Day 2
Breakfast is military food. It's not bad, but it's bland and boring. You don't eat much. You don't need to, after all; you're snacking a little, only to keep the twins company. The... younger twins. You still haven't gotten used to that, and you're not sure how long it'll take you, but you're constantly aware of Veliona's presence by your side in a way you weren't yesterday.
Things are looking up, though. The four of you have taken a table in a corner of the cafeteria–
That's, well, that's Veliona's doing. She cleared out the path to it early in the morning, while you and the twins were still sleeping. There's a few tufts of grass and other nonsensical intrusions, but it's safe, and that means Hans and the rest of everyone can get around at least a little bit without Roza and Liliya to fetch necessities, which in turn means you can keep them where you can keep an eye on them.
It also means the place is almost boisterous. Everyone's chatting and laughing, and it's almost like a normal morning. Almost like you woke up back home, rather than on a broken ship on the edge of nonexistence.
"Good morning." Hans smiles.
"Morning, Hans," the twins chorus.
You get the impression that he'd like to pat them on the head, but he settles for scooping a second helping of eggs onto Rozaliya's plate. You can't help but smile at him. Anyone Roza and Liliya likes is okay in your book.
You take a sip of your water, and listen in on the conversation.
"So what's the plan for today, Hans?" Liliya asks.
"Taking stock," he says. "I might not look it, but I'm good with numbers. Well, the Hyperion was stocked for a lengthy deployment. Even with the power having failed for a while, there should be plenty of food, water, medical supplies, you name it. For now, I'll be summarizing everything that's accessible in the cleared areas."
"Got it." Roza nods.
He hesitates, then looks at Veliona. "I'm happy to have something to do, but..."
"Those seals? Not my doing," she says, shaking her head. "I've been wondering about that too. We've found three now."
Hans frowns, and scratches his chin. "It's a big ship, but that's three out of eight freezers in this area. I'm worried about how much of our provisions we've lost. Maybe the seals are edible, but..."
"Um, what are you talking about?" you interject.
Veliona blinks, and shrugs her shoulders at you. You blink back.
"There were eight walk-in freezers in this section," Hans says. "We've found five that are intact, their contents still frozen. The other three turned into..." He scratches his chin, once again. "There's no way to say this without sounding crazy, but the entire room was replaced with a single block of ice, containing frozen seals. All three of them. The seals look perfectly intact, but all the same I'd rather not eat them."
"What do you mean, seals?" you ask. "Like, the animals?"
He nods. "Big furry creatures that live in the ocean, like a cross between a fish and a bear."
"That can't possibly be right," you say, imagining the scene.
"It isn't," he agrees. "But there they are, behind a solid wall of ice. I mean, I'm not an idiot. I know what's probably causing this. It's just..." He shakes his head. "Bizarre. Even for me."
"Do you think we should go in and investigate?" Lili asks.
Hans shakes his head vigorously. "I'd rather leave them alone," he says. "Absurd or not, they're still just dead animals. Frozen, dead animals. They're not going to come alive if we leave them alone, and I'd rather not risk the wrath of the Crawling Plague of R'lyeh."
"The what now?" you ask.
"Highly contagious, morphologically unique virus," Hans explains. "Highly unstable. Gives you superpowers, but makes you broody and dark. You end up slowly turning into a kraken. It's from a novel I was writing in my teens."
"Oh," you say. "Uh... is that a real virus?"
Hans chuckles. "No, no," he says. "It's not a real virus. You'd need a direct injection of squid DNA to contract it."
You scratch your head.
Veliona grins. "Does it turn you into a tentacle monster?" she asks. "That sounds really cool."
"It sucks," Hans says. "You spend all your time in the ocean, you have to kill yourself or become a complete psychopath who lives to hurt others, and there's no way to turn back. All you can do is brood. And defeat the Herrschers, but that's just a way to suppress the dark cravings in your heart."
Hans brightens up. "I should write a book," he says. "What do you think, Veliona?"
"Uh huh," she says. "That's a great idea. I'm sure it'll be a bestseller."
"You think so?" he asks. "Really?"
The five of you look at each other, then collapse into laughter.
"Yes, really," you say, wiping a tear from your eye. "Thanks, Hans. I needed that. Roza, Liliya–" You take a deep breath. It's not unlikely you'll be spending the day with them, and you could tell them about your sister later, when it's just the four of you. You could. You could, but... she's not a secret. You don't want her to be a secret. You might as well do this now.
