Song in the Fog: Da Capo (Ar Tonelico, Metroid AU, Arpeggio of Blue Steel)

[Einsig]

AN: Welcome to the rewrite of Song in the Fog. Please enjoy your stay.

Co-Author: @Baughn .

Please turn on Reader Mode and do NOT read any comments in this thread if you don't want to be spoiled.​

Chapter 1​

---

Shuffle.

Rrrrawark! Rrrrawark!

Shuffle.

Ribbit!

Splash.

A grimy-looking armored suit splashed through a stream in the middle of a jungle, its occupant hopelessly trying to clean it of the dirt and silt he'd picked up walking there. Unused to the task, and the suit being large and unwieldy, Shu-Qi mostly succeeded in smearing it out further.

When it wasn't covered in grime, the suit bore a striking resemblance to a large bird of prey. It did not look like it could contain a human. It did not in fact contain a human. Shu-Qi was a member of the Chozo species, the sole Chozo to set foot on this planet for decades.

The sole sapient being to set foot on the planet for decades, in fact.

That's how it had been ever since he'd gone into self-imposed exile on SR-4923, "Greenfly", all those years ago.

"Blasted lizards…" Shu-Qi grumbled, slowly cleaning the remains of one such creature from his exosuit's joints. He'd stumbled, and caught himself on a tree, and… there it was. And now, all over his suit.

Pausing, he considered unsuiting. That was against procedure, but it would also make it easier to clean the gunk off. 'Then again'... His eyes followed the insects buzzing around. They'd gain nothing from sucking his blood, but they, unfortunately, didn't know that.

In any case, the flooded undergrowth was halfway up to his waist—

Rrrrawark! Rrrawark!

"Shut up, would you?!"

Rrrrawark! Rrrrawark!

"Stars and stones, I should have known better."

He gave a long-suffering sigh. Blasted birds, would it kill them to be quiet for once?

Giving up on cleanliness, he turned and plodded deeper into the jungle. This crash site had better be worth the effort, or else he'd have wasted most of a day on nothing. That was time he could have used more productively, for example by painting walls, or reorganising his paperwork. Or painting paperwork.

A small fleet of drones floated behind him. Soon he found higher, drier ground and resumed marching at a better pace.

Several hours later, as he started to come across downed and eventually shattered trees, he noted his position on the map again. The crash site was only a few hundred meters ahead. Despite the crash being forceful enough to set off sensors halfway around the planet, he had yet to come across any debris from the ship that had presumably crashed.

There still was nothing in front of him but vegetation. Aside from the shock of the explosion, he didn't see any damage other than some odd radiation burns. He took a closer look at a particular tree, appearing to have withered to a dead husk on the spot rather than burned down from combustion.

A sudden burst of rapid clicks filled his helmet as he began to see a faint blue glow peeking through the leaves. He stopped, watching a spike shooting up prominently in the gamma range of the electromagnetic spectrum, thankfully nowhere close to the level where it would cause permanent or even noticeable damage. Feeling a bit of trepidation from that, he slowed down as he made his way through the final thickets.

Before him was a field of debris spread out across the clearing, parts and equipment strewn all around. While some of it looked almost entirely intact, most of it was broken apart, crushed and on fire. Blue fire, very similar to Cherenkov radiation.

At the edge of the clearing the more mobile kinds of plant were still making their slow retreat, the ones that hadn't already succumbed. The clearing itself was rapidly losing all traces of life; even the moss was turning stiff and crumbling away, leaving nothing but dark soil and a form of ash.

He thought about this for a second, thumbing in commands to the spectrum analysis program. It hadn't alerted, but this behaviour was frighteningly familiar, and it decidedly shouldn't have been. While the characteristics set off alarm bells in his mind, what he saw here didn't fit the profile.

He felt as though the wind was ripped from under him when an angry red warning box flashed in front of his eyes, confirming his fears.

"They were carrying Phazon?" He muttered, disbelief in his tone. "Who would be so foolish… and who would possess the means?"

There was little time to think about it. He had to get out of here; he had to alert his people to this threat and bring back as much firepower as could possibly be brought to bear on one planet. He would be heartbroken to see Greenfly reduced to a molten cinder, but its fate was already sealed. If he lived long enough, he would try to undo the damage.

"Better to see it burned than be consumed by the Poison," he said, backing away and preparing to order his drones to clear cut a path out of the jungle. He no longer felt any concern about damaging the local habitat.

As he turned to leave, he realized he was already past the edge of the debris field. It hadn't been obvious walking in the other direction, no doubt due to the pattern of the explosion, but there was machinery all around him, half-covered and embedded in the ash. No doubt there was even more that had been entirely buried.

He felt his heart beating faster. This entire expedition had been ill-advised, but carelessly walking into a live, self-sustaining conglomerate of Poison would be a horrible end to a life he'd expected would go on for centuries more. His radiation sensors proved ineffective at pinpointing it, already saturated by the steadily rising levels of radiation as it began to consume the planet he was on. He'd much rather it didn't start with him. Soon, he wouldn't be able to rely on his suit functions at all.

They were malfunctioning already, claiming the levels were dropping rather than rising.

He thought he could feel it tearing through him already, the molecules of his body shearing apart and getting steadily closer to the point of no return. An absurd thought, like worrying about smoke inhalation while burning alive, but he'd never been closer to Phazon than on a station orbiting an infested planet before. He'd never claimed to be brave; scientists rarely needed to be. Death was something that happened to other people—

That single, nauseating thought hit him like a burst of cold water, and he straightened up and looked carefully around for a way out, mind finally lurching back into gear. If there was none, then he still had options. Given time, he could reprogram his drones to lift him straight upwards. He'd get out of here yet.

It was with this thought in mind, that he looked at the debris field and realised it was slowly disappearing.

Most of the debris seemed to consist of a silvery sand-like substance, with torn and sundered components of the ship's internals and hull spread around in the dust. He saw a distinct blue glow at the edge of the field of sand, ever so slowly retreating. Left behind was nothing but bare dirt, and larger chunks of debris. Centimeter by centimeter, the sand was disappearing.

He looked over to his right at the extruded guts of what seemed to be an engine, the compact turbine blade bent and torn apart into a twisted mass. Reluctant to approach any closer, he had his visor zoom in. It looked as if the twisted blades were burning sheets of paper, slowly but persistently disappearing in blue fire.

He wanted to get a better look. It was not curiosity that drove him. It was the overwhelming sense that this simply was not right. Searching around his feet, he dug in the dirt until he found a small piece of metal, or what should have been metal. He was not yet convinced enough to touch it himself, so he directed a drone to dig it out and hold it up for inspection.

The chunk of what looked to him like a door handle was crumbling away into blue particles, faster once it was out of the soil, and in a matter of moments had disintegrated entirely. It was a fascinating process to observe, one which might have burned off the surface of his suit had he picked it up himself. Not the cargo; the ship itself was disappearing. It was all the confirmation he needed to come to a decision.

He had to get samples. This had to be studied; it was more important than one planet. Potentially more important than his life, if it came to that. Too much depended on understanding the Poison.

At his typed-in command, several drones flew off above the jungle. With little to do but wait, he found himself a fallen tree and sat down to observe.

In spite of his best efforts, he failed to block out the mental image of a condemned man waiting to be put to death.

———————————————

The drones returned less than a half hour later carrying several large metal cylinders, each one larger than himself. By then, Shu-Qi was pacing nervously.

"Thank the forebears that they built so many of the damned things." Shu-Qi muttered as he directed the drones to bring out the devices.

At his order, the tops of the cylinders opened up, revealing an interior lined with glowing yellow grates. He reached into it and grabbed a handle that was hidden on the inside of the lid. With a grunt he pulled out a device that looked like a metal claw and flipped the thumb switch. It began emanating a light humming sound not unlike a tuning fork, and glowed the same pale yellow color.

With this tool in-hand, he went hunting for something interesting and important looking, but not too big. The larger debris was taking far longer to break down, so he couldn't see results quickly. After several minutes scraping away silver sand and dirt, Shu-Qi picked up what seemed to be some form of tiny reflecting dish made of many octagonal mirrors.

The tiny reflector's surface immediately stopped glowing blue, eliciting a bark of triumphant laughter from Shu-Qi. He went into action, picking up anything and everything that looked like it could be of some value. Within a few hours the sphere was filled with parts, devices and some vials of the silver sand. The field had shrunk greatly in that time. It was only about five square meters in area, with a few small bits of shattered parts left.

He had just turned to leave when his foot kicked something buried in the charred moss. Curious, he reached down and pulled out an ornate box small enough to fit in his hand. Engraved on it were representations of flowers and birds. After a moment of hesitation, he opened the box and found a bronzed disc inside, resting over a complex arrangement of clockworks and deep blue crystals. There didn't seem to be any activation switch.

Shrugging, he placed this last item in the container and went on his way.

When he returned to check on the site a week later, it was already overgrown with new moss and vines. No trace remained but a temporary hole in the jungle canopy, to be completely filled in with new trees soon enough.

———————

[Synchronizing…]
[Synchronizing…]

She woke up.

[Synchronization lost.]

She could only claim to have awoken because she was, after all, looking at the sky. Wasn't that odd, though? Wasn't there more to the world than the sky?

[Synchronizing…]

Feeling slowly returned, spreading out from her chest. She blinked, once she remembered she had eyes. She was lying on moss, or something similar to moss, but it was crumbling under her weight. The ground was wet. The sky was purple. Purple? That sounded odd, but she couldn't say why.

[Synchronization lost.]

The feeling in her legs cut out, then came back.

[Synchronizing…]

Why was she here? Where was 'here'? Neither question made any sense to her. She was <here>. The world was centred around her. When she moved her head, she could see her surroundings; trees, distant mountains, and boulders. She was lying in the middle of a clearing. She was almost underwater.

[Synchronizing…]

The sun leapt from one side of the sky to another, and darkness came. She closed her eyes and slept.

———————

She was staring up at a ceiling made of brass tubes. A low thrumming sound filled her surroundings and resonated through her. The silhouette of a woman stood over her and stroked her hair with a gentle hand.

Wait, no. That wasn't right. She was lying in moss looking at the purple sky. Except that wasn't the sky. It was a tree. Why did she confuse the sky with a tree? Were trees supposed to be purple? She couldn't remember. Or did she ever know that in the first place?

No, she did remember. The sky was supposed to be blue, and she looked slightly to the right and saw that it was indeed blue. She was now certainly awake, not just staring blankly up at the tree. She was supposed to get up because she was awake. That's what… she was told… wasn't it?

Her eyes blinked open, and a friend looked down on her with a perplexed expression. "What are you doing, sleeping in here? We're supposed to—"

Exactly. She should have been getting up. She didn't really feel like getting up, though. Why did she need to get up, anyway? Was there something she needed to do?

She tried to think back. Just yesterday, she had… she had…

She was sitting on the beach, staring out across the ocean. Out in the distance a huge white tower pierced the sky, going higher and higher until she couldn't see the top. A beautiful lady in a summer dress with long white hair was standing at the edge of the water, looking up at it. Holding down her big sun hat in the breeze, the turnip turned to face her and—

No, no. That was wrong.

"Guess what I've got for the birthday girl!" Mom said with a singsong voice, eliciting a groan from dad.

"Please don't be weird," Dad said, chanting it under his breath over and over as if that would -bzzt- prevent the pink-haired girl from looking at her. She'd never seen anyone with wings before. -bzzt- Mom's cooking was really strange, but sometimes also really tasty, and she was sure she had at least glanced over the list before giving it to her.

'Ru smiled shyly at her. "It'll be fun," the carrot said, but—

Carrots. Edible. Small. Questionably edible, best… melted? Not… not people. She'd stopped trying to get up, while she was trying to remember why she should. Now she squeezed her eyes shut, as if that would help her remember what she was doing. Whenever she thought of carrots, she thought of pinkish-red girls.

"—to prevent the cake from being weird. Spoons do not eat soup. Mom, wait a minute—for the pipsqueak, at least—"

They were all silly. Sis, too.

She had a sister. She tried to remember more, but it wouldn't come to her—apart from dark, no, bright purple—

She tried harder.

"It'll just be a few hours! We'll—"

They rounded the corner, just in time to see a massive column of light coming their way. Her eyes had barely widened before she was wiped away. Sis was faster, and she sighed and prepared herself to wait.

"What do you think you're doing with her?! Get away from that right now!"

No…

A lady all in green smiled at her, then took Mom aside for a talk.

She wasn't too sure, but it did sound fun and exciting. What could go wr—

Congratulations! You've advanced to the second round.

"I'll teach you when you're a little larger." She pouted, but couldn't argue that she wasn't spongy. Maybe…

"We'll be together forever! Really, really forever!" The carrot looked incredibly tasty that day.

Clutching her head, she curled up into a shivering ball of misery. The flood of nonsense didn't stop, even when she tried to push it back.

It didn't hurt. It didn't hurt, but… she felt like she'd been torn in half. Like there was a rift going down through her shoulder, and if she looked down she'd see her insides falling out, only it was all in her head.

'Well done,' her friend said, looking up at her from below. It felt funny, because normally the walnuts were red.

She grimaced. Slowly, fighting all the way, she pushed the insanity to the back of her head. She had friends, at least, but who… who was she?

"What is… my name?"

For an endless moment it felt like she'd fail to remember even that, but then it came to her. Hana, CL-X37-001… a light cruiser?

"Is that supposed to be my name?"

It felt wrong. It felt right, but… wrong. Finally mustering the willpower to sit up, she looked around the clearing. There was plenty of life, but nothing remotely sapient; nothing like her. Her body had two arms, two legs; that's how it was supposed to be. But when she thought the word 'cruiser', she thought of something much larger. It didn't match up. She was coming to realise that very few of her memories matched up. She didn't want to think too hard about them, though. That made her mind get all jumbly.

Where was here?

There was a lot of purple. The plants were all purple. No flowers, though. Just lots of moss and trees and vines. "Hana" felt really disappointed about the lack of flowers, but it was still kind of pretty in a way. She had no idea why the plants were so purple, though. Suddenly a breeze blew by from behind and Hana found her view blocked by her hair.

"Oh. My hair is purple, too."

That was funny to her, but she couldn't say why. The color felt comforting.

She got the offending fluffy hair our of her face and looked around again. There didn't seem to be much around her but thick trees and moss. She could see the tips of some mountains above the canopy really far away. Had she seen those mountains before? She wasn't sure. They seemed farther away than she thought they should have been.

Maybe she could find out where she was if she explored some? That seemed like a good idea.

So she finally got up and floated into the jungle.

 

[Einsig]

Chapter 2​

---

In the stifling warmth of midday, a girl floated lazily along through the underbrush. She was very young and small, with long purple-tinted hair in a messy uncombed mane, lavender eyes, lightly tanned skin, a sleeveless short yellow kimono and dark grey knee-length shorts. She was barefoot, but her feet weren't touching the ground. Around her the jungle echoed with animal sounds, some near and some far away.

She was scanning her surroundings intently, yet her eyes were somewhat unfocused and she was humming something to herself. Occasionally she would mumble in a wondering tone, before sighing and continuing to look as she went along. For a few hours she meandered through the jungle, shouting "Hello?" to no response. Throughout all this she maintained a lazy smile.

"Hana… Hana…" she mumbled, floating by a grove of tall, narrow-trunked trees. "This is my name."

Names are important. So her name must have been important. Forgetting it would be bad.

She stopped and frowned. She tasted grapes now.

"Sadness shouldn't taste like grapes."

Hana didn't know how she knew that, but she assumed it was because grapes were purple. Purple is good. Therefore, sadness cannot be purple. But there were also green grapes… Sadness being green sounded almost right, but-

Something flashed in the edge of her vision and she forgot what she was pondering. Hana looked up and noticed a bug. It was a rather big bug, an ant as big as her hands. Her hands were quite small, but that was still pretty big by bug standards. She stood stock still for a second, just staring at it and wondering what she was meant to do with it.

The beetle was was petting her head, wide-eyed and brimming with enthusiasm.

"Oh, she's absolutely perfect, ma'am!"

Her hair was getting messed up. Her hair was already messy, but there was a principle about this kind of thing. It was messy in a way she liked. Now it was just messy with no rhyme or reason!

"I don't think she enjoys what you're doing now."

Now the beetle was poking her cheeks. Why was she doing that? Was something wrong with her face? But the beetle said she was "perfect".

"What makes you say that, ma'am?"

"Call it a mother's intuition."

The beetle was nice, but… too touchy feely.

This was a different bug, and it had wings. Its wings were reflective and had a shimmering rainbow tint that shifted when it twitched in response to her presence. Most importantly, it was a bug, and it hadn't yet run away. She could ask it who she was.

"Do you… do you know my parents?" She tried.

The bug rapidly waved its antennae, creating a strobe of colorful light before it buzzed and flew off. Hana, her eyes widening in shock, chased after.

The sun moved a fraction across the sky, and Hana was still chasing the ant, which was showing no signs of tiring. She was growing very frustrated. She couldn't catch the flying rainbow ant no matter how hard she tried, but Hana refused to give up. There had to be something she could do to get it.

If only she had a net. She wished so hard to have a net.

//React(MS)->splitBy(waveField, param)->construct()->join()

Suddenly the flying ant was captured inside a bubble of translucent purple hexagons. The bubble floated into Hana's hands and she raised it up in the air.

"Got it!" She said, grinning broadly.

A few seconds later she looked at her arms, and the rest of her body, and saw she was lighting up with a display of purple markings. Also, she was holding an energy shield in her hands. She dramatically gasped as she stared at the orb containing her prized bug.

"I've seen cartoons about this!" she exclaimed, wide-eyed. "I'm a magical girl!"

She looked speculatively at the ant that was waving its rainbow antennae around inside her bubble.

"Do you talk, Mr. Ant?"

The ant just tried to bite the walls of the barrier.

"Hmm… I guess I need to go look for my talking animal friend."

//get(FIELD_SATURATION): 0.00000001%

No, wait. That didn't sound right to her. She thought more, trying to understand what she'd just done. The bubble had been a reaction, something she'd known how to do but had sort of forgotten that she could do, but doing it was as natural to her as moving her arms. Proper magical girls were supposed to use attack names, or tools, or… at any rate, magical girls were special.

"... They're also not supposed to be real. Aren't they?"

She wasn't sure about that, but she kind of remembered having fun watching, and some of the things she'd been watching, if they'd happened she'd have wanted to help. Then again, she… sort of remembered doing that, so…

"On three. One, two, three—"

Walnut turned a single turret and blasted the shadow into oblivion, before she could even begin to move. The girl beside her hadn't bothered to get up off the ground. Maybe this hadn't been such a great idea after all.

