Chapter Text
AUFNAHME AUSWÄHLEN 30.08.3991c
WEITERSPIELEN?
J/N
[J]
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Thumbing open my rifle’s feed tray, I swiped the loaded belt back into its box before detaching the assembly from the weapon and settling it into one of my pouches. I racked the bolt and snatched the ejected round with my grip hand, then pocketed it and racked the bolt a few more times just to be sure.
With my weapon empty, I set it on the rack near the living room and carefully sat down on the couch. It creaked unsteadily, and I froze for a second. Right… most Gestalt families didn’t have Replika-rated furniture.
“...My frame in this armor is over five hundred kilograms,” I hesitantly said, “Can this furniture handle it?”
“Eh, it’ll be fine. Stuff breaks all the time in this house.” Taiyang waved it off, setting down a plate of small… snack-things? They looked like some kind of flour-butter concoction baked with crushed pieces of chocolate in them, almost like one of the rations we’d stolen from an Imperial patrol all those years ago… What were those things called?
Tilting my head, I examined one of the circular not-quite-biscuits, experimentally licking it a couple times before I paused at the looks Yang and Ruby were giving me.
“...Have you, uh, never had a cookie before?” Ruby asked awkwardly.
“Once… on Vineta…” I mumbled, avoiding her eyes and taking a bite of the sugary ‘cookie’. It was a thousand times more… vibrant than the one on Vineta, tasting of true love and quality ingredients rather than the mass-produced el cheapo MRE garbage of that Imperial ration. I carefully wiped away a bit of wetness in my eyes and said, “After our supply lines were cut by an orbital blockade, my company ambushed an Imperial patrol and took their rations. I ended up with a dessert MRE that had one of these.”
Taiyang gave me a soft look, “You’re a soldier?”
“I was. I held the rank of Replika-Kapitänleutnant within the 203rd Naval Special Warfare Division… that’s roughly equivalent to an Army Major, if you have similar ranks here. After the Vinetan Campaign ended, I was transferred to the Penrose Exploration Program as a technician.” I explained, nibbling at the cookie with a grimace, “Things… happened, and I wasn’t certain what was real and what was hallucination after a certain point, but I woke up in the forest here some time ago. I’m fairly certain Ariane and our ship are both on this planet as well…”
Slipping a hand into one of my frame’s hidden pockets, I withdrew the picture of Ariane and me. It was over five thousand cycles old, taken at the very start of our journey. Part of the Penrose’s supplies was a self-developing camera, a bulky model meant for documenting exploration data, and she had insisted on taking a portrait of us together as soon as our ship escaped Rotfront’s gravity well.
A fond smile broke across my face as I took in the sight of those brilliant eyes. Even on the fuzzy half-bleached photo, I could still imagine the way her eyes would twinkle as she showed me one of her paintings or talked me into trying on some of her contraband makeup.
I could hardly bear to part with the photo, but I carefully set it on the table for Taiyang and the girls to look at. It was just for a little bit, just so they could help me…
Just a little while longer…
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“Just a little while longer…”
I could barely hear my own mumble over the sound of the rainstorm. A half-crumpled Imperial cigarette hung between my lips and sent little wisps of smoke up towards the cloud-filled skies, filling my lungs with an acrid smog and puffing a cloud out of my mouth with every breath.
A long sigh escaped my mouth, one that turned the air into a thick haze of pseudo-tobacco smoke as I leaned against the concrete wall and stared up towards the grey-black clouds. Years of bombardments and chemical warfare had put enough smog into Vineta’s atmosphere that some regions, like this one, were completely covered in clouds 24/7. The rain was semi-acidic most days, to the point of causing damage to unprotected equipment, though LSTR/D units like myself had special coatings to avoid damage to our own frames.
Just a little while longer, and we’d be off of this godforsaken planet.
We wouldn’t be living in great holes dug into the ruins of bombed-out cities, hiding from Imperial airstrikes and desperately hoping that the supply spacedrops came through this month. Perhaps I’d get an assignment on a voidship, rather than Naval Infantry duty like I’d pulled for the last thousand Cycles. I could only hope…
“Eins.” A voice called out abruptly, “Kommandantin wants you.”
I exhaled another smoke-filled sigh and looked over at my fellow LSTR. Drei, LSTR-MSk91103, was standing near me with her TYPE-21E hanging lazily on its sling, ballistic mask affixed around her nose and mouth. Removing the cigarette from my mouth, I nodded and said, “On it.”
