Give me a John who gets more airtime than should be possible when he jumps, who never gets too hot or too cold and can always tell when it’s going to rain or snow or bluster. (Give me a John who dreams of flying, who has to concentrate to keep himself corporeal, like if he stops thinking about having mass he’ll drift apart, unable to pull himself back together.)
Give me a Dave who can tell what time it is down to the millisecond, with infallible accuracy. Who makes split-second catches like it’s second nature, like time slows down for him before a crisis, who can fast-forward through any of John’s movies by speeding up his perception. (Give me a Dave who can’t stop hearing ticking. Who sometimes blinks and finds himself ahead or behind of where he should be, who can never be sure if he’ll wake up the morning after he fell asleep.)
Give me a Jade who can make any bag into a bag of holding by shrinking what she puts in it or making the inside bigger than the outside. Give me a Jade who can shrink herself at will to go on adventures inside terrariums, who could tell you where anyone is with pinpoint accuracy, who can show up on any of her friends’ doorsteps like it’s nothing at all, who never gets lost. (Give me a Jade who misses being able to wander, who feels trapped, confined, in her body, on this planet. Give me a Jade who feels purposeless without Prospit’s quests or the pressured trials of the game, who feels like nothing presents a challenge anymore.)
Give me a Rose who can still tell the most favorable outcomes of any decision. A Rose who is never in the dark, figuratively or literally. A Rose who never gives a wrong answer. (Give me a Rose overwhelmed by all the information in her head. A Rose who dreams of tentacles and ink and darkness and wakes up choking on her own tongue, who knows she shouldn’t be afraid of what she saw but can’t reason with her own emotions. Give me a Rose who can’t tell if she thinks people are individuals or pawns anymore.)
If the Condesce was alive SO FREAKING LONG, which is looks like she probably has–like, SO long. Way too long–then like
what if her species has evolved without her? What if the young would-be empresses come to fight her for the throne, expecting somebody like them, like the adults they’ve met who laughed when they demanded respect? And the empress comes out of the dark with a face like an ancient animal and a mouth that goes too wide and too full of teeth and pitch-black keratin plates so thick clothes are a formality. Just black chitin and then these great, vivid slashes along her sides where her gills are, and gold everywhere, she can just carve lines in her plates and fill them in with gold. And her teeth are too long and so is her tongue with its gold studs, and her eyes are from an age when there weren’t seadweller hives in the oceans of Alternia. Just darkness all the way down to the Emissary who raised her.
They’ve evolved so tame down on the homeworld, cute little silver-skinned minnows. Tame hair that straggles out down their soft, bare necks, tame claws that are barely claws, tame little delicate horns that would crack the minute they slammed together to fight head to head like she used to when she took the throne. Tame bodies that aren’t made to dive onto all fours and long-lashed eyes that barely see, let alone in the abyssal dark. They’ve gotten smaller and smaller–faster because of it, with hands made to do the work she sets them too, but not fast enough, and so small and so, so weak.
She could gut them with one thumbnail, and her reach is so much longer than they ever trained for and sometimes it’s nice to indulge in animal instincts (hers are so much closer to the surface than theirs) so she reaches out and she does.
At least they developed glitter and big plastic sunglasses. Not a total waste.