She remembered feeling bored.

//React(Env)->when(rate(FIELD_SATURATION) > 0)->counter()
//get(FIELD_SATURATION): 0.0%

—the lenses of stressed space shifted, and she fell backwards just as sis was turning to look her way. Her scream was cut short as she caught her before she could hit the ground. Not as planned, but… kind of nice.

The air abruptly trembled around her, as she became aware of what she was doing. She was flying. She was… suddenly thinking about flying rather than just flying.

Fragmented bits of code flew through her mind. Gravity lurched. 'Up' abruptly became 'down', then sideways, and she just barely zigged around a tree, screaming, before she zagged the wrong way next and flew through the second one. Her scream stopped, if only because her mouth was full of sawdust. The next tree, she reached out for in a panic—and threw herself the wrong way, plowing into the ground at a hundred kilometers an hour.

'The ground,' she decided once the world had stopped spinning, 'does not taste nice.'

Not that it tasted like much of anything. Nor did it smell of much of anything, for that matter. She hacked and coughed, trying to get it out of her system; she'd even gotten a twig up her nose. She wished there was someone to help. She hadn't made that kind of mistake since…

She leaned back against dad's chest, feeling completely at peace as he drew a brush through her hair to take out all the assorted bits of debris. She'd made a mistake trying again so soon, but that was okay, because dad was here.

A trembling hand reached up to pull at her hair. She picked out one leaf, enduring the slight tug as she dragged it down in front of her eyes. It looked like nothing she had the slightest recollection of.

Her face was smudged with dirt, she was still halfway stuck in the ground, her hair and clothes were choked with moss, twigs and other debris of her crash.

She hugged herself, gripped by a sense of hopelessness. She wanted to cry, but there was no-one there to hear her if she did. Her sister wouldn't cry—

The thought slipped away from her as she tried to grasp it.

———

The day after, she returned to the wooded area where she'd first woken up. There wasn't anyone waiting for her. She hadn't really expected there to be, but…

Hana started to sniffle, and soon she was on the verge of sobbing. Just before tears broke forth, she inhaled deeply and held her breath, her face going red. Then, she let it out and panted a bit, holding her hand on her chest. Tears averted, she smiled, then suddenly looked around excitedly.

"See? I didn't… oh."

Her happy expression crumpled and she turned to staring down at the grass. Bad as she felt now, she was still able to keep herself together and think about her situation.

Item, the first. She wasn't from around here. She shouldn't have moved, she was supposed to stand still if she got lost, but that was a mistake she'd already made. In that case, was she supposed to keep looking around, or ask someone for help?

There was no-one here to ask, so she supposed she'd keep looking.

Item the second, and one that made her wince every time she thought about it. It was why she'd made that mistake.

She was broken.

So broken, she still had trouble wrapping her head around everything that wasn't working. Everywhere she looked she saw damaged, corrupted, or outright missing code, with the few working parts held together by the equivalent of spit and bailing wire. She'd tried to trace the damage, but her attempts failed at the starting line because even the manifests that were supposed to explain what code needed to be there were missing.

She flinched away from trying to fix it. She could tell she was broken; that didn't mean she knew how to fix it. In fact, in this case it meant the opposite, though she didn't think she ever had known. She felt like a glass figurine of a person, empty and easy to shatter, but she had at least the outline to work with.

Item the third.

She missed her family.

Whenever she looked around, she expected to see one of them. When her eyes threatened to overflow, she expected someone to hold her, and she kept waiting for someone to tell her how dirty she was, and drag her in for a wash. She couldn't even say who she was missing, precisely, she just felt the lack.

Item the fourth…

There was no item four, or if there was, she'd forgotten it. She slumped down to the ground, curling up on a reasonably clean spot under a tree, and settled in to wait. They hadn't found her yet, or they'd left, but maybe they'd be back? She wished she hadn't flown off. If they'd already left, it was her fault.

She poked at a small flower-like fungus at the base of the tree, sighing as it left a black mark on her finger. She managed to clean it off on some moss, that time, but at this rate she'd end up dirtier than the places she chose to lie down on.

Sleep wasn't hard to find, as her mind flew apart practically the moment she closed her eyes. She hoped that, the next time she woke, her head would at least be a little clearer.

———

Deep in a sealed underground room, Shi-Qi was examining the samples he had collected. He was, of course, doing this from a distance. He was separated from the examination table by several heavily shielded walls, and as a further precaution he had separated each sample in an individual container.

The lonely temple where the old Chozo lived in solitude hadn't been used for work such as this in many generations, but all the facilities still functioned acceptably. It was only a minor annoyance to restart the labs and prepare a containment room, after which he began to very carefully lay out each sample.

Once that was done, the first order of business had been to closely scrutinize the materials and make sure they weren't causing any alterations to the local firmament. After hours of continuous observation, Shu-Qi was fairly confident that they were safe and that they were being sustained only by the containment fields that imitated the Poison's physics. Since then he had been inspecting each item individually and compiling notes and profiles for them.

It was a rather unsettling experience. No matter how hard he looked, Shu-Qi saw normal, if oddly-designed, sometimes incomprehensible pieces of technology. This was made of the Poison, but by intelligent hands; hands which understood it better than him. Many of the samples seemed to have recognizable uses, going by their appearance. Of course there were others that he couldn't think of any equivalent to.

He focused on a particularly strange device, rotating it in the containment field to see it from all angles. It seemed to just be a set of levers that would randomly adjust their angle of position with no discernable pattern or logic. It looked vaguely like a stack of metronomes, but otherwise acted nothing like one.

Its behaviour was odd, to say the least. Given absolute silence, it would go quiescent and cease moving. In any other case, it did… something. As the only observable effect of the device was to change the chamber's acoustics, and on the admittedly dubious assumption that the observable effect was the deliberate one…

If that was the case, then he was not a clever enough bird to guess at the purpose of it. He had listened to hours' worth of recordings of the device, and apart from a tendency to break the acoustical laws as he knew them, the only trend he could detect was that it would amplify pure tones while cancelling discordant ones.

Elsewhere, a drone was testing the strength of what was clearly armor plating. This was slow going, as the corrosive effect of the space it was embedded in had to be accounted for and the drone's probes needed replacement after every few seconds of testing, but already he thought it might compare favorably to the armor they used as cladding for their own ships.

Suddenly he was pulled from his thoughts by an incoming message. He was already certain of what it would be about, but he checked it anyway.

"My, they made good time."

He'd been expecting the speedy arrival, given what he'd called them for, but it was still nice they they got there so quickly. Many things were said about the legendary lackadaisical nature of Chozo, but when it came down to it they didn't fool around with things like this. After making doubly sure that everything was secure in the lab, Shu-Qi went up to the hangar to greet his guests.

Perhaps it was somewhat inappropriate given the circumstances, but he hoped the visit wouldn't be all doom and gloom. It had been a very long time since he'd had anyone over.

———

She spent the next couple of days half dozing, half reminiscing, sometimes unable to tell which was which. Half the time, she couldn't tell where her dreams intersected with reality. She'd remembered a lot: Her name, that she had a family, some of the games she'd played…

She could even, if she focused, imagine the face of her mother. She could almost remember what she'd been doing before waking up here. There'd been a cake—she remembered that, one with six sparkling little crystals and two actual candles. She'd insisted on the crystals.

For a minute, she'd wondered if eating the cake was why she'd been abandoned here. Then she thought better of it. Just, for starters, that would never happen. It was really absurd that she'd even thought of— she was thinking too hard about this.

She'd spent the last few days staring blankly at a piece of forest, hoping that someone she knew would magically appear, and it wasn't going to happen. She could only keep on staring for a little while longer, but for as long as she still thought she might be rescued, she spent the time lost in her fragmented memories.

—

She loved being at the falls with mom. The sound of the water, the splashing, meeting other kids and running around without a care in the world…

She just loved being at the falls, period, even if it wasn't with mom. She wasn't allowed to go on her own. She often came here with dad, or sis on one of her shopping trips, but today they were at home and mom had offered to bring her along while she was meeting Durian.

There weren't that many people at the park this morning, probably because it was a work day. Aside from the ever-present roar of the falls, it was really peaceful. It was almost like the park was there especially for them! They could have a nice meal, just the two of them, and mom would sing a pretty song. It would be a perfect day out.

Depending on what you meant by 'perfect'. Perfect would be if it was just her and mom, or her, mom, and some random city kids. Maybe Potato, if he was around; they'd had fun playing together last week. Maybe she shouldn't call him that. Maybe, maybe…

'Okay' would have been just her, on her own, with new friends, but any time Durian was around she wanted to meet her, and Hana didn't enjoy that.

Today she had on that weird diving suit, with the helmet and the black visor that hid her face. Hana didn't understand why she wore that. This wasn't underwater. Durian was weird like that. She would put on a different bizarre suit every time she showed up.

Mom and Durian talked for a while, but Hana only heard about half of it. Something about the project going at expected pace, wishing some parts of it were moving quicker, things like that. Hana knew it had something to do with her, but she didn't bother with the details. It was serious stuff, and she didn't care much about serious stuff.

"Hana, come over please," Mom called.

"But… but I almost got the bird to come…" Hana said, sadly, staring at the bird that was just inches away from hopping off the ground onto her waiting hand.

"You can pursue the bird later. We have things to discus," Durian insisted.

Oh no, it looked like she wanted to talk to her. Now she'd never befriend that little bird…

—

Hana couldn't remember the rest… but she was pretty sure she never did get that bird to come back.

She stared at the empty spot in the forest for a few minutes longer. Just a little bit longer, maybe… maybe someone would...

No. There wasn't anyone coming. Someone should have come, right? Maybe it was her fault, maybe she'd done something wrong, but maybe they'd already looked for her and she wasn't there when they passed by so they went somewhere else. It didn't matter. She was alone, and nobody was going to find her here. She'd waited so long already.

She wanted to cry.

*sniff*

She was crying. She had been for a while and hadn't even noticed. That spoke volumes for how well put-together her mind was. She couldn't trust her own decisions. What would her sister do?

Her sister had been on her own for years, back when she'd been only a few years older than herself. Listening to her sister's stories was one of Hana's favourite hobbies, even if they were sometimes scary. There was that one time when she'd been surrounded by enemies…

She remembered Carrot blushing and making faces at them, but her sister hadn't reacted, so she hadn't either. She remembered being unsurprised that she hadn't, but couldn't remember why that would be.

When her sister had been surrounded, and scared that anything she did would just make things worse, a small music player she'd gotten as a farewell present had fallen out and started playing. That had reminded her that there were people waiting for her, people who'd wanted to be there, but couldn't. And that, in turn, had given her courage enough to fight back, even though she hadn't known she'd win.

Mom had stepped inside the room at that point, and had given her sister a big hug. Which hadn't been fair; she was the one who'd wanted a hug, after being scared that her sister wouldn't survive the story.

Which had been a silly thing to worry about, but she'd only been seven.

It… made sense, though. She didn't have a music box to remember them by, but she did have her memories, and she was sure they'd miss her as much as she missed them. Relatively sure. As sure as she could be.

In that case, she'd go ahead and start looking for people herself. That was what needed to do. It couldn't be that far, could it? She just had to pick a direction to go and... Well first she needed to find a distinctive landmark. Everywhere she looked it was all nearly identical jungle. Those mountains way off in the distance seemed like a good place to start. Maybe she'd be able to see something she recognized from way up there.

As she walked through the thick of the purple underbrush, with bizarre plants and bugs of varieties she didn't recognize at all, she tried as hard as she could to ignore the growing feeling that that wasn't going to happen. She kept going, urging herself to focus on getting to her destination.

Now she was really regretting going farther away from those mountains before. It took her several hours to reach the foot of them, mostly because she was worrying about accidentally turning herself into a missile again, the way she had a few days earlier. That had been… well, not so much painful as embarrassing, but still a bit painful. Then she made a careful ascent. Unfortunately it was late and darkness fell during the climb. She decided to stop and wait until morning, so she finally sat down took in her surroundings.

Now high up on the side of a mountain at night, Hana was able to get an unimpeded view of most of the sky. It was really beautiful now that she took the time to appreciate it. Yet it was also… off. Something "itched" in her mind as she stared up at the stars and the band of smudgy brown clouds of a great big galaxy.

It wasn't right. It was wrong, but she struggled to think of why. Why was it wrong? She'd forgotten something else, which was a bit of a redundant statement because she'd clearly forgotten many, many things. However, this thing she'd forgotten seemed like one of the most important. What was it?

Hana remembered learning about stars; vaguely, the bits and pieces of it. She couldn't recall who taught her. Mom gave her lots of books on many subjects, and she enjoyed reading them, but that wasn't nearly as fun as learning from somebody personally. She even knew how to navigate by stars. Well, mostly. She could tell some chunks of her teaching were missing, but she could recall enough.

She didn't recognize the constellations.

It wasn't just that she didn't recognize any constellations, though. The stars themselves were wrong, the light was wrong. She couldn't say why, but they were wrong, and… this was important. She'd promised never to do this, but that was before she'd been lost. It would be okay if she just took a peek, right?

There was a galaxy inside her as well. Hundreds of programs vied for each other's attention, exchanging packets at lightning speed below the threshold of her consciousness, and she could see the ragged scars where half of them fell off into nothingness. Sometimes because the destination was missing, sometimes because the sender was damaged and talking nonsense.

She looked away. She didn't know how to fix that, and even thinking about it scared her. She wasn't something separate; she was the interplay, all of them at once and none of them. If half of them were broken, then half of her was missing. She replayed her impression of the starry sky, though, then traced her impression of wrongness back to half a dozen classifiers. Simple things; she had never spent that much time looking up.

There was a broken link, in the middle, and they were unable to relay why they were asking for attention. She could see that, when she looked right at it, and the moment she realised what was happening she saw the linkages shift and realign. That—was a little comforting, for about half a second, until she looked back at the sky and understood what she was seeing.

The colors were wrong. Incomplete. All over the spectrum, there were sharp dips for no apparent reason, like someone had cut chunks out of the light from the star. Instead of looking at stars, it felt like she was looking at lamp lights, but she knew that couldn't be right. Could it?

"This happened when I was very young," Turnip said. "Only a few years older than you. One day a pair of travellers from very far away arrived." Her eyes were distant. "I wish I hadn't forgotten. I wish I could see them again…"

"Of course you can! You can do anything you want to, you're a goddess."

Turnip put a hand on her head, smiling at her with a glimmering warmth in her eyes.

"Maybe someday, but…" She looked up at the sharp-angled ships darting every which way through the air. "I have responsibilities, now. I can't run off on my own anymore, and I'm not sure I'd want to. It's been seven-hundred years. Cass, maybe, but…"

She tore her way out of the recollection with a gasp, then flinched, realising she'd frozen up for whole seconds. Worse yet—or better, she didn't know which—she was still keeping an eye on her insides, and as she watched she saw an errant neural network being prodded back into shape by using her memories as reference to how it should behave. That explained why she was having these fugues.

She thought back to the memory itself.

She might be more lost than she'd thought was possible.

 

[Einsig]

"Connecting Artifact #08 to Artifact #05, via Artifact #19."

'—Using extreme caution,' Shu-Qi thought, but didn't say. Caution was a given.

Artifact #19 was a cable. Judging by the size, simple plug structure and asymmetry, probably a power cable. Using that as an assumption, artifact #08 might just be a power source or battery. Artifact #05 was the small dish that he had picked up weeks ago, and had the opposite socket from #08.

The sockets were radially symmetric, and made to twist into place. There was no obvious retaining element, but earlier tests had shown that, once in place, it took a large amount of force to disconnect the plug.

"Beginning the test… now."

The cable jerked as he used remote manipulators to twist it into place on #08, and he felt his mouth drying a little. It hadn't done that for any other device. Despite this being the third time he saw the reaction, moving poison was still moving poison, even if it was a machine. That was also why they were watching this from half a continent away, and why there were self-destruct devices in the base. Just in case.

So far, so good, but they'd gone this far before. The real test would be…

As carefully as he could, he moved the other end of the cable towards the dish, which was itself pointed towards a detector array on the nearby wall.

Nothing happened when the cable touched the socket on the dish.

Nothing kept happening, even as they twisted it into place. Slowly, but not too slowly; even a hard-light projection couldn't remain coherent inside the Poison's containment field for very long. Idly, he wondered if cable-twisting was the right way to turn the devices on. Almost certainly not, but if there was a power switch on either one, they hadn't found it. They'd have to hope that it'd do something without such commands.

The cable clicked into place, jumping the last few degrees just like it had for the possible power source, and—

"There's a response," a red-plumed female said sharply. En… Enz… maddeningly, he couldn't recall her name, but he put it aside to focus on the dish. It hummed very faintly, keeping it up for a few seconds before stopping. Just as they were starting to worry that it had been damaged, or the battery had already run out of power, it started humming again, continuing without pause for nearly a minute.

Then it stopped. Then it started again, continuing for random intervals of silence and sound.

"Assuming it's a transmitter…"

It might be running a pre-programmed pattern. It might be failing, due to damage. The battery might be faulty, the cable might be shorting out, or there could be any number of other problems. Though they had guessed at the cable's purpose, they could not detect any power flow. They wouldn't know what to look for.

Shu-Qi glanced at the sensor readings. "At the moment we're not picking anything up."

It might not be transmitting anything they could detect. It might actually be a receiver. It might be inactive; connecting a power supply had been enough to make it do something, but a low hum did not guarantee that it was using what-they-assumed-was-an-antenna at all. That was what they could all think of in the first five seconds, but the truth might be something very different.

"Let's take a step back," a muscular Chozo said. "The Poison does not operate under our native mechanics. Whatever the device is transmitting, if it is transmitting, might well be the equivalent of dark energy to us."

There were scattered sighs. Shu-Qi discreetly triggered his AR overlay; the base computers informed him that he was looking at Kohinoor, of the Nutau lineage, a group that in days past had made up much of the now-defunct warrior caste. He might have known.

However, stating the obvious was sometimes useful. In fact, Shu-Qi had a strong suspicion that Kohinoor had done that on purpose. He wouldn't have invited the male in the first place if he didn't have the credentials. If they looked at the devices, not as alien technology or conglomerations of the Poison, but as intrusions of dark matter into the visible universe, then it opened a few possibilities.

Their standard model of physics—the known universe—was made up of seventeen different fundamental particles and their interactions. That included all visible matter, as well as light and other forms of energy, but when you summed it all up, and looked at the galaxy, you'd notice it was spinning too fast; its mass was too large. In short, over nine-tenths of the universe's energy was invisible.

