He sat at the play table, which was really too small for him, and watched her almost inhumanly pale hands unscrew the bottle cap. She did not fumble, even though her small fingers looked so weak against the harsh plastic. The lemonade bottle popped when she finally pried it open, and a small clarion laugh escaped her red, red lips. Teacups appeared on the table, but that did not surprise him. They reminded him of the ideas he used to have, well shaped and just waiting for the words to fill them.

'I tasted defeat once,' she said happily, pouring the lemonade out into the petit little cups. They looked oddly breakable. She looked up at him momentarily, eyes shining. 'I didn't like it. Bitter, bitter, bitter!'

The surreal humour and harsh rise in her voice made him shudder, so he just nodded to show that he understood. She smiled at him again. 'Go on,' she prompted, waving her child-like hand at the cup. 'Take a sip.'

He reached out for the pale pink cup, long fingers tracing the embedded floral design as he ruminated.

'Hey,' he asked softly, eyes following the his hands. He was unwilling to look up into her honest face. 'Have you been here long?'

'Here?' she asked quizzically, looking around her playroom. It was a quaint little place, wallpapered with old fashioned antiqueness. The sunlight that streamed in through the windows at the side looked like it had never ceased before. The lace curtains hurt his eyes with their perfect patterns 'Of course I've been here long. I've been here forever!'

'Oh,' he responded. He took a sip of the lemonade. It was bitter. 'How do you survive?'

He missed the cool darkness of his metal world, where the computers and the keyboards had long replaced the rough paper and leaking quills. He had been evicted from that place so suddenly. She quirked a grin at him that was far too mature for his liking. 'How do I survive?' she mimicked cruelly, her rose-petal mouth somehow emulating his rough tone. 'I adapt, isn't that what all things are supposed to do? They didn't like my words, and they didn't like what I said.' The smile was adorning her face now, like some artistic mask of sorts, horrifically in tangent with her white dress and her perfectly combed hair. She cocked her head, and for a moment he believed in her innocence. 'Isn't that so?'

He lifted the cup and drained it. Bitter, bitter, bitter. 'Oh,' he repeated, a little while later. She had not moved, still observing him. Her sharp little eyes tracing his despondency. He found himself disliking her, a sort of instinctive urge to recoil. How could he live, locked in this ideal little room forever? He looked up at her. 'So if they don't, what happens then?'

'They become skeletons,' she intoned, laughter curling around the edges of her words. 'They become skeletons in the closets, things people are ashamed of. We have plenty of closets, here.' She finished her own cup, and wiped her lips on a handkerchief just as a little lady would have. She stood and stretched her arm out to him, offering him her hand. 'Come on, I'll show you. You're new around here, so I suppose you need the introduction.'

He did not like the cynical wisdom in her tone, but he followed her anyway. It was almost as if it was her small palm that encompassed his larger one. She tugged him along, skipping in a manner that reminded him of pre-programmed code loops. She opened the door of the playroom and walked down the long corridor that was revealed. She pointed to the first door, a bleak white thing with only a sign to distinguish it from the other bleak white things down the never ending corridor.

'That's the closet for the poets. We get a lot of them, especially the Sylvia Plath imitators and those who want to be like Blake.' She laughed her cruel laugh and shook her head in disdain. 'They refused to change. They refused to adapt. So now they're skeletons, and no one cares about them anymore. They don't like imitations. They don't like the people who try to be like others and fail. They need perfection.'

He looked a little horrified, standing there and staring at the carved sign that had been hung up to signify the room's purpose. She moved him along impatiently.

'And here are the mock-epic writers, those who tried and failed.' She giggled, and he did not like the sound. 'They use their manuscripts as firewood, I hear.'

Her voice rose and rose as they went past each room full of failures. She crowed as she informed him how they had died and she had lived. The corridor went on and on, past the philosophers and the journalists and the jingle-writers. By the time they had finished the little girl was almost ecstatic in her glee, bounding forward and trying to show him more failures, more skeletons in the infinite closets. Her laughter was almost demented, and he did not want to become like her. He did not want to adapt.

'But you have to,' she said slyly as she led him back to the playroom at last, and he wondered if she could read his thoughts. 'I know you think you'll be different, that you don't need to become like me, but I'm not so bad. I'm,' she smiled at him, 'perfect.'

She shut the door on the terrible reality behind it. 'Don't worry,' she said, reseating herself at the play table. 'You're just a muse, remember? Your author doesn't care.'

'My author cares,' he said, shaking a little from what he had seen. He thought back on how his author loved his ideas and how he had filled his existence with sweet words. His author wrote so vividly, and even if it seemed sad he took joy in it. There was joy in watching the words take form and flow along. That was perfection to him, and so why should it not have been perfection for his author? 'Of course he cares.'

'No he doesn't,' she said again, shaking her head and allowing her golden curls to bounce on her shoulders. 'That's why you're here. They didn't like your words, either. They didn't like mine; they didn't like the reflection of corrupted children. They can't stand us. They don't like seeing their own human ugliness.'

He sat despondently on the tiny seat. 'But it's the truth,' he tried to rationalise. 'We're human inventions, human conceptions. That's why we're muses. We inspire people.'

'Sometimes you inspire the wrong ideas,' she said solemnly. 'Ideas like the truth.'

'What's wrong with the truth?' he asked, clearly confused. 'You wrote about children suffering, and I wrote about the meaninglessness of society. We both spoke our individual truths; what's wrong with that?'

She shrugged. 'Humans don't have the need for truth anymore,' she answered. 'They lie all the time, and so the truth becomes useless. They want other things now, that's why we're here to adapt. We're here to learn how to lie to ourselves, and then we'll become wanted and we'll be perfect.'

'How can that be perfect?' he asked, voice broken. She smiled, pearly white teeth lined up nice and straight.

'It'll be like Hollywood. Everyone wants to be a star, and once we get that attention, we'll be perfect. We just have to be what they want us to be.'

He hung his head. 'As simple as that, huh?'

She poured him another cup of lemonade and offered it to him.

'It's called defeat,' she told him. 'It tastes bitter.'

He drank it.