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Perfect Hero, Absolute Lover

Summary:

Relena Darlian, a happy-go-lucky trust fund heiress is a bit of a wastrel, and a favorite of the gossip-loving masses, along with her best friend, Dorothy Catalonia. She'd mostly coasted through her life in happily, ignorant bliss, until one transgression became too egregious for her father to decide that Relena needed to be taught a lesson in responsibility.

With her credit cards cut, her diplomatic passport cancelled, and with no job, no skills, no house, and no one to turn to while stuck on V-08744 colony in the L2 cluster, Relena must navigate trying to find a job, trying to find meaning in being a productive member of society, all while trying to live with the stupid mistake that had caused her father to put her in this position in the first place!

Gundam Wing AU in which the Eve Wars never took place and the Alliance and Romefeller just have a moderate level of corruption and ugliness about it, so there was no desire for any sort of war from anyone around. Literally everyone has a different job/personality in this AU, and Heero isn't even human.

Notes:

(See the end of the work for notes.)

Chapter Text

In hindsight, she really should have realized this would become the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back. Of course Daddy was going to hear about it. Even if Alliance Vice Minster for Colonial Affairs Ferdinand Darlian didn’t watch any of the trash tabloid channels that reported on and hounded his daughter with the relentless force of a hundred paparazzi and their unrelenting telephoto lenses intend on catching a scoop of her changing out of her Gucci dress and into her Versace swimwear while lounging on a yacht off the coast of the Cayman Islands, he certainly looked into his daughter’s credit card bills. Daddy was always hounding her about her propensity for living in excess, and it wasn’t like Relena wasn’t trying. Wasn’t that why she had sugar daddies? That’s what Dorothy said anyway.

That was really all there was to it as she tried to reason with the Colony Port Authority about her cancelled passport. Apparently, not only was she getting cut off from her allowance and trust fund so that she could be taught a lesson in responsibility, her diplomat status passports were also cancelled, and now this meant she was stuck on this ugly rock of a colony, all because Dorothy’s date, some rich colony tycoon’s scion by the unlikely name of Quatre Winner, wanted to see a colony sunrise. He’d spent so much time in his boring engineering internship on L3 X-18999 designing spacecraft, and V-08744 on the L2 cluster just happened to be in the sun cycle that particular time of the year.

Quatre had already gone back to his work colony, like the mousy, boring, white collar worker rat that he was as soon as the sun was up, leaving Relena and Dorothy to find their own way back to Earth. That really wouldn’t have been a problem, because there was no way either Relena or Dorothy were getting into that hipster trash pile he liked to call a shuttle (“No, Quatre, that sandskipper is not a shuttle,” Dorothy had said of Quatre’s modified freighter he’d given the dubious moniker, MS Sandrock. It didn’t even have leather upholstered seats, much less business class service, and Dorothy and Relena only ever flew first class) if Relena’s credit card statement hadn’t arrived in Daddy’s email box while Relena and Dorothy were having brunch at the local Dean and Luca’s on colony.

Daddy really blew a gasket on that one.

To be fair, it hadn’t had anything to do with Quatre Winner and his boring, nerdy self that Daddy had been pissed off. Well, not really really.

The truth was, it was mostly Relena’s own fault.

Oh sure, the main reason why she ended up in Operation Meteor’s New Tokyo office two weeks before had been entirely because Quatre Winner had been more interested in Dorothy than he had been with Relena, even though Relena was so the one who met him first. Dorothy had told her it was because blond girls simply had more fun, even though with both Dorothy’s dyed blond hair, and Quatre Winner’s extreme blond locks, they looked more like fraternal twins than a romantic couple. Still, Relena had been so nettled that Quatre Winner hadn’t been interested in her at all that she’d allowed that charlatan masquerading as a scientist to seduce her into signing up for Operation Meteor’s beta test of their newest product. She hadn’t even known what Operation Meteor sold before she was walking out of their office.

She’d all but forgotten about said product and that sign-up up to now, until Daddy called her while she was paying for brunch to tell her that he was immensely disappointed with her life choices (“You are twenty years old, Relena! You should have been in Oxford or Harvard two years ago, and yet here you are wasting your life away with that fair weather friend of yours!”), that he was cutting her off from all of her credit cards until she showed that she could be responsible, not only with her finances but with her life choices as well, and that she would be stuck on V-08744 for the foreseeable future, until she could prove that she’d grown up, and could be responsible with her life and her trust fund money.

