Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

 Darla is quiet. The gentle hum resonates off the polygonal surfaces of the ducting. My strands of hair grasp onto the walls of the vent and pull me forward effortlessly. I remove the access panel with a tiny screwdriver, and inside are the delicate innards of the central ventilation system. I withdraw a diagnostic probe and touch one of the circuits. There’s a reading on my mask in the heads-up display that traces the circuit visually through the duct. With the push of a button, the circuit changes course. The line is shorter, more optimal. 

 “I believe I found another location for a circuit optimization.”

 “Oh, thank you Entrapta. That would alleviate a sensation that I have been detecting in that location.” Darla’s voice is becoming more genuine by the day.

 I wonder if it was a good idea to give her a pain modulation signal. Ah well, I can deactivate it if it becomes too disquieting for her.

 I stow my tools away and continue on through my journey. I’ll come back to that issue. For now, I have another matter to take care of. I continue down the vents and arrive at the grating to the medical diagnostic room. I open it up to spider my way in. It is quiet save for audible diagnostics of Angella who lays on her bed. She sleeps soundly, but the remote electrocardiograms display diminished and erratic signals while the electroencephalograph has very little activity. This is bad. 

 I withdraw my datapad and activate my recorder on my mask. Much easier to speak directly into it than my old handheld recorders and the data is conveniently saved into the databanks of Darla. I speak in a hush. “It seems the magical interference fields are having a direct impact on the angelic being’s capability to heal after being lost in portal-space for so long. The angelic beings appear to derive their immortality from the magical conduits of Etheria and, without it, she may be incapable of recovery. Diagnostics are continuing and possible amplification mechanisms are being investigated. It is unclear at this time if they are intrinsically linked to magic and can survive without it at a possible healthy and optimal physical condition, or if they are completely incapable of healing and maintaining their indeterminant lifespans without it. Additional data may be gleaned from—”

 A hand touches my shoulder from behind.“Entrapta?”

 I screech as my hair shoots out in all directions in alarm.

 I spin around to see the concerned face of Glimmer. “Ah, hello. I was unaware of your arrival.” I relax my pigtails and they hang limply over my shoulders. “I hope I was not intruding.”

 “Not at all.” She smiles shakily. “I think she likes the visitors. She spent a long time alone in that place.” 

 I thumb off the display on my datapad that shows Angella’s vital signs. “Are you sure? She does not seem to be fully conscious given the data that I have been gathering.”

 A brief wound lapses in Glimmer's expression and I look away. I should not have said that.

 She steps past me and towards her mother. Her cape hangs loosely from her back and shimmers in the dim light of the room. The sources of the photon emissions is still unclear from my preliminary investigations. I should try to get a sample while she’s—  

 Her words shift me out of my mental digression. “I think she does. She’s awake every so often. So if she wakes up and someone is there, it makes it easier on her.” She hovers over her mother with eyes that carry a mixture of emotions I cannot understand by simple visual observation alone.

 As an unspoken conversation lingers, the walls of the room feel as though they are folding inward on me. An irrational thought, but one I feel necessary to act upon. “I should go. I apologize for interrupting the private interval that you wished to share with your mother.” I lift up on stilts of my hair.

 “No, don’t.” She raises a hand but stops short of grabbing me. “Could you stay for a bit?”

 “I can’t draw a hypothesis as to why my presence would be beneficial.” I linger on the stilts, halfway to the vent. 

 Glimmer takes in a slow, deliberate breath and looks up at me. “I think that’s why I want you to stay.” Her glittering eyes shimmer in earnestness.

 Regrettably, refusal at this point may be detrimental to further social bonds I am forming with the other shipmates. I step gingerly on the fingers of my hair around to the opposite side of Angella. Glimmer leans onto her elbows and rests her head in the crook of her arm. Her eyes tiredly study her mother. “She looks so awful.”

 I wring my hands together and the gloves squeak in the quiet of the room. “Yes, the emaciated state may be due to the lack of sustenance in the portal-space that she occupied. I am unclear as to what her optimal caloric intake is as an angelic being. Was there anything in particular that was preferred for her consumption?”

 She smiles. “That’s the best way I’ve ever heard someone ask ‘what did she like to eat?’”

 “Oh, well…” My cheeks burn from a dilation of the capillaries from a sympathetic response to my embarrassment. “I like to be specific in my language. It’s more scientific.”

 “I like it. No one talks like you and I think it’s great. And she liked cake. Lots of cake. I remember it was something she’d bring me when I was sad. There was a long time there when I realized my dad wasn’t coming back and she’d always bring me something different. Frosted, fruit, ice cream —oh, that was just the best.” She sighs at the recall of pleasant memories.

 “Ice cream doesn’t seem suited to be in the geometry of a cake.” I scratch my chin with one of my pigtails.

 “You just need to eat it fast.” 

 “I suppose if you made them tiny they could be consumed at an adequate rate. Or if they were served in an optimal environment such as the low enthalpy conditions of the Kingdom of Snows.” I double tap the recorder button to log a bookmark. “Experiment number four-thousand seven-hundred and fifty-two, create a refrigerated room to conduct experiments with ice cream cakes.”

 “I’ll help out with that one.” Glimmer smiles and reaches out and grasps her mother’s hand. There’s a small twitch in Angella’s eyebrow. Glimmer smirks. “See? She knows we’re here. Even if the charts say otherwise.”

 I nod carefully. “I suppose I haven’t accounted for a familial bond in my collection of data.”

 Glimmer strokes her thumb over the back of Angella’s hand. “Entrapta, why are you visiting her?”

 I thought I was being so careful. I was attempting to be discrete in my visits and collections of information. Would this be an optimal time to attempt to conceal the truth? “I wasn’t… I haven’t I mean. I was just checking the—the equipment.”

 “You’re a bad liar. C’mon, you can tell me.”

 “Sometimes people are not in the best position for an objective assessment of the condition of their current operating status.” I feel a pull towards the vents. I look down at Angella’s other hand. It looks skeletal on the soft fabric of her blanket.

 “I know she isn’t getting better. But I want to know why you’re here.”

 “I thought…” I swallow. “I thought with enough data gathered on her situation and studying the latent energies that are in flux through the multidimensional space that I could… help, somehow. I didn’t mean to intrude.”

 “It’s not intruding.” Glimmer grasps her mother’s hand with both of hers. “It means a lot to me, and everyone else.”

 “I’m just gathering data.” I scratch the back of my neck.

 “Entrapta, hey.”

 Her voice draws my gaze up towards her. Her eyes are wide, shimmering with sincerity and sparkling with her magical confluence.

 “Catra kinda stole the show back there, but I didn’t get a chance to thank you for what you did.”

 I glance to the side. “It was nothing, I was merely—”

 “No. Don’t say that. Everyone just acted like she was gone, but not you.  None of us even knew you were looking for her. But this whole time you were.” Her voice breaks.

 “I… didn’t know if I could find her. So I didn’t want to give a false perception of hope when I lacked data to support my efforts.” I intertwine the strands of my hair and worry them through one another.

 “But you kept looking.” A teary smile cracks along her lips.

 “Well, it has been on my mind for a long time. Ever since the Portal and everything… I realized that…” I scratch at my scalp with my fingers. They’re frustratingly concealed under my heavy gloves. How do I even say everything that happened in there? “I felt responsible, at least in part. It never would have opened if Hordak and I—” I choke on the words. I feel a swelling of unwanted emotions that I beat back with the greatest of mental effort. “I didn’t have access to a warp system that could generate portals on Etheria for a myriad of reasons. So, I felt like I should resume the research. It was simple finding her since I had already worked through the experimental steps that I needed to follow.”

 There’s a lingering pause as a mixture of emotions wash over Glimmer. They are such a swirl that I have difficulty discerning which, and they all add to the intensity in her posture. I’m unclear as to her intent until she flashes and I’m surrounded in an embrace of her arms. She constricts me so tightly I have difficulty with my respiratory functions. 

 “Thank you. Thank you thank you thank you.” She cries into the crook of my neck and her tears tingle like nucleations of carbonation there.

 I pat her on the back with a pigtail, unsure of what else to do. My body feels rigid. The touch feels nice, though.

 Scorpia was right. These friendship experiments are going to be interesting.

 My datapad chirps as I scroll through the topography of Terern. The geography bears the scars of an indiscriminate orbital bombardment. The silicates from the natural structures of the crust have been vitrified into discordant glass. The thicker igneous rocks appear to be intact deeper under the surface. I scroll down the display, probing deeper with Darla’s newly installed deep terrain sub-acoustic neutron harmonic scanners. Most of the surface of the silicates appears to still be salvageable with a proper terraforming initiative. I bet I can reprogram some of the salvaged tech that Horde Prime has left in his pylons to—

 I gasp aloud as an elbow drives into my side.

 “You could at least pretend you’re paying attention.” Glimmer winks at me. 

 “Oh! Of course.” I use a tendril of my hair to stow the datapad behind me.

 Adora and sorcerer man exchange their pleasantries with the three space children and a man who seems old enough to be their father. I lean over to Glimmer. “Who’s that?”

 She sighs and smiles at me. “Their great uncle, King Daedlestar.”

 “Oh, and the three of them with the variety of bot tech augmentations?”

 “You met them.”

 I stare at her. Had I?

 She deciphers the blankness of my expression. “When we had to replace the thulite crystals in Darla?”

 “Ohhh! Oh, that was such a fun trip. I’ve never been so deep inside of the fuel system of an interstellar cra—” Glimmer’s look of thinning patience cuts me off. “Sorry.”

 “Come on.” Catra’s voice startles me. I forgot she was standing there. She steps forward from my side and gestures us to follow her. “Time to watch another flower explosion ceremony. I should’ve stayed on Darla with Bow and Melog.”

 I remember the tall one’s bot enhancements. The level of neural integration in the hardware must’ve been astounding. Their biotech synergies were incredible in the caves. I wonder if I can pull her aside long enough to get a proper diagnostic of the circuitry to get another blueprint running.

 “I was reluctant to come back here. My nieces and nephew had a hard time convincing me.” Daedlestar gestures to the siblings. His robes shimmer with the embossed stars dotted all over the blue cloth. His hands show the same tech augmentations as his nieces. These seem to be oversized and adapted for crushing strength. Curious what the necessity for that particular function is.

 “C’mon, Uncle. We had to get you back here somehow. She-Ra should be enough.” The blonde haired girl speaks in a delicate sing-song. Her long curls of hair bounce around her face even though there is no apparent breeze. I wonder if she creates her own convective currents? I must make a note of that for later.

 “I’m not too happy being here. There’s… I don’t know how many of our people will come home after Prime’s destruction.” The king has a solemn look to him, as though staring at the ground could heal the vitrification of silicon oxide.

 The young male of the group with the visual prosthesis scowls in frustration. I wonder if his augmentation was elective or if it was necessity from an injury he sustained? Perhaps he has some additional schematics that I could use for the heads-up display I’ve installed into my mask. 

 “I think they will. We just have to give them a new home,” he says.

 The siblings nod in their agreement to his deduction.

 Have they performed the sociological surveys to determine this or is he making an unsubstantiated assumption? 

 “We’ve all seen suffering. I think with time, we’ll heal. I pledge to you Etheria’s help in making that happen.” Sorcerer man—Micah’s voice is more regal in the presence of fellow royalty. He is clad in the attire of the position of authority of Bright Moon. Long cape, purple tunic, golden spaulders, an irrational choice of attire but one he insisted on. Before our departure it was selected as the optimal representation of the leadership of Etheria. His instance to wear at each of these rendezvous appears to be a logical conclusion as it presents a consistent image of leadership and peace. I just hope the symbol of a moon he insists on wearing is regarded as peaceful in every civilization we encounter. 

 “And there’s one very good reason for them to come back.” He gestures to Adora.

 I drop my visor and withdraw the datapad from my back again. I hear a little exasperated noise from Glimmer. 

 “Relax, I’ve done this before. It’s pretty awesome. Just wait.” Adora reaches her hand into the sky. The strands of interdimensional light merge together and the sword manifests in her hand pointing upward. There’s a small flicker after it forms. The runestone sparkles in the dim light of the glassed planet. “For the honor of Grayskull!” 

 The space-time fabric responds in a sympathetic reaction of an other-dimensional summoning of magical energy. The prismatic light of all photon spectrums from low energy radio to high energy gamma waves focus inward into her being. Her body responds in an absorption of the power, gaining additional mass and size in a way that is not possible with normal biological functions. Somehow—I am still collecting data on what the mechanism is—She-Ra redistributes that energy into a regalia of white and gold. Each feature shows an intimate connection that she has with someone in her social proximity. With a final flourish, and possible exposure to ionizing radiation, she stands with an aura of golden, shimmering light. Transformed into a physical representation of a being from beyond our dimensional reference.

 My datapad can never fully record the transformation. So I am unable to scientifically catalogue the emotional experience of the moment.

 The sensors I installed on my visor pick up the characteristic flash and spectrum of a She-Ra summoning, but the flickering sword was not an expected fluctuation. She may not have even noticed it. She-Ra stands in her usual radiance. All of the light she is exhibiting has the characteristic magic aura of a synchronous magical field, but something else seems to be off. The standard profile is missing a signature band of energy.

 She smirks. Nothing is amiss in what she is sensing. She turns the blade around, pointing it straight at the ground with both hands grasped around the handle.

 “I just love this part!” Glimmer claps her hands together in front of her in excitement.

 “Watch this .” She-Ra stabs the sword into the hardened ground.

 Nothing. An agonizingly long time spans out.

 The diagnostics show no culprits. Not a resistance of the planet, but no showering energy of She-Ra channeled through the sword. Instead of a cascading field of green and trees to envelope the landscape, it is only silence.

 “Was that supposed to do something?” King Daedlestar raises an eyebrow.

 “I… yeah. Hold on.” She-Ra gives a nervous chuckle. She picks up the sword and stabs it in again. Nothing happens. “What? Huh… It’s worked on a couple other planets. I don’t know what’s wrong.”

 “Uh oh.” Glimmer turns to my pad. “What’s going on?”

 “Oh, now you’re curious about my observational data.” My voice reflects off the mask. I turn the pad to her. It has a stylized figure of She-Ra stabbing into the ground, nothing happening, including her grimace of frustration. I look up and she is matching my predicted behavior from the simulation perfectly.

 “Real helpful.” Glimmer smirks.

 “No, that’s exactly what’s happening. There’s no magical resonance in her and the sword with the planet. It’s just nothing. You should see a channel forming between She-Ra, the sword, and the planet.”

 “Huh.” She at least sounds a little convinced.

 “What are you guys looking at?” Catra sidles closer and looks over my shoulder at the datapad.

 “Entrapta was showing me that there’s a problem.”

 “Duh. Any idea what though?”

 I raise the visor. She-Ra seems to have given up on her fruitless stabbing. She visibly fights a slump of her shoulders and puts her fist on her hip bracingly. “It’s fine! I just… I’ll figure it out! Nothing to worry about at all!” She grins broadly at King Daedlestar.

 I turn back to my datapad. “Not without running a full diagnostic. I need to see how the energy fluctuations are behaving. Maybe there’s something on the planet that is in a nonmagical void space?” I stow my display again.

 “What’ll that take?” Catra leans with a hand on her hip.

 “I need to hook her up to a monitoring system with neural, electrobiological, chemical, and magical harmonizer detectors.”

 “The same ones connected to my mom?” Glimmer says.

 “Precisely!”

 Catra looks over to Adora who is saying, “Maybe I’m just hitting a rock or something. I’ll just—” She shuffles to the side and thrusts the point of her sword into the ground a few feet from her last point.

 Catra pinches the bridge of her nose. “Okay well, figure it out before dumbass winds up turning the whole planet into a pincushion.”

 “I’ll get right on it!” I snatch She-Ra with a strand of my hair.

 “Hey wait, what?!”

 “It’s for science!” I run off back to Darla, carrying a noisily objecting She-Ra above me.

 The diagnostics beep and chirp as each of She-Ra’s magically enhanced biological functions keeps running. She fidgets in the reclined chair, even though she is not restrained. A mass of wires connect to a menagerie of detectors and sensors all over her body. A nest of them sits on her head, waving faintly in the ethereal wind that usually blew her hair. She looks alarmed at the rest of the room, her eyes pinched. “So… This is going to say what’s wrong with me?”

 I tap the recorder. I read out the normal biological functions. “Heart, blood pressure, gastrointestinal processing, neural activity, all seem to be within the norms of, well, She-Ra. Her biological interactions with the magical energies are fascinating. I can’t believe that she’s able to maintain a heart of this size given your physiology is near identical to a normal humanoid. It’s so efficient at pumping the blood that it needs only a fraction of the—”

 “Entrapta.” Bow cuts me off. “What’s wrong with She-Ra?”

 “Oh, no idea!” I flip to the magical fluctuation fields. “Nothing is amiss for a typical spectrum emission from She-Ra. All of the blackbody magical radiation is nominal.”

 His voice pitches up as he asks, “Then why did we hook her up to this?”

 “Bow! Relax! I’m sure Entrapta has a good reason to connect her up like this.” Glimmer pats his arm.

 “Oh, yes! I don’t know how many times I’ll be able to log a representational simulation of She-Ra so I couldn’t miss my chance.” I flip through more diagnostics. “The neural connections are spiked. There’s an elevation of neurotransmitters through the thalamus. This spike could be related to a possible deharmonization of her She-Ra field. Adora are you feeling anything in particular right now?”

 “Yes, Entrapta.” Her voice is thin.

 “Such as?” 

 I look up to see her eyebrow twitching in frustration. 

 “Oh… sorry.” I shrug. “Everything is reading like it should. Can’t help that. But maybe… If I had comparative specimens I might be able to do a differential.”

 “Speci mens? ” Catra walks up and puts a hand on She-Ra’s pillow. Her finger worries over a button on her shirt indicating her distress that she will not vocalize. Melog curls around the base of She-Ra’s chair, their growing lethargy also a potential datapoint. However connecting them to a diagnostic battery might strain the social connection I have with Catra. And they’re a good kitty.

 “Yes, Micah and Glimmer could represent the other parts of the magical fields we’re using. Glimmer the intermediary resonance of sorcery and princess power, Micah the sorcery part of magic.”

 “Is this a trick to get more data?” Glimmer remains unmoving.

 “It’s… it’s not not a trick.” I smile.

 “All right. C’mon, Baby Girl.” Micah takes a seat in one of the chairs along with Glimmer. I use my hair to attach the different sensors to both of them simultaneously in a blur.

 “Okay, done!” All three diagnostic machines beep in harmony as I pull up the comparative scans on Darla’s holographic computer. “Each of the specimens exhibits a different profile of magical energy. She-Ra’s is strongly attuned to the higher energy band of powers. While Micah is on a lower band wavelength of magic. Glimmer’s resonance with magic appears to be in a median point between the two with overlapping normal distribution.”

 The room watches the scans with me. Catra is disinterested, instead focusing her attention on She-Ra. 

 Bow stands beside me. “What do you see?”

 “Well their different kinds of magical harmonics all seem to exhibit a standard distribution of energy wavelengths. I think they are behaving nominally but—”

 A dip in the energy bands starts at the bottom of the spectrum of Micah’s waves. It slowly crawls up the bandwidth and transitions to Glimmer’s energy band. Finally it moves into She-Ra’s matching the same spectrum profile I saw when her explosive florification event seemed stifled.

 “ Fascinating . So it isn’t isolated to just She-Ra!”

 “Wait, it’s affecting all of us?” Glimmer jostles in a mild panic.

 “Yes!” The dip finally crawls off the energy profile of She-Ra and all of their signatures return to normal.

 “What’s doing it?” Bow approaches Glimmer to place his hand on her shoulder.

 “I have no idea!” I spin on my chair over to Micah. I pull out a smaller scanner and wait for the band to show up. After a few minutes, the same signature dip appears in his energy band on the display. “Micah cast a spell for me.”

 “All right.” He lifts a hand and motions with his fingers a small glyph.

 Nothing.

 “This is bad, right?” He looks wide-eyed at me.

 “It might be something just on this planet. But it seems temporary, whatever it is.”

 “So I can give it another shot?” She-Ra leans up from her chair. Catra caresses lovingly at her shoulder, but when she notices us watching she jerks her hand away.

