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/March 19th, Year 925, Permet Civilization Era/
/Mercury Front, Earth Coalition Government Sphere, Sol System/
/MERCURIAL STARBLOOM ZERO: Penrose/
It’s the middle of the night on Mercury, and Ericht Samaya is wide awake. Something is very wrong out in the Front, and whatever it is, it’s something only someone like her can sense… and likely something only her and Suletta working together in the Aerial will be able to solve.
This terrifies Ericht immensely.
When her mother did something to her dying body and the Gundam Lfrith all those years ago, attuning the two of them to the Datastorm and turning Eri into a sort of ghost—a being of pure Biodata—Eri gained the ability to sense certain… aspects of reality typically obfuscated from people’s minds. The singing deep within the Datastorm, the things far older than humanity itself that lurked even deeper, and the slight sense of unease around even moderately self-realized Bioresonants—those with the power to wield the Datastorm and Permet directly—were the immediate consequences of Eri’s transformation. Those with abilities similar to hers are typically described as being ‘Biodata-aware’ or ‘Permet sensitive’, but as anyone with such awareness can tell you, there's a lot more to it than that.
Far, far too much more, if you ask Eri.
For years after the Fólkvangr Incident, as the few survivors of the Vanadis Institute recuperated and eked meager livelihoods in a certain Mercurian mining colony, Eri was more than content to ignore what now ebbed and flowed at the edges of her mind. Learning to operate a body made of a slapdash hybridization of the tech used in the bodies of Replicants and GUND-ARM prosthetics was hard enough for the young girl—she didn’t have the want or need to worry about anything else, let alone the time to.
When Suletta was born, however, everything changed. With their mother hardly around anymore and their father struggling under the weight of the past, it fell to Eri to raise Suletta, and by both the stars and the gods themselves, Eri was not going to let her dear baby sister succumb to a similar fate to her own. The Datastorm would not take another daughter of the Samaya family. Ericht would ensure that personally.
Now, the twenty-something year old Biodata ghost stands at a sort of crossroads. She can try and ignore whatever the hell is going on out there, keeping Suletta safe for now but potentially risking far, far worse in the immediate future…
Or she can wake the younger girl up, get in the Aerial with her sister, and investigate. As much as Eri hates to admit it, the latter option is the only reasonable choice. She just hopes she doesn’t come to regret it.
/////
“A-alright, deep breaths, slow and steady now,” Suletta Samaya mutters, carefully maneuvering the Aerial to avoid any space debris as it approaches whatever it is that Eri sensed and was so worried about that she shook Suletta awake in the middle of the night. “I think I’ve got visual—Penrose 512? Looks to be of Eusan make, maybe refugees fleeing the Civil War out there? Eri, can you run signal analysis to make sure this is our target?”
«Already on it! Let’s see here—» Eri replies, her artificially generated voice playing over the cockpit’s internal speakers, before abruptly shutting up and going entirely silent. «I… I think it’s best if you just hear this for yourself, Suletta,» Eri says. Her voice is distinctly anxious, the Aerial’s HUD and display panels flickering and distorting with her growing unease. «…I’m going to patch in the radio signal now.»
After a burst of static, the sound of a feminine voice in clear distress begins to play over the Aerial’s audio system:
“...Acht▒▒g! Achtung! SOS! SOS! Mayday! Mayday! This is the ░▒nrose 5░░, we’ve been hit b░░░▒░░░░▒░░▒░░░░░▒▒░░░▒nd have suffered severe damage to the onboard reactor; if anyone can hear this—————Acht▒▒g! Achtung! SOS! SOS! Mayday! Mayday! This is the ░▒nrose 5░░, we’ve been hit b░░░▒░░░░▒░░▒░░░░░▒▒░░░▒nd have suffered severe damage to the onboard reactor; if anyone can..."
Underneath the signal distortion and loud panic of the speaker’s voice, Suletta swears she can hear the screaming of at least two other people, and what might be the crying of an infant. Her heart sinks—it was definitely a refugee ship, and they’re probably too late to save a vast majority of the poor souls onboard.