And no, Relena, signing up on an Operation Meteor Beta Test is not responsible adulthood!

She’d wanted to tell Daddy that she was at least not strung out and pregnant at fifteen, like half of her other classmates in St Walburga’s Private School for girls in Brussels, but she was certain that wouldn’t have gone over very well.

At least Daddy had allowed Mommy to pay for her hotel room and cellphone bill for the rest of the month, but after that, she supposed it meant getting a job, finding an apartment on this ugly, boring rock, and paying Nord Telco for mobile and video services all on her own. It was stupid and boring, and Relena was sure was beneath her, except her passport had been cancelled, so she couldn’t even get on the Earth-bound shuttle Dorothy was boarding that Relena had had to ask her friend to pay for her at least until they got back to Brussels, where Relena could ask Mr Pagan to get her emergency card stash that linked to Mommy’s accounts instead of Daddy’s.

Dorothy looked at her now as she adjusted her fashionable summer cloche, as she handed one of those greasy little Port Authority porters a twenty (bless L2 for being one of the only colonies left that still accepted cash, and in American dollars, no less!) for taking care of her luggage as they stood near the boarding gate.

“Are you sure you don’t want me calling my grandfather? I’m sure Gramps Dermail would be able to find some way to get Inter-Colony Travel Authority to reactivate your passports.” Dorothy smiled at her smugly.

Relena wanted to shudder. Dorothy’s grandfather was the head of the Romefeller Foundation, the group that primarily funded the United Earth Sphere Alliance and essentially made him the most powerful man in all the cosmos, or at least richer than Satan. It would be an utter embarrassment to Daddy if it got out that Duke Dermail Catalonia had had to bail an Alliance Minister’s daughter out of a tight spot, and Relena may be a lot of things, but she would never intentionally hurt Mommy or Daddy, even when they were stranding her on a godforsaken rock in the middle of outer space to teach her a lesson in responsibility.

“Please, no. Can you imagine the scandal, the likely international incident that would cause?” She grimaced delicately. “I’ll wait it out. Once Daddy sees how awful it is here, I’m sure he’ll come back to his senses. He always does.”

Dorothy sighed. “What was it about this time anyway? I thought you said your dad doesn’t read the tabloids, so it can’t have been about that time you were photographed with your cooch hanging out in that limo outside the Fullerton in Singapore.”

Relena was far too genteel to scowl, but she did frown, just a very slight wrinkling of her brows. It wouldn’t do to overdo it—she didn’t get collagen milk facials every two weeks just to have it ruined by scowling over Dorothy’s incredibly crude language. For such a high born and well-educated woman, her best friend had such an immensely uncouth mouth on her. “I did not have my privates hanging out. I’ll have you know, I was wearing a nude T-back, since that crystal lace Zuhair Murad would’ve shown panty lines.”

Dorothy laughed. “Well, it can’t have been the sex tape. You weren’t even there when that idiot Levinski decided to film me and Trant and Luna in that threesome.”

Relena flattened her mouth in distaste. Dorothy’s penchant for sexual adventures both repulsed and excited her. She wished she could be half as carefree and beautiful as Dorothy was, but even though she was a bit of a wastrel, Relena could never quite stoop to the sort of escapades Dorothy had gotten herself into. It just wasn’t in her nature. Consequently, all the men they’d ever met in their travels and all the parties they’d gone to had gravitated towards Dorothy, because they always found Relena incredibly boring. Just because she wouldn’t put out for the first penis wagging at her…

“No, you know my dad,” she hedged, because while she was jealous of Dorothy, there was no way she was telling her best friend what she had gotten herself into. It was too embarrassing. That she even ended up with Daddy discovering this already mortified her. If Dorothy ever found out, she would absolutely laugh Relena out of their Trust Fund Babies Anonymous friend group, and Relena couldn’t have that. Who would she party on yachts with if that ever happened? “He’s always on about these character building lessons. He’s still disappointed I ran out on MIT last summer, I suppose.”

Dorothy shrugged artfully. “Well, Mr Darlian can’t have expected you to stay in Boston for six whole months just to attend that short course. What would happen to your social life?”

