Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Explosion.

Fire.

That is all your mind's eye can see as you lurch forward awake in your seat. You slam down on the interface and the seat releases you as you stumble down onto your knees.

The pod is crackling with a low hum of electricity. It's hard to think through the pounding headache, but you need to get up and assess the damage.

Breathe in. Out.

The pod is broken, obviously, if the crackling electricity and broken lights were any indication. The damages were extensive, but nothing a bit of duct tape couldn't fix. Hopefully. You weren't an engineer.

At least the pod wasn't on fire.

In. Out.

You grab the radio with shaking hands. "Hello? Any survivors? I repeat, any survivors?"

Silence, save for radio static. No response. You heave a shuddering sigh. What are your next steps? What do you need?

You don't… you don't know.

That's not it.

There's something you have to do. Call for help: done. There's nobody on the other end. What now?

Wait for rescue.

Something in your gut tells you that nothing will come out of waiting.

Live.

That's the goal, alright. Food and water are definite essentials you'll need.

You have to leave this planet.

How? The ship is down, blown to pieces, and any of you that survived are all scattered about.

To leave, you'll need a ship. You can repurpose the old, wrecked ship (not happening—it's too large to repair, even if you had any idea what to do), or build a mini ship of your own.

The PDA should contain the blueprint for the rocket that'll take you off-planet.

You swipe on its screen, turning it on. It automatically speaks out loud: Data lost. Rebooting… Hi! Thank you for purchasing—

You put the PDA down and tune out its spiel.

Fuck.

Fuck.

FUCK!

Breathe. This is still salvageable.

First things first is to establish food and water source. Once that's done, you can explore for any fallen wrecks for scraps of blueprints.

The pod was equipped with a day's worth of water and nothing else. This is garbage. You need to find food and water, but you can't—you've never had to before so how can you live for—

Breathe in. Out.

Drinkable water was a bigger priority. You were surrounded on all sides by water, but if this was like back home, it's not safe for human consumption without prior filtering. Another source of water can be from the food you eat, but cooking evaporates it all, so that's a no go; not to mention finding food will be tricky.

Is this a desolate planet, or one with inedible lifeforms?

Only one way to find out.

The rush of water greets you as you slip out of the pod. You were partial to water, but you have a feeling your feelings on this matter will change.

It's not a wasteland, as you feared it could be. There are fish darting around. It's lively and teeming with small, unfamiliar aquatic lifeforms. You can feel the burning curiosity rise up, the need to hold them closer and study—

Focus.

You're not a xenologist. Your field of study lies in the animals inhabiting the earth, not those outside of it. Still, your employer wanted to follow in Alterra's footsteps and sent its own crew in the planet they heard Alterra send a ship down in. You were simply here to study the planet's lifeforms, if it had any, and you saw the opportunity in your hands.

And now you're here, waiting to die.

No. No, this is not your end. Not yet, not yet. Not if you had anything to say about it.

In. You shudder as you breathe out.

Catch a fish. How hard can that be?

It is, in fact, extremely hard to catch a fish.

This spooky ocean world wasn't helping matters. You swear you can hear faint voices in the sea, whispers that seem to come from beneath your feet or from behind. None of it sounded like anything, like a hushed conversation in the other room, but you catch a word or two—something about a door?

Besides that, your fish-catching predicament isn't helped by what you can only sum up as your 'shiny brain.' Half of the time, you're tempted to pull your scanner instead of catching it. You have to remind that part of your brain every so often that catching a fish means both food and a scan.

Nonetheless, the shallows is a quaint little place for a fish. It's full of tiny fish native to this planet, and a bunch of nooks and crannies for them to hide away in. You spotted caves below in the seafloor, but you didn't have the courage to do more than a cursory peek inside.

So far, you've managed to gather a few metals and acid mushrooms, the latter which you'll test the edibility of later.

A whole days go by, the sun setting from its peak down to the horizon.

And you still haven't caught a fish.

You sigh, slumping over and putting your head in your hands.

Something bumps against your helmet. You suck in your breath and scream when rows of teeth greet your vision.

The thing with too many teeth scrambles back. It smiles (with its sharp teeth, no doubt able tear you apart like paper) and holds its hand out to you.

You hardly notice the fish that swims away from its claws, too busy staring at the creature in front of you. You forcefully rip your gaze from its sharp smile to study the rest of it. It was golden, the frills around its head reminiscent of cartoon drawings of the sun's rays. Its body looks like the depiction of mermaids back home, albeit without a human upper half.

Fascinating. Terrifying, too.

Will this be your end?

It growls and swims away, leaving you behind. You press a hand to your chest and will your heart to calm down.

The mermaid-looking creature comes back once again, fast enough into your line of sight that you flinch back. It holds its closed hand out towards you and opens its hand. A fish darts out from its open hand and swims away.

It tilts its head at you and chirps. You sit still, unsure what to do. Then the mermaid creature dashes away again at the escaped fish and darts back towards you, fish once again in hand.

You hold very, very still as it grabs your hand and spreads your fingers out. No sudden movements, not from you, not if you wanted to keep your hands intact while this predator holds it with its very sharp claws.

It puts the wiggling fish in your hands and closes your fingers around it. That is... a lot of blood that the fish is losing, bleeding from the claw marks which you're sure came from the mermaid-like creature.

You hesitantly move your hand back to reach for your pocket knife, and stop to judge the mermaid creature's reaction. It does nothing but blink at you, so you grab the knife and hold it in your hands. The fish in your other hand continues to squirm weakly.

You miss the head of the fish with your knife, thwarted by your shaking hands. The creature coos and backs away slightly. You try again, and the blade of your knife meets the neck of the fish in your grasp. As fast as you can, you cut through its head and wince when your blade meets bone and struggles to cut. You put more pressure behind the knife and cut its head off completely.

Your stomach threatens to lurche, but you know there's nothing in your stomach. You'll need to figure out either one of two things: where to get a proper cutting board, or how to get better at killing painlessly.

The mermaid creature trills and stares at you. You stare back.

"Well, I'm gonna..." you paddle slowly backwards as it continues to stare. The pod's shadow fall over you and you know you're directly beneath it. The hatch opens and you climb up into it.

That was a bad idea. Now that thing knows where you live.

Breathe in. Out. You're safe now. If it comes back, there's a hatch at the top you can escape to.

Nice of... whatever that was to give you food though. It doesn't seem aggressive, but you're not sure what game it's playing at. Would it not be easier to kill you rather than take the time and effort to hand you a fish? Repeatedly, at that? Chasing after food took energy (which you now have personal experience in), and it would be easier to simply kill the giant walking—er, swimming—meat sack that hardly knew what they were doing.

Instead, it brought live prey to you. When that failed, it injured the prey and handed it to you directly.

For what reason? If it displayed the same behaviour towards one of its kind, it would possibly be trying to take care of one of its own. No, that's incorrect. If that were the case, the fish would be handed dead, not alive but injured.

It was almost like it was teaching you how to hunt.

Oh.

Did it think you were an incompetent hunter? That's embarrassing, not to mention that assumption wasn't even wrong. Were you seriously embarrassed at looking bad in front of an alien fish? Mermaid? Aquatic lifeform.

At least you got yourself a meal. Now the bigger problem was how to cook your dinner.

There was no way to start a fire inside this pod, not that you would want to do that regardless.

What this pod did have, however, was a bunch of exposed circuitry. Circuitry that still had electricity bouncing around, and quite honestly should be your number one priority to fix lest you die in your sleep, but it would do for the task you had at hand.

Some part of you cries that this is a bad idea. Another part of you wants a meal before you pass out. The earlier stress in the day kept you wide awake, but as time went on, you can feel the burning need in your eyes to shut them. You will not die of something as preventable as sleep deprivation, assuming your body would let you sleep. Please.

Fish now held in place with a sharpened stick from a piece of the wall that you broke off, you put the other broken pieces of the wall beneath it as a shield for the exposed wires underneath hope the water dripping down from the fish won't fry anything important in the circuitry. Job done, you lie against the wall as you wait for the fish to get cooked.

There has to be a better way to cook this other than wait for the jumping electricity to reach the fish.

Well... it's not like the machinery can break more than it already has.

You put the gloves from your diving suit on and hope it's suitable protection from electrocution, and remove the wall pieces and the fish from where you placed it. You grab the exposed wires and stab it into the fish, and it looks like the wires were connected once again, albeit via fish than duct tape.

It's working! Or looks like it is, anyways. The fish occasionally flops as electricity flows through it, giving the impression that it's still alive.

Now all you need to do is wait.

...what was up with that creature earlier? It was docile enough back then, but you don't know how much longer it'll be until it tears your head off.

If anything, it looked friendly. Bright yellow with a happy face and frills like a sun's rays around its head. It looked like it could serve as one of those cute animal mascots for a zoo or school or something.

Its mascot name would probably be something like Sunny or Sundew. Silently, you name it Sun in your head. Sun the... alien fish thing. You'll need to use your scanner later on Sun to check what species it is.

It's still taking a while to cook.

More electricity means faster cooking, right?

(A part of you whispers, This is why you were banned from the kitchen. Your roommates just don't appreciate your genius.)

More electricity does mean faster cooking, at the expense of your poor heart doing another workout when you get jump scared by a sudden crackle of electricity.

And tada: an alien fish dinner! Recipe made by yours truly, for whenever you find yourself stranded on an ocean planet! All you have to do is ignore the giant eyeballs staring at you, and you're all set.

The taste is... why are you hesitating and trying to be diplomatic? It's not like a friend cooked this and eagerly expects a review. It's bad, plain and simple. It's not cooked the entire way through, and the discrepancy between biting into it and tasting both cooked and raw bits was awful, to say the least. At least the bones were easy to pick apart and remove, though you weren't sure what to do with them afterwards.

This planet contains edible food, which is good to know. (The edible part will be confirmed if you don't later drop dead from whatever you just ate.) Now all that remains is the matter of finding drinkable water. This pod has no water filter conveniently stored on board, and you don't know how to nor do you have the means of creating one.

Creating... that would be easy to do if the fabricator works.

It better. That fabricator may be the only thing standing between you and home. If things went south, you were willing to build a ship with your own hands, but you would rather not when most likely that ship will break down and leave you to die.

If the fabricator doesn't work—

It will work. It has to.

You walk over to the fabricator and turn it on. The fabricator lays unresponsive under your touch, as if to make your day worse.

Focus. In. Out.

"Come on, come on," you hiss under your breath and give it a few good whacks to its side. The screen flares back to life and you sigh. If the fabricator was toast, you might as well say goodbye to any chance you had of getting off-planet.

It fizzes to life and you let out a sigh of relief.

The fabricator lists out several recipes, and to your relief, filtered water is on the list. The fabricator managed to identify the materials needed on this alien planet to craft a bottle of water, and you weren't about to question how it got that information or what the hell a bladderfish is.

The fabricator also shows on its screen an item called a "cooked peeper." The picture shown is the fish you just ate with a cooked texture.

Cooked.

Cooked?

The fabricator can cook? It can do that? Cook?

The entire time there was an option to cook properly. Instead, you ate something that was half (mostly, if you're being honest) raw.

The fabricator can cook...

You're going to sleep on this.

Chapter Text

You wake in the morning to the humming of electricity and cool metal on your back. Assuming you really did wake in the morning, that is. How long does a day last on this planet?

You climb the upper hatch and take a moment to sit on top of the pod. The smell of the ocean breeze is surprisingly similar, and the moon in the sky is super fucking large. Earth's moon was never this close. This moon makes the one back home seem like an ant.

Moment of peaceful quiet over, you head back down into the pod. Before you slide down the bottom hatch, you take a moment to check over your items. Commence the pat of checking for keys, wallet, phone, except this time you have nothing on your person except your PDA, and also the scanner, flippers and O2 tank that you fabricated last night.

You weren’t proud to admit that the scanner was crafted before the O2 tank. All it needed was a simple battery and titanium, and those you managed to find relatively easily during your breaks from catching fish (of which there were more breaks than you would like to admit. At least you got a lot of exploration done).

Something hits your flippers when you slip out of the pod.

A dead peeper.

Did it crash into your pod and die?

A blur of yellow swims quickly into your field of vision. You yelp and startle back.

"You!" What did you name him yesterday? (Probably he? It's not like you can ask about fishy pronouns.) "Sun?" This fish is about to be the death of you, quite literally if he ever felt like taking a bite out of you. "Well, good morning to you too," you said between shaky chuckles.

He chirps and holds his closed hand out to you, wiggling peeper in it. Like a repeat of last time, his free hand darts towards you as you flinch. The peeper in his grasp is deposited in your hand as he curls your fingers tightly around it. Once satisfied, he lets go of your hand with a chirp and stares at your face expectantly.

Why is Sun feeding you again? What prompted this sort of behaviour from him? Is this common for him, to feed strangers outside of his species? Is this a species-wide behaviour or is it just him?

Sun growls as your hold on the peeper slackens. With a startled noise, you quickly tighten your grasp around the peeper. He trills and resumes staring at your helmet.

Was he waiting for you to eat it? The peeper continues to fight against your hold.

The dead peeper from before drifts closer towards Sun and in front of his face. He nudges his head against it so that the dead peeper floats towards you.

"Is that, uh, is that gift yours?" This behaviour strikes you as incredibly similar to cats back home presenting their owners with their latest catch. A mental image of Sun with a cat's body and a dead bird in his mouth pops up.

In your contemplation, Sun takes the opportunity to grasp your other hand and deposit the dead peeper there. Now both of your hands are full of peepers.

Sun opens his mouth wide, and you quickly, mentally say your last goodbyes, sure that this was the end for you. Instead of chomping your head clean off, he points at his mouth and opens and closes it.

You shake your head and hope that's the universal gesture for no. Sun whistles and brings you closer towards him, arms holding your sides, but you kick and flail until he stops and brings you back to your prior distance.

This time, you try crossing your arms in the shape of an X. He blows bubbles out of his nose and grabs the dead peeper in your hands faster than you can react. The wiggling peeper in your other hand takes advantage of your momentary surprise to finally escape and swim to freedom.

Sun watches the peeper swim away with a chitter and the flattening of his frills, but quickly turns his attention down onto the peeper in his hands.

You try to swim slowly back to escape this situation while his attention is elsewhere. Before you can go far, his hand grabs your arm, brings you closer to him and wraps his tail around your body, effectively preventing your escape. You feel like you're on the fish equivalent of a child leash, a predicament not at all helped by the size difference between the two of you. He wasn't gargantuan, but he was still a good deal taller than you.

If only you were that escaped peeper from earlier. All you want to do is leave and stay as far away as possible from something that's docile now. His behaviour is so far consistent, but you keep finding yourself thinking of how easily his teeth could take a bite out of you.

You're snapped out of thoughts on your impending death by taps on your helmet. Sun's hand is holding torn off pieces of the peeper and keeps tapping your helmet with it.

Your eyes widen when what sounds like a dog's whine comes from Sun. His hands hold your helmet and he gently tilts your head around.

"Uh…" This was not a situation you were expecting. He lets go of your head and cranes his neck down to peer at your eyes. Or, at least you think he tries to look you in your eyes, but it's a little off from where your eyes actually are. He makes the same dog's whine.

"What's wrong? This helmet isn't my face, you know."

"What's wrong? This helmet isn't my face, you know," Sun parrots back your words perfectly, inflection and all. It wasn't the same as your voice, too loud and cheery, but it was something that could fool you for a human.

"You can talk? " All prior reservations are thrown out of the window as you press your hands against the side of Sun's face. The frills on his head flatten and fan out. "Well, mimic, but still. That's a very convincing mimicry you've got there, Sun, more convincing than a parrot's!"

"More convincing than a parrot's," he echoes back.

"Of course, you can't understand what I'm saying, but it would be so cool if you could understand somehow. We could have a full blown conversation! I get to actually talk to an alien!"

"Oxygen," your PDA warns. Sun whips his head around at the noise, then bumps his head against the bottom of your helmet when he doesn't find what he's looking for.

"Please let me go," you kick your way out of his grasp. He doesn't try to stop you as your surface for air, your helmet automatically opening. It smells of saltwater.

Sun surfaces next to you, looking comical with only a portion of his face breaches the barrier between water and air. You let out a snort. The rest of his head surfaces, and you see him blink before dashing forwards into your personal space with fast-paced clicks.

You try to spit as much of the water out as possible and gag when something small suddenly finds its way into your mouth. You spit it out and examine the red thing floating on the waters.

Sun chirps, waving a hand with peeper chunks in it.

"Oh no." You forgot about this entirely, and you did not want to eat raw fish again, regardless of his intentions.

Sun, however, seems to take your unwillingness to eat raw chunks of meat as a challenge, as he narrows his eyes with a slight smile. He coos and slowly reaches his hand forwards, but you shove the approaching hand away from you and turn your head away.

Sun clicks and reaches his hand for you again, but you dive back into the water before he can shove another chunk of raw peeper inside your mouth. The helmet comes back around your head again to shield you from the waters. Sun stares at your helmet and makes displeased clicks.

“Fine,” you sigh and hold your hands out, “Give me the peeper.”

It seems to be a gesture that Sun understands, given that he puts the peeper and chunks into your outstretched hands. He nudges his face towards your helmet and you swim backwards, hands held up. “Personal space, buddy, personal space.”

