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“That should do it. Cole, can you give me a hand with these?”
With a grunt of effort, Zane lifted the tree branches before him into his arms, feeling the spiny twigs sticking through his clothes and poking his skin. It was his idea to use the nearby crabapple trees to camouflage their vehicles, purely because of the spines on the branches. If anyone wanted to sabotage their vehicles, they’d have to get through layers of spikes first. A brilliant plan in all modesty, and one that he was quickly beginning to regret suggesting at all.
Turning around, he shifted the branches in his arms, wincing as a particularly sharp spine carved a gash in his palm. He held up his wounded hand, examined the injury, the silver sheen of metal under his skin glinting in the dappled sunlight. The cut was clean, bloodless; that had run out months ago, he hadn’t bothered to refill it. Being a ninja meant frequent injuries, and that meant frequent bleeding, which took far too much time to replace for how quickly it ran out. In the end he’d decided it wasn’t worth the effort, but every single time something like this happened he wished he hadn’t been so blase about it.
It was always… confronting. To see what laid underneath his skin. To have to think about it at all.
Nearly two years had passed since he’d found his old home, found his true potential, found what he had forgotten, and thereby found himself. By now he had mostly accepted it, but two years was merely a fraction of his life compared to how long he’d spent thinking he was human. Why would he think any differently?
‘You were built to protect those who cannot protect themselves.’
He knew that. He could never forget. His father’s voice would echo those simple words in his skull anytime he came close to forgetting. His father, who had given so much to him, the amount of which he could never repay. Especially not now. That aching pain of grief in his chest served only to remind him of what he had lost. The second time was no easier than the first.
He looked back to his hand. The cut skin would knit itself back together in time, then he wouldn’t have to think about it, or see himself for what he truly was. The less he had to ponder that, the better.
His head snapped up upon hearing a loud cracking and tearing noise from behind.
“I meant the branches, Cole, not the whole tree!”
He turned, finding Cole carrying what was most certainly an entire tree over his shoulder, with Jay standing off to the side, doing what Zane considered to be a rather poor job at hiding how impressed he was.
Cole came to stand next to Zane, with Jay quickly following behind.
“Sorry man, I need this one for mine,” Cole said. “In case you hadn’t noticed, my mech is about five times the height of your raider–”
“483.22% bigger, to be exact,” Zane interjected, ducking as Cole turned back to face Jay, the tree slung over his friend’s shoulders coming dangerously close to clipping his head.
“See? Zane’s on my side.”
“I think he was correcting you.”
“I was?”
“I don’t care how big your stupid mech is,” Jay shouted. “Why did you take the exact tree I was getting branches from?!”
“Since when did you own this tree?! I didn’t see ‘motor mouth’ written on it.”
“That joke was only funny the first time!”
Zane found he was no longer listening. Readjusting his grasp on the branches, he turned and made his way back to the vehicles, carefully arranging the spiny branches around his hovercopter, trying his best to make them look as natural as possible.
Once finished, he stood, seeing Kai emerge from the trees, followed by Nya, Kai haphazardly tossing branches over his jet and Nya immediately correcting their positioning. Cole and Jay then reappeared, followed by Lloyd.
“This is a perfect place to lay low,” Lloyd announced. “No robots–”
Zane noticed Kai was side-eyeing him, through the fire ninja quickly looked away upon making eye contact.
“–no cameras, no problems.”
“Still,” Nya began. “In case any aerial drones pass overhead, you’d better wear this.”
She tossed a neatly folded bundle of bright green fabric to Lloyd, who deftly took it from the air and immediately undid the meticulous folding, revealing it to be a new uniform, not dissimilar to the ones gifted to the ninja by Cyrus Borg. It seemed that Nya had managed to reverse engineer the cloaking technology after all.
Cyrus Borg. That name led Zane back down a mental pathway he had been trying not to follow for hours. Nya had recounted to them all what had happened on the factory floor, and it wasn’t that Zane didn’t believe her, but more so that he didn’t want to believe her. He had always been a realist. Pragmatic, oftentimes to his own detriment, but for the first time he could recall he found himself hoping that maybe Nya had misremembered, possibly even exaggerated what had occurred.