Relena sighed regretfully. Come to think of it, maybe she should have stayed in MIT. That had been where she’d first met Quatre Winner, and sure he was a little boring, and a little nerdy, but he was hot, right? She’d had no idea astrophysicist engineers could even look as hot as that man. Maybe if she’d stayed, Quatre Winner might even be dating her now. And she’d still be in MIT getting a degree and… and being a boring, mousy astrophysics and engineering student. Sure, she liked studying for these two courses, but did she want to be some mousy, desk-bound engineer who frothed at the mouth and got her rocks off on the subject of Lagrange point calculations for the next colony cluster? Jesus, Mary, Joseph and Louis Vuitton, she hoped not!

“Anyway, I’ll stay here and wait it out,” she assured Dorothy. “Daddy’ll change his mind, you’ll see.”

“If that’s what you want to do,” Dorothy said flippantly. “Give me a call over the next week if you’re still here and I’ll come see you, all right, love?”

Relena flipped her light brown hair off one shoulder. She wished she’d at least thought to lighten her hair to a honey blond to suit the summery climate L2 was in now, so she didn’t look exactly like every boring, humdrum person who sat in the economy cabin in the shuttle. “Of course. I’ll be fine here, Dorothy. You’ll see.”

Dorothy’s eyes flashed dubiously, but she just shrugged and nodded. “Well then, I suppose I’ll have to go. The chalet up in the Hamptons awaits. See you next week, pet.”

They exchanged air kisses, and then Relena waved goodbye to her friend as Dorothy disappeared into the docking tube that connected the spaceport’s boarding gate to the space shuttle. Dorothy would have at least eighteen hours of space travel before she could even enter Earth’s satellite range. That would at least mean her cellphone would be out of range and coverage area, and she wouldn’t be able to call Relena and watch her grovel to her father to send her back to Brussels, or even Boston and MIT—just anything to get off this miserable, godforsaken rock.

Once Dorothy was completely out of sight and safely ensconced in the shuttle, she made her way out of the spaceport and hailed a taxi.

L2 V-08744 was actually a massive colony, about twice the size of New York City, and about ten times as grimy, dirty, and just plain gross. It had been one of the earliest colonies to have opened for civilian habitation back in AC 13, and therefore, it meant outdated systems and just about two hundred years for the formerly prosperous and bustling colony to decline into an aging, decrepit cesspit of corruption that the L2 cluster colonies seemed to be predisposed into becoming. It was odd, really. It seemed to be a particular characteristic only of L2, because none of the other colony clusters had colonies that eventually ended up looking like Detroit in decline. At least the V-08744 high street in the heart of the colony still looked like Upper Manhattan, even though the boroughs that surrounded it tended to look less like 5th Avenue, and more like Spanish Harlem.

She was booked in the junior suite of the L2 Sheraton, which was not her preferred hotel, but the only one she could get after Quatre Winner abandoned her and Dorothy when they wouldn’t ride on his MS Sandrock. Dorothy, of course, had to get the presidential suite for herself.

It wasn’t too bad, and as she got off the taxi and looked up at the gleaming white building of the hotel, she had to wonder how she was going to find an apartment in this ugly colony that would give her the feel of living in at least a four star business hotel. She wondered how much a serviced apartment on 3rd Avenue would cost.

The receptionist flagged her down as she headed to the elevator lobby. Relena had to suppress a sigh as she headed towards the customer relations desk. Having lived in Brussels and the seat of the Alliance’s political might all her life, she would likely never get used to how casual these colonists usually acted, flagging people (and taxis, the cheek!) down to get their attention instead of sending a bellboy to greet her. At least L2 was a former American colony before the Confederation of Colonies became entities unto themselves under the AC 195 Eve Accords. It meant the population was primarily English-speaking and she shuddered to think what could have happened to her had she ended up stuck in say, L4, where the primary spoken language was Arabic and Urdu. Relena had a pretty expansive language repertoire, thanks to the sort of education she needed to receive as an Alliance politician’s daughter, but even she had her limits in how many languages she could speak, and the L4 languages, unfortunately, were just not any of them.

“Yes, hello,” she greeted the receptionist, who smiled politely to her.

“Ms Darlian, there was a gentleman who came to see you earlier. He said he would wait for you to arrive. Will you meet him in the lobby cafe or shall I send him up to your suite?”

