Chapter Text
Patricia Tannis had never been the most social individual. She never learned those types of skills as a child, and so many horrific days on the hell planet that was Pandora did little to help with that. But there was one particular vault hunter she was surprisingly close with, and no one around her could ever really pin down just why.
She was happy to see Zer0 back in Sanctuary. Maybe a little bit relieved. The universe was full of danger, greedy corporations and monsters capable of eating entire worlds. And Zer0 just loved to run straight towards those sorts of things. Did she worry about them? Of course not, that would mean she cared about someone! Though she had to admit, knowing she could now check up on him more often than not - at least until he found somewhere else to run off to, or return to Atlas with that horrible mustached capitalist - put her at least a bit at ease.
If only she had the stomach to tell them. Not about how she cared about them, she didn’t give a skag’s crap if he knew that or not. But there were some things that they lived their whole life blissfully unaware of, and only she had the power to tell them. Perhaps someday she might be strong enough to give them all they deserved to know.
Although ‘blissfully’ was most certainly the wrong term. She knew they searched for that truth constantly, even if subconsciously, subtly attempting to question it out of her when no one else was around, taking assassination jobs simply for the opportunity to travel, to see more, in desperate hopes of one lucky discovery. Even delving into the dangerous world of vault hunting, because somewhere deep in their subconscious they were drawn right to them, to ancient alien tech, to weapons hidden for thousands of years. They were so alike to them. She could see the frustration of their futile attempts in his eyes during their routine checkups, Tannis being one of the few people to have ever seen their real face and probably the only person who knew how to properly provide them any sort of medical attention. They were anything but shy about their appearance, but she had insisted they keep themself hidden. Insisted that it was dangerous. And they still didn’t know why.
Of course it wasn’t fair! But they had to know by now that life wasn’t fair. Tannis had never asked to be cursed with such dangerous knowledge! And Zer0 hadn’t asked to be born. These things just happened.
She sighed, setting a scalpel down on a tray. She was far too distracted for this tedious work, she needed a moment to clear her head. But then again, her work was her only strategy of clearing her head. So with stubborn dedication, she wiped the scalpel clean of jabber blood and hunched back over the brain she was dissecting for perfectly normal science reasons.
Only moments after, the lights overhead flicked off, casting her laboratory in darkness and a normally graceful assassin stumbled into her office.
“What is the meaning of this!” Patricia demanded, dropping her tools back down and stomping as she turned around for extra emphasis. Though her angry guise quickly fell away as she spotted the vault hunter, a thin crack in the visor of their dark helmet, glitchy red text depicting a sideways face with a slanted mouth.
Skipping their usual poetic meter, they spoke in an urgent, raspy voice, “It happened again.”
—-----
People from all over the galaxy flooded Pandora when news of the vault reached them. The promise of riches was alluring to many, but Patricia was drawn more towards the promise of knowledge, and more importantly, adventure. This new job proved to provide neither of those things, instead only death and hunger and dirt under her fingernails. Many had given up by now, those rich enough choosing to leave the planet in search of more promising ventures, while those who could not afford it grew mad from the harsh conditions. Tannis was no exception from those unlucky few.
Some rare folk turned to selling what few Eridium artifacts they had managed to dig up to any chump scientist that would fork up the cash. Tannis eyed such a bandit’s wares with a suspicious eye. Most of these were surely nothing but junk, if not all of them, but she chose to humor him regardless. Though she was hardly listening as he described objects that were little more than rocks with far too much fanfare. Eridian in nature, sure, but rocks nonetheless.
“Hmm. If I buy one of these will you stop talking?” she eventually interrupted, finding that the man’s voice was starting to grate on her and she wanted nothing more than to bash his head in with one of his own 'priceless' artifacts. Pandora was making her shockingly violent, she noted to herself.
“I can guarantee it!” The bandit exclaimed with an unsettlingly wide grin. Tannis picked the most intact looking artifact from the bunch and offered a thin stack of bills in return.
“Off you go now,” she waved a hand as if to shoo him away, gingerly brushing dirt from the smooth face of the rock.