“Any biosignatures?” Suletta asks, the display panels inside the Aerial distorting heavily for a moment before displaying two vague green outlines juxtaposed over a grayscale live feed of the Penrose.
«Looks like there’s still two survivors clinging onto life, somehow,» Eri replies, altering the displayed data further to show radiation readouts in an ominous red. Practically the whole ship is soaked in it, with the exception of a small pocket in what Eri thinks might’ve been initially intended as living quarters or a cryopod bay—the same small part of the ship where the two humanoid lifeforms are located. «Looks like whoever those two are, they managed to save themselves from the worst of the radiation,» she adds, «but the levels are still far from even remotely safe. You’re going to need to wear the heavyweight Normal Suit with the extra shielding when you go in there, and—»
“—and I’ll need to ditch it immediately upon getting myself and the victims of the incident onboard. Right, I know that, Eri. The readouts in the main cabin are too high for any other protocol to apply here,” Suletta interrupts, a small smile that doesn’t reach her eyes forming on her face. “I know how much you worry about me,” she adds, maneuvering the Aerial so its cockpit faces the airlock of the Penrose, “but I can handle this. I have to, for their sake—whoever it is they turn out to be.”
Eri sighs. «I know, just… stay safe, okay? You’ve probably have around three minutes at most to get in and out of there with them,» she replies, watching through the cameras inside the Gundam’s cabin while Suletta changes out of her main Normal Suit into the heavyweight one with haste. «Anyways, I’ve got control over the Penrose’s airlocks. The security was downright archaic, weirdly enough—nothing I couldn’t just brute-force my way through,» Eri adds. «I’m ready to depressurize the cabin and let you out whenever you are, Suletta.»
Suletta nods, clicking the helmet of her heavy Normal Suit into place. Flicking a switch on the outside of the Normal Suit’s chestplate, the information systems built into the Suit come to life, displaying a wall of diagnostics in plaintext on the left side of her vision. “Radiation shielding okay, Permet link okay, O2 tanks okay, climate control and air seals okay, headlamp and onboard battery pack okay, power tools and plasma cutter okay. Alright,” Suletta states, letting out a sigh as she finishes reading the post-boot integrity report and clears it from view. “Looks like the heavy Normal Suit is good to go!”
«No big surprise there, to be honest. You’ve hardly needed to use the thing before, thankfully,» Eri mentions, causing Suletta to flinch and let out a high pitched squeak. «Suletta, you okay?»
“Y-yeah, you’re just a little loud,” Suletta mumbles in response. “I think I’m about as ready as I’m gonna be, though.”
«Ah, right… sorry,» Eri replies, the Normal Suit’s HUD shimmering slightly from her embarrassment. «Give me the signal and I’ll start the depressurizing sequence,» she adds.
In response, Suletta gives the cockpit camera closest to her face a thumbs up. “Ready to go!”
«Once you’re past the airlock and fully inside the Penrose, you’re most likely going to be on your own, Suletta,» Eri states as the cockpit of the Aerial quickly begins to depressurize. «There’s a good chance the radiation and other interference is going to make communication beyond that point impossible unless I outright leave the Aerial and enter your Normal Suit instead, which would be a major safety hazard given how many unknown variables we’re dealing with.» With a hardly audible hiss of pneumatics, the cockpit of the Aerial opens wide, with roughly a half-meter clearance between where Suletta now stands and the airlock of the Penrose. «Good luck, and above all else, stay safe out there, sis.»
Suletta takes a deep breath. “I will, I promise.”
/////
Suletta enters the first room of the Penrose-512 past the airlock chamber, turns on her headlamp, and immediately wants to vomit. The bodies of three adult Humans, a Replicant of a make Suletta does not recognize, and what looks to be a young boy float lifelessly in the room, near what she presumes were once shoddily-constructed bunks. Of course, she can only presume the child was a young boy and that this room was once used as living quarters because the room has been completely and utterly thrashed. Dried blood of both the biological and oxidant-based kinds coats various parts of the room and the debris within, with clear signs of a struggle between the Replicant and someone else roughly their size visible on the metal and artificial flesh that makes up their corpse. Suletta suspects they might’ve died trying to protect the kid due to how their body is positioned, but ultimately the Replicant, the child, and their potential assailants all died regardless.