 “Sure, why not. It should be fine.” I shrug.

 Everyone looks at each other concerned, and then back to me.

 “What? I’m a scientist. Not a fortune teller.”

 She-Ra grumbles, popping off the sensors with a jerk of her hand, and heads back outside.

 I adjust the focus on my magnification amplifier on my mask. I glance over to the left of the heads-up display and hold for a moment. The retinal tracking lasers on my visor register the focus of my pupil and expand the display menu. With a flick of my eyes, I run through the possible filters and enhancers. I stop on the one for bio-mechanical amplifiers. The connections of the cybernetic augmentation blossom like a conflagration of volatile alcohol at an optimal stoichiometric mixing. 

 “Fascinating !” The glowing light creeps between the electrical signaling and the piston assembly on the arm. I tap the recorder function on the side of my mask. “The tall one’s cybernetic augmentations have the capability to enhance her reach up two to three times her normal span, but their engineering has optimized the connection between the neurotransmitters and the electrical signaling of the extenders.”

 “I have a name, you know.”

 I glance up from the arm and a displeased face is filtered through the bio-mechanical enhancer. It seems the nanotech in her body isn’t just exclusive to her arms. The blooming face scowls at me.

 I lift my visor. “Which is?”

 She pauses. Her glare intensifies and her voice reflects her thinning patience. “Tallstar.”

 “Why?”

 “…because I’m…”

 “The tall one.” I grin at her.

 She scowls fury at me but doesn’t seem further inclined to disrupt my work.

 “You don’t require lubrication, do you?”

 “What?” 

 “Nothing, just noticing that your sliding mechanisms appear to be mated with a frictionless bearing surface.”

 “If you say so.” She brushes her free biomechanical hand through her short-cropped orange hair. 

 Her normal hooded jacket is draped across the back of her chair, allowing me access to her connections. I flip the mask back down and pull out a series of small surgical and mechanical instruments from finer tendrils of my hair.

 “Hey, what’re those?”

 “Oh, no need to worry. I won’t do anything I can’t repair. Probably.”

 She twitches in her chair but doesn’t protest further.

 I inject a quick anesthetic into the gray skin of her arm near one of the mechanical augmentation points. With a small scalpel, I make an incision that is barely more than a millimeter in length. There’s a small bead of blood that I staunch with a tiny napkin. I insert a small probe into the entry point and press it against the neurotransmitters. My visor lights up with a series of diagnostics and I read through the chemical signaling interacting with the electrical receptors. 

 “There seems to be an inefficiency in the connections. Have you noticed a delayed reaction time in intermittent and sometimes inconvenient instances?”

 “I… yes.” She furrows her brow at me in a mixture of amazement and startlement. “How can you tell?”

 “Well it’s quite simple really,” I explain as I continue to read through the diagnostics. “The sodium-potassium receptors in the differential ion detectors in your augmentations seem to use an inefficient catalyzer that is prone to breakdown.”

 “Can I get that in normal-speak please?”

 I sigh and pause in my work. “E—lect—tric—al sig—nals are not sending well to your met—al arm.” I bring two spare strands of hair into points and touch their tips together representing the connection.

 “Oh. That might explain a few things.” She flexes her fingers and I watch the catalyzers flicker in ripples of light through her arm. “Can you fix it?”

 “That would take some time to research and dissect your arm. I can’t promise that it would be painless and there may be an extended period of sluggishness as the receptors adapt to the new programming. I can’t guarantee a successful repair.”

 “Nevermind then, at least I—”

 “Just kidding! It’s already fixed!” I laugh in excitement. Another successful experiment with a joke! I can’t wait to transmit this back to Scorpia. “I just injected nanotech that replaced the sodium-potassium channels and they’re now operating at an improved efficiency of thirty-eight percent! You’re welcome!” I beam a toothy grin at her.

 The tall one stares at me wide-eyed. Hesitantly, she stretches out her arm and sends it shooting across the tent. It latches onto a cup stashed on a table and she restracts the arm back to its preset, minimum length. She stares at it with disbelief.

 My work satisfactorily done, I start stowing my micro tools in their requisite pouches and nooks, but I am interrupted by a flapping of the tent behind us.

 “Entrapta! I need your help!”

 “Hi, Bow!” I spin on a chair of my hair to face him.

 He brushes the leaves off his shoulders. The botanical variety on the planet seemed similar to that of Etheria, however their photosynthetic basis appears to be on the lower energy photon band due to their star’s composition. Some samples will need to be collected before I return to Darla.

 He looks over my shoulder at the tall one sitting behind me. “Oh, sorry, was I…?”

 “No, we were just finishing up.” Her tone reflects a more sincere astonishment. I hear the metal fingers click around a cup behind me. “Should it feel different?”

 I swivel back around on my hair to look at her. “Yes! With the improved bandwidth, you also have additional detail in your sense of touch.” I look back to Bow. “What can I do for you? Need some additional arrow tech? I have some electromagnetic disruptors that have shown a higher penetration success rate with First Ones bots.”

 He holds his hands up and shakes his head. “Nothing like that. I need something else. Something serious.” His expression does indeed reflect the serious nature of his inquiry.

 “Ohhh.” I clap my hands together in excitement. “Are you building a new tech upgrade for your scanner goggles or tracker pad? Perhaps working on an interdimensional transmitter to gain access to—”

 “I need a nickname for Glimmer.”

 I stare at him.

 “What?” The tall one’s question drops like a brick into the middle of the room.

 “I don’t understand.” I idly pack more of my gear away with my hair. “That isn’t tech or science at all.”

 The tall one stands from her chair and assesses Bow, crossing her arms. “Isn’t Glimmer the one that you were bickering with back when we were getting the thulite? The purple sparkly one?”

 “Yes, that’s her.” Bow flushes a little as his capillaries flow at a higher rate, indicating his discomfort with the current subject. “We’re—uh… We’re dating now.”

 The tall one steps around from behind me and stands to the side of us so she can lean against the table. “Good. It sounded like you guys had some tension to get out of your systems.”

 He flushes brighter red. His voice cracks sharply before he can reign it back in. “I didn’t—We’re—Focus! I need a nickname!” 

 “I don’t see what science has to contribute to this dilemma, Bow.” I pick myself up from my seat and prepare to leave.

 He holds a hand up in a gesture to stop me. “It kind of does!” He obviously searches for a reason, his eyes casting about the tent as though something within will illuminate the answer. “I need to make it more efficient… I guess.”

 The tall one shakes her head in disbelief. “You are some of the strangest talking people I’ve ever met.”

 “Why thank you!” I scratch my chin with a finger of my hair. “Hmmm, if the desire is for efficiency of communication between parties then why not shorten the phonology as much as possible. Would ‘G’ work, perhaps?”

 Bow’s shoulders visibly sink.

 The tall one looks between the two of us, brow furrowed. “Why are they such a big deal for Etherians?”

 “They aren’t.” Bow sighs and rubs a hand over his brow before dropping that hand to his hip. “It’s just... Glimmer has one for me but I don’t have one for her.”

 “Well, why not pick a constellation? Our people nickname our loved ones off the stars.” She smiles and lifts a hand toward the sky.

 “Ohhh! Is that to keep a present cognitive interest  of the astronomical placement of starsystems in the galaxy and create an instilled interest of science in the general population?”

 “What?” She frowns at me. “No. We just like them…”

 I roll my eyes. “And you call me strange.”

 Bow has wandered over to one of the crates near the wall of the tent and is rearranging the supplies within. He releases a forlorn sigh. “That won’t work. Etheria didn’t even have stars until a couple years ago.”

 The tall one watches him compulsively clean. “No stars? That must have been weird.”

 Bow shrugs. “Shadow dimension and all that.”

 “Well, I believe that the phonology is the ticket.” I pull out my datapad and start keying in the numbers and analyzing the results. “Is there an optimal shortening of her consonants and vowels? Or perhaps performing a replacement to provide the most attractive combination.”

 “Entrapta, what are you saying?” He looks up from the crate.

 “Why do none of you speak science?” I sigh and slump onto my hair. “I believe the communication of names normally requires a consonant-vowel-consonant construction.” I hold out my datapad with the corresponding pattern and point at it. “Why not truncate her name to that? Glim?”

 Bow shakes his head. “That sounds terrible.”

 “I don’t think she’d let you live that one down.” The tall one smirks.

 “Okay.” I take note of this and type in other possible combinations. “Sometimes a letter substitution could be seen as attractive. Why not substitute for one of the other constructions people use with her name? Sometimes she is referred to as ‘glitter.’ So why not Glit?”

 The tall one hides a smile behind her hand, but she can’t cover the snicker of amusement that shakes her shoulders. 

 Bow’s eyebrow twitches at me before he turns back to the crate in resignation. “Okay, I’m thinking this was a bad idea.”

 “Wait! I got it!” I cross the tent on my tendrils of hair over to Bow and lift him up by the shoulders. I show him the screen of my datapad and point at it emphatically. “Oftentimes, a close front unrounded vowel noise is seen as attractive between two people who share an emotional connection. Add one at the end!”

 Bow stares, trapped within a loop of my hair.

 “‘Ee’. Make it Glimmy!”

 The tall one’s laughter has faded by now. She smiles and shrugs. “Okay that’s better, but I don’t know if that’s going to get you very far, Bow.”

 Bow’s brow flattens in determination and he nods solemnly. “It’ll have to do. Thanks Entrapta.”

Chapter Text

 I hold the welder close to the wires. There’s a spark. The micro trace fuses and the connection lights up with nanoparticles that course through the printed circuit board. The channel should be open. The climate control systems were fine but another optimization was needed. Darla’s diagnostics were spot-on with the assistance of a pain diagnostic feedback system. I withdraw the microwelder and stow it on my belt, pulling forward a magnifier. 

 “Hey, Entrapta.” Catra’s voice calls from below the vent.

 “Little busy here!” I check the trace down the circuit board and follow it to the next metal oxide silicon field effect transistor. The flows look optimal from the next path so there doesn’t appear to be another fault in the line. I spider my way out of the vent into the diagnostic room—my room. It’s smaller than the bunks that everyone sleeps in on the ship. The hard panel display sits in the corner, a holographic map projects into the middle of the room. No furniture, not even a bed. Hair works well enough. Catra is standing in there. I worm my way past her and sit down at the panel.

 “Something I can help you with, Catra?”

 She stands, arms crossed in front of her. The light glints off her eyes and I catch a glow from her retroreflective pupils. “I was just checking on you.”

 “All good here! Darla’s heating seems to be on the fritz and I’ve been working with her the past few nights. It’s such a shame that her connections are so old. The normal effective life span of some of this wiring is just decades! It’s amazing she hasn’t cast us into the cold vacuum of space !” I seat myself in a bow of my hair and lower to the keyboard in the diagnostic station. I finesse through some simple codes to verify the repaired circuitry is live.

 “Yeah, real amazing.” I hear her scratch at the back of her neck. 

 I flub the next keystroke and need to delete it. I finish keying in the code and everything looks nominal. Satisfied with the results I spin on a column of my hair back to her. “We’re good here Catra. You can go back to bed. Darla’s diagnostics show you’ve been sleeping better! I’d hate for you to get off a circadian rhythm.”

 “I can spare a night every so often.” She stands unmoving in the cramped room. Her posture is biased onto her right foot indicating a slight discomfort in the current situation. She appears to be avoiding a subject, yet hoping that it will come up with her physical presence.

 “No, actually you can’t. A disruption in your natural sleep patterns is almost impossible to recover from after a sustained interruption of—”

 “I’d like to stay, if that’s all right.” She rests the back of her hand on her hip. She shows no signs of voluntary egress and I don’t believe any coercion short of an electrical arc can help. Her tail flicks impatiently behind her.

 A creeping cold laces down my neck. I look down, away from her. “That is irrational reasoning. You have Adora, and since the excursion into the Portal, you’ve been much calmer. I don’t understand what is to be gained by you spending time up here with me and Darla.”

 “That’s kind of why I want to stay.” Her intonations and vocal pitch are different. There is less of a feeling of irritation in her disposition. Instead, a softer flexing of her larynx indicates a genuine concern.

 “Oh? Want to know more about her subsystems?” I grin, still looking to the side of her.

 In my periphery, I see wide eyes of worry. Her senses are heightened and she is attempting to detect an involuntary tic. She is good at that. And I feel very exposed. “Not exactly. I’ve been thinking about you, and Darla. You’ve been spending a lot of time with her.”

 My attempt to reroute the conversation fails and I feel the room creeping in tighter around me. “There’s a lot to get done. I’m never going to be done working with her. Her designed duration wasn’t meant for the millennium that she sat dormant. Plus she’s good company!”

 “You’ve been changing Darla’s artificial intelligence, haven’t you?”

 “I assure you, Catra, all of my programs are inta—”

 Catra and I both startle at Darla’s voice. Her tail and my pigtails are rigid as structural reinforcing bars.

 My hair darts faster than I am truly aware. Snaking across the room activating switches and buttons in a synchronous order. Hopefully she just reads it as a sensor glitch. No comms, no cameras. “Shhh!”

 “What?” She waves her hand dismissively looking nonplussed.

 I hold a finger of hair in front of my lips. “Are you crazy? You can’t just tell someone that you’re trying to help them. You need to do it more subtly. Even I know that.”

 “Darla’s a someone now?”

 “I… not exactly. I’ve been working on her subroutines on this trip. I’ve been learning the code for the First Ones’ qubit system of data management. Their circuitry was so advanced and I haven’t been able to tinker with one of their AI structures. I figured we could use another person on the trip.” I curl myself up on my pigtails, clasping my hands in front of me. “New code, new data. New untold horizons. This trip I can really dig into her circuitry.”

 Catra looks up at me, still standing stoically, seemingly unmoved by the development of nascent AI. “So… what about the ships back in the hangar?”

 I pull back from her. A shift in my heart and a darker mood takes me. I debate on a deflection. “I am doing the coding by experimentation. I don’t know how the code actually works. I wanted to find another AI from the original First Ones databanks. See if I was missing something. And…” I look to the side. “As I get more systems running and she adapts more personality, she’s told me that she’s lonely. I was hoping—we were hoping—maybe we could find a friend. Someone like her.”

 Catra looks confused. I read the questions in her face. How can a ship have a friend? Why are you trying to make something intelligent? Every one of the unasked questions swirls doubt in my trust in her.

 “Does she… did she take that well?”

 I’m shocked. That was not a predicted question. “I guess she did. She didn’t talk about it again.” I pull myself downward again away from the lofty heights at the top of the diagno—my room. I stop at her eye level, standing on my two feet for a change. 

 Catra makes an advancing step towards me, seeking to close the distance and provide more intimacy to our interaction. “Is she your friend?”

 I want to shift away from her, but I don’t. “I… I don’t know.” I hadn’t really considered that possible outcome to the modifications of making a cognitive AI. Just that it could be done and should be done. Shouldn’t it? “I don’t really think about that. Bots are capable of remedial intellect and I do believe they feel things. Emily sure does.” A brief unwelcome memory of her rises and falls like an improperly calibrated hydrometer in an alcohol rich solution. No, she’s with Scorpia now. Safe. “They’re not really people, not with the same cerebral processes and logical skills. Darla could be some one though. I thought it was worth an experiment.”

 “Maybe. But I’m,” she takes a deep breath, “I’m worried. Darla might be different, and she might be a wonderful person someday. But why are you making her?” She tugs at her sleep shirt, straightening a wrinkle that isn’t there.

 “Because I can. The circuitry is there. It’s just a matter of experimentation.” I worry my gloved hands together and they squeak in mild protest.

 Catra bites at her lip. I see her posture shift. It appears the conversation is not going the direction she wants it to. “Entrapta, why did you change your mind to come with us?”

 I blink at her. I was not expecting it to be that direct. The unexpected question dredges up more memories and images that have been meandering around in my thoughts. I should have deflected with a psychologically discrete method. Because now she’ll catch me. Still worth a try. “Well, Scorpia convinced me that Darla needs a shiptender to keep her running and I thought she made a logical argument.”

 “You were really intent on staying before that, though.” She crosses her arms. She knows something and I don’t know if I can convince her otherwise.

 “Y—Yes, there’s work to be done on Beast Island, but I spoke with Hordak before our departure and he agreed that some time away could help our efforts to create beneficial upgrades to the bots to assist with the reclamation of Etheria for the native citizens.” I twist my hands together again. 

 Catra taps her foot impatiently. “What aren’t you telling me?”

 More memories, more images. Anger, hiding, not here. Not with Darla. It’s okay here. Isn’t it? I flinch, reach up with my hair to grab at the lid of my mask.

 “No, stop.” Her hand snatches the edge of the mask before I can pull it down. Her eyes plead with me.

 I look to the ground, I look to the side. I watch her tail flick and twitch behind her. I reach behind me with a pigtail and grab a tool. Any tool. I find a pair of wire snips and roll them back to my hands. I flex the jaws open and shut. She’s staring at me. I know she is. Even if I can’t see her gaze dissecting me. She needs to stop. Her dichromatic eyes hurt. “Hordak said things to me.”

 She kneels down in front of me, and sits on her heels. “What did he say?”

 I follow her positioning and slide down on my hair to sit with her, not daring to look at her face. Instead, I focus on her lap. Her hands are clenched tight there. Veins pulse with blood under the fur. She must be running a higher blood pressure. Probably because she is agitated. She wants an answer. What can I say?

 “Entrapta…” 

 “He wanted me to stay.” I fixate to her left. There’s a display screen showing Darla’s diagnostics. Fuel level is at eighty-six percent and she has been burning two percent on every portal jump we have taken. We hadn’t predicted this kind of usage on her thulite crystals. The additional time we are making up in the distance traveled is being offset by the amount of fuel crystal we are burning. Therefore, we will need to also be scouting ahead for additional deposits of crystals. I’m going to need to map out—

 “I understand.” I finally glance up at her. Her flattened ears reflect her concern. Her worry. She doesn’t often look like this. Most of the time, Catra is too preoccupied with Adora or Glimmer on this current expedition. And before then, Catra never showed concern except for when their plans were going awry, didn’t she. If that could count as concern.

 She stands and turns to leave.

 I flex the wire snips open and closed.

 Her steps are silent against the metal duratitanium alloy of Darla’s floorplates. I reach out with strands of my hair and snatch her hand. I tug and she spins around to look at me. Her expression is shocked. She’s upset. I look at her. It hurts.

 “You don’t.” I keep playing with the snips over and over in my hands. They hurt against my gloves. I’m pressing them too hard.

 “Then why are you stopping me?” Her resolve is set. Her kindness has fallen to her impatience. She tugs against my hair, but it holds firm.

 “Because no one ever understands, but you’re still my friend.” I keep my focus on her. Her eyes shift left, then right. Her nose twitches. She looks down and left. Shame. She is uncomfortable. I release her wrist. She pulls it back with a jerk.

 “What’s with you Entrapta? What happened with Hordak? Why are you locked away in here with Darla? Just say something.” She crosses over the floorplates again and seems to tower over me.

 “It’s hard.”

 “So? That hasn’t stopped you before.”

 I look away again. Uncomfortable. She is digging. Catra is trying to cope with her pain and she finds some relief in helping her friends since she cannot address hers yet. She is trying. It’s admirable. In a way. If it wasn’t directed at me.

 “Hordak… disagreed with me leaving with you.” I twist the pliers around in my hand again and feel the smooth metal through my thick gloves.

 “Oh trust me, he doesn’t just disagree with anything. What did he say ?” There is that concern again bleeding into her voice like a leaking gasket weeping lubricant. Why is she pushing so hard?

 I look back at her. Catra is leaning towards me. Her body posture is more aggressive. I can tell she is more certain that she is making headway with me. Why am I speaking to her? What does she understand? 

 I take a deep breath. All of my possible avenues to avoid this conversation have failed. “Hordak wanted me to stay on Beast Island with him. We have been working on uncovering the First Ones tech that is scattered in the scrapyard there. It’s been nice. He has quite the interest in uncovering their data structures and recovering lost information from their civilization. It seems the First Ones were not the most astute with data destruction prior to disposal. We’ve been able to restore a significant portion of their databanks—” 

 Catra taps her foot. 

 “Sorry…” I look back at her face. “Hordak wanted me to stay. He said he couldn’t finish without me. He said I was abandoning him coming with you.” 