The stone was ovular and smooth, almost polished looking, composed of some dark material that pulsed with an intricate silver pattern. A cluster of purple crystals had grown around the stone in jagged crystalline shards. She had seen ruins with a similar glowing pattern before, but she had never seen anything like that crystal. Maybe there was something to be gained from this purchase. Or at the very least, it made for a neat paperweight.
For now, however, she had far more important things to attend to than to stare at a rock, however pretty it may be.
She set the stone aside where it would stay for at least another month, cast aside as a wave of unfortunate events hit her small group of archeologists. Plenty of previous crew members had found themselves as dinner for the local fauna. It seemed that Dahl had given up on their endeavors, no longer sending replacements or even supplies for that matter. They were stranded, alone on the hostile planet of Pandora with nothing more than scraps to live off of. It wasn’t too much longer before Tannis was the last remaining member of the entire dig team.
She never expected to find herself alone roasting skag roadkill over an open fire, talking to the corpse she was about to call dinner in idle chit-chat. She hadn’t even been alone for that long, yet this is what she resorted to. Perhaps there was something in the Pandoran air… She made a mental note to study that later.
Later that night, that strange glowing stone caught her eye. She hadn’t had time to truly take a good look at it, but now there wasn’t much to do at all. At least it would fill in the time before her inevitable demise. She grabbed the rock and retreated into the laboratory tent. A rock made for a better companion than a dead skag anyways.
She ran through routine tests, focusing mostly on those violet crystals, studying them close under microscope. To say she often got wrapped up in her work was an understatement. She spent hours sketching out the molecular structure, unlike anything she had ever seen before. Why had she not studied this earlier? Sure, in her current situation this information was essentially useless! Yet this was the most exciting thing to have happened to her since she arrived on Pandora. A brand new mineral, and she had been the very first to discover it! Or at least, as far as she was aware.
She leaned back from her microscope, rubbing her eyes tiredly. How long had she been at it now? She glanced at the clock hung up on her wall, but she wasn’t sure what time she had started at either. She stored the prepared slide with others of various origins, and lifted the stone to store it up on the shelf across the room. Though in her tired state, her foot caught on a cable, the one that connected to the generator outside to provide power to the tent, and lost her grip on the rather heavy rock cradled in her arms. It hit the stone foundation with a loud crack, a chunk of the crystal shards breaking off.
Tannis quickly dropped down to gather all of the pieces, swearing quietly under her breath as she did so. All of her precious crystals scattered across the dirty ground! How could she have let this happen? She shoved as many broken crystals as she could onto the shelf, and then went for what remained of the glowing stone base.
When her hands wrapped around it, she recoiled, the surface now covered in something… Wet? And slightly sticky. She scrunched her nose at it, before going back in, rotating the rock to find a sizable crack in it, and some sort of clear viscous liquid dripping out of it. What a strange thing for a rock to do.
With renewed energy, she quickly cleared off her workstation, shoving her microscope out of the way and nearly tossing her notes to the floor in her haste. She set the rock (rock?) on the table, and grabbed a chisel off a rack of archeology tools. Whatever it was, the shell was thick, but she could see through the crack that it was hollow. Perhaps a strange geode of sorts? She chiseled at the crack, breaking off the remaining chunks of crystal to follow the line all around. More of that substance leaked out, thicker portions with thin lines of deep blue spilling onto her desk as she broke the artifact open more. Eventually the stone broke into two, and the rest of the substance leaked out, with a big blob of… Something in the very center of it.
Once again, she recoiled. This was never a rock at all, she realized, but an egg. Perhaps preserved for hundreds of years? Thousands even? And whatever creature had somehow survived within it was now taking its first breaths right on her desk. If it was even still alive.
She poked the black mass of flesh with the back of her pen, and the creature stirred. Definitely still alive. But what in the world was it?
It was the size of a young skag, with thin black feathers coating what Tannis could see of its curled up body, slicked back and covered in albumen. She was no biologist, but there was little doubt in her mind that she had just hatched an undiscovered species.