It Takes Time <To Be Properly Taken Apart> - Interlude 03-1
Interlude 03: Part I
Chapter Length: 5,800~ wordsTo Oppose The Affini Compact: Part I
Author's Note: Hi everyone! I am pleased to announce that the site now has a basic dictionary/glossary of terms built-in to it! You can access the glossary at any time by clicking the blue spinning eye in the top left of your screen, in case you ever need a reminder on what a word in Saltiltomeyin means.
"Thisssss fucking sucks, dude; I am so bored, holy shit." Raqi's voice came out in a strained half-laugh as she spun around on her desk chair. "Holy fuck, man; I did not realise lack of stimulation was going to be this big of a thing when I set out on this trip. Ugh." She grimaced. I get now why they say not to travel on your own for long periods of time; this shit actually is enough to make anyone go insane. The humour value of the comment was decreased somewhat by the realisation that, if she stayed out here in these circumstances for much longer, there was a very real chance she would actually start to lose her mind. Fucking social species, dude. Can I not just be chilling on my own spaceship? Why do I need to talk to other people or else my brain starts malfunctioning? Oh, I hate this. She turned back towards the game of Terra Universalis XXII that was open on her computer. Screen games had been her primary go-to for warding off boredom on the multiple-month long trip from the Gliese to what she was really hoping would be Affini Compact space. The kuruki ability to hyperfixate had proven itself a powerful line of defense, and for several days, she had managed to get so engrossed in gaming that she had mostly forgotten how lonely she was. The effect had not lasted as long as she had hoped, however, and she had soon found herself craving conversation; at which point her only options were rewatching recorded holovids or talking to the ship AI. Raqi stared forlornly at the game for a few moments before hanging her head in defeat, unable to muster any inclination to engage with the program. "Wueeegghh." She hopped off of her chair and stood up, stretching before glancing around the inside of her bedroom. Her eyes affixed upon one of the many posters upon her wall; this one depicting a white-cloaked woman with red hair, brandishing a sword and surrounded by wings made out of fire. The sight made her expression droop. If I was still plural, this would be so much easier. Her eyes flickered from spot to spot, a familiar ache blossoming in her chest as she looked. I wish there was some way I could go back... Some way I could bring you back. But there wasn't. She had tried everything, and none of it had worked. Whatever magic had once animated Straessa had vanished; and that magic, once lost, did not seem to be able to be retrieved again. A minute passed during which Raqi was lost in memories of the past, before a soft chiming sound brought her back to reality, followed by the sound of a synthesized voice announcing: "Jump drive charging complete. Schrimpf Transfer is now ready." "Oh, good." The words drove all thought of her lost partner from her mind, as she turned at once and began walking towards the bridge. This would do to occupy her for at least a little while.
The door to the Rending Talon's command deck slid open. Calling it a command deck was largely a joke on Raqi's part: it looked more like an industrial machine cockpit than an actual deck, with about three feet of room to stand in if one was generous. The vast majority of this space was taken up by a chair at the centre, which Raqi promptly hopped into. The girl then spent a few moments peering at the dizzying array of buttons, levers, switches, and dials on the three separate control consoles positioned in front of and to her sides. Imagine actually being able to pilot one of these things. Like, how the fuck? How does *anyone* remember what all of this shit does? It was fortunate indeed, then, that she got to cheat. "Straessa, bring up route map." A split-second later, a holographic display depicting the route that Raqi was taking from the Landamar Mobile Fleet to her destination popped up. It took the form of a flat panel of star systems, connected by a row of lines that made it look as if she was drawing a constellation with her travels. Jumps she had already taken were highlighted with blue lines, while remaining ones were in white. She had once stopped to count the full amount of jumps it was going to take to get to her destination, but had since pushed the information from her mind; the number was large enough that it had started making her fidgety when she thought about it too much, and now she just focused on the pretty blue line and watched it get longer with each jump. Raqi let out a small 'hm' noise. By her estimation, she was probably about two thirds done with her journey; which was good, because she was not sure she could survive much more than another half of the time she'd done this so far without losing her sanity. The repeated trips in-and-out of cryosleep were very much not helping; she was also starting to understand why cold sleep was a procedure greatly disparaged by most among the Mobile Fleet. Santraz akk aqchko, if I was anything other than a delusional weirdo who sort of liked being ill, this would be unbearable. Fortunately for her, the 48 hours she had to spend incapacitated in bed with nausea and a fever every time she emerged from the cryopod was relatively tolerable on account of how her mind seemed prone to sending her into dissociative fever dreams each time. She imagined that most people probably hated that sort of thing, but for her, any kind of a vacation from being conscious and aware was desirable. "Okay, anyway-" She attempted to pull her focus back to the task at hand. It was getting more and more difficult to focus of late- whether that was a symptom of cryosleep, social deprivation, or just boredom, she didn't know- but she was aware that it was getting increasingly hard to