Chapter Text
“She’s fitting right in, don’t you think?”
Sona’s brows furrowed. She turned away from the massive explosion rocking the small spaceport on the edge of the Piltov Trade Federation space and glared at Yasuo.
Whooping laughter, two sets, sounded from the chaos ahead of them. Two small figures came sprinting toward their docking bay, arms and legs akimbo, weapons bouncing at the back of one, the other’s flowing hair shimmering in the dim purple light of the twin moons.
“Yeah, okay, fine, make that face, but I think she’s-” another explosion rang out, shaking their ship’s landing gear. Plasbolt shots zipped from Piltov Enforcers streaming down the landing pad after their two companions.
“-she’s good for Jinx, don’t you?” Yasuo finished with a warm smile.
Sona raised an eyebrow at him. The captain of the Morning Star whistled and turned away from the silently-fuming Templar, “Malphite…looks like we’re out of here. Fire ‘er up!”
The big guy grunted, tossed down the remains of a crunchy Strokk burger, legs and all, and stabbed his thick fingers into a couple of buttons on the console before he cranked a lever.
As the juddering ship started lifting its landing gear, Sona sighed and drifted within. Yasuo shrugged, flicked his sword from its sheath and strolled to the edge of the gangplank.
“All aboard!” he called out, blade flashing to deflect a few incoming shots in a casual flicker of charged energy. His pilot and their newest member barrelled down the concourse and made a wild leap for the rising ramp.
Jinx’s laughter rang against the interior of the Morning Star. Her prosthetic hand clamped onto the ramp, her human arm hauling the slim form of her companion with her.
Light, just a rainbow glint, flashed faintly in the distance as the ramp closed.
Two young women rolled on the floor, laughing. The ship started to lurch free of the pad.
Blue-green eyes met vivid, celestial pink as Jinx turned to face her new friend, both of them panting with the exertion of their adventure.
“Ahahaha ha ha ha oh that was amazing -”
“I also think this! You are the most wonderful Jinx!”
“-ooh, um,” Jinx, flushing, wheezed. The ship jolted beneath her, “-hold that thought. Malphite! Gotta ease the throttle up buddy, remember – we talked about this…”
She kipped to her feet and sprang to the battered pilot’s seat, trailing braid and cable, seized the controls, and squinted as she poked her tongue.
Plasbolt shots spun uselessly into their fiery wake. The Morning Star pierced the heavens and tore away out of the small mining moon’s orbit.
“Did you two have fun?” Yasuo asked with a smirk.
He kicked up his feet and flopped into his chair to resume his place in Caught In Your Thrusters. He was now on chapter four.
“Oh yes!” cried the girl on the floor, still lying on her back with her feet kicking up toward the ceiling, and one hand lifted to display her treasure, “I drank al-co-hol! And I stole something! See?”
She waved a gleaming silver-and-gold contraption that Sona, peering back into the room, recognized as the magnetic subspace oscillator they would need to upgrade the ship’s Ora detection capabilities.
“Jinx would be proud,” Yasuo smirked, giving a particular eye to Sona and daring to quirk a brow at her.
The Templar gave another sigh and rolled her eyes.
“You bet Jinx is proud,” crowed their pilot, peeking over her shoulder with a wicked grin, “You did good!”
In response, their newcomer sat up, a gleam of light pulsing down the gradient of her hair in pleasure.
“I did?” Lux whispered, her small lips quivering.
“You betcha, Starbeam,” said Jinx, her smile softening a little before she pulled away to focus on steering their craft, “You did the best ever…”
I suppose, Sona thought, Yasuo is right. She has been good for Jinx…
If only that were all she were.
A week earlier…
“I got a good feeling about this, guys. I bet we’re gonna find somethin’ crazy good. You’ll see.”
The Morning Star slid out of slingspace near the signal Sona had detected; the strongest that she had sensed in several months of following the trail of Ora signatures that the young Templar had insisted would lead them to the fabled Gate…
And months of being pursued by the forces of the Demaxian Empire, in particular Sona’s former captor, Ordinal Kayn, as cruel as he was relentless.
And hot, thought Jinx.
