070: Drifted Dimension – One
Even if Rhea hadn't shown her where the mess hall was located, there was no way V'tala would have been able to miss it with the unmistakable sounds of merriment coming from the open door. It wasn't overly boisterous, but it did feel like she was intruding on something she shouldn't have when she entered the room.
But one of the insect-like members of the crew, a woman with a dusty pink carapace over lavender flesh caught sight of her and waved her over, a smile on her face as she said, "Hey, good morning! Come and have a seat, food's almost ready."
It was a request, not a demand. In terms of a dlegh, her dryhten's crew should hold as much authority over her as her dryhten herself, and yet… V'tala felt no tug to obey. There was absolutely nothing stopping her from turning around and walking straight out the door.
And that amount of freedom was terrifying.
So instead, she took up the seat next to the friendly alien, and the woman beamed at her.
"We haven't had the chance for formal introduction with everything that's been going on, so I'm Elytra Cerci Setula Clypeus, fourth in clutch." She introduced herself, briefly touching the plate of her forehead with her left hand.
"V'tala Fext." She replied with a slight bow.
Rhea, the towering alien of all shades of brown, and Viatrix, the omnipresent AI she already knew the names of, but Elytra made introductions for the rest of the crew.
Nevara, the other insectoid alien, teal and grey in colour. Though she was as tall as Rhea, she was half as wide, slimmer than even V'tala was in her underfed state. She nodded in greeting from where she was helping her captain prepare the morning meal.
Malakh, her body covered in orange fur streaked with creams and reds, a short red mane curling around her head, out from which poked two triangular ears. The tail that swayed idly behind her was a surprise, one that momentarily had V'tala thinking some sort of serpent had found its way into the room.
Then there was her dryhten, Pryseia. Like Malakh she possessed a tail, but unlike her she was furless, instead covered in navy blue skin covered in golden freckles, as gold as her remaining eye, and the wavy hair that she was wearing loose. She possessed horns like an usgaisjan, but she had only two, jutting from the front of her skull instead of the back, the left one slightly shorter than the right, a slight white discolouration near the middle of it, damage no doubt caused by whatever had taken her eye and brought a white streak to her hair. Perhaps even the same thing that had cost her her left arm.
V'tala knew, as her dregil, she should feel nothing but bitter regret at these prostheses, that she hadn't been there to prevent her dryhten from being so grievously injured. She should be on her hands and knees begging for forgiveness for not being there to take the blow that had wounded her so. But all she felt was a sense of sympathy, a general sorrow that Pryseia had been hurt like that, nothing more or less intense than she felt when learning about the wounds anyone outside of her dryhten's sphere of influence had received.
And that apathy felt alien.
She didn't have time to dwell on it, Pryseia and Nevara coming to the table with dishes and platters stacked in their arms, and Rhea rose, asking her, "Do you have a flavour preference when it comes to your drinks?"
"Water is fine." Was out of her before she could think about it.
"No no, you're gonna want a flavour to cover up the medicinal stuff in your supplement smoothie." Rhea told her with a little laugh, "Sweet? Tart? Herbal? Other?"
V'tala clenched her jaw, unsure what to say. Food and drink were just fuel to keep her body running, she hadn't paid much attention to flavour before.
"How about a surprise then?" Rhea said kindly, "If you don't like it, we can swap it out for something else."
"Do not give her mint!" Malakh cut in as V'tala just nodded to Rhea's compromise, "That stuff was nasty!"
"I rather enjoyed the bracing taste myself, though I fully admit it was a shocking flavour to experience." Pryseia leaned over to her to stage whisper, shooting Malakh a teasing glance.
The proximity should have had her groveling to her dryhten, but all V'tala felt was a sense of amusement at the antics between the two, Malakh pulling a disgusted face at the memory of whatever this 'mint' actually tasted like as she scooped some sort of lumpy yellow substance onto her plate before passing the platter over to Elytra.
More platters were passed around, the others insisting she try a little of each dish, calling out far too many ingredient names for her to remember all at once. Rhea returned not long after, placing a pale green beverage in front of her.
"Don't worry, all the food we have here can be processed by your body," Rhea informed her as she sat down between Nevara and Malakh, "Thankfully our physiologies are similar enough that we can eat pretty much the same stuff, just a few things here and there that we can't digest on an individual level, so that stuff gets left off the menu. And your drink is key lime flavoured, it's a small citrus fruit from my homeworld."
Rhea had told her earlier about the supplement smoothie, a way to get the nutrients her body needed to recover in a manner less invasive than the intravenous drip, and so V'tala took a measured sip of the drink before her, the sweetly tart taste causing an unintended sound of appreciation to escape her.
"That is… refreshing." She admitted, trying to make up for the social blunder, but Rhea just beamed.
Idle chatter broke out after that, in between bites of food. Most of what they were talking about, V'tala had no context for, and so was shocked when they kept pausing in their conversations in order to bring her up to speed. Even more so when they turned to her for her opinion on this matter or that. Put on the spot like that, she had responded with whatever had seemed like the most logical train of thought on whatever subject they were going on about, fully expecting to be reprimanded, but instead everyone seemed pleased that she was participating in the conversation with them.
