TGW – 113th Page Special:
P R O L O G U E
Part I
P R O L O G U E
Part I
1948 A.D.
”What do you think; do human beings really deserve to inherit the stars?”
”Does an entire race deserve to die for sins they’ve not yet committed?”
”That’s why you’re doing this, isn’t? Visiting me like this. Some kind of retribution.”
”No. I regret nothing, Byron. But I refuse to stand idle while a universe withers and dies for lack of the living.”
”How noble of you.”
”Nobility has nothing to do with it, my friend.”
He had stood atop the tallest structure in the city – buffeted by the icy winds that roared above the snow-dusted rooftops. He had crossed his arms and looked up to a starscape beyond his imagination – an ancient universe in which he, and his kind, were only beginning to comprehend.
What would it be like, he wondered, to look up and see no stars? To see an empty sky, devoid of entropy or matter – to know that one was utterly alone in an endless void?
He could not replicate the feeling, he knew. But he could feel empathy – sorrow – for the trials of a people long since dead.
”This…isn’t the path I had envisioned my people taking. Atom bombs. Bringing mass-death at a whim, standing on the brink of total annihilation, and for what?”
”I would expect nothing less. The Progenitors were no different. Maybe even worse, since they didn’t live to tell the tale.”
Byron tore pale blue eyes away from the starscape and turned to face the pale man with a sober expression on his face. ”So why come to me, then? These, these dreams, these visions – why??”
The man only grinned his death’s-head smile, peering back at the man through the unkempt, flowing locks of white-blonde hair that fell ignored in his face. ”Don’t they inspire you, Byron? You should be grateful.” But even as he said it, Gabriel wasn’t sure he felt all that differently from his friend. Was to be part of a greater plan – a plan that spanned space and time and the universe itself – worth anything at all?
"Of course it inspires me. Byron said, turning back to face the sleeping city – to look down at a people who might well soon perish within the atomic fires of their own deadly invention. "But that doesn't mean I'm entirely dedicated to devoting my entire life to a project that I will never see completed. The way things are, I doubt it will even be considered. Nobody will ever build this, it's insane. So why then? It's the least you could do."
But the tall, pale man behind him did not reply. He never did reply, to those sorts of questions. They had gone over this before. A hundred times before, and it was always the same.
He teased Byron with visions of the past, revealed himself only to one man in the entire world – told him stories of those who had come before, the Progenitors – The First – but there was more. There was always more – and Byron would never shake the sensation that there was a universe of untold knowledge that he would die without tasting.
”It will come to fruition, you know. The Star. Mankind might seem to be on the doorstep of total destruction but…if you design it, they will build it. And they will survive.”
”Not within my lifetime.”
”Nor the lifetimes of many future generations. But it will be built.”
”Let me guess, you’ve seen it?”
”I am but a mote in the eye of an angry God.” The man replied, seeming to relish the enigmatic words with some small, sadistic delight. Byron chuffed something between a laugh and a scoff, and crossed his arms, tucking hands into himself. The cold was starting to reach him - maybe he should have grabbed a coat first.
“Look at us. The madman who sees visions of aliens and talks with specters in the night. Surely my legacy will be great.” There was a bite of sad complicity there. Not that leaving a legacy or being remembered had ever been a priority for him.
“They’re coming along well, I take it?”
That question set Byron to scowling and shifting the pale blue eyes behind thick framed spectacles. “Why don’t you just peek in my head and see for yourself?”
The man’s laugh was immediate, rich and full. His voice was deep and as smooth as silk, approaching a baritone that did not seem befitting of a tall, pale, skinny man such as himself. The sound fled from the rooftop and disappeared into the blackness of night. But despite this, it was controlled, and measured. Everything about the man was that way - not as if he had planned it out, but rather that he already knew how it would play out.
And despite that the laughter was clearly not aimed at him, Byron felt a hot rage swelling in his gut. “You know it doesn’t work that way, friend. Why must we have this same conversation every time?” The tall man said, and Byron whirled on him suddenly, arms unfolding, fists balled at his side. “I am not your friend, specter.. And don’t try to make this out to be something it’s not.” There was a bite in his voice like the nip of icy wind or the growl of a snarling arctic wolf. “You, whatever you are - you invade my dreams, you haunt me, you say these cryptic things and tell me nothing. I’m just someone who’s doing something that serves some mysterious, arcane purpose of yours that I'll never live to understand. Never be allowed to understand. You’re not oblivious to just how much of my life I’m putting into this. I’m nearly forty years old and hardly halfway done with this ridiculous project. The least you could do is, is…"
But his words stuttered, halted and faded off. He was too tired to be arguing with ghosts. He couldn’t be up here shouting at a wall in the middle of the night.
But for once, something he said must have actually affected the man to some degree. This was the part of the conversation that had not been repeated a hundred times. The death’s-head smile had faded from his narrow, pale face, and a sober, almost sympathetic look came over him. Byron found himself suddenly seeing the ethereal man not as the manipulative, enigmatic creature that he was - but a man, or something approaching one. A person who had seen too much, known too much, done too much. Someone who had been manipulating and using people for longer than the human mind could envision. Someone who had ruined lives in the pursuit of an end that was so far away it bordered on myth.
The specter watched Byron with that expression for long moments, as if expecting to wear the man down with his sad stare - but the middle-aged architect persisted. And, in the end, he won.
“I’m sorry, Byron." The man said, looking regretfully down at the floor - the roof of Byron’s apartment building - and he sounded as if he actually meant the words as an genuine apology. An admission of guilt, rather than some dismissive gesture. Byron deflated, and pointedly shoved his hands into the pockets of his beige slacks. He gave a heavy sigh, heaving the breath from deep within him, and turned back again to gaze almost absently at the city that stretched out before him. Low buildings, boxy things, brick and concrete, pale and drab colors. The rooftops and roads were darkened and shimmered with the shallow pools and eddies formed by melting snow. The streetlamps shone above them like miniature suns - but dim, and lifeless - comforting only in the suggestion of giving some sign that life was in this place.
It was a dismal place, and it was nights like these that Byron found himself wondering regretfully why he had chosen to make this, of all places, his home, and the home of his future generations to come. He had little affection for this place. His name was regional, but his connection to the country ceased there. Why, then?
“I’d have done it anyway I suppose.” He said at last. “Regardless of your mysterious ulterior motives. I'm not doing it for you, and I think you know that. The world needs the Star. We need a symbol of unity between nations before we destroy ourselves. I suppose I’m something of an idealist, aren’t I?”" It was not a question, and he let the words drift away.
“You don’t have to believe me," the silky, near-baritone voice behind him said, “But I find that to be a truly beautiful thing.”
Byron cracked a grin and turned again to look back at the man, to comment on how unlikely he found the prospect - but the man was gone.
The words, unspoken, seemed to hang in the air and in his mind -
a thought that was not his own, yet was.
He felt compelled to say it, even though it was only a breathy mutter, heard by him alone in the world.
“And...when the end of the Universe comes, it will be The Idealist who speaks on behalf of the damned."
Even as he said it, he did not know what the words meant - only that they were as true as anything he had ever known.
”And from His Mind...will come The Next.”
With an almost dejected huff, Byron Petrov shrugged, then slumped his shoulders, and made his way across the silent rooftop to the access door, propped open a crack by a handy block of wood. Even that seemed metaphorical, he thought with some amusement, though he couldn't place the imagined meaning.
The air in the musty stairwell was colder than the outside chill if only due to the stagnation. Spider webs accumulated in the corners, and the paint was little more than flecks of green barely spotting the bare concrete walls.
The hallway on the fourth floor was better. Old, industrial carpeting. The bite of bare bulbs made soft by cheap, frosted glass sconces. The walls had been painted within the decade. The door to apartment nine creaked softly as he slipped through, absentmindedly flicking the lights on as he closed it behind him.
The apartment was much nicer than it might have looked given the state of the rest of the building. The scent of aged leather, decent coffee and the faintest spice of the occasional cigar. The carpet was auburn and plush, the walls refinished wood paneling. The floor creaked as he made his way across the living room, where he had barely spent any time at all since moving here some years prior.
It was the study where Byron spent most of his time, now, and the room showed it. A small chamber, lined with books from floor to ceiling. Architectural theory, poetry, classics, references - and even a small collection of guilty-pleasure science-fiction novels packed into one corner. Contemporary works. The bright colors of their spines stood out brashly in their little corner shelf.
In the center of the little room, against one of the walls without bookshelves, sat a luxurious leather wing-back armchair, brass rivets darkened with patina, the leather on the arms showing the first signs of real wear. Byron sat in the beloved chair where he spent most of his life, and leaned lazily forward on the large, mahogany writing desk. A simple, gilded lamp craned over it to shine down upon the works. And strewn almost haphazardly across the face of the desk, among an assortment of writing tools, was a small taste of the work of half a lifetime.
The images depicted a technological utopia. Great cities and their seemingly impossible technological marvels. Railcars that hovered on tracks which curled around the elegant shapes of great skyscrapers. Some were fully finished, colored in vibrant hues, while others were barely sketches, vague shapes that would, perhaps, become something beautiful. Most were conceptual pieces, but some were technical documents including brief explanations of finer points.
And hanging above the desk, set in a cheap, wooden frame, were the towers.
He had seen them in his dreams, even before the mysterious man had started to visit him. He had gazed upon the great, gilded spires as if recalling a memory that was clear as day. He had looked down upon them, standing amidst a world that was green and alive, where a city rose up like ivory shrubs in the shadow of a golden grove. He had walked among the towers, felt the vertigo of standing at its base and looking straight up at the baffling heights at which it stood. He had walked within the towers, wondered ponderously at the inner workings of a great machine, the purpose of which he could only speculate.
And he had known how The Star would have to look. Even the memory of that night was clear as glass in his mind - the way he hastily stumbled out of bed, fumbled about his desk for the tools, and then spent until the break of dawn recreating the city of golden towers down to the finest details. Even now, almost twenty years later, it was still his most masterful piece. It was, he knew intrinsically, the way The Star must be. Golden towers - and within them, a city of all people, living in unity, their home a testament to the ingenuity of their species. The towers themselves would be a blatant show of decadence and defiance against the universe that sought to keep them trapped on a world.
Still gazing up in something approaching reverence at the exquisite depiction of a place out of time, he blindly reached for the stubby glass of brandy that he had not quite forgotten, and by some measure of luck, found it easily. He sipped at the amber nectar, relished the familiar warmth it brought.
Then he placed the glass down gently, adjusted the cuff of his shirt, plucked up a pencil and resumed mapping out a complex network of interconnected corridors. He hummed a quiet, meandering tune to himself as the future of all mankind spread out from his fingertips.
♪
”What do you think; do human beings really deserve to inherit the stars?”
”Does an entire race deserve to die for sins they’ve not yet committed?”
”That’s why you’re doing this, isn’t? Visiting me like this. Some kind of retribution.”
”No. I regret nothing, Byron. But I refuse to stand idle while a universe withers and dies for lack of the living.”
”How noble of you.”
”Nobility has nothing to do with it, my friend.”
He had stood atop the tallest structure in the city – buffeted by the icy winds that roared above the snow-dusted rooftops. He had crossed his arms and looked up to a starscape beyond his imagination – an ancient universe in which he, and his kind, were only beginning to comprehend.
What would it be like, he wondered, to look up and see no stars? To see an empty sky, devoid of entropy or matter – to know that one was utterly alone in an endless void?
He could not replicate the feeling, he knew. But he could feel empathy – sorrow – for the trials of a people long since dead.
”This…isn’t the path I had envisioned my people taking. Atom bombs. Bringing mass-death at a whim, standing on the brink of total annihilation, and for what?”
”I would expect nothing less. The Progenitors were no different. Maybe even worse, since they didn’t live to tell the tale.”
Byron tore pale blue eyes away from the starscape and turned to face the pale man with a sober expression on his face. ”So why come to me, then? These, these dreams, these visions – why??”
The man only grinned his death’s-head smile, peering back at the man through the unkempt, flowing locks of white-blonde hair that fell ignored in his face. ”Don’t they inspire you, Byron? You should be grateful.” But even as he said it, Gabriel wasn’t sure he felt all that differently from his friend. Was to be part of a greater plan – a plan that spanned space and time and the universe itself – worth anything at all?
"Of course it inspires me. Byron said, turning back to face the sleeping city – to look down at a people who might well soon perish within the atomic fires of their own deadly invention. "But that doesn't mean I'm entirely dedicated to devoting my entire life to a project that I will never see completed. The way things are, I doubt it will even be considered. Nobody will ever build this, it's insane. So why then? It's the least you could do."
But the tall, pale man behind him did not reply. He never did reply, to those sorts of questions. They had gone over this before. A hundred times before, and it was always the same.
He teased Byron with visions of the past, revealed himself only to one man in the entire world – told him stories of those who had come before, the Progenitors – The First – but there was more. There was always more – and Byron would never shake the sensation that there was a universe of untold knowledge that he would die without tasting.
”It will come to fruition, you know. The Star. Mankind might seem to be on the doorstep of total destruction but…if you design it, they will build it. And they will survive.”
”Not within my lifetime.”
”Nor the lifetimes of many future generations. But it will be built.”
”Let me guess, you’ve seen it?”
”I am but a mote in the eye of an angry God.” The man replied, seeming to relish the enigmatic words with some small, sadistic delight. Byron chuffed something between a laugh and a scoff, and crossed his arms, tucking hands into himself. The cold was starting to reach him - maybe he should have grabbed a coat first.
“Look at us. The madman who sees visions of aliens and talks with specters in the night. Surely my legacy will be great.” There was a bite of sad complicity there. Not that leaving a legacy or being remembered had ever been a priority for him.
“They’re coming along well, I take it?”
That question set Byron to scowling and shifting the pale blue eyes behind thick framed spectacles. “Why don’t you just peek in my head and see for yourself?”
The man’s laugh was immediate, rich and full. His voice was deep and as smooth as silk, approaching a baritone that did not seem befitting of a tall, pale, skinny man such as himself. The sound fled from the rooftop and disappeared into the blackness of night. But despite this, it was controlled, and measured. Everything about the man was that way - not as if he had planned it out, but rather that he already knew how it would play out.
And despite that the laughter was clearly not aimed at him, Byron felt a hot rage swelling in his gut. “You know it doesn’t work that way, friend. Why must we have this same conversation every time?” The tall man said, and Byron whirled on him suddenly, arms unfolding, fists balled at his side. “I am not your friend, specter.. And don’t try to make this out to be something it’s not.” There was a bite in his voice like the nip of icy wind or the growl of a snarling arctic wolf. “You, whatever you are - you invade my dreams, you haunt me, you say these cryptic things and tell me nothing. I’m just someone who’s doing something that serves some mysterious, arcane purpose of yours that I'll never live to understand. Never be allowed to understand. You’re not oblivious to just how much of my life I’m putting into this. I’m nearly forty years old and hardly halfway done with this ridiculous project. The least you could do is, is…"
But his words stuttered, halted and faded off. He was too tired to be arguing with ghosts. He couldn’t be up here shouting at a wall in the middle of the night.
But for once, something he said must have actually affected the man to some degree. This was the part of the conversation that had not been repeated a hundred times. The death’s-head smile had faded from his narrow, pale face, and a sober, almost sympathetic look came over him. Byron found himself suddenly seeing the ethereal man not as the manipulative, enigmatic creature that he was - but a man, or something approaching one. A person who had seen too much, known too much, done too much. Someone who had been manipulating and using people for longer than the human mind could envision. Someone who had ruined lives in the pursuit of an end that was so far away it bordered on myth.
The specter watched Byron with that expression for long moments, as if expecting to wear the man down with his sad stare - but the middle-aged architect persisted. And, in the end, he won.
“I’m sorry, Byron." The man said, looking regretfully down at the floor - the roof of Byron’s apartment building - and he sounded as if he actually meant the words as an genuine apology. An admission of guilt, rather than some dismissive gesture. Byron deflated, and pointedly shoved his hands into the pockets of his beige slacks. He gave a heavy sigh, heaving the breath from deep within him, and turned back again to gaze almost absently at the city that stretched out before him. Low buildings, boxy things, brick and concrete, pale and drab colors. The rooftops and roads were darkened and shimmered with the shallow pools and eddies formed by melting snow. The streetlamps shone above them like miniature suns - but dim, and lifeless - comforting only in the suggestion of giving some sign that life was in this place.
It was a dismal place, and it was nights like these that Byron found himself wondering regretfully why he had chosen to make this, of all places, his home, and the home of his future generations to come. He had little affection for this place. His name was regional, but his connection to the country ceased there. Why, then?
“I’d have done it anyway I suppose.” He said at last. “Regardless of your mysterious ulterior motives. I'm not doing it for you, and I think you know that. The world needs the Star. We need a symbol of unity between nations before we destroy ourselves. I suppose I’m something of an idealist, aren’t I?”" It was not a question, and he let the words drift away.
“You don’t have to believe me," the silky, near-baritone voice behind him said, “But I find that to be a truly beautiful thing.”
Byron cracked a grin and turned again to look back at the man, to comment on how unlikely he found the prospect - but the man was gone.
The words, unspoken, seemed to hang in the air and in his mind -
a thought that was not his own, yet was.
He felt compelled to say it, even though it was only a breathy mutter, heard by him alone in the world.
“And...when the end of the Universe comes, it will be The Idealist who speaks on behalf of the damned."
Even as he said it, he did not know what the words meant - only that they were as true as anything he had ever known.
”And from His Mind...will come The Next.”
With an almost dejected huff, Byron Petrov shrugged, then slumped his shoulders, and made his way across the silent rooftop to the access door, propped open a crack by a handy block of wood. Even that seemed metaphorical, he thought with some amusement, though he couldn't place the imagined meaning.
The air in the musty stairwell was colder than the outside chill if only due to the stagnation. Spider webs accumulated in the corners, and the paint was little more than flecks of green barely spotting the bare concrete walls.
The hallway on the fourth floor was better. Old, industrial carpeting. The bite of bare bulbs made soft by cheap, frosted glass sconces. The walls had been painted within the decade. The door to apartment nine creaked softly as he slipped through, absentmindedly flicking the lights on as he closed it behind him.
The apartment was much nicer than it might have looked given the state of the rest of the building. The scent of aged leather, decent coffee and the faintest spice of the occasional cigar. The carpet was auburn and plush, the walls refinished wood paneling. The floor creaked as he made his way across the living room, where he had barely spent any time at all since moving here some years prior.
It was the study where Byron spent most of his time, now, and the room showed it. A small chamber, lined with books from floor to ceiling. Architectural theory, poetry, classics, references - and even a small collection of guilty-pleasure science-fiction novels packed into one corner. Contemporary works. The bright colors of their spines stood out brashly in their little corner shelf.
In the center of the little room, against one of the walls without bookshelves, sat a luxurious leather wing-back armchair, brass rivets darkened with patina, the leather on the arms showing the first signs of real wear. Byron sat in the beloved chair where he spent most of his life, and leaned lazily forward on the large, mahogany writing desk. A simple, gilded lamp craned over it to shine down upon the works. And strewn almost haphazardly across the face of the desk, among an assortment of writing tools, was a small taste of the work of half a lifetime.
The images depicted a technological utopia. Great cities and their seemingly impossible technological marvels. Railcars that hovered on tracks which curled around the elegant shapes of great skyscrapers. Some were fully finished, colored in vibrant hues, while others were barely sketches, vague shapes that would, perhaps, become something beautiful. Most were conceptual pieces, but some were technical documents including brief explanations of finer points.
And hanging above the desk, set in a cheap, wooden frame, were the towers.
He had seen them in his dreams, even before the mysterious man had started to visit him. He had gazed upon the great, gilded spires as if recalling a memory that was clear as day. He had looked down upon them, standing amidst a world that was green and alive, where a city rose up like ivory shrubs in the shadow of a golden grove. He had walked among the towers, felt the vertigo of standing at its base and looking straight up at the baffling heights at which it stood. He had walked within the towers, wondered ponderously at the inner workings of a great machine, the purpose of which he could only speculate.
And he had known how The Star would have to look. Even the memory of that night was clear as glass in his mind - the way he hastily stumbled out of bed, fumbled about his desk for the tools, and then spent until the break of dawn recreating the city of golden towers down to the finest details. Even now, almost twenty years later, it was still his most masterful piece. It was, he knew intrinsically, the way The Star must be. Golden towers - and within them, a city of all people, living in unity, their home a testament to the ingenuity of their species. The towers themselves would be a blatant show of decadence and defiance against the universe that sought to keep them trapped on a world.
Still gazing up in something approaching reverence at the exquisite depiction of a place out of time, he blindly reached for the stubby glass of brandy that he had not quite forgotten, and by some measure of luck, found it easily. He sipped at the amber nectar, relished the familiar warmth it brought.
Then he placed the glass down gently, adjusted the cuff of his shirt, plucked up a pencil and resumed mapping out a complex network of interconnected corridors. He hummed a quiet, meandering tune to himself as the future of all mankind spread out from his fingertips.
{01:01:01:000,001}
Deep within the superstructure of the Stella Viventium, a young man in a long, brown coat sat on the floor, back against the wall, and wept. Long, black hair spilled over his face, the young man curled in upon himself hands clutching at his face, and sobs wracking his shoulders. He shook his head slightly, silently denying the truth of what it had all been reduced to.
A few steps down the corridor, a young woman stood, leaning with arms crossed, against the opposite wall. Brown hair tufted at the top, and bound in a long braid from the back of her neck almost to her hips. She wore a grey hooded sweatshirt and jeans - a stark contrast to the young man in appearance and demeanor alike. The young woman did not weep, though the sorrow became her no less. Her eyes, a curious blend of lavender and pale grey, watched the carpeted floor as if something in the texture might hold some hidden consolation, if only she looked at it long enough.
The corridor held the vague scent of fresh paint and lacquer, accented by hints of ozone and freshly minted electronics. The lights were bright and new. It looked like a sparsely used hallway in an office building. She felt as if, should she look out a window, she would see an Earthside cityscape, bustling with activity, beneath the blue sky she had grown up beneath. Or, perhaps she would see Mars - where the edge of Mariner’s Metropolis met the dusty plains, under the ruddy, but beautiful sky that she had long since come to appreciate.
But there were no windows.
And even if there had been
There were no Earth or Mars to look out upon.
They were gone. All of it. Everything that the human race had struggled so hard to build over the course of their meager existence - all the achievements - gone in an instant. And, she had decided some minutes earlier, they were all going to have to accept the fact that they were never coming back again.
Why should they?
Her fiancé, in his grief, had insisted that there might be some chance that everything would go back to normal. That his brother would figure something out, and fix the problem. His brother could fix anything, he thought. There were no limits to Paeryc Petrovalyc’s genius. Surely this was all a big mistake, and he would fix it all. He always came through.
Except that he didn’t.
He wouldn’t.
This time, it was different.
Everyone had lost everything. She had lost her parents, her older sister, her cousins. She had lost the beautiful blue and white marbled world of her childhood - and all that remained of any of it were the memories. He had lost the only family member he’d ever had. There was nothing left of humanity.
So, what was the point of going on? Nothing mattered now, she knew objectively. The paltry millions aboard the Stella were barely a fraction of a fraction of what there had been. A meager tribe - and already on the brink of collapse.
Alex clenched her jaw. That was what she needed to focus on.
Humans had never changed, even in all the centuries since they had come up from the Earth to populate the System. They were violent, territorial, irrational, emotional. She was no exception - but it was her responsibility now to be something more than human. Her and Aelyn. She risked another sad glance his way. She had been weeping that way yesterday. Both of them had wept almost every day since it happened. Everyone was weeping. Mourning the death of all mankind. The two of them had gotten past the point of bothering to comfort each other - there was nothing one could do to ease the other’s pain, though staying close did help.
From around the corner, a tired, middle-aged man in sweat-stained collared shirt and slacks came shuffling. Alex couldn’t remember his name, but she recognized him as one of the officials who had been in charge of the coordination and preparation of humanity’s first venture into the galaxy. A journey that had once been a symbolic beacon of hope in troubled times, now a meaningless endeavor.
He cleared his throat, looking awkward, and apologetic. ”Uh, Mr. Petrovalyc, the council has called a meeting and-”
Alex hadn't’ meant to lash out at the man, but it was done before she could stop herself.
”Would you shut the @#$% up!” She snapped, whirling on the man. He probably hadn’t slept in days - none of them got much sleep anymore - and being in some position of authority or office, he was one of those unlucky few who found themselves in charge of holding the last remnants of humanity together in the face of insurmountable crisis.
The man stiffened and backed away half a step. Alex, immediately regretful, softened her furious expression back to the image of quiet misery she had been before. ”I’m sorry.” The man smiled weakly. “I understand.” He replied, earnestly. They all understood. They were all finding themselves snapping at people who didn’t deserve it, lashing out in their grief and anguish, looking for someone to blame.
”What were you saying?” Alex prompted the man, who fumbled awkwardly with a sheaf of papers in his hand, vaguely gathered into some sort of folder. “A meeting has been called. The council wants to go over our options.”
”Again?” Alex retorted dryly, looking fed up already. The man returned the expression with an apologetic undercurrent. “Again. And...we really think Mr. Petrovalyc should be involved this time…” He left the remainder of the sentence to hang unspoken - because this ship belongs to him’ - but the look in the man’s tired eyes connected with Alex’s own, and she nodded in silent understanding. Her glance back toward the young man curled up against the wall behind her was almost imperceptible, ”I’ll talk to him.” “That would be good. It’s being held in two hours in Command 4.” ”Alright.”
And the man departed, looking no less haggard than he had been when he appeared. Alex watched him go, then turned again to face Aelyn. He had stopped crying, though his defeated, reclusive posture persisted. He rubbed at his eyes with the heels of his hand. She walked over to him, crouched beside, and wrapped her arms around him. Her fingers idly, soothingly toyed with stray locks of black hair, like she had always done. She said nothing - everything had already been said a hundred times.
It was he who spoke, after some indeterminate amount of time sitting in silence and gathering himself together.
”Alex...Alex I’m a scientist, not a ship captain.” He whimpered. His voice was weak, and the words trembled slightly. ”I Can't do this. I can’t...make decisions on behalf of all these people!”
”Ael, you’re just about the smartest person I Know. You’re brilliant. And frankly I Can't think of anyone who’s better qualified for the position.” The words did not sound like empty reassurance, and he didn’t seem to take them that way. ”And...for what it’s worth, I’ll be with you every step of the way.”
That made him smile. For the first time since the dread had overcome him minutes before, he took hands away from eyes and looked at her. Alex had to suppress the shudder that ran down her spine at the sight of them.
The eyes.
They had been hazel. And now they were inky black pits of darkness, with brilliant points of white..It was bone-chilling. A part of her wondered why it had happened to him but not her - but it was a question for another time. What had happened to them was strange enough as it went.
He did not seem to notice Alex’s shiver - so she must have kept it off her face. That was good, at least. They had lost everything - but not ‘everything’ - and if the disappearance of their entire civilization couldn’t change that, inexplicable incorporeality couldn’t either.
Still, it had been a hassle keeping people from trying to hand them things.
The silence of the hallway blanketed them, as if nobody had noticed how quiet it was until that moment. And for a while, they sat, while all that remained of humanity bore all its weight down upon them.
When they entered Command Board 4 two hours later, they were the last to do so. The room seemed too small. The ceiling arched above like a small chapel. The table running down the center was long and sturdy. Some of them were sitting in the chairs lined up against it, though most were standing. The energy was too high. The whole room abuzz with anger, fear, desperation - all crushed together into the agonized hearts of people who had lost everything.
Aelyn wore the cheap pair of solid black sports sunglasses he had found in his pocket. Even he thought it looked ridiculous, but there was nothing to be done. Nobody could be allowed to see what he and Alexia had become. Everything was fragile enough without incorporeal, black-eyed demons. Her hand was clasped in his, fingers interlocked, but hidden behind the low railing that sectioned off the speaker’s podium. The room gradually quieted as the two of them walked wordlessly to the back, stepping up, and standing stoically where they might address the group as a whole. They said nothing - and eventually, everyone had taken their seats.
Alex looked over them, her expression blank, but with the same undertone of despair that had become a permanent fixture on everyone’s face. It was a pathetic group of people. Only a week before, these had been powerful, influential people. Members of the Stella Viventium’s Board of Operations. Minister of Colonization Mark De Santa, slumped over the desk with his face buried in folded arms. Philip Gerard, Head of Security, sat with arms crossed, leaning back, and glaring at the table as if it might have been the reason that his entire life was ripped out of his hands. Maggie Wallace, Head of Agriculture. Bill Steinburg, Head of Engineering. Alice Porter-Li, Head of Research and Development. Peyton Jennings, Head of Commerce. Mei Jian, Head of Industry. And there were others. A full board, all aspects of the great ship accounted for in a single room. All pale, hollow-eyed, in sweat-stained clothing that hadn’t been changed in days for lack of a spare moment.
But Alex had to give them credit – despite their fear and despair, they were working hard – doing their best to keep what little remained of Mankind from collapsing into meaningless chaos. They were good people – unaccustomed to this new lifestyle, but good. Angry with nobody to be angry at, grieving for the loss of everyone they had ever known – and capable of irrational action under the stress, but good.
And the same applied to the other three million people who had chosen to leave their world behind and embark on the most ambitious venture in history. They had been ready to bid farewell to those who remained on Earth and Mars, and Europa and Ganymede. Communication would be slow and at a premium, but they would still be there. The cool, green hills of Earth would always rest beneath fleecy skies.
Except – they wouldn’t.
