[b]Yellow![/b]

"Most people aren't real to me," said Yellow. She's got that same critical tone she used when discussing Green earlier. "To Orange and Brown, they are. They like listening to the bullshit, telling themselves they can pull valuable data and patterns out of it but I can't see the point. To me most of them seem like meat robots, absolutely unaware of themselves and you could watch them for a hundred years and not see a single spark of wit or self reflection. I try to pull it out of them but it feels more like inserting myself into them, running my mental electricity through a corpse and watching the fingers twitch."

Her eyes flick across. There's something magical about yellow as a colour. It can exist in a dull, inert mass that fades into brown, but so can it exist in a green so vital and alive it becomes electric. It can harden into glorious gold, ignite into flaming orange, ascend into a pastel shade that's brighter than white. It sparkles brighter than anything when set against black and becomes the sun when standing next to blue. It's the colour of cowardice and imperium. All this from a tiny fracture of the wheel.

"Other people, though, are more alive than I am," said Yellow. "Like if I added up all of my parts I still wouldn't measure up. Like they are running [i]their [/i]electricity through my cold dead metal hands and I'm [i]lucky [/i]to feel that close to being alive. I can see my limitations when that happens, my failures of character, the distance between what I am and what I want to be. And that gives my own self-hatred definition because now I know what I need to do to be better, who I need to be, what a better version of myself might look like. It turns me from being a pointless little god, a dead soul reigning in a soulless world, into something real. Something directed."

"Instead of being powerful and intelligent and whatever, I become a creature who has identified beauty and is actively pursuing it. There's nothing better in the universe to be than that. Status, wealth, fame, capabilities - people who have those things without striving towards beauty, trying to better themselves to become worthy of that beauty, to become one with beauty - those people are among the world's boring dead. Social media has let us see the souls of the rich and powerful and those souls are hollow and pointless. What they have isn't worth having if it means becoming like them."

"Real beauty exists here. In this hidden gym where a girl dances with lasers. In this mentor I cannot surpass. On this battlefield where my every weakness is seen and exploited. Where I can see beauty, beauty that even if I can't create I might some day be able to reflect. Beauty that makes my mechanical heart determined to build a soul, beauty that keeps it from shriveling and dying of thirst."

Her gaze is still steady. Her voice has that same tone as earlier; precise, matter of fact, even critical. This is her self assessment and self condemnation, as sincere and harsh as she applies to any of her other colours.

"I don't meet many people like that," she said, finally looking back towards the ring. "So when I do, who [i]I [/i]am kind of stops mattering. If you had the same level of passion and devotion to welding or basket weaving or whatever I'd be coming here all the same and learning just as determinedly. Might not be able to convince the rest of the colours over as much if combat wasn't so broadly applicable to us, but fuck them. What else is the point of all this? If you don't have a vision you're in the dark until you do, and coming here I can see the path to becoming a better version of myself."

She was quiet for a while, watching the whirl and flash of heart and blade. 

"Besides," she said eventually. "Surpassing you will be the best feeling of my life."