What? He was! Flippy hair, crazy eyes, and that arrogant sneer, and he totally wanted to murder them all for constantly eluding his attempts to recapture Sona for whatever nefarious purpose…
Maybe Jinx had just a little crush.
From the look on Sona’s face, though, the Templar didn’t share her optimism about this approach.
“What?” Jinx glanced over at her from the pilot’s seat, “You were the one who was all like ‘oh blah blah, the Ora signal is the strongest ever, this may be a key location, maybe even the site of the Gate itself…’, why the Furrowed Brow of Consternation?”
Sona sighed. Her fingers darted about her soundboard, thrums of golden energy welling up to spell out her words in an arc before her –
Jinx had tried to offer her an actual telepathic-pulse-to-speech upgrade to her device, but for some reason she’d stopped using it. Jinx couldn’t fathom why.
::: Something is wrong. I do not sense the presence of a living Megafauna, yet the Ora is overwhelming here. It trembles with anticipation and unease. It is not speaking clearly to me…we must tread carefully! :::
“What’d she say?” said Yasuo, from across the cockpit, where he was toying with the nav map, “I missed it from over here.”
“She said-ugh,” Jinx rolled her eyes, “Can’t ya just use my voice plugin once Sona, pleaaase?”
::: No, ::: signed the Templar, scowling, :: Not until you have promised you shall never again reprogram it to speak in a … ::: here she paused, let the words trail off, and then rewrote them, :: ‘duck voice’. :::
“Ohh, right,” Jinx blinked, remembering, “Oh yeah, that was funny tho, right Malphite?”
Malphite snorted, his massive bladed shoulders shaking with laughter, and then caught Sona’s look from the corner of his eye, choked off and made a small, noncommittal shrug.
“Traitor,” said Jinx, “Fine, she said there’s no floaty whale thingy here but the reading’s still nuts, blah blah party-pooper-be-careful. I’m tellin’ ya though, the tip-off I got was good…”
“We’re deep into no-man’s-space, though,” said Yasuo, “And your contact was babbling about some sort of Demaxian facility? What are the Demaxians even doing out here?”
He narrowed his eyes.
“Smells bad to me. Could be good for us, or it could be some trap of Kayn’s.”
Yasuo did tend to get uncharacteristically broody when their pursuer came up. Okay, so the dude had killed his brother and pinned it on Yasuo and that was how he’d ended up on the run from – haha, basically everyone.
Nobody’s perfect, though, right?
“Yeah, okay,” said Jinx, trying not to roll her eyes again, “Geez, you guys are such downers lately. I’m tellin’ ya, my gut’s never wrong.”
“Your gut is consistently wrong,” Yasuo pointed out, “And consistently getting us shot at.”
“Aw, you wouldn’t have it any other way.”
He chuckled.
“Fine. Caught me,” shrugging on his weapon and clicking it into place, his pet space lizard hopping up to his shoulder, he grinned that ever-charming grin at the crew, “Let’s see what we’re looking at.”
As Jinx brought their crew into a stealthy approach over the seemingly lifeless planetoid, their trepidation and her excitement grew in lockstep.
It might not have had the typically flashy, shiny white and gold walls and columns, by their standards it was quite covert, but they were definitely hovering up to a Demaxian facility. Albeit one that was half-concealed in the grey geometric contours of a basalt valley wall and boasted several apparent layers of formidably thick bunker walls…
None of it had mattered.
“Woah,” growled Malphite, “Trashed.”
That was the most delicate of words he could have used.
Even at this distance the place was in ruination. Demaxian Raptor fighters were strewn around like crushed toys, along with the wreckage of unfamiliar, hodgepodge ships, the sentry guns had all been obliterated, and the place was pock-marked with blast marks and debris…
And completely dark. Especially in the huge narrow wedges sliced clean through the flanks of the facility, like…
“Like Malphite’s birthday cake,” Jinx breathed in awe, “But like, cut with the galaxy’s biggest knife…”
::: This bodes ill, ::: Sona signed to them, :: We must hurry to the source of the Ora before whatever did this returns. :::
“Or before some other scumbags show up to take advantage instead of us,” said Captain Yasuo, “Gear up, crew. Our covert recon mission just became a salvage op.”