She thought the language sounded innocuous enough, though if Relena knew more of the L2 culture in general, and that of V-08744 in particular, she would have been able to detect the mildly sardonic way in which the receptionist spoke. Room calls in L2 hotels, even the fancy and respectable ones, were rarely business only or purely innocent.

Relena flipper her hair off one slim, silk-clad shoulder. “My room, I think. Thank you.”

She thought no more of it as she proceeded up to her hotel room. The junior suite was a tastefully appointed room in the hotel, with a separate sitting area, a queen bed, and a glass-paned bath with a clawfoot tub. Relena still had her suitcase and the many and varied designer dresses and shoes she had selected and discarded for the day before going with the Donatella Versace one she was wearing. Her clothes littered the sitting area and she sighed at the inefficiency of the hotel’s Housekeeping service in getting to her room to tidy up after her. She managed to pick up silk dresses, cashmere scarves and tulle skirts, patent leather high heels and gladiator sandals, and she stuffed them all back into her pink suitcase, just in time for when the room buzzer pinged. She did a complete once through of the room to make sure there were no lace panties or satin garters she may have forgotten to put away, before coming to get the door.

Probably, she should have made a habit of checking the door security feed first, but of course this was L2 and one of the older colonies to boot. The hotel didn’t come equipped with security camera feeds, and Relena had no idea that the round hole in the middle of the door was supposed to be used as a spy hole to check who it was at her door. Maybe then, she wouldn’t have opened it. But then, Relena had never been in the habit of opening her own doors—good lord, that was what butlers were for!—and therefore, she didn’t know the first thing about security.

The man on the other side of the door was tall, incredibly handsome, and terrifyingly blond. He would have absolutely been Relena’s type, and she remembered that this man being so good-looking and interested in talking with her very specifically had been one of the reasons why she’d been so easily roped into the stupid hair-brained scheme he had been trying to sell her when she first encountered him in New Tokyo’s Shinjuku Takashimaya Times Square while she and Dorothy had been on one of their outrageous shopping trips that Daddy had tried so hard to lecture her against, only Relena wasn’t possessed of an ounce of self-awareness, self-control or self-preservation, so she’d been easy prey for this man’s smooth and charming sales tactics.

When she saw him now though, she tried very hard to shut the door in his charmingly smiling face, only Mr Merquise was taller, faster, and obviously stronger than her, and he quickly held out a strong, leather-clad arm to hold the door open, even as his blue eyes twinkled, bright and mischievous, at her. Behind him, his willowy, dark-haired assistant, Ms Noin, stood calm and stoic, next to a massive black gundanium box the size of a fancy coffin. For all Relena knew, it probably was, and the only reason why she wasn’t screaming blue murder or rape right then and there was because she knew exactly who these people were, not only because Mr Merquise and his ridiculous platinum blond hair and smashing good looks was so distinctive, but because she instantly remembered that flying rock insignia stitched on their coats, and embossed on the top fo the black gundanium coffin box they had with them outside her room. These were those two swindlers from Operation Meteor. Mr Merquise claimed he was a scientist, but Relena was sure the only science he was well-versed in was the science of swindling pretty young women looking for their prince charming while shopping at an upscale mall.

“How did you even find me here?” she demanded, all her good breeding and manners going right out the door in the face of Mr Merquise’s winsome, if a touch smug, smile. “I saw you in New Tokyo and—“

“Miss Relena!” Mr Merquise greeted in that obnoxiously cheerful, ridiculous voice. It made Relena want to throw a tantrum. “Tracking our very important clients is an integral part of our job so that we can make sure we only ever deliver pure satisfaction, pure enjoyment, pure pleasure, all the time, every time.” She hated that he spoke flawless, accentless English. When she’d met him in New Tokyo, he’d spoken flawless, accentless Standard Japanese too.

Behind him, Ms Noin gave her a brief, perfunctory nod of her head. Relena had originally thought the woman was one of the products Mr Merquise was peddling because she had absolutely no expression on her pretty, heart-shaped face the entire time Relena had been talking with Mr Merquise. She hadn’t even been certain the woman breathed at all when she’d been in their office in Roppongi.

“Now,” said Mr Merquise, that charming smile widening to give her the full benefit of his incredibly gorgeous, Narcissus-like face, “shall we do this inside? I would hate for the other guests of this hotel to find out what a wondrous opportunity you have signed up for without you enjoying its full benefits during the trial period.”