It was overwhelming, but not in the way she expected. It was overwhelming because this felt easy, like it was a skill she should have been utilizing her entire life.
Born to dregil parents, she pledged her first dlegh at the age of ten, the decade before spent in intense, isolating training. Under her dryhten, R'aya Hantu - one of the captains directly under the command of G'elin Basty - she was to be a bodyguard and assistant. And when Hantu's team had unearthed the ancient starship on one of the outer colonies, a massive, bipedal mech stowed away inside it, V'tala became a guinea pig. No one knew what would happen when they entered the ship, or the great machine within, and so the expendable dregil was sent.
What returned was a weapon.
The Great Machine, as Hantu and her team called it, would not obey their commands, no matter how many of them sat in its cockpit and tried to bend it to their will. Only to V'tala would it listen. Only to V'tala would it speak.
Enaruli.
Sitting in the cockpit of the Storlayacas - her Storlayacas - she had felt the constant thrum of its thoughts. Formless, shapeless, she knew they were there, but she couldn't make any sense of them. She didn't know if it was because whatever was within Enaruli was so alien that she couldn't comprehend it, or if the strength of her dlegh kept her from hearing Enaruli's words, because the demands of Hantu drowned everything else out.
The testing period had been brief, because the Grafan Coalition had found exactly what it needed - a weapon able to go toe to toe with Tymbos' fleets, and a ship capable of delivering it to whatever world they wanted, in record time. V'tala's next two decades had been spent in and out of stasis, hopping from world to world, destroying whatever targets Hantu pointed her at.
And then… silence.
Fifteen hundred years.
It had felt infinitely longer. It hadn't felt that long at all. Caught in broken dreams, unable to wake up, time ceased to have meaning. She vaguely recalled a sense of loss, like something had fallen away when she hadn't been looking. In hindsight, this was no doubt her dlegh dissolving with Hantu's group suicide, but it hadn't stung the way the dissolution of a pledge should have. It didn't have her own life coming to an end alongside her dryhten's. Her being trapped in stasis was probably the reason for that.
R'aya Hantu hadn't been a cruel woman, but she hadn't been kind either. V'tala had been a tool to her, nothing more or less, and she'd cared for her as she did all her other tools. The world hopping while in stasis, her and her Storlayacas being sent hither, thither, and yon, that care had fallen to the wayside. Out of stasis only long enough to get in Enaruli, destroy her target, then return to stasis, it hadn't left much time for food or sleep. What would it matter when she was going to be in stasis shortly enough anyway? Bound as she was, V'tala hadn't had the capacity to voice this oversight, wasting away with every mission, fighting against her exhausted body to carry out her orders every step of the way.
Outside of the spread before her, and the smaller meals she'd eaten in the medbay, she couldn't recall the last time she ate.
Her training had her instincts telling her to stop with a single plate of food, modest proportions, but the women around her were heedless of this inner struggle V'tala was going through, scooping out portions for her as well as themselves as platters made the rounds. It was not something she had ever expected to experience.
"From the reports in Avvisi, there seems to be a sizeable presence of Leviathan in the area," Nevara said, swirling the last of the tea in her mug before downing it, "We should be able to get something entertaining out of that."
Curiosity had always been something her dlegh had kept in check. Fractured as her bond with Pryseia was, V'tala was unable to stop herself from asking, "Is that another faction like your Kith?"
"Oof, not even a little bit." Rhea told her, arm braced around the back of Malakh's chair, "They're a type of creature that lives exclusively in deep space - their biology allows them to survive in hard vacuum. Very large, very territorial, very aggressive, and very prone to staking out corridors of space that make for prime trading routes. Even worse, they can pop in and out of subspace as easily as a ship with a subspace engine can, so you can't even escape them half the time. They can also fly faster than light too, so the only way to outrun them is with a a ship that's all engine and no weight, the opposite of a cargo ship. There's plenty of people who make a living with hunting them down, the Kith only dabble in Leviathan hunting recreationally."
"We've set up a bit of a narrative that our characters are being urged to fight Leviathan's by the Storlayacas themselves," Elytra added, "Mostly because these mechs have proven to be incredibly effective against them, and it's better than picking off cargo ships."
This whole Kith of the Void business, sensationalizing their exploits with false personas in return for a profit, V'tala wasn't sure what she thought of it. While she had been stuck in the medbay, she'd reviewed all the recordings that the crew of the Pelekys had made available to the public, all the thefts and interpersonal drama, her own appearance included. Frivolous, self-aggrandizing, it would have been something that Hantu would have abhorred.
No longer bound to the woman, V'tala found herself liking the concept out of spite.
"You've fought these things often, then?" She asked.
Letting out a hum beside her, Pryseia said, "Only a smattering of times, our acquisition of the Storlayacas was our main priority. But now that all are seemingly accounted for…"
Storlayacas. Multiple of them. A foreign sense of longing swept through V'tala so powerfully that she felt lightheaded.
"I would like to see them."
Malakh turned to Rhea, asking, "What about taking them out for a spin?"
