Metals and Glass

Written by Sailor Fere

The room was small and poorly lit by the eerie green glow of an electric clock. Across from the clock was a small, square window with false wood shutters. A few feet below the window, a cot was bolted securely to the wall. Dressed in overly starched pajamas, a girl sat on the edge of the uncomfortable bedding. Her long, spindly legs dangled over the edge as she hugged a stiff pillow in that desperate way people do when they themselves want nothing more than to be hugged in return. Bags had formed under her eyes. She stared at the clock.

It was now three in the morning. The girl's name was Lega Toblue, and the past twenty-one days had been the worst in her life. Seven of those days spent in the sobering knowledge that she was a sailor senshi. In three hours, twenty-nine minutes, and forty-seven seconds she would have a brief meeting with the most terrible woman on this or any known planet before setting out on her own to sink or swim in the unfriendly sea of unfamiliar faces and locations that was Coruscant.

Lega lay back on the cot, pillow still clasped firmly to her chest.

She closed her eyes, but did not fall asleep. She thought.

3 Weeks Ago, Twilight

"She has not moved or even spoken, do you think that she is broken?"

"If she is not now, Tock, she most certainly will be once the Queens are through with her."

"Your callous answer makes me sick! Such a dreadful statement, Tick!"

"Such dreadful things are the Queens, Tock!"

Lega lay curled on her side upon the cot, facing the wall. Her eyes moved violently beneath their lids and her face puckered into a displeased sneer as she reluctantly awakenend. She had been dreaming of fields of flowers and towards the end she had heard a wonderful voice calling her name from a distance. Now that she was awake, however, her reverie had given way to a throbbing ache in the back of her head, a dry and foul taste in her mouth, aches and sores throughout most of her body, and an eerie blank area in her memory.

As her unwanted consciousness returned to her, she heard the female voices speaking. She furrowed her brow in confusion. The voices sounded much more like a single person occasionally using a lighter, airier inflection to talk to herself. Lega meant to say, "Who are you? Where am I? What happened?" but her words blurred together into a "Hoor you? Where'm I? Wha'ppen?" Lega half-opened her eyes and turned to face the room. There was nothing there at all, save the clock on the grey wall across from her.

A silence thick with astonishment passed. "Goodness, Tick, this raises a fuss! Can this human understand us?" That was the higher pitched inflection.

"It certainly appears that way, Tock, even if she speaks in a truly peculiar dialect." That would be the slightly deeper, more jaded voice. "What manner of devilry could cause a human to possess such a skill?"

"It is too good to be devilry, it must be pure wizardry! Perhaps my tiny bud of magic grows into a fully mature, enchanted rose!"

Lega stared at the clock. "Um, no, I'm sorry," she said gingerly. "I've, augh..." she covered her mouth in a vain attempt to subdue the wave of nausea sweeping over her as she swung her legs over the cot. "I've always been able to talk to... er... non-organic entities like yourself. Selves. Whatever." She coughed and a wheeze rattled in the back of her throat. "Where am I?"

"You are in the Kingdom of Metals and Glass, where there is not a single blade of grass. No flowers or trees or pollen of the air, except where people put them there. In the dungeons of the Queen of Grey and the Queen of White, They as lovely and deadly as dragons in flight, that is where you are tonight," said Tock, 'her' voice quavering slightly with restrained awe and fear.

Lega frowned at the clock's poetic nonsense. She prodded at the blank space in her memory. The last she could definitely recall was fiddling around with the remains of a ship to see if it was salvageable. After that, her memory was like a thick fog: every time she would catch a flicker of something in the distance and try to focus on it, it would blend back into the emptiness, gone. She could vaguely recall pristine white clothing and the disarming lies of a politician, but couldn't place the ideas in context in the least. For all she could recall, it could have been a character on a holodrama or a villain in a dream. Lega sighed and asked, "Who are you?"

"We shall answer your inquiry only if you extend the same courtesy," said Tick in a snipped tone. "It is the honorable thing to do."

Lega rubbed at her temples with her thumb and fifth finger in a vain effort to alleviate her escalating headache. "Fine, fine," she said tiredly. "You go first."

