World Seed

Author’s Corner: Hey all, sorry for the slowness of releases. Been a lot of RL issues cropping up lately, health-wise. Good news is, I am going to try to do at least two chapters today!

After five days, I had managed to acquire twenty people from the interviews that would be joining the crew. From what Sharon and Celeste said, the two of them together had gotten another fifty. It was not really a surprise that more people went to get interviewed by the girls.

Anyways, right now I wasn’t doing the interviews. Why? Well… this is pretty much what happened.

“John.” A familiar voice called out to me from outside the tent door, before Sharon made her way inside. “Come on, we’re stopping early today.” Though she said so in a way that left no room for argument, she seemed somewhat happy.

“Uhm… what for?” It had been about ten minutes since my last interview, since people weren’t exactly lining up for it anymore.

“We’re going on a date.” And with that, she left the tent.

Thus, right now I am in one of the high elf cities, accompanied by Sharon. When she said we were going on a date, I had half expected Yin to be coming with us. However, Sharon told me that they had worked it out, and Yin would have her turn tomorrow. At the moment, we were sitting at a large restaurant, having a frosted dessert in the shape of a pyramid. It was surprisingly sweet, and tasted like a mix between apples and strawberries.

“Are we doing the right thing?” Sharon finally asked.

“What do you mean?” Was she talking about the date? We had pretty much come straight here after arriving in the city, so I didn’t exactly see what could be right or wrong about it yet.

“With what we do. On the ship, I mean.” She had a conflicted expression on her face as she clarified.

“We’re saving worlds, aren’t we? Not really sure how that could be considered wrong.”

“We’re saving some, yeah. But how many are we missing? So far, we’ve been at this for over a year, and we’ve managed to actually save only two races. I’m not counting the robots, since they might destroy themselves with what we gave them. But in that time, how many races might have been wiped out because we weren’t there?”

I reached over, putting a hand on top of hers. “Sharon, we can’t be everywhere at once. You know that, so what’s wrong?”

“I just…” She looked up at me, with a somewhat sad expression. “I want to do more. I know I came with you as more of an impulse decision, but being out here, saving people… I want to do more to help. I know it probably seems silly, right? I mean, what more could there be than saving entire races from extinction…”

I shook my head, smiling slightly to her. “You’re right, it is a bit silly. Come on, you help me out all the time. I’m not sure where I’d be right now if not for you.”

At that, Sharon could only grin. “Probably sleeping with Yin, Yang, and Celeste. But seriously, John. I want to be able to help more… But I just don’t know how. No matter what we do, it feels like it’s not enough, knowing that for every race we save, five die because we couldn’t be there.”

I nodded, thinking about her words. “I understand. But again, there’s not much we can do about it that we aren’t already. The technology to travel faster doesn’t even exist yet. The materials to make it don’t even exist.”

She sighed, understanding but obviously not happy that I was right. “I know… hopefully we aren’t the only ones doing this.” Suddenly, she lightly slapped herself in the face. “Sorry, I invited you out here for a date, then went all mopey on you. This is supposed to be a happy day, so let’s be more happy about it. We can worry about that other stuff some other time.”

Saying that, she quickly got up and dragged me out of the store. As for the bill… well, Maeve told us that she’d take care of any expenses we had while here, since there was no way we’d have their currency. Our next stop surprised me, because I soon found out that Gerin had a facility similar to old movie theaters of Earth. Though they weren’t using holographic videos, it was still rather enjoyable.

Unfortunately… the movie itself left me somewhat depressed. It was a dramatic retelling of our adventures to save Gerin. In it, I was portrayed by a particularly muscular elf, and several facts were… altered. For instance, rather than cautiously destroying the monsters from orbit, in the movie I bravely fought toe to toe with a dragon. Dragons are scary, you know?

After the movie, we continued to wander around for a little while without running into anyone we knew. Sharon was back to her cheerful self in almost no time at all, making it seem like the talk from before had never happened. To finish off our date, she even told me something that surprised me quite a lot.

“Hey John, Priscilla told me that you asked her to look into making it possible for travel between groves?” She looked at me curiously, but with a tinge of excitement in her eye.

“Yeah, was she able to come up with anything?” She’d been looking into it for about half a year… even though it didn’t really feel that long.

“Actually, she did. I told you that I let them make their own groves after they fully evolve, right?” When I nodded, she continued. “Well, Priscilla put together a research group to solve this problem, and they think they’ve got something worked out. After we leave in a couple days, she wants me to pull her out to talk about it with us.”

“Ah… alright.” I was expecting her to do so right now, but I could wait a couple of days.

From there, we decided to head back early, since we had already spent several hours in the city for our date. My date with Yin was… well, I can’t really sum it up too easily. It was honestly the happiest I had ever seen her, even though all we did was walk around one of the other wood elf forests and get dinner. When I asked her what she wanted to do, she said it was fine to let me decide. Well… she didn’t say it in that many words.

Nonetheless, it was good to see her so happy. Unlike Sharon, she didn’t get depressed halfway through, though I did ask if there was anything important that she wanted to do in life. The answer I got back from her was, honestly, not that surprising.

“I want… to take care of Yang.” She smiled as she said that. I knew that Yin would probably want something like that. I mean, she watches after Yang almost all the time as it is, like a big sister. She didn’t have a complex emotional issue like wanting to save the galaxy, she just wanted to take care of her little sister.

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While walking through the forest, we gathered several new and interesting fruits, but most surprising was that we found a green, heart shaped apple. Although it was quite a long time ago, I remembered what this fruit was. It certainly didn’t hurt that Yin’s eyes practically sparkled when she saw it.

“I never thought that the lovebird’s favorite fruit would be from the Gerin system… though I guess it makes a bit of sense, since it was elf territory where I first found it.” I still had a couple trees in my grove growing these fruits, so we didn’t really need to gather any. Though, Yin still plucked one and ate it happily, loving the familiar taste.

Like that, the last days on Gerin passed pretty peacefully. In total, counting my parents, Tessa, and Beth we recruited just under a hundred people from Earth. Naturally, most did not have any useful skills for running the ship, but there were a few mechanics. The rest could be slowly trained up. At the very least, with this the last of the facilities on the Ariadne finally had crew assigned to them!