Microstory 1229: Khuweka Kadrioza

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Out of all the Maramon, which were also known by humans as the white monsters, Khuweka Kadrioza was probably the very best. Even amongst her group of rebels, who were against the war, she was the most compassionate for their progenitors. The Maramon were created by an imaginative child with almost unimaginable power, who didn’t understand the basic concepts of life. For most, life begins, they suffer struggles, they get hurt, and then they die. He was far too young to recognize these truths, and so when his ability to conjure entire beings into existence kicked in, they appeared without them. Maramon are so difficult to kill that later generations didn’t even have a word for death until centuries of development. They didn’t war, they didn’t have traffic collisions. They didn’t have any problems with resources until their population rose to untenable numbers. But they did have strong feelings about the humans, and were convinced that it was their responsibility to deliver any human they encountered to what was essentially their species’ analog to heaven. Again, they didn’t consider this to be death. Humans were their gods, and to them, gods did not belong in the same realm as them, so they needed to be removed. It was only after the first Maramon died that they realized what was truly going on, but by then, their instinct to attack humans was quite nearly impossible to resist. Khuweka had no problem with this resistance. It’s true that she was lucky enough to be born inside the counterculture, which knew that humans were just a different species; one that was genetically not too terribly dissimilar. But there’s evidence to suggest she would have come to the right conclusions on her own, if only to a smaller degree. She didn’t need to spend time with humans to know she didn’t hate them. She never understood this weird veneration-slash-animosity that all her fellow Maramon seemed to feel. It wasn’t hard for her to see individuals as just that; individuals. So she continued to work with the resistance, operating against the Maramon establishment, and protecting what precious few humans they came across. But she also felt apart from everyone else; again, even when she was around other dissenters. She felt fortunate when she followed a group of people out of the universe entirely, and ended up traveling to other worlds, all of which were dominated by humans. Of course, this wasn’t much better, because the people in these other worlds wouldn’t likely accept her either, because she looked scary and threatening. Finally, however, she found the right place to be. She was in a world where all sorts of crazy and unpredictable things happened on the regular. When people saw her, they assumed she was merely the product of something they called a base modification; just a human who had been randomly transformed into something else. It didn’t matter that they didn’t know the truth, because it didn’t bother them either way. Society there quickly lost all sense of prejudgment, and let people’s actions speak for themselves, rather than presuming their character upon first meeting. She was home, and she never looked back to where she came from.