"I am Helpful Sage Tick," Tick answered primly.

"And of the Sisters of the Clock, I am Delightful Fairy Tock," Tock said cheerfully.

"Lega Toblue," Lega said.

"Ohhh, Tick, a name like that can never do! It is boring, plain, and dreadful too," Tock moaned.

"Quite right, Tock, as always. From henceforth I declare that you, Legsomething Towhatsit, will now be called... er..." There was a slight pause as Tick thought. "Green-Eyed Soldier! Green is my favorite color."

Lega continued to observe the conversation, growing ever more uncomfortable. She chewed on her lower lip and reguarded the clock with hesitation. Listening to an obviously crazed instrument for time measurement hold a conversation with itself was getting to be too much for her. Her head pounded, her body ached, she couldn't remember leaving her home and electronic friends, and she could very well be imprisoned by some more sadistic than usual politicians. It all built up, filling her up until she felt as if she could burst at any moment.

"Pfft," said Tock. "Heliotrope paisley covered in glitter, that is the color that sets Tock's gears a-flitter."

Something inside of Lega broke and was more than prepared to take the clock's bubble with her. "Stop, just stop!" she exclaimed. "It's obvious what your problem is. You're clearly just one clock that's developed a secondary personality. You're not 'sisters of the clock', you're not a sage or a fairy. You're just crazy!"

There was a silence without remarks from rhyme and reason. Finally, a choked sob escaped from the clock. "That... that isn't true... it's not," said Tick in a strained voice barely above a whisper. She sounded like a small child that had just been told a certain yuletide fat man was a mere fantasy. "It isn't at all. No."

"Don't listen, sister-friend Tickity, it is HER sanity that is lacking and rickety!" cried Tock. "It is I that saved you from loneliness and fear, does it really matter how I arrived here?"

"You're right," Tick's voice still sounded unsure. "You're right." A bit louder and certain. "You're absolutely right, Tock! It doesn't matter at all where you came from, just that you're here now!" It was spoken with a passionate fervor.

"It does matter," Lega said quietly. She spoke slowly and reassuringly, hiding the panic she was feeling. Her stress induced outburst had obviously caused the poor thing to lose trust in her, something she desperately needed to regain. She still had so many questions left, and she would prefer them answered without rhyming riddles. "It matters because it isn't good, Tick. I can help you. I can..."

"Liar, liar, heading straight for Hell's red fire!" shrieked Tock. "She tells you lies that you are mad, she merely wants to make you sad. She wants you back in your miserable ditch, for she is as cruel as the Wicked Red Witch!"

"No, you've got it all wrong. Look, I know I flew off the handle, I just..." Lega tried to explain. She gesticulated wildly in the hopes that it may convey her fumbling, desperate honesty.

"No, Tock," said Tick, ignoring Lega. Her voice was cold. "She may be cruel, but the Red Witch would destroy her utterly if allowed even half the chance. I doubt this one could do the same to her, in the end she'd be far too weak of either physicality or courage. I doubt this one will last long enough under the presence of the Red Witch to grow old enough to find her prince charming, in fact."

"A lost cause with a cruel, weak heart, oh dearest Tickity, you are ever so smart," Tock said adoringly.

"So much of a lost cause, let us never speak to her again!" said Tick.

"Never ever!" exclaimed Tock.

"Oh, come on," said Lega. "I know I offended you, but now you're just being so stupid! Who's the Red Witch? Who are the Queens? Answer my questions without those stupid riddles! Make sense, you idiot!" And there was a horrible, deafening silence.

Lega winced and buried her face in her hands, a little moan of frustration escaping her thin lips. She made a note to stick to repairing the hulls and wiring of electronics rather than any hopelessly cracked personalities. She was stuck now. Stuck with only a few strange rhymes as told to her by a machine that thought it was both a fairy and a sage in a mythological world. Her rage boiled back up into her and her fists curled seemingly of their own volition. With an adrenaline-fueled growl, she slammed her right fist into the cot and turned away from the clock.