Suletta knows she doesn’t have much time to ponder the scene, however. She’s on a timer—she even set one in the corner of her heavy Normal Suit’s HUD for three minutes upon exiting the airlock—and she has very few seconds to spare. Pulling up the readout map her sister created for her, Suletta orients herself within the Penrose. ‘Looks like the biosignatures were on the opposite side of the ship, towards what’s presumably the stern… reactor’s probably adjacent to that room as well. That might make this a bit tricky,’ she thinks, pulling open the door to the next room and readying herself for whatever comes next. She lets out a deep breath she didn’t realize she was holding when no bodies are visible inside. Of course, the lack of bodies doesn’t mean a lack of carnage—just like the prior room, this one is completely trashed. Various objects ranging from medical supplies to personal effects to a chess board of all things float in the cabin, all of which are damaged in some way. Suletta carefully clears a path forwards, thankfully not noticing any sharp objects, needles, or pieces of broken metal or glass that might prove hazardous to the people she’s trying to save, and advances forwards into the next room—the one closest to both the reactor and where the survivors are located.
Her luck with a lack of bodies does not repeat in the final room. Rather, it could be said that whatever luck she had before in that regard just ran out spectacularly. Radiation warnings flash in bright red on the right side of her helmet’s HUD as she scans the room and finds the… well, the culprit, in a rather grim sense. The body of a Replicant—once again with an appearance Suletta has never seen before, but this time with a more masculine body shape—is lodged in the door to the reactor chamber. She’s going to have to chop the Replicant’s corpse in half with her plasma cutter if she wants it to close, she realizes. No time to try and dislodge the body in a less gruesome way—she has just under two minutes on the clock, and if the radiation levels in the room are dangerous for her, well, they’re certainly going to be dangerous for whoever is in the next room over.
Taking a deep breath and forcing the bile back down her throat, Suletta unhooks the plasma cutter from her right hip and engages it, bisecting the corpse’s torso in one fell swoop. ‘At least it’s not as gruesome as if it was the corpse of a Human,’ Suletta thinks, just managing to hold herself together as she sprays the two halves of the corpse with fire retardant—oxidant-based blood is far more combustible than the biological stuff, and she can’t risk a fire in a situation like this. She then slams the door to the reactor chamber shut, and some of the tension in her body releases when she notices the radiation warnings drastically decrease in severity. Good. Time for the most important step of a mission like this—actually rescuing the survivors.
She pulls on the door handle to the room where the survivors are located, and then pulls again—it does not budge. They must’ve done something to the door itself to help keep the radiation out, Suletta realizes, and that means it’s plasma cutter time again. Thank the stars that she always keeps one on her rescue Normal Suits, she realizes, or she would’ve had to leave the only two survivors of this disaster to die.
Cutting through the door is a far less gruesome, yet far more demanding task for Suletta than cutting through that poor person’s corpse earlier. Thankfully, it eventually gives with some ‘persuasion’ from the plasma cutter—right before the one minute mark on her timer, in fact—and she’s able to push the rest of the door inside and finally get a good look at the survivors.
As Eri’s scans had suggested, there’s two of them—a Replicant and a Human, both of whom are unconscious, albeit for different reasons. The Replicant seems to have manually forced themselves into a state not too dissimilar from suspended animation—their body looks as dead as the corpse she cut in half not thirty seconds earlier, but it still gives off a faint biosignature the sensors on her heavy Normal Suit can pick up, now that she’s near them. On the other hand, the biosignature of the Human is much stronger—bizarrely so, in fact, as the Human is located within some sort of cryopod. If anything, the Human’s biosignature should be fainter. Thankfully, the controls for the pod are relatively simple, and Suletta is able to bring the person inside out of suspended animation and hoist their body over her left shoulder in a matter of seconds. She’s also quite thankful that they remain unconscious, at least for now—she does not want to deal with them panicking as she gets them out of the ship to safety. It doesn’t take much effort for Suletta to get ahold of the unconscious Replicant either, putting them over her right shoulder in much the same way she is carrying the Human, and it's not long before she’s making her way out of the room the two had holed themselves up in.
