That night, Roxanne found herself at Mace's door, dressed in her best with Gilda at her side. She had barely knocked on the door when it was flung open by a beaming Mace, who practically pulled her into the house.

It wasn't a minute later that Macklnn and Mendje were giving her the warmest welcome Roxanne had ever received.

"Aida, it's good to see you again," Macklnn greeted, shaking her hand enthusiastically and smiling the same smile as his son. The two really did bear a striking resemblance.

"And you as well, Mr. Mind," Roxanne greeted, trying not to meet his eyes. Next Mendje came forward as Macklnn stepped back.

Roxanne jumped as Mendje put her arms around the girl. "It's so nice to meet you, Aida," Mendje said, smiling warmly at the girl as she withdrew from the hug. Roxanne couldn't help but notice that Mace had her eyes and eyebrows. "The last time I saw you, you were just a little baby."

"It's nice to meet you as well, Mrs. Mind. I'm sorry to say that I cannot remember having seen you before." Mendje laughed.

"Just call me Mendje, dear. Fid and Idna are still working on getting dinner ready—it might be a few minutes. Mace, why don't you take your girlfriend out back and show her the pod?" Mace flushed and Roxanne's face turned red.

"Um—yes, sure, that'd be—uh, Roxanne, Gilda, Minion; come! Let us away to the backyard!" Mace cried, grabbing Roxanne's hand and dashing out the door before anyone could say anything else to embarrass the both of them.

"So they know?" Roxanne asked as they exited the house.

"Well they certainly know that I'm taking you to the dance, but I as-ure you that I never said that you were my grillfriend," he said quickly, still purple from embarrassment.

"You didn't?" Roxanne asked, overlooking his mispronunciations again and feeling the smallest bit dejected.

"Well, no, of course not! I mean—not that I don't want you to be, but it's just it's only the dance and I didn't want to rush you into any—let's get to the pod now, shall we?" Mace asked in an attempt to remove his foot from his mouth, motioning out into the grounds. Roxanne smiled a little and looked to Gilda, who flashed her Mistress a smile and a thumb's up. "Come on, quick, before we lose daylight," Mace beckoned, taking Roxanne's hand again. "It's just over that hill there…"

***Break***

The Mind estate was enormous. The house itself was nothing short of grandiose, but the grounds swept in three directions for miles. There was more land under their ownership than they'd ever know what to do with, and one could easily get lost if they didn't know their way around. But Mace, who had traversed every inch of the estate at least a dozen times in the course of his lifetime, knew exactly how to get anywhere he wanted and in the shortest amount of time.

It wasn't more than ten minutes before Mace was punching codes into the door of a relatively huge craft at the center of a crater that stood fifty feet at its deepest point and one hundred feet in diameter. The craft was really kind of small, but compared to the escape pods stored in the back room of every Cerulean home, it was oversized and bulky.

Roxanne's eyes were wide as she gazed around at the walls of the crater. "I landed…here?" she asked in slight disbelief.

"Well of course!" Mace laughed. "Where did you think you landed?" Roxanne shook her head.

"I knew the pod was kept here, but I never actually thought…I mean, I landed so close to where I live now...It just seems kind of unlikely." Mace simply smiled and shook his head as his hand went to a lever. With the downward thrust of his arm, the door sprang inward.

Mace stepped in, holding the door open for Roxanne and their minions. "This, Roxanne, is what you are," he said with the sweeping of his arm to encompass the craft's insides. Roxanne's mouth parted and Gilda's eyes went wide as they took tentative steps into the vehicle that had carried a young Roxanne, her surname then being Ritchi, across space and time with no company but for a tiny kitten and a stuffed creature inexplicably called a "teddy bear."

Roxanne felt as though she were stepping into the past, into another world. It was a strange feeling, and a part of her was frightened that if she stayed still for too long, the craft would take flight, and she would be back to hurtling through the galaxies. Most of her, though, felt as if she did not belong here, as if she did not belong to the past into which she stepped, nor was she welcome in this strange new world.

Gilda looked upon the scene with a certain degree of reverence. Monitors were built into nearly every inch of wall, each displaying a different picture. Images of people that looked just like Roxanne, overviews of jungles and mountains and lakes and cities. Buildings towered, primitive-looking vehicles were frozen in place on filthy-looking black roads, and animal life abound. Some of it looked so similar to the things they had on Cerul—there were little chifflings in the arms of pale children and a bird on one woman's arm—but a few of the things they took note of looked like nothing on their own blue planet. There was a gigantic water creature with a hole at the top of its rectangular head, the body colored bluish-gray, and beside it swam a smaller something, silver-gray with a fluke and dorsal fin, as well as two pectoral fins. This, too, had a small blowhole, and a long beak, its mouth half-open as it swam toward the screen.

There was a control board in the corner beneath a cluster of smaller screens that clearly served the crucial function of animating the images shown to them on the primitive screens.

And directly across from the door, firmly attached to the wall, was a small seat designed specifically for a child no older than two and no younger than six months.

It was to this that Roxanne first gravitated, venturing hesitantly into the ship as if she wasn't sure she was allowed to be here. Gilda followed her Mistress at a distance while Mace and Minion stood in the doorway, simply observing the two females. They had been here many times before, had already unlocked just about every secret this vessel held. They didn't need to get in the way.