There had been riots – still ongoing in some sections. Looting in the commercial district. Murmurs of mutiny in Command. The Research Department had been nearly overwhelmed with desperate, terror-stricken people demanding that they work some technological magic to fix the problem. Navigation had been taken forcibly by a group of self-proclaimed ‘security’, claiming that it had been the Navigators’ fault – that they had somehow moved the ship to the wrong place, rather than the seemingly impossible truth of the matter. Security had to retake that section by force – which only added to the growing sense of ‘martial law’. People began to feel oppressed – as security began enforcing curfews, confining people to quarters, guarding the colonization supplies, agricultural centers, against looters who thought the end of the world meant they needed to stock up on food. There had even been a suicide bombing in the Governmental District – some religious zealot claiming that the Stella was a sin, and they were all meant to die for it. Medical centers were at or over capacity with those who had been injured in panic-induced violence between people who had once been adamant to cooperate and build a new world.
Alex glanced sidelong at Aelyn – he had been standing there for what seemed like an hour in the silence of the room, though it had only been a minute or two. Still – public speaking had never been something he was comfortable with. Alex gave his hand a subtle squeeze, and it seemed to help.
”I’m sorry for not being present at these meetings before today.” He began without preamble, his voice almost without inflection. Alex was impressed. ”I won’t try to tell any of you that this is anything but the biggest disaster in human history. And…I won’t try to tell you that there’s any going back.” There was a restless shifting of the men and women in their seats. Nobody liked to hear it – even if it was becoming more true by the day. ”I wish I had answers. This ship…the people on it, they deserve to know what happened – but it’s becoming clear that there’s no real chance of answers coming.”
The way they looked up at him, Alex realized, was not merely the exhaustion and determination of powerful people trying to make things work – because they too were no more than human beings. Just as the people in the body of the vessel were desperate for answers, for someone to blame, for someone to look up to and assure them that they would handle it all – so did these men and women. They were strong in the face of the apocalypse – but they could only be so to an extent.
Alex looked at Aelyn as he spoke. Watched him – and knew that it was going to have to be him. He would have to be the one that these people could look up to, to put their faith in.
And she knew that he would accept the burden – even though there was nobody for him to look up at. He was at the top – and all the weight of everything below pressed down on him, with nowhere to go and escape it.
The realization that there was nothing she could do about it brought Alex to the verge of tearing up with acute frustration. He was going to do it, and she couldn’t stop him. For all she cared about the people in the Board, in the Stella proper – she didn’t care enough about them to justify the weight that Aelyn was going to bear on their behalf. He would take charge – she was certain of that now – and she would be there every step of the way to keep him standing at these fiery gates. She would not be allowed to bear the weight – but she could support it. The young woman leaned slightly into the tall man at the head of the room, slightly, unconsciously. She wanted to cling to him. Wrap her arms around his waist and bury her face in his chest, and tell him that everything would be okay – that she was still there – but it would have to wait.
”The lives we knew…they’re over. And there’s nothing we can do about that…Except…what humans have been doing for generations. In ancient times, when cities burned, the people left and built new ones. When the systems on Eros died, survivors left and started anew. And even though their homes were gone, they could have something new to live for.”
They were enraptured – all of their attention was on him now. Not eager, but focused. Finally, after all these days, someone was going to do something. Anything.
”The Stella is…fully self-sustaining. We could stay where we are and wait for generations, on the chance that our old lives might somehow return to us – but we have no reason to believe that is ever going to happen. We could stay here and live out our lives looking down on the ashes of the worlds we left behind…Or we could move forward.”
The tremor sneaking into his voice, Alex was sure, would only be audible to her. Again, she squeezed his hand, and held it that way.
”I say we need to…w-we need to go. Fire up the stardrive and move on. This chapter in human existence is over…but it doesn’t have to be the last. We’ll find a new world, and we…we’ll start again.”
He needed to catch his breath, if he was going to maintain the illusion of what strength he had. Alex wasn’t sure she had ever loved him quite as much as she did in this moment. And still, nobody had said a word.
”Tell the people…we’ll be holding a memorial ceremony…in memory of the people we’ve lost.”
And suddenly, there was a tightness in his jaw – a determination underlying the sorrow. The words trembled, but with a boiling passion rising up from within.
”We will light up the sky. We will sing songs and raise prayers, and give our homeworlds the funeral pyre they deserve. We will etch memories of the lost on the walls of the Living Star. Generations from now our descendants will look to the walls and know how beautiful, and magical and full of life and wonder the place we left behind really was. We’ll write their names in steel and give thanks to their memory in every step we take.” His voice had risen to a crescendo of passion – not strength, but fervor. The bone-deep love for the dead and the diamond-solid will to march forward with them at his back.
But then, the volume was gone. He became quiet again. Not defeated – but sorrowful. And his words were all the more powerful for how he annunciated them.
”And then…Once we’ve paid our respects…We’ll leave. We’ll leave, and we’ll find a new world, and build a new life. Just like we were planning to do before. We’ll show this cruel, evil, unforgiving universe that it can throw whatever disasters it wants at us – but humankind will never, never surrender.”
His grip on her tightened. The passion was welling up again – the determination – the strength. Yes, it was strength, now. Resolve. Determination beyond the scope of imagination. The words trembled with a vibrato built from something deep in his bones.
”And we won’t stop at just one world.” He continued, looking each of the exhausted men and women in the eyes, in turn. This was something new.
”No. We won’t stop at one world. We won’t stop at one star. We won’t stop until humanity has spread out through the entire, galaxy wide. We’ll build world, after world, after world. And I will destroy any obstacle in my path to protect these people! The universe took our star, but they will not take our people! We will dominate the galaxy with our presence! We will be heard by the powers that be and overwhelm the universe with our existence!” He was almost shouting now, voice on the verge of breaking. Tears had welled up beneath the sunglasses and ran openly down his face, tracing the lines of his scars. His free hand, balled into a fist, suddenly came down to slam forcefully on the podium with a sound like a gunshot.
“And we will show this cruel, hateful universe that nothing will keep humankind down, we will never be defeated, and we will never! Never surrender!”
In the days that followed, a great mourning swept the Stella Viventium. Yet with the sorrow came celebration. The somber, nostalgic remembrance of the lives that once had written their stories upon the worlds of Men. It was the Grand Funeral - they drank, they sang, they wept - but they wept together. And in those final moments, there was a peace. Violence was all but snuffed out for the brief time when Mankind mourned the great passing.
Upon the walls of the great, domed Grand Stella Station were carved images in tribute to each of the worlds that had been lost. The cityscape of Capitol Ares, and the grand Martian canyons. The Hanging Cities of Europa, the gossamer mountains of Callisto, the vast plains of Ganymede. The cemeteries of Eros, the shipyards of Luna - and the cities of Mother Earth herself. All rendered in masterful bas-relief by the most skillful artists humanity had to offer.
And on the Final Day, the emptiness where once a race had been born and died was made alight by the brilliant spectacle of the stardrive’s first burn. They gathered in the observation decks to witness the grandeur of the ultimate show - the sound-off of light more brilliant and luminous than the vanished Sun itself. An explosion of energy unprecedented as the engine that had been devised to carry Mankind to the stars embarked on it’s lonely maiden voyage.
And yet, for all it’s glory, it hardly seemed enough.
♪
A few steps down the corridor, a young woman stood, leaning with arms crossed, against the opposite wall. Brown hair tufted at the top, and bound in a long braid from the back of her neck almost to her hips. She wore a grey hooded sweatshirt and jeans - a stark contrast to the young man in appearance and demeanor alike. The young woman did not weep, though the sorrow became her no less. Her eyes, a curious blend of lavender and pale grey, watched the carpeted floor as if something in the texture might hold some hidden consolation, if only she looked at it long enough.
The corridor held the vague scent of fresh paint and lacquer, accented by hints of ozone and freshly minted electronics. The lights were bright and new. It looked like a sparsely used hallway in an office building. She felt as if, should she look out a window, she would see an Earthside cityscape, bustling with activity, beneath the blue sky she had grown up beneath. Or, perhaps she would see Mars - where the edge of Mariner’s Metropolis met the dusty plains, under the ruddy, but beautiful sky that she had long since come to appreciate.
But there were no windows.
And even if there had been
There were no Earth or Mars to look out upon.
They were gone. All of it. Everything that the human race had struggled so hard to build over the course of their meager existence - all the achievements - gone in an instant. And, she had decided some minutes earlier, they were all going to have to accept the fact that they were never coming back again.
Why should they?
Her fiancé, in his grief, had insisted that there might be some chance that everything would go back to normal. That his brother would figure something out, and fix the problem. His brother could fix anything, he thought. There were no limits to Paeryc Petrovalyc’s genius. Surely this was all a big mistake, and he would fix it all. He always came through.
Except that he didn’t.
He wouldn’t.
This time, it was different.
Everyone had lost everything. She had lost her parents, her older sister, her cousins. She had lost the beautiful blue and white marbled world of her childhood - and all that remained of any of it were the memories. He had lost the only family member he’d ever had. There was nothing left of humanity.
So, what was the point of going on? Nothing mattered now, she knew objectively. The paltry millions aboard the Stella were barely a fraction of a fraction of what there had been. A meager tribe - and already on the brink of collapse.
Alex clenched her jaw. That was what she needed to focus on.
Humans had never changed, even in all the centuries since they had come up from the Earth to populate the System. They were violent, territorial, irrational, emotional. She was no exception - but it was her responsibility now to be something more than human. Her and Aelyn. She risked another sad glance his way. She had been weeping that way yesterday. Both of them had wept almost every day since it happened. Everyone was weeping. Mourning the death of all mankind. The two of them had gotten past the point of bothering to comfort each other - there was nothing one could do to ease the other’s pain, though staying close did help.
From around the corner, a tired, middle-aged man in sweat-stained collared shirt and slacks came shuffling. Alex couldn’t remember his name, but she recognized him as one of the officials who had been in charge of the coordination and preparation of humanity’s first venture into the galaxy. A journey that had once been a symbolic beacon of hope in troubled times, now a meaningless endeavor.
He cleared his throat, looking awkward, and apologetic. ”Uh, Mr. Petrovalyc, the council has called a meeting and-”
Alex hadn't’ meant to lash out at the man, but it was done before she could stop herself.
”Would you shut the @#$% up!” She snapped, whirling on the man. He probably hadn’t slept in days - none of them got much sleep anymore - and being in some position of authority or office, he was one of those unlucky few who found themselves in charge of holding the last remnants of humanity together in the face of insurmountable crisis.
The man stiffened and backed away half a step. Alex, immediately regretful, softened her furious expression back to the image of quiet misery she had been before. ”I’m sorry.” The man smiled weakly. “I understand.” He replied, earnestly. They all understood. They were all finding themselves snapping at people who didn’t deserve it, lashing out in their grief and anguish, looking for someone to blame.
”What were you saying?” Alex prompted the man, who fumbled awkwardly with a sheaf of papers in his hand, vaguely gathered into some sort of folder. “A meeting has been called. The council wants to go over our options.”
”Again?” Alex retorted dryly, looking fed up already. The man returned the expression with an apologetic undercurrent. “Again. And...we really think Mr. Petrovalyc should be involved this time…” He left the remainder of the sentence to hang unspoken - because this ship belongs to him’ - but the look in the man’s tired eyes connected with Alex’s own, and she nodded in silent understanding. Her glance back toward the young man curled up against the wall behind her was almost imperceptible, ”I’ll talk to him.” “That would be good. It’s being held in two hours in Command 4.” ”Alright.”
And the man departed, looking no less haggard than he had been when he appeared. Alex watched him go, then turned again to face Aelyn. He had stopped crying, though his defeated, reclusive posture persisted. He rubbed at his eyes with the heels of his hand. She walked over to him, crouched beside, and wrapped her arms around him. Her fingers idly, soothingly toyed with stray locks of black hair, like she had always done. She said nothing - everything had already been said a hundred times.
It was he who spoke, after some indeterminate amount of time sitting in silence and gathering himself together.
”Alex...Alex I’m a scientist, not a ship captain.” He whimpered. His voice was weak, and the words trembled slightly. ”I Can't do this. I can’t...make decisions on behalf of all these people!”
”Ael, you’re just about the smartest person I Know. You’re brilliant. And frankly I Can't think of anyone who’s better qualified for the position.” The words did not sound like empty reassurance, and he didn’t seem to take them that way. ”And...for what it’s worth, I’ll be with you every step of the way.”
That made him smile. For the first time since the dread had overcome him minutes before, he took hands away from eyes and looked at her. Alex had to suppress the shudder that ran down her spine at the sight of them.
The eyes.
They had been hazel. And now they were inky black pits of darkness, with brilliant points of white..It was bone-chilling. A part of her wondered why it had happened to him but not her - but it was a question for another time. What had happened to them was strange enough as it went.
He did not seem to notice Alex’s shiver - so she must have kept it off her face. That was good, at least. They had lost everything - but not ‘everything’ - and if the disappearance of their entire civilization couldn’t change that, inexplicable incorporeality couldn’t either.
Still, it had been a hassle keeping people from trying to hand them things.
The silence of the hallway blanketed them, as if nobody had noticed how quiet it was until that moment. And for a while, they sat, while all that remained of humanity bore all its weight down upon them.
When they entered Command Board 4 two hours later, they were the last to do so. The room seemed too small. The ceiling arched above like a small chapel. The table running down the center was long and sturdy. Some of them were sitting in the chairs lined up against it, though most were standing. The energy was too high. The whole room abuzz with anger, fear, desperation - all crushed together into the agonized hearts of people who had lost everything.
Aelyn wore the cheap pair of solid black sports sunglasses he had found in his pocket. Even he thought it looked ridiculous, but there was nothing to be done. Nobody could be allowed to see what he and Alexia had become. Everything was fragile enough without incorporeal, black-eyed demons. Her hand was clasped in his, fingers interlocked, but hidden behind the low railing that sectioned off the speaker’s podium. The room gradually quieted as the two of them walked wordlessly to the back, stepping up, and standing stoically where they might address the group as a whole. They said nothing - and eventually, everyone had taken their seats.
Alex looked over them, her expression blank, but with the same undertone of despair that had become a permanent fixture on everyone’s face. It was a pathetic group of people. Only a week before, these had been powerful, influential people. Members of the Stella Viventium’s Board of Operations. Minister of Colonization Mark De Santa, slumped over the desk with his face buried in folded arms. Philip Gerard, Head of Security, sat with arms crossed, leaning back, and glaring at the table as if it might have been the reason that his entire life was ripped out of his hands. Maggie Wallace, Head of Agriculture. Bill Steinburg, Head of Engineering. Alice Porter-Li, Head of Research and Development. Peyton Jennings, Head of Commerce. Mei Jian, Head of Industry. And there were others. A full board, all aspects of the great ship accounted for in a single room. All pale, hollow-eyed, in sweat-stained clothing that hadn’t been changed in days for lack of a spare moment.
But Alex had to give them credit – despite their fear and despair, they were working hard – doing their best to keep what little remained of Mankind from collapsing into meaningless chaos. They were good people – unaccustomed to this new lifestyle, but good. Angry with nobody to be angry at, grieving for the loss of everyone they had ever known – and capable of irrational action under the stress, but good.
And the same applied to the other three million people who had chosen to leave their world behind and embark on the most ambitious venture in history. They had been ready to bid farewell to those who remained on Earth and Mars, and Europa and Ganymede. Communication would be slow and at a premium, but they would still be there. The cool, green hills of Earth would always rest beneath fleecy skies.
Except – they wouldn’t.
There had been riots – still ongoing in some sections. Looting in the commercial district. Murmurs of mutiny in Command. The Research Department had been nearly overwhelmed with desperate, terror-stricken people demanding that they work some technological magic to fix the problem. Navigation had been taken forcibly by a group of self-proclaimed ‘security’, claiming that it had been the Navigators’ fault – that they had somehow moved the ship to the wrong place, rather than the seemingly impossible truth of the matter. Security had to retake that section by force – which only added to the growing sense of ‘martial law’. People began to feel oppressed – as security began enforcing curfews, confining people to quarters, guarding the colonization supplies, agricultural centers, against looters who thought the end of the world meant they needed to stock up on food. There had even been a suicide bombing in the Governmental District – some religious zealot claiming that the Stella was a sin, and they were all meant to die for it. Medical centers were at or over capacity with those who had been injured in panic-induced violence between people who had once been adamant to cooperate and build a new world.
Alex glanced sidelong at Aelyn – he had been standing there for what seemed like an hour in the silence of the room, though it had only been a minute or two. Still – public speaking had never been something he was comfortable with. Alex gave his hand a subtle squeeze, and it seemed to help.
♫
”I’m sorry for not being present at these meetings before today.” He began without preamble, his voice almost without inflection. Alex was impressed. ”I won’t try to tell any of you that this is anything but the biggest disaster in human history. And…I won’t try to tell you that there’s any going back.” There was a restless shifting of the men and women in their seats. Nobody liked to hear it – even if it was becoming more true by the day. ”I wish I had answers. This ship…the people on it, they deserve to know what happened – but it’s becoming clear that there’s no real chance of answers coming.”
The way they looked up at him, Alex realized, was not merely the exhaustion and determination of powerful people trying to make things work – because they too were no more than human beings. Just as the people in the body of the vessel were desperate for answers, for someone to blame, for someone to look up to and assure them that they would handle it all – so did these men and women. They were strong in the face of the apocalypse – but they could only be so to an extent.
Alex looked at Aelyn as he spoke. Watched him – and knew that it was going to have to be him. He would have to be the one that these people could look up to, to put their faith in.
And she knew that he would accept the burden – even though there was nobody for him to look up at. He was at the top – and all the weight of everything below pressed down on him, with nowhere to go and escape it.
The realization that there was nothing she could do about it brought Alex to the verge of tearing up with acute frustration. He was going to do it, and she couldn’t stop him. For all she cared about the people in the Board, in the Stella proper – she didn’t care enough about them to justify the weight that Aelyn was going to bear on their behalf. He would take charge – she was certain of that now – and she would be there every step of the way to keep him standing at these fiery gates. She would not be allowed to bear the weight – but she could support it. The young woman leaned slightly into the tall man at the head of the room, slightly, unconsciously. She wanted to cling to him. Wrap her arms around his waist and bury her face in his chest, and tell him that everything would be okay – that she was still there – but it would have to wait.
”The lives we knew…they’re over. And there’s nothing we can do about that…Except…what humans have been doing for generations. In ancient times, when cities burned, the people left and built new ones. When the systems on Eros died, survivors left and started anew. And even though their homes were gone, they could have something new to live for.”
They were enraptured – all of their attention was on him now. Not eager, but focused. Finally, after all these days, someone was going to do something. Anything.
”The Stella is…fully self-sustaining. We could stay where we are and wait for generations, on the chance that our old lives might somehow return to us – but we have no reason to believe that is ever going to happen. We could stay here and live out our lives looking down on the ashes of the worlds we left behind…Or we could move forward.”
The tremor sneaking into his voice, Alex was sure, would only be audible to her. Again, she squeezed his hand, and held it that way.
”I say we need to…w-we need to go. Fire up the stardrive and move on. This chapter in human existence is over…but it doesn’t have to be the last. We’ll find a new world, and we…we’ll start again.”
He needed to catch his breath, if he was going to maintain the illusion of what strength he had. Alex wasn’t sure she had ever loved him quite as much as she did in this moment. And still, nobody had said a word.
”Tell the people…we’ll be holding a memorial ceremony…in memory of the people we’ve lost.”
And suddenly, there was a tightness in his jaw – a determination underlying the sorrow. The words trembled, but with a boiling passion rising up from within.
”We will light up the sky. We will sing songs and raise prayers, and give our homeworlds the funeral pyre they deserve. We will etch memories of the lost on the walls of the Living Star. Generations from now our descendants will look to the walls and know how beautiful, and magical and full of life and wonder the place we left behind really was. We’ll write their names in steel and give thanks to their memory in every step we take.” His voice had risen to a crescendo of passion – not strength, but fervor. The bone-deep love for the dead and the diamond-solid will to march forward with them at his back.
But then, the volume was gone. He became quiet again. Not defeated – but sorrowful. And his words were all the more powerful for how he annunciated them.
”And then…Once we’ve paid our respects…We’ll leave. We’ll leave, and we’ll find a new world, and build a new life. Just like we were planning to do before. We’ll show this cruel, evil, unforgiving universe that it can throw whatever disasters it wants at us – but humankind will never, never surrender.”
His grip on her tightened. The passion was welling up again – the determination – the strength. Yes, it was strength, now. Resolve. Determination beyond the scope of imagination. The words trembled with a vibrato built from something deep in his bones.
”And we won’t stop at just one world.” He continued, looking each of the exhausted men and women in the eyes, in turn. This was something new.
”No. We won’t stop at one world. We won’t stop at one star. We won’t stop until humanity has spread out through the entire, galaxy wide. We’ll build world, after world, after world. And I will destroy any obstacle in my path to protect these people! The universe took our star, but they will not take our people! We will dominate the galaxy with our presence! We will be heard by the powers that be and overwhelm the universe with our existence!” He was almost shouting now, voice on the verge of breaking. Tears had welled up beneath the sunglasses and ran openly down his face, tracing the lines of his scars. His free hand, balled into a fist, suddenly came down to slam forcefully on the podium with a sound like a gunshot.
“And we will show this cruel, hateful universe that nothing will keep humankind down, we will never be defeated, and we will never! Never surrender!”
In the days that followed, a great mourning swept the Stella Viventium. Yet with the sorrow came celebration. The somber, nostalgic remembrance of the lives that once had written their stories upon the worlds of Men. It was the Grand Funeral - they drank, they sang, they wept - but they wept together. And in those final moments, there was a peace. Violence was all but snuffed out for the brief time when Mankind mourned the great passing.
Upon the walls of the great, domed Grand Stella Station were carved images in tribute to each of the worlds that had been lost. The cityscape of Capitol Ares, and the grand Martian canyons. The Hanging Cities of Europa, the gossamer mountains of Callisto, the vast plains of Ganymede. The cemeteries of Eros, the shipyards of Luna - and the cities of Mother Earth herself. All rendered in masterful bas-relief by the most skillful artists humanity had to offer.
And on the Final Day, the emptiness where once a race had been born and died was made alight by the brilliant spectacle of the stardrive’s first burn. They gathered in the observation decks to witness the grandeur of the ultimate show - the sound-off of light more brilliant and luminous than the vanished Sun itself. An explosion of energy unprecedented as the engine that had been devised to carry Mankind to the stars embarked on it’s lonely maiden voyage.
And yet, for all it’s glory, it hardly seemed enough.
TGW – 113th Page Special:
P R O L O G U E
Part II
P R O L O G U E
Part II
{04:08:02:346,451}
“Have you ever heard of…the Iridiites?”
“Is this the part about what you couldn’t tell me until we got here?”
“Humor me, Léto. I beg you.”
“Fine. I think I’ve heard the name somewhere but that’s about it.”
“Of course. Because it has been proven time and again that it is always the most important people who lose their names to history.”
All around the two men, the sounds of nature and of mid-spring rain made an intoxicating atmosphere, the air thick and wet, but rich with life. They walked carefully, watching where they stepped, for there was no path to follow. It was, Léto Amareta had to admit, a beautiful place, even in the relative simplicity of the aesthetic and moody precipitation. Vibrant tones of green, the deep browns of sturdy, deciduous trees that seemed too evenly spaced to have been wholly natural. Even the sky above, past the foliage where stray beams of soft light penetrated like silvery blades, there was a sage hue in the clouds that rained down upon them. Some kind of cloud-borne algae, Al had said. Léto had no reason to doubt that – but Léto also had no experience or knowledge in biology.
In three directions, the land was almost perfectly flat – and the airy forest seemed to stretch on for eternity. There was no trace of the little village they had left that morning. With the sun just starting to descend from the peak above behind the jade rainclouds, Léto guessed they had been walking for some seven hours. It had gone quickly enough – even though Al always seemed so distracted, it didn’t stop him from being a good conversationalist. He was also the only person in his respectably wide circle of explorers, adventurers, and treasure-hunters that was actually more of a scientist than anything else. Léto liked that.
“If the stories are to be believed, the Iridiites were the… Precursors to humanity. The people that humans were, once, long before the beginning of recorded history.”
“But I thought the consensus was for a…what’s it called – a situation where humans had always been all over the galaxy.”
Al waved a dismissive hand and made a similarly percussive sound. “Bah. Just because most people agree on something doesn’t make it true. Everything must have a beginning, and an end – no matter what these fools who think that time expands infinitely in either direction say.”
Léto nodded, glancing to Al, then back to the sparse ground cover upon which they walked – then up at the place, far ahead, where the forest seemed to stop and give way to a great plain, and greater mountain beyond. From the brim of his wide hat, rain dripped steadily.
“If time went both ways indefinitely, entropy could not exist. You can’t un-scramble an egg – that’s because of the linear nature of time.”
“If you say so.” Léto replied.
Léto was not a man of science. He was a man of exploration, of cartography, adventure. His life might not have been as romantic as explorers in films were portrayed, but it was a good life, and he was good at what he did. He had made some big discoveries, brought in some big profits, and gotten himself a ship. That particularly made him popular with some of the less skilled entrepreneurs, who were always trying to hitch a ride to their next hunch. Al was the only one he considered a real friend – so when Al came to him with the prospect of the biggest find he would ever know, he could not resist the temptation.
“But I digress. The Iridiites – they were very much like us. They were ambitious, and ingenuitive. They had an almost insatiable lust for technology – and as such, they achieved much greater heights of technology than Man ever has. We develop machines to aid us in life – they developed machines because it was their calling.”
A bird with feathers an unflattering shade of puce landed delicately on a branch, made an equally unflattering gurgling sound, and then flew off in a flutter of droplets.
“So, an ancient, technologically advanced civilization gone extinct, and leaving forbidden technology behind in the ruins.” Léto said – and Al shot him something of a grumpy look.
Al was hardly older than Léto, no more than twenty six, or twenty seven – but he looked a decade or so older than he was. Something about the long face and slight, natural jowls. The perpetual look of thoughtful disdain, and the pale, sandy brown hair added to it. He was by no means an ugly man. The two of them had been on-and-off lovers over the decades they had known each other, ever since their teen years. At present, they were ‘off’ – but Léto had little doubt that they might find themselves again in such a position, some day.
He admired Al deeply – though Al had never been one for boasting, and on the few occasions he had expressed this to the man he had been awkward about it. That was fine.
“Yes. That.” Al said, with a hint of deadpan frustration that was not so subtle as he might have intended. Léto gave a light chuckle. “I’m just screwing with you, Al. But you’ve got to admit it’s sort of an old story.”
“Yes, it is. But that story must have come from somewhere, right? Is it so implausible that it might be inspired from reality?”
“I never said I doubted you.”
“Yes, well…the Iridiites were obsessed with perfection. The idea of perfection. Legend has it that they were descended from some other race of immaculate beings – but that just sounds like a creation myth to me.”
Rather abruptly, the forest broke – and laying out before the two men was a vast expanse of green, rolling hills giving shape to gently sloping plains. Past that, a single, gigantic mountain loomed in the distance. It almost looked out of place, rising up like that. It also looked like a very long walk – but that was fine. Both men lugged hefty backpacks with enough supplies to last a week…He just hoped that Al wasn’t intending to have them climb the mountain. Almost as if synchronized, the men adjusted the light, wide-brimmed hats to better shade their eyes from the brighter light that shined down upon them through the weeping jade sky. They looked like a proper pair of explorers, right down to the shin-high leather boots and machetes at their hips. It might have been a safari.
“The Iridiites, in their attempts to achieve perfection, tried to build an artificial mind, you see. A collection of…” He put his hands out in front of him, gesturing as though he were holding an invisible watermelon. “Aspects of the natural universe – a sort of patchwork of…Well, of energies we can’t hope to understand, now. And once they had built it, they put it into a robot body, and it promptly wiped them out of existence.”
“Ouch.” Léto vocalized, grimacing. “They didn’t even fight back?”
“Oh, they tried. They built more robots – but mostly they just fled. I have personally seen one of the gates they used – it was an amazing thing to behold. You looked into this grand archway and just on the other side was a planet on the opposite side of the galaxy.”
“That…sounds like really important technology.”
“It is. But the forces in control of it refuse to let it be known. I won’t tell you what I had to go through to see it.”
Léto was, of course, intrigued by that – but Al apparently didn’t want to talk about it. That was fine.
“The chase was a slow one, however. It played out over generations. The Iridiites would build the gate from one planet to the next, and settle there. The robot couldn’t fit through the gate – so it was forced to hunt them down. Probably one generation of Iridiites never saw the robot more than once.”
“Wow. So, they lived their whole lives with the knowledge that some godlike being was, some day, going to drop out of the sky and kill them all?”
“Yes. It would make a good book, don’t you think?”
“Complex, but good, yes. I imagine many of them would believe it was just a myth until it actually appeared. Very religious.”
“Indeed. The chase obviously ended in their inevitable extermination. But they survived long enough to leave ruins on twenty two planets – possibly more.”
“And…there is an Iridiite ruin inside that mountain.” Léto finished, understanding at last. Al beamed – he rarely got excited like that, and when he did, it was always on that kind of note.
“Exactly!”
“Hey, don’t take this the wrong way Al, but…if all this is so totally unknown…how did you learn about it?” Al’s smile became something of a low-profile grin, in response.
“An angel told me.”
The two of them had a good, long laugh over that one. Al didn’t usually have much of a sense of humor – so when he did crack a joke, it always seemed to hit the mark.
It was dusk of the following day that the pair arrived at the base of the mountain, and the rain had ceased some hours before, at last. It was a steeper incline up close than it had looked from afar – there was no chance they would be climbing it. Léto was glad for that.
“Alright boss, what are we looking for?” He queried, crossing his arms and scanning the immediate area. He would start setting up camp soon – but the devilish anticipation that had come over Al was something worth seeing.
