#scifi lesbian

[super-ion]

Valiant

(based on this post)

Chapter 1

Night has fallen and the chill is setting in. Stars blaze overhead, I wish I could stop and marvel at them, but I very badly need to find shelter for the night.

It was a normal day, I worked an extra half shift, figured it would be good to bank up a few extra credits. By the time I got out, I was starving, so I stopped at my favorite noodle stand as a treat. All of this is to say that I wasn't at the tenement where I've been staying when corpo security raided it. By the time I got there, civil protection had the entire block cordoned off.

It happens.

I don't even know what the raid was for. It could have been revolutionary activity, it could have been drug cookers. I don't know, and I don't particularly care.

You learn to carry everything you can't bear to part with. Honestly, I carry all my tools with me to work anyway, since the government furnished ones are crap.

I did leave a decent blanket in the tenement. That's a shame. Hope it finds a good home and gets put to good use.

Anyway, that's why I'm hurrying through this abandoned part of the junkyard. Tonight promises to be particularly cold but exposure is the least of my worries right now.

There's a clatter on one of the junk piles behind me followed by a distant baying. No way in hell am I stopping to look around, but I can say with a high degree of confidence that I've picked up a pack of junk wolves on my trail.

I round a corner and a hulking warehouse looms before me. I've probably passed it a few times, but never paid it any mind. It's exactly the same as hundreds of others in the region, the kind Tanaka-Kuiper was pumping out about a hundred years ago during disarmament after the Second Contact War. If there was anything of value in there, it would have been scaved and looted decades before I was born.

It could be shelter though, and that's currently the most valuable commodity I need.

I hurry to the door, trying not to run lest I make too much noise. I hesitate at the scav mark of three interlocking triangles - not a place of honor.

There's more baying behind me, closer this time. I hear the scrape of paws on dirt as one of the pack's scouts reaches this avenue.

Fuck it. My rad counter isn't particularly angry, and maybe death by maybe radiation is better than certain death by junk wolves.

There aren't any locks on the door, which is good, but it's clearly been a long time since anyone has opened it. The baying of the junk wolves is getting closer and I throw my weight against the door. It groans in protest and I'll probably have bruises on my shoulder, but gradually it inches open.

When it's just wide enough, I cram myself into the gap. As I struggle though, I accidently glance behind me to where several pairs of eyes gleam in the darkness. Scraped and bruised, I dive through the gap and slam the door behind me. The door latches and I stand there panting as something snuffs and scratches at the other side.

It's dark.

Outside it's night, but there's still the moon and the ever present light pollution from the city center and the industrial district. In here it's almost pitch black… almost but not quite. There's a faint illumination coming from somewhere.

I'm in a small reception room… from back when this place might have needed one, I guess. Now it's just a desk bolted to the floor and a series of empty shelves. There's even a burned out hole where a safe might have been once. Everything else is long gone.

I slowly make my way past the desk and through the door into the warehouse proper.

I blink up in incomprehension.

Metal beams arc high overhead, filling the space of the massive room, like the ribs of some massive beast. If I had to guess, I'd say it was either a small starship or a war mech. Either way, it's likely a relic from the Second Contact War. My eyes follow the curve to the metal sphere suspended at their central like a cold heart. Scaffolding spirals up from the ground to wrap around it.

I realize the dim blue-white light I've been seeing is coming from gaps in the plating of the sphere. I scramble back in a slight panic and dig my rad counter out of my jacket pocket… not that there's very much I can do about it at this point. Fortunately, the counter is ticking happily along with the background radiation. The sand and grit in my clothes is probably putting off more radiation than this core is.

That's the only thing it can be, a massive positronic core, the brain of a mighty war machine that outlived the conflict it was built for. That explains why it's sitting in a warehouse. A positronic core exposed to the elements is functionally an antimatter bomb waiting to go off. Better to leave them somewhere for several centuries as the internals slowly decay away.