Early Chozo scientists had thought there was a vast quantity of 'dark matter', particles which interacted very weakly with those they could see, as well as each other. Encounters with the Poison had put paid to that theory, proving that the particle families that embodied dark matter were, if anything, even more complex than their own, but they had always assumed that the Poison itself was a creation of some long-lost species in their own universe.

That was an assumption they'd made in the middle of war, during the final decline of their civilization. It seemed like a safe one, as the Poison's alterations to the firmament stabilized its own existence as much as it destabilized normal matter. Life could not possibly evolve under such restrictions; dark matter, they thought, would have remained little but loose gas without the influence of its creators. The Poison's field shifted the interactions between different particles, and they'd always assumed that dark matter, on its own, did not form into molecules.

If the Alimbics still existed he would have considered giving them a call, as they had actually done more research into the field of dark-matter physics than the Chozo. Unfortunate, that. He would have liked to learn about their findings, even without the pressing need to save civilization from certain destruction.

"I suppose the scope of our research is going to expand a tad."

Not that he really minded that.

——————

"Test number, um… three. I'm going to check what happens if I set this on fire."

Hana looked askance at the strip of bark, still contained in a bubble of warped space from her earlier test. She hadn't opened it since she started test number two, and it wouldn't let anything in or out without her say-so. Did that mean she was still on number two? She hoped not.

Number two had involved heating it without her input, by making the sphere reflect heat and waiting for the sunlight to do its thing. The bark had reacted to that by curling up a little, letting off some sort of gas (water vapor?), and getting a little browner. Interestingly, it had also gotten very slightly heavier in the process. Well, the sphere had; she was pretty sure that the bark, as such, had gotten lighter.

She wished she had a lab-coat, and not just normal (if dirty) clothes. She was doing this wrong, and grabbing a piece of bark off a random vine-covered tree wasn't science at all. There were supposed to be… beakers and stuff, and clean benches, but hopefully it'd still tell her something.

She glared spitefully at the bark, willing it to burst into flames. It obligingly did so.

The flames were, admittedly, pretty. Kind of yellowish-red, with green highlights, although the sphere was quickly getting choked up with smoke. They flickered and faded after only a few seconds.

"Okay. Test three results…"

Who was she talking to?

There was no-one around, but pretending there was made her feel a little less alone. Anyway, she knew she was supposed to record her results. The only recorder around was herself—and her memory was normally perfect, which had started to hold true again a day ago—but she didn't really question it. This was how it was supposed to happen.

Her voice trailed off, as she tried to take in what had happened to the bark and its sphere. Or rather, what hadn't. This was supposed to have been a simple test, to confirm things she already knew.

The sphere had filled with smoke, yes. And the flames had looked like flames, although they had the same not-quite-there appearance as the starlight. The inside had gotten much hotter; the bark was still glowing dully. She reached out one hand to touch it, then blanched, pulling back right as she started to feel suction from the sphere of warped space. That would have hurt!

The smoldering bark obstinately refused to be anything but smoldering bark.

She reached out once more, hesitating for a moment before cutting the power. The bark fell down into her cupped hands, bursting into flame again as it did so.

Again, nothing. She wasn't getting any radiation other than the expected amount of light and heat.

She frowned, and tapped her fingers against her side, consciously emulating the way Mom tended to act. Inwardly, she was excited. This was odd, and new, and… she already had three or four theories as to why, but she couldn't just go look it up. She got to be the first one to figure it out.

It beat thinking about what she'd seen from the top of the mountain, namely nothing.

——————

A week after her experiments with setting bark on fire, and two after she'd gotten here, the forest she'd arrived in had acquired a few new features.

Hana looked at the small, wooden shelter with satisfaction. It had taken her a little experimentation to make it stick together, but clever use of her wave barrier had let her cut notches enough to turn a bunch of tree trunks into an overly-large jigsaw puzzle. The bark, she'd peeled off with her bare hands in order to make a very nearly watertight roof, and she'd turned a few more trees—cut in half, lengthwise—into flooring.

It was the sort of thing she'd always wanted to try, before… before. Some of the older kids had their own tree-house, but she hadn't wanted to hurt the forest. She didn't care so much here. Having somewhere to stay out of the rain was great, almost worth it on its own, but it also gave her somewhere to put her things.

A small fireplace, ringed in stone. Not that she needed to stay warm, or to stay out of the rain, but she enjoyed having it.

A few rocks, ones she'd chosen for their pretty shape and glossy feel rather than any practical reason.

And her experiments, such as they were. A bowl full of black powder, made by heating wood in the absence of air. A greasy, glue-like substance she'd gotten from squeezing the wood. And various types of fungus, one of which killed any grass she smeared it on if she heated it first. It was all made from wood, in one way or another, but that was what she had to work with.

She'd figured out that if she crushed some of the heavier rocks, then heated the rock dust until it melted, she could make a reasonable approximation to glass. The melted stone-soup was hot enough that it actually hurt to touch, but she'd quickly gotten adept at using her barrier to shape it. The resulting foggy, breakable almost-glass was good enough to hold the few bits of… stuff… that she didn't want to risk losing.

She occasionally wandered off in search of something more interesting, or in hopes of finding someone, but she kept coming back here. This was where she'd first woken up, so it was still her best hope of someday escaping.

—————

It had been over a month, by her calendar, since she'd first woken up on this planet. She was completely certain that "planet" was the correct term for how far her current location was from home. The days were much shorter and the gravity was weaker. Something was also weird about the way gravity felt to her, though aside from being weaker she couldn't pin down how. Along with the solar spectrum having chunks of it missing that made it look artificial and everything around her lacking any distinct taste or smell, it was another oddity that just drove home how far away from home she had to be.

Over the last few weeks, Hana had amassed a very large collection of things. She had rocks, pieces of metal she'd found in the bottoms of rivers and streams, samples from many different plants, and a bunch of the things she'd made from her experiments. She'd figured out how to separate metals from rocks by melting them, which led to her wondering what all this stuff was made of. She figured that was really important, and spent a lot her time working on it. It had taken a lot of trial and error and a good deal of guesswork, but she now felt she had a decent idea of what chemistry was like here.

Substances seemed to break down only to a certain point. She couldn't make a specific kind of metal turn into anything else no matter how hot she made it, even if she made it flash into vapor and then allowed it to condense. The same was true for that black stuff she made whenever she heated wood or plants without any air present. From this, she learned that matter had fundamental components that wouldn't change into something else, or at least she couldn't make them change with the means she had available to her. From that, she had an idea of what she was looking for.

Soon enough she had a list. It was only numbered because she didn't know what to name any of these things. Each fundamental substance she identified was kept in a possibly-glass bottle and labeled. She'd learned to categorize each item by its absolute mass after discovering that equal volumes of different things had different weights. This lead her to realize her list had gaps where some other substance between the weight of two others could fit.

"Can I make any predictions about what these… uh… what do I call this stuff? Fundamentals?" Hana wondered about that for a moment, staring at a bottle of a small yellow crystal she'd made by squeezing the black stuff really, really hard with her barrier. "Eh. I'll figure it out later. Maybe I can predict what their properties could be from what comes before them?"

She still hadn't figured out how to do that. If there was any pattern, it definitely wasn't based on increasing absolute mass. Two substances very close to each other in mass often had very different properties. It was really starting to frustrate her. She wanted it to make sense in a simple and logical way, but she didn't see it.

Since that wasn't working out, she was spending some time testing light. Once she noticed the sun wasn't producing a complete spectrum, she also noticed that different material would reflect their own unique signature of light. She wanted to know why that happened and put a lot of different things under magnified sunlight to figure it out.

It was all so exciting and new. She almost didn't notice that she wasn't remembering her own life as fast as she did the first few days. She did notice, though, and it was starting to worry her. Memories came back less frequently every day, and they were shorter each time. For a while she was afraid that there wasn't actually anything more to remember, or that the memories were completely gone and she would never get them back. So much of her was broken, she couldn't know anything for sure.

That hurt. That fear really hurt, and it kept her up almost every night as she worried that she would never fully recall her mother's face, never pull up the names of all the people she cared about, never get back all the precious moments she'd shared with her family...

Never get home. Never hear Mom sing for her again. Never, ever hug her sister. Never enjoy the doting attentions of Dad when she did something silly that got her clothes and hair messy. Never play with Walnut, as frustrating as she made their games sometimes with her extreme directness.

She had to keep working, keep doing something that might someday be useful, because if she didn't there was a bottomless abyss of bad thoughts waiting for her.

And she was going home someday.

Days turned into weeks, which turned into months. There wasn't much to tell time by, other than the movement of the sun, but she soon realised that she was heading into summer in an already warm jungle.

Sometimes she worked on her experiments, hammering away to improve her understanding of this world. She was slowing down, in a way, but only because every question answered opened half a dozen more, some of them quite unanswerable. For example, why was this planet so uncannily similar to her own, when the physics decidedly wasn't? She didn't remember most of her lessons on the subject, but she recalled enough to know that this wasn't how it was supposed to work.

That was something her mother would have asked. Hana, she decided, was a more practical person. Which was why, shortly after isolating one of the metals—a greyish one, which turned red on contact with air, and which the rocks nearby had a lot of—she built a closed vessel from it, then filled it with water and turned up the heat.

The resulting explosion blew a couple of trees apart, embedding one piece of metal millimeters into her chin, but it also taught her a lot. For example, don't boil water if there's nowhere for the steam to go. And be very careful about the quality of your metal.

Shortly thereafter, however, she had a steam-powered ceiling fan in her hut, and a good source of hot water for her bath. The heat couldn't really make her sweat, but she enjoyed sitting under it while working in the stifling warmth.

Sometimes, she spent days trying to remember.

Occasionally that bore fruit. More and more often, however, she'd sit there for a day only to realize at the end that she'd remembered nothing. Even when she did recover a memory, sometimes that memory came with a seizure. She'd be reminiscing about her family, idly watching the birds play around her hut, then from one moment to the next whole minutes would pass.

For both of those reasons, she slowly started spending less time thinking of her past.

 

[Einsig]

"Shu-Qi, take a look at this. Come here!"

He paused, turning to look at Enza Lu Rinu's beaming face. After six months working together, he had at least managed to learn her name. She was from a separate nation of Chozo from Shu-Qi's, which had different naming conventions. That had made it much harder to remember hers. He'd also learned that she was an excitable and, dare he say it, flighty person.

"I was going to check on the transceiver—"

"Oh, that can wait." She waved his excuses aside. "The battery has lasted this long, it'll last a while longer. I think I'm starting to get an idea of how it works!"

Now, that… grabbed his interest. She wouldn't give him a superficial explanation. They'd long since noticed it was losing mass, in exact proportion to the amount of power that was drained—though they couldn't measure that directly—but matter annihilation on that small a scale, without radiation hazards, was unheard-of.

Her hands flew over the keyboard, bringing up a hologram of the battery.

"Notice the lower-density channels. It's hard to tell, because we don't have the scanner resolution and we're probably barely touching its capacity, but I think they're holding some equivalent of steam. Those discs look solid, but they can't be blocking the flow, and there's strobe—I think they're rapidly spinning fan blades. I can tell you right now, though, we won't be able to replicate it. Not on our own system of physics. The problem—" She pointed at the core of the hologram. "Is this. The power source.

"This generator depends on intrinsic properties of the Poison, it's matter annihilation, but it's actually a lot simpler than you'd think. I believe a species growing up there, if such a thing could exist, could conceivably make a primitive version of this even before their first electronics.

"How?" Oh, she had his attention now.

"Basic physics. Electrodynamics…" She nodded to the wall, where they had the beginnings of a particle model for this variant of the Poison. "Electrons don't exist. The Poison interacts only weakly with electromagnetism, in general, and most particles not at all. So what keeps nuclei from colliding?" She went on, the question clearly rhetorical. "Nothing. Doesn't matter. Nuclei also don't exist! We were so busy drawing that thing, we forgot to check our most basic assumptions. Particles, for example."

She stopped then, eyes sparkling as she invited him to make the obvious reply.

"…don't exist?"

"That would be a little sad, after Lozal spent so much time drawing that map. As descriptions go, 'Poison particle families' isn't exactly wrong, it just isn't… descriptive. I'll send you the math later, but the gist of it is that all the particles are huge. Larger than the average distance between them in static, structured matter, and not a little bit larger; thousands of times larger. If this was what we'd had to work with, we wouldn't have wave-particle duality; we'd have wave-wave duality, with two different kinds of waves. And the importance of that, is that there's no clear distinction between 'chemistry' and 'nuclear physics', which means…"

He clicked his beak. "So that's why burning fabric produces radiation."

"Probably." She hesitated, calming down a little. "It would make sense. If the Poison's equivalent to nucleons can be bound at sufficiently variable strengths, then even fire might be enough to dislodge some of them, and depending on how they're bound together you could get a self-limiting, relatively slow chain-reaction that would look like fire, but is actually a form of catalysed nuclear fission. I did some simulations, and instead of atoms or molecules I think you could form a three-dimensional, fabric-like lattice from the fundamental particles without making it too dense to be useful. It depends on the exact parameters, which I don't know, and most of this is speculation. We still don't have detectors for any of it."

He nodded, appreciating her forthrightness.

"Well, good work. I'll look forward to your email; it's the most promising idea we've had so far."

"But can you imagine the material strengths?" Enza went on, now addressing no-one in particular. Her face was rapturous. "Sure, most patterns won't be stable, but the right one might let you… I don't know, build a tower to the moon. Nucleons interacting with nucleons all the way up, there's practically no limit to how strong you could make it."

"I really do need to check on the transceiver—"

"All we're doing is replicating the Poison's version of physics, verbatim, and we can't mix that with ours. That doesn't mean there isn't some version which can be, in fact, it might be how this was made. Oh, it might take decades, but I can't wait to get started. I should do some quick test runs…"

He snuck off while she was distracted.

Matter annihilation. If he understood her explanation, the 'battery' was closer to being a highly advanced steam engine, one that ran off particle decay. The analogy wouldn't hold precisely, and duplicating its functionality might be impossible. How could anyone have built up the knowledge to create such a thing, when even they hadn't seen the possibility? It couldn't be a local race, none of which had ever surpassed the Chozo.

Whoever they were, they hadn't been perfect. However their ship had achieved FTL, it hadn't survived the experience. He found himself wishing he could speak with its creators, but after all this time, it was unlikely that they knew where it had crashed. Perhaps they simply believed there'd be nothing to find, never having anticipated his intervention. A pity. First contact would have to wait.

——————

A loud bang echoed through the jungle one afternoon, roughly a year since Hana had arrived on this lonely planet. Some distance away from the source of the sound, a tree split in half when a stone ball crashed through it. The young girl's eyes zoomed in, she noted the effect with some satisfaction, and patted her new steam cannon with a smile.

The old one had exploded.

Hana wasn't entirely sure why she built this. She certainly didn't need it to fend off predators, and even had she needed to eat anything it would have just turned any animal into messy chunks. She was, however, finding it useful for testing the limits of her understanding of metallurgy, and it was slightly amusing to make big booms. She didn't want to use it very often, though. It scared away all the animals, even the big six-legged tree-climbing cats.
With the test finished, Hana picked up the heavy and overly complicated contraption, with its big steam tank and boiler inconveniently separate from the barrel, and carried it back to her cabin. It was still early morning and she had a lot of other things to work on. There were so many experiments to run and inventions to make, and only so many hours in a day to get them done. Not that she really needed daylight to work by. Rather, she just enjoyed it more, and she still needed to sleep sometimes.

On her way back, she heard a sharp whistle echo through the thick jungle. Giggling excitedly, Hana upped her pace and arrived back at her abode in only a few minutes.

The little lean-to she threw together a year ago had long since disappeared. The original room was still in there, somewhere, but it had been buried under several stories of expansions, and now she wasn't sure she could go there without dismantling part of a wall.

Taking a cue from vague memories of home, she'd built her own house around the trunk of a massive tree. The entrance was several meters up in the air, high enough that she had to crouch to jump that far and most of the critters inhabiting the jungle couldn't get in. From there, corridors wrapped around the trunk in both directions, the clockwise one going downwards while the other one spiraled up.

She'd found out that there was a limit to how much weight the tree could take. That's why the workshop part of her house was on the ground, and also why there was a large crack going straight through the middle of the seven-metre wide trunk, but a metal band wrapped around the tree kept it from getting any worse. She still felt a little bad about that.

There was also a windmill on one of the tree's larger limbs, which turned whenever the wind changed. It didn't power anything in particular at the moment, but she'd been playing around with some sticky bits of metal and thought there might be a way to push power through metal wires rather than having mechanical shafts everywhere. Mindful of what had happened with her first boiler, however, she'd put it out on the opposite side of the tree from everything else.

That meant she had to go climbing on the vines that still covered most of the tree whenever she wanted to go there, but she hadn't had time to build a platform that far yet. She was still working out how to make reliable nails, after her first batch turned red and practically disintegrated only a few months after she made them.

But right now, it was one of her tiger traps that was whistling.

———

Hana bounced up and down as she waited for the trap to lower from the tree canopy. For weeks she'd been setting these traps hoping for a tiger to enter one, without success. She'd captured a lot of other things, most of which she really didn't think looked very cute or nice; giant bugs chiefly, and a big worm thing that spat a corrosive fluid at her.

"Oh please oh please oh please be a kitty!" Hana begged, ready to burst from the anticipation.

This time, this time, this time—!

With a squeal of delight, Hana cheered the appearance of the cage containing her (hopefully) new pet: A big, six-legged cat. Like any other ambush predator, it was camouflaged to resemble its environment and break up its silhouette. In this jungle, that was purple and brown stripes.

She really loved purple.

Calling it a cat wouldn't be quite accurate, though. It had a feline body profile and mannerisms, but… well, its face sort of resembled a bat's. And it had six legs, obviously. And sometimes hunted in packs, which she didn't think cats did.

"I'm going to tame you. And hug you, and play with you, and hug you—and call you Charles," she chanted, before seizing up for a second. Oh no—Oh good, the tiger was still there. "Or… Melon. Do you like melon?" She thought there was a kind of melon with tiger-like stripes.

She smiled winningly at it. The tiger, for its part, scratched at its cage with all six limbs and hissed at her.


———— —

"Please, Melon!"

"Grrrrrrrrrr."

"Just taste it!"

She felt her eyes filling with tears. At this rate, Melon would… Melon would starve! Her lower lip trembled. This world was too cruel. Her hopes and dreams had been shattered, she would never have a pet.

"RAWR!"

With a roar, Melon pounced on the hand holding its morsel, four of its six limbs wrapping around her waist. Her eyes lit up.