“I love it when he talks all cool and Captain-y,” Jinx bubbled.
Yasuo, ever unflappable, only shrugged.
Jinx exchanged a giddy glance with Malphite and sprang up from her seat, snatching up her guns and tools with a whirr of prosthetics and a squeal of glee.
“You said the magic word, Captain!” she cried, “Let’s steal some shit from some dead Demaxholes!”
If only she’d known.
The Demaxian facility was every definition of the word ‘dark’ inside.
The crew of the Morning Star crept quietly, wearing breather masks and enviro-field generators despite the stable atmos readings – one couldn’t be too careful – and checking every crevice and corner of the place as they proceeded.
No life signs on the scanners. No movement. They were, of course, armed to the teeth in case that proved mistaken. Certainly, every body they found smeared on the floor or riddled with blast holes reinforced the general impression that they weren’t going to find any survivors.
Jinx didn’t much mind that. Survivors were pesky. You had to figure out what to do with them. Sometimes you got a good ransom, but other times the Captain got soft, and you had to take a whole detour to drop them off somewhere. Sometimes they tried to kill you and you had to shoot them out into space. Sometimes they wanted a cut of the profits. Same solution! If only Yasuo would let her…
Jinx shook her head and focused on her surroundings.
Yasuo knelt, looking over one of the bodies, shaking his head, “Looks like someone didn’t like what the Demaxians were doing here.”
He rolled the body over with his foot, revealing a tattoo of a gold-linked, thorny-looking chain on the dead man’s upper arm.
“Huh, that’s on a bunch of ‘em…” said Jinx, her voice muffled by her respirator. On badges, on tattoos, or painted somewhere on their gear, some of them even wore chains themselves…
“On the invaders,” Yasuo chuckled, “Looks like the Uprising hit this place, and hit it hard.”
“Waaait, there’s an Uprising?” Jinx shot back with a grin, “Where do I sign up?”
“You should know what you’re enlisting for,” said Yasuo, “You’ve been out on edgeworlds your whole life, Jinx, you haven’t had to live under the Imperial boot. Empire rounds up people with ‘talents’, riles up their populace to turn in anyone who might be experimenting with Ora implants or claiming connections to the Templar faith…”
He couldn’t help but look at Sona. Her eyes, haunted, fled from his. She turned away and kept her gaze ahead.
“…grinds them through the military-industrial machine,” Yasuo continued, “Experiments on them, brainwashes them, turns them into weapons for the imperial order. Or keeps them imprisoned as lab-rats…”
“Guess someone didn’t like that,” Jinx hummed, counting the mangled bodies that weren’t in Demaxian Vanguard sling-trooper armor versus the ones that were, “Lot of someones.”
“Yeah, the Empire’s trying to keep it hush,” Yasuo pursed his lips, “but they haven’t been able to keep this particular rabble down for long. I hear the rebel leader’s a real chain-breaker.”
“Hot,” said Jinx, but Yasuo ignored her.
“Whatever they came for,” he finished, “It probably had something to do with whatever experiments they were doing here.”
“Didn’t go so good,” Malphite grunted, “Nobody won.”
::: Let’s move on ::: Sona signed in a hurried flash of letters and pulse of tones, floating ahead, :: The Ora calls to me… it is strong, but still deeper within. :::
Jinx exchanged a glance with her Captain and a nod as they moved ahead.
She didn’t quite know what to expect, but there was a tugging at the back of her thoughts. The chemlight scout drones she’d sent ahead of them lit up larger, more cavernous spaces, rows of tanks with floating things in them…
Some of them looked a lot like floating people.
All of them dead and dark. Jinx didn’t dwell on them long.
As she moved past the misshapen things, she pushed the sick queasy feeling out of the back of her mind. Stupid. Didn’t mean anything. She squashed it down and returned to gleefully picking over the lab equipment, levering off useful parts with her toolkit and either sequestering them on her person or dropping them in the salvage cart she was dragging in their wake, much to Sona’s chagrin whenever it went over a bumpy bit of floor and clattered…
Whatever. This place was dead, everyone here was dea-
Jinx skidded to a halt next to Sona, nearly bumping into their floating moon wizard and her nifty Ora board.