A thought occurs to me. If this core is indeed operational, it would have to be highly sophisticated and highly resilient. It may still be able to process external stimuli.

"Hello?" I call.

The light pulses, confirming my suspicion.

Curiosity gets the better of me and I cautiously ascend the scaffolding like I'm on a pilgrimage to a holy relic. Despite my efforts, each step lands with a clang that echoes in the vast space and brings another weak pulse of light from the interior of the core.

As I reach the top, where the scaffolding circumscribes it, I get a sense for how big it really is. The diameter of the thing is at least twice my height. I see positronic cores all the time. It's part of my job. But the ones I work with can fit in the palm of my hand. This one is… immense.

An impulse seizes me and I step closer and strip off my gloves. Any active sensors have long since been scrapped, but it might respond to electrostatic contact. Most cores can pick up on body capacitance from touch.

Before I let myself think better of it, I place my bare palm on the plating. There's the tiniest spark as I make contact with the cool metal.

The light pulses again and I can feel the faintest hum from within. It probably has military grade thermoelectric generators buried inside it. That might sound like a tempting prize, but to get at them, a scav would need to get past several layers of shielding and risk positron exposure… assuming cracking it open didn't result in a runaway antimatter reaction first.

I drag my fingers idly as I circumnavigate the core. Dim luminescence trails after me. I still don't know if the core is actually aware of me or if it's just reacting.

My fingers snag on something. There's a rough spot, something etched into the paneling. I peer closer to examine it, but there's not enough light to make anything out. The etching is linear, regular, writing.

My curiosity gets the better of me and I did a torch out of my pocket.

VALIANT 3426-90087523-33

A name and a serial number. Definitely second contact war, when puritanical names like Fortitude and Allegiant were in vogue.

"Valiant," I murmur.

The core flares bright and I stumble back a few steps, throwing an arm over my eyes.

A faint crackly scream echoes in the room. It sounds terrible until I realize that a tiny embedded speaker is probably one of the only parts that hasn't been stripped.

I lower my arm and squint against the light.

The screech echoes into silence.

"Is that your name?" I ask.

No response.

"Um… my name is Eloise," I reply, feeling almost ridiculous. I don't even know if it can process speech.

The sound returns, but broken and clipped.

". .-.. --- .. ... ."

That… that was a pattern. It's trying to communicate.

"I'm sorry, can you repeat that?"

It repeats slower.

I've heard something like that before… like some kind of binary code. I wrack my brain. Single short pulse is e… three long pulses is o… three short is s…

Holy shit.

It's my name.

The core heard me, processed my words and replied.

"Yeah, that's me," I reply. "Or Ellie, I guess, I'm still working some stuff out."

I rest my bare hand on the plating and the core flickers in response, some kind of plasma discharge centered at my touch.

"You must have been alone for a long time."

"-.-- . …"

"I can't imagine," I whisper. "If… um… if it's okay with you, I'd like to spend the night? I don't really have anywhere else to go right now."

"-.-- . …"

I let out a small breath of relief.

"And… maybe tomorrow I can come back and I can see what I can do to fix you."

The light pulses, almost like breathing and it doesn't reply for a moment. I start to wonder if I've overstepped somehow.

"-.-- . ... / .--. .-.. . .- ... . / -.-. --- -- . / -... .- -.-. -.- / . .-.. .-.. .. ."

It's too fast and I don't know enough of the code to parse it anyway. But I catch "yes" and "Ellie", so I take it to be an affirmative.

I lean forward and rest my forehead on the cool metal.

"You're not alone any more."

