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It was late at night in August when I first saw her, though I suspect she had been watching me for some time prior. I had been at my office in the SPDM working on some papers at the time, and was just about to finish when I happened to look out the window, and there I saw her.
She was a girl, seeming at first glance to be no one of note. Her manner of dress seemed to fit what I vaguely remembered as some school uniform or another, and the way she smiled at me was the picture of innocence – if not for certain incongruencies. For one, she was certainly not a student of ours, they would never be out at night in unusual clothing.
For another, my office stood on the third floor of the building.
It was not unheard of for certain arcanists to exhibit abilities that could translate to flight, though these tended to be cumbersome and often required outside assistance to become useful. This was not that, however; the girl seemed to stand on air as if it was no different from the earth.
So caught up in this unusual phenomenon was I that I was caught off guard by a knock on the window. Before I could properly respond, however, the girl stepped forward. All at once the world seemed to bend in protest, as though something thoroughly unnatural was occurring, and she walked through an open space that was and was not into my office.
Now that she stood before me, certain singularly disturbing details became apparent. The girl stood unnaturally still, as though she were a statue. Her expression did not shift, her eyes did not blink, her chest did not rise with breath. If I had not seen her move with my own eyes, I would have thought her a corpse. The proportions of her body were ever so slightly off in such a way that threatened to send a shiver down my spine.
Between the space of moments she was suddenly holding a document up to me, which upon closer inspection turned out to be an application form for SPDM. I spoke up hesitantly, for though I did not fully understand the being before me, my subconscious knew it to be dangerous.
“Ah… I’m afraid we only accept students below a certain age, miss…”
She did not answer my unspoken query as to her name, though it may have been a mercy that she did not, for surely her voice would have rent my ears and strained my mind. Instead she merely smiled and tilted her head – much too far for what any human or arcanist with a functioning skeletal system should be able to achieve.
Then her chest opened up and I witnessed infinity.
I saw the birth of the universe, that fiery conflagration from which everything originated. I stood upon the earth as it was formed. I felt as the light of the last star winked out and all was still, as the cosmos died. And through it all, She was there. She was older than time, greater than the most massive galaxy. There, in the space between stars, I saw her for what she truly was. Her form was beyond description, such that I could feel all reason leaving me as I gazed upon it. And as my pitiful human mind whimpered and died, I knew that it should be better to fear the unknown than to understand it.
— — —
The girl called Voyager works with the Foundation occasionally on various things. When asked, all anyone can ever answer is that she has always been there.