“Not what we’re looking for, my good man. What we’ve already found!” He said loudly, from where he had been examining the rock some yards ahead. Léto was taken aback, brows raised. It took him a heartbeat to realize he was supposed to get closer, and trotted up behind the giddy scientist-explorer. Al must have already known exactly what to look for.
“Here, right here.” He hissed excitedly, gesturing up against an almost vertical portion of the virtual wall that the base of the mountain formed. Léto stepped in closer, then fidgeted with the small light attached to the collar of his shirt, which better illuminated their find in the dusky auburn twilight.
It was a symbol, carved deeply into the rock. A rounded square, with a horizontal football shape inside, to the right. Two small, curved triangles sprouted from the top of the football on either side.
Al, without looking, reached behind him and into one of the side pouches on his backpack, withdrawing from it an artifact that just happened to match the symbol in bas-relief on the wall. A rounded square, football on the left side, so that if put face to face – it lined up.
Al held the thing there for what seemed like an eternity. The thing looked rusty, but Léto imagined that it was more the texture of the metal, or simple wearing of age, rather than actual rust. If these Iridiites were as ancient as Al said they were, anything they left behind would have to be much more sturdy than that.
He held it, and held it – until Léto began to doubt that anything was going to happen at all.
Then, without warning, the mountain came alive.
Dazzling, neon-orange light spread out from within the rock along the edges of the artifact. They shot out in all directions, straight lines and right angles in a pattern so complex that it did not look to be a pattern at all. Gaping, Léto watched as the lines of light shot along, all the way up the mountain and continuing on out of sight.
“The locals are gonna’ go ape@#$%.” He said softly, for lack of any words that would really matter in a moment such as this.
“Savages. Let them write stories and prepare for the wrath of an angry god.” Al spat disdainfully, and at last stepped back, hunching his shoulders to let the backpack slide off and onto the ground. The smaller messenger satchel was still slung over one shoulder, and he put the artifact into it.
The wall before them began to move.
It seemed to fall slowly away from them and disappear into the floor. There would be no need for flashlights inside, he saw – because the orange lines of light extended all the way down the corridor, and the downward stairs that followed. Al shot him an almost manic smile, then started down the corridor. Léto shrugged his own backpack off, and followed suit.
If it seemed to go on forever, it was only because anticipation was stretching time out to a maximum. Each step, he knew, was taking them toward something amazing. The stairs descended sharply, first in a straight line, then in a spiral that actually started to make Léto dizzy after a few minutes of going in circles.
Léto was an accomplished explorer. He had seen the ruins of ancient civilizations – found unique pieces of technology lost to disaster or theft. Uncovering the reality of that which bordered on myth was in his job description. But he had never seen anything like this.
The stairs opened up into a vast chamber – still, the orange lights in their vaguely squared patterns stretched all the way up to the lofty ceiling. This, he realized, must have been most of what the mountain outside was made of. Mostly hollow – though he knew they were below ground level.
He imagined that the lights must have been present inside here even before they had arrived, because there was a healthy spattering of flora along the floor of the cavernous chamber. The stone surface gave to clods of dirt, with vibrant grass and tall, gnarled trees. An oasis against one wall – that was when he saw it. It was the largest feature in the room – so large that it tricked the mind into not seeing it at all. The far wall was of a similar orange color to Al’s artifact – except that it wasn’t the far wall.
In the center of the huge, vaulted room was a gigantic orange cube, rounded at the edges.
It was cracked and crumbled in many places – but everywhere there was damage, gnarled juniper trees grew from the wounds. In the center, the cube almost seeming to be built around it, a single, gigantic tree. The trunk must have been yards in diameter. It was ancient, but alive – the branches splaying out over the room, blocking out the orange lights above it.
Léto was speechless. Even as Al went pacing ahead, closer to the grove that surrounded the great orange cube, Léto stood there, and took in the majesty of it. Whatever the giant cube was, it was clearly in ruins. The tree had grown out of it, had warped it until the two were one. And he was certain that the structure must have served some special purpose – but could not begin to guess. After long moments of staring in awe, he trotted ahead to join Al.
His friend was beneath the trees in the grove that surrounded the great orange cube, fervently looking over every detail – he seemed as though he knew what he was looking for, and that did not seem so unlikely anymore.
Upon closer inspection, there did not appear to be much else to the room. The monolithic cube that merged together as one with the great tree – the grassy knoll surrounding it like an oasis of life in a sea of orange neon patterns. Al had found some kind of control board, though there were buttons, or switches or controls that Léto had ever seen before. He was doing something – but a detail that had caught Léto’s eye seemed more pressing. He walked away from Al, along the side of the cube, looking up the grand wall of orange metal as he went. Just over halfway up, and far to the left – the vertical surface was marked with something other than the cracks and roots. A horizontal line. A slight bulge in the metal.
If Léto hadn’t known any better, he’d have called it the closed eye of a slumbering giant.
A cry from Al snapped Léto back to reality – he was instantly alert, body tense – and sprinting back toward Al with his hand in position to draw the sidearm at his belt.
But when he arrived, there was no ancient guardian golem rising from an eternity of waiting – nor angry cave bats on the assault. No pit of snakes or giant boulders. Only Al, standing there, before a small outcropping in the giant orange wall that was the central cube. He appeared to have opened some kind of small compartment, and slid out some kind of thin tray – upon which rested the artifact.
It looked to Léto like the most beautiful marble he had ever seen – though it was slightly larger than that. It seemed to be made of glass, except that the crimson and gold colors within it gave a sense of depth that was mystifying. It was as though an entire universe existed inside that minuscule sphere. A billion stars, shrunk down until each made only a single speckle of gold or crimson in a sea of blended colors. It seemed to be liquid, but unmoving – not frozen, but solid. It was incredible.
“This is…amazing.” Léto said. “What…what is it?” But Al did not answer. He was too busy crouching down to look more closely at it, peer into the depths of it as if the meaning of life might be within his grasp. “I…get the feeling we’re going to be very, very wealthy men from here on out.” He added after a while, just to say something.
Al did not tear his gaze away from the artifact, but a scowl formed on his lips.
“What are you talking about? We’re not selling this to anyone. This is a technological relic.” He snapped. Léto frowned. Awed as he was by the thing, it still just looked like a slightly large marble to him. A trinket – even if a trinket that seemed to hold the secrets of the dead. He was not so stricken by the discovery to forget about the expenses involved in the expedition to get to this place.
“I’m sure research conglomerations would pay-“
“No!” Al snapped, interrupting him.
“Please, Al. Don’t start playing the part of ‘obsessed goblin’. We need to be smart about this.” But Al ignored him Léto sighed, and turned around to look toward the staircase they had entered from. The expedition was complicated, now. He was going to have to figure out a way to snap Al out of the euphoria of discovery before they would be able to leave – he had seen it before, even though he had not expected Al to be the type to succumb to it.
But, he realized, they had surely not explored the entirety of this ruin, just by coming to this point. So maybe there would be other artifacts throughout? It was worth a try – and there did not appear to be any imminent danger lurking among the neon lines and gnarled trees. Al would be fine here, preoccupied with his discovery. He turned to glance at Al once more, then started to make back in the direction of the strange spot on the face of the cube. From there, he could continue around the side of it, and see what lay on the opposite side from where they stood now. He spoke to Al as he went, not looking back at him for concern over stumbling on one of the many roots that knotted the grassy floor.
“Al, I’m gonna’ go see if there’s anything else worth finding – but if I come back empty-handed, we’re going to have to figure out a way to make a profit from that marble. I’ve put too much into this expedition not to get anything back.”
♪
“Have you ever heard of…the Iridiites?”
“Is this the part about what you couldn’t tell me until we got here?”
“Humor me, Léto. I beg you.”
“Fine. I think I’ve heard the name somewhere but that’s about it.”
“Of course. Because it has been proven time and again that it is always the most important people who lose their names to history.”
All around the two men, the sounds of nature and of mid-spring rain made an intoxicating atmosphere, the air thick and wet, but rich with life. They walked carefully, watching where they stepped, for there was no path to follow. It was, Léto Amareta had to admit, a beautiful place, even in the relative simplicity of the aesthetic and moody precipitation. Vibrant tones of green, the deep browns of sturdy, deciduous trees that seemed too evenly spaced to have been wholly natural. Even the sky above, past the foliage where stray beams of soft light penetrated like silvery blades, there was a sage hue in the clouds that rained down upon them. Some kind of cloud-borne algae, Al had said. Léto had no reason to doubt that – but Léto also had no experience or knowledge in biology.
In three directions, the land was almost perfectly flat – and the airy forest seemed to stretch on for eternity. There was no trace of the little village they had left that morning. With the sun just starting to descend from the peak above behind the jade rainclouds, Léto guessed they had been walking for some seven hours. It had gone quickly enough – even though Al always seemed so distracted, it didn’t stop him from being a good conversationalist. He was also the only person in his respectably wide circle of explorers, adventurers, and treasure-hunters that was actually more of a scientist than anything else. Léto liked that.
“If the stories are to be believed, the Iridiites were the… Precursors to humanity. The people that humans were, once, long before the beginning of recorded history.”
“But I thought the consensus was for a…what’s it called – a situation where humans had always been all over the galaxy.”
Al waved a dismissive hand and made a similarly percussive sound. “Bah. Just because most people agree on something doesn’t make it true. Everything must have a beginning, and an end – no matter what these fools who think that time expands infinitely in either direction say.”
Léto nodded, glancing to Al, then back to the sparse ground cover upon which they walked – then up at the place, far ahead, where the forest seemed to stop and give way to a great plain, and greater mountain beyond. From the brim of his wide hat, rain dripped steadily.
“If time went both ways indefinitely, entropy could not exist. You can’t un-scramble an egg – that’s because of the linear nature of time.”
“If you say so.” Léto replied.
Léto was not a man of science. He was a man of exploration, of cartography, adventure. His life might not have been as romantic as explorers in films were portrayed, but it was a good life, and he was good at what he did. He had made some big discoveries, brought in some big profits, and gotten himself a ship. That particularly made him popular with some of the less skilled entrepreneurs, who were always trying to hitch a ride to their next hunch. Al was the only one he considered a real friend – so when Al came to him with the prospect of the biggest find he would ever know, he could not resist the temptation.
“But I digress. The Iridiites – they were very much like us. They were ambitious, and ingenuitive. They had an almost insatiable lust for technology – and as such, they achieved much greater heights of technology than Man ever has. We develop machines to aid us in life – they developed machines because it was their calling.”
A bird with feathers an unflattering shade of puce landed delicately on a branch, made an equally unflattering gurgling sound, and then flew off in a flutter of droplets.
“So, an ancient, technologically advanced civilization gone extinct, and leaving forbidden technology behind in the ruins.” Léto said – and Al shot him something of a grumpy look.
Al was hardly older than Léto, no more than twenty six, or twenty seven – but he looked a decade or so older than he was. Something about the long face and slight, natural jowls. The perpetual look of thoughtful disdain, and the pale, sandy brown hair added to it. He was by no means an ugly man. The two of them had been on-and-off lovers over the decades they had known each other, ever since their teen years. At present, they were ‘off’ – but Léto had little doubt that they might find themselves again in such a position, some day.
He admired Al deeply – though Al had never been one for boasting, and on the few occasions he had expressed this to the man he had been awkward about it. That was fine.
“Yes. That.” Al said, with a hint of deadpan frustration that was not so subtle as he might have intended. Léto gave a light chuckle. “I’m just screwing with you, Al. But you’ve got to admit it’s sort of an old story.”
“Yes, it is. But that story must have come from somewhere, right? Is it so implausible that it might be inspired from reality?”
“I never said I doubted you.”
“Yes, well…the Iridiites were obsessed with perfection. The idea of perfection. Legend has it that they were descended from some other race of immaculate beings – but that just sounds like a creation myth to me.”
Rather abruptly, the forest broke – and laying out before the two men was a vast expanse of green, rolling hills giving shape to gently sloping plains. Past that, a single, gigantic mountain loomed in the distance. It almost looked out of place, rising up like that. It also looked like a very long walk – but that was fine. Both men lugged hefty backpacks with enough supplies to last a week…He just hoped that Al wasn’t intending to have them climb the mountain. Almost as if synchronized, the men adjusted the light, wide-brimmed hats to better shade their eyes from the brighter light that shined down upon them through the weeping jade sky. They looked like a proper pair of explorers, right down to the shin-high leather boots and machetes at their hips. It might have been a safari.
“The Iridiites, in their attempts to achieve perfection, tried to build an artificial mind, you see. A collection of…” He put his hands out in front of him, gesturing as though he were holding an invisible watermelon. “Aspects of the natural universe – a sort of patchwork of…Well, of energies we can’t hope to understand, now. And once they had built it, they put it into a robot body, and it promptly wiped them out of existence.”
“Ouch.” Léto vocalized, grimacing. “They didn’t even fight back?”
“Oh, they tried. They built more robots – but mostly they just fled. I have personally seen one of the gates they used – it was an amazing thing to behold. You looked into this grand archway and just on the other side was a planet on the opposite side of the galaxy.”
“That…sounds like really important technology.”
“It is. But the forces in control of it refuse to let it be known. I won’t tell you what I had to go through to see it.”
Léto was, of course, intrigued by that – but Al apparently didn’t want to talk about it. That was fine.
“The chase was a slow one, however. It played out over generations. The Iridiites would build the gate from one planet to the next, and settle there. The robot couldn’t fit through the gate – so it was forced to hunt them down. Probably one generation of Iridiites never saw the robot more than once.”
“Wow. So, they lived their whole lives with the knowledge that some godlike being was, some day, going to drop out of the sky and kill them all?”
“Yes. It would make a good book, don’t you think?”
“Complex, but good, yes. I imagine many of them would believe it was just a myth until it actually appeared. Very religious.”
“Indeed. The chase obviously ended in their inevitable extermination. But they survived long enough to leave ruins on twenty two planets – possibly more.”
“And…there is an Iridiite ruin inside that mountain.” Léto finished, understanding at last. Al beamed – he rarely got excited like that, and when he did, it was always on that kind of note.
“Exactly!”
“Hey, don’t take this the wrong way Al, but…if all this is so totally unknown…how did you learn about it?” Al’s smile became something of a low-profile grin, in response.
“An angel told me.”
The two of them had a good, long laugh over that one. Al didn’t usually have much of a sense of humor – so when he did crack a joke, it always seemed to hit the mark.
♫
It was dusk of the following day that the pair arrived at the base of the mountain, and the rain had ceased some hours before, at last. It was a steeper incline up close than it had looked from afar – there was no chance they would be climbing it. Léto was glad for that.
“Alright boss, what are we looking for?” He queried, crossing his arms and scanning the immediate area. He would start setting up camp soon – but the devilish anticipation that had come over Al was something worth seeing.
“Not what we’re looking for, my good man. What we’ve already found!” He said loudly, from where he had been examining the rock some yards ahead. Léto was taken aback, brows raised. It took him a heartbeat to realize he was supposed to get closer, and trotted up behind the giddy scientist-explorer. Al must have already known exactly what to look for.
“Here, right here.” He hissed excitedly, gesturing up against an almost vertical portion of the virtual wall that the base of the mountain formed. Léto stepped in closer, then fidgeted with the small light attached to the collar of his shirt, which better illuminated their find in the dusky auburn twilight.
It was a symbol, carved deeply into the rock. A rounded square, with a horizontal football shape inside, to the right. Two small, curved triangles sprouted from the top of the football on either side.
Al, without looking, reached behind him and into one of the side pouches on his backpack, withdrawing from it an artifact that just happened to match the symbol in bas-relief on the wall. A rounded square, football on the left side, so that if put face to face – it lined up.
Al held the thing there for what seemed like an eternity. The thing looked rusty, but Léto imagined that it was more the texture of the metal, or simple wearing of age, rather than actual rust. If these Iridiites were as ancient as Al said they were, anything they left behind would have to be much more sturdy than that.
He held it, and held it – until Léto began to doubt that anything was going to happen at all.
Then, without warning, the mountain came alive.
Dazzling, neon-orange light spread out from within the rock along the edges of the artifact. They shot out in all directions, straight lines and right angles in a pattern so complex that it did not look to be a pattern at all. Gaping, Léto watched as the lines of light shot along, all the way up the mountain and continuing on out of sight.
“The locals are gonna’ go ape@#$%.” He said softly, for lack of any words that would really matter in a moment such as this.
“Savages. Let them write stories and prepare for the wrath of an angry god.” Al spat disdainfully, and at last stepped back, hunching his shoulders to let the backpack slide off and onto the ground. The smaller messenger satchel was still slung over one shoulder, and he put the artifact into it.
The wall before them began to move.
It seemed to fall slowly away from them and disappear into the floor. There would be no need for flashlights inside, he saw – because the orange lines of light extended all the way down the corridor, and the downward stairs that followed. Al shot him an almost manic smile, then started down the corridor. Léto shrugged his own backpack off, and followed suit.
If it seemed to go on forever, it was only because anticipation was stretching time out to a maximum. Each step, he knew, was taking them toward something amazing. The stairs descended sharply, first in a straight line, then in a spiral that actually started to make Léto dizzy after a few minutes of going in circles.
Léto was an accomplished explorer. He had seen the ruins of ancient civilizations – found unique pieces of technology lost to disaster or theft. Uncovering the reality of that which bordered on myth was in his job description. But he had never seen anything like this.
The stairs opened up into a vast chamber – still, the orange lights in their vaguely squared patterns stretched all the way up to the lofty ceiling. This, he realized, must have been most of what the mountain outside was made of. Mostly hollow – though he knew they were below ground level.
He imagined that the lights must have been present inside here even before they had arrived, because there was a healthy spattering of flora along the floor of the cavernous chamber. The stone surface gave to clods of dirt, with vibrant grass and tall, gnarled trees. An oasis against one wall – that was when he saw it. It was the largest feature in the room – so large that it tricked the mind into not seeing it at all. The far wall was of a similar orange color to Al’s artifact – except that it wasn’t the far wall.
In the center of the huge, vaulted room was a gigantic orange cube, rounded at the edges.
It was cracked and crumbled in many places – but everywhere there was damage, gnarled juniper trees grew from the wounds. In the center, the cube almost seeming to be built around it, a single, gigantic tree. The trunk must have been yards in diameter. It was ancient, but alive – the branches splaying out over the room, blocking out the orange lights above it.
Léto was speechless. Even as Al went pacing ahead, closer to the grove that surrounded the great orange cube, Léto stood there, and took in the majesty of it. Whatever the giant cube was, it was clearly in ruins. The tree had grown out of it, had warped it until the two were one. And he was certain that the structure must have served some special purpose – but could not begin to guess. After long moments of staring in awe, he trotted ahead to join Al.
His friend was beneath the trees in the grove that surrounded the great orange cube, fervently looking over every detail – he seemed as though he knew what he was looking for, and that did not seem so unlikely anymore.
Upon closer inspection, there did not appear to be much else to the room. The monolithic cube that merged together as one with the great tree – the grassy knoll surrounding it like an oasis of life in a sea of orange neon patterns. Al had found some kind of control board, though there were buttons, or switches or controls that Léto had ever seen before. He was doing something – but a detail that had caught Léto’s eye seemed more pressing. He walked away from Al, along the side of the cube, looking up the grand wall of orange metal as he went. Just over halfway up, and far to the left – the vertical surface was marked with something other than the cracks and roots. A horizontal line. A slight bulge in the metal.
If Léto hadn’t known any better, he’d have called it the closed eye of a slumbering giant.
A cry from Al snapped Léto back to reality – he was instantly alert, body tense – and sprinting back toward Al with his hand in position to draw the sidearm at his belt.
But when he arrived, there was no ancient guardian golem rising from an eternity of waiting – nor angry cave bats on the assault. No pit of snakes or giant boulders. Only Al, standing there, before a small outcropping in the giant orange wall that was the central cube. He appeared to have opened some kind of small compartment, and slid out some kind of thin tray – upon which rested the artifact.
It looked to Léto like the most beautiful marble he had ever seen – though it was slightly larger than that. It seemed to be made of glass, except that the crimson and gold colors within it gave a sense of depth that was mystifying. It was as though an entire universe existed inside that minuscule sphere. A billion stars, shrunk down until each made only a single speckle of gold or crimson in a sea of blended colors. It seemed to be liquid, but unmoving – not frozen, but solid. It was incredible.
“This is…amazing.” Léto said. “What…what is it?” But Al did not answer. He was too busy crouching down to look more closely at it, peer into the depths of it as if the meaning of life might be within his grasp. “I…get the feeling we’re going to be very, very wealthy men from here on out.” He added after a while, just to say something.
Al did not tear his gaze away from the artifact, but a scowl formed on his lips.
“What are you talking about? We’re not selling this to anyone. This is a technological relic.” He snapped. Léto frowned. Awed as he was by the thing, it still just looked like a slightly large marble to him. A trinket – even if a trinket that seemed to hold the secrets of the dead. He was not so stricken by the discovery to forget about the expenses involved in the expedition to get to this place.
“I’m sure research conglomerations would pay-“
“No!” Al snapped, interrupting him.
“Please, Al. Don’t start playing the part of ‘obsessed goblin’. We need to be smart about this.” But Al ignored him Léto sighed, and turned around to look toward the staircase they had entered from. The expedition was complicated, now. He was going to have to figure out a way to snap Al out of the euphoria of discovery before they would be able to leave – he had seen it before, even though he had not expected Al to be the type to succumb to it.
But, he realized, they had surely not explored the entirety of this ruin, just by coming to this point. So maybe there would be other artifacts throughout? It was worth a try – and there did not appear to be any imminent danger lurking among the neon lines and gnarled trees. Al would be fine here, preoccupied with his discovery. He turned to glance at Al once more, then started to make back in the direction of the strange spot on the face of the cube. From there, he could continue around the side of it, and see what lay on the opposite side from where they stood now. He spoke to Al as he went, not looking back at him for concern over stumbling on one of the many roots that knotted the grassy floor.
“Al, I’m gonna’ go see if there’s anything else worth finding – but if I come back empty-handed, we’re going to have to figure out a way to make a profit from that marble. I’ve put too much into this expedition not to get anything back.”
Léto nodded once, sharply. A decisive gesture of affirmation.
Then he promptly collapsed into a heap in the grass, gaping wound in the back of his head already beginning to seep into the soil.
Al considered the corpse for a moment, before holstering the silenced pistol at his belt, and taking from another pouch his aethernet transmitter. With the artifact safely stored in a specially sealed bag in his pocket, he dialed and spoke into the transmitter as he began to walk back across the great chamber, to the stairs they had initially descended. The connection on his transmitter was accepted.
Al considered the corpse for a moment, before holstering the silenced pistol at his belt, and taking from another pouch his aethernet transmitter. With the artifact safely stored in a specially sealed bag in his pocket, he dialed and spoke into the transmitter as he began to walk back across the great chamber, to the stairs they had initially descended. The connection on his transmitter was accepted.
“Hello?”
”Yes, this is Doctor Aller. I think I’ve found something that will greatly help our cause.”
{07:01:10:346,482}
Percy pressed the heels of his palms into his eyes - shutting out the harshness of the light, clawing at his scalp with white-knuckled fingers. Teeth clenched, he made a conscious effort to breathe - but curled in upon himself like so, it was a useless gesture.
Abruptly, he flung himself back onto the bed, feet still touching the floor. Black hair spilled about him as he struggled to pull away his own hands, but only succeeding in shifting the, so as to cover his face with both palms like some fleshy, eyeless mask. He inhaled sharply through his nose, air hissing through his fingers - and finally ripped his hands away from his face, smacking them on the bed to either side. Emerald eyes were free to gaze blankly up at the bitter light, heedless to the vibrant afterimage which would inevitably remain to plague his vision.
He had opened a door.
Nothing else.
Was that so bad? Was he such a criminal? Such a traitor?
That he had yet to be confronted on the matter made it only worse. Maybe nobody knew. Maybe he was sweating over nothing. Surely someone would have demanded answers by now.
But if they did know - he knew all too well that there would be no trial. He would not see his daughter again. And for what! A stupid little boy who meant nothing to him! Regret flooded the man’s body with a dreadful riptide. The agony of the mind’s refusal to accept the immutability of the past, the cyclic ’what-ifs’ that had driven countless others before him to the limits of their sanity.
It played over and over, against his will - but mutating the will - distorting the perspective into masochistic addiction. It had all come down to a single, precise moment. Hardly a flick of the wrist. If only- The loathsome passion welled in his chest until it burned. I only- He despised himself with directionless rage until his arms buzzed with the need to lash out at nothing. If only-
”...Doctor?”
The voice, soft and uncertain, yanked him from the spiraling grief so harshly that a beat passed before he was able to readjust himself to the world around him. He sat up too hastily, causing his head to rush and his vision to refocus as he looked to the door of his room. It was Harry, peering with concern from the hallway beyond. Percy could only utter a querying sound from the back of his throat.
”You feeling okay?”
Percy nodded, cleared his throat with a small sound before speaking. ”I’ll live. Migraines, you know.” His own voice sounded wrong in his head - distant, yet not unlike a whispering in his own ear for the closeness and intimacy of it. HIs voice was someone else, living inside him-
Harry seemed about to say something - doubtless to offer some kind of aid - but Percy raised a politely dismissive hand and gave a minute shake of the head. ”Already taken care of.” He said, anticipating his words preemptively. HIs smile was soft, and faint. ”Just forgot to close the door is all.”
Frowning, the soldier’s gaunt face regarded Percy for a long moment, searching him. Harry was, from what Percy knew, a decent guy. He had known the Master Controller personally, even serving with him in the war, before his ascent to true forced-power. He never talked about Thirteen however, and generally nobody asked - especially not now.
The moment dragged on.
Did he know?
At last, Harry nodded, satisfied with the answer. Silently and with a small wave, he departed - thoughtfully closing the door behind him. It slid with a soft hiss - and he was alone.
The solitude of these rooms had always bothered Percy. He was free to leave any time he wished - but it didn’t stop the quarters from feeling like cells. The few personal possessions he had did little to make the room feel like home.
But what did feel like ’home’?
Certainly no place in that miserable town above, where the buildings stood squat and utilitarian among the endless fields of ashen waste and alabaster boulders. A place without a name, save perhaps for some coordinate position. But they called it ’Steel City’ regardless. A desolate place where generation after generation of nostalgic imperialists, obsessively working toward a lofty goal that had eluded them for centuries.
They had been exiled here, to this desolate rock, as punishment for brewing a massive coup d'etat. And while the fiercest of the imperialists stayed where they had landed and built Steel City, the repentants traveled far across the globe and built Adrusade - where tall, mirrored towers and wide swaths of parkland looked out onto the verdant Pine Sea.
And from Adrusade had sprouted city after city, town after town, radiating out like the serfdoms in the shadow of their grand castle fortress.
That was where he wanted to be. Where bitter winds and desolation didn’t force people beneath the surface. Where life was free and open, where the citizens strove to build a new and better place from the ashes of the old. Where, with their extended resources, they had built starships, ready at last to rejoin the Way as a new, peaceful people.
Except that Adrusade was gone now. It had been gone for two years. The buildings stood, but wisps of grass had sprouted from the cracked pavement. The bodies had been left strewn, and it still reeked of death. The promise of a bright future for the once exiled people had been crushed beneath the hate and might, beneath the imperialistic boot of those who demanded, above all else, power.
A waste.
And there was nowhere to hide, in this new Ardella - controlled like a single organism from the depths of the very facility in which he sullenly sat.
Or...so it had been.
Until the Central Processor escaped. Until he had flipped a latch.Until the Administrator had been slaughtered by his own creation. Until a physician flipped a latch, and let a door be opened.
The facility had been a shambles since then. The Administrator held no official power in any political capacity, but he was the driving force behind nearly every scientific endeavor taken on within the facility. He had never needed permission to embark on a new experimental venture. His plans were extensive, yet he had told nobody. Dozens of experiments needed to be ground to a halt or else fail in directionless chaos.
The bioweapon programs, genetic modification projects, telepathy experiments - even the so-called ’Secret Academy’ where they had been cultivating genius programmers would have to be put on hiatus. What would become of the ones involved in such programs? What would be their fate? Would they be killed?
Even the Administrator’s own son - his flesh-and-blood kin - was rumored to have been implanted with one of the prototype ’Demon’s eyes’ that had been intended to mimic the original artifact and create more Master Controllers like the very one which had now disappeared. The prototypes were limited and imperfect, but now they were the closest thing at hand to the real thing. What would happen to them, now that they were needed most? Would they, in their imperfection, be discarded of? Would the Administrator’s own son be tossed aside or hidden away so that the forces that had made his initial augmentation possible could not get their hands on him? Whey simply be destroyed?
It seemed wasteful, but in times of crisis the powers tended to act irrationally - and with BioDyne imposing their impressive corporate bulk down on the Imperial scientific division, demanding returns on their investments - to what lengths would the new powers go to keep or sell their secrets?
Would this be the downfall of all his people had sought to plunder? Would it all return to the thoughtless moment where, seeing the boy wracked with terror and grief, a young doctor chose to release the latch that would allow his escape?
He’d caught his eye for the briefest second as he passed - the moment seemed to linger forever - mismatched eyes shimmering like jewels of infinite depth - and then he was gone. Soldiers had followed, knocking him carelessly into the wall as they passed, paying the physician no heed.
He had not cared for that boy - that young man who sat at the center of all the Empire’s power. He had been cold and stoic with him, as he was with all his patients. He had seen too many children die agonizing deaths at the hand of Imperial science to allow it to affect him. He certainly did not care enough about that boy to commit treason.
Percy’s gut sank as the words silently crossed his lips.