 “Has he been saying that a lot?” She walks closer to me. 

 “No.” The word comes out of me like an involuntary muscle spasm.

 “I don’t believe you.” Catra reaches me and sits beside me. She takes a strand of my hair into her lap and strokes it gently.

 “Maybe a little.” This doesn’t seem right. How can I talk about him like this?

 “We haven’t seen much of you since we defeated Horde Prime.” Her claws split and separate my tangled hair. Each stroke is gentle. 

 “We had so much work to do. It felt good working with him. We did so much together. We’ve managed to get the guardians back up to a sixty percent availability rate and have amassed quite a spare collection set for further break-downs. Some of the guardians and bots have bonded with organic matter as well and we were studying ways to incorporate this technology elsewhere. It seemed foolish to leave in the midst of such amazing science.”

 She digs her fingers deep into one of my pigtails, pulling out the knots and twists of the purple fibers. “You need friends, too.”

 I shutter. There’s a tear in my eye. I wipe it away with a strand of my hair. “I do.”

 “It’s okay.”

 “It doesn’t feel okay, Catra. Hordak understood me. He wanted to know more about tech and see what I have been working on. I have built so many simulations based on the databanks we’ve recovered. He wanted to know every single one of them. Every time I showed him one, he asked me questions! And then he would help me with another run! We have a zillion bots on the island now.” I squeeze the wire snips, feeling the mated surfaces grinding against one another. A lubrication is needed to alleviate possible corrosi— 

 “But…” Her normally assertive voice softens, provoking me onward.

 “But, sometimes he doesn’t care. Sometimes he gets frustrated. I know I can be too much. So I let him be for a while.” I grip the handles again, and place my finger in the jaws. I gently squeeze, feeling the pressure through my glove.

 “That’s not all, is it?” Her strokes tease further up my hair. 

 I stare forward. Looking at the immaculate microtexture in Darla’s plates. “He gets mad sometimes, too.” I take a breath. “He yells. He can’t help himself, but I’m there to help. I think that if I am patient enough that I can help him. He’ll get over it. And things are okay again.”

 Catra sidles up closer.

 I release my finger from the jaws, and then pinch again. “He gets really angry sometimes. Sometimes… it’s scary.”

 “I know.” She reaches out a hand and places it on my thick overalls. A delicate hand with wicked black claws.

 “Why are you asking me about this?” Pinch. Release. Pinch.

 “Because…” I feel her pause. I await the deflection. She is going to— “I’m worried about you.”

 I close the snips again but the corrosion of the working surfaces relinquishes its binding friction and it bites hard onto my finger. “Ouch!” I jump up. The jaws clatter onto the floor plate. 

 “Are you okay?” Catra follows me up and wrenches my glove off. A hemorrhage has formed on my pale white skin, but no piercing has occurred. Blood appears to have stopped under the top layer of skin. Her soft hands inspect the wound carefully. I hold my breath. 

 She looks up. “Sorry.” She gently releases my hand.

 My fingers still tingle. I look at them. They’re pale and clammy from being in the gloves for as long as they have been. I look back to Catra again. “I’d like to get back to work on Darla.”

 “Can we do this again another night?”

 I nod numbly. “I think… I would appreciate the company.”

 She steps forward. Before I can push away she envelopes me in her arms. I slowly recover and wrap my arms back around her. Maybe she could understand.

 I deftly anchor and pull my way through the vents in a continuous single motion through the constrictive space. I pass by gratings and access ducts but overhear a conversation up ahead. I pause momentarily. I believe it is a social complication to eavesdrop on conversations that I am not a part of, but I am still unclear how that is different from when people are talking in my proximity when they fail to notice my physical presence.

 There could be useful information to be gleaned, regardless. Adora and Catra are engaged in a conversation in their room.

 “I just don’t know why that happened. She-Ra’s energy is getting weaker or something and Entrapta doesn’t know what’s happening.”

 “We still got the job done at Terern.” Melog sits beside Catra and both of them flick their tails side to side in agitation. “Let’s just get some sleep. Maybe—”

 “I can’t just sleep! If we’re losing She-Ra, then how are we going to keep this up? We’re supposed to be healing the universe after Horde Prime and I almost couldn’t do anything today. I just stick the sword into the planet and BAM there’s forests and meadows and trees and everything is okay again. It gives people hope and it means I can help them—”

 “Adora—for my sake—can you just calm down? A lot of us are getting along fine helping people without princess powers.” Catra crosses her arms.

 Adora stops dead in her pacing. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

 Melog stirs. They look between Catra and Adora, and weakly mew. Darla’s scanners are detecting diminishing energy from them. Worrying.

 “Not all of us can rely on a magical warrior princess to fix our problems. We can help people in other ways. We might be able to—”

 “It’s useless without She-Ra! If I can’t get her back, then we’re going to—”

 I continue my traversal through the ducting of Darla, leaving the conversation behind. There is not much more value to be gained in overhearing their discourse further. Adora’s concern is valid and logically derived, however Catra has a point about the necessity of magic and the capability of individuals without it. Though I wonder what particular efficiencies could be gained with access to magical space energy. There is potentially a limitless amount of free energy tied up into the interdimensional strings.

 I find my way through the ducts to arrive at my room. Darla’s purple orb is there already. She tracks me with a dark spot on her hologram. “Hello, Entrapta.”

 “Hi, Darla. How have you been?” I smile at her.

 “You are in distress.”

 She’s getting good at this. “Yes, I am. I appreciate the analysis.”

 “Why?”

 “I believe our crewmates are having interpersonal complications given the disruptive events that have occurred recently.”

 “This distress is being caused by the fluctuations we have observed in the magical dimension space that overlays matter-space?” She changes shape into an oscilloscope curve that shows a diminished peak moving through a flat line.

 “Precisely.” I sigh.

 She flicks back into the orb. “Well I have been working on the modeling in your absence and believe I have made progress.”

 “Excellent!” I plop myself down at the station to resume my work and close my visor for optimal visual reality augmentation. The multidimensional overlays are running in front of me. The holograms show a cylindrical space. On the inside, the gridline of dimensional space never intersects. Threads run in a circle around the outer surface, and inside there are representations of the plane crossing through the middle of the cylinder.

 Taking out a third dimension was the only way for it to make sense.

 I tap my recorder on. “Darla, drop another local point in the volumetric space.”

 A bright point drops in the middle of the cylinder. It hits like a tiny firework. The energy ripples out, and cascades to the edges of the cylinder. The two dimensional boundary then refracts back. A shadow wave moves against the bright waves, canceling them out.

 “It seems the volumetric matter-space that we are in is having a reaction with the subquantum energies of the magic that are generated in the interactions of the quantum envelope of portal-space.”

 I turn back to the data readouts on the test subjects. I take the She-Ra energy profile and load it into the simulation. The point drops again in the same location. Instead of a firework, a cascading prismatic rainbow originates outward. It moves in the plane at a faster rate, reaches the boundary edge of the two dimensional portal space, and the portal space reacts, pushing back another shadow wave to the point.

 It consumes the bright rainbow.

 “Both magic originated from an Etherian locus and a She-Ra broad spectrum profile are canceled in their interactions with the portal space. There is a time delay between the interactions but in the end they are reaching equilibrium. Therefore there’s a limited amount of time where the magic can act exoenergetically before it is balanced against the rest of space-time.”

 My fingers run on the holographic keyboard in front of me, while my hair manipulates the model, turning it over on it’s edge. I run the She-Ra simulation again and this time the simulation pulls the dot of light away and sets it aside in a simulated Despondos. The shadow waves interact with one another and have no magic waves to cancel them out, but they harmonize, cascade on one another, and spike. They fall away after this back to equilibrium with the two dimensional portal space.

 “It seems Mara’s dimensional jump may have created a negative energy feedback loop. It…” I pause. I consider stopping Darla’s recording of my notes. I can’t stifle the truth. The data speaks for itself. “The First Ones were likely caught in the portal cascade event and seems to be the cause of their extinction.”

 I bite my lip. “This isn’t good. With the Etherian magic released it seems to be interacting and canceling with the portal space. We may not be able to harness magic for much longer. Current fluctuations are due to the portal and magical wave perturbations but it seems the interactions will harmonize before long and there will no longer be a connection to the runestones.”

 I sit back. I bite at my thumb and look at the simulation. “There isn’t a way to counteract this. Either the magic is maintained as a locus and removed from the matter-dimension to be held in Despondos, or it is mitigated by the portal dimension interactions with the matter-space. Unless…”

 I turn to the hard terminal and drag my body towards it with my hair. I maneuver the access node’s server to the hidden one stashed in the directory. “Sorry Darla, I need some privacy.” I reach over to a nondescript panel and initiate a lockdown in the room. Her AI, sensors, and all detection devices shut down in the room. It’s silent.

 I key through the blind encryption on the sub-server. It syncs with a hidden randomized key embedded into my glove, and opens up. I touch a red button, one with the wings of a bat on it. The neural network scatters in points with strands of light between them on my display, and a ping echoes into the empty space around us.

 “Elevated cortisol levels detected, Entrapta.”

 I look up from the display and the running algorithms. “Who and where?”

 “Catra. She entered the sick bay carrying Melog moments ago. She is traversing me at a rapid pace.”

 “Track her for me.”

 I flip the visor down and a 3-D projection of Darla pops into view centered in my vision. A bright dot centers on a representation of Catra as she dashes through the ship. I flick my eyes down to the left twice and the map minimizes to the left corner of my vision. I reach out my hair in a spider-like motion each of them grabbing and pulling me through the vents and ducts.

 I move quickly. Catra’s dot has left the main corridors and darts through the vents, moving quickly and nimbly as I would expect. She is moving down to the lower bays and the thulite crystal storage. I emerge from a vent, popping the cover off. I see a startled Adora. She grabs one of my fingers of hair, jerking me to a halt before I can continue on.

 “Entrapta, what’s going on?” Her brow is pinched together indicating a deep concern, there’s no question what for.

 “There’s no time.” I reach up for the vent adjacent to us.

 “I’m coming, too. Where is she?”

 I raise my visor and look deep into Adora’s eyes. They shimmer, but are set in determination. “I want to talk to her first.”

 “You?” Bafflement rises on her face.

 I want to smack her aside, but she isn’t wrong. “Yes. Please, Adora.”

 “I can’t just keep getting cut out from her life and her problems! I need to go, too.”

 “I can’t explain it. But I need you to understand. Can I call you when we’re ready to talk?”

 She looks down. Hurt. She can’t look at me right now. 

 “I have to go.” I take a strand of my hair and touch Adora’s cheek.

 She nods in resignation. Releases my hair.

 I drop my visor, and then resume my path. I push through the errant cables that I have not yet been able to diagnose. More work to be done. That one is a rampant short that needed bypassed ages ago. I haven’t been able to work on it because the reroute has held for now but the smaller wiring is going to—

 I shove my way past it and hear the sobs of Catra before I even get close to her. I don’t need another distraction. I burst through the cover and rappel down to her. The thulite room is an ominous red with a small set of pink crystals in storage on the far wall. It isn’t spacious, but there is easily enough room for two people. The innards of Darla hum, only interrupted by Catra’s hitching breath.

 “Go away.” She is curled into the corner, legs drawn up, arms across them. The sleeves of her shirt are shredded and her arms bare bloodied claw marks on the biceps.

 I don’t answer as I take a seat in front of her, and lift my visor to get a better look at her. She looks away. Tears have stained the fur on her cheeks and her dichromatic eyes are ringed in red from the effort of crying. She has claw marks on her temples as well.

 The blood on her arms is causing the fur to mat. I fish a cloth from my overalls and move to press it to her wounds.

 “Get away from me!”

 “I’m not leaving.” I gather my legs up crossed in front of me, and stretch my hair out around me. A deep breath calms me.

 Catra resumes her sobbing. She drops her head onto her knees and I see the claws extend again, crimson. My breath holds. Should I grab at her hands? Keep her from causing more pain. It seems rational, but now is not the time for that. I choose a different option. I curl my hair around and touch her foot delicately. 

 She lurches away. Her hand lashes out and claws uselessly at my hair. “Stop it!”

 I recoil away and sit back again, letting my hair draw around her again, ready to grab at her hands. “I won’t let you hurt yourself. But I won’t make physical contact otherwise.”

 She nods and puts her head back on her knees. Her claws flex but they stay away from her arms. The cuts are shallow and won’t take much time to heal. With an epidermal sealant they won’t even leave scars. I drop my visor again and look up twice. I pull the manifest from the ship and focus my eyes on the medical supplies, and then the sealer. Darla will ping one of the crew to grab it and be ready.

 Catra’s sobbing trails away into a soft whimper in the hum of Darla’s interior. “Melog is dying, aren’t they?”

 I hang onto the answer. It would be distressing to confirm her suspicions, but she will know if I lie. I take a strand of my hair and twist it between my hands. “I’m sorry, Catra. The magical fluctuations are getting worse. Angella won’t last through it, either.”

 “I don’t want to lose them.” Her voice sounds like a rusty bearing, ready to shatter.

 “I understand. They have been important to you.” 

 A sardonic smile crosses her face. “Can you do anything?”

 The models are still running. The results are mysterious and my confidence interval is too low. I can’t say it yet. “I don’t know. I am working on it.”

 “You can’t let them… you can’t let them just die like this.”

 “I won’t. If I can do anything, I will.” 

 She stares off into the distant corner. Her mental construction disassociates from the current location. “Melog… when I saw them… not moving… I realized I’m trapped. I won’t… I did horrible things, and they won’t ever just go away.”

 “They are mental constructions that are debilitating your logical processes.”

 “I see them.”

 “See who?” I raise the visor again letting it hang over my face.

 She looks up at me, grief. So much grief it hurts to look at her. Her eyes are wide. “Salineas. I hear them. The cannon fire, riding into the city. People are screaming. Hordak is laughing.”

 His name hits me across my heart. I feel a surge of adrenaline and I want to run. I want to spider back up into the vents. But I stay. I need to stay. It hurts, but I can’t leave.

 “They’re… there’s blood. A lot of blood. Most people got away. They saw our ships coming and they knew the princesses would be far away. But some stayed. Some guards. They…” She chokes again.

 “I’m sorry.” The words feel stiff. Guilt associated with the retrospective analysis of her deeds is quite painful.

 Her hands tighten on her arms but her claws don’t quite dig in. “Sorry for what?” Her bitterness wounds me.

 “I’m sorry you’re experiencing that again in a mental disassociation. We’re in space though. Far away from then.” I sit back more relaxed, crossing my legs under me.

 She laughs, a painful one. Her voice is already hoarse. “You say that, but I can’t get away.”

 I twist my hair again and it flicks in my hand. “I can’t either.”

 She fixes her gaze on me, drawing her back to the present. Her face reflects an unasked question.

 “I did a lot of things, too, Catra. I helped you. I was… complicit I believe is the word. My tech was used to do the things that happened. And I have been trying to make up for it in my own way.”

 “That’s why you went back to Beast Island with Hordak?”

 That is a convenient response. “Y—Yes.”

 “What you did is different, though.” She sniffs.

 “In a way, but I also believe it is in proximity to your feelings. Being in close contact with the people that were most involved in the events that occurred can be distressing. I feel it too, so I understand—at least partially—your current mental distress.” I comb my gloved fingers through my hair. 

 She lets out a laughing scoff. “That’s one way to put it.” 

 Perhaps reflecting on my personal experiences would create a social bond that may alleviate her current state of anguish. “I’m on this ship with all of you, and it hurts. It hurts even more with Angella here. So I know what it’s like when people just look at you and it hurts.”

 She wipes a tear away, leaving a crimson streak on the fur of her cheek. “How?”

 “I made things that got people hurt because I don’t really know how else to… to… interact. I’m not very good with people or friends. They don’t make sense to me most of the time. Sometimes when I feel like I understand them, they surprise me or don’t act in a way that I expect. It makes me uncomfortable, and I want to go away for a bit. But I can’t. Not when we’re on this ship together. I have to live with everyone. Scorpia said I should run friendship experiments, but it still is lonely.” I remember him. A part of me wishes I was still back on Etheria, back on Beast Island.

 She relaxes her left leg and lets it stretch out as I talk.

 I take a deep breath and look down at her feet. They are barren of fur on the bottom, also dirty. There’s no wrinkles of prints, just soft pads. Her toe claws are long and don’t retract the same way as her hands. Probably why she doesn’t wear boots.

  I continue, “People that are different from me make me feel uncomfortable. They always have. It’s not their fault. But it hurts when I’m not understood, so I avoid individuals that are different. It hurts when they don’t want to know everything that I am working on, or what I’m thinking about. At best they try, but normally they get bored and leave. So I get bored of them. I have friends on this ship. And I think you all accept me. But it’s not the same as what you and Adora have.” And I won’t ever have something like that.

 Catra remains silent. Her posture reflects an alleviation of her traumas, shoulders dropped, her finger claws retracted.

 I tug my hair between two hands. It twitches. “When you sent me to Beast Island, it was strange. I’m really ashamed—scared—to say I liked it. It was one of my happiest times, Catra. Everything was another problem. Another thing that needed sorting out. I was happy to be there and to have the company of machines and data. When I found the core, it meant everything to me. I wanted them to leave me there because I could understand everything that the First Ones did. I’d never get bored of learning what they had to show me. I didn’t realize that it was a problem, though. I hide from people in my data.”

 “Why are you telling me this?” Her words are calm, but distant as the supermassive black hole that sits in the heart of the galaxy. The tension’s absence soothes my concerns for her current wellbeing.

 I pause to collect myself. “Because we can’t keep hiding from each other. I think we need to keep talking with each other, so maybe we can understand.” I set my face in stone. “You need to talk with Adora about what happened. And why you can’t sleep. Why you came in here to hide from her.”

 She looks away. “I don’t know if I can.” A crack in the vocal chords of her larynx indicates a lack of confidence.

 “You can. You’re hurting her because you aren’t. It will be beneficial to your relationship together. It’s in the data. Data never lies.”

 I see half of her smirk. She turns back to me. “I’ll try then.”

 I wait. Generally in the exchange of vulnerability there is a reciprocation that would be quite welcome. I think about Hordak, and what Beast Island was like. Catra wasn’t there. But maybe she could understand, if she would just ask.

 She lingers on a thought that finally forms into words. “Entrapta, you’ve been watching me, haven’t you? For me to do this.” She holds up a hand, the blood still caked on the ends of her fingers.

 That was not the question that should’ve been asked in this social exchange. But it is bad science to expect a result. “I believed that there would be another occurrence and Melog’s diminishing health would likely result in another… another incident. Ever since I saw you in the cockpit the other night, I knew there was an elevated risk.”

 She blinks tears away. “I guess I am predictable.”

 The conversation has lingered too long. She has not responded adequately to the truth that I have revealed. It was a mistake to tell her in this condition. A failed friendship experiment. It is a mistake to tell anyone. I should depart. “We all are.” I start toward the vent opening but stop. “Before I go, can you promise me something?” I feel my tears welling in my eyes.

 “Anything.” Her earnestness feels like a warm breeze.

 “Can you come and see me sometimes? When you’re better, and not trying to fix me. Just to see me, and work with me.” Maybe a different location would result in a different experimental outcome. I feel a crushing despair on me combined with the shame of not understanding a social boundary. I thought she wanted to talk about him, but my observation was incorrect. It is possible that she was only using a social interaction with me to hide from her feelings, as I predicted.

 I want to talk about him. But I am unclear how. I don’t understand friends.

 She blinks. “I… Of course.”

 “Promise me. Promise me you won’t forget.”

 “I promise.”

 “Okay.” I believe her. Perhaps that is a mistake. One of my tendrils of hair reaches down and grabs at my comm. I pull it to my face. “Adora, you can come in now.”

 I pull away and stand on the spider limbs of my hair. 

 Catra reaches out to me. “Wait!”

 The door to the bay slams open and Adora’s boots are clanking on the floor. “Catra, what happened?” Her voice is alarmed and she falls to her knees next to her, epidermal sealant in hand and already touching it against Catra’s arms.

 “It’s fine.”

 I reach back up to the vent.

 “It doesn’t look fine!” 

 I unlid the cover and reach in.

