"There was... there was... blood. In the vent, I think, and on the floor. In there. Beneath the table. And when I came out here... I thought I saw something. Someone. Gods, there's no one here, why am I being so stupid?"
The air in the room was so stale. As it should be, considering that the components of the ship designed to recycle the air amongst the bowels of the vessel probably met its critical system failure hundreds or even thousands of years ago. His mouth was scant and dry, and his tongue would stick to his teeth often as he made those harsh recovery breaths.
Blood? Did she see blood? Ryanti saw no such thing, but the thought of such a thing upon the floor and even in the vent… how did he not notice this? Was he too distracted with his own senses to realize it? The idea, the possibility that the blood wasn’t the black incarnations of millennia-old injury very deeply troubled him. As much as he hated to admit it, he couldn’t rule out that either marine life had gotten inside the ship somehow… or the ship had become an ecosystem to whatever ecosystem the Allagans made to study. Hell, it would even be plausible for marine life to have gotten in and evolved because of how much time had passed. Especially if the Allagans were masters of magic – aether could have been dense in this air long ago.
Regardless of all that, Ryanti was taught in training for this job to always worry about the right now, not about potential outcomes. Right now, they were safe. Right now, all was quiet. Right now, everything was okay. “It’s okay, Sounsyy. It’s alright. You’re not stupid.â€
No, she wasn’t. Ryanti’s experience in that room proved his assumption correct. There was something in this building besides both of them, and it wasn’t anything physical. He himself wasn’t sure if it truly had anything to do with his dreams, but he remembered when he came into the ship for the first time what had happened to the artifact. He remember how the bright light from the tool spread amongst the ship before the artifact went dead. He glanced back at his backpack. It was still dead.
Ryanti’s face flinched up. The jolting feeling of pain in his spine, neck, and buttocks made it difficult to think. He would have stopped breathing as hard as he was if he wasn’t trying to shake off the pain. Sounsyy’s assumptions were right, Ryanti was hurt. All of that weight crashing down on him followed by the mental pain of what he experienced right after… it left his back in a scraped up mess, and the wind knocked out of him. Then there was the pounding on his head from the fresh wound on his temple, blood dripping from it visible for her to see.
He didn’t say anything about it. This was his burden to bare. Especially for her. It was his fault she was here… yet even as Sounsyy believed Ryanti sentimental, it was not something his superiors appreciated from time to time. It was why he could never afford to blunder, why he always had to give results to justify his methods. He had to leave this ship with something. Or he wouldn’t leave at all. He’d send Sounsyy back up at the cost of his life if he had to… if they were to find nothing. That was something he wasn’t going to tell her though.
He glanced over to her eventually as the silence progressed. It was deathly quiet in this ship. His eyes focused a little bit on her braid, all fancied up. It had gotten thicker since they had boarded. The little burst of hair from the last cross of the braid was no longer wet and tiny, but dry and bushy again. He remembered her comment from before: Have yeh ever tried to keep a braid underwater?
Her pretty braid was something pleasant to focus on. But Ryanti knew from her subtle movements that she wasn’t feeling okay. It dawned on him that she never answered that question with a yes. It had been a no, a shake of the head. She had curled up, nibbling on a ration that she had obtained from her backpack. Was she hungry? Probably not. She looked afraid. Lonely. But she wasn’t alone, not truly. He wished… that his presence could do more for her. He wished he was someone else… someone more dear to her. If he was, then well… he could have helped her right now. It ate at him. Again, again he had wished he was someone else.
His features lightened up a little bit when she glanced at him, for some reason knowing the instant she did. Then she began moving a little bit… ah, yes… she was offering him a piece. Ryanti looked down upon the square cracker ration with an uneasy “Sure… thank you.†And accepted it, softly taking it away from her. Ryanti never held it for a moment in his mouth. He simply bit it, and chewed it quietly… idly.
He never expected that next question that came for him.
"Before yeh were Seventy-seven, what did yeh do?"
His chewing stopped for a moment. He blinked a few times, making sure that what he heard was what Sounsyy actually said. His eyes warmed up a little bit and closed as he got to thinking about that question, swallowing what was left of the silly ration he had chewed up. He wasn’t hungry either.
