Xi (Meld/Aura)

When Aura had asked Meld to forge her a sword, Meld couldn't help but jump at the opportunity. She was known most for her violence and death but in those rare quiet moments in her life, she was an artist. How could she not be given that she forged all of her titanium flesh melds herself, designing them from the ground up? The sword was only the second conventional weapon she would ever create, the first having been her metal gauntlet created only a few weeks ago in order to protect the blue veined mutant hand she had acquired after the slaughter of the human isolationist cult. It would be a good opportunity to further hone her metal working skills and to design something brilliant for a good friend.

Meld had made an arrangement with a local forge owner and all around shady individual, Mikah, shortly after her entrance to the city when forging her metal arm. The arrangement was basically that the forge remain open to her use during after hours and in exchange she gave him a wad of money for its use. She got her very own forge out of the deal and he got money and the promise that she wouldn't torture himself or his family, nor would she report to the authorities some of his less than legal doings. It was a good arrangement for both parties involved and thus far she had no cause to complain.

As per usual it was night when Meld arrived, taking a taxi most of the way to her destination and offering the cab driver a generous tip. It was good to have money and after her trip to Romania, she had quite a bit saved up and when she had the money she was always generous with it if for no other reason than people were less inclined to talk if they had a pocket full of money. The remainder of the distance she walked on foot, her natural paranoia (which had a tendency to keep her alive in certain circumstances) preventing her from allowing the cab driver to actually see her destination. It was better for all parties involved that it remain secret, even if in this instance she wasn't actually doing anything illegal.

Once arrived Meld began setting up her work area, making sure the anvil was properly heated and taking stalk of her materials. Shortly after having set up she heard Aura arrive. "I'm in here," she yelled back. It should be an interesting night.

Meld nodded her greeting of Aura as she wandered around getting ready for the final preparations. This was a project that she was uniquely looking forward to, not only because it was something a little out of the ordinary for her to create and she so rarely had an opportunity to indulge her creative side, but also because Aura was the only person she would consider to be a good friend. The two of them were comrades in arms, having completed a number of missions together and they had a very similar view of the world and mutants place within that world. The other woman didn't seem years younger than Meld even though she technically was, perhaps owing to her unusual childhood.

Meld looked at the money that Aura offered her and shook her head with an indulgent grin. Perhaps the next time the two of them got together for a purpose other than eliminating a human threat she would have to teach her the correct value of money. Instead she removed some of the bills, around $1000 worth and returned the rest to her friend. "That should cover expenses. You really shouldn't walk around with that much money on you. I know you can take care of yourself, but the type of attention you could attract due to that money may not be the type of attention you want to attract." Meld, of course, couldn't help but attract attention no matter where she went, but that didn't mean that Aura had to.

Meld gestured for Aura to follow her over to a table where she had the blueprint drawn up for the sword she was about to create. It was a Japanese katana, relatively simple and practical with a little ornamentation on the hilt of the blade. As much as she would have liked to make something a little more fancy, the sword was meant for killing and defense, not for looking pretty so she did what she could with that in mind.

"SO what are you up to these days? Besides hunting down baby killers"

Meld smiled, remembering the justice they had meted out with the help of Cafas. That was what she lived for. "I've been trying to get this new hand to work properly," Meld answered. "I think I'm finally starting to understand how its powers work. We should really take it on a test drive sometime, don't you think? That and I just finished creating a rather nice little gauntlet to cover it in a fight since I've lost the defense of my previous metal hand." That fact didn't hurt as much as it originally had, now that she was beginning to understand the uses of a hand that could turn on and off electronics. She gestured towards a bladed metal gauntlet sitting on the table near the blueprint. It wasn't quite as good as a proper metal hand, but it was deadly nevertheless.

"Yes, it does seem more then most people i have seen carry, but i was unsure how much it would cost and i don't normally use it anyway, i prefer the picture cards they carry"

Meld assumed that Aura was talking about credit cards, some of which had pictures of the card holder on them, but then again with Aura one could never be entirely certain. As much as Meld liked and respected the other woman, she was a little bit strange sometimes. She had never asked the details of her past, but had gotten the impression that it had been unusual to say the least and knew it involved a great deal of fighting and death in the forest.

