Lapinet

There was nothing before there was Lapinet. Nothing that they've ever deciphered, nothing they've found. Perhaps they blipped into existence entirely untethered from any doppelganger or past ties - or perhaps they simply unraptured themselves a little too late. Arkrust is not a sentimental place; if there were traces of a life before Lapinet, they had been long since ransacked and repurposed in those strange six years since the decimation of the human race.

No – there was only nothing, and then - as quickly as if they'd only blinked their way into the world - there was Lapinet. They were, before they were aware of being anything at all, a pair of spindly white-gloved hands scrabbling at the underside of a barracks-mattress within the Battle Tower. Eventually, their hands had found the edges of the mattress, spindle-stick fingers appearing over the horizon of the bed. The blue-skinned man occupying the bed above them had screamed like a sacrificial goat, stumbled out of bed (mismatched socks and pink-purple leg hair, from Lapinet's line of sight) and evacuated the room long before the little thing had realised there were no words they could say to soothe the poor man.

Their mouth, as the leaders of this strange Vanguard would come to find out quickly, was mask. The skin of their face was also mask, unwilling to budge even for the most persistent of fingernails. Lapinet couldn't – still cannot – speak, as they have no voicebox to vocalise, no tongue to touch their non-existent teeth with, and no lips to spread the sounds smoothly. In the moment they had their mimes, their mimicry - but it proved to express much when quite what to say remains a blank. They were, after all, nothing until a few minutes earlier.

After some continued reluctance, the dog-queen of Arkrust agreed not to evict them if they really so desired to stay within the walls of the Vanguard, so long as they were willing to work for their worth. And, though they could not verbalise quite why, they felt right remaining. It soothed a little of the discomfort in them, a feeling not of something being right but at least being less wrong. They worked with a feathered mechanic within the Vanguard to create a text-to-speech device that somehow warped itself in their fingers– within a week, it was no longer computing text but instead interpreting and narrating their mimes, slowly growing a life of its own. It has never made sense, but neither has Lapinet.

Searching for a calling, trying to find a part of them to settle comfortably and to prove said usefulness, they became an Apprentice – odd jobs held aloft in their animated fingers. They are comfortable here and now – they have not found meaning just yet, but they have found reliability and comfort, and sometimes that is worth just as much.

(…. There was something before there was Lapinet. Someone, surely. Their steady hands, their instincts with a scalpel and a dressmakers' scissors, were not crafted wholecloth from the air - they had to be someone's hands, once. They think they can feel a real mouth behind the mask that is their face, though they're unsure what a working mouth is supposed to feel like. Sometimes they feel such an emptiness at their centre of balance. A great buzzing at their cheeks like a scream that can't escape its confines. They have looked inside themselves and called out for company, and the only sign of life was the echo.

But all of this chafes against their closed-mouth smile. It is not Lapinet to dwell on the past and on the rot inside their gut. There is no way to explain through mime and peppy narrative the existential dread that courses through their too-long veins. They are lost, but cannot remember the direction they came from – and the only option now is to keep going onwards, forever.)