Have you ever felt so powerless?

"I called. I kept on calling. I screamed at the navigator countless times, "help". I needed help, I felt like I was dying. But there was no one available to rescue me.
It's not like they decided to let me die there, saying "Oh well, who cares". It's exactly how it is--there's just no one available to rescue a single reploid feebly clinging to life."

---

We like to cling to the illusion that our everyday routines would keep repeating itself without any surprises to interrupt the clockwork, even though we know that nothing is consistent except for change. It's wired in our brains to expect the expected every day, whether you live a life of comfort, monotony, or suffering. It's also why we tend to take things for granted.

We forget that everything is so fragile. We forget that we really depend on the people around us. We depend on our parents, our employers, our peers, even our government, no matter how much we try to deny that we can do without them. In reality, if all of a sudden, we lose something we're so used to having, we'd melt, no matter how brief the meltdown period is. When a nasty surprise pops up, we'll be caught off-guard, especially if we don't plan for it.

In the grand scheme of things, every single one of us--no matter how many people depend on us--are powerless on our own.

We like to say that we can carve our path in life ourselves, we like to feel that we're in control of our own lives.
But none of us are completely in control of our own lives. One fine night, someone can break into our house and either take everything we have or kill us in our sleep. Or a plague can break out all of a sudden, or a fire can start, taking everything we hold dear, if it didn't take us first.

It's hard to accept and recognize how powerless we truly are. When the feeling of powerlessness hits you, it hurts so much, it fills you with so much fear, and then despair. It leaves you so afraid of the unknown future, inducing a big inner pandemonium, which leads you to want to take the easy way out then and there.
But all of us have to come to terms with it one way or another, because that's the truth.
In accepting the bitter truth, we become a humbler person, less likely to take things for granted.

---

It's the end of my first month of work in my intended post.

I was always a hardworking student who paid attention to important things and finished all my tasks in time. I thought my track record would be just as flawless at work. But guess what? It didn't happen.

I was hired because they need me. They need me--which means they are intent on paying me and incorporating me into the company--because there's something wrong that they believe I can solve.
In this case, the company is in a chaotically busy period. Three people were laid off due to unwillingness to work so hard, leaving a mess that I and my fellow newbie had to sort out. They were in the middle of working on a few projects, and because business is so good, more and more projects flow in like water.

There was not much of a tutorial because of how busy everyone is. I find it hard to get information from them because they're trying so hard to make everything run as smoothly as possible, and eventually I find it hard to help others as well, because I am so occupied with my own work. Just as I was working on something, something else comes up without warning, and I still have to maintain a few documentation lists on top of it all.

I was plunked into the company as an administrative staff required to deal with, or at least keep an eye on the correspondences. Therefore, when e-mails on the projects that were ongoing before I joined came my way, I was so confused, because I am like someone forced to read a novel starting from the middle, not the beginning of the story.

That wasn't much of a problem because the company didn't force or expect me to understand much about those, because they're kind and understanding people.

But because of the sheer amount of work I had to deal with given how good business was, I was overwhelmed, and I even missed a few things to my superior's dismay--but it's not the company's fault at all.
It's natural for a lot of correspondences to be tossed around in the middle of multiple projects that are ongoing at the same time. Even though I don't like having a lot of work suddenly being piled on me, no one has a choice if everyone wants the company's operations to run smoothly.
In fact, my company's supportive of me, so it would be blasphemous for me to resent them.

If I am to blame someone, I'd blame myself, my inexperience, and my low short-term mental storage space.
But even then, in an outsider's perspective, this phase can be called natural, because I've been in the company for just two months, and the reason I was there was because of the mess the three ex-employees made when they were not ex-employees yet.
So I really can't blame anyone, and it can get kind of frustrating.

We like to think that it can be nice if we don't have to blame people so we can just support each other and move on without pointing fingers. But in the end, sometimes it's easier when you have someone you feel you can blame. Easy doesn't mean good, though.

It's during this period that I realise how powerless and how small I am.
Looking at my superiors who can handle their work--which is about 4-5 times more than mine--properly, I feel so small, I feel so insignificant. All the confidence I had gotten from my time as a good student faded away as I watched them juggling their work better than me juggling my own work.
And yet, logic has taught me that it's natural for me to struggle like this because of how new I am. But at the same time, it just feels so disgraceful.

But this too shall pass. And for it to pass, I'll continue to fight.

---

I've never really drawn Solid outside of her default armour, and given my recent feelings of powerlessness, it was a good chance for me to draw her in other armour. In this case, it's her starting armour: shinryuu-uroborus.deviantart.c…

Solid wasn't always the brutal claw-wielding Special A-class hunter she has become by the time X7 started. She started in the most chaotic period of the MMX timeline, Megaman X6, when the world was fresh out of an apocalypse that nearly killed the Earth, Eurasia.

At this point, Solid's already lost everyone, as far as she was concerned.
Eurasia killed her family and friends, and she had no idea if Rho and White, the professors who cared for her were still alive.
She woke up alone--the successful prototype that Rho and White had finally completed had disappeared.
In that flash, Eurasia (and Red Alert) took everything she knew and loved. And then, she stumbled to find Hunters HQ.

The Maverick Hunters were so short on manpower, and Solid had no choice but to join the front lines because the slots for noncombatants are full. Many wanted the Hunters' protection and the privilege of not having to risk life and limb, and Solid couldn't grab that chance by the time she found HQ.

There was barely anyone to teach her proper fighting techniques, or even how to be a proper hunter because of how occupied the Hunters are with the Nightmare virus. Solid stumbled as she was assigned to, and survived, squad after squad after squad, experiencing multiple near-death experiences. If it weren't for her human consciousness power that allows for emergency first aid (That corrodes the insides because of the sheer amount of energy moving inside her body at breakneck speed during a short time period), she would've died in one of her first missions.

---

By this time, you would've known that I am drawing this picture to pour out my feelings of powerlessness, and to convey that Solid didn't start out as a brutally competent hunter. Even when she's become a Special A-class hunter, there are many things that she can't do, leading to her being assigned with Axl on transmission-less missions.

We're all powerless in the grand scheme of things, and there's nothing we can do to change it. All we can do is deal with it.

As an aside, I do know that there's a lot of blank space on the left, but I believe that the composition is better that way, to better show that Solid was calling to the navigator in charge of supervising her squad, which she outlived again.