It’s a bit nerve-wracking to turn your back to something very able to kill you, if it decides to, but Sun is docile. It doesn't seem like he'll hurt you, and so far, he's never threatened you except your hunger and your personal space. His teeth looks like it could bite through the hull of a ship. He has also never done anything with it, not even to eat the peepers he caught or even to tear the peeper into bite-sized chunks.

When you reach your pod, you turn around and fix Sun with a stare. He stops in place and watches as you point down. “Stay,” you say firmly, and climb up the hatch.

Quite honestly, you don’t want to eat yet. You know you’ve barely had anything, but that little interaction with Sun wasted more daylight than you liked.

Either this planet’s rotation is faster than the earth’s or you’re just bad at keeping track of the time, given that you woke up in the middle of the day and now the sky looks darker than it would look like on earth if the same amount of time passed. Probably the latter, given your track record of easily losing the time, but the former might be true too.

However, like it or not, you have a peeper to eat. There’s no way to store this without it rotting and stinking up the whole pod, and you mentally tack onto your list a way to get ice somehow.

Even if throwing the peeper out of the pod was a viable way to solve your current problem, your entire being screams at you for being wasteful with food, and that you’re sure Sun would react negatively to that. Whether that reaction would be like looking at a kicked puppy or the last thing you'll see, you don't know and you aren't keen to find out.

Suddenly, you’re struck by the urge to pop the chunks into your mouth as is, but the rational part of your brain takes over before you can do so. No eating raw food. No. Don’t.

The fabricator hums as it cooks the peeper, and you pop it into your mouth. Not the best, but it’s vastly better than the raw shit you ate yesterday, and you’ll take this over that any day.

You step out of the hatch and immediately something rams into your side. It takes a while to regain your bearings, but once you do, you find Sun curled into himself and with flattened frills. Like this, he looks a lot smaller than he actually is.

He's like a big, excited dog that's unaware of its own size.

“Hey, it’s ok,” you wave your hands around, “I’m not hurt, just be more careful next time.”

“Ful next time,” Sun parrots back.

“Careful,” you correct him.

“Careful." He repeats. "Careful next time.”

Can you teach Sun to speak and understand your language? That would be fascinating if possible. He seems to understand that he didn't speak the full word. No, not the time, you shake your head. You’ve materials to find and items to craft, and not enough daylight to do so.

Sun reaches a hand out and whistles, though he doesn't hold you this time. You tilt your head. He mirrors you, tilting his head in turn.

"Well," you swim down, and hear Sun following you, "There's a wreckage just below on the floor there and I'd like to check it out. See if there's anything salvageable, you know?"

You continue to speak whatever comes to mind, and Sun responds with a variety of noises in-between pauses.

The wreckage has hardly anything of worth that you can identify. You hold a metal ball, broken in half, and wonder if it can be used for anything.

"You can scan items," your PDA pipes up. Sun perks up and circles around you. "This includes human-made items. Blueprints may be found during scans and added to the list of craftable items."

"Thanks," you say out loud.

"You're welcome," says the PDA. It can do that? Neat.

You hold the scanner to the metal ball in your hand, and Sun bumps his head against your hand.

"What do you need?"

Sun hums and tugs at your scanner, but you shake the hand holding the scanner and swat his hand away with your free hand.

"I need this," you shake your head, and Sun whistles and bumps lightly against your helmet in response.

The scanner closes its light once its done its job. The screen displays "Grav trap: incomplete blueprint", but suddenly, the scanner is plucked from your hands.

"Hey!" You whirl around to see Sun turning it around in his hands. "That's not yours," you stick your hand out towards him.

Sun chitters and instead of returning the scanner into your hands, instead points it at you. The familiar light indicating the scanner scanning an object washes over you.

Does he like coloured lights or is he just mimicking your prior action?  Maybe you'll find some way to fire a beam of light and have several coloured prisms for him to play with. A flashlight and coloured glass would be good enough, right? Though that begs the question of how you were going to get different coloured glass, seeing as that doesn't seem to be an option in the fabricator.

Sun would probably like raves. Maybe not for the music, but for all the flashing lights and glowsticks.

Even if he doesn't like coloured lights, the plastic prisms you'll find some way to get for him should serve as something shiny to play with.

The light of the scanner shuts off, indicating its completed progress. Congratulations, you're now added to the database.

"Wanna give it back to me now?" you hold your hand out again.

Sun whines and brings the scanner close to his face. He yelps and drops it when the scanner's light turns on directly into his eyes.

You let out a snort of laughter before you take the scanner. Instead of tucking it away, you point the scanner towards Sun.

Sun darts away from the light of the scanner with a trill. You turn it towards him, but he dodges its light yet again. You turn to tuck your scanner away, but clawed hands dart forward and stop you before you can.

"Personal space," you laugh a little hysterically and shake your hand free from his grasp. He really is like a giant dog unaware of his own size. As much as it was fun interacting with him, you're still not entirely used to his presence. Not yet, anyways.

Sun stares between the scanner and you with exaggerated motions.

"Oh, you think this is a game, do you?"

Sun clicks and swims away, and the two of you play this laser game for a while.

You point the scanner towards him and he tenses, ready to dart away, but no light comes. Sun narrows his eyes as you laugh and taunt him with no light from the scanner. When he whines and wiggles in place, you turn on the scanner and watch as he scrambles away from its light.

After a while of this mock game of laser tag, the screen shows "Scan complete". Interested in what it has to say, you open the latest page added to the database and see it's named Sun's species as Celestial Leviathan.

Hmm, you're not too sure you agree with that leviathan part. He was bigger than you, sure, but you wouldn't exactly call him a leviathan.

Sun swims closer to peer down at your screen. You wave to him, and he waves back.

Unlike Alterra tech, whose technology could figure out the abilities of the species with a scan, the scanners you were handed did not have the same functions. Sure, it built a page and told you the species name, but other than that, all it gave you was a bunch of guesses on the species' possible abilities, if it even did that at all. It was your job to fill in the missing blanks and make sure the information is accurate.

You perform the job that you were hired to do by accomplishing your first task: putting a question mark next to the "leviathan" part of the name. The page marks several spots on the diagram of Sun as bioluminescent spots, but you weren't sure of its validity given that you've never actually seen them light up.

Before you can jot down mimicry as one of his abilities, you're suddenly seized by your arms and dragged off at very high speeds.

"Let me go!" you struggle, but it would be like kicking a brick wall for all the good that did.

Sun lightly taps you against the hatch of your pod. He lets you go and levels you with an expectant stare.

“Put me back!” you gesture, “I wasn’t finished!”

Sun growls and points up. With a huff, you take the cue and climb up the hatch.

Once in the pod, you curse and slap the wall. Fuck this, you were pissed at a job left half-done, and one that was rudely interrupted at that. You're not even done exploring the wreckage! Not to mention there were still cave sulfurs and more creepvine seed clusters to gather after exploring so you could craft a repair tool. Those open wires are still exposed, and you’re sure that thing is waiting to electrocute you to death in your sleep.

You hardly got any work done today, and your body is wide awake and still used to earth's 24-hour rotation. Too much to do and too little time to do so. As much as you would like a nap, there would be no sleep any time soon. In normal circumstances, you would be glad to take a quick nap, but you weren’t tired now and you hate to sleep on a job unfinished—

Wait, where is your scanner?

You sigh and hold your head in your hands. Just another reason to go back down. Crafting another was an option, but you were attached to this scanner specifically. It even had a dent on the handle from when you picked it up in the middle of its fabrication and dropped it.

Sun can't keep you in here.

The moment your flippers leave the hatch, they get promptly shoved back up. The hatch closes.

So he can, apparently.

Well then, two can play at that game. Your body is on jetlag, while his is used to this planet’s shorter day-night cycle. All it would be on your end is waiting for Sun to tire out and fuck off elsewhere.

The same artificial lighting greets you as always when you sit up. Your hair is wet and mussed from the water on the floor, but your brain is too sleep-addled to mind. Not like there’s any way to remove all the water from the pod, you muse.

The darkened sky greets you when you climb up the hatch to the roof, giant moon in the sky like always. Seriously, that moon is scarily close to this planet.

Oh fuck wait. How long have you been asleep?

You jump from the top of the pod straight into the water. A satisfying splash rings out, and you take a moment to shake the sleep from your head before diving deeper.

In the dark, the waters become a lot harder to see. You take the PDA out and give it a few quick taps to turn it on, and use it as a light source. The wildlife here seem to be fond of glowing in the dark; maybe you should start trying to hunt during the night instead.

Where was that wreckage you were exploring just earlier in the day? That has to be where you left your scanner, when Sun dragged you away. You’ll check on the floor and around the wreckage, and hope the scanner hasn’t been hopelessly swept to sea.

There's nothing, but your skin prickles with the feeling of being watched. Oh well, you mentally shrug. There was a reason the dark was a common setting in horror stories anyway. No doubt it's your mind trying to evoke those same feelings.

Movie night with the crew was a mistake. It was the last thing all of you did before leaving earth, and now you'll have to live knowing The Thing was your last movie. It does not help that you're in the middle of nowhere and unable to call for help too. There was a weak hope that you wouldn't find yourself in a horror movie plot on this ocean planet.

No scanner in sight, not even when you swam down all the way to the bottom of the ravine the wreckage was located close to.

You'll miss that scanner; it was your first fabricated item, and you were so excited to start scanning everything in sight until you got distracted. There's always next time, but it won't be the same.

You'll use this time to instead gather ingredients. The creepvines are close by back in the direction of your pod, so you won't even have to go out of your way to gather some. Cave sulfur must wait until day, though, judging by its name. You'll go cave-exploring when there's actual sunlight.

Another piece of wreckage is below down in the ravine. The way it's stacked reminds you of a shipwreck.

A stupid joke takes its change to bring itself to the forefront of your mind: What do you do when you witness a shipwreck? You let it sink. Jokes like these were a favourite of the captain’s, and not so much of his son’s. The kid would always look so offended or done whenever he said one with a bright smile.

You laugh. So does something behind you.

The silence is deafening.

For a split second, you want to turn around. Then you remember that's how people die in horror movies.

You book it towards your pod.

The creepvines rustle with the water's movement as the thing behind you gives chase.

The sound of the creepvine's rustling gets closer and closer.

Too slow, too slow, can't outswim. Find a nook to hide in and outmaneuver.

There! That cave!

You swim as fast as you can and grit your teeth when you bump against the cave walls.

A hiss grows louder and follows behind you. You're too slow to dodge when it explodes on your back.

You let out a strangled cry. The explosion ejects you outside the cave system. No crackled helmet, thank your lucky stars-

Claws grab your leg and rake down. You scream.

The same laughter from before echoes behind you. "Careful."

Mimicry?

He growls and releases his claws from your leg when your flipper hits him on the face. He grabs the offending flipper. You wiggle your feet free from it and dash to the safety of your pod.

The moment the hatch beneath you closes, you drop to the floor like a dead man. The adrenaline burns as you take deep breaths.

Taps ring out in the dead silence. He knocks several more times against the hatch.

Seconds turns to minutes but the wait stretches it to hours.

You let out a breath you didn't know you were holding and press a hand against your beating heart. You know it's only been minutes at most, but it feels like hours passed.

"Calm down," you murmur to yourself.

It's a while as you lay there on the floor, taking deep breaths in and out. With a reluctant grumble, you push yourself up to assess the damage.

Your PDA is still with you, thankfully, but the seed clusters were left behind during that whole ordeal. The O2 tank and remaining flipper are fine. Angry red marks leave its trail down your leg.

It's hard to stand up with one leg red and bleeding, but you lean against the wall and drag yourself to the med kit.

The blood's going to be a real pain in the ass to clean off the floor. Pain in the leg, if you were going for accuracy.

You're not sure why you didn't expect this.

This had to be why Sun wanted you inside the moment the (actual) sun set. This hunting behaviour is a far cry from the caring yet playful nature you came to learn about him.

Fuck, it stings.

Why did you let your guard down?

From initial assumptions, you already figured out he was a carnivore and a hunter. He targeted after peepers, smaller prey than you are, and you did think of yourself as on the menu.

Sun spent the whole day with you and never attacked you.

Why now?

He's a wild animal, not your friend. You were too quick to think of him as human, when he's the furthest thing from that. You shouldn't have placed those expectations on him.

It still hurts.

You are a fool.

Shame on you to forget he's a predator. You know better than this.

Even still, you don't blame him. It was entirely on you to ensure that you were the one interacting safely with the wildlife, and you neglected that.

A lion, no matter how friendly, still has claws.

Chapter Text

As much as you hated the idea of going back into the water, you had no choice. You still needed a repair tool, and now you also need fiber mesh for med kits too. Two clusters of creepvine seeds are needed too, one for the repair tool and another for the fin you lost.

Your stomach grumbles, demanding breakfast, but you know there will be none in this state.

Breathe in, out.

It takes you a moment to prepare yourself to go back into the water. The pod sways gently with the waves, rocking you back and forth like a lullaby.

You poke your head out of the hatch and spy a dead peeper nearby. Again? Well, whatever Sun's game was, you were in no position to deny a free meal.

You stretch your arms as far as they can to reach the peeper without fully submerging yourself in the water. Your hand catches onto its tail the moment you spy yellow in the distance.

You cringe when your shoulder harshly bumps against the pod in your attempt to scramble back up into the pod.

"Oh, no you don't," you close the hatch, and not a moment too soon. The pod tilts when Sun thumps against the bottom.

He whines.

"It's your fault I'm stuck in here, motherfucker," you glare at the closed hatch. You cringe a second after. Mad or not, you shouldn't have done that.

Breathe in, out. Remember: it's not his fault, it's yours for forgetting he's a wild creature.

He knocks against the hatch. The reminder of last night sours your mood even further. Breathe in, out.

"Fine, you want to talk face-to-face? I'll be outside." It's doubtful he knows what you mean, but it's not your loss.

You climb up the ladder and sit on top of the pod. A moment later, Sun's face pops up in the water.

"I have the high ground now," you crack a little joke to help your nerves.

Sun whines again and splashes the water with his tail. He holds a single hand out of the water.

"Nuh-uh," you shake your head, "Not after last night."

Sun whistles. He holds both of his arms out, as though asking for a hug.

One of his hands holds your scanner.

"Hey!" You move to stand up, but wince and quickly fall back down when your leg protests. Sun clicks with a frown. "That's mine! Give it back!"

Sun flicks his gaze between you and the scanner, and shakes the hand with the scanner at you.

Hell no, you weren't going down there.

"Put it down, put it down," you point downwards.

He tilts his head to the side and whistles.

He wants you to join him in the ocean, does he? Fucker.

"I'm not going down with you because—" you quickly roll up your pants and strip the bandages—"of you!"

The open wounds sting in the face of the cold, salty breeze. You bite back the hiss of pain and gesture towards angry red marks. His frills flatten.

"That's your fault!" you wave him off, "Now shoo! And leave the scanner behind!"

What did you just say about—argh! You always had trouble keeping your emotions under lid, all of it threatening to spill. Joy, anger, sadness, all of it. You show how you feel, but you still need to learn how to untangle them and act like how you need to, not how you want to.

And now you're yelling at a fish.

Breathe in, out.

"I'm sorry for yelling at you," you begin, voice low and as soothing as you could make it.

He whistles again, but looks away from your gaze down to the scanner moments later.

"I know you don't understand what I'm saying—"

With slow movements, he swims towards your pod—

"—but I still shouldn't have yelled at you. Did you even know that was me last night? You should've, given the mimicry, but I don't know how you think—"

—and latches onto the ladder. The pod sways, tilted to the side.

Ice-cold fear washes over you. The hatch is closed. Can you make it down in time?

Instead of climbing up the ladder, Sun tucks the scanner in the space between the pod and the ladder. He looks up towards you and whistles.

“Thank—thank you. For returning the scanner."

You… don't know what to do now. You grab tight onto the lifepod, just in case he ever decides to tilt it more and unbalance you off it and towards him.

Sun whistles once more, before disappearing beneath the waves.

Now it’s just you, alone on top of the pod. The waves are a clear blue, and you watch as Sun’s silhouette swims away until he vanishes from your sight.

Deep breath in, and out.

The sky is a pretty orange-lavender, sunset in the distance. The jet lag seems to be leaving you awake at random times of the day, but at least the sunset here is pretty, even the giant moon in the sky. It’s different from the sunset back home, but nice all the same.

But you have things to do, like collecting the scanner Sun left at the base of the ladder. You climb down the ladder and wince in pain. Nothing much you can do about it but grit your teeth. You bend down and flail in an attempt to reach the scanner, unwilling to let go of the ladder or go further down.

With a sigh, you push off and let go of the ladder, splashing in the water. The helmet covers your head before you can inhale saltwater. Scanner retrieved, you duck down into the water and make your way to the hatch at the bottom of the pod.

Now back in the safety of the pod, you open the storage and take out a water bottle, and think.

The creepvines were not too far, but not that close either. If you had enough time, you could make it there and back. You need to get some bladderfish too, to make more water for yourself and your slowly dwindling supply, but in your current state, you’ll just have to settle for drinking less.

What can you do? It’ll take a long time for your leg to heal fully, and you can't just sit around and wait.

This sucks.

The missing flipper should be the first thing to craft, but to do that, you need silicone rubber, and for that, you need to go back to that fucking creepvine forest for another seed cluster.

Why does everything you need to craft revolve around those seed clusters?

If it wasn't for the survival situation you've found yourself in, you know you would lose days just researching everything.