That was when she noticed the window above her. Her eyes fixed on it, and she slowly rose despite the protests of her joints. She stood on the cot, face to face with the window. She reached up with both hands and shoved away the shutters in a quick movement.

She made a noise that sounded like it could not decide if it wanted to be a chuckle or a sob. Her still throbbing right hand pressed against the cool glass seperating her from the view outside. Fingers tapped upon it, its cadence booming in the awful quiet like war drums over a decimated village. She eased her forehead to rest upon the glass. "A Kingdom of Metals and Glass," she muttered.

Before her was the splendor of Coruscant in early evening.

Present, 5:00 AM

Lega's left arm lurched in an involuntary twitch and she opened her eyes. She groaned and glanced first at the silent clock, then the ceiling, the window, and finally the ceiling again. With a heavy, grumbling sigh, she ran her left hand over her face and stopped with her palm over her eyes. She sat up.

Through the green-tinted half light, she could see the still unfamiliar scar with the bit of discoloration underneath it. She traced over it lightly with a finger before drawing her bony knees up to her chest and wrapping her right arm around them. She continued to stare at the mark marring her skin.

Last Week, Late Afternoon

The blindfold covering Lega's eyes was removed swiftly. "Where are we?" Lega asked blearily as she noted that her hands were still in cuffs.

"We are in a part of the galaxy where only fools and corpses ask questions like that," Carnelian answered sharply.

Lega Toblue scowled before taking in her surroundings. Carnelian Sing and she were in an enormous building, specifically in what appeared to be the lobby of the complex. Far above them, the bleak gray light of a sun obscured by heavy rainclouds shown through the mostly shattered glass of the domed ceiling. The rest of the room matched up quite well in its decay. It was run-down to the point where hardy, thorned plants had pushed their way in through cracks in the tiled floor. Ominous brown-black stains were splattered across most of the floor and even up onto the walls in some areas. A large desk sat near the middle of the room. It was easily the least worn object in the room, though it too was crusted with the brown substance. Chipped gold paint spelled out, "BL ENET PRIS INC." on the front of the desk.

Attached to the atrium were three long corridors with a faded letter on the wall next to the openings. Corridor A was silent and almost as dark as the void of space. What very little light made its way into the hall reflected off of broken glass, things that may have once been beakers and test tubes. Despite how broken down the entire facility was, Corridor C was rather well lit. The heavy hum of an aging power generator echoed down the way. Corridor B also had the sound of a generator and functional lighting fixed to its ceiling, although these flickered in a sickly fashion. Other, quieter sounds echoed down far from the end of Corridor B. They could just barely be heard above the generator's buzz. They were snuffling, ripping, chewing sounds. Every so often a sickening crack would be heard.

After observing all of this, Lega shrank into herself, suddenly feeling as if the skin from her scalp and around her spine were much too tight. She began to suspect that she may not have very long to live at all. She snapped out of her fearful reverie when Carnelian began walking towards Corridor C. At its entrance, she turned sharply on her heels and gave Lega a piercing glance. "Follow," she said simply and turned around to proceed down the hall. Lega complied.

At the end of Corridor C was a door, which the Sing senator and Lega entered. Inside was a fairly large room in a very different condition from the rest of the facility. The lighting was good and the room looked clean, even sterile. On the eastern and western walls were many filing cabinets that looked as if they were rifled through quickly and messily. On the northern wall was a large steel desk. Standing before the desk was Alexandren Sing.

Carnelian moved towards her sister and laid a hand on her shoulder. "Have you found it?" she asked.

Alexandren turned slightly to look at Carnelian. "You always did have an impeccable sense of timing, Lian," she said as she reached into a large envelope and pulled out something tiny.

Carnelian crossed her arms over her chest and looked around at the filing cabinets before giving her sister a withering stare. "Those files will take me ages to sort. Must everything you touch be rendered disorderly?"

"Yes. It's more entertaining," Alexandren answered as she looked at the small object she held.

"Hmph," Carnelian muttered, still clearly annoyed. She turned back around and stared at Lega. In fact, she seemed to stare straight through the girl. Lega blinked in confusion for a moment before glaring back with as much intensity as her quavering bravery could allow.

