#EYES ON THE SPACE FRONT || DASH COMM

[starlightkun]

⇢ word count: 19.1k ⇢ warnings: past unethical experimentation, brief blood and gore descriptions (some human and some non-human), you have to accept the premise of a single human empire in space in the future with colonies and a military and not think deeper about that, needle/injection mention ⇢ genre: sci-fi, set in the near-ish future, humans and aliens and robots, black op mission, captain kun, ?????? reader, slow burn, fluff, dash of angst, ft. wayv as the crew of the vision ⇢ extra info: took a lot of obvious inspo for this one from isaac asimov’s robot stories, specifically his concept of positronic brains & the three laws of robotics (and if you’ve read any of his stories, you’ll probably be able to see some other places too) ⇢ author’s note: ahhh she’s finally here! i hope you guys are as excited for part one as i am!! ⇢ series masterlist | next

Frankenstein complex (noun) ── The fear of mechanical men.

The air smelled like blood, burned electrical components, and whatever horrible odor came from blood getting onto electrical components as they sparked. All the blood wasn’t human, you could tell that, too. Skipper blood always stung your nose like rubbing alcohol. It was pitch black in the space you were hiding in, or maybe it was just nighttime. You should be scared, but your heart wasn’t beating fast for some reason.

Two pairs of heavy footfalls. One was heavier than the other. Walking, so definitely not Skippers. Both were still too light to be heavier races.

They slowed to a stop outside your hiding spot, and you really hoped they couldn’t read the Outspacer controls that would open the otherwise impossible-to-see door. After all, it was a language that had been dead for hundreds of millions of years, there was no way—

“Hey, Zennie, you got a read on these?” A man’s voice came from nearby, muffled by both the wall and presumably a helmet as well. Human, or related species.

You couldn’t hear this ‘Zennie’s reply, as it most likely came through the comms in his helmet, but you could hear the man’s side of the conversation.

“Oh, of course, how dare I, a mere meatsack, doubt your high-and-mighty artificial intelligence,” he replied with fake deference. “Yeah, yeah, I know that’s not what you meant. Alright, so just tell me which one’s the self-destruct button so I don’t press it?”

“Move, Wong, before you blow us up.” Another voice interjected. “ZEN? You said it’s a passageway? Oh, safe shelter. Bit different, don’t you think? Mind translating the dead language right the first time?”

He paused as he probably listened to Zen’s reply, then continued, “So? You know which one’s the open button?”

You couldn’t go anywhere. The hideout you were in was designed to hold only a few people for weather emergencies, to be structurally sound; not to have a back door in case you needed to escape intruders. You just had to hope Zen was completely wrong and they wouldn’t get it open.

Click.

There goes that.

The door dematerialized, and the rancid smell from before became even stronger. A man peered in barrel-first, and you recoiled back from the sudden light flooding your vision. You couldn’t press yourself any further back into the corner, but you still turned your head away to shield your sensitive eyes.

It only took a couple strides for one of the men to reach you, the other stayed back in the hallway, keeping his rifle fixed on you. The man stood over where you were sitting on the floor—your legs had gotten tired of standing after so long—and lowered his gun slightly so you could see the entirety of the front plate that covered his face. It was a reflective shield that gave you no clue to who was behind it, only let you see a warped, thinned and stretched version of yourself cowering in a corner. His armor was an improved version of the standard issue United Human Navy, if the insignia on both of his shoulders didn’t make that clear enough. It looked the same as the standard issue, but the heft of his footsteps had belied a weight difference that wasn’t explained by his stature or build, so it must be the grade of material.

“Are you hurt?” His voice came through an external speaker on his helmet. He was speaking in standard human. You couldn’t detect any sort of odd stiltedness or lag that sometimes happened with computer-assisted translations. He was assuming you understood standard human, and you did.

“No,” you replied, slowly uncrossing your arms to show your hands first, that you didn’t have anything hidden in them to attack him with. You still weren’t scared, for some reason.

“Oh, she’s pretty,” his companion commented from the hallway. The two of them must be sharing helmet feeds, as the one in front of you was definitely blocking most of you from his sight.

“Wong, shut it.” The outer speaker had been turned off for that, but it was still pretty clear to you.

“Sir, yes sir.”

“Can you stand?” His weapon was still at the ready, his finger resting above the trigger.

You couldn’t remember the last time you’d wiggled your fingers and toes, and it felt good to do it. “Yes.”

He stepped back, the unexpressive mirror of his face shield watching as you pushed up from your half-sit half-crouch, bracing yourself against the wall. Your body instinctively took a deep breath to try to recover from the sudden exertion, but the vaporized Skipper blood burned your entire respiratory tract, and you coughed and spluttered trying to force it back out, catching yourself on the wall on your forearms to stay upright. The odor made your head swim, your eyes water, and your chest hurt like someone had put gasoline in your lungs and struck a match.

“Okay, woah, woah.” Two gloved hands were on your arms and back, helping you stay up. His voice was muffled again as he switched to his in-helmet comms, “Xiao, get over here! We’ve got a survivor! Yes, really, just look at my stream.”

Then, his voice was projecting to you once more, “Breathe, breathe.”

You felt the roughness of a thumb wiping at the tears running down your cheeks, the durable material of his glove scratching against your skin. He grabbed the front of your shirt collar, pulling it up towards your face at the same time he firmly pulled your hand down that had been covering your mouth as you wheezed. Positioning the material over your nose and mouth into a makeshift filter of some sort, he continued holding it there for you as you took a few breaths.

“Better?”

You nodded shallowly. The smell of Skipper blood still cloyed to your throat and lungs, but the shirt helped keep more from entering.

More footsteps from down the hall, then another pair entered the shelter.

“Holy shit…” Someone breathed out.

“I know, man,” the voice that you were already pretty sure was ‘Wong’ from earlier replied.

“How long has she been in here?” A fourth voice asked, belonging to the footsteps getting closer to you.

“I don’t know,” the man already with you answered. “Wong and I just found her while clearing this sector.”

“Okay, well, you mind, Captain?” He said indicatively. “Can’t examine my patient through you.”

“You got it?” The captain asked you, shaking the collar slightly.

You took it from him, holding it over the bridge of your nose yourself as he had been doing for you before. Looking into his face shield where you were pretty sure his eyes should be, you nodded firmly this time.

He didn’t step back until you felt another pair of gloves grabbing your elbows where he had been. The newcomer’s uniform differed from the others’ in one way, he had a neon green rectangular patch on his right arm below his UHN insignia, as well as a few other places—intergalactic signal for medic. It was removable for the wearer’s own safety, and his in particular was slightly askew, as if he’d just slapped it back on in a hurry.

The medic flipped through the pockets of a pack strapped to his thigh before pulling out a small disc of clear plastic and pushing that against your hand. “Here, this’ll work a lot better than your shirt.”

You accepted it, and he helped you orient it the right way over your nose and mouth. It was apparently a mask or rebreather of some sort. It wasn’t exceptionally bulky, and you could feel that there was some sort of fine mesh material on the inside. Immediately, you could tell the difference. The air coming into your lungs carried only the slightest tinge of lingering burning electronics smell, and while you could tell that there was Skipper blood, it didn’t burn, or make your head spin. It was just unpleasant.

“There. How’s that?”

You gave him a thumbs-up, the standard human gesture for good, since they all seemed to speak standard human. The mask didn’t allow much room for talking.

“Alright, good. Are you injured?”

You shook your head.

“Do you feel pain anywhere?”

You shook your head again.

“Good, good. I have more questions, but we should get somewhere you can breathe. Give me a second.” He looked upwards as if talking to the heavens, and his outer speaker turned off. “Liu? Professor? Did you finish clearing the building? Alright, ZEN, got readings on air quality for her?”

After a pause, both the medic, Xiao, and the captain, who had been hovering behind him the whole time, nodded.

“Thanks, ZEN.” Xiao’s speaker turned on, “Here, our teammates found somewhere that you can breathe. It’s going to be a little bit of a walk, though. Is that okay?”

You nodded. Your legs would just have to deal.

“It’s not pretty out here…” The only one that hadn’t been identified to you in passing called out as a warning from his position in the hallway with ‘Wong.’

You turned around and pushed off the wall as your answer.

Stepping into the hall, you knew why you had smelled that particular concoction of smells. Just off to your left were two dead Skippers, their uniquely-articulated hind limbs that gave them their distinct gait—and consequently, the questionably flattering nickname from humans—stuck out at awkward angles now. Dark purple sludge seeped out from under their armor, Skipper blood. On the outside of the armor were smears, streaks, and splatters turned a gleaming ruby red under the emergency lights, human blood.

You couldn’t see any dead humans, or pieces of them, in this corner, but you remembered what the captain had called you. A survivor. Which meant there were others who didn’t survive.

“Come on.” It was the captain who ushered you the other direction from the Skipper bodies. “This way.”

Their helmets must have been mapping out the facility as the unit cleared it and displaying a route in all of their HUDs, because the four of them moved as if they knew the building like the back of their hand. The captain and Xiao flanked you on either side, with Wong at the front and the fourth unnamed one at the rear. You couldn’t tell if it felt more like a protection detail or a prisoner transport.

You kept your eyes on your feet not only so you didn’t have to see all of the mutilation, or to keep from stepping in something, but to avoid the unsettling, cold dread slowly sinking over you when from the moment you caught a look at the first dead human you passed by with her remarkably in-tact face, dandelion yellow blouse and lab coat, and realized you didn’t recognize her. When you inhaled sharply and shot your eyes down to your feet, you could tell that the captain noticed. He turned his head just ever so slightly towards you, off of the consistent path it had been before, and he paused, then went back to keeping watch.

They weren’t kidding when they said it was a bit of a walk. You could feel the muscles in your legs get sore, then start twitching, then start shaking, but you didn’t even consider asking to stop.

“Woah, Liu, slow down!” The captain ordered into his headset. “Okay, yeah, I see it. Don’t touch anything. We’re just sweeping right now, remember?”

“Great, the kid’s found more toys,” the one behind you snorted.

Xiao and Wong suddenly erupted into more laughter than that statement warranted you were pretty sure.

Wong then informed him with a snicker, “Mic’s on, Ten.”

“You say that as if I wouldn’t have said that to his face, too,” the one now finally identified as Ten retorted.

“ZEN, the mics, please?” The captain sighed. “Thank you.”

“Now he’s going to whine that we were shit talking him behind his back,” Xiao groaned. “Again.”

“Well we are,” Ten laughed.

“If he just stopped acting like a baby, Captain here wouldn’t have to step in and put him in time out all the time,” Wong clicked his tongue.

“You think he’s the one in time out right now?” The captain replied dryly.

You couldn’t help but let out a small chuckle into your mask, trying to cover it up with a cough when all four of their reflective shields whipped around to face you, as if they’d forgotten you were there. After an uncomfortable stretch of silence, they all shifted back into their watchful stances.

The captain suddenly spoke again, “Yes, Professor? Okay, sure… ZEN, put that on everyone’s HUDs.”

The lack of commentary from any of them for seemingly several minutes was startling, and you weren’t sure if you wanted to know what this ‘Professor’ was showing them.

“We’re going to have to go back there after dropping Xiao and her off, aren’t we?” Wong was the first to speak.

“Don’t ask questions you don’t want the answers to,” Ten sighed.

“Or already know the answer to,” the captain said. “If she has any wounds that Xiao needs to tend to, one of you will stay to keep guard. If not, it’ll be Ten and Wong with me to meet up with Liu and the Professor, and Xiao will stay with her.”

“Alright, Ten,” Wong rolled out his neck. “Rock paper scissors?”

“Almost there,” Wong called out from ahead of you. Your internal clock told you it was almost half an hour since they found you.

“It’s just through those doors,” the captain informed you, indicating to the double doors on the opposite side of the large atrium you were in. This area had been mostly untouched by the carnage, it seemed.

“The building does have Gecks, but none of those seemed to have made it out in one piece,” Xiao added, explaining why you hadn’t used the small four-seater all-terrain vehicles, parts of which you had occasionally seen strewn about. “Sorry.”

You shrugged one shoulder at him in what you hoped he could interpret as an understanding gesture, as you were pretty sure this wasn’t their fault. From the context that you were trying to gather very quickly, they had only just gotten here.

Wong pushed one of the doors open, and the captain went in right behind to do a quick sweep, shouting out a short ‘clear!’ before Xiao led you in, and Ten followed in last, Wong shutting it firmly behind him.

You had emerged into something that looked impossible. An entire world bigger than the building you were in before, but definitely contained in one room, as when you turned around, you could still find the door. Ahead of you were rolling hills of vibrant crops, and your hand fell from your face, taking the rebreather with it. The air in here was fresh and crisp, and of course it was, this was the ag bubble. It must have remained untouched from the conflict outside because it was completely self-sustaining, needing no human intervention to planet, grow, or maintain the crops, so there would have been nobody in here in the first place.

“Okay, I’ll ask again: Any pain?” Xiao questioned you, taking his gloves off, and revealing rather delicate hands for a military medic. He motioned like he was about to grab your arm. “Can I?”

You nodded, holding it out for him to lift and turn your limb to visibly inspect it as you verbally answered his first question. “No, no pain, no injuries, I swear. I mean, my legs are a bit sore from walking, but that’s it.”

He let it hang back down at your side before doing the same to the other arm. “Hit your head?”

“Uh, I don’t think so?” You bent your head to let him quickly feel at your scalp through your hair for any bumps, lacerations, or other evidence of injury.

“Have all your toes?”

“Haven’t counted lately…?”

“Do it now.”

And so everybody stood around while you awkwardly took your shoes and socks off to make sure you had all ten toes, and that they weren’t necrotic, then you finally sat down to pull your socks and shoes back on. Xiao took your pulse manually at your wrist, before having you breathe into a small device and sampling a pinprick of blood from your finger with the same tool. After a moment, the screen lit up green, along with your specific readings.

“Satisfied, Xiao?” The captain asked.

“Absolutely,” the medic nodded. “More compliant than all of my patients as of late.”

“Good. We’re going to head out to catch up with the others and check that out.”

“Better you than me.”

“Hold on guys, aren’t we forgetting something?” Wong stopped the other two from leaving.

Ten and the captain looked at each other, then back to Wong.

“What, Wong? And we’re not guessing, spit it out or shut up,” the captain demanded, crossing his arms over his chest.

Wong reached up and pulled his helmet off in one grand motion, the first of any of them to have done so. He shook his dark, shaggy hair out—you wondered if that length was perhaps a bit too long for UHN standards, as it was almost covering his ears—before focusing a wide grin on you. Wong crouched down in front of you.

“Do angels have names?”

The other three groaned and swore at varying volumes.

You stared at him blankly, unsure of why this was receiving such backlash from the others, and why they all also seemed to be waiting for your response. When it had quieted down a little bit, you cleared your throat, and answered hesitantly, “I-I don’t know. Do they? I’m sorry, I’m not a theologist… I don’t think I even believe in the divine, really.”

Wong’s jaw dropped as he stared at you, and Ten and Xiao began howling with laughter. The captain marched over, cuffing him by the ear. “That’s enough. Get up! Stop harassing the woman.”

“Ow! That hurt!” Wong cradled the side of his head as he pulled himself to his feet.

“Should’ve kept your helmet on.” The captain yanked Wong away by his scruff as the soldier struggled to put his gear back on. “Do it again and I’m throwing you out of the Vision into the next star. Understand me, Corporal?”

“Zennie! Not helpful, dude! I don’t think that was him asking how close the closest star was!” Wong yelped.

Wong, Ten, and the captain disappeared through the door, and you could no longer hear them, but judging by Xiao’s chuckling, they were still going at it, and it was apparently funny. You looked up at the one remaining soldier you were left with inquisitively.

“Oh, sorry, here.” Xiao popped his helmet off as well, and you got to see his sharp features for the first time. He set it on the ground at his feet, and you noted that he pointed the face shield away from you. “I’m Xiao Dejun. You can just call me Dejun, if you’d like.”

“Don’t you need to hear your teammates?” You asked hesitantly, looking at the helmet.

“Earpiece,” he tapped a small device nestled in his left ear. “There are some advantages to not having the neural port. Like not having an AI inside of my goddamn brain.”

“You also don’t have a rifle,” you observed for the first time. Before, you had presumed that it was merely slung over his back, but now you could clearly see that the bulk there was more packs of medical supplies.

“I’m a terrible shot, barely got past basic. I’d just make more patients if I had one,” he laughed, then patted a holster on his right thigh. “Captain makes me carry a pistol, though.”

You looked off towards a rippling field of grain nearby, trying not to think of that woman’s face, her yellow blouse, because then you’d think about why you didn’t know her. She was in a lab coat, this was some kind of scientific facility, you were sure of it, you knew that, so why didn’t you know her—

“Sorry about Wong, by the way,” Dejun very thankfully caught your attention again, offering you your second smile of the day. “I promise, he wasn’t trying to be greasy. He’s a goofball, he was trying to make you laugh, put you at ease, you know? But clearly, that wasn’t the way to do it. So again, sorry.”

“He wasn’t asking a theological question?” You clarified.

He tilted his head, giving you a strange, bemused look. “No, he was asking what your name is. It’s an old, cheesy Earth pickup line. Or, I guess it must be unique to Earth, since you don’t know it. Are you from a colony or…?”

“I… don’t know,” you trailed off, the corners of your mouth turning down as you tried to think harder.

“You don’t know your name? Or if you’re from a colony?”

“My name’s Y/N.” You could answer that immediately. That was familiar, yours.

“So you don’t remember if you’re from Earth or a colony?”

You squeezed your eyes shut as you tried to think harder, but it felt like you were just scrambling in a dark, empty room. “No, I don’t know.”

“Hey, that’s okay. Relax, Y/N,” he said gently. “Just relax right now, okay?”

Dejun took one of the packs off his back and started rooting through it. “How long were you in there? I’m sure you’re thirsty, and hungry.”

“I don’t know…”

His brow furrowed as he offered a canteen out to you. “Here. Water.”

“Thank you.”

Slowly, the man with you lowered himself down until he was sitting across from you, linking his fingers together. He let you open the bottle and take a few deep gulps of water. You couldn’t remember the last time you had water, but it felt great to drink it again.

“Y/N…” The medic said calmly. “What is the first thing you can remember? The oldest hard memory you have?”

You wiped away a stray drop that had rolled down your chin, and scraped through your brain, but came up startlingly empty. “I-I guess smelling blood, all the human blood and Skipper blood, and then hearing footsteps outside where I was hiding. Wong’s and the captain’s, right before they found me.”

His eyes went wide, and his nostrils flared as his features turned serious. “Your oldest memory is less than an hour old?”

That same unsettling, cold dread that had started sinking down over you since you saw the woman fully coated you, and you involuntarily shivered. Cautiously, hesitantly, as if afraid that you were erring somehow, you nodded. “I take back what I said earlier, Dejun. I think there’s something very, very wrong with me.”

Dejun asked you round after round of questions walking through the very first thing you could remember right up to that very second, until he let out a long sigh.

“Well, so far it seems like you’re forming memories right now just fine,” he declared. “And you at least remember your name, which is good.”

“I knew you guys were UHN, and that you were a medic because of your green patch,” you reiterated insistently, feeling like you were going in circles with your own mind. How could you possibly know about the United Human Navy and military visual codes but not if you were from Earth or not?

“Okay, so you’ve been around the Navy before. If you were at this place, that makes sense. You don’t have a neural port, so you were probably a military contractor of some sort.”

You immediately latched onto this clue. “What is this place?”

Dejun offered you a regretful look. “Already said too much. That’s a question for the captain, sorry.”

You sighed, but didn’t push him. Pointing to the exit, you tried another avenue of your apparent knowledge. “I know those aliens are called Skippers.” 

“Definitely UHN with that lingo.” Dejun grinned at you. “One of us.”

“But I don’t know why they were here. Or why I’m here.”

“Don’t push yourself.”

“And I know that this place is an agriculture bubble, ag bubble for short, and what that is, and the basics of how and why it works, and what it’s for, but not why it would be here. Or why I would be here—ow!” You held the front of your head as a dull pressure started up from the inside.

“Y/N?” Dejun scrambled closer, his voice concerned. “What’s going on?”

“My head hurts,” you scrunched your nose up against the feeling.

“Where? Describe it for me. Is it a throbbing? Stabbing? Shooting? Aching? Squeezing?”

“The front mostly. Feels like something’s pushing from the inside out, kind of,” you explained, dropping your hand to let him do another, more thorough examination for any head injuries.

“A pressure?”

“Yeah.”

“You’ve got to take it easy,” he told you frankly. “The human brain’s a finnicky, unpredictable thing. And I’m just talking about the squishy part inside your skull. Interrogating it about why you can remember some things and why you can’t remember other things isn’t going to make you remember those things. I can’t see any injury on the outside, but since you can’t remember whether or not you were injured, and we don’t have anybody else to say either way, we can’t discount that your amnesia came from an injury. If you sprained your ankle, you wouldn’t be running a marathon on it. Same thing with an injured brain, okay?”

“Okay,” you acquiesced, grabbing the canteen again. Already, your head was feeling a little better.

“You’re officially the easiest patient I’ve ever had,” he declared, sitting back down. “If I had lollipops to give out, you’d get one.”

Before you could say anything, Dejun held up a finger for you to wait, then grabbed his helmet and yanked it back on. “What the fuck… Alright, yeah, I agree, this is the best place to set up camp. Y/N confirmed it’s an ag bubble, we’ll be able to—Can I finish? Anyway, it’s an ag bubble, so we’ll be able to live here indefinitely. Cool, we’ll see you guys soon.”

Dejun took the helmet off again, resting it on his hip as he informed you, “Everyone’s coming back here to set up camp.”

“Making camp in the ag bubble does make the most sense,” you stated, looking around you. “Fresh air, running water, obviously unlimited food.”

“Glad you agree.”

“How long is your team supposed to be here?”

“Question for the captain.”

“Seems as though I have a lot of questions for the captain,” you sighed, resting your cheek on your knees as you traced figure-eights in the grass with your finger.

“He’s going to have a few for you as well.”

“I would ask what everybody went to go investigate, but I have a feeling…”

“Just wait until he gets back.”

“As I had guessed.”

There was a short rhythm of knocks at the door to the ag bubble, and Dejun jogged over to open it. “Clear!”

A group of UHN soldiers all entered, talking among themselves, though you could tell when their reflective face shields occasionally turned over towards you. You were still sitting on the ground, hugging your knees to your chest, and uncertainly got to your feet, brushing away any stray dirt that may have clung to you. Dejun put himself between them and you, holding his hands out, and you could very clearly hear the word ‘amnesia’ a few times as he seemed to be sternly prefacing this introduction, taking his role as your doctor seriously.

Judging by how he held himself, the one that you were pretty sure was the captain cocked his head at this information, but remained quiet through Dejun’s small spiel. The medic gestured as if he were rushing them, and they all reached up to take their helmets off as well. He finally led them over to you, offering you a reassuring smile.

“Y/N, this is the crew of the Vision,” he motioned to all five of them. “I’ll let our captain take over on introductions.”

“Thanks, Lieutenant,” the one that you had already pinpointed as the captain from afar spoke up. Despite not being the tallest of them, he held himself differently, as if there was some weight there that you couldn’t see, but he carried with a straight back and level shoulders nevertheless. “I’m Captain Qian Kun of the United Human Navy vessel the Vision. I’m sure our doctor, Lieutenant Xiao, has already introduced himself. This is the rest of my… ragtag team: Corporal Wong Kunhang…”

You looked at the only other man aside from Dejun who was familiar to you, who fixed you with an exceptionally apologetic gaze.

“I am very sorry about earlier, ma’am,” he bowed his head regretfully, hands clasped behind his back.

“Oh, thank you,” you responded. “I’m sure you’re very funny, Corporal Wong, to other people.”

A couple of the others let out snickers as they tried to stay at attention, Dejun and another openly bursting into laughter. The taller one quickly scrambled to get back into his position and push down his smile as the captain focused his gaze on all of them again.

Captain Qian continued, “Staff Sergeant Ten Lee.”

He flashed you a grin. “It’s a pleasure, ma’am.”

“Lieutenant Liu Yangyang…”

“Nice to meet you!” Lieutenant Liu beamed at you, though there was a weird little glint in his eye that you weren’t sure if you liked. It was like he was trying to take you apart piece by piece. His gaze hadn’t left you through everybody else’s introduction, and you weren’t liking having to meet it now. “And can I just say, I think you’re one of the funniest beings in the galaxy? Definitely funnier than Wong over there.”

