Xue

Once upon a time, there was a terrifying rivalry between Wilbur and Konqi. They had very different views on what the right way to build a race car is. Wilbur liked his cars simple. He didn't like them full of buttons and dials and screens all over the dashboard. He wanted them to be simple and elegant - just a steering wheel, an accelerator, and breaks would be enough! Konqi, on the other hand, wanted a super-cool hacker-style dashboard full of buttons, levers, dials, meters, small screens and voice command panels. His car dashboard looked less like the dashboard of a car and more like the bridge of the Star Trek Enterprise!

While these two ingenious fellows rushed headlong trying to make the best possible car, little Xue emerged out of the blue. She knew that she had neither the aesthetic style of Wilbur, who was an artist, nor the creative zeal of Konqi's qt heart. Instead, Xue the mouse wondered if elegance and sophistication were even important in designing a good race-car.

*Aren't race-cars supposed to be all about speed?*

So she decided to put together her own car. It wasn't much, but boy was it *fast!* It zoomed through the streets at unbelievable speeds.People sometimes wondered if her cars were even safe. A massive fan powered by liquid hydrogen tanks at the rear would propel the car forward, and Xue had even replaced the wheels with a hover mechanism to get rid of the friction. Her cars were known to be ugly and somewhat clunky - all that speeding was certainly not good for the rivets she had used to put together the odds and ends - but they were light, and they were fast. Just like Xue herself.

Where the dashboard was concerned, Xue seemed to have copied the essential internal mechanisms from Wilbur's design, but she had added in a lot of extra switches and buttons. Her car was *very* configurable, but the inside looked neither artistic and elegant, nor sophisticated like a spaceship. It looked like the controls of a tank.

Nevertheless, a lot of people loved Xue's car for its speed and ease of use. It was light, understandable, simple and efficient. Over time, as Wilbur's design became more and more bloated with styrofoam paddings and velvet covers and posh polished surfaces, many who had joined our band of hippie friends for the love of freedom and simplicity came to increasingly like Xue's style better. Besides, because its internal design was so similar to Wilbur's aerodynamic model, people soon realized that they could swap in components from Wilbur's model into Xue's car if they wanted any special, robust modules inside their vehicle. Xue's car kept growing in popularity, and soon became a direct rival to Konqi's own car.

Xue is a fidgety character, but she is a really loyal friend who quickly grows on you. Her love for simple but hackable things has led her and her geeky admirers into interesting bouts of creativity. Her responses are fast and zippy, but if you get her thinking about something really deep and complicated she sometimes stops moving and becomes very still for long periods of time. This freaks her friends out sometimes.

And few who know Xue can forget about those gorgeous eyes. Sometimes her friends forget where they kept their keys and other things, but Xue's eyes reliably follow their things around and she always knows where her friends have placed what they think they have misplaced.