"Wound the quarters have been better, i got them from the same bank"

Meld barely managed to restrain a snort of laughter but didn't even bother to hide her grin of amusement. "The bills were definitely the right choice. Quarters aren't worth very much." She paused, trying to think of an example that her younger friend would be able to understand. "With a handful of quarters you might be able to buy yourself a small meal. With a handful of $1 bills, you might be able to buy yourself a whole day's worth of food. Larger bills go up from there." She wasn't sure if she had gotten her point across or not, never having had to explain money values before, but at least she had tried. Besides, it wasn't as if Aura hadn't been taking care of herself perfectly fine until now.

As Aura continued speaking, Meld began heating the forge in preparation for actually creating her bladed work of art. Coals were put into the furnace and the anvil and tools used in the forging process were double checked. The heat was likely to make most people uncomfortable, but when one didn't have any sense of touch one wasn't able to feel heat either. She wasn't sure that it made up for the lack of being able to feel things, but it certainly helped.

"I have been playing to go back to canada some time, the false memories i have been experinceiing are getting worse, and fighting all the time is no longer preventing them from blinding my eyes to the real world. I can't help but think the answers i seek are located in the ruins Miracles fortress....if it even existed or did not dissopear since it was unnaturally made of trees and the like. I just wish i could recall clearly and understand why their are so many holes before it"

"Funny you should mention Canada," Meld answered. "I've recently come into the knowledge that my sister, who I thought was dead, is actually alive and being held in an insane asylum." It was a difficult thing for Meld to talk about and she struggled to keep the emotion out of her voice. The death of her sister was something she blamed herself for, even though it hadn't been her hand that had struck the fatal blow, she was the one that was supposed to have been able to protect her. To find out that she was still alive was a shock to say that least. "If you need a hand up in Canada, I'd be happy to come with you. I know I could use the support when I go to see my sister." It was a hard thing to admit, that she wasn't as emotionally untouchable as she liked others to believe.

Meld was a little disappointed to see the state of the old blade that her friend had brought to show her, though she didn't let the disappointment show. Blades were artful implements of death and should be treated as treasured instruments, cared for just as anything of value should be cared for. "When I've finished with your sword you will need to care for it, treat it as something of value. If you treat it right, this blade will be with you for years, perhaps until we see the mutant utopia we're both working so hard to achieve. Treat it as you would a treasured companion and it will never let you down." A sword may not be a flesh meld, but it was still something beautiful, valuable and deadly.

"Hmm with any luck it is not the same people whom i fought with miracle and the others. For her sake anyway, part of me wishes it is, so i can have vengeance. I will gladly aide you in freeing your sister and lending whatever aide i can to ensure her safety, whoever may hold her. No Mutant should ever be held by Humans"

"Thank you," Meld said simply. Nothing else really needed to be said. Aura was a good friend to offer to help, even though she didn't technically know whether or not her sister was a mutant. She had heard somewhere that it ran in families and knowing her parents, it woudln't surprise her one bit to find out that they had stashed their daughter away in some institute the moment they discovered she was more than human. It probably would have been Meld's fate, had she stuck around to find out. As she conversed, she began hammering out the crude piece of metal that would soon become the elegant katana. It would be something perfectly suited to her, a unique weapon to be sure. Slowly a shape began to form from the chunk of metal.

"I don't like guns much," Meld stated with a shudder, in reply to Aura's story. "But you know I'll help in whatever way I can. Humans of that nature deserve to die and all the better if their deaths can bring you some measure of peace. The question is, how would we go about finding them? My sister was easy to find because there were records of her existence, but a human cult?" She wondered if her underworld connections might have some insight in a group like the one Aura had described and made a mental note to ask them. It was the least she could do, really.

Meld listened, fascinated, as Aura spoke about her past. It was the most she had ever heard about her friend's life history before and it explained a lot about her. She couldn't imagine what it must have been like to have such a life at such a young age. Meld's own childhood had been relatively normal except, perhaps, that she was more driven and serious than other children of her age group. It hadn't taken a turn for the worst until after she had finished high school and was forced to deviate from normalcy due to her mutation and her own will to survive. If she had been a different person she would have offered some words of sympathy and perhaps a conciliatory hug, but she wasn't that sort of person. Relatively normal childhood or not, years of living a life of crime and violence had stripped away any vestiges of kindness and sympathy she once had. As it was, her sympathy lay in the acts she did for her friend and in the sword she was making her.

