Katharine Z.

She is beautiful.

Perhaps that makes what she is all the more tragic.

Katharine stands tall and proud (proud? afraid.) at five feet and six inches, curvaceous and wonderful to the eyes; her hair is soft and long, to about halfway down her back; it's red, wonderfully red, but recently she's taken to wearing it in a ponytail. Typically Katharine wears white, white shirts and pants and a robe, because white is the color she grew up around, white and sterile. Katherine says she is four years of age, but she was aged to the physical age of eighteen before she was released from her tube; for four years she has lived, but she appears to be in her early-twenties; Katharine looks like she is twenty-two.

Most importantly, Katharine is always healthy. She does not get sick, she does not fall ill (or at least, she has not yet; now that she's left the 'safety' of Aquavia whether or not she's still that way has yet to be seen); her skin does not blemish nor does it blister nor does it callous. Her flesh is silky and smooth to the touch, and the most she can do is bruise, break bones; internal injuries. If her flesh is cut, it bleeds, she bleeds, but her life is...too uneventful for her to really bleed too much.

She is afraid. Wouldn't you be? Katharine exists in a world that gave her no name, just the designation K-Z, and expected her to go to the slaughter, and she would have, had she not realized what was going on, and even then, even then! She is afraid, horrified at the world around her, and she is even worse than afraid, she is innocent. She knows enough of the world to know that the world will try to cause her harm but she does not know how to recognize certain things; she distrusts, and that distrust serves her well in an odd fashion--yet here she is, bumbling and afraid.

Paranoia lances through her body and she feels the drying of her throat, and she is quietly aware of how everything is hostile to her. Katharine is unsure if she is even allowed to enter Domhan Tir; she is not, in her mind, technically human, but she has a life, doesn't she, and isn't her life worth saving? It is a quandary she has to answer to herself over and over and over again, she has to tell herself that she is a thing with a life worth keeping. Sometimes it feels like the best choice would be to return (then she remembers the screams and the surgeries and she stays away still).

Katharine has learned how to farm, however, and the girl has proven rather proficient at self-sufficiency. She's been free for long enough to have been able to die otherwise; were she not able to take care of herself, the organs someone else paid for would be rotting in the sun.

She does not understand a great many concepts; bravery is often lost on her, because she was raised as sheep in a pasture. She doesn't get a grasp on courage, either; it is best to keep the head down because if she does that, then what comes after her will surely miss her trail. She can survive because she learns how to hide, and that is what has kept her--together. She is capable of combat. She's aware of that much. But...the combat is quick. It has to be quick. She isn't strong. She has to move quickly and knock someone out and run away, run away fast.

Katharine feels something else, though. She's...slowly growing to resent having to run and hide for her life. She never asked for this, for the running and the hiding and the fear, she never asked to not even know the names of the other countries, she never asked to be considered nonhuman. Yet she is, and it makes her angry and there is a little part of her that wants to turn around and destroy the ones who caused her such pain...

It is best to hope that part is not nurtured.

She clings to her life, rationalizing her survival at the cost of those who would have used her organs; she can cry, she can feel pain, she hungers and thirsts and she has fears, and Katharine swears she deserves the life she has (even if she feels like she doesn't, sometimes).

She cannot stand eating meat. It reminds her too much of what would have been done to her.

Katharine's organs are incredibly durable and can withstand damage that would regularly destroy an organ; this is because sometimes there can be mishaps in the utilization of the organs. Her organs can repair themselves to a point as well; internal damage from puncture wounds is less of a worry when the organ can heal itself rather quickly. Healing varies, but all healing is done within a day. Major injuries take hours to heal, but minor pops and breaks are healed near instantaneously.

Katharine's skin is incapable of blistering, burning, or blemishing; it can be cut and stabbed and torn, but it cannot show imperfections. This means that Katharine has fireproof skin (her flesh was going to be used to augment bio mechanical soldiers to defend against flame attacks) and she does not suffer damage from fire. She can still bleed, and suffer pain, but fire just has no effect on her. She is, however, sensitive to pain, even if her skin doesn't show the trauma.

THE DONATION BLOC:
Serving Aquavian Sick and Needy! Don't be afraid! Register to Receive a Donation Today!

The Donation Bloc is a small series of buildings in Shinsoo; the buildings appear warm and inviting and the Donors are seen inside of them on occasion, but those Donors are always the same and are not Donors but rather, humans, Aquavians who take the job of Faking to throw off the trail; in reality, for eighteen years the Donors are grown in tanks from sperm and eggs to fetuses to adolescents; at age eighteen the Donors are flushed from their tanks. They are sustained through the rebellious phase, and once they are flushed from their tanks, the Donors are raised to be submissive. Every day, they hear about how they are not going to leave the facility save but one time, they hear constantly about how their lives are meant to sustain those of Aquavia, how little value they actually have; all of it is meant to make the Donors be easygoing about their certain deaths.

Once Donors are flushed, the knowledge fed to them in the tanks is accessed; they live lives that range from three to four years; never five. Once the primes have been reached, the Donors are rounded up quietly into buses and transported from one edge of the Donation Bloc to the other; at which point they are led into sterile buildings and one by one Utilized for their organs. The Donors are lined up in a single line.

The way the utilizations work: the Donors are named at Flushing, through the alphabet. A-A is the first Donor flushed, and Z-Z is the last one flushed. Each letter has twenty-six members, ranging from A to Z, and there are twenty-six groups, with each letter as the first: A-A, B-K, and so on.

The average life of an A is six months; the average life of a Z is for years; this particular year when Katharine was to be Utilized, things had fallen behind; a disease had swept through the ranks of the N through P Donors, and some letters had to be shuffled.

But K-Z got lucky. A logistical error. As she shuffles into her place in the line, twenty-six away from the door, nurses and doctors in scrubs shuffle down and across the hallway; the fear in all of the K-Donors can be felt in the air, just about; they know that this is it, and there is no more life to be had. They do not want to die, truly, and so the panic begins to grow. When it does, the Nurses spray certain chemicals to calm them down.

Twenty-four away from the door, now, and K-Z holds her breath by accident as the nurses spray; when the rest are numbly walking to the room where she can see the surgeons working, talking about them like they're inhuman, K-Z can feel something rushing through her brain. She does not recognize adrenaline, and so she passes out; fortunately the donors must be cautious when they are put under for Utilization, because they must be absolutely stable--and when she comes to, she is being wheeled to a small storage building. K-Z manages to escape the gurney holding her and runs.

She gets into a small shuttle heading for the surface of the water, and when she steps into the sun, K-Z begins to weep, and she finds a place to stay, pretending to be a lost child; when she realizes she is being chased, K-Z flees again, past Aquavia, all the way to Domhan Tir. Perhaps she is safe there...

She looks at her past and damns Dym and Jag. She wants, a part of her, to destroy Aquavia. There is no saving the rest of the Donors for the year but maybe she can...do something. Cause something. Start something. How dare the gods just stand by and watch the slaughter?!

She takes the name Katharine from a traveller who meets her, and from there, things begin. Her life truly...starts.

However, in the higher rankings of the people who started the Donor program, a quiet question has buzzed away, unsettling. Have we made them too human? While Katharine's escape was a fluke, a blip on a system that was not at all supposed to happen, it has alerted some people to the...possible 'humanity' of the Donors. They wanted muscles to be strong, they wanted movement to be observed...they wanted to see the intelligence of the Donors. After all, technology cannot be inferior, can it?

But perhaps, they think, as they send out a squad to track down the escaped Donor, they overplayed the technology the slightest bit.