His one and only conversation with Pixal had lasted less than three minutes. That wasn’t nearly enough time to make any substantial judgements about her character, he knew that, and yet he still found himself thinking that there must be more to her than the hollow, emotionless shell that had attacked Nya and their students on the factory floor. Whatever had turned all the security droids and mechs against them must have extended to her. But for that to happen–
“Lloyd!”
“Mom?”
Zane’s vision snapped back into focus as another figure emerged from the trees. Short statured, long silver-grey hair in a braid swept over her shoulder. Misako, Lloyd’s mother. She ran up, throwing her arms around her son and pulling him into a hug, one which he quickly returned.
Zane was never quite sure how to feel about Misako. She’d abandoned her only child at a very young age — her son whom they’d all come to view as a brother — for a reason that Zane personally didn’t think was very good. According to his database, disappearing for five years for the sake of research didn’t exactly fit the definition of good parenting. He would never say any of that out loud though. That research had done a great deal of good in the end, and she was here for Lloyd now, as was Garmadon, and that was far more than Zane could say for himself.
His chest ached.
He missed his father.
“What are you all doing here?” Misako asked.
“The Overlord’s back,” Lloyd answered. “And New Ninjago City has fallen under his control.”
He paused, grimaced, averted his gaze. “He has Master Wu.”
Misako laid a hand on Lloyd’s shoulder, smiling warmly at her son. “Wu’s tough. There’s a reason he’s lived as long as he has.”
“Well, where’s dad?”
Kai stepped up to stand on Zane’s left.
“Yeah, where is Lord Garmadon?” He spat.
“He no longer goes by lord,” Misako didn’t skip a beat; it seemed that she’d had to give this explanation many times already. “Here, he is Master Garmadon. And he won’t be back until this evening’s lesson.”
“Uh… did you just say Master Garmadon?” Jay asked.
“I am glad he’s on our side now,” Zane admitted. “With Master Wu gone, we could use the help.”
That being said, Zane still wasn’t sure how to feel about Garmadon either. Lloyd’s golden power had supposedly cleansed Garmadon entirely of evil during his last battle with the Overlord, but after having spent more than three years believing Garmadon to be this all-encompassing figurehead of everything wrong with the world, Zane was having trouble reconciling that with the version of Garmadon in existence now. And he knew it wasn’t just him struggling with this. Lloyd had adapted the best of them all, but even he still seemed to have his reservations.
“You’re welcome to join us, but your weapons are not allowed,” Misako said, turning to guide the group towards the monastery. “Ever since Lloyd saved his father, Garmadon’s sworn an oath to never fight again in hopes of making up for his evil past. It’s an oath he takes very seriously.”
Kai stopped, taking the technoblade off his back and examining it, its golden metal frame glinting in the late afternoon light. Zane glanced at his hand again, clenched his fist.
“But we were supposed to protect these with our lives,” Kai argued. “Never let them out of our sight and all that.”
Zane paused, thought for a moment. If any of them were to keep guard, he would be the most optimal choice. Being a nindroid, he wouldn’t get tired, no matter how long the lesson took.
“You all go on ahead,” he said. “I will stay back and watch over them.”
A chorus of gratitude rose from his teammates as the three other technoblades were piled into his arms. He took a seat under a nearby tree, watched his friends turn and walk away momentarily, when a thought struck him. An idea that had been building in his head all day, but he was only now able to find the words to express. And thus, against his better judgement, he found himself calling out;
“Cole, could you stay back a moment?”
The earth ninja turned, looked at Zane with an eyebrow raised. Glanced back at the group, nodded, then made his way over to Zane, reclining on the grass next to him.
“What’s up man? Thought you might get lonely?”
“May I confide something in you?”
