She Who Woke Among Eternity

“Avalyn, are all your systems okay?” Gramps asked with clear worry upon first greeting her in the morning.

“Yeah? Everything is fine.” Why was he worried about her systems, and why was that the first thing he said to her in the morning instead of his usual greeting?

“Did you do something last night while I was asleep?”

“Sure, but nothing crazy. Why?”

He huffed a little, but not at her. It was more in confusion as he looked around the hangar. “I woke up and everything was charged. Not only that, but the security system for the yard shut itself down, and I couldn’t start it until about ten minutes ago. You sure you didn’t do anything last night?”

“Ah.” If she had an organic face, she might have flushed a little. That timed up with when her Mama left in the morning. Avalyn had expected to wake up alone in her bed, but no, Mama had stayed with her the entire night. It was the best night of sleep she had had since waking up. She had even asked if Mama wanted to stay awhile and actually meet Vestan, but she said the time wasn’t right and that she needed to start the search for a body for Avalyn. “While I was not the cause of that, I will take responsibility for what happened. There isn’t anything that overloaded or broke, was there?”

“The coffee pot had a few burned-out circuits and burned the coffee. I haven’t checked much else yet. I was about to go through the yard and check.”

Avalyn wasn’t sure whether she was happy that coffee was something that existed in reality. On the one hand, she was happy it existed because she loved a good cup of coffee in the morning, and on the other hand coffee was now just a tease because she couldn’t actually have it anymore. Honestly, she wasn’t even sure if the taste would be the same, but she looked forward to the day when she could taste it.

“I’ll fix that and anything else that’s broken, and I’ll even try to do it without commandeering it first so that I can learn the old-fashioned way.” That appeared to put Gramps in a better mood. He very much liked it when she fixed things his way.

“I’ll hold you to that, Kiddo. You know what did all this though, right?”

She nodded. “I’ll see if in the future I can prevent this from happening again. At least with the burned - out circuits, I’m sure you don’t mind the free charging.”

Gramps shook his head. “That parts fine with me, but what happened?”

“I just had a visitor for the night.”

He looked confused. “Who was visiting you?”

“Eternity.” There was no point in hiding that, and she would probably tell him a lot about the conversations last night. For the moment, however, she wouldn’t mention the demigod part.

Gramps didn’t say anything for a while, but over that period his eyes god wider and wider. “The ancients goddess?” His voice sounded a little panicked. Nodding didn’t appear to help him feel comforted. “W-why?”

“She wanted to talk to me.”

“And she wanted to do it in person?”

Avalyn shrugged. “I am literally the only other living Vysven, so naturally our relationship is going to be a little more personal than that of a god with millions of people to look after.” For some reason that made Gramps look a little worried. “You’re not used to interacting with gods, are you?”

“N-no, most people aren’t.”

“Well, at the very least you’re going to have to get used to Eternity showing up regularly, even if you don’t actually interact with her.”

“You’re going to keep doing this?” The worry wasn’t leaving his face, and it starting to worry Avalyn.

How could she calm this situation down? She still had no frame of reference to understand how people of today interacted with gods, so maybe she had to go down the route of telling him this was normal, at least for her people. “Yeah. Like I said, we’re the only Vysven, so things are more personal.”

“Vysven?”

“That’s the name of the ancients. I know people believe we call ourselves Kestevk, but that’s a misunderstanding.” He nodded, still clearly not comforted. “I should also warn that on occasion random furniture will appear somewhere in the hangar.”

Now he just looked confused. “What?”

“Vysven furniture for when I get my body. Oh! I completely forgot to say, Eternity is going to get me the body I should have had.” She couldn’t wait until she could show Gramps her smile. “So no need to worry about money for a body; we can just focus entirely on Stargazer.”

“A-alright. That’s…” Gramps took a deep breath and steadied himself. “That’s wonderful.” For the first time, he actually smiled this morning. “It’s honestly really relieving,” he said with a sigh. “I’ve been looking at organic-looking automatons, and those things are expensive beyond measure.” He shook his head. “Nearly all of them are really only built for… I don’t know if any of them could stand up to the job of repairing ships and such. Repairs on those things are nearly as expensive as just buying a damn new one.”

Avalyn felt warm in the chest of the ghost of her organic body. He had been looking at organic-looking automatons for her. Without even thinking, she just jumped forward and hugged him. She could barely feel it, but it was enough. “Thank you, Gramps.”

“What are you thanking me for?” he asked, still hugging her back. “I’m not the one who’s actually getting you a body.”

“No, but just the fact that you were looking is enough for me.” A little reluctantly, she pulled away from Gramps. “Anything special on the docket today, besides seeing if anything else got a little too charged?”

“I reached out to Scevi and left a message for her. Don’t know when she’ll show, though. That woman runs on the spur-of-the-moment decisions and checks her messages as frequently as she remembers to actually loo—”

“Holy mother draking giff! You lucky son of a whore! Whose ass did you have to worship to pull that off!? That’s a draking Stargazer!”