 “Adora. Wait. Just stop for a minute. There’s something I want to talk about.”

 I’m out of earshot before the conversation continues. 

 I slip into the room through the vent. No one notices me. Part of me can’t blame them, but I still feel vanishingly insignificant among the people in the medical diagnostic room. Melog lays on their side, their chest slowly rising and falling. Catra slumps against the side of the bed, forehead resting on her arms. Adora stands behind her, hand on her shoulder.

 On the opposite side laid in her bed is Angella. Her skeletal figure breathes softly. A halo of light radiates down, casting her body in a pure white incandescence. Around her are Bow, Micah, and Glimmer. Each carries the weight of the universe on their expressions. I understand logically their grief, but the individuals on the table are strangely intangible. It weighs as guilt inside of me.

 That won’t keep me from helping. I step quietly towards Angella’s bed. I tap Glimmer and Bow on their shoulders with my hair and they turn around. 

 Bow is the most lucid of the faces around her. “What’s up, Entrapta?”

 “I…” Their faces are mirrors of grief and pain that stare back at me. My thoughts are being washed away in a flood of emotions that bear down on me. I attempt to grasp at some kind of anchor to keep my words from completely failing me. “I am working on some simulations and I need some help.”

 “Anything that you need.” Glimmer cocks her head to the side and a thin smile graces her lips. 

 “I need a continuous scan of your signature spectrum. Since you are half angelic there may be a key in creating an interference field.” I open and close my hands nervously.

 “What’re you working on? Can I help?” Bow says.

 “I appreciate it, Bow, however it is still too early to know where I need assistance yet.” A lie but a necessary one. Additional help may only impede the development process of solutions.

 “All right, will it hurt?”

 “No, there will be no pain.” Now is not the time for friendship experiments.

 I walk over to the chair nearby and Glimmer flashes into it. I unhook the scanner from the vent high above with a finger of my hair and position it over her body. She looks up at it nervously but settles. I withdraw my datapad out and start the scanner. A green scintillating light flickers over her, scanning head-to-toe. 

 Bow peers over my shoulder at the results. Normally, it would bother me but considering the circumstances his curiosity is understandable. “Is it any different?”

 “No, it is still diminishing. It is a shallow exponential function, though. So there may still be time.”

 “How much?” Glimmer remains still, staring up at the scanner as though any movement will cause an electrical arc through her body.

 “It’s…” Hiding the truth has not been an adequate social interaction, and data never lies. I won’t lie to them. “We have approximately ninety hours before the fields have diminished to the point that both of their vital functions will cease.”

 I drop my mask for concentration to block out the observant individuals around me. The scanner stops and the datapad shows a 3-D representation of Glimmer’s signature. It’s differently shaped than any I’ve recorded thus far. The additive nature of both Etheria and angelic biologies seems to have created a multiplicative resonance. I may have to study this more later. For now, it’s enough. I stow my datapad and Glimmer sits up from the chair.

 I hear Micah’s steps approach us from behind. “Can you save them, Entrapta?” His typically masculine voice has the sound of a groaning landslide. 

 “I can’t say for sure, Micah.” Using first names helps. I feel proud for remembering his. “None of the data has provided a clear solution, so I have been trying more radical solutions.”

 His face wilts further. Glimmer steps past me to stand at his side, placing her hand on his chest. “It’ll be okay, Dad.”

 I don’t understand this reasoning. There is nothing that states there is a beneficial outcome to any of my models. Social interaction normalities be damned, I must know more. I lift my mask to face them. “Why do you think that?”

 Glimmer doesn’t flinch. There’s no disruption in her stance or anger betrayed in her face. She turns to me. “Because we have hope. And… I know that if there is any chance in the universe of saving my mother and Melog, you will find it.”

 “Science is not a process built on hope. Its foundation is on hypothesis, experiment, and results and replication.”

 Bow places a hand on my shoulder. I almost flinch away from his touch, but I relax myself through the sensation. “It’s not the science we have the hope in. It’s you.”

 I turn upward. He brims with tears and holds a smile with much difficulty.

 “I will exhaust every potential scenario for you.”

 He leans down and wraps me tight in a hug.

Chapter Text

 “Entrapta, the compilation is complete.” Darla’s voice edges on excitement.

 “Fantastic! Has it been unpacked yet?” I shove myself over to the hard terminal on the side of the room.

 “Yes, the simulation is ready.”

 “Ahhh!”

 I push away back into the center of the room. The cylindrical hologram opens up. Portal-space envelops matter-space. I grab a holographic representation of another magic locus and pull it into the hologram. When I release it, the same behavior is observed. It falls, and in a cascading wave, it hits the portal-space. The shadow harmonics cancel out the magical energies.

 “Same simulated response observed. Model of portal-matter space seems to be intact with overlaid neural simulations. Now, here goes nothing!”

 I reach out with my hair and start manipulating the holograms. I pinch my tendrils together in multiple locations in the three dimensional space inside of the cylinder. Each of them localizes as another bright spark. A magical energy space drawn together. The points then align around one another and form strands of light between them.

 They hold in space, but I haven’t started the calculations yet. They are a web of points and gossamer lines. They shimmer. They’re so beautiful.

 “Okay Darla, lets see what the neural networking does.”

 “It’s been running, Entrapta.”

 “What?!” I jump to my feet in excitement.

 “Yes the simulation was not paused.”

 “This means… This means! Oh Etheria!” I tear out of my room and into the halls, cackling the entire way.

 The room is silent. They all arrived as soon as they could in the mess hall. My data terminal sits on the table in the middle of the room with Darla’s hologram projected between everyone seated there. All eyes are on me. Micah’s face stares vapidly. He’s a ghost of himself. Bow and Glimmer sit in front of me. Bow’s face is serious while Glimmer’s reflects an edging excitement. Adora and Catra are a more difficult read. Adora’s face is earnest, while Catra’s is preoccupied. 

 I welcome Adora’s attention, at least.

 “I have bad news, and more bad news. But it’s also good news!” I sit on a chair made of my hair, looking across the room. I am doing my best to not twitch with excitement. “Bad news first. Glimmer, Adora, the princess powers are diminishing because they’re interacting with the portal dimension. There’s a natural quantum equilibrium. From my studies, the First Ones were able to coalesce magic into Etheria because it had a positive energy point deep in the core, the Heart. They figured out some method of taking all of the magical energy from the universe, and collecting it there.”

 “That’s how they were going to make it a weapon?” Adora sits up from where her chin was resting on her closed hands, eyebrows shooting up in shock. The rest of the room has all assumed a serious quiet.

 “Yes. I still am unclear why, since Mara’s Rebellion destroyed almost all records of events prior to her casting Etheria into Despondos. But I do know it likely caused the destruction of the First Ones.”

 “Can you show us?” Catra’s face remains stoic. She scratches idly at the table.

 “I can, yes. Darla?” 

 “It is my pleasure, Entrapta.” Darla shifts into the model. The cylindrical representation of matter-space enveloped with portal-space materializes in front of everyone. The blue lights play off everyone’s face. I swallow. “This is the simulation that I have created with a quantum computer that we scavenged from the First Ones ship graveyard.”

 “I don’t remember grabbing that.” Bow assumes his typical thoughtful tic of grasping his chin.

 “I added a couple things to the manifest before we left.” I grin at him. “Couldn’t leave good tech behind after all.”

 There’s a huff of laughter from Glimmer. Despite the gravity, she manages an encouraging smile for me.

 “Okay, so the portal space has been simplified a bit and I’ve removed dimensions from both portal and matter-space to keep the computations simple in the small computer that we salvaged. Anyway— things that are two dimensional work in three dimensions and three dimensional things are four dimensional and—” Their faces reflect puzzlement.

 “Sorry, it should make sense. The outside of the cylinder in the two dimensional skin is portal space, while the inner volume is a simulation of matter space. With this model, I simulate a princess point of focal magic. They’re a locus of energy that creates a positive energy fluctuation in matter space.” A bright dot drops into the cylinder. The ripples of light follow the same behavior as before. When they reach the outer cylinder the waves are reflected back as dark energy, canceling out the light energy until the system is static again. “See? Any magical point is eventually canceled out in matter-space. There’s a thermodynamic equilibrium that even affects magic on a quantum-wave interaction.”

 “What about She-Ra?” Glimmer’s voice edges into concern already.

 “Same behavior.” I show the same effect on the rainbow light as well. “You are phasing in and out of your magic as the waves cancel each other out. It’s going to get worse and eventually the powers will leave.”

 “We can’t let that happen.” Adora’s voice resonates with her characteristic determination.

 “The first rule of thermodynamic equilibrium is you cannot violate equilibrium. The second rule is that you cannot break the first rule. Everything returns to a steady state. Unless…” I drop the point again and this time I pull it out of the cylinder. “When Mara warped Etheria into Despondos, it preserved the positive magical energy. But watch.” 

 In response to my pulling the positive energy away, the negative waves find the originating point. With nothing to cancel out their actions they harmonize, creating a spike of negative energy before they taper away. “The First Ones likely died when the negative energy portal spike hit them. It’s why they’re all gone. With Etheria gone, there was nothing to cancel the portal wave that hit them.” The normal excitement of sharing my findings has dimmed. 

 There’s a silence.

 “What can we do, Entrapta?” Micah’s solemn voice echoes in the quiet room.

 “I’ve been working on this for weeks. We have an option. The First Ones didn’t understand the static equilibrium as well as I do. Rather than create a single focal point, we can instead create several smaller points.” I reset the simulation. With my fingers of gloves and hair, I draw. I collect the invisible space in the hologram in thumbprint sized balls of glimmering light. I then draw between these two dozen globes gossamer threads of light, tying each of the bright spots together. They hold.

 “What are we looking at here?” Bow stands up and reaches inside of the hologram. He plucks at one of the strands of light and it vibrates like a string on his lute.

 “Bow, please refrain from that. It tickles.” The tiniest hint of laughter resonates in Darla’s voice.

 He snatches his hand back in alarm.

 I move on quickly to avoid the complications with explaining her reaction. “There’s a different way of creating the magic loci. This is a distributed and entangled system. This is a neural network overlaid onto the three dimensional matter-space. You see, with the quantum entanglement, we can focus the energy into localized matter-space, drawing it away from the empty space. We only care about having magic where people are, after all. So with enough power and management of the quantum entanglements, we can bind magic to certain localities without violating equilibrium of portal space!”

 “So…” Catra says cautiously but curiously, “the princess magic right now is a point that explodes while your web model creates magic by drawing it in from empty space?”

 “Yes! Exactly!”

 “This sounds like good news then.” Adora has an edge of relief and excitement to her tone. “We just need to get this neural entanglement thing up and running.”

 “There is the other bad news. And I don’t want people getting mad.” I step back, and look down. My fingers intertwine behind my back.

 “If it helps, then we trust you.” Micah turns his gaze from the model to me. The seriousness and determination of saving Angella will probably blunt his reaction to the truth.

 “There’s only one neural net large enough and powerful enough to manage this kind of locality focus. Horde Prime’s.”

 After a long silence, Catra speaks up first, voice hoarse and incredulous. “You can’t be serious.”

 “I… I am.” I want to hide. I want to draw back. From my periphery, their stares bear down on me.

 Adora shakes her head in confusion. “But I destroyed him. Him and the Velvet Glove.”

 “In a manner of speaking, you did. However, that was his centralized consciousness. And technically the Velvet Glove was florified, not destroyed.” I use my hair to make a series of spikes in the air. “His network was tied to pylons across the galaxy. He managed simultaneous communication across billions of worlds with a simultaneous quantum communication network.” I dip one of my spikes of hair and the others respond with a short delay demonstrating the interconnectedness. “Horde Prime’s existence was fueled by a neural computer the size of the entire galaxy. It’s the only computer that can manage something of this scale. I’ve been… I’ve been studying it.”

 There’s a set of scrutinous faces looking at me. Worms crawl through me and I want to leap away from my own skin.

 “So we need to use Horde Prime’s computer to get the princess powers and magic back to help rebuild the galaxy?” Adora closes her hand into a fist on the table.

 I nod. “It’s the only way. I need to marry the First Ones’ quantum computational engines with the neural network hub on the Velvet Glove.”

 “Well then, we have to do it.” Adora stands, pushing her chair back with a loud screech.

 “Are you serious?” Catra’s snap hits me across the heart. I was expecting an emotional reaction from her, but not one so narrow in perspective.

 Adora leans towards her, posturing her defiance. “Of course I am! We have to give these people their lives back.”

 Catra can’t speak, only stare wide-eyed and incredulous at Adora.

 “We can’t be too brash, but I think we need to consider this,” Micah’s expression reflects hope, however dim it may be.

 Glimmer turns to him with an angry scowl. “The last time we tried using tech we didn’t understand it didn’t exactly work out, Dad.” 

 Bow clasps at Glimmer’s shoulder as though to offer some calm. “I know there’s things that happened to you there, but it might be our only option.” 

 She pulls away. “No, there has to be something else we can do.”

 “Sparkles is right. We can’t mess around with his nightmare again. Who even knows what’s still on that station?” Catra’s tail is puffed in agitation.

 “Well, whatever’s on it we’re going to have to get past it.” Adora turns to Catra with her hands on her hip.

 I watch, I hear them. I want to pull away. They’re so loud. Their feelings are too much. I inch away. They argue amongst themselves, and I make my leave through a nearby vent.

 I hear someone coming up through the vents. There’s a loud clamor as a diagnostic cover is knocked away. I sigh and close the terminal shutting off the inter-space connection. When the hologram flits out, there’s only the blue light of the room. I hear groans and grunts of struggling before finally a gasp.

 “Made it!” 

 “Hi, Adora.” I spin around. Glimmer could’ve teleported here. Catra knew how to climb the vents with ease. Adora struggling to get here means something else.

 “Entrapta, your room is really hard to get to.” She pulls herself up and huffs. Dusting herself off before she finally stands.

 “The isolation helps me focus on my scientific processes.” 

 “Oh, well that’s understandable. Privacy was hard to find in the Horde. Catra and I had this spot in the Fright Zone up on the roof. We used to go there to talk and...” She drifts off and fixes her red jacket, then walks over to me. “Anyway, can we talk?”

 The interrupted solitude festers an anxiety that itches at the back of my neck. I scratch it with a lock of my hair. “I… I suppose your company would be welcome.”

 She smiles and sits in front of me with her legs crossed. “Thanks.”

 “So what are you here to talk about?”

 “Well, I, ah… I guess, what’s your plan?”

 “I don’t have a plan, just a simulation.” I grab for something behind me. This time a hex driver—don’t have to worry about pinching myself with this. I roll it over in my hands. I look down at Adora’s lap. There’s a smudge of grease there. That’s odd. I wonder if she picked that up on the trip up here? There shouldn’t be any lubrication points in the ventilation ducting. I need to check if a leak has—

 “I think we can make a plan with a simulation. But is there really no other option?”

 I ratchet the hex driver in my hand. It clicks between our silent moments. “No. Managing the quantum-thermodynamic equilibrium of space takes a computation engine of power that we will never hope to achieve. Horde Prime was more of a lifeform than a person, spanning an entire galaxy.”

 She nods. “I can believe that.”

 “It took a She-Ra to purge his neural hive mind.” I smile, still averting my gaze from her face.

 “Hah. Well, I’ve been talking to Catra and Glimmer. They don’t like it, but I don’t think they have to. Is it going to be dangerous?”

 “Oh, very. Even with the Velvet Glove disabled in the florification event there may still be tech and weapons active on the station. Most of the bots likely are still functioning and there may be clones still operational. I don’t know what their behavior is going to be when we get there. And then we need to marry up the quantum compute engines of the First Ones and that could be perilous, too.”

 “You’re not selling this on being a good mission.” She sounds amused, rather than judging.

 “I don’t think there’s another way.” I twist the driver in my hand, it makes a squeaking noise against my glove.

 “We’ll make it work. We can clear out enough space for you.”

 “Adora, you know you can’t count on having She-Ra, right?”

 She hesitates, her hand drifting to her left forearm, but then she smiles broadly. “I still know how to use a staff.” She unfolds her legs. The gray canvas slides against her skin as it smooths the wrinkles. “It affects all the princess magic?”

 “Yes. Scorpia has reported that the other princesses have increasing fluctuations in their magical abilities. I believe our companions are the most skilled at nonmagical combat.” 

 Adora smirks. “I think Catra can take down half the station if you piss her off enough. We have plenty of troops with the five of us. It’d be too dangerous with too many people.”

 “I can give us some electromagnetic pulse weapons I have made in the bay. It should help.”

 “When did you make those?” 

 “Oh, when you all were on the Star Sibling planet. After… well after I set up the fabricators for them.” 

 “You do a lot when we’re not looking.” She shimmies closer to me. 

 I still fixate downward.

 “Hey, Catra and I have been talking a lot more. She said I have you to thank for that.” Her hand touches my shoulder. I look up, and see her earnest eyes gazing back at me.

 They hurt to look at. “I was just… you know.” I can’t talk.

 “She said you’re lonely here, too.”

 I drop the visor on my face and look back down. I can’t do this. I asked Catra to come back. Not Adora. 

 “I don’t really know what to say. I’m not as good talking about feelings and stuff. I lean on the other people for that.” She sounds painfully awkward already. “But I wanted to say something.”

 I keep silent, unmoving. I want to shove her away.

 “We’re all going through a lot on this trip. And we’re trying to be there for each other. I think it’s working. No small part thanks to you.”

  Her hand opens and clasps my shoulder. She pulls closer. I feel myself relax. I still look down. I glance through Darla’s diagnostics on my visor, looking for subsystems that are flickering a cautionary yellow. Everything is nominal and the fuel is replenished. The electrical systems in the lower wing are starting to show degradation from the increased amperage and are going to need rerouted through the central cabling. I need to find that short.

 “I think… we’re trying to understand each other better. We spent the past few years fighting and struggling. Nothing made sense. We all dealt with that in our different ways. I had mine, and—” Her hand tightens on my shoulder “—it was really lonely.”

 I stop the diagnostics and lift the visor, my gaze still fixated down. She has moved from my front to the side. “How? You had friends and help and everyone was behind you.”

 She smiles wanly. “Behind me, sure, but not next to me. For as long as I can remember, I’ve been expected to lead. Shadow Weaver, she—” Adora pauses, her eyes drifting to the side. She takes in a long breath. “She raised me to lead, told me I was special and different and pushed me harder than the others. Sometimes I wonder how right she was about me.”

 I don’t—I can’t… I feel the clicking of the ratchet. Adora doesn’t talk like this. Not to me. Her jacket. I’ve never bothered to look closer into the material. The weave must have interwoven fibers of hexagonally interlinked carbon nanofibers surrounding titanium filaments. To punch through that must take at least—No. Don’t lose focus.

 Her fingers touch her forearm again. “When I joined the Rebellion, I came as She-Ra—as an ex-Horde soldier. Not Adora. It was hard at first. The first few months in Bright Moon, I couldn’t sleep. It was so dark at night and the birds were so loud in the mornings when I was used to sleeping in a bunk room surrounded by others. Bow and Glimmer were so kind to me, but they didn’t know what it was like to grow up in the Horde. They didn’t understand. Soft beds, open spaces, warm food, it was awful… they thought it was funny. They thought I might come around. I didn’t, but because they’re so wonderful they just made the changes for me.”

 “I remember those days, too,” I say hesitantly. “The noises and people were very distracting. The thrum of machinery felt much more comfortable in the Fright Zone.” Less interferences, and a lab partner. I twist the hex driver harder in my gloved hands.

 She smirks. “It has its appeal, doesn’t it? I used to think Catra was the only one who understood.” Adora draws her knees up and leans over them. “Growing up together, we used to explore the Fright Zone. Every part of it. We made all these plans to rule it together—just the two of us.” Adora reaches out and finds an errant bolt on the floor. She picks it up and stands it on the threads. She holds it by the head with a single finger, balancing it. “But then I found the sword and left and…” She lets the bolt go and it clatters against the plates before she tilts it back up. “I’m worried about her. The longer we’re together, the more I’m seeing just how much we’ve changed. I can’t blame her for wondering what things would have been like if I hadn’t left. I’ve wondered that, too. But I just… I don’t understand the point in wondering. Not now that we’re okay and things are okay. That’s fine, right?” She turns her head to me and offers me a pained smile. “I guess I should just be happy she’s talking to me about it.”