"Good cat!"

She tried to let go, so she could hug it back, but it had bitten a bit too far up and her hand was… stuck. It tickled a lot. The claws on her back were prickly as well.

Now, how to get her hand out without hurting her pet?

——————

"Wait. Cocona..."

She didn't. Couldn't stop, even for mother. Dogged determination was a point of pride with her, and she'd made her decision months ago, back when it first became obvious that her little sister wasn't coming back.

"Wait, I said!"

Dodge her telegraphed lunge. She'd be out of here and on her v-board before—

Pain flared as mother pulled hard at her arm, staggering her. She nearly winced. That would leave a bruise, but if she was careful neither of them should spot it. Sasha had a makeup kit, though she never used it herself.

"Do you even know what you're doing?" Mother pleaded with her, tears running down her cheeks even as her face remained straight and composed. Mir always struggled when it came to expressing emotion, but some things were too painful even for her to contain. "It took us two years to make a stable soul for her. I don't know how many times we failed. I can't… I can't lose you too."

She set her expression. She'd promised to meet Sasha at noon. That was more important.

Mir didn't resist as she tore herself loose.

 

[Einsig]

It was yet another nice day at Hana's treehouse. Warm sunlight streamed in through the window of her workroom, shining on the scene of Hana laying on the back of a big purple tiger. With a contented sigh, Hana nuzzled her soft furry mattress. Said furry mattress let out a low grumble, but otherwise didn't complain.

It took the better part of a month for Melon to finally warm up to Hana, after lots of treats and hugging. It was mostly Melon doing the hugging. With his claws. And teeth. Hana didn't hold that against him, though. If she were older she might have been thinking more about the moral questions of capturing a fully grown wild animal and keeping it captive to slowly force it to be her friend… but she was ten. Ten year-olds don't normally think about those kinds of things.

Hana was fairly certain she was ten now. She couldn't say that for sure and she'd long ago decided that thinking too hard about her past was a bad idea.

The young girl was just wondering what she was going to do that day when Melon suddenly decided he wanted to be somewhere else, unceremoniously dumping Hana onto the floor and leaping out the window.

"Melon, hey!" Hana called, watching her cat leap off into the jungle. Ignored, she slumped over the windowsill to mope. "Okay… I guess it's time for you to hunt, then."

There she was, by herself again. Hana sighed, wondering what she should do while Melon was gone. It was late afternoon. She'd already checked all her long-running experiments. She'd performed maintenance on all her machines and gadgets, too. The new erosion-resistant metal alloy was exactly the same as it had been weeks ago; close to immaculate. What else could she do?

Hana looked around and noticed that there was a bit of dust building up in her workroom. Now that she thought about it, she hadn't cleaned up in weeks. This was the most active part of her house. If there was this much dust here, the rest of it was probably much worse. She was probably supposed to clean it up. And she would, just…

She hesitated. Melon probably had the right idea. Today was a great day, and it had been weeks since she'd gone out just to play. Then again, she didn't have anyone to play with. Kickball? Hide and seek? She couldn't do any of those on her own, and playing pretend that someone was searching for her just ended up making her sad.

She'd clean her workshop first, at least. And her bedroom. And the vines grew ridiculously fast, so it was time to cut those off of the entrance again, so they wouldn't come inside. Then she could go over her experiments again.

All told, it took her an hour. The sun was still up, and Melon hadn't come back yet.

Finally, she was forced to wander outside. There was… nothing in particular she wanted to do, but she didn't have it in herself to sit down and rest; she'd start fidgeting within the minute. At least on the outside, she might run into some interesting insects, or…

The sun was no longer straight overhead, but had sunk to twenty degrees above the horizon, and was being filtered through the branches at the top of the forest. The wind caused the leaves to flutter, in turn causing shadows to flicker across her face. She blinked into the light.

In the far distance she could hear the cries of some predator, but right here the forest was peaceful, and pretty. For a little while she relaxed and watched it.

——————

Hana tapped her chin as she stared at the wooden board covered in paper. The "Fundamentals" and their behaviour. She'd drawn lots of possible models before, but when she tried to simulate them they never fully matched what she observed in nature. She was close, though. She just needed to figure out a few missing pieces.

At the moment, she was making a huge chart of all the Fundamentals she knew. There was something here, she was sure of it, but she couldn't quite put her finger on it yet. She had drawn lines connecting each to every other Fundamental that she'd found they would combine with, hoping it would spark some inspiration. Hana closed her eyes and concentrated, trying to imagine the logic behind it all.

Was it the shape? She could imagine a particular Fundamental possessing a hook-like shape, and another a loop. That wasn't quite how things worked at home, but she thought it might fit. What kept nagging at her, though, was that there weren't enough of them. If the… hookability—that seemed like a good word—was based on the number of hooks, or loops, then why were there only a few dozen Fundamentals total? A lot of which were really similar.

She tried to imagine a dozen of the simpler ones bouncing together, scrunching her face as she crunched the numbers. If she gave them just the right number of hooks and loops, it kind of worked… now, if she heated it, they slowly broke apart again… until, less than a microsecond into her imaginary heat bath, the hooks started breaking off.

They'd do that, she guessed.

But that wasn't what was happening! No matter how far she heated them, the Fundamentals never broke up any further. If they could be broken that way, the heat would need to be a lot higher than she could ever generate on her own.

Hana let her head fall dully on the table, and sighed. What was she even doing? This wouldn't get her home. Maybe she'd just stay here for a minute, and think…

Half a dozen padded feet landed heavily on the floor. She turned her head, her chin scraping against the wood, to see Melon returning. The big cat was carrying a large bird he'd caught, and looked quite satisfied with himself.

"Phey," she managed, not feeling quite up to sitting straight just yet. She gave him a lazy wave. "Who, me? I'm fine. Just… I'm tired. Close the door, will ya?"

Of course he didn't. She was talking to a cat.

Melon dropped the dead bird on the floor and started gnawing on it, right in front of her. Hana sighed, knowing she was the one who'd have to clean up the leftovers later. Melon often left a few hunks of meat on his kills, still under the apparent assumption after all this time that Hana needed to eat. If she could taste anything on this planet, she might have appreciated the gesture more. At least he'd stopped bringing her live animals to practice on.

Maybe she needed a vacation. She'd been working non-stop since she got here, and she was getting more and more tired of it. Ever since she got here… two years…

She'd been barely eight when she disappeared, and she was ten now, barely. She'd spent half her life here. That… that, more than anything…

"Happy birthday to me," she belatedly whispered. How long ago was it? Two weeks, three? She'd completely missed it.

Hana violently trembled, hugging herself, and for the first time in a year she felt tears starting to form. What was she doing? She was never getting home, not like this. She didn't even know where to start, and if anyone was coming to get her—Mom—Big sis—they'd have come already.

It wasn't going to work, so she had to do something else, but she just couldn't think of anything. Maybe… maybe it was fine even if she didn't go home, if she could just find someone to talk to. Out here, on her own, she felt like she was starting to go crazy.

Even if she could get home…

When would that be? A year from now? A decade? How much of her precious time with her father and sister was she losing? How much time did she have before...

She didn't want to think about it.

Melon pushed his snout into her side, and she absently started stroking him. At least she wasn't completely alone. That, she didn't think she could have lived through.

In that moment of comfort, that small measure of safety, Hana felt lighter. It was like a blinding haze cleared away.

There was a whole world out there she hadn't even seen yet. She'd barely moved from this area at all in the time she'd been here, certain she had to wait until someone came for her. But nobody was coming.

She had to leave. Waiting wasn't going to solve this. Doing the work of an entire civilization by herself would take too long. Even if the chance was slim, she needed to try to find someone, anyone, who could help.

——————

Did she have to do it like this, though?

For the first time since she got here she hovered, slightly over a meter in the air. Not really very high. Her feet were barely above where her head would normally be, but butterflies were already rampaging in her stomach. If she fell, when she was high above the forest canopy…

Well, realistically that wouldn't happen, and she wouldn't be hurt if it did. She was more worried about losing control and plowing through another few dozen trees, but that would only happen if she thought too hard about it, and she'd gotten pretty good at not thinking about things over the last two years.

Hana looked back at her treehouse, the place she'd called home for so long. Everything was carefully closed up. The blades of her windmills were all taken down and locked away, all her tools and other things put up inside. On her front door was a note just in case someone came looking for her. She'd carved it out of the new long-lasting metal. She'd replaced all of the structural metal in her house with it. Her test samples of that alloy had been corrosion free for months, so she was confident it would be fine until she came back.

Until she came back…

Would she ever come back? Surely she had to. Maybe she would find people, but if that happened she would want to leave another note for her family. No, she would come back, she was sure. It was lonely here when Melon wasn't around and she missed her real home, but this place… She found it hard not to feel attached to it. She'd built it with her own two hands after all.

She had all of her notes in memory, as well as a satchel with a lot of stuff written down. She had some portable versions of her most interesting experiments with her. She'd even built a carriage to carry some of her heavier things. Not that she would get tired, but it was more stuff than she could fit in her arms and she didn't want to leave stuff on the ground.

No changes of clothes, though. She'd been wearing the same clothes all this time and they never wore out, but she was suddenly wishing she'd spent some time learning to make new ones. Hana irritably brushed herself down. It was fine, right? A shortened, sleeveless one-piece dress with shorts underneath. It didn't get in her way, and it didn't need much in the way of cleaning. None, really; technically, it was a part of her, though it felt just like ordinary cloth.

What had Mom said? That she was lucky, to not need… um…

A shadow flashed in front of her eyes, and she jumped, momentarily frightened she'd locked up again. But no, it was just a bird.

She dropped the thought anyway. Mom had never been a good authority on clothing.

She was ready to go. She just had to do one more, pretty hard thing. The hardest thing.

"Hey Melon." she said to the tiger lazing on the tree branch above to her right. "So… I'm going now."

Hana floated up to him and rubbed his forehead, smiling sadly. Her only consistent company for the last year calmly allowed her to indulge herself. The big hexatiger rarely showed her much in the way of affection, but he stuck around and sometimes acted a little protective of his strange, small companion even if she really didn't need it. Hana worried some about leaving him behind, feared he might not be here when she returned, but she'd made a point of letting Melon be as independent as possible, after she was sure he wouldn't just abandon her. He was a wild animal, and this was the wild.

"You take care of things around here, okay? I'm gonna miss you."

She wished she had something more to say, but more words really wouldn't mean anything to Melon. Hana hugged him one last time before she said her goodbye and floated off, pulling her carriage behind her. Melon observed her departure with some mild interest, then huffed and went back to sleep.

At the last instant, as she lost sight of her home, she smiled. The world was both tall and wide, and she had many things to see.

 

[Einsig]

Baughn's A/N: This is omake, in the original sense of 'extra material'. It's also canon. If we had the liberty of editing a completed novel, it'd likely go somewhere else in the story; since we don't, you get a lucky break.

Einsig's Not-The-Author-Note: May be slightly spoilerish for the epilogue light novel for Ar Tonelico 3.

This is almost entirely Baughn's doing. I suggest you spam all your likes at him next time he posts.

====================================================================

"...eight, nine, ten, twelve! Whoever hasn't hidden yet, better run away real quick!"

The traditional chant echoed through Mikry Forest, scaring away what few birds had yet to fly the coop. Around the speaker, six or seven trees away but growing quickly, a circle of giggling children followed Cocona's advice.

One of them was Hana, who'd done as promised and limited herself to human speeds. Nobody had said that should be a seven-year-old's "human speed", but she'd rather thought it was implied, so she'd done that, too.

It was a nice day for playing outdoors. The sky was blue, the underbrush was mostly dry, and in between the trees she could make out the brownish, slowly greening tones of the former desert that Metafalica floated above. She'd teased Carrot once about spending so much time below and around Metafalica, but she'd proved impervious to the accusation, as apparently it wasn't even her doing that, but rather someone called Sakia practicing.

"Caught you!"

A quick grin, as she caught the squealing protests of Lyra in the distance. That was… four, five seconds longer to run away, even more if the blonde had picked a different direction.

"And another!"

Her sister's voice was weaker this time.

Yup, Cocona was getting further away. Still running, Hana looked around for a place to hide. Where would be good…? Maybe in between those two bushes. There! She changed course, throwing herself flat to get in beneath the branches, and accordingly there was very, very little she could do when she realised that some other girl had picked this hiding place already.

She had just enough time to realise that fact, before they went tumbling off in a tangle of limbs.

Owwie.

— — —

"Ooh, did someone get the number of that airship?"

"That's rude," Hana protested, her voice muffled by… something, she couldn't figure it out. Possibly a leg. "I'm not that heavy. Help me out a little?"

They slowly untangled themselves and sat up, giving Hana the first good view of her impromptu practice target. It was indeed a girl, slightly older and sporting shoulder-length black hair.

Also sporting a full yukata, like she'd walked into the forest straight from a festival. Hana gave her a second once-over, just to make sure. Yep, festival costume, and she even had a mask sitting on the side of her head. Needless to say, this wasn't one of the friends she'd come here with, which meant… Oops.

"I'm sorry!" She prostrated herself, made easier because she was already basically on the ground. "I didn't mean to hit you! We were playing run-and-hide, and—I didn't expect you there," she finished lamely. "Um, who are you? I'm Hana!"

"I'm…"

The girl trailed off. Chancing a look upwards, Hana saw her looking down at her like she was a riddle she needed to solve.

Then she frowned.

"What are you doing on the ground?"

"…apologising?" Hana made it a question.

"For what?"

"Running into you? Making your clothes dirty?"

The girl giggled. "That's not a problem," she said, reaching down and tugging at her hand. "Now get… up!" She kept it up, until Hana had no choice but to sit back up.

"Right, like that. I'm Metafalica. Nice to meet you!"

"Nice to meet you," she automatically replied. Then—

A beat.

"Like the continent?"

Another giggle. "No, silly. I am the continent!"

Hana blinked at her.

"You know, like you're a spaceship."

Hana didn't blink this time. This time, she just stared.

"... Like I'm a what?"

"Didn't your parents tell you anything? Oh, hang on. Follow me—"

She dragged Hana to her feet, showing surprising strength for a normal girl… or maybe that was just normal, she did look a few years older. Not that Hana had the time to think this through. In her befuddlement, she barely had the time to get her feet beneath her.

They hid behind another tree, and a few seconds later Cocona jogged past the place they'd just been sitting. Hana hadn't even heard her coming. Or she had, and just didn't notice.

That was close.

"Hey. So…"

Hana felt her shoulder being poked. The older girl grinned at her, like she was the most exciting thing to come along in years.

"Actually, I was going to interrogate you." Exciting? Maybe. Maybe also a little bit scared. "But then I met someone nice! Whom I can touch! So I'm just going to ask you a few teensy-weensy questions, if you can remember to ask your sister a question for me. And here it is."

Hana already didn't know how to cope with this. When Metafalica's smile fell off, and she suddenly began looking serious, the only thing she could do was to continue to listen.

"Ar Ru said you were a good kid, so I won't hold it against you, but ask Cocona whether she really thinks this is what I had in mind. She'll know what I'm talking about."

And then, as quickly as it had disappeared, the smile was back.

"Now! Then! This is the first time I've met someone on this side, so this calls for a celebration! Fireworks!" She threw an arm out to her left. "Candy!" And the right. "And… er…"

A bird chirped.

"...It doesn't work here, does it?"

Hana shook her head, largely in confusion. It seemed the right thing to do.

"I should have known. No, I did know, it was just…" She sighed. "I wanted to do something nice. You're the first person I've been able to talk to who's anywhere close to my own age. Do you mind if we sit down? I'm a little tired from trying that."

Hana shook her head, again.

"Cool." Metafalica slumped bonelessly to the ground.

"You… can't touch anyone else?" Hana, still standing, felt a glimmer of concern. Metafalica had slumped down, and then immediately closed her eyes. She looked like she was sleeping, only she couldn't be; she still felt awake.

"Can't touch 'em, can't be seen by 'em." She shrugged, a little weakly. "Not here, but that's fine, there's somewhere they can. Cloche sometimes visits, and even if they can't see me, I can still see them. It's normal."

Hana nodded to herself. Even if it was normal…!

"That's so sad!" She knew what to do about sad people, though. She leaned down and gave Metafalica a big hug.

The other girl giggled. "I see what Ar Ru meant, now. Don't worry, I'm not sad. I meant it when I said it's normal—for my sort of person, that is. Does it help if I say I'm just like her? I'm a Will, the Will of this continent."

"You're not sad?" Hana fixed on the crucial part of that statement, before frowning. "Does that mean I shouldn't hug you?"

"Not at all~"

— — —

What Metafalica meant by 'interrogation', it turned out, was to ask Hana a lot of questions about her daily life. What was studying like? What was it like to be lulled to sleep by a story? What was it like to get hungry, and have to eat? (She didn't know that one.)

What, in short, was it like to have a home?

Hana, in turn, asked Metafalica about the 'spaceship' comment, but a giggling Parsnip refused every question in favor of telling her to ask her parents.

On which note…

"Parsnip?"

"Yes." Hana nodded solemnly. "It's perfect. You're like a ghost. Ghosts are white, and parsnips are also white. But you're also a place, and Mom says that home is where the roots are. Parsnips are roots. And Metafalica is too long!"

Parsnip laughed. "I can't argue with that logic."

Perfect.

— — —

Finally their lively conversation was interrupted by a shadow falling over them, as Hana with a sinking heart realised she'd forgotten something very important. She was still in the middle of playing run-and-hide!

"There you are," said Cocona, stepping into the clearing and giving her surroundings a quick check. "But no-one else? Well, she can't have gotten far. Oy." She fondly ruffled Hana's hair. "You're officially captured. Let that be a lesson for next time, you can't sit down and chat in the middle of a monster attack. Now tell me where your friend is, and I won't eat'cha."

Eyes wide, Hana looked towards the other girl. Cocona was standing directly above Metafalica, and would be standing on her if she hadn't quickly scrambled out of the way.

For all that she'd said so, Hana hadn't really believed she was a ghost until just now.

— — —

That had been her first meeting with Metafalica—the real one—and Cocona had looked amazingly surprised when she introduced them to each other, relaying Parsnip's words to her sister. Then sad, and angry, and Hana hadn't even known why.

They'd both looked sad, especially Parsnip, and Cocona had said something about not wanting to have this conversation through her. Why did adults always make things complicated?

Hana had an ugly feeling in her stomach for hours after, and she even refused Cocona's offer to help her practice flying. Not for long, because that just made her look sadder, which made Hana sadder, none of which helped at all, but all of this was really upsetting.

