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The plant Muelsyse is looking at appears wilted, almost; leaves crinkled, growing at an angle desperate for more sun under Sami's frozen sky. She runs a winter-gloved finger along its thin stem. "No warmth, all alone," she says, knelt down on the half-iced soil to get a closer look. "And yet, it's alive."
An air of reverence in her words; she continues, musing: "I should've tagged along with Maggy when we first started the Exploration Project… Seems a bit late for Ecological to get into this now."
"Isn't she planning some expeditions to get more samples still?" Saria asks. She's standing just behind her, arms crossed for heat retention, a pillar to Muelsyse's crouched shadow. "They'd save you these sub-zero trips."
"Not the same as seeing it in situ myself," says Muelsyse, head turned slightly in reply. "This is more of a… personal project, anyway. Wouldn't be fair to impose on her what I'm looking for."
Seven hundred and fifty-three plants to replace — no, maybe more than that. She isn't sure if all of the species she'd dutifully collected in the Stellaria's vivarium over the years have remained the same or even still exist. A doubt that this expedition will hopefully address.
The trip itself is more a reconnaissance than anything: no hard research deadlines to answer to, sitting nicely in the pocket of ambiguity they've been afforded after the breaching of the starpod. And given the once infallible pace of life at Rhine Lab, she might even say it's the first true holiday the two of them have had in years.
"I've braved worse conditions," she continues. "The last time I was here, our equipment wasn't quite as state-of-the-art."
"If it's what you want," Saria says, unmoving. Her gaze is fixed on the elf, who's now preparing a sample container they brought for use. "Anything I can help you with, just… Let me know."
"You said the same thing when I proposed this expedition and invited you along." There's a teasing note to Muelsyse's voice, present enough in their interactions that Saria picks up on it immediately. "Do you remember what I told you in return?"
Her memory is impeccable to a fault. "You said — I'm — on paper, here to help make sure you don't get lost and buried in snow." A puff of cold air as she breathes out. "And in reality, here to provide moral support and good company."
"Exactly," says Muelsyse. She gets to her feet, a newly sealed bag of plant material in her hands — the sample ends up the first of many in a large container, one stamped with the Rhine Lab logo and fitted with tools to simulate its immediate external environment. Glancing at the monitoring devices she has available to her she notices the readings have indeed fluctuated from her previous journeys here; a mark of time and the environmental changes that followed its passing. "So just keep doing what you're doing."
Their party of two advances at a somewhat relaxed pace. Muelsyse knows she won't be able to cover everything she found over the span of many, many years within a single trip. She'd kept aside some seeds and cuttings, but only in containers that were also inside the vivarium when the H.A.M.H.R.R. took off.
In hindsight that was an illogical move; in further hindsight maybe she'd just mistakenly viewed that vivarium as the end of a certain line. She'd placed all the plants representative of her species in there, spores to be scattered into space — and now only Rhine's copy of the vivarium is left, filled more with plants found in the outside world, elven in structure but not in heart.
Splitting the contents of the two eco-gardens was admittedly an odd decision. But it does mirror the carefully separated sides of herself, as she is still reluctant to point out: one perfectly content, enjoying regular life at Rhine, and one that never really fit in, perceiving herself as an other; one she'd thought she'd be leaving in the past, in favour of one meant to be carried into the future.
Regardless — regardless. The plants are gone. She should pay more attention to what's here. Especially now. Especially after.
She pipes up now, remarking: "I'm really looking forward to when we reach the depths of this place."
"Are you?"
"Last time with the settlement I was just focusing narrowly on one goal; now I'm getting to the whole thing, there's so much more to see!" Her conversation fills the otherwise still air, releasing the tension of their initial silence. "There's a possibility I'll find even more plants than I'd originally had…"
Saria hums in response. "I'm glad you're having fun."
"Thank you, but hey, don't treat me like a kid…"
"No, I mean it." Muelsyse can hear the smile in her voice even if she doesn't show it. "If it was my particular area of interest, I'd be excited too."
"C'mon, even objectively, it's fascinating! Terra incognita, you know? To think there are such places, sparsely inhabited, that haven't fully been explored," she muses. "Somewhere out there in the far reaches we haven't yet seen, there might yet be new discoveries to solve our current problems… A fairytale, made possible."
"You of all people should know fairytales are just that," says Saria. She thinks of Ifrit, her storybook, and her wishing upon an alleged water sprite. "And I'm sure I don't need to tell you this either, but for the sake of it — with so many moving parts involved, it's never that simple."