Roxanne slowly lowered herself onto her knees as she inspected the infant seating arrangement. It was so simple as to be indescribable, but it fascinated her nonetheless.

Then her gaze trailed upward to rest on the screen directly above it. The face of a man and a woman, the same color as Roxanne, could thereupon be seen. The man had hair of black and eyes of blue, and he looked happy even though sorrow echoed in his eyes. His face was crossed with laughter lines.

The woman beside him looked like Roxanne aged…How many years? How long did it take for her people to age? She couldn't say, but if she were to go by Cerulean standards, she'd say maybe forty years. The woman had the same brown hair, albeit longer and pulled into a tight bun on top of her head. She had the same face shape as Roxanne, the same eyes…Even the same beauty mark on her right cheek.

Roxanne's fingers strayed, again, hesitantly, to the small red button just above the seat and below the monitor. It was the only screen in the room not activated by the control panel in the corner.

She pressed the button with a certain reserve, not quite sure what to expect from the man and woman who had given birth to her.

Of course, she shouldn't have expected originality.

The message began as a voice recording of the note that had been tucked beside her when she and Quicksilver had landed—but Roxanne tried not to think about Quicksilver. Why she didn't just move on, she didn't know. But she supposed there was a little piece of her that desperately wanted to know what they sounded like.

"To whoever finds this message," the woman spoke, Roxanne with her. "We hope that you can find a way to decipher our language. We hope that one day our daughter may be able to listen to our message and to understand it.

"Whoever you are, if indeed there is another race out there willing to adopt our daughter, we wish you well, and we thank you for taking her as your own. She is everything to us, everything to our people. Her destiny is our legacy, and we hope that her destiny is great.

"We are of the human race. The creature we send with our daughter is her kitten, named Mercury, and the object is her teddy bear. They are intended to supply companionship and comfort, and perhaps give insight into our culture. It lives on through what we send to you.

"Our planet, Earth, is hours away from being sucked into a black hole that has somehow appeared at the edge of our solar system. We'll all be dead by the time our daughter reaches you, if she reached you."

"All the information that we could gather in a matter of days is stored within this very same pod," the man said, picking up the narrative where his wife (Roxanne wondered if they used that sort of terminology on Earth) left off. "All that we send is all that is left of us. Take care of her," the man added, his grip on his wife tightening visibly as they looked into the camera. "Keep her safe."

"If you're watching this, darling," the woman added, "we want you to know that we love you. We wish you the best for all eternity."

And there the transmission ended. Just plain ended. No "goodbye," no heartfelt sentiment, no critical piece of trivial information that could make Roxanne feel even the slightest hint of sympathy for her long-dead people. Mace watched her carefully, taking note of her facial movements and the way she bowed her head.

"Are you OK?" he asked after a moment. Roxanne shook her head, and Gilda helped her to stand.

"They didn't even mention my name," Roxanne answered contemptuously. "They at least did that in the letter. They never mentioned my name, they never explained why it was that I was chosen to go away—nothing! They don't even give their own names!" She looked down and shook her head again, gripping either arm just below the shoulders with the opposite hand.

"Mom always tells me that I should be proud of where I came from," she said. "But I know barely anything about that place, and even if I sift through all of the information on this craft, it still won't make up for the fact that these people who are supposed to be my parents can't even muster up the slightest bit of false affection. I guess I thought maybe they'd seem more real and sincere if I saw them with my own eyes—but all they imply is that I have to make sure the human race doesn't die, and that that's my only purpose. They don't smile, they don't sound anything but factual—they act like dagging machines!"

Gilda pulled Roxanne into a hug, but somehow Mace found himself pulling her out of that hug and into his own. "Maybe they were just too worried to bother with emotions?" he suggested. "Maybe they thought that if they left themselves feel they wouldn't be able to stop crying? That they wouldn't be able to give you up?"

"Maybe," Roxanne answered, leaning her head against Mace's shoulder. "But maybe they just didn't care. Maybe that's why I was chosen. Maybe they offered me up. Or maybe I wasn't even theirs. Maybe they adopted me. That'd be ironic. Adopted twice in the space of a year and a half."

"Are you sorry that they sent you?"

"What? No! I'm glad I'm not there! They probably had some backwards culture, anyway. I just…I just wish I had more to be proud of." Mace nodded. He understood, not in practice, but in theory, and he felt for her. But it was nice to know she was happy here.

"Do you want to look at the other videos?" he asked. "The primitive technology is really quite fascinating in and of itself, but the truly amazing part is the depictions of the otherworldly creatures and cultures—they still had people who lived in forest treebs—"

"Tribes, Sir," Minion corrected.

"Yes, that, too," Mace agreed, moving on quickly. "And different governments—they had more than one hundred governments just in their alliance! Can you believe that? On one planet! Amazing!" Roxanne smiled.

"Maybe some other time," she said. "You could tell me about it, though. I'd like that."

"Oh ho ho!" Mace laughed. "I can very well do so, Miss Cerebellum! I'll tell you about your country while we go back to the house, come on! Apparently your family lived in this huge mass of land called 'Ameerica—'"

"America."

"Yes, yes, America, and it was made up of all these tiny little sections called 'states' and one 'terr-i-tory,' and each one had its own government that acted under the main government, and it had the strangest setup…"

Author Comments:

Roxanne is an unusual adoptee in that she has NO desire to meet the people who gave birth to her...

ALSO: Sorry I haven't been updating in a while. :F