Dust To Dust [Closed]

[Ryanti]

Ryanti felt himself take a few steps back, but not out of will. In fact, it had almost surprised him enough to nearly make him stumble. The cold outline of her four fingers lingered upon the young man’s chest. They were like tiny little icicles. It thawed like the icicles upon the roof of an Ishgardian home in the highlands of Coerthas during the coming spring.

 

It was a feeling Ryanti knew very well. From the time that he was a little Halfling child born of mixed blood in a circle of society that valued purity above all else, to when he stepped on this boat, it felt the same. It was a feeling of being pushed, pushed away. Left in front of the door when it closed. It was a feeling of mistrust, and of suspicion.

 

It mattered not for what reason why people had felt that way about him in the past. There were too many reasons to count: His blood, his demeanor, his place in society, all of those. While they were packing, he was thinking about how ironic it probably was that he had come to bond with this crew. He wondered in his mind just how fast they would turn on him and shoot him dead if ordered. Just how fast Sounsyy would prop his jaw open like she did Cynthia’s. He tried not to think about it, but those thoughts were always in a dark corner of his mind.

 

I’ve outlived a helluva lot of suicide missions where I believed in what I were doin’, so I ain’t keen to die on one I don’t.

 

Of course. When was it ever different?

 

He had crossed his arms and stood silent as he watched Sounsyy look about at the Elezen that had been watching this whole conversation and pick up the rifle to feel it out more. There was really nothing he felt like he could say right now. He let her have the moment. A part of his mind wondered whether Sounsyy actually believed that she had it in her to handle weapons like that and gear like this, and whether or not she was truly ready. He couldn’t read any thoughts behind those dead eyes. He was gambling on an instinct, on a feeling, an intuition. He knew it. It was how he always was, even before he took up this occupation.

 

“Understood, Captain.” Ryanti repeated himself when she explained to him that he should really get to sleep and everything. He understood that he had to, and unlike the last time he said those words, this time they carried an aura of just pure business. When it was time to go below deck, right before Sounsyy went back upwards, she heard his words follow her up. “But we both know we aren’t immediately going straight to our beds.”

 

 

Ryanti solemnly looked over his shoulder as the Captain proceeded upstairs. He had closed his eyes, despite the darkness surrounding him giving him no need to. There was a certain heaviness in his heart, a familiar feeling that he was all alone in this endeavor. He of course surely wasn’t alone in this physically but… alone in his belief. The only one to believe him was the only one out of the unit that didn’t have any dreams like he did. Now she was barely alive. He felt the straps of the gear crate eat into his hands as he carried it on one side of him. The weight was causing his fair skin to turn red with irritation, but he didn’t really notice. It wasn’t the lightest weight he felt on his body right now.

 

She had told him not to put all of the weight on himself, and then told him that the mission was something she – no one – believed in. How was he supposed to carry all this weight?

 

“She doesn’t trust you.”

 

Ryanti knew that voice. He always had a unique voice. He figured he could feel someone else in that dark empty hallway watching him. The ends of his lips twitched a little bit in response, and the young man moved ever so slightly, the crate in his hand bobbing a bit with the weight. “I know.” Ryanti said back to the darkness, opening his eyes within it even though it saw just as much of nothing.

 

Suddenly, a strike of a match happened, and then there was light. A brief little fire upon the match stick burned into the little cup of the pipe that the man had extended. His pure black locks confirmed who the man was – Jonathan. He took a wiff and a little billow of smoke came out from his chapped lips before he shook the match out, the embers only illuminated part of his face as smoke came from it. “And you trust her?”

 

Ryanti turned to face him, quietly bending his knees and gently placing the crate upon the floorboards with barely a peep, resting the strap upon the top of the crate. “I do.” He simply said, feeling an urge swell up in his gut that he was going to get ridiculed and chastised for what he said. His shoulders tightened up, and the Halfling looked away. For once, the darkness in the hallway seemed a better companion.

 

“Why?” Jonathan pressed him, puffing on his pipe right after. Why, why why… the dreaded why. Ryanti knew it was coming, yet he could never make that blow easier. For what purpose did he ask that; to judge him? To tell him how wrong he was?

 

“I don’t have a reason.” He found himself saying after probing his mind and finding nothing except for the honest answer. “Not any reason that you would be pleased with. You can’t always have concrete reasons to do something, or feel a certain way. That is what faith is.”

 

Jonathan digested Ryanti’s answer while billowing a puff or two from the corner of his lips, nursing the pipe with a finger and his thumb plugged over the top. “You will not make any friends or otherwise in this line of work. There’s no such thing. People look after only themselves, and crave naught else but the table scraps of power that somehow find their way slipping through the fingers of the ones that have always had the power. Trust, faith, love, these things are a luxury not afforded to people like us. If you die following an impossible dream, you will not be the first Keeper to.”

 

Ryanti’s expression molded into a rather perplexing tone, and he allowed himself to sigh. He had heard this before too from Jahh. You would not be the first. You would not be the first. Even though he had always felt like he wasn’t wanted… that he was pushed away by others…

 

“I do not believe that about people. Not all people. So I cannot follow your logic. I have already experienced much in the tastes of death, betrayal, and horrific war. I have killed many. But as I have seen men and women change their outlook on people after their experiences, I find that I don’t have the same ability to change how I see people. I can’t get myself to, no matter what I have seen or done. I still have faith that this cycle of madness can stop. So I cannot agree with you, Jonathan.”

 

Jonathan blew out a sigh that had a thick amount of smoke in it. His back casually shuffled as he laid against the wall to support himself on his good leg. “Because reasons don’t matter to you?”

 

The crate slowly lifted off the floor again by Ryanti’s other hand. “Because I don’t have faith in your reasons. I can’t look at it the way you do, Jonathan. I’m sorry.”

 

“Is that is the real reason why you removed me from command?” Jonathan questioned, his emotionless gaze boring into the young man’s aquamarine eyes. Once again, Ryanti had dropped the bag, and he found himself once again face to face with his superior officer… on paper at least. “I removed you from command because your job in this unit was to be on the ground to guide us to our objective once we dived in. Now that it is I and the Captain diving, the job falls to me now. That is all there is to it. You may be able to advise me from the Roehmerl, but once I dive, let’s be frank: I and the Captain will be the ones making the decisions down there. Without your help down there, the Keeper takes command. You know that was the very reason why you were summoned to help. Because you had to protect me. Now you can only do that from a distance.”

 

Jonathan let out a deeply ingrained sigh from the bottom of his throat. He was happy that being crippled allowed him to smoke again, to feel that feeling again and to ease his mind. Still, his next words were slow and rather hoarse in an ominous tone. “I hope you know what in the seven hells you are doing, Seventy-seven.”

 

Ryanti hoped so too. He lifted the crate once more. “Well, the good news is that we won’t have to wait too long before finding out if I am.” That was true. Tomorrow was it. Tomorrow would be the beginning of the culmination of everything that had come to this – the biggest moment of his life.

 

As he began to turn away and walk towards his resting place, he stopped one final time. “Have you been keeping tabs?” He asked the older man. “Ever since the first shite comment about us was said.”

 

“Good.” Said the snowy haired young man. “I am no naïve marmot. I fully understand that sometimes I… may be wrong about –some- people.” And with that, he retired.

 

 

A slight sound was heard when Ryanti rose himself up from his slumber against his corner of the room. The sheet that covered him slid down his shoulders and his body, revealing his threadless form to the unwatchful world. It was an uneventful sleep, hopelessly interrupted. Probably anxiety.

 

Forty-three was already out and Jonathan had yet to follow Ryanti back to their resting place. It was an uneventful sleep, hopelessly interrupted. His light clothing was tossed aside near the mattress he had been sleeping on for the past week or so now. He couldn’t remember the last time he had tried to sleep fully nude, but he figured… he could fall asleep easier that way. The salty winds from the window outside leaked through and felt very different with a lack of threading. After the sheets fell, he had pulled them up his legs enough to cover what was sensitive so that the same cold seething wind he had experienced out on deck would not find their way in his most sensitive of areas. He felt his chest with his fingertips, near the same spot Sounsyy had pushed him away. He thought maybe… he could warm that spot with his own fingertips, but they were equally cold, and all it did was re-ensure the memory.

 

He shifted his glance rapidly when he witnessed a feint light, the bluest of light, coming from underneath his pillow. In the bowels of the ship the artifact had rested, but it had seen many places of the Roehmerl since Ryanti uprooted it from its ultra-secure location. With a movement of the pillow, Ryanti gazed upon the piece of work that was the Allagan contraption; the link between the men of present day… and the long lost wishes… the dreams of those who had perished in the deep over five millennia ago.

 

He noticed the blue light was fading in and out faster than usual, with a erythematic pace. With a solemn movement, he picked up the artifact with a single hand. The cerment still felt so well made and so unbelievably strong in form. It was cold to the touch, but yet it was making Ryanti’s palm warm and humid. There was a ‘tenseness’ about the light… and the aura about the device. It was as if the device was looking for something, assured that something was there where it was looking but finding nothing. Ryanti held his breath and touched the tips of his fingers upon the outline of the circular component that held the bulb which was the strongest source of light on the objects. He slid his fingers along the outline of the circle in a command that told the key to give him a diagnostic.

 

He maneuvered his hand swiftly back, and the light upon the object began to dim, giving way to a blue background of a monitor of some sort. A bunch of garbled writing began to spill itself out upon the orb that had turned into a screen of sorts. It was the same garbled writing he had remembered the night before he came upon the ship. That was the last time he had checked. He was trying to make sure everything was okay tomorrow. It looked like it was.

 

Still, as he locked the device with a reverse movement of his fingers, he could see that the artifact was still pulsating rather… fast and tensely. There was life about this object upon it right now. He didn’t know whether or not there were actual souls trying to communicate, or… residual feelings, emotion or energy. It was still so poorly understood in his time. It was almost like a heartbeat. Almost as if he was cradling a heart itself. Ryanti took great care when he enveloped his second hand upon holding the object. With a quiet gesture, he lowered his head to the object and breathed a very calm and warm breath from the back of his throat a few times upon the device. He did it until his breath made the device warm again. He wanted to make it warm to soothe it.

 

“It’s going to be alright.” Ryanti murmured to the device in the slightest of whispers. “It’s okay. Your nightmares will not win tonight.” He continued, and finally the pulsating of the object began to calm down a little bit, and slow down. Ryanti’s eyes closed a quarter way and his lips formed into a weak smile. “You must be worried. I’m worried too. I don’t want to fail like the others.”

 

Ryanti manuveared his eyes to glance up above at the window, his eyes pointing towards the shining silver moon in the sky. His breaths were slow but deep, and he spoke as if trying to communicate beyond the sky, his eyes closed in a kind of prayer. “Mother Crystal… I know we haven’t talked much, but... I would be most grateful if you could watch over us. If you could bless us.”

 

He shifted his eyes back to the Artifact. It felt so surreal knowing that at one time so so long ago when millennia became eons… Allagan hands had touched where Ryanti’s hands had touched. It was easy to believe it was nothing but a dream, as nothing but thoughts and wishes and fairy tales. But this object was real. Those dreams were dreamed by real people in a world that was so far beyond the imagination of most. But it was… real. All of it was real. He rested his forehead upon the orb of light, closing his eyes and whispering out another prayer… this time towards the Allagans. “I would be most grateful if you could watch over us too. Those from an era so profound. I… hope I can be worthy in your eyes to be blessed.”

 

 

---

 

 

Ryanti jolted his eyes open. He must have fallen asleep. Right?

 

But it was dark still, and there was no one in the room with him. How was that? He swept the sheets off of him and stood himself up, glancing around the room and nearly getting dizzy doing it. It felt there was a storm going on, and Ryanti’s body shifted as the Roehmerl crashed back and forth against the waves. Normally in such rough weather, he expected that the crew would be shouting aboard deck and handling the equipment upstairs. He heard nothing. This troubled him and troubled him greatly.

 

“Guys?!?” Ryanti had shouted upon each wooden doorway of the ship that he had opened. Everything was there as if the crew had just left it the way it was, but everyone… everyone was gone. It was like the Roehmerl itself was abandoned and the crew had vanished in an instant. The lack of the crew nor Ryanti’s partners caused the ship to feel eerily empty and void. It was lifeless, and Ryanti could feel the panic racing up against his throat as he swung doors open faster and faster. “Fruhsuun!?! Pamido?!? Jonathan?!? Leura?!? W-welro?!? A-ANYBODY?!? H-hey! It’s a storm! A storm!”

 

As soon as he found stairs that led up to the deck, one of the masts found him. Without the crew, the ship was falling apart in the storm. The wooden pillar crashed upon the stairs and Ryanti helplessly yelled and stumbled onto the steps, having to crawl on all fours to get past the obstacle and continue to the deck. A bolt of lightning crashed against the deck of the ship, and Ryanti had to hold onto the remnants of the mast just to stay on the ship as a roaring wave crashed upon the floorboards.

 

What had caused this?!? What was going on? The clouds around him were a sulfuric, dead yellow, spewing dark lighting from within its bowels and striking the ocean water, sending waves flying towards the ship as Ryanti desperately tried to hold on. His hair whipped around as his frightened eyes looked up at the sky. There were no stars out. It was a black void filled with rotten clouds that seemed to trap him in this reality. He could make out, at an impossible point behind the black void, the shape of the Allagan artifact.

 

Everywhere in the sky he looked was that shape. It was as if it was painted upon the sky at impossible angles that could only be real if taking place in a dream. Immediately after, a huge sound filled Ryanti’s ears that boomed from the distant sky. It sounded like an ultra-modern humming noise that blared from the sky at an immensely loud volume level. It was like a… like a starship activating its full power. He couldn’t make out the form behind the clouds, but blue lights stemmed from it… a shape, he could make out a shape… a MASSIVE shape…

 

A second blaring horn sounded that felt like the ground quaking underneath him. Ryanti had found himself looking over the water as a consequence. The water… the rustling waves of the Indigo Deep. Ryanti whipped his head behind him to witness a massive tentacle of a Kraken, sea monster of legend in the little picture books Ryanti read as a kid, slam against the Captain’s cabin of the Roehmerl, reducing it to shreds in an instant and bending the ship in a contorted, twisted shape as it mauled the guts out of the vessel. Ryanti found the ship tilting to the side at an impossible angle, inevitable that it would sink. The next thing he knew, he was hanging from the guardrail, his feet dangling from the side of the capsized vessel as it began to capsize.

 

Ryanti looked down, and realized that he was wearing his Sharlayan suit. Realizing that he had no other choice, he climbed the side of the ship and stood upon its underbelly that had reared itself above the sea. He fiddled the mouthpiece that rested next to his collarbone, and realized that the suit had been modified for diving. As a precaution, he put the mouthpiece into his lips and took a test breath, breathing from the oxidized air that had been filtered into the tiny tubes in his suit. At that moment, an ultra-loud blaring horn from the blue lights in the sky shook his head and caused him to writh in pain and agony, toppling over the vessel and dropping into the dark water below.

 

He had closed his eyes, and was writhing back and forth in the cold water, feeling himself sinking and the cold beginning to overtake him. It would feel nice to just give into the relaxation of it all… and the numbness of the cold to settle his fright and his pain. But it didn’t feel right, and Ryanti shot open his eyes. Sounds and echoes permeated through the water despite it being an impossibility in reality. Sonic waves buzzed his ears. He was treated to visions in the water of violent creatures heading straight towards him. Ryanti pulled out his Sharlayan knife from his thigh and held it steady in his hand, spinning two and fro and recoiling in fright from these visions and even swiping at them with his knife only to hit nothing and for the image to fade within an instant of coming at him.

 

He continued to sink into the water, but the visions were replaced with echoes of voices he didn’t know speaking a language he didn’t understand. Within the chaos, Ryanti looked for the first time below him to see an astounding sight.

 

There was a figure in shadow, squirming about, looking like it was drowning. A hyur torso with a serpent tail was pursuing her in the darkness, arms outstretched to claim her. It was… it was Sounsyy. It all made sense now… the storm, the ship, the absence of the crew and the Allagan presence. He felt like he was in someone else’s dream… Sounsyy’s.

 

He had invaded a cycle in his dreams because of his desire to break them, though Ryanti did not know he had done this.

 

His blood boiled. He felt his adrenaline surge. The young man swam towards her as hard as he could, eyeing the sea serpent that swiped her arms about Sounsyy to try to claim her. He could feel every muscle he had burn with pain as he swam, getting closer, getting ever closer… with every moment that he swam he knew he might lose her. His teeth put marks into his mouthpiece with his effort and he brought his knife blade up and out. He wasn’t going to lose her. He was not going to be a helpless bystander in the crowd anymore.

 

With his free arm, he reached out as his body javelined towards its target. For a brief moment, he felt his free arm warp around the neck of the creature as he slammed into it from behind. For a tiny second, he felt his other arm thrust as hard as it could with that knife towards the monster’s neck.

 

 

---

 

 

Ryanti woke up. He was lying on the bed stomach first with the covers up to the small of his back, gripping his pillow with both hands near his chin level. The sounds of the morning bell were undoubtedly familiar in Ryanti’s mind, as everyone that was able were to wake up and help prep. The young man looked about, and noticed that there no one in the room with him. His features lit up a bit at the realization that he had gripped the pillow so hard that it had formed tiny breaks in the threading, and that the artifact was in the pocket of his trousers when it had been underneath his pillow. His heart was beating so hard… he felt like he had done something. He gripped his chest slightly, and squeezed at it. There was a connection there. It made a feeling of heat wash through his skin, clearing his mind.

 

He pulled up his covers a little bit and glanced out the window. The sun was bright, and the sky was a crystal clear blue. He realized now that the Roehmerl in his dream was not the real thing. It gave him some relief. But the issue that he was facing today was so great; he couldn’t afford to dwell upon it longer. It was the big day. The biggest day of his life. The door to his room creaked open from a Lalafell that he was familiar with, his spectacles nice and polished up as if there was never any blood on them. “It looks like today is your big day, young man.”

 

“And he’s not talking about graduating or some shite like that.” Jonathan commented, walking into the room with the same kind of walk that spoke authority when he entered the room, even though he still held a single crutch in his armpit and hobbled like a cripple. “Damn it, you people… I’m naked.” Ryanti admitted, earning a stern lookaway by the other two men of his crew as he slinked his undergarments his Sharlayan lower fatigues upon him, swiftly tying up his combat boots. Jonathan leaned upon his crutch and extended his hand out. Thinking about everything revolving the mission, Ryanti caught his hand with his own and was helped onto his feet by the older man despite his injury, squeezing into his netted undershirt right after. “Let’s get you ready.” Jonathan murmured firmly to Seventy-seven, patting him on the back once or twice.

 

Forty-three adjusted his spectacles to the morning sun. “Indeed. The Captain just woke up herself, and the crew are tending to her needs right now as if they were butlers! Strange. I don’t believe we will be able to swallow our pride to do such a thing.”

 

The Captain had just woke up? The same time he did? “Don’t worry about it.” Ryanti told him as Jonathan took big steps with his good leg to be able to get to the door frame and wait outside of it for him. “Let’s go, Seventy-seven. They’re cooking a big breakfast today. Stuff from that Garlean shite. Something filling for the both of ya. They even got juice.”

 

It seemed to be complete chaos in the mess hall. Susuroon was in fantastic spirits for the first time since Eighty-five had gotten hit. There was something about cooking a giant meal in the morning that cheered him up. He had said something along the lines of the feeling tickling his tummy. Ryanti had sat down with Jonathan and Forty-three, and they were talking amongst themselves. Anyone that could have overheard their conversation would note that they were mentioning how to best handle the rations and water they would be taking down there. A fair amount of the conversation also had to do with advising Ryanti what courses of actions to take if he were to run into any situation deemed unsafe. More than likely, this was their way of making up for not being able to go down with him. However, they got up to convene outside of the Mess Hall before the Captain arrived.

 

The mess hall was the first time Ryanti had seen the Captain since that last night. But they didn’t get much of a chance to talk after what happened last night. Ryanti still had those thoughts linger in the back of his mind, but he was all business this first half of the morning, cramming food in his mouth. Asparagus, popoto, lean meats, steamed vegetables, fruit juice, even plain old stalks of lettuce that Ryanti grimaced at when he wolfed it down. He was eating purely to fuel his body this morning, not to please the tongue. He did send a sign to Sounsyy across the table though. A subtle little thumbs up, and a quick smirk. He was ready. He hoped she was.

 

“Marjanie is ready to begin the briefing!” Jonathan shouted out from the entrance to the mess hall, among the commotion, holding out his full hand to indicate attention. “Once you two suit up, we need to get to the deck! We’re expecting light rainfall by the time the sun is a few more clicks across the sky and we’d like to get you two in the water before then! Make sure you have –everything-!”

 

Just then, Jonathan tilted his back a bit, as if he was hearing a little bit of commotion from behind him. Whether or not it was Forty-three or Cwaenlona, no one could really see, but it seemed as if Jonathan was relaying messages because he had a more booming voice than anyone. “Eighty-five has woken up!” Was his next phrase, which got nearly –everyone’s- attention in the mess hall, including Ryanti, who wiped his face clean with a cloth and immediately got himself up out of the stool to follow the group of people that left the place.

 

Her skin was still a bit pale, and it looked like she hadn’t moved all that much since the last time Ryanti and Sounsyy had seen her. She had a sponge bath once or twice though, and her hair was tied in a loose bun to make things a little easier for her. Messy as all hell, not something she would prefer but it worked. Her bandages on the side of her neck were very thick, and the medical gel applied to the wound was a combination of what the Sharlayan crew had and what Cwaenlona had. There would be a scar, no doubt about it. It would haunt her neck for cycles to come, probably.

 

Her words were quiet and weak as her watery eyes took notice of everyone around her. Jada was the closest to her, but Sounsyy and Ryanti were allowed to be close as well since they were leaving. Leura had already spoken with Susuroon and Jada, the two that were notified before Jonathan let the word out, which explained why Susuroon was so happy. She had been told that Ryanti and Sounsyy were leaving, and even though she was kind of messed up at the moment because of the painkilling drugs pumping through her veins, she managed to get a few words out.

 

“You’re wearing… my shite.” She managed to croak out to Sounsyy. “I’d..k- ..kick some… ass in that suit. n’.. look after.. snowcone over there, like he would for me… so… you better… you… better not… you better not do anything l-… less, girl.” She seemed out of breath even saying that, closing her eyes and taking heavy breaths. If one were to look near the top of her bandage, they would see the discoloration. “Sorry, just.. I g-got.. a Garlean n’… vein in my.. neck right now n’.. feels… weird… lightheaded..” She eyed Jada with dazed and unfocused eyes, and it was not too long after before the ones that came were being shoo’d out of the cot. But before Sounsyy left, as Jada held Leura’s head when she closed her eyes and breathed deeply out of fatigue, sweating dripping down the side of her scalp, she spoke one final time.

 

“I never.. dreamed of nothin’, Captain. It really never was my… suit.”

[Sounsyy]

Sounsyy shifted into wakefulness in her armchair after only a few hours of sleep. There were dark circles under her eyes and her body felt stiff from the exertion of the day before. Something had woken her, some noise from without. She waited for it to repeat and in after a time another gentle knock rapped on her door. She pulled herself up using the back of her chair and moved across the floor to open the door for her usual morning visitors, P'welro and Marjanie.