Muelsyse's pace slows slightly, and Saria slows with her. "You're right," the elf says, "all of that I do know very well. But I feel like dreaming, sometimes…"
She's looking at the ground, speaking in an entirely different tone now. Saria's attention is locked on her words.
"During those moments," Muelsyse continues, "I find myself thinking like her."
Back to the beginning of the figure-eight loop. No matter which way you put it, she was left behind that day.
There's a long pause. Saria does not speak. Maybe it's the extended period of time they've now spent together mostly isolated from civilisation — barring the occasional visit to a chain of emporiums somehow subsisting on the trail — but Muelsyse eventually volunteers:
"I never told you, but the plants I sent up with her all ended up not surviving."
Saria's mind flashes with the memory of her making the hole in the vivarium's wall. She says: "...I'm sorry for the loss."
Muelsyse says: "She's all alone."
Wasn't she always? The words are still too bitter to pass through Saria's mouth. Instead she says: "You're not building another H.A.M.H.H.R."
Muelsyse smiles at the suggestion, wavering like one of her liquid illusions. "Of course not. There's no way I could."
If you could, you would. Once again Saria can't bring herself to voice the reply that rises to her tongue. If only she could be sure she wasn't just projecting — if only there were no consequences, if only time hadn't passed, if only it were just the three of them, sat around one of their dorm rooms, getting distracted as they studied late into the night.
*
They are about to step out of another path of twisted bark and leaves, back into more relatively open space and air and light, when the shadows cast by the thick branches above in the clearing ahead begin to shift.
Saria stops moving first. Her partner continues walking forward a few steps more. She watches.
The temperature drops further. A disturbance. Dew on the leaves of the trees around them, pooling heavy and falling fast. Cold, clouded, gaseous yet liquid.
"...Muelsyse," she calls out, "are you doing that?"
They'd come across another traveller on the way here who'd hallucinated a similar supernatural weather occurrence, a black rain that destroyed his equipment; as far as they could tell, the destruction was visible only to him. Saria blinks at the scene in front of her. No change.
"No," says Muelsyse in return, and Saria's relieved that whatever's happening she can see it too, "and — I don't think you're doing that, either..."
She doesn't have to specify what she's referring to. Pieces of rock underneath the soil have burst through the surface and risen above, forming thinner lines tracing perfectly formed curves in the air. To an outside observer the structures look just like the effects of Calcification, fine-tuned with a precision only Saria is capable of. Before the vouivre realises she's already rushed forward to adopt a protective stance, shielding herself and Muelsyse from the view ahead.
The danger does not arrive. What happens is that the volume of falling dew rapidly increases, and suddenly — as if released from a temporal spell — it starts freezing on the intricate rock structures. Ice crystals in unnaturally perfect shapes, seemingly gravity-defying, flying in the face of natural physics. Concentric rings around a solid stone core; the former appear to shimmer in the air.
Saria recognises the layout of the self-making construct. As it blooms in her field of vision she senses Muelsyse, completely still, next to her. They must have caught on at the same time.
The forces of nature have faithfully reconstituted the features of the Galleria Stellaria's planetarium.
It's a perfect picture of how it looked just before the space station broke through the barrier. In her vision the opaque swathe of dirt they're on turns reflective, resembling marble that mirrors the tapestries of the sky; approximations of the planets in Terra's galaxy hang suspended in the air, an orrery borne of nature instead of man.
Their relative positions are exactly as she remembers them, perfectly spaced apart, measured in sharp memory. Where Saria is standing now is where the emergency trap door was; the exact spot where she last saw…
They remain, unmoving, staring at the cold Sami sunrays filtering through the clouded ice. The contrasting shadows within form familiar shapes, though too fleeting for a real, proper look — sweeping coats, half-kempt hair, an idle canine ear — tricks of the light that dance in the fog. Saria says nothing, not a question, not the name that so familiarly catches between her teeth. The cold is beginning to seep in through her boots.
Had this structure always been here in this clearing? Had they simply imagined its gradual reconstruction?
"Maggy wrote about similar — referential phenomena," Muelsyse says, stumblingly, to break the silence. "Handprints on trees that resemble Siracusan mafia customs. Sounds of Columbian prison shackles on inmates who perished in the swamp."
"I've read the reports," says Saria, "this is new."
"We should record it somehow," says Muelsyse, and then, almost sheepishly: "But I don't want to touch it."
"With the equipment we have, and according to what we know," says Saria, "there should be no danger. Either way, if anything happens, I'm here to —"
"Saria," says Muelsyse, interrupting, and the vouivre turns her head to find two copies of the elf in front of her. She can't tell which one of them spoke.
