ANOTHER CODE

By MargaritaDaemonelix

For Kiyoshiin - merry Christmas.

Eve was not meant to be a fighter.

Adrian never meant for her to be one, after all. She was meant to be the better Nasod, the best Nasod, the one who embodies all of Adrian's will. Adam would one day tremble in her presence, and regret his every move that he took against his creator.

She embodies grace. She is a diplomacy model, not a combat model. Nasod like her are few and far apart, which only makes her that much more special. Her unparalleled coding and efficiency are a spectacle that not many get to see.

And yet, hidden away for thousands of years, she can do no more than slumber.

Eve wakes up to nothingness.

She is alone in the world, in her fallen island. Her creator is gone, the City in the Sky is gone, even Adam is gone. Nothing stirs as she steps out of her silk coffin, and no one comes to greet her as her delicate steps lead her into the throne room that Adam once occupied.

Altera is frozen in an eternal winter, she notes, and she is the only one to survive. The body that was once Adam is collapsed over the dais, the "crown" he once wore having rolled to a stop against the wall. The view from the balcony reveals only a wasteland outside. The ancient court of the Nasod is gone, and not even the light of the El upon her own head can save them.

Eve is alone.

She is the last of her kind, the last Nasod. If Adam was once their king, then she is now the little queen of the Nasod, far from perfect and far too young to lead her dead empire. She is the last hope of the Nasod, and she has no choice left but to resurrect her empire. She kicks the old crown away, and starts her new empire.

Dust fills the once pristine hallways as she walks through them. Every Nasod she sees is broken and collapsed against the floor. Her people are too far gone for her to save. And yet Eve has hope. She continues to walk on through the stifling hallway, deeper into the heart of Altera.

The Core, once the mother of all Nasod, has frozen over. The womb that birthed all her brothers and sisters is cold and lifeless. Eve stands motionless at its base, hoping for a miracle to happen.

No miracle comes. Eve exhales silently.

There is no El left in the Core, no life for it to give, she concludes. The Core cannot produce life without giving life, after all.

Once, the El gem that fueled Altera's Core was large enough to spread life across all of Altera. In the years since the El was lost, Altera has fallen out of the sky, crashed to the world below, and all its life eradicated.

The only El left in Altera is Eve's own. She is the only living creature in a world of the dead.

There must be a solution to the problem. The Core needs El to function, and of course Eve has that El. She runs a few calculations and discovers that regardless of how she connects herself to the Core, she would have to enter another lifeless slumber to restore life to Altera again. There would be no way for her to watch her empire come back to life. On the other hand, if she were to attempt to find the El to revive her island herself, it could take thousands of years for her to make any successes.

In another life, maybe Eve would have taken that chance, returned to eternal slumber to power the resurrection of her people. In that life, Eve would wake up millennia later to more destruction and new friends. In that life, Eve would find solace in a red-haired boy who offered to be her friend.

But Eve is not perfect; she has made mistakes and will continue to make mistakes. If she fires her single bullet into the darkness and makes a single fatal mistake, then it will be worse than any suffering she may endure during her time trying to manually resurrect the Nasod.

She looks at the Core once more, says a silent apology and promises to return when she has the power to.

Then, she turns away, closing the door behind her gently.

Eve's first official act as queen is to craft herself new clothing, as befitting for a queen. White artificial silk makes up the basis of her new clothing, clean silk in a dirtied world. She shines wordlessly in the gloom of Altera, heedless of the way dust tries to choke out her glow.

Her second official act is to find a way to protect herself. Eve is not a combat model, after all. Should someone - or something - attempt to tread upon her island without permission, she must be able to fend them off. After much contemplation, she chooses a silvery white spear, alongside a pair of black and white combat drones. She picks them apart only to reassemble them, and watches them bounce to life before her eyes.

"I shall name you Moby," she says, petting the black one, "and you, Remy."

The white drone butts her hand softly. She pets it too.

It feels strange to have companions again, even if they can only communicate to her in short bursts of code. The drones float alongside her as she walks up and down hallways looking for parts from broken Nasod.

Her third official act as queen is to construct a new Nasod. Since the Core is offline entirely (and may be for millennia to come), it is up to her to create the new children of the empire. She selects parts from various fallen Nasod to put together into a whole body, like a jigsaw puzzle.