Sona stared through what was frankly an impressive cleft in the laboratory walls ahead, cut right into the inner sanctum of the place. If Jinx had to guess, it looked like a laser cut, but unless a galaxy-class Armada slingship had decided to pour full power into some sort of laser cannon…
Well, that was a thought that got Jinx all tingly in the jinglies, she had to admit.
That wasn’t the distracting part, though. The distracting part was how the glob of Ora in Sona’s device was wobbling and throbbing about, its energy glowing until it cast golden light through the split in the wall...
Into the vast containment chamber beyond.
“Oooh, spooky…” said Jinx.
::: No… no. ::: Sona signed. Then her signs became more frantic as she pushed ahead, flowing past Jinx and into the darkness like a flaming torch.
“Wooh, woah woah, wait on!” Jinx flailed to grab at her, but was too slow; she could only swear, dropping the salvage gear she had in her grip to sprint after Sona into the chamber…
It was still faintly lit by some kind of auxiliary power from the facility. Whatever they were storing in here, they wanted to be damned sure it was still active in case of emergency, even when all of the guards and scientists and personnel were scattered around in various states of sliced-clean-through-and-cauterized-or-reduced-to-piles-of-fine-dust…
Sona had fallen to her knees.
“Pssst! Yasuo’s gonna be a big grumblepants if we split up! C’mon, Sona-oh,” Jinx pulled up short.
Sona knelt in front of a gigantic wall of containment glass that spread across the breadth of the whole chamber. Lit up in the grim haze was the floating body of a creature, vast beyond measure, only part of its colossal cheek and a single closed eye visible…
Probably, the whole thing would fill the rest of the mountain itself. Maybe that was conservative. Maybe it was bigger…
But even if it had been as big as the whole planet they were on, it didn’t matter anymore.
The flaking pallor of its flesh and the network of pipes and tubes piercing it from all directions, the incisions cut and stitched and cut again…
There wasn’t a spark of Ora left in the giant body.
::: Blasphemy. ::: pulsed from Sona’s periphery. No longer was she signing the words deliberately. They were pulsing out of her thoughts and through the Ora, a bottomless well of grief and outrage, ::: Abomination! :::
This creature, a Megafauna, a living god to people like Sona, was dead, and the Demaxians had killed it.
The little flinch that ran through Sona’s shoulders hit Jinx somewhere in the gut. Panic started rising inside her at the sight of their stoic Templar dissolving into shuddering tears.
Jinx winced, backing away, “…oh, uh…”
Crap, what do I even say?
“…bummer?”
Jinx wasn’t good at this. Comforting someone. Being serious at all, really. Couldn’t get much more freaking serious than ‘someone murdered one of your gods’, but that wasn’t going to suddenly make Jinx any better at not quipping jokes to distract from that uncomfortable feeling of not knowing what to do…
But Sona needed – someone – something –
– and despite all her teasing, Jinx liked her. She was a stick in the mud, but she was kind. She was brave, she was selfless, she was honest and loyal to their crew. Sona was a capital-G Good Person and stars knew Jinx wasn’t.
She didn’t deserve to feel like this.
Tiptoeing closer to Sona, cringing despite herself, Jinx awkwardly lay a hand on the Templar’s shoulder. Her human hand, her warm one, she had enough sense to let it be that one.
Nothing she could say could make it better, so Jinx just stood there, letting her hand rest there, whilst Sona broke down in ragged sobs. At some point, Sona’s hand came up to grip Jinx’s own and held on tight.
At some other point, Yasuo and Malphite peeked into the room, took stock of the whole situation, and then locked eyes with Jinx.
She gave a helpless shake of her head, and the boys backed away.
Sona still hadn’t let go of her hand, so Jinx found her attention wandering the space, doing her best to give the Templar her privacy with her grief, cuz that’s what you were supposed to do, right, even when people were literally attached to you?
Besides which, Jinx was already bored. And bored and awkward weren’t a good combo.
