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Her name was chosen to be Juanaflippa.
Two people were tied by fate or random chance, given a new child to care for, and then took the wheel. To say they were grossly ill-prepared was an understatement, they complemented each other like a house on fire and that situation wasn’t too conducive to raising a kid. In between the protests made in emotional agony and the sadistic cheers for joy, it was clear their matching tickets from the matchmaker machine were the dry kindling. Nonetheless the disagreements, they named the child anyway with a fervent gleam in their eyes hidden behind their glasses. Frontflipo at first, then Juanflippo. Neither name satiated her until she nodded to her parents when they asked if she’d rather be seen as a girl. So Juanaflippa as a name was born. Juanaflippa as a kid was born. Juanaflippa's family was born. That day, she was a real girl with a real heart and real parents. They didn’t have much choice in the matter but that didn’t matter much to them; the choices would’ve been the same with the freedom to make them.
Her name was chosen to be JuanaFlippa.
That’s what she had to adopt in order to sell the façade. That was an order, a clear concise instruction she needed to follow. It wasn’t a matter of choice if it was for the greater good. That’s at least what she is told and was told to take to heart. There is not much choice when it comes to being what she truly is, there is no choice in doing what she is doing. She just has to wear the cadaver of a costumed corpse and smile away. Just to wait in the corner of a pre-made pristine home in a cave until the target is in sight. Standby, that's what its called when one has to wait in anticipation for the next instruction. But she had to pause a little when she was told the rest was in her hands.
They let her take the wheel, to take the drive in the situation. She's not caught off-guard because to react to the order was a choice. And yet, the instructions themselves are clear but read like an oxymoron. She had to follow them regardless as the train carriage wheels chugged down the train tracks and halted with a hiss of steam. She steels herself as she listens to her target's confusion with the derailed carriage. A couple of seconds more and more, then she stands upright from the shadows into the torchlight with a convincing smile.
Her first choice is to greet Slimecicle with boundless energy in her stumbling run and hop, circling the birthday boy while he revels in the well-welcomed surprise. She can tell there are tears in his eyes, they stick to his lenses and make them gleam more under the berry glow. At a point his words become muddled in his scratchy throat, caught with chokes and sobs that can't escape. All that she can understand is his shivering arms trying to wrap around her body but freezing up a few moments in. She puts down more signs, she tells Slimecicle she needs to go. She'll see him soon if things go according to plan. Though she doesn't say that last part...
She leaves a moment after, diving into the bushes and wriggling into the deep caverns of the hollowed-out lush cave. She pays no mind to the horribly hoarse screams that echo throughout the cave. Instead, she curls up with her back pressed to the rough rock, easing out of the disguise as the tumbling footsteps start to fade further out. She can't look at herself, a mass of binary code that glows neon green, but she knows what it looks like. There's the reason they call them Code Monsters, it's because they were horrific. That was the first step, and her choice-filled actions ceased. Now it’s the part where she waitss for the signal to go further. The part to wait for the next choice she doesn’t get to make.
Juanaflippa has glasses.
It's the reason she was picked from the adoption center by two myopic idiots in the first place. They were never blood related but they joked anyway about Juanaflippa getting the bad end of the genetic lottery. She's told by her papa that she has allergies to practically anything that is a noun and now she's vegan too. (Well, vegan sometimes — she can have cheat days) She never learned to speak for a while so she could never really ask a complex question like "Why?" to her papa, she just had to get by with Yes and No to him. And it was hard to keep up with whatever he said sometimes, meaning that she was slow to follow his aggressive instructions. But that was alright. Her papa starts to act a little strange one day, struggling with the sternness in his voice that masks his joy in being a parent. He starts to say stuff about putting her in a cage and stuff, and it starts to unnerve her. But that's okay because she loves her papa truly. And when she tells her papa she's sorry, that she just wants love, she knows then that her papa does love her too.
JuanaFlippa has glasses.