[sypphic]

SciFi mspec lesbian / SciFi mspec sapphic

[SciFi mspec lesbian / SciFi mspec sapphic]

A flag for mspec lesbians/sapphics who enjoy the SciFi genre

Possible SciFi mspec lesbian/sapphic characters are:

The orville

- alara kitan

- talla keyali

- topa

- Charly burke

Terra nova

- Maddy shannon

- Skye Tate

- Alicia Washington

- Mira

Battlestar Galactica (og)

- Athena

- Cassiopeia

- sheba

- Serina

The last of us

- riley abel

- Ellie williams

- dina

- Sarah miller

SciFi lesbian/sapphic flags(link)

Fairy lesbian flag(link)

No current set dni but I will block if uncomfortable

Discourse gets blocked

Tagging: @rwuffles @delightfulweepingwillows @hewasanamericangirl @lovesse @bi-lesbian

[super-ion]

I awaken to the smell of bacon and coffee and an empty spot next to me in the bed.

Damnit.

Even on her birthday she's making me breakfast. Five years since peace unexpectedly broke out and she still can't let herself sit still. On top of that, her augments make it so she only needs three hours of sleep.

I sigh and pull on one of her t-shirts. It hangs off my shoulders like a dress. I'm not a short person by any stretch, but she's got a good two feet on me. She won't say so in words, but I know she finds the sight adorable.

I wander into the kitchen, careful not to be too quiet… she really doesn't like being snuck up on. Seven years fighting Vesperians will do that.

There's a cup of coffee waiting for me… the #1 wife mug. She's got the #2 wife mug, half empty next to the stove. My coworkers at the mechanics corps got us the mugs as a joke wedding gift… The only time I've ever gotten her to drink from the #1 mug was when both of her legs needed to be serviced and she was bedridden for three days.

I wrap my arms around her thick frame and bury my face in her back.

"Oats and bacon will be ready soon," she mumbles flatly.

She's like that, direct and to the point, reluctant to speak too loudly, her voice is always flat and neutral. I suppose most people find off putting... It definitely took me a while to get used to it.

"Why are you cooking breakfast?" I murmur demandingly into her back. "It's your birthday."

It isn't really her birthday. She doesn't exactly have one specific date that she can point to between not existing and existing. Shortly after we started dating, I managed to badger her into picking one that we could celebrate. She picked the date that we met... and then I kissed her for the first time.

See, she may be a terrifying augmented super soldier, but deep down inside, she's a cinnamon bun.

"I like cooking breakfast," she replies.

I huff grumpily and release her from my embrace. She turns and leans down so I can plant a quick kiss on her lips.

I grab my coffee and wander into her workshop to see what she's been working on. It's not quite complete, tall jagged mountains (the Tetons I think), bathed in red gold by the sunrise. I'm pretty sure it's a commission, but she's working on it with the exact same love and joy that she would for one of her personal pieces.

I'm leaning close to admire the minute brushwork when the door chime rings.

"I got it!" I shout and scramble for the door. Lucky for me, she's preoccupied with cooking and I make it to the door before she can.

I swing the door open to greet the delivery bot. It's right on time. My face splits in a wide grin at the sight of the package it's holding before it.

I quickly sign the delivery slip and thank it profusely as I try my hardest not to snatch the package from its hands.

I close the door and I'm practically bouncing with excitement. She must have picked up my elevated heart rate because she pokes her head out of the kitchen.

"What is that?" she asks.

"This…" I reply, "is your birthday present."

She cocks her head and regards it as I offer it excitedly.

After a moment's consideration, she takes it cautiously and opens it. Her confusion deepens as she pulls out a swath of white fabric patterned with pink and red roses. She lets out a tiny gasp as she unfurls the dress.

"Okay, so…" I announce. "I found a tailor online who specializes in clothing for augments. I had this custom made."

She's staring at the dress in wonder.

"You wanna try it on?" I prompt.

She blinks at me like she's still surprised someone would encourage her to wear something like that… old habits die hard I guess.

I shoo her into the bedroom and start serving breakfast for the two of us (making sure to swap out the coffee mugs in the process, it's her birthday, she's #1 wife today, damnit).

She emerges from the bedroom a few minutes later and…

Oh my god, she looks radiant. She's trembling slightly and there are tears in her eyes, but she's grinning. It's more emotion than I see on her face most days. The dress fits her frame perfectly and she can't stop running her hands along the skirt. She unconsciously makes a little twirl, billowing the skirt out.

