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Warrior of Light Aydria Fireheart stands with a digital notepad in her hands, glancing back and forth between it and a large shelf.
“Resistors box…check,” she mutters to herself, marking a square box on the notepad.
“14/2 cable roll…check. 13 levin batteries…check…box of ducting tape…check…” she continues on, going on and on through the list under her breath. A clock on the wall helpfully beams out 03:47 in glowing red numerals, though the short miqo’te doing her inventory doesn’t pay the time any mind, nor does she show any signs of being tired at all. By the time the clock has dutifully ticked past the minutes to 04:09, she’s finished with the first two levels of shelves - which are the only ones she’s actually tall enough to reach.
She tries and fails to reach the third shelf, the very tips of her toes insufficient to give her the height to see the various mechanical miscellanea stored on it.
With an annoyed roll of her eyes and a sigh, she sets the notepad down and walks over a pair of heavily magiteknically augmented boots sitting in the corner of the room. She straps them on her legs, the boxy metal boots come almost halfway up her thighs, then clicks the heels together once with a metallic clack . A few light blue status lights begin to glow at the tops of the boots, indicating a steady supply of power being pulled from her aetherotransformer resting on her hip.
“Alrighty, you, let’s try not to get me stuck to the ceiling this time,” she remarks to the otherwise empty storage room onboard her airship home before taking a loud, whirring step in the boots back towards the shelves to retrieve her notepad from where she’d left it. After a few jerky steps, she finds her stride, whirrrr-clickclunk -ing her way across the metal floors towards the bulkhead and stepping one magbooted foot onto the wall.
Noisily, the inventive miqo’te machinist walked her way up the wall to the ceiling, tail dangling and twitching to and fro to try to keep a balance as the world turned upside down. She clunked her way across the ceiling, the thud of her footsteps and clicking as the electromagnets in her boots powered on and off with each step echoing across the airship’s hull. Eventually, she came to a triumphant stop to stand inverted in front of the third shelf, crimson red tank top falling down to rest under her arms having lost its battle with gravity.
She meticulously checks her way through pneumatic compressors, servo actuators of various sizes, and half a shelf’s worth of different kinds of drive motors before she hears the automated door buzz as it slides itself open to make way for a bleary-eyed bespectacled roegadyn.
“What are you doing?” they ask, wandering up underneath Aydria’s position affixed to the ceiling.
The Warrior of Light looks up from the ceiling, down to her partner. “I’m checking the inventory. Did I wake you up?”
Snoegeim brushes a strand of her blaze-orange hair from their face. “Not until you started thumping around on the ceiling, but I wasn’t sleeping very well anyway,” they answer. They look at the shelf, then to their partner dangling from the ceiling. “You’re doing inventory manually?”
“‘Course,” Aydria says like it’s obvious. “The automatic cataloguer might’ve missed something.”
Snoe raises an eyebrow. “But you already double checked it twice.”
“I did, but I could have missed something, too,” she declares, checking off the box for the replacement aetheric siphon on her notepad and stepping to the right with another whiiiirrrr-clickclunk .
The roegadyn woman follows half a step forward beneath the machinist, not saying anything for a moment.
“Are you nervous?” she asks, knowing her Warrior of Light well enough to know the answer already.
Aydria stops and looks down, strip of bleach-white hair pointing directly down at her partner.
“Yeah, a bit,” she says. “You gotta stop knowing me too well, it makes it hard to hide.”
Snoe smiles gently. “I’m going to make some coffee. Do you want some?”
“Do I have to come down from the ceiling to get it?”
“I don’t see how you’d drink it upside down, so, yes, I imagine you’ll need to come down for it.”
Aydria pauses. “You’re just trying to get me to stop doing this, aren’t you?”
“No. If I forgot to pack a copy of Tural and Her Faiths I’ll be very upset!” Snoegeim declares emphatically. “I’ll be back in a few minutes. Make sure my books are there!”
Aydria chuckles to herself and crouches down on the ceiling to check the top shelf, cataloging her way through a small library’s worth of various mythological and anthropological titles by Eorzean scholars few have ever heard of, much less read.