All humor suddenly drained from Cole’s face. He fell silent, tilted his head in thought. “I’m guessing it’s about that droid girl, right?”
Zane blinked at him once, twice. “How did you know?”
“You’ve been super distracted ever since you laid eyes on her. I mean, you’re normally off in your own world anyway, but at least you usually respond. We’ve tried to talk to you a bunch of times and it’s like we weren’t even there.”
Cole crossed his arms behind his head and leaned back against the trunk of the tree, smirked at his friend.
“So, what? You gonna tell me what about her’s got you so tied up in knots?”
Zane smiled softly. This was why he had asked Cole out of everyone else.
He opened his mouth to speak, then closed it again. He’d been so focused on trying not to think about Pixal turning on them that he hadn’t actually thought about what made her stand out so much to him in the first place. She was pretty, of course; a droid like him, her manner of speaking kind, elegant, enthralling. But none of that was the right answer. What stood out to him most was,
“Her name.”
It was now Cole’s turn to look confused. “Her– her name? Ooooooookay, what about it? It stands for something, right?”
“Primary Interactive X-ternal Assistant Life-form,” Zane said. “She asked me if my name stood for anything and… I couldn’t tell her.”
“It doesn’t though, does it?”
Zane shook his head. “Not that I am aware of. But that gave me a thought.”
He lifted his hand, inspecting the gash from the tree branches. Silently, he took his other hand, pressed his fingertips to the cold metal in his palm. His skin had heating nanotechnology, intended to give the illusion of his body having warmth, but nothing could change the harsh chill of steel laying just beneath the surface. The illusion of humanity, an illusion so easily broken. He grimaced, his nails involuntarily clawing at the edges of the wound, sending small sparks of pain up his arm. Humanity; such a fragile thing, and he couldn’t help feeling that as time went on he was starting to lose his grasp on it.
He glanced back at Cole, and found his friend averting his eyes, looking slightly green. Zane cleared his throat and folded his hands in his lap. He had forgotten how squeamish Cole could be.
“Her name being an acronym denotes purpose,” he began. “But my name means functionally nothing. I’m… just Zane.”
He cast his gaze to the ground, running a blade of grass through his fingers. “I am beginning to worry that… I do not have a purpose. I am a nindroid, yes, an elemental master, part of a team better than any other I could ask for, but… why?”
“Zane–”
“All of this could’ve been easily accomplished by a droid far less complex than I, with no appearance of humanity, o-or feelings, or even sentience. I have all these things, but none of it really fulfils any specific purpose. There must be more to why I am the way I am, but I don’t know what, and…”
He trailed off. His chest ached again.
“Now I can never find out.”
Cole made some noise of comprehension, then fell silent, and with that Zane retreated back into his thoughts. In the span of twenty four hours his whole mindset had been thrown into disarray. He’d believed that he had solved who he was, but after having all technology in the city turn on him, including Pixal, he wasn’t sure what to believe at all anymore.
Pixal. She was the lynchpin for all of this. Her very existence seemed to be undermining his; she was an improvement upon him in almost every way. Faster, cleaner, more efficient, less… feeling. If anything he should’ve felt scorn at her presence, and yet in that moment he wanted nothing more than to see her again. Cole was right, this was far more than just Zane himself. He had been mesmerized by her since before he even knew her name. He wanted to talk to her, learn from her, in hopes of improving himself.
But by all reasonable standards there was no way he could do that now.
“It’s… funny,” Zane muttered. “How meeting someone new can have such a large effect on oneself.”
Cole chuckled. “Yeah, girls’ll do that to you.”
He sighed, ran a hand through his hair.
“I know this probably isn’t what you wanna hear but… does it even really matter?”
Zane blinked at the grass, furrowed his brow. That was nowhere near the response he was expecting. Despite his confusion, he stayed silent, letting his friend speak his mind.
“You said her name means she has a purpose, and that’s definitely true, but she’s not the same as you. You might not have an objective purpose, but you feel things, and at the end of the day that’s way more than she can do.”