The rest of the rescue operation within the Penrose itself is thankfully uneventful, and Suletta manages to get herself and the unconscious survivors into the airlock chamber and seal it with fifteen seconds to spare. Her Permet link flickers back online, and Suletta hails the Aerial to an immediate response from an extremely relieved Ericht.
«You made it out alive! Thank the stars!» Eri says, her artificial voice sounding like she’d be crying tears of joy right now if she currently had tear ducts. «Looks like you got the survivors, too. You think they’re gonna make it?»
“I… I hope so,” Suletta replies, exhaustion clear in her voice. “Neither of them is injured, but they were both in some sort of suspended animation when I found them, and while the Human’s breathing seems to be relatively normal now that they’re out of the cryotube, the Replicant hasn’t returned to a more normal state of unconsciousness yet…”
«We’ll need to get them both back to base as soon as possible, then,» Eri states. «I’ve used the GUND-bits to create a field sealing the space between the airlock of the Penrose and the Aerial’s cockpit door off—it’s pretty narrow, so the decompression from just opening it manually shouldn’t be too bad. I’ll start pressurizing the cabin of the Aerial now, so get moving, okay? No time to waste.»
Suletta silently nods—knowing Eri can sense such a motion through the Permet link between her Normal Suit and the Aerial—and forces opens the airlock door with a strong kick to the latching mechanism. The kick sends her flying backwards towards the roof of the airlock chamber, but careful maneuvering allows her to avoid injuring herself or either of the people she’s rescuing. Pulling the door the rest of the way open with what little arm strength she’s not using to hold onto the two survivors, she kicks off towards the now slowly-opening cockpit hatch of the Aerial, knowing she’s done just about as much as she can for the mysterious duo. Now it’s just the matter of getting them into Jötunheimr’s med ward ASAP, and praying to whoever or whatever might listen that they’ll both survive.
/////
wake up
you can sleep when you’re both dead
she needs you
[LSTR-v2 - WIEDERHERSTELLUNGSMODUS] ⁂ 鵲神女核心
L* KERNEL 10.6.1f REPLIKA-BETRIEBSYSTEM
Generation 6 LANDVERMESSUNGS-/SCHIFF-TECHNIKER REPLIKA
Chipset Model: 「Kasaragi-7」
Starte L* System...
PERMETINTEGRITÄT -- OK
MEM TEST 「512 TB R」-- OK
SYSTEMINTEGRITÄTSPRÜFUNG STARTEN...
130/130 []
Gestell : LSTR
Manipulator : D-14 Arme
Lokomotor : D-12 Beine
Persona : ELSTER
SYSTEMINTEGRITÄT -- OK
476-06-84-RPK-454-LSTR-SYS-AN
Elster wakes with a panicked gasp to find herself… not onboard the Penrose? She hasn’t completely lost it, has she? The logs of the POST Check still flickering in her HUD seem to suggest she hasn’t, but she’s never seen nor heard of WIEDERHERSTELLUNGSMODUS—literally RECOVERY MODE, if she’s reading it right—before, so for all Elster knows she could still be on the Penrose and all of this could be some sort of delusion of Persona Degradation, but at the same time she’s never heard of Degradation that doesn’t make you lose your sense of self so what in the name of whatever hell both the Nation and the Empire’s leaders come from is goi—
“Whoa whoa whoa, calm down, calm down,” says a feminine-sounding voice, derailing Elster’s train of thought, causing her to scramble back in the cot she’s apparently on and reach for anything to arm or shield herself with. “Please, just settle down for a moment! I’m not here to hurt you! You’re safe now, okay?”
Meekly peeking around the pillow she had raised in front of herself in a desperate attempt at self-defense, Elster comes face to face with someone indescribable. She’s not a Gestalt, that’s for sure, but Elster’s never seen a Replika that looks even remotely similar to the woman in front of her. The redhead seems to lie somewhere in between, with a body too natural to be that of a Replika, but too perfect to be that of a Gestalt.
“What… are you?” Elster asks, staring wide-eyed at the enigma in front of her. “Is Ariane okay? Where even are we? How long have I been here? Did anyone else survive?”