 It hurts to see. I look to the side, but back to her eyes. I feel a panic ebb and flow in my chest. I want to run. I don’t want this conversation, but the words are falling from Adora like she is shedding a burden. This doesn’t seem right. Not Adora. I grasp for something to say. “I think she is getting better.”

 “I hope so. But it doesn’t feel right, somehow. Can I tell you a secret, Entrapta?” Her eyes. I feel myself getting lost in her pain.

 I swallow. “Are you sure you want to tell me?”

 “I think you’re the best person to tell.”

 I nod. “Okay.”

 “I feel… it feels selfish, but secretly I was always jealous of you and Scorpia.” She looks back down at her distraction. She tilts the bolt to the side holding it in precarious balance. “It was so hard seeing the three of you together and I could just tell how much you cared about her when I was supposed to do that. It was always just supposed to be the two of us. But I left and when she didn’t come with me, I just… I don’t know. I’m happy someone was there for her when I wasn’t and I think that the two of us having to forge our own paths has made us stronger now. But it didn’t make it easier to see it happening. That distance growing between us, knowing that I was the one that had caused it.”

 It’s as though two stray live wires have touched and they are arcing electricity without a fuse to shut off the flow. Forlorn words mix with the pain of lost time. The air is heavy with her outpouring. I… I want to look down, or hide, or something. But I can’t. I won’t. I sit there. I watch her. Diagnostics flow through my thoughts, not of a mechanism, but her feelings and thoughts. 

 “I wanted her to come with me. I assumed she’d just follow the same steps I did. We always did everything together, so why not this? I thought I knew everything there was to know about Catra, but I was wrong. I didn’t understand her at all—not like I thought I did. I took it for granted just how much control Shadow Weaver had over us. How much she pitted us against each other. And I never considered Catra would feel differently about it.” Adora spins the bolt beneath her finger, first clockwise and then counterclockwise as though to illustrate the difference. “I don’t think she gets why I chose to be She-Ra. I don’t even think I do. Not completely. It’s just, out of everybody, I always thought Catra would understand the most or at least try. But the more we talk, the more I realize that’s not going to happen. She’s here for her own reasons and it’s just another thing I was wrong about.” Too much applied pressure and the bolt snaps to the floor beneath her finger. She pauses a breath before righting it again. “I think the only person who could possibly understand what I did is Mara and she’s… well… you know… dead.” Adora laughs quietly before heaving a sigh. “But it doesn’t matter. We’ve all made our decisions and we all ended up here. Together.” She lets the bolt fall with a tiny clatter.

 “By my assessment, we appear to be functioning as optimally as we could expect given the systems and protocols we have brought with us.” The words fall dully from my mouth.

 Adora turns to me again with a lopsided smile. “After Catra told me what you said about Hordak and why you came, I wanted to talk with you. You’re up here by yourself a lot, and I don’t want you to think you’re doing this all alone.” She takes a deep breath as she rallies herself to say something she must have prepared beforehand. “I’ve been rambling, but I wanted to tell you something. I don’t think we all experience loneliness the same way. Mine was that no matter what I had to make things right. I had to fix everything because I couldn’t trust anyone else to. We both fix things in our own ways, Entrapta. You and me. But in the end we kind of stand alone.”

 All of my distractions flat-line. The ship, the thoughts, they all fall away. Just Adora and I sit here in this space. That makes sense. She makes sense. She tugs me over and I don’t resist. She wraps her arms around me and I pull into her chest. “It’s hard.” Is all I mutter.

 “It hurts a lot. I know. And I wish we had an answer for you. I’ll do everything I can to help you find what you need, to not be lonely. Until then, we’re your friends. And we need you to get this neural computer thing running. And you’re the only person in the galaxy that can do it.”

 I nod, rubbing my face against her jacket. “I can do it.” And that’s what hurts the most sometimes.

 Adora pulls away and looks down at me. “Could we work on a plan together?”

 I am once again startled out of words. I blink at her. “I… Yes, collaboration would be optimal due to the complexity of this problem.”

 “Great! I have red string and a corkboard.”

 “I have models and predicted encounters that may be in opposition to our mission.”

 “That’s perfect!” Adora smiles. “I’ll be right back.”

 “I’m reading diminishing vital signs, Entrapta.”

 “Understood, Darla. I think I need to take it from here.” I hold the small silver cube in front of me. I take a deep breath. With two spare strands of hair, I grasp at either side of my face, rallying myself. No more delays. I can do this. 

 I step forward, and the door opens. The entire ship’s crew is in the medical diagnostic room. Micah stands beside Angella’s bed holding her hand delicately. Bow and Glimmer stand on the opposite side of him. They all watch the queen, scowling in worry and sadness. The blips of her monitors are weak.

 To the left, on the other side of the room, are Adora and Catra holding each other as they look over Melog. Their mane and tail are diminished, and they lay unmoving on their side. The stillness is startling, but the corresponding sensors for their magical biology still show faint signs of life.

 No one looks at me.

 I approach the middle of the room and touch Bow, Glimmer, Adora, and Catra with my hair on their shoulders. They all turn to me in unison. I scan between them. “I can help.” 

 I see Glimmer’s eyes light up first.

 To my left Catra is unmoved. 

 Adora manages a faint smile. “Whatcha got, Entrapta?”

 “In the simulated models, I’ve miniaturized a quantum compute engine. It’s not much, but it might buy us some time.” I offer the cube in front of me.

 Bow approaches me and touches my shoulder. The gesture means enough.

 “I’m going to need Melog and Angella to be in the same bed. The radius is pretty small.”

 Adora nods and stoops down to pick up Melog. Catra swats her hands away. “I got them!” Her harshness shocks Adora, but she steps back.

 Catra deposits Melog at the foot of Angella’s bed and steps away holding her arm. Adora quickly stands beside her again, holding her shoulders. The outburst forgotten.

 “I think she’ll like this,” Glimmer says with teary eyes.

 I pick the cube up and place it over the bed. My hair keys on tiny buttons and the cube suspends above them. Radiating green light faintly shimmers in the air like illuminated dust. A cone projects over them. There’s a minimal blip in the vitals of the two.

 “It won’t heal them. But it’ll hold them long enough to get into the Velvet Glove.” I look down at the two sickly people. I want to touch them, but I’m afraid. A lingering thought wafts through my mind. Am I going to forget them when they’re gone? I bite my lip and step back.

 “Thank you, Entrapta.” Micah touches the side of Angella’s head, tucking her hair back. “I take it you’ve all agreed to go?”

 “I—I guess.” Catra looks to the side again. Adora gently squeezes her against her side.

 “We have to.” Glimmer wraps an arm around Bow and leans against him.

 Micah brushes his wife’s hair lovingly one more time before focusing his attention on the rest of us. There’s a seriousness to his eyes—his face. A graveness he’s carried with him since Beast Island. “Be careful,” he says, “and please come back alive.” 

 His voice falls into the room and is lost in the serenade of dying heartbeats.

 I flick the monitor back on. Adora, Catra, Bow, and Glimmer sit in the mess hall. Their green ghosts are half scale to fit in my room. Catra and Glimmer sit adjacent to each other, while Bow and Adora stand facing them. Adora stands next to her corkboard with the optimal encounter flowchart that we were able to collaborate on.

 “You’re sure?” Bow asks with a skeptical tone.

 “No, none of us are.” Adora fidgets with her left forearm.

 “We barely got through there when we had She-Ra on our side.” Catra hunches over the table with her fingers intertwined.

 “Yeah, but she said there’s not another option. And I’m going to believe her, and you all should too.” Adora smacks at the corkboard with an ivory luminescent pointy stick that is normally the Sword of Protection.

 “We need to be smart if we’re doing this. And no bravado.” Glimmer points at Adora.

 Adora emphatically points at a particular picture with several branches of choices spiraling out of it. “We put that into the plan. I don’t have anything to prove this time.”

 “Oh yeah, I heard that before,” Catra says sardonically.

 “What? I don’t always need to rush ahead.”

 “Uh, yeah you do. I trained with you for our whole life in the Fright Zone, remember? You still don’t know how to relax.” 

 “Okay, okay, I’ll try to stick with you guys.”

 Bow steps in the midst of them. “We can’t just improvise this time. We all have practice fighting without magic on our side, and this is going to be serious. We don’t know what automated protocol is left on Horde Prime’s ship. We need to stick together, and keep tight around Entrapta.”

 As if to punctuate her point, the Sword of Protection-turned-pointer flickers out of existence. There’s a painful, awkward silence as the gravity of what was happening settles on each and every one of us. Without missing a beat, Adora reaches into her pocket and pulls out the collapsable pointy-stick I had given her as a back-up. She extends it fully with a decisive snap.

 I smile. She’ll be fine without magic. I rotate the holographic display around to get a better view from another angle.

 Adora begins to point at the different pictures and crayon drawings of our visual representation of the plan. “Right, so she’s going to carry the quantum uplink device and we can’t let her fall behind. We need a forward wedge with someone covering behind. Bow, I need you in the back since you have the range advantage to keep pursuers off our tail.”

 “Got it.” He gives a small salute.

 Adora’s confidence swells in her face. “Catra and Glimmer you guys cover left and right. We need to move forward so disable and move along. We have to cut off any flanking maneuvers before they become a problem. I take point.”

 Catra growls in frustration and runs a hand over her eyes. “Adora what did I just say about you barging ahead all the time?”

 “I won’t be barging ahead. I’ll be… out front. There’s a difference!” Adora collapses the pointer and puts her hands on her hips indignantly, notices she’s making the gesture, and slams them down on the table instead. “It’ll work! I’ll cut the path ahead and we’ll all get through this together. Entrapta also said she has some kind of disruption rifles that could help.”

 “What’re those?” Catra raises her eyebrow.

 “I dunno. They sounded helpful though.”

 Catra sighs. “Well I guess she can tell us about them before we head out.”

 “Everyone good with the plan?” Adora smiles and scans the room.

 There is a unison of agreement. 

 “Great someone needs to get Entrapta and get her up to speed now.”

 I key in on the comm in the room. “Oh, that’s okay. I’ve been listening the whole time!”

 Adora smirks while the rest of the group exchanges looks of disbelief.

 I pick up an electromagnetic pulse rifle with my pigtails and check the plasmatic battery charge. This one seems to be in peak operational status as well. I worry briefly over a thought. I hope they can get me there. My data terminal should be shielded from an errant blast but I still have a concern that it could be damaged. The neural uplinks, if compromised, could cause a fatal disruption in our neurochemistry prior to my uplink.

 I just need to stay on long enough to—

 There’s a jarring noise behind me as the door to the storage bay slams open. I spin to see Catra and Adora rush into the room and close the door behind them.

 Adora has her back pressed against the wall, her chest heaving. “You think she’s actually going to do it this time?”

 “How should I know?” Catra barks back.

 I cock an eyebrow at them. “What’s going on?”

 “Entrapta! Thank Etheria you’re here.” Adora finally starts to catch her breath. She holds her position barricading the door. “Do you know if Darla’s hull is magic-proof?”

 “Why would she need to be—”

 Darla flickers between us in a squinting orb. “Ouch!”

 “What is happening?”

 Catra’s tail swishes back and forth in her agitation as she inches away from the door, apparently torn between retreat and helping Adora. “We were getting ready in the mess hall and checking our equipment and Bow tried another dumbass pet name for Glimmer and she lost it! Where’d he even come up with that one? Did you tell him to try it?”

 “ Me ?” Adora shouts indignantly. “Why do you think it was me?”

 A cold wash cascades down my neck. “Is there… a problem with the pet name?”

 Adora stares at me wide-eyed. She lurches across the room and seizes me by the shoulders. “What did you do?”

 Darla flinches again and makes another noise of distress.

 “What’s going on with her ?” Catra tenses her claws against the wall causing another scratch.

 “She’s recording magical impacts in the mess hall!” I pull down my visor and use my optical inputs to disable the pain reflex.

 “Thank you, Entrapta.”

 Adora lets me go and edges away. “Maybe we should try to talk to Glimmer. Tell her it was a silly joke. She’ll understand, right?”

 There’s a distinct bushiness to Catra’s tail. She’s hedged to a stack of crates near the wall. “Fuck that! I’m not getting on Sparkles’ bad side ever again.”

 There’s a loud bang and the door bursts open. This time Bow comes charging through. He appears to be lacking any physical damage although his cardiovascular system is running at such a severe pace that it could cause an arrhythmia. He slams the door shut and braces a shoulder against it.

 “Entrapta! That was a bad idea! Glimmy was terrible!” His voice cracks and he buckles forward, placing his hands on his knees.

 “ Glimmy ?” Adora crests in panic. “Entrapta what did you do ?”

 “I… he… there was an optimization request and I—”

 There’s a flash between us. Glimmer materializes directly in front of Bow. Her hands shimmer in her magical confluence as she stares him down. “You really thought Glimmy was a good idea? It sounds just like Spinny! You couldn’t put a little more effort in?” 

 “I didn’t…” His voice cracks and he holds both hands up defensively.

 “Oh, so one of you thought it was a good idea to put him up to this?” She rounds on Catra and Adora.

 “We didn’t do anything this time! Honest!” Adora holds her hands up as well.

 “ This time ?” She raises her ominously glowing hands.

 Catra finds a nearby crate to dive behind.

 “It seems this was a suboptimal experimental result.” I scratch my chin with a pigtail. “Darla, make a note.”

 “Yes, Entrapta. Where would you like me to file it?”

 “Under friendship experiment number… sixty-eight—No! Sixty-nine.”

 Glimmer turns to me and her hands flicker out from the threat of impending doom. Astonishment floods her expression. “Entrapta? You…?”

 “What?” I look at the terrified faces of Bow and Adora over Glimmer’s shoulders. “I do the science. It’s an iterative process.”

 Her astonishment turns into a broad grin before she disappears in a cloud of sparkles only to reappear next to Bow. She smirks and pats his arm. “You thought asking Entrapta was a good idea?”

 “I… She… I thought maybe—”

 She leans in and kisses him on the cheek. “I guess it’s the thought that counts.”

 A hushed silence fills the room. 

 I retrieve my data pad and pull up my previous calculations on the matter. “Perhaps another variable needs to be accounted for in the naming optimization between two—”

 “Entrapta, don’t push your luck.” Catra’s voice calls out from behind a crate.

Chapter Text

 Getting this far wasn’t a problem, not until the bots showed up.

 There’s a concussive blast as the electromagnetic pulse erupts from Adora’s rifle in the front. It moves like a wave of blue energy, crackling over every surface it touches. A titanic war-bot the size of a large building collapses in front of her. The pyramid-shaped body crumples on the legs, each the size of a tree. The thud is felt as much as it’s heard.

 “Ooh I could get used to this thing!” Adora shouts over her shoulder, a manic grin on her face.

 “Yeah, but it won’t work on organics so be careful!” I hold the quantum interface over my head with my hair. I scan for any stragglers with my visor and track the swarming army of renegade bots that surround us.

 “What’s an organic?” she calls back.

 “The squishy ones!”

 “Got it!”

 She-Ra’s explosive florification has made traversing the geometries of the station more difficult. The access hall is the largest one I’ve seen on the Velvet Glove. Darla could’ve flown right to the main server through this corridor, but the trunks and brush create bottlenecks as small as two of us abreast.  Plants have displaced many of the metal plates and they jut out at strange angles.

 The toxic green lighting of Horde Prime still glows faintly down some of the walls where the illuminating elements haven’t been shattered, spilling the ooze onto the floor. Many of the archways that sectioned off the hallways have fallen as well and present their own obstacles. We take turns climbing over them. 

 Another bipedal bot pops up from around one of the tree trunks and aims its arm cannon at us. The charge is a high-pitched squeal among the subsonic rumblings of the ship. Catra is quick to pivot and fire a shot with the disruption rifle. The pulse of electricity arcs over its metal body and it crumples in a heap of sparking metal. 

 “How much further?” she asks around a snarl.

 I check the projection in my mask. A long corridor lies in front of the glowing orb of our beacon. “My best estimation is another kilometer.”

 “Another what ?” Glimmer calls from my right. She fires at a flying bot careening towards us, but it deftly darts away. It flies on a collision course towards her, but the butt of her rifle intercepts it and scatters the nuisance against the far wall.

 “The central access node is in the heart of the station!” I pull the quantum engine out of the pathway of another swing of her rifle. Physical damage to the engine would be a suboptimal incident. “What do you want me to do?”

 A bot speeds towards us crawling along on its stomach. This one is long and snake-like with a maw full of fangs that drip with toxic venom. None of these bots fit the catalogued specimens observed during Prime’s invasion. It is unclear if these are mutations caused by the rampant magic of She-Ra or if these were contingency bots activated after his demise. Bow pivots out from the group and fires an arrow that strikes the bot in its face. It dies in a combustion of electricity and fire.

 Its death throes are interrupted with a loud slamming noise, and the lights go out. We are immersed in darkness.

 “Uh oh.” I mentally assemble scenarios that I have predicted for a lack of visual contact.

 “What ‘uh oh’? No, uh oh. You can’t say that.” I hear Adora step back to the group.

 “This isn’t good.” I flip through my visor digging through menus trying to break into the Velvet Glove’s interface remotely. Nothing.

 “Entrapta, you have a plan for this. Right?” Catra bumps into me from the left. She yelps and everyone in the corridor gasps.

 “I… sure.” I keep flipping through menus, and scan my equipment for a light or an interface device.

 “Guys… What’s that?” Bow pats my shoulder.

 I lift my visor. A wall of eyes stare back, glowing red against the backdrop of black. I drop the visor again but see nothing in their shapes.

 “I… I can’t extrapolate a possible construct for those ocular sensors... I can’t pick anything up.” My heads-up display only shows a blank hallway. They seem to be invisible to the scanners on the station. A creeping groan crawls around us, reverberating against the metal struts and framework.

 “Well, something is out there.” Glimmer bumps into the crowded group, releasing a small squeak. 

 We huddle together in the dark.

 “I have a flare arrow.” I hear a movement in Bow’s quiver.

 “How long does it last?” Catra tenses next to me. 

 All of their bodies feel smothering around me. I want to push them away.

 “Not long enough.” He gulps.

 “Entrapta.” Glimmer turns to face me, at least I think she does. “Can we use magic?”

 I flip to the other overlay display and scan the magical resonances in matter-space. “I don’t know. The fields are fluctuating and it can crash at any moment.” 

 Adora’s staff opens with a pop. “No, you saw the field fluctuations before when you hooked us up to those diagnostic machines... And the field travels from Micah, to Glimmer, then me. Right?”

 “Ye—Yeah.” I feel a strength take hold in my chest.

 She-Ra’s sword materializes in Adora’s hands. The glow fills our vicinity but the shape of what holds the eyes remains out of sight. 

 Glimmer steps away from me. She flexes her hands into fists, but nothing happens. I drop my visor again and watch the spectrum dip move through her signature, and then to Adora’s and the sword blinks out.

 “So, tell us before our powers fade. Adora and I are going to trade off.” Her hands flex with the glittering power of the Moonstone.

 “Oh, this sucks.” Catra sighs. She crouches in preparation and opens her hands.

 “It’s going to have to do.” The power phases back into Adora again, and she summons the sword carrying the light around us. “Bow, send it.”

 “Roger.” He looses the arrow from behind me and it lights in a bright red flame. Its trajectory embeds it into the ceiling and illuminates the shapes in front of us.

 The disfigured clones stare back. The minions of Prime stand in a ragged line. They groan at the presence of the flare. Their bodies have been mutilated. They’re a concatenation of plants and bots. Tubes fasten into their skin and leak with the green amniotic fluid that stains their white robes. Arms have been reappropriated as ragged claws of metal. Bodies are covered in disfigured tumors of branches that sit in festering wounds.

 Each is different, each has a face of agony.

 One of them screams. The skeletal face opening wider than possible, fangs unfurling like a snake’s. 

 “Oh, this is really going to suck.” Catra’s claws open with a snap.

 “Glimmer! You’re online!”

 “Got it!” She dashes ahead. Her fingers trace a pattern in the air in front of her. The glyph hangs in the air, and with her fist she draws her glittering magic, casting the hall in flickering light. She slams her fist through the glyph and a beam of magic lances through the clone. He collapses.

