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[VolcanoBakemeat]

The average Matoran has a memory span of ninety years, and by the time all the neurons in their brains have finished replacing each other, they remember hardly anything about the time before. So they live ninety years. They’re always ninety years old. And the years go by very slowly on Metru Nui. Metru Nui’s the name of the island, of course. The city is dead. The city doesn’t exist anymore.

My memory span is forty-seven years. That’s nothing. My roommate Beneus has a span of one hundred and thirty-two and he acts like a Rahi. I’ve tried to compensate as much as I can. I had a job, I was making enough widgets to actually live in a house, which is more than I can say for most people this side of Onu-Metru. Since the Ko-Metruans started moving in prices have gone up and up and most people are just camping in the streets. But I decided to quit all that and moved in with Beneus. I’ll be a different person in forty-seven years. I have to make the best of what I am now. So I became an artist.

Po-Metru is the artsy part of town, the one where you have to move if you want to eke out a living in the arts, but I never liked it over there. It’s hot, it’s empty, there are landslides, and with so few Vahki the crime rate is through the roof. Luckily, there’s been a scene developing in Onu-Metru over the last few years--I like to give myself credit for helping start it, but it’s very likely that it’s been around for years. They call it “Dead City,” which is very appropriate given that absolutely nothing is happening in Metru Nui right now. Some of my friends even go far as to say that Dead City is the only thing happening in Metru Nui. It could be true.

After all, what’s the competition? Akilini’s okay, but it’s incredibly expensive. Po-Metru’s empty; Ko-Metru’s dull; Ta-Metru is an industrial Karzahni. I only go to Ga-Metru to sit on top of the waterfall and eat Harakeke flowers, and even then the Vahki have been making that more and more difficult. Le-Metru used to be a lot of fun during the airship days, which was about a thousand years ago. (How I remember that is beyond me.) There was amazing theater, art, music, and some of the best food in the Matoran Universe. Now it’s just a touristy mess, full of Sardans and Telkerrians. They don’t speak Metruan, but nobody in Le-Metru ever really did, what with their weird little dialects and their inflections and all that.

Onu-Metru has a pulse. It has history. From what the Chroniclers say it hasn’t changed a bit since the city was founded, save for the building of the Archives. It has fine food; it has fine art. It knows how to party, which I couldn’t say about any other Metru since Le-Metru went down the drain. The joke was that a good day in any other Metru meant you took a chute to a different Metru and spent the day there, but a good day in Onu-Metru meant you didn’t leave the Archives until the Vahki dragged you out kicking and screaming. Most parties I go to are in the Archives, and I’ve lost count of how many nights I’ve spent sleeping by the big Proto Drake on the fourth level. Probably millions. They put it there recently, though... Maybe it was a different Proto Drake. I was there a few weeks ago for a Naming Day party and it looked a lot smaller than I remember it ever being.

What trivial and useless things I think about at night.

Beneus shifted in his sleep. I started thinking about the art show that was taking place next week in the Archives. I put the lightstone in the stone urn by my bed and dozed off.

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Edited by Moo!, Mar 08 2012 - 02:03 AM.

[VolcanoBakemeat]

Another old joke about Onu-Metru goes like this: you know you’re in an Onu-Metru chute station if people are actually getting on chutes. Onu-Matoran don’t leave their metru much, so the local bureau hasn’t spent that much money trying to renovate the chute stations. In Le-Metru chute stations are the size of supermarkets and have little cafes and restaurants and tacky souvenir shops where you can buy miniature airships and little beads you can put on your Kanohi and little books to keep you entertained on airship rides. In Onu-Metru, a chute station is three benches, a map, and a chute door.

I don’t really have an opinion on chute stations. I guess it’s the only thing I really don’t have an opinion on. The stations in Le-Metru are fun to visit once in a while, if only because they sell the best Harakeke flowers there. The flower-girls usually congregate in the chute stations very early in the morning, so some days I wake up very early to chute over to the Moto-Hub and pick some up. There’s one flower-girl named Aleirea who comes by the Kalland station every now and again, but I hadn’t seen here for a while. When I arrived at the Kalland station to go to the art show nobody else was there except a lone Vahki, which made me nervous. I jumped on the chute immediately.

On my way down the main boulevard that leads to the Archives, I saw a small squad harass a group of Sardans. They didn’t seem to be doing anything wrong. I thought they might have been tourists. Maybe they were wanted, which was odd given that they were leisurely strolling in broad daylight. I could hear one of them protesting furiously in Tatong before the Vahki knocked them out with their stun staffs.

I swore out loud. One of the Vahki turned its head towards me. I pointed to the Archives. It nodded its head and turned back to the unconscious Sardans.

* * *

“Karzahni is wrong with these Vahki anyway?”

My friend Rey and I had decided to go the long way to the exhibition hall, which involved going through the crowded lobby. We decided to go that way after I had told him about the Sardans. With more people around us, the Vahki would have less reason to harass us.

“There must be a new policy,” I said, knowing that the explanation was probably less simple.

“They’ve been getting worse over the last few days. Amenner from the sixth floor got busted the other day in Ga-Metru.”

“What for?”

“Not working, apparently. They gave him a month’s extra work in the lower levels cleaning the Rahkshi tubes.”

“He must have enjoyed that.”

“Poor guy probably never even been to the lower levels. All he does is guard electrical tools.”

