Saraphine is the picture to the right :)
All feedback is welcome.
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As Saraphine sat in front of the vanity in her dimly lit room she couldn't help but feel a certain amount of disdain for its blandness.The dirty dishwater grey walls washed out her olive tone and made her appear as if she had been claimed dead a few days previously in the least. The pro-king, pro-government posters that clung to her walls were the only thing in that room that would suggest that it had not been abandoned long ago. These posters are ones you would find in any citizen's room. They were mandatory. "The King is Your Life" one of them read. This must be true she thought considering she didn't have much of her own life. Then again this can't be true. The king must have a much more exciting exsistence than my own she considered.
Saraphine examined herself as she applied the eyeliner to her deep brown eyes. She liked the way she looked, even though she knew no one else did. Her hair was long and a deep red. Granted it was dyed, but everyones was. Saraphine had received her first coloration at the age of three months. King Jabul had been on throne since the year before her birth and he had red hair. So as was custom, all the citizens dyed their hair red. Her mother had said it was a sandy blonde prior to that, but she didn't really knew what that meant. She had never seen any other color of hair but red. She often wondered if she would look less awkward in her natural color. Such thoughts were forbidden once spoken or acted upon though.
"Saraphine! You're going to be late for school and you haven't even eaten your breakfast. Get down here!" she heard her mother call from downstairs. Saraphine hurridley grabbed her bag and applied her gills before galloping down the stairs. She definitely prefered the gills to the gas masks of her childhood. It was required that you wear gills, a stick on microchip that purified the air before it reached your lungs, before you went outside. All she had to do was apply them to her neck and viola, breathable air. She remembered well how clunky and impracticle the gas masks had been. When she was five she had had quite the scare. Her gas mask had gotten punctured on a shard of metal after falling on her way to school. Saraphine couldn't exactly remember how she had made it to the hospital that day. The last thing she could recall was a hazy figure standing over her and scooping her up. "I swear you'll be late to your own funeral." her mother sighed handing her a morning feed pouch and placing a glass of pop on the table in front of Saraphine.
"Sorry mom. I got a little distracted trying to find something to wear." Saraphine replied taking a sip. Her mother looked her over. Saraphine was suddenly very self conscious of the way the fabric draped over her. She had tried so hard for years to be like her mother, whose garments clung tightly to her.
"Well maybe it wouldn't be so hard to find clothes if you tried a little harder to put on some weight," her mother said worriedly looking down at the mostly untouched pouch in Saraphine's hand. " I mean I was a bit on the thinner side at your age as well, but one hundred and thrity-five pounds! That's unheard of." Saraphine's mother had been determined to enter her in pagents since she found out that she was having a girl. However Saraphine had always been too thin to even bother entering her. Saraphine felt like a dissapointment to her parents. She felt especially bad that they were stuck with only her considering every family was required to be sterilized aftrer having their one child. She gulped down the rest of her pouch in an attempt to please her mother, which failed miserably when she refused a second glass of pop. Her mother always meant well but came off a bit harsh. Saraphine loved her regardless.
As Saraphine stepped outside she was once again grateful that her parents had been assigned a bungalow by the north wall. It was by far the coolest section of Exopolis. It was a cool eighty-five degrees in mid-December. Most of the other kids didn't walk to school. Their parents insisted they take bus in order to avoid vagrants. Not that took much convincing. Most citizens did whatever they could to avoid physical activity. It took Saraphine a great amount of begging to be able to walk everday. She rarely ever even saw a vagrant, and when she did they were too busy scurrying back into the sewers to bother her any. Saraphine secretly wished one of them would approach her. They were the only ones that looked like her. She used to care much more that she wasn't plump like the people on tv, and everyone else she knew. Saraphine used to eat until she couldn't help but to throw up. She did it in hopes that she might be able to get her thighs to touch when she stood, to no avail. She had long since given up on this and accepted that she was doomed to be a twig until the day she died. Now all she could do was hope that her life wouldn't be too horribly long. Unfortunately for her, her family tended to live up to twenty years over the average age of death, which was forty-five.
The sky was a bit of a darker gray than normal, but that was to be expected. Since it was winter no one walked anywhere. Not that they genrally did, but everyone was exponetionally more lethargic in the winter time. Saraphine wondered to herself if the sky had always been the digny gray color that matched so well with the sidewalk beneath her feet. She knew it was gray and hot due to the pollution and that the pollution was due to the cars. But what about before there were cars or were cars always there? She longed to know what the color pallet of the land had been before it was washed in this suffocating grey. She wished she knew someone who could answer these questions for her but it was unheard of to ask such things.