She hesitates slightly when she sees me staring. It's like she's almost embarrassed by the idea of being seen taking joy in something as frivolous as a dress.

I'm her wife and I love her. Her happiness is anything but frivolous. I bound out of my chair and wrap her in a tight hug.

"You look amazing," I tell her. "You like it?"

She nods, and tears are falling down her cheeks now. I grin and rub them away with my thumbs.

"Happy birthday," I whisper. "I love you."

"I love you too," she says, her voice cracking with the tiniest bit of emotion.

She’s a battle-scarred, jaded super-soldier loaded with biomechanical upgrades and chemical augments. All she wants to do is wear cute clothes and paint.

[monstatron]

FEELIN’ LIKE A FREAK ON A LEASH

this morning's warmup. sunila sporting some metal orca fashion! i based this off of an outfit i own! 🤘

sketch + alt background version!

[gipki]

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[aphyray]

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[ashes2caches]

cutting a cute little boob window into my hazmat suit. ya gotta let the babies breathe sometimes.

[eruditegeek]

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[super-ion]

I arrive at the door and pause to remove my goggles and glance at the sky. The sandstorm has long since died away, but by the looks of it, there's still a lot of fine silica in the upper atmosphere. It will make a beautiful sunset, but the stars will be all but invisible in the haze tonight.

It's too bad, I was really hoping to wheel Val up to the roof tonight. The stars are the one thing she misses from her past life and it's become a ritual of ours to lie up there on clear nights as the brutal heat of the day fades to an equally brutal chill. She loves to point out the stars as they appear. We lie there together and she names them and tells me their stories.

I turn my attention back to the heavy rusted door. I reach into my dust jacket and fish out the ring of keys to unlock the padlocks.

One. Two. Three. It's enough to keep the building secure, but not enough to attract attention.

A year ago, a scav wouldn't have spared this particular warehouse a second thought. This was where corpo-military surplus went to die, after all. Anything of real value would have been stripped during decommissioning and any leftovers would have long since been stripped by roving scavs.

Three hundred and sixty days ago, one standard year exactly, one particular scav saw the building and decided it would at least make a decent place to hunker down away from corpo security and roving junk wolves.

I did find shelter that night, but I also found so much more than that. I found Valiant.

She had been stripped down to almost nothing, the barest suggestion of her former superstructure, her only remaining components were those too bulky to haul away. Her positronic core hadn't been deemed worth refurbishing at the factory and no scav in their right mind would risk trying to sell a military grade core. So, blind and nearly deaf, she had been left to decay alone.

Until I found her.

Maybe I'm insane. Maybe I was just so desperately lonely that I decided it was worth the risk to start tinkering with military technology.

I make this week's secret knock.

One. Two. One. Pause. Two.

Then I throw my weight against the door and it slowly grinds open.

The sound of music drifts through the entry hall. I don't want to interrupt her, so simply offer a wave to the camera before hauling the door closed and locking it once more.

I strip out of my dust jacket to the sound of Vivaldi. She doesn't speak much of her past, but she has occasionally spoken fondly of one particular QA engineer who always had classical music playing during her inspections.

Three months ago, I came across a battered electronic keyboard at the market and spent the majority of our savings on it. I had to go on half rations for three weeks to recoup the loss, but Val's joy had far outweighed the cost.

She was built as a machine of war, meant to deliver death and destruction to the enemy. Now, long after she outlived her original purpose, she makes music.

I pad softly down the hall to the main space. She has the back of her android chassis to the entryway, framed by the decaying remnants of her superstructure. I have to stop and take the sight in. There's something transcendent about the scene, almost holy. It's like the photos of cathedrals in the architecture book she likes to page through occasionally.

As she reaches the end of the piece, I lay a hand on her shoulder and give her a kiss on her cheek. The titanium composite is hard and cold under my lips, but the light matrices of her eyes flash a delighted green. Her face is a single unmoving piece, a simulacrum of a human face locked in a neutral expression, but her eyes convey such an incredible array of emotions.