Maybe he would have escaped anyway. Maybe he would have found some other way. Maybe nobody knew that he had flipped the latch. Maybe he would resign tomorrow, take Amaya and head to some nicer part of the world - if any such part yet remained.
But he was startled out of his thoughts by the voice that rang over the facility-wide PA, standing automatically even before he heard his name.
”Doctor Kallenger, please report to Cryogenics 4.”
“Doctor Kallenger to Cryogenics 4.”
♪
Percy pressed the heels of his palms into his eyes - shutting out the harshness of the light, clawing at his scalp with white-knuckled fingers. Teeth clenched, he made a conscious effort to breathe - but curled in upon himself like so, it was a useless gesture.
Abruptly, he flung himself back onto the bed, feet still touching the floor. Black hair spilled about him as he struggled to pull away his own hands, but only succeeding in shifting the, so as to cover his face with both palms like some fleshy, eyeless mask. He inhaled sharply through his nose, air hissing through his fingers - and finally ripped his hands away from his face, smacking them on the bed to either side. Emerald eyes were free to gaze blankly up at the bitter light, heedless to the vibrant afterimage which would inevitably remain to plague his vision.
He had opened a door.
Nothing else.
Was that so bad? Was he such a criminal? Such a traitor?
That he had yet to be confronted on the matter made it only worse. Maybe nobody knew. Maybe he was sweating over nothing. Surely someone would have demanded answers by now.
But if they did know - he knew all too well that there would be no trial. He would not see his daughter again. And for what! A stupid little boy who meant nothing to him! Regret flooded the man’s body with a dreadful riptide. The agony of the mind’s refusal to accept the immutability of the past, the cyclic ’what-ifs’ that had driven countless others before him to the limits of their sanity.
It played over and over, against his will - but mutating the will - distorting the perspective into masochistic addiction. It had all come down to a single, precise moment. Hardly a flick of the wrist. If only- The loathsome passion welled in his chest until it burned. I only- He despised himself with directionless rage until his arms buzzed with the need to lash out at nothing. If only-
”...Doctor?”
The voice, soft and uncertain, yanked him from the spiraling grief so harshly that a beat passed before he was able to readjust himself to the world around him. He sat up too hastily, causing his head to rush and his vision to refocus as he looked to the door of his room. It was Harry, peering with concern from the hallway beyond. Percy could only utter a querying sound from the back of his throat.
”You feeling okay?”
Percy nodded, cleared his throat with a small sound before speaking. ”I’ll live. Migraines, you know.” His own voice sounded wrong in his head - distant, yet not unlike a whispering in his own ear for the closeness and intimacy of it. HIs voice was someone else, living inside him-
Harry seemed about to say something - doubtless to offer some kind of aid - but Percy raised a politely dismissive hand and gave a minute shake of the head. ”Already taken care of.” He said, anticipating his words preemptively. HIs smile was soft, and faint. ”Just forgot to close the door is all.”
Frowning, the soldier’s gaunt face regarded Percy for a long moment, searching him. Harry was, from what Percy knew, a decent guy. He had known the Master Controller personally, even serving with him in the war, before his ascent to true forced-power. He never talked about Thirteen however, and generally nobody asked - especially not now.
The moment dragged on.
Did he know?
At last, Harry nodded, satisfied with the answer. Silently and with a small wave, he departed - thoughtfully closing the door behind him. It slid with a soft hiss - and he was alone.
The solitude of these rooms had always bothered Percy. He was free to leave any time he wished - but it didn’t stop the quarters from feeling like cells. The few personal possessions he had did little to make the room feel like home.
But what did feel like ’home’?
Certainly no place in that miserable town above, where the buildings stood squat and utilitarian among the endless fields of ashen waste and alabaster boulders. A place without a name, save perhaps for some coordinate position. But they called it ’Steel City’ regardless. A desolate place where generation after generation of nostalgic imperialists, obsessively working toward a lofty goal that had eluded them for centuries.
They had been exiled here, to this desolate rock, as punishment for brewing a massive coup d'etat. And while the fiercest of the imperialists stayed where they had landed and built Steel City, the repentants traveled far across the globe and built Adrusade - where tall, mirrored towers and wide swaths of parkland looked out onto the verdant Pine Sea.
And from Adrusade had sprouted city after city, town after town, radiating out like the serfdoms in the shadow of their grand castle fortress.
That was where he wanted to be. Where bitter winds and desolation didn’t force people beneath the surface. Where life was free and open, where the citizens strove to build a new and better place from the ashes of the old. Where, with their extended resources, they had built starships, ready at last to rejoin the Way as a new, peaceful people.
Except that Adrusade was gone now. It had been gone for two years. The buildings stood, but wisps of grass had sprouted from the cracked pavement. The bodies had been left strewn, and it still reeked of death. The promise of a bright future for the once exiled people had been crushed beneath the hate and might, beneath the imperialistic boot of those who demanded, above all else, power.
A waste.
And there was nowhere to hide, in this new Ardella - controlled like a single organism from the depths of the very facility in which he sullenly sat.
Or...so it had been.
Until the Central Processor escaped. Until he had flipped a latch.Until the Administrator had been slaughtered by his own creation. Until a physician flipped a latch, and let a door be opened.
The facility had been a shambles since then. The Administrator held no official power in any political capacity, but he was the driving force behind nearly every scientific endeavor taken on within the facility. He had never needed permission to embark on a new experimental venture. His plans were extensive, yet he had told nobody. Dozens of experiments needed to be ground to a halt or else fail in directionless chaos.
The bioweapon programs, genetic modification projects, telepathy experiments - even the so-called ’Secret Academy’ where they had been cultivating genius programmers would have to be put on hiatus. What would become of the ones involved in such programs? What would be their fate? Would they be killed?
Even the Administrator’s own son - his flesh-and-blood kin - was rumored to have been implanted with one of the prototype ’Demon’s eyes’ that had been intended to mimic the original artifact and create more Master Controllers like the very one which had now disappeared. The prototypes were limited and imperfect, but now they were the closest thing at hand to the real thing. What would happen to them, now that they were needed most? Would they, in their imperfection, be discarded of? Would the Administrator’s own son be tossed aside or hidden away so that the forces that had made his initial augmentation possible could not get their hands on him? Whey simply be destroyed?
It seemed wasteful, but in times of crisis the powers tended to act irrationally - and with BioDyne imposing their impressive corporate bulk down on the Imperial scientific division, demanding returns on their investments - to what lengths would the new powers go to keep or sell their secrets?
Would this be the downfall of all his people had sought to plunder? Would it all return to the thoughtless moment where, seeing the boy wracked with terror and grief, a young doctor chose to release the latch that would allow his escape?
He’d caught his eye for the briefest second as he passed - the moment seemed to linger forever - mismatched eyes shimmering like jewels of infinite depth - and then he was gone. Soldiers had followed, knocking him carelessly into the wall as they passed, paying the physician no heed.
He had not cared for that boy - that young man who sat at the center of all the Empire’s power. He had been cold and stoic with him, as he was with all his patients. He had seen too many children die agonizing deaths at the hand of Imperial science to allow it to affect him. He certainly did not care enough about that boy to commit treason.
Percy’s gut sank as the words silently crossed his lips.
Maybe he would have escaped anyway. Maybe he would have found some other way. Maybe nobody knew that he had flipped the latch. Maybe he would resign tomorrow, take Amaya and head to some nicer part of the world - if any such part yet remained.
But he was startled out of his thoughts by the voice that rang over the facility-wide PA, standing automatically even before he heard his name.
”Doctor Kallenger, please report to Cryogenics 4.”
“Doctor Kallenger to Cryogenics 4.”
{06:07:02:346,930}
The air smelled like rain, and wet soil, dried blood and burning flesh. The pungent odor of death hung over it all like a bitter aftertaste. The stink seemed to permeate everything. There was no escaping it. The whole planet smelled that way now - and probably, it always would. Death on the kind of scale they had wrought on this hapless world did not simply go away. They talked about taking it over - and indeed, they were just getting into the swing of undertaking that very endeavor - but it was a pointless one. What was there left to take over? A dead, irradiated rock and untold sums of now helpless refugees.
But she had come anyway. Granted, it was dubious as to whether she actually had a choice or not - just as she didn’t know exactly why she had gone through with it one way or the other. Not that it mattered. She was here now, and she happened to be in one of the most important positions there was to fill. Curious, she noted, how it didn’t seem to mean so much now as it had a few years ago.
Kiba Esther was not a ‘good person’. She was a soldier - and nobody had, to her knowledge, ever been so disillusioned as to believe that soldiers could be ‘good people’. Soldiers killed - and it didn’t matter what the reason was. Someone who killed others could not, by definition, be a ‘good person’. Even if the reasons for their killing were just and good - the person who carried out the death of another forfeited their own goodness for their cause. Soldiers sacrificed their humanity for the cause they believed in.
And Kiba was fine with that. It was the philosophy of everyone she knew, and certainly the most accepted mainstream doctrine. But then, in a world where one third of the entire global population was dedicated to military pursuits, it had to be. She was expectednot to be a good person, even honored for it. Though, she refused to believe that she was a bad person. It was one thing to not be a good person - it was something else entirely to be a bad person.
But that delicate balance, Kiba found, was being disrupted more and more the longer she stayed on the newly conquered world - and she hadn’t even been here but a few days. Even if it did seem like much longer. Even the short ride over seemed like lifetimes ago.
They had won the war. Actually won the war that everyone had long since decided would rage for eternity. It was the most glorious moment in the history of her entire people. It was literally the only good thing that had ever happened. Who could deny that the ending of a war was a good thing? Even at incredible cost.
And it wasn’t as if it had been people that they had exterminated in that final attack - that they were continuing to exterminate now, four standard weeks since the final, decisive blow. They were M’Draani - not people. It didn’t matter that they were human beings. Being a human being did not mean being a person. M’Draani were less than people - so why feel morose at wiping them out of existence? They didn’t matter. They were the eternal enemy of her people - of real people.
But Kiba couldn’t help thinking about how they didn’t look so different from herself.
And yet, that had not stopped her from doing her duty. She had killed more of the wretched creatures than she could count, now. She had made a point not to count. Perhaps if she thought hard enough, she could recall a vague sum - but she didn’t want to do that. So she didn’t.
Though, she had not been quite as enthusiastic as her comrades. Some of them found it suspicious others were too busy enacting their revenge on the M’Draani people for lifetimes of fighting.
Kiba was a soldier, part of the occupation of a conquered people, and personal guard to High Commander Maas. She was not a mass-murder. Not a war criminal. Just a soldier, doing her job - and she could live with that. She would not be riddled with guilt for the rest of her life, because she had grown up knowing it would one day come to this.
But even she had to admit - privately, of course - that it was all starting to become excessive. This kind of cruelty simply was not befitting of a leader such as Maas.
Not that she was really in any position to judge.
The compound around her was a sad state of affairs, and likely it had not been much better before the final strike. Such compounds were spread all throughout the M’Draani jungles - places where they could train new soldiers for the eternal war. But this one in particular had clearly been outdated and run-down long before they arrived. It seemed to Kiba that it had been focused around the Engineering Corps - a training facility for future engineers. The people who would ultimately build and maintain the weapons that would be aimed at her own people down the line. Was the builder of a bomb as responsible for its casualties as the one who pulled the trigger?
Philosophy was no place for a soldier but it seemed to Kiba that pointed revenge should be more directed toward those more immediately responsible. If one man killed another with a rock, was the miner to blame?
Maas was an impressive figure on her own. A big, tall woman of incredible strength. Her stature alone commanded respect. Her dark skin - almost as dark as Kiba’s own, but with a redder tint - and broad face were somehow attractive, despite the woman’s approaching of middle-age. The smart, crisp uniform decorated her more than adequately - though it also made her stand out almost grotesquely in the current situation. She was immaculately clean - uniform spotless - and yet, all around her was mud, and rot, blood and filth. Kiba’s own uniform was rather disgusting at this point - not that she really cared. She was the soldier, Maas was the commander. Naturally there would be a stark contrast in their appearance. It was to be expected.
Just as it was to be expected that the person in charge of the final strike would need - and want - to savor the victory that their decisive action had brought about. Who could blame Maas for despising each and every M’Draani? Everyone felt the same way.
The girl writhing weakly beneath High Commander Maas couldn’t have been more than fifteen, maybe sixteen years old. Hardly five or six years younger than Kiba herself. She was a runt even by those standards. One of the engineers in training at the tie of the takeover, Kiba figured. She was a pathetic creature. Bright crimson-red hair was tangled and matted with blood and filth. From where she lay on the floor, face-down with head pressed casually beneath Maas’ immaculate boot, the creative wound on her back could be seen between the remaining scraps of filthy white undershirt. Someone in her group had heated up the metal, cleated sole of one magnetic combat boot until it had glowed red, then pressed their foot down on the girl’s back, branding her with the imprint of the sole. She could recall hearing the agonized scream some hours before, though only now made the connection.
Wouldn’t have made more sense just to kill her? Why the humiliation and torture? Had she personally done some harm to the person who felt the need to do that to her?
The girl’s hands were bound behind her back with simple zip-tie handcuffs that had all but cut off circulation in her wrists, and the blood from where the fibrous plastic dug into the flesh only added to the slew of open, festering wounds that covered the pitiful creature’s body. She couldn’t see the girl’s face from where she stood, some yards away, on the edge of the same cement outcropping in a mostly arbitrary defensive position.
If she looked out into the murky jungle, and forced herself to take pointed interest in meaningless detail - individual leaves, or blackened bits of branches or the occasional flower that grew grotesquely from a patch of dirt that someone had probably died on - she could avoid looking at the bodies strewn about in vaguely organized heaps along the edge of the bunker wall where the outcropping began. Most of them were dead, the rest were all but. They would be burned later. The girl that Maas was amiably grinding into the concrete would join them soon enough, just as soon as Maas decided she’d had enough, and shot her in the back of the head like she had almost all the others.
But there was no sense in watching, so Kiba just hefted the long, powerful rifle slung over her back, and focused still more intently on the surroundings. There was a wide swath of open space between the squat building with its concrete outcropping and the ruined remnants of what had once been a reasonably sturdy perimeter wall, probably long before Kiba was born. Useless now, except for defining a loose boundary between compound and slowly encroaching jungle. A number of M’Draani had tried to flee in that direction since they arrived yesterday, and she had shot every one of them down without hesitation. She didn’t even regret her actions. It was her job, so she did it. Now, almost all of them had been taken care of. It was terribly unlikely that there was anyone left to make a break for it. So she was the only one posted for this entire area, and even then her presence was mostly redundant. That was fine with her.
From off to her right, there was a nearly inaudible yelp, coinciding with the sound of a sack of meat being punted. Kiba would have taken no notice, except that the sound was followed by the harsh, commanding and yet almost dismissive voice of High Commander Maas. ”Take care of this.” She barked in Kiba’s direction, before promptly striding back into the building toward some errand in some other wing of the compound.
The sniper merely nodded, knowing that the Commander wasn’t actually looking for an affirmation in the first place. Maas had more important things to focus on, no doubt. Kiba waited a moment for Maas to depart from the concrete outcropping before turning and heading toward the heaping mass of equal parts corpses, and those so mortally wounded that they were virtually indistinguishable from the dead, The red-haired girl had been kicked so that she was close enough to the rest of the bodies so as to seem a part of the whole. She was curled on her side, looking to be dead save for the slight, rhythmic motion of ragged breathing.
Kiba ignored the girl, walking past her and drawing her sidearm - a hefty pistol with more than enough rounds to fulfill the currently assigned task. She had done it the day before, and would do it again now. Maas wanted her to light the pyre and set the bodies burning - but nobody could blame her for wanting to put the last remaining alive out of their misery first - if not out of kindness, at least to save everyone else the annoyance of all the screaming and moaning that came along with burning alive. Following a perfunctory and mostly unconscious checking of the sidearm’s general operating condition, Kiba turned casually scrutinizing eyes, half-narrowed, to the pile of bodies and began looking for the telltale signs of smoldering life.
One young man was missing most of his face, but a slight twitching of the lips gave him away. His one remaining eye staring blankly into space as he had some kind of nonsense conversation with himself in a delusion brought about by excessive trauma. Kiba raised her sidearm, and a shot rang out through the compound. One bullet, cleanly to the head, and it was on to the next one. A woman, probably some years older than Kiba was, made a small sound and twitched slightly. Another shot rang out. A man of indeterminate age due to the burns obscuring all his features, a young woman who looked unharmed other than a gaping hole in her abdomen. Others. Six shots rang out. Six M’Draani put out of their misery, for their own good.
Having reached the edge of the concrete outcropping, where the bodies were stacked thinner so as to not spill over the side, Kiba sat down without thinking and found herself seated immediately beside the red haired girl - who she had somehow neglected to put out of her misery. It had slipped her mind - maybe the thing was so slight of stature that she was easy to miss? Or mabe the boot-print in her back constituted such a vicious wound that she already registered as ‘dead’ in Kiba’s war-numbed mind?
She did not holster the pistol before sitting. She held it loosely, let it dangle between her knees. She stared straight ahead, willing herself to ignore the girl’s presence, and steeling herself for what had to come next. Her thumb stroke the hammer idly, finger playing about the trigger. After a time, a consistent, but subtle shuddering in the dead girl’s breathing became audible. She was the least-dead of the ones she had executed - maybe that was why she hesitated? Not that it mattered. It might take a few extra seconds, but she would put a bullet in the girl’s head soon enough.
But seconds passed, and turned into minutes. And gradually Kiba realized that time was passing, and the girl was still breathing.
Knowing that it was a bad idea, the ebon-skinned sniper looked again at the bound girl laying all but inert at her side. She looked the girl over, willing herself to see this particular specimen as no different from the rest - but to her discomfort, she realized that she did see this one no differently than the others.
The only discrepancy was that she had hesitated to shoot this one for some reason she could not fully comprehend.
An indeterminate period of time had passed and Kiba still hadn’t finished the job. Abruptly, she stood - feeling the need to put some small distance between herself and the bound girl that needed to be the next one at the end of her barrel. She paced off in one direction, then another - glancing only periodically to the red-haired girl. At last, she halted immediately beside the girl, on the opposite side from which she had previously sat - able now to get a look at the girl’s face. Maybe if she could get a glimpse of the dead, glazed eyes that were so common among her executions, it would be easier.
But the girl’s eyes were as full of life as could be.
Steely grey eyes, intense and focused - blinded by pain and saturated in utter despair, but alive, and cognizant. Full of impotent rage and unbridled sorrow. Full of life in all its’ ugliest forms. A fighter who, even while lying half-dead and on the brink of oblivion, was unable to submit fully to her inevitable fate. A strong-willed spirit who had been crushed into nothing, and yet remained. Not proud, certainly not powerful or valiant - but alive. A survivor. She even had the gall to shift her steely glare up toward Kiba and meet her eyes, grimacing with the pain that had become her existence and simultaneous loathing and contempt of the one who was undoubtedly going to end her. She was almost goading Kiba into shooting - and yet Kiba got the feeling that it was not a plea for death - but instead the utter inability to fully submit.
Kiba blinked, and did not waver beneath the withering gaze that was shot up at her from the girl bound on the rough concrete floor. She met the hateful glare with a cooly blank expression. She took in the girl’s features - pale skin marred beyond recognition with scrapes and bruises and other wounds. There might have been freckles along the bridge of her nose, but they were indistinguishable from the dirt and blood caked all over her body. The crimson-red hair was matted beyond repair. Fresh blood leaked from the corner of her busted lips. And still the defiance radiated from her. They stared each other down for an endless moment - and when the end did come, it was Kiba who was forced to look away. She glanced toward the doorway that Maas had passed through earlier - how long ago now, she was not certain.
Then, without a word and almost without thinking, Kiba holstered the sidearm, and instead drew the hefty utility-combat knife from her boot. A nearly inaudible stifling of breath was heard from the girl at her feet - a feat of hiding her more than justifiable fear that was far beyond merely impressive. She had just learned that her execution would not be with one painless bullet - but an agonizing torment by knife - and yet, she had stifled that terror so that it became barely a catching of already ragged breath.
Still without thinking about what she was actually doing, Kiba crouched over the slight body and in one swift, decisive gesture, sliced the plastic zip-tie binding the pale girl’s wrists together. Then she stood again, placed one booted foot against the girl’s side, and gave a single, slow, heaving kick, rolling the girl off the edge of the concrete outcropping and dropping her down the three or four foot height into the mud below.
She only saw the girl once more, after that. Some minutes later, after returning to the heap with a canister of gasoline. In absent minded curiosity, she peered over the edge to see the girl laying on her back, almost spread-eagle. She looked down with the same dead-blank expression as before, but was met with a slightly different pair of eyes this time. Suspicion, mistrust, disbelief, and still with a sheen of loathing, all wrapped up in agony and hopeless despair. Again, their eyes locked for a long moment - and again, Kiba was the first to look away, proceeding to go about her business as though nothing had happened.
By the time the heap of bodies was blazing brightly in the evening light, the girl was gone - with only a vague imprint of a scrawny, undersized body in the mud as evidence that she had ever existed.
A movement in the corner of her eye caught Kiba’s attention then - and against her better judgement she looked - but it was only one of her comrades who had emerged some ways down the line. The tall guy, with the long blonde ponytail - he was stooping to pick up a battered, black baseball cap off the ground. Disinterestedly, Kiba watched as he regarded the hat, brushing it off, then stuffed it in his pocket with a silent note of something like satisfaction. She looked away before he could catch her watching.
It was time for a career change, Kiba decided absently.
♪
(Reduce Volume)
The air smelled like rain, and wet soil, dried blood and burning flesh. The pungent odor of death hung over it all like a bitter aftertaste. The stink seemed to permeate everything. There was no escaping it. The whole planet smelled that way now - and probably, it always would. Death on the kind of scale they had wrought on this hapless world did not simply go away. They talked about taking it over - and indeed, they were just getting into the swing of undertaking that very endeavor - but it was a pointless one. What was there left to take over? A dead, irradiated rock and untold sums of now helpless refugees.
But she had come anyway. Granted, it was dubious as to whether she actually had a choice or not - just as she didn’t know exactly why she had gone through with it one way or the other. Not that it mattered. She was here now, and she happened to be in one of the most important positions there was to fill. Curious, she noted, how it didn’t seem to mean so much now as it had a few years ago.
Kiba Esther was not a ‘good person’. She was a soldier - and nobody had, to her knowledge, ever been so disillusioned as to believe that soldiers could be ‘good people’. Soldiers killed - and it didn’t matter what the reason was. Someone who killed others could not, by definition, be a ‘good person’. Even if the reasons for their killing were just and good - the person who carried out the death of another forfeited their own goodness for their cause. Soldiers sacrificed their humanity for the cause they believed in.
And Kiba was fine with that. It was the philosophy of everyone she knew, and certainly the most accepted mainstream doctrine. But then, in a world where one third of the entire global population was dedicated to military pursuits, it had to be. She was expectednot to be a good person, even honored for it. Though, she refused to believe that she was a bad person. It was one thing to not be a good person - it was something else entirely to be a bad person.
But that delicate balance, Kiba found, was being disrupted more and more the longer she stayed on the newly conquered world - and she hadn’t even been here but a few days. Even if it did seem like much longer. Even the short ride over seemed like lifetimes ago.
They had won the war. Actually won the war that everyone had long since decided would rage for eternity. It was the most glorious moment in the history of her entire people. It was literally the only good thing that had ever happened. Who could deny that the ending of a war was a good thing? Even at incredible cost.
And it wasn’t as if it had been people that they had exterminated in that final attack - that they were continuing to exterminate now, four standard weeks since the final, decisive blow. They were M’Draani - not people. It didn’t matter that they were human beings. Being a human being did not mean being a person. M’Draani were less than people - so why feel morose at wiping them out of existence? They didn’t matter. They were the eternal enemy of her people - of real people.
But Kiba couldn’t help thinking about how they didn’t look so different from herself.
And yet, that had not stopped her from doing her duty. She had killed more of the wretched creatures than she could count, now. She had made a point not to count. Perhaps if she thought hard enough, she could recall a vague sum - but she didn’t want to do that. So she didn’t.
Though, she had not been quite as enthusiastic as her comrades. Some of them found it suspicious others were too busy enacting their revenge on the M’Draani people for lifetimes of fighting.
Kiba was a soldier, part of the occupation of a conquered people, and personal guard to High Commander Maas. She was not a mass-murder. Not a war criminal. Just a soldier, doing her job - and she could live with that. She would not be riddled with guilt for the rest of her life, because she had grown up knowing it would one day come to this.
But even she had to admit - privately, of course - that it was all starting to become excessive. This kind of cruelty simply was not befitting of a leader such as Maas.
Not that she was really in any position to judge.
The compound around her was a sad state of affairs, and likely it had not been much better before the final strike. Such compounds were spread all throughout the M’Draani jungles - places where they could train new soldiers for the eternal war. But this one in particular had clearly been outdated and run-down long before they arrived. It seemed to Kiba that it had been focused around the Engineering Corps - a training facility for future engineers. The people who would ultimately build and maintain the weapons that would be aimed at her own people down the line. Was the builder of a bomb as responsible for its casualties as the one who pulled the trigger?
Philosophy was no place for a soldier but it seemed to Kiba that pointed revenge should be more directed toward those more immediately responsible. If one man killed another with a rock, was the miner to blame?
Maas was an impressive figure on her own. A big, tall woman of incredible strength. Her stature alone commanded respect. Her dark skin - almost as dark as Kiba’s own, but with a redder tint - and broad face were somehow attractive, despite the woman’s approaching of middle-age. The smart, crisp uniform decorated her more than adequately - though it also made her stand out almost grotesquely in the current situation. She was immaculately clean - uniform spotless - and yet, all around her was mud, and rot, blood and filth. Kiba’s own uniform was rather disgusting at this point - not that she really cared. She was the soldier, Maas was the commander. Naturally there would be a stark contrast in their appearance. It was to be expected.
Just as it was to be expected that the person in charge of the final strike would need - and want - to savor the victory that their decisive action had brought about. Who could blame Maas for despising each and every M’Draani? Everyone felt the same way.
The girl writhing weakly beneath High Commander Maas couldn’t have been more than fifteen, maybe sixteen years old. Hardly five or six years younger than Kiba herself. She was a runt even by those standards. One of the engineers in training at the tie of the takeover, Kiba figured. She was a pathetic creature. Bright crimson-red hair was tangled and matted with blood and filth. From where she lay on the floor, face-down with head pressed casually beneath Maas’ immaculate boot, the creative wound on her back could be seen between the remaining scraps of filthy white undershirt. Someone in her group had heated up the metal, cleated sole of one magnetic combat boot until it had glowed red, then pressed their foot down on the girl’s back, branding her with the imprint of the sole. She could recall hearing the agonized scream some hours before, though only now made the connection.
Wouldn’t have made more sense just to kill her? Why the humiliation and torture? Had she personally done some harm to the person who felt the need to do that to her?
The girl’s hands were bound behind her back with simple zip-tie handcuffs that had all but cut off circulation in her wrists, and the blood from where the fibrous plastic dug into the flesh only added to the slew of open, festering wounds that covered the pitiful creature’s body. She couldn’t see the girl’s face from where she stood, some yards away, on the edge of the same cement outcropping in a mostly arbitrary defensive position.
If she looked out into the murky jungle, and forced herself to take pointed interest in meaningless detail - individual leaves, or blackened bits of branches or the occasional flower that grew grotesquely from a patch of dirt that someone had probably died on - she could avoid looking at the bodies strewn about in vaguely organized heaps along the edge of the bunker wall where the outcropping began. Most of them were dead, the rest were all but. They would be burned later. The girl that Maas was amiably grinding into the concrete would join them soon enough, just as soon as Maas decided she’d had enough, and shot her in the back of the head like she had almost all the others.
But there was no sense in watching, so Kiba just hefted the long, powerful rifle slung over her back, and focused still more intently on the surroundings. There was a wide swath of open space between the squat building with its concrete outcropping and the ruined remnants of what had once been a reasonably sturdy perimeter wall, probably long before Kiba was born. Useless now, except for defining a loose boundary between compound and slowly encroaching jungle. A number of M’Draani had tried to flee in that direction since they arrived yesterday, and she had shot every one of them down without hesitation. She didn’t even regret her actions. It was her job, so she did it. Now, almost all of them had been taken care of. It was terribly unlikely that there was anyone left to make a break for it. So she was the only one posted for this entire area, and even then her presence was mostly redundant. That was fine with her.
From off to her right, there was a nearly inaudible yelp, coinciding with the sound of a sack of meat being punted. Kiba would have taken no notice, except that the sound was followed by the harsh, commanding and yet almost dismissive voice of High Commander Maas. ”Take care of this.” She barked in Kiba’s direction, before promptly striding back into the building toward some errand in some other wing of the compound.
The sniper merely nodded, knowing that the Commander wasn’t actually looking for an affirmation in the first place. Maas had more important things to focus on, no doubt. Kiba waited a moment for Maas to depart from the concrete outcropping before turning and heading toward the heaping mass of equal parts corpses, and those so mortally wounded that they were virtually indistinguishable from the dead, The red-haired girl had been kicked so that she was close enough to the rest of the bodies so as to seem a part of the whole. She was curled on her side, looking to be dead save for the slight, rhythmic motion of ragged breathing.
Kiba ignored the girl, walking past her and drawing her sidearm - a hefty pistol with more than enough rounds to fulfill the currently assigned task. She had done it the day before, and would do it again now. Maas wanted her to light the pyre and set the bodies burning - but nobody could blame her for wanting to put the last remaining alive out of their misery first - if not out of kindness, at least to save everyone else the annoyance of all the screaming and moaning that came along with burning alive. Following a perfunctory and mostly unconscious checking of the sidearm’s general operating condition, Kiba turned casually scrutinizing eyes, half-narrowed, to the pile of bodies and began looking for the telltale signs of smoldering life.