Relena looked down the corridor, terrified, when she saw a curious pair of Housekeeping staff looking curiously in the direction of her open door. It would be utterly reputation-destroying if it ever got out what contract she’d signed with this man and the company he worked for, and while very few of the hotel staff had recognized her and Dorothy when they first arrived, it was only going to be a matter of time before someone snapped a picture with their phone, uploaded it to the internet, and then the paps would descend in droves, and not only would this hugely embarrassing contract come to light, people might even hear about how Daddy had cut her off from her trust fund and stranded her on this ugly, godforsaken rock in the middle of bumfuck nowhere to teach her a lesson. Her social media stock would absolutely plummet!

She ushered them in. “Quickly! Before Housekeeping snaps a picture and sells it to the tabloids!”

At least she could count on Mr Merquise and Ms Noin to move fast, even when they were hauling in that massive coffin-like box with them. Relena looked up and down the corridor once they were safely inside, just in case there were any other curious eyes spying on them, but Housekeeping had already moved on and were busy cleaning up Room 714 down the hall, and there were no other guests about. Still, she shut, locked and bolted the door for good measure, just to make sure.

Mr Merquise had made himself comfortable on the loveseat couch in the middle of the sitting room. They’d moved the coffee table to the side so they could put the box in the middle of the room like some kind of grotesque centerpiece. Ms Noin sat primly at the dinette table.

“I have here a printout of of the questionnaire that you filled up in our Roppongi office, in case you needed a refresher of the all of the personalization features we’ve configured into your very first Perfect Hero #001 series of the Absolute Lover class of intelligent, self-adaptive human dolls.”

Relena wanted to cringe at the description. She couldn’t believe she’d been desperate enough for a date to have signed up for this rubbish.

“This… box… it contains the—er—robot?”

Mr Merquise was affronted that she’d referred to his invention as a robot. “Ms Relena, this here is a top of the line humanoid AI, capable of providing you intense please, satisfaction, and even a bit of emotional investment. It, in as few words as I can use to describe it, is perfect for the lonely young woman who just needs a date. Or a young woman in need for a perfect man to make her significant other jealous. Or a perfect partner fi you just want to engage in a bit of hanky-panky, or—“

“Okay, I get it,” Relena interrupted. It was mildly creepy how thoroughly invested Mr Merquise was in his own invention and product. “And… this thing… I get to have it for free just for the trial period, right? And then I can return it risk-free and you’ll lift the earmark on my credit card, right?”

“Absolutely!” Mr Merquise said cheerfully. “Subject to the terms and conditions in the fine print you’ll find of the Beta Testing Contract you signed with Operation Meteor, found on page 1019 of the Perfect Hero Absolute Lover Handbook enclosed in your package. Ms Noin, if you would kindly do the honors?”

Ms Noin stood from her stoic corner in the room and walked over to the box, very carefully pressing on the release hatch at the side of the box that Relena had not noticed in her initial inspection. There was the sound of some kind of air pump releasing, like the the box was vacuum-sealed, before the cover of the box very slowly and mechanically swung up and away, to reveal a shape that looked vaguely humanoid, curled up in a fetal position inside the box, and covered in a sheet of protective plastic. Relena could make out smooth tan skin and dark hair, and holy mother of Miuccia Prada, was the doll naked?

Mr Merquise picked up the thick handbook that came with the doll inside the box, and set it on the coffee table next to Relena. “Here is the operating manual and handbook to the Perfect Hero Absolute Lover doll. To operate and switch it on, you have to give it a kiss.”

Relena goggled at the plastic shrouded… thing… inside the box. “A kiss? I have to kiss that thing to switch it on?”

“Naturally!” Mr Merquise exclaimed. “The Perfect Hero series is designed to be your ideal boyfriend and partner and can only be operated with an intimate touch from a woman. Right now, it’s set to be a kiss on the mouth, unless you prefer something a little more risqué. Of course it would be no trouble at all to change the trigger for start-up sequence from a kiss to a touch on his—“

“I’ll kiss it!” Relena cried, before Mr Merquise actually went there. She didn’t think she would survive her private mortification if Mr Merquise suggested she touch that thing in its… private parts.