"Welcome home, Ellie," she says. "Was your day to your satisfaction?"

I can't help but grin at that. She has access to all forms of audio and visual media, but she maintains her own distinct cadence and vocabulary. It's something that's wholly her own and I love it.

"Oh, same old bullshit," I reply. "But I got you something."

She tilts her head to glance at the keyboard and her eyes make a pattern of curiosity and mild concern.

"I hope it is not anything that will cause you to go hungry again," she chides.

My lips quirk.

"Not too badly, I promise."

I reach into the pocket of my jumpsuit and pull out a tiny parcel.

"Do you know what today is?"

"Today is the seventeenth day of the eighth month," she replies.

"It's been exactly a year since I met you. And by sheer luck, I found something special in the scraps at work today."

I hand the parcel over and she takes it in her delicate hands. Her chassis had likely been a service model before it had fallen from a sky tram. The legs had been a complete loss, but the torso and hands had survived well enough and the firmware was still good even though the core had shattered on impact.

"Happy anniversary," I say.

She pulls the object from the wrapping and examines it. It's just a tiny scrap of material, barely two by three inches, stretched over a biomechanical substrate.

"What is this?" she asks finally.

"Synthetic skin," I reply. "It's not much, but I think I get you some sensation out of it."

Her head snaps up and her eyes have gone a shade of cyan.

"Really?" she asks, modulating her voice with a slight quaver.

I take one of her hands in mine. The tactile sensors in her fingertips are rudimentary at best, but she can feel my hand in hers. It's become the central goal of our entire project, to let her touch and be touched in return.

Well, that and liberating her from her superstructure, but there is still a great deal of work that needs to be done in that front. Her core will never fit into a humanoid chassis, which presents two problems. We still need to find a suitable substitute and then we need to determine how to mirror the parts of her programming that are her. We need to pick apart the complex web of interconnected subroutines and extract her soul.

But that's a problem for another day. Right now, we have a problem that we can solve.

She cradles the module reverently in her hands as I wheel her to the workbench, careful of the tangle of wires that lead back to the superstructure.

The thing about war machines of her design is that they can feel. A soldier that doesn't know it's injured is useless if it becomes damaged beyond repair. An individual unit represents an investment of billions of credits, so they are designed to process something approximating pain. It sounds horrible, and it is, but the trade off is that with minimal modifications to the programming, the heuristics can be convinced to simulate other sensations.

We've already proven it with the tactile sensors in her fingers. This tiny bit of artificial skin is just a step up from that.

I help her get situated on the workbench. It isn't strictly necessary to interface with her humanoid chassis. I could just connect directly to her core, but we're trying to get her used to the idea of operating in this small form.

She watches me intently as I plug the module containing the skin into the console. The skin itself is a medium brown olive tone, almost dark in contrast to my own pale fingers. We're going to have a hell of a time gathering enough matching material to cover even part of her. And then there's the challenge of actually integrating it with musculature for facial expressions…

One problem at a time.

That's become our mantra. Break the project into smaller problems that we can solve. It's already been a year and we still have so much more work to do.

But I love her. She's worth it.

I grab a cable off the rack and connect it to the workstation. When I move to plug the other end into her chest, her fingers meet mine and her touch lingers for a moment.

The connection is made and the display flickers to life with telemetry.

"You ready?" I ask her.

She nods.

I poke the skin gently with the butt end of a pen.

The displays monitoring positronic activity in her core light up and her entire chassis twitches.

"Oh…" she says, her tone unsteady and breathy.

"How was that?" I ask. "We'll have to run some tests to calibrate it properly."

"It was…"

She pauses. It's not like to hesitate like this.

"I require additional data," she says, almost uncertainly. "Please."

"You sure?"

She nods again, slightly more vigorous than last time.

I have an idea and I set the pen aside. I'm not entirely convinced it's a good idea, but the whole point is to touch, isn't it?