stay on track for more than a few seconds at a time. Did I maybe forget to take my meds? ...Wait, yeah; I keep going into cryosleep. I've only been taking them when I wake up. Do they maybe leave my system when I'm froz- She realised she was doing it again. Fuck. Okay Raqi please, focus. She decided to eschew a proper inspection of the system she was about to jump into; it was all but guaranteed to be unremarkable anyway. Raqi had plotted her journey with use of the Rending Talon's AI, which would only pick out safe systems for her to travel to; she didn't know nearly enough about space travel to make those kinds of calculations herself. The result was that in over fifty jumps, there had been practically nothing of interest anywhere that she had turned up at any point; but at least she hadn't gotten sucked into a black hole, she supposed. "Alright, then." Her thoughts quietened down momentarily as she assumed a proper sitting posture within her chair. Even now, fifty times in, she felt a small amount of trepidation at what she was about to do. A hyperspace jump aboard an island ship or done within Fleet space was one thing, but out here in the middle of nowhere... Supposedly, there was no actual difference in how safe it was. It was just... Raqi let out a groan of discomfort as a shiver ran down her body and she reflexively shut her eyes. No, enough. We are not doing that. I have been over this- stop having anxiety about one in a billion malfunctions. She sucked in a deep breath, and before she could fret any further, spoke the words to begin the jump: "Commence Schrimpf transfer." "Acknowledged. Jump drive engaging. Commencing jump in five..." She felt her stomach drop, and she wrapped her fingers around the arm-guards on her chair much tighter than was strictly necessary. Sat down as she was, there was no risk of falling over when she lost consciousness during the jump; but something about the knowledge that she was about to be rendered unconscious made her deeply nervous nonetheless. It would only be for the fraction of a second that the ship was in hyperspace- less in reality, and even less from her perspective- after which she would reawaken to find herself in her destination. "Four... Three..." The first time she had jumped, it had taken her nearly half an hour to work up the courage to input the command for fear that she was going to die or have her consciousness thrown into incomprehensible agony, but the experience had turned out to be entirely painless and not even particularly uncomfortable; just disconcerting. She had come to comparing it to the experience of taking a micro-nap on a shuttle, when one realised they had fallen asleep for a split second and took a moment to regain their bearings. Most of her rational concerns about the process had been allayed within the first dozen jumps, and it was growing easier to believe the ship wouldn't just explode or cease to exist. "Two... One..." Of course, rational concerns were one thing. Irrational ones, on the other hand, were much harder to shake. As the voice of the ship AI finished its countdown, a small part of her wondered if she wasn't about to be cyberized the moment she jumped by- "Commencing jump." There was a momentary flash, the colour red-
"Jump completed. Arriving in: Sector 2B-NA-9S." -and the Rending Talon had arrived at its destination. Raqi let out a breath she had not realised she had been holding, finally relaxing her grip on the arms of her chair. She experimentally flexed the fingers on one hand and was reassured to find that, yes; she did still have a body. Her relief was interrupted when the lights in the command room turned a dark red and a warning siren began to blare all around her, prompting her hands to shoot to cover her ears with a practised speed. "Warning," Straessa's synthesized voice announced, "ship jump drive has experienced catastrophic failure-" "Shut up!" Raqi shouted. "Shut up shut up shut up! I know! Mute alarm!" Straessa's sentence cut off mid-way, as did the alarm, and the lights within the room abruptly returned to normal. After a few seconds of tentatively continuing to hold her hands over her ears lest the alarm resume, Raqi let her arms drop to her side and flopped backwards into her seat. Oh Inos, being a spacer is fucking stressful. She let herself deflate into the chair, thoughts empty and breathing laboured. She remained that way for several minutes in order to allow her heart rate time to return to normal. When Raqi had stolen a Chimera module and made her escape from the Mobile Fleet, she had prepared for what she thought was every eventuality. She had downloaded blueprints that had allowed her to use the module to reconfigure her ship to one suitable for long distance travel, including amenities like her garden; onboard fuel and food production facilities; oxygen synthesizers; replacement parts; and both asteroid mining equipment and a gas siphon. In theory, that list contained everything she needed to live self-sufficiently within the depths of space. What she had not taken into account was the nature of the Rending Talon as a spacecraft. The Talon could be considered a spacecraft in the same way that a Terran Accord canal boat could be considered a ship; it could technically go into the void, but it wasn't designed to go any further than half a mile away from the nearest port. The problem in the Talon's case was its jump drive: The Rending Talon was equipped with a civilian jump drive, which Raqi had only learned was different from the standard commercial-grade jump drive used by traders and commercial shuttles when it had exploded after her third long-range jump. This had given her quite a fright at the time, and she had thought momentarily that she was about to die in a spacecraft accident; but it turned out that civilian jump drive failures were actually nowhere near as dramatic as holovids made them out to be. Unlike when the commercial or military variants demised - which was precisely as bad as holovids