The window was open, and so the lizards came in.

It would have been nice if there was a breeze. If there was sunshine. If there was more outside than the towering cityscape and point blank view of the skyscraper across the street. But those desires were... academic, really. Illusory. Born from old anime about green trees and wooden houses. Dreams from a life she'd never lived. Her life was the city, the circular air, the view of concrete walls and advertisements. She didn't know anything more about life in the country than she knew about life under the sea. Both were more distant to her thoughts than life on Mars.

And yet, from that dream so distant she'd only ever seen it in paintings, the lizards came.

Pink sat and watched them. The hesitant movement and stillness. The way they lingered, like their brains needed a moment to catch up with the darting motions of their bodies. The odd arrangement of their little fingers, how they seemed like predatory rocks. They took cover with a confidence, hiding themselves behind jars and pots as though they were ancient pillars of the earth.

The kitchen was in a state of crippled indecision. Nobody was satisfied with the space but time, money and vision all conspired to prevent them from doing anything about it. Her relationship with food was inconvenient and nonstandard; she did not need to eat, but she could draw pleasure from it. She did not need to digest but could efficiently sort ingested materials into a variety of chemical compounds. If she set her mind to it she could synthesize hydrocarbons or acid from the right ingested elements. If she could not breathe fire she could at least barf petrol. The whole thing was weird and unpleasant and awkward conceptually and was sure to launch bizarre debates. The kitchen was the collateral damage. She wanted to use it as a kitchen, Green wanted the workbench, Orange wanted a space to entertain guests, Brown to maintain it as a functional space for the property value, Blue wanted to use it for storage... No space for a table, let alone one that sat nine, and so three of them might cram in shoulder to shoulder at the breakfast bar and talk and make awkward chemistry talk about internal sulfur reserves and if they should cook something with onions to balance it out. No one quite clear if they could afford, financially or socially, to make something just because they liked it.

"Lizardwatching?" said Yellow, wrapping her arms around Pink from behind and laying her chin on the top of Pink's head.
"You know it!" said Pink, but softly. She didn't know how well they could hear and didn't want to startle them.
Yellow didn't seem to mind them. She gave Pink a squeeze then stepped into the space, moving a rack of electronics and unplugging what she judged to be the least valuable computer so she could plug in the kettle.
"There's hot water on tap!" Brown yelled from the living room, which was the same room.
"I prefer the kettle," said Yellow serenely. It was shaped like a little cow, white with black spots, another animal dream. Red had picked it out of a sale in a junk market as a gift to try and cheer up Green during one of her spells. Pink had crocheted it a little vest.
Pink kept her eyes on the lizards as they hid behind the jars. Watched them scamper as quick as lightning when their world changed around them. The tumeric came up and the lizards withdrew behind the sugar until that came up too and then there was a rush back to the windowsill where they stopped and watched. What did they see in the golden-haired angel who worked away on the cups in front of them? Could they see the colour? Or could they only see the darkness and its absence?
"It was going off," said Yellow, handing her a glass of tumeric and cardamom tea.
"I know," said Pink sadly, taking it but not drinking. 
Yellow took a sip and made a face. "Unbelievable," she said. She took another sip.
"Oh, it's stained the cup -" said Pink, noticing the yellow tint above the waterline.
"Yeah, I think this was used as a dye or something?" said Yellow.
"Oh, [i]dyes[/i]," sighed Pink. "Imagine growing a plant for its colour."
"Yeah," said Yellow. 
"There's something about having a bottle of colour that just seems magical, isn't there?" said Pink. "Like taking a... no, like finding a little piece of reality broken off and waiting for you to put it back. It's beautiful on its own. The way it moves when you shake it, when you spread it, how it pools when it's thick and how it spreads when it's thin. Thin it enough and you can see the individual pigments floating in the water, like salt in the sea."
"And seeing those pigments and knowing they came from a plant grown in the sunlight, harvested by the scythe, and ground down for its beauty?" said Yellow.
"Yeah," said Pink. "It's wonderful, isn't it?"
"Why is it wonderful?" said Yellow and the mood was different somehow.
"Every part of the process from start to finish was wonderful," said Pink. "And the end result is both wonderful in itself and a stepping stone to make further wonderful things."
"That's a grim thought," said Yellow.
"Why would you ever say that?" said Pink.
"There's this ideal inside you," said Yellow. "A nostalgia, for a place you've never been, a time you were never alive in, a world that isn't real."
Pink nodded quietly.
"How do you survive it?" said Yellow.
"Survive it?"
"As a creature that's never had atmospheric sunlight, never touched living soil, never had a view of anything other than a concrete wall?" said Yellow. "How can you possibly endure having a belief system where beauty is found in the things you've never had and never will have?"
"Ray of sunshine today, aren't you?" said White, stepping past her in the kitchen to plug back in the cable that Yellow had unplugged for the kettle.
"Oh, I'm doing great," said Yellow, beaming a smile. "I don't yearn for any of that stuff."
"What do you yearn for, then?" asked White.
"Different things," said Yellow. "True love. Revolution. Things like that."
"Those don't seem incompatible," said White.
"Oh, but they [i]are[/i]," said Yellow. Her smile was as constant as sunshine. "Mine are about engaging with society to a maximal extent. Hers are about disengaging as hard as possible. I want to tell them to their faces, she wants them to figure it out from the monument she left twenty years ago."
"I idolize traditional dye manufacturing without considering the colonial implications in the plantation harvesting process," Pink supplied helpfully.
"Thank you, Pink," said Yellow, "but when you put it like that it makes me sound exhausting."
"You're right," said Pink. "That's why we're probably going to wind up in a duel to the death."
"Oooh," said Yellow.
"Mm, don't think I'm signing off on that one," said White.
"Think about it, though?" said Pink. "Green made us both at about the same time. We're obviously two halves of a thought, two visions for the future. Clearly she intended our rivalry of destiny to end in swords on the moon."
Brown elbowed Green who was lost in a game on her phone. She looked up and Brown whispered to her furiously. "Don't damage your bodies by fighting with your sister," said Green. "They're expensive. Go to your room."
"Ah, it is to be a duel of wits, then," said Yellow. "A game of riddles with death on the line."
"Let's cut this off at the pass," said White. "Why did you create these two?"
Green stared at her blankly. "Because... I wanted to."
"Yeah, Green," said Blue, tagging in. "You're basically the creator God as far as we're concerned."
"Oh holy mommy who art on the couch," said Red. "What is the meaning of life?"
Green rolled her eyes. "So you know how 
5(arc)/delta; parse 05(a)
Bletchel from (RGB #225#150#070)
Delta =/ 
5(arc)/delta; parse structure
Motivariable (sigma^Bletchel&From)
Well, that's why you exist."
"Really?" said White skeptically.
"What do you want from me?" said Green irritably, picking her game back up and resuming play. "I made you because it felt awful and now you feel awful instead of me. Get wrecked idiots."
"Wow, that's bleak," said Red.
"Our god is not a god of love," said Blue.
"Besides if we're talking about design intent obviously I was visualizing something more like space construction vehicles firing thermal cutting lasers in high orbit," said Green. 
"So we must joust as cosmic knights," said Pink.
"More like mechanical dragons," said Yellow.
"Why not split the difference?" said Pink.
"I hate this," said White. "I hate you two getting along and agreeing on whatever the fuck this is. Cut it out. Go to your room."
"We will not accept the tyranny of - eek!" Yellow shrieked as White took her in her arms and lifted her in the air in a princess carry. "Put me down!"
White smiled the smile of someone getting to use a skill developed in secret for the first time. "No."
"Oh!" Yellow huffed and folded her arms. "[i]Brute[/i]."