I drag my fingertips lightly across the skin. It's cool to the touch and smoother than any human skin, but there's a slight give to it. It's so fundamentally different from the metal and composite that makes up her chassis.

I'm touching her.

I'm touching her and her entire chassis shudders. She throws her head back and her hands grip tight against the edge of the workbench.

Positronic activity is off the charts.

"Fuck!" she shouts.

In the entire time I've known her, I've never heard her curse.

She's in pain. That has to be it.

I withdraw my hand instantly and reach to unplug the module from the interface.

"Shit! I'm sorry. I must have gotten something wrong, I'll take a look at the-"

"No!" she interrupts. "No… leave it. It was good… just… a lot… all at once."

I stare at her. Her chassis is still trembling slightly but her eyes have gone a shade of magenta I've never seen before.

"Jesus fucking Christ, Ellie," she says. "Is that what you feel all the time?"

"I… uh… I can't really say. I mean, it's probably not perfectly analogous to human sensation, and it's all subjective anyway…"

I trail off as she lifts her head to regard me.

"Yeah, something like that, I suppose," I say as my lips quirk into a smile.

Another idea strikes me.

"Should we run another test?"

"Another…?"

Before I let myself think better of it, I pull my hair away from my face and lean down to brush a gentle kiss against her skin.

She makes a wordless mechanical scream and her positronic activity is so high, I'm worried she's about to blue screen. She's trembling again, harder than before. The led matrices of her eyes are bright pink, but a few are flickering uncontrollably, almost glitch-like.

"Ellie!" she gasps. "Oh my god… Ellie."

"Did you… did you like that?"

She nods and reaches for me, beckoning. I pull her into an embrace and she clings to me.

"Ellie," she whispers. "It is… incredible. I do not even have the words to describe it… Thank you… I love you."

"I love you too," I murmur back. "Happy anniversary."

what if i was a giant machine of war, once a beast of lightning and steel, pure death encapsulated in a perfect impenetrable skin, a machine capable of turning the tide of a battle merely by my presence, but now decommissioned and aging, parts stolen by scavengers, abandoned in peacetime by the same people who once sang my praises; and you were my mechanic, sworn to secrecy (not that you’re close enough to anyone to tell), making just enough money from your shitty government job to keep the warehouse where I reside powered, sleeping in the shadow of my chassis at night

and we were both lesbians?

[peanutlolxd]

Some space alien ocs im starting to develop more 🪐

[girlballs]

every time i see that "star wars would be so good if it was good" post i write another Threadspace chapter

[super-ion]

Valiant

(Original post, Chapter 1)

Chapter 2

"Ellie!"

I blink awake. It's dark, the lighting hasn't switched over to morning mode yet and the sky is still black through the warehouse skylights. In fact, the only light is the gentle blue-white from Val's core. The indicator lights from the diagnostic equipment I have set up are completely dark.

I feel a spike of panic. A black out could mean any number of things, from benign to literal end of the world.

"What's going on?" I ask, fighting my grogginess. "What time is it?"

"I have lost external network connection. My internal clock indicates that it is 2:36:74," she says. Her voice is tinny and distant, likely the embedded speaker that I've managed to patch up.

"Ellie, I am sorry," she says. Her tone is distressed and contrite. She continues in a rush, "local wildlife nested amidst the network antenna and I attempted to relocate the nest. However in the process, I have accidently shorted the main high power bus with my drone peripheral."

Ah. That explains that. She probably tripped the main breaker. It's a terrible design and I've been meaning to add some resiliency, but that keeps getting out prioritized.

"Ellie, I am sorry," she repeats. "I have committed a mistake and I have inconvenienced you."

What?

Oh…

She's having the equivalent of a panic attack. She is a hyper intelligent AI core designed for fleet coordination and battle modeling, where failure to follow orders and standard operating procedure costs lives. This comes with a lot of built in anxiety. I understand that modern starships are less prone to such things, but when she was commissioned, the goal was to produce many warships very quickly. They were ultimately meant to be disposable, which led to some programming shortcuts.

