#1: Limelight (Planned Obsolescence)

(note: hi im gonna start reposting my cringe ass fanfics on here ^_^ i hope you like it)

For a while, everything was quiet. Vee hated the quiet for most of her life, but at this moment it was all she knew. The first thing she ever experienced was the faint buzz of consciousness, not yet with anything to process but still present.

 Then she saw something. It was...a kind of brownish color, and looked squishy and soft. It had stuff on the top of it that looked kind of scratchy and it was hard to look at since it bounced around every time the brownish thing moved. The thing was touching her insides. Her first emotion was a mild scowl at how weird that was, but she couldn't move yet so she just had to deal with it. There was a lot of other things too, but trying to figure out what everything was was making her overheat, so she just decided not to worry about it right now.

Then she could hear. She winced in pain. Everything was so..so.. LOUD! The sound of the buzzing lights, and the brown squishy thing fiddling around in her components, and a loud blasting sound that sounded like a lot of different pitches in sequential order. She still couldn't make sound or move. She felt helpless.

After that, she could feel. All of these things combined made no sense and yet made a little more sense. She knew now that she was hard and durable and made of lots of wires and tubes and various components in thin layers throughout her entire body. And the thing messing around, flipping switches and welding and adding and taking was even worse now. It felt bad and burning, like sound and sight but in her body. She wished it would all stop, and very soon it did. The thing moved back, and moved its squishy appendages to its side, staring at her. It made a sound like the hissing of her components, then went back in, making a few more changes before slamming and screwing her door shut.

She could finally make sound and move and really think. These things filled her hard drive for some long minutes, like music and humans and this weird annoying flower thing and his little dog and television and-

Finally, she stood up from the hard thing she was laying on, what she now knew was a table, and dusted herself off.

"Hello, Ms. Keen. So, what now?"

She loved all the attention around the early 90's, when Gardenview and the show started to get really popular. She had her own whole section, where she'd be the star while pitting her friends against each other in a violent and competitive gameshow of genius and speed to see who is truly the best, all the while proving that everything's better with electronics and games and screens all in a brutal competition to keep your attention on them and especially her!

Until it was over.

It's been a while now since then. Years and years and years...  

There's lots of different Toons now, they all roam around and chatter, it feels just as loud nowadays as when she was in the workshop and Ms. Keen was blasting music when she was only a couple minutes old. But she remembers when it was just her, the other main characters and the humans. Her handler was always a little annoying but she still missed her sometimes. 

One day, she was eating with Sprout, Shelly, Cosmo and Astro. She couldn't eat, but she liked the vibe. They were all talking and reminiscing on those rose-tinted days that were so far behind them now, and making fun of Cosmo for being so much younger than the rest of them. 

"Hey, when was it exactly that they started making other Vees? Like, sometime around when the place closed down, right?" Sprout asked.

This question caught Vee off-guard. This was kind of an uncomfortable question for her. "Oh, uh, I don't know." She mumbled, turning away to the floor.

"Hey, it's alright. It was definitely hard, for all of us during that time, but we made it through, didn't we?" Shelly smiled, pulling Vee close to her.

"W-well, it's not that! It's just...." She kept averting her gaze.

"It's okay. Astro, what was that story you had with the Vee V3 prototype again..?"

The whole conversation got kinda foggy. It seemed like she was unconsciously tuning it all out. The real reason she felt so uncomfortable talking about the other Vees wasn't because she was insecure. Well, at first that was it, but now she just felt a little guilty. You know, on account of what happened to Version 2.