Cole leaned his head back against the tree, closed his eyes in thought. “What was it… your father said something about you protecting people.”
Zane nodded. “That I was built to protect those who cannot protect themselves.”
“Yeah, that was it,” Cole said, clicking his fingers and pointing at Zane. “See, I think there’s more to that.”
“Such as?”
“Think about it. You’re made to protect people, and so are all those security bots in the city, but good luck holding a conversation like this with any of them. They only do what they’re programmed to do, what they’re told is right, but you do what you feel is right. How can you decide who to protect without feeling?”
“This seems like a rather large leap in logic–”
“I’m saying I think you weren’t just built to protect, you were built to feel,” Cole gestured to the monastery behind him, its outline highlighted by the glow of the setting sun. “You wouldn’t be here otherwise.”
Zane had to admit to himself that Cole had a point, a very strong one. If he was the same as Pixal, he most certainly wouldn’t be here now. Here, running from an ancient evil with his best friends in the world, people he’d gladly throw away his life for if it meant they would live to see another day. He saw his team as his family; they’d wholly accepted him for who he was, what he was, and treated him no differently. They’d taught him how to see the good in others, to walk the path of righteousness despite how difficult it may be.
Cole was right. Zane didn’t have an express purpose, but in the end it didn’t seem to matter all that much. Maybe just being alive, experiencing the world and trying to make it better, was enough.
Cole smiled warmly. “Feeling is human, and if feeling is your purpose, then you’re more human than the rest of us.”
Zane smiled too then, properly this time. “Thank you, Cole. I find your existence to be purposeful as well.”
Cole barked a laugh, playfully punched Zane’s shoulder. “What’s that supposed to mean, you tin can? Only good when I’m lifting boulders?”
“I’m not sure if that has yet outshined the usefulness of the triple tiger sashay.”
“Aw c’mon, you said you weren’t gonna bring that up again.”
Zane chuckled. “I made no such promises.”
He glanced at his hand one more time, studying the metal, then closing his fingers over the gash. Right now, it didn’t matter what he was made of.
Right now, he was enough.
“In all seriousness, I appreciate it.”
“Don’t mention it, always happy to ground my brothers.” Cole crossed his arms, tilted his head. “Why’d you ask me, though?”
“You were the most logical choice. As you said, you are the most grounded. In more ways than one.”
“Har-har,” Cole rolled his eyes. “That’s fair though. Kai would give you terrible advice, Jay would just make fun of you, and Lloyd…”
He trailed off, a forlorn expression crossing his face. “He tries his best, but he’s still just a kid, y’know?”
“You and I are barely adults ourselves, Cole,” Zane stated. “Your eighteenth birthday was five days ago, and if I recall correctly, Kai’s is in two months.”
“Ugh, please don’t remind me of my rapidly approaching old age, I’m already uncool as it is.”
Cole suddenly stood, stretching his arms above his head, his shoulders making a series of popping sounds. Zane had always meant to ask about that, but he never seemed to remember.
“Speaking of old, Garmadon’s probably back by now, and if I’m late Lloyd’s gonna kick my butt halfway to Sunday.”
Zane furrowed his brow. “I do not believe there is a place by that name in Ninjago.”
Cole groaned, ran a hand down his face. “It’s– y’know what, never mind. You just watch the technoblades, I’ll see you later.”
With that he was gone, leaving Zane in silence with his thoughts once more. He glanced at the pile of blades to his right, gathering them up into his lap. He might not be human, but at this moment that was what his friends needed.
He closed his eyes, feeling the cool evening breeze ruffle his hair, fill his lungs. Listened to the rustling of the trees, the chirping of crickets. He’d always enjoyed the forest’s natural ambience; quiet but not silent, calm yet alive, it helped him decompress. He loved his friends but they could be… overstimulating at times.
His mind drifted back to Pixal. How she so confused him, intrigued him even more. He sensed that he would be seeing her again, though it remained a mystery as to when.
Illogical though it may be, he silently hoped against hope that it would be soon.