 

They both offered their morning reports while Sounsyy dressed in the same clothes she wore the night before. Marjanie gave a brief account of expected weather as well as a tally of the number of Sahagin she had marked circling the ship that morning. "They are anxious, waiting for our move. I suspect if we chose to leave now it may provoke them."

"Good thing we aren't leaving."

 

P'welro offered her status of the crew, who all were cleared to return to duty and who were still confined to the infirmary. Fortunately, the list of those still bound to the infirmary was shorter than the day before and better news - Eighty-five was beginning to rouse.

"I'm sure she'd like to see you," P'welro offered afterwards. Sounsyy nodded and moved over to her vanity and began sorting through the drawers.

 

"You should eat Captain," Marjanie said calmly, but Sounsyy just nodded and affirmed that she would in short order. After the two women were relieved, they returned to their duties about the ship, having already eaten and dressed for the day. Marjanie returned to her position at the helm and P'welro to the main mast to begin prepping the sails for the coming rain. Sounsyy sat motionless at her vanity for a while after the two had left, staring at her reflection. The gold flecks of paint around her eyes from yesterdays battle were all but chipped off, leaving only the dark circles under her eyes accentuated. Her hair was a loose mess.

 

She felt a sudden cool chill filter into her room, unnaturally so even for a morning on the Indigo Deep. Outside she could hear the sounds of a different morning, five years before.

 

Can you breathe? Is it tight? A woman's voice echoed in her ears. A sad smile curled about the edges of Sounsyy's lips. "I wish yeh were here," she whispered aloud to the memory, "I'm sorry I didn't write."

 

Sounsyy looked at herself in the mirror, her fatigued face merely staring back. For but the briefest of moments, Sounsyy thought she saw the shadow of her old friend move behind her. Her soft voice admonishing her for the state she let herself be in. It reminded her of Eighty-five's own attempt. So Sounsyy began.

 

 

Breakfast was already past being in full swing when Sounsyy carefully descended the steps into the Mess. Her stomach growled unbidden when the pleasant aromas of Susuroon's cooking met her nose. She was glad he had recovered so soon and seemed to be in good spirits when he came into her line of sight. Ryanti and the Sharlayan crew were already below and had eaten. A few of the crew looked up as the captain plodded past in her small glade boots and loose-fitting undershirt. But while her clothing looked as haggard as the captain normally did, she had taken the time to style her hair in a classic Ishgardian braid. Her hair was tight, neat, with only a hair or two out of place across her entire head.

 

She sat in her usual seat at the closest end of the counter and waited to be presented with breakfast. She took a quick glance down the counter to where Ryanti was making a hand signal at her, but only gave him a quick nod in return. Her focus returned to her food shortly after. Sounsyy leaned across the counter towards the Qiqirn and the two exchanged a few whispered words before she sat back in her stool.

 

She had nearly wolfed down the bowl of food when the announcement was shouted across the hall that Eighty-five was awake. Sounsyy cleaned her face with a cloth and left behind the group that moved its way to the Infirmary. It was a rather large crowd that tried to fit into a small room and Cwaenlona ended up shooing most away to keep the peace. The Captain and Ryanti moved to the front with Jada. Sounsyy gave a small smile at the young Miqo'te.

 

"You look like a ship's captain now," Sounsyy said gently to her. Eighty-five still looked weak. She manged a small, "You're wearing... my shite," which made Sounsyy laugh a little. "I tried puttin' on Forty-three's instead, but it didn't fit."

 

Then Cwaenlona came and dispatched the rest of the group to give Eighty-five rest. She was alive and they would get more time with her. But the captain seemed to have doubts that she'd make it back on this ship. She lingered for a moment, watching the young girl and Jada. Then Eighty-five breathed out her confession. Sounsyy stiffened, but Eighty-five was beginning to doze softly again. Sounsyy turned her gaze to Jada and regarded the woman for a moment.

 

"It's time to gear up," she whispered. Jada nodded and stood, moving her way past the captain and moving quickly to the armory, Sounsyy hot on her heels. As much as she wanted to, she did not look back over her shoulder at the wounded girl. The two Miqo'te took hold of one end of the large Sharlayan crate each and hoisted it out onto the deck. The Sharlayans were waiting for them out on deck and the small crew were gathered in assembly. P'welro had taken the helm while Marjanie sat on the gunwale opposite them. Forty-three and Sixteen were laying out their gear on the deck and Sounsyy and Ryanti stripped down to smallclothes and stepped into their suits.

 

Marjanie eased herself off the gunwale, keenly watching the two dress like a hawk. Ryanti dressed quickly. Sounsyy took her time. When the captain had pulled the suit up over her shoulders and began buckling herself into the suit, Marjanie began her briefing.

 

"According to our charts, the drop site provided to us by the Sharlayans lies one-hundred, twenty six malms to the north and west of Vylbrand's coast. Below us lies the edge of a deep sea shelf. Beyond this point, the sands drop off into the Deep to depths unknown. The shelf itself lies an estimated thirteen-hundred fathoms below."

 

There was a general murmur amongst those of the Roehmerl's crew. This was clearly a concerning number. Sounsyy bit her lip and continued fastening her suit in place so it fit about her snugly.

 

"That's six-hundred, fifty yalms down for those unfamiliar with the measurement," she gave Ryanti a look. Sounsyy wondered if that was somewhere in his mess of notes he left lying on the infimary cot. Marjanie continued, "That's where the suits come into play. The Ironworks designed the carbon fibers of the suit to withstand the crushing pressure of the deep sea, while using the very same pressure of the waters trying to rush into the suit to filter air aspect from the sea into the filtration device. You're not the only smart one aboard this ship, Seventy-seven."

 

Sounsyy smirked and knelt down to begin packing supplies into a small, single strap backpack made of similar materials as the suit. She looked up at Ryanti's surprised face saying, "Bet yer wishin' yeh had a suit fer her now?"

 

"My mother was an accomplished marine biologist before she became an Ironworks engineer. Some of her smarts passed on, even if I followed a very different path," Marjanie explained, "She postulated that before the Age of Endless Frost or even the following Great Flood, that Eorzea was a much different shaped continent. She believed that there may be dozens of lost cities beneath the Five Seas, though we lacked the technologies to find them. The suits you're wearing appear to be based on her original design, Atmospheric Dive Suits, she called them. Let's hope they work. The pressure at those depths can easily pop a cork into a bottle of champagne."

 

Sounsyy visibly winced. She had packed her bag full of necessary supplies. Rations, the canteen of clean water, first aid supplies, torchlight, ammunition, the Sharlayan goggles, and whatever else could fit beside the disassembled Sharlayan rifle. Ryanti would have to pack whatever else her pack would not allow. Sounsyy stood and examined herself. Every buckle, belt, and gauge seemed to be in place, but she had Sixteen double check for her.

 

"On the topic, pressure will increase every ten yalms, reducing the amount of air your lungs can hold at any given time. The suit works to reduce the amount of pressure your body actually feels, but you'll still need to pace your descent as slowly as you can. If you feel lightheaded, swim upwards several yalms and recover. Your body must needs adjust to the pressure even with the suit. And lastly, you've each been given a linkpearl that will relay messages between each other and to Sixteen or myself aboard the Roehmerl. Should..."

 

Marjanie trailed off some, as if hesitating to continue. Sounsyy met her gaze with a hard stare and the Elezen nodded solemnly.

 

"...Should communication be severed between the divers and the Roehmerl, you will have no more than three suns to return to the surface. Captain Mirke has ordered we meet the Sharlayan rendezvous, regardless of your fates. If the Roehmerl comes under attack and communication with the divers is not restored, we've been ordered to flee to safe waters and deliver the injured Sharlayans to their vessel awaiting us in the southern Bloodbrine."

 

Sounsyy could feel all eyes on her. She was ready, though the collective gaze of all those present on deck made her feel heavy. The wetsuit hugged her form tightly, accentuating every shift in her muscles. The breathing mask hung loosely near her collarbone and her diving goggles pressed into her forehead. She was hardly recognizable as the captain in the foreign gear. Though she had strapped her shortsword in a sheath, resting horizontally above her tail. Everything else of import was stuffed into her small backpack, which she tucked her braided head under and slung it over her torso, making sure it was strapped tightly to her.

 

She stepped forwards to Marjanie, relieving her to return to the helm with a nod. Sounsyy turned to face those on deck and gave each one a good look as if it might be the last. She looked up and gazed upon the Lominsan red sails that stood out against the dark grey sky. The soft drizzle made the sails look like blood. P'welro moved through the small crowd until she was standing besides Ryanti.

 

"Last preparations were made this mornin' cap'n. Quartermasser helped meh unhook the anchor so'z yeh could 'ave the cable."

"Good," Sounsyy said, "And yer captain while I'm below. Yeh know what to do."

"Aye, cap'n. Fair winds."

 

Sounsyy gave her a Storm salute and echoed with her crew, "...and following seas."

 

She turned and made her way to the starboard side of the bow where Jada was waiting for her. Over the gunwale at the bow, the anchor cable had been lowered into the Deep. Sounsyy could only make out the cable going so far down before it disappeared into darkness. The captain breathed in deep, her sides flexing beneath the suit. It still felt really tight.

 

"It only goes straight down eighty fathoms. Can hold onto it while you're getting used to the dive. After that, it's up to the fishbacks to guide you down I guess."

 

The thought did not instill the least bit of comfort. Sounsyy looked over her shoulder as Ryanti joined her on the forecastle. She nodded to him that she was ready and they both made their way over to the edge of the ship. Jada stepped forward and placed a comforting peck on Sounsyy's cheek as she made to move.

 

"Come back. Both of you."

 

Sounsyy didn't want to look at the water below her. For the first time in her life, the sea did not look comforting to her. Perhaps because she had never willingly gone beneath it. Or perhaps because it was full of fishbacks and faery tales and Garlean body parts? She tried to shake these thoughts as she dug the yellow linkpearl into her ear and pulled the suit's breathing mask and diving goggles over her face.

 

Eighty-five's pale face whispering, I never dreamed of nothin’, Captain. It really never was my suit, was the last thing Sounsyy thought as she plunged into the icy blackness below.

[Ryanti]

Should communication be severed between the divers and the Roehmerl, you will have no more than three suns to return to the surface. Captain Mirke has ordered we meet the Sharlayan rendezvous, regardless of your fates. If the Roehmerl comes under attack and communication with the divers is not restored, we've been ordered to flee to safe waters and deliver the injured Sharlayans to their vessel awaiting us in the southern Bloodbrine.

 

Ryanti had been different since that morning, and there was no more obvious of a time where that was proven true than now. He stood firm, his shoulders stiff and his knees tight as he listened to the Elezen brief them. His look was almost a reflection of Sounsyy’s: a hard yet determined glance in their direction. The Captain and the Keeper were earning glances from the entire crew. No one said a word about it, but most of them knew that despite how unusual the outcome of events had been, both of them understood what was expected of them. Perhaps Ryanti more than Sounsyy. It had yet to be determined, but there was no question that it will be decided upon the coming days.

 

It was true that Sounsyy was hardly recognizable. Ryanti might have mused about how nicely the wetsuit accentuated the shape of a fully trained and capable soldier, but this was far too serious of a time. Immature musings and sourly jokes were out the window long before the sun rose. Though he couldn’t help but smile a little. Her hair looked really nice. Having it down would have distracted her anyhow.

 

He observed Sounsyy see off P’welro with another Limsan manner of farewells that Ryanti was unfamiliar with, but he knew that he didn’t have to understand some things. Likewise, when the woman he had shared an echo with stood alongside him after the Captain had made her way to talk to Jada, Ryanti slightly turned his gaze to her and spoke with a quiet, sincere voice. “I am not going to tell you what to do about me or Sounsyy in the case that we don’t make it back, because we are going to make it back. I’m not just saying that, either.” As for emphasis, he placed a soft palm upon her shoulder, and whispered to her. “I have something for you. It’s in the Captain’s drawer. If you ever need something to keep your hopes up while on deck waiting for us to come back, look in there. This is not a goodbye.”

 

The Hyqo’te took a few steps back, eyeing everyone that stood around the deck of the Roehmerl. “I would like to sincerely thank each and every one of you for choosing to write a memento into my Book of Days.” He solemnly spoke, though his voice was rather loud, enough for Sounsyy to overhear. Ryanti placed a fingertip of two upon his single-strapped backpack that contained everything he would hopefully need to survive. “I have placed it in here, to go with us down to depths unknown. There is no doubt that it will keep me going, despite whatever happens. You’re truly great people, and I am honored to have known you all. Don’t mistake this for a eulogy, I am just letting you all know.”

 

With that, the young man strapped his backpack upon him, and picked up his diving mask and placed it upon his head, checking his gauges one more time before stepping up to the Forecastle with the Captain as Jada wished them well.

 

“We will.” He replied to her.

 

This was when the nerves got to him the most. This was it. This entire mission had culminated up to this point. Ever since he was a child, he had been fascinated by the history of this world and its people, and was determined to unlock the secrets of knowledge that had the potential to better the future. He was lucky, and extraordinarily blessed for having the opportunity to do this… terrifying and mentally agonizing task of being the kind of man to see this through. To save the world. Sounsyy was, in a way, the first person outside of his agency to do this kind of work. To see the world for what it was truly was at one time. To witness the truth.

 

So before they dived, Ryanti took Sounsyy’s injured hand and eyed the loose piece of fabric that would have been for Sounsyy’s ring finger. He placed his fingertip upon the end of the fabric and pressed inward, folding the finger shape inside out, and then rolling the outsides of the fabric with his hands the same way someone would roll up their trousers to turn them into shorts. “I need to say one more thing before we go down.” He murmured to her as he folded the fabric until it fit around the edge of her severed finger.

 

“I cannot promise you what awaits us. But there are some things I can say. It’s very important to understand that you may see some things that may be hard for you to come to terms with. There are truths about this world that have remained hidden for a very, very long time. Our missions are classified for a reason, so…” He trailed off there. It was a hard thing for him to explain. He couldn’t really describe how he felt when he observed his first Allagan relic. Sounsyy and he would be seeing their first Allagan structure.

 

 

“But there is something that I understand you know, though I will mention it anyway. We will need each other for every moment inside of where we are going. I need to depend on you as much as you depend on me. With my life.”

 

With that, Ryanti put the linkpearl inside of his ear and turned the device on. After his ear twitched once or twice due to the static, he pressed his finger up against his ear and tested it. “Can you hear me, Jonathan?” Jonathan gave him a hand signal from across the room with a swift nod, hearing Ryanti’s voice through his own ears. He was already pacing the deck, and Forty-three had his spectacles on and tested his own linkpearl. Sounsyy could hear all three men. “You’re good to go, friends.”

 

Ryanti smiled a little before placing the mouthpiece into his lips. Sounsyy actually dived first. She had stepped over the ship’s Forecastle feet first, and hit the water with a splash. Ryanti took one last look at the shining Eorzean sun, and closed his eyes, trying to remember how it felt, for he never knew whether or not he had to call upon it later.

 

”See you on the other side, everyone.”

 

 

---

 

 

Ryanti jumped off the Roehmerl and tilted his body backwards, landing into the water headfirst. Sounsyy could see the bubbles surround the young man’s form as he entered the water begin to clear away in the immediate moment after. Dark figures could be seen approaching the Roehmerl’s side that faced him, the crew glancing at their two forms in the water. Ryanti’s head was at equal height to Sounsyy’s, his form upside down to her. He took a breath through his filter. The air tasted a little bit like Garlean rubber, but it was just fine to breathe. If one could look close, one could see tiny little fibers in their suit glowing a very feint blue as they filtered the water around them into air, dispelling the de-oxygenized water out of the back of their neck.

 

“Confirming that you can hear us.” Jonathan’s voice was heard over the linkpearl, with a little beeping noise to indicate an over signal. Ryanti gave Jonathan a waving of his arm from where he was at. “Excellent. Alright we’ll observe you for as long as we can but right now what you can do for me is make sure the Captain gets used to the process. Now Sounsyy, don’t be afraid to spend some time on that line, I’d rather have you alive and well then quick.”

 

Ryanti bent his torso forward and tucked his knees, turning his orientation back to normal. It was pretty obvious that he had received some training prior to this mission about underwater diving. With movements of his legs and ankles, Ryanti maneuvered his body around Sounsyy’s form as she placed a hand upon the anchor line. More of Jonathan’s voice graced her ear. “Now Ryanti’s going to show you how to breathe right. Look at his diaphragm and match his. He’ll be following you down the line and just go at your own pace. Ryanti’ll tell you when to inhale and exhale, just watch him. Now turn your head towards the sea floor and start going down, ilm by ilm. A slow to medium pace.”

 

With that, Ryanti re-oriented his head towards the bottom of the ocean and waited for the Captain to do the same. When she had done so, Ryanti made gestures with his hands to emphasize when he was taking a breath, and when he was exhaling that breath. It was a slow and calm process, almost similar to the kinds of breathing people would use when meditating. He kept doing it until the Captain caught onto it. Ryanti began nodding to clue her in that she was getting it right. “Is she ready, Seventy-seven?” Jonathan said from up top. Ryanti gave the okay signal.

 

“Alright, get your bearing and start heading down.”

 

Ryanti didn’t need the line, so he stayed perfectly across from the Captain as their bodies slowly began to descend. At first, they didn’t feel too much pressure. It was like swimming in a pool. But Ryanti was very keen on making sure the Captain was breathing properly. This was a crash course, and she had to learn fast. Ryanti’s legs methodically paddled back and forth as he followed her down. After a while, there was a feeling of tightness that seemed to creep up on them. Almost as if on cue, a voice again ringed out in their linkpearls. “Should be feeling it by now. That’s what you’re gonna feel. It’s going to get more powerful before your suit functions kick in. So make sure you’re taking slow, thin breaths but just keep breathing, don’t stop.” It sounded like he was relaying from Forty-three, as it took a little bit of hesitation on his end. He didn’t have the verbal skills Forty-three had.

 

“Breathe… breathe… breathe… breathe…” Jonathan kept saying over the linkpearl. The feeling of tightness was getting rather rough. For a moment, it became uncomfortable and very distracting. But that was when they both heard a little sound of pressure release from their suits. The veins with the very feint blue color began to glow stronger, as if reacting to something. What they were doing was creating a kind of aura around them of concentrated shell aether that kept the water from pressing too much upon their bodies, which relieved the pressure all the way up to them barely feeling it. However, it didn’t mean that their diaphragms would be spared. “You will need to keep this pace of breathing up, so it will be a little workout once the sea goes dark.”

 

 

---

 

 

 

 

 

But it wasn’t dark yet. The sun’s rays decorated the underwater landscape with the healthiest of blues. It was amazing how after a single day, the ocean could wipe away so much blood, and so many more bodies. Distant limp shapes in the underwater horizon still betrayed the ugly reality of what they had done days prior. But there was also a side of the ocean that was beautiful – side that had always been there. Schools of fish sometimes approached the two foreign figures in the ocean.

 

Ryanti waited patiently for Sounsyy to take the first step to let go of the line. His head slowly turned in the water, his snow-white locks floating about. There were Sahagin that had swam up to them, and in fact all around them. But unlike perhaps previous encounters they have had with Lominsians, these Sahagin were not carrying spears, but rather riding elbsts with coral-made straps and latches to the back of them. Ryanti had not seen those on the elbsts from before. Perhaps they were intended to give them a ride to the Allagan anomaly?

 

He reached out with his hand to grab onto the straps that rested upon the elbsts, and the creature in question swam a little forward, but stopped due to the Sahagin rider, who glanced at the Captain and waited as another elbst pulled alongside her. It seemed that their fate to arrive where the Allagan wreckage was going to be via elbst.

 

“You’re getting deeper. We can’t see you anymore. According to the rate you’re going, you’ll be crossing the end of the sea bed within two minutes and be at the objective within ten minutes. Prepare yourselves.”

 

It seemed like a long time. Ryanti’s face was fixed on what was in front of him. Gradually, it seemed the further they traveled under, the more aspects of the sea that they had known about began to fade away. First it was the school of fish, replaced with the bits of fungal and oceanic bottom feeders that clung to the slope of the seabed. It was during this time, when the water began to get colder and darker that Ryanti’s mind was running exceptionally fast. They had no idea what they were going to find. “Go ahead and check and see if your navigation light is working, Seventy-seven. Captain I assure you do the same.”

 

With a single gesture, Ryanti clicked a button on the upper right part of his chest. A small, but very effective and bright forward-mounting light activated, which gave him a good few fulms of light in front of him that glanced off of the elbst and into the depths below, though he still couldn’t see anything. He glanced briefly when the Captain did the same, and nodded to himself in approval. So far, so good.

 

The water got colder. They were getting deep, really deep. Only their suits were keeping them alive now, and it was doing a very good job at that. It was becoming harder to keep air in their lungs, but following the protocol enabled them to last. Their equipment was checking out, and the elbst escort was going off without a hitch. They were the most prepared as they could possibly be.

 

But nothing… nothing could prepare them for what they saw when the blurry, dark, and ominous sign of the Allagan starship, buried for at least five millennia, came into view.

 

Within the dark waters, where visible light was hard to come by, one could still make out the even darker outline of the vessel. It was MASSIVE, easily dwarfing any kind of naval vessel Eorzea possessed. Garlean naval flagships could not hold a candle to the behemoth of a shape that they were witnessing now. Even Garlean airships did not hold a candle to the size of this vessel. It took up the entire horizontal view of where they were facing, as if it was a second horizon.

 

The Sagahin looked back with faces mixed with admiration and fear when the artifact in Ryanti’s bag suddenly lit up, causing the black bag to slightly give off the light from inside. That was when something happened that was reminiscent in their dream. A shining, piercing, illuminous blue light emitted from the Allagan starhip. At its size, it could easily have been mistaken for an entire underwater reef. Then – a sound – a light buzzing sound that permeated the water and sent vibrations through their bodies. They could feel the pull. This was where they were supposed to be. The artifact, the souls were calling out to its resting place, and the graveyard, for the first time since the third era was… alive. Calling.

 

Ryanti’s eyes were as wide as they could be. It became a challenge to keep his calm breathing. This vessel was enormous in the biggest sense of the word, and he could feel that call. It was admirable, amazing, and unbelievable in scale, covered in fossil life and coral formation for the duration it had been down there.

 

Twelve’s graces… what in the god’s seven hells am I looking at…?

 

“Call us when you get i-..n” Jonathan’s voice echoed across the linkpearl. It was slightly garbled, but still understandable. Sahagin were surrounding them now, observing them just as well as guarding them from any aquatic life that had made their homes among the civilization that rose to godhood that still dreamed in the deep blue sea. As they got closer, despite the darkness, they were able to see its true shape. It was very rugged and square in a kind of shape foreign to even Garlemald’s highest standard, built with specifications beyond what anyone that knew nothing but sailing could remotely comprehend. This was not a ship that sailed the water. This was a ship that sailed the sky… and beyond.

 

The elbsts began to change their course, deviating to the bottom right of the huge vessel. Briefly, their lights were able to shine upon the side of the ship. Beyond the sea life that had attached itself to the ship, they could see their first of Allagan metal. Only the Twelve knew what kind of metal. It was extremely well designed to such an extent that five thousand, six thousand something years under the pressure of all of this water… even that could not reduce this contraption to dust.

 

They could almost feel it. The emotion. The weight. The era of their Empire…

 

Ryanti pointed his finger to the lower half of the bottom right side of the ship. There was shaped out to what might be a kind of… door. The Sagahin’s elbsts stopped almost as soon as he did. The ship was so massive in size that where they were floating in the water near the bottom of the ship, they could have looked as up as they could by craning their necks and not even see the top of it.

