“The captain is…a unique individual,” I say, as the Julus slithers around the table I am sitting on.

He has been looking me over medically, checking for any signs of illness and scanning my blood for nano-vaccines. Finding none, he almost worked himself up into a panic, but his cold blood kept him calm enough to explain to me what those are, while he mixed some up in a test tube.

Nano-vaccines are tiny, biomechanical robots, injected into the bloodstream. They are programmed to mimic foreign objects, such as infections and diseases, that the body would not normally have immunities to. These have been used so long and are so well-tested that rarely is there an outbreak of “bad vaccine”, which would turn against the body. Usually, these nana-vaccines are almost foolproof, guarding the body against any disease.

Usually.

“A nutcase is more the word,” Rameses answers.

“Nutcase?” I ask, unfamiliar with the word. There are many words I am unfamiliar with in this form.

“A lunatic,” he answers, looking at me. “He’s crazy.”

“Oh. That I believe.”

There is something not quite right about Thanatos Darkstar. It isn’t is obvious…instability. There is something not normal about him, not normal by any stretch of the imagination.

“You have no idea,” Rameses continues. “The boy is completely off his rocker.”

“Oh?” I reply, tentatively rubbing the infection in the back of my next. Rameses had to “lance” it, slice it open to drain the infection. It did not hurt so bad, in fact, the “pus” draining from it felt good and the swelling seemed to go down. It was the antiseptic that burned.

Pain is not an enjoyable experience. In my robotic form, I was programmed to avoid things that caused damage so that I would not destroy myself or be ordered by my owner to do so, but that is not quite the same thing. With no prompts to tell them how to behave, organics must rely on feelings and emotions, pain being, apparently, one of the strongest to keep whole races from destroying themselves.

“Je parle avec un pomme de terre,” Rameses responds. “Un pomme de terre parle avec moi. Je suis un gateau de fruit!”

I stare at him blankly, not understanding a word he has just said.

“It’s an Earth language,” he explains, filling a hypodermic needle with metallic gray nano-vaccines. “Paris…French toast…something like that. Anyway, it means ‘I talk to potatoes. Potatoes talk to me. I’m a fruitcake!”

Thanatos must be more insane that I realized if he believes he is a cake made of fruit. Perhaps following him onto his ship was not the best idea. Then again, where else would I go? What was I supposed to do, knock on my owner’s door and tell her that the damage I sustained allowed her worse fears to come true?

“Thanatos said that?” I exhale, feeling the texture of the paper on the table with my claws.

“Yup. Said the fruitcake part with the biggest smile on his face like he thought it was the neatest thing in the world. Then he walked off muttering to himself like he was annoyed at the thought. Hold still.”

I do so, and the snake-man grabs my arm. His scales are cool to the touch, his claws prick at my skin. The needle he’s holding disappears into my flesh and I cry out, more with surprise than pain, though the needle burns on entry.

He chuckles, “You don’t want to get sick, do you?”

“No…but that hurt!”

“Pain is a fact of life,” he says, slightly wistfully. “There wouldn’t be life without pain.”

“Why?” I inquire. Surely if society were to evolve to the point where there was nothing to harm, physically or emotionally, then there would be no pain at all.

“To understand pleasure…you have to understand pain,” he clarifies. “How can you judge something when you have nothing to judge it against?”

I suppose that makes sense. Evaluations cannot be made of nothing. Someone observing something must already know a bit about how his observation is to behave, or else there would be no point in observing it.

But what of me? I have felt no pain, physical or mental, because I could not understand it as a robot. As a robot, I was a toy and nothing more, a creature made for the amusement of others.

But was it loss I felt when I realized that Diania hated me? Was that an empty feeling, when I realized one of the aspects of my personality was to please my owner, and that could never be satisfied because she hated me? Was that emotion, beginning to bloom inside me, or just a trick of clever programming?

“Okay, one last thing and then I can show you to where you’ll be staying,” Rameses continues, reaching for a silvery object, a bit like a projectile weapon, except I cannot see where the projectiles would load. I can see a shining, silver needle.

Needles are never a good thing, instantaneously. They might bring nano-vaccines, good for keeping the body healthy, but they hurt. A lot.

“Hold out your winglet for me,” Rameses orders gently.

“Which one?”

“Doesn’t matter.”

Doesn’t matter?! How can it not matter?! Randomness brings chaos! Randomness is disorder! Nothing, nothing at all can function if there is randomness!

Which winglet does he want? What is he going to do with my winglets? I don’t like the look of that needle. I am pretty certain whatever he plans to do, it has something to do with that needle.

But which winglet? How can it “not matter”? There has to be some way of choosing…which one is better? Better for what? How can I choose with I have no criteria?!

Which one? Left, no, right, no…left…no, right…umm…l…no…r…RIGHT!

Shaking, I hold out my right winglet, extending it toward him. He places the thin membrane in between a plate on the projectile weapon and the slot with the needle. He pulls the trigger.

I flinch, pain shooting up my winglet. I feel a fluid, bright red. I’M BLEEDING! This isn’t an infection, this is an open wound! I’m bleeding! I’m going to bleed to death, before I can learn everything!