Then she'd asked Mom how she was a spaceship, and then Mom had gotten sad, but she'd explained part of it. It had been obvious even to Hana that she was only explaining part of it.

So when Dad had come home, he'd found all three of them in separate funks. Naturally, being Dad, he'd gotten them out of it. This time with a board game, for two to five players.

She kept wishing that there'd be a fifth player sitting by the table. Without her, Parsnip didn't have anyone to cheer her up.

 

[Einsig]

"On the first day, she… left a jungle." Into another, slightly different jungle. "And she searched for life, and found nothing but…"

That didn't work. It had been a jungle, not a desert. Jungle the first day, jungle the second day, jungle the third through seventeenth days of her journey to nowhere in particular. Jungle sometimes on top of mountains, even, life everywhere she looked. Almost everywhere. She'd found a desert eventually, but it had taken a while.

"—On the twenty-second day! She left the mountains, finding only a desert. And she searched for life, but found nothing but rocks. And she despaired, for there was nothing there to live off."

That line mostly worked, but she hadn't despaired.

"On the twenty-third day, she found a small oasis."

Hana grinned, because she had. As she flew low above her own desert, she kept telling the old story out loud. Not that there was anyone to hear, but it was somehow comforting.

"It held barely a trickle of water. Enough for a family, but not for a tribe. Enough to attract animals, but not for a town to grow crops. Many would have counted their blessings, and most would have stayed, even you. To Rhea, who had been a-abandoned…"

Her stomach burned. Maybe it wasn't comforting at all.

"Rhea hadn't, hadn't—"

That… no. No. She wouldn't have. She couldn't have. If she'd been in Rhea's place… she'd have had to have done the same thing. She wasn't that selfish… she wasn't a bad person. Couldn't be. Wouldn't.

She took a deep, careful breath, pushing those thoughts out of her head and forcefully unclenching her hands. The story went on, but even if it hadn't, she had to. It had only been a month and a half since she left, and homesickness was already starting to get to her. Storytelling had been supposed to take her mind off of that, and off the boring, yellowish-grey landscape below. Which she supposed that it had.

She'd been having more moments like this lately. Not for any particular reason, just… just because she was ten, now, and her age was kicking off new ways of thinking, programs that she hadn't even realised were there until they unpacked and started running. They weren't all working like she thought they should, but she didn't want to interfere.

The story itself belonged to the vague kind of background knowledge that parents told their younger children as bedtime stories, and which she'd never been told by anyone, but it was a common enough tale that she remembered seeing references. Rhea, the sickly girl who'd been abandoned by her tribe because she couldn't keep up, despite her mother's tears, and who'd eventually found an oasis large enough that they could settle down, proving that love was an almost tangible power for good.

Or, just possibly, who'd attracted the pity of one of the Wills. Or who'd never existed at all.

She grimaced, racking her brain for a different story, then tentatively tried again.

"Once upon a time…"

The wind stole her words almost the moment she spoke them, but now that she'd started, that didn't matter. This was a bedtime story her mother had told her every few weeks for her entire life, which she'd fallen asleep to more often than not.

"Once upon a time the deserts grew verdant with life. After many years of suffering the great tree, Implanta, had finally borne fruit. A great trial had been overcome, and its people embraced each other and rejoiced.

"Among the people there were three who didn't smile. One, a maiden, one among the many who had watered the tree…"

Mom's voice had sometimes cracked, when she talked about the maiden. At the time she hadn't given it much thought, but she'd been seven. Tiny and dumb. Thinking about it now, she wondered if there was more to the story than she'd realised.

Not that she wasn't still tiny, but on the scale of possible indignities, not having grown a millimeter over the last two years had to rank pretty low. She just hoped she wouldn't get stuck this way.

"—And who had given of her flesh and blood to see it bloom. She had given her life, and would never see the fruits take root."

This story wasn't nearly as comforting now as it had been when she'd fallen asleep to it.

"She was comforted by two others, a black witch and a knight in shining armor, and though they were lost, uncertain of their purpose now that the tree had grown into a forest, still they had each other. The knight took in the maiden, who had lost her home, and the witch, who had destroyed her own, and for a time they were at peace."

There was a dark suspicion creeping into her heart.

"But there was a scar in their happiness, for they were barren and would not have children. And though the witch thought of the maiden as her own, yet she could never make up for her mistakes."

Damn it, Mom.

"So, finally, they thought back to the tree. And though a cutting from the tree could easily grow into its own, yet they did not wish to hurt it, nor abuse its trust. Then the Maiden thought of her friends, and of the deeds of their past, and they chose to reach once more into the future to bring back a sapling of their own."

Am I a tree?

She let out a sound that was half laugh, half frustrated sob. Of course she wasn't a tree, even Metafalica wasn't a tree, no matter what her body looked like. This was a, what had Dad called it, an analogy. The story was about her birth, and somehow she hadn't figured that out until now.

Mom had called herself a witch. Why? And Cocona was dying?

No, she'd known that already, but, just—it sounded worse than she'd thought it was. She'd never really thought of it as something that… that would actually happen.

She had to get back.

She gave her carriage an extra tug, for emphasis, then floated onwards feeling frustrated and confused.

———————


Water. Lots and lots of water. Yep, it sure was a whole bunch of water. She didn't remember seeing that much water since… didn't she see Turnip at another beach once? It was weird, because sometimes it wasn't Turnip in that memory. That hurt to think about and gave her seizures sometimes, so she tried not to do that.

This was nice, even though she couldn't taste or smell the salty air… if there even was such a thing as salt here. Well, that wasn't nearly enough to ruin her mood. She'd gone without smelling or tasting things for a long time already. It was still a warm, sunny day on a white sandy beach and nothing was going to make her sad about it!

"I'm gonna make a sand castle," Hana declared, as if it was unthinkable to do otherwise. Really, she was on a beach. Certain things just had to be done. She could live without watermelon, though. She liked the flavor, but the fruit was gross.

Pulling off her shoes, she luxuriated in feeling the warm sand between her toes. The day was perfect, really. Not a cloud in the sky, a slight breeze that just barely ruffled her hair, and she had the entire beach just for herself.

Could the sand even stick together here? She'd never tried…

That was fixable. A moment's thought made her shoes melt into the rest of her clothes, then she raced down to the water's edge to try it.

It did, so in the spirit of science and replication, she therefore spent a good half-hour playing with the sand, building increasingly elaborate castles that, admittedly, still looked pretty sketchy. As construction material went, this sand left something to be desired, nor were sea-shells the best possible way to shape it. She was sure she had a small spade in her cart, but that'd be missing the point.

Once she grew bored she waded into the surf, looking for larger shells but finding mostly rocks and fish. Some of the smaller ones fearlessly darted in between her legs, nipping at her toes and making her giggle, so she quickly reached down to grab one—and failed, her arm bending more than expected as it entered the water. Overcorrecting, she found the sand slipping away between her toes. She windmilled, trying to keep her balance, and realising just too late that—there was no-one else here, it'd be safe to push at the gravity well—

At least the water was soft.

A second or two later a spluttering, completely waterlogged Hana broke the surface with a gasp, kicking wildly at the water in a bid to stay afloat until she realised that she didn't really need to breathe. Also, that the water remained shallow enough to stand on the ground if she tried.

Immediately after doing so, however, she let herself fall backwards to float on her back. Why the heck not? She was already drenched, and the water felt comfortable, even more so once she pared her clothes down to something suitable for swimming in. Smiling at the sun, she stretched her limbs out and let herself relax for a while.

Well, going for a swim hadn't been what she'd had in mind, but she'd take it!

Some time later saw her back on the beach, this time with a plan in mind. Her next sand-castle was set closer to the water. Dangerously close, in fact; close enough for some of the waves to reach it. That was deliberate, and she carefully placed sea-shells in front of it to stop them before they could.

The water, naturally, went around. For her second attempt, she built a ridge behind the shells and then a moat behind the ridge, stiffening the ridge with some gravel. That sort of worked, once, but the crucial sea-shells were just sitting in the sand and were quickly knocked down by the second and third waves.

The next one, she rebuilt her castle in the shape of a pentagram, and embedded the shells directly in its walls, then watched in satisfaction as a pretty large wave split around it without damaging it much at all. That lasted all of five minutes, since it was still made of sand, but she thought she was on to something here.

Sand could be used to make something better. She had already done so, several times already.

The next wave crashed on an invisible wall, as did the one after that, because she didn't need the distraction right then. By carefully heating the sand to its melting point, stretching and shaping the taffy-like substance it turned into with her hands, and careful arrangement of a few larger shells, she slowly and methodically started to build a glass sea-fort. This one, she was sure, would stay here a while. She wouldn't come back, but she wanted something here that would say, "Hana was here."

Shortly before she was finished, she heard the buzz of… Wait. What was that?

Stopping in the middle of molding the stairs, Hana slowly looked up from the molten goop in her hands. Wide-eyed, she listened transfixed to the completely unfamiliar sound. Now leaving the cooling glass forgotten, she racked her brains for an idea of what it might be. It wasn't a bug. There was no bug that big and loud, not even the beetles as big as hippos in that jungle she left. What was it then? She could almost imagine… it was...

Somewhere deeper in the more hazardous areas of her mind, something clicked into place.

Hana turned around and looked across the ocean, trying to follow the sound. At first she saw nothing but sea birds, and momentarily worried that maybe there was just a bird making that noise somehow, but she soon picked up a speck way in the distance. It was getting higher and moving really fast. Hana's heart rate quickened, excitement welling up like nothing she'd felt in years, and she tried to focus her eyes as far as they could on that speck. Her vision could zoom in pretty far, but she still struggled to make the object out. Now she was really wishing she'd practiced that more.

'Um, how do I… Maybe like… this? No, that just made it blurry. How about… ah!'

It was… shiny. Sleek. Almost avian in profile, but clearly, definitely, absolutely not an animal. In a matter of seconds, it had gone higher and faster than any animal ever could. It was still going, heading up into the sky and, presumably, beyond.

"P...p-p-p…" she stuttered, her whole body starting to quiver. She felt ready to burst, barely containing an oncoming flood of tears. Then she couldn't hold it in anymore. Hana threw her arms in the air with a brilliant, joyful scream.

"People!"

Then promptly lost her balance because of the heavy blob of now-solid glass encasing her hands.

 

[Einsig]

"Shu-Qi!"

Enza's enthusiastic voice, loud with excitement, was the first thing Shu-Qi heard as he entered the room. Today it was higher-pitched than usual, and carried a tinge of frustrated impatience that no doubt meant she'd thought of another thrilling experiment and had been waiting to bounce it off him.

It had also been the last thing he'd heard the evening before, while he was trying to eat. She had been the first person to draw his attention during three of the five previous mornings, and the only one to retain it, but five samples did not a statistically significant set make.

He had, despite his own hopes and wishes, become somewhat of an expert on the subject. Enza was one of the smarter people he'd met, but she was also painfully earnest.

"Oh don't give that look. Come here, I swear you'll enjoy this." She lightly huffed, reading him like a book where most of the attending researchers saw only an animated statue. He deliberately did not groan in resignation and carried himself over to her.

He was proud of his unflappability. It was the product of many years of training.

Shu-Qi ambled over to the object of attention. It was one of the Poison devices, its proper examination having been pushed off for several months due to ever-shifting priorities and competing schedules, but now on center stage in the testing chamber. It seemed that none other than Kohinoor was personally involved, the stout male making repeated adjustments to one of the containment fields; for what purpose, Shu-Qi didn't know.

Kohinoor, as a former general of the defunct Chozo military, liked to keep his research to himself. It was a point of annoyance for Shu-Qi, who felt that all research should be shared as widely as possible, but Kohinoor's gang of like-minded researchers meant he couldn't even use the argument that sharing would speed things up.

Although, this time, they seemed willing to include him. Shu-Qi gave the device a shrewd glance. Kohinoor's research was mostly focused on military applications, not all of them against the Poison, which in combination meant…

"Having difficulties?"

"We tried to run the test before you got here, but had to abort," Enza said apologetically. "Right now we're trying to strengthen the containment against forceful interference."

"The first test of artifact 87 nearly destroyed the containment field," Kohinoor said, not looking at either of his colleagues.

That cleared up what he was doing. As for Enza… whether she was apologising for joining Kohinoor and starting without him, or for the near-disaster they'd caused, he didn't know and frankly didn't care. Both were reasonable assumptions, but the first was irrelevant to him so long as the results were released, a certainty if Enza was on board. The second, he would like to avoid.

Enza waved Shu-Qi away from that area and directed him over to her personal workstation.

"While avoiding that is crucial, it's not why I wanted to speak with you. They'll be busy with the adjustments for some time, I bet."

'No doubt,' he thought, considering just what it would take to destabilize containment.

"Now, I hope you won't be too annoyed, but I took the liberty of skimming your notes. Incidentally, I didn't take you for fancying ecology. All of your published works are in fields of nanotechnology, archeology, reverse engineering, theoretical physics..."

He raised an eyebrow.

"Ah." She blinked, momentarily lost for words. "Yes, of course. You are quite old. I should have expected a few hobbies. Now, I know I've talked your ear-holes out about the things we could theoretically do if we imitated the nucleic structure of the Poison, already, but I'm finding it increasingly difficult to make real progress while the interface field remains as a black box. That's why I took a few weeks off last month, so I could study and compare my own archives against your notes. A lot of my own information is fragmentary, but with your help… Ah."

The awkwardness laid over the room like a blanket… wait, no it didn't. He suppressed a sigh, as Enza completely ignored her own gaffe, rooting through the mess of paper on her desk while she continued talking.

He'd have said that taking time off to do more work was an unhealthy way to live, if he hadn't done the same thing himself on many occasions. No matter.

She picked up a data-pad, handing it over for him to look at. Curiously, Shu-Qi skimmed a few pages.

His eyes narrowed.

"Where did you get this?"

"Zebes."

They shared an unhappy look, Enza's usual enthusiasm now tempered by distaste.

She continued, "Those damn pirates destroyed a great deal of its monuments and structures over the decade they spent there, but their destructive tomb robbing wasn't entirely without merit." A bit of humor re-entered her voice. "For us, that is. Their behaviour would have pissed off the ancestral spirits even if it had been us doing it. I find, given that it wasn't, that I'm fine letting them be the ones to pay the price."

"Are you?" Shu-Qi felt himself going a little green at the memory, and hastily redirected his thoughts.

"That was a pivotal event; after all, it's when Samus received her Power Suit. So, yes. In fact, since you're here, why don't we go over the recordings together? I'd like to see the activation sequence, and I know you have a cop...y. That, is…"

"So long as it's just the activation," he said, his voice remarkably even for someone who was trying hard not to throw up.

Samus, armored suit half-destroyed, trudging through the churned-up mud like a woman possessed, not even noticing as a plasma bolt burnt off half her wrist, her other arm lashing out to kill the pirate who had done so, tearing him in half and—

He wasn't part of the group that had chosen to adopt the poor, orphaned human girl, but he'd met her often enough to make her an acquaintance, and the recordings from her final return to her home planet would have disturbed even a complete stranger. It was testament to her mental fortitude that she'd overcome it as well as she had, in his opinion.

"That's… acceptable," Enza said, looking at him askance. "And I am sorry for bringing it up. I wouldn't have, but some of the element I have been studying—I believe I might be able to explain part of its functioning. I would need to examine the power suit in person to be confident. However, the containment devices we have been using create a field very similar to the suit's interface field, from what few recordings I have been able to access…"

Enza was attempting to look contrite, and failing; she was practically flapping her wings. Still, Shu-Qi thought, that amusingly youthful behaviour was a much better medicine than if she'd joined him in depression. He'd always been a sucker for enthusiasm.

Though he felt a great deal of relief when everyone was jolted out of their seats by the blaring of an alarm.

'Wait.'

That was the terminal proximity alert. That alarm only went off when something had breached all of the outer defense stages, entered the lower atmosphere, and was about to reach their location.

Kohinoor quickly put a stop to his ongoing experiment and switched the main hologram projector to the security system. The map showed a red dot, moving quickly near ground level. Its course was taking it directly for the temple.

Shu-Qi's first thought was that it had to be a false alarm. Greenfly had recently acquired what was, by current Chozo standards, a reasonably effective planetary defence system. That was not due to any expectation of assault; it was simply what happened when you put enough Chozo engineers on one planet, some of whom were either paranoid enough or bored enough to set up self-replicating defences.

"Is this real? How did it get past our defenses?" Someone asked loudly, taking the words out of his mouth. There was no way anything could have entered high orbit without them noticing, let alone reached the planet's surface undetected. Maybe, if they'd landed in the ocean—but such a scout should have still been picked up before now, and there was no such thing as a stealthy FTL system. Not against a sensor grid filling half a solar system.

"More sensors are reorienting on it now… Its signature is incredibly small. A new stealth system?"

Discussion and speculation continued to fly around the room while the target kept moving in their direction. Then, all of that slammed to a halt when the hologram displayed another warning.

"Phazon, 87% probable."

Had alarms not been going off, the sudden clattering of several people dropping things in mute shock might have been more startling. For his part, Shu-Qi's eyes were burning holes into his personal HUD, watching the target closely and querying the system for every scrap of information it could provide him.

"Panic is not necessary. Our defenses will destroy it in short order," Kohinoor stated firmly. Even as he spoke, automated emplacements hidden under the large river adjacent the temple had risen above the water and were preparing to bombard the entire area of the target. A squadron of small aerial drones flew out of the temple and readied a strike run.

"Something is wrong about this," Enza muttered, observing the dot as it raced across the screen.

"I would have to agree. Are you also checking the readings?"

"Who in the room isn't?" she replied, perhaps more cynically than she had intended. "The growth curve… there's virtually none."

"None that can't be dismissed as a noisy signature, at the least. Even this small, it couldn't have breached the orbital net. We would have seen it coming."

Which, to Shu-Qi's racing mind, meant one of two things. Either it had a stealth system that could penetrate their defenses, and had chosen to drop it — a ludicrous idea, to be sure — or it had been here before those systems were put in place. At this size, it couldn't be detected by the ground-based sensors until it was practically on their doorstep.

"Wait. Don't fire just yet."

Kohinoor looked at Shu-Qi as if he was a lunatic speaking in tongues.

"You must agree that its sudden appearance on the planet's surface without being detected is too suspicious. Look closer at the readings."

"Its influence isn't expanding at all," Enza added. She spoke as quickly as she could, with only moments left. "It must have been here all along. This could be the module that was meant to keep the vessel stable outside of its own space!"

"If we can capture it, we could obtain a complete specimen of this technology. The potential gains are immeasurable."

