Alasla: The New Age

Chapter Thirty-Five - Pasts

She had been told that she was an orphan. She didn't belong anywhere. Her whole life's purpose was to serve and obey.

She didn't know how long her 'whole life' was. She was six, and she was always six. She lived as a six-year-old for three centuries. But back then, she watched her friends and fellow slaves die one by one. She's met a lot of people, but none of them stayed with her till the end. They all left before her.

Gradually, she stopped believing in the lies and promises of those 'forever's. No one can do that. She finds herself in a world of black and white. Nothing is important, because she knows they'll be gone eventually. Tsana and her friends weren't the kindest rulers out there, both her mind and body were always covered in scars, stained by new ones every day.

Days seemed dark, she never knew what to do. She lost her mind and gave it to the world.

Until she met Whales.

One day, when she was putting out the cloth, a servant came and told her that a person named Mr Balleine called for her.

She followed her throughout the stronghold of Madame Tsana's, then entered a lab, surprisingly.

The servant left her there and walked away. The lab was covered in tables and shelves, which were filled with smart-looking bottles, tubes and stacks of documents.

Kanitha closed in on one of the tables and stared as a tube sent little balls of black liquid zipping up from a large bottle. Then she stared at two white mice, who were actually cleaning the table and setting the bottles around. She poked one of them gently, but they ignored her and continued what they were doing.

Suddenly, a voice came behind her that made her jump. "Helpful, aren't they?"

Kanitha was so shocked that her elbow knocked over a bottle, it smashed to the floor and the solution inside came sizzling out.

"Oh! I'm sorry, I clean it up—"

But before she even figured out where the cloth was, the two rats scuttered down and cleaned up the mess in an instant, then replaced the bottle with a new one.

"Um..." Kanitha staggered, not knowing what to do for a second.

She turned around to look at the man. His hair was surprisingly a dark, greyish colour quite like a whale's. He also had a sprout-like hairstyle at the back of his head, sticking up. He wore a long, dark brown leather jacket with grey dots at the bottom, and he held a large whisky bottle in his hand. He wore a pair of rectangular glasses and behind them, his grey eyes were sliding in and out of focus as he raised the bottle again to drink again.

"Who are you?" He hiccupped, raising a brow and benign down to regard her. "A pink cat?"

"No- no, Sir," Kanitha replied, not sure what he meant by 'pink cat'. "I was summoned by a person named Mr Ba—"

"That's me," the man laughed and grinned, walking with his knees bent, his long jacket wavering behind him. "I-hic- need an assistant. You- hic- can take a rest now. Start tomorrow."

Before Kanitha asked him what she should do tomorrow, he swung the bottle around and flopped onto a sofa. He took one last swig that emptied the entire thing, wavered a little, and then his head sank onto the sofa's cushion.

Kanitha blinked, then shrugged to herself and decided to just clean the lab's floor.

That was her first encounter with the person who completely changed her.

In the next few days, she slowly began to feel something about Mr Balleine that was different from others.

He never judged or randomly flirted with women of Madame Tsana's stronghold like a lot of men here did. He liked strange things, candles that were shaped like fingers, his unique hairstyle and soap that smelled like the earth after rain.