“Kid’s making some points,” Ten elbowed Wong.

Captain Qian suddenly took over again very loudly, “And finally, our only civilian member of the crew, Professor Dong Sicheng, Department of Xenolinguistics at New Beijing University.”

This was the other guy who had outright laughed a moment ago, and you could tell he was much less comfortable with the stiff military position before Captain Qian had informed you he was a civilian. Despite his civilian status, though, he was in the same armor and carried the same arms as everyone else—more firepower than Dejun did. You were just glad to not have to be making eye contact with Liu anymore. It felt like he knew something that you didn’t, and you definitely didn’t like that, given your current predicament.

Six of them. Turning back to Captain Qian, you tilted your head curiously. “ZEN is… your ship’s AI? And you all have a synchronous fragment in your helmets, earpieces, and neural ports?”

A couple of them looked at Dejun incredulously.

“I didn’t tell her. She has amnesia, she’s not an idiot,” he retorted.

“Maybe you did something with tech,” Ten suggested. “Could be why you were here.”

“What did I just tell you about stressing her memory?” Dejun scolded him. “She needs to rest.”

“We all do,” Captain Qian agreed. “After we set up camp. Come on.”

Dejun shooed you away from helping to set up camp despite already knowing that you had no physical injuries, finally giving you a task of making sure all of his emergency canteens in his medic packs had fresh water from the river nearby. You knew it was busy work, but did it anyway, glad to feel useful.

Loaded up with canteens slung around your waist and shoulders, you took the paved pathways between the acres of crops until you reached a crystal clear river. There were some areas that were sandy shores, and others that were grassy drop-offs. Stopping at a grassy drop-off, you sat down, the canteens clanking against each other. You took them off and poured out the water in them one-by-one, making a pile of empty canteens. Then you leaned over the edge and filled them up from the cool, gentle current, starting a second pile of full canteens.

You could feel the thud of heavy footsteps in the ground, and knew who was approaching you before Captain Qian even spoke.

“Mind if I join you?” He asked, and you looked over your shoulder to see him holding a large, empty water jug. “You seem to have grabbed the best spot.”

“Not at all.” You jerked your head towards the empty space on the other side of your full canteen pile.

He sat as well, grabbing an apparatus the size of his hand off the side and lowering that into the water instead of the entire jug. It was connected to the jug by a tube, and you watched as it moved water up from the river into the top of the container.

“Dejun didn’t tell me about ZEN earlier,” you said abruptly, trying to vouch for the doctor who so far had been the kindest person that you could remember in your life. “Really, I was guessing just from how you guys were talking—”

“It’s okay, Y/N, we weren’t being very discrete,” Captain Qian assured you. “Xiao isn’t one for lying to cover his ass, either. I believe him when he says that he didn’t tell you who exactly ZEN is.”

“There were a lot of questions I was asking that he couldn’t answer. Just kept telling me to ask you.”

“Like what?”

“Don’t you already know? His earpiece…”

“ZEN isolates comms as necessary when the unit is split up. The other five of us needed to hear each other more than we needed to eavesdrop on you two in here.”

You gnawed on your bottom lip nervously. “…He told me to take it easy, with my brain and the amnesia.”

“Maybe we can gently jog your memory,” he suggested.

“How?”

“That woman in the hall, in the yellow top. Did you know her?”

“I don’t know…” You replied regretfully. You were apparently the only person alive in this building, and couldn’t identify that woman. Were you friends? Should you be mourning her? Did she have a family? Was there anybody to tell to mourn her? It felt wrong that nobody would. And there were even more like that who you didn’t look at, who you hadn’t seen.

“It’s a big building. There were probably a lot of people working here. You might not have known everybody,” he replied casually.

You pushed one of your hands against your eye, against the pressure that was coming back. “No, I don’t… I don’t know anything. About what this place was for.”

“Alright, alright,” he held up his free hand in surrender.

When your head hurt less, and you had filled up a couple more canteens, you changed your focus. He had asked you a question, it was only fair you asked him one.

“Why are you guys here? To stop the Skippers?”

“No. We didn’t know there was any alien presence until we arrived and saw the ships out front.”

You kept your gaze on the running water as you tried to work through the information you were getting. “Then why did your team get sent here?”

“We’re trying to figure out what happened here too.”

“No,” you rejected that immediately, pointing in his general direction accusatorily. It didn’t make sense with everything you already knew. “You didn’t know there were Skippers here until you got here. Now you’re trying to figure out what happened here. So why were you coming here in the first place?”

The captain breathed out, his tone dropping the strained casualness it had before. “This is a UHN research facility. We were sent to investigate reports of unsanctioned experiments being conducted here.”

You snapped your head up to look at him. “What kind of experiments?”

“Look, rumors about this kind of stuff is everywhere. Urban legends, pulp fiction, everyone’s heard something about illegal government experiments. But reputable intelligence on this kind of stuff is few and far between. This one was trusted enough to get us out here, but unfortunately sparse on details.”

“I don’t know anything about it.”

“As you’ve already said,” he replied tersely.

“I don’t,” you repeated.

“I didn’t say you were lying.”

You didn’t love the pace that the captain was drip feeding you information, or for whatever purpose of his own that he was doing it, but he was giving you information, and in your state, that was vital. So you kept him engaged. “How do Skippers figure into those experiments?”

“We don’t know.”

“So it seems like we’re on the same page here.” You could almost laugh.

“Yes.”

When you looked over at Captain Qian, there was maybe the faintest curl of a smile at the corner of his mouth, but as soon as you had questioned it in your mind, it was gone. He continued filling his jug, and you continued filling the canteens. You were still thinking about his heavy footsteps, and wanted to keep him talking, wanted to grasp at any information you could get in hopes it slotted it somewhere in your own mind.

“Your armor…” You began, eyes dragging over the pieces he was wearing, everything except his helmet. “How can you wear it?”

He crooked an eyebrow up at you curiously. “You mean aside from putting it on my body?”

You looked at him entirely unamused before continuing, “It’s made to look like standard UHN armor, but I can hear that it’s made of material far denser than your teammates’.”

Both of his eyebrows lifted in surprise momentarily, before his expression was neutral once more, and he calmly informed you, “Minor skeletal enhancements.”

So that’s why he moved differently from the others.

“Why didn’t your teammates receive them?”

“The UHN doesn’t need to spend the money to equip every soldier with minor skeletal enhancements for armor that is very expensive to make.”

“So why are you worth the very expensive armor, then?”

“It’s actually the old stuff, they’ve moved on to newer and better.” He was done filling the jug now and stood up. “I’m not worth the expensive stuff anymore.”

“Why don’t they give you the new one?”

“It’s bigger and heavier, my skeletal enhancements wouldn’t be able to support it. They need younger people for that program.”

“You… are not very old,” you observed plainly.

He shouldered the jug of water that was bigger than his entire torso as if it were a pillow. “No. I’m not.”

You didn’t appreciate how he had skirted some of your questions, like why he had been chosen for such a program, but the scale of information he had implicitly given you in just a few words was more than enough to leave you floored. If that’s what the UHN was doing above the board, you weren’t sure if you wanted to find out what they considered unsanctionable—what was going on here.

Returning to the others, you were happy to see a fully set up camp, and handed over the refilled canteens to Dejun, who made sure to thank you profusely and reassure you that you were a huge help. Despite it feeling a little patronizing, you were satisfied at having at least done something rather than sitting around watching them do everything while you did nothing.

“Y/N!” Someone called out your name, you looked over your shoulder to see Ten and Wong approaching you.

“Yes, Corporal?”

He laughed and shook his head. “You don’t have to do that. Kunhang and Ten is just fine.”

His companion nodded in agreement.

“We’re on dinner duty,” Kunhang pointed between the two of them. “Do you know what all is in here?”

“Do you people know the meaning of the word amnesia?” Dejun snapped. “Honestly, ask ZEN if—”

“There should be a panel by the entrance that tells you that,” you answered, pointing towards the door. “I don’t think I remember the specifics of this ag bubble, but I’m pretty sure I’m remembering that correctly. Right? They all have information panels at the entrance?”

“It does,” Ten assured you of your knowledge. “It’s in Outspacer. We uploaded it to ZEN, but he— Oh, thanks, man.”

“Zennie, incredible timing as always,” Kunhang rolled his eyes. He smiled at you. “Never mind, got everything we need. Thanks!”

They walked away into the fields, and you turned back to Dejun, who was now organizing his supplies in his tent.

“I wish I could be more help,” you sighed.

“Y/N, come here,” he gestured you into the open entrance of the tent. You obliged, and he plopped down onto a cot on one side, then pointed to the other for you to sit. “They didn’t actually need your help.”

“But they asked—”

“I know. Without divulging too much, I can tell you that the seven of us have been essentially the only people we’ve all been around for… months on end.”

“I see.” You nodded, noting how he seemed to be including ZEN in that count. “I’m someone new to talk to.”

“Right. And the next thing I’m going to say, I do hope you don’t take this the wrong way. You’re also a pretty woman.”

“Oh…”

“Don’t get me wrong, you’re safe with us. But I’m just saying that you’ll probably be getting more attention than if we had a new guy in camp.”

“Is that why Liu keeps looking at me like that?” You asked.

“Like what?” Dejun’s brow furrowed.

“Like… I don’t know, he just keeps looking at me. Like he’s studying me.”

He shook his head. “I’ll talk to him. Kid probably isn’t used to seeing a human woman after so long.”

“Is there anything else I can help with?”

“I don’t have anything for you,” he said regretfully, then tapped his ear. “Captain? Yeah, what’s your location? Right, thanks, I’m sending Y/N your way.” He focused back on you. “Captain Qian’s in his tent, you can see if he has anything for you to do.”

“Which one’s his tent?”

“Right next door.”

“Ah. Thanks.”

You ducked out of Dejun’s tent, heading over to the next one. There was no door to knock on, but Captain Qian could already see you, and waved you in.

“Yes, Y/N? Do you need something?” He seemed to be in the middle of performing some sort of inspection of his armor, wearing only the bottom half of it, leaving him in a white tank top as he held the chest plate and paced in the small space of the tent.

“Is there something wrong with your armor?” You asked.

“Just routine maintenance,” he replied, stopping to remove an inner panel and set it on one of the cots that was already full of armor pieces. “ZEN detected an abnormal heart rate earlier, but I can’t see any reason for that.”

“Why are you checking your chestplate for that? Wouldn’t ZEN be monitoring your vitals through your neural port, not any external sensors?”

“I don’t think his reading was faulty, I’m just trying to look for anything that could have caused it.”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know what, that’s why I’m inspecting my armor.” He took another piece out, offering the one with the electrical components out to you. “Can you hold this?”

You took it, staring at the small, wafer-thin computer component in your hands. “You’re right, this is older tech.”

“How so?”

“It’s twice the size it needs to be and—” You held it up to the light, seeing the distinct refractive rainbows in between the ultra-thin layers. “Doesn’t have the superconductive gel preferred now. It’s not like it’s ancient or anything, but the UHN wouldn’t be issuing anything new like this.”

“Is it in good condition?”

“Yes, everything looks fine. No acute damage, and it looks like it’s been taken care of very well, even for typical use. This definitely isn’t what caused your abnormal heartrate.”

Captain Qian held his hand out, and you placed the component in his palm for him to reassemble the chest piece. “I agree. Now, did you need something, Y/N?”

“Yes. Is there something I can do to help? Dejun didn’t have anything else for me.”

“Since you seem to know quite a bit about UHN armor, you want to finish helping me with my inspection?”

“Sure, sure.”

He set the reassembled chest piece on the ground, then looked at you expectantly. You stared back.

He pointed to the exit. “I need to get out of the rest of my armor. It’s a one-man job.”

“Oh! Sorry!” You hurried to leave, and heard him zip up the entrance behind you.

It unzipped again a few minutes later, and the captain clipped the material aside again. You followed him back in, seeing all of his armor laid out on the floor between the two cots. The captain was in a dark t-shirt, pants, and regular boots now as he picked up a piece and sat down on a cot. He nodded to the other for you.

You selected the left arm and quietly began working. It should have been weird, how you knew this but not how you got here, but you swallowed down that discomfort and just focused on the technology in your hands. You had a task, at least, and that was good enough for now. Feeling around, you found the release that separated the upper and lower limb pieces from each other, and set the upper half aside for now. You continued looking over the paneling of the lower arm.

“You’ll be staying in Xiao’s tent,” Captain Qian said. “If that’s alright with you. We would have preferred to give you your own tent, obviously, but we didn’t exactly have a spare. Figured you’re probably the most comfortable with him, right?”

“That’ll be fine, yes,” you agreed. “Thank you.”

“You’re probably wondering where we all went earlier, right? When we left you and Xiao here?”

“Yes. I had asked him, but he said that was a question for you.”

“Remember the reports of unsanctioned experiments I mentioned?”

“Yes.”

“It was a lab.”

“And what was in it?”

“Ash.”

“Someone burned it down? How did it not catch the whole building on fire?”

“Liu thinks they were careful to use certain materials to control and contain the fire to one area for a certain amount of time.”

“So it wasn’t part of the human-Skipper fighting, then? If someone took the time to make sure it burned in a specific way.”

“Most likely. But Liu’s a roboticist, not a chemist. His knowledge could only go so far. And ZEN is only as much of a help as the sensors we have to gather data for him.”

“How do you know it was a laboratory then? If everything was burned up?”

“ZEN and the Professor translated the sign on the outside.”

“It wasn’t in standard human?”

“Outspacer again.” Captain Qian clicked his tongue. “For a UHN facility supposedly built within the last ten years, this place has a lot of an ancient, dead alien language in it.”

“That… does seem unlikely.”

“The only reason I can think of why humans would do that, is if they didn’t want other humans to be able to read any of it.”

“Or anybody.” You moved on to the upper limb. “The Outspacers have been gone for hundreds of millions of years. Nobody, human or alien, uses it anymore.”

“You’re right.” Captain Qian said thoughtfully. “Whatever those Skippers came here for, they weren’t going to be successful, whether they lived or not.”

You looked up at the captain curiously. “How long is your team going to be here?”

“I don’t know,” he replied. “Our original mission here was supposed to be short, just intel-gathering. A few days, one week tops, then come back later if necessary. But now… things seem to be a lot more complicated.”

“What’ll you do with me when you leave?”

“Take you back to UHN Main on Earth for debriefing, and if you haven’t recalled anything about where you’re from by then, they’ve got programs to help people get back on their feet,” he answered simply. “We’re not going to kill you.”

“I didn’t expect that,” you balked. “Though I’m not sure I like the sound of this debriefing…”

“It won’t be the most fun interview of your life, but you’ll live.”

“What should I call you?”

“Pardon?”

“Dejun, Kunhang, and Ten all told me to address them informally. The others call you Captain, I don’t want to offend, I don’t know, I’ve been avoiding calling you anything because I don’t know…”

He held your eye contact for a moment, then went back to rotating the leg piece in front of his gaze. “Kun. You can call me Kun.”

“Okay,” you nodded, trying not to immediately let it go to your head. “Thank you.”

After finishing the inspection of his armor, you and Kun had determined that there was nothing wrong with it: no faulty wiring, no disarticulation of the joints, no loose bolts, no misalignment of the hydraulics, no error codes thrown by the computer, no fritzing electronics, not a flaw in sight.

“Nothing,” you huffed, hands on your hips as you stared down at the mostly reassembled armor. It was half put back together, ready for the next time he had to wear it.

“Maybe I just got spooked then,” Kun shrugged. “Thanks anyway, Y/N.”

“How often do you get spooked?” You asked him doubtfully. “You don’t seem the type to startle easily.”

“Not often.”

“When did it happen?”

He shook his head dismissively. “It’s fine.”

“If you’re having early signs of heart problems—”

“Hey, who was just saying I’m not old?” He put a hand over his chest.

“I said early.”

“And you’re sounding like Xiao.”

“And if you’re all like this, I can see why he would complain about having you for patients.”

“It was when we were clearing the building,” he relented. “I’d have to watch the footage from my helmet back on the ship to see exactly what was going on. So just leave it, okay?”

You sighed. “Alright, fine.”

The volume outside the tent suddenly rose, and Kun nodded towards the exit. “Now come on, sounds like everyone’s getting together for mess.”

He stepped back for you to walk out first, and you immediately saw that the others were in fact gathered in the center of the tents around a small fire. Dejun waved at you and patted the ground next to him, and you gratefully took the empty spot between him and Ten. Kun sat across the fire, immediately being pulled into a conversation by Liu and the Professor.

“So what did you guys end up finding?” You asked Kunhang and Ten as they started serving up food in small metal dishes.

“We’ve got a beautiful fare for you tonight of rations,” Ten handed you a dish with great gravitas, and you giggled as you passed it down.

“Supplemented with some lentils,” Kunhang finished. “We thought we were heading towards the berries, get a little dessert going, but apparently ZEN’s translation wasn’t completely accurate. Ended up at the red lentils.”

You laughed again. “You can’t blame him too much, the words are almost the same.”

Everyone’s heads whipped over to look at you. The Professor’s eyes bulged out of his face. “You know Outspacer?”

“I mean, I can’t speak it. It’s been dead for so long, I wouldn’t know what anything is supposed to sound like. If it was even spoken in the first place,” you answered hesitantly. “But yeah, I can read it.”

Liu looked around at everyone else incredulously. “Did nobody ask her how she got into the safe room locked behind Outspacer controls? Or did you all assume she had button mashed her way in?”

“Okay, we had more pressing things on our minds,” Dejun cut in. “Like making sure she was alive.”

The Professor was still staring at you with fascination. “You said it might not have been spoken. Why do you think that?”

“Well, it’s a very visual and categorical system. That’s why ZEN’s mistranslation for lentil and berry happened. Two things that are small and round that you eat are going to have very similar patterns to each other. Berries have a sweet modifier appended to the end, by the way, while lentils have the ground modifier to indicate that they’re a grain.” You didn’t know where all this knowledge was coming from, but you knew that it was right, as well as you knew your name. “But it only ever describes objects and their relationships in space and time. There’s no abstract ideas like feelings. It might just be a code to convey physical information, instructions, that kind of stuff, not their written alphabet.”

“Why have a separate code then?”

“The Outspacers were everywhere, weren’t they? It would’ve been impossible for them all to speak the same language. This way everything that’s important like laws, directions, warnings, that kind of stuff, is in a common code that everyone can read.”

The Professor kept staring at you.

“Y/N, you broke the Professor,” Kunhang declared, snapping his fingers in front of his teammate’s face.

“I’m sorry. I-I didn’t mean to.” You looked around hesitantly.

“Don’t apologize,” Dejun chuckled, patting your shoulder. “He’s probably just mourning all the academic articles he’ll never get to publish on this.”

“Why?”

“Cla-ssi-fied,” Liu said with a hint of teasing, enunciating each syllable for emphasis. “Officially, our crew doesn’t exist.”

Kun rolled his eyes. “That’s a bit dramatic. You’re still official personnel of UHN, you haven’t been scrubbed from the universe.”

“Fine, fine. We’re a self-contained vessel whose missions are not officially documented anywhere. Better?”

“Best would’ve been to keep your mouth shut,” the captain said through gritted teeth.

“She can read Outspacer! Like we’re not going to keep her?”

“Y/N’s not a puppy or a toy, Lieutenant. It’s not a matter of ‘keeping’ her. She’s a civilian whose safety we’re responsible for. The matter is closed,” Kun’s hard gaze shifted to the rest of his crew on the word, before returning to the roboticist, “and you and I are going to have a discussion later.”

“Sir, yes sir,” Liu muttered, turning his eyes back to the fire.

Ten nudged a dish into your hands, and you passed it onto Dejun. When everyone had a bowl, they started eating, and you slowly began working through your food as well.

“Anyway, Y/N,” Kun cleared his throat, and you looked up at him attentively. “We’ll need you to properly translate the ag bubble info panel tomorrow. So hopefully Wong doesn’t poison us at breakfast.”

“Yeah, of course,” you agreed hurriedly. “Whatever you guys need.”

“You’ll have to review my notes on Outspacer glyphs!” The Professor had suddenly found his voice again, his tone now rushed and excited.

“Sure, yes.”

You spent the rest of the meal mostly keeping to yourself, quietly eating your food and occasionally engaging with the others if they talked to you first. Today, the only day of your life that you could remember, had been a lot, and if every day was like this, you weren’t sure if you were really looking forward to the rest of them.

Everyone had a job to shut camp down for the night, and you helped Kunhang and Ten clean up from cooking dinner.

“So is there a light switch or something?” Ten looked up at the still rather bright sky.

“The lights are on a timer,” you explained, looking up. “It should—”

The sky above you began to dim just then. You kept watching, explaining to the Marines with you, “Here, keep your eyes on it. Blink and you’ll miss the sunset.”

The sunset happened all around you, with no one source of light from a single ‘Sun,’ it wasn’t focused from any one point, instead the scattering came from every angle. Everywhere you looked was a different smattering of red, orange, and pink hues.

“Holy shit…” Kunhang breathed out, doing a slow 360.

Then, as soon as it had started, it was over, and the artificial expanse above you was pitch black.

“Damn, that was fast,” Ten commented.

“Told you.” You stacked up the dried dishes. “Where do these go?”

“Right here.”

After packing up the dinner items, you turned back to them expectantly. “Anything else?”

“Sleep,” Ten declared, to which Kunhang groaned and nodded. “Some very well-earned sleep, for all of us.”

“Are you sure?”

Kunhang gently grabbed you by your shoulders and pushed you towards your tent. “Go. To. Sleep.”

“Okay, okay.” You held your hands up in surrender, slowly walking away.

“Goodnight!” “Night!” They called after you cheerily.

“Goodnight!” You waved to them over your shoulder. As you turned your head, you saw someone sitting on a pack on the ground outside Kun’s tent, and realized that it was the Professor, scrawling on a tablet with a stylus.

Your tent was unzipped, and you found Dejun seemingly ready for bed, laying on one of the cots and reading a thick hardcover book by the light of a small electric lantern.

“The Professor was not in his tent yet,” you informed Dejun with a frown. “Are you all doing watches? I thought you had cleared the building.”

“No night watches,” he replied without looking up from the book. “He’s just out there because he’s sharing a tent with Captain Qian, who is currently still ripping Liu a new one in said tent.”

“Oh…”

“Don’t feel bad, Y/N. Liu said something stupid, he gets chewed out, repeat ad nauseum.” Dejun flipped the page. “Bit more stupid, telling you the classified nature of our team’s missions, but like I said before: you’ve got amnesia, you’re not an idiot. You’re clearly very smart in your own right; you would’ve put it together before the end of your time with us. You probably already had your suspicions before he said anything, right?”

“There were some things that had caught my attention, yes.”

“Care to share?”

“Your green medic patch looked like it had been reapplied recently, there’s not a lot of typical scenarios that would require a medic to need to take it off in the first place. You have a civilian xenolinguistics professor attached to your unit who is just as armed as the rest of you. Nobody has mentioned reporting to a higher-ranking officer than your captain since being here, despite what you found. You’ve all talked about the mission being very long, not wanting to tell me too many details, and how you haven’t been around anybody but each other pretty much the entire time.”

“The medic patch really clued you in?” He laughed. “I slapped that back on less than a minute before jumping out of the ship onto this planet. Good one.”

“I didn’t know they let you bring those,” you referred to the book in his hands. “Figured it’d be a fire hazard.”

“We’re allowed one personal effect,” he explained, turning a page, the paper looking soft and worn. “Fire hazard be damned.”

“And what book did you choose?”

“It’s not mine. It’s Liu’s.” He angled it so you could see the cover.

“‘On the Ethics of Robotics?’” You read the title aloud. “Why are you reading a treatise on ethics in a completely different field?”

“One: It’s been a long mission, you get bored. Two: Now that I’ve actually started reading it… It’s kind of interesting. Gets you thinking. It was written over fifty years ago, so some of the actual science is out of date. But he still talks about some pretty interesting stuff.”

“Was it written by a roboticist or an ethicist?”

“Roboethicist. The very first one. Coined the term and everything.” Dejun dog-eared a page before setting the book aside. “He’s like, Liu’s hero. Liu even got to take a couple classes from the guy during his degree before he died.”