Instinctively she reaches out to touch the copy closest to her. It dissipates into its smaller water droplet constituents. The droplets quickly evaporate and rejoin the air, revealing the other — more tangible, more real — copy behind it, a small wistful smile on her face.
In the periphery of her vision, Saria sees another image in the structure. The three of them on New Year's Day, the start of one of their final semesters at university, fireworks in the sky represented by will-o-wisps within the ice — Rhine Lab's Control in the middle, her arms chain-linked around theirs, her gaze raised high to the stars.
Cognitive disturbances — words written in Magallan's neat script appear in her brain — playing on the mind. But the mind cannot conjure from nothing. Hanging even from strings held cryogenically in deep space; a puppet, an attack dog, always, forever. Her fists sting with phantom cuts over her knuckles — her ears faintly pick up the sound of her Arts being broken, echoing in Control's office as she tries to shatter a barrier built just for her, over and over and over —
and over.
It's Muelsyse's touch that shatters the spell, one Saria doesn't even know takes hold of her, pulling her back from the far reaches of space, past grass and soil and rock, into a sea where they do not wash away. The buffeting of the waves fades with the sensation of the elf's hand around her wrist, where the skip of her heartbeat slows underneath her fingers; a gesture that while far from the most physically intimate they have been with each other, seizes Saria's attention entirely.
She loosens the vice-grip she had on her shield. Beside her, Muelsyse's breathing slows. "We should set up camp soon,"she says, her gaze beyond both the planetarium's replica and Saria, "it's getting dark."
*
Saria awakens much too early the next day, her sleep restless and filled with dreams that have all bled into each other. The night in Sami is longer than in the rest of Terra — it's still dark outside. Two moons, stars dotted around them, and the faintest outline of the aperture created in the sky directly above Trimounts. She tries not to move so as to not rouse Muelsyse beside her, but she knows she's failed as the elf shifts, eyes fluttering open.
"Sorry to wake you…"
She gives a slight shake of the head. "You're not the only one who naturally rises early, you know," says Muelsyse. "I was just closing my eyes a little longer. The air dries them out faster than usual."
"But last time —"
"The circumstances are different now," she interrupts gently, "This place especially. It feels like I can barely sleep."
The structure is visible through a window formed by a transparent plastic sheet embedded into the sturdy fabric wall of the tent. Their vision of it is clear and unobstructed: the tent is functionally large enough for two, but they've left what was supposed to be Muelsyse's half unoccupied.
She watches Saria now prop herself on her elbows, getting into a more comfortable position to view the outside. The vouivre says after a few beats:
"You helped me when I was falling from the Stellaria." What little moonlight comes in through the nighttime fog illuminates her eyes. "The real one. Didn't you?"
"Did I?"
"I could sense the water over my calcified shield. It's partially soluble."
"...Right," Muelsyse says. "Yes, I did. It was no problem at all." And then she finds she doesn't know how to continue.
How long has it been already? A day, a week, a month? Long enough for life to go on as normal; short enough that everyone still can't help looking up whenever they're entering Columbian streets. Sufficient time for Saria to say:
"I thought again yesterday… about what I could have done differently."
Suddenly, fleetingly, like the words flew out of her grasp. Muelsyse says, jokingly, though the effect is tempered by her rueful words:
"Aww, you're bringing that up now?"
When Saria doesn't respond, she continues: "I thought this expedition was really time just for us."
She laces their fingers. The vouivre does not lock them closer together as — Muelsyse doesn't want to assume, to think 'as she usually does', but that is what she expects.
"If you're talking about 'us'," Saria says, barely above a whisper, "it should include..."
Her voice trails off. Muelsyse replies preemptively, and there is the sense that the space between them is more vast than the real physical distance allows for, perhaps more like what separates the sun and her planets: "It feels more real when you say it, so don't."
"If I'd known sooner," says Saria, and Muelsyse notes with some degree of affection that she sounds sleepy, unfiltered, "or maybe if I'd engaged Rhodes' help earlier…"
"We both know Rhodes couldn't contain her," Muelsyse says. "She had the whole of Rhine in the palm of her hand." The stars in the sky, accentuated in the absence of light pollution in Sami, shine in her eyes; one for each of the things they don't mention. "Including you — well, say less about me, but her influence was to the point that you, Saria, unlike her — have never been able to truly leave Trimounts behind."