"Hey," I say softly. "Are you okay? That's all I care about right now."

I roll out of my hammock and press my body against the surface of her core so that she can feel the plasmic discharge induced by my contact.

"I am well," she replies, her voice still small and panicked. "My core is isolated from main power. I can provide full diagnostics if you desire."

"No, that's okay. I'm glad you're alright. Should we see what we can do to take care of this?"

"Yes, please…"

She pauses.

"I do not like being disconnected. I… do not like the dark."

My heart breaks a little. Eighty-seven years, that's how long she was alone before I found her. An AI like hers can enter low power mode, but that is still an unfathomably long time. Units like her were never meant to be alone.

I reluctantly disengage from her core.

"I have to go outside," I tell her. She knows this, but I'm hoping it helps to talk through the process. "I'm going to get the headset working, so I'll be able to stay in contact, okay?"

"Thank you"

I pat the surface of her core gently before checking the rf transmitter I rigged up at her access port. It's short range, but it runs on her internal power. We used it a lot before I got her connected to internal and external networks, pretty much for this exact purpose, so I could talk to her without being right next to the core.

Connection looks good. I slip on the ear piece.

"Hey, can you hear me?"

"Yes, I can hear you Ellie," she replies.

Her voice through the earpiece is warm and smooth, even under the panic. It's her chosen choice and… well, it makes me feel… okay, I'll just say it, it's a very sexy voice. The speaker mounted on the access panel doesn't really convey the full timbre of it. Needless to say, I was blown away the first time I heard it in high fidelity.

I think I might be in love with her.

There's a lot to unpack there, but there's no point in denying that the feelings exist.

I throw on a sweater and a spare pair of boots and make my way up the scaffolding that leads to roof access. About halfway there, I pause for a moment to catch my breath. I chance a look down and my breath is stolen from me.

This room, this entire building, is a warehouse built for a machine of war to be abandoned and forgotten.

It's a squat for a scavenger trying to eke out an existence on the fringes.

"You're beautiful," I whisper.

It is a cathedral. It is a temple built for a goddess and her priestess.

Here in the dark, lit only by the radiation of her core, the space seems infinite.

Her core flickers in response, but she doesn't say anything. She might be embarrassed. She might never have heard those words before and doesn't know how to respond. She doesn't need to. I don't know if she feels the same about me. I'm not even sure if I should want her to. I would hate for her to feel obligated to return my affection solely by the fact that I am the only one who cares enough to repair her. I started this project because I couldn't bear the thought of her suffering alone in darkness, any romantic feelings I have are incidental... mostly.

I continue my scent and finally arrive at the roof access. The door opens with a squeal and I step into the frigid night.

"Oh!" I gasp.

"Ellie?" Val asks in my ear after a moment, worry creeping into her voice. "Are you well?"

"Oh, sorry…" I reply. "It's the stars. The high altitude haze from that dust storm last week has finally cleared. It's… spectacular."

There's a pause.

"Would you describe them for me?" she asks plaintively.

"Uh, sure… but I'm not sure if I can do it justice. Well, there's the glow from the industrial district, but it's not too bad tonight. We've got the arc of the Milky Way pretty much directly overhead. And there's like the fuzzy haze of the planetary disk. Looks like one of the ice giants too. And… well, stars. Thousands of them, just crystal clear."

I locate the main antenna and, sure enough, the drone is tangled up with the main power lines. It looks like there might have been some thin insulation that arced. The spidery drone itself might be salvageable. It is clutching an unfortunately empty nest in its manipulators, whatever wildlife must have fled when she disturbed it. The drone's head is tilted curiously back in a way that I don't think it's fully explainable by arcing.

"Wait, were you out here stargazing?

"The ocular system on the drone peripheral lacks the resolution and focal length to resolve individual stars."

It's not an answer and she sounds very vaguely guilty.

