Chapter Text
Tessa was tired of being alone.
She had been for some time, but this was different.
Now she was TRULY alone in the universe.
Her life had become a neverending nightmare, her fate sealed from the moment she set foot into the Gala. A neverending buffet of bloodshed and destruction, the front row seats shared by Tessa and the mastermind itself.
Cyn.
Tessa hadn’t felt solid ground since she set foot from Earth, though in a way she was thankful Cyn hadn’t subjected her to the torment of seeing all of the violence up close and personal. Seeing each planet crumble one by one from their ship, subjected to the constant terrors of how utterly despair-riddled the state of everything was, was enough, thank you!
It had been neverending. Being stuck in the middle of space, on an impromptu interstellar cruise that toured each staple of Cyns work, didn’t leave much else for Tessa to occupy her mind with. Even when Tessa could find something else to focus on, anything, it wouldn't be long before Cyn had wormed her way back into Tessas’ brain, seeds of doubt and anguish engraved in her mind through that lifeless, monotone voice. Tessa sort of really hated how despite the lack of inflection the voice carried at how determined it sounded. How sure of everything. She hated how it had no reason to think otherwise, every word, every promise of chaos Cyn delivered to Tessa coming to fruition. There was no escaping the absolute end. The promise Cyn had made to her being the only certainty in her fate.
Tessa would not be discarded.
Tessa’s fate was sealed to watching the universe die.
Her home, her planet, her drones; all gone.
Not that Cy-No, not Cyn, the Absolute Solver was the puppeteer behind this neverending nightmare, that poor drone Tessa had rescued back at the manor was simply another one of it’s playthings; a symphony of chaos orchestrated behind the facade of of a sweet worker drone who could do no harm (Intentionally, anyways).
…That was if the ‘Cyn’ Tessa had known was even there to begin with. Did Tessa ever truly ever get to meet the Cyn she thought she knew and loved? Was Cyn ever truly there, or was she long gone by the time Tessa had first found her in the dump?
That train of thought was something she tried to stray away from.
Tessa turned back to the facts in front of her; to what she DID know. She knew the Earth was long gone. She knew the Absolute Solver had reached other exoplanets. She knew everyone who tried retaliating was dead, too, whether from her own home planet or on the exoplanets scattered across space, last-ditch attempts to try and figure out the Absolute Solver. To try and figure out how to understand it. How to *stop* it. She knew, one by one, any flames of hope humanity had were being snuffed out. One by one, communications between planets died. The planets themselves falling victim to the virus as it claims its victory, leaving the shadows of what humanity once was, what it was trying to accomplish, in its wake.
Tessa knew she was no more than a symbol of what the Solver had managed to destroy; the lone survivor from Earth. She knew, after being trapped with the eldritch horror for so long in space, that she was merely a form of entertainment to it, a sad excuse for company as it wiped everyone out, one by one. Someone to witness its ‘achievements’ in all their glory.
…Until the solver had vanished, that was.
She knew the solver commanded an army of puppets to help slither their way into the cracks of any resistance, tearing it open from the inside. Tessa had seen it first hand, back at the solvers’ very first performance at the Gala, meager in comparison to the planet-wide entropy it would cause. She remembered how her closest allies, her friends, had been twisted into feral beasts at the flick of its wrist. How her sweet, shy V had been contorted to do the Solvers bidding, a hunger seemingly clawing from her insides and tearing its way through her body until the only thing that…*thing* and V had in common was the accessories that adorned the worker drone. Not even V’s body was safe from the Solvers’ influence, unnatural clawed hands seared into Tessas’ memory from when they had been slicing at her in attack, a grin smeared across the drones’ form, fangs eager to find their brace on flesh and BITE. The deformed, fleshy wings that sprouted from the casing, letting the monster V had been turned into move with an unnatural speed, only barely matched by the inhuman robotic speed of J as she countered V’s attacks, protecting Tessa from her wrath.
Oh, J…
Just the thought of J made her soul ache, her feelings a mixed flurry of…
..she wasn’t sure how to feel about her. She felt a lot of different things when she thought about her.
J, headstrong and stubborn.
J, hardworking and orderly.
J, who only ever seemed to be a moments’ notice away.
J, her favourite drone, though she would never admit that.
Her J, her comfort when she needed it most.
Her J, her idea of what cosyness would look like personified, despite the lack of actual warmth the drone could emit.
Her J, loyal as ever, to the end.
J, twisted into a nightmare, just like the Solver had done with every other drone in the manor, her inviting eyes replaced with an elongated X, scrawled in a sickly yellow.
J, who, despite throwing her life on the line to protect Tessa minutes prior, now her captor as she trapped Tessa in the ballroom.
J, who didn’t flinch a single servo as the massacre unfolded in front of her, watching her fellow coworkers tear into the guests, clawing and biting through tendons and bone with ease.
J, expression unwavering as Tessa pleaded with her to help her escape this nightmare.
J, the savage grin her coworkers wore now adorned her own face, Tessas’ face bathed in the yellow light of her visor as J stalked closer to her victim.
J, the last thing Tessa saw before her world went dark.
She knew how J, how all of them, were used as puppets to dance to the Solvers’ siren of destruction. She knew how likely it was that they must have ended up in the crossfire, given the Earth blowing up and all. She knew they were expendable to the Solver, who always seemed to have more toys to play with.
…She knew she would never see her favourite drone again. Or any of them, for that matter.
Yet she couldn't extinguish the flicker of hope that lay heavy in her heart. The least she could do was to try and find answers to what had happened to them, information the Solver had gut wrenchingly kept from Tessas’ grasp since the destruction of Earth.
She needed to know.
Even if it was just for closure.
Stuck up here on her own, with no home, no planet to go back to, she needed something to keep her focus on. She needed something to work towards. She needed to understand what was going on.
Tessa's attention turned to the console in front of her. To no surprise, she had no luck with contacting anyone, every last trace of humanity and what it once was wiped off the face of…well, everywhere. She was the last speck of their pitiful existence. Everyone besides her seemed to be gone, including the mastermind behind all the horrors, who had just become unresponsive out of the blue. She seemed to be alone in the universe.
That was until she had picked up some readings from one of the exoplanets the humans used to inhabit, strange readings of activity from a planet long ravaged by the sickness that was the Absolute Solver. A planet that should be dead, just like Tessa.
Possibly the only speck of life this universe still held, just like Tessa.
One of the only advantages to being stuck around the solver was so long was that she had plenty of time to figure out the ins and outs of space travel from her front row seat to the downfall of the universe.
Tessa set her course for Copper-9.