 

This was not a fairy tale. This was real.

 

Ryanti removed the artifact from its resting place inside of his bag, and immediately the aetherial aura that surrounded him and kept his body from succumbing to the pressure of the depths became visible under the potent artifact. It was now apparent what its job was. It was a literal key. A key card for the maintenance entrance of the rear of the ship. If it had been in Allag’s era, it would have been the access way to the supply hanger. That was their first stop.

 

Ryanti had forgotten to blink for a while now. His eyes felt dry when he did so. Slowly, methodically, the young man with the key in hand approached the entrance to the Allagan starship. His frame huddled in front of the door and was no larger than someone of his stature. It was meant for individual personnel that flew in maintenance shuttles, workers who would have repaired the little ships inside. They would have carried this key. A key that was found eons later.

 

He brushed a bit of seaweed off of the key, and glanced at Sounsyy for a brief moment. He was expressionless, but his gut felt like he was melting. He knew what he was about to do but… taken aback by the fact that it was him doing it. With a slow breathe, the young man brushed the sea life away from the key slot on the side of the door, and messed with the end of the key in the hole before finding the right spot, and sliding the key inside.

 

Rectangular LED lights lit up in red around the lock. Lights that had not been activated in eons, but STILL operational after all this time. They immediately felt an impulse of energy, a kind of pinnacle in transverance. The light in the key left it as the metal contraption slid itself into the key slot and turned on its own. Brief red lights could be seen skitter and scamper along the vessel, reaching all corners of the ship. A louder buzz emitted from the vessel. A domineering, screeching noise, as if it was responding. While they didn’t know it at the time, it was the spirits of the residual energy returning to the ship. The key lost all light after that, and became dormant. Were the spirits gone? The key slid back out, and Ryanti took it.

 

The outlines of the door glew in a much brighter blue light all of a sudden. Intricate lights activated on the doorway and the latch slowly began to open from the sides. Water coasted inside the two doors and almost instantaneously filled up the inside of the hallway. Flood lights lit up the inner parts of the rectangular room that Ryanti was now heading towards, beckoning the Captain to follow him. The inside of the room had elaborate LED lights all over it, and thickly braced computer monitors etched into each side of the wall, doing calculations automatically. Everything was running completely fine in this room. It looked like as it was meant to be a pressurization room. An airlock.

 

It was the first time Ryanti had seen something like this. He couldn’t imagine that it was like for the Captain. As they floated inside of the room, the Sagahin began to pull away. The inside of the room had an architecture that made even the Garleans themselves look like children with toys. It was strangely beautiful how the different colors lights blinked in unison or separately at such precise times, or the computer monitors processing code. Perhaps the blinking red and green lights upon the floor too…

 

The artifact must have used its energy reserves to give this place power.

 

Ryanti floated on one side of the room, watching Sounsyy. The door to the outside world closed with a slow but sure connection, vibrating the room a bit. But it was not dark inside of the room with their Sharlayan navigation lights and of course, the Allagan LEDs decorating the room with a lovely mix of color and operational tone. At their current load, the water was very pressurized, and so the room began to de-pressurize it. Gradually, the aetherial aura around them began to fade as it was no longer needed. Eventually, it shut off, and the water that they were in became less cold and more habitable, all the way until it felt like they were swimming in a pool again.

 

Amazing. Simply amazing.

 

Ryanti let himself sink down to the surface for a moment, sliding a fingertip or two along the walls. There was a certain part of him… his childhood self or maybe… the part of him that still held idealisms and romanticisms. That part of him couldn’t believe what was actually happening. He was touching something built by them. Actual Allagans had been in this hallway.

 

It was the most surreal moment of his life that would easily be overtaken by more surreal moments later in their coming days.

 

Two compartments opened at the bottom of the hallway and began sucking out the water. Ryanti leapt up to the top of the hallway and latched onto something he could grab onto, taking his first fresh breaths as the water was draining. The water was being pumped out into the ocean while the entranceway was water tight in its seal. It had to be. It was meant for space after all. But the Allagans had prepared for events like being trapped underwater.

 

Ryanti allowed himself back to keeping his head and shoulders above the surface as he felt his feet softly hit the ground. He softly turned about to examine the intricate details around him. “This is..”

 

But before he could say anything else, one of the lights closest to the entranceway shattered, and a sound of a groaning machine was heard as the lights dimmed. A sound of snapping electricity was heard and the second door that they were meant to walk out of began to open, but only slightly before one of the panels on the side-by-side door broke, jamming the door open. A huge jolt was heard above the ceiling as a mechanism broke due to age. It was not soon after that the vessel went dark again.

 

And it was dark. Darker than dark.

 

Having his shoulder slam into the side wall during the jolt caused Ryanti to cough up a lung. The Captain could feel the water to her knees spilling out onto the other side of the airlock and Ryanti’s coughs to remind her that he was still there. “Ah… eh... okay. Are you alright?” His heavy breathe were heard as he turned on his Sharlayan light again, providing a much needed torch to his surroundings. He muddled his way to the entrance that they had come from, knocking a bit on the sealed door. “We couldn’t open this again. The pressure would send water our way so violently that we’ll split in half. We’ll have to find another way out once we get our data.”

 

He said it non-chalantly. But he knew what it meant. They were trapped. Already.

 

His waddling slowly turned to walking as the water fizzled out to the ground beyond the second door. Ryanti shined his light into that door, but he couldn’t make out anything beyond it. “At least it’s open enough for us to get through.” He commented, shifting himself to the side and sliding his body through. “No use to stay here... let’s see where we are.” With some movement, and a little bit more momentium, Ryanti made it through. He immediately hugged the wall of the new room he was in with his back. “Everything’s pitch black! I’d keep your light on!” He called out from the other room. A few more breaths later, he spoke again. “Go ahead and get in here with me – we absolutely need to stay together. Period.”

 

Ryanti turned his body towards the wall facing away from the door, and the Sharlayan light illuminated the walls. Again, this kind of perfect metal. Not a hint of rust or… anything. He laid his bag against the wall in front of his feet but decided not to remove the mouthpiece. They may need it later if anything in here was flooded. The air felt unnaturally cold – probably because they were still soaking wet. Ryanti eyed something curious with his light as Sounsyy made her way through second broken door. His eyes squinted at what appeared to be some sort of plague in the wall. He blew upon it and dust clouded his vision, which he wiped away with a hand.

 

His aquamarine eyes darted over the words with a hard gaze, his voice audible but… quiet. “It is with honor and pride that the Consul commission this Research and Development Sub-Ragnarok Class Frigate the Anakalypsi to sail the stars in search of answers to our most incompressible understandings.” He read outloud, his face freezing in pure shock at the next statement.

 

“In the three thousandth, four hundredth and fifty second year of our great Empire…”.

 

Twice the amount of years on the Astral Era calendar… and it was just how long their Empire was around when this was made.

 

This mission is classified for a reason…

 

The bewildered Halfling slowly turned around to the room they were in… adjusting his light to focus less on width and more on depth. The scale of the room they were in, the supply hanger, was baffling. Many Roehmerls could easily fit into this single room. The space was long and wide, with a near endless corridors of metal and a ceiling impossibly high. Despite missing rust, many of the small features such as the LED lighting and the remnants of what used to be cargo lying about were twisted and mangled in their design to the immense decay of thousands of years. It felt eerily lonely, and long forgotten. A civilization that came from dust, and became dust. Or perhaps… not quite.

 

“God’s forfend… “

 

Ryanti remembered his order then. He placed a finger upon the linkpearl and took a very swift breath in order to re-compose himself. “We have made it inside. Jonathan this place is huge. It’s insane.”

 

He waited for a moment as static enveloped both of their ears. Sounds of the crew were in the background cheering. “Go- -ob Seventy-seven. It look like like y-.. made it in the hanger. We’re tracking yo-…” Then it became all but static for a moment or two. Ryanti’s breathing became tense. “Jonathan?...”

 

A voice came back, but it was the voice of Forty-three. “It seems you have l-… -t getting a good signal. Need to make your way further i-… better signal. Just move to-…. Front. Fro-..nt if you can hear m-.”

 

“Copy. Copy. Copy.” Ryanti kept saying, hoping it would come in. “We can h- .. –st… -ther in. Ove-.” With that, the communications were cut. “Hello!” Ryanti shouted out in response, his voice echoing off of the massive walls of the room they were in. The same room that the Allagans in their dream had boarded from. Though they did not know it at the time. Ryanti gave Sounsyy a look, and pursed his lips as he adjusted his light again to focus on what was in front of him more than ahead of him.

 

“Let’s assemble our weapons. We do not move an ilm until we are fully armed.”

[Sounsyy]

Sounsyy kept her eyes clamped shut as the watery world surrounded her. The sudden rush of cold water raised the hairs on her neck beneath her suit and she gave an involuntary shiver. When she opened her eyes again, Ryanti had dived into the water and his form was surrounded with millions of tiny bubbles racing back to the surface. He moved with more skillful strokes than Sounsyy would've thought, but she knew he had to have been able to swim for this mission.

 

She scanned the surroundings, but found nothing but endless indigo beneath the waterline. Below her, the anchor cable descended into blackness. She turned in the water and moved towards the rope with a practiced sealion stroke, finally reaching out with her uninjured hand to grab hold of the rope. Her breathing was hesitant at first, not fully placing her trust in the suit and its ability to keep her alive. But as the oxygen mixture filled her nostrils, she began to relax more. Then she heard the crackle of the linkpearl in her ear and saw Ryanti swim over to her making signals that she should mimic him.

 

I know how to swim yeh damned landlubber, Sounsyy wanted to growl into her linkpearl about the sixth time Jonathan told her to breath. But in truth she was unused to the suit and had never attempted a deep sea dive such as this. Breathing through the mask was awkward, but manageable and after a few breaths Sounsyy had the practice down. Sounsyy looked at Ryanti trying to catch his eye. She motioned towards her linkpearl then made a sharp slitting motion across her throat, then pointed up at Jonathan.

 

I get back up there I'm gonna push him over, was Sounsyy's intended message. She shook her head and flipped over her shoulder so she was oriented downwards and began to swim straight down along the rope. She kept her injured hand out near the rope to guide her descent even so. Orientation was going to become more difficult the further she went down and as the pressure began to build up and she was forced to take time to allow her suit to adjust, she clung to the rope to conserve her energy.

 

The rope was near its end when Sounsyy took another rest. She looked around her in the deepening blue. Just on the edges of vision she could spot the tiny motion of the surrounding Sahagin. They were watching them. Through the bodies and flotsam of destroyed Eastern warships, the Sahagin were watching them. Sounsyy felt very uncomfortable down here. Perhaps it was the shortage of air, or the claustrophobic feeling the suit gave her.

 

The two divers continued their descent for a time after that. The cable had long since given out and Sounsyy swam downwards with Ryanti deeper into the Sahagin awaiting them below. They were over one-hundred fathoms deep when the Sahagin began to move closer to them. They were in their preferred environment. Sounsyy wondered what would stop them from just killing them down here and taking the key for their own?

 

But that was not to be their fate. A pair of elbst were led to the divers by their handlers. Sounsyy hesitated, but a young Sahagin warrior swam close to her and nodded his head gently. His mouth opened and in the rush of water Sounsyy could hear the old language of the sea flow through his gils.

 

The Rhotano Bloodcant sang beautifully in the Deep. Sounsyy had never heard it spoken underwater, she knew it only in its harsh, out of water dialect. The sounds that formed with difficulty to emulate the gentle rush of water. Sounsyy stared at the warrior transfixed, though she knew not what it sang to her. She forced her eyes away and swam over to the elbst that had been brought for her. When she was properly mounted the elbst streamlined forwards and began its descent.

 

The sudden increase in pressure from the dive constricted the Captain's chest and she closed her eyes and bent over the back of the elbst in pain. Her entire chest felt like it was crushing until the suit could adapt. When the pressure had abated she looked up to find herself in waters much deeper, colder, and darker than before. She saw Ryanti click on his torchlight and she did the same, but it did little to pierce the darkness. She worried suddenly that the light might blind the elbst, so she clicked the light back off and only turned it on for brief intervals to see if she could see anything.

 

Not that she needed to see, she reminded herself. The elbst seemed to know where it was going and there were Sahagin all around them, swimming eagerly or anxiously by their sides. How many years had it been since they had had visitors - if ever? Then out of the deep blue came a darker shape. Sounsyy almost didn't recognize what she was looking at for several moments, mistaking it for a deep sea mountain or rock formation. But she click on her torchlight and gasped in a mouthful of recycled air.

 

What under Llymlaen's deep seas?

 

The captain's eyes widened until they seemed to fill up all of her goggles. She was staring at some vessel, some great sunken vessel buried beneath the sea. The cermet frame hummed and creaked below the sea. Sounsyy's linkpearl crackled but Sixteen's voice was distant and distorted. Or... Sounsyy was not listening. The world seemed to drown out around her as she gazed upon the massive frame. She suddenly felt so small, so insignificant. She felt weightless in the deep blue, she was reminded of Carteneau, just before she fell into darkness. She lay there on the rock, staring paralyzed skywards as Dalamud ripped itself apart and the world was covered with fire. Now the world was swallowed in water. So deep, so dark.

 

Sounsyy felt short of breath and her chest tightening. Had her suit failed and the pressure finally crushed through or was she having a panic attack? Her breaths came quick and sharp. Her brain was convinced she was dreaming or was oxygen deprived and needed more air. Her elbst seemed to disappear out from under her and she was suddenly alone in the blackness. Her eyes were watering beneath her goggles, obscuring everything in a dark blur. Then suddenly a light. Pale and blue and gentle - like the glyphs she had seen in the skies over Cartneau just before the end.

 

She looked for their source and saw the key. The glow seemed distorted by the sea or by her tears. But it was clear Ryanti was holding it and moving towards the ship. There was a door. Sounsyy tried to regain command over her breathing. She tried to time her breaths with Nophica's Hymn, a pleasant song from her time in Gridania. Deep woods, rich earthy air. A time before she was afraid.

 

Sun's sweet smile and wind's cool breath,♪

Both of these I send thee,♪

To ripe thy fruit and spread thy seed,♪

And nourish those that tend...

 

Sounsyy gasped and her breathing stopped all together when Ryanti inserted the key. The entire vessel lit up in a red glow, illuminating just how monolithic the Allagan starship was. What had they disturbed after so long? Sounsyy looked over her shoulder, her breath steadily quickening again. The Sahagin had dispersed. Fear?

 

Then the door opened and the frame shimmered in blue light. Water rushed in with a thousand fathoms of pressure behind it, filling the small room almost instantly. Sounsyy felt the flow of the sea change around her as she was sucked near the ship. Ryanti swam inside. Sounsyy wanted to swim away, but followed him in against her better judgement. Inside the hallway were glowing lights and a window looking in on the next room. Sounsyy caught Ryanti staring at her from across the hallway as the outer porthole began to reseal itself behind them. She shook her head at him completely at a loss.

 

The room started to depressurize and the water began to warm. The feeling of relief was immense. She looked back at Ryanti, who was touching the walls of the vessel. He seemed to be enjoying himself. Sounsyy was still in the process of stabilizing herself after her miniature panic attack. The water began to drain and the door at the end of the hall groaned open after five-thousand years of neglect. Sounsyy covered her ears at the sudden, horrid screeching that shattered the last silent hour of their descent.

 

Then with a great shudder, the ship's power failed it and the lights died sending them all into darkness. Sounsyy fell on her bottom in the water with a yelp and staggered back to her feet, pressing her back against a wall. It sounded as if something had broken. If it was the ship and it had sprung a leak - or worse - depressurized, they'd all be dead in minutes. But nothing happened and Ryanti righted himself enough to press forward deeper into the ancient Allagan monstrosity.

 

"I-I'm all right," came her muffled voice beneath her mask. Then her senses left her at long last and she ripped off her mask and hissed at Ryanti, "Where the swiven hells are we?! What in the Seven Hells is this?! This- this!" She looked about her frantically, but Ryanti was already tucking himself through the half-opened door and into the darkness beyond. Sounsyy stood there cursing. She heard Ryanti's voice on the other side and went to the doorway. She gauged the clearance and decided to remove her backpack while she slid through.

 

Ryanti was in awe gazing about the next room, but Sounsyy had even taken notice. When she reached back through the doorway to pull her backpack through, she immediately knelt down in the fulm-deep pool and set about unzipping her bag and withdrawing the dismantled Sharlayan rifle. With a few clicks she had assembled it. She felt Ryanti's light on her back and she stood up and turned to face it.

 

“Let’s assemble our weapons. We do not move an ilm until we are fully armed.”

 

Sounsyy slung her backpack over her shoulder and hefted her completed rifle, nodding to the Miqo'te, "Way ahead of yeh."

 

Sounsyy took in the room for the first time while Ryanti made to assemble his. It was massive. Her breath, ragged as it was, seemed to echo softly about the space. She began wandering about in the darkness, her torchlight set to cast as wide a light as it could produce. She came upon the plaque covered in eras of dust. There was strange writing that Sounsyy could not understand. She could barely read Eorzean as it was - this was far beyond her. She looked to where Ryanti was prepping, "Yeh can read this?"

 

She had an evenly mixed look between incredulous and impressed. Her voice sounded nervous though. As if she was trying to ignore the fact that their linkpearls were receiving so much interference, either from the ship's cermet hull or from being so many yalms below water. She went to stand by Ryanti as he finished assembling his rifle. She let out a long exhale as she psyched herself to go deeper into the dark.

 

"Yeh take point. I've got rearguard," she said. Ryanti's torchlight was set to maximize the distance he could see forwards. While Sounsyy's was set widely to see if anything moved in the peripheral darkness. As if to say she was ready, she raised her rifle and rested the butt against her shoulder, at the ready to fire.

[Ryanti]

Ryanti took a few breaths to ease his own tension upon giving out his first order of business. The first order was always to get themselves armed. It was a golden rule in his unit. Ideally, if it weren’t for the water, he would have had his rifle in hand before he had even inserted the key into its resting place.

 

It appeared that Sounsyy was already ready. Good. It did well in reassuring Ryanti that he picked the right person for the job. Or was it the Allagans…? After all, she did receive those dreams, unlike Leura. He began wondering why she was chosen as he gently sat himself down next to the plague, bringing his backpack forward in front of him after taking it off, unzipping it to find the disassembled pieces of his weapon. He had witnessed others checking and examining the artifact in prior missions without so much as just feeling slightly drowsy or having a headache later in the day, but otherwise no symptoms. No dreams. Not like Sounsyy. But why? A man and a woman from the seventh era investigating the traces of the third… he had remembered the prophecy of the seventh era that was the rage during the Calamity, that the era was to be a culmination… were they destined to be the ones to culminate the events on this ship full circle?

 

Or were they just here to die?

 

His gaze followed her as she examined the plague for herself. He placed the first piece of his weapon – the stock- down upon the ground in a standing position as she asked him whether or not he could read it. Immediately it triggered back memories.

 

I’ve been staring at this thing all day. This rectangular shape of darkness. That and this sheet of paper. The letters have become scribbles in my mind. All of these symbols that I’m studying in this dark, cold room. They keep on staring at me. The men in the window, with only their lips visible to me. Lips that keep asking me about my progress. I pick up the tomestone. I hover it over the words on the piece of paper. They begin to change. Morph. My mind feels like it is on fire! My eyes burn! These symbols feel like they are branding themselves onto my brain! The blue light shines! I grab my head! Make it stop!

 

“Yes. I can.” Ryanti answered, with a kind of gaze in his eyes that reminded Sounsyy of her own; the kind of eyes that told her he was in remembrance of a memory he did not enjoy. “It was required of me during the… selection process. It is similar to a non-classified unit. The Keeper of the Artifact is a title, and like any title in any military, there is a skillset you must learn to earn it. The difference is that I cannot disclose what occurs. But I do have a paper in my backpack de-coding the wordings, if we need them later.”

 

But Ryanti wanted to disclose it. He really did. His commitment to secrecy had already been breached by this point. The Captain was never intended to know even what the hell they found in the Deep, or even what the Sharlayans were carrying. But realistically… he could no longer afford to keep things secret when he now trusted Sounsyy with his life. Ryanti preferred it this way anyhow. It was very hard to carry the burden all by yourself.

 

He had picked up on her nervousness in her question. He had also heard her stammering words back in the first room. It was surreal to Ryanti to hear such a capable woman spew out words and curses in such a panic like that. Her shaking her head at him while they were still in the water burned into his short term memory. He had tried to tell her earlier in the mission, hoping that it would ease the transition. But this was Ryanti’s first term in an Allagan structure as well, and even he was having trouble coping, despite his knowledge beforehand and his training.

 

It was why his hands were very subtly twitching when he was assembling his rifle. Occasionally, Ryanti would shake a hand once or twice to try to rid himself of those mild jitters. His mind was still trying to contemplate the kind of rational decisions he needed to make about the communication. The interference was very bad, and they had no clue whether or not it would get better. He clung to the hope that Forty-three was right, that it was the location that was the problem. So he formulated the next step of their objective in his mind.

 

The last piece of his rifle clicked together, and Ryanti cocked back the lever. A slight whining sound emitted from the rifle as it sprung into a loaded state. It was a satisfying sound, letting Ryanti know that there were barriers between him and death down here. He almost immediately reached into his backpack again and pulled out the same powerful revolver that nearly took Cynthia’s head clean off. He spun the chamber and shot it back into place, clicking off the safety and holstering it by his waist. As armed as they were, they had enough firepower to kill nearly one hundred and fifty Garleans if they were to burn all their ammunition. It was the kind of armed-to-the-teeth preparedness that they needed to face their nightmares.

 

Ryanti nodded at Sounsyy’s suggestion. He was to lead, and she was to make sure he didn’t miss anything. Perfect. His fingertips clamped onto his torchlight and he turned the dial, shifting his light to point at a thin angle, giving him as much sight as it could afford distance-wise. Ryanti started to tilt the rifle in front of him when he stopped parallel to Sounsyy. He did not forget the nervousness in her voice. “Remember, we have the absolute best weapons and equipment my people could afford us. And each other. Let’s just take it one step at a time. Our main objective is to locate and acquire any kind of valuable information or data in this place that can benefit the greater good, and prevent the Garleans from getting their hands on anything else. But for now, let’s just press deeper into the ship, and see if we can get a better signal with my teammates. Let’s move out.”

 

He had to say those words himself as much as he knew Sounsyy had to hear them. “Watch my back, Sounsyy. I need you at one hundred and ten percent at all times.” Perhaps more than she ever had been. She had never seen Ryanti this deadly serious before. He walked with a purpose and conviction beyond his years as he stepped in front of her, yet the deep breathe he took and the hesitation he experienced proved that he was just as tense. There was no possible way any of them could have gone in here by themselves. They would have gone mad. After that one last breathe, Ryanti began to move forward.

 

The first thing he did was point his torchlight at both ends of the room, but the beam seemed to go on forever in both directions. He was trying to determine where the closest wall was so that he could huddle closer to it to reduce the amount of space he had to cover with his torchlight. He finally determined it to be the right wall. So as he proceeded, he took a hefty amount of steps forward, and then traversed diagonally to the right a little bit, then pressed forward once more.