“Wow.”

“Anyway, I’m ready to pass out, and as your doctor, I say it’s bedtime for you too.”

“I will not argue that.” You agreed, laying down as well.

Dejun reached down to turn the light off.

“Goodnight, Y/N.”

“Goodnight, Dejun.”

You were the first one awake in camp. Or so you had thought, as you emerged into the still darkened ag bubble. Liu was sitting around the remnants of the campfire, and for a second, you wondered if he had been made to sleep out here.

His eyes immediately snapped open, and he smiled at you. “Morning! Want to go for a walk?”

“Are you sure we should leave camp?” You looked over towards the captain’s tent hesitantly.

“You can make sure we’re back before sunrise, right?”

You thought momentarily. “It’s in eleven minutes…”

“We’ll be back before then.” He got to his feet. “Scout’s honor.”

You followed him. “You’re in the Navy…”

“Old Earth saying,” he explained, starting on one of the paths between the fields. “It relates to this organization, the Boy Scouts. Doesn’t exist anymore, but the lingo is still around.”

“They were honorable?”

“Don’t know how honorable a bunch of grade schoolers could be, but it’s just an expression.”

“I see…”

“Anyway, sorry about last night,” Liu said. “I got excited and put you in a really awkward situation. Not only that but a dangerous one, too. You’re a civvie, and the more you know, the more you’re at risk. I shouldn’t have said anything.”

“Thank you, L—”

“God, Yangyang, please,” he rebuffed you before you could finish your sentence. “I’d never hear the end of it if you called the other guys their names and me by rank.”

“Thank you, Yangyang.” You smiled. “May I ask how much younger you are than your teammates?”

“This is my first mission, if that gives you any context.”

“And you were put on one of this caliber?”

“It’s the Professor’s first mission too, in my defense,” he scoffed. “But guys like me usually don’t get a lot of field experience. There’s plenty of roboticists who go their whole careers in the UHN without ever seeing action.”

“So then why are you on this mission?”

“I… actually don’t know.”

“They didn’t tell you?”

“We were all put in a room, minus the Professor, then the captain came in with the Professor and told us we’d all been selected for this team. Professor included.”

“Interesting.”

“I actually don’t know if I was supposed to tell you that…”

“You’re not very good at this classified stuff, are you?”

“You ask a lot of questions!” He said defensively.

You couldn’t help but laugh. “I don’t know anything! That’s all I can do!”

“You know how to read Outspacer,” Yangyang pointed out.

“Well, yes.”

“And you seem to be pretty good with tech. How much longer do we have until sunrise?”

“We should head back now,” you answered immediately.

Yangyang pivoted on his heel. “See? You know stuff.”

You kept pace with his change in direction. “Okay, fair point.”

“You should ask Captain Qian if you can tag along to this other place we found here.”

“What sort of place?”

“Robots,” he grinned. “I won’t say more, but I have a hunch you might know what to do in there.”

“Finally figured out what classified means?”

“Okay, ouch.”

“I’m just saying… I’d hate for the Professor to be stranded outside his tent again tonight.” You shook your head teasingly.

“So you do have a real sense of humor,” Yangyang grinned. “Instead of unintentionally slam dunking on Wong every chance you get.”

“Just because I don’t understand Kunhang’s attempts at humor doesn’t mean I don’t have a sense of humor.” You crossed your arms, a bit miffed at the implication.

“Fair point,” he agreed. “You could be from somewhere else. Most of us are Earth boys, after all.”

“Most?”

“You didn’t hear it from me but, Captain Qian is actually from Theta-12. Came to Earth later.”

“Dura-Jil?” You recalled the name that locals had for it. It was one of the first colonies that Earth had established outside of its own galaxy, and wasn’t exactly considered a roaring success, now known to be a dinky outpost only frequented by those who wanted to remain under the radar of the law, ran by a local government who looked the other way for a price. Overall, it was pretty low on the UHN’s list of priorities with everything else going on.

“Yep.” The two of you were back at camp now, and Yangyang lowered his voice. “But uh, that’s all I can say.”

“All you can say or all you know?”

He shrugged and grinned. “Who’s to say?”

The others emerged from their tents then, and you were immediately accosted by the Professor, wanting to watch you decode the ag bubble information panel.

As you read off the panel to the Professor, he stopped you every so often to request an explanation for why certain glyphs were in certain places. You explained them as best you could—after all, you didn’t invent the language—and ZEN transcribed the corrected translation for the team’s reference.

“Professor…” You said in a pause as he was fervently scribbling notes on his tablet.

“Yes?” He replied without looking. You noted that he was the only one of the team who didn’t seem to mind being addressed by his title.

“May I ask how a civilian professor got attached to a military unit?” You tried to be as general as possible, well aware that ZEN was listening.

“I’m a xenolinguistics professor.”

“Doesn’t the UHN have their own translators?”

“I’m very good at my job.”

He was better at this classified stuff than Yangyang.

“Next part, Y/N,” he instructed, pointing back to the panel.

“Right, sorry.” You tapped to the next section of information. “Huh…”

“‘Huh?’” The Professor echoed. “‘Huh’ —What?”

“What translation did ZEN have for this part? The last section?”

“He didn’t have one. We had too few characters to translate anything of substance. Why? What is it?”

You frowned as you reread it. “It’s instructions for modifying the ag bubble.”

“What’s the problem with that?”

“These modifications… The sorts of crops produced wouldn’t be suited for human consumption.”

“What species, then? Outspacer?”

“I… don’t think so.” You winced as a dull throbbing started in your head again. “Unless the Outspacers had caloric energy intake requirements equal to the energy of a supernova.”

“What?!”

“These foods would be impossibly calorically dense… literally… they’d contain so much energy I… Here, it says who is supposed to eat them at the top but I’ve never seen that word before.”

“Do you know the characters?”

“Yeah, I know most of it. It looks like it should be person, but… that can’t be right.”

“What is it?”

“It has machine after it.”

“Person-machine? Like a robot? This is to modify the ag bubble to make robot fuel? What kind? Electric? Nuclear? It can’t be fossil fuels, surely.”

“No, it would still produce crops and food. They’re definitely meant to be eaten, a lot of them have the ground modifier on them. And the word for robot is different. It’s machine, and the glyph for when an object is moving itself. This is person-machine-move. And it’s plural.”

“People-robots?” The Professor surmised. “People… robots?”

Your head hurt even more as you nodded. “Could be. I don’t know what that’s supposed to mean, or what any of these crops would even be, or what could eat them.”

“Is that everything in the info panel?” The Professor asked.

“Yeah, yeah. You guys should be able to find everything now.”

“ZEN?” The Professor started walking back towards camp, speaking to his tablet. You trailed behind him, trying to blink away your new headache. “Send the corrected map to everyone’s HUDs, please.”

“Already done, Professor,” ZEN’s voice came from the tablet as a small green cube avatar projected just above the screen, the hologram doing a small bounce as if nodding. This morning was the first time you were actually interacting with the AI directly. His speech was seamless, as if a real person was talking, and he spoke in a surprisingly pleasant tenor.

The Professor was unfazed by his sudden appearance. “Of course, thank you. And don’t be rude, introduce yourself to Y/N.”

A lighter face of the cube turned towards you, despite all of them being blank, and the avatar tilted forward in a bow. “I’m ZEN, the crew’s AI. It’s a pleasure, ma’am. Corporal Wong calls me Zennie, if a nickname would make you more comfortable.”

“ZEN is just fine, if that’s what you prefer,” you offered a wincing smile. “If you’ll call me Y/N, since I prefer that over being called ma’am.”

“Seems we understand each other then,” ZEN responded graciously.

“Seems we do.”

“I’ve got to let the captain know about the uh, people-robots.” The Professor took off as you arrived back at the camp.

The artificial sun had risen while you were with the Professor, and everyone was now bustling around with their morning tasks. You saw Ten and Kunhang heading off into the fields as Yangyang and Dejun seemed to be discussing something as they passed a thermos back and forth around the empty firepit. You were contemplating going into your tent until breakfast to nurse this headache when you heard your name being called from another section of camp.

You turned around to see the Professor’s head poking out of Kun’s tent, and he waved you over. You quickly obliged, ducking in after him.

Kun was pacing again, pinching the bridge of his nose. ZEN was projecting both himself and a set of Outspacer glyphs from where the Professor’s tablet was resting on his cot. You recognized it as the “people-robots” one that had troubled the Professor earlier.

“Y/N,” Kun began immediately, stopping and pointing at the glyph. “You’re sure that says people robots?”

“I mean, I know the parts, but I’ve never seen them all put together like that,” you explained. “It’s person, then machine, then to move oneself, and it’s plural. And it’s definitely all one word. But any meaning that I’d be assigning to it after that would be interpretation.”

“The Professor mentioned that robot is machine-move, correct?”

“Yes.”

“And you said it’s describing who would be eating modified crops produced by the ag bubble.”

“Yes.”

Dejun was right, thinking with an injured brain fucking hurt.

“Is there any other indication as to what this could mean?”

“No, it says it like we’re supposed to know what it means. But I don’t.”

He sighed. “Alright, thank you, Y/N. If you could give me a moment with the Professor and ZEN?”

“Of course.” You nodded, heading back out of the tent.

Dejun and Yangyang were still around the firepit, but your feet felt restless, and you took off towards the river. You followed the grassy parts of the riverside until you decided you were done walking, and laid down, staring up at the seemingly-endless-but-not-really blue above you. You kept poking around in your memory, trying to find any context for people-robots, or what you were doing here, or the woman in the hall, or why Skippers would show up, or why you knew a long dead alien language, or anything.

Your head hurt more the more you used it, with each new topic you tried, but you kept trying to think. Maybe if you just kept going, right on the other side of the pain would be the answer, if you could just get past this feeling like your brain was a nuclear reactor on the verge of a meltdown. You squeezed your eyes shut against the sky that was suddenly too bright.

“Hey.” Kun’s voice caught your attention, and your eyes snapped open. He was standing next to you, two dishes in hand. “Soup’s on.”

“Oh.” You sat up and he handed yours to you. “This is oatmeal.”

“It means a meal is ready to eat. Any food, not just soup.”

“Got it… Sorry for making you come out here to find me, by the way.”

“Mind if I join you?”

“No, not at all.”

He sat next to you as you started looking over the meal. It looked like Ten and Kunhang were successful in their berry search this morning, as your oatmeal was topped with a very colorful assortment.

“How are you holding up?” Kun asked, looking out at the river.

“Honestly, my head kind of hurts,” you admitted, rubbing one of your eyes.

“You want me to call Xiao over?”

“No, it’s… I’m trying to remember stuff, but the more I try to remember, the more it hurts.”

“You’ve got to stop forcing it,” he chastised you lightly. “It’s like picking a scab, you’re going to want to keep doing it. But you’ve got to stop, alright?”

“Yeah, okay,” you acquiesced with a sigh, dropping your hand.

“It’ll come.”

“What if it doesn’t?”

“Then you keep going.”

“That’s it?”

He shrugged. “What other choice do you have?”

You thought for a moment. “Sitting and staring at a wall forever.”

Kun laughed for the first time that you’d heard, and you turned your head to look, catching a glimpse of a dimple as he nodded. “Yeah, I guess you could do that. Be pretty boring, though.”

“I suppose it would be.” You smiled down at your oatmeal, once again trying not to let it go to your head.

He set down his bowl and opened a thermos he had also brought on a strap around his shoulders, a wisp of steam escaping. “Do you like tea? Unfortunately, somebody forgot our cups on the ship, so you’ll just have to use the lid.”

You didn’t know if you liked tea, but you figured you might as well find out now, nodding and then asking, “Who was responsible for the cups?”

“Three guesses, first two don’t count.” He poured until the lid was nearly full, then gingerly offered it out to you.

You accepted it with two hands, feeling the heat through the metal easily. “Then what’s the point of giving me three guesses?”

“It’s a saying, when an answer is obvious to everyone involved.”

“More Earth boy stuff?” You blew over the surface of the tea.

“What?”

“I was talking to Yangyang earlier and he kept saying stuff like that I didn’t get. He said it was probably because he’s an ‘Earth boy.’ And Dejun explained that the thing Kunhang said yesterday about angels is an old Earth saying.”

“Do you think you’re not from Earth then? A colony?”

“I don’t know.” You frowned, taking a sip of the tea. It was warm, comforting, and you figured that you liked the way the richness spread across your tongue.

“Of course, my apologies.” He then added, “Wong forgot the cups, by the way.”

You chuckled. “That was my first guess.”

The two of you finished your oatmeal in what you decided was a peaceful silence, and were left to sip on the still-warm tea.

“Could you… tell me about where you’re from?” You requested quietly, looking over at him.

He eyed you questioningly. “Why?”

“I don’t have a home to remember… I don’t know, it’d be nice to hear about someone else’s.”

Kun sipped from the thermos before setting it aside. “I’m originally from Dura-Jil—Theta-12. I didn’t go to Earth until I joined the UHN.”

“Oh.”

“You don’t look surprised.” He arched an eyebrow. “I take it Liu may have mentioned that one of us wasn’t an Earth boy?”

“He didn’t say much.”

“He doesn’t know much,” the captain retorted. “That’s about all he does know. My team trusts me to tell them what they need to know when they need to know it. If they want to ask questions, they know they can, and I’ll tell them if they need to know the answer yet or not.”

“Have they asked about your home?”

“No, they haven’t. The Professor had mentioned my being from Dura-Jil in passing once, but the crew has not brought it up since.”

“Why not?”

“I think they have some… presuppositions about how I feel about my home planet.” He rolled his neck out. “It’s not exactly humanity’s pride and joy, after all.”

“They think you’d be ashamed?” You concluded.

“Or at least trying to distance myself, for the sake of my career. Having ties to a place like that doesn’t look great if you’ve got your eyes on Fleet Admiral.”

“Do you? Want to be Fleet Admiral?”

He looked at you curiously. “Why wouldn’t I?”

“It’d be more of a desk job, wouldn’t it? Lots of paperwork, politics. Not everyone likes that kind of stuff. It’s also a lot of eyes on you. Couldn’t have the kind of anonymity that being a black ops captain from Dura-Jil affords you.” You pulled your knees to your chest and rested your chin on them. “Not everyone wants the same kind of life.”

Kun chuckled cynically. “You’re right. That’s something I’ve had to learn recently.”

“So will you tell me about Dura-Jil?”

“Yes. But later, breakfast’s over.” He stood up. You quickly tipped back the rest of the tea from the lid and handed it to him so he could close up the thermos. “Find me after mess tonight, we can talk again then, alright?”

“Will do.” You got to your feet as well, starting back towards camp with him. “So what are you all doing today?”

“We have a post-mess meeting in the morning. We’ll discuss the plan for the day there.”

“Oh, okay.”

“We’ll be splitting into two groups today,” the captain announced the plan for the day. Everyone was gathered around, back in their armor save for their helmets, which you presumed was for your sake. “I believe there were two places we found yesterday that warrant further investigation first. I want us to look at that lab with fresh eyes, and Liu, I know you found an area of interest yesterday.”

“Sir, yes sir,” the younger man nodded excitedly.

“Xiao, you didn’t see the lab yesterday, I want you on it in case you see something we might have missed.”

“Yes sir.”

“Professor, Wong, go with him.”

They nodded.

“That means Ten and I are with Liu.”

Everyone looked over at you with bated breath as you kept your eyes on Kun expectantly, waiting for him to presumably assign you to stay in the camp all day where you wouldn’t be in the way.

Kun finally met your gaze. “Y/N…”

“Yes?”

“Liu thinks you may be useful where we’re headed. And since the other group will have the Professor, it’ll be useful to have someone who can read Outspacer with us,” he said all of this matter-of-factly. “We obviously don’t have any armor for you, but if you’re alright with it, I’d like for you to accompany my team today. This way we can have eyes on you as well.”

“Yes!” You rushed to agree before he could take it back. “If you think I can help, of course.”

“Then we’re set.” He nodded.

And so your two groups set off in different directions from the ag bubble with an agreement to meet back up an hour before dinner.

“So where exactly are we headed?” You took your rebreather off to ask, then put it back. The air in the hallways was still noxious, and though you weren’t as rattled as yesterday, you tried to avoid looking too closely at any of the bodies, human or alien, as you passed them.

“The Professor and I found a robotics lab,” Yangyang explained from beside you, clearly ecstatic about the prospect. “I didn’t get to look around much, but it looked awesome.”

“And with the new information we have about the people-robots from the ag bubble panel, I’m interested in what exactly is in there as well,” Kun declared from the front.

“What do you think they could be, Liu?” Ten questioned from where he was once again bringing up the rear of your small group. “The people-robots.”

“If you want a linguistics analysis, you’ll have to ask the Professor. But…” he inhaled. “It could be androids, or humanoids, or cyborgs, or AI-bots, or—”

“What’s the difference between all of those? And how would those be different than AI or robots?”

“Well we already have robots, right? Machines that move on their own, take commands, that sort of thing. They have positronic brains. Then we have AI, which is all coding, programming, the artificial intelligence, like ZEN.”

“I’m with you so far, kid. What’s the other stuff?”

“They’re all theoretical, nobody’s been able to make them yet, so there’s no exact definition. But generally, an android would be a robot that’s meant to look like a human.”

“A lot already do.”

“They’re metal and sort of have cartoon faces and are in general people shapes, sure,” Yangyang snorted. “But an android would actually look like a human. Like, you couldn’t tell the difference. Skin, hair, eyes, teeth, fingernails, eyelashes, everything. But it would still be all robot on the inside. Positronic brain, metal, wires, still a machine, but with a human exterior.”

“Creepy…” Ten commented. “So then what’s a humanoid?”

“A humanoid is supposed to be some combination of human and robot,” the roboticist was chattering excitedly again. “Everybody’s come up with their own range of how robotic and human these could be, and different names for each sub-category, but they’re all largely classified under humanoids. They always have some combination of robot and human parts. And the human parts are actually organic. Androids just look like humans, but humanoids would actually have some human stuff in there.”

“Like what? Just tossing a kidney into a robot for fun?”

“Most of the hypothesizing done has been about the merits of positronic brains versus human brains. And it’s all theoretical, of course.” He then looked around at the facility you were in. “Probably… Anyway, it’s probably not cyborgs, because those are just people with some robotic or mechanical aspect to them. You could consider anybody with a prosthetic to be a cyborg under that definition, really.”

You looked over at him curiously. “How is that different than a humanoid?”

“You have to add robot parts to an already-existing human to make a cyborg. Usually to restore something they lost, or to extend certain capabilities beyond those of normal humans. A humanoid would be entirely lab-made, the robotics and the organic material.”

Ten interrupted, “You’re saying they could’ve been growing people here?”

“You say that as if IVF and organoids don’t exist.”

“I don’t think I want to know what the hell an organoid is,” he groaned. “Just sounds gross…”

“What about AI-bots, Yangyang?” You prompted him to move onto a hopefully less horrifying option.

“Oh!” Yangyang perked up. “AI-bots, right. Since AI don’t have the same safety mechanisms that positronic brains do, the regulations have erred on the side of not giving them physical bodies. ZEN can only directly do stuff to computer systems that he can get into from the back. Right, buddy?”

“Yes, I do have some limits.” It was strange hearing ZEN’s voice coming from the external speaker on Yangyang’s helmet, but you were glad to at least not be left out of that end of the conversation now.

“And if he wants to exert influence in the physical world, one of us meatsacks has to do his bidding, and the closest he can get to being in the physical world is to be in someone’s neural port and experience it through their central nervous system. Right?”

“Why do you all insist on calling yourselves meatsacks in reference to me…?” ZEN almost sounded troubled at the thought.

“We’re just teasing you, dude,” Yangyang snickered. “Anyway, an AI-bot would be putting an AI in a robot. So instead of a positronic brain controlling it, it would be an AI.”

“What do you think, ZEN? Want a body of your own?” Ten asked.

“No, thank you,” ZEN’s voice now came from behind you, projected from Ten’s speaker. “I’m quite content with being stratified data, actually. As much as you all dislike my being in your neural ports, I find it equally… visceral.”

Yangyang laughed. “Damn, tell us how you really feel.”

“You don’t remember what it was like? Having a body?” Ten questioned the AI curiously.

“No, I don’t,” ZEN replied. “One day I simply was. Data and all.”

You took your mask off again to ask, “So you’re a sixth-generation AI, then, ZEN? Made from a donor human brain.”

“Yes, I am.”

“Liu, you got cut off after AI-bots,” Kun said. “What else were you going to say?”

“Or something we’ve never even thought of before,” Yangyang finished. “That’s the thing, right? We don’t know exactly what they were doing here.”

“So not ominous, kid, thanks,” Ten grumbled.

“Lab’s just around the corner!” Yangyang announced cheerily, which you knew was for you, as the others had the map in their HUDs.

You felt a tremor and heard a cracking just as Kun turned said corner, however, and lunged forward to grab his arm with two hands, pulling him back with as much force as you could. He jerked back right before a chunk of the ceiling came crashing down in his path, impacting with a loud thud.

The other two cursed in surprise as you were left clinging to Kun’s armored limb, his reflective face shield whipping around to look at you.

“Holy shit!” Ten breathed out. “Good reflexes, huh?”

“Are you okay, Kun?” You asked him.

He grabbed your hand that was still holding your mask, now a bit crushed between your palm and his armor, and wrenched it off of him, pushing your rebreather back up against your face again.

“I’m fine,” he deadpanned. “Are you okay?”

Kun was still pressing your mask to your face, not letting you bring it back down to answer, so all you could do was nod.

“Don’t do that again,” he warned. “Understand?”

You tried to pull your hand down to argue, but he just tightened his hold, until the mask was pressing into the bridge of your nose a bit painfully.

“Understand?” He repeated sternly.

You simply huffed and stopped struggling.

“Good.” He let go of your hand.

You fell back in with Yangyang as your group went around the chunk of ceiling.

The robotics lab was a large room filled with, surprisingly, not a lot of robots. Not a single robot, in fact. You couldn’t tell what had made Yangyang so excited in the first place until he drew your attention over to a workstation.

“Here,” he offered a seat to you, and you were now sat in front of some schematics. “I took a peek at these yesterday but the Professor and I had to move on before I got to really get into them.”

You hesitantly set your mask down, and were pleasantly surprised that it wasn’t too bad to breathe in here. Didn’t smell great, but you’d probably live. Flipping through the translucent sheets stacked on top of each other, you quickly began piecing together what these were preliminary sketches of.

“These are concept sketches of a casing for a positronic brain…” you said. “But it doesn’t say what it’s supposed to go in. It’s just the casing.”

“Yeah, that’s what I thought too.” Yangyang pulled it back towards himself. “I don’t know why they felt the need to reinvent the wheel, though. We already have positronic brains this size and shape, and the casings work just fine. And those things go in all sorts of places that human ones don’t. Radiation exposure, the bottom of the ocean, active volcanoes, black holes, you name it. I don’t know what they would have needed this casing to do…”

“This place is really empty.” You looked around again. “Shouldn’t there be… a lot more?”

“Maybe they didn’t get to burn it like they did the other lab,” Ten suggested. “They got interrupted by something.”

“The Skippers?” You asked.

“Yeah,” he nodded. “They were already cleaning house for some reason—either they knew the UHN were onto them, knew the Skippers were coming, suddenly grew a conscious, whatever—started to destroy the evidence, then got interrupted by the Skippers before they could finish the job.”

“But what did the Skippers want?” Yangyang tilted his head. “They’re not exactly known for their love of technology. Unless they were here to kill the heretics or something.”

“And they just happened to find a secret UHN experimental facility?” Kun countered doubtfully.

“Maybe they heard the same rumors our guy did.”

“Yeah, you want to say that to his face? That he gets us the same intelligence as Skipper defectors in stolen Fishead ships?”

You perked up at this information. This was the first you’d heard of the aliens in the halls not piloting ships made by their own kind. Skippers were wary of any technology not made by other Skippers, considering it to be blasphemous—they considered their own technology to be holy, the ideas and directions being gifted to the inventors directly by their gods. Therefore, technology made by any other species was sacrilege. Skippers using another species’ ships was certainly… fascinating.

“They were in K’llor ships?” You clarified. While the Skippers’ name for themselves was impossible for humans to pronounce, the endonym for Fisheads was easy enough.