“Before I was Seventy-seven, huh?†She could hear the little clangs of metal upon metal as he set his Sharlayan rifle to the side away from her. A little ‘hmm’ emerged from him as he tried to find out the best way to answer that question. He could still feel that warm crimson blood creep down the side of his face... but he had nothing to wipe it with. He spoke.
“Well… I was born as the mixed-blood child of a very old and quite influential family in Ul’Dah. My last name, Veanysus, has a bit of reknown to it in the world of big business. My family has been Dinnerware merchants for centuries. We have our hands extremely deep in the restaurant business. We’ve been supplying decent establishments with wine glasses and glass plates and such for a very long time. We’ve also had a fair amount of our family serve the nation in the military – the Flames.â€
He bit upon his fishtack, and grimaced a little as he chewed it down. He obviously didn’t like the taste. “When I was a child, I felt like I had to try that much harder to impress anyone. Because… I felt like the world didn’t get that perfect Hyuran boy and got me instead.â€
He slipped the rest of the snack into his mouth, trying not to remember the taste as he swallowed it. But the damn ration’s aftertaste clinged to the back of his throat. Oh well. “Before my father retired, he was a Bloodsworn in the military. My mother took control of the family business and immersed herself in work. I never wanted to… spend my entire life selling plates and silverware. I always wanted to be like my father – proud, powerful, and possessing the ability to change the world for the better. I looked up to him. So when I came of age, I decided to join the military too. Now back then I was really green. A big softie. A wimpy loser rich boy with his stockings to his knees.†He laughed a little bit at the memory of his past teenaged self. “I was pathetic. I thought it would be easy. I learned really quickly that it wasn’t. I still remember the smell of piss and lukewarm rubbing alcohol. That’s what the Barracks smelled like – one of the worst months of my life.â€
He leaned a little back towards the cerment wall, coughing a bit. He was still trying to ride out the pain. “I went to Officer’s School, basically. So… we were given big projects before we were to graduate. They gave me a notebook the size of my hand, and told me to travel the world and document my good deeds endorsed by the people I helped. They told me not to come back until I had done one hundred endorsed good deeds. That was the first time I truly set out to travel the world. I ended up meeting someone. A woman… older than me of course. She was a former Paladin of the sultanate. I remember how she did her hair… it was cut short like a Bob, but she had a long ponytail in the center… black hair.â€
He rubbed the back of his neck as he mentioned her. “She took me in. She taught me… a lot about growing up. Back then she was the head of a band of individuals determined to morally shape Eorzea into a better world than it was. Things were more uncertain during those times. I traveled with them and … those good deeds started piling up. I resolved to never go on a journey without a notebook after that. After I finished my assignment and reluctantly informed everyone that I would have to go back, she proceeded to give me a great test, a test that I passed with no shortages of bruises and scabbed kneecaps.â€
He laughed a little bit, recalling a positive memory. “I remember one of the sponsors of our freelancing group was a rather wealthy man who had little faith in our group’s leadership. So I spoke up and told him not to ask anything of us that he wouldn’t do himself and we would listen to him. We ended up running across the frozen wastes of Coerthas with nothing but skimpy briefs on! My feet were totally numb and I nearly shivered my teeth into pieces! But we did it...†He realized that it was perhaps the first time a laugh had permeated these walls in five thousand years. Those were some of his happier times.
His hand slowly reached over to his rifle again, and Ryanti glanced towards it and away from Sounsyy. “I never saw her again after I left to graduate. I never saw any of them again…â€
The young man spread his legs, and suddenly picked up the rifle and placed the rear stock in between his legs with a thud, holding the rifle upwards with one hand and inspecting it, whipping out a cleaning rag from one of his pockets to clean it from the dust. It would be bad if it got into the contraption. He couldn’t use that rag to wipe his blood off, which was beginning to dry.