One young man was missing most of his face, but a slight twitching of the lips gave him away. His one remaining eye staring blankly into space as he had some kind of nonsense conversation with himself in a delusion brought about by excessive trauma. Kiba raised her sidearm, and a shot rang out through the compound. One bullet, cleanly to the head, and it was on to the next one. A woman, probably some years older than Kiba was, made a small sound and twitched slightly. Another shot rang out. A man of indeterminate age due to the burns obscuring all his features, a young woman who looked unharmed other than a gaping hole in her abdomen. Others. Six shots rang out. Six M’Draani put out of their misery, for their own good.
Having reached the edge of the concrete outcropping, where the bodies were stacked thinner so as to not spill over the side, Kiba sat down without thinking and found herself seated immediately beside the red haired girl - who she had somehow neglected to put out of her misery. It had slipped her mind - maybe the thing was so slight of stature that she was easy to miss? Or mabe the boot-print in her back constituted such a vicious wound that she already registered as ‘dead’ in Kiba’s war-numbed mind?
She did not holster the pistol before sitting. She held it loosely, let it dangle between her knees. She stared straight ahead, willing herself to ignore the girl’s presence, and steeling herself for what had to come next. Her thumb stroke the hammer idly, finger playing about the trigger. After a time, a consistent, but subtle shuddering in the dead girl’s breathing became audible. She was the least-dead of the ones she had executed - maybe that was why she hesitated? Not that it mattered. It might take a few extra seconds, but she would put a bullet in the girl’s head soon enough.
But seconds passed, and turned into minutes. And gradually Kiba realized that time was passing, and the girl was still breathing.
Knowing that it was a bad idea, the ebon-skinned sniper looked again at the bound girl laying all but inert at her side. She looked the girl over, willing herself to see this particular specimen as no different from the rest - but to her discomfort, she realized that she did see this one no differently than the others.
The only discrepancy was that she had hesitated to shoot this one for some reason she could not fully comprehend.
An indeterminate period of time had passed and Kiba still hadn’t finished the job. Abruptly, she stood - feeling the need to put some small distance between herself and the bound girl that needed to be the next one at the end of her barrel. She paced off in one direction, then another - glancing only periodically to the red-haired girl. At last, she halted immediately beside the girl, on the opposite side from which she had previously sat - able now to get a look at the girl’s face. Maybe if she could get a glimpse of the dead, glazed eyes that were so common among her executions, it would be easier.
But the girl’s eyes were as full of life as could be.
Steely grey eyes, intense and focused - blinded by pain and saturated in utter despair, but alive, and cognizant. Full of impotent rage and unbridled sorrow. Full of life in all its’ ugliest forms. A fighter who, even while lying half-dead and on the brink of oblivion, was unable to submit fully to her inevitable fate. A strong-willed spirit who had been crushed into nothing, and yet remained. Not proud, certainly not powerful or valiant - but alive. A survivor. She even had the gall to shift her steely glare up toward Kiba and meet her eyes, grimacing with the pain that had become her existence and simultaneous loathing and contempt of the one who was undoubtedly going to end her. She was almost goading Kiba into shooting - and yet Kiba got the feeling that it was not a plea for death - but instead the utter inability to fully submit.
Kiba blinked, and did not waver beneath the withering gaze that was shot up at her from the girl bound on the rough concrete floor. She met the hateful glare with a cooly blank expression. She took in the girl’s features - pale skin marred beyond recognition with scrapes and bruises and other wounds. There might have been freckles along the bridge of her nose, but they were indistinguishable from the dirt and blood caked all over her body. The crimson-red hair was matted beyond repair. Fresh blood leaked from the corner of her busted lips. And still the defiance radiated from her. They stared each other down for an endless moment - and when the end did come, it was Kiba who was forced to look away. She glanced toward the doorway that Maas had passed through earlier - how long ago now, she was not certain.
Then, without a word and almost without thinking, Kiba holstered the sidearm, and instead drew the hefty utility-combat knife from her boot. A nearly inaudible stifling of breath was heard from the girl at her feet - a feat of hiding her more than justifiable fear that was far beyond merely impressive. She had just learned that her execution would not be with one painless bullet - but an agonizing torment by knife - and yet, she had stifled that terror so that it became barely a catching of already ragged breath.
Still without thinking about what she was actually doing, Kiba crouched over the slight body and in one swift, decisive gesture, sliced the plastic zip-tie binding the pale girl’s wrists together. Then she stood again, placed one booted foot against the girl’s side, and gave a single, slow, heaving kick, rolling the girl off the edge of the concrete outcropping and dropping her down the three or four foot height into the mud below.
She only saw the girl once more, after that. Some minutes later, after returning to the heap with a canister of gasoline. In absent minded curiosity, she peered over the edge to see the girl laying on her back, almost spread-eagle. She looked down with the same dead-blank expression as before, but was met with a slightly different pair of eyes this time. Suspicion, mistrust, disbelief, and still with a sheen of loathing, all wrapped up in agony and hopeless despair. Again, their eyes locked for a long moment - and again, Kiba was the first to look away, proceeding to go about her business as though nothing had happened.
By the time the heap of bodies was blazing brightly in the evening light, the girl was gone - with only a vague imprint of a scrawny, undersized body in the mud as evidence that she had ever existed.
A movement in the corner of her eye caught Kiba’s attention then - and against her better judgement she looked - but it was only one of her comrades who had emerged some ways down the line. The tall guy, with the long blonde ponytail - he was stooping to pick up a battered, black baseball cap off the ground. Disinterestedly, Kiba watched as he regarded the hat, brushing it off, then stuffed it in his pocket with a silent note of something like satisfaction. She looked away before he could catch her watching.
It was time for a career change, Kiba decided absently.
Seeing the dragon lady towards, made Maria's eyes go wide, as her arm went for her gun on her her hip as the compartment pops open. The way she was acting it seemed like an attack, but feeling the friendly padded shoulder, the bounty hunter eased herself and relax, moving her hand away from her hip, letting the compartment close. Maria couldn't help chuckle hearing her compliment about her hair, not really minding the contradiction she made, but from just looking how the draginkin acted...she kinda thinks that the dragon isn't too bright. "I'm a bit surprised that I get even a compliment from people, either I'm meant with insults or just too scared to deal with me" she chuckles lightly as she see's the dragon have her canteen of rum
However what made up her perceived dull mind was her impressive drinking ability. Maria looked at her in shock as she holds the empty canteen and turns it over to truly see it was empty. "Damn, butter my butt and call me a biscuit you drank a really strong drink of mine that I have been nursing for a long ass time" as she goes ahead and puts the canteen back into her compartment which popped out once more before closing. "Remind me, not to bring you when I go raid my dad's liquor cabinet" she comments as she shakes her head in disbelief, just seeing the Illya being fine as the alcohol literally goes up in smoke. The bounty hunter just sighs hearing that the dragon has no idea what she is talking about when she says "King's bane". She thought about in what to say besides saying "You are a stupid dragon for not knowing what ship she was on" She thought about it some more and now knew what to ask next. She looks at her with tired eyes and asks "Okay...let me put it to you this way. Who sent you after me? A name of a man or a woman who I guess introduced you to my work and who I am. King's bane is the name of the ship in which I presume you came from him since you muttered it in your sleep" hopefully it would be something for Illya to answer. "All I want is his or her name so I can make a poorly drawn drawing and through knives at it" she adds as she pulls out her large Bowie knife. "Feeling brave? Want me to show you the knife game?" she asks her after she admires the large blade, before glancing over he dragon wondering what her answer would be.
However what made up her perceived dull mind was her impressive drinking ability. Maria looked at her in shock as she holds the empty canteen and turns it over to truly see it was empty. "Damn, butter my butt and call me a biscuit you drank a really strong drink of mine that I have been nursing for a long ass time" as she goes ahead and puts the canteen back into her compartment which popped out once more before closing. "Remind me, not to bring you when I go raid my dad's liquor cabinet" she comments as she shakes her head in disbelief, just seeing the Illya being fine as the alcohol literally goes up in smoke. The bounty hunter just sighs hearing that the dragon has no idea what she is talking about when she says "King's bane". She thought about in what to say besides saying "You are a stupid dragon for not knowing what ship she was on" She thought about it some more and now knew what to ask next. She looks at her with tired eyes and asks "Okay...let me put it to you this way. Who sent you after me? A name of a man or a woman who I guess introduced you to my work and who I am. King's bane is the name of the ship in which I presume you came from him since you muttered it in your sleep" hopefully it would be something for Illya to answer. "All I want is his or her name so I can make a poorly drawn drawing and through knives at it" she adds as she pulls out her large Bowie knife. "Feeling brave? Want me to show you the knife game?" she asks her after she admires the large blade, before glancing over he dragon wondering what her answer would be.
Koolest
Kilwen nodded his head at the two individuals as the one named Leng introduced himself and to the tall muscular man named Jet. Even though Jet rivaled Kilwen's own height, the Lord knew not to mess with a man like that unless he wanted his arms to pop out of their sockets and be smacked by your own arms. He looks behind him and see's the crumbling mess of a ship behind him and looks back with a nervous smirk. "Sorry about the mess" he responds, but a name did catch his interest. From the familiar paint job and the colors on Leng's uniform, Kilwen didn't pay much mind, but hearing the name "Catheorine" was what caught him and with said knowledge everything didn't seem so much like a coincidence. Plus, from all of his encounter's women with the name "Catherine" never put a "O" into their name and knew that the Frost Queen was the only one with said name. Kilwen follow and says "Catheorine? The Frost Queen? I could have sworn she died a long time ago...now that was a time" as they make it to the living area, he sat on a chair and began to tell his tale like the old man he is even though not looking so. "Yeah, I remembered the Frost Queen, before she was a cold hearted woman"
As he smiles and twittled his thumbs "Yeah, she was actually a normal woman with nice smooth apricot skin, blonde hair and blue eyes. Her full name being Catheorine Roberts, she was a graduate from Cambridge part of an archaeological team that team went into the arctic ice on Earth. She fell through the ice and came upon a large cavern which house this gaint shining Ice sharp diamond. She ended up touching it, and before long a tremendous amount of power poured into her" he leans forward and adds "Later we found out it was the legendary crystal of Ymir, a fabled crystal that was the last chunk of the Ice giant before passing in creating Earth if you believed the Norse mythology " he clears his throat and continues "However, as the pour of ice came in, it manipulated her DNA, twisting it so her skin turned blue and giving her the ability to control ice. As for the crystal, it shattered into forming the staff she, I'm guessing, still has"
He huffs as he leans back into the chair "Its too bad about her husband though...Heinrich Daggerfall was his name, he somehow was the one to at first warm her cold heart and they both were happy married and ruled over her Icy kingdom for some years, failed in having a child, but it all ended when her husband was assassinated" he took a pause to think. "I don't ever believe she found out who killed him" as he then looks whoever was around listening him ramble. "I remember my council was able to find out who did him in, that being the Veracon assassin who killed him..I don't believe she ever found out since shortly we got reported that she was killed" he says with a face showing how he was trying to recollect his memory. "When he died, she became much colder and crueler, but I'm surprised that she is back though if that's who we talking about" he says as he looks at them non-verbally giving out who he truly is as he looks at whoever with an innocent look.
Kilwen nodded his head at the two individuals as the one named Leng introduced himself and to the tall muscular man named Jet. Even though Jet rivaled Kilwen's own height, the Lord knew not to mess with a man like that unless he wanted his arms to pop out of their sockets and be smacked by your own arms. He looks behind him and see's the crumbling mess of a ship behind him and looks back with a nervous smirk. "Sorry about the mess" he responds, but a name did catch his interest. From the familiar paint job and the colors on Leng's uniform, Kilwen didn't pay much mind, but hearing the name "Catheorine" was what caught him and with said knowledge everything didn't seem so much like a coincidence. Plus, from all of his encounter's women with the name "Catherine" never put a "O" into their name and knew that the Frost Queen was the only one with said name. Kilwen follow and says "Catheorine? The Frost Queen? I could have sworn she died a long time ago...now that was a time" as they make it to the living area, he sat on a chair and began to tell his tale like the old man he is even though not looking so. "Yeah, I remembered the Frost Queen, before she was a cold hearted woman"
As he smiles and twittled his thumbs "Yeah, she was actually a normal woman with nice smooth apricot skin, blonde hair and blue eyes. Her full name being Catheorine Roberts, she was a graduate from Cambridge part of an archaeological team that team went into the arctic ice on Earth. She fell through the ice and came upon a large cavern which house this gaint shining Ice sharp diamond. She ended up touching it, and before long a tremendous amount of power poured into her" he leans forward and adds "Later we found out it was the legendary crystal of Ymir, a fabled crystal that was the last chunk of the Ice giant before passing in creating Earth if you believed the Norse mythology " he clears his throat and continues "However, as the pour of ice came in, it manipulated her DNA, twisting it so her skin turned blue and giving her the ability to control ice. As for the crystal, it shattered into forming the staff she, I'm guessing, still has"
He huffs as he leans back into the chair "Its too bad about her husband though...Heinrich Daggerfall was his name, he somehow was the one to at first warm her cold heart and they both were happy married and ruled over her Icy kingdom for some years, failed in having a child, but it all ended when her husband was assassinated" he took a pause to think. "I don't ever believe she found out who killed him" as he then looks whoever was around listening him ramble. "I remember my council was able to find out who did him in, that being the Veracon assassin who killed him..I don't believe she ever found out since shortly we got reported that she was killed" he says with a face showing how he was trying to recollect his memory. "When he died, she became much colder and crueler, but I'm surprised that she is back though if that's who we talking about" he says as he looks at them non-verbally giving out who he truly is as he looks at whoever with an innocent look.
Jack was growing frustrated in his search of the expansive cargo bay. He was just about to ready to pull back and find a intercom to get the alert out, and more eyes to help search. But then he heard the clattering activation of the decrepit tincan and it's subsequent march through the bay. If it had not been for the damaged droid Jack might have actually missed the girl at first, hidden as she was in a blind spot slightly ahead of him.
Instead Jack stepped forward and to the side of the droid as it passed by him. Then he saw her. At the ready with his knife, it took the old soldier a moment to fully comprehend just what the intruder was. When it finally registered he sheathes his knife with a irritated groan. Noting the girl's injured arm and decidedly hostile glare Jack relaxes his stance in hopes of getting her to relax as well. He'd seen the children produced by war before. Speaking like a parent to a child, he says "All right kiddo. Come on out. If you come nicely we'll go get you patched..." Jack didn't get to finish as all hell broke loose thanks to....blue slime? It looked just like the one earlier.
Seeing her freak out, whatever chance he had at talking the girl down without violence were gone now. Wasting no time, Jack charges at the girl, reaching out in an attempt to pull her into a bear hug. It was honestly the most non-lethal take down Jack had under the circumstances and size differences. If he succeeded he would begin to loudly repeat "Calm down!" while doing his best to hold onto the girl. If he could get her calmed, then he'd deal with the slime blob.
Instead Jack stepped forward and to the side of the droid as it passed by him. Then he saw her. At the ready with his knife, it took the old soldier a moment to fully comprehend just what the intruder was. When it finally registered he sheathes his knife with a irritated groan. Noting the girl's injured arm and decidedly hostile glare Jack relaxes his stance in hopes of getting her to relax as well. He'd seen the children produced by war before. Speaking like a parent to a child, he says "All right kiddo. Come on out. If you come nicely we'll go get you patched..." Jack didn't get to finish as all hell broke loose thanks to....blue slime? It looked just like the one earlier.
Seeing her freak out, whatever chance he had at talking the girl down without violence were gone now. Wasting no time, Jack charges at the girl, reaching out in an attempt to pull her into a bear hug. It was honestly the most non-lethal take down Jack had under the circumstances and size differences. If he succeeded he would begin to loudly repeat "Calm down!" while doing his best to hold onto the girl. If he could get her calmed, then he'd deal with the slime blob.
What was that saying again?
Ah yes, Talis remembered now.
If you wait long enough, an opportunity will always present itself
A grin spread over Talis's face, wide and open, showing her whitened teeth. In that moment her motives were laid bare; this was prime entertainment for her and she would gladly raise her glass to whoever won, maybe even place bets.
"Kick his face in, Scales!!" She cheered on the large reptoid, blue eyes sparkling with delight.
Things were about to get really good.
Besides, what was an adventure of a lifetime without its honorary bar fight?
"Better yet, rip off that ridiculous shoulder piece. It's very tacky and just ugly," She shouted as an afterthought. Looking at the Old Detective, she winked at him playfully.
"Drinks are on the smoking man~"
Ah yes, Talis remembered now.
If you wait long enough, an opportunity will always present itself
A grin spread over Talis's face, wide and open, showing her whitened teeth. In that moment her motives were laid bare; this was prime entertainment for her and she would gladly raise her glass to whoever won, maybe even place bets.
"Kick his face in, Scales!!" She cheered on the large reptoid, blue eyes sparkling with delight.
Things were about to get really good.
Besides, what was an adventure of a lifetime without its honorary bar fight?
"Better yet, rip off that ridiculous shoulder piece. It's very tacky and just ugly," She shouted as an afterthought. Looking at the Old Detective, she winked at him playfully.
"Drinks are on the smoking man~"
Stealing was not fun.
Nirix had done it once, however, in her mind, it was for a good cause; it had been for him after all. His smile had meant more than anything to her back then.
Even now, she could see him. There was something about the way he smiled; the way butterflies seemed to escape from the pit of her stomach and the way the sun had somehow toppled down from the sky and made a home right there in her heart. He had the kind of smile that made you feel happy to be alive and just that little bit more of a person.
And when he looked at her...
The memory was tamped down at the mention of the tea; Nivek tea to be specific.
"Sengan's favorite tea...We use to have a cup every evening after training," Nirix muttered and a fond smile brightened her face.
Sengan was her favorite cousin and had been her mentor in the way of the sword. He was only a few years older than she and would make sure to remind her of that. He always acted as the protector and guardian. Maybe that was where Nirix got some of her traits from. She was always so loyal and strived to protect everyone she loved...
It was hard when she had left her homeworld.
Suddenly her smile dropped and her lips became a thin line.
Entering the tea house had been a pleasant change in Nirix's mood. It had shattered the brief amount of sadness as she let the many homely aromas overtake her. Drinking the tea was nice and though it didn't exactly carry the same amount of flavor of the one she had drunk with her beloved cousin, Nirix was sure Sengan would've found it enjoyable.
Yet halfway into her pleasant drink, a man appeared and when his fingers inched towards her back pocket, Nirix had to restrain from the reflex of snapping his arm in two and merely stopped his methods of reverse-pickpocketing by grabbing his arm instead.
"I would refrain from touching me sir," She warned him lowly with darkening eyes. It was a cautious threat, one that was meant to be taken seriously.
Regardless, the money was returned to him with a simple gesture and she barely heeded his call to attention when he spoke of his Casino. But of course, Ketin was interested and that made Nirix cautious even more. If Ketin was feeling lucky, was that a bad or good omen?
Nirix sighed outwardly.
This was never a good sign.
Nirix had done it once, however, in her mind, it was for a good cause; it had been for him after all. His smile had meant more than anything to her back then.
Even now, she could see him. There was something about the way he smiled; the way butterflies seemed to escape from the pit of her stomach and the way the sun had somehow toppled down from the sky and made a home right there in her heart. He had the kind of smile that made you feel happy to be alive and just that little bit more of a person.
And when he looked at her...
The memory was tamped down at the mention of the tea; Nivek tea to be specific.
"Sengan's favorite tea...We use to have a cup every evening after training," Nirix muttered and a fond smile brightened her face.
Sengan was her favorite cousin and had been her mentor in the way of the sword. He was only a few years older than she and would make sure to remind her of that. He always acted as the protector and guardian. Maybe that was where Nirix got some of her traits from. She was always so loyal and strived to protect everyone she loved...
It was hard when she had left her homeworld.
Suddenly her smile dropped and her lips became a thin line.
Entering the tea house had been a pleasant change in Nirix's mood. It had shattered the brief amount of sadness as she let the many homely aromas overtake her. Drinking the tea was nice and though it didn't exactly carry the same amount of flavor of the one she had drunk with her beloved cousin, Nirix was sure Sengan would've found it enjoyable.
Yet halfway into her pleasant drink, a man appeared and when his fingers inched towards her back pocket, Nirix had to restrain from the reflex of snapping his arm in two and merely stopped his methods of reverse-pickpocketing by grabbing his arm instead.
"I would refrain from touching me sir," She warned him lowly with darkening eyes. It was a cautious threat, one that was meant to be taken seriously.
Regardless, the money was returned to him with a simple gesture and she barely heeded his call to attention when he spoke of his Casino. But of course, Ketin was interested and that made Nirix cautious even more. If Ketin was feeling lucky, was that a bad or good omen?
Nirix sighed outwardly.
This was never a good sign.
"Woah woah woah guy, I answer them, just slow the question, capisce? And don't talk into my ear all, creepy like. Anywho, yea, it was pretty crazy then and now, and yes, losing my eye hurt like a mother@#$%er. And, once more, yes, I do think this box will make us rich, because if they want it, I want it. It means its valuable to someone, and that means they'll pay.", as Ringo began to answer the final question, he slowed the bike, and went deep into thought, realizing where Muta stood in social intelligence. "You said you were found on a rando planet right? I mean it makes sense why you wouldn't know these kinds of things...well I'm going to enroll you in the school of true...life...where in the women are easy and the money is easier, if you have the right credit score or look. You'll learn everything you need to know and more, if you just stick with me and protect me, until this little treasure trove *taps the box* is in the hands of some greedy gang boss or some skinny tweaker that'll pay a ton of Standard and maybe a ship or two for it."
Rai winced at a resounding SCREEEEAAATCHKKK that seemed to rumble through the ship. For a moment they froze, straining to hear for anything else that would indicate alarm. When none came they relaxed, thoughts now tinged with curiosity.
What was THAT supposed to be?
They stepped out of the guest quarters and started walking toward where the two Qetans are. Shen had opted to sleep again, grumbling about the short sleep cycle. Though they would rather join the bird in resting a little longer, they knew what they had to do first.
Also, perhaps they would be lucky and bump into someone who knew what-
They barely stepped out of the way of the grey and green armor that suddenly came into view as both turned a corner. "Woop, sorry Commander!" they stammered, craning their neck up and shooting the female Wylaseen a sheepish smile.
The tall commander gave a slight nod as her four eyes slowly blinked. "My apologies as well," she said. Her eyes darted across the hall, then back down at Rai. "Do you know the source of the commotion?"
They shook their head. "Was hoping to maybe bump into someone who knew." Their grin widened a bit, turning playful. "Maybe not LITERALLY bump someone, like what almost happened now." They shrugged. "Anyway, was just about to talk to the Qetans. Were you gonna go ask about the noise?"
"I was," she said. She sent them a small, barely there look of concern. She looked like she wanted to say something- then refrained from doing so, merely nodding.
"Good luck," she said, and Rai shot a quick 'you too' before both went their separate ways- one to where she could barely hear what sounded like the tailing ends of a story, and the other to what could only be described as a guarded closet.
What was THAT supposed to be?
They stepped out of the guest quarters and started walking toward where the two Qetans are. Shen had opted to sleep again, grumbling about the short sleep cycle. Though they would rather join the bird in resting a little longer, they knew what they had to do first.
Also, perhaps they would be lucky and bump into someone who knew what-
They barely stepped out of the way of the grey and green armor that suddenly came into view as both turned a corner. "Woop, sorry Commander!" they stammered, craning their neck up and shooting the female Wylaseen a sheepish smile.
The tall commander gave a slight nod as her four eyes slowly blinked. "My apologies as well," she said. Her eyes darted across the hall, then back down at Rai. "Do you know the source of the commotion?"
They shook their head. "Was hoping to maybe bump into someone who knew." Their grin widened a bit, turning playful. "Maybe not LITERALLY bump someone, like what almost happened now." They shrugged. "Anyway, was just about to talk to the Qetans. Were you gonna go ask about the noise?"
"I was," she said. She sent them a small, barely there look of concern. She looked like she wanted to say something- then refrained from doing so, merely nodding.
"Good luck," she said, and Rai shot a quick 'you too' before both went their separate ways- one to where she could barely hear what sounded like the tailing ends of a story, and the other to what could only be described as a guarded closet.
Tora Station
To what meager extent Royanna Kallenger could be ’delighted’, it was such that she found herself upon the canid’s question. Even so simple and idle a query as to the general size of the station was promising. Indeed his curiosity was one of precious few driving forces - and there was a deep satisfaction in sating it. ’Explaining’ things was a form of conversation that Kallenger had no trouble with whatsoever. It was just impersonal enough to be easy and stress-free, but intimate enough to be satisfying.
”Mid-range, give or take.” She replied after a brief moment of consideration, having already torn her eyes from their own majestic vessel and begun to walk at an easy pace in some direction that, to Christopher, probably seemed quite random.
Above them, the smaller of ships and landers hovered about in silence like so many great fish, while the low undertones of distant bustle laid a soft background noise to their conversation.
”The really large ones have public transit systems. Usually rails or cabs. Ones this size usually just have priority access shortcuts for paying commuters.” She liked it when he asked questions, showed an interest in the new and fascinating world around him. Though scarcely admitting it to herself, the kid’s clear-cut case of PTSD was getting to her. She didn’t want to see him like that - the terrified, glassy-eyed husk that stumbled blindly along behind her, twitching and whirling with every minute sound.
She understood, to an extent, why he was so afflicted. The past days had been traumatic even for her - and she was both trained and conditioned to handle it. She still couldn’t imagine what kind of military would consider allowing so timid a creature into its ranks. There was both disdain for his weakness and...something else. Something softer that she refused to acknowledge.
Regardless, it was in some way a pleasure to ‘chat’.
The pair made their way with no hurry through the maze of ships that sat seemingly at random all about the floor of the great, white-hued docking chamber. Wherever one could fit a ship, one could set it down. It had been lucky that the two of them were able to find a spot large enough to accommodate the comparatively hefty Diplomat. Yet despite the great mess of ships on the floor, all of which stood at least two to five times the height of the individuals weaving their way between them, the atmosphere was not nearly so chaotic as it should have seemed. Such was the order and regulatory peace of daily Imperial life, extending even to such typically maddening platforms.
At one point, Roy halted and put out one arm, silently ushering her companion to a halt beside her in the process. Almost idly, she gestured to the floor before them, where a large, circular blue light was shining down from somewhere above. She glanced up to the source of the light, which was a small, slate-grey ship in the shape of some kind of buggy. Then, wordlessly, she walked around the blue light as the ship descended softly to fill the space that the light had outlined. A simple lesson on safely navigating such hangars, executed without a word. She hoped idly that he would remember it, and not go bumbling into the path of any landing craft. The fact that most modern vessels had safety features to prevent such tragic mishaps was little consolation.
It was a strange and uncomfortable sensation, this alien sense of what she recognized logically as a type of ’concern’. She had realized only too late that she had once been concerned over the wellbeing of her men. They had been capable soldiers - she had never needed to protect them from anything. Yet still, she had failed them.
This one - this kid - was clearly not any kind of capable. If she had led twenty experienced, hardened soldiers to their deaths...how in Space was she ever going to keep this one in working order?
It was not on her mind at present - she would not allow it to be.
Now was the time to try and draw out some of the humanity in him. Not a conscious goal, but there in her mind nonetheless. Now was the time to get food and reassure him that despite the traumatic events of the past days, the Galaxy was not the overwhelmingly dangerous place it had lately appeared to be.
And if she kept reminding herself of that fact too, maybe she could handle the coming confrontation rationally and move past it unscathed. Not that she was allowing herself to mull over exactly what she was going to do or say once finally faced with Malbec…
”Allowance?” The woman repeated with a hint of incredulity. She gave that little half-scowl that he would have by now leaned constituted, in her, the closest thing she could manage to a smile. A confident one, at that. She shook her head, making a little coughing sound that probably translated to dismissive laughter.
”They wouldn’t be too happy if we bankrupted the Imperial treasury, but they wouldn’t stop us.’ She said - was it some attempt at ‘humor’?
Glancing around then and remembering that they were not alone, she continued in a more hushed tone - not so conspiratorial as to seem ominous, but careful to keep it between the two of them.
”There’s a reason those badges are only given to the most capable Agents.” She said, gesturing toward the lower half of her own diamond-shaped badge that hung around his neck. It shimmered in holographic electric-sky-blue, opposing her own matching green upper half that lay hidden inside her jacket. ”If we get separated and you need to pay for anything, just flash that badge. You’ll be covered. No cap on funding for ’Imperial affairs’, and as long as you’re wearing that badge, any expenses you incur are just that.”
They had arrived now at the end of the great hangar bay that was opposite to the translucent blue energy-window through which they had entered - though it might prove difficult to maintain such a sense of direction in the forest of parked ships they had been navigating. It was obvious that they had reached the end of the room though, given the expansive wall that now towered up before them. It was shelved with pathways, staircases, and doors, all of which led to different levels of the station proper. They jutted out like toadstools above them, all with elegant metal and glass railings. The lack of a single, smooth surface reduced the effect of vertigo that one might have experienced looking up from where the two of them were now on the ground floor.
Roy did not stop to look up at the protruding gangways and platforms however, instead opting to continue unhindered through the large, arching doorway before them.
Just like that, the scenery changed. While the theme of cool whites and greys persisted, the architecture was different once passing through the doorway from the hangar to the station interior. They stood in a long hallway that stretched out before them some quarter of a mile, before appearing to branch off in either direction. Lining the walls were various storefronts and facades, all with clean, modern architecture that rather implied ’high-end-fashion’. Clothing, tools, all variety of retail. Down the center of the wide, airy hallway were planters with lush, tropical plants sprouting up from them. The air held the subtle scent of clean linens, and a quiet musical track mostly made up of soft sines and easy rhythms could be heard over the dull roar of bustle.