She doesn't have a design to follow except the one in her mind. She makes her new Nasod vaguely in the same shape as herself - humanoid, except less lithe like her, more like Adrian once was. A masculine form would do well as a bodyguard, she reasons. Ideas for a feminine bodyguard arise, but she will get to making that one some other day.

As soon as she is done with the body, she begins to search for code. Personality data from the older Nasod is out of the question - she never really liked them anyways. She hesitates momentarily at Adam's side before moving on. While his hardened determination was admirable, his attitude was not something Eve liked.

Eventually, she finds the code she likes best in an old porter, lying prone in a hallway. She couples this with newer data from Nasod whose lives ended just as they began, those that fell as soon as they left the Core. She plugs a cable into her own arm and extracts some of her own coding as well, to see where Adrian's expertise leaves off and her own personality begins.

Weeks pass, and she constructs a flawless personality code for her perfect bodyguard. In a final moment of truth, she connects her console to her new servant and uploads the code, holding her breath for the moment when he comes to life.

And he does. Oberon's eyes light up, and his joints move. He kneels at Eve's feet, wordless in the presence of his queen.

Oberon is perfect, and Eve is filled with pride as she looks upon her creation.

"Arise," she says, putting her hand on his head. "Oberon, knight of the Nasod Empire, arise."

But he doesn't.

Oberon is perfect, but he is not.

Eve finds out quickly that Oberon is what the humans call deaf - that is, incapable of picking up sound. It was a flaw in his construction, one that Eve left behind, and it's too late to fix it without harming the Nasod.

She is devastated, but she doesn't let that get her down. He has the world of knowledge within him, and he can still see clearly. She develops a series of hand signals so that she can communicate with him easily, on a day to day basis. A gentle nod means she is pleased with him. A motion of raising a cup to her lips means she would like some tea.

(He is a surprisingly good butler. Eve concludes it must have something to do with the fact that part of his source code came from a porter.)

With Oberon helping her, she is able to clear out a great majority of the Alteran palace easily. She spends months, years giving each Nasod a funeral of its own after extracting their personality data. Adam's data is stored to a drive, which she keeps on a shelf over her workbench. Sometimes she takes it off the shelf, only to stare at it for hours before putting it back.

The funerals take a toll on her pristine white clothes, and soon her machines are crafting more for her, slender white boots and an elegant white dress reminiscent of the empresses of the old kingdom. A perfect white diadem sits upon her head. She plaits her hair back and covers the inside of her dress with plates of armor.

The next Nasod has some of Adam's code in her. Eve takes his determination and perfectionism from the code, leaving behind his aggressiveness and temper. She makes a note of remembering to give the new Nasod a more feminine body, and reminds herself that she cannot fail this Nasod where she failed Oberon.

She extracts more code from a young Nasod girl who tended to the royal infirmary when she was alive, and combines this with Adam's code and again, the code of the newest Nasod. She explains this all to Oberon as she knits the code together, creating a visual commentary on a separate screen as she runs numbers and words and files on her own.

You call me Oberon, Lady, he says. What will her name be?

Eve decides to call the new Nasod Ophelia. She salvages parts of the Nasod girl's body to make a perfect form for Ophelia and reinforces it with parts from combat models. Her code is perfect, and her hearing is flawless. Eve makes a point of ensuring that Oberon's hand signals are already in her code before uploading it to the robotic form.

Ophelia's eyes blink to life, but she does not kneel at Eve's feet like Oberon did. Maidens do not kneel at their ladies' feet; more often, they embrace them as sisters. "Milady," she says clearly, giving Eve a gentle curtsey. "I await your command."

Then, wobbly and unsteady, she falls into a pile.

She, too, is not flawless. Her hands do not feel texture, and she can barely stand due to the lack of strength in her feet. Eve puts in more reinforcements in her legs to keep them from collapsing, attaches wheels to the bottom of her feet, and little boosters to her heels to help her move.

None of the surviving Nasod are perfect. Sometimes Eve finds herself rewriting code because it led nowhere. Sometimes she spends hours looking for Oberon, because she cannot simply call for him. Sometimes she hears a crash somewhere in the palace, and finds Ophelia sitting at the bottom of a staircase, having fallen down.

I didn't have to fall into an endless slumber, after all, Eve thinks. The island of Altera could have become complete ruins if I had.