 “Fading now! Adora!”

 She draws the sword again from the immaterial dimensions. “For the honor of Grayskull!” The corridor flashes with the light and she swings the sword wide, wasting no time. The blade cuts a savage shimmering gash through the dark and the slash of rainbow strikes another pair of charging infuriated former subjects of Prime. It shears through their bodies and they fall lifeless onto the ground.

 The crawling magical spectrum anomaly creeps into the She-Ra band. “Fading! Glimmer you’re ready in a few seconds.” 

 She-Ra flicks out of her shape and Adora stands in front of the rushing horde.

 “Oh crap.” Bow steps to my side and draws two arrows. He looses them and hits two charging clones in the head. They collapse at Adora’s feet. She doesn’t even look to acknowledge them.

 The rushing mob surges to us. Their other-worldly screams fill the air and pierce my ears. I want to clutch my hands over them and hide. But I can’t. Teeth and claws bear down on us. Adora steps aside, striking one on the face and knocking it down. She spins her staff and stabs the back of its neck.

 Catra leaps forward and slashes at the throat of another mutated clone that reaches for Adora. She drags her claws across the neck and it falls clutching the open wounds. Groaning, it dies in bubbling amniotic fluid. Adora surges in the direction that Catra just left. She jams the staff between the legs of a opponent and lifts, knocking it on its back.

 “Glimmer! Go!” I scan for some kind of server connection or biological signal that ties them together. My display shows empty space between them. They seem to be acting on their own. In the madness of the quiet on the station. An insanity of lost purpose.

 Glimmer knocks another adversary away with her staff and forms a glyph. She unleashes a scorching flame on the back of the crowd to stifle their progress. One breaks through the wall of fire with its skin smoldering and blisters popping to charge at me. The face is full of fury and pain. A beam from Glimmer catches it across the face and it falls in front of me.

 I stifle my scream. I look back. Adora has three more monstrous opponents bearing on her.

 “Adora!” I cry out. I flit through more menus, trying to pull something up that can crack into the network. I manage to get a schematic up of the station. The halls feed around us. There’s no ducts or tunnels. I hate this place.

 Adora spins with the staff knocking a group away. She summons the sword and follows the staff with the blade, cutting through their chests in a single stroke. More gurgling death.

 Bow unleashes an arrow from behind me again. This one splits wide into a long rope and catches a string of disfigured foes across the chest. With a jolt of electricity they fall, smoke emanating from their bodies.

 Catra steps back to open up the distance and kick another charging monstrosity. It staggers away into a crowd buying her time to slash another at the back of their knee. “We can’t keep this up!”

 Adora backpedals, striking another monster under the jaw and kicks it away. “I have an idea.”

 “Am I going to hate it?” Catra claws the clone that Adora downed. 

 “Not if it saves us!”

 Their movements are fluid, trading strikes and staggers of their opponents into one another. Catra spins and kicks a clone in the back for Adora to meet it with an elbow across the face.

 “Entrapta I need to know when we’re about to transition between Glimmer and me.”

 “Got it! It’ll be another minute.”

 “Glimmer, I need the most light you can manage.” Adora dodges another oncoming attacker long enough for Bow to land an arrow into its forehead.

 Glimmer spins her staff, causing a couple of the assailants to pause. “That’s going to be pretty bright.”

 “Brighter the better. What’s our count Entrapta?”

 “Thirty seconds!” I smack a clone away with my hair and knock it hard enough into the wall that I hear a snap. It falls limply.

 “We’re going to need to run. I’m clearing us a path right through the middle.” Adora and Catra bump back to back. A grin crosses both of their faces despite the savagery and peril. A surge of abominations charges them. Adora moves first and takes a wide stance. She holds the staff horizontal and knocks it into the onslaught holding them at bay. Catra dashes and slides between the legs of Adora and attacks low, tearing muscles and bone apart. The clones fall in agony.

 “Fifteen seconds!” 

 Glimmer steps up and with both hands draws a glyph. The geometric lines spin and radiate in front of her. It draws in the meager light from around us. My visor picks up on the warp of matter-space that it’s drawing from. “Ready!”

 The shadow flickers between each of their signatures. “Go!”

 Adora leaps into the air straight at the mob. “For the honor of Grayskull !” a burst of light engulfs her and she lands as She-Ra. The blade collides with the ground, buckling the plates with her impact and tearing through them in a shockwave directed at the clones. Glimmer’s flare of light follows behind her. The manifestation of incandescent magic surges past She-Ra like a stream over a river rock and meets the rainbow wave of energy, impacting against the malformed horde of Prime. They flinch from the light, and the wave tears them asunder. They’re cast in all directions against the wall. She-Ra’s wave is indiscriminate. Steel, wood, and flesh all are torn through.

 “Run!”

 I lift onto legs of my hair and charge with everyone else across the swathe cut through the mindless and misshapen Horde.

 The door slams shut behind us, blocking the horrid noises of the disfigured clones in the hall. The console sits in the middle of the circular room surrounded by doors the same size as the one we left behind. It towers around us; in the dark it stretches into nothing behind the console.

 “Okay! I am going to get hooked in.” I run to the middle console and skid on my knees with the quantum compute engine. I have the panel off and the leads secured before I stop moving. “This should only take a second. But not literally!”

 I hear a stutter from Catra.

 “Hey, you okay?” Adora’s concern teases at the back of my thoughts.

 No. I’m not. But she isn’t asking me.

 “Yeah, I’m just… bad memories.” Catra stammers out.

 I block them out and log on into the terminal. I close my visor and use a holo-projected keyboard to interface. Horde Prime’s neural network was just as complicated and obtuse as before, but now I have practice. I break through the network firewall into the facilities to restore the main power and lighting. The walls glow with white luminescence interspersed with the wood of invasive plants. The ghastly green decorative illuminations also line the walls.

 There’s a thunk behind me. I break in deeper into the station’s sensors and can see the masses of clones. Their minds are lost. I scan their brains for wave-forms of consciousness neuro-electrical signals but find a flatline in all but the most basal functions. They’re acting in pain and instinct only.

 “The doors should hold for long enough to get me in there and shut everything in.” I draw wires from the quantum compute engine. These end in fine-pointed needles. I hold the three of them in my pigtails. “Two of you need to stay behind and look over us. If the cables are pulled and our consciousness is in the neural net, we’ll be trapped there forever.”

 They look at me gravely. Catra touches the back of her neck. Mindful, she drops her hand and grasps her bicep instead. “I’m not going back in there.” She sounds ashamed.

 Bow steps in and touches her shoulder. “No one is asking you to. I’ll stay out here with you.”

 Adora readies a protest.

 “No, I need the signature bands of She-Ra, elemental, and sorcery magic in the neural network. I will trace the circuits as we traverse the neural net-space using your connections to magic.”

 Her and Glimmer nod. 

 “We’re here for you, Entrapta,” Glimmer says. 

 They take up seats beside me, watching me expectantly. Trustingly.

 “Good. I’m sorry but this is going to hurt. I need to connect to the brainstem.”

 Adora and Glimmer tense.

 “You have to relax. If your neck is tight, I could paralyze you.” I turn to each of them.

  Glimmer glares, but there’s determination underlying the expression. “That’s not helping.”

 “Okay, then—” Another smack against the door interrupts Adora and we all flinch.

 “No time!” I jab the needles into the three of our necks with my hair. It hits like a bullet of pain jamming into my back and down. A flash of heat carries up from my tailbone and back up my spine. When it reaches the needle point, I feel the pain release and my body relax. I open my eyes.

 Infinite space.

 Reality folds in on itself and warps at the edges of the known and unknown. Adora and Glimmer are beside me. I feel both of them. They’re agitated. Scared. They don’t really understand. It’s hard to explain. 

 My thoughts spider through the air with the same dexterity of my hair, grasping at the quantum foam of space through the computer. I pluck their immaterial signatures and overlay them inside of the neural networking. I can touch the code with mere thought. Their connections synchronize with quantum-portal space and the requisite computations.

 Every step radiates new space around me. The quantum folds touch in the neural network and the computational cycles take those calculations and iterate on them around me. Every step releases new realities into the world. Not just here, but in the fabric of all space-time. Portal and matter-space intertwine with each other in this world as the First Ones quantum compute engine finds new pathways in the qubits of logical processors. I am threading through a different reality with my mind. 

 The uplink has started.

 It’s hungry. The neural network consumes the new algorithms like a famished person given a feast before them. 

 The lust for information intoxicates me.

 “Everything is happening as predicted.” I try to reassure them.

 “ What’s happening?” Glimmer holds her arms closer around herself. I don’t need to look at her. I sense it all around me.

 “They’re synchronizing right now. The neural net is more compatible with the qubit information and the quantum machine is calculating more efficiently than I expected. I thought I’d need to reprogram something, but I guess with a galaxy of neural logical processors, it adapted around the new information quickly.”

 “Is that a problem?” Adora clasps her arm and walks closer to my side. She sticks to the growing web of light that I walk on. Every step forward fills in the gray space around us.

 Shadows of the world permeate the space of gray. I observe across the cosmos every pylon and station that Horde Prime left behind as bright sparks in the dim features. It doesn’t matter how many light-years away they are. They’re all connected. From each of those, another web radiates away as they connect to the neural pathways. The spire of the Velvet Glove is in front of us, towering so high that it feels like another dimension at the top. It’s just an outline of the matter-space that it occupies. 

 It’s beautiful.

 “ Entrapta .” Adora grasps my wrist. “Is that a problem?”

 “No, it just means the information is assimilating at a higher rate than I modeled.” I pull my hand away. “The central hub is just ahead.”

 “Can we hurry? We don’t know how long Catra and Bow can hold out.”

 I close my eyes. I look back at our bodies we left on the Velvet Glove. We’re sitting around the terminal. Bow and Catra have their backs to us. All of the realities spider away from that moment encompassed in the qubits. I feel down every fork and watch them fall. In a projected reality, the mutated clones tear us apart. I don’t like that one. I lock it off and thread the light into one where they hold on for a bit longer. I can control reality. Fate will mean nothing to me soon.

 I can feel time.

 “Entrapta!” Adora calls out again.

 With an effort as simple as voluntary respiration, I shift the neural reality around us. I open my eyes. “We’re here.”

 We stand in the umbral bowels of the projected Velvet Glove. Shadows of the matter-space writhe like mud kicked into a turbulent water flow. The echoes matter envelope the dimensions of portal-space. This other reality is shaping  perfectly as predicted by my synaptic models I project into them. The space readies for my consciousness.

 Adora and Glimmer’s surprise is palpable.

 Mine too. I see a figure in white standing at the console. The red bat wings of the Horde adorn the center of his shimmering robes.

 “Entrapta.” He pivots away from the shadowed projection of a physical terminal.

 “Hordak?” Adora steps between him and me. “How are you here?”

 He narrows his glowing crimson eyes at us. “You didn’t tell them?” 

 “Tell us what?” Glimmer follows Adora’s lead moves between us.

 Hordak’s mouth twists in a sneer. “She and I have been working on the neural net since she left with you.”

 “What?” Adora reels a step backward.

 I look down. Capillaries of light thread through the neural reality around us like fungal hyphae in rich soil. They distract me from the involuntary emotional cues of Adora’s sense of betrayal.

 “She needed my help finalizing the model.” He touches his chest, concealing the tip of a bat wing. “We’re here to finish it. The network is almost ready for the embedding of her consciousness.”

 “Her consciousness ?” Glimmer demands. “No one’s getting embedded into anything!”

  Adora turns to me. “Entrapta? How did you… why didn’t you…” 

 Both her and Glimmer’s gazes hurt. In the new reality I am experiencing, I cannot hide myself from their eyes. I see all. I know all. Including their disbelief.

 “You wouldn’t have understood.” I look up, staring into the empty space between the two of them. “Your presence has started the quantum algorithm, but I need to finish the uplink with Hordak. It needs a guiding hand from the inside to cohere the magical energy around matter. It needs a person. You two need to help Catra and Bow. You don’t need to see this.” It’s the closest I can get to a goodbye.

 “Wait!” Adora reaches out to me.

 I pull their uplinks and both of them flicker and fade away.

 “I’ve been waiting for you.” Hordak crosses the streams of light to approach me.

 “Thank you. This has been incredible working with you.” I smile at him. Force myself to.

 He touches delicately at my cheek. I flinch away but suppress further troublesome involuntary reactions. He doesn’t notice, but smiles back, bearing all of his teeth in a self-satisfied smile. “This will open up an entire new reality for us. We can resume the work of Prime, but as gods of the universe. I couldn’t have done this without you, Entrapta.”

 “I know. It will be nice to have someone with me.” How do my words feel so empty in this moment?

 He extends his hands around us as though he was lord of the infinite computations that surround us. “Yes, together our thoughts and minds will be intertwined. We just need to finish the connection and uplink. We will leave our frail bodies behind.”

 I nod again. Certainty awaits us. A reality that I can control.

 “Well.” Impatience edges into his voice. “Get on with it.” 

 I pause briefly. His tone triggers a strange but fleeting reaction inside of me that I quell. I extend the tendrils of my hair, now raw strings of degenerate matter, coalesced in primordial energy. They extend past reality and into the unknowable infinity. They join the quantum computations all around me. The universe is full of them. Filaments of swarming light. Everything is touched, all of space, all of time. I see the future, the past, and that which is unknown.

 This can’t be fleeting. I need to stay. I knew I would stay. It was certain. Logical.

 “Yes! I can see it too!” Hordak’s voice surrounds me. “Entrapta so much is opening before us.”

 We need this. I need this. The fingers of light reach around my ankles, my wrists. They lift me up, my limbs are outstretched. I do the same with Hordak. This feels right.

 “We will be benevolent and kind. We will know all and be all.” His voice is honey-sweet in joy.

 Maybe I’ll be happy.

 I intertwine the tendril of radiance behind each of us. The point focused on the neck. Severing the medulla oblongata will be the fastest and most painless way to uplink. My neurons will be one with the net, and it’ll be over.

 I reach out again. I feel the world.

 Adora, Catra, Glimmer, and Bow stand with their backs to my body still in matter-space.

 Adora is strong. She glares at the oncoming monstrosities. She wants to protect me.

 Catra is scared. Her claws are out, and she swipes at an oncoming deformed clone. She doesn’t want to lose me.

 Glimmer is determined. She smacks another one across the face and knocks it away. She wants to take me away from here.

 Bow is worried. He looses another arrow and it creates an arcing interference conduit, disabling a group of monsters. He wants to be here instead of me.

 Another focus. Another place.

 Micah sits by the bed of Angella. He watches the monitors, and holds her hand desperately. He doesn’t want to lose her again.

 Melog is curled up on Angella’s lap. Both of their breathing is shallow. The interference field is waning. They are breathing their last breaths.

 “Finish it, and we can save them.”

 I can’t. I pause.

 It’s not the science we have the hope in. It’s you.

 “Entrapta, do it now!” He strains against the light, impatient.

 Override.

 I wrench my hand free and the tendril shatters. Diffuse, degenerate matter falls like broken ice on a hard floor. The rest of the restraints fall and I land on the platform of light. I flex my hand and Hordak’s restraints shatter as well. He falls to his knees. There’s another answer, one the model didn’t predict. One that I couldn’t predict.

 “What are you doing, you fool?” He growls out between coughs.

 “I am the last person you should be calling a fool, Hordak.” I extend my consciousness past our bodies and into the folds of the neural network and its binding with reality. I can abandon certainty. I can embrace the unknown.

 “They’ll die. You have to finish the uplink! It’s the only way to save your friends.” He hisses with poisonous anger. The voice that haunted me on Beast Island. 

 But never again.

 He attempts to rise, but I manifest a column of luminous neural computations that force him back down.

 “They should be our friends.” I step closer to him. 

 He twists his head to glare up at me. “What will they do for you? What can they do? You’ll never be like them.”

 “That’s okay.” I’m recomputing. The system doesn’t need me. The network is building itself. The strands of radiant neural algorithms are reforming. They’re twisting back around one another. They climb into the column of shadow that is the Velvet Glove.

 He struggles against the light that holds him. “You’ll always be alone without me.” 

 His anger floods into the calculations around us, risking a distortion of the data that could result in a qubit corruption. I open my hand and the column dissipates at my will. I reach out again with my consciousness, and incorporeal threads of his link into the neural network extend out from his body. The network doesn’t need him to guide it. It doesn’t need him in it. With a slice of the primordial light, I sever his connections.

 Freed of his confinement, he sits back and stares at me wide-eyed. Crimson eyes of disbelief. As though he never formulated my defiance as a possible scenario. “What did you do?”

 “I’m taking you offline.” I step past him, but still see him. I see everything. 

 He turns, sitting up into a squat behind me. “Entrapta, please.”

 “No, Hordak. You won’t take me from my friends. I’d rather be lonely with them than spend the rest of reality with you.” I look at him, an unrestrained mixtured of pity and grief and relief in my chest. “I don’t think you’re a bad man, but you can’t treat me like this anymore. You can’t have this. No one can have this. It’s a new reality, and I want to see it for myself.”

 He snarls and lunges. I sense him reaching for my neck.

 “Goodbye.” With an effort no more taxing than a twitch of my finger, I trace his linkback to Etheria and pull his connection. He flickers out of existence. 

 I’m alone.

 I linger. I turn to the shadowed spire. Filaments and fibers of light crawl across the projected form of the Velvet Glove and turn it from an umbral monument into a beacon of infinite, growing radiant calculations. In each thread is a reality, a new possibility. Magic embeds back into the material world, and the commingling draws a polychromatic brilliance of energy out of the space. The universe reshapes itself.

 No recording of this event could ever be made. An experience that defies even a qualitative data collection surrounds me. A new reality blooms. One that doesn’t need me. The thaumetic neural network is born.

 The universe is laid before me, and I shift through the morass of light and matter with a projection of my consciousness back to the physical Velvet Glove. 

 My friends are surrounded. A chaotic and desperate last stand unfolds around my body still sitting with its uplink to the quantum engine attached to the back of my neck. A clone wrenches Adora’s staff away. Another slams his fist into Bow’s stomach. Catra grasps the wrists of another, trying to hold him off Glimmer who has fallen. 

 It needs to stop. They won’t hurt my friends anymore. 

 I hold out a hand and the clones cease their operation. They collapse as the limp, lifeless dolls they are. Adora, Catra, Bow, and Glimmer stand in disbelief and I see relief in their faces.

 My focus on reality shifts back to Darla. I find the sick bay. Micah huddles over Angella and Melog. I feed the interference field that is their only thread suspending their mortality. The light fills them and their breathing picks back up. I feel Micah’s astonishment, and he cries. I hear his ‘thank you’ across the cosmos.

 I take a look around me. All of space, all of the information. The qubits blend with the neural network and every computation is completed. It’s only a matter of finding the answers.

 But it’d be cheating if I didn’t figure out myself.

 I pull my uplink to embrace reality again.

 Uncertainty awaits, and I am ready.

Chapter Text

 My pigtail is a confluence of light that connects directly to the terminal in my room. Data flows with as much ease as my cognitive thoughts through the calculations being performed. I visualize the calculations as easy as I can recognize spatial positioning in my room. The combination of the efficiencies of my new data interface and the visualization of a hologram are accelerating my interpretation and dissection of the new data. Darla’s computer runs a cross-referential search algorithm and sorts through the strands of portal-space in a projection in my room. They are coalescing into channels of magic just as predicted. Matter is acting like a nucleation point for the raw elemental energies.

 The filaments are stretching from a location that is slowly resolving itself. In a few more weeks, loci of magic will emerge and possibly the origination points of the energy can be found. Oh, it’s so exciting .

 Darla’s sensors pick up a biological signal traversing the ducting and I withdraw the shimmering threads of my hair from the terminal shutting down the visual projections. They return to their normal purple coloration.

 “Hey, Entrapta.” Catra’s head emerges from the vent adjacent to my room.

 “Catra! Hi!” I spin on my seat on the floor and beckon her in.

 “I brought someone.” She pounces upward and lands soundlessly on her hands and feet. She slides to the side, and Melog pokes their head up from the vent behind her.

 I loose a tiny squee. “Melog! I haven’t had you up here yet! How’re you feeling? Better?”

