"They're going to get food," Aldrec said. "Good hunting, friends."
"Now I really envy you," Mericlou said with a laugh.
"Why?" Aldrec asked.
"Because now that I've seen that you can talk to plants and animals, I want to as well!" She emitted a wistful sigh. "If I could do just that, I'd be the happiest android in the world!"
"You mean you don't feel like the happiest android in the world right now?" Aldrec said. He leaned over to kiss her on the cheek, and then stood up.
"Oh, I'm sorry!" Mericlou said, quickly grabbing hold of his hand. "I do feel like the happiest android in the world right now! It was just a poor choice of words; that's all."
Aldrec smiled knowingly. "I know, Tulyr," he said. "And I'm glad that I've made you feel that way."
"Then where are you going?" She saw that he was headed back towards Vinta.
"To a place where dreams come true," he said. "I should be back in a moment. Wait here, okay?"
Mericlou nodded, and let go of his arm. Aldrec vanished behind a small grove of trees, all sounds of his footsteps ceasing as he went out of sight, leaving her alone with her thoughts.
In all her short twenty-six years since she was first activated, she never would have even dreamed -had she even known she could- that she would have fallen so heavily in love, and that it would have been with an elf … no, a High elf, of all the beings on this world. She had thought too lowly of humans, after years of mistreatment and discrimination at their hands. And she had never once given elves much thought, as most would never have formed strong ties with humans, let alone androids. Unlike her hopelessly romantic sister Noroa, or lusty Alaema, she had been far more like Skori or Sedriil in her mentality: pragmatic and focused on the present, rather than the future. With the exception of her affinity for the natural world, she had always been a classic textbook android. In the way of romance, she only hoped to someday find one of those one out of twenty-five hundred good humans somewhere along the line, who would be tolerant of android rights, and would treat her nicely enough to warrant her interest. Or perhaps even another android would have caught her eye, but that was even more unlikely, as the ones she knew were too obsessed with the artificial, and behaved more like machines than anything living to be of much fascination to her. And female type Alerian models outnumbered males twenty-eight to one, to say nothing of the fact that they were all of a now-obsolete model, whose demand plummeted since the end of the sterility crisis. The tolerance levels of humans were tested to their limits with the existence of her model anyway, even during the crisis, and so most android companies were grateful to cease their production after it was dealt with. It was too bad, since Alerians were still the more mentally sophisticated of most android models, perhaps with the exception of Kespar models, like Sedriil. But as fixated on logic as they were, no Kespar model would have ever caught her eye. In light of these facts, she was fully prepared to resign herself to a life alone.