This is an entirely new alien planet with sparsely documented species just there! Who wouldn't go crazy? Hell, even if you didn't know how to conduct research on wildlife, you would still have the time of your life scanning everything.

If only you got your hands on a higher-end scanner, the ones that could accurately extrapolate data from wildlife easily. It would be such a good read!

You huff a little. It's not like anyone else is around to watch you get mad at this. Sad. Sad mad. Smad.

You open the PDA and scroll through it mindlessly. Not much to scroll through here. Your eye catches Celestial Leviathan, and with a huff, you close the PDA and lie on the ground.

Oh shit! You completely forgot about the dead peeper on the floor!

You lie on your stomach and point the scanner towards the peeper, silently cheering when the scan is complete.

The page on the PDA is mostly blank, like always. The only information on it is that it's edible, which is good to know. If it was listed as inedible…

Welp, time to make some jot notes on peepers!

-Big ol eyes good for seeing, detects predators food etc

• Dissect one later and hope I'll understand what I'm about to see

-Speedy motherfockers that I'm going to GET someday

• Good swimmers but I’m going to be better

-Very common, at least where I crashlanded, coords uhhh fuck it I'll look that up later
-A little chewy, pretty tasteless

• Tastes raw when raw

-Yellow blood

• I bet that's going to trip me up when I tear one open later
• Why is it yellow? No bitches hemoglobin?
• Blue blood would be cooler, it'll blend into the water but that is a sacrifice that I'm willing to make

It's not like anyone's going to read this. Besides, you've got plenty of time to fix this up and make it presentable to human eyes that are not yours.

One cooked peeper after, and you're all set. Not like there's much to pack.

Knife, check. Oxygen tank, check. Nothing else, really. The PDA and scanner are safely tucked away on your person, just in case.

Wait, can you craft a second knife?

No, apparently, because everything needs those fucking seed clusters, including knives. Why?

It's dark out when you submerge into the water. It was dark out yesterday when Sun attacked you. He must be cathemeral then, awake both at day and at night. That makes things troublesome for you, but, nothing you can do about it.

Hopefully Sun is far, far away by now. You're… doubtful that he's truly gone, but there's not much you can do about that. Injuries or not, you've still got to get out there before you die here.

Your hand clenches around the knife.

Round two of trying to get some seed clusters. If Sun comes after you over again, you won't hesitate to stab him.

In a moment of impulsiveness, you yell, "I've got a knife and I'm not afraid to use it! Not like last time! Make sure you hide away from this! Hidey-hide!"

That was probably the worst thing you can do, but nothing is rushing to end your life, so, all’s well that ends well. Hopefully.

You want to trust Sun, you really do. But there's Sun, the one who catches peepers and plays with you; and Sun, the one who bled you and hunted you down.

The trip to the creepvine forest is a quiet affair, though one made longer due to your lack of flippers. You grit your teeth as the claw marks on your leg flare in pain, but stopping here would make you into a sitting duck.

Taking another seed cluster is a familiar affair, and once you've grabbed enough, you tuck it away and swim as fast as you can back to your pod.

Laughter sounds from below you, and to your horror, it's closer to the pod than you are. "Hidey-hide," he giggles, "Hide away."

Your breath comes out in terror. "Sun."

His shadow rises from beneath to block your path. Red eyes gleam as—

Red?

That—

There's no distinctive sun rays around his head. Thanks to the bioluminescence, you're able to make out an appendage reminiscent of a night cap sticking out of his head.

This asshole isn't Sun?

Not-Sun giggles before he swims forward, hands outstretched to grab you. You point your knife forwards, ready to take him down with you.

Before you can stab a bitch, Not-Sun shrieks as he's tackled off to the side.

"Sun!" you grin. He’s glowing! The PDA was right about those!

Sun trills in response and picks you up before you can blink. The hand holding the knife stutters as you were about to instinctively stab Sun. Didn’t actually stab him, thankfully.

At speeds you could only wish to swim at, Sun takes you to your pod. The familiar sound of—wait, no way he knows how to—

You were gently placed down on the floor of your pod. Sun climbs in soon after, careful not to squish you.

Oh my god he knows how to open the hatch.

Despite Sun's best efforts, your pod was built to accommodate the size of two humans at most; not the size of a small leviathan and a human.

"Wait, close the—" you cut yourself off before you finish your sentence. Turns out Sun already closed the hatch before you could say anything about it.

Not-Sun growls from beneath. Sun stares down and screeches.

There's silence for a while, before Not-Sun trills. Sun growls. Not-Sun hesitates, then whistles. Sun shakes his head minutely, then whistles twice in quick succession.

What a fascinating conversation that you had no way of understanding. Briefly, this scene reminds you of parents fighting in the other room, but this one is a lot more… less shout-y, really.

The hunter from last night, was it even him? You assumed so, thanks to the mimicry, but it's not just Sun who possesses the same mimicry ability. You initially thought him to be fairly solitary, and didn't expect any other celestial leviathans might be hanging around in the area.

Sun croons and shifts towards you. It's super cramped in the pod with him taking up majority of the space, but where in the everliving fuck do you even begin to get a leviathan out?

"Do you, like," you gesture vaguely, "This can't be comfortable for you."

Sun tilts his head and whistles. "Careful."

"Not the right context, buddy,” you shake your head. “Or, hmm… right context if you're saying that you're going to be careful, but you’ll need to say more words than that if that’s what you’re going for."

You hold your hand out to Sun. He bumps it against his head, and you take that as permission to pet him. His skin is smooth and cold, and it reminds you of a beluga whale. It takes a bit of willpower to resist the urge to squish his face.

"I don't even think you can understand what I'm about to say, but I think you deserve an apology regardless. Sorry for thinking you tried to kill me, and for driving you away earlier, and this morning, for calling you a motherfucker—"

His hands slap the empty air next to you and hits the wall. Your heart leaps into your throat, with his claws so close and no way to run; but then he takes his hand back and rests it under his chin.

"What? What's wrong?"

Sun snorts and lays his head down with a wiggle of his tail.

"Was it because I said motherfu—"

He baps at the empty space again, but the way he does it this time reminds you of a cat trying to hit the air. His hand goes back to rest under his chin again.

"Hey, I can say what I want, thank you very much." You hesitate, and offer your hand out again. He bumps his head against it again, and you resume petting him. “Do you even recognize that’s a swear? Was it because I yelled this word at you and now you recognize it as a bad word? Do you even know what a swear is?”

There’s no answer this time, no movement to him aside from the slight rise and fall of his breathing.

An indication of his ability to breathe in air? He seemed at no discomfort in being away from the water, though you had to wonder how he managed to evolve the ability to breathe in both air and water. There’s no hint of land so far, though yet again, you haven’t gone very far. With your luck, land is plentiful on this planet and you just happened to land in the middle of the ocean.

…Sun really is asleep right now, is he? Now that you know the other creature wasn’t Sun, you had to wonder whether Sun was cathemeral as per your previous observation (now made obsolete), or if he was diurnal.

You’ve now found yourself with a new problem: you can’t move. It’s not like having a cat fall asleep on you, where if you really had to, you could gently move it to the side. No, this was a giant sea creature that could easily crush you if he rolled over in his sleep.

It hits you right then, right now, that you can kill Sun. Of all times to do so, there is none better than this, with him asleep and vulnerable in your lap (figuratively. Literally, he's crushing your entire body. He’s tried his best to give you space, but this pod was not made to accommodate his size).

But he's… not hostile. The opposite, rather. In fact, he seems to see you as some sort of companion, though you weren't sure what he exactly saw you as. Pathetic animal that needs help? A smaller individual of his species with a fucked up tail?

Does he know that you’re non-native to the ecosystem, that there’s only one human on this planet?

(There are survivors, there are survivors.)

(There’s no radio signal. )

Either way, killing him out of fear won't do you any good, especially killing the one thing that seems invested in your continued survival.

What an incredible show of trust. You wave your hands in front of his face, not touching, but close. He doesn’t react. What did you even do to earn such deep trust? To sleep so openly and so deeply, he must really be comfortable here with you.

Even after you tried chasing him off in the morning (evening, technically), he still shows no ill will towards you. You know you would be pissed if you were in his place. For what reason does he have to treat you with such non-hostility?

Sun continues to slumber on. The harsh, artificial lighting of the pod is getting to your eyes. Sun, too, it seems, given that he’s turned his head away from the lights. Perhaps another point of proof of his diurnality? No, even nocturnal animals sleep in the dark in their own dens or roosts or wherever they’ve made their homes.

The itch to write down your thoughts is getting to you, but you can’t even if you want to. You really, really want to.

Even if he’s able to breathe in air just fine, would Sun really be ok? There’s still that exposed circuitry that you’re fairly certain Sun is resting on, and he might dry out once morning comes.

Though if he did dry out, he would be able to free himself into the water anyways. What a smart little (not really little but you could pretend) guy he was, to figure out how to open the hatch just from watching you. It's a little terrifying, if you were being honest, but Sun body slammed a bitch just to keep you safe.

But if Sun could open the hatch, then what was stopping the other creature from doing the same? Unsuitable hands for this kind of work, hopefully.

Did it even have hands? It was dark, but the only details you knew for sure was that hat-like appendage sticking out of his head and that he had a tail. What were the chances of him being the same species as Sun?

Wait, no, if celestial leviathans are native to this part, there has to be more out there. That other guy was probably a celestial leviathan too, given their similar size. Or what if there were other species of a similar size around here, and you just don’t know given that you’ve hardly scanned a thing around here?

Not your problem, at least not right now. Not in the day either, but you only have two encounters to go off on. It could be coincidence, it could not.

You should probably name the thing. Sure, that thing was trying to kill you, but all he was trying to do was keep himself fed. Could do it in a way that’s less pants-shittingly terrifying, but hunting habits were hunting habits, and you weren’t going to begrudge him for that. Stab him, maybe, but no hard feelings.

Night was a fitting name for something that only hunts at night, but… it didn’t really felt like it fit. Hatty? Nah. What else is in the night? The stars, space, that giant fucking moon that seems to watch you every time you wake up—

Oh! Moon!

It would fit, too, with what you’ve named Sun. Sun and Moon, Moon and Sun.

You hope you can find the opportunity to scan Moon one day. Yeah, sure, he was trying to kill you, but you have a feeling he’s only the first in what’s about to be a long line.

Besides, you’re not going to let something like attempted murder stop you from logging down this planet’s wildlife.

Chapter Text

Something soft gently slaps your face.

“Five more minutes…” you turn to the side and freeze.

This is not your bed.

You spring up, but you’re trapped under the weight of something keeping you held to the ground. You cry out in pain when your leg seems to twist. A shadow reaches closer, but you jerk back and hit your head on the hard wall.

"Ow fuck—"

A growl.

That gets you to sit up—if you could. Stupid—get out now before it come after you with claws and mocking laughs—

You blink. “Good morning.”

Sun trills in response.

You bite back a wince and hold one hand on the back of your head, the other to cradle your leg the best you can. It seems all that moving managed to aggravate the injuries you've been keeping wrapped up.

Sun purrs and taps his hands on the hard floors.

"What are you, a cat?" you mutter and look around the pod. Nice of the exposed wires to not kill Sun in his sleep, but you really need to get that fixed today. You wave a hand around, "Do you think you can move a little? I need to reach the hatch so we can actually get out of here."

Sun wiggles around but his position doesn't change by much.

"You're stuck."

Sun croons. To your surprise, you can hear the sounds of the hatch opening, slow as it is. With a click, it opens.

His tail slaps you in the face. "Hey," you say, but Sun has already slipped out of the pod before he can hear your protests.

His head pops up briefly through the hatch. Sun clicks, beckoning you to come down with him.

"Soon," you push him down with your flipper, "I've got to make the other fin for this thing. I need two to swim, Sun."

You close the hatch. Sun clicks again.

"Like I said, I'll be down there soon."

A couple buttons on the fabricator and you've got a flipper. As for the repair tool, all you're missing is some cave sulfur. You can hazard a guess as to where to look based on the name.

When you slip out of the pod, Sun is nowhere to be seen. Well, it's not like he has an obligation to stick by your side.

…though maybe you should try to hunt something first before you go searching for some cave sulfur.

You're tempted to go without food in the name of gathering the last material needed—going hungry wasn't exactly something new to you—but you need to learn how to hunt. Independency was key, and while you appreciate Sun helping out, you can't keep relying on him to keep yourself fed.

With a knife in hand, you zip around, chasing peepers and anything that looks small enough to be breakfast.

The peeper makes its final mistake as it swims into the wall and backs itself into the corner. A simple stab is enough to immobilize it, and you pick the peeper up. As quick as you can make it, you sever the nerves connecting its brain and poke around inside to make sure it's as dead as possible. Every jerky movement the peeper makes is another cut and a hope that it finally dies.

It's not your first time watching an animal get butchered. It is, however, your first time being the butcher, and you're not even sure you're doing this correctly.

…maybe next time, you should just bring a live peeper to the fabricator. But being cooked alive sounds like it hurts. It's not like it takes long, but…

You'll put this thought on hold.

Two quick chirps has you looking up to see Sun holding a peeper in one hand and a bladderfish on the other.

"Sun!" you tuck the knife away and wave your free hand, "You're back. Are those for me?"

Sun has both hands towards you. You hesitate—the kills he presents to you has claw marks embedded deep. You have something much the same, raking itself down from your knee to your ankle. If it was at your throat—

And then Sun ducks his head to look up and meet your gaze. He tries to, at least, though no true eye contact is made. You take the peeper and bladderfish from his claws before he can say anything and put them away.

Sun croons and lowers himself down to the ground, right next to the peeper you killed. The spots on his body glows.

“You’re glowing!” you gasp, “Incredible. I’ve noticed that a lot of the wildlife here do so too, the peepers and acid mushrooms and everything. The creepvines don’t do so, only their seeds.”

You dig out your PDA and open the page for Celestial Leviathan. He peers over the screen, trills and taps lightly on the screen at his mirror image.

"That's you, Sun," you say, and jot 'may be able to recognize self in reflection. Perform mirror test later?'.

The spots the PDA identified as bioluminescent are slowly confirmed to be true. You look up and down from the screen, checking to make sure the marked spot really does glow. A task like this would be easy if done at night, but as it is now, it takes you a while to squint and make sure.

Sun is still watching you work on his species page. When he notices you staring, he bumps his head against your helmet. You write down 'big puppy' and tuck the PDA away.

You pick the peeper up, the one you managed to kill, and present it to Sun. He tilts his head and chirps.

“It’s for you. I mean, I don’t think it’s enough to feed you, given your size and all, but it’s my best attempt at repayment for the food you’ve been bringing me.”

Sun bumps his head against your hands, bringing them closer to you and away from him. He points at his closed mouth and then at you.

“Alright, alright.” You can tell when a gift is rejected. Still, you try to present it to him again. “You sure you don’t want it?”

Sun crosses his arms in an X and points at you. "It's for you."

“Correct!” you stash the peeper away and clap. Sun trills and claps alongside you. "Good job, buddy! Correct context, and I'm pretty sure that's what you were trying to tell me anyways."

Maybe you could make a meat pumpkin later for him, though you’re not sure what to substitute the pumpkin with.

“Alright, so," you swim away, "I’ve got silicone rubber and titanium back at base, so cave sulfur is the last ingredient I need.” You snort at the mental image of fitting all the materials in an oven and out pops a repair tool. “So I’m hoping the caves here are—Sun?”

He’s gone when you turn around. Looks like you’ll be alone for this, then.

A quick chirp sounds behind you. When you turn around, all you can see is a giant coral tube—oh, that’s what he’s trying to do. Think he can hide, can he?

You draw closer. Before your hand can knock on the tube, Sun pops out with a wave of his claws.

“Peekaboo,” you swim back a little. Sun darts back inside.

You position yourself above the coral tube and wait. When Sun pops up beneath, you drop your scanner in front of his face with a, “Boo!”

Sun looks up and chirps in delight. He brings the scanner back to you, and you take it from his outstretched claws and scan the coral tube.

“Had your fill of games yet? I’ve still got cave sulfur to look for, you know,” you kick your feet around as though you were young again and talking on the phone on your bed. You’re almost tempted to tangle invisible cords around your fingers.

Sun wiggles out of the coral tube and claps his hands together. The scanner beeps, done.

“Okay, it’s time to go now. Are you with me?” you turn around (knife is sheathed on the toolbelt) and swim down to an opening of what looks to be a cave.

Something small and dark swims near the opening. You tense, waiting for it to pounce on you, but all it does is swim in place. Sun pokes at it with his claw and watches it swim away into the cave.

“Huh.” Such a carefree, passive creature. Everything else was either running away from you, trying to kill you, or in Sun's case, helping you.

You follow it into the cave and scan it. So shuttlebug was its name, though if you were being honest, you half-expected it to be called something like a cave dweller. Seems fitting for something that, well, dwells in caves. The shuttlebug’s page has more information filled in than what the other pages got, but you’ll look over it later.

“Now where is that cave sulfur…” you mutter under your breath. Quartz and limestone deposits seem plentiful down here, and it would be a good idea to pick some up just in case.

A hissing noise to your side. Your hackles raise—you know this from that first night, the sound that precluded an explosion.

A red fish swims towards you at alarming speeds. Sun cuts it off before it can reach you with his body, and hisses back at it. With another hiss from Sun, the crashfish swims back and into the flower-like plant that closes around it.

