Chapter 29: Any Chance You Can Forget That?
“What’s happening?” Mable said once Scevi had dragged her from the hangar and out of sight of Vestan and Avalyn. “It’s pretty messed up to program an automaton to cry and destroy itself when someone calls it what it is.”
“Avalyn isn’t an automaton, Mable. That’s just her body,” Scevi said.
“What do you mean? She’s just using piloting that automaton for fun? Of course people are going to think she’s an automaton if she does that,” Mable said defensively.
“Avalyn doesn’t have a choice,” Hugh said somberly. Scevi and Hugh shared a look between them before Hugh sighed. “Avalyn’s species can make living artificially created people, and that’s the only body she can use at the moment.”
Mable rolled her eyes and crossed her arms. “So it is an automaton that doesn’t shut down at the paradox.”
“No,” Scevi said firmly. “Avalyn passes the Krens test. The whole damn test. She has a soul, Mable.”
“Just because an automaton says it has a soul, doesn’t me—”
“Mable, I’m telling you without a shadow of a doubt, she has a soul,” Hugh said with a gentle but firm fatherly tone. It had been a long time since he had to correct his daughter like this. “An automaton couldn’t do the stuff I’ve seen her do with magic. I’m not even sure demigods could do the stuff she’s done. Also, gods don’t personally come and visit automatons when it prays to one, but Avalyn’s goddess does.”
Mable didn’t speak for a moment, not having heard her dad growl at her in a very long time. “How can a machine have a soul? Who made it?”
“Her.” Hugh’s voice was much firmer now.
“Why are you talking to me like I’m a child? You’re literally afraid of it, yet you defend it!” Mable’s voice was firm, but there were hints of hurt that seeped through. It had been a long time since her dad used that tone of voice on her, and she didn’t like it.
“Because you’re not listening to what we’re saying. Avalyn is the first member of her species to ever willingly interact with the Alliance, and it’s a human’s fault that she’s here to begin with. Not to mention she is the only living member of that species besides her goddess.”
There was a long pause as Mable thought about his words. “Is it Yechun make?”
“No, Mable, stop trying to make her out to be the villain in this. I know you hate automatons, but this is different.”
“If it’s not the villain, then why are you so afraid of it?” When Hugh didn’t respond right away, Mable's stance grew more confident. “See, I’ve never known you to be afraid of—”
“Mable, Avalyn isn’t even a hept old yet,” Scevi said, and it clearly took her by surprise. “She’s a child, and Vestan found her lost in space. For the first half hept of her life, she was completely alone on a dead starship. She didn’t even know magic was real. Hugh is scared of her because we know nothing about her and she barely knows anything about herself. Everything we learn is just scary, but that doesn’t mean she’s a bad person.”
“Like what? What’s so scary, but not a sign that it’s a bad person?”
“She can power cities without a catalyst,” Hugh said quietly. “The day I got drunk, we took her to a catalyst testing site, and she maxed out the cables on output. She could easily power Crescent twice over and we don’t even know what her max power output even is.”
Mable’s mouth opened to say something, but she stopped herself. For a moment her eyes narrowed before going wide, then as quickly as it came, all emotion on her face vanished into a well practiced neutral expression. “W-what were the things it could do with magic that scared you?”
“She can take over spellwork and make them a physical part of her body and they become extremely powerful and stable. When we scanned the astrolabe after she commandeered it, it stopped putting any readings out too. To every scan we have, it’s invisible.”
“Her power generation is the same,” Scevi added. “At the facility there were no detectable readings besides power output.”
Mable’s hands started shaking, but she quickly tucked them under her armpits so neither of the other two could see. “A-anything else?”
“She can turn tech into a physical part of her body as well through just a simple touch.”
Though her shaking hands were hidden away, Mable nervously started lightly bouncing from one foot to another, betraying the calm she wanted to display. “W-what are its people called?”
“Vysven,” Hugh answered.
“Oh, thank the gods,” Mable said with a nervous laugh and a smile. Her shaking stopped and her light movements became still again. “I thought you were about to say Regent.” In her relief, Mable almost missed the look Scevi and Hugh shared, but she didn’t. “What? I’m just happy you’re not harboring an ancients’ intelligence. That’s what that thing that killed a system is called.”