She looks upon her two imperfect Nasod, and is proud of herself.

Her first visitors to the island come over three hundred years after her awakening, and they are fuzzy little creatures that both confuse and alarm her.

"Your majesty, we are Ponggo, pong," says their leader. "Our ancestral homeland has been laid to waste by an incoming human army, pong. We escaped here with only the clothes on our backs. Please allow us to trespass on your island while we recover, pong."

Humans. Eve recalls humans. They were strange creatures, and seemed to think highly of Adrian and lowly of the race he created. She doesn't like humans, and after hearing what they did to these harmless creatures, she likes them even less.

"You may stay as long as you would like," she decides. "However, you must tell me of the outside world. I have not ventured out of the island since my awakening, three hundred years ago, and I am rather out of date on the events of the outside world."

The Ponggos tell her everything they can. The outside world - greater Elrios - is now home to several growing nations across two continents. After the great El explosion that caused Altera to fall from the sky, the continent of Elrios split into Lurensia and Fluone. Two of the greatest powers are Velder Kingdom, of Lurensia, and Senace Kingdom, of Fluone.

"They are at war, pong," the elder of the Ponggos says sadly. "We have been running from the war for several months. We only wish to live in peace, pong."

"Then peace you shall have, here on Altera," Eve says. "I will protect you with the force of the ancient Nasod Empire."

She doesn't mention that the Nasod Empire is really just herself and her two creations with their unique flaws, and the elder doesn't press into it.

The Ponggos have their own little culture, and within months they've dug deep into the earth, building their own town underground. They invite Eve to their little celebrations, and she tries to attend, but there's much more to be done around the palace. Sometimes she sends Oberon and Ophelia in her stead.

Eve gets two separate invitations one day - one from Hamel, and one from Velder. Both are requesting her alliance in the war. Neither acknowledge the wrongs they dealt to her people, thousands of years ago.

She knows she cannot take a side in this war. She must create her own side. Instead, she replies to both letters with a firm no, I will not be allying with anyone in this war and purposely sends the Hamellian reply to Velder, and vice versa. Perhaps that will teach them to get along.

In the meantime, while her replies are heading back to the mainland (by droid, no less), Eve pulls Oberon and Ophelia into the ancient Alteran armory. "Take your pick," she says. "We may be going to war soon, so we must prepare ourselves."

Oberon cocks his head. What is war, Lady?

They have never seen war, so Eve tries to explain by reaching into her deepest hidden memories. She shows them pictures of destruction, from the great Nasod War, and she shows them horrible images of humans killing each other, live from Velder and Hamel. "That is war, and we must arm ourselves to prevent it."

The two of them choose their weapons quickly. Oberon picks up a large cross-shaped sword, with a chain that connects to his sleeve to prevent it from escaping him. Ophelia dons stronger boosters in her heels and fills her skirt with explosives to load into her new grenade launcher. Eve reinforces Moby and Remy, and teaches them to use their combat utilities despite having none herself.

Months pass again, and new messages come. Velder and Hamel have both agreed to not attack Altera, but the war continues to harass innocent humans and other creatures alike on the mainland continents.

Eve has worked tirelessly in a new experiment, and now with her companions armed and trained for battle, she can finally reveal her project. Building a new Nasod was hard, but it has not been as hard as restoring an ancient Nasod. Now, Ignis and Leviathan, the guardians of her childhood, stand on guard to protect Altera while Eve is gone.

"I will be overseas, doing peacekeeping work," she says to them. "Keep the Ponggo village safe during the period while I am away. Obey their elders' commands."

Ignis and Leviathan kneel at her feet once again. They were obedient to her in the past, and they will be now and forever more.

(Truth be told, she has missed their presence on her island.)

The vessel she builds to transport herself and her companions over the sea strait within two days, a feat only bested by an elven explorer nearly two centuries later. They travel on foot and on the backs of mechanical beasts, travelling towards the heart of the fighting.

The source of the issue is a small island between Velder and Hamel, known widely as Ereda, according to the Ponggos. Eve gets there one day, late in the evening, and stops a man in blue from murdering one in red.

"Thank you," says the soldier in red. He is barely more than a boy, his voice lively and youthful. When he removes his helmet, Eve notes that everything about him is red, from his eyes, to his tousled hair, to the very tip of his nose. "If you hadn't stepped in, he'd probably have killed me."

