"How was school?" Macklnn asked as Mace entered the door with Minion and Krut close behind.
"Could have been worse," Mace said, giving his father a look that said, "I could tell you the truth, but I really can't." Macklnn understood immediately.
"Well, Krut, your parents are waiting for you in the living area. Mace, Minion, let's all wish them well." The three boys followed Macklnn from the room and into a lavishly furnished area. Unlike the uniform white entranceway and several surrounding rooms, the den, or living area as some called it, was very colorful. The walls were painted with thousands of miniaturized versions of the family crest—a bright blue lightning bolt on a black background. The black could be interchanged with dark blue, but the black was a preference.
Everything in the room was in different shades of colors, the chairs were red and green and yellow, the book cases were brown and purple and orange, and the carpet was blue. They so appreciated color in the Mind household, though Macklnn and Mendje chose to wear the customary sparkling white jumpsuits, and world that Mace ventured into every day, with uniform white walls, floors, ceilings, and buildings, hordes of people with white clothing, the ground paved with sparkling marble, was so very clean and pristine and perfect. It was a sight that might have filled someone from a less eutopic age with wonder, but it was so very much the same from town to town, city to city, state to state. Color was had, but only in private, for in the public eye, whiteness allowed for dirt and grime to be spotted and removed immediately. It prevented disease and kept Cerul clean.
That was part of why the Minds lived so far away from the city where Mace attended school, and why they preferred to work from home. The estate was large and multi-storied, and they weren't far from a lush forest. It was one of the last unaltered places on Cerul.
Upon entering the room, King Ort and Queen Yrrrt stood. They were both tall, Ort soaring to seven feet and Yrrt stable at six. Ort had short, close-cropped black hair with sharp blue eyes and a long beard-mustache ensemble. He looked hard and fierce and had a scar across his left eye, which was also blind.
No one dared ask what could have possibly caused harm to the King of invincible beings.
Yrrrt had long brown hair, curly and wavy at once, with much softer, rounder features. She was less muscular than her husband and son, but her strength was still evident in strong, thick limbs and a firm structure.
King Ort looked fierce and formidable, and Yrrrt looked less than welcoming, but the both of them lit up as their son entered the room. Much like Mendje and Macklnn, they still remembered that point in time when he was young where they almost lost him…But no one liked to focus on that, especially knowing that another inhabited planet had been done away with in order to keep them alive. That chapter of history was barely spoken of, and would never be recorded in any history books; quite certainly, no one would ever allow Aida to know.
"Krut! My boy!" the King exclaimed, holding out his arms.
"Hi, Dad, Mom," Krut greeted.
"Are you ready to head home?" Queen Yrrrt questioned.
"Sure."
"Farewell, Mendje," Yrrrt bade, kissing each of Mendje's cheeks, "Macklnn." She repeated the action, and the two accepted with the smallest possible amount of discomfort. Much like the touching of Cerulean heads, the kissing of both cheeks was a traditional farewell for a woman of Crypt. King Ort bade the two farewell, not kissing their cheeks but setting a hand on the head of each of the blue adults and kissing it (his hand, not their heads); it was the traditional farewell of a male of Crypt.
Cryptonians were strange.
The two then allowed the Ceruleans to touch heads with them, the series of tasks showing the acceptance of the other's culture. Mace and Krut, being respectable males of a similar age, would have no such series of tasks between the two of them. Instead, they simply said their farewells and grasped hands for a few seconds before saluting one another.
"Farewell, Prince of Crypt," Mace said with mock seriousness.
"Farewell, Noble Cerulean," Krut returned with the same tone and set to his face. It was silly, but they'd invented it when they were little, and just hadn't yet grown out of it. They smiled and laughed as Mendje herded the Royal Family out the door, giving her own husband and son a kiss and a promise to be home by midnight.
Minion bade the collection goodbye as they exited the room, having not entered in the first place, and when everyone had gone off about their business, Mace and Minion headed upstairs. Mace dropped off his things, checked his watch, and very quickly licked each forefinger and ran them through his eyebrows, trying not to let Minion notice. Minion saw, but he decided it would be best not to ask.
"Let's get headed, Mignon!" Mace exclaimed, forefinger of his right hand extended into the air.