She doesn't need them to see, she just needs the mask for the masquerade she has to go through. She adjusts a little with how thick the lenses are through some modification but it's still a little offputting to wear something that isn't armor. A finger of hers still reaches to the bridge of the glasses to push them up her nose, it's already become second nature it seemed.
She had to do this several times, she learned while reconstituting her body back into corporeal form. Three times she was felled that day, two times actually "died". It's harder to learn that Slimecicle is kind of terrible at things that are meant to be subtle. He's a very poor liar, his words so laced with anxiety that it's even more suspicious when he plants a casual but panicked attitude with it. It's entertaining to her, the endless string of excuses he stumbles on leaves her nothing short of giggling a little inside. But she knows Slime's instability of improvisation is a causality to her secret mission.
At that point, she accepted that Slime was going to give it away in three minutes and rethinks the plan. Everyone's eggs are missing, she learns, so it's the prime moment to at least weaponise the hole in their hearts that isn't just Slime. For a moment when she thinks this, a pang of something hits but she ignores it.
They are sat in the dark and dingy basement of the Eggxile shack. They are completing their task of naming cockroaches after enemies. The names she chooses aren't hiding her disdain for the Federation from the green guy, who is agreeing to her every word of explicit political opinions by the requirement of supportive parenting. That hatred is sort of ingrained into her head like engraving craved into a metal plate. The bespectacled islander offers his own names of enemies; "The overwhelming grief I felt without you" and "Mi Puta Esposa". She gathers as much as Slime has a lot of pent-up emotion, more the reason he's a subject to the mission. Slime pipes up for a fifth name for the cockroach, placing a sign and scribbling his choice. "Code Monsters" he had written, to which the code monster smacked it off the cage with a clatter. But Slime doesn't know it's a code monster who's desperately erasing the words to replace it with a more Federation-related name. He doesn't know that the little one in front of him was hit with a pang of the feeling again while writing the name like printed lines over the smeared pencil marks. He doesn't have to know, he shouldn't know. Luckily he doesn't want to know any further as she keeps up her act of being his dead daughter.
Juanaflippa is scared.
She feels like she hasn't woken up yet her eyes are open. the last thing she remembers is sleeping in her safe bedroom then darkness. Underneath her feet, there's the tickle of warmth and she assumes she's in Hell. That of which is fair, considering her animal murders. But she also feels the shiver up her back like a thin atmosphere, and she thinks she's in Heaven. She is confused because she doesn't know what's happening. She doesn't know what's happening so she is scared. Juanaflippa tries to move but she can't breathe. Juanaflippa the egg tries to breathe but she can't move. Juanaflippa, daughter to one Slimecicle and one ElMariana, tries to move to breathe but nothing seems to work in purgatory. Then all of a sudden there is a bright light that blinks into her eyes. And now she's sat on the grass as she sees her parents once again. She knows where she is, snug in their arms and never letting go, so she is no longer scared.
JuanaFlippa is scared.
She never thought an entity like her could be scared. Not even those who battled that masked cucumber man were afraid — because they had no choice in being not afraid.
The task was well-executed and the real mission was going smoothly. It was pure luck that the group she ended up with seemed to be the least investigative and prying group out of all the other islanders she'd interacted with. That luck was in her favor since they had no qualms about storming the weirdly unprotected Federation offices for some bubbles. She quickly made a beeline to the office labeled "01", she knew that it should belong to someone important and hence contain equally important high-level information. She scoured the barrels and shelves in the office, her dad just behind him lost in trying to find bubbles. She tries to reach the higher bookshelves but she can't reach them, so she does a light sucker punch at her dad's leg and points up. He gets the message after a few more punches, reaching up to the shelf and plucking a picture. They continue to ravage the office and she points to a barrel she can't reach in her short egg form. Slime gets that for her too, this time it's a book. He tells her that it says something about a failed experiment, an abomination, a proof of the Federation's impurities.
She should be a bit proud to have acquired some intel, yet when she peeks at the photo she is struck by a pang.
All of sudden as she looks to the pearly white lobby outside the office, she has the need to rub her fingers in her palms to stop them from shaking a little. It's just the air conditioning that's making her cold, the excuse falling on deaf ears as she buries any thought into mindless bubble-blowing.