 They mew in reply and hop up. With a couple quick trots they rub their shoulder against me. They press their muzzle into my face and a lick kisses me.

 “Blech.” I wipe the lingering wetness away. “What brings you guys up here?” I scratch behind their ears and they lean into my hand. Their fur… oh, it feels so soft. I’m not wearing my gloves. I’d forgotten about them until now. 

 “Well, I promised. How’re the calculations coming?”

 Catra’s question pulls me out of my trance from the tactile distraction. “They’re running in a self-verification loop currently. Most of the puzzling is syncing up the magic loci devices with the quantum fluctuation fields. Need to map those out first.” I cup my hands at Melog’s face, squishing their cheeks. “Who’s a good kitty!”

 They bump into me again, and I scratch behind their ear.

 In the corner of my eye I watch Catra approach me slowly. “And what about you? How’re you feeling?”

 “Oh, I’m fine. Plenty to do, all the data to unpack.” The lapsing shadowed memories of the neural network intrude in this moment. It could’ve gone an entirely different way. I scratch Melog under their chin and they close their eyes. “I think I opened up a whole new science!”  

 She laughs lightly. “Of course you did. What’re you going to call it?”

 “Thaumetics!” Melog forces their way past my hand and butts their head into my chest. There’s a tingle as a positive indication of their restored magical synchronicity. It feels warm.

 “And what’s that mean?” She is so close now that I can feel radiant heat from her in the small room.

 “It’s like physics but with magic !” I can’t hide the joy and excitement in my voice. I don’t care. I remind myself that it’s important to return the query back to Catra. “How about you? Is everyone adapting to the new normalization adequately?” 

 “Of course we are. Everyone’s happy again. It’s almost like nothing happened.”

 “Happy my scientific skills could be of assistance, Catra.” I stroke at Melog’s head and smile up at her.

 Her face switched to a serious expression while I wasn’t looking.

 “Are you preparing a query?”

 She nods and takes a breath. “I thought a lot about what happened, and what Glimmer and Adora said after we got back.” She folds her legs under her and sits down cross legged, slowly raising her dichromatic eyes to mine. “In the neural net, when you disconnected them… You weren’t going to come back, were you?” 

 I am silent. I struggle for concepts that could explain the complications that arise in my cognitive processes.

 “I thought so.” She looks aside, but then back up to me, meeting my eyes with her elongated pupils. “Why did you change your mind?” She studies me, not out of curiosity, but concern.

 “I don’t know.” I wring my hands over one another. Melog snakes between us and rubs against my leg. I scratch their back between the shoulders.

 “That’s a lie.” She reaches down to pet Melog’s head. “Everything you do has a reason. It’s calculated.” 

 Melog steps away. Their emotional cognition has fixated on Catra, curious. They settle down and lay their head on her lap.

 I sit back and set my hands on my lap. “No, it’s true. I don’t know what’s going to happen with you guys. So I decided to give it another shot.”

 Catra’s canine teeth peek through between her lips as she smiles. It is a soft, genuine expression that’s so rarely seen. “I’m glad you did. I don’t know what we’d do without you.”

 “You’d be lost without me. You people couldn’t jump-start a toroidal fusion reactor.” I wink at her.

 She chuckles quietly and shakes her head. “Scorpia mentioned those social experiments. You’re getting better at them.” Melog glances at her in annoyance as she stands and their head slips from her lap. She gestures me toward the vent. “C’mon. I came up here to get you.”

 “Why?”

 “You’re just going to have to see.” I barely catch the sly grin on her face before she leaps down into the vent, Melog close behind. 

 This is a curious turn of events. I mentally list off different precursors that could have resulted in this behavior. I follow her through the vent. We arrive at the airlock and egress ramp and she stands up into a sprint across the grass with Melog close behind. I pause briefly.

 I had forgotten. We are on Etheria. The calculations and my new interface system had consumed my attention. No wonder Catra came looking for me. The small avians chirp and chitter in a social exchange of one another’s presence, while a brief gust of wind carries the perfume of antherous flowers. I follow her from the grassy field into the main halls of Bright Moon, using stilts of my hair to keep pace with her. All around are the scattered indications of an expired celebration. Chairs strewn about haphazardly and the remnants of the serving of food. It is starkly empty, a strangeness in the normal teeming social rituals that were conducted here. Instead it is just the crew—correction my friends—of Darla waiting for my arrival. 

 Catra and Melog cross the dining hall to join the others in front of the main table, sidling in next to Adora. Micah and Angella are seated nearby, holding one another’s hands. She looks pale and weak, but her regal smile is indomitable. Glimmer stands in the middle, holding a tray with a sheet draped over the top. Bow leans in on her other side, barely able to contain his ear to ear grin.

 “What’s all this?” I glance at each of them in turn. Their eager expressions look ready to burst in excitement.

 “I think we’ve taken something for granted, and we all wanted to fix that.” Glimmer grips the edge of the sheet. “We were going to invite everybody, but Catra made a good point. Just us is better.”

 A nervousness ebbs in the back of my mind. Having this much attention is unsettling.

 “We don’t want you to feel left out any longer.” Adora holds tight to Glimmer’s shoulder, her other hand an a closed fist held in front of her in anticipation 

 “Okay, I can’t wait anymore!” Bow yanks the sheet off from the tray and Glimmer pitches it down to show me.

 The tray is covered in a grid of tiny cakes, laid out in a motif of my face—pigtails, mask, and all—each with different colors of frosting to represent the features that they illustrate. A sensation overwhelms me. Threatens to break me. 

 I can barely hear my own voice. “What’s this?”

 Bow sprints across the room, nearly knocking the tray out of Glimmer’s hands in his exuberance. Adora hastily helps her correct it as Bow snatches me up in a hug. 

 “Welcome to the Best Friends Squad!”

 Oh, I had not predicted this at all.

 “Entrapta!”

 The hull plate falls from my hair with a clatter. That voice is familiar. I cross the top of Darla and I crawl over to the side of the hull to peer down at the ground below.

 Scorpia sits on top of Emily waving at me.

 “Scorpia! Emily!” I anchor myself on the edge with my hair and drop down in a quick fluid motion managing my kinetic energy carefully. I fall on springs of my hair, but before my feet touch the ground I am snatched up in a hug. I feel the compressive strength of Scorpia threaten my respiratory functionality. I tap her on the shoulder and she releases me. I fall, sitting on top of Emily and catch my breath. She chitters cheerily under me and bounces up and down.

 “It is nice to see you, Scorpia.” I smile and grip the bot jittering under my seat with my hair. “And you too, Emily!”

 Scorpia sets her hands on her hips and grins. “I wanted to catch you before everyone took off again! You guys are leaving so soon!”

 I pat at Emily’s head and get another set of chitters in response. “There’s a lot more to discover and the thaumetic neural network may need some additional research that can only be conducted in the infinite vastness of space. It’s not because we don’t want to stay.”

 She leans forward and nudges my shoulder with a pincer. “Don’t let us keep you away from all that science then. We can hold things down on Etheria until you get back. Just keep up with those friendship experiments! I love reading them!”

 I smile but look down. “Your correspondence has been appreciated on this journey.”

 Scorpia laughs in a bellowing baritone. “Ho ho, and that was quite a joke with that last message you sent me! You really had us going there for a minute! Did you program that error in there, too?”

 I grit my teeth together as logical derivations run through my thoughts. What does Scorpia need to know? How much should she? I can’t keep hiding. She needs to hear everything. “That wasn’t a friendship experiment, Scorpia.”

 Her pincer drops from her hip and falls limply next to her. Her metasoma falls on the ground behind her in kind. “You were serious?”

 I hope my silence can fill in the answer she needs.

 Emily shifts under me, but she’s silent as well.

 “Are you… did I?” Scorpia rubs her pincers together, frowning off to the side. “Was it something that I did?”

 “No!” I snap out the word louder than I think I ever managed before.

 She startles back, pincer over her chest. 

 “Sorry! The absurdity of your question needed interruption. It wasn’t you it wasn’t anyone. It was me.” I slide off Emily into a seat on the grassy lawn of Bright Moon. “It was… It was a lot, Scorpia.”

 She squats down in front of me, gazing at me with sincerity. “Is it okay? Is there anything I can do?”

 “No, you did more than enough.” I feel a tear roll down the side of my cheek. “Scorpia…”

 “Yeah?”

 “You were an excellent peer advisor in this experimental study. And… The best I’ve ever had. And I…” I take a deep, rallying breath. “I would not have arrived at the conclusion I did without your consultation and assistance.”

 “Are you saying I helped?” She tilts her head.

 I can’t manage any verbal acknowledgment as more emotional tumult rises in my chest. I nod, wiping a tear from my eye.

 She snatches me and Emily up in her embrace, pinning us together, squeezing the lingering nightmares of the neural network out of my memories.

 With a final touch of the microwelder, the circuit is finished. The cabochon gemstone, the color of the most gorgeous sunsets of Etheria, sparkles with refracted rays of luster. It’s beautiful. I smile and affix it to the mount. I check the display, the bright orange point of light over the modeled surface of Etheria glows. It has synchronicity.

 “I predict a high probability she will treasure this gift.” Darla’s hologram bends and squints. I think it’s her smile.

 “Oh, she’s really going to love this.” I snatch the completed piece up from the workbench. “Where’s everyone at?”

 “Angella and Micah have retired to their quarters. The others are in the mess hall eating their dinner.”

 I feel a rumble in my stomach. Oh right, food. No matter. “Thanks!” I spider my way through the vents, darting between the different cables. Some of them I’ve managed to tidy up on the cruise back away from Etheria. There are still more to get to, but there is plenty of time. I pop out of the vent. 

 “Hey, Entrapta!”

 “Hi, Bow! Sorry I’m late!” I seal the vent up and drop next to them at the table. They sit in pairs across from each other, empty plates before them. I see smiles. I look away, but bring myself back to their faces. It isn’t so bad. It gets a little easier each time. “I was working and time slipped away.”

 “I figured. We kept a plate set aside for you. Can I warm it up?” Glimmer goes to stand.

 “Sure! But in a minute.” My body squirms in excitement as I wrap fingers of hair around the menagerie of gifts I am concealing. “I have good news! The simulations are showing a convalescence of thaumetic energy around the localized nodes for the princesses! Sorry it took too long, but sometimes even I’m surprised with how complex multidimensional networking is! You know, space-time geometries and all that.” I splay my hair out in an interconnecting series of lines and nodes to illustrate my point.

 Adora laughs from where she sits, Catra leaning into her shoulder. “What does that mean?”

 “The magic has come back to us.” I point to a node in my hair. “Glimmer and Adora, you have regained control of your princess powers. You can channel your runestones once again.”

 “You mean…?” Glimmer opens her hands and a blast of sparkling magic erupts. She follows this with ecstatic laughter. “Oh Etheria!” She jumps up and teleports across the room to hug me. I return her embrace.

 Adora stands and holds out her hand. There’s a shimmer in the air, and She-Ra’s sword materializes in front of her. She smiles softly, her eyes threaten tears.

 “Well, you gonna say it?” Catra rests her head on her hand, elbow on the table, and looks to Adora with enamored eyes.

 She lets the sword disappear in a flash of light and smirks at Catra. “I think we can do a demonstration later.”  She turns an expression of pure gratitude toward me. “Thank you, Entrapta.”

 I simply smile at her.

 Glimmer plants a long, lingering kiss on my cheek. A flush of dilated capillaries distracts me momentarily. She tilts her head to the side. “This is wonderful.” She releases me and steps away again.

 “I… uh…” I shake my head to clear it. There is science to be done. “Right! Presents! They’re a little bit of a work in progress. I’m still ironing out some kinks in the whole neural net. I’ve been building individualized antennae based on the control chips that Horde Prime made. Reverse engineering them was a cinch and I just had to disable the command circuitry and everything is running ship-shape!”

 “So what’s that got to do with presents?” Glimmer says, raising an eyebrow curiously.

 “Apologies!” From behind me, I unfurl a pair of shimmering pearl teardrop earrings. “Bow and Glimmer get a matched pair.” I hand them over with a curl of my hair. They accept them with open hands and look curiously between one another. They each don the pearls on their ears.

 “I’m still not sure what that—” Glimmer stops mid sentence and her eyes widen.

 Bow matches her expression. “Woah.”

 Glimmer pulls away from me and her eyes grow even brighter. “I can hear him! Well… Not hear, but… What is it?”

 “Yeah!” I jump upward, carried higher by tendrils of my hair before landing with a thump . “I’m still working on the connections to the thaumetic neural net and I’ve made progress! I can’t channel the princess powers to non-princesses… yet . But I can still connect you to the neural net. It means you can talk with anyone on the network across all of space-time! It’s complicated and I’m still working on the protocols, but you two are the only ones with access until I connect up the other princesses.”

 He smiles sweetly at me, adding to the joy of the room. “I don’t know what to say.”

 “I’m not done yet! Adora!” I turn to her and she startles slightly. “I made you this.” I reveal a belt from behind my back, and drop it into her hands. 

 She glances skeptically from the belt to me. “I mean… I appreciate it, but I already have a belt.”

 “Not like this one you don’t! Reach inside!” I clench my hands in front of me in anticipation.

 She looks at me queerly, but pushes her hand into the belt. It disappears. Her face goes slack with bewilderment. There’s a startled gasp across the room.

 I loose a tiny squeal. It works!

 Adora grasps something and pulls out a small hand-torch with a miniaturized power crystal and retroreflective focusing dish. She stares at it, thumbs the switch on the back and briefly blinds herself. “Ack! Wow that’s bright!”

 “What in the worlds is that Entrapta?” Bow reaches across and pushes a hand into the belt as well, withdrawing a grappling hook from inside. Adora inhales sharply in excitement, eyes wide, and she snatches it out of his hand.

 “It’s a localized portal space manager that has been installed in a local gravitational field around a woven carbon reinforced multipurpose belt. There’s a whole portal dimension holding all the tools you’re ever going to need!”

 “ All the tools?” She reaches back in, and withdraws a set of bolas. She giggles aloud and spins them in a fluid motion. They flicker in a blur over her hand and she launches them at a nearby chair. They connect and knock the furniture to the floor with a clatter. She spins back around to the group, eyes alight. “Catra! I got my belt back!”

 Catra groans and rolls her eyes. “I thought we left that thing in the Fright Zone.”

 “No, actually I lost it with my jacket in the Whispering Woods! The Bright Moon tailors gave me one but it didn’t—Nevermind. This is fantastic!” She giggles elatedly again, a radiant sound that lifts the spirit of the room. With a quick hand, she encircles the belt around her waist. “Thank you, Entrapta.” 

 “All right, so where’s mine, nerd?” Catra smirks, one of her fangs showing through her lips.

 “Oh, I made one special for you, too. ” I pull out her stone. The orange gem glitters brightly set in the thick black band.

 “What’s this? A bracelet?” She holds out her hand to accept it.

 “Nope!” Before she can react, I reach forward and wrap it around her neck. “It’s a choker!”

 She sits stunned as the neural thaumetic link synchronizes. Her eyes flit left and right similar to Bow’s expression. 

 I grin. 

 “Does yours feel tingly, Bow?” She reaches up and touches at the gemstone.

 “Nooo.” His eyes glitter in intense interest. “But mine isn’t a collar either.” 

 “What?!” Catra jumps up.

  Glimmer gasps, raising her hands over her mouth, but it can’t hide the delighted grin. “It is a collar!”

 “It is not!” She struggles at the side of it. Trying to free the clasp.

 Adora watches Catra struggle with a broadening smile. “We’re going to need to put your name on a tag!”

 “It’s so cute !” Bow says.

 Hysterical laughter fills the mess hall.

 I grin wider and cut Darla’s pain modulation sensors.

 “It’s not cute !” She swipes at Bow. Heat fills the room as an arc of fire bursts from her hand cast in their direction. Thankfully, everyone has enough reflexes to duck away from the flame. Bow falls straight back out of his chair. Glimmer vanishes in a burst of sparkles to reappear next to Adora on the other side of the table. The fireball batters against the far wall.

 The crackles of fire dying out leave silence in its wake.

 “Ahahaha! It worked!” 

 I thread my hair around Catra and turn her around in a spin laughing in victory. A smile breaks through her bafflement. I set her down and beam. I almost feel like crying. 

 “How’d you do that?” she asks. “I thought you said you can’t connect non-princesses with powers.”

 “I can’t , but I can fix a broken fire runestone we found on Etheria remotely and give you back yours. ” I hold her at her shoulders with both hands.

 Catra can only stare at me in stunned silence. Bow gasps loudly in wonder and he looks rapidly from me to Catra. Adora’s mouth drops open, the torch from her belt clattering to the floor forgotten. Glimmer grins broadly and grabs a handful of Adora’s jacket and shakes her limply in excitement.

 “I…” Catra touches the gemstone hesitantly, then raises her eyes to mine. “I don’t know what to say.”

 “Why don’t you start with a ‘thank you’?” Glimmer winks. “ Princess Catra. ”

 I sit in my room again, lounging on a bed of my hair. Darla is quiet. The lights are off other than the nocturnal ambiance that we leave on. I rest with my hands behind my head. With my gloves off, my hair feels coarse but still smooth. I worry at the fibers and stare into the ceiling.

 Even my head is quiet. No roaming thoughts, no problems to solve. 

 A grappling hook interrupts my thoughts as it appears at the edge of the vent with a metallic clank. I didn’t even hear her approach this time. She’s getting more agile in her traversing of Darla’s internal ducting.

 Her blonde-haired head pops above the edge of the duct. “Entrapta!”

 “Adora! Thank you for coming.” I wave at her.

 “Well, you said you wanted to talk. Got up here first chance I got.” She unhooks the grappler from the edge and winds the rope in her hand, looping it over and over. She tucks it into her belt and it disappears in a dull flash. The motion is practiced despite having just received it recently. 

 “Is the new locally affixed portal storage device to your liking? Any further optimizations needed?”

 She looks at me perplexed. “Oh, right! The belt. No, it’s been perfect. I’m still figuring out some of the tools you stashed in here.”

 “To be honest, even I forget what’s all in there. Have fun figuring it out! I can’t locate my plasma arc torch, so if you find it I would appreciate its return.” I grin and carry myself over to her on a platform of my hair as I sit in repose. 

 “I’ll let you know if I spot it.” She dusts her pants off and looks around my room, full of more pictures than furniture. “Where did you get all of these?” 

 “Warp space has become rather simple to navigate since we synchronized the neural network with the quantum engine. Darla and I have been pulling some of my favorite portraits.” I grab one of a robotic dog off the wall and bring it over to Adora. “Isn’t it a sweetie?”

 “Well aren’t they…” She smirks at the painting, searching for a word. “Cute.” She looks around. “So what did you want to talk about?”

 A nervousness flutters through my gastrointestinal system and my breathing shallows. I take a deep calming breath. “A lot. If you have time.” I grasp a spinny chair with my hair and slide it over towards her.

 “As much as you need.” She sits, somewhat uncomfortably, and worries at a seam in her trousers.

 I reach out with my hair and pick up a small mechanical switch that I had been repairing. With another strand, I grab a small piece of wire and drop it into Adora’s lap. 

 “Thanks.” She gives me a genuine, warming smile and twists the wire around her finger.

 I click the mechanical switch. It makes a soft pop-pop in the silent room. “You… You said, before we left for the Velvet Glove, that we’re both good at fixing things. You remember?”

 “Of course I do.” She digs her boot in on the footrest at the bottom of the spinny chair and sways herself left and right.

 “I appreciated that a lot. And I have been pondering on what you meant. I have been… I have had a lot of distress for a long time about… things. People.” I pump the clicker again. Thoughts of him drift into my mind. The hope and joy on Hordak’s face, clouded by his anger and impatience with me mix, swirl, and die. Confusion infiltrates my thoughts, but I reach out for a hypothesis that I had long been formulating. “Would you believe me if I said… I don’t understand the difference between being useful and being loved?”

 “Ha!” She pulls the wire taut abruptly. “You and me both.”

 A brief smile crosses my lips before I turn serious again as the thoughts flow. “I have been ruminating over Catra and Hordak, and I have a troubling thought that maybe I hoped you would understand.” I spin the switch in my hand, looking to the side of Adora. 