Carnelian opened her mouth and began to speak in a strange language. Lega had never heard anything like it before and doubted that she could even form its syllables on her tongue. Hearing this language was like standing all alone in a pitch-black, forgotten tomb and suddenly feeling puffs of breath against your neck. Finally, Carnelian stopped speaking in the forboding tongue. Blessed silence reigned and Lega's glare withered.

Then, suddenly, Lega heard a feminine voice, as deep and dark as the bottom of a well. However, it wasn't spoken aloud. Rather, it appeared in the corner of her mind usually devoted to hearing electronics. The words seemed to appear from nowhere and clung to her mind like condensation on a cool glass. "Understood," the voice said. "Though I regret that I may not see the new one's face when she is reunited with her sisters." Lega turned around.

A girl wearing a long, deep red coat sat on a chair in a corner near the door. Her head was downcast, which caused her blue hair to fall over and obscure her eyes. Slowly, the girl in red rose from her seat to stand at her full height. Lega's jaw opened slightly in awe and she wondered how, exactly, she had missed seeing this girl earlier. She was tall, taller than many adult men, and only a few years older than Lega. Her face was clean of all emotion and her golden eyes stared emotionlessly through the lenses of an odd little pair of orange glasses. Without saying another word, mentally or otherwise, she left the room. The sick feeling of dread Lega had felt earlier returned in full force.

"She was Chapel Tabes. I imagine you'll be seeing much of her," Carnelian said.

Alexandren grinned. "Yes. Senshi really ought to stick together. Especially our senshi."

Lega slowly turned her head to look at the Senators. "Senshi?" she asked warily. "Senshi aren't real. They're fairy tales."

Alexandren laughed harshly at that. "Oh, fairy tales? I suppose that makes Chapel the wicked witch who eats little children." The smile she gave Lega was a cold, feral thing. "More importantly, what does this make you? The little girl who is lost in the dark forest at night?"

"Alexandren Sing, you are not helping," Carnelian said sternly. She looked back at Lega. "Come here, Toblue," Carnelian commanded, her voice still sharp as knives. Lega carefully walked towards the petite woman. "Turn around." Again, Lega did as she was told and was surprised to feel the Senator unlock the cuffs that bound her hands together. She rubbed at her slightly sore wrists.

Alexandren approached the two, still grinning. In one hand she held a device that looked like a slightly oversized syringe. Inside the syringe was the small object Alexandren had removed from the pouch earlier. It was a microchip, no larger than a pea. Her smile never faltering, Alexandren moved ever closer until she stood directly before Lega. "There's a very interesting fact about fairy tales," Alexandren said conversationally. As she spoke she opened the syringe and placed the microchip inside. "And that is that all of them, even the most extravagant, are based on fact. There's a tiny gem of truth buried deep inside each and every one of them. I'm going to show you your truth. Give me your hand." There was a pause, thick and heavy with apprehension. "Give me your hand or I will take it along with any other body part I choose," she hissed.

When Lega extended her left hand to Alexandren, it felt as if she had just tightened a noose around her neck. "Good girl," Alexandren said pleasantly. With a movement as swift as a snake strike, the small woman jabbed the syringe deep into Lega's palm.

Lega screamed before biting down on her lower lip in an attempt to divert the pain. Tears sprung to her tightly shut eyes and stuck on her thin eyelashes. She felt the little microchip under her skin, somehow digging and settling into her flesh all on its own. Something flashed in her mind, bright and quick as lightening. Opening her eyes in wide surprise, she slumped into a heap on the floor. She lay there, motionless and bleeding, her eyes still open.

Alexandren stared at the body. She scoffed and said, "Just wonderful. We get another senshi and she's defective."

Carnelian looked at Lega's prone form, her hand cupping her chin in deep thought. "Any more so than our first, Ren?" she asked with a flat tone. Alexandren smiled and said nothing.