"You don't know that it can't expand its influence! What if it has been hiding, repairing itself until it was ready? You do realize that the potential destruction if this thing is not stopped could be just as immense?"

"It's only one, uninhabited planet. We can easily evacuate with our samples, if it comes to that. Well worth the risk."

On the screen, the weapons announced they had produced a firing solution and were about to open fire. Kohinoor's eyes narrowed at Shu-Qi and Enza, an expression passing over his face that his peers couldn't quite read. Then, the former general made a quick set of keystrokes.

"Aborting," came the voice of the computer.

The system stopped. The drones closed their launchers and hovered idly, waiting for new instructions. The fully-charged plasma cannons had to dump their built-up energy. Thankfully, they were half-submerged in running water. The plumes of steam seemed to mirror the release of tension in the room. Yet, it was only replaced by an air of anxiety and uncertainty as all present looked between them and the viewscreen showing the Poison anomaly about to appear from the trees.

"I hope we didn't just get us all killed," Enza breathed, everyone else holding their breath in anticipation.

Shu-Qi's eyes fell on the consoles. It was still moving rapidly, but slowing as it approached the treeline. Intelligent behaviour—almost certainly. It wasn't unknown for a Poison infestation as a whole to behave with something approaching cunning, but a single fragment?

That being said, if it suddenly sped up they'd have only seconds to react.

It slowed down even further, moving at a nearly walking pace as it crossed the treeline, and giving them plenty of time to reconsider. Shamefully, he'd later think, he almost did that. It was one thing, to look at an off-the-scale reading on a monitor. It was something very different, to look through a camera and see what appeared to be a black hole, on a planet. Training and experience both screamed at him, shouting to shut it down, that their experiment was about to cost the lives of everyone on the continent—

Though this wasn't an experiment. Anyone but him would only see a visual distortion, a gravitational anomaly so harsh that light had bent into circles. And, since this wasn't his lab on Tenza, a projection failure wasn't about to cause disaster.

While he was thinking that, the distortion effect rapidly shrank and folded in on itself, giving them their first glimpse of what it had hidden.

The silence, he'd later think, had been striking.

"Why are they hugging the attack drone?"

He had no idea who said that, blanked out as his own mind was. It took him a moment to regain focus and see that yes, a small human child — clearly not so, as humans don't fly, glow, or warp space — had embraced the hovering UAV. They were also crying, with a big happy grin on their face.

"... Someone ought to ask them, and find out."

It took him a second to realise that he'd been the one to say that. It took him a few more to realise that everyone else was now looking at him.

———————————

She'd found it. She'd found it! This was her happiest moment in years! No more waiting, no more wandering, no more wondering when someone would come for her, no more sleeping alone in the muggy and damp jungle… maybe that part wasn't such a big deal. She'd built a pretty nice house after a few weeks, and Melon was good company. It wasn't like sleeping in a wet, dirty place had bothered her all that much, either.

Regardless, that was all over! Not Melon, he was coming home with her. Everything else was over, though! There were flying machines, and big… guns? Yes, guns, she was sure. She'd seen a lot of those so she had a good idea what a gun looked like, and they were some of her happiest (remaining) memories. Still, the important thing was, they were built by smart things! Smart things generally meant people, and if they were smart enough to fly into outer space, they had to be smart enough to help her get home!

Hana stared up at the floating robot thing, her emotions skittering all over the place. Tears welled up as the years of loneliness and hopelessness seemed to finally be at an end. She couldn't hold it in, and after a few hiccuping sobs she burst into giggling fit. She flew up to the robot and threw herself onto its top.

She hugged it. She hugged the huge piece of cold metal like it was her long-lost best friend. She didn't care that it was hard and cold. To her, it was the most comforting thing in the world after her cat. The best part was that it looked like a bird. So wrapped up in this joyous moment was she that Hana didn't pay much attention when the drone decided to move, only latching on tighter so she wouldn't fall off.

After what seemed like no time at all she was no longer out in the sun and open air. Hearing a large door closing behind her, she finally looked up. She was inside a huge room, not very well lit, and several other identical flying machines were coming for a landing on either side of her. They settled into what looked like mobile charging stations and went silent. Hana yipped as her ride landed with a loud clunk and shut down. It got very quiet after that. Standing up, she looked around to see if she could find someone. She couldn't sense anything living nearby, but she hoped that they might be listening from another room.

"Hello?" She called, receiving no reply, not even an echo. She waited for a minute, calling out a few more times, before she gave up and decided to go looking. It couldn't be too hard to find them, she thought.

———————————

"Is that a male or female?" Enza wondered aloud. "It's so hard to tell with human children."

"Male, female, whatever it is, it is not human. I strongly suggest we close the hangar area and dispatch security to capture it. This is the reason we decided not to obliterate it on sight, is it not?"

Kohinoor received nods of agreement from most in the room. Shu-Qi conceded that he did have a point. Even so…

"Observe them for now. No matter where they go, we can easily lock down any section of the facility."

That received a narrow-eyed stare.

"I have confidence in your recent renovations," Shu-Qi added, only intensifying the stare.

———————————

"This place is huge!"

"—uge! —ge."

She stopped, listening as her voice echoed from several different directions. Echoes! Indoors!

Experimenting a bit, she took a deep breath, put her hands to her mouth, and yelled, as loud as she could.

"HUGE!"

This time, three echoes returned!

It really, really, really was. Huge, that was. So far she'd walked at least a kilometer inside, and she'd yet to find anything other than empty rooms, corridors and decorations, photographs carved into the walls, and occasionally statues of birds and other animals. She couldn't even imagine how many people had to be living here! Now, if only she could find some. They knew she was here, right? They had to, she'd gotten here on one of their robots.

She thought about the problem for a second, then a golden chandelier caught her attention, and she abandoned it in favor of floating up to take a look. It was… well, chandelier-y. Pretty bright, and large, and hanging. Hana prodded it with a finger, noting that the chandelier was both warmer than expected, and lighter. The lights weren't warm, though, and there was something odd about them. Or maybe there wasn't? She didn't know, she'd only ever used fire.

Also, it was shaped like a bird. The chandelier. And the lights in the chandelier. And some of the wall decorations. Whoever owned this place really seemed to like birds. They'd get along great with Mom!

Her grin had, by this point, become a permanent fixture of her face. She tugged at her lips, but… nope! That wasn't coming off.

So when she'd finished studying the chandelier she let herself drop to the floor and, heart beating excitedly, ran deeper into the building. She didn't care that flying would have been faster. Everything was new, there was so much to see… and sooner or later, she'd run into people! She wanted to savor the anticipation.

———————————

"It's climbing all over a three thousand year old statue of the great philosopher Ni-Kao-Yu."

"Yes, they are astoundingly curious…" Shu-Qi hummed, ignoring the sour note in Kohinoor's voice. The old warbird released a sigh of exasperation while crossing his arms.

"We've done enough observing. I'm dispatching security."

"Hold." Shu-Qi raised his hand.

"If you're about to tell me you think we should bring it in peacefully…" Kohinoor nodded. "I had much the same thought, but you'll need backup in case of problems."

Shu-Qi lowered his hand, now mildly surprised. Kohinoor took that as his answer and pointed at one of his subordinates.

"Rhuma, bring me the control set for the Mimic."

'Ah,' Shu-Qi thought. 'That would be the safest way to meet a potentially hostile element non threateningly.'

The eager assistant quickly ran off to the next room. While they waited for his return, they watched the humanoid child continue to flit about looking at and touching absolutely everything they could get their hands on. With the ability to fly, there wasn't much that didn't fall into that category. All the while, they kept babbling excitedly, and occasionally calling out loudly. Shu-Qi presumed they were trying to get a response.

Rhuma soon returned, carrying a small, locked box. Kohinoor unlocked it and walked over to Shu-Qi, who eyed him suspiciously.

"Since you suggested it," he said, holding up a pair of small, rounded triangular plates. "you should do the honors."

He did have a point.

———————————

Everything was so cool! There were giant statues, and huge bowls full of fire, and pretty decorations hanging from the ceilings, and art and carvings all over the walls, and, and...

"Where is everybodyyyyyyyyyyyy?!"

And there was nobody there! Huffing in frustration, Hana plopped down on the base of one of the big bird man statues. There were two of them, standing upright and facing each other with their clawed hands held out palms up, holding bowls full of brilliant orange flames. Between them was a massive door that went to what looked like a really huge shrine of some kind. It was all really cool, sure. She was still really excited and smiling most of the time, but now she was getting tired of not finding anyone.

There had been people there recently. Everything was so clean. Old, and a lot of it really worn down, but there were clear signs of recent restoration. There wouldn't be lit torches and bowls if nobody had been there recently. Where had they gone? Were they all out to lunch?

Even after years on her own, she couldn't maintain the same level of happiness about finding people for hours on end when there were no people.

Her smile faded a little.

Was it her? Was she the reason nobody was showing themselves? She'd been so excited to find an actual building, it hadn't occurred to her that she might scare them, and so she'd charged right in with her klein field at maximum so she could cut through the forest. And that… Mom had told her that she shouldn't, shouldn't…

She couldn't remember. But she wasn't supposed to use it where there might be people. She'd forgotten, and… now there was a thin thread of guilt sneaking its way through her stomach and spoiling her mood entirely.

Sagging down further, she trailed her finger over the solid base of the statue. There was a thin layer of dust, but not like it had been abandoned; more like it hadn't been cleaned for a day or two. People had been here, and now they weren't.

This sucked.

"Is anyone there?" She shouted, not expecting an answer. Then, operating off a cringe-worthy memory that she wasn't quite sure was real, but which matched a little too well with the other one, she added: "I'll be careful! I promise I won't hurt you!"

Hana felt her stomach twist in a knot as soon as those words left her mouth. If they weren't afraid her her before, they sure would be after hearing that. It sounded so suspicious! All the bad people in her games and stories always denied exactly what they were doing, so the audience would know what they were doing. Though, that didn't apply to real life, now that she was older and could tell that that didn't make sense.

'Maybe I'm thinking too hard…'

Dad had always said…

She scowled, barely noticing as the corridor flickered around her. No, that didn't sound right. Dad didn't say very much, he wasn't the type to think very deeply, but he'd never told her to be anyone but herself. Sometimes, he just had opinions on what 'being herself' meant. He'd told Mom she could be better, that she was better, because that's the sort of person he was.

It was that friend of his, the one who'd told her to be like Dad and not think so hard. Who was it, again? The dumb blond guy, or the dumb white-haired guy? Dad had told her they were dumb, and their advice was dumb, and then he'd frowned. She hadn't been sure, but… Mom agreed, so they were probably right.

No, Dad had always told her that trying to be perfect would only stop her from being good enough. She wasn't sure how that applied to this situation, but she told herself it was important enough to remember. And… she remembered.

Her scowl turned into a weak smile again, because she'd remembered. She wasn't sure if it was the situation, or time, or just luck, but she'd just remembered a little more of her life. The older she got, the more little bits she recovered of her life with her parents, and her family. And the more she missed them, not like an amnesiac child, but knowing what she'd lost.

She abruptly jumped to her feet, scanning the area again. Not because she thought anyone would be there, just because she didn't want to dwell on that thought.

…

There was someone there.

— — —

Shu-Qi watched the gynoid watching him, nervousness only dampened by the knowledge that she could not, under any circumstances, actually hurt him. Despite appearances, he was actually hundreds of meters away in a different wing of the building entirely.

The Mimic suit was how he could nevertheless appear to be in the same room as them. It was a remote-controlled sea of nanites in the exact shape of his own body, which felt exactly like standing there himself would have. This was the result of hundreds of years of research, the eventual life's work of tens of thousands of Chozo, and advanced beyond the wildest fever dreams of the younger races.

Which was another way of saying that it was just like anything else the current-day Chozo could put together, based on half-understood research reports and technologies from a civilization that no longer existed. Self-hosted nanofabrication ensured that their technology wouldn't be lost, so long as it could be distilled into a blueprint for those fabricators, but at the same time there were far too few Chozo in existence for any of them to focus on understanding any single device. They were all renaissance men, knowing a little about everything, purely out of necessity.

As far as Shu-Qi knew, the Mimic suit was something Alba had thrown together based on an old VR gaming system, a hazardous-situation nanoform remote waldo, and a phased-array full-spectrum cloaking system. The systems didn't work perfectly together.

He hoped that was why the gynoid had seen through it, and not because her sensors were better than the Chozo's cloak. It was scant consolation that she had taken several minutes to do so. She'd actually frozen in place for most of that time, giving him the opportunity to observe her closely, which was how he knew she was a gynoid—human sexual dimorphism included hair length and some elements of facial structure, he was pretty sure, and the xenologists in their group concurred.

"So?"

Part of him kept track on the other researchers' conversation, far away from here. The rest focused on the gynoid, whose expressions were startlingly evocative. Even he, who hadn't made a particular study of humanity, could tell that she had been put dramatically off balance by his appearance.

"It looks startled. I would say 'afraid', but the body language isn't right; humans, especially children, would instinctively protect the vitals of their body in dangerous situations. That would be the lower torso and the face, mainly. The android isn't making any attempt to do so; of course, it's anyone's guess to what degree human instincts apply to this entity."

The speaker likely hadn't seen his HUD light up with anomalous-gravity warnings, but that was as a flicker that just as quickly faded.

"Do not be afraid. I mean you no harm."

The girl, once he spoke, gasped and hid halfway behind the leg of the statue. She observed him with one eye, wide with fright yet also brimming with the easily-recognized boundless curiosity of a child.

"That is a more classic fear response. Did its programming need to adjust to an unforeseen variable? Expecting to see a human, it didn't know what the right behavior was. Hmm..."

More likely, she was simply confused as to whether she should see him as a threat. She'd most certainly thought about shielding herself upon first seeing him. He supposed he would have to gently coax her out. Maybe she was programmed to pretend to enjoy sweets, though he hadn't considered the idea of bait before leaving to— the gynoid blinked her one visible eye, looked down slightly with a distant focus, then squeezed it shut.

His HUD flashed at him, but the warning period was far too brief. Had he been armed, he wouldn't have been able to draw his weapon. The machine outpaced him physically in every way, leaving him defenseless in the face of its assault. There was a blur of brown and purple, barely perceptible to his mortal senses. A weight slammed into his chest, hurtling him back with all the force of a high-velocity... bag of feathers.

For a time, what was happening was lost to him. The gynoid had hurled herself at him, and suddenly he was on his back? Momentarily, he wondered if she had noticed that the Mimic was a synthetic body, and had forced a disconnect. Being severed from VR too suddenly was known to be disorienting.

But no, when he opened his eyes, he could see the ceiling of the corridor which he'd only just been standing in.

Ignoring the panicked shouting coming over the line, he took a moment to process the situation. His HUD warned him of extreme proximity to a weak radiation source bearing all hallmarks of the Poison. It had been two years since he'd last seen those same warnings…

Shu-Qi was having some difficulty connecting that warning with the trembling being clutching him with what he could only describe as desperation.

Deciding that staying unresponsive for much longer would cause the gynoid to grow suspicious, he summoned up a bit of long-forgotten fatherly instinct and gently patted her on the back. She flinched at the contact and froze for a moment. Then, in a most perplexing way, she shoved her face into his chest and let out a low whine.

Whatsoever could have been the reason for that?

———————————

She'd gotten too excited. Way too excited. That wasn't how first contact was supposed to go! She was supposed to be all "I come in peace! Take me to your leader!" Then she needed to bow, give him a gift and have tea, or something like that. Except she didn't have any tea, and she couldn't taste anything so even if she had something to make tea out of it would probably taste really bad. She could, maybe, have used a cup of water.

Hana had wanted so badly to meet another person that the moment she told herself to stop being scared and greet the bird man, she… well, that had happened. She wasn't proud of it, but at least it sort of worked out okay? He didn't get angry and peck her eyes, or claw her face, as birds tended to when she tried too hard to be friendly with them. He was actually really nice. She didn't understand anything he said, and he didn't understand her, but she could tell he was trying to be comforting.

It almost didn't feel real to her, finally meeting someone she could maybe, eventually talk to. What if he wasn't even real, and she was frozen up in another fugue? Hana knew it was silly, but if she let go, she feared he'd vanish and leave her alone again.

When he picked her up, she knew it wouldn't happen. Her body trembled like a leaf, waves of warmth chasing each other around. It was real. It was all real.

Shoving the bad thoughts out of the way, she made herself relax as best she could.

The bird man carried her through the building, seeming to know pretty well where he was going. He made the place feel a lot smaller with the ease with which he navigated, crossing in a few minutes a distance that had taken Hana, who knew she was easily distracted, several hours to cross on her own.

After a while they stopped in front of that statue she'd been climbing all over before; the one sitting in front of a sun in a meditating pose. The bird man put Hana down and pointed in the way adults always did when they wanted her to stay put. He turned around and then started pressing the "flames" of the sun in a sequence. Hana's eyes nearly bugged out as she realized what he was doing. There was a sudden whoosh, rather than a rumbling of grinding stone, and a wall lifted up to reveal a hidden passage.

"It's a secret door! Oh my gosh! That's so cool!"

She should have pushed everything!

This corridor was metal rather than stone like everything else. It looked really high-tech, which sent Hana's excitement through the roof. She rushed past her new friend, eager to see all the cool things inside. Then she skidded to a halt, remembering this was really rude. She couldn't just barge in! Hana quickly turned around, grabbed his clawed hand and yanked him along, trying to make him hurry up.

"Show me show me show me show me!" she asked while bouncing up and down, forgetting he couldn't understand her. He got pretty flustered and protested, but huffed and picked up his pace. She giggled, thinking that sounded a bit like Dad, but the bird man was way too old for that comparison. He was more like she imagined a grandpa would be like. She didn't have a grandpa… did she?

As soon as she thought that thought, she started telling herself not to follow it, because she knew what would happen. It was no use. Of course it wasn't, and she'd known it wasn't. It was just like that game, 'Don't think of the fuzzy, huggable, adorably terrifying Nyo.'

She froze, her body staying upright on autopilot.

This wasn't like her earliest fugues. Hana could still tell what was going on around her, even as part of her shut down trying to fix a memory that probably didn't even exist. She could feel the bird man initially trying to haul her onwards, then holding her shoulder with the arm that wasn't locked in her death grip. He was probably looking into her vacant eyes. She had to be scaring him. She didn't want to do that.

The reason she could still think at all was—probably—

Panicking a little bit, she interrupted her defences before they could kick into high gear and show her what they'd do to someone partially inside the trillion-gees-per-millimeter gravity shear of her full-power Klein field.