"Thanks for the save," you put your knife away, back where it belongs. "Why do fish explode on this planet? They don't—do they die from this? Exploding? That doesn't seem sustainable, though maybe they make up for it by having a shit ton of eggs at once."

Sun growls and raises his arms in an X.

"What's the problem?" Your mind replays the earlier scene. "Oh. Is it because I said shit?"

Sun growls again.

"I don't think I've said sh—uh, the s-word before. Do you have a sixth sense for swears? What is this, a no swearing zone?"

"No swear," Sun huffs.

"Oh, damn! It's a minor swear, at least give me this," you say at Sun's unimpressed look. "But! Hey! Your sentence wasn't even a direct copy of what I said!"

Sun tilts his head and hums.

"It's no swears or no swearing, though," you correct him. "I wish I knew how to teach you. I'll make sure to never shut up for you," you smile, "You're going to be hearing me a lot for however long you stick around for. That’s how you’ve been learning, right? Listening and copying?"

Sun trills.

“You’re a smart one, aren’t you?” you say, “I don’t think I’d be able to pick up on a language as fast as you just from listening to a single person.”

The scanner beeps twice shortly after. Two pages, one for the fish and the other for the plant.

You bite back a sigh once you open the tabs listing every species. Sulfur plant, huh. At least that answered your question of where to get cave sulfur from.

Hopefully there were other ways to get some. If not, well, you're probably going to die of electrocution sooner or later without that repair tool, provided that Moon or something else doesn't get you first.

You open the picture of cave sulfur on your PDA and show it to Sun. You tap on the screen, "That’s cave sulfur. Do you have any idea where else I can get cave sulfur, besides trying to wrestle it away from crashfish?" Worth a shot, at least.

His frills flatten.

"Sun? What's with that look for—"

Sun darts forward and punches the sulfur plant. The crashfish inside explodes, the explosion contained inside the sulfur plant. Sun hisses and brings his hand back to his chest.

That…

Well, that’s one way to get cave sulfur.

"I hope this doesn't affect the crashfish population.” You reach your hand towards Sun, "Let me see that?"

Sun obliges and puts his hand on top of yours.

"Looks good to me, as far as I can tell."

You take your hand back—well, you would, if Sun lets you.

You tug your hand. He still holds on.

"Sun. Please." You don't want to wait for his grip to tighten and dig into your skin. If you have to, you'll cut him off with your knife. "Let go."

Sun lets go.

"Thank you."

The sulfur plant opens up, revealing cave sulfur inside. Should be enough for your purposes.

You swim out of the cave and up to breach for air, and dive back down. There was still ample time left in the day before night hit. Red and orange streaks across the sky, lovely colours much like the evenings back home. Some things never change.

Sun swims alongside you as you talk.

“Now that I’ve got the cave sulfur, I’ll just look around the wreckages and see if there’s anything I can salvage. I’ll look over the blueprints when I’m back home, see what I can craft. I’m hoping that I can find some seaglide blueprints lying around. I know they tell you to wait in one spot so rescuers can find you, but this isn’t exactly a regular situation.”

There’s plenty of wreckages around you. Nothing much to see around here. Once you finished exploring one, you moved onto the next.

Grav trap and pathfinder tool blueprint, got. Seaglide blueprint, score!

You try to move a particularly stubborn piece of wall to see what's hiding underneath. Sun grabs the other end of the wall, and with his help, it flips over.

"Thanks, Sun," you say. He trills.

Your old notebook! Albeit ruined and unusable now, given that it’s not waterproof. It’s served you well.

If your old notebook is here, then would your photos be around too? Mementos of back home would be nice.

Sun grabs your waterlogged notebook and hisses once the paper crumbles under his touch. He shakes it off and hides behind you to glare at it. Well, not like your notebook was salvageable in the first place.

You turn around to pat his head. He bumps his head against your arm with a purr. "Don't worry, buddy, the paper won't eat you."

Sun shrinks back when the shredded pieces float towards the two of you.

"I think it's time to go home now." You've got fish to eat and a repair tool to fabricate.

Sun accompanies you back to the pod. You spot from the corner of your eye a lanky fish coming towards the two of you—stalker, your PDA informs you when you take a cheeky scan—until it stops in its tracks and swims the other way.

You're fast enough to see Sun smile where he was just baring his fangs out. He chirps innocently.

You give him a thumbs up. "Thanks for the bodyguard detail, Sun."

Admittedly, you wanted to see the stalker up close, but that would probably end in your death, or at least some new injuries.

You open the hatch and climb in without fanfare. The bottled water was made easily in the fabricator.

"Non-vegetarian filtered water. The bottle was made by reusing the organism. Remember to eat or throw away the bottle before it rots," the PDA informs you.

What? Fuck it, why not, that's just what water bottles are made of now.

You set the peeper down on the fabricator after, though not to cook it. With your knife, you cut it apart and set the organs away. Apart from the peeper's alien anatomy, the process felt a lot like chopping a fish on the cutting board back home.

The end result doesn't need to look pretty. You didn't want to keep Sun waiting for long.

The fabricator removes the bones and internal organs when it cooks. How it does that, you have no clue; it could be vaporizing the internal bits into thin air for all you know. Still, it felt like a waste, especially when you had something waiting patiently outside that would probably appreciate a quick snack.

The repair tool and seaglide was easy enough to make. “Hell yeah!” you lift it into the air with both hands, “Land ho! When I find it!”

You can actually go places now!

And you’ll actually get to fix those exposed wires!

Sun is there to greet you when you come back down. “You!” he chirps.

“Hope you didn’t wait too long,” you present the peeper’s internal organs to him, “Want this? I can’t eat it.”

Sun tilts his head with a quizzical look. He points to you.

“Nuh-uh,” you cross your arms in an X. It seems he picked that up as a way to say no. “For—” you point to him with your free hand and present it again with the other— “you!”

You haven't seen him eat all day. Here’s to hoping he won’t start feeling peckish and hunt what’s closest to him. It was partly a gift, and partly a peace offering.

Sun takes the guts from your hands and eats it. He chews as he makes a sweeping gesture with his arm. At your blank look, he swims up and breaches the surface of the water. You follow suit, and follow his pointed finger towards the sky.

“Where did the time go?” you squint.

It felt like it was just light out moments prior. Of course, up in the sky is the one constant so far on this planet: the giant red moon just casually chilling there. It would suck if it pulled a Majora’s Mask.

Sun goes back into the water, his bioluminescent spots flickering on and off like a light show.

“Ohh, wow! How pretty! What’s all this for?”

Sun points behind you. You jump when you see red where there’s supposed to be empty water.

“Fuck! Don’t jumpscare me like that!”

Moon cackles in the imitation of your laughter and wiggles his fingers. Sun pushes you behind him gently and levels Moon with a stare.

“Yeah!” you pump your hands up, “Kick his ass, Sun!”

Sun turns around and blows bubbles from his nose.

“Sorry.” He really must have a sixth sense for swears. “I mean, just make sure Moon doesn’t kill me, gotcha?”

Sun hums and turns back around to face Moon. The two talk to each other with clicks and growls, and while that’s absolutely fascinating, you’re sweating a little.

If Sun called Moon over, it can’t be for anything good. Sun’s put you behind him, but they could just be easily plotting your demise together. Or not? Sun did bodily tackle Moon out of the way. The best case scenario for you is Sun telling Moon to fuck off, or at least not to hurt you, but what you wish is happening doesn’t mean that’s what’s actually happening.

It would be so, so cool to listen to them talk to each other! In the comforts of a station far away from where they can actually get you! Not right next to them, oh god.

A single knife won’t be able to help you out much, not against two of them, but it’s all you have. If you fiddle with your PDA, you could probably change the brightness settings to disorient one or both of them. If they’ve got functional eyes, they can be blinded.

Sun growls. A few moments pass before he turns around and grabs your arms and holds them to your sides. You yelp and kick your feet. With your arms pinned, there’s no way you can do anything. You kick behind you as hard as you can, but your feet meets nothing but water.

Moon stares at you. You freeze up and close your eyes. Of fucking course you would die like this. If he was going to tear you to shreds, you only hoped that he either made it quick or that your body produces a fuck off amount of painkillers at that exact second.

Something bumps against your helmet. You crack an eye open, and nearly startle when you see the red of Moon’s eyes right next to your face. Without leaving your personal space, Moon whistles and continues to stare at you.

Unfortunately, he’s found your eyes and now you’re locked into an uncomfortable staring contest. To your surprise, it’s Moon who averts his gaze first.

Moon backs off and whistles once more. Sun rumbles, not quite a growl, and that gets Moon to swim away.

He relaxes his hold on you. You take a moment to you stretch your arms and whirl around to face Sun.

“Don’t do that again,” you cross your arms.

Sun whines and whistles with flattened frills, his hands held together as though asking for apology.

“...you’re forgiven.” You whistle a quick, single note, and that has Sun perking his head up.

He circles around you excitedly, hands moving quickly that you can’t follow his gestures. He’s making a bunch of sounds at you in a fast-paced manner, and it has your head spinning.

You whistle again. He claps his hands together quickly, and you find yourself clapping along from his sheer enthusiasm.

“I don’t think I can make a bunch of sounds that you can, but it seems whistling is a pretty important part of your language, huh?” you tilt your head and Sun tilts his along with you, still clapping.

Sun whistles a low note that rises in tone and ends up as a high note. You copy him as he repeats the action several more times, then he points at himself and repeats the whistle. “Sun,” he points at himself, and repeats the same note.

“You picked up on your name! The one I gave you!” Holy shit! You whistle, low to high. “Is that how you say your name in your language?” You whistle his name again.

“Your name,” he repeats in your voice, and whistles his own name.

You cross your arms in an X. “My name. When you say it, it’s my name. When I say it, it’s your name.”

“My name,” Sun corrects himself and whistles his own name once again.

“Correct! And my name is—”

Sun interrupts with an entirely different whistle. “Your name!” He whistles it once again.

“Oh shit, you gave me a name?”

Sun huffs, “No swearing.”

“Forgive me?” you raise your hands up.

This time, Sun whistles in a different manner. It’s one you’ve heard quite a bit between Sun and Moon’s conversations: a simple, short note.

You copy the whistle. “Is that how you say sorry?”

Sun whistles the same note. “Sorry.” He hums, muttering under his breath.

You patiently wait. This is the most interesting language lesson you’ve ever been apart of, and you’ll fucking wait for him to take as long as he needs to gather his thoughts. He picked up on your words so fast! His sentences are actually understandable, a feat you would never be able to accomplish if you were in his place!

Sun was picking this up at an extremely fast pace. Is this his nth learning another language?

“You say sorry.” He whistles the short note. “And that’s how you say I forgive you.” He whistles the same note.

“Okay, gotcha.” You whistle, and then say, “Sorry.” You whistle the same note again, and say, “I forgive you.”

“No.” He whistles the same note twice. He hums when you tilt your head. “Corr…ect. No. Correct and no.”

Something that’s both correct and not correct. “Close?”

“Close,” Sun repeats. He holds up one hand when he whistles, and then the other hand when he whistles the same note.

No, not the same note. Different words, but your ears can’t tell the difference.

“Sorry and I forgive you are two different words, are they? I can’t hear the difference between them,” you point to where your ears are, “And I don’t think I ever can. Our ears aren’t the same.”

Sun trills, but cuts short when he suddenly yawns. On your end, you get to see massive rows of teeth and back away from him. You silently curse—you really got distracted, but it’s so hard not to when fascinating shit keeps happening.

“Are you sleepy?”

“Sleepy,” Sun repeats. He chitters and clicks. His way of saying goodnight, if you had to guess.

“Nighty-night,” you wave him off and watch as he swims away.

You dart off as fast as you can towards your pod and open the hatch at record speeds. In the safe confines of the pod, you tear open your PDA and write as fast as humanly possible in the Celestial Leviathan page.

Chapter Text

The artificial lighting of the pod threatens to blind you when you open your eyes.

“How do I turn that off…” you mumble. Just because you can sleep with the lights on doesn’t mean you want to.

It takes a minute more before you slowly, reluctantly, get up from where you were lying on the floor. The PDA is on the floor, right next to you. You pick it up and blearily look at the most recently opened tab.

…

You run a hand down your face. What you would do for a nice cup of coffee right now. Hell, you’d kill someone for a shitty burger and some fries.

The repair tool fumbles in your hand, nearly dropping and landing on the ground. Once you have it firmly secured, it takes hardly a minute to repair the exposed wires. Fucking finally, that task felt like it took forever.

You sit down, roll your pants up and unwrap the dressings to check on your injury. It’s calmed down from the bright red it first was, and so far has been fairly ignorable. It doesn’t look infected, so you’re hoping the trend continues and it heals up just fine while you swim around and do whatever needs to be done. You replace the dressings and roll your pants back up.

A grav trap is waiting for you on the fabricator. Did you craft it last night? It was a bit hard to remember, given all that seems to be coming to mind from last night was the haze in which you wrote a fuckton of words on your PDA.

Right! Sun can talk! And he even taught you a bit of his language!

Sun can talk.

Holy fuck.

You open the Celestial Leviathan tab and blink when a wall of text hits you. In your excitement, it seems you forgot to make it readable.

Ugh, you hate going back and editing. This was supposed to be your personal notes, damn it. It's supposed to be the rough draft that you hardly had to edit.

Ah well, this was a problem for your future self.

The PDA goes back to your toolbelt, and the salty breeze hits your face when you go up the hatch. It’s dark outside, but the wind is nice even at night. You close your eyes and hum.

The waters were always peaceful. Back home, you’ve always liked going near rivers and lakes; however, the beach was on thin fucking ice with its coarse, rough sand that gets everywhere.

The waves gently rock your pod back and forth.

You take a deep breath, and go through your PDA, trying to figure out what you were supposed to do now. Building a ship will be a… long task, and just a smidge impossible without the right blueprint. You have no clue how any piece of technology works, only that it does. Before all of this , that was never much of a problem.

Upgrading your O2 tank sounds like a good plan. You could also swim further out with your seaglide, see if there’s anything of interest you can find. With any luck, you find what you need immediately and get off this godforsaken planet.

The waters are dark, but the wildlife surrounding you glow. You decide to scan a couple acid mushrooms for the hell of it, then bring out your newly-crafted grav trap.

The original plan was to pick up a couple of acid mushrooms to test it out, but holy hell. You cackle as every creature in range gets pulled towards the grav trap. The effective range of this little contraption is a hell of a lot larger than you expected.

Everything trapped in the grav trap’s pull gets scanned: rabbit rays, peepers, holefish, garryfish, bladderfish, boomerangs, and a chunk of limestone.

You pick the grav trap up and gleefully swim towards the nearest cave system you can spot, on the lookout for the telltale colours of the sulfur plant.

Bingo! There it is, right at the—oh fuck, the crashfish spotted you.

You hiss in an attempt to copy whatever Sun did to make the last crashfish stand down, but all that does is make it angrier.

Welp, you tried your best.

You hightail it out of there as fast as you can and brace for impact. You scream as it explodes at your back. Lovely, that’s for sure going to do wonders for your back pain.

You flex your arms. Your back stings, but it’s probably something easily fixable given time. You set the grav trap down and pick up the cave sulfur when it gets pulled in.

There’s another cave system going down into the ground next to a ravine, and to your frustration, you hear the hiss of a crashfish again. You swim up out of the cave, and lucky for you, the crashfish doesn’t seem to have spotted you and went further down the cave instead.

Do crashfish just… not sleep? Polyphasic, maybe? How do you catch one unawares? You shake your head. This is a mystery you’ll figure out later.

Back in the wide expanse above the ground, you bat the grav trap around for a bit between your hands, considering.

There’s a lot of small animals in the path ahead.

The grav trap expands with a click, already collecting the nearby poor, unsuspecting animals, and it takes only a bit of aiming to throw it into the path of most fish.

The pull the grav trap has on most of the fish is lost as it zooms through the water, but some are unwillingly dragged alongside it as though in a high-speed chase.

“And that’s a goal!” you cheer. With the ball settled in place, more animals get picked up by it before they can swim away from its range. You scan them all before grabbing a few of the small ones for lunch later. The grav trap settles back and shrinks with a click, and you store that away too.

Right, what were you here to do again?

To look for stuff to to make a high capacity O2 tank, right. For that, you need to get silver, titanium, and glass, which requires quartz.

Time for more spelunking, then. You swim out further with your seaglide into the kelp forest, ignoring the stalkers you can spot. They don’t seem to spot you, and so you continue on with your day.

Except one does spot you, and it’s swimming faster than you’d like. You brandish your knife and clutch it tight.

It roars and bites your arm in one swift motion. You sink your knife into its exposed neck, and it legs go with a roar. You slide the knife out and stab it several times as it writhes and falls back, swimming away.

“Yeah, that’s right! Hide away! Fuck you!" you swing your knife around for emphasis.

Another stalker roars behind you, too close for comfort. You whirl around and slash in front of you but miss as the stalker darts backwards.

The stalker laughs in an imperfect imitation of you, too low and gravelly.

Of course.

"Oh, fuck you, asshole," you shoot Moon the middle finger, and wince when you realize it was the arm bit by the stalker.

Moon tilts his head, eyes focusing on the blood seeping out from your arm.

"Hey, hey, we were fine last night, weren't we?" You hide your bleeding arm behind your back, and that has Moon refocusing to look at your eyes instead. "Sun told you not to kill me, right? So don't fucking try it."

