A/N: Welcome to my world, oh seeker of diversion. Read my thoughts and cherish my words, for they are not posted carelessly. (In fact, I normally have to wrestle with them for quite a while to get them to make any sort of coherent sense at all.)

If I ever finish this, it’s going to be quite long. Subsequent chapters may or may not be as long as this one, so no nagging me.

Before I even begin to write: I will update when I have time. Did we hear that? Let’s say it again: I will update when I have the time to do so. I know you’ve all heard it before. The countless reviews I’ve read of others’ stories give evidence to the contrary, but if possible, please do not demand that I update because I want to write as much as you want me to. If not more. Ok! On with the show.

Now we proceed to the Rite of Copies: All of these characters do, in fact, belong to me. Please do not steal them as I’m still using them and really they do get worn out when they’re trying to be in two places at once.

And so my story begins.

Have fun.

I assume, though I do not and probably cannot ever know, that I was born on one of the many ships made and employed by huge shipping companies and crewed by various miscreants picked up in one of the millions of stations that dotted the galaxies of four hundred years ago. Anyone from this century probably wouldn’t know what I’m talking about, so for context: because space travel took so long back then and was so out of sync with Planetside time, these ships became the home of their crew and eventually the crew’s family and descendants. Essentially they became small towns hurtling through space at near-lightspeeds.

The first place I have memories of is a nursery in said ship. There were three other children besides me. I don’t remember one particular mother or father; I think the ship just took care of their children in common. There were several nurses, I remember.

My time spent in the nursery was quite possibly the only time in my life I have ever had a tendency to being at all noisy. I seem to remember in particular singing a song with the other kids and the nurse du jour. I think it was something about bunnies.

That’s the only real memory I have of the nursery. When I was four or so – I’m never sure of my exact age – the ship I was born on underwent a transition in ownership. That is to say, it was annexed by pirates.

Pirates were a big problem back then. It was a highly profitable business. The only way to defend against them was to have a fast drive, big guns (yes, we still called phasers “guns” back then) and good sensors, because they hadn’t quite invented shields yet.

My true memories start from the day the pirates took over our ship. I have had to make a number of assumptions about the events that happened on the ship that I was not present for, or was too young to understand at the time. One of these assumptions is that the pirates must have damaged a piece of equipment we needed to defend our ship or get away; I can think of no other reason why we would not have attacked them in turn or simply warped away as fast as we could.

I remember that the ship pitched sharply and then settled. The other babies and I started crying. A woman ran into the nursery from the corridor and tripped; she was caught by the nurse, who sat her down. They spoke in low tones. I stopped crying. Then the woman ran out again and the nurse turned to us and told us we must be very very quiet. Then she rushed around in a lunatic fashion, gathering things up and stuffing them into sacks and boxes. The woman returned with three other people, who helped our nurse stuff more things into sacks and boxes.

The ship gave a shudder. One woman screamed. She was shushed by a tall man.

When there was nothing left in our nursery – every toy collected, every snack packed, every blanket folded and stowed – these five people picked up me and my three playfellows and quickly – almost running – took us outside the nursery, where I had not been before. We flew down several corridors, coming to a lift, got in and went down several floors. We came out running, went down several more corridors and then through a swishdoor into a cramped space where I could smell lots of people. There were bunks on either side of a central aisle, which we came out into to the middle of from the corridor. Each bed had three drawers and a locked chest. The cramped boxy unfamiliarity of it almost made me cry again, but the nurse was already shushing one of the other babies, so I didn’t.

The tall man spoke hurriedly to one of the crewmates who was lounging in her bunk. She nodded. Then she went to the corner of her mattress and pried it up, revealing a hatch door. She grabbed the handle, pulled open the hatch and motioned for the adults to climb down the ladder below. The tall man climbed down the ladder and we were handed down to him into a small, dark, and slightly damp room. Then they ferried down our boxes and sacks.

The nurse climbed down to us and made us each a bed with the blankets she had brought. The tall man climbed out. She told us to be very quiet. She gave us all a snack and then climbed back up. She told us down the hatch not to be afraid and that she would be back very soon and to be very very quiet. Then the hatchway closed with a muted thud and a whumphing sound as the mattress flopped back into place.

There was a silence in the small, dark room as each of us processed, with our small, unformed minds, what had just happened. One of the girls started to cry again. That set the other one off. They were twins, after all. The boy, Wyatt, appeared too shocked to even cry.