As I stood up, I looped my TYPE-25 assault shotgun’s sling around my shoulders, securing the weapon against my power armor’s chestplate before taking another drag on the cigarette.
Casting a glance around the makeshift camp while I marched towards the large command tent at its center, I watched the dozens of not-quite-identical Replikas milling about, practically sitting on their hands and waiting for something to happen. I knew there were a couple squads on patrol, but the vast majority of our fighting force was all concentrated in this mass of boredom and anxiety.
No orders for over a week… High Command really didn’t understand the danger of bored infantry at all, did they?
A thick sheet of camo netting stretched over the nucleus of the camp, blocking out both visual-spectrum and IR sensors from above. It only filtered out some of the rain, allowing most of the water to drip through and soak the poor fools below.
I grimaced at the feeling of a particularly large drop breaking on my head, wiping off the small puddle of water in my hair as I ducked into the command tent.
The interior was dryer, but not by much. Half a dozen dehumidifiers were running nonstop just to make the place safe for paper documents, particularly the large maps strewn across nearly every table. Along the sides, a dozen different radio sets were all wired into the short- and long-range transmitters atop the tent, long cables running across the ground and up the tent’s support poles.
At the center of it all, a Replika wearing the three strikes of a Replika-Korvettenkapitän stood over a table, studying a map with a stony glare and tapping her finger on the table.
LSTR-MSk19901, Kommandantin. B Company’s commanding officer, and my direct superior.
“Eins. Orders came through, get over here and look at this.” Kommandantin bluntly said, gesturing at the map in front of her.
I nodded, adjusting my weapon silently before marching over to stand beside her. The map depicted a city, Zone NA63, where the Imperials had set up an anti-orbital battery to enforce their blockade, and Kommandantin had already marked it up with a semi-eraseable pen.
“NA63-6?” I asked rhetorically, studying the various markings on the map as Kommandantin scribbled on her pocket notebook. -6 was the last surviving Anti-Orbital Installation inside Zone NA63, a tri-barreled battery of electromagnetic cannons mounted on a massive turret capable of tracking orbital and aerospace targets. Something about it was… off, though.
“Elster…”
Something about the innocent little map markings made the scales at the back of my neck stand on end. The enemy positions were wrong, they wouldn’t come from that direction… Machine gun nests in elevated buildings were Imperial doctrine, yes, but these troops hadn’t set up in that area. I just knew it, almost like I’d seen it before…
“Elster.”
I turned to Kommandantin to try and tell her, but she…
She wasn’t there.
Only a hole in the air where she once stood.
“Elster!”
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Shaking myself out of the daydream, I focused back on the cookie in my fingers. It had crumbled a bit from the pressure of my fingers, but it was still perfectly edible, so I popped the remaining food into my mouth and swallowed.
“Elster?”
Ruby was giving me a strange look, as if she couldn’t quite decide what she was looking at.
“Everything alright?” The diminutive Gestalt asked, “You look like you’re thinking heavy thoughts…”
“Just… remembering bad memories. Vineta was a bad time for everyone.” I grimaced, looking down at the polymerized scale patterns on my palm and remembering where an Imperial bayonet had gone through them, where a nuclear blast’s thermal wave had scorched off the upper layer of my frame, where I’d fired an assault shotgun for so long that my hand’s touch sensors had been deadened for nearly an hour afterwards and weakened so badly that the company’s ARAR units all ganged up to whack me on the head with rolled-up map sheets. A tiny smile tugged at my lips, “I miss the people, not the planet. I could never miss that miserable swamp.”
“Maybe you could tell us about it?” Ruby inquisitively asked, “I’ve heard sharing stuff can make it hurt less.”
I avoided those piercing silver eyes and mumbled, “I don’t know if I should. The details are… horrifying.”
“Y’know, we wouldn’t be very good protectors if we couldn’t handle a rough story.” Yang interjected with a grin, and Taiyang nodded in agreement.
For a second, I was silent. I didn’t really want to burden this family with what was already done, did I? Kommandantin, Drei, the others… their stories were over. Those stories had come to a close, those stories I had never shared and likely never would share if I didn’t do it here.
Would it be fair to them if I didn’t share their stories?
There was really only one answer to that, I supposed.
