Your name is KARKAT VANTAS, and you cannot believe that you were right. You stand in front of a towering building, huge and grey and blocky, alone in the sunny wastes of Alternia. The building has no motto, no company name. Just a circle with a tail, like a comet, chasing another circle in a loop. You touch the matching symbol on your shirt.

You are sore and bruised and covered in bandages because god forbid any of your blood leaked into the open air. You feel very small and young in front of this building, but the sun is creeping over the horizon, threatening to end the short night. You wrap your hand around cold steel and pull the door open.

Blood thrums in the air. The low murmur of voices drowns out individual words. You have never seen this many trolls in the same place. There are tall, thin willowy trolls that look over the heads of the crowd, short, huge-horned kids so young and small they looked fit to keel over with the weight of their head ornamentation. The line stretches all the way to the door, a ribbon of tired, relieved troll. You slip into line and a tall troll with hair that dragged along the floor in dirty mats turns and gives you a tired grin.

"Where you from?" He asks with an unmistakable seadweller drawl.

"Alternia." You say, unhelpfully, and the troll rolls his eyes.

"Yeah, me too. Water the odds?" He asks, and you bite your lip at the fish pun. Old friends of yours- people you would probably never sea see again loved fish puns. You turn from the tall seadweller and scan the room. All of the trolls are as bandaged as you are, some limp towards the front of the line on makeshift stilts, some limp forwards on makeshift false legs. All are tattered- dirty clothing, hair matted with mud and a full spectrum of blood- and every troll has not one visible cut. The tiniest paper cut has been meticulously taped up.

You stare down at yourself. Your pants aren't grey so much as brown now, and torn at the knees, several inches too short. The shirt that bears your symbol is torn and threadbare, the sleeves end a good three inches up your wrist. You look at the kid in front of you, and his fingers are long and slim and bare, no trace of the usually seadweller jewelry. His clothes are too small and have been sewed up too many times, just like yours. Seadweller of not, the tall kid's been through some shit. You sigh and jam your hands into your pockets and wait as the line creeps forwards.

You look up as the tall seadweller limps away from the front of the line and approach the desks you've been waiting to see for the past three hours.

"Hello?" You say, uncertain. A perfectly rectangular man looks up at you, square shoulders, square jaw, muscles corded thick under his skin. The man grabs your arm and holds it against the desk.

"Hey! What the fuck-"

He draws a knife against the palm of your hand and releases you, examining the candy-red on the knife. You yank your hand back, rubbing your wrist.

"Name?" He asks, wiping your blood on a sheet of paper in a binder full of identical forms.

"Karkat Vantas." You stutter, and he grunts, writing it down with a pencil that looks tiny in his thick fingers.

"Age?"

"Uh, seven and a bit."

"Lusus?"

"What?"

"Do you have a Lusus?"

You frown and glance out the door where your dad was hiding. "Yeah."

"Species?"

"Uh, Crab dad." You say, because fuck using the proper troll-Latin names.

He jots it down. "Get him, and bring him to your room while we organize the stables."

"Uh-"

"You have a sign?" He asks, and you gesture to your shirt.

He writes it down. "Welcome to the Signless's Training Shelter." He mutters, and passes you a USB key.

"Room 351." He says, and you stand and stare for a bit. He growls.

"Your new clothes will be in your room. Clean off and take a rest. Dinner will be in three hours." You stagger off with your room key. You're halfway up the stairs before you remember to get your lusus.

The sun is blindingly hot, and you briefly wonder how Kanaya ever did it, before remembering you'd promised yourself not to think about your old friends. Your lusus is standing in the shade of the building, looking hot and angry as usual. You sigh. You are seriously not in the mood for a showdown right now.

"Come on, dad." You say, and he files in behind you, polite and orderly. You file back inside, out of the bright-hot sunlight. Your dad is uncharacteristically quiet. He stays calm through the lobby, teeming with trolls, where you receive a few envious looks, and limp up the stairs to the third floor. Room 151 is a blank, candy-red door with a tiny slot in the middle. You insert the USB key, and the red on the door flickers with the words

"Welcome, Mr. Vantas."

The door spits your key out and slides open silently. The room is cool and small, with a Recuperacoon and a desk- complete with husk top- a couch, a chest shoved against one wall. There's a door that presumably leads to the bathroom. The walls are grey. The floor is polished concrete. Your Lusus seems satisfied, and he's folding himself into an awkward resting position, boney plates and spindly limbs jutting sharply in all directions.

What had the huge troll said? There would be fresh clothes, rest, clean up. You open the second door- mirror, sink, ablution trap, load gaper. Definitely a bathroom. You strip off the dirty too-small clothes and shove them into the sink. You run the water and let the clothes soak.