Moon doesn't stop staring, and you back off slowly, sweating. It's you who breaks off the staring contest first, looking off to the side but still keeping him in your vision. Moon laughs in his imperfect imitation again.

"Prick."

Moon isn't as aggressive as he was before, and you know you only have Sun to thank you. You don't know what words were exchanged, but nonetheless, it seemed to have made Moon into less of a threat.

Sun and Moon are definitely somehow related, though you aren't sure how the social dynamics of Celestial Leviathans work. They seem to be a social sort, given that the two of them seem to communicate a lot from what you've been able to see, but you're unsure of how friendly they are towards each other.

Still, whether or not Moon was friends with Sun, it seems a good idea to keep the other Celestial Leviathan on your side.

"Here," you hand him a dead rabbit ray, the largest prey animal you had on hand in your inventory. You toss it towards his direction and swim back before he gets the idea of biting it out of your hands, and by extension, your fingers.

Moon looks between you and the rabbit ray, without taking the offered meal.

"Do you not eat this? I mean, I'll take it if you won't."

The moment your hand reaches out to take it back, Moon takes the gift with a snap of his jaws around the rabbit ray, and swims off to enjoy his meal.

Unlucky for you, given that you were hoping to get a full scan of him while he ate. That rabbit ray was going to be your dinner, but hey, your would-be dinner is going to be the start of an allyship between you and Moon. Bribery always works, especially when you're bribing with food.

With Moon gone, you take out the med kit you keep handing and wrap the dressing around your bleeding arm.

Moon holds a remarkable similarity to Sun, now that you had a chance to properly look at him close-up. You assume Sun and Moon were both Celestial Leviathans, but to be honest, you aren't exactly sure. They had no problems communicating with each other. Even keeping their mimicry abilities in mind, Moon was using the same language as the one Sun was using even before you met Moon.

Maybe they were different subspecies living in the same or similar areas, or this could be a case of sexual dimorphism.

You open your PDA and check the anatomical notes the PDA automatically made for everything you've scanned thus far. Every peeper, garryfish, and other animals that you've scanned seem to look as though they all have the same-looking reproductive anatomy as the other samples in the same species that you've scanned thus far, and you scanned quite a bit with that grav trap earlier. If every, or at least a majority, of the species on this planet seem to be simultaneous hermaphrodites like the current data is suggesting, then Sun and Moon looking being a case of sexual dimorphism seems unlikely.

To be fair, it's still a viable theory, especially since you haven't gutted anything open yet with the intention of studying its anatomy and confirming the accuracy of the generated anatomical diagram the scanner made.

That doesn't cross out the subspecies theory. Or maybe they were a completely different species from each other that only happened to look fairly similar to each other due to convergent evolution.

Or, more terrifyingly, they could be the same species and look so different from each other due to domestication. That implies there's intelligent alien life out there capable of domestication, and if Sun and Moon really were this way as a result of domestication, then where did they go?

No no, don't think that way. You've hardly even left this safe little bubble you've made for yourself, how would you know if these aliens are around or not? Even if there were, you aren’t sure if you want to meet them.

You shake your head. This is no time to be spacing out. The theories can come later, once you’re back in the safety of the pod.

Moon isn’t back, or if he is, you can’t find him, so you swim down into the cave system in the kelp forest to look for quartz.

The cave down here is beautiful. The jellyfish-like plant sways with the current when you disturb the waters near it, swinging your hand back and forth.

“Ouch,” you bring your hand towards your chest and blink as your vision seems to turn green, not to mention the motion sickness.

You stick your tongue out at the plant and shake your stung hand. Drooping stinger is what the scanner calls it.

A simple click on the grav trap and now rocks are coming towards you. You peer at them, and pick up the quartz in the grav trap’s pull. You hadn't been collecting much quartz, or much of anything, really, given the quickly dwindling storage space back in the pod.

You should probably get to work on getting a habitat builder, if only to have more room to stash your stuff. That, or you can just build waterproof lockers and put it inside your pod. Sure, that space is going to be quickly filled up, but you don't want it to be swept away or stolen.

You eye the oxygen meter at the corner of your screen. You turn around, looking for the way you came from, but all you see are the same rocky walls.

Fuck! Fuck!

You swim up as far as you can, navigating the cave system. It has to open up somewhere, right?

"Oxygen," the PDA warns.

"I get it, I'm trying!"

You find your way out of the cave, but it's still a ways away from the surface of the water. You're about to take your seaglide out when you hesitate, seeing something out of the corner of your eyes.

You turn your head to fully face this glowing, green, beautiful, mesmerizing creature. Its alluring light beckons you forward.

How beautiful. You reach a hand towards it.

Its mouth opens up and strikes your approaching hand. You yelp and flinch backwards, watching as the creature swims away, spell broken.

"Thirty seconds," your PDA warns. You take out the seaglide and hold your breath, praying you breach the surface in time.

The helmet opens up and you gasp for air. Balancing yourself on the seaglide, you take your PDA out and manually create a new entry. For now, until you can properly scan the creature, you put down its name as Little bitch and jot down its ability as being able to mesmerize others. Probably. You put down a question mark to signal to your future self to fact check this.

You duck back beneath the water and spot red past the kelp forest. Seaglide in hand, you make your way towards the new biome.

Something digs its way across the sand down in this new sandy biome filled with red grass. You slowly inch closer towards this new creature, scanner in one hand and knife in the other. Its armoured skin looks tough to break with your knife, but at least you can say you tried.

The creature lunges itself upwards towards you when you approach. It's fast, but if there's one thing you're better at than it, it's changing directions while swimming. You swim circles around it, waiting for the scanner to complete. Once done, you swim off and back away, and watch as the sand shark gives up and goes back to digging around in the sand.

What else can you find in this new biome? You swim along, seaglide in hand and eyes peeled down below for anything out of the ordinary.

Red grass, lots of fish down there, which a quick scan tells you it’s a spadefish, and holy fucking shit a leviathan!

With glee, you make your way towards the giant swimming creature, and take out your scanner. It doesn’t react to the light of the scanner, nor does it react to your presence.

A Reefback Leviathan, huh? For sure this one looks like a leviathan, unlike Sun and Moon’s misplaced leviathan tag. Maybe those two were young or small for their species, or both?

You swim up above the Reefback so you can look over and scan the flora growing on its back. You might not know a single thing about plants, but having a catalogue of the plants on this planet was still something you were going to do, even if it wasn’t going to be as comprehensive as the fauna section.

Something sharp flies towards you, and it’s only by sheer luck that you manage to dodge it. You turn your head around, trying to find whatever’s trying to attack you, and this time you get it.

A plant. Of course there’s plants with guns here. Lucky for you, swimming in circles around it while you scan the plant ensures that no other bullets come for you. Tiger plant is a fitting name for this thing, if only for its tiger-like colouration and pattern, but it is a bit of an asshole, shooting its spikes at you. You scan the other plants on the Reefback’s, well, back, all while dodging the spikes the tiger plant keeps shooting at you. It’s not hard to do, but it is annoying.

Once you’re done scanning the flora growing on the Reefback, you swim below it just so the tiger plant would stop targeting you.

You freeze, spotting a familiar shape in the sands below. A lifepod.

You swim down with your seaglide, hoping to find another person, a sign of life, anything.

The pod is wrecked with a giant hole on its side. You grimace. There’s a databox inside the pod, and it contains an intact compass, as well as the blueprint for crafting more compasses. You take and equip the compass, and upload the blueprint to your PDA.

When you open the storage, there’s nothing in there besides flares, soggy crackers, and an instant film. It doesn’t crumble when you pick it up, and seems to be in good condition.

It’s a picture. The captain’s picture, to be exact, of him and his son. The captain was a kind man, always walking with a smile on his face. His son was the opposite, a little ankle biter that you grew to be quite fond of. Precocious brat. Smart little shit, too, to sneak aboard the ship under everyone’s noses until it was far too late to put him back home.

That boy is dead now, him and his father both. It… fuck, this entire situation is messed up. You can only hope that you’re wrong.

You pocket the film.

How can you think that? How can you—there has to be survivors other than you. For fuck’s sake, you haven’t even found a corpse and you already declared them dead. The captain could be around, he could be off elsewhere and left this wrecked pod to find better shelter.

Then why is this picture here?

You know the captain. He’s a kind man, but his son is his life, and he would cross hell and high waters to keep that boy safe. Your memories of the crash itself may be scrambled, but you were one of the last to get into a lifepod. You were there to watch the captain frantically call for his son, and although the entire ship was in a panic, you remember the captain ardently refusing to go in a lifepod until he found his son.

The captain could… still be alive. Maybe he forgot the picture. Maybe he had no choice but to leave it behind.

The film burns a hole in your pockets. It’s not yours to take, but you can’t find it in yourself to put it down back where you found it. It’s the only proof you have that there was other people.

You tuck everything away and grab onto the seaglide, going up to the surface. Your helmet pulls back, and you breathe the air in.

Are there other pods nearby? Where are they?

You can’t see the stars. With a sigh, you submerge below the water again.

…there’s only one problem now: which way is home?

Even if you can’t find your way home, you can stick to the surface of the water for air and nap instead of sleep a long, full cycle. No, wait, that’s shit, humans are monophasic, not polyphasic, and converting to the latter sleep schedule is going to fuck you up.

Your sleep schedule’s already fucked anyways, what difference does it make?

Down below, there’s no sight of the captain’s lifepod. You’re too far up to see it now, the pod covered by the blue of the ocean.

You whirl around, trying to find a clue of where the hell you ended up, blinking at the sight of a blue dot on your helmet’s navigation screen.

You don’t get a chance to think about it. There’s the roar of a stalker below you, and it’s rapidly approaching.

Guided by the blue dot on your screen and your seaglide, you swim as fast as you can. The stalker growls intermittently, still hot on your heels.

Out of curiosity, you turn around to see the stalker, but you don’t see the usual green of a stalker. Rather, the stalker is dark blue with glowing yellow dots—

“You can stop chasing me, Moon!” you yell.

Moon clicks and stalker-roars again. Just for the hell of it, you suppose.

“I’ll stab you if you get closer, don’t test me!”

Moon clicks again and slows down. Still right behind you, but not as close as he was earlier.

Your pod comes into view, and you slow down as you approach. You hear Moon stop in his tracks too, a distance behind you, and you turn around to shoot a glance at him. He’s not that far from you, but he’s not close, either, remaining a respectable distance away.

You open the hatch.

Moon darts forward.

You scream and scurry up as fast as you can. The hatch closes with a thud as you scramble to screw it shut.

“Asshole!” you stomp your foot.

Moon clicks and laughs in your voice again. “Hide away,” he croons, “Nighty-night.”

It’s silent once again, but there’s no way he left that easily. You sit down on the cool metal floor and strain your ears to try and hear any signs of him, but there’s nothing. With a huff, you get up to your feet.

The radio crackles to life. “Receiving pre-recorded distress call. Playing back...” says the mechanical voice, before it plays the human-recorded distress call. “This is lifepod, uh, if I’m going to be honest, I don’t exactly know ? The lifepod got wrecked before I could get a good look at it. I’m trying my best to stay alive, but come get me soon. Out.”

You’re not alone.

Chapter Text

How many radio signals have there been? How many have you missed? The others were alive and all you did was ignore their calls—how could you ignore them like that?

That's not… this is the first radio signal you've received. You didn't—you didn't miss any, and even if you did, the missed calls would show up somewhere in the PDA's logs, right?

You tap against the radio. "Hello? Hello? This is lifepod 5, I've received your distress signal. Are you there?"

Silence.

"Are you there? Who is this?" you rack your brain to try and match the voice to a face. "Is this… the doctor?”

Admittedly, you don’t know the doctor’s name, but neither did anyone else. They were just the doctor, and that was how they preferred to keep it.

"Is that you? Are you there? Doctor? Doctor!" you tap against the radio again.

Right, it's pre-recorded. You sigh.

If this was, in fact, the doctor, that was good. Great, actually! The doctor is a brilliant mind, and near-unstoppable at game nights. Great to have on your team, awful to go against. If they’re able to apply that to real life, your chances of survival might go up. That, and they were a licensed medical professional and it’s always good to have an actual doctor onboard. They could help you with the scratches Moon gave you.

You’ve got nothing but a distress call and coordinates to go off on. Bit far, admittedly, but still within range. With the seaglide, you should be able to make the trip there quickly.

You hastily grab some water bottles and jump into the waters below.

The coordinates sent with the distress call have been automatically logged in your PDA and, consequently, your helmet's navigation system. The blue dot is set about southeast to you, and you swim towards it with the help of your seaglide.

You hear a snarl, as all of a sudden, Moon blocks your path forward.

You move to the left. Moon moves left. You move back to the right, and so does he.

“Move aside,” you take your knife out and brandish it. Moon zeroes in on the knife and growls a warning. “Listen, I’ll fucking stab you if you don’t move aside.” You’re on limited time, you’re already too late, you don’t need this asshat wasting your god damn time!

Moon growls again and points behind you, back to the direction of your pod.

"No," you say slowly, "I have somewhere to be and you’re blocking the way. Move your ass."

He doesn't move. This is getting ridiculous.

You gasp and point behind him, shouting, "Holy shit! Look behind you! There’s some—some fucking thing!"

Moon takes the bait and looks away. That actually worked? Not your fault if he falls for the oldest trick in the book.

You swim past him. Before you can make it far, his claws clamp down on your leg. You jump at the sudden contact on your wounded leg.

You let go of the seaglide and jump towards Moon with outstretched hands. He lets go of your leg and you’re able to sink your knife into him before he moves out of reach.

Moon screeches. You wince and try to cover your ears, but it does nothing thanks to the helmet in the way.

He growls and stares at you with dilated pupils. You clench your hands and whistle the note Sun taught you: I’m sorry. Moon squints, and for a few moments, you’re sure he’s about to snap.

Instead, he leans his head away and swims downwards, away from you. The bioluminescent spots on him dim down and soon enough, you can’t make him out from the scenery.

You let out a breath you didn’t know you were holding.

You lean down and run your hands through your leg. Aside from being sore, nothing hurts the way it does when skin is broken. The lack of red pooling around your feet is another confirmation that nothing was hurt, at least not majorly.

That’s progress. Unexpected progress, but progress all the same, if you’re correct on your thoughts behind his intentions. While he’s not exactly cuddly, you didn’t want to erase what little friendship there was between you two. You’ll have to hunt later and gift him food as a way of apology.

But you can do that later. Right now, you’ve got something more pressing.

The coordinates are underwater, further past the kelp forest. The landscape below is barren, full only of sandy hills, if you were able to see anything at all past the dark, murky water.

It’s just… empty.

There’s a muted roar off in the distance. None of your concern, not if it doesn’t come closer.

There’s a roar, again, closer. Red swims in the distance, covered by the dark.

“Oh fuck no,” you backpedal away.

Too late.

A fuck-massive leviathan with the sharpest mandibles comes into view and roars.

You hardly get the chance to scream. A hand wraps around your waist and yanks, knocking your breath out.

The leviathan is still hot on your heels, but you’re roughly shoved off to the side and near to the sandy hills.

“Asshole!” your voice yells in the darkness, then screams in ever-increasing anger in what you can only describe as Simlish, or what songs sound like before you look up the lyrics.

The mimicry of your voice and the roars of the leviathan get farther and farther.

You look up. It’s still night-time.

You owe Moon double.

You continue on your way through the dark, the seaglide your only source of light.

Quietly, tentatively, you whistle Sun’s name.

Nobody comes. Of course. He should be asleep around this time, if you were right about his diurnality. Or maybe he’s away. Not asleep, just away. Off for a meal, maybe. He seems to stick close to your area, so most likely he's around… somewhere. What does he eat? Peepers, you know that, but they seem a bit small for him. For his size, he should be eating slightly larger fare, or he eats a lot of peepers in a day. He could eat stalkers, maybe.

With Moon and the leviathan gone, the waters seem too quiet, too empty.

“Lifeform readings in this area are sparse,” your PDA informs. You could see that with your eyes, but confirmation that this place truly was barren was… nice, you suppose.

Will the doctor be ok? They’re alive, but for how long? Brilliant their mind was, they were also incredibly weak. That… does not bode well for their survival, not if they come across anything hostile; or, if they had to carry anything heavier than a cat around on their person.

The coordinates are still up ahead.

There are species back home who claim large swaths of land as their territory. How big of an area does that leviathan mark as its territory?

Lights shine ahead, steadily increasing in size. Moon comes into view, glowing in his full glory. The knife by his shoulder is gone, replaced by a yellow-tinted scab. You'll have to fabricate another knife.

"Moon," you greet and look around. Where did that leviathan go?

He responds back in his own language. You recognize two words in his sentence: the name Sun gave to you, and Sun's name.

You whistle Sun's name. Moon is still for a second, before repeating what you said. You whistle it again.

The two of you swim side-by-side in silence.

Moon breaks the silence. He whistles, then, in a perfect imitation of your voice, says, "Moon." He repeats the whistle.

"Is that your name?" You repeat the whistle; a long, low note.

"Moon," he says again, and leaves it at that.

You don't let the silence continue for long. "Sorry, by the way," you say, "About stabbing you. I don't know what you were trying to do, but… yeah. That wasn't cool of me."

You don't particularly regret stabbing him, but you don't exactly want to sour your relationship even more than it already is. You still don't know what he was trying to do back then by grabbing you, but it wasn't to hurt you, apparently, given your lack of bleeding and further injury.

