The Void Vaulters

Princess Aikaterine - Kitty's Ant Farm

Princess Aikaterine
Kitty’s Ant Farm

    The only thing Princess Aikaterine wanted for her fifth birthday was an ant farm. Her best friend Mark had one and she loved watching his ants building tunnels through the dirt. Kitty had asked Lord Alexandros for an ant farm of her very own two months in advance. She reminded him weekly up until ten days before her birthday, at which point she began reminding him daily.
    When Kitty’s birthday finally came she received many nice things, which she classified into two simple categories: cherished gifts from her loved ones and horseshit. The horseshit category was comprised of obligatory presents from Lord Alexandros’ many servants and soldiers and samples sent by merchants and craftsmen from all throughout the Void. These people that she barely knew, or in most cases did not know at all, saw Kitty’s birthday as a good opportunity to impress Lord Alexandros.
     One of the finest wine makers in the capitol had joined up with an accomplished glass crafter. Their gifts, a bottle of the vineyard’s newest wine and a two piece glass set, were sent to Lord Alexandros with a note that read, ‘Please enjoy these gifts in celebration of Princess Aikaterine’s Birthday. We felt it best to send this directly to you, my Lord, so that sharing it with the young Princess would be at your discretion, of course.’ The two cups in the wine glass set were engraved with Lord Alexandros and Princess Aikaterine’s names. Kitty’s was significantly smaller, barely large enough to hold a swallow. But it was very pretty and she was allowed to keep it even though her grandfather did not see fit to let her have any of the wine. Possibly the only reason the wine and glass makers were not punished for sending such a questionable gift to the Princess was Lord Alexandros’ love of the wine. He drank it all in one sitting, which was a quite unusual as he rarely drink much at all.
    Other gifts that made horseshit status included things like rolls upon rolls of different silks and cloth, gems, dresses, jewelry, silver and gold trinkets, different kinds of food, books, scented soaps, ribbons for her hair, and a ton of other nonsense. Most of these things Aikaterine already had and did not want more of but she accepted them all in the manner that was expected of her - happily, but not so happy for anyone to question whether giving her less than all of this could ever please her.
    The fact remained that she was more pleased by the home-made gifts from the people that actually mattered in her life than any of the fancy horseshit she had received. Aikaterine’s primary teacher, Max, made her a fine wooden jewelry box that played a pleasant tune when she opened it. Her personal physician, Warren, presented her with a pianoforte with the promise of teaching her how to play. He also have her a small brown and green corduroy bag which he had create specifically to allow extra space for Kitty to store almost as many books as she pleased, without adding additional weight.
    Many of her siblings also gave her things of their own making including paintings, drawings, plates of baked goods, hand sown dresses, dolls, and very detailed wood carving. Her favorite older sister, Calandra, made her an herb set. The plates, cups, and bowls were light blue with silver flowers painted on them. The spoons, pitchers, and teapot were all pure silver with floral designs etched into them. Another one of her older sisters, January, who had only just started taking classes on creating animals with the Art, gave her a hot pink colored kitten. January had thought a lot into the hair color she should make this kitten but never thought into the cat’s natural hair growth process. The kitten still lost its fur at the same shedding rate of normal cats and was quickly completely bald. But Aikaterine loved Pinky all the same.
    And Lord Alexandros, well, he got her a child sized katana. It was a very nice blade. It had a good balance and was just the right size for Kitty. Despite the fact that the handle was very ornamental, with green emeralds that exactly matched her natural eye color, this was no decoration. The blade was exceptionally sharp and Lord Alexandros fully intended for Aikaterine to learn to use it. Kitty tactfully thanked him and as soon as she could get away from her public duties, retired to the bedroom she shared with her sister Mia. By the time Warren and Mia had caught up to her there, she was curled up on the bed sobbing.
    “I asked for one thing!” she told them, “One little thing that would be no problem for him to make with the Art! Why can’t he do it? Because an ant farm doesn’t kill people? Am I not allowed to have something just for fun?”
    “Princess,” Warren started to say before cautiously checking the hallway and closing her bedroom door, “In Lord Alexandros’ mind your birthday is not the time to show that he cares about you; his gift was about sending a message to the entire Void and the requirement for gifts from through out the Void is entirely about him judging other people by what they give you.”
    “Yeah, like that bottle of wine that I wasn’t even allowed to try a sip of?” Kitty remarked coldly.
    “It’s not fair that you get roped into the politics all the time, Kitty,” Warren continued, “But trust me this is the way it’s always going to be. If you go about life expecting anything different you are just setting yourself up for disappointment.”
    Mia glared at Warren for a moment before sitting down on the bed with Kitty, pulling her into an upright position, and wrapping her arms around her comfortingly.