 

 

It was deathly silent. Ryanti’s light shined upon what appeared to be five thousand plus year old cargo crates that seemed to span the entire horizontal distance of this section of the room. Once again, these are made out of cerment. They were all different shapes and sizes. Some were square in shape and large in size. Some possessed a cylinder shape, and were sealed shut by complicated locking mechanisms and where the LED’s upon the boxes used to shine was nothing but blackness, as the lights faded in power long ago just as well as the materials in them were long expired. They were exotic and foreign even to Ryanti; the first relics of an ancient time when the world was different.

 

The air was stale, not ever affording a gust of wind over the eras of time. It smelled of metal. It was different from the Garlean steel which smelt dirty. This kind of metal smelled clean and refined, not containing any kind of imperfections that would leak in the air as an odor. There was so faint smell of oil or fuel or smudge. If Sounsyy noticed, Ryanti was only looking directly at where their lights were pointing, for if you didn’t, it would quickly feel like the space around you was choking you down in claustrophobia. No words could describe the ominous silence. Ryanti had a feeling that they were trespassing, almost committing some sort of sin for being here and re-discovering this. Perhaps it was simply the dread of the silence.

 

“I’ll answer your questions that you had earlier about where we are. I did not forget.” No, he did not. He was just trained to do something when someone required information, but was in a wrecked state of mind. He was taught to deny them the answer and allow them to wait out their frustration before answering, so that they could better absorb the reality around them. It was meant to be a coping mechanism. He had to learn a lot about them to be able to grasp all this. So he spoke, hoping his enlightening dialogue would ease the dread of the long consistent silence.

 

“As we know, there have been seven Astral Eras so far. For thousands of years, we believed that civilization as we know it began after the Age of Endless frost in the Fifth Umbral Era. Before the ice age, historians speculated that man was primitive in nature, and lived out their lives in either stoic or nomadic tribes and lived off the land with countless individual, secular cultures. All sources of either our present day nations or their ancient mothers trace back to the end of this ice age. So naturally, it was thought for a long time that the beginning of recorded history around the early Fifth Astral Era was the beginning of civilization and factual history. Anything prior to that was neck deep in myth and legend.”

 

Ryanti tilted his torchlight up to glance at the ceiling. There were several cords hanging from the roof at the place they were. Some of them were broken, others were still interconnecting into the ceiling. They looked similar to fuel lines that Garlemald would use on their vehicles, but the network within the exposed ceiling seemed much more complicated. Upon lowering his flashlight again among the endless sea of long neglected cargo boxes and scattered portions of cords and wires, he resumed his dialogue.

 

“Some of the beast tribes and Miqo’te tribe lineages extend all the way back to the First Era. It was known for a long time that these tribes possess very interesting legends and fables of a world before the Endless Frost. They speak of everything from ancient sea monsters to extraordinary chariots that rode across the sky and befriended Menphina’s moon. They spoke of Menphina’s loyal hound, and of demi-Gods that sailed the great Star Ocean under Her watch. For centuries and millennia scholars kept these legends transcribed but believed them to be that: imaginative legends and fairytales. They deduced that these legends and fairytales all had common themes. Beings that rode the sky, beings that constructed immense monuments that came crumbling down when they met their end.”

 

Ryanti shined his torchlight to his right, finally reaching the right wall. The ceiling had to be at least eighty fulms in height. There were broken and twisted remnants of a kind of catwalk complex upon the right wall that would have been quite marvelous looking five millennia ago. But now it was all twisted and broken, having partially collapsed at some point. The metal was ripped in half and distorted, and the catwalk was half suspended still on the upper floor and half sprawled upon the ground.

 

“Well, they were wrong. A man by the name of Saint Coinach was a historical figure during the Sixth Astral Era. You might have heard of him. He was the first person to discover that the legends and fairytales of the old tribes contained more reality than fiction. His discovery was to change everything we know about this planet. The Sharlayans knew the real nature of his discoveries, and they have probably known for a very long time. But they chose to keep the true realities of Saint Coinach’s discoveries hidden from the greater public, and for good reason. It turns out that during the Third Astral Era, two further Eras back than the beginning of our recorded history, there existed a time on this planet where civilization reached its absolute apex. On the very top of its apex stood the mighty Allagan Empire. In the very distant past, the landmass of Eorzea was said to be larger, and the Allagan borders must have stretched at least across half of the planet. Their civilization reached a pinnacle of technology to near omni-potent levels, and a complete mastery of the forces of magic. We still do not know how many years thick the Third Astral Era was, but the amount of years Sharlayans theorize vastly extends the length of the Eras we know. However, very little is still known about that time. There is a… point where this Empire and other nations that thrived during that time, such as Meracydia… completely vanish from the record. It was not over years or even months… they were there and then suddenly they weren’t. They were just… gone. Nobody knows why. This happened approximately five thousand years ago.” Ryanti slowed down his steps, until he was completely stopped in his tracks, glancing around in the darkness as if he could see, but obvious could not. “As far as this place goes… according to the plague, this must have been some sort of research vessel. It’s good for us because research vessels contain much more useful data to us than military ones. But it’s not the kind of ship that sailed the ocean, no… this vessel was meant to sail the star ocean, Sounsyy…”

 

The sight of Hydealyn from space in her dream…

 

Ryanti briefly looked back to her, his facial features shining within the confines of her torchlight. “The reason why this information is buried is clear. It’s… much easier for society to accept a clear beginning to the history of civilization and be able to draw a straight line from there to where we are now. It’s easier to accept that the way of life and civilization that we know has always been relatively familiar to us. It would be difficult for people to accept the… truth. Society is not ready to be able to cope with it. That is why Jonathan advised you not to tell your Superior Officer about this. Even if you did, your Superior probably would not believe you.”

 

He solemnly turned around to face his front again. “How can you just simply… tell someone these things and expect them to believe you unless you see it for yourself…” There was a kind of burden in his voice. It was hard to live with this and not be able to tell everyone.

 

Now do you believe…? Ryanti thought.

 

Just then, there was a noise. A sound of a bump or two in a ventilation shaft somewhere further beyond, a bit to the right where the wall met the ceiling. Ryanti’s heart skipped a beat and he immediately pointed his gun up at the source, clicking on the torchlight that came with the rifle. It was weaker than his body one, but certainly not a weak light in of itself. It shined upon the spot where he heard the noise, but there was nothing. Had there always been nothing. “Assume all foreign noises independent of us are hostile.” Ryanti murmured to Sounsyy. “We have no literal idea what could possibly be down here with us if we aren’t alone. Probably something not ever meant to see the light of day.”

 

Within an additional twenty or so steps, they cleared the cargo farm, and found themselves amongst the largest part of the room. It had a trapezoid-like shape to it, and an intricate network of perfectly molded steel and ancient hydraulic pistons held shut the enormous twin hanger doors that hugged the left wall. It would never be opened again. Perpendicular to the hanger doors was another second story catwalk, and this one was intact. In the distance, Ryanti’s light shined upon the door up there, which half of it was broken down, providing an open to go through. “That’s our way out.”

 

When Ryanti lowered his light down to the center of the room, he gasped at the marvel of what he saw. In the center of the room, there was a derelict… craft of some sort resting in that place in which had become its grave. About the size of the Roehmerl, it was nowhere near in perfect condition. The rear rotors were long disintegrated, and the wiry mesh of the light metals used in design of the small shuttle was broken and mulled in many locations. The front landing gear had collapsed long ago. The rear ones, alleviated of the weight due to the nose of the aircraft resting on the ground now, were still standing. The middle of the craft looked like it had caught fire centuries ago, a fire that eventually burned out. The front windshield of the cockpit was broken and shattered in some places, yet still intact upon the ship.

 

“This must be a place where they landed those… smaller ones. Wow… unreal.” Ryanti mentioned, examining the entirety of the craft, noticing a partial serial number on the side of the craft. Some of it had been burned away by the fire. Then his light gathered with interest at the front of the craft, where the shattered window was. It would not be that much of an effort to climb aboard the smaller vessel and peak into the combat. Ryanti felt like he had to do it, even though it make him extra nervous to do so. He had to check to see if anything was… harboring inside of it. The insides of the ship beyond that point were scourged by fire and melted metal, so there were no worries about that. “I need to examine it and make sure it’s clear. Watch my back.”

 

And with that, Ryanti made his way ever so cautiously to the front of the craft. As he laid the torchlight upon the broken windshield, he felt a tingling in his mind. He remembered in one of their first dreams there was a split second… yes… he could almost hear the hydraulic doors closing, the sky being their destination. It had to be a ship like this… a ship like this. That must have been how they arrived. On a ship like this…

 

With a single gesture, he leapt up into the air, his feet landing with a thud upon the nose of the smaller vessel. The scale of it was still immense. Ryanti’s form was miniscule compared even to this ‘smaller’ ship. “Okay Ryanti…” He murmured to himself, examining the lower parts of the nose by sweeping his torchlight slowly, back and forth, finally reaching the windshield, and shining the light inside.

 

All of the levers... all of these controls were buried in dust. It reminded him of Garlean schematics he used to recover from his earlier missions in the Immortal Flames concerning stealing Garlean blueprints. But these were much more sophisticated. All he saw were just buttons and levers galore, and a seat or two before the fiery molten metal brought an end to the ship’s space. He quietly etched the light over the controls… then examined the seats.

 

The seats… they had bite marks on them. How old were those bite marks? Thousands of years old? Centuries? Decades? … Days?

 

“Sounsyy!” Ryanti shouted, his voice booming with an echo across the room to get her attention. “We might not be alone in here!”

 

Just then, four more noises. Like four heavy bumps in a constant pattern above him. The ceiling. Immediately he shined a light up above to investigate. There were so many roof panels that had some off, so many exposed wires and compartments where anything could be hiding… waiting. The artifact could not help them now. It had been dead since they arrived.

[Sounsyy]

They had walked in darkness for too long.

 

Sounsyy's torchlight cast a wide beam of light on the floor behind where they walked, but it's distance was severely lacking and all it seemed to do was blind them to what lay beyond the shroud of swirling dust that their shuffling feet disturbed as they crossed the ancient Allagan tomb. But turning off the beacon would have been as equally futile. There was no light for her eyes to adjust to, however dim. So she kept stepping back carefully in line behind Ryanti, her rifle at the ready and scanning side to side in the darkness.

 

Periodically she would whisper something into her linkpearl, hoping for a response, but Marjanie's replies were scattered and often unintelligible. So she resigned herself to listening to Ryanti's explanation, though most of it went above her head. A people who sailed the stars? How low they must think of the denizens of the Seventh Astral Era. If the Allagan truly was some sort of distress signal on repeat throughout the ages, did it even know how hopelessly deprived these futuristic survivors were? What did they hope to accomplish here? Only Ryanti seemed to know... and Sounsyy suspected Jonathan knew far more than Ryanti.

 

Sounsyy heard a thumping noise above their heads and she whipped around with her rifle. Ryanti had heard it too, but there was silence now. The captain's heart was pounding in her ears, almost making her dizzy from the volume.

 

"Just... more old, breaking ship... right?" Sounsyy words hissed out between her teeth. Ryanti kept moving forwards and Sounsyy slipped back into her flanking position, even more on alert now. They kept moving along the far wall for what seemed like several minutes more before the captain was taken by another unwelcome surprise. Ryanti had stopped to scan an adjacent wall and Sounsyy had unknowingly backed into him causing her to give a short yelp which fortunately caught in her throat out of fear. She whipped around and saw he was training his torchlight on a distant catwalk.

 

"Yeh wanna climb up that?!" She said in an incredulous whisper. But Ryanti's attention was already snatched away by the discovery of the small airship. Small being a relative term, of course. Sounsyy gawked at the sight even as Ryanti started making his way over, leaving her by the wall.

 

"This is... an airship hanger?" She looked baffled, looking about the expansive darkness around her as if she was trying to imagine what this place looked like with lights. She lowered her rifle a bit, raising her hand out in protest of Ryanti climbing the Twelve-damned thing.

 

"I- I don't think that's a good-"

"Sounsyy! We might not be alone in here!"

 

Sounsyy pulled her rifle up into position instantly and ran full tilt towards the airship's nose even as the thumping drummed overhead.

 

" Keep yer voice down Twelve-damnit!"

 

No matter where Sounsyy flashed her torchlight, she could see nothing in the darkness, but she could hear. And that thumping, it sounded like something - right? Then to her right, she caught what looked like an inky black wisp of dust slip out of her light and into the shadows. She tried to focus her light, but it was gone. Her lips parted in silent exasperation.

 

Did she just imagine it?

 

The thumping had receded and fallen silent. Sounsyy kept perfectly still in her crouched position at the nose of the airship. Her good hand was trembling slightly and she had bitten her lower lip when she noticed her own ragged breathing disturbing the musky air. There was no sound for several minutes, save for the quiet drags of air Sounsyy and Ryanti drew. Then a far distant clamor deeper into the bowels of the ship caused the captain to jump slightly. It sounded as if the ship were groaning under the pressure of a thousand fathoms of icy water. Had it all been just that? Were they truly alone?

 

Sounsyy stood and sighed, "This ship. It's tryin' to drive us mad."

 

She looked at Ryanti, but seemed to be looking past him and into the backpack he wore, where the Allagan key lay dormant. This was all its fault. Maybe Jonathan was right - it did warp minds.

 

"False alarm," Sounsyy whispered into the linkpearl, though she was unsure if anyone up above could hear her. She felt incredibly alone. And no longer was she sure if that was comforting or terrifying. She looked at Ryanti, "Yeh good? Let's get the Hells outta this room."

[Ryanti]

Perhaps they have been walking in darkness for too long, but for the long road ahead, there was nothing but.

 

Ryanti was trying to keep as much of an eye on Sounsyy as he was on his own light. There was nothing in the old, decrypted hangar that he saw with his own light besides her. He did not move much on the ship, preferring to stay where he was. He had the high ground. As much as he tried to prepare himself for the possibility that they might be truly not alone on this vessel, he found that there was no way that he could rid himself of the debilitating feeling in his stomach that felt like a hot iron twisting away on his soul.

 

This ship had a darkness, crippling aura to it. It was not like the inventive and ethereal craft of the Allagans that Ryanti would see on the classified objects that he handled in the past. This place was… long abandoned, dark, and cold. There was nothing in this ship that felt welcoming so far in the least. The thought that no one knew where they were besides the small crew on the vessel troubled him. The concept that at this very moment an innocent bystander would be buying a cold beer at the Drowning Wench or a glass of wine at the Bismark while lamenting their lunch hour, would easily trouble anyone’s mind down here.

 

He was not prepared for this. Jonathan was supposed to be the man to guide everyone through the ship. He was a hardened veteran at this sort of thing. He knew how to let things get to him, and to do his job. Ryanti was just there to be guided into obtaining the material he needed, then escorted out. While he was thoroughly trained, he was not prepared for the psychological aspect of this. He couldn’t imagine what kind of thoughts Sounsyy would be going through. He had to be strong for her.

 

Then a noise. A far distant clamming from deep inside the ship. Ryanti turned to face where the door on the second floor was, as that was where it came from. It sounded like a panel falling into the floor or tumbling down some stairs. It was subtle, quiet, far, but it didn’t matter. Ryanti knew they would have to climb into the bowels of the ship. Deeper and deeper.

 

"This ship. It's tryin' to drive us mad."

 

“Tell me about it.” Ryanti responded to Sounsyy.

 

While Sounsyy stared at his backpack, it made no quiet light as it did when it was time to be used at the beginning. Nor did she feel any kind of pull or memorization that she used to during the time on the Roehmerl. It was dead for the moment. As dead as this ship.

 

Ryanti did not look back for the moment. He was too busy glancing his eyes around and shifting his lighting slow, sweeping directions over the second floor. Tiny dust particles blew away with the wind of his calming breathe. All was silent. It could have been nothing…

 

Ryanti saw her whisper into her linkpearl. A sign of concern and a small, minor look of pity crossed his face. He had wanted badly to call this in too. He was unsure of himself that those words would make it to the outside, but he was sure than she was.

 

They probably can’t hear you, Sounsyy.

 

But no sooner than she finished, Ryanti tried anyhow, pressing his finger into his ear. “We are alright. Seems like nothing. Going to brush it off for now. Heading further inside to try to get better reception.”

 

He bent down to his knees while getting off of the nose of the ancient shuttle. He briefly slid on his butt before dropping down onto his feet beside Sounsyy. He sighed a bit to relieve some tension, eyeing the braded woman with a gaze. “Yeah. I’m good.”

 

He paused for a moment, his mind briefly flashing back to her running into him by accident on the way over to where they were now. He could see the same kind of muddled breathing present now. The subtle shaking. The loneliness the fear. Perhaps she could see some of that in him too. “Just the same old breaking ship, and we can’t let it break us.”

 

He lifted up his rifle once more, and gave her a nod to reassure his words to her. He had the same look now that he had when he first raised his sword up to challenge her that one day that now seemed so long ago. He was not challenging her to combat now, no. He was challenging her to press on.

 

Then he raised the light up to where the door was on the second floor. The catwalk that hugged closed to the door looked relatively safe. Ish. The components that used to be accented guardrails looked like they were a bit deformed and melted a tad. It must have been directly related to the fire that consumed the center of the shuttle Ryanti had just gotten off of. Or perhaps a completely different fire that started or died out centuries or millennia removed from the fire that claimed the shuttle’s innards.

 

“This room does look like an airship hanger. I guess you could call it an airship. They remind me of Garlemald’s just… a lot more uhh... well made. The Allagans did not need propellers or sails. They had other means. They’re… more than airships.” He murmured to Sounsyy while looking up at the guard railings, letting the subject fade. He lowered his rifle and clicked a switch upon it, turning off the rifle’s torch. It did invite more darkness to surround their presence within the now dead silent ship, but it also gave him an opportunity to sling his rifle to his back.

 

Ryanti was preparing for something. He knelt onto his knees, looking back up at the place briefly before unzipping a zipper that rested on the actual side of the backpack, hidden from view normally. It was a compartment of the backpack that was in its own place, as it had to be for the size of the object that he contained in it. Light whistling sound of a tight fiber-like rope being pulled was heard as Ryanti whipped out fulm by fulm of climbing rope, a really skinny rope that bent easily and was very tightly woven.

 

“Well… let’s see if this works.” Ryanti muttered to her, forming one end of the rope into a little lasso loop. Afterwords, he stood himself up and launched the lasso’s rope three times until it finally hooked onto one of the vertical railings that had lost its horizontal railing long ago. Ryanti gave it a few harsh tugs, tightening the loop around the notch with two hands before turning to the Captain with a few moments of silence. “I’ll go first.”

 

The young man pursed his lips and leapt onto the rope, immediately wrapping his legs around the material, his face looking up and his eyes constantly focusing on the top of the railing to see if it moved any. Did it become weaker because of the ancient fire or stronger? He pulled his arms downwards and slinked his legs upwards as he began to climb. So far, so good.

 

“Okay Ryanti…” Sounsyy might have heard him say quietly to himself as he solemnly kept climbing with a sure medium pace. It was not too long before he was quite a few fulms above her. It was a lot of cardio work to do this, so Ryanti did not rush himself, knowing that he had to at least partially save energy as he knew he was going to be working on rations. However, the Hyqo’te wasn’t sucking wind. His training served him well. Upon reaching the top, he hooked his arm underneath another one of the melted notches and hoisted one side of his body upon the upper neck, untangling himself from the rope and letting it seep down, Sounsyy hearing Ryanti’s words in her ear via local linkpearl. -Hzzzt- Hold on. Need to clear this.” Followed by a heavy breathe.

 

Ryanti got himself up rather quickly, checking the rope briefly before taking a few steps towards the door. From the bottom, his torchlight on his chest quickly faded away, then silence. Moment after moment passed as Sounsyy was left alone for ten seconds… twenty… thirty… forty…

 

At about one minute, a very distant sound was again heard from within the ship. Two singled-out groans, then many clicks of smaller groans from somewhere deep within.

 

A few seconds later, a light of salvation shined down from the upper deck as Ryanti clicked back on his rifle torch to add to his chest torch when he peered over the railing, his voice crackling in her ear again. “-Hzzzzt- I’m here. I just I thought I heard something and I had to listen. The upper floor is clear though, you’re good to climb.”

 

He let the rifle down, but let the light on, shifting onto his stomach and letting his arms dangling down below, so that just in case the rail broke during her climb, he would be able to catch either the rope or the Captain herself. “I got you.” He called down to her, beckoning her to join him above.

[Sounsyy]

Sounsyy kept her torchlight on and continued scanning what little she could make out of the hanger as Ryanti prepped the rope, tossed it several times, and began the climb. She half expected to hear another groan, another crash, the twisting metal railguards failing and dropping her partner to certain injury or death. But his climb was uneventful and before long he reached the catwalk. Sounsyy slung her rifle over her shoulder and grabbed the rope, but Ryanti's voice over the linkpearl gave her pause.

 

<Hold on. Need to clear this.>

"Sevent- No! Don't leave meh-"

 

But he disappeared into a doorway and Sounsyy was left alone. She could feel the darkness creeping up her back. It was breathing. Sssssss thsssss Sssssss thsssssssssss dusssssssst. Sounsyy kept her good hand on the rope as she whipped around, but there was nothing there. She could hear nothing and as soon as she realized this place was completely devoid of noise her ears began ringing loudly in her head. One more sweep of her light and her breath caught in her throat. Something had disturbed the dust. Tiny particles floated lazily upwards from where something long and slender had left soft brush strokes in the floor. Did they make that?

 

Then another loud groan from deep within the ship's core. The sudden noise made Sounsyy jump. Still there was no sign of Ryanti. She turned back, but the dust had settled. The captain cursed violently under her breath and pulled on the rope to test its stability. She bent her knees and sprang up onto the rope, propelling herself up a few fulms above where she would've normally been able to reach. The voice in her head was screaming at her to move, so she pulled herself up the rope in double time, reaching one hand over the next and relying heavily upon her upper body strength to keep her pace.

 

She had made nearly half the distance before the grip in her injured hand failed her and she slipped, dropping a fulm before her good hand caught her. She let out a frightened yelp as she dropped. Her left hand was on fire. She pulled herself into the rope, holding herself steady with her feet and with her injured hand hugging the rope to her breast. Sounsyy rested her cheek against the rope and panted. Then above her Ryanti's light returned into view.

 

<I’m here. I just I thought I heard something and I had to listen. The upper floor is clear though, you’re good to climb.>

 

When he got down on his stomach, the Miqo'te light illuminated her huddled form swiveling slowly about on the rope. She gave him a cross look and resumed her climb with renewed purpose. Her hand was throbbing but her anger was far more palpable. She powered up the rope hand over hand like before, her biceps bulging under her lithe-framed wetsuit. She grabbed Ryanti's arm when she reached the top and let him pull her up and onto the catwalk.

 

She laid on her side panting for a moment until she saw Ryanti move to stand, which made her leap up suddenly and shove him back down to the catwalk.

 

"What the hells were yeh thinkin'?!" Sounsyy hissed, "Yeh brought me down 'ere fer a reason! Did yeh or didn't yeh? What if that room weren't clear?! Ye'd be up the damn Rogue without a paddle. We. Clear. Together."

 

She sighed heavily and shook her head. Her anger seemed to have abated for the most part. She looked down at her injured hand and flexed each of her fingers in turn. Satisfied, she pulled her rifle from around her shoulder and raised it back up to the at-the-ready position.

 

"All right. Let's go. And... this room better be clear."

[Ryanti]

When Ryanti hovered the flashlight over Sounsyy, he could immediately identify the struggle in her face and in her muscles, but he could not neccissary figure out the source of her anger. Initially, he had attributed it to the pain she was feeling in her bad hand. The young man immediately urged in his gut for her to try to make it to him as soon as possible, so he could relieve her of the pain.