10 minutes later, Snoegeim returns from the upstairs kitchen carrying two cups of pale beige coffee, cream and sugar smothering the flavor of the bitter brown liquid to within an inch of its life. Aydria checks the final box on her alphabetized list of books, marking Zahar'ak to Paglth'an: The Amal’jaa of Thanalan as safe and sound.
“It’s here,” Aydria shares with a smile, “along with all the rest.”
“Oh, wonderful!” Snoe says, elated to hear what they already knew from the first few times this inventory had been taken. “Can you come down from the ceiling, now? These cups are slightly unpleasant to keep holding.”
“Yeah, I’m working on it, just a second,” Aydria replies, fiddling with her left boot’s magnet that is stuck in the ON position. “C’mon, you cantankerous…” she mutters to herself, multitool stuck inside the wiring. The status light flickers a few times before it douses itself, the magnet switching from stuck ON to stuck in OFF. Aydria dangles from the ceiling, one leg awkwardly bent and trying not to swing herself off balance. With a centering breath, she purposely clicks together the heels of the boots, depowering the remaining magnet and doing an acrobatic flip midair to fall to the floor with a resounding THUD.
Clearly proud of herself, she struts over to Snoegeim and takes her mug of coffee out of her partner’s hand, the insignia of the Garlond Ironworks emblazoned on the cup faded after many years of dutiful service.
“So, what are you nervous about?” Snoe asks, sitting on a desk covered in sketched diagrams and loose papers. “You’ve gone on far more dangerous expeditions than a mere flight to Tural.”
“That is precisely what I’m nervous about,” Aydria replies, sipping her oversweet coffee from the mug cupped in her hands. “The last few years have been flitting from one world-ending disaster to another…I don’t know what to do with myself. It’s too calm. I’m so used to having to make sure everyone is safe, up to and including stopping the literal end of the world, that now that there’s even free time to take a vacation, I don’t know if I’ll be able to actually relax.”
Snoegeim nods. “That certainly makes sense, but that’s what you have me for, you know. You might be the all-powerful Warrior of Light, but I’m just some scholar from Sharlayan who’s biggest adventure before I met you was a trip to Thanalan.” They take a sip of their own before continuing. “You might not relax very easily, but that’s what everyone else is there for - making sure you don’t have to take the lead and can just relax. Maybe this trip will be more my adventure than yours!”
Aydria giggles into her coffee. “Maybe it will. I’m quite the research assistant, after all. Helped you discover and publish on the real home of the Twelve and everything.”
“That’s true! I still struggle to believe it,” Snoe says with a laugh of her own, pushing their round-rimmed glasses back up their nose. “Who knows what we’ll find in Tural. Maybe their faiths have something to show us, too.”
“Gods I hope not,” Aydria remarks. “I’ve had my fair share of bouts with deities, I’d like to just lay on the sand and sip some fruity drinks with little umbrellas in them. Or whatever it is people do when they go to the beach.”
Snoegeim shrugs. “That sounds like vacation behavior to me.”
Silence sits in the air for a moment before the roegadyn speaks again.
“It’s almost dawn. Why don’t we go out and watch it? It’ll be like your first act of vacation; relaxing watching the sun rise with your girlfriend?”
Aydria walks up to the desk where Snoegeim sits and stands on the tips of her toes, planting a quick kiss on the scholar’s cheek and smudging the left lens of her spectacles.
“Sounds like as good of a start as any to you leading this little expedition to me,” she says. “Show me the path to relaxation, O Fearless Leader.”
Snoegeim hops off the desk, accidentally sloshing a few drops of coffee onto the hem of her chocobo-dotted pajamas.
“First star on the left, and straight on til morning!” they declare, starting towards the door.
“What does that mean?” Aydria asks as she follows shortly behind, incredulous.
“It’s a Sharlayan saying - I honestly don’t know what exactly it means, though. I’ll have to look through some books and see; don’t know why I never bothered to until now…”
The door whirrs itself shut and then shuts with a soft clunk , the only sound left in the storage room the soft hum of the airship power core that will carry the Warrior of Light and her allies forth on the wings of freedom towards a new adventure.