“At first I started just simply supervising weapon shipments and such to pay my dues. I was going to go into quartermastering. That was my plan. I always enjoyed tinkering with weapons, and I knew that technology almost always innovates with weapons first. That had become an obsession of mine, both technology and history. I adored such subjects when I was a child, but I never really had the faith in me to chase my dreams. It was that woman and her ragtag group that gave me the faith to start believing that I could make a living doing what I wanted.â€
His rag continued to swipe the dust off of his rifle as he spoke. “At this point, I was a young man that never had an identity due to my mixed blood, and never figured I deserve a reason to live in the first place. Believing my existence a fluke, I just… immersed myself in knowledge. I despised the world I was living in so I… wanted to know about other eras in this world, other times. I pulled strings because my family name allowed me too. I figured out that in the end… what I truly wanted was knowledge. I wanted to know about the world in its entirety as it occurred in the past so that I could build a better future – so that nobody born in any situation would ever grow to loathe the world. That gave me a purpose… a reason to live. So I started asking questions and rubbing elbows. They were actions that were dangerous and very risky now that I look back at it. But I wanted to know, and I had no qualms about the consequences because I didn’t care if I died because of it.â€
He paused for a moment, his voice turning grim. “I didn’t find ‘them’ … they found me. I was taken right out of where I was sleeping. I thought I was being kidnapped… -again-, like I was when I was little once… but no. It wasn’t a kidnapping… in the literal definition. I was taken somewhere. All I could remember was that it smelled like dust and metal and gas, the place where they took me.â€
“They asked me if I really wanted to know.â€
Ryanti smiled a little. “I told them that if I could be afforded to see the past, present, and future and live only half a life... then I would have already seen many times more than if I would have said no and lived a full one. That’s when they took me in. They gave me a warm blanket and some hot chocolate. That was the first day – their only love they ever gave to me in that place was a blanket and hot chocolate.â€
“They worked us to the bone. Trained us in obscene conditions, yet never crossing the line to the point of permanent injury. None of us left that place with a single scar on our bodies and yet… yet there was so much pain. I never knew who I was training with. It was twenty-four seven. Never ending, for one entire month of hell. My parents were told I had simply shipped out to do an escorting job for a friggin’ caravan.â€
He began to unattach his flashlight from his rifle, and stuck it into a little slot on his belt. Three stripes of light glew in the darkness, an indicator that it was charging. He began shuffling through his backpack to find his other flashlight. “We were given all sorts of physical tests. Psychological ones too. They wanted to make sure we were as sane as could be despite the insane training. But… but I think the worst was when we began to realize the true scope of what they were preparing us for. What they called their real training. The final week they… subjected us to… things.â€
He lightly pinched his fingers against his closed eyes for a moment. The little smile was still on his face.
“That’s how I could read some of those pieces of writing back there.†He mentioned, tilting his head in the direction of where he came. “They had us learn those kinds of things the quick and painful way. The Keepers only, of course. We were subject to the most rigorous training. Though I have to admit... I closed my eyes for some of it..â€
“So then I became agent Eighty-two. That was my first number. Five people have either left the business or died since then, so I became agent Seventy-seven. Since it’s damn near impossible to leave the business once you’re in it, well… they probably all died.†He attached the fully-charged flashlight onto his barrel, and took the magazine out to make sure it was clean too.
“The thing is though… you asked me about who I was before I was Seventy-seven. There is no before. Seventy-seven is a number. It’s a body. It’s a label that tells you what rank I am and nothing more besides hiding my true name during classified missions. One privilege we do receive is that we still get to keep our prior lives. The innkeeper you book a room for – the merchant you buy a tunic from – the janitor of a friggin’ fishing vessel – anyone could be one of us. Our deeds go un-thanked, and perhaps will for years… decades… centuries. But yes… I only go on missions like these maybe once a month or less. I didn’t transform into Seventy-seven, Sounsyy… Seventy-seven is simply my alias when I’m on my special little shift. My workplace persona. It’s no different than Captain Mirke or... Mirke the Maimer. When it comes to you though, I’d just… I’d just rather be called Ryanti. That is… if I have earned it.â€
Satisfied with his weapon, he set it down before him again, this time on his lap and resting his hands upon it. He wouldn’t make the mistake of putting it on the floor again, not with all the dust. He offered the rag to Sounsyy. Maybe cleaning her rifle could be something to take her mind off of things?
