project vessel (twenty one pilots)

eight - keeper's second

Her hands were slight, freckled, and pale. No exposure to the sun, the clan would tease, could change the moonlight colored skin that hugged her lean, bony frame. She cupped them in the river water, splashing the liquid to her face.

"Second!" A voice called from the distance. She turned, large eyes wide and alert.

"Ooh?" She quietly responded, her pale fingers wrapping quickly around the metal of her staff.

"Keeper summons." The scout approached. His bronze skin was darkened with swirl of red around his eye, illuminating the hazel and gold flecks of his irises like the light of a dying star. Black streaked across his cheek, marking him as one of the Keeper's trusted scouts. But the red and black only proved that he was just a scout; the red was flawed because it showed inferiority in a tightly knit clan of rule and order. A clan where the past hundreds of years, ancient laws of nature and morality guided a lonely people into an evolution that couldn't simply be observed with the eyes.

The simplicity to the paint pointed to another conclusion; she was much different. The Second followed him away from the river, taking his hand as he guided her through the rough, tawny grass that tangled due to their unnaturally extreme length. She could feel them tickling at the slivers of skin exposed at her knees. Now, she was slight of frame, muscular of body, but she knew grass wasn't supposed to be this high (usually). They walked a short distance until she could see the jutting shapes of tents and the scrambler pillars. The story behind those pillars was one she'd been taught vigorously as a child ("All Seconds must know their story, child. They must know the story of their Clan, the Clan that lived before it, and must know how they become Keeper."), and as she walked past the gray blocks, she crouched.

The pillars weren't quite pillars. They were rounded, about shoulder length for her (perhaps four feet, eleven inches?) Their insides glowed with flickering blue lights, circuits pumping a similar cyan liquid throughout vein-like wires. If the Second closed her eyes and rested her fingertips on the surface, she could remember what happened generations long ago, just like the Keeper taught her.

The Firsts dragged themselves from the City many, many generations ago. They were bleeding, hungry. Dying, as all refugees seem to do. They found the river and stumbled into its waters. Whatever had happened to them within those city limits had changed them. As the water rushed over their wounds, the skin regenerated, and they were clean. They had no other option but to stay there, to live off the land, to continue running from the hounds of the City that had cursed them.

The Firsts were not human, simply. They were the products of human people, were altered by human, but they most certainly were not human themselves. They lingered near the expanding borders of the City just to observe the humans. Over time, more people joined them just to hear the enchanting stories of what they were capable of. Love and human nature took its course. The Second generation was born. The human and human machine clashed in the offspring; it created a product that was not quite one, not quite the other. Humans with the abilities of the First, but weaker. Those who wandered away from the City were lured back into this growing cluster of people, and soon, the Third was born. The Fourth. By then, it became clear.

The middle between humanity and the slaves of the City had been created.

But what City would not notice people vanishing from their homes? Missing experiments? A poor City. This City was not dull. This City was full of hounds and monsters. Intelligent ones, too. They began to search beyond their borders to find their prey. The people could not have that, and thus, a plan was born; the son of a son of a son of the Firsts emerged as the hero to the day. He would go to the City and steal an important piece of technology and free as many of the slaves as he could. On the perilous journey, he brought his daughter. She was a quick, smart thing, and could fight better than two adult men combined.

The technology he stole and returned to the outside were the pillars that kept the City from ever finding them. With him, he brought a new pool of blood, a new pool of genes to freshen the diluted blood of the Firsts. He became the first Keeper; Keeper Jarl. His daughter, Mara, became the very first Second. He taught her the ways of the Firsts by coming to the River where they had cleaned their fatal wounds. He crouched in the long grasses, trailing his calloused fingertips over the vegetation. It grew under his touch. Then, the Keeper reached into the river and dragged his fingers across the river bed and brought it to his face. When she asked him what he was doing, he pointed to the South.

"There," he said. "lie the monsters who created and tormented the grandfathers of our grandfathers."

"Why do you paint your face for the monsters in the City, Papa?"

"Because I do not want to look like them."

The Second drew her fingertips away. Her eyes flickered around the camp, studying the swirl of paint over their faces. Most had permanent designs, the younger ones with temporary paints that their mothers would scrub off their cheeks at the end of the day and redraw in the mornings. The Second was never painted temporarily. She felt the pain of the needles at birth, and would feel it the day again the day the Keeper died and she became Keeper. As she walked (her gait was graceful and agile, she floated), a few dozen heads bowed to her. She dismissed them, head held high as she entered the tent marked with her family's symbol; the half flower. It was painted over her left eye and she saw it in her reflection daily.

"Papa?" She asked. "You summoned?" Her voice was gentle, timid, and lilted a little. It reminded many of birdsong. He turned around, old shoulders stiff but his posture reminisced to better days.

"I'm afraid, Raya, your future is going to change dramatically, my dear. And very, very soon." His voice was low, defeated.

There, those pale knuckles whitened as she gripped her staff. "I know, Papa."

a/n in which mo kills herself because this sucks and she didn't know how to quite do this fuckign trash