“Regent would be considered Avalyn’s subspecies, but she is a living ancients, or as they call themselves, Vysven,” Hugh said stoically.
“N-no,” Mable said with fear in her voice, but her shaking was yet to return. “A-ancients are called K-kestevk.”
“Kestevk means first in Melcarna, and Vysven would often refer to themselves as the first because they were the first to discover things, but their species are called Vysven…”
The rabbit’s brown eyes grew wide. “T-that’s not p-possible.”
Hugh tilted his head to the side a little. “How do you know the term Regent?” That wasn’t something Hugh had seen anywhere on his late night researches of ancients after meeting Avalyn.
The fear in Mable’s eyes only grew. “I-it can’t exist. There aren’t any of its kind left. N-nothing could s-survive for that long.” Mable took a step back, ignoring her dad’s question.
“Well, she wasn’t even alive yet, Mable,” Scevi said. “She was literally born only half a hept ago.”
“That can’t be p-possible.”
“It is.” Hugh said. “As terrifying as that is, Avalyn is a non-organic living person with a soul made by the ancients.”
“It’s going to kill us all,” Mable said in a scarily calm voice, but her body’s actions betrayed her voice. She started shaking again and her ears folded down.
Hugh reached out and put his two large hands on his daughter’s shoulders, trying to help calm her down. “Avalyn is a child, Mable, not some terrifying monster that’s out for blood.”
“She is technically born an adult,” Scevi said, “but she is a child in the grand scheme of things.”
“B-but you’re terrified of it!”
“I am,” Hugh admited. “I have never met anyone with that much power, but I am not afraid of who she is. She’s a scared and traumatized girl, stuck in a body where people try to immediately shut her down. Giff, I didn’t just threaten to shut her down when I met her, I threatened to destroy her spellwork and kill her. You want to know what Avalyn did in response?”
“T-threaten y-you?”
“She insulted my outfit, and it was even worse because she was right…”
“She told me to go drak myself when I tried to shut her down.”
“Everyone Avalyn has met has tried to some extent to end her life, and she only responds with insults.” Hugh sighed. “Of course it’s clearly getting to her, but even now her response wasn’t to hurt someone else, but to break down.”
“It w-was tearing its own face off!”
“So she needs help, not further admonishment of her personhood!” Hugh said firmly. “Can you really tell me you’ve never known someone to be self-destructive when having a breakdown?”
“B-but you’re t-terrified of it! It started ripping its own face off. That’s more than self-destructive!”
“It’s probably fixed by now,” Scevi said. “Avalyn’s physical body automatically repairs itself at a scary rate. Which is probably worse for someone who gets self-destructive.” Scevi took a few steps back and looked around the corner of the hangar door. Her eyes went wide as she spun back around and moved back towards Hugh and Mable. They had never seen Scevi look so white in shock. “M-maybe don’t look in there just yet.”
“Did it hurt Unc—”
“Nope!” Scevi yelled with still wide eyes. “Y-you just aren’t prepared to see what’s going on in there.”
“Did she hurt herself more?” Hugh asked.
“N-no. That’s all fixed.”
When Hugh went over and Scevi put her hand out to stop him. It didn’t work and Hugh peered inside. He reacted the same way Scevi did. “I should have trusted you,” Hugh said quietly to Scevi.
“What did it do?” Mable asked, clearly both afraid but determined to get an answer.
“Nothing,” Scevi and Hugh said at the same time.
Mable took a step forward and Hugh got in her way. “Mable, trust me, you don’t want to see that. If you’re this scared of Avalyn, you don’t want to see inside the hangar right now.”
“What h-has it done?” The shaky voice was filed with frustration, and before either of the other two people could respond, Mable pushed her way past them. Inside the hanger a golden amber goddess with four arms and wings, cradling Avalyn like a child while she cried, with Uncle Vestand kneeling close by. Admittedly, the goddess wasn’t the terrifying mental images she had made of ancients from their fossils when she was a child, but it was still her worst nightmare come to life. There was no way to deny that the ancients were back, and that Avalyn was one of them. Though it was hard to believe, she couldn’t deny that a goddess being here meant that Avalyn had a soul. The worst part was that for as terrifying as it was, the atmosphere in the hangar felt warm watching how Uncle Vestan and the Goddess comforted Avalyn.