 I see a passing confusion reflected in her eyes; she’s unsure what I could mean mentioning the two of them together. “What about them?”

 “In your rather… rapid unloading of your cognitive reasoning, you mentioned back in the Fright Zone and the time I spent there.” The thoughts flow like an unmitigated imbalanced system seeking equilibrium.

 “Sorry.” She blushes and untwists the wire slowly.

 “Oh, don’t apologize. I hadn’t ever spoken with someone like that. I found it quite fascinating to see the internal processes of a nonmechanical logic process. And it got me thinking about my own. I thought about that time I spent there.” I spin the switch again. On the back are two copper electrical contacts. I touch my finger to them feeling the gentle poke of sharp metal on my bare skin. “I realized it was… confusing… more so than usual. It seems I was… unprepared to interact with people. I didn’t know any other than my bots for a long, long time. Except maybe my subjects... or assistants. Whatever they are. They cooked me tiny things.”

 I pause in frustration and look down at Adora’s boots. Her hands worry in her lap. She twists the wire between her thumb and forefinger, but in my periphery, I see her expression invites me to continue.

 “Anyway, it was strange there, the people I mean. First Bright Moon, the princess ball, and then there. I just wanted to work on science. I just wanted to… to understand things better. After you and the princesses left me there, I didn’t really have anyone, or anything. Except Catra and Scorpia.” The Super Pal Trio, as Scorpia had applied her moniker to it. It was strange to have friends. Hopeful.

 Her hands tighten around the wire in her grasp, smashing it together. She exhales a long breath and she quietly straightens it back out. “I’m sorry we did.”

 “No, I understand better now what happened. I can’t be mad at you. It was… complicated by Catra. She was different. She was… kind. She was strange, but kind. She wanted to—She promised me she would never leave me, and she wanted to know the things I was working on. She was a friend. Her and Scorpia.” A memory lapses into my visual and tactile senses. Catra’s words felt so kind then, as her claws gently stroked through my hair. “They were my first real friends that weren’t mechanical or manufactured.” 

 I choke on a thought. More confusion, more obsession. Reconciling and evaluating data and behaviors. “And she… She hurt me, Adora. She tried to stop me. When I stopped being useful, she turned on me and sent me away. I was alone again. I felt like it was the way it should be. When I was on Beast Island, I thought it was where I should stay. Because I wouldn’t be let down or betrayed again.” I made a new mask, a new identity. I grip the switch with a more severe pressure than was strictly necessary given the current state. I recognize the anger. I relent before causing unnecessary damage to the component.

 “Entrapta, it doesn’t have anything to do whether or not you’re useful. I think it’s one of the hardest things for people to understand about her. Catra... she... what do you call it? The lever thingie that helps you lift stuff up?”

 “A fulcrum?” There’s another pop-pop from the switch that punctuates my words.

 “Yeah! She’s like this fulcrum that makes you stronger.” Adora emphatically makes a levering motion with her arm, raising her hand by pivoting her elbow. “I still don’t know exactly how she does it, but she makes you so powerful. We could take on the world. We thought we could take over the Horde . She made me feel strong. And wanted. I guess what you mean by useful.” 

 She unwinds the wire again. Her face is forlorn, staring at the oblivion through me, past the ship. “But then she wrenches it away, and it’s used on you. Suddenly I saw how she did it.” Her hand brushes over the bridge of her nose and beneath her eye absentmindedly. “And... that hurt. It hurt more than I can really explain to people. Except for you, and I guess Scorpia.”

 I absently pop the clicking switch again as I process through her words. “I am… that makes me feel a little less lonely. She does hurt, a lot. But then she was different after we rescued her. And one of the first things that she did was apologize to me. For what she did. Which I… is very valuable as a data point in my evaluations of her behavior. But how… when we were in the Fright Zone together, was I still… was she my friend? The data suggested it, but I’ve learned that friendship data isn’t always that easy to collect or reliable. Were we friends then, and are again? Or was she never my friend until now? She’s confusing.”

 Adora laughs a little wanly, looking down and to the side. Her eyes still have trouble meeting mine. I know her discomfort too well. There’s a mixture of emotions on her face—pain, regret, and love all mixed together. “She is. She still confuses me most of the time. Maybe that’s why she calls me ‘idiot’ so often.” She starts a breathy laugh that dies quickly. 

 “She does refer to you as ‘idiot’ in a rather high incidence rate given your relationship, but I have found your mental facilities to be quite satisfactory.” I look at her inquisitively.

 She stops and meets my gaze. Her eyes are full of astonishment, and suddenly she erupts into snorting laughter. “You should tell her that sometime.” She grins, and a warmness flows through me. “No, that’s not what she means. She means it in a good way.”

 “It seems rather hurtful.”

 “Right…” Adora heaves a long sigh. “That’s the hard part of friendship and dealing with people. We all hurt each other. We might not mean to most of the time, but it happens. Catra, she… she hurt so many people and… She knows it. She’s working to make it right because she cares and she wants to be better. We’re all working to be better.”

  “You’re right, and maybe that’s why Catra is still my friend, but her erratic behavior during our current expedition has caused me additional emotional strife.” Sitting alone in my room, with only Darla to keep me company as the rest of the ship had their interpersonal interactions. I curl strands of my hair into a ball and then release them, trying to flex the frustration out of my current cognitive distress. “She acted as though she wanted to hear about my feelings, but then when I tried to express them she didn’t reciprocate as I had predicted.”

 “You mean when she hurt herself?” Adora’s hands are uncharacteristically still with the wire.

 “Yes, then.” I frown. A sense of guilt washes through me. It was an erroneous assumption in retrospect.

 Her voice is quiet and pensive as she gently unwinds the wire. “Entrapta, it’s not that she doesn’t care. It’s that… she couldn’t talk about it with you. Not with what she’s going through. We talked about it, after. When she told me, I knew I had to come see to you.” Her hands pause on the wire and she looks at me apologetically. “She knew, and she would’ve come if she could.”

 “Your visit was unexpected, and at first unwelcome I must admit.” 

 Adora snorts a breath. “That’s fair.”

 “But illuminating in a unique interchange of information. It helped me with postulations that I did not get to speak about to Catra.” Another memory of him, his anger inside of the neural network. Overwhelming, swelling anger. I make a conscious effort to relax my hands before they cause an unnecessary perforation in my skin with the switch.

 Adora shifts on her seat. She leans in slightly, a gesture I recognize as engagement with the current subject. “What did you want to say to her?”

 Those words. There’s a small hitch in my chest. Thoughts that I have prepared but have been unable to express now stack in my frontal cortex. “It was about Hordak and how… confusing he has been.” I flip the switch again and press the contacts into my finger. There’s a biting sensation but not enough to break through the epidermal layer. “I thought it would be different when we were together on Beast Island. But I was incorrect in this assumption. It was the same again. I was useful; I was helpful. We got him back, and all he ever wanted me to know was that he loved that I never gave up on him. That I would find him. That he… loved me.” 

 What does that word even mean? No, the question is detrimental to our current subject.

 “And I believed him. I wanted to. He… We worked on Beast Island together, and everything was fine until it wasn’t. I look back on it now, when we were working on the Portal together. When we were lab partners. He’d get angry.” I pop the switch again, trying to calm myself. I don’t have to hide from him here. Everything is nominal. “He didn’t have the patience for science or the curiosity in failure. When things went wrong, he would punch something, slam things, and I let him do it, because of course science is frustrating. It is one of the hardest things to stick with. Especially when your hypothesis is wrong.” The words tumble out of my mouth. I want to stop them, but I recall Adora the other night in the same position and that comforts me.

 I look up to read her for signs I have said too much or gone too far. She watches me. Her hands have gone still with the wire and her expression effuses earnestness.

 I take a deep breath. The pain of a memory rolls through my thoughts and tears threaten at the corner of my eyes. The words stick and I am almost unable to work past them. I look again at Adora. No, it needs to be said. “He never attacked me, but I was scared sometimes. He yelled at me. He yelled at everything. I waited for him to calm down, and everything would be okay again for a while. I thought it was just how we worked together.” 

 Another pause, another thought, another fear. 

 She will understand. 

 “I was no longer able to excuse his violent outbursts when he almost destroyed Emily. She bumped into him when we were working on a cyberaugmentation for a First Ones protector droid. He… He kicked her, and then he didn’t stop. He broke her optical sensor and almost tore off one of her legs. I patched her up after he was done, but she hides from him now. I knew something was wrong then. I knew I couldn’t stay.” My voice cracks. 

 I faintly hear his voice, even though he is parsecs away. Our interstellar communication interface is disabled, no, ripped out of the console from where I had obfuscated it from everyone. Still I sense his proximity, a ghost of an irrational thought invoked by a rational fear. I hid that night from him with Emily. Huddled together with her in a corner of the island that I thought he’d never get to. A mix of sadness and fear interrupts my thoughts like an overstressed gear in a shear fracture.

 Adora sees it, and shuffles forward on her chair. Her boots make a squeaking noise on the floor of Darla. 

 My breaths stutter, swell, rise, fall. I collect my broken thoughts as her proximity closes. “When Scorpia reached out to me, and said that you all were going on another mission with Darla, I was scared to leave him. What if I could never come back to him? But I couldn’t leave Emily with him. He agreed that she needed to leave the island. As though he could admit he couldn’t control himself. I had a hypothesis of hope that he was close to realizing the folly of his outbursts. I just needed to protect Emily.”

 Adora doesn’t stop at a normally socially acceptable distance of an arm’s length from physical contact. Instead she gets close. Close enough that I can feel the radiant heat of her body against the little bare skin that I have exposed.

 More anxiety rises at the proximity. I’m nervous that we’re almost touching. “Scorpia made a compelling argument for further scientific experimentation. Enough to assist me with the courage I needed to leave him, if just for a bit. But I didn’t want to bring Emily with us because I thought… maybe… I didn’t want anyone to hurt her, Catra or Hordak. She still has the scratch marks from Catra. I never wanted to fix those. The imperfection, the scars she has. They make her beautiful to me. But I didn’t want to be… I didn’t want to have those thoughts in the way of Catra and me. And Emily and Scorpia like to keep each other company anyway.” I press the electrical contacts harder into my skin but release them. I flip the switch over again and push it. Pop-pop .

 Adora leans forward in her chair and touches my knee. She rubs her thumb there gently. The physical contact draws my eyes up to her face. Sincerity. The kind that Adora will never yield. “You did the right thing, and she deserves to be safe. I’m sure Scorpia is keeping a good eye on her.”

 “Me too.” I nod. Her hand triggers a strange feeling through me. It rattles a shiver through my back. “It doesn’t feel right, though. I keep hoping as we travel away from him that he has realized his anger is detrimental to our relationship. That he loves me like I love him, and he will work on his poor emotional management skills to treat me in a way that isn’t… isn’t...” Hope is a scientifically erroneous basis. A whirlpool of black, drowning thoughts grabs onto me as I try to swim through them. I need to hold onto something.

 I reach down, and I place my hand on Adora’s.

 She doesn’t move. She doesn’t pull away. Her skin feels soft, smooth, like polished steel but with the warmth of a thermodynamic exchange radiator. She brims with consideration. She visibly processes her words carefully, measuring them, and verifying them. “Entrapta, I need to say something, and I’m not quite sure how.”

 “What is it?” 

 “When we were in the network with you and Hordak was there, waiting for us…” She pauses, collecting herself. She scoots closer with the chair so she can sit more upright with our physical contact. “It surprised us for sure, but what surprised me more was that you didn’t tell us. You just assumed we wouldn’t understand. But Entrapta… I do.” She rubs her thumb along my thick overalls. Even through the dense fabric it feels welcoming. “Do you know how hard it was to keep a secret from the princesses—from Bow and Glimmer? I wanted to tell them that I always hoped Catra would join us, despite everything she did… everything we did to each other. But I still hoped that one day she’d just walk out of the Whispering Woods into Bright Moon and say, ‘You were right, Adora. I was the idiot.’ But that never happened.” She laughs and shifts on the chair, bumping it against my legs and the hair that I am perched upon. “She’d still never do that.” 

 It is a rueful, painful laugh. Her expression sobers. “And every night it didn’t happen, it hurt that much more. But what could I say? What could I tell Bow and Glimmer after Princess Prom or the Battle of Bright Moon? So yeah… I might not know exactly what it is that you’re feeling, but I know exactly why he was there, why you asked him to be.” 

 I relinquish her hand and we both sit back. Though the touch has vacated from my leg, I still sense it there. She grasps the wire again with both hands, and me the switch. A mutual bond of our desire for physical fidgets to discuss complicated topics chips another weight of my loneliness away. I believe her. 

 “I… I am regretful of my logical fallacy. I drew a conclusion that was biased by my desire for his love. I—mistakenly—extrapolated that if Catra was capable of apologizing and redeeming herself for her destructive and malevolent behaviors that he would be, too.”

 “It wasn’t that simple, Entrapta. There’s a lot that happened between me and Catra that I’ve never been able to tell anyone about.” She looks at me with pain written within her eyes. “Can I share?”

 “Of course, Adora. I would like to…” I reconsider my phrasing. “I need to hear your data and findings.”

 She nods and her expression is a silent ‘thank you.’ She pauses a moment to gather her thoughts, find a place to begin. “Remember when we opened the Portal to get Angella? Catra mentioned that she made her own version of the Fright Zone the first time, right? That it was everything she wanted it to be. She never said what it was. Only I saw it, and at first I didn’t even notice.” With another pivot on the chair, she bumps our knees together. “I’m a little ashamed really. I was happy to be the Force Captain I was always supposed to be, with Catra right there by my side. Just like we’d always planned as kids. But it wasn’t real. It wasn’t right. We had this small piece of what we wished things could be, but everything else was crumpling around us. And I couldn’t live in that lie.” 

 She twists the wire slowly around her finger, her eyes watching it but her focus on something else. Something farther away. “I tried to take Catra with me, just like I always wanted to. But she wouldn’t let me because it was her fantasy. I left; she stayed. I wanted her to leave with me; she wanted me to stay with her.”

 As she speaks, I return her gesture from earlier by placing a strand of my hair onto her knee. Unexpected memories carry me away from the moment. Those from the Portal. Catra and Adora manifested together, Angella and her family. My memories of the Portal were not of people or friends. They were machines of my own hand. Easier to predict their behaviors and adapt around them. Hordak wasn’t there. Just a machine of him.

 I should have known something was awry then.

 Adora takes my hair into her hand instinctively and sucks in a deep breath to rally herself. “Neither of us would let the other have their way, and it nearly caused the entire world to fall apart. We both wanted to control each other, but Catra was willing to destroy everything to get her way.” Her thumb caresses through my hair. “I might’ve even let her pull me into the Portal if my badge hadn’t ripped off and taken the choice out of my hands. Sometimes I wish it hadn’t.” A crackling tension fills the room from her words. A pressure that has built up in her now fills the air around us. 

 She pauses, a particularly painful thought lapses through her face and she rubs her knuckles with her other hand. “Sometimes I tell myself the Catra that dragged herself out of the Portal wasn’t the real Catra—that she’d been half-consumed by it and the things she said were just… the Portal trying to stop me. It’d be a lie though.” She strokes through my hair with all of her fingers. 

 The same gesture as Catra. Her fingers untangle a knot at the end of my hair and a resultant tingle radiates through my scalp. I squeeze her hand. “What did she say?”

 She grimaces as though my question treads on an open wound that has festered for years. “That I… that it was all my fault. That I was the world’s worst She-Ra, and because of that I broke the world. She said… she said… I took everything from her. That I made her what she was.” Her voice cracks on those last words.

 Hordak… He… those words, those thoughts when he was mad. They sounded so familiar. He said the same thing every time I tried to see my friends. I was weak before I met you, you made me strong and you think you can just leave?   

 Hearing Catra’s similar extrapolations in Adora’s voice makes his derivation feel obscene. “Well, that was an irrational thing to say. Clearly the Portal opened because of our work, and she acted in a manner independent of any influence you had in her situation.”

  She coughs a laugh and wipes a tear from the corner of her eye. “I know that, and I believe it now… Mostly. But those were things she always wanted to say to me. Things she actually thought. She always knew exactly how to hurt me the most.” Her fingers resume their pensive brushing on my hair. “That’s the thing about loving someone—you willingly give them the best weapon against you and all you can do is trust that they won’t use it. But she did and… and I refused to let her. We had hurt each other so much over the years, but in that moment I decided I wouldn’t be part of it anymore. It was one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do.”

 With difficulty, I swallow a lump in my throat. “I felt that way with Hordak.”

 Adora nods. She looks up at me tearfully, expression full of pain, maybe even agony. It’s almost too difficult to look at. “She taught me the hardest thing is realizing when someone you love is hurting you more than everything else, and being strong enough to say, ‘No. I won’t let you hurt me anymore.’ I never wanted to learn that lesson. But Entrapta, please believe me when I tell you what you did with Hordak, that was so brave.”

 “It doesn’t feel brave.” I look away from her again. Her words hurt somehow. “It feels like… like I gave up a piece of myself.” I stand on a mental precipice again, fearing a fall into the dark.

 “I think that’s the way it’s supposed to feel. I think that’s why it’s so hard. And why some of us struggle to do it. But we have to. And I’m glad you did.”

 I try to stifle the swarm of emotions rising inside of me. It feels incorrect to show them so nakedly. “I just wanted him to feel the same things, enough to change, to be better for me.” 

 “It’s okay to want that. It’s just you can’t make him want those things, too. Trust me, have you ever tried to make Catra do anything she didn’t want to do?” She smiles at me again, a softer, thoughtful one. “If Hordak wants to change, he will. But that’s not up to us. We don’t control that ‘system’ like you say. I couldn’t wait for Catra anymore, and you can’t wait for him. That’s why we have friends. No matter what, we’re here to get you through it.”

 “Thank you, Adora.”

 “Wait, I’m not done yet. Listen to me.” She uses her feet to shuffle forward on the floor. I encircle a pigtail around the back of her chair. She leans forward, her hands drawn to mine. She gathers each of them up and holds them between us. The pressure of her grasp almost hurts but it bears a strength of certainty.

 An unexpected surge of electricity jumps up my arm, into my spine, and then my face. I look at her again. 

 Her eyes. Those blue eyes. There’s a purity and earnestness in them like no other. The rest of her face conflicts with the confidence. The soft convex arc of her eyebrows, the slight frown in her lips. These words trouble her and a part of me is ready to believe her before she speaks just to alleviate a pain and a burden she carries alone. She believes in what she is about to say and yet still grasps for it herself. 

 “You’re not an asset, or a robot, or something that someone made. You’re a person. And being a person is hard. The older I get the more I realize it. And… I couldn’t have this conversation right now if you weren’t… you. It’s not about what ‘use’ you are to someone or what you give people. It’s about who you are, and what we stand for. I want you here with us, with me, because you make us stronger. I don’t want you ever to forget that.” 

 “I… I don’t… I can’t…” More anxiety, more unwanted surges in my adrenal system escalate my cardiovascular system in an undesired response. Every instinctive coping mechanism that I had manufactured previously attempts to dissect and mitigate Adora’s words. Her face, her grip, her hands will not relent and against the onslaught of my doubt she holds true. “You really want me here?”

 “Yes.” She squeezes my hands again. “You’re important to us. You’re important to me . You’re thoughtful and beautiful and kind in a way none of us are. Just by being you, you’ve shown me the things inside of myself that aren’t perfect, and I am strong enough to start looking at them because of you. No one in the galaxy could do that. And it’s not because you fixed anything for me, it’s because if you have the courage to find the beauty in who you are, I can too.” Her voice cracks on the last word as her larynx strains with emotional fatigue. Her eyes brim with burgeoning tears. “That’s why you matter.”

 “Adora…” I try to hold myself back, but I can’t. I envelope her in my pigtails and drag her forward off the stool. She has a brief, startled look on her face, but when she is embraced in my arms, she relaxes. Something breaks inside of me, and I cry into the shoulder of her jacket. I cry like I haven’t before. Her hands soothe at my back and coax further pain and fear out of me.

 It wasn’t until later that I realized you were crying, too. 

 I always remembered that moment, Adora. I remembered that night because you made everything different. Everything was a little less confusing.

 And I didn’t feel alone when I was with you.