 

Ryanti extended one of his arms, and as soon as he was able he snatched her good arm with it. His grip upon her was very tight, immensely tight. He was utilizing all of his strength to prepare to pull her up. With a clenching of the teeth and a grunt, he snatched the latter part of her good arm with his second arm, and his entire upper body clenched as he yanked her smaller body up onto the deck with him.

 

Ryanti found himself rather heated and absent of breath for a moment, their bodies next to each other and gathering a brief reprieve. It was so much harder to life someone using just their upper body, he mused. With one last breath, the halfling began to stand with the intention of collecting his rifle and proceeding, but before he knew it, he found himself aggressively shoved onto the ground again before his brain could even process it.

 

"What the hells were yeh thinkin'?! Yeh brought me down 'ere fer a reason! Did yeh or didn't yeh? What if that room weren't clear?! Ye'd be up the damn Rogue without a paddle. We. Clear. Together."

 

Ryanti closed his eyes for a brief moment, sitting himself up and looking at her with the kind of glazed look in his eye that spoke volumes in the sense of being flabbergasted that she even did such a thing. He stood silent for a moment, watching her gather her rifle to a ready point and beckon them to go. As much as he was privy to let things like that slide off of his back, Ryanti, like anyone, had a line. Sounsyy had been creeping up further and further to that line. That action and remark finally stepped over the line.

 

The young man snapped himself up, swinging his rifle around with a great deal of speed, pacing up to her aggressively before stopping in front of her, his voice stern in warning. "FYI Sounsyy, there are exceptions to that rule. If there -was- anything up here and we were both on the ropes, we would not have cleared together, we would have died together. So the next time you're thinking of shoving me down or doing some other similar childish shite because you didn't like a decision I made, how about instead you do the adult thing and respect those decisions even if you disagree with them."

 

He could have sworn that none of this would happen if she just bloody trusted him. But no one trusted him, not a damn person. Except for maybe Leura. Or P'welro, if Ryanti felt bold enough to believe it. But none of them were down here. Only Sounsyy. He was beginning to wonder if he would ever be able to gain it, no matter what he did. It stung, because she was the person he wanted to trust him the most.

 

He turned and shined his torchlight at the door. What he could see through the small opening crevasse was a long encompassing hallway shrouded in absolute darkness. A few fixtures that used to hung above the hallway eons ago had fallen into disrepair and were now broken into pieces of glass among the floor, having fallen from the ceiling eras ago. There was a tiny hint that the hallway had doorways on the walls on occasion, but in order to investigate further, they would have to cross that door. Ryanti had shined his light across the entire hallway when Sounsyy was climbing and saw nothing, but he did not investigate the rooms yet. "I brought you down here for many reasons, and some of them include the fact that I know you can survive and take care of yourself better than anyone else on that ship. You can handle it. I know you can."

 

He had a silly idea to explain her anger from before. Maybe it was a funny thought in order for him to be able to finally abandon his stern emotions about the matter. Ryanti brushed himself up against the door panels, once again shifting to his side, and sliding through the panels, his backpack bending due to the panels grinding up on it, but Ryanti shoved himself through, now completely inside the hallway and shining the light throughout all of its corners, immediately noticing that there were indeed rooms to the side. They were paired in two's. Every twenty fulms of the one-hundred and twenty fulm hallway contained two rooms on each side. Some of the doors, which during Allag's heyday had been keycard accessed and automatic, were shut tight for good. Others were broken open, and some were slightly open and long broken such as the door they came in through. Ryanti waited for Sounsyy to join him.

 

"It's like... you're afraid of the dark or something." Ryanti murmured to her as he waited. He said it in jest, almost like it was impossible for him to believe that Captain Mirke would ever be afraid of such a thing, but that she made it look like she was. That had to be the only possibility for a woman like her in Ryanti's mind... right?

[Sounsyy]

If Sounsyy's anger had cooled any after raising her rifle, Ryanti's retort brought it bubbling right back up to the surface. She met his aggressive stance unflinching, her own frame now seething, her teeth gritted as she growled at him. Her rifle lowered instinctively, but the urge to blow out one of the Miqo'te's kneecaps was powerful.

 

"Yeh made it to the top of the rope safe and then yeh left meh!! Yeh heard some gods-damned noise and yeh just had to go check it out on yer own! And in the time it took yeh somethin' could've gotten me in the dark cause I had no one to watch meh back while I climbed! The only childish thin' I see 'ere is yer damn need to be a hero. And yeh got a damn sight o' nerve talkin' to meh about respect. Or was that swivin' stunt yeh pulled with Sixteen what yeh call keepin' yer head down and respectin' idiotic decisions?"

 

Her eyes narrowed as she called him out on his tantrum. In Sounsyy's limited experience of the man, he really was just a child. Though, she did view many people in this manner - undoubtedly a product of her being thrust into an early adulthood. But she had made many hundreds of mistakes as a youth trying to be an adult and it was a danger she attributed to Ryanti.

 

The two stood there in opposition for another moment before Sounsyy gave up their staring contest and turned her back on Ryanti. She scanned the catwalk behind them with her torchlight, while she composed herself and suffocated the anger still welling up in her throat.

 

"Lead," she said flatly, still facing away from him, "We've lingered here too long."

 

She could feel Ryanti's eyes boring holes into her neckline for a moment before she heard the unmistakable grunts and grating of him squeezing through the half-closed doorway.

 

"I brought you down here for many reasons, and some of them include the fact that I know you can survive and take care of yourself better than anyone else on that ship. You can handle it. I know you can," she heard him say as he pulled his way to the other side. If yeh don't get me killed, she thought in response but said nothing aloud. She slid her backpack through the opening first and followed after Ryanti, coming out on the other side into a long hallway. She scooped up her backpack and replaced it over her shoulder.

 

"It's like... you're afraid of the dark or something."

 

Sounsyy gave him a withering glare as she moved past the Miqo'te and went over to the first pair of doors on the right. The first was sealed tightly, and Sounsyy's torchlight shimmered through the dust, seemingly giving the door a strange texture. Or perhaps that was just the door.

 

"What were yer first clue," she affirmed rhetorically. She kept her eyes averted from Ryanti and sidestepped over to the second door of the pair - this one had been broken open. She could not be sure whether by time or by something unnatural. She shone her light in on the small room, but the jagged shreds of the door cast odd shadows against the back wall. It made her spine tingle. She turned her back on the doorway and her torchlight shown on Ryanti.

 

"Scared of a lot of shite, Seventy-seven. Sure yeh are too. Right now I'm scared of this hallway... and what used to be in them rooms."

[Ryanti]

A damn need to be a hero.

 

That thought sunk into his head when he watched her pass him with a glare that seemed to Ryanti like a light that was fizzling out. He remembered one other time that he was lectured in this manner. It was from his mother, years back at the time of the Calamity. She had chastised him for trying to abandon his home to join the city in defending itself against the horde that had unleashed itself upon Dalamund's wake. But Sounsyy was a good fifteen or so years younger than his mother.

 

She seemed so convinced of herself. So sure that she understood what the banter between Ryanti and his commanding officer meant. So set in how their unit functioned. Ryanti had offered respect to her as far back as challenging her for the first time. Hell, even before then when she was fighting in Ul'Dah.

 

And she treated him like garbage in return. Like a child. Like he was still that little kid cheering her on from the Bloodsands when he was now a man in his twenties. Yet she didn't want him to leave her now. He figured she could do all of this by herself from the way she was talking. Ol' experienced iron eyes.

 

"What were yer first clue."

 

It was a statement that broke Ryanti out of his negative trance. He eyed her afterwords as her gaze adverted his own. He had a hint of legitimate surprise on his face, immediately picking up the rhetorical content of the statement. Wait... was she really? Truthfully, this ship was imperiously taxing on both of their psyche. The darkness in this place had been so long abandoned that the very walls seemed to close in on you and suffocate you. Ryanti had yet to determine whether or not this was actually the ship itself doing it.

 

But... was she really?

 

My first clue was your dream. Your dream I invaded.

 

Ryanti was scared of this hallway too. Scared of this entire ship. That realization brought his thoughts to perspective. All of these angry thoughts, this urge to lash out... was just stupid. It was all just stupid. He wasn't sure who was right, or who was wrong, or if it even mattered.

 

With her admittance, he also chimed in. "I'm scared. Yes. Very." He stated in a bit of a tight voice, approaching her with his rifle pointed more towards the room in question. His fair skin was very bright against Sounsyy's light, reflecting a big part of it back at the very peculiar patterns along the walls. He stepped up parallel to her, glancing into the room, but seeing nothing but darkness where he was, although he could pick out some odd shapes close to the wall.

 

"Look... I'm sorry, alright?" He finally murmured, though he did not glance at the woman completely, still minorly focused on his own task. "I'm sorry I made you go through that, for leaving you behind, and... for whatever else I did."

 

With that, he lifted one leg at a time over the bit of debris that had piled up against the open part of the door, kicking the half-open panel open a little bit further, causing it to squeak in a quiet noise but nothing further. The ship remained silent.

 

There were a bunch more glass pieces on the floor of this room. Tables were still erect and hugged against the side walls, about 5 fulms in length and 2 in width per table, totaling four tables. It was a small-ish room, and many delicate instruments were absolutely coated in dust and far beyond their usefulness or even being safe to wield. These instruments were sprawled along the top of the tables, and a decent amount had fallen to the floor and broken. There were some larger machines further back, bent and twisted in misuse and what could only be attributed as pressure changes in the air from the past centuries.

 

A lone glass window was at the farthest edge of the room. Bubbles from the deep ocean traced themselves along the glass, visible by Ryanti's light. The fact that this glass stayed intact for so long spoke volumes, especially at this pressure. But it was meant for space, so it held steady. "Must have been some kind of processing room. There are beakers here... maybe they were testing liquids. Looks like these machines were used to mix them."

 

Just then, two sparks shot off in the room. They were minor electrical charges that short-circuited exposed wired in an open ventilation shaft near the top corner of the room. Ryanti immediately pointed his light at it with breakneck speed, seeing nothing but observing a definite place where something could sit down and... watch.

 

"I don't like that vent..."

[Sounsyy]

"I'm sorry I made you go through that, for leaving you behind, and... for whatever else I did."

 

Sounsyy made a small 'hmph'ing noise as Ryanti moved past her and climbed into the darkened cell. Her light shimmered down the abandoned corridor but fell on nothing sinister in the shadows. After another quick pass she climbed into the cell after Ryanti.

 

Sounsyy found herself in a tiny room with several tables and instruments she did not understand. Shattered glass, test tubes, syringes - or rather what may have at one time been syringes. She moved to one of the tables and tenderly lifted one of the aged instruments between her thumb and forefinger to examine it. After five-and-a-half-thousand years even the gentle pressure disintegrated the artifact into crumbs in her cupped palm.

 

Sounsyy breathed out a slow, "Shite," as she brushed the dust off her hands. She looked about the room, catching the sight of the window to the outside world shimmering under Ryanti's torchlight. She looked quickly away, fearful to gaze overlong into that abyss.

 

"Ain't entirely yer fault," she said in answer to his apology at long last. Her eyes were averted and she began visiting each of the tables to see what implements they might have once held. "The circumstances we met under. I ain't the most trustin' person at meh bes-"

 

TZZZT! PZTT!

 

Both Sounsyy and Ryanti whipped around to face the crackle of energy snapping through broken powerlines. It was as if this ship was trying to revive itself, but was too weak. Too far gone, though it kept limping on in the attempt after all these years. Ryanti's light fell upon the source, two exposed wires poking out of an air vent whose grate had long since warped.

 

"I don't like that vent..."

"I'll check it," Sounsyy said emotionless. She shuffled over to the underside of the vent with rifle raised and shone her light upwards. Seeing nothing, she lowered her rifle and slung it over her back. She selected the nearest table and began dragging it so that it sat directly beneath the air vent. It made a screeching noise as it slid by its hind legs that seemed unbearably loud within the small room.

 

She placed a hesitant heel upon one corner of the table, testing its sturdiness before climbing on top of it completely. The table wobbled some, but held despite its protesting creeks and groans. The captain gave a quick sigh of relief before erecting slowly from her knees to a standing position. On top of the table she could just reach the bottom of the grate. Her nine fingers eased carefully in between the empty spaces, careful not to touch the wires. With a few sharp tugs downwards, the grate broke free, sending fragments of broken screws skittering and tinkering across the room. Sounsyy knelt down and gently set the grate to one side of her table, picking up her rifle and shining the light up into the air duct. All that moved in the light was the shimmering of dust that had been unsettled.

 

"Looks like enough space to crawl up into," she reported, almost to herself more so than Ryanti. She looked blankly at Ryanti, unsure if the fear bubbling beneath the surface of her expression was visible. "I'll let an ankle dangle."

 

She slipped her rifle's strap off of her shoulders and laid the weapon on top of the table next to the grate. She didn't want to risk it getting caught or lodged in the narrow passageway if she needed to make a hasty retreat.

 

With a delicate sweep of her hand Sounsyy brushed away the once-live wires to one corner of the vent. With a path cleared, she reached her arms up over her head and took hold of one side of the opening and pulled herself up and into the vent with some effort, her legs kicking out a little after she was halfway up into the vent to give her momentum to get her knee up over the side.

 

She knelt inside the air duct on one foot, her right leg dangling down into the cell below from about the knee down. The thin metal groaned under her weight as she shifted a bit to keep her balance on one leg. In front of her lay an empty stretch of ducting, coated with dust, with little rivulets of disturbance over the years leaving variations in the thickness of the dusty coat. She tried not to cough and buried her mouth and nose into the inside of her elbow. A musty stench emanated from somewhere in the airway as if something had lived in it and died in it. She gave a soft cough of disgust into her arm and turned away from the smell to the other side of the shaft.

 

This side was coated much the same as the first, but the torchlight flashed against several white striations that were not present on the other side. She withdrew her arm from her face and reached out to wipe away the dust. In the metal were long, white scratch marks that disappeared down the long shaft. The cleaned area beneath Sounsyy's outstretched hand sported five semi-parallel marks running side by side into the darkness. Sounsyy splayed her fingers apart to find that the claw marks were similar distance apart. Someone had been dragged through this vent...

 

Sounsyy lifted her torchlight so that its light shimmered further down the hallway. She found more furious scratches several fulms down the tube, as if something had thrashed wildly against its course. There was a narrow, dark streak in the midst of the scratching. Black and stained into the metal. Was that blood or... rust?

 

"Seventy-seven...?" Sounsyy whispered nervously, unsure of what to make of the stain. Below her she heard the sound of her partner carefully mounting the tabletop. Her eyes were fixed ahead of her, scanning the far end of the shaft for signs of movement.

 

"Here, trade places with meh, there's somethin' at the end of tha-"

 

But then another loud clamor deep within the ship that echoed down the air vent, reverberating within Sounsyy's eardrums. She shut her eyes as if it would dull out the volume but she missed the subtle hiss of the wires coming to life or the flickering of lightning aspect leaping across the wires.

 

Sounsyy felt a pair of strong hands grab her by her ankle and calf and yank her out of the vent. She screamed and toppled off balance and crashed into Ryanti below. The ancient table gave way under their weight and the pair crashed into the ground, splaying across the dust and cloudy glass. Sounsyy had tried to curl into a ball, but the jarring force of the fall flailed her outwards as she rolled out of Ryanti's embrace. She had landed atop the Miqo'te and crushed the wind out of him when they crumpled to the floor.

 

When Sounsyy had pushed the wires to one side before her climb, their frayed ends had come close enough to connect and in a brilliant surge of ultraviolet light, the cell was lit before flickering. The hot wires sparked and sizzled angrily from sudden use, burning off all of the dust that had collected upon them over the centuries.

 

In the brief flashes of light, Ryanti found himself laying amidst a cell full of ancient Allagan writing and archaic formulaes. They coated the walls of the lab, angry scribbling of bygone equations that did or did not work to improve human life. The symbols burning and sizzling for Ryanti to remember what had been forgotten. But when darkness fell upon the room, the symbols were too pale and aged to be seen beneath the dust and shroud of darkness. Only in the pale blue light of the Allagans did the writing shine true.

 

Sounsyy, who had pulled herself away from Ryanti, did not see the symbols for her eyes were fixed upon the ruined remains of that table and that open segment of air duct. A soft river of dust floated lazily out of the vent upon the remains. When the lights flickered on, she witnessed another dark stain upon the floor beneath that vent that they had failed to notice upon entering. They had been too busy shining their lights upon the tables or at the walls to notice the stain that had collected in the very corner of the flooring. Something unmistakable as blood.

 

With a start Sounsyy bolted upright onto her hands and knees. Something had been in that vent! Something had pulled some hapless victim up from the ground and dragged him down that vent to his death - or so the wild ravings playing inside the captain's mind thought. Sounsyy was hissing with increasing conviction, "Get out, get out, get out, get out," as she tripped over her own feet as she moved towards her rifle.

 

"Come on!" She pleaded as she pulled at Ryanti's suit, but kept moving towards the doorway. She toppled out of it and into the hallway. The lights flickered once more, blinding her some as the hallway shimmered to life, and then the power gave out completely, sending everything back into complete blackness. Sounsyy had pushed her back tightly against the wall just to the left of the opening, panting heavily in the darkness. She no longer felt entirely alone. The very darkness seemed to seep into her suit.

 

"A-are you okay?!" she called out fearfully into the dark.

[Ryanti]

“I’ll check it.”

 

The young man shifted his eyes to her with an immediate look of concern upon his face as his gaze grew still and his posture shifted in a more tense fashion than before. The air was so still in that room. Ryanti could trace his breath in the midst of the dust particles among his torchlight, which now momentarily shined on Sounsyy’s form.

 

He continued to hold his rifle up pointed towards the door. The cold steel of the gun’s make was beginning to feel more moist and damp because of the sweat coming from Ryanti’s palms. “Are you sure?” He murmured to her, but already knew the answer to that question. It was best that they leave no stone unturned in this ship, and Ryanti knew that his fear was playing with him by trying to make it okay for his conscious to prefer ignorance to anything that could be in there.

 

Ryanti’s tail and ears tensed up and he clenched his teeth and shut his eyes tightly when he heard the loud screeches of the table moving. The sound permeated throughout the room in the all too silent ship, bouncing off of the walls in the hallway and echoing down the corridor. At least out of the most mysterious noises they have heard so far, this noise had an explanation to it, but Ryanti couldn’t help but think that now that they were making their own noise, the rest of the entire ship knew they had… intruders.

 

With a few steps, he aligned himself with Sounsyy’s position, briefly looking up at her dark form on top of the eons-old piece of furniture. He flinched retroactively at all of the loose screws that broke free from the grating, tiny Allagan pieces of work sprinkling over his form and causing him to wipe his shoulder and a few other spots to clear himself of the rubble and dust.

 

“Looks like it’s enough space to crawl up into.” She said.

 

Ryanti’s grip on his rifle tightened. Checking out the inside of paneling like that with the enormous chance of electric shock was a terrifying risk to take. But it would but one of many crazy risks they would have to take on this trial by fire inside of the derelict ship. He returned her glance with one of his own, with concern forefronting to the surface, whether it be because of him sensing her fear or projecting his own.

 

“I’ll let an ankle dangle.”

 

“Please be careful.”

 

Ryanti had a little taste of Sounsyy’s prior loneliness after she had grabbed onto the grating and kicked away to pull herself up. There was a primal fear deep inside of him that she would suddenly be whisked away from him, never to return and leaving him by himself in this place. A heated feeling of guilt coursed through the young man’s body. He would not leave her again. Even for a moment. The young man timidly placed his rifle down on its side next to hers, letting out a few breaths of exertion as he slowly climbed himself upon the ancient table, the legs wobbling a little bit when he tried to stand. Ryanti weighed more than Sounsyy, so he was afraid the slightest movement could send the table crumbling to dust.

 

“Seventy-seven…?”

 

“Yeah?.. What is it?” Ryanti said back to her. Despite him being below her and not in the duct with her, his voice sounded just as loud as if he was right next to her. He had already placed both of his hands right outside of her dangling right leg, as if he was ready at any moment to grab onto her leg and pull with all of his might if one of the thousands of ways this could go wrong came true.

 

He remembered she said something about trading places, about something literally being there with her in the vent. But that was all that he could recall. His eyes were wandering around outside of Sounsyy’s vision in places he could afford to see from the vantage point of where he was. When the clamor happened deep within the ship’s bowels, Ryanti was not exposed to the true nature of the sound like she was. It allowed him to pick up on a subtle noise. It sounded like a tiny buzz, almost like the sound of white noise that quickly increased in volume. It was actually the sound of electrical current bouncing off of two ends of exposed wire that threatened to get too close.

 

It was then that it all clicked together in Ryanti’s mind. The very deep bowels of this ship… even after all this time… still retained power. The power was coming to life, and within moments Sounsyy would be exposed to the voltage! Oh no! He had to get her out of there NOW!

 

“SHITE!”

 

The young man snapped into action with amazing speed that could only come out of anyone in a life or death situation. He snatched one hand upon her ankle and warped his other arm around the woman’s thigh. Immediately after, he pulled as hard as he could, ignoring her cries as her life was more valuable to him than her nerves and always would be. The force of his pull caused the metallic surface underneath Sounsyy to break off, the rectangular metallic piece crumbling down along with her body. Ryanti looked up just in time to be overtaken with the weight of her, knocking his face to the side.

 

He groaned out in pain after taking her weight, the table immediately collapsing into a bunch of pieces. Ryanti was able to catch her, warping his arms tightly around her collarbone area as they fell to keep her from flailing out of his grip and injuring herself further until they hit the floor. His back smashed into the ground of broken glass with all of her weight on top of him. “AHK-!” He cried out with the last of his breath as he hit the floor, his lips parted in pain but unable to breath.

 

It was a horrid amount of pain, and if it were not for his suit protecting him, Ryanti would probably have mean gashes all across his back now for falling upon the broken glass. He coughed and wheezed, his arms limp when Sounsyy flailed out of his grip not a moment after the accident. An acute puncture wound had formed near his left temple. Bright crimson blood began to bubble to the surface, crawling down the side of his face after bubbling up too much.

 

Immense sparks of electricity shot between all space of the air duct right afterwords. If Sounsyy had still been there, her heart would have easily ruptured and her brain fried from the immense electric shock. Ryanti took a deep, painful breath with a bit of a hoarse voice, opening his eyes in a daze on the floor and squirming a bit, the tiny pieces of broken glass crackling under him.

 

Something was flickering, something in the distance… a buzzing sound rang in his ears. It was a familiar sound from far away from here… an echo of Ryanti’s recent past.

 

For but a moment, the cell they were in came to life under a five thousand year old florescent light. His pupils dilated and he gasped with marvel at what he saw before him. There were… pieces of writing. Writing all over the walls. The Allagan writing was so sophisticated and the various shapes and puzzling formulas written on the wall were far beyond the comprehension of anyone in the Seventh Era. These incredibly complex mathematical formulas were everywhere on the walls of this room.

 

This was when Ryanti felt that connection again. That pull. Those numbers… those equations… those diagrams that were buried in dust… the incomprehensible nonsense formed themselves into shapes in Ryanti’s head. It was as if he was being forced to remember, forced to understand, and forced to recall only what he had just seen moments prior as if he had studied those shapes for weeks. The writing on the wall was burning into his mind, much like the Allagan alphabet had during Ryanti’s initiations. But this was not promoted or provoked by tomestones or other advanced methods of acquiring knowledge. No, this was burned into him because of something else. Because both him and Sounsyy were connected to the fate of this ship. Ryanti had allowed the back door of his mind to be open to the Allagan influences, and this was why.