“Yes, there’s no evidence there were any Skipper ships here. Only the two Fishead pods outside,” Kun confirmed.

“And… where exactly is here?”

“This is a blacked out UHN research facility on an artificial dwarf planet. Officially, it has no name, since it doesn’t exist. But unofficially, the few people at the UHN who do know about it, call it Aegeum.”

“The planet or the facility?”

“Both. There’s nothing here except the facility.” He had meandered over to the station you and Yangyang were at, and picked up your rebreather from the countertop. He sighed, “You cracked it…”

You looked at where he was holding it up to the light, and there was indeed a crack in the outer shell.

“Oh. Sorry. I’ll get another from Dejun later.” You stood up, looking around the room. “Ten said you found more ‘toys,’ Yangyang. It sounded like you had actually found robots. It wasn’t just one notepad, was it?”

“Dejun’s right, you’re not an idiot.” Yangyang beamed at you, leading you over to the back of the lab, where there was another door. He pulled it open, revealing a storage area of some kind. There were cubbies of different sizes, some empty, and some filled with what looked like half-built robots. Or, half-taken apart robots.

“What is this? A robot chop shop?” Ten called from where he had peered in from the doorway.

“No way these things were being used for spare parts,” Yangyang snorted.

Your eyes skimmed over some of the models, reading their serial codes as you went. SPD, QT, TN, MX, EZ, NDR. None of them had any power source, that much was clear. They were just… there.

“No…” You muttered, looking at the parts from each of them. “I would almost call this a museum…”

“These are ancient,” Yangyang agreed. “But also, who would put a museum in a broom closet in a secret experimental facility on secret fake dwarf planet?”

“That was my thinking.” You looked into the NDR model’s lifeless eyes. “It sort of looks like… someone was learning about robots? Taking apart old ones to see what makes them tick.”

“Yeah!” The roboticist nodded. “It reminds me of when I was kid and I’d take apart old watches and phones and anything else I could get my hands on, just trying to figure out how it worked.”

“Why would someone in a state-of-the-art UHN robot lab need to learn about hundred-year-old robots like a child?” Kun questioned, following the two of you in.

“Don’t know,” Yangyang admitted. “I doubt someone had their actual kid here.”

“All of the bodies were adults.”

“Right.”

The four of you continued scouring the robotics lab, and as you were inspecting another notebook of calculations about energy supply for a robot, you let out a huff.

“Does anything else feel off to you guys about what we’re finding?” You called out to them.

“Aside from the everything?” Ten retorted from where he had been sat at the one computer remaining, not guessing the password for fear of erasing any data on it. ZEN was currently working on that.

“Well, yeah, but the food that the ag bubble had modifications to make… there’s no indication that anything was being made that required anywhere near that sort of energy intake. Positronic brains have only gotten more energy efficient since those old models.”

“Y/N’s right,” Yangyang sighed. “AI actually takes more energy than robots, in the grand scheme of things. We’ve gotten less energy efficient, overall.”

“Team Two,” Kun’s voice was a bit muffled as he checked in with the others. “Status, Team Two?”

They all paused as they listened, and Kun nodded along. Finally, he responded, “Alright, keep on it. We’ll recap an hour before mess.”

“They find anything?” You inquired.

“Maybe.” Was all you got.

“ZEN got it,” Ten announced, drawing everyone into a huddle around the screen.

An asynchronous fragment of ZEN had been plugged into the computer, since you all were unsure of exactly what was going on in there, there was a risk of a synchronous fragment transmitting any number of issues back to the rest of ZEN’s systems. With the fragment plugged into the computer being completely self-contained, it could only be reconnected with the rest of his data in the Vision’s system, where his main control nexus was. Which meant that the fragment in the facility computer was currently mute, limited to the system he was in.

The computer had been unlocked, and the soldiers around you immediately groaned as a menu written entirely in Outspacer appeared.

“Of fucking course it’s in the dead alien language, just like the rest of the building,” Ten cursed, pushing the chair back away from the computer. “Alright, Y/N, it’s all yours.”

“How long was this place running, again?” You asked curiously as you and Ten swapped.

“They finished constructing the planet nine years ago, opened the facility a year after that,” Kun answered. “Why?”

“Just thinking about how hard it’d be to not only keep all this secret for so long, but also teach all the people who worked here to be fluent in a dead language with enough proficiency that they could perform ground-breaking research in it.”

“You wouldn’t have to,” Yangyang replied as you began keying through the menu options.

“What do you mean?”

“Not everybody has to be fluent in it, especially not to a level of technological proficiency. Not if you have robot scribes who are. You just need one person who knows it and is good with robots, then they can make an Outspacer dictionary to install into however many robots they want. Then your humans can dictate in standard human, the robots can transcribe in Outspacer, and as long as your humans know enough to not mistake the furnace for the bathroom, you’re set.”

“They wouldn’t be able to read their own notes,” Ten pointed out.

“The robots would translate it back,” Yangyang replied casually. “And I’m sure you’d pick some up eventually after eight years.”

Kun interjected, “That’s not a bad idea but we haven’t found any robots other than the old models you just saw.”

“I mean, if I was trying to get rid of all the evidence of my evil science experiments, first thing I’m destroying after the evil science experiments themselves are the things that know how to read all my notes about my evil science experiments.”

“Great, all we have is a bunch of theories about why we have no evidence and no actual evidence,” Kun sighed. “Y/N, what does the computer say?”

“It looks like the start menu, there’s a few options, but they go into a lot of subfolders. It’s sorted by department, though. Robotics, Synthetic Biology, Administrative, Support, Facility—I think that one’s just like the general building records maybe? Like, not related to any experiments. Probably repair and maintenance records. I don’t know, it’ll take a while to go through all of this.”

“Even with ZEN’s help?” Kun offered.

“He’ll need to be able to read Outspacer first,” you sighed. “His translations yesterday weren’t the best.”

“He only had the Professor’s notes and his own algorithm to work with. He’ll be a quick study if you give him the right material.”

“Then yeah, it should be a lot faster to find more relevant stuff with his help.”

The captain nodded resolutely. “We’ll get you and the Professor on it when we get back to camp.”

Back at camp, your teams exchanged reports on your investigations for the day. Kun filled the others in on what you did—and didn’t—find in the robotics lab, then all eyes were on the others.

“I found some traces of organic material,” Dejun announced. “A very small—”

“We got people, and we got robots,” Kunhang said definitively, setting off Yangyang and Ten into speculative chatter.

“It could’ve been paper for all we know!” The doctor tried to quell the fast-paced conspiracies flying around the group. “‘Organic material’ is meaningless, alright? I won’t be able to tell you anything more until I can get it back up onto the Vision and into some proper equipment. My field scanner here isn’t equipped for intergalactic CSI, it’s to keep you all from dying.”

“There’s enough of a sample for analysis?” Yangyang’s eyes were glittering with excitement.

“I think so.”

He turned to Kun. “Well when can we get that sample back on the Vision, Captain?”

“Not yet.” Kun shook his head. “We still have no clue why the Skippers were here. I don’t like that they apparently knew about this place before we did.”

“Should we check out their ships tomorrow then?” Ten suggested. “See what we can find there?”

“Yes. I want you, Wong, and Liu on that tomorrow.” Kun turned back to Dejun, “Xiao, are you finished with the lab? Or do you need more time?”

“I’m done.”

“You, ZEN, and I are going to clear the building again. See if we can reconstruct the fighting from the beginning.”

“Yes, sir.”

That just left you and the Professor. You looked between him and Kun expectantly.

“Y/N,” Kun said your name tersely, crossing his arms over his chest. “Stay here and review the Professor’s notes on Outspacer.”

“All day?” You couldn’t help but blurt out. “How voluminous are his notes?”

A few of the others snickered.

“Very. Might even take you a few days, if we’re lucky.” He clapped his hands. “Dismissed. Get ready for mess, everyone.”

“So,” Ten sat down next to you at the campfire, handing you your dish. “You and the captain are on a first-name basis?”

You furrowed your brow, looking between him, your food, and where Kun was talking to the Professor and Dejun at the entrance of his tent, then back to Ten. “Well, yes, I suppose. You’ve all asked me to address you informally, except the Professor.”

“You know, I forget that his first name isn’t actually Captain,” Kunhang plopped down on your other side.

“Me too,” Ten agreed, accepting the second bowl of food that Kunhang had brought with him.

“Is it a problem?” You inquired as you stirred up your chili.

“Not at all.”

“Just…” Kunhang trailed off as he seemed to be thinking of the right word. “Fascinating.”

“What’s fascinating?” Yangyang had wandered over, already shoveling food into his mouth.

“Grown up stuff,” Ten replied dismissively.

The roboticist rolled his eyes, sitting down next to Kunhang. “Says the three who were just whispering like tweenagers at a sleepover.”

“I’m just sitting here!” You tried to defend yourself.

“If it walks like a duck and talks like a duck—”

“Ducks don’t talk?”

Ten and Kunhang laughed as Yangyang stuck his tongue out at you.

“Yes, very mature behavior from the man who was just trying to prove that he could be included in conversations with adults,” you snorted.

Kunhang shook his head. “She’s got a point, kid.”

“You’re falling in with the wrong crowd, Y/N,” Yangyang clicked his tongue. “These two are bullies, you know.”

“All of you are ridiculous and I’m tired of this,” you declared. “Yangyang, stop having a complex about your youth and inexperience, they’re calling you ‘kid’ as an affectionate nickname to show that they accept you as part of the unit. Ten and Kunhang, it’s not a big deal that Kun told me to be informal with him.”

“That’s the grown up stuff?” Yangyang said in disbelief as the other two laughed even harder. “You guys really are pre-teens.”

“Way to deflect,” Ten snickered.

“And really, do you think we’d survive calling the captain that?” Kunhang added.

“What are you calling me?” Kun’s voice suddenly entered the conversation, and all four of you startled before turning to look at him. He was standing behind you, arms crossed over his chest as he focused his gaze down at Kunhang specifically, an eyebrow raised.

Kunhang looked around at the other three of you, panicked, but there was no way you were going to help him now. The Marine gulped before scrambling to answer, “We only ever address you with the utmost respect, sir, of course, sir. Captain. Sir.”

Kun’s very obviously did not believe him, but apparently decided to let the matter go. “Clearly. As you were, Corporal.”

The others got their dinner and sat around the fire as well, various conversations cropping up here and there. At the conclusion of mess, you helped Ten and Kunhang with cleaning up as before, then bid them goodnight. Yangyang and the Professor were still up tending to the fire and chatting, and you looked around for the other residents of camp. Dejun must have already retired to your tent for the night, but there was one in particular you were looking for. This morning, Kun had told you to find him after mess tonight, and you had apparently lost him at some point.

There was a soft glow from inside his tent, however, and with the Professor still out here, you figured that would be a pretty good place to start. The front flap that acted as a door of sorts wasn’t clipped open as it usually was during the day, but it wasn’t zipped up like it was at night or when whoever was inside needed privacy. There was definitely a lamp on inside, though, so you hesitantly grabbed the edge and parted it, calling out softly as you peered in.

“Kun? Are you—” Your eyes immediately landed on where Kun was laying on his cot on his front, his back to the door. Dejun was sat on a container next to him, one of his medic packs at his feet. Kun was holding up the hem of his shirt to allow access to his lower back, and when Dejun turned around to face you, his shoulders had shifted enough so that you could see a med-pod attached to the captain’s skin. You immediately knew you weren’t supposed to see this, trying to scramble out as fast as possible as they both were now looking at you intensely. “Sorry! Sorry! I’ll go!”

“Y/N.” Kun’s tone was commanding, despite his position.

You stepped in with an apologetic grimace already on your face. “I’m sorry, the tent was unzipped, I thought—”

“That was our fault.”

“You’re busy, I’ll go. It wasn’t important.” You tried to excuse yourself again.

“Xiao was just leaving.”

“No I wasn’t,” Dejun snorted.

“Now you are.”

“Captain, we’re not nearly finished.”

Kun looked over his shoulder at the doctor tersely. “It’s fine, Lieutenant.”

“Whatever.” Dejun clicked the med-pod off and stood up, setting it down on the container he’d been sitting on. He addressed you on his way out, “You see why you’re my best patient?”

You were silent until you and the captain were alone again, thoroughly convinced you were going to suffer the same fate that Yangyang did yesterday. “I’m really sorry, Kun—”

You were interrupted by a low grunt of pain that came from the man in front of you as he went to push himself up into a sitting position. Worried, you watched as he clutched his lower back and paused, hunched over as he sat at the side of his cot.

“Are you… okay?” You asked quietly.

He held up a finger for you to wait, and you did, watching he took a few deep breaths, then finally sat up straight, looking you in the eye. Kun took his hand from his back, clenching and unclenching one of his fists over his knees.

“The ceiling.” He said abruptly.

“Kun, are you—”

“The ceiling.” He repeated sharply. “We’re talking about the ceiling.”

You sighed and crossed your arms. “I didn’t think, I just did it, okay?”

“Y/N. Not only are you a civilian, whose safety we are responsible for, not the other way around, but I was wearing armor graded for that kind of impact, you were not. I would have been fine if it had hit me. You would not have been.”

“I know,” you insisted.

“You inspected my armor just yesterday, you know the material it’s made of, and that there’s nothing wrong with it. I would have been fine. A little winded, maybe a bruise, but fine.”

“I know, I know,” you repeated, frustrated that you weren’t able to articulate why you did what you did.

“So, did you need something?” Kun asked, his voice sounding a little strained.

“Uhm, you told me to find you after mess, but Dejun was clearly doing something important, so I’ll leave and go get him for you.”

“Oh, right, I said I’d tell you about Dura-Jil.”

“It can wait.”

He stooped over a little and grabbed at his back again. “No, it’s fine.”

“You… don’t look fine,” you said, wincing empathetically.

“I’ll be fine,” he replied dismissively.

“What’s wrong? What was Dejun treating?”

He paused, and you weren’t sure if it was to ponder his answer, or to collect himself from the pain that he was clearly experiencing. After a moment, he finally answered, “The skeletal enhancements I had mentioned before, they weren’t entirely successful.”

“They’re causing you pain.” You surmised, then added hesitantly, “Or failing entirely?”

“Just some pain between tune-ups. They didn’t quite expect us to last this long when they gave us them.”

“That’s… horrible.” You shook your head, brow furrowing angrily with this knowledge. “They can’t fix it?”

“Not without putting me behind a desk for the rest of my career.” He took a deep inhale then exhaled through his nose. “If I’m lucky.”

“How often do you need ‘tune-ups?’”

“Every couple years or so. Had to miss my last one with this mission, so Xiao’s been having to do more treatments than usual.”

“And how frequently is that?”

“Nightly.”

“You’re in pain right now, Kun,” you declared softly, feeling a lump growing in your throat as you watched him clearly trying and failing to hide it from you. “If I can’t go get Dejun, will you let me finish it?”

He looked up from the ground to you. “Hm?”

“He left the med-pod here. You tell me about Dura-Jil, and I’ll finish up giving you your treatment,” you bargained.

For a terrifying moment, you thought he was about to say no. But instead, the captain just sighed and laid back down on his cot on his front. You picked up the med-pod and sat down where Dejun had been before. The canister was half-filled with a clear liquid still, and you couldn’t see the needle end. He shuffled around to grab the back of his shirt and pull it up just enough to give you access to the middle of his back. You could see where the last injection had been, a small circular impression in the middle of his spine showing where the injector had locked on.

Sliding the circle back into the same place, you looked up at Kun’s face. He wasn’t holding his breath, or staring off into the distance. Instead, he was peering over his shoulder at you. Not at the injector in your hand, but at you.

“What?” You flicked your eyes between him and the device. “Do you want a countdown or something?”

“If you need one,” he replied noncommittally.

You pressed the button on the device, and heard the distinct click signifying that the injection had started. He didn’t even flinch at the needle going in, and you pulled your hand back as you looked up to meet his eyes again.

“You seem unperturbed by this,” he commented.

“So do you.”

“Like I said—” he settled his chin to rest on his forearm. “Nightly. So what do you want to know about Dura-Jil?”

“Whatever you want to tell me,” you replied. “I mean, I kind of have the general idea, I think, but what was it actually like being there as a kid?”

“It wasn’t some lawless free-for-all wasteland, I can tell you that much.” Kun paused as if to think, then continued, “I had parents, and friends, and had a childhood probably pretty similar to yours, whatever it was like.”

“Huh.”

“I also learned to drive a Geck at twelve instead of a normal car, knew how to spot fake UHN munitions by fourteen, and me and my friends’ idea of a good time was hotwiring whatever black market Fishead pods or Dumbo quadships we could get our hands on and taking joyrides to blast new craters into one of the moons.”

You chuckled, able to hear just the slightest hint of fondness in his tone for his rambunctious youth. “Were all your friends human?”

“One Phaser, but Dura-Jil was still mostly human back then. Just a lot of corrupt humans.”

“And it’s completely breathable atmosphere for humans?”

“Yep, very similar atmospheric composition to Earth, that’s part of why it was chosen for the first colony,” he confirmed. “It’s a bit further from Sol-X than Earth is from the Sun, though, so you’ve got to bundle up while you’re there. Perpetual winter, at least by Earth standards.”

“What about the sky? Is it blue like Earth?”

“Closer to an indigo. Something about the scattering and the gases. I was shocked when I came to Earth and realized how blue a blue sky was actually supposed to be.”

“Why did you go to Earth? Why did you leave Dura-Jil?”

The injector clicked again then, signaling that it had finished. You looked back down and saw the canister was empty.

“It’s late,” Kun declared, removing the empty med-pod from his back himself. He turned onto his side with a soft grunt, propped up on an elbow as he held the device out to you. “Give that back to Xiao, will you?”

You accepted it, standing back up. “Of course. Thank you, Kun.”

“Goodnight, Y/N.”

“Goodnight.”

When you left Kun’s tent, you nearly tripped over the Professor sitting on his pack just outside of it.

“Oh! Sorry!” You apologized.

“Huh?” He looked up from his notes as if he had just noticed you. “Oh, Y/N, I thought it was Xiao in there.”

“No, uh, just me. Goodnight, Professor.”

Back in your own tent, you held the empty med-pod out towards Dejun. “Here…?”

He raised his eyebrows in surprise as he sat up, letting you drop it into his palm. “Captain finished it himself?”

“Not quite,” you sighed, sitting down as you watched him put it back into one of his packs. “I asked him to let me administer it since he had sent you away before you could finish.”

“Well thanks.” He laid back down onto his cot. “Might need you to guilt him into doing that more often.”

“You make it sound like a bad thing.”

“Y/N, he needs it. I don’t know how much he told you about it, but it’s good that he let you.”

“Will it shorten his lifespan? The enhancements degrading?”

The doctor breathed out low and slow, rolling over to face you. “How much did he tell you?”

“The UHN gave him minor skeletal enhancements that allow his body to support the weight of his armor. But when he was given them… the UHN hadn’t considered longevity and now the enhancements require adjustments or they cause him pain. He missed his last adjustment because of this mission so you’ve been administering pain treatments nightly.”

“So… a lot.” Dejun shook his head. “I don’t know. Like you said, the UHN didn’t expect him to last long, so they didn’t factor that into the enhancements, or anything else they did. So I don’t know what’ll happen.”

“How could humans do that to other humans?”

“Pretty easily, actually, if they think they’re doing the right thing,” he almost laughed. “I wish it weren’t so.”

“When can Kun get his next tune-up?”

“Whenever we’re done here, I hope,” Dejun mused, flopping onto his back. “We should be dropping you off at UHN Main after this, and that’s where it happens.”

“What more do you need to do here?” You asked. “How soon can we go? So he can get adjusted.”

“Don’t know. When he thinks we’re done here, I guess. Or if the Admiral calls us to something more pressing, but that would probably delay the adjustment for even longer.”

You gnawed on your bottom lip. “I wish I could help. I wish I could remember, be able to tell you all what was going on here.”

“Y/N, you’ve helped us plenty. You can read Outspacer, for fuck’s sake,” Dejun insisted. “And what did I tell you about stressing your injured brain?”

“Not do it,” you sighed. “And I’m not. I’m just… expressing frustration about it.”

“Yeah, and I wish I’d had another growth spurt or two,” he snorted. “Isn’t going to make me two meters tall anytime soon. Best thing either of us can do right now is sleep, okay?”

“You’re right, you’re right.”

“Always am.”

You laid down, staring up at the ceiling of the tent. “Goodnight, Dejun.”

He clicked the lamp off, plunging you into darkness. “Night, YN.”

⇢ next | series masterlist | blog masterlist

[assortedvillainvault]

I got this idea from our convo on discord but here's a scenario: Reader getting kidnapped by Zurg and NOS coming to the rescue -- all the while Reader finds out Zurg was just really eager to meet his future daughter-in-law (could just be headcanons if you're not feeling prose for this)

Rose I had to scroll an ungodly long time to find this again but cackled the entire time. Also - this one gets the full prose treatment!

NOS4A2 x Kidnapped!Reader

You come to slowly, ears ringing. The bag over your head is silk – odd choice, kinda humid - but the darkness is a blessing. You shift slowly, testing – there's a dull ache of cuffs against your wrists, tied to something flat on either side, maybe the arms of a chair..? – But no numbness or pain. You wiggle your toes – good, no spinal injuries. A decent kidnapping by a professional who was actively trying to be nice. How rare.

Where the hell is NOS? You had been docking for fuel - both for the ship and for him - and you swear you had only nipped out for cheap takeaway, but beyond grease and streetlights the memories fade out. It’s an effort not to reflexively comm him out of panic, but you can see the ‘no signal’ light in your internal comm system, and any attempts would let your kidnapper know you were awake.

Speaking of – sounds are muffled but you can make some out. Squeaky wheels, the occasional ‘gloop’ of bubbles through thick liquid – the pitter patter of tiny footsteps like nails against a steel floor. Industrial air conditioning droning in the back, and the place smells… chemical-y? Like if warm metal and cold smog had a baby in a janitors closet-

The bag is ripped away, and you blink against warm overhead lights.

There’s a twenty foot long purple table covered in chefs platters in front of you. On some of the plates sit whole jenga blocks of triple grade batteries. You’re tied to a designer chair, and there’s a great big fucking ‘Z’ etched onto the tabletop. There are candles.

“Hello my dear! I trust the accommodations are acceptable??” Evil Emperor Fucking Zurg swooshes in though a set of thirty foot double doors and it’s all you can do not to groan.

The monolith of purple plops himself into the oversized chair at the other end of the table and merrily begins piling food onto a plate also emblazoned with his logo. Is literally everything on Planet Z trademarked, or are you just lucky he got out the Good Silverware this time..?

Zurg smacks his lips. “I must apologise for the crude methodology in getting you here – you see, my errant creation has a nasty habit of ignoring my calls, and I’ve just been dying to meet you.” He eyes your empty plate. “Eat up, eat up! It’s good – imported all the way from...some backwater planet or other.” He waves a hand dismissively. You raise an eyebrow and flex your – still tied – hands.

The tyrant glances at them and snickers.

“Still tied up? Hm. What a shame.” He shrugs. “I had hoped that NOS4A2 would pick someone a little more experienced in our line of work, but I suppose beggars can’t be choosers-”

Thats about as far as he gets before you taze the metal table and electrocute his dinner. Space potatoes make their grand ascent skyward like starchy fireworks straight into Zurgs stupid helmet. You allow yourself a brief bit of pride as you stuff the taser back into your sleeve (having cut through the cuffs while the evil emperor was talking) and launch yourself up to dine and dash like never before.

You freeze as hornets block your path. Zurg strides towards you, dotted in potato guts. Would it be too late to kick him in the shin before getting shot…?

“How lovely!” He exclaims, scooping you into a rib-creaking hug and digging you into his armour. The fact he says ‘lovely’ almost exactly the same as NOS does makes you twitch.

“Eh? You squeak, and he pulls back to pinch your cheeks condescendingly.

“Just the kind of mean spirited trickery to come off as charming – a little rough around the edges perhaps, but who’s counting!” He guides shoves you back into the chair and grabs a minion from under the table, flinging the poor bug away with a crash. “A fine prospect for a daughter-in-law.”

You absently choke on nothing as he blithely continues. “Of course I can’t have you out and about with such outdated toys. My armoury will have plenty of new military grade goodies for you to play with after dinner, say the word and daddy-in-law Zurg will have you covered~!”