"Veliona," you say, "is my sister."
Hans looks surprised. Roza and Liliya look surprised. Veliona smirks and folds her arms, rolling her eyes.
"Really? I had no idea," Hans says, scratching his head. "Seele, that's fairly obvious. You look exactly alike."
"We do," Veliona agrees. "Although now that you mention it, we've always been a little different. Seele was always the quiet, timid one. And I... well, as you know, I'm not."
You palm your face. You really, really should have seen this coming. Hans looks at you, then at Veliona, then at Roza and Liliya for confirmation.
"You're... right," you say. "It's obvious. She's my twin sister. The thing is, I didn't realize that before Rozaliya said so yesterday, and I should have. We've been together... six years now?" you say questioningly, looking at Veliona.
"Or a hundred," she says, shrugging. "You shouldn't be beating yourself up about this, Seele. My memory is hazy that far back, but I know we didn't get off on the right foot. Honestly, I'm not surprised you thought I was a demon."
"Please, Vel. You're not a demon. You're my sister," you say.
She smiles slightly. "Of course I am, silly."
You look away, feeling the beginnings of tears in your eyes.
"Seele, are you alright?" Liliya asks.
"Yeah... I'm just happy," you say, rubbing your eyes. "Anyway, Hans, here's the thing. Veliona was born from my stigmata, somehow–" And you'll keep your guess that she wasn't to yourself, for now. "–And it's only four years ago, or thereabouts, that I started seeing her as a person. I'm not proud of that, but it's true. It took Rozaliya stating the obvious to make me realize that we're family."
You take her hand, squeezing it softly. She squeezes back.
"Seele, you don't need to explain yourself," she says. "I know you didn't mean to. And I get it. I probably would have done the same thing, had our roles been reversed."
You give her a sad smile. "Thanks, Vel. In any case, that's... that, I guess. She's my twin sister. It's not that complicated. I just wish I'd let her out a bit earlier, like when we were in the orphanage."
Vel winces. "Thanks for the vote of confidence, but that would've been a really bad idea. I would have murdered Sin."
You sigh. "Yeah, you're probably right."
"The point is, you're stuck with me," she says, smirking. "Now, as for your punishment..." Vel looks at Roza. "What do you think I should do? You're the expert. How do you handle overly quiet little sisters?"
"I'm not that much younger than you," you say.
It's probably true. Probably.
"So what?" Vel grins. "We're twins. They're twins. I'm sure Rozaliya's got plenty of ideas, and I want to hear all of them."
She corners Roza, who smiles back nervously. This? This could be a real problem. For you, for Theresa, for everyone whose sanity isn't already in question. You should probably stop them.
"Come on," Vel says, leading Rozaliya out of the room. Liliya follows like a lost lamb.
After briefly weighing your options, you decide the best course of action is to...
Ignore them, and hope for an impossible miracle.
ooOOoo
Nothing like yesterday's disaster happens, and after the first two or three rifts, closing them becomes second nature.
True, your patches aren't as clean as Kiana's. Sometimes the patches turn into holes into the abyssal void, and sometimes into floating patches of grass, or pinecones, or other things that don't belong. When that happens, you try it again until they're at least traversable. Veliona, on her side of the corridor, seems to have found a trick for reliably turning the ones in the floor into flagstones.
You could swear you saw something moving inside one of them, but it was only an illusion, a shadow playing tricks on your eyes. There's nothing to worry about.
Nothing at all.
Which doesn't stop you asking the twins to stay well back. They obey—or rather, Rozaliya seems reluctant to approach them at all. Is that because of the spiders? Was it the spiders? It was the spiders, wasn't it. You feel a smile playing about your lips. Of all the things to make Rozaliya stay back, you didn't think plastic spiders would be it.
You spend the morning mostly like that, making about a foot of headway per minute, while the four of you have a half-shouted conversation about nothing of importance. Who cares about the exact shade of pink that goes best with blue and white?
Rozaliya, evidently, and you find yourself smiling at her frustration, born of trying to match both you and Liliya simultaneously. Veliona joins in to disagree with everything Rozaliya suggests, both of them turn on you—Liliya pointing out she did blue first—and you end up dressed in brown for a while. Vel might have an evil streak a lightyear wide, but she has good taste. It's great to see them getting along, whatever long-term consequences that may have, and you're happy to just sit back and be…
You're falling.