made them look - a civilian jump drive failure was a comparatively tame affair. In the Rending Talon's case, the entirety of the engine unit had merely melted into a pile of superheated slag that had then tried to eat its way through the bottom of the ship. All things considered, it was a far cry from the instantaneous obliteration of the ship and everything within several kilometres of it. Nevertheless, this would ordinarily have still been lethal to the ship; as left unchecked, the new miniature volcano in the engine room would have melted clean through the vessel's hull- but at the same time as Raqi learned that her jump drive sucked, she also discovered that Chimera modules came with an automated repair protocol. The protocol in question responded to the drive melting in a rather ironic way: It first closed the bulkheads leading to the engine room in order to avoid depressurization, then beat the molten jump core at its own game by opening a hole of its own hole in the engine room and venting it into space. Said hole was then neatly un-made by the repair program, and the end result was a ship that was the same level of intact as it had been before the jump; minus one jump drive and plus a few burn marks. Of course, being stranded in the middle of uninhabited space without a jump drive should also have been a death sentence; but this, too, the Chimera module could fix. The module had apparently taken a scan of the ship's layout right after Raqi had first gotten it, and set this as the new 'baseline' to attempt to revert to in the event of any catastrophic hull damage. This meant that although Raqi could not make it produce a commercial or military-grade jump drive, it was capable of rebuilding the Talon's destroyed civilian drive. After doing some reading on her offline copy of Fleetpedia, Raqi had discovered that the only difference between a civilian and commercial jump drive was its durability. Civilian drives were capable of jumping just as far as the commercial variants (though not nearly so far as military ones, allegedly), but would break down after two or three long-distance jumps at most; whereas commercial ones could keep going for hundreds if not thousands of jumps. It took a while, but this gave her an idea for how she could overcome her problem. It took even longer to work up the courage to test her idea, but eventually, Raqi plotted in three more jumps for her rebuilt engine. As she had expected, the engine gave out on the third jump and was promptly vented into space once more; after which the Chimera module promptly sealed the breach, and began work on creating a new drive. When it succeeded a week later, this seemingly confirmed her theory; that she could jury rig a faux-commercial grade jump drive by simply destroying and rebuilding her civilian version over and over again. This system was, by all metrics, completely insane; but Raqi supposed that was fitting, given she was essentially on a madwoman's quest to travel half way across the galaxy in search of a civilisation from a series of fictional stories. The only downside was how much time her solution required: Ordinarily, it should have been possible for her to reach her destination in a matter of weeks at most, but the week-long downtime every time she needed to rebuild the engine meant that things would now become dreadfully slow. The good news was that the process of rebuilding the jump drive was handled automatically, which meant that Raqi could just skip the week of downtime by being in cryosleep. The downside, of course, was that she needed to keep going into cryosleep. I still cannot believe this actually works, Raqi mused to herself. I think if any engineer in the fleet heard what I was using the Chimera module for they'd probably have an aneurysm. Her thoughts trailed off into nothing as she stared out of the bridge window and into space. After time enough had passed for the unpleasant screeching of the alarm to fade into the back of Raqi's memory, she felt able to move again. She sat up and kicked her legs forwards, forcing herself into a standing position- only to wobble abruptly from momentary vertigo and be forced to clutch onto one of the consoles to avoid falling over. Ow, ow, ow, my head. Aa. A few seconds later, the purples and blacks that had filled up her vision disappeared, and she was able to see again. Okay, anyway: now that that's done with, it's... Her expression drooped. ...back into cold sleep again. Wheeeeee. She let out another groan, then turned to a nearby view screen; the only one she actually understood the purpose of. On it was a display of all nearby objects that had been detected by the Rending Talon; nearby being defined as 'anywhere within approximately 1,000 kilometres', apparently. The display didn't pick up any objects less than about a tenth the size of the Talon itself, which meant it would only show celestial bodies large enough to resupply on; which was helpful. Raqi tapped a finger against the nearest one and spoke: "Straessa, plot a course for this object. If it's an asteroid, eat it and use it to resupply the Chimera module. If it's not an asteroid, uh..." She paused, realising there wasn't really anything it could be other than an asteroid. "If it's somehow not an asteroid, then wake me up, I guess." "Understood. Plotting course and commencing resupplying operation." Raqi felt a split-second of force exerted upon her body as the ship began to move, and then the inertial dampeners kicked in and she was back to normal. With nothing more to do, she turned and headed back towards the hallway, making her way down to the other end of the ship where the cryochamber was located. Once she arrived, she spent a quarter of an hour preparing the chamber - half of which was spent resigning herself to the nausea she was going to experience when she next awoke - then stepped inside and sealed the door behind her. Pressing a button on the inside of the chamber, she closed her eyes and let the cold take her.