"It's alright if you were," I tell her as I bend down to examine the power conduits. "And I can see if I can get you a better camera system up here. Maybe something telescopic."

"I would not want to inconvenience you," she replies.

"Val, you're allowed to want things," I sigh.

She's quiet for a long moment while I move the drone and begin repairs on the power conduit.

"I miss the stars," she says finally. "There are many things I wish to forget about my past. Being alone amidst the stars was one of my few comforts."

I consider this. It's the most she's ever told me about her past. I've seen the diagnostic logs of her positronic activity indicating distress. Her equivalent of nightmares.

"You know any good stories about them?" I ask.

"I do not understand the nature of your query."

"I don't know," I say with a shrug. "I guess I'm just curious if you have any favorites or if you have any interesting facts in your database.

I'm not really sure how I expect her to respond. I just want to get her talking and not dwell on being trapped in the dark or feeling guilty about causing it.

"There is a star," she begins tentatively, "which according to local charts and my estimate of local time, should be located at azimuth 146.7, elevation 25.4. It is the brightest star in the southern sky, do you see it?"

I'm honestly surprised by this, and it takes me a minute to orient myself and find it.

"Yeah, the bright blue one?"

"Yes!" she replies, and as she speaks she gets more animated - her tone brightens and her cadence picks up. "Epsilon Orionis, Hipparcos 26311, also known as Alnilam. It is the central star of the asterism as viewed from Earth known as Orion's belt. It is among the brightest stars visible from this region of space. During first wave colonization, it was erroneously back translated to Al-Nilam, the Sapphire. Local neo-folkloric tradition associates it with either a maiden or queen…"

She continues on like that, and I find myself absolutely fascinated as I work. The detail is very encyclopedic, but there are aspects of it that she can't possibly have obtained from just a star chart. I quickly come to the realization that she must have sought out details about the folklore and mythology on her own.

This was a hobby of hers. There's no question in my mind now that I have to obtain a better system to facilitate her stargazing.

I finish the patch job on the conduit and heft the drone over my shoulder while she continues. I only interrupt her when I arrive back at the high power breaker.

The night lighting comes back up and she practically sighs with relief as she reconnects with the external network. I wearily drag myself back to my hammock.

"Ellie, I'm sorry to have woken you and taken up so much of your time," she says.

I sigh and press my hand to the surface of her core.

"It's okay, really," I tell her. "I'm here for you."

"Thank you for listening to me," she says, bringing a smile to my face.

"Goodnight, Val."

"Goodnight, Ellie."

I almost say "I love you". I want to.

[sypphic]

SciFi Lesbian / SciFi Sapphic

[SciFi lesbian / SciFi sapphic]

A flag for lesbians/sapphics who enjoy the SciFi genre

Possible SciFi lesbian/sapphic characters:

Star trek

- jadzia dax

- ezri dax

- Kiera neris

- seven of nine

- Kathrine Janeway

- Julian Bashir (because I said so)

Star gate

- Samantha carter

Mass effect

- fem commander Sheppard

- lyra aldonia

- Miranda lawson

- Cora harper

- siani t'nair

- adaria

- alania t'soni

- many more

Star wars

- Ahsoka tonno

- Padme Amidala

- omega

- zeen mrala

- assaj ventrice

- hera syndulla

- Sabine wren

- barriss offee

- aayla secura

- Riyo chuchi

- and more

Fairy lesbian(link)

No current set dni but I will block if uncomfortable

Discourse gets blocked.

[latelyloxiv]

synthetic savior (she/they)

[monstatron]

CYAN HELL

some lighting practice i whipped up this morning, also wanted to nail that "dreary but powerful" aura that my girl obasi has. boy is she a mess.

(character is a butch lesbian, she/he)

[c-kiddo]

you want to watch scavengers reign so bad you want to watch scavengers reign literally look at it watch this trailer i promise its so good its so good 🌀🌀🌀🌀🌀🌀🌀🌀