Reality crumbles, all around you. You get a brief but crystal-clear glimpse of Liliya screaming as you tumble to the floor, a spear of white-hot agony lancing your side. Veliona bursts, like a soap bubble that's been pricked, and you feel her attention tear outwards. Away from the Hyperion.
It's like looking through a kaleidoscope. Sounds, colors, sensations run past your vision like a whirlwind. Rozaliya is begging for you to get up, but you can barely understand her words. The world has shattered around you, and you're helplessly falling through the cracks. It takes you a moment to realize that it isn't the hallway that shattered, but you.
ooOOoo
Your mind is awash with fragments of memory, and you can't for the life of you remember what's real and what isn't.
You almost feel as if you're in two places at once.
You're on the floor of the hallway, body broken in half, but you're also in a void, a butterfly wrapped around the Hyperion. A shattered butterfly. Everything's tearing, and you can't keep up. You have a blinding headache, and if you try to look at the damage or focus on what's important, you feel as if you'll lose your mind.
You can't afford to lose your mind.
Painfully, you drag yourself away from the Hyperion, from the broken body in that hallway, glitching and fuzzing out. It isn't really doing either of those things, but Veliona's own panicky exertions are making it impossible to keep it synced with the Hyperion's reality, something that should normally be automatic.
Your own panic isn't helping.
The world resolves itself piece by piece.
You're in the quantum sea. You're nailed to the Hyperion, a lance of white nothingness piercing your side. The horizon is a wave of beasts, of quantum shadows, of something or other that your headache is making it hard to resolve.
From that perspective, Veliona is fighting a desperate but hopeless fight to protect you from an onslaught of what must be thousands of the beasts, enough of them to fill the sky. They aren't acting normally. They're faster, stronger… bigger than normal, and they're not just aiming at Vel. In fact, they're barely aiming at her at all. They're going for the ship as a whole, and it's defenseless. Vel is forced to put herself between their attacks and the Hyperion, her efforts to protect you and the rest of the ship making the fight even more one-sided.
Your vision swims, your attackers' appearance shifting from honkai beast, to quantum shadow, to an all-encompassing flood of consumption that threatens to swallow you up when you look at it. The only constant is the white lance of energy protruding from your side.
The beasts are relentless. They're deadlier than any shadow should be, slipping into every crack, every weakness, every fault and fractional timeline of the ship, making it impossible for Veliona to find a clear shot without risking damage. It's an impossible fight, one even Durandal would have trouble with. Your entire left side is gone, torn to pieces, large chunks of it simply missing. Pinned to the ship, you're struggling to maintain your form.
That's how a human would see it.
Good thing, then, that you aren't forced to conform to that perspective. This is dangerous, but not yet a disaster.
ooOOoo
It would be wrong, to say you must be a native of the quantum sea to fight the things that are. All you need is the ability to see them, and shoot at them, or hit them, or do whatever act of violence you're best at—and the Sea will take care of the rest. All you need is to pick out the right correlations, through serendipity or nature, that let you treat your enemies as 'someone you already know how to fight'.
As above, so below. The instant something in the Sea matches well enough with events in a higher world, the Sea will conform to that story instead of its own. That's what you mean by 'correlations'.
The same applies to movement, or breathing, or existence in general. Anyone who wasn't born here is, by definition, a juggernaut. Mountain-sized, or planet-sized, compared to the gnats that are the native life. Efficiency isn't needed, only the ability to aim at them at all, and if the creatures you might have seen your scythe slicing through in the past weren't as real as you, then that didn't change the outcome at all. But that's only true for someone like Bronya, fighting something that—in a Tesla-esque sense—barely exists at all, relative to her.
That it was still a fight at all goes a long way to demonstrating how inefficient this is, and for someone who can't do that—like Roza, or Liliya, or most people really—wading into the quantum sea would mean being slowly worn down by enemies they can't even see, their life stolen away until there's nothing left at all.
None of that is optional. If you're human, then the true nature of the fight you're in is literally unimaginable. No human could possibly fight a battle that's even close to equal, mired in the depths of the quantum sea. Not like Veliona's doing right now.
But Vel isn't human.