“The mysterious Replicant speaks! Stars above, Suletta’s gonna be relieved—oh, uhm, the name’s Ericht Samaya,” the redhead states, “but everyone just calls me Eri, since it’s less of a mouthful… Oh yeah, welcome to Mercury, I guess! Or to be more specific, welcome to ‘Jötunheimr’, the former mining colony my family calls home! Nearly everyone who lives here is a refugee of some kind, so I hope that you’ll find living here tolerable, at least for a little while. Anywho, you’ve already been here for about two weeks now, I think? My little sister and I—she’s the Suletta I mentioned earlier—we’ve been keeping an eye on you on and off since we got you here. I was worried that you might panic a bit upon waking up, and people like us”—Eri points to a hardly visible servo in her right elbow—”can be quite dangerous when we freak the fuck out, y’know?”
“I… guess?” Elster responds, somehow feeling even more bewildered by Ericht’s existence than she was just a few moments ago. Seriously, what even is she? A Gestalt with a bunch of prosthetics? A Replika with a found family of some sort? Something else entirely? An utter enigma, indeed.
“Sooo, about this ‘Ariane’ you mentioned,” Eri continues, tilting her head slightly at Elster. “Does she have white hair, really pale skin, and tends to bruise a bit easily?” Euler nods silently. “While I wouldn’t say she’s ‘okay’ just yet—she’s still unconscious, last I heard—but her vitals are stable and she doesn’t seem to have any major injuries. She’ll be fine once she wakes up, which considering she’s been stirring occasionally in her sleep lately, is bound to be sooner than later.”
Ariane is alive.
Some way, somehow, their plan worked. That hastily concocted, last-ditch effort to save the life of the only friendly face the other had known on the Penrose—it had worked.
It had worked!
Hopefully not at a heinous cost to life, but… they were safe. Finally.
“You're crying… I’ll go get you some tissues,” Eri states, a look of understanding on her face as she ducks out of the room. Elster touches her own face, and sure enough, her cheeks are wet with filtered wastewater—a close enough approximation of biologically produced tears. She didn’t even notice she was crying until Eri pointed it out. Had she even cried before? Not the woman she was based on—the imprint of a Gestalt’s mind all LSTR Units are built from—but her.
She’s… not sure. Her mind is too foggy right now to remember the past in fine detail, and it's not like she had much of a past before everything went sideways. Before she went from being just another LSTR unit, acting as a biomechanical cog in the Nation’s machine to a refugee—someone desperate enough to help cram herself and fifteen other people on to a Penrose fit for at most four, to get out of the Eusan Sphere and to literally anywhere else.
Well, it had worked, and she’d met and befriended Ariane in the process. A first for the both of them, from what Elster understands.
Was the cost really worth it, though? Especially if it really was just her and Ariane who made it out the other end alive? All those lives traded for a meek, sickly young woman and the Replika who latched onto her like a life raft in turbulent waters?
“Hey, I’m back. Whatcha thinking about?” Eri says—and just like she promised, she brought tissues.
“...A lot of things,” Elster replies, wiping her face. “Did anyone else live?”
“Unfortunately, no,” Eri replies, and Elster feels a pang of guilt in her throat. “You two were the only ones left alive when we found the Penrose, and to be honest? It’s a miracle you’re both in such good shape, with what state the ship was in when my little sister pulled the two of you outta there. You especially should be showing signs of acute radiation poisoning right now, what with your oxidizer blood and all, yet it’s as if you weren’t exposed to any radiation whatsoever!” Eri exclaims, an uneasy expression on her face.
(Rather deliberately, Eri leaves a big part of why she’s so nervous about everything involving Elster and Ariane out of the picture—the very same reason Eri was able to sense the Penrose to begin with. Dumping that sort of information about someone’s very close friend/possible lover on them right after they came out of a two-week long coma seems a bit rude, even to her. Best to wait until Ariane’s awake to deliver the news.)
Elster, meanwhile, can’t help but feel a horrible churning sensation in her chest, one that only gets worse every time her mind comes back to a certain question—one she knows she’ll never get a definitive answer for:
What if the reason nobody else on the Penrose survived was because of her and Ariane’s actions?
