixty seconds. "Heart rate is good," he continued. "It looks like everything is in order with you." He smiled in a self-satisfied way and began to get up.

"Wait!" Marian rasped out. "Where am I? Where are you going? What's going on?"

He would only answer one question. "Welcome to Itex."

Two: Marian later learned that she had been selected, because of her parents and supposed 'good breeding', to be the crowning jewel of Itex's brand new genetic engineering program. As they had not yet discovered how to change the DNA of an unborn baby, they had had to settle for one that had already been born. That one had been her. It had been a gamble - both of her parents were strong and healthy, she was strong and healthy, therefore there was a chance that she would survive the experiment. She was lucky to still be functioning.

She was the property of Itex, now, even her parents had no claim on her. She was never given any further explanation as to why she couldn't go home 'just to see them', why she was constantly watched by at least two people, or why suddenly she was locked day and night in this stone building.

As years went by, her memories of her parents, of her childhood home, began to fade until they were no more.

Three: Things may have been miserable at times at the German Itex fortress, but truly the scientists weren't that terrible to her. She got an education, far better than one that she would have received at even the private school her parents planned on sending her to. She learned to speak English, French, Italian, Spanish, even Japanese. All of this was at a young age, while the pathways between neurons were formed easily.

Above all, however, she learned science. From the time that she was strong enough to be able to walk around from her 'surgery', she learned. Biology, chemistry, physics, you name it, she'd learned it. As the new discoveries came around, she learned those as well.

When she turned ten, they began putting her in leadership positions over other experiments. She was put in charge of overseeing the children that they brought in to experiment on. Marian never learned that it was wrong - there was no one there to tell her so. However, there will always be one incident that stands out in her mind.

She had been eight years old, and they had placed her in a holding cell with ten other children. They all looked up at her, frightened. It had given her a sense of power to know that she was the one they were looking at with such fear.

"Please," one dared to whisper. "Why were we brought here?" The child's face was dirty and her clothes were in rags - unlike Marian, they had not been chosen for 'good breeding'. They had been chosen because no one would miss them.

She pointed a finger at the child imperiously. She must have seemed like she was playing pretend - an eight year old pretending to be a queen. "Be quiet," she ordered. "There's no talking in here."

One of the boys was older than her, and even though he was thin as a stalk of grass, he stood up shakily to face her. "Who are you to tell us what to do?" he asked her in German. "You're littler than me. And you're a girl."

Marian was slightly frightened, but she had long since learned never to show her fear. She kept up her cold facade. "You listen to me because you have to," she replied in the same language.

His eyes narrowed. "I don't have to do anything. None of us do," he gestured around at the rest of the children in the cell. "But we want out of here."

Marian lifted her chin. "No."

The boy stalked toward her and grabbed her around the waist, flipping her over his shoulder. "Fine. I'll do it my way." Marian screamed and beat her fists against his back, and suddenly he collapsed. She fell hard, cracking her head against the stone, but heaved herself back up again. To her horror, there was a pool of blood billowing out from beneath him. She stumbled backwards, eyes bugging out.

"Now, that wasn't something that we could condone, now was it?" asked a calm voice from outside the cell. Marian looked up. A man with pale skin and dark hair was standing outside of the barred entrance, fingering a knife sheath that was on his hip. "They sent me down here to check on you," he said by way of explanation to her unanswered question. "And good thing I did." He nodded to the boy that was lying on the ground. "Let that serve as a warning to the rest of you," he called to the other children, who had backed up to the very far corners of the cell. One of the little girls was crying.

"Now, Marian," he said, beckoning her closer to the bars. She stepped up to him warily, and he grabbed her chin between two fingers. "Be a better leader, won't you? So this doesn't have to happen again?"

Needless to say, her leadership skills went through the roof.

Four: The tortoise genes in her, it turned out, did absolutely nothing except grant her an extremely long life. And no, she does not move slowly, thank you very much.

Five: Not unlike the Max II that she would grow to create, Marian was not treated like the others. She grew up feeling special, entitled. It gave her the sense that she was important. While Itex was only raising her to be a scientist - nothing more, nothing less - they didn't expect that she would be driven enough to eventually become Director of the entire organization. It was their fault, really - she had grown up watching people with ambitions who had told her that 'she would be important someday'.

Her important just wasn't the same as their important.

Six: She doesn't believe that the world really has use for parents, one of the reasons that she looks down on the flock. Why on earth would one want to find their parents when they were already conveniently out of the picture? It didn't make sense to her. It was why she made sure to leave that picture of the younger blond male with them, made sure that they knew he had been sold. If they were ever going to be of any use to her, they had to disregard their parents completely. Otherwise, they were weak.

She would never admit to the fact that this had stemmed from the fact that her own parents had recommended her for research that had just been beginning, had dedicated her life to it before she had even reached the tender age of six. She won't even allow that thought to take root in her mind.

Seven: Marian wishes that she could change the fact that she is an experiment. It sets her apart from her colleagues, from the other Directors. She's had to work extra hard for the respect that she knows she deserves. New colleagues that are in on the secret still look at her like she's something to be dissected.

She's partly to blame for that, she supposes. After all, she condoned that type of behavior towards any other type of experiment. But she was different. She was special. They couldn't look at her that way. Didn't they realize that she was the one that would be controlling the world someday? That without her on their side, they could all very well die?

She was different, damn it. Show her some respect.

Eight: Though she knows that she is, in fact, an experiment, she doesn't view herself as one. To clarify - she doesn't believe that she is like the experiments that she sees each day in cages, bags of skin and bones. Of course she's not. She was chosen, wasn't she? And those things were made in a test tube. She was born from humans, so she must be human. She has a fully fledged mind, so she must be different. She has emotions, so there must be something different on some fundamental level.

Right?

Nine: The avian mutants don't understand her Re-Evolution Plan. All that they see is 'pointless murder', but she would not be able to live with herself if that was so. They also think that it's a plot for Itex to take over the world, but that isn't the case either. If they would just open their eyes, they would see the truth.

The Itexicon Corporation wasn't trying to destroy the world; they were trying to save it. Didn't they see that the lives that would be lost were merely collateral damage? It was necessary. Humans, as foolish as they were, had overpopulated the world, had polluted it, had watched it deteriorate without a second thought. With the Re-Evolution Plan, most of those corrupted people would be out of the way, and only her few selected people and experiments would be able to walk the earth. If the entire world was cleansed to a select few, it would be much easier to regulate - and thus, they could prevent any more disasters from happening. No more war, no more pollution, no more endangering of species.

It escaped her how the mutants could fail to see this.

Ten: There is no trace of the frightened five year old girl in Marian Janssen anymore. Now, she has learned power, and how to manipulate people to get what she wants.

For example, the oldest avian hybrid female. She had the thing believing for days that she was truly her mother. Granted, there were certain things already in her favor - the blond hair and brown eyes, for example - but the rest was all a matter of simple mind games, and mind games were what Marian did best. How else would she coerce people into doing her bidding, into becoming subordinate?

And in the end, it's really only her way that matters.

A/N: Finished! Dang, that took way more effort than usual. I don't know why it took me so long to 'crack' the Director. Eventually she started talking...if that makes any sense at all...

Oh, yeah, the schedule thing. I'm going to try and update every weekend. Any requests for characters? (Preferably not someone as minor as Sam, who I really can't say anything about, but other than that...)

And LASTLY...about secret number 9. I am really curious to see what you guys thought of that one. I think I know the answer, but it could be a potential good discussion - who is right? The Flock, or Itex?

My personal answer is the Flock, but I think you could make a case for Itex.