"To where, Sir?"
"To the Cerebellum house, of course!"
"Why are we going there, Sir?"
"I told you, didn't I?" Mace asked. Minion shook his body as if shaking his head. "Oh," he said, folding one arm over his chest and using the other to stroke his chin hair. "I could have sworn I had…No matter! The kitten," he said, snapping his fingers, "Quicksilver! Aida said she would allow me to examine her more closely, and that is precisely what I intend to do! Come now, Minion! We must be going, or we will be late, and that would be very undesirable, now wouldn't it?"
"Of course, Sir," Minion agreed, following Mace and closing the door gently behind them as Mace dashed out. The teenager grabbed the banister and threw himself up, sailing down the railing as if it were a slide with an ear-to-ear grin on his face. Minion followed quickly behind, taking the stairs one at a time and meeting his Master at the door.
"We're going out, Dad!" Mace called.
"Where are you—" Macklnn started to ask where they were headed, but was cut short when Mace slammed the door behind himself and Minion. Macklnn sighed. He was a good kid, but he was always running off to all corner of creation and undertaking all sorts of random projects with manic energy at all hours of the day and night. He smiled and shook his head. He reminded him so much of himself at that age…
Roxanne was in the kitchen assisting Isst, Civ, and Gilda again. Every few seconds her eyes would flit toward the arch through which the rest of the house was accessible. From her place, washing dishes while Gilda dried them (sure, they icould/i have used the laser filth-removal, or the automatic dish washer, or any number of the cleansing mechanisms stored away in closets and storage spaces, but they preferred to do their own work most of the time—it gave them all a feeling of satisfaction and pride that was lost when it was done by machines, and the machines also offended the minions of the household, though none of them would ever admit it), Roxanne could just make out the very edge of the door.
"You know, Roxanne," Isst said as she laid noodles out in the bottom of a pan, "you and Gilda are getting older. In just a few short years, she'll be too old for a name change. You should start considering what to rename her."
"I don't want to rename her," Roxanne said, looking up at Gilda. "It's the name her birth mother gave her, and it's beautiful. I don't think she needs a new one." Usually, minions were renamed by the time a Cerulean was five or six, and while the name wasn't permanent until seventeen, it usually didn't change after that. Almost all Ceruleans renamed their minions at some point, to show that they embraced the minion as their own and to strengthen their bond. But Roxanne truly didn't want to rename her minion. She'd known her as Gilda from the time she'd been brought to the planet, and that was the name she wanted to continue to call her by.
Isst was silent for a few very long moments, and Roxanne finally looked up to see her giving her a very pointed smile. Roxanne might have cursed if it had been anyone but her mother standing there. Isst had just turned Gilda's naming into a lesson on her own choice of name.
"My name is still Aida," she said crossly.
"Sweetheart, iwhy/i won't you let anyone call you anything but Aida? Why don't you like your birth name?"
"Because it's not normal!" Roxanne exclaimed. "Aida is the name you gave me—"
"The icentered/i name I gave you, not the first," Isst pointed out.
"—and Aida is a perfectly normal, perfectly iaverage/i name! Roxanne is just so weird and strange and out of place! It takes people two or three tries to be able to pronounce it!"
"Roxanne—"
"Aida means 'returning visitor,'" Roxanne stated, cutting her mother off. "It also means, 'of the stars,' and in some parts of Cerul, it means 'present.' You always told me those were the reasons you decided that that would be my central name; I am 'of the stars,' and I was a gift to you and Dad, and that's all I want to be. I don't want to be human, I don't want to have hair, and I don't iwant/i to stand out. I iwant/i to be Cerulean, I iwant/i to be bald, I iwant/i to blend in, and I would ivery much like/i to be blue and have a head that isn't so ridiculously small!
"My family is the only thing about me that's normal, and my own ibrother/i doesn't even want to admit that I even exist, let ialone/i that we have the same parents, and unlike Gilda, my first name isn't normal, and I will continue to perpetrate the lie that Aida is my ireal/i name, because as far as I'm concerned, it is."