“...Vineta was the cradle of life in the solar system from which I come. As far as we know, Gestalt life as we knew it first evolved about two hundred thousand years ago… And, until recently, the Eusan Empire ruled over the entire Solar System. There is very little record of pre-Imperial history, at least outside of the Imperial Archives on Buyan, so…” I grimaced, racking my mind for anything more about the Empire, “I cannot speak on that. It was a common goal for my Nation, the idea of finally breaking Buyan and taking the knowledge of the Imperial Archives, but we never achieved it. Regardless, about ninety years ago, a powerful Bioresonant known as the Great Revolutionary instigated an uprising against the Empire, and she formed the Eusan Nation in an attempt to create a truly equal society. She and her Daughter have ruled the Nation ever since then.”
I paused to nibble on another cookie and gather my thoughts, then continued, “I was created three-thousand six-hundred-fifty Cycles prior to my exploration mission’s departure, at a facility in orbit of Heimat, the Nation’s capital planet. Originally, I was manufactured as a Landvermessungs-/Schiff-Techniker Replika - Ausführung A, usually known as an LSTR/A, but I was upgraded to an Ausführung D model shortly after. Replika such as myself are based on the neural pattern of a Gestalt, though we are manufactured primarily using mechanical parts for simplicity, durability, and ease of repair. My production run included approximately two-thousand nine-hundred ninety-nine other LSTR/A units, most of whom were eventually modernized to the Ausführung C type.”
All three people in front of me looked as if they had just been flashbanged, like a squad of green rookies getting hit with their first stun grenade. I finished the cookie in my fingers, swallowed, and kept going.
“By the time of my production, Vineta’s polar ice caps had melted, completely flooding the planet save for a few small landmasses that were formerly mountain ranges. Prolonged bombardment from ships in orbit devastated the ecosphere, killed most plants and animals on the planet, and filled the atmosphere with gases that trapped so much sunlight that the entire planet’s average temperature rose by twenty degrees. The Empire had only three major strongholds remaining on the planet, and towards the end of my service in the People’s Naval Infantry, my unit was assigned to remove an orbital defense cannon defending one…”
X
VIOLENT
SCENE MISSING
512
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SIGNALIS
RE-39486
By the time I finished a basic explanation of everything that had occurred during the final mission of my company, the plate of cookies was empty, and all three Gestalts stared at me with shellshocked expressions.
…Had I overdone it?
I hadn’t even gotten into the really gorey bits, like Drei’s death.
Well, these people were less accustomed than I was to the industrialized death of modern war… Perhaps it was a good thing I hadn’t told them about Drei. Ruby already looked on the verge of tears, frozen and shellshocked as she was.
There was stone silence in the living room for nearly half a minute as I finished off the final cookie. Ruby blinked once, twice, then exclaimed, “Cheese and rice, Elster!”
“...What does Heimati cuisine have to do with this?” I tilted my head.
“It’s an expression.” Yang offered numbly, rubbing her brow with a sort of age that ill-fitted her youthful exterior before letting out a long groan, “Oh my Gods, aliens are real and their wars are horrifying…”
“That is… accurate.” I nodded with a frown, “War is a highly industrialized machine. It’s nothing like the combat I’ve seen here.”
“We haven’t had a war in almost a century.” Ruby mumbled, fidgeting with her sleeves despondently, “They never said it was that bad in school…” “If it’s… any comfort, it likely never approached the levels of horror unleashed upon Vineta.” I offered, though I knew it was a hollow comfort, “Your world remains beautiful, and you are far more personable and welcoming than any Vinetan civilian I’ve ever met. It gives me hope for you.”
Taiyang nodded, running a hand through his hair and taking a deep breath, “Yeah, I’ve seen the records in the Vale Library, the Great War was the worst that Remnant’s ever seen… but it never approached how bad your Vinetan War was.”
Few Native Vinetans were left after the orbital bombardments, and they were a prickly bunch on the best of days.
Honestly, I couldn’t blame them.
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While the family processed everything I’d dumped on them, I sat in the house’s spare bedroom and pondered the rubberized patterns of my palms. Horizontal, horizontal, diagonal, vertical…
Questions spun through my mind, spinning like the vaguely-circular patterns of my pseudo-skin.
What was I going to do?
Where was Ariane?
Was she even on the same planet as me?
For all I knew, she was still back in the Eusan System, stuck below Leng.
With a grimace, I shook my head and began grasping at the release clasps for my armor. There was no point in what-ifs, I could only work with the situation I’d been given, and there was nothing thus far which disproved Ariane’s presence…
In the morning, perhaps Taiyang would have more answers thanks to his contacts, but it was too late in the evening for that right now. As I shrugged off the upper torso of my armor and it went limp in my arms, I hefted the heavy plating down onto the floor with a muffled thunk. Next, the leg and hoof armor joined the haphazard pile, before I finally removed my mask from where it hung around my neck and set it with the rest.