As expected, the lobby was packed, mostly with tourists. They were admiring the massive Tahtorak shell in the main lobby. Every time I saw the Tahtorak shell I was reminded of a piece of artwork I had seen on a trip to Kirata. A local artist had taken an entire Tahtorak shell--it must have been seventy feet long--and replaced the creature’s insides with some kind of flowering vine. It disturbed me a bit, as Tahtorak were capable of speaking the common language and were easily as intelligent as most sapient beings. I tracked down the artist and she said she had found the body abandoned in a swamp, left there by Skakdi poachers who had no way of removing it from the island. I was not sure I believed her, but I cannot deny its power. I had heard there would be a Kiratan artist today, which piqued my excitement.

“Is it true we have a Kiratan today?” I asked.

“Yeah,” Rey said, raising his eyebrows. “Her name is Sederea.”

“You should see what she brought in!” another Matoran shouted.

When we arrived at the exhibition room, the first thing I noticed was a huge stasis tank. There was a Matoran in it.

[VolcanoBakemeat]

“Karzahni is this?” Rey muttered. I could tell he wanted to scream. This seemed to be the general reaction of most of the people who soon began walking in.

The Matoran in the tank was a Ga-Matoran. She was frozen in an almost reclining position, as if she had been knocked out, picked up off the ground, and placed in the stasis fluid while still unconscious. Her expression was completely neutral, eyes about three-quarters open and somewhat obscured by a clear tape that had been placed over her mask-holes. She was certainly alive. The stasis fluid was still, clear, and filled with tiny, suspended bubbles. It was the most beautiful sight I had ever seen.

Even despite its beauty, it took me a moment to realize it was the artwork. Rey made the realization shortly after I did. Aesthetically, as an artwork, it was a masterpiece. The Matoran remained motionless at the center of the hubbub, with people swirling around it and admiring her unmoving body. To me it expressed all of my frustrations with the stillness of Metru Nui. At the same time, I thought of the Vahki confrontation earlier. I thought of the helplessness of this Matoran, locked in a prison. I thought of the new work policies. I thought of how this Matoran was on display, exactly like a Rahi, and how Matoran seem to amount to little more than Rahi these days.

I thought it was amazing that the artist was Kiratan. Kiratans have no Vahki, only Matoran police forces, and their government is very detached from public affairs, focusing mostly on economic matters. I thought maybe she had lived in Metru Nui. Or maybe I was simply interpreting the piece completely wrong.

I noticed a name engraved on the side: Attack On Memory.

“I wonder if this thing is even legal,” I wondered aloud.

“This art is not legal here,” a husky, thickly-accented female voice came from behind me. I turned around and saw a Ta-Matoran. It took me a minute to put the voice and the appearance of the stranger together, and I realized it was a painted Ce-Matoran, a Matoran of Psionics. “We will take care of that.”

“Are you Sederea?” I asked.

She nodded and chewed on the Harakeke flower she was holding. “I know this flower is not legal either,” she said, smiling.*

“The Vahki have been really cracking down on that kind of thing recently.”

“I know when the Vahki are coming,” she said. “Psionics. I can feel the Rorzakh staffs. It makes me happy that there is so much art in Onu-Metru.”

“Can most Ce-Matoran do that?”

“Only some.”

“She’s gonna be a Toa,” another Matoran joked, elbowing Sederea. This Matoran looked like a Po-Matoran or an Onu-Matoran but was painted blue. “Put ‘em in vats now, then save the poor things from people like her.”

“Tell me a bit about this piece,” I asked, and immediately regretted asking. I am the most awkward talker in the world when it comes to people I respect. Apparently I had dinner with the Turaga once, a long time ago. I’m glad I can’t remember a thing about it.

“What are you thinking?”

Of all the questions. Sometimes I hate artists. I started babbling about the Vahki and Matoran culture and how nothing happens in Metru Nui and then I think I started talking about my memory span before I realized what I was making made no sense. She just smiled all the while, which was even more frustrating.

“I’ll let you think what you want. But the Vahki will come, and when they come perhaps you will see meaning in it.”

She left with a few others to look at a wooden Skakdi idol. I found Rey by a collection of Telkerrian art. The Telkerrian art was pleasant--mostly paintings of the sea--but everything else in the room paled in comparison to Attack on Memory.

“You actually like that monstrosity?” Rey said, chuckling in disbelief.

“It’s fantastic.”

“It’s garbage!” Rey shouted.

“I think I understand it,” I said.

“Tell me,” Rey said, not condescendingly.

“I think it has to do with how slow events in Metru Nui are compared with how short our memory spans are. With an organic animal that lives ten years, a bird for example, being in stasis would be a massive chunk of time spent, well, not really living. But for something that lives millennia and millennia, it’s nothing. Still, with the...”

I cut myself off because I was making no sense and because Rey’s attention had shifted. He was looking in the direction of Attack on Memory. I shifted my gaze towards the artwork and noticed it was covered in a massive white sheet.

In the doorway were six Vahki. Rey swore and returned to looking at the paintings. I watched as one of the Vahki ambled up to the massive, veiled object in the center of the room, extended its staff, and gently lifted up the sheet.


*^{Harakeke flowers are illegal on Metru Nui due to an ongoing trade dispute with Nongu, the main producer of Harakeke flowers in the Matoran colonies.}

Edited by Moo!, Mar 19 2012 - 01:40 AM.