“It’s so interesting to see how they interact, isn’t it?” A new voice spoke.
“Oh, drak me, there’s another one,” Scevi said.
Both Hugh and Mable looked around from the sight of Avalyn and the goddess to find a navy human goddess standing near them. She was peering into the hangar with clear, immense interest.
“What is going on?” Hugh asked while staring at the new goddess, trying to remember who she was. He had never been the best at remembering all the hundreds of gods over the hundreds of species.
“An extinct species came back to life. I take it that is very important,” Scevi said. Running a hand through her brown hair, Scevi sighed. “Gods, I really would fall for the crazy junker that adopts any wayward newly revived species.”
“He’s a very brave man,” Nevella said, still not taking her eyes off of the trio inside.
Mable slowly made her way over to her dad, still staring at the newcomer. Her shaky hand reached out for his sleeve. Once he noticed, he quickly wrapped his arms around his scared daughter, like he did when she was a child. He couldn’t help but wonder how terrified she must be to have seen one of her childhood nightmares in the flesh.
“Brave and stupid, but I’ll be a damned if I wouldn’t follow him to the edge of the universe.”
“Then you’re a lucky woman.”
“How are you so calm about this?” Hugh asked Scevi quietly, his eyes staying on the newcomer.
“What good is going to do if I panic?” Scevi said. “Sure, I’ve never seen a god in person before, let alone two, but…” She shrugged. “I don’t know. Avalyn’s the kid here and the one who needs help.”
“Is it appropriate to consider her a child?” Nevella mused. “I’m not aware of any species where offspring are born full adults, but regents are born adults. They live entire lives in those simulations. Then again, Avalyn’s simulation was different and not reminiscent of the society she would be born into.”
“I shouldn’t have agreed to help with the damn Stargazer,” Hugh muttered quietly, still holding tight onto his daughter.
“You’re not helping the situation, Hugh,” Scevi said.
“I don’t know how I’m supposed to help! Avalyn is my daughter’s worst nightmare come to life.”
“She’s a lot of people’s worst nightmare,” Nevella said somberly. “Yet she has done nothing to warrant that fear and hate.”
“She h-has the capability t-to destroy us,” Mable said.
Without missing a beat, Nevella said, “So do us gods, yet you worship us until we do something bad, and even then some of you will worship us more for it. I won’t deny that your fear isn’t unfounded based on our one other experience with a member of her species, but that is only one member. You can’t judge a species by just one person.”
“But she’s unstable. She was ripping her face off!”
“She wasn’t ripping it off, Mable,” Scevi said. “Sure, she was hurting herself while having a massive breakdown over how we all treated her, but pain is the only form of physical stimulus she can feel. Some people try to regulate through physical stimulus and pain is all Avalyn has.”
“Except Eternity’s touch. I’m very curious to know if she can feel the touch of any god, maybe only Vysven gods, or maybe it’s because they’re mother and daughter.” Silence filled the air outside the hangar, but Nevella didn’t notice.
“What?” Scevi asked after some time.
Nevella slowly turned to look back at the three people all staring at her. Her eyes were wide with realization. “She hadn’t told you that, had she?” Scevi shook her head, and Mable held tighter onto her dad. “Any chance you can forget that? No?… Fuck, I’m going to be in so much trouble.”
“Avalyn isn’t organic though, so it’s adoption, right?” Hugh asked.
“It’s,” she sought for the right word, “complicated. We might have to broaden our understanding of what living and organic matter can be because of Avalyn. She does have genetics she get’s from Eternity, and her magic and soul also share a link with Eternity like many ‘organic’ children do with their genetic ancestors.”
“Vestan, you crazy son of a whore,” Scevi said. “Adopting a damn demigod…”
“Well, if you didn’t know that, he probably didn’t know that either…”