Something had caught her eye; the pipes and tubes and cables and sockets slotted into the dead god’s face. Her engineer’s brain had already started to break down the mechanisms they’d clearly been using to drain Ora from the creature…
Her eyes followed the pipes as they faded into the gloom of the tank, all of them curving up…Jinx let her eyes drift to the central ceiling of the lab chamber.
Where the masses of pipes and tubes and cables reappeared, twisting into a single central cluster that all fed down into…
A big cylindrical tube on a platform in the middle of the room.
One that was broken.
The hairs raised on the back of Jinx’s neck. She turned her eyes to Yasuo, to see him frowning as he stared down at his life-sign tracker.
It was flashing. A glance at Jinx’s belt showed that hers was too.
As quietly as she could, Jinx slid her hand from Sona’s, with a final pat-pat to the Templar’s shoulder and crept it back to her hip – to Zappy’s holster.
Something stirred in the dark, beneath two massive lab tables that had been split in half and fallen together to make a shadowed ‘tent’.
Jinx, closest to its position, crept toward it, hand on her pistol, whilst Yasuo and Malphite fell in to flank her.
In the dark, a spark – a gleam – light, an iridescent sheen like sunlight through the spray of a waterfall. Jinx had seen that on a couple of cool planets they’d visited.
But…here?
“Uh, Sona…” Jinx whispered, “Don’t mean to be insensitive but uh – that Ora signal’s not…coming from the big tank anymore, is it? So where…”
Behind her, Sona gave a sudden gasp and shuffled to her feet, her Ora wobbling and thrumming furiously as it communicated with her.
Jinx swallowed and leaned down, peering into the dark, her hand slowly drifting away from her pistol.
A naked young woman huddled in the shadows.
“Huh,” whispered Jinx, “Hiiii…”
She was pale as snow, though smudged with dirt and blood. Vivid eyes, stellar, crystal blue rimmed with hints of purple like a rising dawn, lifted to meet hers from beneath shimmering tangles of hair – its color indeterminate, a kind of silvery-white silk that went in a gradient through several hues to the blue at her tips.
Glinting between the strands in the center of her forehead was a marking like a golden star.
“Wow,” Jinx murmured, despite herself, “You’re shiny. What’s your name?”
The girl didn’t reply. She was staring at Sona and her Ora. Then she was staring at Jinx, shivering, soft pink lips parted to draw breath like a small panting animal.
“…you look kinda scared,” said Jinx, “…or maybe just cold. You cold? Hey, Sona, can I borrow yer cloak?”
Yasuo frowned, “Jinx, be careful.”
Without a word, Sona flicked back her hood and shrugged off the outer layer of her Templar robe. It was the first time in all their time together that Jinx had seen her so bared, doffed of any part of her mysterious space wizard attire, but she did it unhesitatingly and passed it over.
Jinx gathered the cloth in her hands and held it out to the girl.
The girl looked at the cloak, looked up at Jinx and Sona, and her brows creased in a kind of soft wonderment.
“Luh…” said the girl, then she swallowed, bunched the cloak in her hands, and lunged at Jinx –
Yasuo had his hand on his sword in an instant – Malphite fell into a defensive stance – Sona’s hands flicked up, glowing with Ora –
To hold them both back.
The girl’s arms slung around Jinx’s neck. Her body draped over Jinx, shivering, her face tucked into Jinx’s shoulder. She smelled of strange chemicals and a hint of sharp fear-sweat; not that Jinx found that at all unpleasant, apart from the ‘fear’ part…
Someone like you shouldn’t be afraid…
“H…hi…” Jinx, eyes wide, reached up to gently pat her back. Her hair was stupidly soft, and sent a strange thrumming tingle through Jinx’s fingers when she touched it, like something warmed by sunlight…
“Wow, you’re um – okay let’s just get this on you, cuz you’re all kinda nekkid and stuff…”
Jinx tugged awkwardly at the cloak in the girl’s hands and ever-so-gently managed to drape it around her. The stranger shifted in Jinx’s arms but only burrowed in deeper, buried against Jinx’s skinny frame like a kitten seeking shelter, despite the fact that Jinx wasn’t at all bigger than her, really.