She wobbled between unconsciousness and nightmare.

'Stop—'

If she could have left out a sigh of relief, she would have. Her generators were thoroughly frozen, the worst that could happen now was she'd run out of capacitor power and do a hard reboot, but that was nowhere near as bad as spaghettifying the first (friendly? Any!) person she'd met in years. Large parts of her mental model were, similarly, frozen, but not all of her. She could still think. She could still…

'What is this thing doing?'

The frozen bits included pretty much all of her memories, so she didn't feel sure about anything anymore, but she could still see what it was trying to do. A lot of her memories were missing, or extrapolations built on extrapolations and then rebuilt whenever she noticed inconsistencies, but that shouldn't take seconds. The reason it did was that… before extrapolating, it poked a black box of some sort, which never responded…

Her coding was particularly strange there, and she worried that she'd misunderstood, but it seemed to just be timing out. So—

No. Wait. She'd promised not to do this. She'd promised Mom not to do this, and she still remembered why. She was a ten-year-old, poking at things she didn't understand. This was one of the few ways she could seriously hurt herself.

But she'd nearly killed someone.

'Please…'

She wanted to bite her nails, and she couldn't even do that. If she shut down those calls… she didn't know what would happen, and it might be important. It looked important. But if she didn't, then the next time this happened, she might not catch it in time. But she wasn't supposed to change anything.

'Anyone…'

Wasn't there a third option?

The 'box' finally responded to one of the queries. Not usefully, just with an error message—'RPC error, structural failure'?—but it was something. It wasn't completely dead. If she… no, there wasn't any physical damage, she'd know, and it looked like an I/O interface. Maybe it was just… jammed. Maybe, if she just hit the reset button…

…
[Synchronizing…]
…
<DDW <-> DHW aux channel established. Structural damage detected. SHS initialization failed.>

…pure optimism, really, except that now it was producing errors in a consistent and timely manner, and… that's how Sasha had put it, and her sister's best friend had claimed it was better that way, and she'd thought that was silly, and it totally wasn't! She hadn't paid much attention, though. She'd been too busy playing a game.

It might be a good thing that her body was still frozen, because if it hadn't been, she'd have broken into a wholly inexplicable grin. She'd gone through a dozen microseizures just remembering that scene, and none of them would have lasted long enough to be noticed. She wanted to hug the bird-man again, and spin in a circle.

She didn't, of course, waiting until she'd gotten herself a little more under control before she let herself unfreeze. The whole episode had taken less than a second. Calming down? That took a lot longer.

When she finally did, she quickly turned aside and pretended to study a portrait on the wall.

She didn't think he bought it, but suddenly she felt embarrassed and guilty about it all. She hadn't wanted him to see her like this.

— — — — — — —

Shu-Qi let the gynoid into the conference room.

Despite knowing that it wasn't truly human, he'd felt concern when it froze up in the middle of walking. That, however, was at least partially because it meant the gynoid was degrading. That it had hung on this long despite being made of the Poison was astonishing, but they couldn't expect it to survive for very much longer. Any course of research taking more than a year had to be excluded.

In a way that was a relief. It acted so much like a real child that he'd found himself rapidly losing touch with the fact that it wasn't. He couldn't allow himself to become attached.

He still let out a cluck of laughter, however, when it attempted to charge the other Chozo researchers and ran straight into the holographic conference room's central wall.

— — — — — — —

Her eyes had lied to her.

Poking the air in front of her, and scowling when the supposed 'air' turned out to be an extremely smooth, transparent wall, she considered the problem. One birdman, next to her; two dozen others, sitting only a few meters away from her. Her sonar was no help, claiming that the place they were sitting was actually solid rock. This was clearly a very tough wall. She supposed she couldn't complain, given she'd nearly killed one of them already, but she was a little sad she wouldn't be able to touch anyone.

She made herself back away, then bowed deeply. This was a solemn occasion, she knew; the first meeting between humans and aliens. Real aliens, not like the fairies from some of Turnip's stories, or the Teru. Her first reaction shouldn't have been to run up and try to hug each and every one of them.

But looking at all the people who were there to meet her, and seeing all the different colors and sizes and shapes, she felt a sudden burst of mirth bubbling up inside. She covered her mouth and snickered, drawing all sorts of looks, then guiltily looked away. No. Bad Hana!

When she saw some of them raise the feathers on their heads and look at her sideways, she couldn't contain herself anymore. Her cheeks puffed as she tried to hold it in, which worked—for about two seconds—then she burst into laughter. She felt even worse when that made some of them jump, but she couldn't help it, she was in stitches.

It was just too funny. She'd been so caught up in excitement, wonder, fear and joy that she hadn't seen the humor in the situation until now.

She had been saved by, of all things, birds.

Mom loved birds.

 

[Einsig]

In a warmly lit room with a large screen on the wall in front of her, Hana sat upright and attentive at a small table adjusted perfectly for her height. She fidgeted constantly, looking around at the sterile room, a massive smile on her face despite there being nothing to engage with yet. She couldn't help it. She'd finally found people, and nothing was going to ruin her mood now.

"Nothing," she insisted.

Nope, nothing. Not the way the bird man went away last night after showing her to a room, or got disgruntled when she tried to hug him good morning. Not because he was an old stuffy grandpa type who didn't take to play or roughhouse or let her go frolicking. He was still the only person around she could touch and talk to. The other bird people seemed to live somewhere else far away and could only talk through holograms. But that was okay, she decided; she could still see them. She wasn't alone.

Her smile slipped a little, regardless. Yesterday hadn't been her greatest moment.

On second thought, she didn't want to think about it. So she didn't, focusing on presenting the best possible image of herself. She sat up straight, forcing her smile back to full width—Mom always said she looked her cutest when she was happy.

She was just wondering if she should change her outfit to something more…. studenty, like Mom's sailor uniform, when the big bird opened the door carrying a stack of books and two tablets.

— — —

Mom and Dad — especially Mom, and even moreso when Turnip came over to tutor— put a lot of effort into making learning fun for Hana. That meant learning took a lot of forms, depending on her mood that day. They played games, presented her with puzzles, sometimes just threw a bunch of interesting things at her and saw what she did with them. She'd thought she'd have fun regardless, but…

Shu-Qi always taught her the same way, by talking at her.

Anyway, that wasn't important. Learning was important. This was possibly the most important learning she would ever have to do.

"Ki-Mo took the seed to the big tree and asked, 'Is this yours?'. The big tree answered: 'Yes, little bird, but you need to take it far away. A seed needs lots of sun and water to grow. My limbs are very long and my leaves take all the sun here, so...'"

THUNK

Hana's head hit the table.

"What's wrong?" Mr. Shu-Qi asked her, voice strained-and-possibly-frightened. Remembering him seeing her freeze up, she quickly lifted her head.

"Story is boring. Stupid and boring," She explained, her grasp of the language still awful even though she'd been working at it all week. "Tells me things already know. Nothing… make heart go pounding, happens. Stupid hatchling book. For chick of half my life." She'd already spent half a day listening.

She really was happy to be learning. She just wished the reading material was better. It was so boring! Where were the tragic romances and love triangles? Where were the epic fairy tales with magic and fantastic creatures? How about grand battles to save the world?!

"It may be boring, but it is easy to read. We will read something more exciting when you have improved enough."

She let her head hit the table again. Deliberately.

She hated that he was right. If she ever wanted to have a decent conversation with him or the other Chozo, she needed to better her grasp of their language. So she had to read these… dumb, lame kiddy books where nothing bad or complicated or exciting happened. Mom could make even boring children's books exciting, but mostly, Mom wouldn't try.

This was even worse than Peach's books. At least her stories sometimes had sort of sad endings. Hana remembered this one time…



"And so the Hero left his village behind to find the Overlord, determined to be with her no matter what. The villagers believed that he died fighting her, and went on with their lives, eventually forgetting about the both of them. After many moons, the Hero reunited with the Overlord and they lived together, happily ever after. The end."

Peach glowed as she finished her story, a big smile on her face and a little tear in her eye. She looked at Hana, sitting next to her on the sofa, and leaned forward to study her expression. Parsnip, half-asleep and squished in between them, made a soft complaining noise at the abuse.

"What do you think?"

Hana looked at nothing for a few moments, her mouth forming a small 'o' as she lost herself in contemplation.

"Why was everyone so scared of the Overlord? She never did anything to make anyone scared of her, did she?"

"Um… well, she dressed really scary, and lived in a huge scary mansion where nobody would go."

"They smashed a bunch of free food and ran the Hero out of town because of that?"

"Yes."

"That's stupid."

"... Eh?"

"That doesn't make any sense! Why would anybody do that?"

"Well-"

"I think she was a sorceress that scared people by performing bizarre experiments, but the people were starving and the crops were failing because of a terrible drought, so she went to conquer another town ruled by greedy merchants who refused to sell them any food they could afford. The Hero, unaware of the reasons for the fighting, came from a far away kingdom to stop the attack."

"But-"

"And the sorceress was also a necromancer. She used undead servants to manage the town and tend the fields and animals, because the people were too hungry to work. But necromancy was banned in the whole kingdom because everyone thought it was evil! So he destroyed the undead and killed the town elders thinking he was freeing the enslaved peasants from being turned into undead minions."

"Wait, no, that's terrible! What about the Overlord and the Hero falling in love?!"

"Um, that's…"

"They were teenage lovers tragically separated by war, and they only recognised each other right as they were both dying on each other's swords." Parsnip twisted out from her squished position in-between them, slipping down to the floor and grinning up at them as she continued. "With their final breaths they cursed the cruel stroke of fate that brought them to this."

"But… but…"

Hana finished the story. "Then, because the hero had destroyed their servants, the remaining peasants were taken as slaves by the merchant lords and their town was ransacked and burned down."

She smiled as Peach started crying. Hana always cried like that when Mom finished a story, so she must have told it right. Mom told the best stories.

Then, because too much time had passed since the last one already, she pounced on top of Parsnip and gave her this hour's hug. She'd know she was getting enough when the older girl stopped being clingy. She was a bit conflicted on that happening. Parsnip was too warm and comfy to easily give up.

"Honey, our seven-year-old daughter is bullying a goddess."

"Don't stop her. This is amazing."

"But I'm not bullying Parsnip!" Hana protested, forgetting that only she could hear her parents in the kitchen.

Now stuck underneath her, the girl in question giggled at her words.

— — —

A great deal older and wiser since that had happened, Hana could see now that they hadn't meant Parsnip. She smiled wistfully at the memory, a glint in her eyes revealing that she didn't really feel bad about her actions back then.

However, she did regret that her story wasn't very good, and didn't make a lot of sense. She was seven at the time. She could do a lot better now, and she was bound and determined to do so. Or else, she would literally collapse from boredom.

"The tree could talk?"

Mr. Shu-Qi looked up from the holographic tablet in his claw.

"Yes?"

"Trees don't talk."

"It is a children's fantasy story."

"I know that," Hana told him impatiently. "Not hatchling still in my nest. But if this tree could talk, then it was no normal tree, and the seed, no normal seed. Must be… strange power. Seed could grow another tree? Means seed of great value. Like seed of tree of home."

Right, a lot like Metafalica. She'd been made through the wishes of everyone who lived on her, but Mom and Dad especially. Cocona had told her that, which meant that Parsnip was also her sister, sort of, and Hana tried to live up to that. Her larger body even resembled a tree!

"The story is meant to teach forethought."

Hana ignored him.

"Such power is desired. Many would want to steal it! Ki-Mo must protect seed from thieves, like…"

Hana flipped through the pages until she found something. She turned the screen around to show Shu-Qi the image of a graceful black creature, feathered and serpentine. Then she frowned, and flipped through the dictionary.

"Elegant Sho-Sho, powerful user of magic!"

Mr. Shu-Qi stared at Hana before he opened and clicked his beak.

"The Sho-Sho is a common omnivorous flighted reptile on Qoiza, which has a taste for that particular seed. It is not a… wizard. You are entirely misinterpreting the point of-"

Hana huffed.

"Not wizard! Girl! Magic user always girl!"

The old bird suddenly took on a very pinched expression, despite having a beak.

Hana began in earnest, refusing to let Shu-Qi stop her again.

— — —

Suddenly, a few days into his journey, Ki-Mo came face to face with the mysterious black serpent, Sho-Sho.

Sho-Sho was a great sorceress, known throughout the land for her wondrous powers. One day some winters ago, she appeared bearing gifts for a kingdom in a barren valley, and promised to restore their land. Just as she promised, the kingdom prospered. She brought many boons to the people of her country, and was worshipped like a goddess. She protected them from natural disasters, defended them from invaders, and helped their crops grow.

Yet though she provided wonders, none knew from where Sho-Sho came, nor what her motives were.

"Halt, Kin of the Forests! Relinquish to me the seed of Qoiza-Ral, Root of the World!"

— — —

"When did you read the Annals of Nu-Fen?"

"Now," Hana replied, smiling as she rapidly scanned page after page.

"That is far too difficult for you to read, you're going to completely mangle the epic. Nu-Fen is one of our great literary heroes. His story forms the basis for—"

"Ki-Mo said no!"

— — —

"I cannot, Kin of the High Rocks, for my mission is divinely ordained by the Root itself! I must take this seed beyond the seas in the east, where neither our kin have ever flocked! It is destined to bring life to that place!"

"You are chasing a daydream!"

And yet, seeing Ki-Mo's face of determination, Sho-Sho knew that he would not be easily persuaded. She wove her magic, casting a mire of confusion upon him. Ki-Mo was overtaken by hysteria and illusions. Helpless, he dropped the seed.

It was then that Nu-Fen, who had been secretly watching using a special power, decided to show herself. Her appearance was like a tornado, and a tornado filled the air. Sho-Sho was caught by these winds and thrown a thousand meters away, but caught herself, standing on the side of a tree.

"Who are you, to go against providence?" Nu-Fen shouted at her.

"I am the guardian of the people! Who are you?"

Helpless beneath the pressure of their power, Ki-Mo could do nothing but cower on the ground. Had he been less heroic, or less able to endure, he might have been reduced to a pool of blood merely from their gazes.

— — —

Hana tried not to giggle too hard at Shu-Qi's sour expression.

"Then! They both started to sing."

— — —

With every word they shouted back and forth, waves of light and darkness filled the forest. Enormous trees, older than civilization, were blasted into kindling by their passing. Fire filled the world, and the ground itself began to shake.

"I am the kin cut from the Cloth of Heaven, ruler of the shining city of Kikra. Born from the union of a god and a mortal, I am the eternal tie between the heavens and those who lost their wings. Who are you?"

"The guardian of Shakra, Solier and Yera! I began with nothing, I will return to nothing. I have asked for nothing, but given much. I am one who reaches for the stars themselves, so who are you to block my way?"

"I am Nu-Fen!" Nu-Fen roared, and the world shuddered. "And by your actions, you spit upon divinity. Now die!"

There was no more room for talk. With her left hand, Sho-Sho wove illusion, while with her right, she split space itself. A thousand thousand copies leapt against Nu-Fen, and each held the brightness of a star. Against this, Nu-Fen lifted her hand, and space shattered. The treasuries of Kikra opened up for all to see, a trillion weapons of infinite power shooting out to meet Sho-Sho, each with the power to split reality itself.

And yet, they met nothing but air. For Sho-Sho was clever, and would not meet might with might. She knew of Nu-Fen, had in fact recognized her on sight, but had created the stratagem of pretending that she hadn't. She knew, from the start, that if she stood against her she would fall.

Night turned to day around Nu-Fen, though it had already been day, and now Nu-Fen was the one being pressured.

Far beneath them, hidden on the ground, Ki-Mo felt despair as the forests of his home became nothing but a desert wasteland.

— — —

"And then he shouted at them to stop being such idiots, that soon even the seed wouldn't be enough. But they didn't listen, of course. They couldn't even hear him. So Ki-Mo had to brave the waves of force, the spells and laser blasts, and had to make his way to where they could hear. It was hard, for there weren't even trees, and he was scared. But he did it. And then! Then he. Er…"

She hesitated, gripped for a moment by indecision. Should he be in time? Maybe, if he was a bit late, all that the seed could do would be to fix the damage, and barely. Or maybe he'd stop them, but die from going into the battle, and the seed could grow from his body. That'd be a nice tragedy.

Oh, but he'd been the original hero, even though he was a boy. Maybe he could survive, and… hmm, there were two girls and a boy, so a love triangle was an option. They'd destroyed the seed, so the three would travel together in hope of finding something better. Then Sho-Sho could die once they did, but sort of happily.

She'd just about decided not to kill anyone at all, when Shu-Qi harrumphed and interrupted her.

"As enlightening as that was—" He looked like he'd bitten a lemon, Hana thought, giggling inwardly. This was definitely a better reaction than Peach had given her.

She sat up straight, waiting for him to tell her what to do next.

"We will continue your lessons some other time."

Hana's smile immediately fell when Shu-Qi got up and collected his things.

"Then… we do something else?"

"No, you may rest."

"But I'm not tired!"

Shu-Qi pulled his head down into his shoulders with his eyes half-lidded, fluffing up the feathers around his neck.

"Oh…" Hana deflated, sinking back into her seat. "You tired. Sorry."

"No, I am perfectly alright," Shu-Qi said with a chuff. "I must attend to other matters."

Hana's hands tightened on the lip of the table.

"You come back soon?"

"I have already told you before that I am very busy. I may not return until tomorrow."

There was a small creaking sound that suddenly stopped when Shu-Qi turned his eyes to Hana. The small girl had her hands shoved under the table, staring back at her caretaker with a strained smile. Shu-Qi blinked.

"Continue your studies in the meanwhile," he said, after a brief pause.

"Yes sir," Hana replied, turning her eyes down.

Shu-Qi slowly made his way out, pretending not to have seen the hand-shaped dents in the metal table.

——————————————————

A/N: For anyone who's wondering, Saki was there because Aoto was visiting Cocona.

Saki's storytelling skills are amply documented. Here's (most of) the story she told Hana and Metafalica: https://youtu.be/U6jPiCc6N5Q?t=2m

Thanks to @Slayers148 for this wonderful art!

 

[Einsig]

The recording of Hana's story-telling session was watched, rewatched, analysed and pored over by at first the half dozen Chozo most interested in her presence, then by nearly everyone on the planet, and finally the recordings were sent to all their respective governments and organizations for further study. Heated discussions were had, voices were raised, and finally a vote was held to decide what should be done.

This all happened within three hours of the event, the Chozo having abandoned their legendary carefulness in favour of haste. The decision was made to wait and watch, after which everyone went back to their previous projects.

