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An endless darkness with no end in sight lay before the apparent soul of a girl. Without movement, nor sound and of course not a thing in sight, it was undoubtedly a pitiful existence. A being that the girl had endured for two-hundred and twenty-five years. In such a long time, one had time to think. The girl, who had known since her birth that her name was Lucie Blanchette and had eventually chosen the name of ‘Ruée’ for herself, knew many things. She could speak, she knew what she looked like and, the worst of all, she knew every single detail of every single year of her “life”, if one may even call it so. Lucie was a Key, she knew that much. One day, she would be chosen and she would be brought out of the misery of her existence thus far. That day could have come at any time. For most of her kind, of which she was sure there were others, as she had heard their voices call out to her many times before eventually coming to ignore her entirely, they were chosen rather quickly. Twenty years was the maximum for most Keys. However, Lucie, called ‘Que sera sera’ as an actual key, had set some sort of record.

	[i]Some record it is.[/i] Lucie remarked to herself in silence, as that was all she was capable of doing at this point. At one point, about two-hundred years ago, she stopped hearing the voices. Ah yes, the voices. She suspected that they were the voices of other Keys, suffering the same fate as her. Some had an arrogant tone, some spoke kindly. In the end though, Lucie could never muster the courage to speak to them and eventually, they stopped making the effort to speak to her. It was unfortunate. Had she been given another fifty years, she might have been able to strike up a conversation. Instead, she was left in silence. Had it been for the better? Perhaps. Had she began speaking back to the bodiless voices, she might have become attached to them and when they inevitably left, she would be separated from a potential friend. 

	In short, there was perchance no existence more sorrowful than that of a Key, at least in Lucie’s opinion. Speaking of opinions, she had a lot of time to come up with opinions. Opinions on life, opinions on love, opinions on humanity. The more she thought, the more she discovered different feelings and instincts within herself and eventually even concepts such as war became understandable to her, despite never having been told of the idea. In the end, she became able to teach herself things based on knowledge she never even knew she had. Even complex mathematics were eventually an understandable subject.

	If you think hard on it, it is entirely possible to do such a thing. Leave someone with only their thoughts for a long enough time and eventually they would come up with things that were, despite never being told to her, common knowledge for most with a sufficient education. For example, a right triangle’s hypotenuse squared was the sum of the two other sides squared. Standard Pythagorean theorem. Lucie figured this out around one-hundred-ninety-four. However, tell her that it’s called the Pythagorean theorem and she’d only give you a blank look. For her, it was knowledge she had figured out herself, simply by thinking for nearly two centuries.

	Knowledge doesn’t bring happiness though and Lucie remained in seemingly eternal sorrow up until this point. Today, it was a day like any other. In the Key Shop, days would pass without any change in the atmosphere, so Lucie hadn’t ever come up with a way of taking the time. It didn’t really matter. Does one measure the length of their torture if they believe it eternal? In this moment, Lucie, with tangible form to speak of, was focused on thinking about movements leading up to a dodge when fighting in close quarters. Though she had no physical form, she had an uncanny knowledge of the humanoid form and her own body. The Key had figured out that she had a similar form to what was called a ‘human’ over two-hundred years ago when she had overheard another Key speaking of how their ‘master’ had fallen in battle. It wasn’t hard to figure out that Keys were chosen by these ‘humans’ and it was thus that in the present, she strategised how she or someone else might fight a human, due to her deep resentment of them. It was their fault she had been left, abandoned like a broken doll for all of those long years, after all. 

	As usual, she remained in utter silence as she simulated various different movements in her mind. Well, it’s not like she had ever spoken to begin with. [i]Back-step relying on right leg, movements in the leg. Contraction of muscles, extension of others. [/i]Facilement prévisible.[i] Left leg?[/i] Her thoughts were systematic and almost machine-like as she simulated a dodge in her mind. While she was rather unspecific in the exactitude of her thoughts, she knew exactly which muscles she was referring to. In the first place, she assumed she wouldn’t need to actually tell anyone about what she was thinking, so she had no real reason to be specific…

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	[url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FztXdRjQPu8&fmt=18]A set of characters in crimson appeared before her[/url]. Had she actual eyes, Lucie may have squinted, but instead she was met with the first thing she had ever seen that wasn’t a shade of nothing. Her first reaction was of surprise. Then, of wonder and finally, of fright and hope. If she had a face, she would definitely be… no, for once, she couldn’t simulate such an expression. Would she smile? Or would her mouth just remain agape in awe? For once, even she didn’t know. The words were easily comprehensible, despite the fact that she had never once actually read something, but all was unknown. As she felt a strange force pull her unconscious, the crimson text faded away and Lucie realized that the turning point that she had sought for all of a two centuries and a quarter had arrived and yet…

	She was terrified.

	Leaving the known darkness, Lucie was brought into a new, unknown light…

[i]Later…?[/i]

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	A few feet away from Julia, the orange plastic casing of her Lumia 720 began vibrating uncontrollably as various messages appeared on its screen, all flashing various status updates before ending by flashing a sky blue success message. At this very moment, Lucie saw light for the very first time, through the four-point-three inch screen of the smartphone. Looking into the room through the screen, which acted much like a window, Lucie was at first shocked by the wide variety of colors she saw and began to take in the surroundings before she remembered the words first told to her two-hundred and twenty-five years ago and she grew nervous, realizing that she would actually need to speak.

	It was in this moment that she realized what would happen if she introduced herself. She knew what to do well; she had rehearsed it in her mind for many years and Lucie pondered what would happen if she didn’t say anything. Perhaps her new ‘master’ would dismiss the phone vibrating and the status messages as a glitch and she would forget about it. If this happened, then Ruée would be stuck in the phone forever. She would be able to see, yes, but it was nothing more than an immaterial existence, only an incremental step up from what she had faced for all of those years. Even if she was nervous, she would need to speak if she ever wished to actually live. Using all of her available courage, she spoke for the first time since she was ‘born’, and her voice, unknown even to her, was heard in the woman’s head.

	“S-salut.” Lucie stammered for a moment, surprised by the sound of her own voice. Clear, it had a tinge of an accent to it and sounded quite young for her age. Nonetheless, she pressed on with her introduction. “You must have received a message a while ago and you must have… bought… me.” As she began to speak, the smartphone unlocked itself and opened up to the Windows Phone 8 dashboard, a mass of orange-red rectangles on a black background, with individual icons indicating their functions. A few of these polygons faded away and Lucie took their place on screen, looking out of the screen towards her new master as she spoke. “You’re… Julia, I think. My name’s Ruée, but if that’s hard to say…” Lucie pondered for a moment if she would give her code name, but it was sort of a given that she would, so the girl pushed it out. “...Lucie Blanchette is fine.”

	Obviously, her speech was full of pauses and such, but it was a surprisingly good effort for someone who hadn’t spoken once in their entire life. “If you would, please open the… erm… ‘Key app’ and choose a username…”