“What about you, huh? What’s your story? And no I don’t mean the Captain Mirke you are now or… the striking young woman on the posters during my youth that I know deep down was nothing more than clever marketing and the persona of someone trying to survive. No... what’s -Sounsyy’s- story? Before you were Captain Mirke of the Roehmerl or Mirke the Maimer… what did you do?â€
The air in the room was so stale. As it should be, considering that the components of the ship designed to recycle the air amongst the bowels of the vessel probably met its critical system failure hundreds or even thousands of years ago. His mouth was scant and dry, and his tongue would stick to his teeth often as he made those harsh recovery breaths.
Blood? Did she see blood? Ryanti saw no such thing, but the thought of such a thing upon the floor and even in the vent… how did he not notice this? Was he too distracted with his own senses to realize it? The idea, the possibility that the blood wasn’t the black incarnations of millennia-old injury very deeply troubled him. As much as he hated to admit it, he couldn’t rule out that either marine life had gotten inside the ship somehow… or the ship had become an ecosystem to whatever ecosystem the Allagans made to study. Hell, it would even be plausible for marine life to have gotten in and evolved because of how much time had passed. Especially if the Allagans were masters of magic – aether could have been dense in this air long ago.
Regardless of all that, Ryanti was taught in training for this job to always worry about the right now, not about potential outcomes. Right now, they were safe. Right now, all was quiet. Right now, everything was okay. “It’s okay, Sounsyy. It’s alright. You’re not stupid.â€
No, she wasn’t. Ryanti’s experience in that room proved his assumption correct. There was something in this building besides both of them, and it wasn’t anything physical. He himself wasn’t sure if it truly had anything to do with his dreams, but he remembered when he came into the ship for the first time what had happened to the artifact. He remember how the bright light from the tool spread amongst the ship before the artifact went dead. He glanced back at his backpack. It was still dead.
Ryanti’s face flinched up. The jolting feeling of pain in his spine, neck, and buttocks made it difficult to think. He would have stopped breathing as hard as he was if he wasn’t trying to shake off the pain. Sounsyy’s assumptions were right, Ryanti was hurt. All of that weight crashing down on him followed by the mental pain of what he experienced right after… it left his back in a scraped up mess, and the wind knocked out of him. Then there was the pounding on his head from the fresh wound on his temple, blood dripping from it visible for her to see.
He didn’t say anything about it. This was his burden to bare. Especially for her. It was his fault she was here… yet even as Sounsyy believed Ryanti sentimental, it was not something his superiors appreciated from time to time. It was why he could never afford to blunder, why he always had to give results to justify his methods. He had to leave this ship with something. Or he wouldn’t leave at all. He’d send Sounsyy back up at the cost of his life if he had to… if they were to find nothing. That was something he wasn’t going to tell her though.
He glanced over to her eventually as the silence progressed. It was deathly quiet in this ship. His eyes focused a little bit on her braid, all fancied up. It had gotten thicker since they had boarded. The little burst of hair from the last cross of the braid was no longer wet and tiny, but dry and bushy again. He remembered her comment from before: Have yeh ever tried to keep a braid underwater?
Her pretty braid was something pleasant to focus on. But Ryanti knew from her subtle movements that she wasn’t feeling okay. It dawned on him that she never answered that question with a yes. It had been a no, a shake of the head. She had curled up, nibbling on a ration that she had obtained from her backpack. Was she hungry? Probably not. She looked afraid. Lonely. But she wasn’t alone, not truly. He wished… that his presence could do more for her. He wished he was someone else… someone more dear to her. If he was, then well… he could have helped her right now. It ate at him. Again, again he had wished he was someone else.
His features lightened up a little bit when she glanced at him, for some reason knowing the instant she did. Then she began moving a little bit… ah, yes… she was offering him a piece. Ryanti looked down upon the square cracker ration with an uneasy “Sure… thank you.†And accepted it, softly taking it away from her. Ryanti never held it for a moment in his mouth. He simply bit it, and chewed it quietly… idly.
He never expected that next question that came for him.
"Before yeh were Seventy-seven, what did yeh do?"
His chewing stopped for a moment. He blinked a few times, making sure that what he heard was what Sounsyy actually said. His eyes warmed up a little bit and closed as he got to thinking about that question, swallowing what was left of the silly ration he had chewed up. He wasn’t hungry either.