For the first time in hours, I stood in only my base-frame, red chestplate and all. It was the altered radiation-resistant frame I’d been equipped with before the Penrose-512 launched, but I obviously retained the Ausf. D mounting points for the power armor. Ironic, really, given that the Penrose didn’t carry even a single suit of actual powered exoskeleton. Even my exploration suit wasn’t powered, and it didn’t mount to the same points as the power armor did.
Perhaps they found it a waste of time to remove, or perhaps it was a mere oversight.
Either way, the ‘radiation resistance’ of my upgraded frame didn’t do much for me once the reactor was fully melting down. Nor did they ever bother to give Ariane the same upgrades, for all the ‘good’ they would have done her.
Pure performative nonsense, as usual for the Nation.
I sat back on the bed with a rough thump, running a hand through my dark blue hair to straighten some of the knots out of it. With all the action and stress, it was a tangled mess… just like it always was in Sierpinski.
After the first couple dozen loops, I’d abandoned all attempts to keep my hair in order. It was a futile game, especially when I’d merely be reset regardless of whether or not my hair was a tangled mess. Now, though, the loops weren’t an excuse to neglect myself anymore…
I set to brushing out as many of the knots as I could with my fingers, grimacing at how it tugged at my scalp, and at how my hand came away with more than a few strands of hair tangled onto my fingers.
…It would grow back, wouldn’t it?
Ariane had cut my hair a few times on the Penrose, when it got too long and I asked her for help with keeping it in check. How did that even work? Was my hair another bio-engineered part? I had never bothered to wonder about it…
Flicking the dead ‘hair’ away, I kept combing through the pseudo-keratin until it was some semblance of straightened out again. When I could finally run my fingers down the side of my head without tugging on something, I flopped back onto the impossibly-soft covers of the bed with a long sigh and rolled some of the tension out of my shoulders.
The bed was far softer than the one in Ariane’s quarters, I could remember that much… Even with the never-ending corruption of the loops I could never forget her. Even now, I could feel the phantom touch of her brush through my hair, straightening it out and chiding me for not taking care of myself…
“Elster, you dummy…”
An invisible hand closed around my throat, and I choked out a barely-audible sob. Her voice! I could remember it, I could hear it in my ears!
“Don’t you remember?”
Why did we have to be apart? Why couldn’t the universe just let us be happy?!
“You promised you’d take better care of yourself.”
Hot tears streaked down my face as I gasped and sobbed on top of the sheets, blindly grabbing something - a pillow? - and trying to imagine that it was her I was clutching. There was nothing of her in the fluff of the pillow, not her scent or her skin or those beautiful red eyes, but just for a second…
“It’s all gonna be okay, Magpie.”
With the barest whisper of her voice in the wind, I felt her arms on me, her hands running through my hair, her legs pressed against mine…
My love and I, reunited forevermore.
“...Elster?”
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“Elster, whatcha lookin’ at?”
I blinked, looking down at Ariane as she stood on her toes and peered out of the same window as I had been. With a soft smile, I admitted, “Nothing in particular… just the stars.”
“They never get less beautiful, huh?” My wife returned my smile, reaching up to cup my cheek, “Just like you.”
“My Pilot Officer is a shameless flirt.” I gave her a fond look, taking in her radiant beauty as she stood barefooted on the rubberized floor of the Penrose. Ari’s white hair fluttered in the inaudible breeze of the life support system’s ventilators, her thin white dress joining it in a silent symphony of beauty. It was everything about her, I realized.
With a radiant grin, she chirped, “And proud of it!”
Every single thing about my Ariane was perfect. Every single thing, from the bottom of her weird floppy Gestalt feet to the very top of her snow-colored head.
I leaned down slowly, deliberately, and gripped her chin with a gentle-yet-firm hand. A tiny gasp escaped her throat, blowing warm breath onto my lips.
“You…” I started, letting the rumbling emphasis of my accent spill over my words in the way that I knew made Ari’s knees weak, “Are unfairly cute, Oberfähnrich Yeong… and you should take responsibility for it.”
And then our lips met.
It was an explosion of bliss, a cannon of serenity firing into my skull, accompanied by the familiar warmth of love and the caress of Ari’s slender fingers grabbing a fistful of my hair to pull me closer.
At some point, our tongues became completely intertwined, joining us together in a way nothing else could. It was a familiar feeling after so long together, but it never, ever got old.
God was in his Heaven, and all was right with the world.