Ms Noin carefully removed the plastic sheet that covered the doll, revealing tan skin, long limbs with lean, ropy muscles just the right side of muscular, but not overly so, that Relena found absolutely hot on a guy. She could see the profile of its face and it looked suspiciously like…

“Why does he look like Odin Lowe of the Ozzies back in his heyday? I don’t remember the prototype you showed me looking anything like him.”

The Ozzies were a rock band that was famous in the colonies a generation before Relena’s time. Odine Lowe had been the band’s frontman and the subject of many a teenage girl’s sexual fantasy and awakening, before his tragic death some years ago from a fatal drug overdose. Relena and Dorothy had been thirteen and their tween hearts had mourned that gorgeous, talented man’s passing.

“Naturally, we made changes and tweaks to ensure prototype #001 would meet your every specification of what an ideal should be like. Odin Lowe’s look was what you listed for a facial model when you were asked the question of your ideal lover’s physical appearance in Question #43 of the Absolute Lover questionnaire that you filled out.” He indicated the sheaf of papers that he had set on the coffee table with the handbook. “Now, shall we find out if #001 meets your expectations and is in good working order?”

Relena suppressed a grimace as she bent over the immobile form of the doll and tried to study its features. Odin Lowe had been a half-Japanese, half-German man, with beautiful, fine-boned features, large, gorgeous almond-shaped blue eyes, and the most heavenly perfect smile that sent teen girls into paroxysms of rapture when he smiled for the cameras, whether it was in his candids or in his studio head shots. He had the most flawlessly tan skin, with only a single beauty mark under his left eye, perfect bow-shaped lips that thirteen-year-old Relena had absolutely yearned to kiss and had absolutely been certain they were made for kissing, and a smooth, stately chin with only the tiniest hint of a cleft in it.

Mr Merquise had captured his likeness almost perfectly, from the sweep of his high cheekbones, to the long slow of the doll’s forehead. The primary difference was that the doll did not look like it was a strung out heroin addict ranging for a fix, and Odin Lowe had been one already in the days of Relena and Dorothy’s fandom. The doll looked like what Odin Lowe might have been had he not been so deep into the whole sex, drugs and rock ’n roll scene of the late AC 190s.

Relena supposed it was not too big of a hardship to kiss a model that looked so much like her adolescent sexual fantasy. She had showered more disgusting slobbery kisses on her Ozzies posters as a teenager after all. Sure, it was a bit gross and a bit cringey because this thing absolutely looked like a real person, but she supposed that must just be Mr Merquise’s mastery of both his craft and his science, that he could make this android look so very real.

She closed her eyes, pretending she was thirteen again and about to kiss the love of her adolescent tween life because he was in the grip of some terrible, unending spell that put him in indefinite sleep until he was given the kiss from his one true love… and pecked the doll very delicately in the corner of its mouth. She had to marvel at the petal soft feel of its lips. It was warm, plump, and almost definitely human if it weren’t so still and unmoving, almost like that of a corpse’s, though thawed to the perfect temperature of a still-living person.

She opened her eyes and backed away for a little bit, watching with reluctant curiosity as the doll’s eyes fluttered open, blue and almond-shaped and slightly slanted, exactly like Odin Lowe’s, before the doll half-turned its head and then slowly stirred to life as it rose out of the black gundanium box that contained it, like a post-modern, post-colonial Venus de Milo rising out of sea foam.

And then her eyes widened, as the thing in the box stood, in all its naked, masculine glory, eight-inch hard android dong wagging in front of her flabbergasted, scandalized face. The thing’s… penis… was hard, blushing red, and almost purple, and rose out of a neatly trimmed nest of black curls, exactly like a real person’s dick, only she knew it couldn’t be real, because that thing wasn’t human; it wasn’t even moving a mere two and a half seconds ago, before she’d kissed it to activate its programmed start-up sequence.

Her eyes traveled up hard chiseled abs, perfectly formed pecs, and dusky nipples, to the thing’s softly smiling face that had once populated all her hormonal teenage sex dreams and would now forever be etched into her memory as a thing of unmitigated horror and terrified mortification. When it opened its mouth to speak, it even sounded exactly like Odin Lowe, if Odin Lowe were a terrifying, programmed sex robot designed to be Relena’s so-called ideal lover.

“Hello, Relena,” it said. “I love you.”

Relena screamed.