Eve dips her head. "It is of no problem." She pauses. "I am Queen Eve of Altera. Please direct me to your leaders, so that I can try to convince them to stop fighting."

The red-haired boy leads her to a building, where armed guards find her a seat in front of a general. She talks to the general for a long, long time, but he is an iron wall, and refuses to let go of his claim on Ereda. Velder needs room to expand, he reasons, and if Hamel cannot respect that, then that is its own problem.

Eve tries to reason again and again that his war is tearing the continents apart, but it is of no use. The general bids her a good evening, and has her delivered out of his office.

She stands alone in the night wind. It is cold, but she doesn't register it. She has failed to diplomatically resolve the issue.

Eve is imperfect, and she hates it.

The red-haired boy comes to stand beside her. "I have a friend on the other side," he whispers. "His father is their general. I can bring you to him, if you'd like to try and talk them down."

"That would be nice," she manages. "Thank you."

He only smiles at her.

The boy finds two horses for them - one for Ophelia and Oberon, and the other for himself and Eve. She sits with her feet dangling off one side, holding onto his waist, and feels a kind warmth radiating from him. It is a good feeling, one that Eve has never felt before.

The other boy, who is decked in white armor and blue clothes, finds them in the forest, and takes over the reins from there. He leads Eve to his father, and their conversation is all too much like the one with the Velder general. Eventually, the conversation comes to an end, and by then it is much too late to do anything. The Hamellian general offers her a place to stay, but she turns it down gently.

She ventures back into the forest with Oberon and Ophelia, and her drones. She has a plan, but it's not pretty.

The red-haired boy is gone, but a telltale scrap of red fabric tells her of the hope he has for her.

In the morning, the two armies prepare their troops for battle.

Velder is home to leagues of sword-wielding soldiers, a battalion of archers, and powerful cannoneers, whereas Hamel boasts mages of every element and the mightiest magical infantry in the history of Elrios. Both armies are out to kill. Both armies are here to bring a piece of glory home.

Both armies freeze in the sight of a slim young woman, standing in the middle of no man's land.

"Do you not see the destruction your fighting has wrought upon this island?" She says, voice thundering over the battlefield. "Once, the Ponggo race lived here, but it is your childish fighting that has destroyed their home. Have some shame upon yourselves, for you have forced an innocent peoples out of their ancestral homeland."

She turns to Oberon, who hands her the flag she so painstakingly crafted the night before in the forest. It is black, with a pristine pink gear in the centre. "This land belonged to the Ponggos," she announces, "and the Ponggos are my people now. So cease your silly fighting. This land was never yours to begin with."

With those words, she plunges the flagpole into the ground, letting the morning breeze carry her flag through the sky.

Then there's a collective cry on both sides as the armies drop their weapons, and turn to themselves in shame and sorrow.

Eve is swamped by a million hugs and so are her companions. Oberon looks baffled; Ophelia nearly falls over at least a million times. Even Moby and Remy are passed around through the crowd to be hugged.

She may be imperfect, but Eve is a diplomatic model. She was not built for war, just so she could stop one. Now, she celebrates with them, for her actions have saved many, many lives.

In the pandemonium of the reunion of the armies, Eve's eyes meet a pair of lively red ones.

After returning to Altera, Eve gets to work on restoring the Core.

Ignis and Leviathan seem to have been adopted by the Ponggos, and under all of their care, the island blooms in green once more. Eve looks out her balcony one day to find Oberon watering a bed of flowers in the field below. Sometimes Ophelia will come in with blooming flowers to stick in a vase.

It's a welcome change from the dead Altera that she awoke to, but Eve isolates herself to the Core once more.

The eyes of the red-haired boy haunt her. Why did he help her? And why did he leave? She lets her mind go blank and focuses on the Core and the Core only.

The Ponggo must have some traces of El in them, she concludes, because otherwise how would the island be thriving? The Core is no longer dead, only inactive, and it takes her just under a century to get it up and running again on minimal El consumption. The production rate is abysmally slow (a new Nasod is born once every week, opposed to the rate of five times an hour of ancient times) but there are new faces around. Eve helps pick names for them - Henry, Othello, Helena.

None of them sound like the name that the red-haired boy could have had. He will simply just haunt her for the thousands of years to come.