"It's more neurologically than physically taxing," Rhea said, turning to V'tala, "We haven't really had the chance to have any kind of group training with them, and so long as we don't get up to anything too strenuous, I think it would be good for us to all get out of the ship for a bit."
A joy larger than V'tala herself coursed through her blood, and she could only nod in response.
"And if you're all going to be heading out, I do have a request," on a console across from the table, the avatar of Viatrix emerged on screen, speaking directly to her, "In our quest to find the Storlayacas, and learn what we can about them, I've been linking up with their systems. I humbly request permission to interface with Enaruli."
Her long suppressed curiosity now unshackled, and with someone as eager for answers as her willing to hunt for them, V'tala said, "You have it."
"Alright, we can meet the rest of you in the cargo hold," Malakh said as she stood, motioning for V'tala to join her, "Stasis did a number on your armour. It's not spaceworthy anymore, so let's get you fitted for a new suit."
As V'tala left the mess hall, trailing after Malakh, she didn't even think to turn around to ask her dryhten for permission to do so. It was only once they'd entered the fabrication room next door that she realized this oversight.
Even more shocking was that she felt no urge to flagellate herself over it.
Getting a modern spacesuit fabricated ended up being a much quicker process than V'tala anticipated. For the sake of familiarity, she'd requested a design as similar to her old armour as possible, and the fabricators had been able to deliver - a hard oversuit crafted off the schematics of period appropriate armour Viatrix had dug out from Usgaisjan historical archives, with a state of the art undersuit beneath it. Her original armour had once been the cobalt blue of the Grafan Coalition, but with her loyalty to that organization as dead as her former dryhten, she'd requested her new armour be coloured the same bleached white as she was. A blank slate, now that she had become one herself
"You'll probably have to have it adjusted as you get your muscle mass back," Malakh told her as they cut through the mess hall to reach the armoury, dressed in the uniform of her Hand persona, "But this should do you for now. Your weapon was in a similar state - it's a miracle that you were able to get off the shot that you did! We've got both of those in here, so you can decide on whether you want to keep or toss them whenever you feel up to it."
"They're broken, why wouldn't you just throw them away?" V'tala asked.
"Because they're yours?" Malakh responded, sounding confused, "Bad roommate etiquette to throw out someone's stuff before asking."
V'tala didn't know how to respond to that type of courtesy when it came to anything involving her, so she just nodded instead.
Malakh led them over to some strange, chartreuse designs on the ground near the farthest wall of the armoury, and a moment later the scenery changed, the pair of them now stood within a cavernous cargo hold.
"Sorry, I should have mentioned how instantaneous the dematting process is." Malakh apologized, but V'tala barely heard her.
Her attention fixed entirely on the six Storlayacas lined up in front of them.
A tap on her shoulder caught her off guard, and she turned to see Malakh grinning at her, pointing at the walkway that was raised before the mechs. "Come on, access is this way."
The others were waiting for them when they ascended the stairs, all of them dressed in their Kith attire. With Queen Kaizoku's crown resting upon her head, masking the horns on her brow and giving the false impression that she had a row of them along the back of her skull, V'tala was again struck by how usgaisjan Pryseia looked. In the sea of aliens she had stepped out of stasis into, V'tala could have pledged her dlegh to no one else.
"As was stated earlier, we've not had the opportunity to train in the Storlayacas as a unit yet," Pryseia said once they were all together, "So we will start of with simple maneuvers for the time being. Nothing to hinder anyone's recovery process."
V'tala was surprised to see that Pryseia was shooting a look at Rhea with her last statement, and the human raised her hands in indignation.
"I'm pretty much fine! My strength and flexibility's almost back to normal!"
"She was grievously injured not long ago." Nevara muttered to V'tala.
The attack on Lichhaemleas. V'tala had thought the injuries Chancellor Bathory had received were just for show.
"Be that as it may, we are not about to head out to battle, so we will take the time to go about things correctly, not swiftly." Pryseia told them all, "Once Vi has her scans of Enaruli, we will run through some simple drills."
Nods and noises of agreement met this proclamation, and then they all split up to take their seats, the cockpits of the Storlayacas swinging wide the moment they approached.
V'tala couldn't help the shiver of excitement that alighted through her as she sat in the pilot seat, the restraints and control apparatus locking into place around her as the cockpit sealed shut.
But as her own senses were overridden by Enaruli's, she had to bite back a cry at the searing pain that coursed through her. It felt as though something had harpooned her through the chest, but as she unthinkingly brought up the HUD to scan for any damage to her systems, she found nothing.
In her periphery, she saw the movement of the other pilots connecting with their mechs, and Pryseia's voice called out over the comms, "Is everyone prepared?"
V'tala could have sworn that Pryseia's voice had been pained, but as the others called out their confirmations around her, she was quick to do the same.
Viatrix's avatar appeared in the corner of her HUD, the AI announcing, "Dematting you out in three… two… one…"
V'tala had only a moment to take in the stark beauty of the green and cyan nebula that dominated the vista outside the Pelekys before she was dragged into unconsciousness by the pain.