Rameses chuckles, “Calm down, boy, that’ll close up in no time. Here, let me fix it.”

From the same tray he pulled the needle out of, he picks up a dangling object, two silver balls hanging from two strands of black beads. He slides it into the wound he inflicted upon me. It burns. Then he pulls out a sterile cloth like the one he used to clean my neck and my arm where he injected the nano-vaccines and wipes down my ear.

Slowly, the pain ebbs into a small sting, but it doesn’t go away fully.

“Meeeeep,” I whimper.

“That’ll close up in time, forming a little hole where the earring sticks through. That earring will translate anything anyone says to you into the Draconian Merchant language, so you can understand it, okay?”

I nod my head, shaking slightly. There is nothing he can do to dull the pain, no way to lessen it when it is not needed? I ask him.

“We could just shoot ourselves up with painkillers, but then how would we know not to stick our hands on something hot?” he explains. “That little pinprick in your ear may not be necessary because the damage is benign, but if you didn’t feel it, how would you know that something worse, a knife through your gut, for example, wouldn’t hurt worse? Fatality isn’t something that most people think about on a day-to-day basis, but pain makes sure it doesn’t happen without a fight. If something hurts, and you know it will, you will do your best to avoid it.”

That is logical. Without pain, there would be no reason to avoid injury. The injury would then get infected, and the injured would die. But, such a little amount…

“Okay, follow me to your quarters,” Rameses orders, slithering out of the door. I hop off the table, my digigrade knees and ankles bending fluidly to absorb the impact.

I follow him, down the hall. The halls are empty, warm, but empty. There aren’t many people on board the Dragon Warrior. It is a skeleton crew, just barely enough to run the ship.

So where do I fit in? Where do I go? I have no skills of which to speak, my knowledge is sorely limited in this form. A ship is like a body, all parts moving and working together as one. There is no room for dead weight, no room for anything that does not serve a purpose, no matter how remote.

Thanatos Darkstar does not strike me as a person who would keep something around that is of no use or value. He must have a plan for me, or else I must come up with one myself. If I am of no value, I might as well be thrown into the garbage, like a broken toy. So if Thanatos does not have a plan for me, then he must think that I have some skill that is desirable.

But what skill would a Pyrixian Elf have? Pyrixian Elves come from a planet with limited technology and are slowly going extinct, day by day, because of the Draconians mining their planet and seeking them as slaves or pets. Thanatos may be crazy, but I doubt he is stupid enough to believe that a Pyrixian Elf wandering the streets knows anything about spaceships or piracy.

Unless he plans to teach me something. Unless he thinks I can learn to do tasks onboard the ship. Or maybe I just caught his attention like something shiny lying on the street. He seems the type to be distracted by shiny objects.

I look at my hair, falling over my shoulder. I feel its silken texture, and watch the white light shatter into its nine basic colors and the multiple ones inside. Visually appealing.

Rameses takes me to the bottom of the ship, to the cargo hold. It is chilly in here, but not so cold that I could not survive. It is merely uncomfortable, cluttered, and dark. There are boxes in here bigger than Rameses and smaller than I am, containing all sorts of objects I could not possibly imagine.

“Thanatos says you’ll stay here until you earn a room,” Rameses says. “He seems to think you’ll be able to make it. I already brought your doll down here.” He points to a corner of the room, where I stand, staring off into space, a shell with no pearl inside.

I shift away from my blank gaze, edging away from a toy with a dead, haunted look in its eyes. I know there is nothing inside, no mind, no nothing, but I cannot shake the feeling that it also means if it were to become activated, there would be no programming to stop it from doing anything it wanted.

It frightens me. I am not sure I like the idea of sleeping, alone in a room, with my empty body.

“How do I earn a room?” I ask, stepping over Rameses’ tail and trying to hide behind his wings.

He shrugs, “With Than, it could be anything from giving him an exotic pet picked up on some out of the way planet or outpost to shooting WarLady Ryli L’thiir’non out of the sky.”

That name sounds familiar. It is a female, I think, though Sarbacapuch names are asexual because their children name themselves.

“Who is that?” I ask, turning around so I don’t have to look at my body. Rameses is twisted, leaning over me, his cool breath fluttering my hair into my antennae.

“A Sarbie conqueror, a good one, especially for her age. She and Than have some sort of rivalry going. I don’t know the whole story, that’s something Thanatos won’t say, but they don’t like each other much. She’s been chasing him since he was a petty thief…which actually wasn’t all that long ago.”

His arms are crossed and he’s leaning over to talk to me, studying me. He straightens back up and says, “I have to go and make sure that we have enough food to last until whenever Than decides we’re going to get some more. You can build your web here. If you get cold, I’ll smuggle you a blanket from somewhere.”

He is cold-blooded, so he does not quite understand the use of a blanket. He slithers away, leaving me barefoot and shivering, staring at my fingertips and tentacles, at the tiny holes at the ends and the spinnerets inside.

I can build a web. This body should know how, correct? It cannot be too hard…it is a biological function of this body, right? I can do this…right?

Right?

A/N:

My username on deviantart is DragonLadyXIII. If you go there, I have a pic of Thantos talking to a potato. It is REALLY good, if I do say so myself. n.n I’m quite proud of it!