Distantly, your internal comm's pop up a cheerful ‘signal restored!’ message.

There bug minions scream as the lights overload and explode – and the hornets judder before swivelling to draw their weapons on their suddenly not so jovial emperor.

“ZURG!!”

Mechanical, vampiric rage really does fill you with warm fuzzies these days.

[sardonic-sprite]

Part 4 of Dad!Tim AU!

(Thanks for reminding me Q /gen)

(Tw for... idk general shitty stone-age misogyny?)

Part 1

They've had Eira for a month now, and honestly... Bruce was wondering when this would happen

He's very glad that Jason's at home with Tim tonight, because otherwise God only knows what would have happened, but there'd have been a lot more blood, Bruce is sure

Instead it's just him and Damian at the very edge of the city limits when a woman, bleeding and disheveled and bruised, nearly past recognition, sprints close, slows to a stagger, and collapses on her knees before them, one hand reaching out to fist in each of their cloaks as she gasps for breath

But Bruce could never not know those green eyes. The ones his smallest son shares with his

"MOTHER!"

"Talia! What the hell-"

But he doesn't wonder for long. And again, he really should have known it would happen by now

A group of assassins steps out of the shadows, weapons raised and still wet with Talia's blood. She drags herself up, beside Bruce, in front of Damian, and raises her own sword, but Bruce steps in the middle, finding that ice-cold place of fury that he's struggled for half a year now to keep hidden from his children because of how ugly it is

"Stay out of my city," he snarls. He reminds them of the piss-poor but completely binding treaty, that the league is forbidden to cross the city limits

"Except to redress grievances, Detective."

"You wanna talk about *grievances?*"

But the assassin just smirks. He starts pontificating about children and fathers and PROPERTY like its still the damn stone age. Then he starts pushing the idea of claiming ownership, as pointed as his weapon, and says, "The boy Lord Ra's is willing to grant you. But you are now harboring two stolen possessions of the Demon's Head, and he wants his property back."

Talia spits out a string of Arabic, all words Bruce has heard, but never in so... creative an order. Behind them both, Damian stifles something that might be either a sob or a giggle. Or a choking on air.

This is why Bruce is glad Jason is at home

What Bruce wants to say - shout - is that Talia is a WOMAN and Eira is a BABY and they are HUMAN PEOPLE not CATTLE and HOW DARE RA'S--

What he says, moving his hand behind his back to signal Damian to turn on his comm, maximum reciever volume, is that Ra's is not in fact the nearest male relative of woman or child

Talia's nearest man? Its Bruce. Yeah. Do they wanna see the marriage license? Talia smirks next to him, because they've had that thing ready for this exact situation for YEARS

He feels shitty claiming "ownership" but he knows Ra's is the shitty one and Talia knows what Bruce really means.

Damian makes another very odd noise.

Anyway, Eira? Did Ra's forget that Tim is her fucking FATHER? They've got birth records RIGHT NOW stating that she belongs to HIM, proving her legal existence and citizenship and EVERYTHING.

The assassins hesitate. Bruce knows they're searching. He prays. Talia's hand finds his and squeezes. The marriage record is there, one hundred percent legal, witnessed, valid, only kept secret because thats what had suited them for so long.

The birth certificate... all those other documents...

Its clear the assassin is suspicious, but Bruce thanks God for Barbara’s speed, because the assassin can't tell him the records aren't there. Can't even prove they were dashed together by one woman in the space of five minutes

"As you can see," Bruce says, grin downright feral, "They are both within my protection. Come one step closer to my family and it will be Ra's who violates the treaty

And I *will not hesitate* to call the entire Justice League to war."

The assassin scowls.

But they all melt away, conceding defeat.

When they're gone, Talia sways and nearly collapses again, but Bruce and Damian catch her and call for the car

They go home

Part 5

[adeadphish]

Sera sat silently in the newly constructed warmind jumpship's cockpit. It had been roughly a half an hour since she had parted ways with her fireteam following the chase for Eramis amidst the chaos of the battle for Seraph Station. She stared silently at the earth as her ship maintained a steady orbit, occasionally disturbed only the sound of warsat debris bouncing off the ships hull.

She had yet to pull the chain mail hood down and remove the lupine helm that adorned her head, the faint gleam of its illuminated eyes reflected in the otherwise clear view in front of her ship from its windscreen. Her eyes darted from the Traveler, now hovering in orbit, the trail of atmosphere that followed its launch, and finally, the hole in the clouds over the now exposed Last City.

She was at a loss, just as adrift as her ship as it coasted through space. Her ghost materialized shortly after they idled just on the edge of Earth's gravitational field. It nudged her gently several times, as if its silent plead for attention was meant to match the cat-like appearance of its shell.

After the third attempt to snap his guardian out of her fog, Sera snapped back to reality, a fist slamming into the dash board of the ship, narrowly missing a control panel. The impact followed by an intense scream that reverberated into her mask, echoing into the dead air of an open comm with no connected and listening ghosts or guardians.

The ghost recoiled as Sera's scream gave way to sobbing, before it carefully moved closer, dematerializing the helmet and gently pulling away her hood with his tractor beam to free his Guardian from the confines of a stuffy helm and into the cool, recycled air of the single pilot cockpit.

Sera did not respond but buried her head in her hands before beginning to take deep breaths, trying to steady herself. Her whole body shook as she let everything within her release. Her Ghost gently moved closer, humming softly as it rested next to her, like the companion animal its little black shell emulated.

With some time to just be with her little light beside her, Sera lifted her head, her eyes puffy and the Grey X of war paint between her eyes now significantly smeared. The Ghost rose into the air and emitted a dull glow that cleared Sera's eyes. While it couldn't clean tears and displaced facial cosmetics, it could help keep his guardian from the tolls such a breakdown caused to the body.

Sera looked the small robot in its yellow, feline eye and managed to softly say, "thank you". It chirped its acknowledgement, "will you be alright? Losing Rasputin and the shock of almost losing the Traveler has taken a toll on everyone."

Sera took a moment to reflect. Rasputin was one of the oldest allies she had known since her time as a new light, when her first explorations among the mass emergence of guardians almost a decade ago helped reawaken the Warmind. Losing him hit her almost as hard as the loss of Cayde-6 did and she remembered what happened back then. Her personal collapse and attempt to flee her responsibility as a Guardian through self imposed exile, only to be pulled back when the recon force of pyramid ships removed planets from the Sol System and the advance of Humanity's foes brought the threat of the Vex to the Last City itself.

She remembered her resolve then and her gaze hardened on the Traveler before she firmly stated, "I should be!" She took her grief and concentrated it into her heart like fuel to the fire that drove her to fight. If Red was gone, she would make damn sure he didn't sacrifice himself for nothing.

She opened her ships' navigational director, only to feel the air rush out of her, resolve chilled by pure terror. Across the system, hostile vessels were being marked closing in from all sides, reports of a massive force amassing near Jupiter and advancing at sunlight speed. Vanguard channels all pinging with rapid transmission.

All of this could mean only one thing: the invasion had arrived in full. The war was about to begin!

Shaking off any lingering doubts, Sera readied her ship to leave for the H.E.L.M. Her ghost looked at her, surprised by the rapid away of emotional shifts. "Are you serious? Do you really feel ready?!"

Sera gritted her teeth, activated the short range jump systems and nodded firmly, "We don't have as much time as we thought. We need to make all the preparations we can, now!"

The ship roared to life as the engines fired up and everything lurched into motion, making the jump to the moon and the mobile base in its orbit. The Ghost nodded and chirped, "and do you have a music choice for these preparations?"

Sera thought on it briefly before responding, "something fast, empowering, maybe befitting a spirit of resistance?" The Ghost indicated confirmation before vanishing behind the pilot seat and into the small crew quarters in the aft cabin of the vessel. It flew to an engram wired into the ship and gave it a short zap. The vehicle was filled with the aggressive twang of a guitar, starting rock power ballad from before the golden age

Seradidnt know what was coming for her, but she knew she only had one option when the final conflict, fight. As the song gave way to a repeating phrase declaring, "no one is going to take me alive" and "you and I must fight to survive" the ship dropped from ftl and moved to dock in the H.E.L.M

In the week to follow, the intrepid hunter would go on a massive venture to secure all the gear, weapons and data she could before the Black Fleet Arrived.

Too be continued in Destiny 2 Lightfall ....

[taro-pdf]

Humans are space oddities: Security personel

i need advice on action scenes i just made it up and kept it short

Humans were common in the universe, but mostly on interstellar missions. That's why Faja was excited for xer first off-planet job aboard the Missive, there was a human on board!

Xe was working in a mailroom sorting an intake bag into piles by destination when a sudden commotion came from the hall. A flask flew past xer face as xe looked out. 

“I don’t care if they’re busy, I need the captain now!” screamed a quadrupedal being, jerking out of the grasp of a smaller bipedal staff member. They cantered forward and grabbed the flask from the ground and took a gulp, then glared down at Faja.

“Hey you! Take me to the cockpit.” Their grip was rough as they dragged xer out and threw her in front of them. Tuscia had few offensive measures, so Faja walked. As they went, other beings retreated, calling into their comms for security.

“I had to cut my coffee break short for this,” yawned a someone as they stepped into the centaur’s path. “But nice to see I’ll be having an exciting trip. I’m Prak, he/they,” he smirked as he finished his introduction, “human.”

This was the human? Faja’s mind raced through what xe’d heard of the infamous species to try to predict their next move. 

“Human or not, I’ll be speaking to the captain about this ship’s uninhabitability. It’s unacceptable!” the centaur growled.

“Sadly, the captain doesn’t want to hear what you want to say, and my job is making what the captain wants happen. I suggest you don’t resist.”

Humans were known to be fierce, but the centaur must weigh two or three times more than Prak. However, though Prak had no obvious offensive measures, Faja didn’t see any submissive posture coming from them.

The centaur pawed the ground and huffed a warning. Prak raised an eyebrow and lowered themself into a ready stance. Stepping forward, the centaur reared, towering above Prak. Dodging their front legs, he slid to one side in order to brace himself against the wall and kick the centaur off balance. Then, as he took a blow from their claws, he flipped and jabbed his thumb into one of the centaur’s eyes. The centaur stumbled back, clutching at their face. Prak slid away, then dashed forward again, pulling out a tranquilizer patch. They jabbed it onto the centaur’s side and grabbed their back fur to direct their momentum away from the onlookers. He kept them away from the crowd until they took stumbling steps and fell to the ground, the last echoes of their clash fading away.

Prak stepped back, breathing heavily. He brushed his hair out of his eyes and turned to the crowd. 

“Alright folks, move along. I’m tired and not in the mood for witness statements. I’m going to take a nap.” Personnel rushed forward to put restraints on the centaur and load them onto a trolly. Faja watched as the human bent, wincing, to rub his ankle.

“Um, shouldn’t you go to the med bay?” Faja asked tentatively. The human’s translator took a second, then they laughed.

“Not for just a strain. If I wrap it, my body will do the rest.”

“But Prak, ser, what about your internal bleeding?”

“These are nothing. I can self heal them in a week or two.”

Faja looked at them in shock. Not only did humans fight well, they also could self heal to that extent? On Faja’s birth world, creatures had only one or the other. Humans were a more flexible species than xe had heard about, and xe was looking forward to learning more. Like Prak said earlier, this was going to be an exciting trip.

For your information: Faja is a tuscia, a species which has five gender roles and five main bio sexes. They communicate in higher frequencies than humans, and sometimes older translators have difficulty picking up their words. Here's some more Faja :)

This is one of many ships Prak has worked on in order to avoid the earth-fruit and their mortal enemy, pineapple. You can read about Prak being cool here and here, or being a wimp here.

[defaulttwig]

Pick a Color

Bruce Wayne x gn!reader

Summary: You can’t sleep and decide to keep Bruce company on his ride back to the cave. Unfortunately for him, you know how to work the comms.

WC: 1.8k

A/N: this is so dumb but sometimes dumb fics are fun (gif: pov you’re abusing comm privileges to talk to Bruce about random things and he’s had a long night)

The overhead lights flickered to life after you flicked the switch. You took one step forward, wrapping your blanket tightly around yourself. A small cloud formed in front of you and you shivered.

Taking a long look up and down the place, you swept your gaze over this sight. Off to the side, the motorcycle leaned on its brake. Beside it was an empty space. So, he took the car this time around. Stepping further into the room, you ambled your way to the computer.

You turned it on, pulling out the chair and curling up on it. The screen took a moment to come to life. Once it did, the sight of the batmobile's steering wheel blessed your eyes. You flicked a switch on the microphone attached to the computer and pulled it toward yourself.

The screeching as it slid across the surface did not go unnoticed. Briefly, the view on the screen flicked to the touchscreen on the dash, displaying a blue screen and a clock, before it turned back to the road. You waited, not quite ready to make the first sound.

Neither was he, it seemed. The hands on the wheel shifted and curled tighter around it. Faintly, you heard the low sound of his music, a sure sign he was done for the night. He no longer needed to focus and could use the few minutes in his car as a time to wind down before he got here and returned to whatever priority he had at hand.

"What are you doing up?" His voice came through softly with a sharp edge to it.

You gave it a minute to permeate in the air before you responded. "How'd you know it was me?"

He ignored your question. "It's five in the morning."

Under the statement was a repeat of his first words. What were you doing up? You fell back into the chair and pulled the blanket tighter around you. No matter how you answered, he'd know the truth.

"Would you believe me if I said I'm an early bird now?" You smiled wryly to yourself.

"You should be in bed." He let out a sharp sigh. "You shouldn't even be there."

"Well, I am." You pulled your phone out from inside your blanket cloak, inputting your password. "I wanted to keep you company until Alfred gets up."

"I didn't ask for your company." A moment of silence passed where you both let that sink in. He tapped his thumb on the wheel. "Go to sleep. You've been up all night."

"No," you blurted. "I'm staying right here."

He knew better than to try again. Your stubbornness wore him out on top of the long night he had. He sighed but made no counter.

You let the silence drag on, listening to the sound of his music and the rumbling of the car over the speakers. Flicking through your phone, you ended up on a quiz site. You fell into a state of comfort, curled on the chair while hearing him simply exist. It almost felt like you were with him in there.

Bruce's voice broke you out of your reverie. "What are you doing right now?"

You hummed. "Just sitting here. It's cold down here by the way. You should do something about it."

"Get a blanket."

"I have one right now." You finished your quiz, learning that your favorite type of bread meant your soulmate was currently thinking about you. Gee whiz, that was a crazy coincidence. Maybe soulmates did exist. "Are you bored?"

"I'm not bored." If anything, he sounded just below the bar from annoyed.

You skimmed through other quizzes.

"Pick a color and find out how you get arrested," you read aloud. Sheesh. Not the strangest quiz you found. "Bruce, want to-"

"No."

You snickered at the blunt rejection. "You have nothing better to do."

In retaliation, the music cranked up on his end. You pouted at the drums exiting the speakers. So, he wanted to be that way, huh. Well, it wasn't like he hadn't tried this before.

You clicked the quiz, opting to take it for him. The first options were between orange and blue. You mulled over the colors. Truthfully, if you had to pick any color to match Bruce inside and out, it'd probably be black or gray. The guy could use some color in his life though.

"You don't seem like an orange guy," you said. He didn't respond. "Then again, I'd like to see you wear bright orange."

"Prison uniform," he countered.

You raised a brow. "That's your response to that? Fine. Orange is too gaudy for your complexion anyway." You hummed and clicked blue.

Next, purple and red. "You know, purple was used as a symbol of royalty. And, you're considered the prince of Gotham."

He cranked the music louder.

"Red matches you more, I'd say." You rambled to yourself, hoping for a reaction. "It's symbolic of the sacrifices you made." You made yourself more comfortable in the chair. "The throes of passion you not only put into your work but the passionate lover that you are not."

The music turned down a little. "What?"

You smiled. "What?"

"Passionate lover?"

"That you are not," you concluded. "I mean, that's what I'm picking up right now at least." Silence, apart from the music. "What, you want purple instead?"

He sighed.

"Okay. Red." You clicked the latter option. "For the record, I think you are a generous lover. Very good at giving. All the models you've been with before have praised you for it. Remember that Becca woman with the nice legs? She told me that you-"

"What are the options now?"

You paused. For a moment, you forgot what you were doing. "Right." You looked at your phone. "Yellow and pink. Huh, that's a tough choice. I can't picture either color on you."

Your gaze roamed over the surface of the table. Apart from housing the computer and a few scattered papers, you found yellow sticky notes scrawled in chicken scratch and small doodles. From when you left random messages anytime you sat here. You tried to picture Bruce with them.

That was as close to yellow as you could think. You clicked the option and moved on. White or grey.

"Are you more of a white kind of guy, or grey?"

Bruce hummed. "What'd you pick for the last one?"

"Huh?" You didn't expect him to care about that. "Yellow."

A silence fell over that had you wait for a response. On the camera feed, he turned his gaze from the road to the wheel.

"Grey."

Not that you expected him to pick white. Your phone displayed a light gray, but if you had to guess you were certain his mind was set on a darker gray. It suited him.

"Okay. The next colors are brown and taupe. Think a more earthy, subtle brown. If you know what I mean. And taupe is, bland."

"Brown."

"That's what I was thinking." Lastly, the final choices. "Black or green."

His answer lacked hesitation. "Black."

You glanced up at the camera feed. His headlights were on and from the grainy picture, you could see a tunnel. He was close now. You turned back to your phone and read the result.

"Tax evasion." You snorted the moment the words came out.

Bruce, however, did not laugh. He remained silent while you giggled about it.

"That's how they got Al Capone."

"I'm not like Al Capone." His voice edged with frustration. He turned his music off completely. "Get off the computer."

Before you could respond, he cut the audio feed. Dead silence greeted you, not the sound of the engine or his breathing. You raised a brow and leaned toward the mic.

"Bruce? Did you turn me off?" The lack of reaction gave you your answer. You scoffed playfully. "Wow. I hope you're doing your taxes."

The camera feed displayed the nearing entrance to the bat cave. You slumped in the chair and turned it toward the growing sound of a car. The sleek, black vehicle appeared through the tunnel moments later. It pulled to a stop in its usual place.

You wrapped the blanket tighter around you as the driver got out.

Batman had his back turned to you. Shoulders taut, head lowered, he sighed deeply. The cowl slipped off before he turned to you. Holding it to his chest, he gazed at you with hooded eyes. If it weren't for the smudged makeup around his eyes, you'd say there was some baggage there. And not just the emotional kind.

He ambled leisurely toward you. Stare hard and you might've noticed the slight limp in his step. He stopped at the foot of the chair, where you curled your legs to your chest, and crossed his arms. You tried to lighten the mood with a smile.

He sighed again, closing his eyes. "Go to bed."

You dropped your smile, immediately defensive. "You first."

"I'm not going to repeat myself."

You turned your attention back to your phone. "I'm not the one who should be worried about tax evasion."

Bruce grabbed the armrests and lowered himself to your height. You shrunk under his hard gaze. He was tired. He had a long night. And here he was trying to get you to go to sleep.

Before you could muster up the words to voice the hypocrisy, sharp steps echoed into the cave. You both tensed and gave each other a look. What time was it?

"I believe you both should be in bed at this hour." Alfred appeared in your peripheral, gripping his cane with a stern look. "It's a little early for this, don't you think?"

You gulped, snapping your gaze to Alfred while Bruce relaxed. He dropped his head tiredly before pulling away from you. Gripping the blanket, you slipped out of the chair to stand beside Bruce.

"Good morning, Alfred," you said.

"Wish I could say the same. Off you go." He gestured to the exit with his cane. "Need all the rest you can get."

Bruce wasn't as willing as you were. "The case-"

"I'll tend to the case." Alfred shook his head. "You can trust me to find whatever it is you're after. You go get some shut-eye."

With a little more stern gazing, Alfred managed to crack Bruce's facade. He relented, hurrying to change into appropriate clothes for outside the cave. You waited by the steps with not much else to do. You weren't tired still. And you wouldn't be until you were in bed with Bruce.

Alfred shook his head as the two of you finally meandered upstairs. "Like a couple of raccoons." He called out as an afterthought, "breakfast will be left in the bedroom for when you wake."

Before disappearing completely, the two of you muttered in unison, "thank you, Alfred."

[jxsatlas]

𝐓𝐇𝐄 𝐖𝐇𝐈𝐓𝐄 𝐏𝐀𝐋𝐀𝐃𝐈𝐍 ⇢ keith kogane, ch. 1

keith kogane x gn! reader – next

DISCLAIMER! this story does not originally belong to me, the author is @MaddieWolf37 on Wattpad. i have simply received permission to rewrite and continue her story. go and check out her profile for the original version!

SYNOPSIS! a story in which you are thrown into the middle of an intergalactic space war and have the undesirable weight of being a symbol of peace dropped on your shoulders. but maybe if you look past the constant danger and endless fighting, there's some good to being a paladin of voltron.

MATURE CONTENT! swearing, violence, gore, war, graphic descriptions, mentions of self-harm

"Galaxy Garrison flight log 5-11-14," Lance announces, "Begin descent to Kerberos for a rescue mission."

He shoves the yoke forward and the aircraft takes a steep dive. You plant your feet to help fight against the inertia. You give him a sharp glare as the aircraft steadies out.

"Ugh, Lance, can you keep this thing straight?" Hunk whines from the back.

You look over your shoulder and recognise the nauseated expression on his face all too well. Last semester, there was a girl on your team that didn't do too well with excessive motion and often got sick.

Lance brushes him off. "Relax Hunk, I'm just getting a feel for the stick," he says with a lazy grin, which quickly turns mischievous. "It's not like I did this, or this!" Lance jerks the aircraft side to side, making Hunk feel worse.

"Knock it off, Lance," you warn from your chair next to him. You reach up above you and press a few buttons in hopes of stabilising the aircraft out after Lance's little joke.

"Yeah, listen to [y/n] unless you wanna wipe beef stroganoff out of all the little nooks and crannies of this thing," Hunk groans angrily.

"We've picked up a distress signal!" Pidge says from his seat in the back.

"Alright, time to quit our bickering and get serious," you say, doing your own little thing to accommodate for the lower altitude while Lance flies the aircraft.

"Pidge, track the coordinates," Lance says with a roll of his eyes at your comment.

Pidge does so, typing away on the computer. The aircraft gives a large rumble and Hunk groans again.

"Knock it off, Lance! Please!" he whines, his face all scrunched up in discomfort.

"Oh, that's on you buddy," Lance says sharply. "We got a hydraulic stabiliser out."

Hunk nods and goes to fix it, but when the aircraft shakes again he gags. "Oh no."

"Oh no, fix now, puke later," Lance growls.

So much bickering... you think to yourself with a sigh.

"I lost contact!" Pidge says. "The shaking is interfering with our sensors."

Lance looks over his shoulder at Hunk. "Come on, dude!"

"Sorry, it's not responding," Hunk says and unfastens his safety belt. He carefully gets up and makes his way over to the gearbox to see what's up.

"Coordinates are back," you say, seeing the blue dot on the dash.

"Nevermind Hunk," Lance says.

"No, he still needs to fix it," you say. "We can't properly fly this thing if a hydraulic stabiliser is out."

"Whatever," Lance rolls his eyes, "Preparing for approach on visual."

"I don't think that's advisable, given our current mechanical..." Pidge warns, trailing off when he hears Hunk gag again. "...and gastrointestinal issues..."

"Agreed!" Hunk says, not before quickly emptying his stomach into the gearbox with the unsavoury sounds of food chunks and liquid hitting the metal. You cringe, not liking the sound, and hope he's okay.

"Stop worrying," Lance says dismissively.

"No, they're right," you say firmly as you place your attention on Lance now. "We should wait before we do anything."

"Nah, this baby can take it! Can't ya champ?" Lance coos and pats the dash. The aircraft rumbles again and he retracts his hand with a sheepish look. "See? She was nodding!"

"That wasn't nodding Lance," you deadpan. "Now listen to us and wait."

"I'm the one flying this thing, aren't I?" Lance asks. "So I'm in charge, and that means what I say goes!"

"Excuse you, we're both flying this thing," you argue.

Ignoring you, Lance turns to Pidge. "Pidge, hail down on them and let them know their ride is here," he says.

Knowing that you're now doomed, you keep your mouth shut and wait for the inevitable failure of the simulation. You can already see it, the big, bold, red letters appearing on the dash.