She felt Sona’s hand on her shoulder. The Templar, her immaculate face smudged with the signs of her tears, gave her a strange look and signed:
:: Jinx. She is… :: A pause. :: She is the Ora. ::
“Wuh…what?”
::: She is the signal. It is all coming from her. :::
Jinx had to admit she’d never seen a look like that on Sona’s face before, a mingling of religious revelation and profound uncertainty.
Jinx looked back at the trembling girl in her arms. Her face turned from Jinx’s shoulder to look at her rescuer, and Jinx’s heart went thunka-dunka.
She had one of those faces you couldn’t forget in a million years; oh, there were hints of a patrician Demaxian bone structure, but it was softened by her huge eyes, little button nose and plush, expressive mouth. Every tiny micro-expression spilled her emotions everywhere, nothing masked, nothing held back.
Right now, those were fear, pain, relief, curiosity, wonder and tentative hope …
::: We need to take her away from here. ::: Sona signed to her, and looked back to Yasuo and Malphite.
“Uh, didn’t think we’d be salvaging a person,” the Captain muttered, “You sure about this, Sona?”
:: She cannot stay here. We cannot leave her. :::
“Guess our salvage mission is a rescue mission now,” Yasuo scratched at the back of his head, and his shoulders slumped in a little sigh, “Fine. Malphite, let’s pack up the take. Get everything ready for the ship and make way for the ladies.”
“New friend,” Malphite grunted approvingly, “Pretty hair.”
The big guy gave a guileless, if terrifying grin and lifted his massive hand in a wave.
The girl peeked at him and only giggled, “Mal-fite!” she said, forming the syllables with an exaggerated expression, “Friend…”
Still leaning on Jinx, she turned to Sona and gave a soft, radiant smile.
“So-na,” she said, and then, to the crew’s flabbergasted surprise, lifted her slim hands and signed :: Sona ::
Trails of gold followed her movements, shimmering for a few moments in the air, seeming to have leaked like glowing mist from her skin.
“Well, there you go, you weren’t kiddin’,” breathed Jinx in awe, “She learns quick.”
The Captain gave a little sigh, took his hand away from his sword hilt and trotted closer, leaning to stay on eye level with the girl.
“I’m Yasuo,” he said, “This is my crew. We’d like to take you somewhere – well, I wouldn’t call it safe…”
“Fun,” said Jinx. “We’re gonna take you somewhere fun. Whatcha say, newbie? Wanna hang with us?”
The girl giggled again, reaching out to boop the tip of Yasuo’s nose with a glowing fingertip, “Ya-suu-oh!”
She turned back to Jinx and hit her in the face with the sweetest, most beaming smile Jinx had ever seen.
“Fun,” the girl laughed, then tapped her still-rather-exposed chest, a bit more amply endowed than Jinx herself.
“Lux,” she said, “It is for…” she furrowed her brows, “…for Lux.”
Jinx kept her eyes stubbornly fixed on the girl’s face and smiled through the heat on her cheeks.
“Lux,” she said, tasting the word on her tongue, “I’m Jinx!” She grinned her trademark cheeky grin, “I like long walks on the beach, flyin’ in breach of interstellar law and speed limits, and splodin’ stuff!”
Yasuo stood back up and stepped back a little, staring off into the distance all of a sudden. Jinx didn’t have time to think about what was up with that. Her vision was full of the girl in her arms, refusing to let her go, incredibly warm and soft in ways that made Jinx suddenly conscious of all the metal poking out of her own body, all the parts of herself that were cold and hard and full of scars…
As if reading her mind, the girl lifted her hand to the implant alongside Jinx’s temple.
Her fingers were incredibly warm. Like they were filled with iridescent light.
“Jinx,” she said softly.
“That’s me,” Jinx tried to grin back, but caught herself swallowing instead, lost in those strange, luminous eyes.
Lux cupped her cheek.
“You are a good,” she murmured, “You are a good Jinx.”
Lux leaned in and brushed aside Jinx’s profuse orange mohawk to press a kiss to her forehead.
Jinx’s eyes widened. Warmth blossomed from the silk-soft touch of the girl’s lips and spread through her like a sunrise.