Raqi returned to awareness, and she could tell immediately that something was wrong. As the door to her cryo-containment chamber swung open, she did not have to try to avoid falling to the floor, nor did she need to fight down the urge to vomit. There was nothing more than a mild feeling of discontentment in her stomach accompanied by a faint swimming of her vision. For her to be feeling this good after getting out of cryosleep, she realised at once that she could not have been under for more than a day- "Notice:" She was greeted by the sound of Straessa's soft synthesized voice. "Close-range observation has revealed the object you selected to not be an asteroid." Scratch that: apparently, she hadn't been under for more than a couple of hours. Well, that explained why she felt so not-awful. However, it also raised another question: "Okay. Very helpful." Raqi did her best at affecting sarcasm, but her throat felt like someone had poured sand down it, and she was forced to interrupt herself by swallowing mid-sentence. Propping herself up by one arm against the cryopod, she turned her gaze upon the ceiling and continued: "What do you mean by 'it's not an asteroid'?" "Attempting alternate wording: Upon arriving within observation distance of the selected object, video feeds were analysed and run through pattern recognition algorithms to attempt to identify the object. Results showed a 99.97% probability that the object in question is not an asteroid." Raqi's expression grew even more exasperated. "Yeah, I got that part the first time. I'm saying: If it's not an asteroid, what is it, then?" "Unknown." Her brow furrowed, and her voice became openly frustrated. "What the fuck do you mean, 'unknown'? You are literally an overdesigned pattern recognition machine, how do you not have any kind of guess as to what it is?" She had to try to resist adding on: Are you stupid? "Pattern recognition failed to find any likely match for the object in question." Raqi's heart skipped a beat, and for just a moment, anger gave way to concern. Before it could properly take root, though, she remembered what Straessa was. For all that she thought of the program as an artifical intelligence, there was very little truly 'intelligent' about it. It could interpret and understand relatively complex verbal commands, but at a code level, it was nothing more than a particularly complex series of language learning algorithms. It did not possess any true sapience to speak of, or even sentience (at least that she knew of.) There was therefore every chance that it was just glitching out and failing to recognise something that Raqi would be able to identify instantly. "Okay fine whatever," she said, her tone flicking from angry-alarmed to irritated-dismissive. "Show me a projection of it, then." "Acknowledged. Displaying likeness of object." The air in front of her began to flicker with activity from the Chimera module, and a few moments later, a translucent mimicry of the object that the ship AI had observed became visible. It was... Raqi realised at once that Straessa's earlier inability to elaborate had not simply been the AI being stupid; she had no idea what she was looking at. In fact, she wasn't even sure where to start in describing it; it took her a few moments to make any sense of the shape whatsoever, and even then, it was only to parse that whatever this thing was, it was clearly not natural. What the fuck? She kept blinking, trying to make sense of the object being displayed; but no matter how she tried, it was not computing. Uh. What the fuck? What- What am I looking at? She kept blinking, again and again. What- am I looking at? This- This does not work. This does not work as- as an object. She tore her gaze away from the display with no small amount of effort, and flicked her eyes back upwards to the ceiling as she always did when speaking to Straessa. "This projection is broken. I do not know what the fuck I am looking at but there is no way that it what it looks like." "Acknowledged. Regenerating projection." Raqi waited a moment as the reconstruction shimmered and flickered, only for a shiver to run up her spine when it reformed in the exact same way as it had done just a moment ago. "Okay, seriously- what the fuck? No- no way. It can not look like that." The Talon's AI had to be erroring out. There was no way this- whatever the fuck this was- was actually outside of her ship. Raqi was pretty sure whatever she was looking at could not actually exist anywhere in the universe, let alone probably less than a hundred metres from her current location, sat inert in the void. And, again- just what was it she was actually looking at? She kept staring at it, but the shape would not resolve in her head. The information transmitted from her eyes to her brain seemed to fizzle out before it reached her mind's eye, and the instant she looked anywhere else, she found she could not recall even the