A few moments later, Lega groaned. The light of consciousness slowly broke through the glaze that had covered her eyes. She jolted up, holding her wounded hand, and coughing violently. After a moment of this she swiftly sat up to stare at the Senators. Her eyes wild with fear and anger, she screeched, "What did you monsters do to me?! There are crazy ideas in my head! What kind of mind control are you trying to do to me, you stupid evil..." Lega was cut off by the sharp, loud slap of a hand against her cheek.

Surprisingly, the hand was attached to Carnelian. The normally eerily calm young woman stood before Lega, her grey eyes glinting with stony resolve. "You listen to me, child," she hissed in a dangerously low voice. "I do not care if you hate my sister and I, but you will never, ever, treat us with anything other than respect. I do not care if you hate and resent whatever we ask you to do, but you will do it without question. Otherwise, the consequences that you suffer will be utterly dire. Do you understand?"

A shocked expression on her face, Lega held a trembling hand to the bright red mark on her cheek. It still stung. She looked down and away, anywhere that was not Carnelian's face. "Yes, ma'am," she whispered.

Alexandren stared at Carnelian in surprise for a moment before another catlike grin spread across her features. She clapped enthusiastically and said, "Brava, Lian. Brava." She turned back to Lega and said, "Now, show us."

"Show?" Lega asked numbly.

"Your transformation. Do it."

Lega looked down at her hand again. The blood had begun to clot. She could tell that there would definitely be a scar. With resignation, she listened to the new knowledge in her head. "Fere," she said in little more than a whisper. "Upgrade Me."

She felt the weight of her destiny cover her, change her. This was who she was, and it could not be altered no matter how often or how loudly she proclaimed it impossible. Lega Toblue was Sailor Fere.

When the change subsided, she took a weary assessment of her person and the new outfit she wore. Underneath all the fear, the hate, the confusion, the resentment, and the intense mental and emotional fatigue that had built up over the course of the day, the girl felt acute embarrassment at how she looked. All the emotions mixed together. They formed a bleak sludge that clogged her mind, making it feel sullied and sluggish.

"So our hypothesis was proven correct," said Carnelian. "Very good. You may revert to your normal self now. I do not want you to test any of your powers here and risk destroying any precious information."

Sailor Fere nodded and quietly said, "Exit Program." She was now Lega again. The girl drew her long legs up to her chest and hugged them close. She looked at the six digits on her right hand and her brow furrowed in confusion. "Fere. So that's what I am. But I've never even heard of... of Fere."

"Not surprising," Alexandren stated. "Considering that the planet is nothing more than a forgotten graveyard, long abandoned to the flow of time. The civilization, the people, the animals, all life there has been extinct for hundreds of years. To return to my highly accurate fairy tale metaphor, that must make you a little orphaned girl lost in the woods. Doubly tragic.

Challenge burned in Alexandren's eyes, she was so close to what she wanted that she could taste it. It was sweeter than honey.

Lega's dulled eyes widened. "Hundreds of years," she muttered. "How can that be? How can... how can I be? No. No, that must be wrong. There must be some Fere hiding somewhere, still alive. I had to have had a family at some point. I wouldn't exist... otherwise."

Alexandren's wicked smile returned in full force; the time she had been longing for had arrived. "No, I assure you." There was a pause. "You never had a family. You were a vanity project, an attempt to revive a dead species as created by geneticists with too much hubris. They weren't even trying to create a sailor senshi. You probably are one simply because you're the only creature in the galaxy with Fere genes."

Lega's throat felt as like something outside of it was growing too tight and something inside of it was growing too large at the exact same time. "You're lying," she choked.

"Oh?" asked Alexandren. With a flutter of white gown, the small woman moved swiftly to the steel table and picked up a small metal box that Lega had neglected to notice. Her thin, well manicured fingers opened the lid with a revelatory flair. Packed inside were discs. Alexandren's eyes swept over them as if she were observing priceless treasures. "These discs hold your story, girl. It would be wise to watch them as soon as you can. Everybody should know who they are and where they come from. In your case the 'who' is that you are an experiment, and the 'where' is here. This very laboratory." Looking up to the ceiling, she raised her arms slowly in an encompassing gesture. "Aren't homecomings wonderful, Toblue?"