 

“Ahhhh! Hnnnn!” Ryanti groaned out, sinking his forehead onto the floor with only his knees supporting him, his arms sprawled out among him as he suffered with this information. It hurt. It hurt so bad. It was like he was being forced to think so hard that his brain felt like exploding. Murmurs, whispers, words… hands writing the formulas upon the wall… florescent lights, beakers, hope, heart, struggle, desperation… all invading his mind.

 

When Sounsyy tugged at his suit, Ryanti looked over at her with an expression of immense pain. In his eyes were mirrored the writing of the Allagans upon the wall, which had burned into his aquamarine irises and gave out a soft white glow as if those memories were being stamped upon his very eyes. He was out of it. He wasn’t completely there. He remained crumpled for a moment longer after Sounsyy left, his weak eyes being exposed to the writing again with one last flicker… ancient memories that were not his own fogging his mind.

 

So… why did you decide to become a scientist?

 

To help people…

 

It seems so strange, that… the more that we seem to understand about this world, the… more that we realize how much we truly don’t know…

 

So close! ... I’m so close! No one will have to die like they do anymore if I just… if I just…

 

When the lights flickered that one last time, the hallway that Sounsyy was in very briefly exposed the entirety of itself with that light. The brilliant white light that had functioned as such five thousand years prior had grown into a pale tan color with age and covered with dust, therefore much weaker than it used to be. The light flickered upon the hallway… once… twice… three times.

 

On the third flicker, out of the corner of Sounsyy’s eye, there was a figure. A figure that was standing in the hallway. It was impossible to make her out completely because she was only around for one flicker. What could be seen was that she had a coat of white. A pair of glasses. An ethereal silver earring that dangled from her ear lobe and sparkled beautifully, even in the rusted light. Long blonde hair of some sort… of some length.

 

And skin that was deathly blue. Unmistakably deathly.

 

The Allagan specter appeared in a blink of an eye, and was gone in the blink of an eye. The lights flickered two more times, exposing the hallway for it truly was: empty and silent, before one of the light bulbs shattered into old and rotten pieces. The wiring in the vent shorted out and fried with age and wear, sending the ship back into utter darkness once more as the ship died again.

 

The ship had died again, but had never felt more alive.

 

“A-are you okay?!?”

 

Sounsyy could hear little sounds and quiet groans from the room that she had left. It was similar noises one would make if they were sick to their stomach or just completed a sprint and needed air. The stale air of this ship did Ryanti no favors in recovering. His brain felt like it was dancing on ice after receiving a burn.

 

Those memories of what the Allagans were doing in this ship during its heyday finally quieted down in his mind, and Sounsyy could see the light of his suit’s torch emerge from the doorway, along with a right hand holding onto the side of the broken door. Ryanti emerged from the entranceway with his head wound still fresh.

 

He looked to his right slowly, then to his left, eyeing Sounsyy who had slammed her back against the wall. Ryanti still had a little bit of a glazed look in eye, and when he swallowed there was nothing but air, but he was able to get some words out. “I… think I am, yeah. Heh… that… that kind of hurt…”

 

Humor. He felt like he had to. To try to calm both of their fears. “I just… I just need a second.” He sounded winded, as if he was tired. He rested himself against her side of the wall, shoulder to shoulder with her. Both of their torchlights illuminated their section of the hallway, at least. He placed a hand upon his head rubbing it gently to try to box out the cobwebs.

 

“There was… there was writing on the wall. Writing that burned into my mind. They… they were so complex, so delicate and sophisticated but… unfinished. The Allagans, I… saw one working on the formulas in that room. I remember it like it’s my own memory. They were… they were trying to solve something. To end a certain kind of suffering. Testing, re-writing, testing re-writing… it was as if they were studying the very core of what made those liquids… down to the tiniest level of detail.”

 

A sudden little realization coursed through Ryanti’s mind, and he turned to her with a bit of a dizzy look that was slowly, yet surely, wearing off. A bit more energy was in his next words. “Are you okay too?”

[Sounsyy]

Sounsyy closed her eyes and the sound of her panting filled her ears in the absence of all other sounds. Had there been something there? Or was she losing her mind? There had been something - she was sure of it. By the time Ryanti had shaken off the Allagan lab's influence and exited through the broken porthole, Sounsyy was sucking air through her teeth. She looked very small in the large hallway, alone in the dark. Her knees were tucked into her chest and the Sharlayan rifle rested limply atop her feet in front of her. Her nose was buried in her fingers as if hiding or trying to slow her breathing.

 

She didn't seem to notice when the other Miqo'te sat beside her and spoke. His words, "Are you okay too?" seemed abrupt to her. She looked at him, eyes wide, and shook her head slowly.

 

"There was... there was... blood. In the vent, I think, and on the floor," she said, sniffing back the panic, "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?"

 

She sniffed sharply again and wiped her nose on the back of her forearm, smearing her nose and cheek with a thin layer of dust that had started to accumulate on her suit. She sighed and reclined her head so that it rested upon the wall behind her, trying hard to hold back tears that she knew would come. Her breathing was finally starting to slow, though she was still anxious over what she had witnessed.

 

She sat there in silence for a while, collecting her thoughts while she listened to Ryanti's recovering breathing. The fall had hurt him, she knew. But he had saved her life, again. It was becoming a recurring event that Sounsyy was not comfortable with. But what choice did she have? For an agent, he was one sentimental bastard.

 

It was only after she became calm that her eyes began to water. If Ryanti noticed in the dark, she would simply blame it on the dust. But she twisted her torso so that she faced away from him so he would not see. She reached into her backpack and withdrew a small packet of rations from it. Truthfully, she was not hungry, her stomach was in terrible knots, but she needed something mindlessly basic and repetitive to take her mind off of her emotional state. So she withdrew a square of leavened bread - Lominsan fishtack - and nibbled the edges as quietly as one could chew fishtack in an otherwise soundless environment.

 

This silence, it was unbearable. Which surprised Sounsyy, as she had long suspected she would do well living in solitude without another soul she could speak or relate to. This venture was making her reconsider her opinion. But she wasn't alone, not truly, though she would not say the young Miqo'te's company was preferable. Still... She passed him a sidelong glance, her eyes still a little red. She realized he'd been watching her. His gaze caused her to become self aware of the square of fishtack held in her mouth like some covetous marmot. She held the cracker steady between her teeth as she dug around for another piece, which she offered him with a questioning, "Mm?"

 

Her injured hand removed the snack from between her dry lips so that she could form words. They came hesitantly at first and she realized this was perhaps the first time she had addressed him in a capacity that would suggest she thought of him as her equal, rather than her subordinate.

 

"Before yeh were Seventy-seven, what did yeh do?" Sounsyy asked. It was a rather sudden and personal question, she knew, but she needed something to escape the reality of their current mission. Her eyes flickered about in the darkness, ensuring they were in fact still alone, before resting back on Ryanti, watching the blood trickle down the side of his face as he spoke.

[Ryanti]

"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.”

 

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.”

 

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.”

 

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.”

 

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.”

 

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.”

 

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…”

 

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.”

 

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.”

 

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.”

 

“They asked me if I really wanted to know.”

 

”Do you really wanna know? Do you really wanna know the truth about this world?”

He felt like his inner spine was freezing cold. He was shivering and soaking wet in the chair. He could barely see the form of the man before him. He had a sharp chin illuminated by a damp candlelight, but that was all he could see. His wrists were cuffed, but he knew. He had an idea what kind of man he was.

“Yes.”

“Even if it means sacrifice? Even if it means death?”

 

“Y-..yes.”

 

 

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.”

 

 

His arms burned with the pain of being overworked. Sweat covered him in waves and droves. He screamed at the top of his lungs as he continued his push-ups. He heard the sounds of somebody getting hit with a stick right in the ribs as he fell limp, unable to continue. He knew it was to be his fate if he was the first one to give up. But immediately everyone fell limp to the floor right when the unfortunate victim got smacked with the stick. He was moaning in pain now, curled up upon the floor. What had he gotten into..?

 

 

“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.”

 

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.”

 

He lightly pinched his fingers against his closed eyes for a moment. The little smile was still on his face.

 

 

”What do you see?!?”

 

He was screaming. It hurt so bad. The symbols were dancing around his head and it was like he couldn’t take his eyes off him. He felt like vomiting, but nothing came out. He felt like bleeding out of his eyes it hurt so bad, but nothing was happening to him. Was it all in his head? Was his head the only one screaming?

 

“WHAT DO YOU SEE! READ IT OUT LOUD!”

 

“AHHHH!! HAAA! THE YEAR, THE YEAR!!! THE CONSUL’S YEAR! IN THE GLORIOUS LIGHT OF OUR EMPIRE!”

 

 

“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..”

 

 

”You need to have the gall to pull the damn trigger!”

 

His hand was shaking. His moral compass was rampaging in a crazed mindset. His mouth was open and dry as he pointed the flintlock down upon a blonde youth that could have been younger than him. His mouth had been taped shut. He was trying to shake himself out of the chair, but he couldn’t. He was trapped.

 

“PULL THE TRIGGER! PULL IT OR YOU’RE DONE!”

 

He had already protested. Once, twice… three times before. But he knew that he was here in the now. It was what they told him. Worry about the right now, and not about the outcome. He closed his eyes at the last moment before he pulled the trigger. He couldn’t see it happen in the end. But he had done it. The youth, with tears in his eyes in his begging silent plead to not end his life fell limp to the floor in a shower of blood.

 

“Good!” His superior had told him. He was either number one or number ten, or someone inbetween. “If you have the ability to take the life away of someone whom you are uncertain of their deeds, you will have no problem taking the life away of an enemy.”

 

He was shaking even worse now. The hot blood was sprinkled all over him. He was taken away in a blanket. Taken away to some hot chocolate. That was how they consoled them afterwords. A blanket and a gods damn hot chocolate…

 

 

“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.”

 

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?”

[Sounsyy]

Sounsyy stared into the darkness while he spoke, only glancing over at the Miqo'te occasionally when he paused or shifted his weight. Her eyes scanned back and forth into the swirling dust, rising and settling beneath the torchlights in time with their calming breaths. Sounsyy continued to nibble on her cracker until he addressed her directly, "I'd rather just be called Ryanti. That is... if I earned it."

 

She looked at him blankly, deciding whether or not to call him anything other than Seventy-seven. She looked down, noting the rag in his hand. She looked then at her rifle still resting across her feet. She said nothing but reached over to take the rag from him, but paused when Ryanti spoke.

 

"Before you were Captain Mirke of the Roehmerl or Mirke the Maimer… what did you do?”

 

Sounsyy met his gaze and took the rag firmly in her hands. She didn't even have to think about the answer, "I killed people Ryanti. That's what I did."

 

She looked away and lifted the rifle off of her feet, pulling it into her lap so that it rested with its stock against her pelvis and the barrel leaning against her thigh. She bent over so her nose was mere ilms for the weapon and began cleansing the gun with the rag wrapped about her forefinger. She was quiet while she did this, giving her response ample time to soak in and for Ryanti to ruminate on it. She considered this one of many differences between them. Ryanti was not his job. He was detached from it, or tried to be. He had a normal life. She...

 

"Yer foolin' yerself if yeh think I'm not those people - the Maimer, the Captain - and I think it's more wishful thinkin' to think everything yeh went through to get to this mission 'asn't changed who you are. In meh experience, what yeh do when no one's looking is who yeh are, not who yeh pretend to be where others can see yeh," she said quietly. It was of course directed at Ryanti's own double life, but she put it matter-of-factly without bitterness in her voice. She sighed and turned the gun over in her lap to scrub the other side.

 

"I'm still hard-ass Cap'n Mirke and that scared little girl both when no one's looking. I guess that's the difference between yeh n' me. We've got similarities, don't get meh wrong. Meh parents lived modestly I guess - strong, respected, not wealthy really. I wanted to be like meh father growing up. I don't think I'm much like him anymore. He were killed during Ala Mhigo's fall so I'll never really know. I became one of hundreds of blooded Ala Mhigan youths left with nothing. Nowadays, most Ala Mhigans have given up. Either Ul'dah's kicked the fight out of 'em or they're just too young to know any different then rollin' about in squalor and dirt. But back then..."

 

Sounsyy sighed almost wistfully. Her weapon polished, she deposited the rag over one of her drawn up knees and reclined the rifle across one shoulder. She realized she had not yet finished her fishtack, so she retrieved the piece resting in her lap and took a large nibble out of it.

 

"Let's just say I've been fightin' a long time. That girl from the Bloodsands yeh admire, the Maimier? She'd already been fighting the Garleans fer three cycles. Killed a dozen or more of the bastards on her own. But back then, the city-states didn't want anything to do with the Empire or helping those what lost to it. We Ala Mhigans had to fight fer our homeland on our own. That's where the resentment started. I didn't realize how much I hated them - Ul'dah - until I fought in the Coliseum."

 

She took another bite of her cracker, "Yer covered in sweat and blood and sand and yeh look up at this crowd dressed in silks, jeering down at yeh, throwing gold and jewels at one another like just one of them couldn't feed the whole Silver Bazaar fer moons. That's about the time yeh stop feeling guilty fer doing horrible things to horrible people and that was a hard lesson to learn fer a fifteen year old girl," she said finishing off her fishtack.

 

She brushed her hands against her thighs to clean them before leaning over to replace the remaining supplies back inside her backpack. She returned her gaze to the dark hallway, finding it impossible how just a few moments ago she was in the throws of panic at some shapeless specter. There was nothing in this hallway. Nothing but history, even the words she spoke - history.

 

"I got disenchanted with fake fights," she said easily, as if she hadn't killed her opponent in the first match, "Fake fights fer fake infamy from a crowd what didn't really care whether I lived or died unless they staked their money upon the outcome. So I got out, first chance I could, and returned to the Ala Mhigan front where my people were still fighting real wars against a real threat for a real cause. But, as I'm sure yeh know, it were all fer naught. By the time we realized nothing more could be done fer our home, our losses were immeasurable. That's how I came to live in Limsa. Moved there with a friend after she were hurt. We'd known each other since we were babes. Thought we could just live out the rest of our days enjoying some measure of peace together. Well, we got a few years in afore word from the Ala Mhigan spies we'd died tryin' to sneak into the city told of coming Garlean invasion."

 

Sounsyy shifted her rifle a bit before continuing, "So like good little soldiers we joined the Barracuda. At least one of the city-states had decided to take the fight to Garlemald, pirating and burning their ships. I became a quartermaster under a bitch of a captain. Took control of that ship when my captain ate a Sahagin spear near a year later. So I ran meh Levy through the Seventh Hell, into the kobold wars, Iron Lake, Carteneau... Meh Levy didn't make the journey, most of them. That's why I'm here y'know? Because they don't think I care how many lives it takes to get the job done. Think I'm desensitized to it by now. Best kept secret is I'm not, not really..."

 

Sounsyy leaned forwards and brought her knees up under her, pushing off into a shaking standing position. She had sat still for too long. She stretched, then doubled forwards sweeping her good hand down to retrieve the rag that had fallen from its resting place on her knee. She picked it up and shook it free from the dust before tossing it back to Ryanti. She was quiet for a bit, not really looking at Ryanti for her gaze was held upon the pathway before them. Her sudden, quiet laugh was almost jarring from her normally placid demeanor.

 

"Captain... Maimer... they're big parts of who I am. Don't ever doubt that, but they ain't the only parts. Bad people can 'ave good sides too, even if they ain't willing to show them."

 

She motioned down the hallway and started to unsling her rifle into a ready position, "Let's walk and talk, yeh? Knowin' yeh, yeh've got loads more questions. Should make clearin' this hallway a bit less tense. If yer ready that is?"

[Ryanti]

He let go of the rag and watched as the woman next to him took to doing what he had done. It was his turn to stare into the darkness, his turn to listen. His aquamarine eyes had a powerful color, but it was all for naught if there was no light to illuminate them. He had the stock of his weapon resting against the floor of the place and leaned back fully against the wall.

 

The pain in his back was beginning to fade away, but the remnants were still there. He closed his eyes and rested the side of his cheek away from Sounsyy upon his rifle, using it a kind of a tool to try to obtain some kind of calm, relaxing rest that his body absolutely needed right now while his mind ruminated upon her words. His eyes very subtly opened just a tad after she had explained her first bit about fooling one’s own self and… who you were when no one was looking. Those words hit him more than she knew. Not in a bad way, but in a penetrating way. He knew. She knew too.

 

Your braid is very pretty.

 

The expression on his face carried an element of drowsiness, but Ryanti’s ears kept upright. He wanted to hear what she had to say, and he listened intently. In his mind he was painting a picture using her words. It was a portrait of her life that was beginning to build in his memories to try to add some depth to the woman he had met back at the Grindstone that faithful day; the same woman he had admired as a boy. Ryanti knew about Ala Mhigo and the events that happened prior to his homecoming. His father had even participated in some events relating to just that. He picked up on her wistful sigh, and he wished he could have been there.

 

“That girl from the Bloodsands yeh admire, the Maimier?”

 

Ryanti turned his head to her when she said that in a slight glance. She didn’t look too different from his memories, honestly. Especially when she had emerged in the war paint she had donned upon her. The closest glance he could afford of her was when he had knocked her down and saved her life from an old rival decades before. She was beautiful then – as she had been in the Coliseum, all primed with makeup and other aspects of showmanship for those fake fights – yet how ugly she was when she got her hands on Cynthia. Ryanti had seen most of it.

 

He continued to listen. So she had been fighting for years before? But she was so young then. The time she was talking about before all that… she was even younger. So young. Ryanti’s heart felt heavy under irrational guilt, as if it was his fault.

 

That's about the time yeh stop feeling guilty fer doing horrible things to horrible people.”

 

Another phrase that penetrated him. This one deeper than the first.

 

He could understand her perspective from her time in the Bloodsands. He did not like Ul’Dah much either. Every day he found himself back there, he would always see someone do something that would make him feel a little sick to his stomach. Ul’Dah was a never city of morals, it was more like a crippling drain of idealism distorted into an evil, selfish desire to shape the world in one’s own image. In other words, it was the city he grew up in, and his job was really no different from that, and neither was he. But yet…

 

You weren’t fake to me, Sounsyy. I cared.

 

Yeah. Right. Like having some damn boy caring would change anything.

 

He noticed that she spoke of moving to Limsa with another, and yet did not mention her again after moving on to talking about her time in the Barracuda. He thought it best not to ask – if she was speaking from the heart right now, there were always crevasses in people’s souls that one just shouldn’t shine a light in. Ryanti decided not to probe.

 

He was feeling rather despondent when she mentioned her best kept secret. He cleared his throat a bit. A few fingertips tapped the barrel of his rifle. Neither was he, Ryanti thought. Neither was he.

 

He glanced up at her as she stood, catching the rag. Even though there was minimal light, he could see well enough to make out her feminine form in the darkness, captured rather ideally by the Sharlayan suit that clung to her in all manners of physical protection. It was a pleasant sight.

 

But a Sharlayan suit could do nothing to protect someone from their own mind. No, he didn’t mean what it did to his mind when he saw Sounsyy in it. That made him laugh a little bit on the inside. Ryanti was in the middle of placing his rag away when he heard her laugh, pausing a bit, honestly surprised at that. Ryanti had laughed in his mind… she had laughed out loud.

 

Your braid is very pretty. So is your laugh.

 

She looked a little bit more like herself again. Confident. She could hear Ryanti slowly getting to his feet as indeed he was. With one long exhale, his taller form stepped alongside hers, glancing to the side to observe her. “I am.”

 

He shifted his glance back to the hallway ahead, and raised his rifle up. “Your best kept secret is safe with me.” He also said that so matter-of-factly. The delivery may had been neutral, but there was much more to it than that.

 

Perhaps Ryanti would have better imagined conversation like this to occur at a nice dinner, or overlooking a field of flowers while enjoying a lovely picnic on days the sky was bluest. Instead, they were an unpresented distance under the ocean in an ancient, derelict relic of a bygone age in which they both could barely comprehend. The little intricate marks of the cerment’s masterful work was apparent everywhere on the ship from the floor to the walls to even the ceiling. Everywhere his light touched revealed another brilliantly made part of the vessel in which could even be seen past all of the eons old dust that had accumulated along with the still air.

 

But it was a good decision to have conversation here. It made it so much easier to do. Ryanti’s movement wasted no energy, and covered every open space in front of him with light and left no louder sound than a whisper. His rifle light did not cross over his torchlight on his torso. He was so very professional, yet his words were so very personal.

 

“Your right, y’know?” He said to her, checking another long-abandoned and long-forgotten doorway. The cerment door which perhaps had openly brilliantly for Allagan peoples of ages past had collapsed within itself, making entry impossible. It would have been a sombering sight to see for anyone that lived during that time.

 

“Your right about me fooling myself. About my wishful thinking.” A little smile brushed off of his face as he glanced at her once more. A smile that was sad in nature. He slung his rifle upon his back and tried to manually remove the large pillars of cerment that covered the entryway. His body lurched and twitched as he exerted himself to try as he continued to speak.

 

“I don’t really know what Seventy-Seven is. I like to see it as separate because… when you’ve not had solid food for three days and water for two, and you’re glancing at the man in the chair, or what’s left of him because you blew his head off with a powerful rifle such as this one or the pistol in my pocket, and you’re having your way with his food and his water, and you.. look at him and go ‘I didn’t do that, Seventy-Seven did that.’ He didn’t know Ryanti, he never met him. He met Agent Seventy-Seven and Agent Seventy-Seven killed him. Because Ryanti could never… could never do something like that. Not the nice man that loves to have a cup of warm tea before lunch time and loves people and art, culture and history.”

 

He could remember how he was on the battlefield with the Garleans. How neutral his face was, how efficient of a killing machine he was. He knew Sounsyy had seen him too.

 

“But maybe I can. Maybe I always could. Maybe that’s a part of me too. Maybe I know it is. Seventy-Seven will always be a part of me. That man that has little problem using the end to justify the means. The man that became the same way, that stopped learning how to feel guilty for doing horrible things to horrible people.”

 

He perhaps tried one too many times to move the debris. It was an outlet for him. The last thing he wanted to do was to have his eyes water, turn beat red, and tears to fall in front of her. He managed to only allow them to water. The rest was dealt with his little outlet – his little attempt at trying to move the debris. His voice was somber, melancholy, and heavy. “Maybe it’s easier to separate that part of me into a number. Into a nickname, or… something separate from my real name to try to distance what I hate about myself. But that’s not the right way to think, isn’t it? To do that would mean that the name ‘Ryanti’ would be nothing but a label to the persona I show to others. It says little about what kind of person I am when no one is looking – the real me. I can’t help but feel that I am a bad man, and a terrible influence. But I don’t know who Ryanti is when no one is looking. I’m too confused with it all to try to answer the question myself, and no one has ever told me who Ryanti is when no one is looking.”

 

Your braid is very pretty. So is your laugh. I’m sorry for bringing you down here, please forgive me. I’m a terrible person.

 

He tugged on his strap and his rifle slung back right around, stepping away from a room that was obviously impossible to get into. Its secrets would be buried forever now. They had to move on. Ryanti tried the adjacent door. It was sealed tight, with no hint of receiving power for decades, centuries, more. He banged on it once or twice, glancing around at the form of it but shaking his head. Another no-go. He spoke again, but this time his voice had a measure of conviction it did not have earlier. “But there’s a difference between bad people and evil people.”