Tiny flickers of rainbow color passed through Jinx’s vision, as though something else were trying to break through.
Not yet, something in her mind said.
Lux patted Jinx’s cheek and slipped out of her arms, gathering the cloak around her more closely. Its twin tails didn’t cover much, and she had to pause to gather her hair – both luminous and voluminous – under the cowl as she trotted away.
Jinx, numb, stared after her.
“Wow,” she murmured, “Lux, huh.”
Yasuo stepped up beside her and cleared his throat. “About that,” he said, quirking a brow and inclining his head.
Jinx’s eyes followed his across the room to the plaque at the base of the broken containment chamber.
SUBJECT CODE: L.U.X. 00-X323-01
Jinx looked back at the pale girl, the way she picked her path through the wreckage of the laboratory, the way she looked at the ruined bodies scattered about with a strange mix of hatred, horror, and…
…regret?
“Oh boy,” said Jinx, “She’s gonna be fun.”
The Captain shook his head.
“We’ll get her back to the ship. You and Sona can finish up here,” said Yasuo, “Hope you know what you’re getting us into.”
Jinx narrowed her eyes, scanning the chamber, noting for the first time the details of the place – the operating tables, the tubes, the tanks, the restraints…
She was suddenly starting to understand how Sona felt.
“No idea, Cap,” Jinx chewed on her lip, “But I’m about to find out.”
Flicking her screwdriver from her toolpak and twirling it about her fingers like a gunslinger with a pistol, she darted across the room to the dataservers backed up next to the Demaxian lab workstations.
Malphite and Yasuo nodded, the Captain giving one final pat to Jinx’s shoulder before the two moved out to escort Lux to the Morning Star.
The mystery girl stared up at the dead Megafauna. Her expression was unreadable, but from the faint crease in her brows and set of her lips she seemed somewhere between ‘pensive’ and ‘wistful’.
It almost felt like a farewell.
She gave Jinx one final glance over her shoulder and a faint smile before she turned and trotted from the room.
::: Whatever you are doing ::: Sona signed at her, her eyes closed, searching through the Ora, :: Please hurry. We need to leave now. :::
Jinx blew out a breath and turned back to her task.
“…I’m doin’ what you’re doin’,” Jinx chuckled, one hand plugging her skull-mounted connector cable into the wiring she’d just exposed, the other levering open the decks and checking through the codes. “…checkin’ out her files-aha!” the screens in front of Jinx flashed red.
She gave a furious blink and swooned a moment, like she’d been punched.
“…Wow, these are encrypted out the whadoozy. Nearly got my noggin fried there. Lessee, though, X323-”
Jinx clipped the visualizer into her temple implant and scanned the holographic display that flashed in front of her eyes, picking quickly through the model of the laboratory she’d plucked out of the Demaxian servers.
“Got ’em,” she snapped her fingers, “Sona, third shelf from the left and four drawers down. Grab all of them samples and treat ’em like a bag full of kittens.”
::: You are distressingly specific ::: the Templar sighed, but at least Jinx giving her something to do was taking her eyes from the existential horror of the dead deity looming in the tank at the back of the room.
A swift flash of Ora disabled the safety locks, and Sona was soon drawing forth several secured metallic slides of biological samples, just as Jinx was yanking coded data chips out of the Demaxian servers, humming as she did.
“This oughta be all they got on our mystery girl,” Jinx whooped, detaching her connector and leaping to her feet, “Let’s blow this dump.”
She sprang to the exit – the giant hole in the wall. Sona secured the samples within her floating device and drifted after her…
…only to pause there, turning back into the chamber. Jinx waited; brows furrowed.
Sona’s golden eyes swept over the mountainous hulk of a corpse beyond the glass.
::: I vow in your memory, ::: she signed, ::: Whoever and whatever she is, if any part of you lives on in her, I will protect her, to the end of the stars… :::
Jinx laid a hand on Sona’s shoulder as she turned back.
“We all will,” she said, “Cuz she’s our crew now.”
About them lay only the void, pierced by the pinpricks of stars stretching in multi-hued streaks as the Domination hurled itself through slingspace.