It was, for lack of a better term, a shopping mall - though with the air about if of a self-sustained society rather than a simple retail establishment.
They were not alone, either. While not crowded, the hallway and shops alike were populated with Imperial citizens and guests browsing wares, chatting, or going about their business. Most were humans, or very nearly resembling humans, dressed generally in light, airy clothing in pale colors. Some other beings could be seen among them - the occasional insectoid, one fellow that appeared to be mostly mechanical, trotting along with only the subtle whirring of pneumatic joints. A teenage girl sporting a pair of fluffy animal ears and matching tail was flirting with a pale blue-skinned person of indeterminate gender who appeared about the same age. Something tiny hovered past, looking like a hummingbird.
It was not a fundamentally overwhelming environment - not like the chaotic, hodgepodge stations outside Imperial territory. There was alien diversity, but it was far from what an ignorant low-tekker like Christopher might have thought to be a ‘freak show’.
None of this seemed anything but perfectly normal to Royanna, who proceeded with little interest and barely a glance toward the potted plant that rolled by on well-oiled wheels or the tall, too-lanky fellow with the sticklike limbs and deep purple flesh. It was only after she had taken several steps forward and glanced idly in the direction of a squat, goose-like creature corralling a small herd of smaller goose-like creatures that it occurred to Roy to actually look back at Christofer.
The environment was surreal and strange, though not chaotic nor nightmarish. At least, not to the average newcomer. But it had suddenly dawned on Roy that this was probably the first time her companion was witnessing non-human entities.
Whether he had stopped to gawk or stayed close behind her, Roy halted and leaned in closer to Christofer.
”I forgot to tell you, there’s a lot of non-humans on stations like these. They may look strange, but don’t be afraid of them. If they’re here, it means they’re civilized, just like you and I. Okay?”
Maybe she was being a tad overbearing, making steady eye contact with him as she spoke, serving as a sort of ‘grounding force’ in case he was starting to panic or shut down. She would even put a comforting hand on his shoulder if he really seemed to be freaking out - but otherwise, it would be limited to eye-contact and a stern, but amiable expression.
The White Death
”K I D D O”
It all happened so fast that the girl’s instant, visceral reaction to that apparently dirty word would surely go all but unnoticed. If all chaos hadn’t broken loose, the old soldier might have seen the suddenly flared nostrils, the spike of sudden hostility dwarfing even the original glare.
It didn’t matter that she was a kid - being called out on the fact was an instantaneous hate-trigger.
But the thing had plopped down onto her before she had a chance to really tell the old man what-for. She had yelped, flailed, barely gotten control of her initial panic at the sudden ‘attack’. Bashed her arm into one wall, then another in desperate haste before remembering the presence of the old man just a second too late.
She had made a dive in a last-ditch attempt to escape. He had leaped forth in a full-body tackle.
She almost made it.
But the hefty form of the old soldier came down upon her small frame like a tidal wave - a force that, if he had not been clearly intending not to hurt her, would have done some serious damage.
It did knock the wind out of the girl stowaway - she gasped a sharp inhalation but did not spare so much as a second in fighting back.
Instantly, the man trying valiantly to keep her restrained in a sort of forceful bear-hug found himself trying to cling to a furious wild animal. Not hesitating, the girl immediately took to flailing wildly, desperately. There was no rhyme or reason, no logic to the struggle. It was not the well-trained movement of someone who actually knew how to fight - but what she lacked in technique she made up for in raw ferocity.
It was not a silent struggle, either. Immediately after regaining her breath, the girl did not scream - instead, she proceeded with an unending torrent of curses, threats, insults, and all manner of fowl language with a strange accent and dialect that was so thick as to make half of what she said entirely unintelligible.
There was no unified attempt to actually combat her attacker - only the desperate, panicked flailing to get herself away at any cost. Likely it would all be mostly impotent given the old man’s method of restraint, but she was bound to get a few hits in between the wriggling and flailing and kicking and struggling.
Then, at last, A break!
The human tornado finally, by some stroke of luck, managed to twist about and out of the old, olive-green army field jacket she had been wearing. The blue thing gave one last bit of resistance as she made for the dive, tearing a little more at the sleeve before the fabric was wrenched free. It still clung to her bare arm, though tiny pieces might have remained with the coat that was left in the soldier’s hand as the girl made her big escape. Clad now in only the camouflage fatigues, antique army boots and a filthy white T shirt, she payed no mind to the discarded jacket as she sprinted with all her might away from the man attempting to restrain her.
Interestingly, it was only then, after she had bounded several paces away from the jacket, that she would suddenly become completely visible to all of the ship systems that she had somehow managed to elude for the duration of her intrusion. Somehow, she had been invisible to the many security systems that would have spotted an unwanted guest or even an anomalous disturbance within seconds. Now, separated from the jacket, he was no different from any other presence on the ship. Fully subject to every applicable sensor, monitor, camera, alarm and motion-detector alike. Seconds prior, and for the duration of their voyage up to that point, the White Death was somehow oblivious to her existence.
Now, quite abruptly, there was verifiably one more warm body aboard the mighty warship - and she was not welcome.
There was no triumph in the girl’s flight. Even had it lasted more than a few pessimistic seconds she was much too frenzied to bother with such trivialities. The victory - if it could be called that - was so brief as to be worthless.
She bounded in the first available direction, down a narrow corridor formed by tall stacks of crates - only to be faced with some kind of decrepit robot that appeared to be missing an arm.
It did not matter that within fractions of seconds she had already determined the most likely candidates for the robot’s weak points. The fact that, if given several seconds she was quite certain she could disable the droid with a screwdriver and a dirty look did not so much as cross her mind.
There was no time. She might have roughed the old man up something fierce, but there was no way she had done such a number on him that he wouldn’t be able to push through and make one final dive at her. He would be at the other end of the narrow corridor in seconds. Less than seconds. And the robot - she could not simply knock something like that over, not at her diminutive size. Not enough room to squeeze by it, regardless of how clumsy it might be.
She was trapped. Her miraculous camouflage gone, pinned between an old veteran and a half-dead robot with nowhere to go.
With the desperation of the cornered animal, the girl skidded to an unsteady stop midway between the two different flavors of imminent demise. Wildly she whirled back and forth several times, trying in vain to decide which way to run without actually thinking about it. No time to think. Cornered.
Her heaving breaths burned in her throat, the myriad of wounds visible all about her arms and beneath the clothing pulsing with each heartbeat.
And when it became apparent through the haze of exhaustion, panic and pain that she was indeed trapped, there was nothing left to do but bark out another series of curses and clearly empty threats. in a hoarse voice and thick accent. It was again mostly unintelligible, with only bits and pieces such as ”Motha#$%^ahs” and ”@#$%sahckin’ sacksa @#$%” and ”@#$%’s you up” and ”y’howl ruddy @#$%in’ bout” and ”Thinks’ye shyde-eds is gonna’” and "I'll 'kiddo' you-" and other assorted colorful language coming through the unending torrent of viscera in something between limey and downright uneducated.
Not a great first impression.
To what meager extent Royanna Kallenger could be ’delighted’, it was such that she found herself upon the canid’s question. Even so simple and idle a query as to the general size of the station was promising. Indeed his curiosity was one of precious few driving forces - and there was a deep satisfaction in sating it. ’Explaining’ things was a form of conversation that Kallenger had no trouble with whatsoever. It was just impersonal enough to be easy and stress-free, but intimate enough to be satisfying.
”Mid-range, give or take.” She replied after a brief moment of consideration, having already torn her eyes from their own majestic vessel and begun to walk at an easy pace in some direction that, to Christopher, probably seemed quite random.
Above them, the smaller of ships and landers hovered about in silence like so many great fish, while the low undertones of distant bustle laid a soft background noise to their conversation.
”The really large ones have public transit systems. Usually rails or cabs. Ones this size usually just have priority access shortcuts for paying commuters.” She liked it when he asked questions, showed an interest in the new and fascinating world around him. Though scarcely admitting it to herself, the kid’s clear-cut case of PTSD was getting to her. She didn’t want to see him like that - the terrified, glassy-eyed husk that stumbled blindly along behind her, twitching and whirling with every minute sound.
She understood, to an extent, why he was so afflicted. The past days had been traumatic even for her - and she was both trained and conditioned to handle it. She still couldn’t imagine what kind of military would consider allowing so timid a creature into its ranks. There was both disdain for his weakness and...something else. Something softer that she refused to acknowledge.
Regardless, it was in some way a pleasure to ‘chat’.
The pair made their way with no hurry through the maze of ships that sat seemingly at random all about the floor of the great, white-hued docking chamber. Wherever one could fit a ship, one could set it down. It had been lucky that the two of them were able to find a spot large enough to accommodate the comparatively hefty Diplomat. Yet despite the great mess of ships on the floor, all of which stood at least two to five times the height of the individuals weaving their way between them, the atmosphere was not nearly so chaotic as it should have seemed. Such was the order and regulatory peace of daily Imperial life, extending even to such typically maddening platforms.
At one point, Roy halted and put out one arm, silently ushering her companion to a halt beside her in the process. Almost idly, she gestured to the floor before them, where a large, circular blue light was shining down from somewhere above. She glanced up to the source of the light, which was a small, slate-grey ship in the shape of some kind of buggy. Then, wordlessly, she walked around the blue light as the ship descended softly to fill the space that the light had outlined. A simple lesson on safely navigating such hangars, executed without a word. She hoped idly that he would remember it, and not go bumbling into the path of any landing craft. The fact that most modern vessels had safety features to prevent such tragic mishaps was little consolation.
It was a strange and uncomfortable sensation, this alien sense of what she recognized logically as a type of ’concern’. She had realized only too late that she had once been concerned over the wellbeing of her men. They had been capable soldiers - she had never needed to protect them from anything. Yet still, she had failed them.
This one - this kid - was clearly not any kind of capable. If she had led twenty experienced, hardened soldiers to their deaths...how in Space was she ever going to keep this one in working order?
It was not on her mind at present - she would not allow it to be.
Now was the time to try and draw out some of the humanity in him. Not a conscious goal, but there in her mind nonetheless. Now was the time to get food and reassure him that despite the traumatic events of the past days, the Galaxy was not the overwhelmingly dangerous place it had lately appeared to be.
And if she kept reminding herself of that fact too, maybe she could handle the coming confrontation rationally and move past it unscathed. Not that she was allowing herself to mull over exactly what she was going to do or say once finally faced with Malbec…
”Allowance?” The woman repeated with a hint of incredulity. She gave that little half-scowl that he would have by now leaned constituted, in her, the closest thing she could manage to a smile. A confident one, at that. She shook her head, making a little coughing sound that probably translated to dismissive laughter.
”They wouldn’t be too happy if we bankrupted the Imperial treasury, but they wouldn’t stop us.’ She said - was it some attempt at ‘humor’?
Glancing around then and remembering that they were not alone, she continued in a more hushed tone - not so conspiratorial as to seem ominous, but careful to keep it between the two of them.
”There’s a reason those badges are only given to the most capable Agents.” She said, gesturing toward the lower half of her own diamond-shaped badge that hung around his neck. It shimmered in holographic electric-sky-blue, opposing her own matching green upper half that lay hidden inside her jacket. ”If we get separated and you need to pay for anything, just flash that badge. You’ll be covered. No cap on funding for ’Imperial affairs’, and as long as you’re wearing that badge, any expenses you incur are just that.”
They had arrived now at the end of the great hangar bay that was opposite to the translucent blue energy-window through which they had entered - though it might prove difficult to maintain such a sense of direction in the forest of parked ships they had been navigating. It was obvious that they had reached the end of the room though, given the expansive wall that now towered up before them. It was shelved with pathways, staircases, and doors, all of which led to different levels of the station proper. They jutted out like toadstools above them, all with elegant metal and glass railings. The lack of a single, smooth surface reduced the effect of vertigo that one might have experienced looking up from where the two of them were now on the ground floor.
Roy did not stop to look up at the protruding gangways and platforms however, instead opting to continue unhindered through the large, arching doorway before them.
Just like that, the scenery changed. While the theme of cool whites and greys persisted, the architecture was different once passing through the doorway from the hangar to the station interior. They stood in a long hallway that stretched out before them some quarter of a mile, before appearing to branch off in either direction. Lining the walls were various storefronts and facades, all with clean, modern architecture that rather implied ’high-end-fashion’. Clothing, tools, all variety of retail. Down the center of the wide, airy hallway were planters with lush, tropical plants sprouting up from them. The air held the subtle scent of clean linens, and a quiet musical track mostly made up of soft sines and easy rhythms could be heard over the dull roar of bustle.
It was, for lack of a better term, a shopping mall - though with the air about if of a self-sustained society rather than a simple retail establishment.
They were not alone, either. While not crowded, the hallway and shops alike were populated with Imperial citizens and guests browsing wares, chatting, or going about their business. Most were humans, or very nearly resembling humans, dressed generally in light, airy clothing in pale colors. Some other beings could be seen among them - the occasional insectoid, one fellow that appeared to be mostly mechanical, trotting along with only the subtle whirring of pneumatic joints. A teenage girl sporting a pair of fluffy animal ears and matching tail was flirting with a pale blue-skinned person of indeterminate gender who appeared about the same age. Something tiny hovered past, looking like a hummingbird.
It was not a fundamentally overwhelming environment - not like the chaotic, hodgepodge stations outside Imperial territory. There was alien diversity, but it was far from what an ignorant low-tekker like Christopher might have thought to be a ‘freak show’.
None of this seemed anything but perfectly normal to Royanna, who proceeded with little interest and barely a glance toward the potted plant that rolled by on well-oiled wheels or the tall, too-lanky fellow with the sticklike limbs and deep purple flesh. It was only after she had taken several steps forward and glanced idly in the direction of a squat, goose-like creature corralling a small herd of smaller goose-like creatures that it occurred to Roy to actually look back at Christofer.
The environment was surreal and strange, though not chaotic nor nightmarish. At least, not to the average newcomer. But it had suddenly dawned on Roy that this was probably the first time her companion was witnessing non-human entities.
Whether he had stopped to gawk or stayed close behind her, Roy halted and leaned in closer to Christofer.
”I forgot to tell you, there’s a lot of non-humans on stations like these. They may look strange, but don’t be afraid of them. If they’re here, it means they’re civilized, just like you and I. Okay?”
Maybe she was being a tad overbearing, making steady eye contact with him as she spoke, serving as a sort of ‘grounding force’ in case he was starting to panic or shut down. She would even put a comforting hand on his shoulder if he really seemed to be freaking out - but otherwise, it would be limited to eye-contact and a stern, but amiable expression.
The White Death
”K I D D O”
It all happened so fast that the girl’s instant, visceral reaction to that apparently dirty word would surely go all but unnoticed. If all chaos hadn’t broken loose, the old soldier might have seen the suddenly flared nostrils, the spike of sudden hostility dwarfing even the original glare.
It didn’t matter that she was a kid - being called out on the fact was an instantaneous hate-trigger.
But the thing had plopped down onto her before she had a chance to really tell the old man what-for. She had yelped, flailed, barely gotten control of her initial panic at the sudden ‘attack’. Bashed her arm into one wall, then another in desperate haste before remembering the presence of the old man just a second too late.
She had made a dive in a last-ditch attempt to escape. He had leaped forth in a full-body tackle.
She almost made it.
But the hefty form of the old soldier came down upon her small frame like a tidal wave - a force that, if he had not been clearly intending not to hurt her, would have done some serious damage.
It did knock the wind out of the girl stowaway - she gasped a sharp inhalation but did not spare so much as a second in fighting back.
Instantly, the man trying valiantly to keep her restrained in a sort of forceful bear-hug found himself trying to cling to a furious wild animal. Not hesitating, the girl immediately took to flailing wildly, desperately. There was no rhyme or reason, no logic to the struggle. It was not the well-trained movement of someone who actually knew how to fight - but what she lacked in technique she made up for in raw ferocity.
It was not a silent struggle, either. Immediately after regaining her breath, the girl did not scream - instead, she proceeded with an unending torrent of curses, threats, insults, and all manner of fowl language with a strange accent and dialect that was so thick as to make half of what she said entirely unintelligible.
There was no unified attempt to actually combat her attacker - only the desperate, panicked flailing to get herself away at any cost. Likely it would all be mostly impotent given the old man’s method of restraint, but she was bound to get a few hits in between the wriggling and flailing and kicking and struggling.
Then, at last, A break!
The human tornado finally, by some stroke of luck, managed to twist about and out of the old, olive-green army field jacket she had been wearing. The blue thing gave one last bit of resistance as she made for the dive, tearing a little more at the sleeve before the fabric was wrenched free. It still clung to her bare arm, though tiny pieces might have remained with the coat that was left in the soldier’s hand as the girl made her big escape. Clad now in only the camouflage fatigues, antique army boots and a filthy white T shirt, she payed no mind to the discarded jacket as she sprinted with all her might away from the man attempting to restrain her.
Interestingly, it was only then, after she had bounded several paces away from the jacket, that she would suddenly become completely visible to all of the ship systems that she had somehow managed to elude for the duration of her intrusion. Somehow, she had been invisible to the many security systems that would have spotted an unwanted guest or even an anomalous disturbance within seconds. Now, separated from the jacket, he was no different from any other presence on the ship. Fully subject to every applicable sensor, monitor, camera, alarm and motion-detector alike. Seconds prior, and for the duration of their voyage up to that point, the White Death was somehow oblivious to her existence.
Now, quite abruptly, there was verifiably one more warm body aboard the mighty warship - and she was not welcome.
There was no triumph in the girl’s flight. Even had it lasted more than a few pessimistic seconds she was much too frenzied to bother with such trivialities. The victory - if it could be called that - was so brief as to be worthless.
She bounded in the first available direction, down a narrow corridor formed by tall stacks of crates - only to be faced with some kind of decrepit robot that appeared to be missing an arm.
It did not matter that within fractions of seconds she had already determined the most likely candidates for the robot’s weak points. The fact that, if given several seconds she was quite certain she could disable the droid with a screwdriver and a dirty look did not so much as cross her mind.
There was no time. She might have roughed the old man up something fierce, but there was no way she had done such a number on him that he wouldn’t be able to push through and make one final dive at her. He would be at the other end of the narrow corridor in seconds. Less than seconds. And the robot - she could not simply knock something like that over, not at her diminutive size. Not enough room to squeeze by it, regardless of how clumsy it might be.
She was trapped. Her miraculous camouflage gone, pinned between an old veteran and a half-dead robot with nowhere to go.
With the desperation of the cornered animal, the girl skidded to an unsteady stop midway between the two different flavors of imminent demise. Wildly she whirled back and forth several times, trying in vain to decide which way to run without actually thinking about it. No time to think. Cornered.
Her heaving breaths burned in her throat, the myriad of wounds visible all about her arms and beneath the clothing pulsing with each heartbeat.
And when it became apparent through the haze of exhaustion, panic and pain that she was indeed trapped, there was nothing left to do but bark out another series of curses and clearly empty threats. in a hoarse voice and thick accent. It was again mostly unintelligible, with only bits and pieces such as ”Motha#$%^ahs” and ”@#$%sahckin’ sacksa @#$%” and ”@#$%’s you up” and ”y’howl ruddy @#$%in’ bout” and ”Thinks’ye shyde-eds is gonna’” and "I'll 'kiddo' you-" and other assorted colorful language coming through the unending torrent of viscera in something between limey and downright uneducated.
Not a great first impression.
White Death, Cargo Bay
BN-12 stared at the much smaller lifeform, currently screaming what the machine recognized as obscenities. Immediately after, BN-12 finally received a response from the ship, and the White Death went on alert. To the trio's left and right, two SPECTRE racks bearing BN-31 through -40 and CN-01 through -10 deployed. Nineteen BRD-02 drones spread out around the group, various armaments aimed at the organics.
"Cease and desist. Submit to apprehension immediately," BN-12 ground out, his immensely deep voice thundering about the cargo hold. BN-37 and CN-02 stepped forward to either side of Jack, while BN-12 merely reached out to set a hand on the girl's uninjured shoulder.
White Death, Medical Bay
Meanwhile, Commander Kovacs had managed to stabilize Jin by reverting to "outdated" technology, which was still bleeding edge by this new galaxy's standards, but half a century old by his. Sparing a glance at his tacpad, he silenced the alarm echoing through the ship as he dialed up Major Zuraw and BN-33 on the intercom, requesting that they head to cargo to diffuse the situation. Afterwards, he merely pulled up a chair, taking a seat as he continued monitoring Jin's condition.
BN-12 stared at the much smaller lifeform, currently screaming what the machine recognized as obscenities. Immediately after, BN-12 finally received a response from the ship, and the White Death went on alert. To the trio's left and right, two SPECTRE racks bearing BN-31 through -40 and CN-01 through -10 deployed. Nineteen BRD-02 drones spread out around the group, various armaments aimed at the organics.
"Cease and desist. Submit to apprehension immediately," BN-12 ground out, his immensely deep voice thundering about the cargo hold. BN-37 and CN-02 stepped forward to either side of Jack, while BN-12 merely reached out to set a hand on the girl's uninjured shoulder.
White Death, Medical Bay
Meanwhile, Commander Kovacs had managed to stabilize Jin by reverting to "outdated" technology, which was still bleeding edge by this new galaxy's standards, but half a century old by his. Sparing a glance at his tacpad, he silenced the alarm echoing through the ship as he dialed up Major Zuraw and BN-33 on the intercom, requesting that they head to cargo to diffuse the situation. Afterwards, he merely pulled up a chair, taking a seat as he continued monitoring Jin's condition.
Tora Station
"Hmmm vhere could she be?" the white haired man said as he walks through the crowded and diverse station of Tora. "Maybe she's up your ass" a olive skin boy says with a sneer in his voice. His hair was black, his eyes are brown, but with a voice with such venom it seemed odd that it belonged to someone so skinny and frail looking wearing a plan white shirt and khaki shorts. On his neck sorta looked like some kind of bomb collar with a small square device on the side that blinked a red light. He also was carrying something in his arms which looked like a toaster. The white haired man dressed in an Imperial officers uniform looks down and says "Jeez, vhy are you like zis? Are you still mad because I caught you in simple trap, because apparently your favorite thing to eat of all zings is skittles?" as he looks at him with a raised eyebrow. The olive skin boy didn't speak as they walk, but his cheeks did go red in embarrassment. "Ohh ze mighty dark knight Nocturnus tricked because he followed a trail of brightly colored skittles off on ze ground in vhich he ate each one till he ended up getting trapped in a cage that was strung up at the ceiling...and not once you zought, zat zis maybe a trap?" he says condescendingly as they kept walking, not really worried about anyone around hearing since of how busy the station was.
"Shutup! You don't need to rub it in and in this form I'm Juilian" he murmured at the end as he looks away from the man. "Oh I'm sorry, I hadn't realize zat probably ze most dangerous being around besides Ketin Clarke had a soft side. Do you vant me to apologize, hmmm? Maybe you should apologize to poor Arena before I give you an apology" The boy began to laugh "Mwhahaha, really? I would have love to have done it again, I hadn't realize killing a lord would so fun. Sorry I killed your girlfriend Kampfer" as he stuck his tongue out at Kampfer. Kampfer gave an angered look and grabbed the boy's tongue before he could pull it back into his mouth. Actually both of Kampfer's hands were normal an not of that of giant metal claws that he is known for nor wearing his optical device. "Listen here, you little dunkoff. She wasn't in anyway a threat to you or Ova and yet she still vas killed because of Ova's increasing paranoia? You should be glade I don't have you on ze table and test hat gives you ze most pain" even with his tongue being held Nocturnus or Julian in this form merely says "Still do it again" Kampfer groaned in displeasure as he let go of his tongue and then slapped him across the face.
"Come on!" he he exclaims as he grabs onto Julian's hair and drags him a couple feet, with a few bystanders looking onward with confusing looks on their faces as the boy keeps going "Ow!Ow!Ow!Ow!" till they come a slight opening in the crowd still going about their business. "Vait? Vhy hasn't the toaster said anything?" Kampfer asks him with a curious look on his own face. Julian looks down and says "Oh he's been talking this entire time, I had just had him muffled against my shirt" as he tilts the toaster away from his chest mid in his yelling "AND I WILL RULE GALA-" before Julian puts him close to his chest. Kampfer can just merely roll his eyes and says "Vhy is it always so mad" as they began to walk again
"Now keep an eye out for a tall tomboy looking agent with a bipedal dog" Kampfer says as he scans the crowd looking for Roy and Toffi. "What?" Julian says as he looks at Kampfer confused. Kampfer rolled his eyes and says "I forget you are stupid so let me make this simple...look for a woman who looks like a boy and a dog that walks on two legs" Julian nods and says "Ohhhh okay then" as they both went looking for Roy and Toffi.
"Hmmm vhere could she be?" the white haired man said as he walks through the crowded and diverse station of Tora. "Maybe she's up your ass" a olive skin boy says with a sneer in his voice. His hair was black, his eyes are brown, but with a voice with such venom it seemed odd that it belonged to someone so skinny and frail looking wearing a plan white shirt and khaki shorts. On his neck sorta looked like some kind of bomb collar with a small square device on the side that blinked a red light. He also was carrying something in his arms which looked like a toaster. The white haired man dressed in an Imperial officers uniform looks down and says "Jeez, vhy are you like zis? Are you still mad because I caught you in simple trap, because apparently your favorite thing to eat of all zings is skittles?" as he looks at him with a raised eyebrow. The olive skin boy didn't speak as they walk, but his cheeks did go red in embarrassment. "Ohh ze mighty dark knight Nocturnus tricked because he followed a trail of brightly colored skittles off on ze ground in vhich he ate each one till he ended up getting trapped in a cage that was strung up at the ceiling...and not once you zought, zat zis maybe a trap?" he says condescendingly as they kept walking, not really worried about anyone around hearing since of how busy the station was.
"Shutup! You don't need to rub it in and in this form I'm Juilian" he murmured at the end as he looks away from the man. "Oh I'm sorry, I hadn't realize zat probably ze most dangerous being around besides Ketin Clarke had a soft side. Do you vant me to apologize, hmmm? Maybe you should apologize to poor Arena before I give you an apology" The boy began to laugh "Mwhahaha, really? I would have love to have done it again, I hadn't realize killing a lord would so fun. Sorry I killed your girlfriend Kampfer" as he stuck his tongue out at Kampfer. Kampfer gave an angered look and grabbed the boy's tongue before he could pull it back into his mouth. Actually both of Kampfer's hands were normal an not of that of giant metal claws that he is known for nor wearing his optical device. "Listen here, you little dunkoff. She wasn't in anyway a threat to you or Ova and yet she still vas killed because of Ova's increasing paranoia? You should be glade I don't have you on ze table and test hat gives you ze most pain" even with his tongue being held Nocturnus or Julian in this form merely says "Still do it again" Kampfer groaned in displeasure as he let go of his tongue and then slapped him across the face.
"Come on!" he he exclaims as he grabs onto Julian's hair and drags him a couple feet, with a few bystanders looking onward with confusing looks on their faces as the boy keeps going "Ow!Ow!Ow!Ow!" till they come a slight opening in the crowd still going about their business. "Vait? Vhy hasn't the toaster said anything?" Kampfer asks him with a curious look on his own face. Julian looks down and says "Oh he's been talking this entire time, I had just had him muffled against my shirt" as he tilts the toaster away from his chest mid in his yelling "AND I WILL RULE GALA-" before Julian puts him close to his chest. Kampfer can just merely roll his eyes and says "Vhy is it always so mad" as they began to walk again
"Now keep an eye out for a tall tomboy looking agent with a bipedal dog" Kampfer says as he scans the crowd looking for Roy and Toffi. "What?" Julian says as he looks at Kampfer confused. Kampfer rolled his eyes and says "I forget you are stupid so let me make this simple...look for a woman who looks like a boy and a dog that walks on two legs" Julian nods and says "Ohhhh okay then" as they both went looking for Roy and Toffi.
His first sip of the mediocre Nivek tea had sent Arnaldo back, way back. It sent him to the times of his work, his starting work, as neighborhood watch for an old lady who hadn't felt safe one night, the night he donned a cloak and the biggest gun he could buy with his money. The night he stood awake until the sun rose, to see if anyone even dare step into his part of the neighborhood. The night Arnaldo became Arnaldo.
His moments of reminiscing were cut short however, as a joker with a smile plastered on his face approached the trio, spouting off guff about gabbling at a new casino and how he'd remind them that they were departing 15 minutes before, "That's not even enough time to buy a Faertiex bread loop and let alone eat it." grumbled Arnaldo, clearly annoyed. He rose from his seat and studied the man whilst trying to come off as intimidating as he could, which was kind of hard to muster for a short, old man. "His lean and smile give an impression of confidence and his movements don't seem to have any hesitation, he obviously has the upperhand in something, and I'd say it the slots and decks of this 'New Vegas', jeez, the life of an adventurer sure doesn't come with any breaks." thought Arnaldo. "Yea, if the kid is feeling lucky, why don't ya show us to our destination, sir.". The last word came out like hot molasses from the PI's mouth as he squinted his nonexistent eyes, still relying on vibrations and ground movement, which he found was much more fine tuned with his new leg, taking his "vision" from hazy to almost clear.