 

Ryanti did not believe her to be evil. It was a very poor word to describe her to him. He could have turned around, and perhaps said something more about that, but he could not manage to gather the courage to glance at her now. He had felt like he had revealed an ugly side to himself to her, too ugly… he was afraid of that ugliness, insecure of that part of his soul just as Sounsyy was insecure about the burns on her shoulder.

 

“Not only do bad people have good sides to them, but they also have the ability to do good things – great things. Part of who I am is being able to experience the wonders of this world on a first-hand basis and to be able to make a positive difference for the future. That’s the part of Seventy-Seven I love to accept. Sometimes I think all people – all civilizations from all eras – have those parts they love to accept, and other parts to themselves that they find a lot harder to accept. I think.”

 

Ryanti wasn’t really sure about that philosophical comparison but… it was he believed, anyway. It was obvious that despite the ugly parts of this job, Ryanti had no shortage of passion for it. He had shown it time and time again. It was then that his light shined upon what appeared to be a much larger door than any of the others, with broken glass above it the only remnants of what used to be a lit up elevator sign.

 

There was a window adjacent to it that had been laminated with glass, but the glass had long since shattered. There were plenty of sharp edges on the broken glass, and so Ryanti immediately figured to try the straightforward approach first. “That’s interesting. Looks like we’ve reached the end of the hallway. Shine a light in the window. Make sure there’s nothing there.”

 

The ship was remarkably quiet now. There were no sounds, no feeling of a presence, nothing. It was almost as if the ship was letting them talk, as if the ship was trying to say that there was nothing left for them to discover in this first hallway here. But was the ship lying?

 

“So… you said you had a bitch of a Captain, huh?” Ryanti stated. His voice had gone back to normal. It was an attempt to change the subject, yes. It was perhaps a part of him that wanted something more lighthearted, something that would illicit a smile or maybe even laughter in this hell of a place.

 

He placed the palm of his hand upon the door, glancing up at the broken light, closing his eyes and trying to feel with his fingertips if there was any kind of manual action required to let the door loose somehow so that they could proceed, trying not to think about the alternative of traveling in the less desirable route of the open window next to them.

 

“Do you have any funny stories from that time?”

[Sounsyy]

Sounsyy moved when Ryanti did and set about searching the remaining doors on her side of the corridor. Several were derelict or impassible from debris, but she was able to duck beneath a fallen beam into a third door and found herself in a room much like the first they had explored. She flashed the torchlight across the floors, walls, and ceiling but found it devoid of all life. Her breath seemed to be the first disturbance the stale air had felt in epochs. She noted there was no window to the outside on the far wall like there had been in the first room. So this way was towards the inner ship?

 

She ducked back out in time to catch Ryanti's explanation on the division of bad and evil. Sounsyy's ears flicked back for a split second and turned her back, investigating the next door in sequence. “But there’s a difference between bad people and evil people,” Ryanti had said. Sounsyy's brow furrowed as she trailed her light down the crease in the once-sliding door. It did not open for her.

 

Not that great a difference, she thought to herself. They pressed on.

 

After a while they reached what seemed to be the end of the empty hallway. Sounsyy turned and swept her light around the area behind them, but it was still just as empty as it had been since seeing her specter. She turned back and moved closer to the broken window beside the large doorway. She hesitated before slowly shuffling her feet over to the empty window and peered out into the darkness.

 

"Not sure funny is 'ow I'd describe that time," she said, her back pressed up against the wall adjacent to the empty window, "Sterransa Syntkhrawyn were more savage than any pirate, Sahagin, or Reaver she ever killed. She would've made one hells of a pirate queen if she didn't hate them as much as she did. She hated most things though, 'cept coin and steel."

 

Sounsyy peeked around to get a better view of the open window. She slipped her rifle past the threshold and cast her torchlight up and down over the steep walls until the light faded into the impenetrable expanse of black below and above.

 

"Looks like a lift shaft?" she said, turning back to Ryanti, "Looks empty though, didn't see cable or anythin'. Think this door is the lift?"

 

She made her way over to the large door adjacent to it and tried to pry it open with her fingers unsuccessfully. So she drew her shortsword from its scabbard across her rear and slid one edge vertically up into the gap between the slots with some effort and grunting. She didn't want to plunge the sword straight in and pull, as that would've likely broken the sword. She hoped that using the sword's whole length and thickest side would provide better leverage, but she was unsuccessful still. She withdrew the blade and held it against the light, shaking free the dust that clung to its used edge.

 

"Hmph, she used to make me clean every blade and ring of chainmail thrice over until she were satisfied. Her cutlass could never be sharp enough. Every piece of pillaged loot taken from the purses of dead pirates couldn't be clean enough. It had to sparkle. Won't do to hand the Admiral unclean spoils, she'd say. I hated her, obviously. Think it were mutual. She were a strong captain though. Commanded loyalty, fear, presence - right up until the day she died. Anyway - thoughts on this door?"

 

Sounsyy motioned to the doorway behind her. She had turned to look Ryanti in the eye for much of the story, but now she seemed hesitant to continue, as if she really had nothing more to say casually on the subject of the person whom she so greatly loathed and seemingly had so much in common with. How could so fierce a woman just die? Sounsyy's eyes almost seemed to dare Ryanti to keep asking about her.

[Ryanti]

The hallway was very quiet now. Almost as quiet as it had been eons prior. Their presence at this time seemed so insignificant to Ryanti, so tiny compared to the size of the rest of the ship. The silence was welcoming in a way. At least in the company of another. The young man wondered if Sounsyy realized now why he could not do this alone. It stood for certain that if she didn’t now, she will eventually. Company… company prevented insanity. Right now, he was thoroughly enjoying this tiny escape from the very grim reality they were in right now.

 

His slender hands began to unfasten a strap from one of his larger pouches on his waistline as Sounsyy began her recalling of her former master. His body seemed to respond automatically to the situation, knowing what tools to apply to any given uncertainty. It was a trick of his trade – they almost always had to improvise.

 

He had a second eye upon the woman as she examined the adjacent room, only accessible through a broken window. It was a relief and at the same time, concerning to be informed that it was empty. If they could not open this door, they would have to take that path and do whatever it took to get deeper inside the maul of this giant mechanical beast of an incomprehensible era.

 

The gadget Ryanti pulled out of his pouch looked like a little black scanner about the size of his hand and shaped like a cylinder. It was designed by Sharlayan to detect electricity and aether flow. With a quiet click, he turned the device on, and a tiny red light from the gadget began to blink in a slow, continuous rhythm as he hovered the device over the door while listening to Sounsyy’s story. This figure of hers, this Sterransa… she seemed so colorful, and so bitter a person. He admitted that part of him was deeply amused about the idea of imagining Sounsyy paying her dues, albeit unreasonably of course. He almost wanted to make a jab at her about how she never would tie her hair neat anymore or make everything spotless because of her former master, but he made no such comment outloud.

 

As for her comment about the lift, Ryanti had a look about him that confirmed her suspicions that he was thinking the same thing.

 

He said nothing when she tried to break the latches open with her sword. He wanted her to experience for herself the immense strength and resilience of Allagan steel. Even after five thousand years, the metal was as strong and abstained from neither rust nor decomposition. Even the modern steel of the Sharlayan blades were pitiful compared to this unknown molecular composition. It was alien. Foreboding.

 

Ryanti had looked back at her while she told the tale. He could tell by the little sparkle in her eye that she hated her – dearly. Yet, at the same time, he could sense that she respected her. Perhaps Ryanti’s own eyes betrayed interest.

 

His attention was briefly diverted by the notification of the device. It made a little beeping noise, and the blinking red light slowly began to morph into an unblinking green light. The look that Ryanti gave the device told her that it was important, and once again concern emerged from the surface of his expression. But it did not seem like it was all too much a bad thing, just… suspenseful.

 

His eyes turned to the blade Sounsyy held up in their torchlight’s embrace. The steel glinted off of the light which bounced off of the dead Allagan walls. A little smile graced him as he whipped out his cleaning rag from his back pocket again. Clean every blade thrice over… funny it was then when Ryanti decided to wipe the dust off of Sounsyy’s blade right then as she held it aloft. Perhaps their Sharlayan tools and skills could never be sharp enough. Not for a job like this.

 

But this was a sign of respect from Ryanti. He figured it was a better way to show it than most.

 

“This door is incredibly thick. It would take Garlean machinations hours, maybe even days to carve through it, and that is if they can even do it in the first place.” He sidestepped her towards the door after cleaning off her blade, his initial sigh wisping some of the dust into the close air around him. “Perhaps these doors opened to some kind of repulsor lift, but something of this magnitude would have not been for passengers.” Perhaps one of the inaccessible doors held the former passenger elevator but… they had no other options but to try to take this one.

 

“My device indicates that there is a power source beyond this point.” Ryanti mentioned, his voice dead serious. He truly didn’t know what power source could be there. “It’s still functioning. After all this time. We need to access it. If the room behind this door happens to be a lift of some sort, and if we can still use it, it would beat climbing. Regardless, we need to press on, we need to go deeper inside… we are not even in the bowels yet.”

 

He gently tapped the device against his chin in thought as he switched it off, eyeing the windowsill again. Gears in his mind began to click together, and he pulled out his utility knife from his thigh and walked over to the broken glass. He stabbed a point of glass sticking out from the bottom, and it shattered a bit. Satisfied with his ability to break it, he placed the blade in a bottom corner of the windowsill. “Let’s go through here, but first help me out with clearing the glass. If our suits get caught in it, gone will be our modesty for sure. There’s a time and a place for that, but definitely not here.”

 

With that, Ryanti began to jab his blade against the bottom of the frame, tiny bits of ancient glass crumbling under its age and his knife. Sounsyy’s eyes had seemed to dare Ryanti from before, and he was not about to decline the invitation.

 

“So... were you there? When she died?”

[Sounsyy]

Sounsyy reversed the shortsword in her hand so that the pommel was held out. She joined Ryanti by the window and began knocking out the remaining glass remnants with that pommel. When she was done, she sheathed her blade behind her and looked at her partner. It was a small window, so they were standing almost shoulder to shoulder, even though Sounsyy's shoulders were much shorter than his.

 

"Yeh, I were there. I drove the Sahagin spear through her chest," she said flatly. She cast her eyes in his direction to catch his reaction. There was the barest glimmer of amusement in the sparkle of her eyes. Was she amused by Sterransa's death or was it that Ryanti had probed like predicted?

 

"That secret safe with yeh too?" she asked with an idle smirk as she turned away and did another sweep of the hall behind them. Again, the light showed nothing so she returned to stand beside Ryanti. She wondered if the proximity of their bodies made him uncomfortable. Had he made the connection yet that she had killed her way into her position as Captain?

 

Without warning she had a firm grip on Ryanti's shoulder, but she only used it to hoist herself up into the open window. Her other hand held tightly to the wall as she perched on the edge and craned her neck out into the darkness of the shaft. Below her, a small walkway barely wide enough for her foot circled about the outer rim of the shaft. She pulled her head back and craned her neck from side to side to see what she could differentiate or use in the dark. There wasn't much. Above them, darkness. Below them, darkness. To her right, she could make out the outline of the massive lift doors that they had been unable to open. There was a gap in the walkway, allowing space for the circular lift platform to meet almost directly to the door.

 

Seeing little other recourse, she pulled her legs gingerly through the window and tested her weight on the platform that ringed around the shaft. It creaked some, but seemed sturdy enough. Once inside, she could better direct her torchlight, scanning the walls in a wide arc. Soon, her light fell upon a control console nearly opposite from them. There may have once been faint lights that illuminated it, but it was now so coated in dust it was nearly indistinguishable from the rest of the wall.

 

"Yeh got more rope? I think that's yer power source. If we can get to it," she added bitterly as she tested the more narrow balcony with her toes. "Whoever crosses this should 'ave a safety rope."

 

She regarded him for a moment before turning back to the empty space before her. Her shoulders seemed relaxed for the first time since their descent into the brine. While Ryanti prepared his solution, the words began whistled from her parted lips, escaping between every breath, "Sterransa had lost her way. The killing had stopped affecting her. Sterransa believed that the only way to deal with the great pirate factions was to give 'em a taste of their own medicine, fight fire wit fire as the sayin' goes. Well, when the blaze takes hold yeh can't tell whose flames burned what. So it was with Sterransa."

 

Sounsyy's voice reverberated down the length of the deep shaft, resounding her secret across the Allagan starship. It was as if Sounsyy was burying these secrets beneath the waves, casting them like rocks down a well of inescapable darkness.

 

"Between the agonized wails of one of our captive brigands we discovered several pirate factions were forging dangerous alliances with the Sahagin. Safe passage across the seas, routes of our trade ships, all in exchange fer crystals and tellin' the Coral Tridents which ships would have the most devastating blow against the Barracuda. Sterransa wanted to hit the Coral Tridents hard before they could use the traitor's intelligence, but the whoresons were not caught unawares. We near lost three battle galleys and our ship were broaching and takin' on water. Sterransa were overtaken with bloodlust and ordered one last pass through the frenzy. We took another blow and our masts began to crack. Sterransa was thrown to the gunwale, the waters rising about her. I was close and I had the spear. I took her outstretched hand and I saw that confident smile spread across her lips, just before I drove the spear down through her chest. I held her fast until I felt the life drain from her fingers, then I let the Deep claim her. With the remaining frigates we adjusted our attack. With nets and cannons we did enough damage to their number after Sterransa's violent plunge to force the Sahagin into retreat. With Sterransa dead, I were the highest ranking officer alive by the end, so the credit of that clutch victory fell to me. That's how I became a Captain."

 

Sounsyy faced Ryanti through the broken window, her face brightly lit by Ryanti's torchlight. She looked almost specter-esque in the steep contrast of light and shadows. Ryanti's face was shrouded and near unreadable. "I think yeh should go to the panel," she said suddenly, "Yer the only one what can read it. I can hold yer safety rope in case yeh fall. That is- if yeh trust meh with yer life still."

 

She paused and started climbing back through the window, perching on the empty frame, her knees nearly up to her chest. She looked at Ryanti and a terse, soft laugh sounded from her throat. "So'z I got to ask. This who yeh expected me to be?"

[Ryanti]

"Yeh, I were there. I drove the Sahagin spear through her chest,"

 

It was difficult to surprise Ryanti in this line of work. She had bared witness to his stunning reaction to where they were at, giving away the reality that he had never been in anywhere remotely like a place such as this before. Yet, he was the more composed individual. He was the most prepared. Likewise, his training had also ingrained into his head the reality of betrayal, deception, and most importantly the unexpected.

 

But Sounsyy did in fact manage to surprise Ryanti sometimes.

 

His knife slid ever so slightly amongst the bottom of the window’s frame as he glanced over to her. The reflection of his torchlight upon the pieces of glass provided only the slightest light upon his feature, but it was enough for her to notice. There was a hint of surprise in his eyes - yes perhaps it was just what she was looking for. But there was also an element of interest and a layer of perplexity about that glance as well. Ryanti’s eyes trapped light easily, and so they seemed to glow under the very dim shadows of his torchlight being reflected back at him.

 

"That secret safe with yeh too?"

 

Her wit. It reminded him of the little spark he saw in her eyes just moments before. Before all of this, he remembered how dead those eyes were. Now there was some life to them, as well as some life that had crept into her lips and gave her some fun things to say. As her light left his own and checked behind her again for a spectre long gone, Ryanti’s lips pursed into a smile. Sounsyy could not see this, but she could probably hear a feint chuckle emanating from his own pair of lips.

 

The chuckle was the sign of him putting two and two together. It was an easy connection to make. The Captain had just told him about the personality and demeanor of her former Master, and the little sideshow Ryanti was picturing in his head… yes, if he were her, he would have hated her. Hated her so much. So indeed it was an easy connection to make… and an easy action to imagine taking. She had gone the less moral path to obtain her position. She had murdered her.

 

Sounsyy’s proximity was enough to break Ryanti out of his thoughts and into reality once more. The lack of distance between their shoulders caused his senses to become hypersensitive. He could almost feel every tiny little movement of Sounsyy’s shoulders, even though he only occasionally felt contact. So softly did his hands rest upon what remained of the broken glass upon the frame of the window; the fragments were small enough now to be harmless to him. He was wondering the same thing as her, if the closeness made her feel uncomfortable. He had a brief memory of seeing her in the infirmary.

 

Then, he felt a sudden harsh pressure on his shoulder. Ryanti’s side hunched over for a tiny moment, as he didn’t expect such a maneuver, but his shoulder then stood firm enough for the woman to leap up into the window. When he returned his glance back to where it was, all he could see was a form hunched up in the window. He turned his head to the side, placing his fingertips upon the torchlight on his chest, telling himself for future reference that he had only seen the illumination of her brunette tail.

 

He was silent for now – studying with his eyes relentlessly as they followed Sounsyy’s torch. She could hear the crackling of the glass bits as he rested the barrel of his rifle upon the frame of the window when she gingerly climbed through. The size of the chamber was immense, and rings circled around the ovalesque chamber with each ideal ‘floor’. He concluded to himself that those rings were there to stabilize the elevator upon each floor of the rear of this vessel, and that Sounsyy was standing upon one of them.

 

"Yeh got more rope? I think that's yer power source. If we can get to it. Whoever crosses this should 'ave a safety rope."

 

When she regarded him, he looked serious. Almost concerned. His face was too stiff to be casual, and he was too quiet for the moment in question to be completely happy with the situation. However, his eyes darted towards her when she regarded him, and when she returned her glance to the empty space, she could hear an “Absolutely.” From him. Ryanti kept his eyes on her for a moment, observing her shape illuminated by his torchlight. Her braid, and her story, was in his mind as he prepared the rope in question.

 

This was a different kind of group than last time. It was tighter, thinner, and stronger. It felt almost like it was made out of Garlean fibers, and it could be easily assumed that perhaps it was even stolen from Garleans physically or.. technologically.

 

Ryanti had actually reached his hands back behind him and started fiffled with two metal clamps on each side of his chest.

 

While he was doing this, he listened to her story. All too often did he hear about tales in which lesser men and women would meet a harsh fate whether or not they expected it so. He could hear the sound of the masts crack. He could feel the spear through her former master’s chest. He could almost picture that look in her eye, and it made him remember Cynthia. She had taken her hand, and killed her. If Ryanti would ever be in the same situation, taking her hand to save his life… would she?

 

Or would she do the same to him?

 

No one would ever know the look Ryanti gave her just then as he bared witness to her in a glistening spectre form to what might have been an ironic appearance given what she saw in that hallway. He didn’t know how to looked, or what glance he gave, and Sounsyy couldn’t see anything on his face. He was to her, in that moment, as his job would portray him: a dark shadow, a silent face with tools in his hand, in a location no one would ever be privy enough to know of, doing his job because no one else could. A number.

 

It was what most saw before they encountered death at the hands of that man.

 

 

 

Ryanti got closer to the window. The shadow was looking out to the enormous, dark, claustrophobic room out ahead of him. A sigh escaped his lips. She was right. It was him that had to go. He had to gather his wits about him and gather them now. It wasn’t the first time, and he was still alive.

 

When she began to climb back through the window, his face was once again illuminated, and she could see for herself the grim look on Ryanti’s face. There was a slight tension about him. He was still stiff from before. There was something else he didn’t like – not just the idea of trying to tiptoe across the shaft’s stabilizer rings. Something was off.

 

But her laughter, that allowed his shoulders to relax and for him to finally brief. What Sounsyy received when Ryanti stared back at her was not a stiff expression nor a concerned one. It was a little weak smile, and aquamarine eyes full of life, as they were before. The porclain-haired man leapt up into the small window frame with a measure of finesse and grace, impressive enough considering that he was taller than her.

 

Now he was close alongside her in the tangled mess that was the window frame, and that is when he answered. “No.” He first said, a chuckle or two emitting from the back of his throat. How did he ever feel like mentioning this stuff? “Though, I must admit that I didn’t really know what to expect at first.”

 

With that, he pushed himself over the side, two feet lightly hitting the balcony. He did not give himself the time nor the moment to stare out at the space in front of him just yet. He only glanced upwards. “Not when I first met you out in Thanalan’s sun, and certainly not when I found out you were our Captain for this mission.” He said to her, his back turned to her and his white hair sparkling in her light as he started sliding the rope through the clamps. His back to her was brief as he found himself turning towards her as he started fastening himself, which included wrapping the rope around his waist. “But, quite honestly I’m too old now to find cardboard cutouts on fliers and posters more interesting than the reality behind it all. Sounsyy the woman… the real woman… I was not entirely wrong about what I expected. I knew you probably wouldn’t trust me, especially how we met the second time. I knew those dead eyes were still able to sparkle, despite what a colorful past could do to a pair of living eyes over time…”

 

When he was all done, Ryanti had all of his front clamps covered in safety rope, and the clamp at the center of his chest extended the cable outwards in front of him. Ryanti picked up the rope, which had been gathered in a circle, and tossed it to the ground next to the window frame, bending down briefly to find the other end of it. “I think that the real Sounsyy is more interesting than the one I saw in my youth. The period to move on from such black and white views of the world is long behind me. It was about time my perception of you updated.”

 

The Halfling emerged from below the window frame, with the other end of the rope in hand. He motioned for Sounsyy to come to the border of the window, adjusting his light to shine dimmer so that she could see him with clarity and he could see her as well. This was a much more dangerous stunt than that time in the hangar. It had to be done with maximum amount of safety in mind. And so Ryanti inserted the rope past the clamps on the front of her, the rope dancing around each of the three on her chest in a very elaborate and specific pattern, as if it was ingrained in him, as if he did it all the time. The task itself was sewn into his unconscious memory. Ryanti was thinking of someone else, of her story about how she became a Captain. He spoke, almost suddenly. “About Sterransa… about how you became a Captain…”

 

The end of the rope went through her top right clamp a second time. She could feel the nooks of the rope tighten upon her chest. “The manner in which everything happened, it was probably wrong. It’s wrong to commit murder. It’s wrong to kill. I know.”

 

A light sigh escaped him. Ryanti kept his eyes on his fingers doing their work. “When I was being trained in this very field, my recruiter treated me like an animal. Like absolute garbage, like less than a sentient being. I hated him. There were times when I envisioned my hands wrapped around his throat and squeezing...” A light scrunching noise emerged from the rope as Ryanti squeezed it tightly with both of his hands in front of her. “Like that. Until he stopped breathing. I even had dreams about it.”

 

There was a solemn look on his face as he lowered the rope, shaking his head but a little in the memory of it, a quiet breath escaping his lips. He slowly lurched the end of the rope towards one side of her waist. “I guess what I am trying to say is… if the manner in which you made Captain is supposed to change my perception of you, it doesn’t. Not by much. I live in a world in which many have done much worse. I myself have murdered in the name of others and even for myself… I have done away with individuals that probably did not deserve to die nearly as much as Sterransa. You should bring up how I got my seventy-seven sometime. Heh, I don’t know… I don’t know what’s right or wrong anymore.”

 

Now his right hand maneuvered around her back, and grabbed onto the rope dangling from her waist. It was in that moment that he himself wondered once more if the proximity made her feel uncomfortable. If it were to make her feel uncomfortable if Sounsyy knew what things Ryanti had done. He asked himself that as he glided the shape of the rope across the back of her waist, then around to the other side. As he did so, he spoke. “But… I don’t think any less of you as a person or a Captain… so to answer your question from before, yes. That secret’s also safe with me. Think of it like this safety rope.”