He's still an asshole, but he's an asshole that can shred you and he just saved your skin, so you'll play nice. That, and he's one of two of your primary curiosities on this planet.

Moon huffs and turns his head away.

How intelligent is Moon, compared to his sunny counterpart? How many of your words does he understand? Are Sun and Moon the same species? They're both proficient with mimicry, it seems; maybe the language they speak belongs to one of them, and the other learned it.

You laugh under your breath at the image of Moon at a chalkboard, teaching a lone Sun sitting at his desk. If that theory was right, you imagine it was Sun who taught Moon, not the other way around.

The first light of the day breaks over the horizon.

Moon wails, louder than you've ever heard. You flinch and shut your eyes.

"Can you be any louder," you hiss.

Moon wails again, louder.

You're about to stab him again. With what, you don't know, but you're sure you'll be able to figure it out somehow. Whack him across the head with your scanner, maybe.

The same piercing wail cries off in the distance. It peters off into a series of clicks, and then a sharp whistle of—Moon's name, huh.

"Did you just call Sun?" you whistle Sun's name, and hope that gets the message across.

Moon chitters.

“Right. Well, if you did, how long can I expect him to arrive?”

Moon clicks in response.

The coordinates are directly beneath you, about 350 meters below and 1500 meters southeast from the lifepod.

You can make it. It’s only 350 meters.

Your PDA issues warnings about decreased oxygen deficiency. “Passing 100 meters.”

You still have oxygen. It’s not that far, you know you can make it.

“Passing 200 meters.”

It’s right there. It’s right there it’s right there you see it! You see it!

The compartment stands starkly against the barren sandy hill. You locate the hatch at the bottom of the compartment, and quickly pull yourself up and indoors. Your helmet opens up and you breathe in the oxygen inside.

Close. Too close.

It’s bright inside.

For a second, you were worried the place would be out of power, but it seems the doctor managed to find a way to power the place. It’s cramped in here, though you’re not much better in that regard when it comes to your own living area. Can’t be too picky with shelter, and the lifepod has been faithfully serving you thus far.

Where are they? It’s just you in the compartment.

Not much to see here. Even if they’re not here, and they've done their best to organize the clutter on their floor. Still messy, but it's clear an effort was made to separate the rocks, organic materials and salvaged tech and metal.

The hatch twists by itself as your heart leaps into your throat. You jump to the wall, as far away as you can from the hatch, and yelp when your foot catches on a rook and you nearly slip.

Moon comes up from the hatch, staring at you. Only his head pops out from the hatch. Thank fuck he didn’t try and pull himself up into the place like Sun did nights ago.

“Do you need anything,” you say dryly, trying to ignore how your heart thunders in your chest.

Moon sinks down back below into the water, until only his eyes and the top of his hat-like appendage is visible.

“Okay, cool. Cool.”

Moon can… stay there, or something. He can do whatever he wants as long as he doesn't bother you.

You're acutely aware of Moon's staring as you bend down to inspect the organized clutter on the floor.

"Can you leave," you make a shooing motion. It's a bit awkward.

Moon tilts his head to the side, before leaving. Huh. That was unexpected.

Then he jumps through and lands right in front of you, arms held in front of him to absorb the impact.

"HEY HEY HEY GET OUT," you fall flat on the ground and kick his head.

Moon hisses and slinks backwards, back out of the compartment and into the water. His head pops back up through the hatch, with only his eyes above water. He squints and chitters.

"Yeah, yeah, laugh it up," you get back up on your feet and shake your hands, "I've got a pile of rocks by my feet and I'm not afraid to throw them at you."

You turn your attention back to the mess on the floor. How did the doctor eat? What did the doctor eat? Did they even eat at all? Nothing in the pile strikes you as particularly edible, though it could just be that the doctor didn't leave food on the floor.

There's a whine, and you look towards Moon with a raised eyebrow. He whines again, and that's when you realize it wasn't coming from him but from someone else outside.

You whistle Sun's name, and get a response back as he whistles the name he gave you before whining again.

Moon growls and ducks down into the water, finally leaving you alone in the compartment.

You pick up their PDA from the floor and back yourself up against the wall before sliding down to sit. Moon's still gone, but you can hear the two of them talk just outside.

There isn't much on the PDA, just scans of fauna and flora you already have but lacking the information you added in. There's several saved coordinates, too, which you can only hope are the locations of other survivors or areas of interest that they've found. There's also pages that seem to be written by them, some of them appearing to be notes or journal entries, though the most recent one is a medical tutorial in layman's terms.

Well, mostly in layman's terms, complete with messy hand-drawn diagrams of whatever they're trying to communicate. It's… well, to put it nicely, they have the usual doctor's handwriting, and that seems to transfer over to their artistic skills.

An audio file is attached to the page, and you balk at the length of time the file goes on for. Why in the fuck did the doctor record for 12 hours?

Well, fuck it, you were already here. You weren't going to sit here for 12 hours, but you might as well see what it's about. Not the whole thing, but the beginning of it.

"I'm going to die." That's one hell of a way to start a recording. "I broke my leg. I'm writing everything I know before I do so. I either have a few hours or a few days. It all depends on when the fish outside decides to crush this compartment open."

The audio is silent, save for some tapping sounds.

"I'm—I’m writing as fast as I can. I can’t talk and write. The thing outside hasn't left yet. I knew I should've left this place and move elsewhere, but I didn't want to move too far. I left a pack of cards on the floor. Not mine. I was going to return them to… well, doesn't matter anym—wait, wait nonono—get back, get—how did you get inside?! How did you open the door—!"

The doctor screams, covered by a clattering sound as the PDA is presumably dropped.

That explains why the file is 12 hours long.

A predator small enough to fit in this space, at least enough to drag any unsuspecting humans out. Something with enough dexterity to open the door and leave it undamaged. You clench the doctor's PDA tight and walk purposefully towards the still-open door. There's only two you can think of who fit the bill.

Is this how you're going to die? It's how they died. Will this be your end, too?

You fall into the water and see Sun in the distance, pacing around in the water by himself. Moon is half-lying on the sandy ground, looking tired and ready to fall asleep by the way his head keeps slumping forward.

“Moon,” you hiss.

You knew he had a taste for humans, but you didn't expect him to have gotten someone before you. Then again, it shouldn't have been all that surprising.

He certainly fits the bill. Just earlier, he opened the hatch to the compartment and went inside, and of the two, it was him who tried to make you his meal. It wouldn’t be anything surprising.

Sun snaps his head towards you and flattens his frills. Moon raises his head up to look at you before looking away again and closing his eyes. Moon whistles and holds his hand out towards Sun. Sun doesn't take it.

But if it was Moon, their reactions don’t line up.

You play back the audio file straight from the beginning. Sun whines and curls in further to make himself smaller. Moon whistles again.

“Sun? It’s you?”

Sun whines again.

“That—that’s not right. It can’t be you, can it?”

It can’t be. All he’s ever done is play around with you and saved you from Moon. It can’t be Sun who's killed a human. Moon’s already tried, but Sun would never.

It’s not.

The rational part of your brain points out that Sun is a predator and a carnivore. You should've expected something like this, sooner or later. The emotional part of you wants to kick his teeth in.

You turn around and climb back up into the compartment.

Sun is getting closer, whistling. The whistles he makes sounds familiar, but you're not in the mood to try and remember its meaning.

You slam the hatch down. The noise drowns out his vocalizations for a quick second, but does nothing to stop him from talking.

You don't want to hear him. You don't want to see him, and you don’t want him anywhere near you.

You trusted him! But you were never safe around him in the first place.

This isn't a good way to handle this situation. You can't find the energy to care about that. Maybe later, when you weren't so tired. Maybe you'll stay tired and angry at him forever.

"I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry," Sun says, right outside the door, repeating the words you taught him over and over again.

"I don't want to see you," you crouch near the hatch. If he tries to open it, you'll twist it closed again, and if that fails, you're throwing rocks at him.

Sun continues to repeat the same words. You ignore them, drowning out his cries in your own head as you try your best to… stop. To stop being here. To stop paying attention.

You don't want to be the sorry zoologist stranded on an alien planet. You don't want to be anything right now.

You take out the creepvines you had on you and do your best to tie the hatch in a way that would make it harder to open. Passable, not your best work.

You have to find others.

What if there's no one? The closest lifepods to you, the closest sign of life, of other survivors, and you've gone too late.

You're alone. What if you find nobody else?

That won't happen. It won't.

It can't.

You sit by the hatch, staring. Waiting.

Chapter Text

You wake up with the worst neck pain and sore back you remember in recent memory. You get up to your feet and stretch.

You cut through the tied clump of creepvines wrapped around the hatch. You're sure if Sun tried, he could break past it. You untie the creepvines wrapped around the hatch, and hesitate to open the lock. Is Sun still out there? Will it make a difference? It's not that hard to kill you, so why…

You take a moment to sit down, wrapping your arms around your legs and hunching over. That was the big question, wasn’t it? Why? Why? Why?

A whistle breaks you out of your thoughts, loud and right outside the hatch.

"What the fuck," you blurt out, apprehensively watching the hatch, "Get the hell away from the door."

Against your wishes, the hatch spins, opening itself.

"No no no no NO NO —” You retreat to the nearest corner inside the compartment, gripping onto your scanner like a lifeline.

Sun peeks in through the hatch. He's barely able to open his mouth before you scream and throw whatever was in your hands at him. He yelps, ducking back down and away from your hastily-thrown scanner. Had he not dodged, your aim would have hit its mark. Instead, it splashes down and sinks out of sight.

"I'm sorry," says Sun, hiding outside, "I'm sorry."

Holy shit, you need to sit down. Instead, you continue to stand in the corner, watching the open hatch with narrowed eyes.

“You KILLED—” you take a deep breath, as Sun shrinks lower into the water—“you killed them. The only other surv—you killed them. You. Why?”

Sun hesitates, before repeating, “I’m sorry.”

“I know! I know you’re sorry! What I want to know is—”

You stop. Right. The language barrier. You pause to think. What is the most pressing question you have to ask him?

You walk closer towards the open hatch, peering down into the dark. Blue eyes stare up at you from below, illuminated by golden glowing spots.

“You—” you point down at him, then mime choking, and slump your head and close your eyes briefly —“kill—” you point to yourself—“me?"

Sun growls, louder than you expected.  You jump in place, heart pounding, and Sun whistles a series of notes that slowly peter out into silence.

You take a step back. “I don’t know what the fuck that means, but I can’t assume that’s a ‘no’ from your end.”

How fast is he? He can reach the back of the compartment, that’s for sure; but, maybe, just maybe, if you walk slowly enough backwards, he won’t try to?

Sun clicks and reaches a hand out the water towards you. You abandon any thought of a stealthy retreat and scramble backwards as far as you can.

“Do NOT come up here I’ll stab you with—with something!”

His hand freezes where it is, and retreats back beneath the water. Sun peers through the hatch, half his face submerged, his eyes staring next to you. If he tries anything, there’s rocks by your feet to kick, but you doubt you can aim accurately like this.

Your scanner clatters on the floor in front of Sun, as well as a peeper. Several rocks take their place beside the scanner and peeper, clattering down one-by-one as Sun deposits them on the floor.

“I’m sorry,” he says, staring down at his hands, “No. No killing you. I’m sorry.”

You absentmindedly wave your hands, trying to think of how to communicate your questions clearly to Sun. You unclip the doctor’s PDA and play the recording again. Their voice echoes in the small room. “I'm going to die. I broke my leg. I’m writ—” The recording stops with a click.

“The doctor,” you point at the PDA. “You killed the doctor. Why?”

Tap-tap-tap. Sun drums his hands on the floor. “I’m sorry,” he says.

This is going to go nowhere. You’re fairly certain you know why, but you can’t get direct confirmation from Sun, not with his incomplete vocabulary.

Sun looks up at you, then dips his head under the water and out of sight.

You wait a couple moments, trying to hear him outside. Silence is all you can hear, and you release the grip you had on your arm and tiptoe over to the left-behind items by the open hatch.

You bend down and reach for the items, tucking the scanner and peeper away. You take a couple rocks into your hands and turn them over.

They're small and, well, rocky. Nothing special about them, as far as you can tell. You toss one idly up and down. Briefly, you get the brief impulse to throw it across to skip it across the water, had you been able to. Instead, you throw the rock across and watch as it hits the wall with a thunk.

You pocket the rocks away, off into some random space you had available and where they probably won’t see the light of day again.

It's empty outside when you jump out. There’s no sign of the telltale yellows of Sun’s scales, no matter where you look. It’s dark, with nothing you can see for miles around aside from yourself and the compartment.

You swim up with your seaglide. At the surface, the helmet retracts, and you breathe in the salty air. The light of the sun shines down on you, warming the cold waters, and you grimace.

What can you even do about it? It's like blaming a lion for killing a human.

But he can speak, he has a high level of intelligence, scarily human-like, and you can’t help but feel betrayed even when you know, logically, that you shouldn’t place expectations on that like him.

Sun was friendly! Sun wouldn't… but he did. You would've expected this from Moon, given that he first tried to hunt you, and Sun… didn't. Would their fate be better off if they came across Moon instead? You get the feeling that it would've ended the same, regardless.

That doesn't make it feel any better.

The only direction you have now are the few coordinates saved on the doctor's PDA, all leading back beyond to where your lifepod is. One of them is behind you, marked as the doctor's lifepod and what you assume to be their initial crash site. Another is ahead of you, quite a ways away. The last coordinate you recognize as the captain's lifepod, and cross it out.

You doubt the captain is still alive. He was close enough from where your own lifepod was, and the difference between his lifepod and the doctor's when compared to yours was that there was no giant, aggressive leviathan in-between. Not like it stopped either of them from crossing.

This is an illogical response. Fuck, you know it is. Food is food, and like it or not, humans are prey here. But if that's the case, Sun didn't have to keep you alive, not when he didn't show the same mercy to the only other survivor you've found. What was so different in you that he kept you alive? You know these are questions he can answer, if you can just somehow break past the language barrier.

How will you cross? There's no one to help you if you find yourself cornered by that leviathan again. The only way to cross is to go around it, but you don't know how far that leviathan travels, or where it is.

A chirp sounds from below you, carried through the waters in a familiar voice you've come to associate with the person you least want to see.

You grit your teeth when you realize your knife is missing from its usual spot. Of course he hasn’t left the area, but you thought he would at least not follow you, or go fuck off elsewhere. Maybe you were too optimistic to think so.

The seaglide carries you away, though your head stays above the surface and out of the water. You know it’s childish to pretend he isn’t there if you can’t see him.

Sun appears from beneath the waters, directly in front of you. Before you can shout, he trills and places his hand on your mouth, and immediately removes it before you could bite down and draw blood.

There's a rumble and a growl, the warning sounds of the red leviathan. You freeze. The sound didn’t come from beneath the waters or from the actual red leviathan itself; rather, it came from Sun himself, his mimicry of the other leviathan.

"Careful," he says. His hand hesitates where it is above the water, before it falls limp.

He really is invested in your continued survival. He’s said it himself that he won’t kill you, and now he’s here warning you of the leviathan in the area. What makes you so different? All this effort, and for what?

Will he actually uphold his words? What happens if you stick your hand in front of his face? Will he bite it off?

Before you can think about it, your hand comes to rest on his face. Sun blinks, staring cross-eyed at your hand, and looks back at you.

You retreat your hand, apology forming on your lips, but it dies before you can utter a word as Sun moves forward and bumps his head against your head.

“Huh?” That’s all you can think to say.

Sun removes himself from the palm of your hands and tilts his head to the side. "You forgive me," he points at himself.

"No,” you say immediately, "Yes. Maybe. I don’t know.”

You don’t know how to feel about it. You don’t want to think about it, either, but you can’t erase the fact that Sun ate the only other survivor you’ve found. He’s made it clear that humans are on the menu, but even then, he won’t harm you himself.

You don’t have the time nor willingness to unpack all of that, so you’re just going to throw the whole suitcase away.

"So," you clap your hands together, "I have places to go, and I do not want you following me, okay? Okay, good."

Without looking back, you swim straight ahead, seaglide turned off so as to not alert the other leviathan.

It's slow-going as you swim through the waters without your seaglide. It's unwieldy to carry around, too, but you don't want to leave it behind and find the materials to craft another.

You look around periodically as you swim across the water. Sun is trailing behind you from afar, though not close enough for you to be majorly on edge. You could probably do something in the time it takes for him to speed over, if he suddenly changed his mind on not hurting you.

This was the opposite of what you told him to do, but, well, this is close enough. There’s nothing much you can do about it, nor will you try so long as he keeps his distance.

It’s eerily silent. You can’t even hear Sun swim behind you, and if you squint, you can see him wave every time you look back. You return his waves, eventually, once the guilt got to you when you didn’t return it.

The sounds of the ocean hum through your ears. You stare at the direction of your lifepod, longing for a nap. A really long, nice, restful sleep that won’t leave you feeling even more tired when you wake up; that’s your greatest wish. However, you have just a tad feeling, just a smidge, just a tinge, that you won’t be getting that anytime soon.

Hands wrap around you, dragging you down. A hand slaps your helmet, over where your mouth is, but it doesn’t stop the ear-piercing shriek you let out. Shit! No way the red leviathan didn’t hear that!