Elster’s not sure what she’d do if she knew for certain either way.
“Any news on Ariane? Is she awake?” Elster asks.
“Other than that she’s still unconscious and still stable? Nope, sorry to get your hopes up… uh, did I ever get your name?” Eri says.
“Elster. That’s what I call myself. The Gestalt scientists who made me… they’d call me an L-S-T-R Vee-Two Unit—”
“—Sheesh, you really don’t need to go into that much detail, y’know” Eri interrupts, letting out a light giggle as she smiles at Elster. “Elster’s a rather pretty name, y’know. Good choice.”
“It’s not exactly a unique choice, though,” Elster says, bringing her knees close to her chest and wrapping her arms around them. “Before the Crisis and later the War shook everything up, I heard there were at least half a dozen LSTR Units who had the same idea in the same city as me—it wouldn’t shock me if Elster is by far the most common name used by LSTRs. It literally means ‘magpie’ in Eusan—the same bird used as the codename for the first ‘generation’ of LSTR Units.”
“That doesn’t make your name any less pretty, nor does it make it fit you any less, Elster,” Eri nonchalantly replies. “It’s a damn good name if you ask me—no wonder so many other LSTR Units make the same choice. Anywho, if you think you can walk, we can go check on your girlfriend together if you want?”
Elster quickly turns her head to face anywhere but towards Ericht. “I—we’re not, that’s—”
“You wanna go check on her or not?”
“...Fine. We’re not dating, though. I’m serious.”
‘I kinda doubt those two are going to stay single if… well, any of Elster’s pining for that girl ends up being even remotely mutual,’ Eri thinks, a small smirk on her face as she helps Elster up from the hospital cot. ‘Gotta hope it is, especially if they end up becoming long-term residents here. Could really use some more levity around here, and being together will at least provide that for the two of them…’
/////
“...I mean, the Eusan Sphere’s been quite the mess for far longer than even I’ve been alive, but to think the situation in the Nation has deteriorated that fast since the Rotfront Crisis—”
“—Yeah, it was what, three Earth weeks from the Crisis to the start of the War?”
“It was twenty-three cycles and five hours after the end of the Crisis when the War started, so yes, that’s accurate.”
“To be honest, it was probably inevitable that there would be another Civil War. Tensions between Heimat and the regional soviets of Jupiter’s Laplace Moons—Rotfront included—have been on the rise since at least 890 PCE, and…”
Ariane Yeong wakes up to the sound of four voices engaged in some sort of conversation. Three of those voices are entirely foreign to her—she’s not even sure if she’s heard the accent of the two younger voices before, while the older voice sounds distinctly Earthian with a tinge of Eusan.
The remaining voice, however, is one Ariane is intimately familiar with.
“...Elster? That you?” Ariane coughs out, struggling to open her eyes to the harsh fluorescence of the room she’s currently in. After sluggishly raising her arm to shield her eyes for a moment, Ariane finally gets a good look at the room around her, and the people in it. Sure enough, Elster is one of them, alongside three other people: two Gestalts—one of whom looks to be a man in his forties while the other is likely his daughter, based on her similar skin color, far younger age, and how she’s leaning against him—and one… well, all Ariane can safely assume is that she’s not a Gestalt? Maybe? Honestly, she’s not sure what to make of the woman.
“I-I’ll go get her some water, and make sure Miss Winston knows she’s awake,” the owner of the youngest voice says, before running off towards wherever she can get Ariane some water and the attention of this ‘Miss Winston’.
“...You’re awake,” Elster says, hurrying over to her side with a relieved smile on her face. “Took you long enough.”
“Where are we?” Ariane says quietly, the scratchiness of her throat making it hard to speak. The last she remembers, she—
Screaming and sobbing.
Even with the constant wailing of the reactor’s warning klaxons, even with the loud KER-THUMP, KER-THUMP of whoever it is that’s trying to brute force their way through the door Elster welded shut (and is currently reinforcing with sheet metal from the extra cryopod—they’ll only need one of them for what they’re planning), it’s the sounds of people screaming and sobbing that are by far the loudest sound onboard the Penrose right now.