Your reflection is less then kind. You are bruised and dirty. A cracked rib, wrapped in bandages. You unwind the gauze and reveal a neon red bruise that wraps across the left side of your chest and across your back. One by one, you peel the bandages off. A slice across the forehead from some overenthusiastic FLARPer. A gash in your thigh from the same FLARPer when he'd seen your blood colour. A thousand little bruises. Nicks and cuts from marching through bushes. A shiny-pink burn from a blue-blood with a flamethrower and a hatred for red bloods. He didn't know your particular brand of red until he knocked you around a little. You run your tongue over the sharp points of new teeth pushing their way through your gums. Your eyes stare into themselves, flat candy red staring back at you, unimpressed, from the mirror.

You start the water flowing into the ablution trap and scrub at your filthy old clothes as you wait for the trap to fill. The water in the sink clouds brown, and you drain the water to start again. The roar of hot water and the sting of cold air on cuts that have been covered for weeks lent themselves to tuning out and thinking.

You've been running ever since red started creeping into your irises. You'd said a goodbye to Terezi that she probably wouldn't understand. You'd grabbed your dad, and a sickle, and set off to chase rumors of a shelter for mutantbloods like yourself.

Following that were weeks and months of running with an empty stomach and stretched nerves and a constantly changing roster of bruises. Too long passed between meals, between recuperacoons. It had seemed like a hopeless dream, running from town to town full of kids your age all making play at being adults, beating on the filthy rustblood who stumbled into their neighborhood.

You've acquired the sort of hard, ropey muscle acquired from walking and fighting everyday on an empty stomach. The old puppy fat had been replaced with jutting ribs and hollow cheeks. You turn from your reflection, and your laundry, and slip into the warm water that's been waiting for you.

The hot water is a balm, and being clean feels better then it has the right to. The towels are soft, and the new clothes that are sitting on the couch are warm and comfortable, a turtleneck and a pair of grey pants like yours were before they got too small. The only difference was that your symbol is now printed in bright red on the front of your shirt, not grey.

You settle down on the couch, planning on dicking around on the new husktop, but you're asleep before you can do anything, dreams dogged with the same whispering nightmares that follow all trolls when they sleep without sopor.

A bell rings trough the building, and you wake up thinking for a painful moment that you are back home. Your head is fuzzy, and you are warmer and cleaner then you've been in ages.

"Dinner is being served. All new arrivals please come to the auditorium. Maps are on your desks." A cool, nasally voice echoes over the P.A. system, and you check your desk- the auditorium is on the first floor, on the other side of the building. You creep out of the room quietly, not wanting to wake your lusus.

The auditorium is clogged with nervous, clean trolls who all smell like the same soap you used. Their shirts display colours that range from neon blue to pastel purple. Most colours are just-lighter or just-darker then the hemospectrum. There were the occasional neon like you, a few trolls with normal blood colours with the fins of seadwellers, blood so dark it was almost black, blood so light it was pastel, nearly white, nearly grey. The room smells like fresh-sawed wood and varnish.

You find a seat in one of the smooth white-yellow wooden seats beside a kid with too-dark green blood that shone through his skin from the tips of his ears to his bright cheeks. His horns are aggressively backswept, sticking straight backwards into over the seat. He shoots you a nervous glance, licks dry lips, and shifts in his seat, twisting a broken arm away from you.

"Excuse me, but is this seat taken?" Someone with a deep voice is right next to you, and you glance over. The troll has his hand on the back of the chair beside you. His fingers are covered in round, bright-blue scars. You look up at the owner of the arm.

He's tall and muscular, arms knotted under slumped shoulders. He was huge, but hunching into himself like he wanted to be smaller. A broad, flat-jawed face. Blue eyes with bruisy shadows under them. A horn, shaped like an arrow. The other one was broken.

"Equius?" You ask, and the tall kid jumps. He looks down at you.

"Are you Karkat Vantas?"

"Yeah. You're Equius. You built Vriska a new arm- I recognize you from grubbook."

He blushed neon blue. That is not the colour he typed in. Equius Zahhak, the sweaty mechanic you talked with on trollian sometimes, he typed in a deep, midnight blue. He was lying.

Equius takes a seat beside you, easing gently into the wooden seat.

"I was not aware that you were so low on the hemospectrum." He says politely, and you glance over.

"I'm not on the hemospectrum, fuckass. Neither are you."

He frowns and looks away.

"Hey, aren't you Nepeta's Moirail?"

He looks uncomfortable. "Yes."

"You guys were like, pale as fuck." You say. "You just ditched her?"

He looked down at the floor, said nothing. The smell of sweat drifts through the air.

You shrug and drop the conversation, and a woman files onto stage. The troll is tiny, practically bouncing with energy. Instead of jumping up and down, she files up to the podium that stands waiting for a speaker and holds perfectly still. Holding all that energy in makes her practically thrum with passion when she speaks.

"Allow me to formally welcome you to the Signless's Training Shelter." She says, and everyone sits up a little higher.

"You have gather from all over the planet, trekking through deserts and oceans and mountains to get here. You have fled from your homes and friends. You are tired and bruised and beaten down."

She stands on her tiptoes, slamming her hands on the podium. "This is because someone, somewhere, decided that your blood, your horns, your fins, your gills, make it illegal for you to be alive."