"You need to learn more about your past?" The hammer continued to fall upon the molten piece of metal and every so often Meld put the half-formed sword back into the furnace to heat the metal to red hot once again so that it could be further shaped. It was good that Aura didn't seem to be significantly affected by the heat of the place.

"Sometimes I wish I could forget my past." Aura had opened up to her so it seemed right that Meld should open up in turn. "The hatred my parents expressed against mutants on a daily basis was enough to make you sick. The worst thing is, had I not discovered I was a mutant I might have turned out just like them; fearful and bigoted in my prejudice." It was something she had never admitted to another living being before. "Sometimes I regret that I even allowed them to live. Sometimes I think that I should have killed them. Maybe I still will one day, especially if I discover they locked my sister up because she was a mutant. Surely that's justification enough to end someone's life?"

Meld wondered if the act of killing family, no matter how justified, would be the final act in her downhill decline? How could one not be a monster if they killed their own parents, no matter the reason? That had been the single most important reason she hadn't killed them the last time she had seen them and instead chose merely to leave on her own terms.

Aura certainly knew how to make Meld feel better. She had such a unique and refreshing perspective on the world. While some might not be able to appreciate it, Meld could. She knew a little something of how her friend had been raised now, understood a little more about why some things were beyond her, such as the concept of currency. But even with such minor handicaps her perspective on the world was amazingly different than anyone else she had ever met. She had been raised, as far as Meld could tell, in large part away from society at large and that caused her to be so very different from those around her. No one could see things quite the way that Aura did and she was fairly certain that few others besides herself could really appreciate that. Few others could see beyond the tendency for violence.

"When I was human I think my parents loved me," Meld said thoughtfully. "They treated me like an important daughter, kept me fed and clothed and indulged my passion for martial arts. But when I became a mutant I died in their eyes. Or maybe it was a fate worse than death for them, I became some sort of horrible leper never to even be acknowledged as their daughter. But if they aren't my parents anymore than who are? There's no one except you and Abyss that care if I live or die anymore." Except maybe Pluto but that was still too new and too confusing to be sure. "You two and our mutual cause are what keep me going."

The sword was actually beginning to look like a sword. The blade was beginning to take on the shape that a blade should be. While still rough around the edges and while it would still serve more as a blunt weapon than a clean cutting one, its final form was beginning to show through. By this point there was a distinct difference between the hilt of the weapon and the blade itself.

"You have a way with words," Meld told Aura with a fond smile. She wiped a trickle of blood off of her brow and continued her work. Just because she couldn't actually feel the heat of the forge, didn't mean that her body wasn't aware of it. She still sweated just like a normal person and the sweat could still seep down into her eyes and cause problems that way. She just couldn't feel the sensation of the heat that caused the body's involuntarily reaction to sweat.

"I've been alone for what feels like half my life. I know its only really been a few years, but it feels like longer. The moment I discovered I was a mutant everything changed, and I do mean everything. My entire life was gone in that one instant and I had to learn to survive completely on my own. I got involved in some pretty shady dealings back then." Shady dealings that had helped shape her into who she was today. Her survival instinct had kicked in and she had done what was necessary to survive and although she lived a couple of years in desperation and near poverty, in the end she had even managed to prosper. "Its good to feel like I have someone I can turn to, someone I can consider to be my family."

Meld lapsed into silence briefly as she worked on a particularly delicate part of the sword, before resuming her speech. "Congratulations on the adoption." They were words she truly meant. "I've been drawing and sculpting since I was a kid. That and my martial arts were my two driving passions at the time. Metal work came later and I didn't truly come into it in a big way until I started making flesh melds. Then I just kind of learned as I went along, trial and error. I'm thinking of creating a ranged flesh meld next to compensate for my lack of ranged weaponry. I think I've got some ideas, at least for close range. What do you think?" She was the one person who would really understand tactical based questions.