    “Well, what do you want me to do, Mia? Lie to her?” Warren defended, “The world isn’t made out of rainbows and flutterbys!”
    “I know that it is a political game, Warren. That’s why I hate all the stuff that those kind of people give me every year. The fancy jewels and silks and nonsense; I don’t want any of it!” Kitty confessed, “I just want to be a normal girl who has family that actually listen to what they have to say and care about how she feels.”
    “It’s okay, Kitty! We listen and care. And Warren can do the Art! Right, War?” Mia consoled, looking up at Warren expectantly.
    “It’s not about the actual ant farm, Mia.” Kitty insisted, “I don’t even want one now.”
    “No, you didn’t even want one to begin with!” Warren accused, “If you had you would have known to ask anyone other that your grandfather for it. All you really wanted for your birthday was for Alexandros Lord of all the Void to put you above his own selfish desires and political games.”
    “Maybe.” Kitty admitted, “But I did actually want the farm at the time. It wouldn’t make much sense to try to prove something by asking for a thing I didn’t even want.”
    “Well, okay then.” Warren stated plainly. He used the Art to build a glass case snug against the light blue circular wall, all the way around the room. The quarter of an inch space between the glass quickly began filling with soil until it almost reached the top of the wall. Warren added a single ant and then built a little ladder for Kitty to climb up so she could feed it sugar water and seeds. The ant, which was bigger than any ant Kitty had ever seen and had wings, quickly explored the fresh source of food.
    “Um, Warren?” Mia asked tentatively, “Wouldn’t we want more than one? I mean… one can’t really do much tunneling, can it?”
    “I’m getting to that.” He agreed.
    He looked up at the girls’ domed ceiling and created a pane of glass horizontally at the base where it met the wall. He let many smaller ants loose in this enclosure. Then he fed a wide tube between the two glass cases.
    “Now all we have to do is set the mood.” he joked.
    “What?” Mia giggled.
    “We have to make the climate that of the ants natural mating habitat. If we get the right humidity and temperature…” he informed them, using the art to change the air inside the case which caused the glass to fog slightly, “See look!”
    The first and biggest ant had finished eating and took flight towards the second glass case in which the other smaller ants were already buzzing around merrily.
    “That ant is called a princess, meaning she’s a virgin queen. She’s going to try to out fly the male ants to ensure she only mates with the strongest of them. When she is done, she will start to explore the ground looking for a suitable place to nest. She only has to mate this one time but it will fertilizing more than enough eggs to begin building her colony.” Warren explained, “She will pull off her own wings and become a queen ant. Most of her offspring will become worker ants who will build tunnels, look for food, and take care of the queen’s every need. Later she will also have soldier ants who protect her and do a lot of the heavy lifting. After the colony is well established she might produce more princess ants. But that probably won’t be for a while. Her first children will be smaller and weaker than the later ones because she won’t have any other ants to help her feed them during the first few stages of their life.”
    They watched the ants fly around the domed room. When one of the smaller ants dropped dead onto the plane of glass, Kitty freaked out.
    “Yeah, I should have mentioned that. The drones die after mating.”
    “That’s awful!” Kitty gasped.
    “It’s just the way their lifecycle works. Their sole goal in life is to try to fertilize the princess. There is no longer a reason for them to live once they’ve completed that mission.” Warren told her remorselessly.
    “Wow, what a whore!” Kitty laughed, “Look, she’s going back for more!”
    “Um, yeah. That happens too.” Warren said awkwardly, “Perhaps I should have made you a fertilized queen.”
    “No, this is very interesting, Warren, thank you.” Kitty replied, beaming up at him.
    Later when the ants had finished mating and the queen had begun nesting, Warren resealed the opening between the two cases. He cleaned out the dead drone bodies, captured the remaining drones, and removed the glass plane from their ceiling.
    “We’ll just let these poor suckers go.” He said, opening the container in which he had the living drones captured out the window, “The queen isn’t going to go back to them. Seeing as they didn’t even get any, they deserve to fly free and try again at love, don’t you think?”
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    As time passed Kitty and Mia’s ant colony grew. The queen produced stronger worker ants and they built expansive tunnel systems in their glass class. They had so many ants that they had to utilize the citadels mainframe system to count them all. They has a screen telling them how many total ants they had, the statistics of each type or life stage, and even the strength and health of the younger ants compared to that of the former offspring.
    The total number read one thousand two hundred and twenty three ants on the day Kitty and Mia were horsing around with the Art and accidentally shattered most of the front panel of the ant case. Their floor was covered in broken glass, dirt, and scurrying ants. Kitty tried to call for help but her efforts to contact Warren were intercepted by Lord Alexandros. Their grandfather was predictably outraged.
