Outside Perspective

Butter, eggs, sugar, flour, cocoa powder, baking soda, baking powder, vanilla, and milk.

Mixed together and baked in an oven at 350 degrees.

Frosted with more melted chocolate cream product.

This so called chocolate fudge cake was a criminally luxurious waste of rations. Mentally cataloging each ingredient and the work cost it would take to earn the specified amounts brought up a non-insignificant work load if she were to requisition it back home.

The ingredient list for the dessert in front of Engine of Salvation flashed in her mind as the fork cut a small bite-sized piece and carried it into the red skinned mouth of her current conversation partner.

“Are you sure you don’t want a slice?” Ririth asked, licking a bit of frosting off of her lips.

“I wouldn’t even know where to start working that off.” Engine said, watching Ririth finish off the slice of cake in horrified fascination.

Engine had met Ririth only recently after Maka mentioned her similarities to herself. She had been dismissive of the idea at first, but to her surprise, she found herself agreeing with Maka. After a series of very thorough examinations and physicals Engine came to the conclusion that Ririth might just be a more intricate piece of technology than even herself.

Built up from billions and trillions of clockwork wheels while retaining a sentient conscience and a fully biological bodily system. She seemed almost needlessly complex, as if someone was showing off when they built her by taking the most difficult route possible.

Ririth frowned and gave her stomach a soft poke before finishing off the cake.

“If you say so,” she shrugged, grabbing another slice before looking up to Engine “if you didn’t come over for cake then are you fighting with Irene?”

“We aren’t fighting,” Engine snapped “She asked me to go somewhere, I said no, she asked me if I was scared, and now I’m here.”

“So you’re avoiding her.” Ririth said pouring a cup of tea for her and Engine.

“I’m not avoiding her.” Engine denied again taking the cup of tea “I’m just waiting for her to leave on her trip before I go out.”

“Are you-””I am not scared.”

Engine looked at her broken teacup and spilled tea guiltily, “Sorry.”

Ririth shrugged off the apology as Engine’s hand split apart into multi-tool and began repairing the teacup to its original shining perfect state.

“I’m not scared,” Engine said again, wiping away the tea from the table “I’m just…”

“Not used to Creation yet?” Ririth asked her, pouring her more tea.

Engine nodded silently.

Another thing they had in common, both she and Ririth weren’t native to Creation. More than that, they had both come from living inside the bodies of their creators, a Primordial and Yozi respectively.

Ririth was the one person she could talk to about how strange Creation was.

The unsettling vertigo feeling after staring at the sky for too long, the rainstorm that didn’t melt your face, but hid deadly bolts of lightning, the seemingly calm sea that led people adrift for weeks until the crew devolved into homicidal cannibals from lack of food and water.

“You shouldn’t stay cooped up in the library all by yourself for so long.” Ririth interrupted her thoughts.

Engine hid her reddening cheeks with the newly restored and filled teacup not realizing she had been muttering out loud.

“It’s just research.”

“The Invincible Sword Princess isn’t the most accurate research material.”

“Pirate Cannibals are real.”

“Sometimes the rain does melt your face and sometimes you can fall into the sky.” Ririth conceded the point.

Engine nodded sullenly.

“Creation was suppose to be a paradise, wasn't it?” Ririth said sadly.

“When we first arrived in Gem,” Engine said after a moment “one of our soldiers stepped out into the sun absolutely amazed at the light.”

Ririth winced at the image.

“We had to treat him for third degree burns before we realized what was happening,” she said her voice leaking the smallest bit of emotion “I mandated level 3 hazard protection from then on at all times and even then everyone was too afraid to leave the tunnels after that.”

“And then the West is hardly any better, a wet desert where even an approaching rain cloud might herald a danger greater than dehydration. The North is a freezing white wasteland that can literally blind men and drive them insane from the cold and isolation. The East is a virulent biohazard that deserves to be put to the torch.”

Engine finished her tirade with another broken teacup, this one shattered into little pieces.

“Did Creation betray you that much?” Ririth asked quietly.

Engine froze at the question, the gathered porcelain in her hands clinked at the sudden stop.

“Betray?” Engine questioned aloud.

“That’s what it felt like didn’t it?” Ririth said “you grew up in a place that actively hated humans, where the only safe places were where you were given permission to stay and where a single misstep in even the safest environs was death waiting to happen. And then you heard about where humans came from, a place where the golden sun shone down on blue waters that flowed gently in a green forest. Food grew on trees and the air wasn’t poison.”

“Except it wasn’t. You came to Creation and it was more of the same.”

Engine let Ririth’s speech swirl around in her head, giving each sentence and phrase a rigorous examination.

“Yes,” she said finally, “I felt betrayed. Creation was suppose to be better than this.”

“I asked my Father about it once I think,” Ririth said with a far away look “my memories of the past aren’t the best, but I remember this vividly.”

Engine looked up from her hands, Ririth rarely spoke about her Father to her, the relationship between their homelands took quite a bit to get over initially.

“He wrote to me in a letter,” she said, “he told me a little about how humans were made. Why they were made.”

“He said when He and They still ruled Creation, they built it to suit them. All the land and the trees and the animals were made for one reason or the other because a Primordial felt like it. Humans were made to give prayer to their betters. Creation isn’t a nice place to people because it wasn’t made for them. Fire burns them, rocks crush them, water drowns them, the air suffocates them. They were made to live in fear of the world around them.”

“I started hating this world,” she continued her expression clouding over “I wanted so much to go back to Malfaes, where at least it’s viciousness was worn out in the open for everyone to see. I fell in with the wrong crowd, who wanted to use me for their own ends. And I think deep down I knew that.”

Engine felt what was left in her hands grind down to dust in her clenched fist.

“And then I made a friend.”

Ririth was smiling now, the gloomy expression she had been wearing was gone like the mist.

“She saved me from myself and fought back against the world. And through her I met more and more friends. People who taught me a very important lesson.”

Ririth reached over and held Engine’s hands in her own.

“If you don’t like the world, then change it. Make it the Paradise it should be.”

Engine looked down at warm hands, her thoughts flashing to Autochthon and her mission, to Maka and her own self-imposed mission.

“Of course,” she smiled, meeting Ririth’s eyes “that’s obvious.”