(Bug Comic) Here is Nyelah Elle, not as a statue, but as a kid in Gresham in 2249, when the Azali leveled the city. You might recognize the guy, Jorge Avila from The History Book"(his ears are back so they are hard to see). Avila isn't an escapee here; the fighter he was part of had been hit by antiaircraft fire, and on landing (hard) his pilot turned him loose to go find a piece of metal "about as long as his arm" to repair a damaged stabilizer, while 22-301 stayed with the grounded flyer to do some spot welding. Avila had assumed that everyone was either dead or had fled by the time he walked through the outskirts of town, and he was taking his time, thinking about trying to pry off his transponding collar and kicking piles of rubbish looking for a tool, when he saw the blanket, tugged on it-- and it stood up and tried to smack him with a tire iron. Nyelah stopped trying to hit him when she saw his chain (she assumed he was a runaway). She had escaped the first Aer patrol by hiding under the blanket in a hot spot, so they would have trouble seeing her in infrared, but the next bunch of Aer foot patrols hunted by scent. Avila knew this too, took her blanket, rubbed it all over his head and face, (figuring they would ignore Mer scent),and wrapped it back around her. Then they wedged themselves under the ruins of a building, waiting for the clearing crew to pass. -------------------- If you look closely at Avila's fingers, you'll see that he has no claws-- he did serious damage to his previous pilot, and was declawed. If he hadn't been a carrier of a valuable anti-malarial gene, he would have been bug food. Instead he was transferred from Everett to a small base near Pendleton, and assigned a pilot with his own history of infractions. Avila knows that without claws, he can use the controls on the Aer side of the cockpit, something the Azali seems to have not thought of. (22-301 has seen him reach across and toggle a fuel control that he wasn't supposed to, but has said nothing.)