Baby set down the syrup and eyed Mel, “You look great, but you’re right, you can’t be seen like that by anyone who knows you. That’s why I missed a good night’s sleep instead of seeing you tomorrow.” She paused, then looked down at her plate. “Can we eat first?”
Monster Rainbow
They ate and Mel had to admit she may have shoveled the food into her mouth like a caveman after starving. Or a bear after hibernation. It was bad enough that a pair in another booth wearing shirts emblazoned with the logo of a local ambulance service stopped to stare at her.
Her cheeks hamstered out, she waved her fork and the piece of toast speared on it. “Great stuff! Best in town!” she exclaimed around the food in her mouth. They looked away.
Once the plates were cleared and the waitress gave Mel a look, Baby leaned back and patted her stomach. “That was so good.”
“It was,” Mel said, then burped into her hand. “I could eat two more plates of it.”
“Don’t. You’ll puke. Trust me on this one.” She smiled at Mel. “You ready to keep talking?”
“Sure thing,” Mel said, then pointed to her empty cup when the waitress looked over.
When her cup was full again, Baby said, “I’m older because I gave away some of what I had to the girls. That’s what I did tonight. I went to each of them and gave away some of my life. It will help them recover, both emotionally and physically. Not enough, but some.”
“You can do that?”
“Yep, and if you want to keep living a normal life, you’ll have to do it too.”
“How?”
“First things first,” Baby said, then leaned forward to lower her voice. “When you take a life, it’s like charging a battery. But it’s too much juice, so your body will do what comes natural to it. It will heal you, fix wounds, cure diseases, but it also sets back your clock. If you take another life before you’ve used up the juice, you’ll overflow even more, and back goes your clock. It will stop eventually at whatever point your particular system wants and you won’t get any younger than that, but that could be a baby. You don’t want that and you won’t know your limit till you get to it. And if you try to take a green when you’re overflowing and at your limit, nothing will happen. You won’t be able to draw their fire and you could wind up dead.”
“So, what? I have to wait till it’s used up?”
“That’s what I did before I understood how to give it away. Giving it away is much better.”
“How do I do that? Who do I give it to?”
“You can give it to anyone, even a yellow. Don’t give it to a yellow though. They’re bad people that someone else is going to eat eventually. You can’t give life to a green at all. That’s the only kind it won’t work on. As to how, you just do it. You get close, think about giving it away, and it will come out of you. I breathe it out or do it by touch, but some of our kind can just think it out. You’ll know when you’ve given enough because you’ll have to push. It flows easy until then.”
“I won’t give too much?”
Baby shook her head. “No. Your body knows what it has to keep. You’ll have to push really hard to get past that.”
“Is that why you’re older? Because you pushed?”
“Sort of. I pushed a little, but not much.” She sighed, then looked around for a moment, taking in all the conversations and relationships going on around them. “When I found you, I wasn’t just playing you until I could tell you what you were. You really did help me, you know. You listened and understood. You cared. Before I met you, I thought you might be the last Valkyrie I would ever find.”
“What? I don’t understand.”
“We have the potential for immortality, but it’s impossible to live this way forever. We all reach a point where it’s too much.”
“Oh.”
“I tried to give this up once before. I tried to age a little and grow up and be as normal as I could. The guilt starts in. You start thinking of all the blues out there and what they’re going through.” Baby shrugged, but it was a helpless gesture. “It’s impossible.”
“I see,” Mel said. And she did see. Now that she knew what she could do, could she ever stop, knowing that others were starting up their dark web pages with children for sale? Could she stop and ever have a moment of peace?
“I had to find another of our kind and get a big load of life off her to get back to my old size again. That’s another thing you should know. Always be there for others like us if they need a boost of life.”
“I will.”
Baby ducked her head to capture Mel’s gaze, then smiled. “But you helped me. I feel better and I feel renewed. I’m taking a little break and I know that’s okay because you’re there. You’re the only one I’ve ever heard of that can do what you do.”
“I’m confused. I thought I did exactly what you did.”
“No, not at all. That stack of papers you brought out with you. What color are they to you?”
Mel didn’t have to think to answer that one. “Almost all green, a dozen or so yellow ones.”
“To me they were almost all yellow, with a couple of greens.”
Not understanding, Mel shook her head. “So?”
“Only a few of those papers had the details of anyone that would directly harm me. I doubt very much any of our kind would see more than a green or two. They would be mostly yellow for all of us. Those papers didn’t show men and women who would be food for us. What were they? I mean, in terms of your interest in them?”
“Money people. There’s even an AI