    He towered over them screaming about their carelessness and how this was why he did not want them to have ants in the house to begin with. He commanded them to kill every last one. When they refused to murder their precious pets, he completely sealed off their bedroom, locking them in there with the ants. He said he would not let either of them out until they brought him one thousand two hundred and twenty three dead ant bodies and that which ever of them killed less of the ants would be the one to be punished for their crime. He also warned them that no one in the building would be allowed to bring them food until all of the ants were dead.
    What he did not know was that Aikaterine and Mia had a small reserve of candy and other goodies hidden in the panel of their headboard for just such an occasion. For the first day they hid under the sheets of their shared bed eating gummy bears and chocolate covered pretzels. They laughed at his stupidity for thinking they would give up so easily - Why would they even want to leave this room when not only did they not have to eat any healthy food but we’re also getting out of having to go to classes? But by that night, when the ants were crawling all over their bed in the process of harvesting their pretzel crumbs, their perspective on the situation drastically changed. On the second day they realized they would have to start conserving their stores if they were going to out wait their grandfather’s anger. They did this by only eating halves of things instead of feasting like they had the day before.
    On the third day, Mia reached for their last half of a candy bar to share for breakfast only to find that several ants had gotten into it during the night. She flicked them off and quickly squashed all of them with her thumb. Then she looked at Kitty hesitantly. They shared an awkward look for a fraction of a second before both of them rushed about the room squashing, smashing, and stomping as many ants as quickly as they possibly could. Kitty set up another counter system on the mainframe to tell them how many bodies were in each of their two separate piles and they glared at each other resentfully whenever one would take lead over the other. It took them all morning, afternoon, and part of the way into the evening but eventually each of their meters read six hundred and twelve dead bodies, an exact even tie.
    “That’s not right. We only had one thousand two hundred and twenty three to begin with.” Kitty said, “One of our piles should have one less ant.”
    “So we give him one more than he asked for. What’s the problem?” Mia asked, “I’m sure he’d be happier that one ant that was already free in the house is dead now too.”
    Aikaterine walked over to the original screen that counted their ants. It now read, ‘Queens: one, Princesses: zero, Workers: zero, Soldiers: Zero, Drones: Zero, Eggs: zero, Larvae: Zero, Pupae: zero, Total: one”
    “We must have had two loose ants in the room to begin with.” Aikaterine stated.
    Mia began searching through the larges of the piles of dirt and quickly found the queen. She was about to cut her in half with her pocket knife when Kitty tackled her.
    “Nooo!” Kitty yelled, punching Mia in the shoulder, “Let her go! You already said it, we have one more than Dad asked for!”
    Mia instead turned her knife on Kitty threateningly. Kitty stopped punching her sister and instead grabbed the queen. Cupping her in her hands protectively, she gently carried her over to her dresser and placing her in the jewelry box Max had given her for her birthday. She immediately locked it before breaking down into tears.
    “You’re right.” Mia admitted, “We should let the queen live. I don’t know what I was thinking. And hey, he can’t punish either of us if we’re even, right?”
    “Right!” Kitty said, cheering up considerably.
    They were wrong. Kitty turned off both counters to destroy the evidence that proved the queen was still alive. Then they swept all of the glass and dirt into two bins, which they laid out by their door. Kitty thought this would make them look more responsible for cleaning up the room properly and not just taking care of the ant infestation. Finally they called Lord Alexandros to their chambers.
    When he arrived and looked down upon their two piles, he smirked maliciously for a moment before having the mainframe frame count them. When he discovered they were even, he did not thank them for killing an extra ant like they had hoped. Instead he got incredibly mad at them for ‘trying to get out of being punished’ and decided to weigh each of the piles on a scale instead. Kitty’s turned out to be a hair heavier and Mia was to be lashed five times.
    Kitty felt really guilty about this. It was her misuse of the Art that had smashed the glass to begin with. Mia couldn’t even use the art, after all. When she tried to tell her grandfather this, he changed his mind and decided to give Kitty five lashings for not having better techniques in the Art but Mia was still to receive her punishment.
    After the whipping, the girls’ room was unlocked and they were allowed to go down to dinner. They were both exceptionally hungry and therefore ate their healthy food quickly and without complaint. When they returned to their room later than evening they waited until the middle of the night, when they were confident that Lord Alexandros was not watching their every move, before opening their bedroom window to released the queen.
    The next day their school instructors were harsher than usual, forcing them to make up the material they had missed as quickly as possible. Many of their siblings started to refer to them as the antsy-pantsy twins. And as if those things were not bad enough, it was a long time before either of them had any desire for chocolate.