Sun clicks rapidly next to your ears and drags you down further, deeper below into the water. You thrash and struggle, but Sun’s grip didn’t falter and your suit is too smooth for you to draw blood with your hands.

“Careful. I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” Sun grips you tighter with his arms.

A roar echoes close by.

You freeze. It was that close by the entire time?

Sun takes the opportunity to swim fast, and out further with you in his arms, away from the red leviathan behind both of your heels.

You cling onto Sun as best as you can and screw your eyes shut. With how fast he’s swimming away, it feels like you’re on the world’s most underwater rollercoaster, and you want off this ride. Unfortunately for you, the only way off is stepping into the jaws of the red leviathan and straight into death.

When Sun slows, you slowly open your eyes to the sight of your lifepod in view. He releases you and swims back, giving you your much-appreciated distance.

You grab the edge of the lifepod and take a moment to reorient yourself. If you could, you would press your hands into your face and wait out the mild nausea building up. Instead, you put your hands to the sides of your neck and blearily look into water, tinted red from the glow of the giant moon.

Red, not blue. That would’ve been nice, if the water was blue like the oceans back home. How did that poem go? Something about the sky being blue. The ocean on this planet was blue, too, but not all the time. Neither was the one back home, if you think about it, so this is a bit of a moot train of thought. Still, you’d like to see the waters blue again, just for a moment.

You turn to look at the waiting yellow-scaled leviathan, who’s currently staring at you and fidgeting with his hands.

“I’m sorry,” he averts his gaze when the two of you lock eyes, “I’m sorry. I’m careful for you, or—” Sun points back in the direction you two just came from, where the red leviathan is—“he kills you. I’m sorry for…” he mimes grabbing something with his hands. Mimes grabbing you, from earlier.

“I,” you hesitate, and whistle a familiar note: a simple, short note. “I forgive you,” you say after. For getting you to safety, at least. The sudden way he grabbed you wasn’t the best way to bring you away from danger, but…

You don’t know. You’re tired and you want to pretend none of your problems exist.

Sun perks up, hope in his eyes. You tense as it looks like he’s about to swim closer, but he doesn’t and stays where he is.

“Well,” you wave to him, “Nighty-night.”

It’s nowhere close to night-time, but you’re ready to sleep on the world’s wettest and most uncomfortable floor.

You open the hatch, and look back towards Sun one more time. He’s still staring at you.

You climb up. The helmet retracts as you enter the lifepod and breathe in the air.

The first thing you do is toss the seaglide somewhere. You flinc when it bangs against the wall, but you can’t find it in yourself to go check on the seaglide’s status and any damage it might have just gotten.

The second thing you do is head towards the fabricator, and you toss the peeper towards it. You let the fabricator cook it as you kneel down towards the hatch, rummaging through the items you have on hand.

There’s no creepvines on your person. Calmly, you walk over to the storage inside the lifepod, and spot one at the bottom. Ideally, you’d have more, but you’ll work with what you have.

You tie the vine as best as you can around the hatch, and hope it’s strong enough to hold against any intruders trying to open it. You have your doubts it’s actually an effective deterrent against any would-be intruders, but there’s nothing else you can do. Maybe you could try your hand at gluing it shut, or jamming it with some materials you have on hand; though, it feels like a waste to try that, not to mention that you still need to be able to open the hatch yourself.

You turn around and pick the peeper up. It’s warm in your hands, and stale in your mouth. It takes long for you to chew it, and more energy than it should have taken to swallow. You wash the rest of it down with water.

The floor is, like always, uncomfortable. You stare at the white ceiling, and wait to drift off.

The gears in your mind latch to the first thought: Sun, and everything that just happened and what he just did. Why—

No, no. Stop. Stop thinking, not about that. You came up here to get away from your thoughts, not dwell on them. You don’t need your mind to start wandering.

You roll over to your side.

Perhaps you could drown your thoughts with something to do, like a task. There’s plenty of scanned species in your PDA, and they’re hardly documented. You can start putting down observations and theories that you haven’t gotten the chance to do so yet.

The Celestial Leviathan tab sits on the screen of your PDA, almost as if it’s watching you.

That’s a stupid thought. How could it watch you?

…

You look away. There’s plenty of other species on this planet to write about. Plenty of other fish in the sea, as they say. You cover your mouth as you let out a quiet snort.

Ah, you should really sleep, if you’re laughing at jokes like that.

Chapter Text

You groan as you wake to harsh lights, and shield your eyes. There has to be a light switch somewhere…

With a sigh, you stand up, stretch, and rub your sore neck.

You're really starting to miss sleeping on a mattress with a blanket and pillows. Hell, do away with the mattress, you could live with just a blanket... though, on second thought, that would be a horrible idea. A soft blanket soaking up all the ocean water left on the floor of the lifepod? Awful. There’s no way you can keep that dry here.

You bend down and lightly apply pressure on the wounds on your leg. It hurts, but not by a lot. If you had to, you could ignore the sting and carry onwards. Thankfully, though, the wound is healing.

And now, first things first before you start the day off: you’re going to make sure you’re not repeating the same mistake as last time. You turn on the radio and wait to hear if there’s anyone else on the other end.

It took you long, far too long to check the radio. If you checked it sooner, then… well, Sun seems to favour you, for some reason. Maybe you could’ve stopped him in time.

(Or maybe you would’ve joined them in their watery grave, who knows. You don’t know what his hunting behaviour is like.)

It’s static, just static, as the radio crackles on. If there's nobody else on the other side of the radio, then you'll have to put yourself out there.

"This is lifepod 5," you speak into the radio, recording and sending your own message out there, "I'm attaching my coordinates to this message, but do not, and I repeat this, do not come here. There are two very small leviathan-class organisms inhabiting this area, and if you're going to the doctor's coordinates, don't. There's a far larger leviathan waiting there. I'll be traveling north of the posted coordinates, so, see you there."

There’s other people out there on this planet, you know that. There’s no way the radio can be this silent. There were plenty of people on that ship, and you know plenty others made it into a lifepod and away from that burning wreck. There has to be something.

You pace around the confined space of the lifepod with gritted teeth and clenched hands. You shove your hands into your pockets, and startle when your fist makes contact with smooth rock. You stop in your pacing, bringing one of the rocks out of your pocket and lifting it up into the air towards the light. It looks the same as any other rock, even similar to the ones back home: hard, gray, and smooth and worn out from the motion of the water.

These rocks were a gift from Sun, most likely as an apology, though you don’t know the exact meaning nor his thought process behind his choice in rocks. Did he pick them because they were the only thing available? Is there some sort of hidden rock quality that made him choose these ones?

You toss the rock up and down a couple of times, then let it fall to the floor. It clangs as it hits the ground. You stare down at its unmoving form, before shaking your head and bending down to pick it back up and put it back from where you got it from.

Right. Well, then.

You turn around towards the fabricator, and watch as it creates a new knife and new batteries. Unfortunately for you, you’re still missing the necessary components to create a habitat builder. Hell, you don’t even have the full blueprint to make any vehicle other than the seaglide. It’s better than nothing, but it’s far too slow for your likings.

You’ve done too little, in all the time you’ve been here, all you’ve done is play around—hell, you were just playing around with rocks! Now look where you are.

Out of time, you’re out of time. People don’t live long in situations like these, and you aren’t the survivalist type.

You slip out of the hatch at the bottom, and scan the area for any little leviathans lingering around. Aside from the usual small fish and giant coral, there's not much else here.

Moonlight streams down from the sky and into the water, painting it in a soft red glow. From beneath the surface, you see the giant red moon aloft in the sky, looking alarmingly close to crashing into this planet, like always. If your observations mean anything, then it's Moon who's active at this time of day.

You're not sure who you'd rather see between the two: the one who made an attempt on your life, or the one who's already killed another human.

Before, you might've said that Moon would be… not exactly the safest to be around, but you don't think he would've tried to kill you, not after what seems to be a talk Sun had with him (even if that was scary in the moment). He even helped you, once, to escape the notice of that red leviathan. Now, though, you're not sure if that still holds true.

You won't have to find out if you never run into him.

You just have to gather everything you need, and soon. There’s only so many hours left until it’s dawn, especially given this planet’s far shorter days.

There’s a handful of materials you’re missing. Silver and gold, for one. Copper, too, after you used the last of it making a battery, not to mention the table coral sample and acid mushrooms that you need.

Your eyes rove over the water, looking for limestone outcrops. You only got hit once (maybe twice. …more than twice) by the persistent, aggressive crashfish exploding in your face.

You so badly want to observe these crashfish—behind a shield of sorts, of course, but you want to watch them and see what threats they deter via explosion. What goal is accomplished by an explosive death? How do they sustain their population like this? Where do they keep their eggs? If you had to guess, crashfish are an r-selected species, a common strategy employed by many species where they prioritize the quantity over the quality of offspring, and tend to mature quickly. Given the size of the crashfish, the size of the eggs are probably—

—focus on the task at hand. You’re not here to think about crashfish, or any other type of fish, for that matter. Get the materials, and that’s it. You can go look at fish later.

It takes longer than you’d like to find the few pieces you needed. You had to venture further out, after you couldn’t find any more limestone outcrops near the surrounding area your lifepod is in.

As you stick close to the kelp, you keep an eye out for more limestone outcrops, staying out of reach of the stalkers. It's hard to see them in the night, given they don't glow, but from what you can observe, they seem to be engaging in some sort of play or hoarding behaviour: the stalkers regularly pick up and drop the metal salvage from that blown-up ship onto the rocky ocean floor.

Curiously enough, one of the stalkers is different from the others. It’s easier to see in the dark waters with its green glowing spots, though if you had to be honest, the spots are reminiscent of artistic depictions from games about some radioactive disease. Maybe it is infected with some alien radioactive disease—it certainly fits the colour of the green glowing goop that people seem to think of as radioactive waste—though your first guess would instead be that this one has a different colouration than the rest. Whatever the case, it makes this one easier to spot than the rest, though you have to wonder if the stalker had anything else different about it that’s just hard to see from far away in the dark.

You break open the limestone outcrops covering the area as discreetly as you can, swiftly picking them up and dropping it in your pockets. You’ll have to remember to get an extra bit of gold too, if you’re going to create a fabricator later on.

Another stalker seems to be lurking close to the dropped metal salvage. It moves the salvage away a couple meters from where it originally was, and hides back under the kelp. If it wasn’t for the movement of the kelp, you’re not sure you’d be able to spot where it hides.

It’s not your concern right now. You just got the last piece of gold you needed from the outcrop, and with that, you’ve gotten all the materials you need to fabricate for the journey ahead.

A different stalker approaches its shifted salvage, its long snout clamping around the salvage, intending to return the salvage back to where it was previously.

It doesn’t get the chance to.

The hidden stalker erupts from its hiding spot beneath the kelp, biting down on the stalker. The predator shakes its head side-to-side, and in no time at all, its prey lays limp, dead.

Not a stalker, then. You weren't aware stalkers had a predator here.

The predator swims off after its successful kill, opening its glowing red eyes. The rest of the bioluminescent spots on its body flares up after, glowing yellow in the murky waters. Now that the spots on its body is glowing, you’re able to make out its familiar shape and—

—wait a fucking second.

At speeds that can only be fueled by panic, you swim away from the kelp forest and back to the safe shallows, clambering up into your lifepod and slamming the hatch down.

That was too close.

That was Moon.

You didn’t expect to run into him hunting, of all things. You don’t know where Sun or Moon live, and really, you should’ve guessed that their territories or living spaces were close to here. Close enough to reach you. You weren’t expecting to see him so close to where you just were, out hunting for resources.

You set the fabricator to create a habitat builder, and the moment you confirm its creation with a tap of a button, you whirl around to face your storage. It’s a small thing, barely able to hold all that you want it to, but now, you have to decide what you what to keep and bring with you and what to leave behind.

The longer you stay here, the likelier it is that either of the two celestial fish will come for an unwelcome visit. With Moon so close by, you’re jittery. He hasn’t made a habit of coming over, but he knows where you live, him and Sun both, and that’s reason enough for you to leave as soon as possible.

You can't stay here, not anymore.

You grab the habitat builder and tuck it away where you can fit it into your too-full pockets, a waterproof locker by your side.

You check the radio.

Still static.

Maybe their radios don't work, or they left their own lifepods behind. Whatever the case, you'll find everyone else and regroup together with whoever's still alive. Maybe you'll find someone else along the way, swimming through these waters. Given how everyone was scattered about, you'll have to run across someone eventually, despite the near-complete radio silence.

You leave the lifepod and don’t bother closing the hatch once you’re outside. There’s no reason to return.

Though it’s still faster than if you were to swim all the way by yourself, you still can’t go far, not with your seaglide.

If you had the blueprints for a faster mode of transportation, you’d fabricate that in a heartbeat. Unfortunately, as it currently stands, you’re missing all the parts. It’s possible for you to fabricate it regardless using an incomplete blueprint—or at least you think you can, given it’s not something you’ve actually done before—but you don’t know enough about technology and engineering to be able to do anything useful with the incomplete product afterwards.

It’s hard to swim with full pockets and a full waterproof locker in your hands, but you make your way towards the floating rock. There’s round, pink things attached to it, which you guess are the reason behind the rock’s ability to float. With your free hand, you detach one of the creatures and stick it onto your waterproof locker.

The locker floats up to the water’s surface once you let go of your hold. Your theory concerning the pink creature is correct. Floater, your scanner tells you.

You tie the floating locker to your belt with a creepvine. The thing is sturdier than you’d expect from a plant, and it’s been substituting good enough as a rope. You let go of the locker and watch it float away, then tug on the creepvine to bring it back.

Satisfied with its integrity, you take out the drained battery from the seaglide and replace it with a new one, and go off on your way. North, you said in the radio transmission, and so that’s where you go.

You stick close to the water’s surface, the lights on the seaglide off, and hope nothing below thinks to look up. You swim past the kelp forest and into a plain floor that slopes down far into where you can’t see.

There are what seems to be floating islands underneath the water, and you swim down to check it out. You aren’t quite sure how these formed, but they were nonetheless fascinating to look at. A sand shark-like creature swims around, away in one of the further islands.

Not exactly the best place to set up camp, though it could be worse. If you have to, you’ll come back here.

The further you look out, the more land you see that disappears into the nothingness of the waters below, hardly any land to be seen under or above the water. You doubt there would be anything that direction for you. To your right, there’s still some land under the water, and could serve as a place to make a makeshift base.

The day is going by faster than you expected, the dark of the night making way for the light of the sun breaking across the horizon.

You blink. There’s no way you just saw an island, did you? The island reveals more itself as you get closer, like a hazy mirage. Now closer, the mirage-like effect dissipates, revealing that your eyes did not fool you.

Land! This is—this is great! You don’t have to be confined to water anymore!

Now how do you get up? The island is more of a mountain than a nice, sloping hill.

Hm…

You drag yourself out of the water at the part where it slopes the least, and make your way up, one step at a time. Even if it was the least steepest slope, it was still quite steep, and not one that you’re used to regularly traversing, especially when carrying the weight of a full waterproof locker in one of your hands.

The land feels like it waves back and forth, a consequence of the days you’ve spent in the open ocean. You’ve spent far too long here, and now you’ve gotten acclimatized to its rocking motion. It’s disorienting, climbing up a slope that feels like its moving beneath your hands and feet.

Spider-like creatures jump around at the top of the hill. Maybe these spider aliens would… leave you alone?

If only. Better to be safe than sorry.

You take your knife out of your toolbelt and clutch it in your hands. Almost immediately, one of the spider creatures skitters towards you. You stumble backwards, away from the creature, and lose your footing and fall to the ground on your back.

Thanks to gravity, you start to slide back down the slope you just climbed up. The helmet automatically activates and covers your head, keeping you free from a death via drowning.

The spider creature follows you down into the water.

You swim as far back as you can, looking around in the water for signs of the spider creature. It’s nowhere to be seen. Where the hell did it go?

At least one good thing came out of this encounter, and it was that falling back into the water let you see the beach on the other side of the island that you previously could not see.

You swim towards the beach, standing up on the sand, only to startle back and nearly slip when you spot another of the spider creature. It scurries away, with you having escaped its detection.

You were wrong. You did not escape its detection.

And so you run from nature’s offspring of a spider and a crab and—oh what the hell is that in the distance?

You slow down to get a better view of the alien architecture, only to have the spider jump on your back.

“Fuck me for trying to look at stuff!” you yell, trying to shake loose the spider-crab creature. You stab the spider-crab once it falls off, only to have it jump at you again. It’s not terribly fast, and so you change tactics from trying to stab it to death, to instead running away.

The alien architecture truly is a marvel to look at it, even from afar. It’s a marvel to look at even when you get jumped by another fucking spider-crab, please, you have things to do and it does not include hanging out with spider-crabs.

You huff and run up the slope leading towards the alien bridge. Some sort of decorations line the path, though it looks like alien pottery, if you had to admit it.

Intelligent aliens are real! Either that, or some humans had a very eccentric taste in design and also somehow built all this on what is supposed to be an uninhabited planet, so you’ll take your chance with guessing the former.

That’s terrifying. Was your previous theory of Sun and Moon being the result of domestication true?

The place doesn’t look to be swarming with aliens. In fact, it looks rather empty for a building so large.

A purple tablet lies on the sloped path ahead, and you drop your locker from your hand and onto the floor. You pick the tablet up and flip it over several times. It’s just a tablet, though it probably has some cool alien property to it that you can’t see. Only your self-control stops you from licking the purple alien tablet.