With their help, the ancient Nasod palace becomes home to life once more. Nasod scholars travel overseas to keep up with current times, bringing back data and all sorts of various trinkets for their queen. The times are changing, after all, and Eve knows that she must keep up with the politics of the outside world.

Eve is changing, too. After restoring the Core, the new Nasod hail her as the first empress of the new Empire of Altera. She dons new sleek white clothes, in the new Velder styles, and a snowy cape that drifts out behind her. Upon her head sits a two-pronged tiara, for she was the little queen of the old Nasod Empire, and the first great empress of the new. The queen of two empires, they call her.

Her empire is growing exponentially, for the first time in nearly a millennium now.

Eve feels pride in her imperfection, for once. Oberon, despite being deaf, is a favourite of the people, and nearly every Nasod and Ponggo can communicate to him in perfect sign language. Ophelia has grown graceful without needing to use her legs, preferring to use her boosters to get around. And even Eve herself is often surprised by the good things that come out of her coding flaws.

So when Ferdinand kneels at her feet and seems perfect in every way, Eve is surprised. Never has one of her own creations been truly perfect.

"Arise, Ferdinand," she says, and he stands up as ordered of him. He can hear, and his legs are not weak, and he has feeling and strength in his hands and feet.

Then she begins to see the flaws in him, even though he can't them himself.

It starts when Ferdinand bumps into her writing desk as he kneels. He kneels at her feet about a million times a day, so it comes as a surprise to her when he hits his head against the desk. He assures her he's alright, but Eve is not convinced.

Ferdinand knocks over a glass champagne flute. Ferdinand walks through a flowerbed. Ferdinand accidentally slaps Ophelia in the back while looking for the light switch.

Finally, Eve asks him to write something on a piece of paper, on a specific line, and winces as his words goes everywhere.

Ferdinand is blind. He is imperfect, just like Eve and Oberon and Ophelia before him.

But they press on. Eve isn't able to fix his sight, but she is able to give him a radar, so he can tell where others are in proximity to him. Ophelia forgives him for nearly knocking her over, and Oberon forgives him for trampling the primroses.

Eve wonders how they've become so human, despite having the same source code as her.

Maybe it's because of the people she's met since making them.

(She tries not to think of the red-haired boy again, and fails.)

A thousand years pass, and Altera is not a barren wasteland ruled by an egomaniacal Nasod King, but a fair and kind Empress with the touch of an angel. Eve awakens not to her beloved nation producing weapons of war, but the birth of children every day.

Travelers from Hamel and Velder alike come to see her, to thank her for stopping the war of eleven hundred years past. She thanks them for preserving the peace of their nations. It makes her feel better that her one diplomatic mission did not go to waste.

Eve watches the world grow around her, and grows with it. She saves a Velder soldier betrayed by his friends, and gives him a new arm to replace the one he lost. She keeps up with the latest fashions in Velder and Hamel, and allies with the countries when demons begin to invade Elrios. She is the first to offer protection to a defecting demon queen and her loyal human bodyguard.

And when a small group led by a red-haired boy bearing the symbol of Velder shows up on her palace doorstep, seeking her guidance to diplomatically stop the war, Eve smiles and offers them all she can to convince the demons to cease their plight against Elrios.

Eve was not meant to be a fighter. Adrian never meant for her to be one, after all. She was meant to be the better Nasod, the best Nasod, the one who embodies all of Adrian's will. Fighting armies will tremble in her gaze, as she calmly reminds them of the peace they are abandoning.

She embodies grace. She is a diplomacy model, not a combat model. Nasod like her are few and far apart, which only makes her that much more special. Her unparalleled coding and efficiency are a spectacle that not many get to see, and her creations are each unique and models of pristine manufacturing.

And after nearly two thousand years, Eve has learned to embrace her flaws.

She may be flawed, but she is perfect the way she is, and her friends and companions wouldn't have her any other way.

A/N: Merry Christmas! This is my secret santa gift to Kiyoshiin, aka the greatest server overlord ever? thank you for giving me permission to post this

anyways y'all should join EFB, it's great fun and everyone is fantastic, hmu if you want the server link

sorry for no Spectrum update like i promised. i was on vacation, but i swear i'll get the update done asap. i still fully intend to finish Spectrum by the end of the year.

again, merry crisis and a happy new year!

~Marg