Somewhere on a foldable table nearby is a collection of worn tourism flyers Muelsyse picked up from a micro-operation platform they found along the way. The low-temperature storage boxes containing them were of a make from several years ago, perhaps from when Trimounts’ tech companies first dipped their toes into Sami, before their pursuits there were overshadowed by grander projects.
From what she can tell, their reputation on the flyers just about matches their actual reputation on the ground — a testament to the good, consistent, unending work of Defense.
Saria does not look at the night directly. Her gaze lingers somewhere on Muelsyse's face. "You think so?"
"Well, if it's not about Kristen —" Her name, finally finding tangibility on Muelsyse's tongue, anchors her suddenly and completely within their space, even from thousands of miles away — "I can only imagine you keep coming back because of me."
The response comes without any turn of her head. The stars are unchanged.
It's so easy for Muelsyse to talk, Saria thinks, especially about nothing at all. All these sentences, facetious, played off as jokes — they're never really effective on the person currently with her, but serve as a foolproof mechanism for deflection regardless.
Saria, on the other hand, can only ever settle for keeping her mouth shut, so that's what she does. Maybe what Muelsyse's implying is true, anyway. Saria holds onto things until her fingers are raw, until they're torn from her and her flesh with them. Even now she has Olivia's feather within reach, strung onto the shield she's left beside her, the edges of its vane scuffed and weathered. She won't let go; she can't let go.
Though this is different from her ties with Silence and Ifrit. She is freely accepting of those bonds, built and frayed and rebuilt. What Muelsyse is hinting at — what she has left of Kristen Wright — is what Saria keeps close to her heart.
Because of their status as co-founders, everyone invariably assumes they're close friends, at least at first glance. And maybe they were, at some instance in time. She remembers when she freely called Kristen her best friend, at one point privately her lover, meaning fully all of the sentiment even despite the level of abstraction and compartmentalization she'd placed upon her emotions. Though looking back she can't quite recall an instance of any of that being said directly back to her — but they must have been something, once.
Their ideologies must not have been so different at their core for their misalignments to be so keenly felt. There's a reason why whenever people talk about them it's always a nebulous 'Saria and her relationship with Control' — and there's also something to be said about how that moniker works both ways.
"Maybe you're right," says Saria.
"Maybe," Muelsyse says, and the other woman can immediately tell she's only humouring her, allowing her the ambiguity to hide behind. They seem to love pretending that they don't know each other as well as they do, that the current gap in their lives was left between them and not around. "Then — what's your plan now? If you believe Rhine's worth saving — perhaps you'll be hoping to fix what failed this time? I guess we could start by figuring out what to do with the hole she made in the sky…"
Two truths: one, she can't give Rhine up; it's the one thing they both really believed in. Two — and this one she's sure Muelsyse agrees with as well — if Kristen ever returns, she wants to be there to receive her. A foolish dream, meaningless — Kristen would continue mapping the stars even if she could come back down to earth — but a dream, regardless.
Saria does not know what she would do upon their reunion — if she would embrace her, catch her off guard and yell at her, ignore her to finally see how much she truly cared — but to spend more time thinking about it would be pure indulgence.
"The hole's closing on its own," she says.
"Then that's one less distraction from the larger issue."
A Rhine Lab without its Control; a spear without its point. "I'm not sure about the plan yet," Saria admits, "but I'm staying for the foreseeable future."
She draws closer now, her fingers curling tighter around Muelsyse's, finally. A kiss is pressed to her cheek, lips chapped from the cold, the pressure warm and comforting.
"Didn't expect anything less."
Silence falls as they both find themselves looking again at the scene outside. It's difficult now to discern the physical boundaries of the ice in the structure; in the dark, it's become one with the atmosphere.
*
They take their time getting ready to leave when the sky turns bright again, unpitching their tent with sure but leisurely hands. By way of bidding farewell, almost, Muelsyse takes samples of the plants she now notices flowering in beds centred below the planets.
"Do you think we'll see her again?" she asks, again at Saria looming over her shoulder. A question unbefitting of the cold logical structure that shapes their organization, given what they saw happened. Saria answers:
"You'll be repeating this trip, won't you?"
She has noted down the set of coordinates leading to this manifestation of the Stellaria. A string of numbers that have made their nest within her, just as the coordinates to the elf settlement must have within Muelsyse. Directions to a monument of a dream that once was.
Saria huddles close to her partner's left flank once she returns with the bags and they continue the hike — her own left side feeling strangely occupied, weighted, a planet's gravity on the two moons in its orbit.
And partially lost in the wind, a delayed reply in Muelsyse's gentle tone: "You mean we."