faintest image of what the object looked like. Uh. Uhm. Okay. This is... Some part of her felt deeply unnerved by what she had just seen. "So, just to check: This object is inert, right? Like, it- it has not started attacking the ship, or moving, or glowing ominously, or anything else like that?" "Confirmed. Object in question has deviated less than 1 metre from its position since initial observation." This, at least, was a relief. "Okay, that's definitely good. Is it electronic?" Her brain started cycling through science fiction cliches, and at that moment, a thought occurred to her: "Can you, like, scan it for signs of life, or something? We have scanners, right?" "This vessel does not possess any sort of scanning equipment. This vessel possesses only visual observation equipment, accurate to a distance of up to half a kilometre." Well, fuck. Raqi pursed her lips; supposing that wasn't very surprising. Scanners were not something she had thought to bring with the ship when she'd departed; which, in hindsight, was actually kind of stupid now that she thought about it, because the ability to scan an entire system would probably come in handy for finding the affini when she actually got to what she supposed was Compact space. Egh, I just kind of figured they'd be pretty easy to spot, given the whole 'planet sized garden stations' thing... Ugh, whatever. She shook her head. Okay, so, staring at it is not effective, and I can't check if it's uhm... Well, it's definitely a thing. The question is whether it's a thing that does something, or a thing that doesn't do anything. Raqi knew that, going off of tropes, investigating this further was guaranteed to be a terrible idea. Just by narrative logic, whatever this was would most likely prove itself to be some kind of sapient parasite or virus that, if she stayed nearby to it for too long, would come alive and eat the ship- or worse. For that reason, there was no way she could possibly be considering taking it on board to get a better look at it. No, there was absolutely no way she would ever do that. She was not a dumb idiot protagonist, and she would never take an unidentified foreign object that she found in the depths of space onboard her ship in order to examine it in person.
Around fifteen minutes later, Raqi had finished loading the object into the cargo bay. She stared with bated breath at the readout on the command console as it showed the scrap arm disengaging and returning to idle position, and then sprinted to the cargo bay door as soon as it was done with her heart beating out of her chest. Fuck, fuck, fuck, this is such a bad idea, this is *such* a bad idea, she told herself even as her feet took her closer to what she was all but certain would be her impending grisly demise. Why am I doing this, why am I stupid, why am I a dumb idiot protagonist? By Inos I should just fucking throw this thing back into the void why oh *why* am I doing this- For all her blabbering self-admonishment, she knew exactly why she was doing this: she was curious. She had always been a terribly curious person when it came to most things that were forbidden or otherwise a bad idea, and the same part of her brain which operated on narrative logic and was screaming at her to leave whatever this object was alone was also whispering to her about the possibility that she may have stumbled upon some fabulous alien relic in the depths of space that would transform her life forever. Okay look, calm down, calm down, she argued with herself. There is virtually no chance that whatever this is is going to kill you. Like, be real here; even on the scale of 'random fucked up alien technology floating in space', it's not usually lethal. That's a horror movie trope. Salvagers find bits and pieces of broken-down ships in the void literally all the time; that's how I got my Chimera module, for pity's sake. Ninety-nine percent of the time, they're broken and they don't do jack shit. This one is probably no exception. Yeah, but, like- it's fucked up and doesn't show up properly when you look at it. That's a really bad sign, she retorted in another voice. Sure, it's a little ominous, but that could mean anything. This would be far from the first time that an object produced a rendering error when it was shown on camera. There was that coating people used to put on their ships to make them invisible to Fleetsec cameras so they wouldn't get caught breaking starlane regulations. Are you joking? This is sooooo not even remotely the same thing as that; girl you are fucking with yourself. She grimaced, finding that she had an uncomfortably good point. Yeah, fine, but- my point is it's probably still harmless. Most cool shit in the universe turns out to be nothing; we know this. This is not gonna be any exception. Her argument with herself was cut short as she arrived at the door to the cargo hold. Immediately, a strong sense of trepidation gripped her as