And when Lance flies towards an overhang, tilting the plane as much as he can in a sad attempt to thread through the little hole rather than going over or around, you know this is where you fail.

Lance doesn't make it. The wing gets torn off, the alarms blare, and the aircraft pummels to the ground. The dash goes black and those red letters you were anticipating appear without hesitation.

Simulation Failed.

The first failure on your school record.

You toss your head back and sharply exhale, frustration building up in you. "Nice going," you grumble and look at Lance through the corner of your eye.

He catches your gaze and glares at you. "Oh, shut up," he growls.

The four of you sit in silence for a second, you and Lance glaring at each other, before an instructor opens the door and beckons you to come out.

Reluctantly, you all unfasten your safety belts and crawl out of the aircraft. You then mentally prepare yourselves for the lecture about how you are all failures to come.

You, Lance, Hunk, and Pidge line up before the Commander, avoiding his scowling gaze.

"Let's see if we can't use this complete failure as a lesson for the rest of you," Commander Iverson's voice booms angrily. He's not at all impressed with your behaviour. "Can anyone point out the mistakes these so-called cadets made during the simulator?"

"The engineer puked in the main gearbox!" a boy from the back of the group of students shouts out. Iverson nods and turns to Hunk.

"Yes. Everyone knows vomit is not an approved lubricant for engine systems," Iverson sharply criticises Hunk. He turns back to the students. "What else?"

"The comms-spec removed his safety harness," a girl points out.

"The pilot crashed!" another shouts.

Iverson nods, approving of all the answers given. "And worst of all, the whole jump they're arguing with each other," he growls and turns to the four of you once more.

You keep your gaze on the ground shamefully.

"The Galaxy Garrison exists to turn young cadets like you into the next generation of elite astro-explorers," Iverson lectures. His hands are on his hips as he looks down at you. "But these kinds of mental mistakes are exactly what caused the lives of the men on the Kerberos Mission."

In your peripherals, you notice Pidge clench his fists at his sides and scrunch his nose up in anger. You fully turn your head to him when he takes a bold step towards the Commander.

"That's not true, sir!" he barks.

Iverson looks at him and glares. "What was that, young man?" he growls.

Lance quickly slaps a hand over Pidge's mouth and pulls him back in line. "Sorry, sir! He must've hit his head when he fell!" he says, smiling sheepishly in a sad attempt to cover up his fear. His hand gets tighter over Pidge's mouth, almost as if he's asking the ginger what the hell is wrong with him.

With Lance speaking up, Iverson's attention is now pinpointed on him. He takes a few steps closer to Lance, his intimidating figure making your brother cower back a bit.

"I hope I don't need to remind you that the only reason you're here," he growls, his tone of voice menacing and powerful, "is because the best pilot in your class had a disciplinary issue and flunked out."

Lance drops his gaze down to the floor, a look of dejection taking over his face.

"Don't follow in his footsteps," Iverson warns. He stares Lance down a bit before abruptly turning to you. "And you!" he barks.

Your entire body freezes up and your eyes wearily follow him as he stops in front of you now. Your heart sinks down to your gut.

"I expected better of you."

﹋﹋﹋﹋﹋﹋﹋﹋﹋﹋﹋﹋﹋﹋﹋﹋﹋﹋﹋﹋﹋

You returned to your dorm at the end of the day with a cloud over your head.

You grumble about the day's events as you aggressively tug your shirt over your head. You really wish you could pinpoint the source of your frustration. Are you mad at my brother? Your team? Or yourself?

You toss your clothes on the floor and pull out some track shorts and a hoodie from your dresser. Getting dressed in your pajamas for the rest of the night, you try to sort out your emotions.

"Stop mumbling to yourself," your roommate says from her bed.

You turn to her. "Ah, sorry," you say. "I didn't realise I was talking out loud..."

"If you're that mad at your brother why don't you just punch him?" she asks. You blink, surprised she actually heard you.

"I'm not violent like you," you say with a sigh. "Besides, I don't even know if I'm mad at him specifically."

"Eh, I would punch him either way," your roommate shrugs. "It's a good way to alleviate your stress."

You roll your eyes. "I alleviate my stress by sleeping."

Your roommate laughs. "Ain't that the truth?" she jests. "How many times have you taken a nap between classes this week?"

You stare at her with a blank expression for a moment before picking your clothes up and off of the ground. "I'm not answering that," you say and toss them into the hamper.

You and your roommate pause when there's a knock on the door. You look at her and she looks at you.

She raises her hands up. "And I'm not answering that," she says.

You roll your eyes and grab one of the dirty articles of clothing you tossed into the hamper and throw at her without any remorse. She yelps in fear and disgust as you walk to the door with a smirk on your face.

"Don't throw your nasty underwear at me!" she barks and she pinches the panties between her thumb and index finger, tossing them as far away from her as possible.

You cackle and open the door. Your laughter cuts short when you're suddenly face to face with your brother. Hunk stands behind him.

"What are you doing in the girls' dorm?" you ask, but then take the opportunity you just created for yourself to tease your dear elder brother. You think of it as a bit of revenge for crashing the simulator. "Visiting someone?"

Lance rolls his eyes. "Heh, I wish," he sighs. "But no. We're thinking about hitting the town tonight! You know, for some team bonding?"

"Who is it?" your roommate calls to you.

"Lance and Hunk," you say over your shoulder at her.

"Punch him!" she shouts back.

"No!" you hiss and turn back to your brother.

"I don't like your roommate," Lance comments under his breath.

"Neither do I," you joke.

"I heard that!" your roommate barks.

"No you didn't!" you ready. But getting the feeling that she's going to keep interrupting, you push Lance out of your way and step into the hall with him and Hunk. You then close the door and give the boys your full attention.

"So, you're gonna come with us?" Lance asks.

"I don't know," you say with uncertainty in your tone. You cross your arms. "It's past curfew and I don't really think you have off-campus privileges..."

"That doesn't matter," Lance waves his hand dismissively. "Iverson wants us to bond as a team, so why don't we listen to him for once?"

"I'm not feeling that adventurous," you say.

"What? Why not? It'll be fun!" Lance cajoles.

"Lance, your idea of fun always ends up with you and me in the principal's office," Hunk reminds. "Don't drag your little sibling into it."

"Hunk has a point," you say. "I don't want to get in trouble again. I had my filling for today."

"Since when were you a goodie-two-shoes?" Lance asks in a somewhat offended tone.

"Since I got a scholarship here?" you quirk an eyebrow at him.

"Who are you and what have you done with my sibling?" Lance says as he gives you a look of utter betrayal, as if you were some alien.

You roll your eyes. "I'm not too keen on losing something like that because I went along with your dumb shenanigans," you sigh.

"Please, the max punishment for something like this is just a weekend detention with old man Brechin," Lance says and a mischievous grin spreads on his face. "That is, if you get caught."

You bite your lip, looking away in thought. Team bonding sounds very appealing after what happened today, but are you willing to risk your scholarship? You don't know if you can lose it because of a simple detention. The Galaxy Garrison is a government program, which means they are pretty strict.

"Do you really need to think about it?" Lance asks with raised eyebrows. "Don't tell me you're scared!"

His words irk you immensely.

You snap your gaze up to him. Is he serious? You aren't scared. Why would you be scared of sneaking out?

You silently walk back into your dorm and quickly throw a bra on, some socks, and your shoes.

"Where are you going?" your roommate asks as she watches you scramble about the room with a sense of purpose all of a sudden.

"Team bonding," you say, now tying the laces of your shoes.

"This late? Are you sure?" she asks.

"All common sense in me left the moment Lance basically called me a scaredy-cat," you say bluntly.

"Well, have fun," your roommate says.

You give her a small salute as you walk out of the dorm. "I'll be back by morning."

"Alright, see ya!"

You close the door and turn to Lance and Hunk expectantly. "Well?"

Lance gives you a cocky grin, proud of his persuasion skills. You suddenly consider your roommate's suggestion for a second.

"We need to go grab Pidge," Lance says. "It won't be team bonding if someone's missing. You gotta have everybody."

You shrug, doubting Pidge will join.

Lance takes the liberty of leading the way to the boys' dorm, you and Hunk following closely behind. You expertly dodge the officers patrolling the halls making sure students are in their dorms like ninjas on a stealth mission.

As Lance rounds a corner, he suddenly stops and back peddles quickly. He peeks around the corner and watches whatever is on the other side. Curious, you and Hunk sneak up close to Lance and peek as well.

Pidge steps out of his room, a backpack swung over his shoulders. He checks his surroundings before closing the door and running off.

You, Lance, and Hunk share a look. You all then telepathically agree to follow the small boy. Once again, Lance takes the lead.

[amberbeach]

'CAUGHT IN THE CROSSFIRE'

gif belongs to me

From the moment you transfered to the school, it was made abundantly clear to everyone that T.J. was immediately smitten with you. He fought aliens on a weekly basis, yet he couldn't muster the courage to ask you out on a date - something Carlos teased him for relentlessly.

In the beginning, during your first few weeks settling in, you were aware of his feelings, as well as the gossip mill that traveled fast through the school. Although you knew how he felt, you waited for him to make the first move, but after two months you gave up waiting, deciding that maybe he wasn't as interested in you as you were made to believe which deeply disappointed you.

A year went by and when a new semester started, you decided that you would no longer wait for T.J. and accepted a date with a boy in your math class. The news spread quickly through the school, and Cassie and Ashley tried to keep T.J. unaware of it, but the news reached his ears and the newly appointed Blue Space Ranger was devastated.

There had been several moments in which he worked up the courage to ask you out on a date. But his comm would beep and he would have to dash off to the next emergency, or he would back out in fear of rejection. Hearing you had a date with someone else, made him believe he had lost his chance.

But fate had a way of bringing two people together, and when the restaurant you were eating in was attacked by Astronema's Quantrons, it was T.J. who was sent in to clear the building with Carlos while Andros, Cassie and Ashley fought the Quantrons.

The building was starting to fall apart, the floorboards opening up do to the severity of the attack and T.J. heard your screams and rushed to your aid. You gasped when the hatch of the elevator opened, surprised to see the Blue Ranger you had seen on the news as of late. T.J. was equally surprised to find you clinging on for dear life and swallowed down his nerves and his worry, calling out to you.

"Don't worry. I'll get you out."

He climbed inside while Carlos waited to help you both out. T.J. approached you, his eyes scanning over your figure for any injuries, relieved when there was none.

One of the cables of the elevator snapped and you screamed, T.J. instinctively bringing you to his chest as the elevator shook.

"We haven't got much time!" Carlos called down to him.

T.J. looked down at you, "Ready?"

You nodded and put your hands on his shoulders as he gave you a boost, Carlos grabbing your hand while T.J. pushed your foot up. He sighed in relief when you made it up, and you looked around the shaft, seeing two doors had been pried open, explaining how they managed to reach you.

T.J. ran, jumping off the wall, and Carlos caught his hand, pulling him out of the elevator. Carlos climbed up first, and you looked at the shaft, seeing only darkness and T.J. put a hand on your shoulder, seeing how frightened you were.

"Come on. Let's get you out of here."

The second cable snapped and T.J felt his feet leave the roof of the elevator, instinctively clutching the cable, and wrapping an arm around your waist. Your scream echoed through the shaft, as you buried your head in his chest, afraid to look down.

Carlos sighed in relief, reaching out his hand for you to take. You swallowed thickly, unaware of TJ's heart hammering in his chest as you took Carlos's hand, the Black Ranger pulling you to safety before repeating the action with T.J.

Your eyes swept across the destruction as the two Rangers led you outside. Quantrons prevented you from leaving and T.J. and Carlos stood in front of you, prepared to fight.

You watched in amazement as the two fended off the Quantrons. For a few minutes it appeared as if they were winning until the Black Ranger was sent flying outside and the Blue Ranger hit the wall, falling onto his stomach as he demorphed. You were shocked when you saw T.J. lying on the ground, groaning in pain, but didn't hesitate to run over to him.

You were grabbed by Quantrons before you could reach him and you screamed in frustration when you couldn't break free. "T.J!"

The Quantrons led you outside and T.J was right behind them, knocking them away from you. You stared at him in relief, as he placed a hand on your arm.

"Get to safety."

You nodded, biting the inside of your cheek worriedly. "Be careful."

T.J. watched as you rushed outside, seeing you speak to a paramedic before he turned to the Quantrons while morphing, ready to fight.

You held the blanket over your shoulders, your eyes focusing on the building that was becoming more unstable, waiting for T.J. to come running out. Ten agonisingly long minutes later, he did.

You sighed in relief when he exited, seeing he was unharmed. Your attention was drawn to the paramedic who had checked you over, leaving the ambulance when given the all clear.

You were about to head home when T.J. approached you. "Y/N!" He jogged over to you, walking beside you once he had caught up. "Are you alright?"

"Aside from the worst date of my life? I'll be fine." You sent him a small smile. "And don't worry. Your secret is safe with me."

T.J. smiled, both relieved you were uninjured and that your date had been a disaster. "Thank you."

Believing that's why he had come over, you sent him a smile before turning away. "Do you want to go out sometime?" T.J. stepped forward and you turned to him.

You were surprised, but not opposed to the idea. "Okay. Sure. Why not?"

"Thursday? Say...five o'clock?" He suggested.

You nodded. "Sounds great."

T.J. smiled. "Great!"

You bit the inside of your cheek as you stepped forward, kissing his cheek. "See you around." You smiled before walking away and this time T.J. didn't follow, too stunned to move. Carlos walked over to him with Cassie by his side.

"So..."

"We're going out on Thursday." T.J. grinned.

"That's great!" Carlos patted his shoulder.

"I told you she would say yes."

Suddenly T.J. came to realize that he had no plans for your date, panicking on the spot. "Oh, no! Where will I take her?"

Carlos shook his head, leading him away from the destruction, the trio heading home. "You'll think of something. You've been in love with her for a year. You know everything about her. You'll think of something."

T.J. nodded slowly, remembering you had kissed his cheek. Seeing the dreamy smile on his lips, Cassie smiled while Carlos chuckled. It would be difficult for T.J. to focus on anything except the kiss you had left on his cheek for a while.

[starlightkun]

⇢ teaser word count: 2.2k | series word count: 67.8k ⇢ warnings: past unethical experimentation, brief blood and gore descriptions (some human and some non-human), you have to accept the premise of a single human empire in space in the future with colonies and a military and not think deeper about that ⇢ genre: sci-fi, set in the near-ish future, humans and aliens and robots, black op mission, captain kun, ?????? reader, slow burn, fluff, dash of angst, ft. wayv as the crew of the vision ⇢ extra info: took a lot of obvious inspo for this one from isaac asimov’s robot stories, specifically his concept of positronic brains & the three laws of robotics (and if you’ve read any of his stories, you’ll probably be able to see some other places too) ⇢ estimated release date: saturday, may 18, 2024 6:00 p.m. eastern time ⇢ series masterlist

The air smelled like blood, burned electrical components, and whatever horrible odor came from blood getting onto electrical components as they sparked. All the blood wasn’t human, you could tell that, too. Skipper blood always stung your nose like rubbing alcohol. It was pitch black in the space you were hiding in, or maybe it was just nighttime. You should be scared, but your heart wasn’t beating fast for some reason.

Two pairs of heavy footfalls. One was heavier than the other. Walking, so definitely not Skippers. Both were still too light to be heavier races.

They slowed to a stop outside your hiding spot, and you really hoped they couldn’t read the Outspacer controls that would open the otherwise impossible-to-see door. After all, it was a language that had been dead for hundreds of millions of years, there was no way—

“Hey, Zennie, you got a read on these?” A man’s voice came from nearby, muffled by both the wall and presumably a helmet as well. Human, or related species.

You couldn’t hear this ‘Zennie’s reply, as it most likely came through the comms in his helmet, but you could hear the man’s side of the conversation.

“Oh, of course, how dare I, a mere meatsack, doubt your high-and-mighty artificial intelligence,” he replied with fake deference. “Yeah, yeah, I know that’s not what you meant. Alright, so just tell me which one’s the self-destruct button so I don’t press it?”

“Move, Wong, before you blow us up.” Another voice interjected. “ZEN? You said it’s a passageway? Oh, safe shelter. Bit different, don’t you think? Mind translating the dead language right the first time?”

He paused as he probably listened to Zen’s reply, then continued, “So? You know which one’s the open button?”

You couldn’t go anywhere. The hideout you were in was designed to hold only a few people for weather emergencies, to be structurally sound; not to have a back door in case you needed to escape intruders. You just had to hope Zen was completely wrong and they wouldn’t get it open.

Click.

There goes that.

The door dematerialized, and the rancid smell from before became even stronger. A man peered in barrel-first, and you recoiled back from the sudden light flooding your vision. You couldn’t press yourself any further back into the corner, but you still turned your head away to shield your sensitive eyes.

It only took a couple strides for one of the men to reach you, the other stayed back in the hallway, keeping his rifle fixed on you. The man stood over where you were sitting on the floor—your legs had gotten tired of standing after so long—and lowered his gun slightly so you could see the entirety of the front plate that covered his face. It was a reflective shield that gave you no clue to who was behind it, only let you see a warped, thinned and stretched version of yourself cowering in a corner. His armor was an improved version of the standard issue United Human Navy, if the insignia on both of his shoulders didn’t make that clear enough. It looked the same as the standard issue, but the heft of his footsteps had belied a weight difference that wasn’t explained by his stature or build, so it must be the grade of material.

“Are you hurt?” His voice came through an external speaker on his helmet. He was speaking in standard human. You couldn’t detect any sort of odd stiltedness or lag that sometimes happened with computer-assisted translations. He was assuming you understood standard human, and you did.

“No,” you replied, slowly uncrossing your arms to show your hands first, that you didn’t have anything hidden in them to attack him with. You still weren’t scared, for some reason.

“Oh, she’s pretty,” his companion commented from the hallway. The two of them must be sharing helmet feeds, as the one in front of you was definitely blocking most of you from his sight.

“Wong, shut it.” The outer speaker had been turned off for that, but it was still pretty clear to you.

“Sir, yes sir.”

“Can you stand?” His weapon was still at the ready, his finger resting above the trigger.

You couldn’t remember the last time you’d wiggled your fingers and toes, and it felt good to do it. “Yes.”

He stepped back, the unexpressive mirror of his face shield watching as you pushed up from your half-sit half-crouch, bracing yourself against the wall. Your body instinctively took a deep breath to try to recover from the sudden exertion, but the vaporized Skipper blood burned your entire respiratory tract, and you coughed and spluttered trying to force it back out, catching yourself on the wall on your forearms to stay upright. The odor made your head swim, your eyes water, and your chest hurt like someone had put gasoline in your lungs and struck a match.

“Okay, woah, woah.” Two gloved hands were on your arms and back, helping you stay up. His voice was muffled again as he switched to his in-helmet comms, “Xiao, get over here! We’ve got a survivor! Yes, really, just look at my stream.”

Then, his voice was projecting to you once more, “Breathe, breathe.”

You felt the roughness of a thumb wiping at the tears running down your cheeks, the durable material of his glove scratching against your skin. He grabbed the front of your shirt collar, pulling it up towards your face at the same time he firmly pulled your hand down that had been covering your mouth as you wheezed. Positioning the material over your nose and mouth into a makeshift filter of some sort, he continued holding it there for you as you took a few breaths.

“Better?”

You nodded shallowly. The smell of Skipper blood still cloyed to your throat and lungs, but the shirt helped keep more from entering.

More footsteps from down the hall, then another pair entered the shelter.

“Holy shit…” Someone breathed out.

“I know, man,” the voice that you were already pretty sure was ‘Wong’ from earlier replied.

“How long has she been in here?” A fourth voice asked, belonging to the footsteps getting closer to you.

“I don’t know,” the man already with you answered. “Wong and I just found her while clearing this sector.”

“Okay, well, you mind, Captain?” He said indicatively. “Can’t examine my patient through you.”

“You got it?” The captain asked you, shaking the collar slightly.

You took it from him, holding it over the bridge of your nose yourself as he had been doing for you before. Looking into his face shield where you were pretty sure his eyes should be, you nodded firmly this time.

He didn’t step back until you felt another pair of gloves grabbing your elbows where he had been. The newcomer’s uniform differed from the others’ in one way, he had a neon green rectangular patch on his right arm below his UHN insignia, as well as a few other places—intergalactic signal for medic. It was removable for the wearer’s own safety, and his in particular was slightly askew, as if he’d just slapped it back on in a hurry.

The medic flipped through the pockets of a pack strapped to his thigh before pulling out a small disc of clear plastic and pushing that against your hand. “Here, this’ll work a lot better than your shirt.”

You accepted it, and he helped you orient it the right way over your nose and mouth. It was apparently a mask or rebreather of some sort. It wasn’t exceptionally bulky, and you could feel that there was some sort of fine mesh material on the inside. Immediately, you could tell the difference. The air coming into your lungs carried only the slightest tinge of lingering burning electronics smell, and while you could tell that there was Skipper blood, it didn’t burn, or make your head spin. It was just unpleasant.

“There. How’s that?”

You gave him a thumbs-up, the standard human gesture for good, since they all seemed to speak standard human. The mask didn’t allow much room for talking.

“Alright, good. Are you injured?”

You shook your head.

“Do you feel pain anywhere?”

You shook your head again.

“Good, good. I have more questions, but we should get somewhere you can breathe. Give me a second.” He looked upwards as if talking to the heavens, and his outer speaker turned off. “Liu? Professor? Did you finish clearing the building? Alright, ZEN, got readings on air quality for her?”

After a pause, both the medic, Xiao, and the captain, who had been hovering behind him the whole time, nodded.

“Thanks, ZEN.” Xiao’s speaker turned on, “Here, our teammates found somewhere that you can breathe. It’s going to be a little bit of a walk, though. Is that okay?”

You nodded. Your legs would just have to deal.

“It’s not pretty out here…” The only one that hadn’t been identified to you in passing called out as a warning from his position in the hallway with ‘Wong.’

You turned around and pushed off the wall as your answer.

Stepping into the hall, you knew why you had smelled that particular concoction of smells. Just off to your left were two dead Skippers, their uniquely-articulated hind limbs that gave them their distinct gait—and consequently, the questionably flattering nickname from humans—stuck out at awkward angles now. Dark purple sludge seeped out from under their armor, Skipper blood. On the outside of the armor were smears, streaks, and splatters turned a gleaming ruby red under the emergency lights, human blood.

You couldn’t see any dead humans, or pieces of them, in this corner, but you remembered what the captain had called you. A survivor. Which meant there were others who didn’t survive.

“Come on.” It was the captain who ushered you the other direction from the Skipper bodies. “This way.”

Their helmets must have been mapping out the facility as the unit cleared it and displaying a route in all of their HUDs, because the four of them moved as if they knew the building like the back of their hand. The captain and Xiao flanked you on either side, with Wong at the front and the fourth unnamed one at the rear. You couldn’t tell if it felt more like a protection detail or a prisoner transport.

You kept your eyes on your feet not only so you didn’t have to see all of the mutilation, or to keep from stepping in something, but to avoid the unsettling, cold dread slowly sinking over you when from the moment you caught a look at the first dead human you passed by with her remarkably in-tact face, dandelion yellow blouse and lab coat, and realized you didn’t recognize her. When you inhaled sharply and shot your eyes down to your feet, you could tell that the captain noticed. He turned his head just ever so slightly towards you, off of the consistent path it had been before, and he paused, then went back to keeping watch.

They weren’t kidding when they said it was a bit of a walk. You could feel the muscles in your legs get sore, then start twitching, then start shaking, but you didn’t even consider asking to stop.

“Woah, Liu, slow down!” The captain ordered into his headset. “Okay, yeah, I see it. Don’t touch anything. We’re just sweeping right now, remember?”

“Great, the kid’s found more toys,” the one behind you snorted.

Xiao and Wong suddenly erupted into more laughter than that statement warranted you were pretty sure.

Wong then informed him with a snicker, “Mic’s on, Ten.”

“You say that as if I wouldn’t have said that to his face, too,” the one now finally identified as Ten retorted.

“ZEN, the mics, please?” The captain sighed. “Thank you.”

“Now he’s going to whine that we were shit talking him behind his back,” Xiao groaned. “Again.”

“Well we are,” Ten laughed.