His moments of reminiscing were cut short however, as a joker with a smile plastered on his face approached the trio, spouting off guff about gabbling at a new casino and how he'd remind them that they were departing 15 minutes before, "That's not even enough time to buy a Faertiex bread loop and let alone eat it." grumbled Arnaldo, clearly annoyed. He rose from his seat and studied the man whilst trying to come off as intimidating as he could, which was kind of hard to muster for a short, old man. "His lean and smile give an impression of confidence and his movements don't seem to have any hesitation, he obviously has the upperhand in something, and I'd say it the slots and decks of this 'New Vegas', jeez, the life of an adventurer sure doesn't come with any breaks." thought Arnaldo. "Yea, if the kid is feeling lucky, why don't ya show us to our destination, sir.". The last word came out like hot molasses from the PI's mouth as he squinted his nonexistent eyes, still relying on vibrations and ground movement, which he found was much more fine tuned with his new leg, taking his "vision" from hazy to almost clear.
"OOOH, a fight!" squealed Jacobo, forgetting about literally everything else he was doing. He opened his back carapace with an almost vulgar squelch as he produced pieces of an extremely long rifle. "That's half the battle right there, now I just need to remember how to put this thing together..." mumbled Jacobo as he fiddled with the many small pieces, slamming and jamming them into places they shouldn't be. "Hey Shashi, if you get to badly hurt, I'll put a round between his greasy brows." yelled Jacobo--raising one of his hands to yell through, as if it were a megaphone--while his other hands were still assembling his rifle. "Oh, and if you win, I want his arm." chuckled Jacobo, thinking of all the things he could do with that arm, such as sell it or make it go haywire in ladies restroom, it was moments like these that Jacobo remembered the most. Finally finishing the rifle, Jacobo shakily put in an Old-World round, one that used Tweklin flash-powder and had a Baoj coating, giving it the famous Tweklin thunder clap.
The prospects of them getting a ship was a pleasing and even exciting thought to the gel-like alien. So much so that they gave a loud purring noise similar to a cat, vibrating against Ringo's back. The offer wasn't something they could refuse even if they had thought there was an option to. Protecting Ringo from a couple of mean guys until they could find someone to buy it? That seemed simple enough. If they could learn more about the human race from Ringo while doing this then that would definitely help also. The only thing they understood about humans was that they were far more complicated than Muta's species in almost every aspect. It was interesting, no doubt, but sometimes, it was inconvenient.
Slowing the bike let Mutacogi receive glimpses of the streets and city around. Other hover vehicles passing them spewed heat and smoke from their exhausts. The people on the sides of the roads were mostly walking and some vendors selling items and more commonly greasy food. Advertisements projected as holograms were only visible to the humans, but the alien still picked up the complexity of rural landscape and sheer size of it in the distorted sounds that permeated the place. Street after street passed, making it seem like this place never ended.
After a while, Muta spoke again to Ringo as if realizing something he hadn't thought to ask. "Where are going to find these 'bosses' and 'tweakers'?"
Slowing the bike let Mutacogi receive glimpses of the streets and city around. Other hover vehicles passing them spewed heat and smoke from their exhausts. The people on the sides of the roads were mostly walking and some vendors selling items and more commonly greasy food. Advertisements projected as holograms were only visible to the humans, but the alien still picked up the complexity of rural landscape and sheer size of it in the distorted sounds that permeated the place. Street after street passed, making it seem like this place never ended.
After a while, Muta spoke again to Ringo as if realizing something he hadn't thought to ask. "Where are going to find these 'bosses' and 'tweakers'?"
Christofer could only really reply in the form of a nod and a quiet but agreeing "Mhm..." to the explanations he was receiving. Well, things were lighting up a little, and he wasn't annoying Royanna with his questions. It was trusty at this point that she'd tell him if he went too far, even if he was trying to keep his mind in most places. Still, tings were going well, so far.
"It's kinda strange, you know. I'm... Not all that used to any of this space stuff, these space things, so I have to try and find something to relate to in a different way." Pondering aloud, perhaps trying to keep up the informative conversation that they were having, but he'd make sure to not speak too loudly. Even if his looks wouldn't be As drastically different if what Roy said about 'non-humans' was true, he'd still stick out from the way he was talking and observing things. Or well, just because of the words he spoke it might have gotten them some unwanted attention. "Like... I'd rather be thinking of the building itself, I... never really considered the parking area together with the building..." He fiddled some with his fingers while eyes skipped a couple steps worth and scanned the floor as a whole for some good meters ahead. "So... Uhhh.... Thinking that there'd be some huge system or something in them... That's like a small town in itself, right?" Looking up, though wholely unsure of his statement.
Stabilizing a little as they walked, he'd have something else to think about, but he wouldn't take half his mind out from observing the surroundings, both because of curiosity and overall wariness.
It's been longer than he knew since he last engaged in his actual work, but everything that had happened still shaped and molded his actions greatly. Like when Roy halted their movement she might as well have never seen a faster more abrupt stop than the one he made, stopping to observe instantly and followed closely. Well, he learned to avoid parking... ships? They were called ships, no matter the size, right? Well, he'd know to keep his eyes on the floor now.
Walking further, ears open and alert, he'd listen as she tried to humor his words in some way. Well, she tried. Christofer had a little different set of thoughts and for him, stealing and using the cash of others wasn't exactly a joking matter. He found the joke in it though, knew what Royanna had meant to be funny but failed to react to it with anything more than a faint quick smile because he wanted to show that he got the idea, and of course, to not discourage the woman from trying to loosen up, he wouldn't want for her to lock up again.
"I see... Well, that gives us a little bigger variety in choices then, right? Anything is fine as long as we know how to cook it?" Lifting his head a little and focusing his eyes ever so slightly higher. He'd probably need to look the part and stand straighter if they were going to have him pose as an 'Imperial agent' as well.
Still, there were some afterthought on the explanations in his head, the thoughtfulness may have made itself known to those that paid attention to his facial features.
The badges. They could be so easily abused. Which made him both think that they either trusted their troops greatly to allow them to have such power. Or. Or then they did Not trust them and did something to make sure that very little room was left for possible thieving habits forming, making sure to work any possible thought of abusing the power out of them and getting rid of it like gardeners took care of weeds. Regardless of which was more correct, he could see a bit of both so far. But none of these thoughts would be passed on to Royanna, not in this moment. He'd keep them to himself, discuss them later if he still remembered them and if they kept bothering him. The place was a little too public for that. He'd be good and quick to make up excuses if she suspected anything. Being a good actor had its perks - when you were being good at least.
Moving on, there was a lot to see, new areas, structures, turquoise eyes looked up and to the sides, but admiring the scenery had to be brief and he'd have to drop it quickly to not give away the fact that he was new to these kinds of things. Royanna was already moving, and so he had to keep going as well. If he truly was an Imperial and what not, surely he'd seen things like this many times before, so such observing was going to look off.
His eyes did catch all the necessary things - well, most of them at least - but he did also spot the not exactly human beings about, somewhat signed by raising discomfort at the girl with ears and tail but the remainder factors being human. It made him a little uncomfortable. And so did the insectoid, but the rest didn't seem to cause much of a reaction. At least not on the outside. A simple change in skin tone meant nothing too drastic, sure it was a little odd, but they might as well have had accidents when painting a house for all he knew. His own steps had slowed down a little as he took in the view and eyed everything that caught his attention, form was leaning forward a little as he was vary and ready to sprint whenever.
Ears perked up at the familiar sound of Royanna's words, back straightened and he was sure to make his way on over to her, fully alert like some guard dog in training, albeit a little lost but doing his best to follow and listen.
".... Ok." Words were few, but he shouldn't need to say much here, right? Just nod and it'll be all good and fine. Even as he turned his head with a little doubtful look given to the beings from earlier, it was rude to stare and again, he didn't want to seem too out of place or attract attention, so he'd leave them be in hopes of trusting Kallenger's words on them. "Uhh... So... I think I saw an opening? I- I mean, an entry, you know..." Fiddling of his fingers and eyes temporarily looking elsewhere before he was trying to look for what he meant, but seemed to lack the words to explain himself when he looked back. Well, he tried.
"It's kinda strange, you know. I'm... Not all that used to any of this space stuff, these space things, so I have to try and find something to relate to in a different way." Pondering aloud, perhaps trying to keep up the informative conversation that they were having, but he'd make sure to not speak too loudly. Even if his looks wouldn't be As drastically different if what Roy said about 'non-humans' was true, he'd still stick out from the way he was talking and observing things. Or well, just because of the words he spoke it might have gotten them some unwanted attention. "Like... I'd rather be thinking of the building itself, I... never really considered the parking area together with the building..." He fiddled some with his fingers while eyes skipped a couple steps worth and scanned the floor as a whole for some good meters ahead. "So... Uhhh.... Thinking that there'd be some huge system or something in them... That's like a small town in itself, right?" Looking up, though wholely unsure of his statement.
Stabilizing a little as they walked, he'd have something else to think about, but he wouldn't take half his mind out from observing the surroundings, both because of curiosity and overall wariness.
It's been longer than he knew since he last engaged in his actual work, but everything that had happened still shaped and molded his actions greatly. Like when Roy halted their movement she might as well have never seen a faster more abrupt stop than the one he made, stopping to observe instantly and followed closely. Well, he learned to avoid parking... ships? They were called ships, no matter the size, right? Well, he'd know to keep his eyes on the floor now.
Walking further, ears open and alert, he'd listen as she tried to humor his words in some way. Well, she tried. Christofer had a little different set of thoughts and for him, stealing and using the cash of others wasn't exactly a joking matter. He found the joke in it though, knew what Royanna had meant to be funny but failed to react to it with anything more than a faint quick smile because he wanted to show that he got the idea, and of course, to not discourage the woman from trying to loosen up, he wouldn't want for her to lock up again.
"I see... Well, that gives us a little bigger variety in choices then, right? Anything is fine as long as we know how to cook it?" Lifting his head a little and focusing his eyes ever so slightly higher. He'd probably need to look the part and stand straighter if they were going to have him pose as an 'Imperial agent' as well.
Still, there were some afterthought on the explanations in his head, the thoughtfulness may have made itself known to those that paid attention to his facial features.
The badges. They could be so easily abused. Which made him both think that they either trusted their troops greatly to allow them to have such power. Or. Or then they did Not trust them and did something to make sure that very little room was left for possible thieving habits forming, making sure to work any possible thought of abusing the power out of them and getting rid of it like gardeners took care of weeds. Regardless of which was more correct, he could see a bit of both so far. But none of these thoughts would be passed on to Royanna, not in this moment. He'd keep them to himself, discuss them later if he still remembered them and if they kept bothering him. The place was a little too public for that. He'd be good and quick to make up excuses if she suspected anything. Being a good actor had its perks - when you were being good at least.
Moving on, there was a lot to see, new areas, structures, turquoise eyes looked up and to the sides, but admiring the scenery had to be brief and he'd have to drop it quickly to not give away the fact that he was new to these kinds of things. Royanna was already moving, and so he had to keep going as well. If he truly was an Imperial and what not, surely he'd seen things like this many times before, so such observing was going to look off.
His eyes did catch all the necessary things - well, most of them at least - but he did also spot the not exactly human beings about, somewhat signed by raising discomfort at the girl with ears and tail but the remainder factors being human. It made him a little uncomfortable. And so did the insectoid, but the rest didn't seem to cause much of a reaction. At least not on the outside. A simple change in skin tone meant nothing too drastic, sure it was a little odd, but they might as well have had accidents when painting a house for all he knew. His own steps had slowed down a little as he took in the view and eyed everything that caught his attention, form was leaning forward a little as he was vary and ready to sprint whenever.
Ears perked up at the familiar sound of Royanna's words, back straightened and he was sure to make his way on over to her, fully alert like some guard dog in training, albeit a little lost but doing his best to follow and listen.
".... Ok." Words were few, but he shouldn't need to say much here, right? Just nod and it'll be all good and fine. Even as he turned his head with a little doubtful look given to the beings from earlier, it was rude to stare and again, he didn't want to seem too out of place or attract attention, so he'd leave them be in hopes of trusting Kallenger's words on them. "Uhh... So... I think I saw an opening? I- I mean, an entry, you know..." Fiddling of his fingers and eyes temporarily looking elsewhere before he was trying to look for what he meant, but seemed to lack the words to explain himself when he looked back. Well, he tried.
White Death, Cargo Bay
The girl's escape was anything but luck for Jack. While he had successfully grabbed the flailing girl without cause serious harm, the result was more like holding onto a wild animal. Doing his best to keep his hold on the girl, he suddenly exhales and almost completely lets go as one of the girls wild kicks landed a particularly critical hit.
Jack practically drops the girl and is left with the destroyed jacket. For the briefest of moments Jack had to simply let the girl run as he worked to catch his breathe and for the pain to subside. Dropping the jacket and continuing the chase, Jack rounds the corner to see the girl cornered by the same half junked droid he had seen before.
With her trapped between the two of them Jack was content to let her vent for a moment without much worry of her escaping. Listening to the girl, he got the small point that she did not like him calling her a 'kiddo'. Holding up a hand, he says in his nicest tone "Alright alright....you don't like being called kiddo. I'm sorry. Now lets try this again. Calm down and just come with me. Do that and I'll see that your arm is fixed...get you some food and then we can sit down and-" Jack was interrupted by the sudden activation of the droids, not to mention the new array of weapons pointed at his face.
Raising both hands where they could be easily seen, he says to the girl as he looks straight in her eyes "Both hands up Slowly....and not a word."
White Death, Crew Quarters
Asya was still outside of Jack's room when alarms began to blare. But just as quickly the alarms where silenced, followed by orders for her and Barney to head to the cargo bay. Taking the time to enter her room and grab her sidearm, Asya then heads to meet up with Barney so that he could guide her to the cargo bay, asking "What's the situation?" immediately upon seeing the robot.
Tora Station, Security
"Are you sure it's them?"
"Yes Ma'am. One unknown but really cute canine humanoid and One very fashion-less woman on the hallway eight camera. Tora control also pinged the Diplomat's codes several minutes ago."
Dee sighed as she heard the information "You should have told me when they first pinged it." Standing up from her chair in the security room, Dee looks at the redheaded woman sitting at the console beside her own "Visha, please pack up here and return to the ship. Wipe our data from the system too. We were never here." The girl, Visha, opened her mouth to ask a question when Dee spoke again as she made her way out of the room "The station management knows to forget. Now hurry along. You have much to do while I go and find Ms. Kallenger. We have so much to discuss." With orders given, Dee passes through the door and out into the crowded station proper, blending into the small crowds as she headed for hallway eight, hoping to still catch Kallenger there.
The girl's escape was anything but luck for Jack. While he had successfully grabbed the flailing girl without cause serious harm, the result was more like holding onto a wild animal. Doing his best to keep his hold on the girl, he suddenly exhales and almost completely lets go as one of the girls wild kicks landed a particularly critical hit.
Jack practically drops the girl and is left with the destroyed jacket. For the briefest of moments Jack had to simply let the girl run as he worked to catch his breathe and for the pain to subside. Dropping the jacket and continuing the chase, Jack rounds the corner to see the girl cornered by the same half junked droid he had seen before.
With her trapped between the two of them Jack was content to let her vent for a moment without much worry of her escaping. Listening to the girl, he got the small point that she did not like him calling her a 'kiddo'. Holding up a hand, he says in his nicest tone "Alright alright....you don't like being called kiddo. I'm sorry. Now lets try this again. Calm down and just come with me. Do that and I'll see that your arm is fixed...get you some food and then we can sit down and-" Jack was interrupted by the sudden activation of the droids, not to mention the new array of weapons pointed at his face.
Raising both hands where they could be easily seen, he says to the girl as he looks straight in her eyes "Both hands up Slowly....and not a word."
White Death, Crew Quarters
Asya was still outside of Jack's room when alarms began to blare. But just as quickly the alarms where silenced, followed by orders for her and Barney to head to the cargo bay. Taking the time to enter her room and grab her sidearm, Asya then heads to meet up with Barney so that he could guide her to the cargo bay, asking "What's the situation?" immediately upon seeing the robot.
Tora Station, Security
"Are you sure it's them?"
"Yes Ma'am. One unknown but really cute canine humanoid and One very fashion-less woman on the hallway eight camera. Tora control also pinged the Diplomat's codes several minutes ago."
Dee sighed as she heard the information "You should have told me when they first pinged it." Standing up from her chair in the security room, Dee looks at the redheaded woman sitting at the console beside her own "Visha, please pack up here and return to the ship. Wipe our data from the system too. We were never here." The girl, Visha, opened her mouth to ask a question when Dee spoke again as she made her way out of the room "The station management knows to forget. Now hurry along. You have much to do while I go and find Ms. Kallenger. We have so much to discuss." With orders given, Dee passes through the door and out into the crowded station proper, blending into the small crowds as she headed for hallway eight, hoping to still catch Kallenger there.
White Death, Cargo bay
For the girl, slipping out of her jacket was the best thing she could have done to get off from the slime ball as the slime held onto dear life on the jacket instead of her. As it went over her wound, it left a slimy seal that covered her wound, preventing it in bleeding anymore.
Upon the ground the ball of purple slime got enough fluid that it wanted and began to rumble a little as it slowly took shape. It began to rise from its balled state like a sculpture being created by clay. It wouldn’t be long till a 4ft purple version of Dietrich was created almost as a carbon copy as the blue one. This time around this slime was wearing the bloody jacket of its pervious owner. The slime looks around getting its barring as if it was just born.
It soon looked at the newcomer upon the ship and gives a wide innocent smile to her. It began to take its first steps towards the frighten woman walking like a toddler, kicking its feet up as it walk towards her with wide smile upon its face and its cute arms outstretched as it approaches her slowly unaware of the situation around it. It began to mouth the term “Mommy” as it slowly approaches the girl in clear fashion that the purple Dietrich was wanting a hug from her.
If the slime did get close enough, it trip on itself and hug her leg gently...easily can kicked off if one so chooses
As for the original blue one, hearing the alarm made it get up and walk out of the recreational area and began to explore unsupervised since Ellen was at the bridges monitoring the situation the best she can. Dietrich soon found Barney and Asya and just stuck to her side seeing what happening. The blue smile would merely smile as it would follow and listen on the two crewmen.
For the girl, slipping out of her jacket was the best thing she could have done to get off from the slime ball as the slime held onto dear life on the jacket instead of her. As it went over her wound, it left a slimy seal that covered her wound, preventing it in bleeding anymore.
Upon the ground the ball of purple slime got enough fluid that it wanted and began to rumble a little as it slowly took shape. It began to rise from its balled state like a sculpture being created by clay. It wouldn’t be long till a 4ft purple version of Dietrich was created almost as a carbon copy as the blue one. This time around this slime was wearing the bloody jacket of its pervious owner. The slime looks around getting its barring as if it was just born.
It soon looked at the newcomer upon the ship and gives a wide innocent smile to her. It began to take its first steps towards the frighten woman walking like a toddler, kicking its feet up as it walk towards her with wide smile upon its face and its cute arms outstretched as it approaches her slowly unaware of the situation around it. It began to mouth the term “Mommy” as it slowly approaches the girl in clear fashion that the purple Dietrich was wanting a hug from her.
If the slime did get close enough, it trip on itself and hug her leg gently...easily can kicked off if one so chooses
As for the original blue one, hearing the alarm made it get up and walk out of the recreational area and began to explore unsupervised since Ellen was at the bridges monitoring the situation the best she can. Dietrich soon found Barney and Asya and just stuck to her side seeing what happening. The blue smile would merely smile as it would follow and listen on the two crewmen.
Tora Station
The pair’s conversation proceeded smoothly as they walked along. To her friend’s suggestion that the station was like a self-contained town in itself, Royanna nodded. ”To put it into perspective, think of space like a gigantic ocean. Stations like this are like small, inhabited islands, while planets are like larger continents.” She explained helpfully, Briefly, the Agent considered suggesting that if she knew more about the canid’s home planet, she could make a better comparison - but she decided against it. After all, he had yet to seem overly willing to discuss at length the planet he had only passingly referred to as ’Earth’.
She wasn’t even quite certain as to how he had gotten to Earth IV in the first place - since it was clearly not his home, despite the similar name. If only they could have talked more with that unit of his before getting kicked off by the infuriating Kampfer…
As their talk progressed further and Christofer mentioned the possibility of purchasing whatever food they knew how to cook, Roy faltered briefly. Beyond instant noodles and things from cans, the young woman didn’t have a clue on how to cook anything.
Suddenly feeling somewhat ashamed by this fact, she nodded and said awkwardly; ”Uh- yes. That.” Then, more naturally ”I figured we’d just get something out though. For now. The trip back to Ardella won’t be long enough to warrant buying supplies.”
This was contradictory to the idea of the Diplomat serving as her future base of operations. It had not been a conscious decision - but having found the historic relic, it seemed there was no plausible alternative and she had already been thinking of the old boat as ‘home’. Regardless, depending on how things went when they did finish on Ardella, there would be other opportunities to fully stock the ship.
”But...if you want to get something to prepare yourself, you’re perfectly welcome to.” She added, looking off somewhere toward the ceiling. If Christofer was going to go buying something that couldn’t just be heated up in the microwave-emitter then it would be on him to work out the chemistry of it.
Some moments later, following a rather disproportionate warning, Royanna found that she was pleasantly surprised at the boy’s level-headedness regarding the various non-humans going about their business on the station. It was nice to see him keeping his cool - and despite feeling a tad stupid for having assumed otherwise, Roy gave that slight, almost contemptuous smirk which from her constituted the closest thing she could manage to a genuine, encouraging smile.
At that exact moment, something out of an Eldritch nightmare went lumbering by behind her, stomping along on elephant-like legs with several writhing tentacles dangling from the general area of its terrible, thumb-like head-region. It stomped by without so much as a passing glance at the pair, disappearing around a corner.
Sensing the presence of this creature that was both a vision of abominable horror and a perfect example of Imperial civility, Roy’s almost-smirk tightened and she held it at all costs, keeping eyes locked on Christofer’s in a manner that seemed to convey the insistence that he not look away. Roy herself was, of course, not remotely disturbed by the creature, who they would doubtless never see again. But to have such a fellow go by just as she was insisting that there was nothing to be afraid of risked melting that fact back into the realm of empty consolation.
Once the big guy had gone, the Agent held her friend’s eyes for another moment before relaxing back into her usual state of grumpy indifference. The conversation resumed as if nothing had happened - since, after all, really nothing had happened.
Not that things were going to make sense, of course. Hearing the kid start muttering timidly about an ‘opening’ and fidgeting with his fingers, Roy frowned. ”An...opening?” She repeated quietly, the question evident in her tone. Then she followed his eyes. Several storefronts lined the hallway. ’Marquis Crypto-Jewelers” boasted windows that glittered with…stuff. Mo-Chuck & Dynamo appeared to sell some kind of hardware. Galfarahan Shores was a restaurant, with several sleek bistro tables outside.
She looked back to him, raising an eyebrow. ”A…door?” she suggested tentatively, probably sounding a lot more condescending than she meant to. Again, she looked back in that direction, blinking as the obvious occurred to her at last. ”Oh, you mean that restaurant.” She verified, looking back to him, searching for a sign amidst his fidgeting to tip her off before continuing with a shake of the head. ”I...don’t think you’d like Galfarahanian food. It doesn’t take too well to carbon-based digestive tracts.” she said frankly.
Most food in the Galaxy was more or less universal. The biology of most life was similar enough, by some chance, to leave little risk of ingesting incompatible nutrients. For all her inability to handle basic social interactions and her overall militaristic outlook, Royanna was ‘street-wise’ enough to know what kind of food to keep away from.
”It won’t hurt you, but it’s not good for you either.” She added, then nodded her head in the general direction of ‘down the hall’. ”Let’s head that way. I think there’s a couple more restaurants around the corner there.”
And, as it happened, the Agent was correct. In fact, immediately after rounding the corner that lead to Hallway 8-B (Not that anyone really paid any attention to those numbers unless they were giving directions) Roy’s face lit up with the closest thing to ‘delight’ that she was capable of. (Which was, as usual, barely enough of an expression to suggest outwardly anything but a lack of distaste.)
The hallway here was comparatively narrow, and more densely built - given that it was one of several offshoots from hallway 8 that needled through the businesses to either side, this was to be expected. Rather than the broad, open floorplan of a shopping mall’s central atrium, this hallway looked more like the interior of a subway station - while still maintaining the universal atmosphere of honest retail. It was not cramped, but did feel generally smaller.
Royanna proceeded directly to the object of her almost-delight, which appeared to be a long bar situated between two other businesses. There was no door, with stools built into the hallway floor and the establishment’s ‘interior’ consisting only of the kitchen. Strips of blue neon lighting bathed the metallic bar in a soft, cyan glow and little paper decorations hung from the section of overhead wall that separated customers from staff, making it so that only while seated at the bar could a patron actually look up to face the one standing behind the counter.
Above it all was the backlit image of a fierce, white dragon accompanied by the re glowing words ”Off-White Dragon Noodle Bar”.
”This, you’ll like.” Roy said confidently, making her way unhurriedly toward the place, taking a seat far to one end of the bar. They were the only two customers at the moment, it seemed.
Gesturing vaguely for Christofer to take a seat on the stool beside her own, Roy leaned on the bar as a gaunt, older man looked up from his cutting board expectantly. He appeared to be human, but for a very strange bone structure, and he smiled broadly with a row of too-sharp teeth at his customers.
The scent of fresh garlic and buckwheat wafted forth from behind the bar, with the aroma of many exotic, yet familiar spices adding to the ensamble to create a tantalizing combination. ”Number four and a PG Cola.” Royanna said to the man, then nodding toward Christofer and adding ”He’ll have the same.” If, by some chance, Chrostofer had concerns on this matter, she would dispel them distractedly by furthering ”Don’t worry, you’ll like it. I eat here all the time.” A graphic on the side wall indicated other Off White Dragon Noodle Bars at various locations throughout the galactic area. Apparently they had chain restaurants in space, too.
The food came quickly - first in the form of two glass bottles containing a very familiar molasses-colored, carbonated beverage that fizzed a little when the tab was popped. Some minutes later, it was followed by two large, steaming bowls filled with a succulent smelling broth, bountiful thick noodles resembling udon, and a plethora of vegetables and meats that would look and taste relatively familiar, despite being nothing like what a one-worlder such as Christofer would have known before. Instead of utensils, there was a pair of wooden sticks that were squared at one end, and tapered to a thin cylindrical shape at the other sticking out of the food and leaning against the edge of the bowl.
Not hesitating for a moment, Royanna plucked up the sticks holding them rather like a double-pencil and dug in with fervor.
One bite of the scalding food had her frozen though, eyes wide as she tried desperately not to let on that she had made such a stupid mistake. With great effort, she gulped down the scalding mouthful then took a drink, pretending indignantly as if nothing had happened at all, muttering almost inaudibly ”Careful, it’s hot.”
Maltese Station
Amused by the hostility of his friends, it was Ketin Clarke alone among the trio that seemed utterly oblivious to the clearly skeevy nature of the young man and his prospects. By all accounts he trusted the guy implicitly and simply would not have been able to comprehend his pals’ animosity...if he had even been aware of it.
Kete was about to say something else stupid, when he was interrupted by the sound of a door slamming open from somewhere behind the casino man. From within came storming a short, stocky man with a round face and dark, oriental features. Narrow eyes beneath short, slicked black hair looked quite angry.
”You! What I tell you! No selling at my shop!” The man barked in a harsh, stilted accent. He pointed an accusatory finger at the young man, them made wild, flailing ’go away’ gestures with his hand. ”Take you casino bo’@#$% somewhere else! Not here! Go! Go now! Sleazy men, you! Shoo!”
Blinking at the angry man, Ketin leaned back in his chair - only to lean too far and tip over backwards, resulting in a chain reaction as the chair fell into the decorative fence behind it. Kete went rolling about on the floor and, in an attempt to scramble back to his feet, proceeded to knock over several of the various plants situated nearby.
At last though, he was able to hop to his feet, beaming his most charming smile and, again, apparently oblivious to the small destruction he had just caused.
”Well I guess we’d better get goin’, huh? No need to bother the nice tea-guy, nope nope~ So, which way was that fancy casino of yours again~?” he babbled cheerfully, not hesitating to shove hands in pockets and go strolling away - coincidentally in the very direction the casino man had earlier indicated. He waved enthusiastically as he went, not looking back. ”Bye Tea-Guy, thanks for the tea! It was super good!” He called, singsong.
The stocky, oriental tea-guy stood scowling at the others - particularly the suited guy - until they inevitably followed their orange-haired friend, with the pale, sandy haired young man peering inoffensively out from the doorway.
Once he was a fair distance from the tea shop, Ketin stopped, making a point of looking with feigned interest at nothing in particular until the others caught up. Immediately, he just happened to bump hips into the apparent proprietor of the apparently fabled New Vegas - whatever a ’vegas’ was.
”Sooo, y’gonna show us around, yeah~?” He drawled coyly, giving a charming look up at the suited individual and letting his tail swish lazily against his leg.
TheKoolest Boat U Know
”Yup, that’s her alright.” Ty said with a slow nod. He had walked along as the loremaster’s story began, feeling remarkably small wedged in between his two hulking companions. Being of a totally average height usually allowed him to avoid such uncomfortable scenarios.
”She’s maybe not as cold-hearted as she once was.” Ty mused thoughtfully, once the story had concluded, switching gears to relate their own tale in a more concise fashion. He, too sat in one of the chairs situated around the common area. ”We met her in an old research station on a planet called Earth IV. Got away just as the place was caving in by hopping aboard a dropship that was locked on a pre-programmed route. Life support started to fail before we got wherever it was supposed to go though...We made a heck of a team getting out of that mess.” He decided to leave out the part where they had to ’commandeer’ the ship that ‘rescued’ them. None of the crew liked thinking about that part.