she stared up at the imposing metal door, the way that the twin halves interlocked together providing no view into what was beyond whatsoever. Shit, I should have thought to install a window at some point... Ugh, but I didn't exactly think I was gonna need to check if anything in there was moving. She bit her lip, and after a moment of hesitation, pressed one ear directly against the bulkhead door. Seconds passed. Nothing. Would I even be able to hear it if it was moving around in there? she wondered. "Straessa, it, uh- the thingy. It's still not doing anything?" "No motion detected within the cargo hold." She let out a small whine. Now that she was here, she was having a much harder time reassuring herself that nothing bad was going to happen. It's- it's fine. It's gonna be fine. Suddenly, an idea struck her. Oh! I know- all I have to do is not touch it! Creepy space artefacts don't do anything so long as you don't touch them, or walk too close to them. If I open the door and just stare at it from here, I don't think that triggers any death flags? This idea was full of holes, but it gave her exactly enough confidence to press a finger against the open button on the console, and before she had the opportunity to regret her decision, the two halves of the door slid apart and began to open. Oh fuck- Raqi's entire body tensed, her mind convinced that the stillness until now had been just a ruse and that now that the door was open some appendage was going to shoot out from the aperture and grab her- -but nothing happened. Eventually, enough time passed that it would have been anticlimactic for anything to happen, and finally, Raqi relaxed. She had been staring fixedly at a point on the wall, and hadn't actually looked through the opening yet. Finally, she mustered the courage to turn her gaze inside, peering about in search of the mysterious object. She saw it immediately. It was sat dead centre in the cargo hold, towering over what few boxes and other storage mediums she had left within the room. It was gigantic, now that she could see it properly; easily several feet taller than her, and- Raqi's expression slackened, and her voice momentarily dropped into a low Gliesi drawl. "Wot?" She found herself blinking repeatedly. What the fuck am I- Okay, no, seriously; what is- Why does it *look* like that? What- I don't. She shut her eyes firmly, shaking her head for a moment as if to clear it, then opening them once more. What? No, that- Am I? Am I having a moment? What the fuck? She shut her eyes again, this time bringing both hands up to rub them. I must be tripping. Genuinely what am I- She opened them again. No, it- It really- How is that even possible, though? Like, how am I- What is actually happening right now? I don't- How do I parse this? What? It's- I mean, it has colours. It's green, and, kinda beige coloured? With... No, I- I don't- She took a step closer, wondering if distance might help. No, what the fuck- How? How do you *look like that?* She was gaping now; her brow furrowed in consternation and her mouth fallen half-open. Am I stupid? I have to be stupid, right? Like, there is- The cargo bay looks completely fucking normal! It's not me, right? I don't have brain damage, right? I'm not having a seizure or something, am I? I- She took another step closer. Oh, what the fuck. It looks even weirder this close. This is *so* fucked. Like, seriously, what in the stars is this? It- Why does the surface *do* that? Oh that is- Oh, wait, hold on a minute. Her mouth slowly closed itself, and the expression on her face gradually shifted to one of confused surprise. Wait, no, hold on, I... She gradually tilted her head to the side. No, no, I can... If I look at it like that, I can... She craned her neck to look closer. It's... oh, it doesn't really look all that strange now. Was I just...? Oh- Oh! Oh, it's because- it's because the surface is- it's- Santraz akk aqchko, it's so detailed. How is that... Wait, but, that texture- She reached out and ran her hand over the surface. Oh Inos. That is- Oh that is *weird.* That is- What? It- so it really is like that? It's... Oh, that's... She found that she was blinking less often now. Yeah, I... huh. I guess, maybe that was why? But, I mean, it- it still... No, I still can't see it properly in my- oh. Is it because-? Oh, I- Oh, wow. That part is really- Huh. Wow. Oh, wow, that's- Oh, wow... Oh... Oh, it looks... Oh... It... It's...
Author's Note: If anyone thinks Raqi's nonchalance about repeatedly exploding her jump drive is unrealistic: I once balanced a cabled electric fan on the edge of a crate of water while it was plugged in and turned on and left it there for several hours, presuming it would simply not fall over into the bucket and therefore was entirely safe.
It didn't actually fall into the bucket; instead it fell off backwards and one of the blades broke and went through the cover and then half way across the room