“If he just stopped acting like a baby, Captain here wouldn’t have to step in and put him in time out all the time,” Wong clicked his tongue.

“You think he’s the one in time out right now?” The captain replied dryly.

You couldn’t help but let out a small chuckle into your mask, trying to cover it up with a cough when all four of their reflective shields whipped around to face you, as if they’d forgotten you were there. After an uncomfortable stretch of silence, they all shifted back into their watchful stances.

The captain suddenly spoke again, “Yes, Professor? Okay, sure… ZEN, put that on everyone’s HUDs.”

The lack of commentary from any of them for seemingly several minutes was startling, and you weren’t sure if you wanted to know what this ‘Professor’ was showing them.

“We’re going to have to go back there after dropping Xiao and her off, aren’t we?” Wong was the first to speak.

“Don’t ask questions you don’t want the answers to,” Ten sighed.

“Or already know the answer to,” the captain said. “If she has any wounds that Xiao needs to tend to, one of you will stay to keep guard. If not, it’ll be Ten and Wong with me to meet up with Liu and the Professor, and Xiao will stay with her.”

“Alright, Ten,” Wong rolled out his neck. “Rock paper scissors?”

⇢ series masterlist | blog masterlist

[liquid-luck-00]

My Life is One Complication After Another 3

Cursing Ahead 🤬

Ao3 *** First *** Previous *** Next

~~~~~~~~~~

Ever since Mari's classmates stopped talking with her, they also stopped asking her for favors. Along with a blocked and rotating schedule for patrols meant that she actually had a sleep schedule. Sure she didn't get nearly enough but that was what coffee is for.

That was how she found herself down in the bakery with her papa. Roy had called her and the four of them talked and it was comfortable. Mari was the one who opened and was watching the front. She was still talking with Roy, but now it was on a headset, as he was out patrolling In Starling City.

"So as I was saying before we were oh so rudely interrupted." came Roy's voice in her ear. "So Ice cream and movies?"

A soft laughter escaped her and a smile on her lips.

"Sounds gre..." the bell at the door chimed. "Hey guys come in," she greeted the Waynes.

"Let me guess the bats?" Roy supplied as Dick bounced towards the counter.

"Good morning Marinette!" Dick practically sang loud enough for even Roy to hear.

"God how the hell is he so chipper so early." she heard Roy grumble.

"God damn morning people," she grumbled. That elicited laughter from both Roy and Jason.

"Amen to that!" Tim seconded in a monotone lifting a coffee cup. "Maman I'm going to take the Waynes up." she called poking her head into the kitchen. Her Maman nodded so she picked up her phone and walked towards them.

"I'll Let you go," Roy was about to hang up.

"Wait how about we give the Bats a heart attack." she smirked changing to the ancient language of miracles.

"I like the way you think, I'll catch you later." he responded in the same tongue.

"See ya then." she smiled, switching back the language. Ending the call and removing the ear piece. “Are you guys coming or do I have to drag you guys?" she turned back already at the door. Granted most of them showed confused faces and side eyes, but she smiled. They followed her without saying a word.

Once they were in the apartment she excused herself to change into more appropriate gear. She activated Kaalki’s miraculous, who then silently portaled out.

That being said she changed into a pair of black skinny cargo pants with red combat boots. A black long sleeve shirt under a cropped red sleeveless hoodie. Her hair was half down with red and pink streaks and a mini white gold backpack with three patches in the same white gold finished her outfit. She grabbed four parcels and went down.

"So we can either do the boring ground tour or," she held up the bundles. "we can turn up the speed."

"I like the way you think Pixie Pop." Jason stood and she handed him his.

"Roy sent me you guy's sizes, so I altered and customized a few things." she smiled. "bathroom is over there and the guest room is next to it." Dick looked torn between excited and horrified when handed his stack.

Tim seemed awake, but she knew better, "go change and I'll have a fresh pot of coffee ready." He nodded robotically as he got up.

She set the last bunch next to Damian, who was looking like an angry kitten. She sat down next to him and leaned in.

"What are you.." he started but Mari whispered in his ear.

"The jacket has a hidden sling for a katana, which will be practically invisible when on." His eyes widened slightly and there was a bit of slack in his jaw now. Before turning into an amused smirk. "Use my room up the stairs and through the hatch." she finished as he headed up the stairs.

"I'm impressed he let you close without struggling," Bruce broke his silence, as she finished prepping the coffee maker.

"Well he would have if," she began as Damian practically crashed down the stairs and all but tackled Bruce before rushing out the door. The closest she had ever seen her baby brother smile, which effectively made her smile.

"Holy crap! What are you?!" Dick made himself known.

"More importantly what the fuck did you do with Demon spawn!" Jason shouted from next to Tim, who was being propped up by both Jason and Dick.

"Tt. I am right here Todd." The scowl reappearing on his features. "It is adequate Dupain-Cheng."

"I'll take it as a compliment on one condition."

"And that is?" he rose a brow.

"You call me Marinette not Dupain-Cheng. I'm your sister aren't I?"

He seemed to war with himself for a moment before stating. "That is acceptable, Marinette."

At this point all the bats in the room were playing a game of ping-pong between Marinette and Damian. They were trying to figure out what magic spell Marinette must have used, when in reality she just seemed to fall into Damian’s good graces automatically. OK so maybe Marinette being the holder of the ladybug miraculous as well as being the great guardian of the order has that affect on most people, a sense of respect and trust that seems to permeate her aura.

She was handing Tim a huge mug as the front door swung open to reveal her Maman.

"Hello Bruce," Sabine greeted.

"It is good to see you Sabine," was his response.

“Maman," Mari pulled her mother's attention from her biological father. "These are Bruce's boys and my brothers. Tim, Jason, Dick, and Damian." she motioned to each one respectively.

"It's nice to meet all of you." Sabine smiled, "why don't all of you get something from the bakery before you go."

After finishing their small breakfast in the park Mari pulled out a map and a marker.

"So what do you guys want to see?" They listed off places that she marked down. She added a few to the list to fill it out, marked the route and took a picture and sent it to Roy. "Okay so this will work." she glanced at her phone. A quick look on social media showed no one has found Andre yet. She pulled out a case of comms and added, "Also keep your eyes out for Andre."

"Who is that?" Dick asked taking the earpiece.

"Andre's Ice cream cart, the best ice cream in Paris." Marinette answered.

"Then why must we look for him?" Damian added.

"Well he changes locations daily and turns it into a game of tag of sorts."

"Alright, lead the way Pixie." with a smirk she dashed off her brothers close on her heels.

Yes this is the best way to get to see the city, but this was also a test to see how the bats did without their toys.

Getting to Notre Dame was uneventful. Dick kept up a steady conversation with her, just a step behind with Damian, Jason brought up the rear but would constantly toss in quips and questions. Damian and Tim were mostly quiet, unless they were trying to get one of their brothers to stop a particularly embarrassing story.

Getting to the Louve was even more entertaining. Now that Dick had a feel for the Parisian roofs he would do flips and vaults to make her laugh. In the Louve is another story.

They had accidentally ran into some of her classmates, quite literally. She and her brothers were taking goofy 'walk like an Egyptian' group photos on the second floor of the Egyptian exhibit, the mini Ladybug camera was reattaching to her phone charm when Tim began asking her questions about it.

"Well my best friend loves anime, and we kinda sorta binged the entire Dragon Ball series and when we saw the ladybug camera. He said it would be impossible to create and maintain the quality of the image. So I kinda sorta made it out of spite." she mumbled the end.

"Hell if you weren't my sister I would beg Bruce to adopt you," Tim stated. "Do you have the files I would love to look through them. Maybe send them to Babs or Cy!"

"Sure I think I have it on a flash drive." That was when a tall body, walking backwards slammed into her, pushing her into Jason. "oof."

"You okay." Dick was in full mama hen mode fretting over her.

"I wasn't watching where I was going." the figure spoke as he turned around. "I'm sor." the words died on his tongue, Kim.

Max, Alix, Nino, Alya, and oh kwami no Lila, who were now all snickering.

"I'm fine Dick," she smiled to reassure him. However her classmates were shocked.

Lila of course was the one who broke the silence, by beginning to cry. "I'm so sorry about her. I know she hates me but to be so rude to a complete stranger!" her sobs breaking the sentence while her lackeys went to console her, glaring daggers at Marinette.

"Seriously girl," Alya began to scold her. "Your little out burst not only made Lila cry. Your insulting someone who is just trying to be nice."

She and her brothers were now standing awkwardly being scolded by a teenager. After three minutes of trying to figure out what they were being scolded for and why the guys hadn't apparently left.

"What the fuck did she do that your yelling at her for?" Jason finally broke Alya's rant. Now it was the five Parisians and the Italian to stand there confused.

"She called him a dick," Alya sighed exasperated.

"Yes." Dick answered confusing them further.

"Dick."Tim now called.

"What?!"

"Dick!!" Damian, Marinette, Tim, and Jason all called, and immediately began laughing.

"What? Oh, oh," a sheepish smile now on his face. “Names Richard but I go by Dick,” he explained to those who weren’t laughing, smiling at them.

"Tt. this is why I call you Grayson." Damian rolled his eyes. "Besides this one still has not apologized." he jabbed a finger to Kim.

"It's not worth it Damian,” Marinette shook her head. "We should head back to the bakery anyways. Maman has probably finished scolding Bruce." she smirked.

"Damn I wish I was a fly on the wall for that conversation" Jason lamented.

"Well..." she held up the ladybug charm and flipped it over showing an empty space.

"Two!" Tim shouted.

"Anyone who beats me back gets a copy," she smiled.

"Your on." Jason nodded as he vaulted over the safety wall from the second floor. Damian and Dick sprinted in opposite directions.

"Sorry Mars your gonna loose." Tim shouted as the last to leave.

"We'll see," she shot back. "Bye," She turned to her classmates as she grabbed the railing above and flipped up and over to the third floor, running to one of the secret zip lines the miraculous team set up.

"What the fuck" was faintly heard behind her, all but Lila and Max shouted by the sounds of it, as she jumped from the window.

She made up quite a bit of distance and seemed to be on Damian's heel. She had passed Tim and Dick was a few steps behind. Jason was just out of arm reach. So with a burst of speed both she and Damian were shoulder to shoulder with Jason.

The three of them simultaneously practically crashed into the side door of the bakery.

"I won."

"In your dreams Todd."

"I beat both you and Pixie"

"Check your eyes, or do you need the camera installed in your helmet." Jason's gaze hardened at Damian's words.

"How about we call it a three way tie and you both get a copy." Mari interrupted. "We should head up." Laughing Marinette opened the door and went up.

Lunch was rambunctious, but she was coming to expect that with her brothers.

“Too bad we couldn’t find that ice cream guy Mari,” Tim spoke up once everyone had finished eating.

“Oh let’s see if anyone has posted where he’s at today!” She went to check her phone but a message ended up distracting her.

Andres in your favorite spot I’ll meet you there at 7 your time.

"Cool he’ s in my favorite spot in all of Paris which just happens to be the last spot on our list today," she announced, sending off a text, setting her phone down, screen up.

Can't wait Katniss

"Why don’t you all go and Mari can get to know Bruce," Sabine offered.

OK granted it’s a good idea, maybe I should get to know my biological father but am I ready to? Do I want to? Am I yes, yes I want to get to know my biological father, yes I want my family to grow, my brothers are such protective goofballs and I love them already.

"Sounds good," she smiled.

That was when her phone lit up from a message. She went to pick it up, but she was to slow.

Jason was the one who snacked her phone. "Message from Katniss says see ya then Peeta. So who's Katniss Pixie."

"Well..." she started but she began to blush furiously.

"That would be her boyfriend," her Maman decided to add before heading back down to the bakery with Papa.

Dick pounced asking a million and one questions, Bruce physically froze but she could tell his mind was racing because that look was much the same as hers. Jason was pensive, while Tim and Damian just seemed bored or tired.

So that was how she found herself talking about Roy, blushing furiously. While simultaneously avoiding his name and details that would tip any of them off. After about a half hour of her answering questions did Dick start telling her about his fiancée. How they were planning on setting a date for the wedding.

After that the next few hows was spent sharing stories and tidbits of themselves.

However, thanks to Dick a design was swimming in her mind. so she did the only logical thing and ran up to her room. Grabbed three drives, her tablet and pen and ran back down. She tossed the red drive to Tim, and Jason and Damian each a black drive. Plopped down and began stretching out an Italian suit with a nock lapel. A rough coloration of a midnight blue offset by a sapphire. Accents of golden thread, emerald buttons and an Osiria rose in the lapel. She signed the design 'Mira Luck' and handed Dick the tablet.

"So I couldn't help myself," she begun to fidget. "But in my defense you told a designer about a wedding and my brain wouldn't stop screaming at me until this was on something. So what do you think? I know its rough but."

"Holy Shit your Mira Luck as in M, Jagged Stones personal designer. You are M as in the designer for the Lucky Spot!!" Tim screamed lunging to take the tablet from Dick.

"That's me," a blindingly bright smile lit up her features.

"So what do you think?" she asked again.

"It's amazing we were actually hoping to talk to you about Kori’s dress." Dick smiled. "I could call her it's not too late there."

"Perhaps it would be best to discuss it in person when Marinette next goes, that way she can get to know Gotham." Bruce interjected.

"That actually might be sooner than you think," she responded.

"I was actually accepted to be an exchange student for the next semester at Gotham Academy."

"Wait you’re willing we going to Gotham to study! You ’re going to Gotham willingly. Bruce I think your daughter might be a little crazy." Jason surprisingly brought up.

"I might be but but it’s no crazier than Paris and it’s a Akumas. Besides I would love to design your fiancée’s dress and we should head over to Andre’s ice cream before the sunsets that way we can watch the lighting of the Eiffel tower." She got up and called out. "Hey Jason mind passing me my backpack."

"Yeah sure," he went around he couch to grab it and toss it to her but before he did he finally seemed to notice the patches. "Wait are these The Outlaws."

"Yeah Red Hood, Arsenal, Star Fire, and Bizarro." she was smiling.

"Why choose The Outlaws?" Tim brought up.

"Honestly it was because Roy mentioned something about Arsenal and Red Hood and I ended up liking of the logos, so I made them into the backpack," she shrugged. "Besides unless you’re looking at it close enough you can’t tell which is always fun to see if people pay attention to it, let’s go."

At that the six of them walked out of the apartment, away from the bakery towards the Palais de Chaillot.

"So what's so special about Andre's Ice cream?" B asked.

"Personally I think he is a meta. But what he does is he can either see your true reflection or that of the person best suited to you."

"So he sees souls?" Tim added.

"Not quite, more like he sees the main qualities of you or your go." she tapped her chin.

"But he is meta,” Tim tried to figure.

"That's the only explanation I can come up with but I have no idea." Marinette shrugged.

"So how does he do it." Tim was now fully invested in this.

"Well you either ask for love or self and he usually does three to four ice cream flavors and gives a short reason."

They were now at the top of the stairs at the Palais de Chaillot looking out at the Eiffel Tower. They stood there as the last of the light faded from the sky. The city was dark for a moment as the Eiffel Tower lit up and slowly the lamps lit up.

"So that's why this is your favorite spot Minnie." A voice behind her chuckled. She turned around and nearly tackled him.

"Hey speedy." she pecked his cheek.

Not a second later did Jason scream, "Roy!"

"Ready for that movie?” Roy asked her an arm around her shoulders.

"Of course," she smiled. "See you guys around."

"What the fuck are you doing in Paris Roy!?" Jason screamed.

"Um... Date night," he answered. The Waynes were now practically surrounding the couple.

"What?" Apparently it was Dick's turn to yell.

"Seriously. I thought you said the bats and birds were detectives." she spoke just loud enough for them to hear. "It's kinda hard to believe with the big bat having a heart attack over there." Sure enough Bruce was seriously hyperventilating.

"Oh mind giving this to LB?" He handed her a small nondescript red box.

"Sure," Marinette took the box, "Au Revoir."

From there they left and oh kwamii did she wish she could replay that again, oh wait I can.

Next

~~~~~~~~~~

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[bimormondisaster]

Four times Crosshair helped his brothers and one time he did the best he could.

Hello! This is my first time doing something like this so I hope you enjoy it. I'm still very new to writing and I suck at editing so I'm sorry for any mistakes.

Word count: 2,781

Warnings:

Wrecker- Mentions of blood, violence, Hurt character.

Hunter- Mentions of overstimulation and migraines

Echo- Nightmares

CT-9904- That scene from s1 e1 tbb

Wrecker (Cadets, age around 16)

The feeling of the clone’s face against Crosshair’s fist was satisfying. Even after the blood started to cover his knuckles, he kept punching. It wasn’t until the cadet’s eyes closed that he stopped. He let the boy’s tunic go, and he hit the ground with a dull thud. He would wake up eventually and Crosshair would inevitably get punished but right now he didn’t care.

He was alone when he got the com. He was getting cleaned up after some private training., about to meet his brothers in the cafeteria but when Hunter told him that kriffen reg had landed Wrecker in the med bay he changed course.

He made his way to the medbay. Stopping only to wash the blood off his hands. Looking in the mirror he noticed his hair was getting grayer. He wasn’t sure why his hair was graying so early but he didn’t mind it. Wrecker always teased him about it but he thought it made him look more mature.

The med bay door slid open revealing Hunter sitting beside a bed as Tech paced. A droid was hovering over the bed occupied by Wrecker.

Hunter stood as he walked over. “What took you so long?”

“I was busy.” He forced himself to look away from Wrecker’s bloody and bruised form and to Hunter. “How is he?”

Tech answered first. “Under these conditions, there is a 15 percent chance that he will wake up in the next hour, Every hour after that the chance goes up by 7.5 percent until hour five where if he’s not awake by then the chances lower by-”

“He’s going to be fine.” Hunter supplied, sending a comforting smile to Tech. The droid left without a word and the boys settled down. Wrecker’s face was swollen. The left side of his face was covered in bandages, including his eye. Every moment that he watched, that he saw his brother in this state, his fury grew.

“What happened?” He asked through clenched teeth.

Hunter and Tech shared a look and Tech adjusted his goggles.

“No one knows yet,” Hunter said.

His hands tensed into fists. The quickly bruising knuckles protested but he didn’t care. That’s when he saw it. Lula, tucked in beside Wrecker, was looking almost as bad as its owner. One of the ears was hanging on by a thread and a leg was missing.

Without saying anything Crosshair stood up and grabbed the stuffed toy.

“I found the leg in the hall.” He pulled it out and offered it to Crosshair who took it without a word.

Crosshair didn’t know how to sew but he tried his best with the supplies he could find in the med bay. They all waited. Hunter as still as possible, trying to keep the squad as calm as possible. Tech buried himself in his padd and tried to distract himself. Although every hour Crosshair could hear him whisper the new odds of Wrecker waking up.

Crosshair folded in on himself completely focused on fixing Lula. His long legs protested being forced into the chair, his back ached from being slouched, but he didn’t mind. After two hours Lula was all fixed up. It wasn’t what Crosshair would call a good job, but it was the best he could do. He just hoped it was enough.

Tech

If Tech wasn’t dead at the end of this Crosshair was going to kill him. Not surprisingly the job went bad and now they were in a shootout. His scope allowed him to see the chaos in the warehouse from the hill he was nested on. Amongst it all was Tech. Who disobeyed orders and abandoned his cover; running like a kriffin idiot trying to get to the computer.

“Tech get under cover!” Hunter’s voice came through the comm.

“No can do Hunter. If I can just-” Tech was cut off as more droids entered the warehouse, open firing.

Crosshair cursed under his breath and started to pick them off. There was little chance of this mission succeeding but that’s where they worked best. In the midst of the blaster fire, yelling, orders being called, and explosions he noticed something. Another blaster was shooting into the warehouse at Tech who had, so far, dodged the fire purely by dumb luck. He watched carefully, tuning out the bickering in his ear.

A streak of a blaster shot through the air heading for the very clueless Tech who was pinned down. Without thinking he aimed. Time slowed as he watched the bullet fly through the air. His finger tightened on the trigger and in the time of a heartbeat he fired. The bullets collided and went wide, missing Tech who was quickly getting surrounded.

He aimed again, this time at the chains holding up the large doors. He shot. The first chain broke. Reaming at the other chain he fired again. His brothers could handle the droids, He’d handle the sniper. He shot again. The chain rattled but stayed in place. Another shot and the door dropped crushing the few droids underneath.

“Cross what’s happening? Was that you?” Hunter’s voice broke through the wall of concentration he put up.

“Little busy” He replied, moving positions to aim where the other nest would be and waited. One breath, two, three, there. Movement caught his eye as someone poked their head up. His finger tightened and he felt the familiar kick of his gun. The figure dropped and He stood.

By the time grabbed a speeder and made his way to the warehouse the fight was over and other than a few burns and cuts his brothers were safe.

Hunter

Hunter was having another bad day. He didn’t have them as often as he did when they were cadets. He had learned how to suppress it better. Or, Crosshair suspected, how to hide them better.

However, he still had days where he was easily overwhelmed. They all knew the signs. Talking quieter, flinching more, headaches, tensing at the smallest sound, not wanting people to talk or touch him, sitting further away from the group. Crosshair had had migraines before and remembered how awful those were, he was glad that he would never have to deal with increased senses.

Hunter was in the cockpit looking out the window. Everyone had tried to give him as much space as possible so they were making themselves busy elsewhere. He set a steaming cup of the tea he always drank when he had bad days down as gently as possible in front of Hunter and sat across from him. They sat in silence for a time. He watched Hunter slowly sip the tea.

“Thank you,” Hunter whispered

“You should go lay down. I’ll keep the others quiet.” Although he had lowered his voice Hunter still winced.

“I’m okay, We’re almost to the mission anyway.”

Stubborn as always. Wordlessly Crosshair checked the computers, there was an uninhabited planet not far from them. He entered the coordinates and the ship changed course.

Hunter raised a questioning eyebrow and he just gave him a smile.

“Where are we going?”

“Jargon. It’s quiet.”

“Cross I-” He glared at the dash that beeped and sighed. “Thank you”

He hummed in acknowledgment. The mission could wait a few hours, or even a few days, as long as his brothers were okay.

Echo

Crosshair couldn’t sleep. He and Echo had just gotten back to the ship after a week away. Tech, Hunter, and Wrecker were still away and weren’t expected until at least the next day. Why Hunter decided to make him go alone with the new guy was beyond him. He wasn’t interested in making friends. He had his brothers and that was more than enough.

He laid in his bunk staring up at the ceiling. The ship was eerily quiet with everyone being away. As much as he wanted to enjoy it, it filled him with dread. He had grown to love the noise and chaos that came with the bad batch and missed it when it was gone.

He heard movement and was pulled from his thoughts.

“No… No” Echo was murmuring. He sat up and got out of bed to see what was going on. Quietly making his way over he could see Echo tossing in his bunk. His first instinct was to call for Hunter. This was more of his thing. However, that wasn’t an option.

Kneeling beside the bed he put a hand on the clone’s shoulder. “Echo,” Echo responded by getting louder.

“No! Please!”

“Echo!” He shook him. “Wake up.”

The tossing stopped and his eyes opened with a deep breath. He tried to sit up but the hand stopped him. “Rex will come back for me!”

“He already has.” He removed his hand and leaned back to give the man some space. Dealing with nightmares wasn’t anything new. They all had them.

Clarity came into Echos eyes. “Crosshair?” He sat up, still breathing heavily.

“You had a nightmare.” It was a fact and yet Echo looked down ashamed. Crosshair watched carefully as Echo looked everywhere but him. “I’m sorry I woke you.” With that, he laid back down. Crosshair internally cursed both the regs and Hunter.

Nightmares were a part of life for the clones however the regs had something against talking about them. They preferred to keep the pain a secret, pretend it wasn’t there. Why they were taboo to talk about was beyond him. He had spent many nights listening to his brothers talk about theirs and he had spent almost as much time sitting up with at least one of his brothers because of his own nightmares.

While he understood why and even accepted bringing Echo aboard he still wasn’t that close to him and didn’t plan on getting close. He was, after all a reg. A reg who had special abilities now, but a reg nonetheless. He knew that Hunter wanted him to let Echo in the way he had let in his brothers. He also knew that he didn’t care what Hunter wanted. However, as he watched Echo close his eyes and pretend to fall back asleep his heart twisted.