Silence in the auditorium.

"THIS SHOULD NOT BE SO!" She yells. "WE ARE NOT NEON PAINT. WE ARE NOT GENETIC MISTAKES, WE ARE NOT FOOD DIE, OR EXOTIC GRUBSAUCE." She quiets down. "Against all odds, you have survived, you have escaped culling, you have stayed trolls instead of expensive paint. Against all odds, you have made it here. Against all odds, you are alive, you sit here in front of me. In my eyes, this makes you ten times the troll of any of those purebloods." She smiles, warmly, welcomingly.

"This shelter is set up so that children like you can be cared for and trained to survive in a world where your very heartbeat is a crime. You will be given weapons, you will be given amour. You will grow stronger. You will sleep, eight hours a night. Sopor slime. Warm meals."

The hungry eyes of two hundred trolls were fixed on the presenter.

She took out a knife and stuck it, point-first, into the podium.

"While you are here, you will learn that all blood is equal. You will learn that you are no worse then any other troll because of the shade that runs in your veins. Your stunted horns do not make you a worse person, your vestigial gills don't make you a freak."

She grabs the knife, slashing it across her palm, holding her hand up. Bright, neon pink shone against the white-grey of her hand.

"DOES THIS COLOUR MAKE ME ANY MORE THEN ANY OF YOU?" She yells, and the near-royal hue has stunned the crown silent.

"DOES THE RED OF YOUR BLOOD, THE GREEN, THE BLUE, THE GOLD, MAKE YOU WORSE THEN ME? IT IS COLOUR, LADIES AND GENTLEMEN. YOU ARE TROLLS, NO MATTER WHAT. YOU ARE PEOPLE WITH LIVES, AND FEELINGS, WITH PITY AND HATE, JUST AS MUCH AS ANY OTHER TROLL. YOU ARE NOT OBJECTS. YOU ARE NOT GRUBSAUCE. YOU ARE NOT PAINT. YOU ARE PEOPLE. WHAT RUNS IN YOUR VIENS DOES NOT MAKE YOU LESS OF A PERSON." The crowd stares at the almost-glowing pink on her palm.

"You are people." She says. "Never forget that."

There is applause, and a tall lanky man with pale, white-yellow blood shuffles onto the stage.

"Anyone with psychic abilities will be required to sign the mind-control and telekinesis agreement document- pick one up on the way out. Any one without psychic abilities, or with ones useless in combat, will be trained with a weapon of their choice. After dinner, we would like to request that you remain in the cafeteria, as you will be called by room number to visit the armories. Any questions?"

No one said anything. The man nodded, a slow curling of his upper body, and walked off stage.

"You will be taught in history and war tactics." Announces a third speaker- a green-blood with huge horns that curl around her jawbones like picture frames before jutting straight up. "You will be taught to read and write if you do not know. You will learn combat strategy and you will become fit. If there are no questions, please follow your row's leader to the mess hall."

An adult troll at the end of each row of seats stood. Yours was extremely pale- maybe blue or green- with a jaw you could cut steak on and horns like snakes playing twister. After a moment of waiting- in silence- for questions, your leader shuffles into the aisle, and you follow him to a crowded dining hall. Bland grubloaf and water. You eat like you haven't seen food in sweeps.

After dinner, you wait for you room to be called. 347, 348, 349… a troll with horns that droop like dreadlocks taps you on the shoulder after a while.

"351?" He asks softly.

"Yeah." You say, and stand to follow the droopy-horned troll down the twisting hallways of the training shelter.

"Take your pick. I'll be here. Take your form and your weapon, then you can return to your room.

The older troll has stopped at a non-descript silver door, and it slides open with a whisper of steel-on-steel. The inside of the room is Shining with polished Metal.

Swords and daggers hold no interest to you. Hammers and maces and guns and crossbows gleam dully on the shelves. You pass them all and lift a sickle from a rack at the back of the room.

The weapon feels comfortable in your hands. Right, somehow. You know that you're never going to be a threshecutioner. The sickle's just an elegant weapon, and you've missed yours ever since some indigo with a chip in their shoulder took yours.

The long-horned escort raised his eyebrows at your choice of weapon.

"Threshie, eh?" He asks. "Well, don't matter ta me. Take a form."

The next few days, you take a lot of forms. Combat injury consent form. Medical information form. Lusus attack responsibility form. The forms tapered off, and before you knew it, it'd been a sweep. Then two. You avoided Equius, you recognized most of the other mutants in the halls. You knew to go to the jade seadweller if you anted a party, and the bull-horned rustblood if you wanted something from the black market.

Another sweep passed and, quite without realizing it, you've slipped into adulthood. You Irises pulse coal-red, your muscle knot under your skin in a way they never had before. You are taller. Your callused hands grip a sickle like it was part of your arm. You wear you symbol, and your blood colour, proudly on your chest because yes, you are a mutant, and yes, for the first time in your life, you are proud of that fact.