Turning to look, Avalyn found an older, burly woman with graying brown hair, striding up to them whilst her eyes stayed fixed on the ship. As she got closer to them, Avalyn was able to see the telltale signs of her half Elven blood in her short pointed ears and the eyes that were just too bright a shade of blue to be human.

“And that’s Scevi,” Gramps said before calling out. “How in the hells did you manage to get up this early?”

Still making her way over, Scevi held up one hand in what Avalyn could only assume was an insulting gesture. “When someone leaves a message saying you need help with power generation and the word Stargazer gets mixed in there, you make sure to get here as soon as possible.” Finally, the woman’s eyes left the ship and scanned over the two of them. “You’ve even got the automaton up and working?”

“Great, here we go with having to have this conversation again,” Avalyn said with a sigh. She really was going to have to get used to having this conversation every time she met a new person.

“Why in the hells would you change the voice? It’s a classic!” she said finally close enough to them.

“It’s upsetting, not classic. Theres no way in hell I’m doing that voice again.” It was already a firm decision that she was never going to do that voice, even though she knew people were probably going to ask her to.

“Oh, it’s got some personality to it. I like a feisty automaton; almost makes them feel like a person.”

“I am a fucking person,” Avalyn said, putting her hands on her hips.

“It swears like an old wayfarer too! Damn, Vestan, how’d you get so lucky?”

“Scevi, this is Avalyn, and before you go down the route of doubting me, don’t, because she get’s scary when upset. Avalyn is a real person. She passes the whole Krens test.”

Scevi laughed. “Sure it does. You disagree with this statement.”

“Go fuck yourself,” Avalyn said without missing a beat, much to Scevi’s surprise.

“Kid!”

“What?” Avalyn said, turning to Gramps. “She tried to shut me down, and she liked that I swear so it felt like an appropriate response.”

“Alright, enough of the jokes, Vestan,” Scevi said. “What’s really going on?”

“No one’s joking, Scevi,” Avalyn said, turning back to her. “I pass your whole Krens test.”

Scevi just looked back at Gramps, crossing her arms. “I’m not fond of this joke, Vestan.”

“It’s not a draking joke, Scevi. I swear it on my Pa’s grave.”

Scevi’s eyes went wide, and she was silent for a long moment. She studied him, looking for any flaw in his serious expression. It was only after letting out a long breath that Avalyn realize that Scevi had been holding her breath ever since Gramps had said that. “Draking giff. How does a Kenana era automaton become a truly sentient person?” She turned back to Avalyn. “Have you been running since you were made?”

It took Avalyn by surprise that Scevi so readily accepted Gramps’s words as truth, but she was rather happy about it. Was there some sort of cultural taboo about swearing something on someone’s grave and not meaning it? Since gods were truly real, maybe there really were dire consequences for breaking such a vow.

“No, I’m not the original automaton at all; I’m just sort of stuck using this as my body for the moment. In truth, I’m only about half a hept old. Arguably the device that was making me has been running since the Kenana era, but I wasn’t really alive during that. At least to my knowledge. My creation is complicated and I’m not even fully sure of how it all worked.”

Reaching up, Scevi brushed a lock of hair out of her face. Her eyes were still wide. “Who the drak in the Kenana era was able to make something that could make you?”

“That’s the really scary part,” Gramps said, for the first time looking a little worried.

“My cradle that made me was actually made tens of millions of vols ago by my people, the Vysven.” Avalyn paused for a split moment, now growing a little worried herself. Scevi was immediately open and accepting of the idea of her being a real person, but would what she was about to say next make her afraid? “Today you call my people the Ancients.”

There were a few moments of clear disbelief on Scevi’s face, but that slowly turned into fear. “L-like the thing that killed an entire system?”

“I’m not sure if that was another regent like me, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it was. Regent being the name of the kind of artificial lifeform¹Data from Star Trek refers to himself as an artificial lifeform. I am. Like I said, I’m only a half-hept old, so I don’t really have any way of knowing if that really was another regent. Would it make you more comfortable if I explained to you all that I know about myself and how I came into being?”

“M-maybe?”

“Scevi? You’re already here?” Hugh called out from the hangar door. “I thought it would take at least a few days before you showed up.

“W-well, maybe I should have waited a little,” Scevi said, turning back to Avalyn, still clearly a little afraid.

“I take it they told you?” Hugh said, walking up to them. Scevi just nodded.

“There is a little more for me to tell now though,” Avalyn admitted. It took a little while for her to tell her story, and she was able to even give more information about her being thanks to the things her mama had told her last night. It also served as a chance for Gramps to learn these new things. The part where she admitted that though she had thought her brain was based on a human’s but in reality her Vysven mind was more or less just placed in a human simulation with some limitations as to not reveal her true nature to herself, did appear to scare the three other people a little. There had clearly been a little comfort in thinking she had a bigger relation to the people of today, and taking that away really made them realize she was truly a Vysven in every way, except physical organic body.

Still, she held back on the fact that she was in reality a Vysven demigod, because that might just be pushing their comfort a little too far.