A tall figure stood by the viewfield, hands clasped behind his back in thought. He did not stir at the hollow call of a soldier’s bootfalls; he’d known they were coming from the moment the woman stepped from the lift.
“My lord Ordinal,” grunted the Vanguard officer, with a stiff salute, “We are closing in on Exis VI as ordered, approaching the Morning Star’s last detected coordinates.”
Shieda Kayn smiled at his reflection in the viewfield.
“Ready them a welcoming party, Commander,” he said softly, “And my personal dropship.”
“You will be taking the field yourself, my lord?”
Kayn’s glove creaked as his fingers scraped the Ora-augmented metal palm of his left hand.
“I’d have it no other way.”
The Commander nodded. The Ordinal’s personal vendetta against this ragtag crew of misfits and the Templar in their ranks was swiftly passing from gossip to legend in the Demaxian ranks.
It would have stayed mere whispers, of course, if it weren’t for the Morning Star’s uncanny knack of escaping from even the full force of the Empire’s might.
“Sir, I’ve just had word there’s an unmarked imperial facility on this moon,” the Commander frowned, “Should we hail them to notify of our coming?”
Kayn tilted his head. He parted his lips to speak, paused, and glanced at the enormous scythe he habitually carried over his back before smirking back at the soldier.
“There’ll be no need,” he said, “Everyone there is dead.”
The Commander hitched in a breath, “Ho-ow did you know that, with respect, my lord Ordinal?”
“Intuition,” he chuckled, “You have your orders. Leave us.”
“Sir,” said the Commander, with a faint, confused purse of her brows at ‘us’, when Kayn stood alone in his chambers. She turned on her heel and was soon gone.
~̨ It̵ ́se͏e͘m̸s̨ ̨s҉h͢e no͢t̵ice͟d̴ ͝y̕o͞u͠r l̷i̢t͠tle͡ ͘s̕li͠p ̛of̀ ͏t̀he ton͘g͠ue̴ th̨e͟r̕é,̨ ͢Kay̢n…̴~
The voice in his head purred like growling magma.
“Shame,” Kayn sighed, “Battlefield accidents sometimes do claim the most promising.”
~͏Real͢ly̡?̧ Ag̛ąi̢n?͘ Aren’͢t yo͞u͝ runni͜ng̴ ou͟t of s͟u̷bo҉r̵din̛ąt́e̛s?~
“There will always be more climbing the ranks,” Kayn chuckled, “Pursuing what I alone shall attain.”
~̵ I ćaņnot ̷d̕eci͘d̸e ͏i̧f th̀a̷t is ͡more̛ h̕i͠lari͘o̵u̵s͟ ̴o̡r͘ ͜p͠at҉h́e̢tic̕.̢ ~
Rhaast’s malice rolled through his thoughts like the rumble of an approaching storm, crawled in his veins, and coiled within fingers that yearned to hold the scythe again – and drench it in the blood it craved.
~B̕ut͠ ̵ do n̛ot ̴gr͟o҉w ̕d͝istr̷acted͢. ͝T́h̷e͏ Ora̧ awaiţin̴g ͡ùs̢ ͝o͏n t͘hi̧s o̕th̴erwis̕ę ͜w̵o̧rt̵h͜l͞ess ̛ch́unk of ̕r̢o͝ck i͞s ͝…~
“Mine already,” said Kayn, narrowing his eyes, “And if we catch your little Templar in the process, all the better.”
He smirked to himself and stepped away from the window, striding with crisp purpose toward the door, toward his waiting forces, toward his waiting ship…
Kayn’s footsteps slowed. Then stopped.
“…what, Rhaast?” he muttered, “No witty comeback? That’s not like you.”
Silence.
“…Rhaast?”
~ B̛e̸ careful,͝ ́~ growled the voice of the Scythe, ~ Somet̡hi͏ng is ̨di͜f́f̵ere̕nt ́~
“Recklessness is your flaw,” Kayn retorted, “Not mine.”
As he strode down the vast halls of the Dominator, past rows of Demaxian slingtroopers lining up in salute, Shieda Kayn couldn’t shake a hint of uncertainty from his thoughts, however.
Rhaast was never so self-serious. Something was different.
And Kayn did not like it.