 

And with that, and a smile, Ryanti looped the rope over her center clamp, and closed the clamp, binding them two together. He took a few steps back, and the rope stayed upon him. He adjusted his light as he turned his back to her from short and wide to long and narrow. It was only then that he truly understood the vast scope of this room. A loose gust of wind blew his locks around and the Halfling realized he was but a tiny ant in this massive, long abandoned dead Allagan elevator shaft. He would have to circle around the razor thin stabilizer rings to get to the other side. His light shined all about, reviving the appearance of the dead cerment chamber coated in eons of dust and casted out to be forgotten with piles of stories left untold about what came up and down through here. Would they find out?

 

“I trust you, Sounsyy!” Ryanti said outloud, his breath increasing in intensity as he slowly began to shuffle himself to the corner of the tiny balcony. He bent down to pick up his rifle, placing the strap over his shoulders and the curls of his fingers gripped the side of the window frame. “I’m a little scared!” He admitted, eyeing the difference in thickness between the balcony and the ring. He needed something… one extra bit of courage to begin what he was about to do…

[Sounsyy]

Sounsyy smirked ruefully when Ryanti told her he trusted her. She took extra lengths of the rope in her hands to give some slack between the window frame and her body while she waited for the man to start his perilous journey around the ring.

 

"Yer a bit of a fool then," Sounsyy said with a half-laugh, "But I won't drop yeh."

 

She touched her toes to the base of the wall beneath the windowsill and sat back onto her bottom, bringing her knees up into her chest so that she sat almost in fetal at the foot of the window so that any sudden weight upon the rope would jerk her forwards into the wall instead of catapulting her through the open window after her partner. Though Sounsyy had no fear of heights, falling to her death was not on her approved list of ways to die.

 

That, and truthfully the sight of Ryanti disappearing into the dark shaft made her nervous. Being alone in the dark was certainly one of her fears, and though much of her physical discomfort from the previous encounter had subsided, she still felt ill at ease being alone in the corridor with some bloody, Allagan specter - real or no.

 

"So," she said quietly so as not to startle him off the edge, "When yer not 'seventy-seven', er, before or after this is over, yeh have a normal life that yeh go back to? Do yeh work or have someone waitin' at home fer yeh?"

 

It seemed like an oddly personal question, even to Sounsyy as she uttered it, but she was curious and Ryanti seemed like the type to not take offense to it. Sounsyy had often wondered how so many others she knew could revert and assimilate back into a seemingly normal life and routine, be at peace, be happy. She had only rarely felt such assurances, the memories weighing back in the night or thinking she heard the clip of Garlean jackboots during the day. Often she'd find her hair on end where she'd duck into an alley to evade the ghost of something that wasn't there, like what she had seen in the hallway, only that was more tangible and real.

 

She waited while he mulled over his reply, only lifting her head up slightly over the window's base to see mostly darkness on the other side, penetrated only by Ryanti's small torchlight. It was hard to see from her angle but he didn't appear to have gone too far.

 

"Yeh there yet or...?"

[Ryanti]

Ryanti had returned her rueful smirk, though his expression was a little softer. Perhaps it was not a smirk but rather a smile. One of the requirements for receiving a number in this line of work was to be a fool. He already had that part covered.

 

“That’s all I ask.” Ryanti responded to the notion that she wouldn’t drop him. He needed that re-enforcement. There was a lot on his plate already. The fact that his teammates weren’t there was such a massive weight on his shoulders; a weight that he tried not to let the Captain of the Roehmerl see as she dove into the ultimate unknown with him. There was no way he was going to try to convince her to come with him on this stunt, let alone be the one to walk out upon the ledge though her height might have made it easier.

 

He felt a great need to tackle the ‘hard’ parts when he could. Still though, in time he was sure that would change.

 

The ledge he was standing on that he had to navigate through in order to reach the other side of the massive shaft thinned out to a space that was shorter in length than even his feet. He could not even use the balls of his feet to balance himself upon the little ring designed to cushion and hoist the elevator that neither of them could see at the moment. There was a moderately firm wind that blew from deep within the gallows of the darkness, flicking his hair about and emphasizing the great distance he would meet with his death if he were to slip and fall – if Sounsyy were to go back on her word and drop him.

 

"So, when yer not 'seventy-seven', er, before or after this is over, yeh have a normal life that yeh go back to? Do yeh work or have someone waitin' at home fer yeh?"

 

Those were the kind of questions that took a little bit of time to fully sink in. But when they did, it always had a bit of an impact on him, especially coming from her. It was a little bit more than an oddly personal question, kind of penetrating as well, but it was something to focus on besides the fear of the immense space in front of him and the uncertainty that lied ahead. He didn’t mind. There was honestly a part of him that felt more at peace over it than he expected.

 

A stronger gust of damp, stale wind brushed across his face, pushing the beads of sweat from his concentration up into the air and flicking a bit of his dampened locks aside.

 

"Yeh there yet or...?"

 

Ryanti looked towards her for a moment, finally getting his second foot upon the razor-thin ledge. The palms of his hands were glued to the cerment wall of the enormous Allagan construct. He could see nothing except for the immense space visible by his torchlight, and the slight silhouette of the woman’s face that had joined him in this hell – this beautiful darkness.

 

One foot slid to the side. Another joined it. Ryanti was making progress, but it was slow and almost painful to watch due to how focused he was on the matter at hand. A moment later, Sounsyy could hear a light little buzz in her ear. The man had placed a hand upon his own ear and activated the local communication signal. It was an easier way to talk now, an easier way to not lose his mind from the other end.

 

“I’m getting there.” He replied softly in the linkpearl. It sounded as if Ryanti was right next to her, but of course he wasn’t. With every inch of space he covered, he drifted further and further away from the ledge – from Sounsyy. She was becoming more and more alone in the dark, but Ryanti’s voice was in her ear.

 

In fact, she could hear every single hiccup in his breath as he found himself more and more alone on the shaft’s ring. She could see the flicker of light as he occasionally moved his body, hesitated and inched his way along. She could hear the concentration, the nervousness, and the focus. That was when Ryanti finally answered.

 

“I’m a Lieutenant Quartermaster… for the Flames.” He answered after mulling for long enough. “I am usually in charge of weapon stockpiles, and I follow where they go. I make sure the right things go out to the right people, and that nothing is stolen or lost. I keep inventory and supervise. A lot of the time I travel. Sometimes I can be at home for a little bit. I deal a lot with other governments besides the Sultanate’s, including yours. It’s… its normal on paper, y’know? Like the ideal job for someone who graduated ‘Officer’s Camp’ … a perfect little life, right? Heck, sometimes I even help my family business out.”

 

He was talking as if everything was normal right now. Where they were, what he was doing… but the tone of his voice was strained and serious. It was that tone which betrayed the situation that they could not escape from. However, Ryanti could escape from that perfect picture of his life outside of this job, and he had no issue doing just that.

 

“Y’know what, Sounsyy? It’s fake. It’s very fake. There’s no such thing as normal in my reality. Ever since I was brought into this world via Halfling blood, it has not been normal for me. My life hasn’t been normal at all. My identity is as abnormal as my blood. Take my career away from me and what do you have? What else besides a number? Who am I –really-? I ask myself that often. My hobbies, and my passions… they define me I think. There’s much more to be besides this suit. But I was never happy trying to be normal… I was never happy with my public face I’m forced to live because of my family. I’m happier here – knowing I can make a difference by doing –something- meaningful beyond words and actions of normal men.”

 

It was then that his left foot made a little slip on the smooth surface of the stabilizer ring. Ryanti was almost two-thirds of the way there. His little slip echoed the noise to Sounsyy’s ear and Ryanti’s light flickered. His body seemed to light on fire inside as he immediately gripped a metal pipe or some such behind him as hard as he could to keep himself from slipping entirely.

 

He glanced to the left. His eyes had adjusted enough to the darkness that he could make out the grey rectangular presence of the control box on the other side. There was a large lever on the side of it, sticking out. It had perhaps not been disturbed in five millennia. It looked like a manual override. Curiously though, it seemed to have been tampered with. He was hesitant to believe that the manual lever would have been designed to stick out like that. From what he knew of Allagan life, terminals like that were operated by fingertips, not my muscle power. Something must have happened.

 

Even something like a control box had a story to tell in this behemoth of a ship.

 

Knowing that any false move at all could lead to a swift death, Ryanti’s inhibitions were a bit lower than normal for the time being. His mind had been mulling over her second question for a little longer now than the first. It was no doubt a more difficult challenge to answer the right way. Part of him wondering why she had asked, but… it was interesting that she did. It brought some feelings up to the surface that were very separate from his mission mindset.

 

His voice crackled once again in her ear. “As for my home, it’s as quiet as a mouse. The only thing waiting for me there is a bed and my belongings…. And maybe some incense and good book if I’m lucky.”

 

He eyed the gap between the ring and the control panel. He would have to jump to the other ledge. Then it would be easy to go to the panel and try to re-activate it or… yank down the manual override. Maybe even kick the damn thing – if that could possibly work. One thing was for sure, he wouldn’t be able to go back until he got it working.

 

Unknown to them both, back within the room in which Sounsyy had crawled up the vent and Allagan equations laid decorated on the walls, the wires that had joined together and provided the entire floor with a brief surge of power were not done with making their presence known. Indeed one of the wire tips had been lifted up into the air with the power of electrical surge. However since then, gravity was slowing edging it back down towards it again… and this time their interference would affect them far more than psychologically….

 

Yet right before everything went to hell, Ryanti managed to ask Sounsyy a rather intimate question in return. A question that made his cheek glow a flushed red in the hostile darkness.

 

“So what about where you lay your head down? Is it quiet too?”

 

That’s when everything went to hell.

 

 

 

---

 

 

 

 

An enormous RUMBLE echoed from one end of the shaft to the other. Sounsyy could hear the snap of the enormous spark caused by the two wired rejoining once more in the room far down the hallway. Bright blue lines shaped like computer circuitry flushed up the shape of the entire shaft in one enormous surge. Ryanti’s voice cried out from her linkpearl, fading out with a little sizzle of words from above the water, very faint but very clear.

 

“If you can h-… ething’s-- ..—ange… ac- …str-.. ge.. someth-- ….live… the sh-… “ And then it ceased.

 

Power had returned to the shaft as well. Crippled, malfunctioning power. The electricity had surged onto the stabilizing ring, and ultimately through Ryanti’s feet. It traveled along his rope and ended up providing Sounsyy with enough of a shock to race her heart, but Ryanti took the brunt of it. Sound disappeared from Sounsyy’s ear as her linkpearl shorted out and became non-functional and dead. Ryanti’s linkpearl did the same, and nearly shattered into pieces.

 

Ryanti’s body snapped in one huge spaz, a spark flying off from his torchlight and sapping the battery power from it. It was strong enough to stop his heart.

 

In a brilliant display, a tiny taste of what it would have been like to witness five thousand years ago, rings of red lights activated along the stabilizer rings and flickered on and off as it struggled to function. Blue light soon joined the circles of red lights, except these lights went vertical up and down the shaft, shaking off some of the ancient dust. Even under layers and layers of it, it was gorgeous. It would have been immensely beautiful back in the day to witness.

 

But there was nothing beautiful about this. There was only the horrifying image of Ryanti’s limp body losing balance, and falling forward... sparks flying out of his linkpearl and torchlight.

 

 

 

”I never truly felt like I ever had a home to rest my head upon. Maybe… the majority of those my age in the Empire feel the same way.”

 

“You only die when you stop moving forward… now move.”

 

 

It had almost felt like slow motion. As if time kept stopping and going, stopping and going…

 

The left side of his body felt warm... yet very cold. He had his eyes closed, and it was almost as if he was sleeping. Just a brief little nap. Just some time to rest. He did not even notice nor feel the aetherial lines ingrained on the side of his face revealing themselves. They traveled all the way down it and further down his left arm. They were life stiff veins of a soft blue glow on his body.

 

Memories that weren’t his. Feelings not of his own. It was what he was experiencing in that split second as he fell without a pulse. It was the symptoms described by Jonathan and the others. The after-effects of seeing and experiencing. His left eye opened and glanced at the manual lever. His left arm that was not his anymore reached out and grabbed the lever, squeezing upon it. His weight fell upon it. The lever creaked and gave into his full weight. He was hanging from the lever as it tugged itself downward and activated.

 

The spectre of the woman stood over the exposed wires with tired eyes in the room they used to be in. She vanished. Power was cut once more, except for the auxiliary, manual mode of power Ryanti had activated with the elevator’s override.

 

The glow in Ryanti’s body left him. The beating of his heart returned.

 

Ryanti let go. His limp body sailed across the open space and swung from the rope.

 

All of this happened in a matter of moments.

 

His back slammed into the wall, dangling for a moment before another great rumbling occurred. Then, life returned to it. Warm, encompassing life. The man opened his aquamarine eyes in a bit of a dizzy state. His ears were ringing and his hands were shaking. Every occasional dim red light was not activated, blinking very lightly. Some glass from the lightbulb’s shells shattered and a few of the dim red lights shorted out immediately. The shaft was rumbling constantly now, and a feint grinding sound could now be heard from above them.

 

Above them… above them! That was when Ryanti knew where he was! His form immediately glanced up to witness the auxiliary Allagan gears wrenching and turning, managing to barely work and lower a huge circular platform. It was heading downward… coming down… it was coming towards them! Towards him! If it were to pass Sounsyy Ryanti would surely be killed by it. Ryanti had never grabbed rope so hard in his life.

 

“Sounsyy! Sounsyy!” Ryanti called out as loud as he could, struggling to try to climb up the rope as fast as he could, slamming the heels of his feet against the wall as he glanced up to witness what could very well be his impending doom. “Sounsyy, pull me up!” He cried out in desperation, trying to beat the elevator with his own merit but he needed her help now! Facing an event so close to death, Ryanti began to panic, realizing now how badly he actually wanted to live.

 

Of course, if he were to die there… Sounsyy would be trapped in this massive place… with no sense of direction… in the darkness… alone.

 

“PULL ME UP!”

[Sounsyy]

Sounsyy hummed to herself, alone in the dark, as the minutes passed alone. She could feel the tautness of the rope between her fingers bounce and tug against the dark like she was fishing at night. Ryanti was bobbing somewhere in the dark waters ahead. The humming took her mind off the dark. She found that it made little difference whether her eyes were closed or open now, and that bothered her. With a soft hiss that made Sounsyy's hair suddenly stand on end, the linkpearl in her ears sizzled to life and Ryanti's voice flowed into her ear as if he were speaking in her head.

 

<I’m a Lieutenant Quartermaster… for the Flames,> she heard him say in the dark. Ryanti could probably hear her groan in disappointment. "Ehh yer a Flame," she said before quickly adding, "Not that... I mean, I've fought beside Flames." As if that hid the almost teasing way she groaned at his affiliation. "So you followed in yer father's footsteps," she added almost as an after thought.

 

Though Ryanti was far out of sight and far too busy trying not to topple to his death, Sounsyy smirked at him. It wasn't that she hated the Flames, she hated Ul'dah, and more often than not she believed maintaining the facade of allies between the Grand Companies was an extraordinary waste of time when each nation, especially Ul'dah, coveted its own interests first and foremost. But she said none of this. It likely would've irked Ryanti, she thought. Though he already seemed quite perturbed, even if it seemed to be vented more at himself than at her quip. His rant seemed invasively personal to her, sudden, childish. She wondered how scared he must be feeling alone in the dark to make him talk this way.

 

"Ryanti, are ye- gods!"

 

She muffled her exclamation when she heard the loud slip and slap of his foot from the other room. Her knuckles were white as they clenched the rope, but she felt no weight. He had not fallen. Sounsyy sighed in relief.

 

"Keep yer focus, okay, yeh must almost be there."

 

She could almost feel him breathing in her ear. She could feel his fear and it pervaded her own senses like a bad odor, seeping in slowly and again all at once. Then his breathing abated and she heard his voice crackle across the cold cermet.

 

<As for my home...> He said almost naturally. <...it’s as quiet as a mouse.>

 

It made Sounsyy laugh softly into the darkness. Maybe it sounded as muted as a mouse scampering through the massive Allagan ship. She wondered if Ryanti could've heard her if not for the linkpearl connecting them.

 

"Yeh've seen where I sleep, Ryanti." Her voice sounded soft, almost amused. "I 'ave meh chair and meh keepsakes. Privacy where I want it. I had a small home before the Calamity. In Vylbrand, small little island called Tiger Helm. Ain't there no more. Waters washed it away. But before, I lived there with a close friend and her husband. We had soirees, if yeh can imagine that, friends would come and we'd build a bonfire by the shore and lay out 'til morning."

 

Sounsyy almost seemed to glow through the pearl, her voice tinted with nostalgia for times long gone. "We even..." She began but a great rumble from all about her drowned out her voice like some great Allagan beast coming to life and then the hum of lifeblood beating through its aged veins. Then her hair stood on end as electricity tingled across her fingertips and into her suit. There was a bright flash and she gave a loud cry as she jerked her hands away from the cord.

 

That is when she felt the tug. Ryanti slip beneath the dark surface of her fishing pond. It happened before her body could react and Sounsyy was thrust forward into the wall she had crouched behind, driving her knees hard into the cermet wall and her chest hard into her knees, knocking the wind from her and laying her flat on her back. She could not remember her left hand taking hold of the rope, only that it was there, hugging the cord drunkenly when she felt her hips slowly rise off the ground towards the open window. Her body was splayed out across the floor in a bewildered fashion, her hair was falling out from her loose braid and slithering behind her as her shoulder blades and head lolled against the floor.

 

She pulled against the upward tug of the rope and eased her hips back down to the ground, before using the rope to pull herself back up into a seated position. Through the opened window she could see an eerie, glowing light of the Allagan elevator, come to life. It was almost beautiful, even if it was a little haunting. It was light, Sounsyy thought. Honest to gods light in what had been nothing but darkness.

 

It took her a moment to come fully back into the sudden awarenss of her situation. "Ryanti?" she said into the linkpearl, but did not even hear the static noise of an unanswered line or his steady breathing in her ear. She was alone.

 

"Sounsyy!" she suddenly heard Ryanti's voice call from the distance, echoing up the shaft. Again he shouted, but this time the sound was muffled by renewed humming as the elevator drew nearer. She pieced together what had happened only moments before Ryanti's paniked cry bellowed from somewhere below her. Her eyes going wide, bathed in the Allagan glow, she took up the rope in both hands and began pulling it towards her end over end as fast as she could lift the Miqo'te. He was so heavy, she knew she couldn't do it fast enough, so she kicked off away from the wall with her feet and slid on her rear across the floor away from the window, pushing backwards one bent leg at a time in near perfect sync with each length of rope she pulled arm over arm.

 

"Get up!" she screamed through clenched teeth, nearly drowned beneath the crushing hum of the elevator's descent. She had backed up several yalms into the hallway by now, pushing herself back now with both legs as her muscles protested every ilm gained. She felt her rope suddenly jolt and with a panicked yelp she grabbed the rope with both hands and yanked it as violently as she could just as the elevator descended into view, ringed with the faint red lights of the Allagan.

 

Sounsyy sat there alone in the reddened hallway, surrounded by rope. She thought she should be breathing heavier, but she couldn't hear anything escape her parted lips. So she sat there staring speechless at the window, unaware of the specter which hovered overhead.

[Ryanti]

He could feel his heart jumping out of his chest. His entire torso felt like it was melting. Down it came, the elevator chamber, and with a long whining sound originating from the long neglected gears did it paint a scenario of doom for the young agent. For a moment, it did not look like he was going to make it. He did not have time to think about whether or not it was the end for him. In a bit, the elevator would push him downward until the rope met their end, crushing his body in-between the two tidal forces while probably tossing Sounsyy over the edge to fall to her death. That was the reality of his job. Often he was that close to the end. But no matter how many times he stared death in the face, that primal fear always existed. The fear of dying.

 

No one would come for their corpses. This place unknown to the present peoples would be their grave. But it was not meant to be.

 

He felt a yank, a huge one. Somehow, between the yelps and the cries, he must have made it. He felt a huge tug on his chest right before the chamber came down, his voice cried out in trauma as he nearly flew from the chamberway right when the platform touched down. He could even feel white hot soreness from the top of his head that had grazed the circular platform; it was that close of a call. He slammed against the ground with a near-similar amount of force that hearkened back to when he broke the table in the room prior. There was a bit of pain involved in rolling on the floor for a few, but it was easily ignored when he realized that he wasn’t dead.

 

Yet.

 

“I’m.. I’m okay, I’m okay… “ he said between huffed breathes.

 

Ryanti decided to go silent for now, to give Sounsyy a bit of space and rest. He could hear a big noise as he tried to recollect where he was. It still could be heard through his beating heart and heavy breathes. It was the sound of the platform stopping on the floor they were on, followed by the primary power source shutting down once more, simultaneously breaking more lightbulbs hovering overhead, glass bits falling upon the eons old floor.

 

In reality, when he pulled the lever he told the elevator to stop on this floor, not go further down. He did not know this to be the case. In fact, he did not even remember pulling that lever…

 

Blinking red lights, weakened by their age but still prominent enough to provide the hallway with ambience through the silent window, penetrated the hallway. Through the tangles of the ropes Ryanti began to untie everything, starting with the bits of rope attached to his body. While doing this, he eyed the body of Sounsyy, silent with her back against the floor.

 

It was then that he saw her.

 

The spectre from before. Or was it? He only saw the figure for a split second, about as long as it took for the red lights in the next room to blink once. The red light… it had graced nothing but shadow except for the lower half of her face. He could see her lips, her chin. The skin was pale, sickly. The lips were a light blue, as if suffocated, or perhaps it was some kind of… lipstick?

 

He could only pick out that she was wearing some sort of coat, but such things were so vague and difficult to predict when he was questioning his own judgement over whether or not he actually saw her. There was a stillness in her face. That was all he could remember of her. That, and… the fact that he couldn’t get it out of his head that she was staring at Sounsyy, whom was right in front of the anomaly with her back turned to it.

 

When Ryanti pulled out an emergency light, no bigger than the side of a pencil, he first pointed it at an area behind Sounsyy with very studious eyes despite his recent tumble and brush with death. There was a hint of concern on his face, but also of strict discipline. Despite how witnessing such a phenomenon in this ship could mean –many- different things and how impactful it was on Ryanti’s emotions, there was a stiff wall of discipline that kept him calm and focused for now. But he was not sure how long that was going to last. Despite all of his effort, however, one could easily see that he had seen something.

 

The hairs stood up on the back of his neck, and Ryanti procured goosebumps.

 

Communications were gone. He was not sure if it was permanent, but the linkpearls in their ears had shorted out. Ryanti’s breathing was hitching. There was a renewed sense of suspense about him... of a frightening demeanor. He decided against mentioning the communications. He did not need to. It was obvious, and he knew that they simply could not re-enforce a lack of hope and protection in their minds if they were going to make it through this.

 

“Hey… are you alright?” Ryanti murmured weakly to Sounsyy, circling the rope around his arm and crawling on all fours to where she was collapsed upon the ground, looking back towards the window as she did when he saw her after she saved him. Another hitched breathe. Goosebumps. He felt like he was being watched.

 

He proceeded to strip her of the rope attached to the hooks on her suit, stuffing it in his bag that was now beside him in earnest. “This place is becoming … unsafe. We need to move, we need to keep going…”