“Before I was Seventy-seven, huh?†She could hear the little clangs of metal upon metal as he set his Sharlayan rifle to the side away from her. A little ‘hmm’ emerged from him as he tried to find out the best way to answer that question. He could still feel that warm crimson blood creep down the side of his face... but he had nothing to wipe it with. He spoke.
“Well… I was born as the mixed-blood child of a very old and quite influential family in Ul’Dah. My last name, Veanysus, has a bit of reknown to it in the world of big business. My family has been Dinnerware merchants for centuries. We have our hands extremely deep in the restaurant business. We’ve been supplying decent establishments with wine glasses and glass plates and such for a very long time. We’ve also had a fair amount of our family serve the nation in the military – the Flames.â€
He bit upon his fishtack, and grimaced a little as he chewed it down. He obviously didn’t like the taste. “When I was a child, I felt like I had to try that much harder to impress anyone. Because… I felt like the world didn’t get that perfect Hyuran boy and got me instead.â€
He slipped the rest of the snack into his mouth, trying not to remember the taste as he swallowed it. But the damn ration’s aftertaste clinged to the back of his throat. Oh well. “Before my father retired, he was a Bloodsworn in the military. My mother took control of the family business and immersed herself in work. I never wanted to… spend my entire life selling plates and silverware. I always wanted to be like my father – proud, powerful, and possessing the ability to change the world for the better. I looked up to him. So when I came of age, I decided to join the military too. Now back then I was really green. A big softie. A wimpy loser rich boy with his stockings to his knees.†He laughed a little bit at the memory of his past teenaged self. “I was pathetic. I thought it would be easy. I learned really quickly that it wasn’t. I still remember the smell of piss and lukewarm rubbing alcohol. That’s what the Barracks smelled like – one of the worst months of my life.â€
He leaned a little back towards the cerment wall, coughing a bit. He was still trying to ride out the pain. “I went to Officer’s School, basically. So… we were given big projects before we were to graduate. They gave me a notebook the size of my hand, and told me to travel the world and document my good deeds endorsed by the people I helped. They told me not to come back until I had done one hundred endorsed good deeds. That was the first time I truly set out to travel the world. I ended up meeting someone. A woman… older than me of course. She was a former Paladin of the sultanate. I remember how she did her hair… it was cut short like a Bob, but she had a long ponytail in the center… black hair.â€
He rubbed the back of his neck as he mentioned her. “She took me in. She taught me… a lot about growing up. Back then she was the head of a band of individuals determined to morally shape Eorzea into a better world than it was. Things were more uncertain during those times. I traveled with them and … those good deeds started piling up. I resolved to never go on a journey without a notebook after that. After I finished my assignment and reluctantly informed everyone that I would have to go back, she proceeded to give me a great test, a test that I passed with no shortages of bruises and scabbed kneecaps.â€
He laughed a little bit, recalling a positive memory. “I remember one of the sponsors of our freelancing group was a rather wealthy man who had little faith in our group’s leadership. So I spoke up and told him not to ask anything of us that he wouldn’t do himself and we would listen to him. We ended up running across the frozen wastes of Coerthas with nothing but skimpy briefs on! My feet were totally numb and I nearly shivered my teeth into pieces! But we did it...†He realized that it was perhaps the first time a laugh had permeated these walls in five thousand years. Those were some of his happier times.
His hand slowly reached over to his rifle again, and Ryanti glanced towards it and away from Sounsyy. “I never saw her again after I left to graduate. I never saw any of them again…â€
The young man spread his legs, and suddenly picked up the rifle and placed the rear stock in between his legs with a thud, holding the rifle upwards with one hand and inspecting it, whipping out a cleaning rag from one of his pockets to clean it from the dust. It would be bad if it got into the contraption. He couldn’t use that rag to wipe his blood off, which was beginning to dry.