With a lack of space to store the tablet anywhere, you carry it under your arms. You leave the locker where it is on the floor, too. That thing is heavier than it looks, and you don’t want to keep carrying it. Do you even really need the contents in it? It’s just materials that you could probably get again fairly easily, if the other areas were similar to the one you landed in.

Your PDA pipes up suddenly, “Detecting a massive, unidentified energy signature in the region.”

You stare at the alien building. Wonder where that energy signature could be coming from.

“What do you mean they’re leaving? Why didn’t you wake me?”

“Why should I? All they’ve done is claw us and get mad at you.”

“Because I killed their friend! I have to make things right! Where did they go?”

“I’m not—”

“Watcher! I need you to tell me!”

“I’m not going to! You always get like this. Everytime! We left because of this exact reason. Why can’t you leave it alone?”

Naturally, finding a sick-ass alien building means you have no idea how to get inside. The walls are too smooth to climb up, sadly, despite your attempts. The entrance is most likely underwater, at this rate, but you really do not want to go back in the ocean after just getting out.

You sigh as you jump down into the water. There’s still no entrance to be seen, but the building stretches down further than you originally first thought. There’s also some octopus thing down below, so you’ll take care to avoid that place.

Underwater, the building itself looks like a giant gaming rig coloured in radioactive green which is, of course, everyone’s favourite colour.

There’s a tunnel beneath, and your PDA warns you of the decreased oxygen efficiency as the pass the 100-meter mark. It’s nerve-wracking to traverse a tunnel that goes on for who knows how long, and you get nervous the further you go.

You breathe a sigh of relief as it turns out that the tunnel is very short, but you’re not totally out of the clear yet. There’s a sand shark-like creature near where the tunnel escapes out into the open ocean, and it’s covered glowing green spots.

You… don’t think that’s a natural colouration.

With its back turned to you, you try to scan it, but it moves too much for you to get a clear scan. It turns around and snaps its jaws at you, though you only swim in a circle around it instead.

“Oxygen,” the PDA warns. Well, there goes that unfinished scan.

You breach the surface in time before the oxygen runs out, and swim back to the beach.

“Is that the door to the alien building.”

Because of course you missed it when it was that blindingly obvious. All you had to do was jump down from the bridge to find it. You scan a broken purple tablet nearby, which surprisingly nets you some titanium, though you drop it down on the beach due to lack of space.

The door… knocker? Doorknob? Whatever it is, it reacts when you draw close, presenting a pattern exactly like the one with the tablet you have under your arms.

The green forcefield around the door dissipates once you slow the tablet into the doorknob, so, all’s well that ends well. You take a moment to quickly chow down a cooked peeper and wash it down with water.

It looks even more like a gaming rig on the inside. On second thought, it looks a bit more like the inside of a motherboard. Did all aliens build their buildings like this or did these ones like the gaming aesthetic?

The place is empty, even on the inside, and the removal of the door forcefield didn’t trigger any sort of alarm. Is there really nobody here?

There’s a terminal with a green symbol of what was on the tablet, and your PDA attempts to download data from it.

The data’s compatible enough for the PDA to download it?

You open up the PDA to check where it stored the data, and it looks like utter gibberish. Of course. So long as the alien data isn’t some sort of virus, you’ll be fine with it.

Hah. Isn’t that a thought. Even electronics have to face risk of infection when it comes to all this now.

You’re probably infected with something at this point. It’s no surprise, given the biodiversity you’ve seen in the area so far. Infection and other things are usually accounted for with the presence of a doctor around and a huge number of medicines available on deck.

You have neither, so you’re essentially fucked.

There’s really only one solution to that, and it’s to get a rescue ship to come pick you up and leave this planet. Once you’re out, you’ll be able to find an actual doctor who can treat you. Probably have to keep your rescuers around a little while, too, just in case you managed to pass something onto them.

There’s a giant green cube downstairs.

“Holy shit! Minecraft!”

Even the square-like textures on the cube is reminiscent of Minecraft blocks. You even manage to nab a second green Minecraft cube, though you pass over the data terminal.

Though you… come back for the data terminal. It’s way too interesting to leave behind just like that, even if you yourself cannot make use of it. There’s even more alien gibberish when you check the downloaded data.

My god, there’s even water in this alien building. A swimming pool? Convenient source of water to douse a fire? A pool where the aliens can soak in nutrients every three days? All of the above? You stick your head under the water, just to check, and there’s a missing wall where the pool leads outside. No matter where you go, you can’t escape the ocean.

Even inside, the water rocks back and forth, familiar and comforting. You nod off, and jerk to awareness a second later, scrabbling against the water and slippery floor. There’s no way you’re already tired, it’s barely been a day. A twenty-four hour day, that is, and not however long days on this planet last.

Ugh. You really don’t want to, but this place is probably your best bet to hunker down for the night. Or, well, for what your body thinks is a Terran night. The building is empty, or at least seems to be empty, so…

You really don’t like how exposed you are, though, but there’s not much you can do about that. You stick close to the walls and try to drift off.

Chapter Text

Morning comes, and you’re still alive. You’re tempted to wash down another peeper, but it’s looking a little past its expiry date. Refrigerators: you miss their cold, food-keeping magic.

You down all the water left in the bottle, consider what the PDA said when you first crafted a water bottle, then bite into it. It doesn't taste of plastic, despite your expectations. In fact, it doesn’t taste like much at all.

You wipe your hands clean, and set down the path, further into the heart of this building. It’s so empty, but the place is still bright, and the terminals worked. The energy to power all this had to come from somewhere, so… there could be an alien ahead? Just one, or two, or several? Or maybe they figured out how to power all of this for eternity. It’s not like your expertise lies in energy.

Well, not eternity. The law of thermodynamics wouldn’t allow such a thing, but it’s long enough that you can call it eternity. That is, unless this entire structure decides to pull your leg and shut down all its power right now.

…

Power’s still on.

It's a quiet walk further down, the only sound that of metal as your feet makes contact with the floor. The air smells of saltwater. You doubt you'll be able to smell anything other than saltwater for the duration of your stay on this planet.

There’s ramps that go up but no railings on them on either side to catch anyone that might fall, so the aliens that built this could probably fly, or they take zero fall damage. There’s what appears to be display cases here and there, and you take a quick moment to scan them before continuing your way up.

Curiously enough, the PDA manages to glean actual information on one of the items in the display cases.

It reads: Scans indicate this device contains enough potential energy to destroy the entire planet, along with most of the solar system. Fortunately, it has malfunctioned.

WHAT?

You really do not want to meet these aliens. Who puts a bomb in a wide-open display case like this? A display case!

Quickly moving on from that thing, there's only more stairs leading up. A purple tablet lays on the floor, which you scoop up and hold under your arms.

The green forcefield door lying at the end of the path is opened easily with the purple tablet you just picked up. Convenient. Do aliens have a habit of leaving the keys right in front of their door?

Inside the then-locked room lies… something. It's square, it's glowing, and it seems the entire room was made just to place this thing down. The glowing thing at the glass center is propped in the middle of a pillar made of the same materials as the walls and floor.

The glowing square might be another planet-destroyer. To say this once more: who the hell casually displays that in—glass? Alien glass?—whatever that's made of. Malfunctioned or not, why? This place can't be a museum either, or you might write it off a little easier, because there's hardly enough stuff on display to classify as a museum. Wouldn’t it be fucked up if this entire structure was some rich alien’s house?

Part of the pillar opens itself up as you approach, revealing a cube made of the same materials.A green square and circle glows on its surface.

You reach out to press the square button. A giant tuning fork pops up as you do, trapping your arm between its prongs with a green forcefield. The green circle reveals itself to be a mechanical arm.

You tug your arm back. "Let go of me!"

The arm snakes towards you, almost as though it's looking straight at you. The small hole in the middle of it looks like it could be its eye, until a spike shoots out and stabs your arm. Very much not an eye then.

"FUCK!" you shout, clutching your now-released arm. Worst surprise needle in the world.

The green square glows to red. The platform speaks in a language you don't understand, and you have no hope of deciphering any of this. Maybe if Sun or Moon were here, that would be a different answer.

Why the hell is there this thing stabbing people? What purpose does that even serve? Presumably, the aliens used this structure once upon a time, so were they just going out and freely subjecting themselves to this? What, a stabbing a day keeps the doctor away? Is that how it goes?

The PDA pipes up, "The control panel is broadcasting a message. Attempting translation… Translation reads: The right spirit does not multiply. Sure, sure."

What? What the hell does that even mean? Did someone put that through several translations in Boogle translate?

"Attempting re-translation…"

Of course that’s how it goes. You pat the PDA by your side. "Take your time, it's not like I'm going anywhere."

"Translation reads: …”

You wait with bated breath.

“Attempting re-translation…"

It didn't even try that time.

The PDA repeats itself like that, attempting a re-translation and saying either nothing or nonsense.

It continues its attempts, even as you leave the structure and step foot onto the sandy beach. The sun is halfway to fading, and the red moon is nowhere to be found. If not for the second, littler moon (and this green structure, of course), then tonight would have been bound to be dark.

You walk up the sandy path, grab the waterproof locker you left, and walk back down and into the water.

Now, where would be a good place to build a compartment? Living it up in this radioactive-green rectangle was okay for a night, but you need your own space. And a fabricator.

You could build it right here, at the front doorsteps, but that doesn’t seem a wise choice.

The sand sticks to your shoes as you walk, the flipper part of it detracted outside the water.

Winged creatures fly about the island. With only their silhouette available, you could pretend they were seagulls flying around. They’re just… quiet seagulls, is all.

“Attempting re-translation…” the PDA all but booms, startling both you and the seagull on the rock.

“Can you just—” you take the PDA out as fast as you can, scrolling through its settings— “just. Be quiet.”

Volume now muted, you put the PDA back where it belongs.

Up ahead is a spider-crab and the end of the beach. You spot the spider-crab further along the beachside before it spots you. If the beach ends there, then the only way forwards in that direction is to climb the steep cliffs, or step into the water.

Well, it looks like you’re building the compartment right in front of the giant green rectangle. At least it’ll be easy to find your way back.

A quick swim and a walk away, and you’re back at the front doors. With your habitat builder, you make a compartment on the beach, low enough for you to climb into. You add a solar panel on top, a hatch on the side, and set your portable locker inside. Who wants to carry that thing around the whole time?

With nothing to do but wait, you set off to explore more of the island.

There was that path above, wasn’t there? Maybe it would lead somewhere cool.

—

Phasegate.

There’s a phasegate at the top of the island.

You weren’t sure what you were expecting at the end of the road, led by the pots or shitty lamps or whatever it is that the aliens left by the side of the road, but a phasegate wasn’t one. You certainly weren’t expecting to recognize anything the aliens built either, but here you are.

A small platform opens up when you approach, clearly asking you to give it something to open up the phasegate. Asking for the green Mineraft cubes you picked up back in the building, if you had to guess.

Where does it lead? Can you really open up the phasegate? It’s a two-way trip, and you don’t want whatever’s on the other side—if there’s even anything on the other side—to cross over and find you.

That’s assuming it leads to somewhere hospitable.

Or maybe it’s your ticket out of this planet.

You toss the ion cube back and forth between your hands. Opening up a phasegate means, well, opening up a phasegate. With no indication to where it leads, you’re essentially leaving it all up to fate.

But it’s not a decision you have to make. Not now, at least.

You pocket the ion cube and leave the cave. It’s not a long walk down, and neither is it that dangerous, so long as you sprint past all the spider-crabs. Cave crawlers, your PDA calls them, but you like your name of spider-crabs better.

So clearly, the aliens are advanced enough to make phasegates. What you’ve seen so far of this island doesn’t look like it was built to be a residential area, but it’s not like they’d live like humans, either. What’s left of this abandoned structure is a bit too neat and tidy, so their disappearance was planned.

What forced them to leave, and where did they go? What even is the purpose of this whole place?

Or maybe you were mistaken in your belief after all. All of this could have come from humans, but… why? Who would build this? Why the fuck did they make a surprise needle?

You ponder over it as you throw the grav trap in the water and collect the two small hoopfish.

It makes no damn sense, not with the pieces you’re given. Yet the mystery compels you.

The lights of the compartment guides you in the darkness of the night. You use the fabricator as a cutting board, slicing your catch into pieces and removing all the guts and bones as best as you can.

You leave the hatch of the compartment open. You can feel the breeze and see the starry expanse in the sky, glimmering up above.

For an alien planet, the night-sky view wasn’t all that different from the one at home. The familiarity is a comfort.

If you’re correct, then between the two interesting new creatures (friends?) you’ve come across, Moon should be the one awake. Sun should be asleep at this time.

As if summoned by your very thoughts, you see Sun wash ashore on the very edges of the beach. His arms are tucked under his chin, and his wide eyes stare at you. Or, well, your general direction. He’s not meeting your eyes. Direct eye contact tends to be a sign of aggression, so this should be a good sign, but you were going off of your knowledge of Terran animals.

He whistles, a note you recognize as the name he’s given you.

“Sun,” you greet back, drumming your fingers on the side of your crossed arms.

Even with him lying on the shore, there’s still enough space for you to move as you please—or to make a break for it, despite your compartment’s lack of a back exit. It’s not like he’d be particularly graceful on land, if he decided to chase after you.

“I guess I was wrong about you being diurnal,” you remark, leaning against the side of the compartment. He’s only lying there, so you don’t feel the need to run for it just yet. You could outrun him without trying. Fish aren’t exactly known for their mobility on land.

“I didn’t think I was that interesting to you,” you laugh nervously, “Really? Staying up this late for me? I personally wouldn’t recommend that.”

Predictably, he didn’t understand a word of what you said. There's no reaction to any of your words besides a trill and the clacking of rocks, as Sun deposits everything from his arms to the ground in front of him.

"More rocks?" you say, surprised. "You already got me a bunch last time, you don't have to get me more."

Sun drags himself backwards, dipping back into the ocean waters.

"Wait, where are you going?"

And with a silent splash, he’s gone.

With tentative steps, you step forwards, peering over to the spot where he disappeared. “Are you actually gone?”

Just below the water’s surface stares back a pair of blue eyes. That’s a no.

“How did you find me again? I guess I didn’t go that far, all things considered, and definitely not by your standards. Your species is probably the sort to travel long distances, I should have considered that. Or maybe what’s far to me is not so far to you. It’s not like I know how far you’d swim, and it’s relative how far a place is. Farness by itself isn’t an exact measurement. Is your kind the type to have territory? Is this island and its surrounding waters part of your territory? I don’t know what your day-to-day habits are like, so it’s poss—"

Sun chirrups. That’s a new sound.

“Y–yes?”

He makes that same sound again, poking his snout out of the water. His tail splashes, catching little droplets in the air.

“What does that one mean? From context, it doesn’t seem like anything hostile, but I can’t parse its general meaning from this alone. Maybe this relates to, um… standing around? Of course it isn’t. You got any hints for me, buddy?”

Nothing. He stares at your general direction for a while, then looks at you for your lack of speaking.

There’s a crunch as your foot makes contact with—you look down—rocks?

Oh, right. Rocks. The rocks that Sun left on the shore. Those rocks. The rocks he gave to you, or so you presume, because why else would you leave a bunch of rocks on shore?

You pick one up, feeling its weight in your hands. It’s… a rock.

“You really don’t have to get me any more,” you say, “It’s not… you don’t have to. I don’t need more rocks.”

Sorry, he whistles, one of the notes of his language you can understand.

“Aughh,” you put a hand on your face, and sit down cross-legged. “Okay, so, if you’re not going to eat me, then can you answer some questions? Where you around when this–” you wave to the building– “was built?”

Sun tilts his head at the building.

“Fuck this language bullshit,” you sigh.

You half-expect him to say something about the swears, but he stays silent.

Right. The aforementioned language bullshit.

Sun growls, which is the first you’ve heard him do that–or, no, you’ve heard him make that noise before, back around your first meeting. His eyes stay fixated on the building, and after a moment’s notice, he splashes his tail down hard on the water and retreats back below its surface.

“...okay, awesome! I’ll just stay here, then.” You weren’t exactly itching to get back in the water.

It’s not a long walk back to the temporary lodge you’ve built. It takes even less time to dim the lights and pretend this suit is at all comfortable for sleep.

Sun hasn’t been aggressive towards you. He has been towards Moon; whether Moon is his friend, or a simple travelling companion, you don’t know. You’re still not certain what their relationship is. He’s hunted down the doctor, too, so obviously he’s learned very quickly that humans are prey.

You don’t know whether that means Sun is particularly smart or stupid when it comes to hunting for food. Humans could have been poisonous to his species, for all he knew. Maybe he was hungry enough to take a risk on something new—but then again, there were those stalkers you saw Moon hunting yesterday.

It’s the largest thing around you’ve seen that they could hunt for nutrition, but maybe stalkers aren’t particularly nutritious for their kind? Or maybe they weren’t hunting enough to feed themselves adequately, given that they’ve been classified as a leviathan-class species, so that was why Sun took a gander and ate something completely new. This was assuming that was indeed the reason as to why Sun hunted a human before your arrival.

Yet despite that, Sun hasn’t hunted you down. He hasn’t lashed out or clawed at you. He hasn’t hurt you.

Not yet.

But it’s curious, isn’t it? Why is he so friendly towards you? What made you different? Why has he remained friendly towards you?

And why you?