"Roxanne, you should feel respect and pride for your heritage. It's rich and diverse, and—"
"Well I idon't!/i" Roxanne shouted, washing the dishes quickly and forcefully to give her hands something to do. "I'm inot/i Cerulean, so I don't even have any memories of ianything/i that happened before I was three, so I have ino/i recollection of who my people were or who my parents were or what life on my planet was like! All I know was that they put me in a pod and sent me into space with Quicksilver, a note, and a teddy bear while a black hole was bearing down on the planet, that my Earth name was Roxanne Ritchi, by some huge coincidence, Cerulean and Human were identical languages, and everyone there is dead! Fargon!" she shouted at a knife slipped and cut into her hand.
"Roxanne," Isst said, laying the pan aside and going to her daughter's aid, but Roxanne turned and dashed out of the kitchen and up the stairs, which were to the immediate left of the front door. Gilda gave Isst and Civ an apologetic look before dashing up after her Mistress. Isst closed her eyes and leaned back against the counter, close to tears.
"I'm going to go sit down, Civ," Isst said. "You just…Just finish up here, and I might be back in a few minutes." Civ nodded for her Mistress to go ahead and leave, which she did, before looking back to her work.
"That miserable little girl," Civ growled to herself. "Her Mother works so hard and tries her best, but she doesn't seem to have any sort of compassion for her. If Madam just hadn't married Loral, we wouldn't even have been a part of this family. The only reason we ihave/i that girl is because Loral works with the Minds, and the Minds were the ones who found her in their back yard. Loral is the source of all her trouble, but she just won't listen!"
"You know you only think he's the source of her trouble because you don't care for me," Rit growled from the doorway, and Civ spun around to face him with a snarl of her own.
"What are iyou/i doing here?" she demanded. "The kitchen is imy/i domain!"
"My Master sent me to find out why Isst is crying in the master bedroom," Rit said, crossing his robotic, lendor-like arms. "And I come in here and find you going on about Sir iand/i Roxanne. What is wrong with you?"
"Everyone in this house is what's wrong me!" Civ exclaimed. "Roxanne goes off and upsets Isst at every opportunity, Reptung is constantly disobeying his mother's wishes and Loral—Loral is just the source of it all!" Rit gasped.
"You used Isst's name!" he whisper-shouted. "You call yourself a minion and you used your Mistresses actual name! And as for the rest of it; you sicken me."
"iI/i sicken iyou?/i"
"Yes, you do. Isst is unhappy, so you blame Loral, simply because your personality conflicts with Isst's so drastically that you see Loral as a threat! You grasp at istraws/i to tie him in, and now you're blaming him for Roxanne being unhappy!"
"Roxanne is only here because the Minds found her and the Minds knew Loral and Madam were looking to adopt a daughter, and they only knew ithat/i because Loral works with them! If they weren't married, they wouldn't have been looking for a daughter, and the Minds could have adopted her!"
"And Roxanne would probably be just as unhappy because she's a iteenager,/i and a human one at that! And Isst would be twice as unhappy because she wouldn't have Roxanne, or Reptung, ior/i Loral! You only think about the immediate and about yourself! Try looking at how happy Isst is the majority of the time, at how happy she was the other day when Roxanne came home and told her she'd had a good day at school! If she'd married someone else, she might not have been able to be a stay-at-home mother! That's not a simple thing, you know. That is something only the wealthy can afford and only the prestigious can truly allow!"
Suddenly a small alarm rang, notifying the inhabitants of the house that someone was at the door. Rit turned to answer the call, but Roxanne was already dashing down the stairs, one of her newer dresses on (looking anywhere near presentable was futile, but genetics be darned, she was going to itry/i), one hand bandaged, and headed for the door. She flung the door open wide to greet no other than Mace Mind, who was smiling, as he almost always was.
Civ's jaw dropped, and Rit smirked as Roxanne led him and Minion timidly up the steps to her room.
"I'm going to tell Sir and Isst that Roxanne's already feeling better," Rit said, fish body turning to face Civ while his mechanical body stayed stationary. "You can do just about anything you like, but I'd consider thinking about how happy Isst is going to be when she hears about this, if I were you." With that, Rit left Civ alone to her own fowl mood.
Author Comments: Angst, angst, angst...But the next chapter will be more fluffy! :D