Chapter Text
Arila just wanted to get away. Earth’s air was dirty and clotted up her lungs more than it provided life. Her two legal owners/caretakers were too old to have children, instead just adopting her only because her skin had some higher melanin content. To try and appease a good chunk of the populus to calm the fuck down by acting inclusive.
Yeah, this little showmonkey will inherit our fortune, a dark skinned person is in the noble class, just believe you could get there too if you just worked hard enough! No. No, it was bullshit. But she did get their money when the two grew fragile with age and varying degrees of dementia. Still won’t warant any tears from my side. But legal heir is legal heir.
The workers were okay when she was smaller, she supposed. Not often kind, but never crossing over into cruel. They weren’t all that bad. And when some random, but lucky, political campaign send some actual funds into the system, it was actually pretty good.
Maybe the new, enthusiastic caretakers just hadn’t lost their beginner’s spark yet, paid well enough to not risk the streets becoming their only place to go after work. Good for them, better for her. She and the others were never starved, per se, but now the food actually deserved the label, having actual substance and taste. But it was too late, her already being a young teen. She remained small, in height, and her curves later on barely existed.
And, as any teenager, she’d been insecure, and then there were the complicated feelings about her body that went past wah, life didn’t see fit to give me a little more curvature to deal with. That paled to the prospect of aging out of the compound when she turned eighteen though, perhaps ending on a busy street as an inconvenient blockage on the sidewalk. Politics still hadn’t put much thought into what’d happen to those children if no well-off enough adult turned them into their cute-enough pity project.
Because of her homeplanet’s decrepit state, she didn’t have to worry about that, in the end. My excuses for caretakers’ attempt at making the dirty workers chill at my presence in the upper class failed, but sending me back could’ve been another spark to the shaking powder kegs that were the moods of the lower classes and provoked another banding together of armed rebels. Not a big one, most likely just an inconvenience. But people that high on their distance from the poverty line most likely viewed that as others would another day without food. An occasion treated like a potential deathsentence. Oh no, I have to replace a cook who died in a little skirmish in a grocery store, how horrible!
When her supposed parents deterioated, she got money. A lot. And with her future an okay enough picture on earth, meaning not being buried in debts, no hunger, a roof over her head and so on, more difficult to deal with worries crept back in.
As to not go through every aspect of her pitiful life on a planet not really that blue anymore as she does every time before bed… She studied a little math, a lot of language…
And resolved to opt out of human racism by going blue, more radiant than her birthplace would ever be again. She could choose how the next body looked and worked, and she’d make the absolute best of it.