The squad rolls out of the offices and stands out of the train station, prepping their lassos on each other with tight knots. The littlest one twirls the bubble in her hands as she focuses her energy on the other palm. As the golden man with the pumpkin on his head makes some noises for the theatrics, the real magician is snapping her fingers as he disappears into the limit of the sky. Soon, everyone is pulled ascending into the clouds with screams; whether of terror or joy, they blend too much to matter distinction. It's all fun, they fly too fast upwards that bubbles barely have time to float in view. She is enjoying herself though, coasting off the collective energies of everyone else as they get higher and higher.
She hears a snap of a lasso and her dad's screams afterward, and all of a sudden that pang hits her like a freight train.
There is the distant panic that she hears, and her eyes only focus on her hand for another teleportation and swapping the bubble blower for a totem. Act quick, he's going to die, so act quicker; that's all she's processing as the teleport happens. She manages to pull her body down more and more, she can barely see her downed dad but suddenly, she gets tugged further away from the ground again. The lasso was still around her waist and the striking feeling of fear was rising as she fell. By the time she lands with the totem saving her, she's starting her dad's dead body on the station floor. She doesn't bat eyes at the rest of the felled people that land beside her, she simply leaps down with a roll and preps another teleport for her respawned dad.
As soon as Slime stood alive in front of her, she already wrapped her arms around his legs and heaved the heaviest sigh she'd ever had. She prints out on her sign that she was so worried, hand gripping the pencil to almost breaking it. Slime coos, bringing her into a hug as evidence he's alive and well even if he needs to respawn. After the little one spots a Cellbit drawing near, she tugs on Slime's pant leg as he gathers his items from his corpse. She writes that she wants to go home now, so they do.
The moment when she is warped to the waystone at Eggxile and her dad isn't there yet, she takes to breathe in and out. Once Slime finally arrives, he talks to her for a little while to check in and gives her the Federation intel. She really takes in the information and scans the image. It's all familiar. The words and the terms, the face in the picture rendered in black and white, the author of the book. It's all familiar and that part is scaring her the most. She can't keep that fear in, she has to say that she is scared. So she does, she admits she is scared even if standing on the perfectly fine beachside with the sundown.
Slime notices her words and reassures her: If anything would hurt his daughter he will kill them instantly.
It didn't even matter if he had the capability to, the sentiment was enough to at least quell the worries. Slime offers out his hand and the feelings start again. The arm he extends out is the infection site, already spreading rapidly up his arm to at least his elbow. It's a lot that Slime barely even minded the infection, even with it slowly shifting in and out of corporeal form. His body isn't handling it well, no immune system could battle his spasms and voice glitches. But he still clutches hard on her hand as they walk into the shack and down the ladder to her bed.
Her dad makes up an apology, if he were a lacking father he is sorry and he would try to be better. She doesn't need an apology, she should be the one apologizing for wearing such a face and such a name. She plucks out another sign, prints out her words, and motions for Slime to read it.
"i love u dad, i really do, dont forget that", he manages to read amidst her horrible spelling errors, "Of course, Flippa, I could never...I could never forget..."
Flippa, she hangs on the name.
It stings more than it should as she hobbles into bed finally.
She is scared. She has glasses. Her name was chosen to be JuanaFlippa.
She had to be JuanaFlippa because it was an order. She had to be some guy's dead daughter and play him like a fiddle. And she had to have no qualms over it, that was what she was supposed to do. They made the mistake of making her make choices, to give her speech, and to give her words to describe how she felt. She never felt like JuanaFlippa and yet... Flippa is clutching her dad's corrupted hand that glows like a neon nightlight because her name is JuanaFlippa. Flippa doesn't want to leave the bed in case her dad disappears into nothing but 1s and 0s because her name is JuanaFlippa. Flippa swallows down that feeling she calls "Guilt" and hopes her dad wakes up soon again because her name is JuanaFlippa.
Her name is only JuanaFlippa because she loves her dad.