This was wrong. They had to be quiet. Nurse had told us to be quiet. Something very strange had just happened and we were supposed to be quiet. I did to them what the nurse had done to us: I put a finger in front of my lips and made a violent shhhing sound at them.

It worked, though not in the way I had intended it to. They stopped crying and stared at me in shock. They were bigger than me. There were two of them. They were older than me. I had never bossed them around before. What right had I to shush them?

But the ship rocked again, more gently this time, and a few moments later we heard distant screams. I was terrified, but I could not cry. Not after I had shushed the twins. Wyatt, on the other hand, started blubbering. I rounded on him and shushed him too. He swallowed and fell silent. The twins merely clung to each other, looking at me with wide eyes. I stared right back, somehow afraid, and defiant about it. First the light-haired one, then the dark-haired one looked away.

I swallowed. The screams continued sporadically, louder and softer, closer and farther away. The four of us sat there in the dimness – a little light came from a window in a square door in the wall, but not much light. I suddenly realized how hungry I was, and how cold it was here. I ate the snack the nurse had given me. Somehow it tasted different than I was used to. It was hard not to cry.

The other three ate their snacks too. After that there was nothing to do. It was cold and we could still hear the screaming. The light-haired twin choked briefly and started to cry again. I glared at her. She stopped with a sniffle.

It was very cold. We took the blankets off our beds and huddled under them together, trying to stay warm. The other three sniffled, but did not cry. I had scared them. I almost cried myself, though. It was so dark and cold and strange and scary.

I must have dozed off, for some time later I was awoken by the sound of the hatch opening above us. Another of our nurses descended to us, and the hatch was shut very quickly behind her, though it wasn’t locked. Wyatt greeted her with a glad cry, and she quickly hushed him. He closed his mouth. The twins did not make any noise at all. We were all learning.

The nurse hugged Wyatt. When Wyatt told her he was hungry again, she got us all food from one of the boxes.

This nurse seemed very tired. She told us that some very bad people had taken over the ship and that we had to stay here now. The dark-haired twin asked her why, and she said that these men were greedy and mean and that we must stay here to keep out of their way. The light-haired twin asked the nurse if she could stay with us, but she said no, she had to go back or else she would be missed and they would search the ship and find our hideout.

When we had all finished our snack the nurse said she had something to show us. She tugged on the handle of the large door in the wall of our room, opening it, and ushered us through the square opening. It was about four feet high. The nurse had to stoop to walk along the strange, square, metal corridor we found ourselves in, stretching out before us in both directions. She closed the door behind us and made us all try opening and closing the door very quietly. This, the nurse said in a very low voice, was the ventilation system. It led to all parts of the ship.

As we walked along it, we heard faint, infrequent screams still coming from the other parts of the ship. The corridor branched off every so often, these branchings being smaller than the main shaft, as this seemed to be. The nurse walked us down the shaft, counting the branchings under her breath, until she reached the twenty-sixth. She asked us if we could count to twenty-six. Wyatt said he could. He was the oldest one of us. The nurse said she would teach the rest of us to count to twenty-six when we got back to our room.

She turned left at the twenty-sixth branching and led us down the shaft. This branching had grills placed at intervals along its ceiling and floor, instead of shafts to the left and right. The ceiling was also lower; our nurse had to bend almost double to walk along it.

Each grill was connected by a hinge and two screws to the ceiling or floor of the shaft we walked in. Here our nurse brought us to the fifth grill in the ceiling and showed us how to twist the screws between our fingers and gently – silently – pull the grates open towards us into the shaft.

The grill opened into a room filled with stacks of boxes – a storage room. It was fairly large. The tall man we had seen earlier was standing by the door. He nodded to the nurse when he saw us emerge, and she nodded back. The nurse waved us back in behind her and then she showed us how to close the grill silently again and twist the screws back into place.

The two other places she showed us that day were the recycling area and a small room connected to one of the kitchens. The recycling area, she explained to us, was where we would go to the bathroom. It wasn’t very far from our home room, thankfully. She said that the small room near the kitchens was where we would go to get food. It was the place where all the leftovers were put before they got taken away to the recycling area. She said that all of the crewmates would be sure there was something there for us every day, for when our snacks ran out.

Our nurse counted under her breath again, but she got lost three times when we were trying to find our way back to our roomhome. When we got back she gave us each a water bottle from one of our sacks. She said that whenever we needed to we could go put these in a certain place in the kitchen and they would be refilled for us. Then she sat down and read us a book. We huddled together against the wall in our strange new home and fell into an exhausted sleep.