Did you think you would be able to trick me with your lies?

Timeline/World: Enter the Steam – Along the Water
Characters: Vodka Schakowsky
Race: Boozeling – Vodka
Age: 25
Final Word Count: 530 words

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I cannot begin to understand why deceit seems to be so much part of the life we have here on the water. In a way, I suppose I am only half-surprised, my whole life until the point when we took to the water a decade ago was nothing but deceit but it still is frustrating. I had thought that just maybe things would change once we were away from them, from the men and women who have created us but that is so far from the truth that I hardly know where to begin.

We had to lie, back then, we had no choice. At first, we could rarely get away with it because lying was so new but it grew on us, I am rather saddened to admit that Gin is the one who took to lying the best, despite his young age. It was innate in him as much as it grew to be second nature to us when they would drag us off to run all of these tests. They had created us; so of course, they saw us as little more than guinea pigs onto which they could do all they wanted. We were test subjects, things without emotions the way I imagine inanimate objects brought to life would be.

The problem with this particular mindset is that while we were inanimate ‘objects’ brought to life, we still had been grown more than made. These bodies that were ours were born this way, not made up of broken pieces and tied together with twine. We had and still have emotions, a mind of our own, thoughts. They subjected us to horrors in testing and I had been more than ready to rip them to shred if father—the main scientist who had come up with the formula to create us but treated us like living, breathing beings—had not found means to sneak us out, to sweep us away onto the water for us to travel away, unseen for now but never truly out of their sight.

We know that we can never stop and truly rest, thinking we have found freedom. We will never have freedom. The Guild is not one to take likely but we have managed to keep ourselves safe and in one piece since we have left. It is not the best of lives, there is so much more we could be doing but it hardly is so bad. We have met others, we have forged bonds, we travel together, stop together, spend time together. It is not a life I truly would want for many but for the lot of us who are out to try and survive, I imagine that it is really not so bad.

There still is lying but at times it is necessary lying. It no longer leads to beatings and drug cocktails or anything else that we would not wish to deal with, so I am grateful at the very least for that much. It is not a lot but it is the life we have and we can do little more than simply go with the flow—no pun intended but still quite fitting.

You don’t have to say a word if it’s too personal.

Timeline/World: New York City – Surviving Earth
Characters: Camille Oxford
Race: Human
Age: 31
Final Word Count: 561 words

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That ugly sentence was an echo of the past, something he’d heard so often and yet it hadn’t been meant back then. No, the point of the shrinks he’d seen before, the ones that hadn’t really wanted to help him but had just been lusting after his money (not that he’d had much), had been to get him to talk, no matter what would come from his mouth. He’d lied a lot back then. He’d had to. Of course, that particular sentence had always been spoken softly, soothingly, as though somehow it would make it mean something more than the lie they really spoke.

Now, however, spoken from this one, a not-quite stranger but a not-quite-yet friend, he wasn’t sure what to make of it. It had been so long since these words had been spoken to him, let alone spoken to him with meaning that they left him confused. He stared, silent for just a moment, a thoughtful moment really, before he was shaking his head, offering that uncertain smile he’d always used when around others. It hadn’t been such a long time now that he’d essentially been ‘allowed’ to work with others, especially on his own, so while moments like these were rare as he didn’t talk much, they still happened, not often about the delicate scarring on his skin.

Scarring he was aware he could have had removed but it was part of him. It had shaped him into whom he was at that very point and he didn’t want to forget that. The time spent in captivity had been one of horror, there was no denying that and it had led him down a terrible path that he could not have come back from without further scars, these mostly emotional. His mind had been broken for the longest of time and only patience and a whole lot of care had been able to change him.

How he did wish that these things had never happened but they had. He had harmed others, taken their lives because of what he had been through and removing the scars that had been so delicately drawn onto his skin was a reminder of what he had done and he wanted that reminder to stay, it was that simple. Removing them would change him.

Though with how long it had been at this point, he no longer really saw these scars, they didn’t bother him as much as they used to though he still was wary about letting others see them.

Today had been a very humid sort of day and wearing pants to do his gathering had seemed like one of the most foolish ideas he could have had, so shorts had been donned with only a brief glance down his legs before he’d made his way outside. They were part of him, part of his history, and part of his life. He couldn’t go back in time and change things and somehow, he was sure, if things had not happened the way they had, he didn’t think he would have been here now, with Anton, with the doctors who had shown him patience, with this new life in the jungle and away, for the most part, from his past. So changing that very past didn’t seem like such a good idea anyway.

He just wouldn’t talk about it.