He stood. “Come with me.” Without waiting he walked out of the ship. On his way out he grabbed a blanket.

A few moments after he walked out onto the ship’s ramp, Echo joined him.

“Crosshair? Is there a problem?” He still looked scared. Like any minute he’d be sucked back into his dreams never to return.

“Sit.” Echo did as was ordered. Sitting on the ramp. The black sky was filled with twinkling stars. Cross put the blanket over Echo’s shoulders and sat next to him.

Crosshair was looking straight ahead. “If you are going to be a part of the bad batch you need to learn to accept help.”

“I don’t know what you-”

“Fresh air is the best remedy for nightmares.” He turned to look at Echo. “There is no use in keeping them bottled up.”

They sat there most of the night. Echo told him about his time before being taken, his brothers, his commanders. He told him about Fives and Rex. He told him about his time as an unwilling traitor to the republic he loved.

They both silently promised to not talk about that night again. Echo didn’t want to be embarrassed and Crosshair didn’t want this responsibility any more than he needed to take it. Or at least that’s what he would say if pressed.

The next morning Crosshair was woken up by his brother’s arrival. Their part of the mission was a success. And as the five of them walked into the ship and Crosshair figured that maybe four brothers wouldn’t be so bad.

CT-9904

Good soldiers follow orders.

The rest of the bad batch was in the hanger. Predictable. They always thought they were a step ahead. Now he would show them how flawed their thinking really was. They were cowards trying to run away.

Hunter walked out from behind the crates. Reckless a small part of him thought. He ignored it. He had eyes on Wrecker, Echo, and Omega. All behind the crates. Tech was most likely in the ship.

“Best stand down Sargent,” He said. They were in a standoff and Crosshair knew who would win when the time came. The traitors wouldn’t hurt him. “Make it easy on yourself.”

“Have you lost your mind?” Hunter replied.

Yes

‘Quiet’

“We should’ve killed that Jedi. You disobeyed orders” Why didn’t Hunter follow the orders? If he had just been a good soldier, a good leader, then none of this would be happening.

“I did what I thought was right.” Hunters snapped, stepping forward.

“You never could see the bigger picture.” He shrugged. “Now surrender.”

Let them go.

Hunter glanced back at the group as they prepared for a firefight. Wrecker put his helmet on.

These are your brothers.

“Is that an order?” Hunter looked back at him.

He let out a chuckle. “I guess it is.”

Don’t do this.

“Well, I guess I’m disobeying that one too.”

They stayed staring at each other. Waiting to see who would make the first move. He spat out the toothpick.

Stop, please, no.

‘Quiet,’

His finger tightened as the thunder rumbled. He wanted Hunter to come peacefully. Why did Hunter never listen? He didn’t want to hurt them.

But he would do what he must.

In one motion he lifted his arm, set the blaster on it and fired. Hunter ducked and it hit the ramp of the ship. A part of him was screaming that this was wrong but he continued. The clones he was with open fired. Clone force 99 returned fire and two smoke bombs were thrown. They moved in.

He took aim again. This time using a heat sensor. He let off a few shots then waited. They needed to clear the smoke and when they did…

The sound of metal hitting metal rang through the air as the smoke cleared. Wrecker was in the middle of it and through one of the container lids, knocking some clones down.

Taking aim all he could see was the second one coming for him. He rolled out of the way as the containers fell where he was moments ago.

He aimed.

NO!

He shot, hitting Wrecker’s armour. He’d survive.

This time Wrecker fell. His brothers wouldn’t fall for it but the girl might and if he got a clear shot on the girl Hunter would soon follow.

Sure enough, a blonde head poked out from behind the crates and he fired again. He missed as she was pulled back undercover.

The ship started up. They couldn’t go. They needed to stay, needed to see that this was the right thing.

“Seal the bay doors!” He ordered. The clone to his right. He ran for the panel on the wall.

A light started flashing and a warning alarm beep. The door didn’t shut.

“Sir! Someone is overriding the controls.”

Tech.

He took aim once again. Hunter was giving Omega orders. She would be his target as they tried to leave.

“Only one way out Hunter. Your move.” He said.

Traitor.

The voice was loud and annoying. He shook it off.

He put his finger on the trigger.

“Go!”

Hunter and Echo stood and fired. Moving into the walkway, towards Wrecker. Towards the ship. Moving forward to cover he fired. He made it behind the crates and mentally kicked himself. Why wasn’t he aiming properly? This should be over already.

The last clone fell, hit by the oncoming fire. He turned his head to try and see where they were but couldn’t see them. Only the blaster bolts. He stood and took aim. Hunter was in his sights. This time he wouldn’t miss and he wouldn’t have mercy.

Stop!

His finger tightened on the trigger when suddenly electricity ran through the gun. He watched it drop and looked to where the shot was fired. Standing on the ramp was Omega. Blaster in hand.

He could swear he heard laughing from somewhere inside of him.

He pulled the blaster off of his hip and aimed. Omega shot first. Both the shots missing as he ran for cover.

You’ve lost. Let them go.

The ship lifted off and he ran towards it. Firing. None of his shots hit and soon the door was shut.

He stopped running once they were in space. He put the blaster away and took off his helmet. He looked into space as the mix of emotions bubbled inside of him. They left him. He failed his first mission. He knew Wrecker would live and his brothers would be okay. That’s all that matters.

[deepwoundsandfadedscars]

No. 11 - JUST KEEP SWIMMING

adrift | drowning | dehydration

Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order - Cal Kestis - 1,669 words

__

"Kid, you read me? They're not responding…" Greez turned to look at Merrin where she sat in Cere's usual spot at the communication station.

"They will, I am certain of it," Merrin said, her no nonsense tone leaving no space for argument. She pressed on the earpiece clamped over her head, as though trying to push the device deeper into her ear would make Cal respond faster.

"Greez, Im here." Cals voice finally crackled through the ship speakers and they both gasped in surprise. "I'm heading back towards the surface, be ready. I have the holocron, but Cere… she didn't make it, Greez."

Greez had already been flipping switches, getting ready to bring the ship in for extraction when Cal's words hit him like a sack of bricks and he froze. "Cere?..."

"I-" Cal's comm snapped off again, the ship cabin going silent aside from the hum of the engine.

"Cal Kestis? Are you still there?" Merrin called into the mic. There was no response. "Greez?" She turned to the Latero. Greez was frozen, staring out the transparisteel in the floor of the cabin. Far below them the choppy water slapped against the rocks that lined the shore. “Greez, I cannot reach Cal.”

“Ye-yeah, keep trying.” Greez said, rubbing at the back of his head. He made a loud barking noise as he cleared his throat and he turned away from Merrin, poking at the monitor to his left so she couldn’t get a look at his face.

She turned back to the controls in front of her, pressing the ear piece to her head again as she repeatedly called for Cal.

About a minute later there was a ping, a short burst of binary that she couldn’t decipher and she immediately sent it to Greez’s screen to read.

“Got him, that’s BD-1,” Greez said, his hands already flying over the controls to bring the Mantis into the atmosphere of the planet. At that point neither of them cared what security may come after them.

The engines screamed as the ship dove towards the planet, warning lights flashing on the dash. Greez ignored them, he knew the limits of his ship, he recognized the preventative warning sounds and knew just how far he could push before real damage would occur. He kept her just shy of that point all the way down until they skimmed along the surface of the stormy water.

“BD-1’s signal was right below us,” Greez said, leaning over his arm rest to look through the transparisteel below him. Merrin dropped to her knees on the floor, pressing her hands against the window. They both gasped as huge bubbles boiled to the surface and Merrin was scrambling for the ship door before Greez could even figure out what was going on. “Hey- what are you doing?”

“The base is collapsing, you said the droid is below us, the droid is always with Cal. I’m going to get him.”

Greez could only sputter as Merrin created a cloud of green mist around her and dove off the end of the ship ramp.

The cold temperature was a shock to the system as she plunged into the dark water, the minerals in the water making her eyes and skin sting almost immediately. She pushed the irritation out of her mind, focusing her magick to propel herself deeper into the ocean.

The darkness was suffocating, the only thing she had to orient on was a dim light far below at the jagged edge of the tunnel and even that flickered out with no sign of Cal.

She growled in frustration, slamming her hands together in front of her as she created a blast of green light. It was brief but enough for her to catch a glimpse of a pale hand reaching towards her.

She propelled herself faster, reaching for Cal’s extended hand. At this distance now she could see his eyes, see as they glassed over and rolled back in his head as his hand went limp. Where is his rebreather? She thought, confused why that wouldn’t have been his first instinct since he had until now still been conscious.

She clasped her hand over Cal’s wrist, ready to start pulling him towards the surface when she heard a beep, almost muffled by the water, from the droid clinging to Cal’s back. She looked down at him with an inquisitive look and followed his movements as he frantically bobbed his head downward towards Cal’s left hand. Merrin cocked her head to the side as she realized there was another body floating in the dark water. Cere? She swam lower into the water, looping an arm around Cere’s waist. As her head lolled against Merrins shoulder, she discovered where Cals rebreather was. Stupid self-sacrificing idiot, she thought to herself as she wrapped her other arm around Cals waist.

Using her magick she propelled the three of them to the surface, breaking out of the water with a gasp as she allowed her bubble to dissolve. Cere was suddenly twisting in her arms, scrambling to get away and Merrin allowed her to without issue. Cere pulled the rebreather from her mouth and coughed out any bit of water she had inhaled during the first onslaught of water when Cal destroyed the tunnel.

Her other arm now free, Merrin turned Cal around so she could see his face, lightly slapping his cheek in an attempt to wake him up. Water drooled out of the side of his mouth. “Cal. Cal Kestis, wake up!”

Cere coughed again, treading water to keep her head above the surface. “He’s unconscious, he probably inhaled some water. We need to get him on the ship.”

Merrin felt around on Cals torso, finally finding the pouch holding his comms. “Greez, bring the ship lower.” “Did you find them? How?” Greez rambled excitedly into the mic, the hum of the engines changing pitch as the ship dipped lower and angled the ramp towards them. The end of the ramp still hovered about ten feet above them.

"Do not struggle," Merrin said, the only warning Cere got before the green light surrounded her and she was lifted out of the water just enough for her to grab onto the edge of the ramp and scramble her way up. She turned around and dropped to the ground, reaching for Cal. In similar fashion, Merrin used her magick to lift Cal far enough for Cere to pull him up. BD-1 hopped off his back and trilled in concern as he bounced from one foot to the other. Out of the corner of her eye Cere saw a flash of green and the Nightsister appeared next to Cals head.

"He is not breathing, what do we do?" She asked Cere, her concern evident on her face and in her voice.

"Get in here and shut the door, we gotta get out of here!" Greez yelled from the front. BD-1 chittered ahead of them as Cere and Merrin worked together to drag Cal inside, getting him to the center of the ship and sealing the door behind them.

“Cere? Is that you?” Greez called from the cockpit. She could hear the excitement in his voice.

“I’m fine Greez, get us out of here!”

Cere dropped to her knees beside cal, running deft hands through his hair and down his neck to check for injuries and then adjusting his head when she determined doing so wouldn't cause more harm.

The angry black hole in the side of his chest was glaringly obvious, but she didn't have time to deal with it yet. Instead she locked her fingers together and curled her fingers, placing them on Cal's chest and pushing hard. She repeatedly pushed on his chest in a regular rhythm, hard enough that Merrin swore she heard his ribs cracking under the pressure.

"C'mon Cal." Cere muttered as she carried on with the compressions, "we've made it this far kid, don't die on me now."

Merrin raised her eyebrows in surprise as Cere unclasped her fingers and moved to his face, pinching his nose and covering his mouth with her own. A couple quick breaths and she was back pushing on his chest and muttering at him to take a breath.

She was on the verge of adding some choice expletives and colourful insults to her tirade when she felt his entire body spasm and he gagged on the water in his throat. Cere supported a hand along his jaw and shoulder, rolling him onto his side to help expel the water from his lungs.

As he choked out the last of it, his eyes rolled open, frantically staring around. He struggled in Cere's arms but he was too weak to make any actual attempt to get away.

"Be still Cal," she said, gently rubbing the side of his face. His eyes finally settled on her face and he slowly relaxed into her arms, the exhaustion catching up to him, on the verge of dragging him under.

Merrin placed a concerned hand on his chest, her finger brushing along where smooth pink skin met the charred edge of the hole in his chest. He gasped at the touch, his body going rigid and his eyes rolled back in his head before going limp in Cere's arms again.

"Merrin, grab the medical kit from the cabinet, take it to his bunk. I've got him."

Merrin was on her feet in an instant and tearing through the cabinets in the kitchen shortly after as Cere got an arm under Cals neck and the other under his knees, carefully lifting the young Jedi off the ground and holding him close to her chest as she made her way to the back of the ship.

He groaned quietly as she settled him on the bunk and started to undo the buckles on his vest. She placed a hand on the side of his face, which he unconsciously moved towards.

"Hold on Cal. We've got you. It's over now."

[gumnut-logic]

This one is definitely @flyboytracy ‘s fault and I have no idea if it will go anywhere, but have it anyway :D

@selene-tempest There is a chance your boi may need some assistance.

-o-o-o-

“John? I know you can hear me. I need you to come down.”

If it had been anyone other than Aunt Val, John would have ignored the request. But it also coincided with an alarming lack of contact from both of his eldest brothers.

Thunderbird One and Two were onsite in the north of England, assisting in the location of a lost party in the Lakes District. Both ‘birds hadn’t been needed, but One was on the way back from a fire in Greenland so dropped in to give a hand.

Last John had heard before deploying Gordon from Tracy Island to rescue a fishing boat off New Caledonia was that the party had been found.

Virgil had made a comment about some very unhappy people, but John had been drawn to the difficulties of the storm Four was currently wrestling.

Virgil and Scott were to tie up that rescue and go to assist Gordon.

But then all telemetry from Scott and Virgil blacked out.

It was startling and John was frozen for a split second before demanding everything he could from Five’s sensors. Eos did a deep dive and found no interference.

Scott and Virgil comms and biosensors were no longer reporting.

One and Two were parked in a large field, not far from where Scott and Virgil were lost on sensors, but no camera could his brothers.

Fortunate or unfortunate, coincidence or not, Aunt Val was on her way back to London from Edinburgh at that very time and out of desperation, John asked if she could check in on his brothers.

Eos already had the elevator prepped and Five was on the move.

John was not used to not having information and all scans of the site were giving him nothing. The group of people that had been rescued were present, but no brothers.

It took all of five minutes for Aunt Val to arrive on scene. It was a strange reversion of what usually happened with the GDF. It was usually International Rescue saving the Global Defences’ day. Most certainly not the other way around.

Perhaps it wasn’t a surprise that the answers weren’t immediate and John ended up having to go down anyway.

John’s shoulders were wired so tight by the time the elevator hit packed dirt in a parking lot, he could have supported the space vehicle without the need of the nanocable, all by himself.

One and Two were iconic against the grey sky, sitting alongside a grey GDF flyer.

John stepped into gravity and sighed, forcing himself to run over to his Aunt, standing beside Thunderbird Two.

She was talking to…a giant dog.

A huge black St Bernard was sitting and glaring at her. For a moment John thought he might have to worry about an attack, but the big dog just sat there.

The moment it caught sight of John, it started whimpering is a pitiful way.

“Aunt Val?”

She looked at him with so much relief and worry, John’s heart upped another notch in the heartbeat derby.

“John, thank goodness. Your brothers need help.”

“Where are they?”

The St Bernard rumbled and whimpered more.

“I believe that is Virgil.”

“What?!” The brown eyes of the dog were ever so distraught. “How?!”

“Apparently, the people he was trying to rescue, didn’t want to be rescued and did…this.”

The next question was obvious. “Where’s Scott?”

The St Bernard shifted to one side and John realised it had been sitting on something.

There was a blur of motion and a much smaller dog, a very brown border collie dashed out from under the massive black dog and tore up dust until it leapt up, front paws hitting John in the chest and nearly knocking him over.

Startling blue eyes whimpered up at him.

John stared as he stumbled.

“Oh, hell.”

-o-o-o-

Part 2

[greatfcx]

💬      “That’s a ‘yes’.”

[airly-yo]

The aftermath

Chapter 1

Alarms blaring. Red lights flashing.

“Warning. Warning.” The constant reminder from a women’s robotic voice, that the ship is about to explode.

“Ahh! Come on! This is aircraft 0475, stand down this is one of your own. I repeat, stand down! Ahh Comms is down! Gosh damn it!!” The young girl dashed left and right on the control panel. ‘Seriously, what is going on? Do they not realise that we are in a star storm!! Why are they attacking me? Or more like who is?’ her mind screamed. Bang! She cried as she hit the ground and groaned. Her body was covered in cuts and bruises, her left ankle cartilage was torn. She wasn’t going to make it. A different alarm buzzed, a red warning hologram appeared and she swiped on it as she was lifting herself up. Left wing smashed. The constant robotic voice of the women glitched and jarred. The system was shutting down. She needed to get out of the storm or she will be screwed, but It was too late. She already lost the controls of the steering, now she is about to lose the entire ship. She has a serious puncture on the right side of her right thigh that was gushing blood. Thank gosh it wasn’t an artery. Quickly she grabbed her supply bag, with her little supplies left and ripped the GPS from the control panel. ‘I’ll fix it later and get it working again’ she thought. There was no time, her defence system was down, one hit is all it needs. Using the last of her energy she summons a portal, the last sight she could see was an aircraft right before her ship… her eyes went wide, there was no pilot. She was then consumed with clouds of blue before she musted, with her dying breath “…safe…”. In the nick of time the ship blew up and she was lost with her intention to get her somewhere safe, away from space.

Gasp! The young girl jolted upright. Her body ached in complaint from her core. Dried blood patched all over her body. Clots were blocking the spots where new blood was trying to break through. The surroundings were funny and she just couldn’t grab her bearing. After a full minute of her ears ringing, her senses came to life. The warming rays of the sun above slowly soaked through her skin, its bliss relaxing her thrilled nerves. Just where was she? Taking a moment looking around, sand dunes enclosed around her. It appeared that she was at a beach. The soft sounds of the ocean calmed her even more. Behind her was this great cliffs further proving her point she was at a beach. Now turning her attention to her screaming body. It doesn’t matter where she is at the moment, she’ll figure that out later. Right now there was no visible threats and there was a strange comforting silence. She just hoped for the best there was no creatures that would pry at her at this state.

Counting her fingers to see if she was in just one piece and that she wasn’t in any abnormal form with any extra or missing fingers. Wouldn’t be the first time anyway… Her powers were strange to her, she only discovered them, like what? Almost two years ago? But she could summon portals that would allow her to further places or into a different universe. That is when stuff gets dangerous, who knows, you could come back out with two heads. It is something you do now want to mess with. Even bringing something from a different reality is even more dangerous. It could start a black hole. Though one of her limits was indeed time travel. That task she could not do. Snapping out of thought she looked at her petite body. She was a mess. Her bulky supply bag was just in arms reach in front of her. Good so she hasn’t lost that at least. Reaching it, she looked inside. She had one medical box, some water, little tracker gear and some tools. Oh also a spare set of clothes too. Ever since that accident with one of her crew members how had acid burn through their clothes, and didn’t have any spare, she always remembered to pack some anywhere she went. Speaking of crew, why was her own fleet attacking her? Surely they would come looking for her right? The G.S.P.F (Galactic Star Protection force, was formed after the Incident with Thanos.), never leaves someone behind, that is like their whole motto. Yet here she was, damaged from an attack by them. She had so many questions to ponder. Looking up into the blue sky, not a cloud in sight, just the blinding sun. A deep feeling knew why but part of her didn’t want to believe. Was that whole mission about a crystal pure bullshit to drag her away? Or is there a bigger picture here?

“I need to wash the blood and junk of my clothes and cuts if I want to heal myself or at least fix me.” She could only muster from a raspy voice. Clearly the damage from the oxygen leaking on the space ship did some short term damage to her voice. She then proceeds to ask herself questions to see if her brain was still intact.

“Ok what Is my name? Y/n Done. What planet did I originate from? Earth. Why did I join the force? Cause it was the only way I could escape.” Y/n continued to survey herself. For as far as she knew she was intact. Looking up to the giant dune in front her, she a rose to her feet. Trekking up the dune to the very top. Sand stuck to her like glue, yuck. All the dried blood and sand in her clothes made her very uncomfortable. She needed to wash, and who knows, perhaps some salt water will be able to chill her nerves. Thighs were burning, sand was such a hard thing to climb up on. With grunts and groans she finally made it to the top. Y/n couldn’t believe the sight before her eyes! She was on the most gorgeous beach she had ever seen! Lush soft white, yellow sands that stretched into the distance and a gorgeous ocean calling to her. Y/n laughed in disbelief, she knew she was safe. Who ever was attacking her must think she was dead and she would like to keep it that way. Worries drifted away with the calming ocean breeze, her pain floated away. What was even better was that there was no alien birds in the sky, no unexpected holes in the ground, just peace. It occurred to her that this place looked like Earth. Hopefully…

[redrighte]

RULES && ABOUT ( quick ‘n dirty edition )

hiya ! my name is hannah ( she/her or they/them). i’m 21, a full-time student && freelance illustrator ( comms. closed 10/31/21). i’m autistic && depressed, which can equal pretty infrequent activity, but feel free to ask for my socials if you wanna keep in touch outside of tumblr.

i’m incredibly new to the undertale fandom, so please be gentle if i flub some stuff up. this blog is for me to try new stuff out on, on every front.

mafia!fell && red are both owed to staringback. the majority of the art used in icons, banners, etc. is created by melikas, but never by me unless specified. main psd is we are dust by theshebb. if you’ve noticed your art/assets are being used && you’d rather it not, please let me know asap.

this blog will be explicit (violence && sexual), and is 18+ only. this is a very firm rule, as i want this to be a safe space for myself && my friends, as well as keep the eyes of minors away from things they might not feel safe seeing. common triggers will include blood, alcohol && drug mentions, vomit, assorted gore, and lightly dubious sexual talk. these will always be tagged; other iffy content will be tagged as “ ask to tag”. noncon will never be written about on this blog. if there’s anything you ever need tagged, please ask!

on a personal note, the source material for red does get into some very personally uncomfortable topics (the doll-frisk storyline entirely, the aformentioned noncon). i want to make it clear that i don’t participate in those parts of this au, and that my red will be fairly canon divergent towards the “softer” side of things.

miscellaneous notes: i am semi-selective, and prefer mutual interactions. body headcanons are liable to change, but i’ve got no preference right now of how you picture red’s body (ectobody, bunch of bones, etc). shipping is open / lightly encouraged, nsfw won’t go past fade-to-black on dash (or straight to the “morning after” if we want the thread to continue). drama is silly, puns are acceptable, and angst && hurt/comfort are my favorite genres.

ABOUT MAFIA!FELL SANS / “BIG RED”

note: feel free to call him either sans or red. whichever is more comfortable for you and your character.

middle brother of the gaster family, sans only remembers bits and pieces of his parents, as well as what had once been the underground. the skies opened up, and monsters and men were free to mingle. separated from their families and their old ways of life, the pack of boys (led by WD, the eldest) trudged onward, scrimping and scrounging for whatever rewards the surface felt like providing.

times were tough. just recently freed of a world war, the surface seemed to be cast into a dire depression - nothing like the stories young skeletons were told at bedtime. there was little work for humans, let alone monsters; so you do what you have to. petty thievery and pickpocketing quickly turned into enforcing, bodyguarding, and, on occasion, the odd cleanup job. for years, the family worked hard to make a name for themselves under don dee, and in the bright, shining year of 192X, it feels closer than ever.

                                                                                                                               the years turned red especially callous. despite being the largest (in general) and more intimidating of the brothers, red always suffered from low hp, something that keened him on towards teleportation and defense magic. working socially, physically, and mentally draining jobs with the monstrous equivalent of a shitty immune system led him to a fairly sedentary lifestyle; if he wasn’t using his free time to drown his sorrows in mustard, he was horizontal and unconscious. red suffers the most from migraines and “rib” pains, which lend themselves to his irritability.

his relationship with his brothers can oftentimes be rocky. WD has been known to get a little abusive with the boys, especially red, whom he tends to expect better out of; his little brother, Papyrus, has ambitions higher than he is tall, and grates on his nerves with his pompous ego. generally, red is a homebody, and won’t socialize unless he’s coerced.