Vel is something else entirely, and by this time, so are you.
ooOOoo
Your human form melts away, discarded, and a disintegrating butterfly-of-light welds itself back together as if time is reversing. You spread your wings high above the battlefield.
That's not what's really happening. These aren't honkai beasts. They aren't even quantum shadows. Their concepts, almost all the ones that are exposed to you, all just say 'enemy', 'predator'; their appearance is hardly meaningful. Their original attack, the one that happened maybe three seconds ago, was to impale you with a spear made of the concept of disintegration. You don't think all of that through in the moment, you just feel the confusion.
They didn't hit your sister first. That was a mistake. That lost them the fight.
Since they didn't…
It's a nuisance. But that doesn't calm you, your heart still racing as you imagine how this could have gone so horribly wrong. Your teeth, if you had them, would clench, creaking with entirely justified anger. And all you want to do is tear them to pieces. These things tried to kill you.
You finish evaporating the lance, its remnants quickly catalogued by your stigma, and feel your insides realign themselves the way they're supposed to. Zero damage, a little 'bruising'—you can feel a few pieces missing, but nothing you don't have copies of. It'll fix itself in a matter of minutes, and you jolt Veliona with a burst of anger and eagerness, letting her know you're ready to help.
Your sister is the icy focus of a stalking predator. And with your presence secure, there's nothing holding her back. She appreciates your offer somewhere, you think. She just doesn't need it.
Shadows crawl out all around you, everywhere these entities are not; a denial of all existence other than your own. The world contracts. The beasts are around you; then they're in front of you; then they're arriving from a single point, a single pathway that's the only way to or from the ship. Another rain of lances arrives, to be swallowed up by the darkness.
She's trying to cut them off, at the cost of placing herself between you, and all the creatures and weapons raining down on you. Again. That's a fight she can't hope to endure for very long.
You don't think, you just hurl yourself down that sole remaining connection, arriving as a wrecking ball in their midst just as Vel's tide of dark and death crashes into the horde of monsters.
Vel's looking to slice away their ability to reach the Hyperion. You help, as best you can, throwing chaff in their way, amplifying their shouts to confuse them, and cutting one or two of them open when they aren't watching carefully enough. If you were still operating on that level, you'd imagine yourself as a whirling ball of death.
The way they react is odd. Ill-coordinated, panicky. Almost animalistic. Not like honkai beasts, which always throw themselves on your scythe regardless, and definitely not like people. Your crude intervention works, the chaos receding a little as Veliona's shadows solidify into shredded space, then no space at all, and that gives you a little time to think. The attacks against you, in the beginning and now, they were… simple. Undoubtedly powerful, but crude. That's an opportunity.
It's easy to win a fight when you outweigh them a trillion to one. Any human can do that to an ant. Harder when you're on equal ground, but whatever these things expected, it wasn't Vel. Or, for that matter, you. You aren't sure if they were expecting anything at all. Their insides leak out, and your stigma catalogues them—panic, confusion, hunger—pieces of humans, but nothing like intelligence. To your senses, their minds feel like the mass of writhing maggots that one sometimes sees on a corpse.
Animals?
Your view of the Hyperion has narrowed to a single, needle-like eye that passes right through the middle of Veliona. That fight is won; there's no way for them to harm it, now.
Your own should have been hard-fought. They should have reacted to your arrival, rearranged themselves. The closest should have delayed you, others pulled back to form lines you couldn't so easily pierce through. Instead the closest are as often biting at other beasts as they are towards you, and they're all pulling back, trying to escape. There's no hint of any kind of coordination.
True, you've done your very best, to stop it happening, but–
You're not in any danger, and that is in itself wrong. You aren't able to slaughter them—they aren't really here. But if you can hold them in place for just a little longer, you can cage them. Keep some of them from running away, trap them in a barely-attached slice of space-time for you to study. Or kill them. Or maybe just cut them off from reality entirely, lost until the Sea degrades them into nothingness.
= = =
The abyss of the ocean is a dark and lonely place, filled mostly with dust at maximum entropy, but occasionally the carcass of a whale drops in from above.
[ ] Trap one of the creatures
- [ ] And study it immediately
[ ] Fortify the Hyperion
- [ ] By making it harder to spot
- [ ] By making it dangerous to get to
[ ] Return to Rozaliya and Liliya
[ ] Write-in