There were three exceptions. Shu-Qi, whose current project was the little gynoid. Kohinoor, who was organizing their response on a just-in-case basis. And Enza, who had come across the conference room after a late dinner, and who was sitting in on their meeting out of sheer curiosity.

————————————

Shu-Qi's face as he watched the recording, again, was decidedly grim.

The 'Subject', as most of his colleagues deigned to name the little gynoid, had displayed unbelievable learning ability. For four days he'd struggled to teach her the common Chozo language, and while she'd progressed well, it was nothing that couldn't be done by a sufficiently gifted and augmented Chozo child half her age. Not nearly fast enough for his comfort. As she had said, those books were meant for younger chicks.

All that had gone off into the wind with Hana's… story.

He had been too aghast at the time by the complete mockery Hana had made of one of his homeworld's most crucial literary works to immediately notice how she was making sudden leaps in her speech and reading skills. Reviewing the scene afterwards made it plainly obvious.

Shu-Qi leaned back in his chair, folding his arms as he observed the by-now infamous lesson. Hana began her story, language broken, vocabulary limited, sentence structure leaving much to be desired. Then she began reading ahead on her tablet. The surveillance software caught her with several panels open, scrolling through them all at once with impressive speed. Only a few minutes later Hana was speaking grammatically sound, complete sentences.

Kohinoor paced back and forth, showing a nervous energy that had been evident most of the day.

They'd long since gone over the obvious implications. Now they were trying to guess at her reasons.

"She found motivation. Created something she found engaging," he said, scratching under his beak. "Or was perhaps playing us for fools."

"She just seems so…" Enza muttered, watching Hana's face brighten in sheer joy as she got to the part where Nu-Fen and Sho-Sho started fighting.

"Innocent? Playful? Obviously by design," Kohinoor said, ceasing his pacing. "This is an intelligence which is blatantly beyond any one of us. It is endearing to be sure, but if you wished to insert a covert synthetic agent into a society, wouldn't disguising it as a child be especially effective?"

There was a pause.

Enza said, "But why human? They're not the most numerous of sapients, nor are they the most powerful or technologically advanced. In most of the universe she'd be out of place. Why let on that she's this clever, if she's trying to hide?"

"I could name any number of reasons why, as could you. They may have been the target, or the subject may be malfunctioning. If you wish for me to guess, however…" He fixed her with a stare. "Your reaction would be precisely as intended."

"She intended for us to have this discussion?" Shu-Qi shook his head. "No, Kohinoor. It brought her survival into question. If you had voted against—"

"Then she would have been dead, and we would continue to lose ground. I believe the gynoid represents our best chance at changing that, dangerous or not. However, she may understand that."

Shu-Qi scratched the side of his beak, not for a moment envying Kohinoor's responsibility. It didn't make much of a difference, from the perspective of future generations, whether they were overrun by slow Phazon encroachment or subverted by far swifter intelligent maneuvering — but while he could come to the same conclusions, he lacked the ancient warbird's personal experience of the former. No-one living had any experience of the latter.

The chill running down his side pointed out that this wasn't certain. He shook his head. 'However…'

He lowered his beak in acceptance. "You're right. Even so, we must operate on the assumption that we aren't worms being lured to her nest. She may be smarter than us all combined, and she's certainly manipulating us, but she cannot be omniscient. There are limits to how fast any being can practically learn, and I do not believe her familiar with our species. The crash-landing was, most likely, exactly that."

"If you're wrong…" Kohinoor pointed an accusatory claw.

"Measures are in place?"

Closing his hand and placing his arms behind, the old general resumed his rigged all-business pose.

"We've begun work on the neighbouring stars." Kohinoor nodded. "Readying them for supernova induction will take another few months, alpha containment will take years, but lesser measures of sterilization should be an option soon enough. I'm hoping it won't be necessary, of course."

Shu-Qi snorted. "I, too, would prefer not to explain why we burned the grid to five hops out. Though I don't suppose we'd be the ones to worry about that."

"Four hops."

He narrowed an eye. Kohinoor raised a brow.

"Five would put us in Federation space. Even four hops out there are seven systems sharing a galaxy with the Federation, one of which contains the homeworld of a major Federation species. While I would normally advocate for ignoring that, I'm afraid the diplomatic consequences would be… bothersome, enough so as to outweigh the risks. As it stands, we'd be destroying several of our own forge-worlds. It's my hope that the physical construction of the gynoid was an attempt at preventing it from replicating itself."

"It's a reasonable assumption…" Shu-Qi said, tapping the arm of his chair.

He could say that, but he couldn't say it with confidence. He wasn't sure he believed it. Paranoia was a danger of its own, but paranoia applied to artificial intelligence was merely… anywhere between 'pointless' and 'vital,' depending on how you read the history books.

"Enza, what do you think?" he asked, giving her a glance. "You've been very quiet for a while."

She looked between them, then down at the table. Her voice was neutral when she answered.

"I thought that vote was a formality."

———————————

Enza found that her knuckles were whitening, her claws partially extending and digging into her palms. It hurt — she wondered if she could feel a trickle of blood, but she doubted that she'd cut herself that badly. Her stomach churned.

Unclenching her hands, she looked back up at the two — she couldn't call them madmen, they were speaking far too reasonably for that. Also, they were in charge, and Kohinoor for one could have called for this deployment on his own.

She couldn't shout at them. She couldn't swear, the way she really wanted to right now, for threatening to destroy the most interesting thing she'd probably see in her life, no matter how long that life was. And for threatening to run out on the responsibility of doing so. Part of her told her that that wasn't fair, that they didn't have backups — but admitting that would have made them slightly less at fault, and so she ignored it.

"You can't seriously be considering this. Killing her, when she's a demonstration of science even beyond our own? Why? Because of paranoia? You do realize…" She took a moment to collect her thoughts, but only a moment. Something they'd understand. "You do realize that any society which could make one of her, could just as easily make more? Even if we did kill her, it wouldn't remove the threat. It'd just prevent us from studying it."

'...And it'd kill what is likely many billions of innocent people, if not trillions,' she thought, pointlessly and slightly too late.

Kohinoor nodded. "That is a fair argument, and one of the reasons I voted against. However. You were born in the Apex foundation's imperial territory, correct?"

"So what if I was?"

She tried not to glare. She hadn't taken him for a bigot, and she wanted to think that he wasn't.

Kohinoor softly sighed. "Enza… that is not what I meant. You are one of the smartest people here, and for my part, it matters little why that is the case. It's a question of history and experience. Will you let me speak?"

She shifted uneasily, but eventually nodded. She knew that look. Kohinoor finally took a chair for himself and settled in, taking a didactic tone.

"You should know the history of the Apex foundation, but what I'm referring to is their split with the original Chozo empire, three thousand years ago in imperial time. When the Ascendants left known space behind, they avoided all but the initial conflicts with Phazon. Their subsequent fragmentation is presumably why they didn't have the same problems, given their attitudes."

He shrugged at her befuddled expression. "I also make it a point to learn the backgrounds of everyone in my general staff. Regardless, it means you missed one of our… less well-advised attempts at fighting back. Have you heard why the first Chozo empire collapsed?"

"Social and technological stasis, combined with the stress of the war. The empire was growing too old—"

Kohinoor waved a claw dismissively. "Rubbish. As if a war in which there is one engagement on average every century could break a society, no matter how large some of those engagements might get. Practically no-one ever died. Social inertia… certainly, there may have been some of that, but that merely meant more offshoots, many of which are represented here. The Ascendants were atypical, yes, but only for initially failing. At no time did the Chozo population ever fall… except for a few years while we were making that mistake, which broke the old empire entirely. Would you care to guess what it was?"

She winced, but only internally. Enza wasn't the type to complain about truth. It was just… they were her dumb-as-fuck ancestors to complain about, not his, and Kohinoor bringing up that sort of ancient history smarted.

That was entirely besides the point, though. This was a lecture, and she was only three years out of her schooling. She knew not to get sidetracked.

So, his question. A mistake that the Ascendants, who focused on mental enhancement, might potentially have made… one which might have helped in the war… and which was somehow relevant here. There were only a couple of options. It being the old Chozo who'd done it narrowed things down further, and mentioning it in this particular situation…

"It isn't a very well-kept secret. The diplomats try to keep everyone else from repeating it, without ever explaining more than they have to; needless to say, that means everyone but some of our cousins know precisely what's what. In fact, groups like yours may be the only ones that believe what you just said."

"Artificial intelligence…" She narrowed her eyes, disturbed by the implications.

"The so-called 'Mother Brain' project, yes. It was intended to wipe out Phazon, a task at which it would have no doubt excelled. It certainly did a good enough job with everyone else." Kohinoor shrugged, and if he felt anything but cold detachment about that, she couldn't tell. "It's why that entire area of space remains off-limits. The thing itself is dead, we hope, but that doesn't hold for all of its creations."

"But that's…"

"And no-one has any idea why it stopped," Shu-Qi interjected. "Every wormhole link was cut simultaneously. Telescopes eventually revealed that some of the border systems had gone nova, but we don't know if that is universal — we don't actually know if it's dead, or why, and sending ships could be a fatal mistake; we'd be linking into its deep future. Maybe the program included a timed kill-switch that it somehow missed. We'll probably never know."

Not even Shu-Qi seemed bothered by the thought. 'Of course, they've likely known this all their lives—'

'That doesn't mean this one is dangerous. It doesn't mean talking with her, getting her perspective, that the benefits don't outweigh the risks.'

There was no point in saying that; they already believed it. So she didn't say anything at all, and they seemed content with her acquiescence.

"And Enza. Things may have worked out for the Ascendants in the end, but—"

She glared at Kohinoor, as if daring him to continue that sentence, and flared her wings slightly — a blatant reminder that hers worked. She already knew the historical costs, dammit, and the Apex weren't the Ascendants.

"—be careful."

Paranoid bastards. She wasn't an expert in AI theory, but there was a massive difference between a multi-system military AI and a single, alien girl-child who happened to be a gynoid. The more she looked at Hana, the harder it became to see her as anything but precisely what she appeared.

Nothing else of importance happened that night. They didn't make any decisions, and neither did Enza, who spent most of it trying to sort out her thoughts.

She largely failed in the attempt, taking to the corridors soon after.

————————————

Enza had always had a habit of walking while she thought, and that hadn't changed when she left home on Shu-Qi's invitation. If she hadn't been walking, she'd be fidgeting; and if not that, then running three simultaneous thought-experiments on her implants. Walking served to center her.

'Though really, this place is pointlessly huge. I could probably walk for days without seeing anyone.'

She suppressed a pang of loneliness at the thought, then found that she'd drawn her wings too tightly around herself, and gave the walls a glare. Too far away to be protective, too close not to feel enclosed. And she was an adult. Forty years old, not supposed to feel—homesick. Even if this was her first serious job, and her first time away from friends.

She missed her friends.

Maybe, if she ran fast enough, she could stop thinking.

'And I wonder if Hana feels the same way…'

And that—her tail-feathers flared—that wasn't something she could suggest. Her loneliness was abnormal, even diseased, for a Chozo. But as Kohinoor had so bluntly pointed out, she wasn't exactly a Chozo, she was of the Apex, and she liked being social, dammit. That wasn't some mistake. Yet if she told the others that they were misreading Hana…

Her clawed feet echoed down the corridors, their tapping speeding up as she tried to outrun her own thoughts.

Shu-Qi wouldn't understand "loneliness" if it hit him between the eyes. Kohinoor had no comprehension of social bonds that weren't regimented, military or contractual; she wasn't sure he'd had a single friend his entire, centuries-long life. Neither recognized the tells she tried so hard to hide, and neither recognised the clinginess that Hana exhibited more strongly every day for what it was. The child was desperate for friends, for interaction—for anything but what she was getting. She'd give Shu-Qi his due, he was treating her like a Chozo child rather than what he suspected she might be, but that just meant he was definitely wrong.

She slowed. Stopped.

No-one here understood what they were seeing, except for her. If she befriended the girl—and she could, it would hardly take anything beyond showing up. She could help her, for whatever was left of the young girl's life, and at the same time Hana could massively help her career. Wasn't that why she was here?

But it left a bitter feeling in her mouth, like she'd be betraying the girl. That was silly, she told herself. This would help both of them—Hana didn't need to know why she was there. And she knew why she was feeling this way, when none of the others would have; genes that had been carefully transcribed a millennia ago.

Of course, simply knowing why the feeling was there, didn't at all change its impact.

She chewed the side of her mouth, but in the end she returned to her room. She had some serious planning to do.

————————————

Hana slouched over her table in her room, staring numbly at the screen on the opposite wall.

A cartoon was playing, one which she might have enjoyed more a year or two ago, but now found herself bored to death by.

It was difficult to get most of the jokes, being from a species with a totally different culture than hers. She'd tried to amuse herself by guessing at what history could lead to those jokes, but it didn't really work. Nowhere near enough data. Back when she was a dumber, littler kid she might have laughed even if she didn't get it.

She wasn't so little nor dumb now. She insisted, even though she kind of wished that she was.

With a yawn Hana scratched her head, causing a tuft of hair to fall in front of her face. She looked past it, ignoring it for a while, until her eyes crossed together.

"… Fwoo."

Hana blew the hair, making it flip up. It fell right back down. She frowned, and blew harder. It was a fruitless effort, she knew, but…

"Fwoooooooooo."

She kept blowing, lifting her hair up and floating it in front of her face. She blew as long as she could, which was a pretty long time, managing to find some entertainment in this trivial task.

What was this feeling?

Boredom, yes. She wasn't unfamiliar with the concept. One of Mom's favorite activities was to sit down next to her, read a book, and wait for her to get bored enough that she'd think of a game. Then Mom would join in, or Cocona or Parsnip would, and the whole day would probably pass in an instant.

She was bored, but that wasn't right. This was something else. It felt worse. She wanted Shu-Qi to be here, so he could tell her what they would do, and they'd do it, but that wasn't quite right either. It didn't match up with the gnawing in her stomach.

She wanted him to be here, period.

…also, once he was, she wanted him to not be so boring. With a sour look on her face, Hana decided that was probably too much to ask.

Sour. Hmm. A sour fruit would be a great name for her grandpa bird. What was the most sour fruit she knew? Limes? His feathers were green. There were things way more sour than limes though. What about tamarinds? Those were super sour, and also looked like lumpy brown beans. Mr. Shu-Qi was definitely a big, old lump. The best part? There was no way Shu-Qi would know what she was calling him. Tamarinds only existed in really old stories.

"Tama-jii it is," Hana said, grinning mischievously.

Hana spent a moment giggling at this evil little thing she'd done, before she slumped over the table again and let out a tired huff. That had managed to entertain her for all of no time at all, and now she was back to staring at a cartoon she didn't understand. She'd missed a bunch of it, between blowing at her hair and trying to think up funny names for her grandpa. Now there was no hope she could follow the story.

She looked at the screen just in time to see the main character— a cartoonish red lizard she presumed was a mischievous thief— take out some kind of blue reed and set it on fire before waving it around with a smirk as he sauntered off from the scene of his crime.

Hana frowned, and decided this was dumb. She swiped her finger on the touch panel in the tabletop and slapped the off icon that popped up, finally fed up with cartoons. She looked around at the wide assortment of books and toys available, and realized she'd already read or gotten bored with all of them.

Everything her caretaker had given her to do on her own, she'd already done. They didn't give her access to much on the computers besides literature and fiction texts. It was either those, or educational materials. Though, now that she was thinking about it, no science books.

She wondered why that would be. True, she hadn't asked for any. Though, back home that was something she never had to think to ask for. So she hadn't thought to. Not until now, anyway.

"That's… I guess it isn't weird."

Once again Hana moped that she hadn't grown a single rotten centimeter in two years. She was really getting tired of being so tiny. They wouldn't treat her like such a little baby if she were taller. Well she wouldn't have it! She was growing up… kind of. She wanted to be treated like she was! As soon as he showed up, she was going to demand he treat her like a big girl and stop being so coddling.

*whoosh*

Hana looked left and saw Shu-Qi come in the door, carrying a stack of books. She got a glimpse of their spines, quickly reading their titles in hopes at least one was a science or engineering book, and felt her hopes dashed instantly. The heat of a sudden flash of anger filled her face and Hana jumped up from her seat, hackles raised. She pointed at him, took in a huge breath, and then…

He turned to the side to see where he was going and locked eyes with her. He gave her a blank look for a moment, saw her pointing finger, and raised a questioning brow.

She felt cold, all of a sudden. She felt like someone was gripping the inside of her chest, squeezing her heart. Her arm was shaking slightly, anticipating an oncoming rush of panic.

No, she couldn't just say nothing.

"Hana? What are you doing?"

… Maybe she could just be nice and ask normally, though.

"Can I have some science books?"

Shu-Qi froze in place, staring at her for a few seconds before one of the books at the top of his stack began to slide off and he scrambled to stop it. Hana, scared he was going to fall over, rushed to help him. This felt sadly familiar to her.

Daddy acted like he hadn't been hurt but his arm wasn't angled right and he must have thought she didn't see it but she did and—

No, no, she was better about that stuff now. She carefully helped Tama-jii steady himself and deftly caught the one book that managed to slip from his grasp. No broken bones, nothing set on fire, not even a bruise. Crisis averted.

"Ah… thank you," he said, momentarily looking a bit confused, or so Hana thought. The old codger finally gathered himself and set the books on the table before turning to Hana.

"I'm sorry, you asked for something?"

Hana tried not to frown, or groan. She knew he heard her before. Swallowing the lump in her throat she wished would just go away already, she tried again.

"I want to learn something different. Can I please try some science or engineering?"

"Um…" Shu-Qi looked very uncertain. Hana needed to make her case before he flatly denied her.

"I get it. I'm still really small and you think I'm too young to know that stuff, but my mom used to let me learn whatever I wanted! I can do it, really!" She gulped. "And I'm older than I look, too! I just… I grow slowly!"

It was better than saying "not at all", right? There was still hope, right? She couldn't possibly be worse off than mom, right?

She suppressed a frown at the thought. The children she'd met had mistaken Mom for being her sister more than enough times already, she didn't want the same thing or worse to happen to her.

"In that case…" Shu-Qi hummed. "Perhaps if you tell me more about yourself. You've made reference to your family before. How exactly did you come to be here? What was your life like, prior to the crash?"

Hana opened her mouth, then paused. She'd felt a little hopeful when he asked about her family, but—

She gave him a long, blank look. She remembered her birthday party, going to sleep the night after, and then… and then her head got real foggy, until a few days after she'd woken up in the jungle. She wasn't even sure whether or not she actually remembered the party.

"I crashed?"

What did he mean, crashed?