Lega's vision blurred and began to shake as her body trembled violently. She clamped her hands over her ears and closed her eyes tightly. "Liar!" she screamed. "Liar! Liar!"

She felt a cool hand grab her wrist. Lega sniffled, opened her now bloodshot eyes and looked up at Carnelian, who was kneeling down before her. "You need more proof?" the Senator asked. "Come." She stood, still holding Lega's wrist, and moved purposefully towards the door. Alexandren trailed after them like a white shadow.

The three walked down the corridor and back into the main hub of the building. The dark stains on the ground were now accompanied by new, bright red smears of blood that trailed from Corridor B to the main entrance doors. As they followed the blood, walking under the buzzing and blinking lights of Corridor B, Lega remembered the quietly sickening sounds she had heard coming from this area earlier. Her heart rate sped up.

The quantities of blood grew and grew, until they were at the end of the hallway near a steel door. Gore covered the floor and even spread the violently red blood high up the walls. A small bit of unidentifiable tissue clung to the ceiling near the last lighting fixture. The sick smell of new death infected the air and made Lega's head swim and her stomach turn.

"Oh," said Alexandren. "Looks like Chapel had fun." Lega felt the hairs on the back of her neck rise. So, this was Chapel's work.

Carnelian ignored the remark and tapped away at a numbered password lock on the door. A click sounded from deep in the door's bowels to signal that it was now unlocked. Carnelian opened the door and Alexandren shoved Lega inside with a swift push.

Lega first noticed that it was freezing. Her breath puffed out in front of her in tiny clouds. She rubbed her hands over her arms in an attempt to warm up, wincing as the sensitive wound on her palm came in contact with other parts of her skin. It was then that she saw the contents of the room.

There were tubes, at least forty, and suspended in each was one vaguely humanoid little creature. The vast majority did not even appear developed enough to have ever been viable, although a few looked as if they may have been a few months old at their times of death. All of them shared similar features: pale skin on the ones that were no longer translucent, four fingers and two thumbs on each hand on the ones with limbs that had developed past nubs.

Lega's face was a mask of horror as she walked through the room, staring at the piteous little things that had all somehow failed to become her. She said nothing and even Alexandren, who stood leaning against the door frame, was silent. Sometimes words are not necessary, after all.

Some time after that, Lega found herself standing in the central room again. Her mind had strayed after seeing the beings in the room down Corridor B. Looking at the irrefutable proof that she was an experiment, Lega's mind had overloaded. It simply did not want to think about the day any more. So, it had stopped entirely. She could distantly recall the Sing sisters leaving to do something, either prepare the ship or track down Chapel, but Lega did not care.

She looked up at the broken glass ceiling. The sky was much darker and the clouds more threatening. Thunder rumbled in the distance. Through a crack, the first drop of rain fell near Lega's right foot. The second landed on her cheek and rolled down.

'The sky cries for you, Toblue', a deep female voice said mockingly. It bounced and echoed through Lega's mind, and somehow it was worse than the ripping and rustling of Corridor B.

Lega slowly turned her head to look to her side. It was Chapel, who was almost entirely covered in blood. The dazed girl looked furthur up until gold eyes met green. Chapel was smiling. It was all teeth.

Present, 6:30 AM

A harsh buzz rang from the clock. It was time already, and Lega had not slept at all throughout the night. This was the third time in a row. It was starting to develop into an unhealthy pattern. Lega would stay awake for two or three days in a row and then collapse in sheer exhaustion on the fourth. She suspected that her sleeping habits might become healthier once she adjusted to everything, but of course, that presumed that she ever would adjust.

The clock continued to buzz. Somehow it sounded as if its alarm were getting more desperate and perterbed. "Yeah, yeah," Lega grumbled as she stood from the cot. She dropped the pillow and stumbled the few feet to stand in front of the door. It opened and Lega shuffled out.

The buzzing shut off abruptly and the room was silent for several long seconds. "Bye-bye!" Tock chirped in an entirely too cheerful voice.

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