Rai and Wyr entered then, with the former continuing on to descend the ramp and presumably make for the glorified broom closet. Ty nodded to both of them as he went on. ”Since then we’ve been working with her to build up some strength and make a name for ourselves. The idea is to one day unite the Galaxy under Ningo, but...I think we’ll be long dead when that day comes.” He smiled in good humor. After all, it was the end goal that really mattered to them - just a life with something worth fighting for.
”Regardless, she’s a good leader. We wouldn’t fight for someone who is totally devoid of warmth, I think…”
The words drifted off, and Ty looked thoughtful for a moment, deciding whether or not to voice some particular thought. In the end, he leaned forward, resting forearms on knees. He looked with sobriety at Kilwen and spoke frankly. ”So, you’re one of the Old Lords.” He said, presumptively. ”That, or you just made up a very convincing fiction. If I recall correctly, I saw your name in the files aboard the Skadi connected with...Negotiation? Diplomacy?” He paused briefly, searching Kilwen’s face for confirmation. ”One of the oldest, if I remember right. Part of that ‘old regime’.” Another pause, then he leaned back and took on a more contemplative tone. ”So, what are the odds that you just happened to pop out right on our doorstep?” He did not sound accusatory - in fact, even he wasn’t exactly certain what he was implying.
It was then that, with a start, he remembered Wyr standing there in the threshold. ”Oh! Morning. Our mutual friend is feeling better, I hope?” He gestured back toward Kilwen. ”This is Kilwen...an old friend of the Boss’.”
Sands was sitting alone, leaning against the door to the glorified broom closet prison that both of the Qetans had been unceremoniously shoved into the night before. He had been listening in as best he could to the newcomer’s story, but only managed to hear scraps of it. When Rai rounded the corner he was more than glad for the interruption of his monotony. He waved. ”Hey. Here to have a word with our honored guests, I assume? We haven’t opened the door all night so...hopefully they haven’t used intergalactic voodoo to disappear or something…”
Should Rai request it, Sands would proceed to hop sorely to his feet, then tap the little button beside the door that would swing it slightly outward, then retract it into the wall. He would be standing at the ready in case they were jumped…
The Ark of Chyll
Wh- huh? I gotta’ do a monologue every time? Great Space, give a guy a break!
The only sound in the silence induced by the tension of the oncoming brawl was that of the reptoid’s shirt being majestically torn off his muscular body. Following a long, stifling moment, it was further broken with the low, deadpan catcall-whistle from the Detective.
This served to only further irritate the already furious man, red in his pudgy face and bulky chest heaving with every heavy breath. ”WhAt Is LiBeRaL?” the fat man mocked childishly, repeating the reptoid’s words back as if the cutting-edge of such wit would drive a killing blow in itself. He shifted from foot to foot, flexing his bulky, mechanical arm. ”Ain’t no slimy-ass snake gone’ wear mah’ hat!” He growled.
Meanwhile, in what was surely not at all a response to Talis’ suggestion that the ‘smoking guy’ should pay for drinks, Detective Clégg casually let the cigarette fall into his drink, where it clinked and looked more like a stirrer than a proper cancer-stick. ”Smoking? Who’s smoking?” He said with feigned ignorance, looking around halfheartedly. Then, with an easy shrug, he suggested ”Oh well. My guess is that guy’s gonna’ be payin’ for drinks in a minute, whether he likes it or not.” He gestured with his drinking hand at the fat man with his baseball cap and clunky mechanical arm.
Hearing sounds from behind though, the Detective’s attention was grabbed and he turned with some haste, looking a tad distressed. ”Heyhey woah, eeeasy there Buggs.” He said leaning over to place a hand atop the barrel of the big rifle that Jacobo was suddenly wielding. ”No need to go spittin’ lead now. You take a shot and this whole thing’s gonna’ get outta’ control real fast, yeah?”
The old Detective liked a good bar brawl as much as the next guy, but he also knew that the minute one man pulled a gun was the beginning of the end. Too many times it had turned simple fights into deadly shootouts, and there were too many innocent people in the bar to risk getting into that sort of trouble.
He was about to say something else when the angry roar from behind him sent the man whirling around again to watch as the fat man lunged toward Shashi, aiming a clumsy, but devastatingly forceful punch with his hydraulic arm in the general direction of his opponent’s face...
The White Death
It all happened too fast - a dreamlike slow-motion that rocketed forward through time with inhuman speed.
Is this what it all had been for?
Everything she had gone through, everything she had survived - all for this?
She was no stranger to the unfairness of life. It didn’t matter what she had done up to this point. Her lot was her lot and she would accept that, just like she had always done - but it didn’t mean she was going down easy.
First it was the one-armed robot, forcing her to double back down the narrow corridor of crates. Then it was the old man, who had recovered from her panicked escape and was standing there placatingly in a way that made her want to sock him in the face. He was talking to her like she was some kind of unstable child - some little nutcase who needed to be talked down from a tantrum. She despised him - and the venomous glare she set on him was more than potent enough to get that across.
For a long moment, it was a standoff between the two of them - the robot behind her forgotten. Breathing heavily, she stood at the ready, looking about to pounce in any direction except that there was nowhere to go. Her fists were balled and eyes locked on the old man’s. Pointedly, she spit in the man’s direction, putting a pinkish stain on his boot.
And then, something else appeared, forcing the girl to break the tense eye contact for just a second, flicking them down to the floor at the old man’s feet. A toddling purple abomination. A note of fear flitted across the girl’s face. She tried to ignore it, tried to look back to the man - but it was getting closer.
Three enemies now - and the one that should have looked the most harmless was by a fair margian the most disconcerting. It grew closer, closer still. She continued to try staring the man down - only to yelp loudly in barely disguised terror and shock as the thing stumbled into her leg. Instinctively she kicked it off with a powerful swing. The movement was enough to catch a glimpse of the robot behind her again, reminding her of the machine’s presence.
She was thinking fast, but her thoughts were going nowhere. Cyclic, dreamlike nonsense. The fact that her plight was utterly hopeless refused to compute, yet simultaneously she wasn’t stupid enough to try and lie to herself.
Then there were robots. Dozens of them, it seemed. Thousands? Tens of thousands? She didn’t even remember their arrival.
A hand on her shoulder. She yelped again, flailing in a knee-jerk reaction and finding herself backed up against one of the crate-walls, now cornered even more than she had been. It felt so much worse, all of them being so close…
She hadn’t said a word since the initial torrent of curses and threats had sputtered off.
The old man put up his hands. He told her to do the same. She met his eyes again.
And this time, there was a very different expression in the girl’s steely grey orbs. They shimmered, but not necessarily with tears. A note of desperate fear tinged the hate. There was utter determination. Finality.
It was the expression of someone about to jump off a bridge just to spite the onlookers.
That moment seemed to last an eternity. She had decided to do something she was not going to like - something that terrified her to the core - but she was going to do it.
But...do what?
At long last, the girl moved. Hands went to the belt of her old camouflage army fatigue pants, darting with the speed of a practiced gunman - but found nothing. Her eyes widened fractionally and a sharper note of fear invaded her dirty face. Frantically, she patted at the waist and pockets, but found nothing.
And lastly, recognition and desolation fell over her like a wet blanket as she glanced to where her jacket was, over where she had kicked the creature wearing it. Whatever she had been hoping to grab in that last ditch effort - it was in the jacket. She was done.
The fight all but drained out of the girl in an instant. Despair would not take over, but resignation would.
Shaking visibly, flinching despite herself with every movement in her vicinity, the girl slowly, weakly raised her hands to either side, gritted her teeth, and tried with only marginal success to keep the panic at bay.
The pair’s conversation proceeded smoothly as they walked along. To her friend’s suggestion that the station was like a self-contained town in itself, Royanna nodded. ”To put it into perspective, think of space like a gigantic ocean. Stations like this are like small, inhabited islands, while planets are like larger continents.” She explained helpfully, Briefly, the Agent considered suggesting that if she knew more about the canid’s home planet, she could make a better comparison - but she decided against it. After all, he had yet to seem overly willing to discuss at length the planet he had only passingly referred to as ’Earth’.
She wasn’t even quite certain as to how he had gotten to Earth IV in the first place - since it was clearly not his home, despite the similar name. If only they could have talked more with that unit of his before getting kicked off by the infuriating Kampfer…
As their talk progressed further and Christofer mentioned the possibility of purchasing whatever food they knew how to cook, Roy faltered briefly. Beyond instant noodles and things from cans, the young woman didn’t have a clue on how to cook anything.
Suddenly feeling somewhat ashamed by this fact, she nodded and said awkwardly; ”Uh- yes. That.” Then, more naturally ”I figured we’d just get something out though. For now. The trip back to Ardella won’t be long enough to warrant buying supplies.”
This was contradictory to the idea of the Diplomat serving as her future base of operations. It had not been a conscious decision - but having found the historic relic, it seemed there was no plausible alternative and she had already been thinking of the old boat as ‘home’. Regardless, depending on how things went when they did finish on Ardella, there would be other opportunities to fully stock the ship.
”But...if you want to get something to prepare yourself, you’re perfectly welcome to.” She added, looking off somewhere toward the ceiling. If Christofer was going to go buying something that couldn’t just be heated up in the microwave-emitter then it would be on him to work out the chemistry of it.
Some moments later, following a rather disproportionate warning, Royanna found that she was pleasantly surprised at the boy’s level-headedness regarding the various non-humans going about their business on the station. It was nice to see him keeping his cool - and despite feeling a tad stupid for having assumed otherwise, Roy gave that slight, almost contemptuous smirk which from her constituted the closest thing she could manage to a genuine, encouraging smile.
At that exact moment, something out of an Eldritch nightmare went lumbering by behind her, stomping along on elephant-like legs with several writhing tentacles dangling from the general area of its terrible, thumb-like head-region. It stomped by without so much as a passing glance at the pair, disappearing around a corner.
Sensing the presence of this creature that was both a vision of abominable horror and a perfect example of Imperial civility, Roy’s almost-smirk tightened and she held it at all costs, keeping eyes locked on Christofer’s in a manner that seemed to convey the insistence that he not look away. Roy herself was, of course, not remotely disturbed by the creature, who they would doubtless never see again. But to have such a fellow go by just as she was insisting that there was nothing to be afraid of risked melting that fact back into the realm of empty consolation.
Once the big guy had gone, the Agent held her friend’s eyes for another moment before relaxing back into her usual state of grumpy indifference. The conversation resumed as if nothing had happened - since, after all, really nothing had happened.
Not that things were going to make sense, of course. Hearing the kid start muttering timidly about an ‘opening’ and fidgeting with his fingers, Roy frowned. ”An...opening?” She repeated quietly, the question evident in her tone. Then she followed his eyes. Several storefronts lined the hallway. ’Marquis Crypto-Jewelers” boasted windows that glittered with…stuff. Mo-Chuck & Dynamo appeared to sell some kind of hardware. Galfarahan Shores was a restaurant, with several sleek bistro tables outside.
She looked back to him, raising an eyebrow. ”A…door?” she suggested tentatively, probably sounding a lot more condescending than she meant to. Again, she looked back in that direction, blinking as the obvious occurred to her at last. ”Oh, you mean that restaurant.” She verified, looking back to him, searching for a sign amidst his fidgeting to tip her off before continuing with a shake of the head. ”I...don’t think you’d like Galfarahanian food. It doesn’t take too well to carbon-based digestive tracts.” she said frankly.
Most food in the Galaxy was more or less universal. The biology of most life was similar enough, by some chance, to leave little risk of ingesting incompatible nutrients. For all her inability to handle basic social interactions and her overall militaristic outlook, Royanna was ‘street-wise’ enough to know what kind of food to keep away from.
”It won’t hurt you, but it’s not good for you either.” She added, then nodded her head in the general direction of ‘down the hall’. ”Let’s head that way. I think there’s a couple more restaurants around the corner there.”
And, as it happened, the Agent was correct. In fact, immediately after rounding the corner that lead to Hallway 8-B (Not that anyone really paid any attention to those numbers unless they were giving directions) Roy’s face lit up with the closest thing to ‘delight’ that she was capable of. (Which was, as usual, barely enough of an expression to suggest outwardly anything but a lack of distaste.)
The hallway here was comparatively narrow, and more densely built - given that it was one of several offshoots from hallway 8 that needled through the businesses to either side, this was to be expected. Rather than the broad, open floorplan of a shopping mall’s central atrium, this hallway looked more like the interior of a subway station - while still maintaining the universal atmosphere of honest retail. It was not cramped, but did feel generally smaller.
Royanna proceeded directly to the object of her almost-delight, which appeared to be a long bar situated between two other businesses. There was no door, with stools built into the hallway floor and the establishment’s ‘interior’ consisting only of the kitchen. Strips of blue neon lighting bathed the metallic bar in a soft, cyan glow and little paper decorations hung from the section of overhead wall that separated customers from staff, making it so that only while seated at the bar could a patron actually look up to face the one standing behind the counter.
Above it all was the backlit image of a fierce, white dragon accompanied by the re glowing words ”Off-White Dragon Noodle Bar”.
”This, you’ll like.” Roy said confidently, making her way unhurriedly toward the place, taking a seat far to one end of the bar. They were the only two customers at the moment, it seemed.
Gesturing vaguely for Christofer to take a seat on the stool beside her own, Roy leaned on the bar as a gaunt, older man looked up from his cutting board expectantly. He appeared to be human, but for a very strange bone structure, and he smiled broadly with a row of too-sharp teeth at his customers.
The scent of fresh garlic and buckwheat wafted forth from behind the bar, with the aroma of many exotic, yet familiar spices adding to the ensamble to create a tantalizing combination. ”Number four and a PG Cola.” Royanna said to the man, then nodding toward Christofer and adding ”He’ll have the same.” If, by some chance, Chrostofer had concerns on this matter, she would dispel them distractedly by furthering ”Don’t worry, you’ll like it. I eat here all the time.” A graphic on the side wall indicated other Off White Dragon Noodle Bars at various locations throughout the galactic area. Apparently they had chain restaurants in space, too.
The food came quickly - first in the form of two glass bottles containing a very familiar molasses-colored, carbonated beverage that fizzed a little when the tab was popped. Some minutes later, it was followed by two large, steaming bowls filled with a succulent smelling broth, bountiful thick noodles resembling udon, and a plethora of vegetables and meats that would look and taste relatively familiar, despite being nothing like what a one-worlder such as Christofer would have known before. Instead of utensils, there was a pair of wooden sticks that were squared at one end, and tapered to a thin cylindrical shape at the other sticking out of the food and leaning against the edge of the bowl.
Not hesitating for a moment, Royanna plucked up the sticks holding them rather like a double-pencil and dug in with fervor.
One bite of the scalding food had her frozen though, eyes wide as she tried desperately not to let on that she had made such a stupid mistake. With great effort, she gulped down the scalding mouthful then took a drink, pretending indignantly as if nothing had happened at all, muttering almost inaudibly ”Careful, it’s hot.”
Maltese Station
Amused by the hostility of his friends, it was Ketin Clarke alone among the trio that seemed utterly oblivious to the clearly skeevy nature of the young man and his prospects. By all accounts he trusted the guy implicitly and simply would not have been able to comprehend his pals’ animosity...if he had even been aware of it.
Kete was about to say something else stupid, when he was interrupted by the sound of a door slamming open from somewhere behind the casino man. From within came storming a short, stocky man with a round face and dark, oriental features. Narrow eyes beneath short, slicked black hair looked quite angry.
”You! What I tell you! No selling at my shop!” The man barked in a harsh, stilted accent. He pointed an accusatory finger at the young man, them made wild, flailing ’go away’ gestures with his hand. ”Take you casino bo’@#$% somewhere else! Not here! Go! Go now! Sleazy men, you! Shoo!”
Blinking at the angry man, Ketin leaned back in his chair - only to lean too far and tip over backwards, resulting in a chain reaction as the chair fell into the decorative fence behind it. Kete went rolling about on the floor and, in an attempt to scramble back to his feet, proceeded to knock over several of the various plants situated nearby.
At last though, he was able to hop to his feet, beaming his most charming smile and, again, apparently oblivious to the small destruction he had just caused.
”Well I guess we’d better get goin’, huh? No need to bother the nice tea-guy, nope nope~ So, which way was that fancy casino of yours again~?” he babbled cheerfully, not hesitating to shove hands in pockets and go strolling away - coincidentally in the very direction the casino man had earlier indicated. He waved enthusiastically as he went, not looking back. ”Bye Tea-Guy, thanks for the tea! It was super good!” He called, singsong.
The stocky, oriental tea-guy stood scowling at the others - particularly the suited guy - until they inevitably followed their orange-haired friend, with the pale, sandy haired young man peering inoffensively out from the doorway.
Once he was a fair distance from the tea shop, Ketin stopped, making a point of looking with feigned interest at nothing in particular until the others caught up. Immediately, he just happened to bump hips into the apparent proprietor of the apparently fabled New Vegas - whatever a ’vegas’ was.
”Sooo, y’gonna show us around, yeah~?” He drawled coyly, giving a charming look up at the suited individual and letting his tail swish lazily against his leg.
TheKoolest Boat U Know
”Yup, that’s her alright.” Ty said with a slow nod. He had walked along as the loremaster’s story began, feeling remarkably small wedged in between his two hulking companions. Being of a totally average height usually allowed him to avoid such uncomfortable scenarios.
”She’s maybe not as cold-hearted as she once was.” Ty mused thoughtfully, once the story had concluded, switching gears to relate their own tale in a more concise fashion. He, too sat in one of the chairs situated around the common area. ”We met her in an old research station on a planet called Earth IV. Got away just as the place was caving in by hopping aboard a dropship that was locked on a pre-programmed route. Life support started to fail before we got wherever it was supposed to go though...We made a heck of a team getting out of that mess.” He decided to leave out the part where they had to ’commandeer’ the ship that ‘rescued’ them. None of the crew liked thinking about that part.
Rai and Wyr entered then, with the former continuing on to descend the ramp and presumably make for the glorified broom closet. Ty nodded to both of them as he went on. ”Since then we’ve been working with her to build up some strength and make a name for ourselves. The idea is to one day unite the Galaxy under Ningo, but...I think we’ll be long dead when that day comes.” He smiled in good humor. After all, it was the end goal that really mattered to them - just a life with something worth fighting for.
”Regardless, she’s a good leader. We wouldn’t fight for someone who is totally devoid of warmth, I think…”
The words drifted off, and Ty looked thoughtful for a moment, deciding whether or not to voice some particular thought. In the end, he leaned forward, resting forearms on knees. He looked with sobriety at Kilwen and spoke frankly. ”So, you’re one of the Old Lords.” He said, presumptively. ”That, or you just made up a very convincing fiction. If I recall correctly, I saw your name in the files aboard the Skadi connected with...Negotiation? Diplomacy?” He paused briefly, searching Kilwen’s face for confirmation. ”One of the oldest, if I remember right. Part of that ‘old regime’.” Another pause, then he leaned back and took on a more contemplative tone. ”So, what are the odds that you just happened to pop out right on our doorstep?” He did not sound accusatory - in fact, even he wasn’t exactly certain what he was implying.
It was then that, with a start, he remembered Wyr standing there in the threshold. ”Oh! Morning. Our mutual friend is feeling better, I hope?” He gestured back toward Kilwen. ”This is Kilwen...an old friend of the Boss’.”
Sands was sitting alone, leaning against the door to the glorified broom closet prison that both of the Qetans had been unceremoniously shoved into the night before. He had been listening in as best he could to the newcomer’s story, but only managed to hear scraps of it. When Rai rounded the corner he was more than glad for the interruption of his monotony. He waved. ”Hey. Here to have a word with our honored guests, I assume? We haven’t opened the door all night so...hopefully they haven’t used intergalactic voodoo to disappear or something…”
Should Rai request it, Sands would proceed to hop sorely to his feet, then tap the little button beside the door that would swing it slightly outward, then retract it into the wall. He would be standing at the ready in case they were jumped…
The Ark of Chyll
Wh- huh? I gotta’ do a monologue every time? Great Space, give a guy a break!
The only sound in the silence induced by the tension of the oncoming brawl was that of the reptoid’s shirt being majestically torn off his muscular body. Following a long, stifling moment, it was further broken with the low, deadpan catcall-whistle from the Detective.
This served to only further irritate the already furious man, red in his pudgy face and bulky chest heaving with every heavy breath. ”WhAt Is LiBeRaL?” the fat man mocked childishly, repeating the reptoid’s words back as if the cutting-edge of such wit would drive a killing blow in itself. He shifted from foot to foot, flexing his bulky, mechanical arm. ”Ain’t no slimy-ass snake gone’ wear mah’ hat!” He growled.
Meanwhile, in what was surely not at all a response to Talis’ suggestion that the ‘smoking guy’ should pay for drinks, Detective Clégg casually let the cigarette fall into his drink, where it clinked and looked more like a stirrer than a proper cancer-stick. ”Smoking? Who’s smoking?” He said with feigned ignorance, looking around halfheartedly. Then, with an easy shrug, he suggested ”Oh well. My guess is that guy’s gonna’ be payin’ for drinks in a minute, whether he likes it or not.” He gestured with his drinking hand at the fat man with his baseball cap and clunky mechanical arm.
Hearing sounds from behind though, the Detective’s attention was grabbed and he turned with some haste, looking a tad distressed. ”Heyhey woah, eeeasy there Buggs.” He said leaning over to place a hand atop the barrel of the big rifle that Jacobo was suddenly wielding. ”No need to go spittin’ lead now. You take a shot and this whole thing’s gonna’ get outta’ control real fast, yeah?”
The old Detective liked a good bar brawl as much as the next guy, but he also knew that the minute one man pulled a gun was the beginning of the end. Too many times it had turned simple fights into deadly shootouts, and there were too many innocent people in the bar to risk getting into that sort of trouble.
He was about to say something else when the angry roar from behind him sent the man whirling around again to watch as the fat man lunged toward Shashi, aiming a clumsy, but devastatingly forceful punch with his hydraulic arm in the general direction of his opponent’s face...
The White Death
It all happened too fast - a dreamlike slow-motion that rocketed forward through time with inhuman speed.
Is this what it all had been for?
Everything she had gone through, everything she had survived - all for this?
She was no stranger to the unfairness of life. It didn’t matter what she had done up to this point. Her lot was her lot and she would accept that, just like she had always done - but it didn’t mean she was going down easy.
First it was the one-armed robot, forcing her to double back down the narrow corridor of crates. Then it was the old man, who had recovered from her panicked escape and was standing there placatingly in a way that made her want to sock him in the face. He was talking to her like she was some kind of unstable child - some little nutcase who needed to be talked down from a tantrum. She despised him - and the venomous glare she set on him was more than potent enough to get that across.
For a long moment, it was a standoff between the two of them - the robot behind her forgotten. Breathing heavily, she stood at the ready, looking about to pounce in any direction except that there was nowhere to go. Her fists were balled and eyes locked on the old man’s. Pointedly, she spit in the man’s direction, putting a pinkish stain on his boot.
And then, something else appeared, forcing the girl to break the tense eye contact for just a second, flicking them down to the floor at the old man’s feet. A toddling purple abomination. A note of fear flitted across the girl’s face. She tried to ignore it, tried to look back to the man - but it was getting closer.
Three enemies now - and the one that should have looked the most harmless was by a fair margian the most disconcerting. It grew closer, closer still. She continued to try staring the man down - only to yelp loudly in barely disguised terror and shock as the thing stumbled into her leg. Instinctively she kicked it off with a powerful swing. The movement was enough to catch a glimpse of the robot behind her again, reminding her of the machine’s presence.
She was thinking fast, but her thoughts were going nowhere. Cyclic, dreamlike nonsense. The fact that her plight was utterly hopeless refused to compute, yet simultaneously she wasn’t stupid enough to try and lie to herself.
Then there were robots. Dozens of them, it seemed. Thousands? Tens of thousands? She didn’t even remember their arrival.
A hand on her shoulder. She yelped again, flailing in a knee-jerk reaction and finding herself backed up against one of the crate-walls, now cornered even more than she had been. It felt so much worse, all of them being so close…
She hadn’t said a word since the initial torrent of curses and threats had sputtered off.
The old man put up his hands. He told her to do the same. She met his eyes again.
And this time, there was a very different expression in the girl’s steely grey orbs. They shimmered, but not necessarily with tears. A note of desperate fear tinged the hate. There was utter determination. Finality.
It was the expression of someone about to jump off a bridge just to spite the onlookers.
That moment seemed to last an eternity. She had decided to do something she was not going to like - something that terrified her to the core - but she was going to do it.
But...do what?
At long last, the girl moved. Hands went to the belt of her old camouflage army fatigue pants, darting with the speed of a practiced gunman - but found nothing. Her eyes widened fractionally and a sharper note of fear invaded her dirty face. Frantically, she patted at the waist and pockets, but found nothing.
And lastly, recognition and desolation fell over her like a wet blanket as she glanced to where her jacket was, over where she had kicked the creature wearing it. Whatever she had been hoping to grab in that last ditch effort - it was in the jacket. She was done.
The fight all but drained out of the girl in an instant. Despair would not take over, but resignation would.
Shaking visibly, flinching despite herself with every movement in her vicinity, the girl slowly, weakly raised her hands to either side, gritted her teeth, and tried with only marginal success to keep the panic at bay.
The Koolest Boat U Know
Wyr blinked, then stood tall. Yet another newcomer, it seemed. That would explain the noise.
"Lord Kilwen," she said, head tilting down in a slight bow. She still had no idea how influential- or indeed, how powerful and significant- these 'lords' were, but a typical move of successful negotiations was acknowledgement of titles.
She then turned to Ty, giving him a tiny nod. "We had a pleasant rest," she responded. "Although Vaxur and Rin may stay in the cot for a while longer. They," she paused, then let out a fond, exasperated sigh. "They have been away from each other for too long."
Thus, Vaxur would be clingy and not let the young Nyran go- even if he was awake and ready to leave the room. She chuckled inwardly at the thought.
She sobered, though, as she looked again at the other man. "I too hope that you and your crew have found rest in the hours of inactivity," she said, eyes flicking from their new lord guest and back to Ty.
Rai raised a tentative hand, smiling weakly. "Yo." A pause, then: "I think they're still there, since you confiscated Reqti's staff. I- well," they flushed, rubbing the back of their head. "Yes, I'm to have a word," they said. "But only if they're awake. So... I'll take a peek in, I suppose."
Sands seemed eager to relieve his boredom, even with something as mundane as opening a door. As the door retracted, Rai took a silent step inside the tiny... well... closet-room.
And there was someone already awake.
Reqti's golden eyes tracked Rai's every movement, hand laid over Tahil's head pillowed in his lap. When Rai made to sit down, cross-legged and a foot away, he released the tension in his shoulders, leaning his head against the wall.
His eyes never left Rai's form.
"You can close the door, if you want," Rai called out to Sands outside of the closet-room. "I'll be alright either way."
The Ark of Chyll
'Shiro' was frowning.
Off to a great start, he thought to himself, pursing his lips as he stared on at the unfortunate proceedings. Hermit was in an unnecessary fight, and Sun seemed to be itching for action. He was glad when Justice went to reign him in- because he was right. If this escalated too much too soon, it would end very badly indeed.
With fatal consequences, even.
Three holographic cards appeared before him- cards that could not be seen by anybody but him. He looked them over, then stopped at one.
Six of Cups.
Good enough.
The two other cards dissipated, leaving only his chosen card in front of him. When worst became worst, he would use it to shut down all electronics in the immediate area for a short time- hopefully, enough time for everyone to escape.
Of course, that was just in case.
Wyr blinked, then stood tall. Yet another newcomer, it seemed. That would explain the noise.
"Lord Kilwen," she said, head tilting down in a slight bow. She still had no idea how influential- or indeed, how powerful and significant- these 'lords' were, but a typical move of successful negotiations was acknowledgement of titles.
She then turned to Ty, giving him a tiny nod. "We had a pleasant rest," she responded. "Although Vaxur and Rin may stay in the cot for a while longer. They," she paused, then let out a fond, exasperated sigh. "They have been away from each other for too long."
Thus, Vaxur would be clingy and not let the young Nyran go- even if he was awake and ready to leave the room. She chuckled inwardly at the thought.
She sobered, though, as she looked again at the other man. "I too hope that you and your crew have found rest in the hours of inactivity," she said, eyes flicking from their new lord guest and back to Ty.
Rai raised a tentative hand, smiling weakly. "Yo." A pause, then: "I think they're still there, since you confiscated Reqti's staff. I- well," they flushed, rubbing the back of their head. "Yes, I'm to have a word," they said. "But only if they're awake. So... I'll take a peek in, I suppose."
Sands seemed eager to relieve his boredom, even with something as mundane as opening a door. As the door retracted, Rai took a silent step inside the tiny... well... closet-room.
And there was someone already awake.
Reqti's golden eyes tracked Rai's every movement, hand laid over Tahil's head pillowed in his lap. When Rai made to sit down, cross-legged and a foot away, he released the tension in his shoulders, leaning his head against the wall.
His eyes never left Rai's form.
"You can close the door, if you want," Rai called out to Sands outside of the closet-room. "I'll be alright either way."
The Ark of Chyll
'Shiro' was frowning.
Off to a great start, he thought to himself, pursing his lips as he stared on at the unfortunate proceedings. Hermit was in an unnecessary fight, and Sun seemed to be itching for action. He was glad when Justice went to reign him in- because he was right. If this escalated too much too soon, it would end very badly indeed.
With fatal consequences, even.
Three holographic cards appeared before him- cards that could not be seen by anybody but him. He looked them over, then stopped at one.
Six of Cups.
Good enough.
The two other cards dissipated, leaving only his chosen card in front of him. When worst became worst, he would use it to shut down all electronics in the immediate area for a short time- hopefully, enough time for everyone to escape.
Of course, that was just in case.
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