“At first I started just simply supervising weapon shipments and such to pay my dues. I was going to go into quartermastering. That was my plan. I always enjoyed tinkering with weapons, and I knew that technology almost always innovates with weapons first. That had become an obsession of mine, both technology and history. I adored such subjects when I was a child, but I never really had the faith in me to chase my dreams. It was that woman and her ragtag group that gave me the faith to start believing that I could make a living doing what I wanted.â€
His rag continued to swipe the dust off of his rifle as he spoke. “At this point, I was a young man that never had an identity due to my mixed blood, and never figured I deserve a reason to live in the first place. Believing my existence a fluke, I just… immersed myself in knowledge. I despised the world I was living in so I… wanted to know about other eras in this world, other times. I pulled strings because my family name allowed me too. I figured out that in the end… what I truly wanted was knowledge. I wanted to know about the world in its entirety as it occurred in the past so that I could build a better future – so that nobody born in any situation would ever grow to loathe the world. That gave me a purpose… a reason to live. So I started asking questions and rubbing elbows. They were actions that were dangerous and very risky now that I look back at it. But I wanted to know, and I had no qualms about the consequences because I didn’t care if I died because of it.â€
He paused for a moment, his voice turning grim. “I didn’t find ‘them’ … they found me. I was taken right out of where I was sleeping. I thought I was being kidnapped… -again-, like I was when I was little once… but no. It wasn’t a kidnapping… in the literal definition. I was taken somewhere. All I could remember was that it smelled like dust and metal and gas, the place where they took me.â€
“They asked me if I really wanted to know.â€
Ryanti smiled a little. “I told them that if I could be afforded to see the past, present, and future and live only half a life... then I would have already seen many times more than if I would have said no and lived a full one. That’s when they took me in. They gave me a warm blanket and some hot chocolate. That was the first day – their only love they ever gave to me in that place was a blanket and hot chocolate.â€
“They worked us to the bone. Trained us in obscene conditions, yet never crossing the line to the point of permanent injury. None of us left that place with a single scar on our bodies and yet… yet there was so much pain. I never knew who I was training with. It was twenty-four seven. Never ending, for one entire month of hell. My parents were told I had simply shipped out to do an escorting job for a friggin’ caravan.â€
He began to unattach his flashlight from his rifle, and stuck it into a little slot on his belt. Three stripes of light glew in the darkness, an indicator that it was charging. He began shuffling through his backpack to find his other flashlight. “We were given all sorts of physical tests. Psychological ones too. They wanted to make sure we were as sane as could be despite the insane training. But… but I think the worst was when we began to realize the true scope of what they were preparing us for. What they called their real training. The final week they… subjected us to… things.â€
He lightly pinched his fingers against his closed eyes for a moment. The little smile was still on his face.
“That’s how I could read some of those pieces of writing back there.†He mentioned, tilting his head in the direction of where he came. “They had us learn those kinds of things the quick and painful way. The Keepers only, of course. We were subject to the most rigorous training. Though I have to admit... I closed my eyes for some of it..â€
“So then I became agent Eighty-two. That was my first number. Five people have either left the business or died since then, so I became agent Seventy-seven. Since it’s damn near impossible to leave the business once you’re in it, well… they probably all died.†He attached the fully-charged flashlight onto his barrel, and took the magazine out to make sure it was clean too.
“The thing is though… you asked me about who I was before I was Seventy-seven. There is no before. Seventy-seven is a number. It’s a body. It’s a label that tells you what rank I am and nothing more besides hiding my true name during classified missions. One privilege we do receive is that we still get to keep our prior lives. The innkeeper you book a room for – the merchant you buy a tunic from – the janitor of a friggin’ fishing vessel – anyone could be one of us. Our deeds go un-thanked, and perhaps will for years… decades… centuries. But yes… I only go on missions like these maybe once a month or less. I didn’t transform into Seventy-seven, Sounsyy… Seventy-seven is simply my alias when I’m on my special little shift. My workplace persona. It’s no different than Captain Mirke or... Mirke the Maimer. When it comes to you though, I’d just… I’d just rather be called Ryanti. That is… if I have earned it.â€
Satisfied with his weapon, he set it down before him again, this time on his lap and resting his hands upon it. He wouldn’t make the mistake of putting it on the floor again, not with all the dust. He offered the rag to Sounsyy. Maybe cleaning her rifle could be something to take her mind off of things?
“What about you, huh? What’s your story? And no I don’t mean the Captain Mirke you are now or… the striking young woman on the posters during my youth that I know deep down was nothing more than clever marketing and the persona of someone trying to survive. No... what’s -Sounsyy’s- story? Before you were Captain Mirke of the Roehmerl or Mirke the Maimer… what did you do?â€