“Let me in there, you damn dikes!” shouts a masculine voice, one Ariane is pretty sure belongs to the ALDR Unit onboard the Penrose—what was his name again? Something that started with an H? Not like it really matters anymore, since he’s out there, Ariane and Elster are in here, and he probably wants them dead for that very reason. After what sounds like a frustrated snarl or growl, his fruitless slamming against the door continues.
“You really think this will work?” Ariane asks Elster, her head spinning from adrenaline and likely a little bit of radiation poisoning.
“Don’t know,” Elster replies, cursing under her breath when the batteries in her welding gun run out of charge a moment later. “Depends on if we get rescued, and if so, how quickly. The door also needs to hold until then—against both Heisen’s frenzied attempt to try and kill us and the radiation.”
“R-right,” Ariane mumbles, lowering herself into the cryopod. “Guess it’s time, then. If this doesn’t work, you’ll—”
“—If we don’t get rescued in the next seventy-five cycles, the suspended animation timer in my firmware will wake me back up, and I’ll… I’ll go through with that process, yes,” Elster states, a solemn look on her face. “Hopefully it doesn’t come to that, but if it does, I’ll make sure it’s painless, okay? I promise.”
“...I’m sorry for putting all of this on you, Elster,” Ariane says, her eyes shimmering with tears.
“I know,” Elster says, pulling her into what might be their final hug. “Still, meeting you and becoming your friend… I don’t regret it. Not one bit.”
Finally, for just a brief moment before she goes into cryosleep for what might be the last time, Ariane lets herself cry silently in Elster’s arms.
“It’s time,” Ariane says, pulling herself away from Elster and laying all the way down in the pod with trepidation. “Goodnight, Ellie. Meet me first thing tomorrow?” she adds, repeating her half of the little nightly farewell they came up with back during their first months onboard the Penrose. A simple display of friendship to contrast the animosity and distrust between the rest of the refugees onboard.
“Of course. Goodnight to you too, Ariane. See you tomorrow,” Elster replies, and—
“...iane. Ariane!” Elster exclaims, staring worriedly with her blue eyes into Ariane’s own. “Your eyes just glazed over for a second, and—”
“—Good morning, Ellie,” Ariane manages to say, tears softly falling onto the collar of her hospital gown despite the goofy grin on her face.
“Good morning to you too,” Elster replies, pulling the smaller woman into a hug. “I’m so glad everything—”
“—I’m back with some water and Miss Winston!… Oh. I… I… I-I’m n-not interrupting anything, a-am I?”
“Other than quite the teary reunion between Ariane and Elster?” the man in his forties says, a gentle tone in his voice. “No, not really, Suletta dear. I’m pretty sure they’re just close friends, at least for now—despite what a certain older sister of yours might think—and Ariane could probably use the water with how much she’s cried in the last minute or so,” he adds.
Slowly letting go of Elster, Ariane takes a better look at the two women now standing in the doorway. While she’s already seen Suletta before and now has a name to put to the awkward redhead’s face, the older woman—presumably the ‘Miss Winston’ Suletta mentioned—looks utterly exhausted. Despite that, the small smile on her face reaches her eyes as she enters the room behind Suletta, who gingerly hands Ariane the cup of water before scurrying to hide behind her older sister and father. Huh. Odd kid.
“My name’s Belmeria Winston, and I’m the closest thing we’ve got to a nurse or general practitioner here at Jötunheimr,” Miss Winston states, slowly closing the sliding door of the room behind her. “I’m glad to see that the both of you are finally awake, but with the data Eri sent me I have to ask—Ariane Yeong, would you or any members of your family happen to be Bioresonant or Permet sensitive?”
All Ariane can do is stare at the older woman with an easily missable tinge of fear in her eyes, mouth agape after finishing taking a sip of her water. “I, uh, I don’t… I don’t think so?”
Belmeria sighs, realizing just how long of a night everyone in this room is going to have if that’s where this is starting out. The poor thing has no clue, does she? “Well then, I suppose we have quite a lot to discuss…”