Amidst the reorganization, Pink returned to her perch on the countertop so she could look again at the lizards. Unperturbed by her chatter, the little skinks had waited patiently on the edge of the world, tiny hearts fearless against the drop. She drank the tea now that it had cooled.
"I think about them a lot too," said Orange, coming to stand beside her.
"Mm?" said Pink.
"They're here because of us," said Orange. "Our most recent contribution to the station. Maybe if we'd pushed harder or smarter we could have routed that money to human interests somehow but instead we sent it all to the lizard guy."
"Yeah, we never really talked about that, did you notice?" said Pink.
"It was the kind of thing that if we'd talked about it we wouldn't have been able to justify it," said Orange.
"I want to think it was my idea," said Pink. "But it wasn't, was it? It was Yellow's, wasn't it?"
"I don't know," said Orange. "Does Yellow [i]have [/i]ideas like that? And isn't that the opposite of everything she was just saying about fuck agrarianism?"
"I don't know," said Pink. "She must have at least agreed because she could have stopped it if she didn't. But she's so weird."
"I know what you mean," said Orange. 
"I kind of want to fight her with swords because I think it's the only way to get a real answer out of her," said Pink.
"Someone on this station has to make swords, right?" said Orange, flipping open her phone.
"I've looked, they don't," said Pink. "Deadly weapons, restricted unless they're a museum piece. There are blueprints to the Adomson Memorial Museum's medieval wing on my phone somewhere in case it becomes important."
"Oh they've got an exhibit on air force anime swords," said Orange, immediately compelled. 
"I know, right?" said Pink. "The space force section is even better."
"Haha what," said Orange. "Is that hilt just the space shuttle?"
"It's actually even made out of the space shuttle's hull," said Pink.
"Okay so we need to schedule a trip to the Apollo lander so we can melt it down into a broadsword," said Orange.
"Reverse meteor iron," said Pink, nodding. "Perfect."

As they went through the strange twists and turns of their alien machine logic, Pink was gratified to notice one of the little lizards had at last walked over the back of her hand. To it, what was happening in her mind and heart didn't matter. She was no different from any other large obstruction, a surface to be traversed or a sudden movement to skitter away from. Maybe in twenty years someone would figure out what she'd meant by it.