WEIRDNESS WITH THE EARLY ACCESS CHAPTERS WILL BE FIXED IN THE NEXT POST! HOPE YOU ALL ENJOY!CH3
Stepping into her private meditation room, Kaido presses the button that locks solid metal sliding door before pressing the adjacent button that sets the timer counting down from five hours and activates the room.
Removing her robe and hanging it on a peg, she steps down the marble tiled stair and into the thigh deep water, noting that in her haste this morning to begin her meditations she did not give the room long enough to get the water up to temperature.
It’s one fiftieth of a degree colder than it should be, but as she slowly wades to the center of the fifty metre square room that discrepancy corrects itself.
The gentle sounds of flowing water quiet as the cultivator stops at the exact centre of the room and lowers herself to a lotus position in a single smooth motion in time with the lights dimming. Closing her eyes, she slowly silences her mind in time with the almost imperceptible ripples on the surface of the water, and breathes.
Slow.
Calm.
Measured.
Soon enough she can feel her core synchronising with the room almost perfectly, as the space was crafted to do, thus she barely has to open her Qi network for the custom mixture of attributes painstakingly infused into that water to flow into her.
The first time she sat in this water it almost overwhelmed her, the liquid an infinitely better conduit for conducting Qi, such that its composition must be carefully tuned for the individual lest the asynchrony overwhelm her core and kill her as it nearly did at first.
The second time was barely better.
Kaido’s breathing hitches slightly as a small impurity in the water scrapes its way through her network. It’s processed and expelled with barely a thought, but the indignity lasts much longer,
The cultivator’s mouth twitches as the flow of Qi wavers with the rising tide of disruptive emotion.
The laziness, how dare the initiates tasked with maintenance to her chambers–
Memories of ten thousand meditation lessons, tinged in her master’s voice, press down on those thoughts, reminding her the cost of anger.
Breathe.
The Qi flows into her core, compressing further and further in on itself, ever so slowly increasing in density and growing no larger.
Breathe.
And as Kaido meditates, her entire being focused on her core, in the center of that impossibly dense amalgam gently smoldering atop her painstakingly crafted foundation, she can sense existence itself straining, giving way and, as her core presses down ever more firmly, something within flashes–
“Incoming priority call.” An electronic voice hisses from the wall mounted machine, beeping a few times before repeating itself. “Incoming priority call.”
“Damnnation!” Kaido roars, desperately wrestling against the Qi inside her body as it nearly escapes control, only held at bay by unflinching will..
She’s not had a Qi deviation since she was an initiate, to have one now is a profound insult to her personal honor.
Even if she’s the only one who knows of it.
Regaining mastery over herself even as her skin momentarily feels ten million times too small, Kaido stabilizes her Qi network before rising to her feet and glares at the beeping interruption.
Marching back across the thigh deep water with a splashing trudge and throwing on her robe, it's only her eternal drills of self control that prevents her finger from going through the panel as she punches the button to accept the call.
“Who dare– Master.” She says with a bow, rage instantly reversing to calm loyalty at the sight of her master's face on the screen. “I apologize for the delay, I was indisposed.”
There’s a short silence from the other side of the call, broken as her master sighs in the way he does whenever he’s rubbing the bridge of his nose.
“...I can see that.” He says in a slightly stilted tone. “Might I ask that you put on some clothes before we continue?”
Kaido rises from her bow and gives a sharp nod, only then realizing the dilemma that she is wearing appropriate clothes for the situation.
After a few seconds of deliberation she unties the lengths of cloth keeping the robe from falling open, then reties them in the formal manner.
“It is done master.” She states before giving another brief bow. “I am at your service.”
Rising to a firm attention, she stares at the wall mounted screen, awaiting her master to continue. But instead of talking, or rubbing the bridge of his nose again, he just stares at her. Eyes flicking between her own, one at a time, as if he’s looking for something.
Eventually, he gives a shallow nod.
“Good.” He mutters. “It has come to my attention that several client sects marshaled under sector twenty four have been reporting reduced tithes over the past three months. You are to investigate these reports and determine the truth of this discrepancy.”
Kaido nods in two abrupt motions.
“Yes Master.”
There’s a slight pause before her Master nods back.
“Good.” He says, continuing after another hesitation. “...Kaido. In your investigation, do not exclude members of the Silver Firmament Sect from the domain of your search.”
Kiado’s imperfect discipline almost allows the shock at her master's words to break her composure, the thought that someone from within the sect is acting against it almost unthinkable.
But she does not break, merely nodding once more.“I understand Master. I will leave immediately.”
Her master lightly tilts his head in acknowledgement, and the instant before her finger presses the button to end the call, says something else, so quietly it almost seems to be to himself.
“...Good luck.”
_____
-_-_
–––––
Laying on her back, Lian squints at the ratsnest of age embrittled electrical wiring, trying to figure out what she’s looking at.
When she’s first opened the airlock for her escape pod, it was a complete mess, every access panel and console removed and thrown on the floor with unplugged cables and electrical wiring hanging from every surface.
But now, with weeks of painstaking effort, slaving over every scrap of metal, ceramic and plastic…
Lian lifts her head and looks at the interior, about the size of a midsize van.
…It’s not worse than when she found it.
The scrapper snorts and looks back at her wiring, fighting back a yawn.
She’d stayed up late installing the components ‘acquired’ from the scrapyard, but early this morning she’d been woken by a desperate thirst and, because it’s needed for the electrolyzer and actually clean water is a somewhat valuable commodity here, she’d hidden her stash of water in the pod.
Lian unplugs one end of a cable, blows into it, then plugs it back in.
And, just because she happened to be here, it couldn't hurt to do some tests to ensure the components were installed properly.
This single thought turned into two hours of tired and tedious tracing to find problems, all leading to this moment…
Flipping a switch on an unmounted control panel laying on the floor next to her and pressing a button, she’s rewarded by an almost inaudible electronic whine and the faint smell of burning plastic. Followed by yet another one of the red blinking lights across the main console to turn green.
“Yesssss!” The scrapper hisses, pumping a fist, then freezes and looks around to ensure that quick movement didn't knock anything loose.
After a second of nothing happening, she breathes a sigh of relief before reaching to remount the control panel.
For a long time she’d been unsure on if it was even possible to bring this thing back online, but as systems flicker back to life one by one, the odds of her actually managing to do this increase by the day.
In fact, the only major component she’s missing by now is a star map, a system of cameras attached to a database of star positions allowing the device to triangulate where she is anywhere in the galaxy, which is an irreplaceable component before any plan can even begin.
In her memory there are thousands of avenues to search for power and wealth, but this station isn't unique so the scrapper has no idea where she is, and until she knows where she is, she can't know which direction to go.
Poking out her tongue as she works, she finishes stuffing the wires into the flameproof enclosure and screwing the panel back on, but as she looks away she sees the time on the blinking lock in the corner of one of the console screens.
The time isn't set, because she couldn't figure out how, but she’s been in here long enough to be able to automatically translate the incorrect time in her head, and that is saying–
“Sssshoot!”
She’ll be late!
The scrapper hurriedly tries to extract herself from the pod, fingers flying across scattered control panels and the central console to put everything back into low power mode as fast as possible
She can't be late!
Scrabbling out of the pod and remembering to pull her mask over her mouth as she enters the dusty room beyond, Lian grunts as she shoves the heavy airlock door closed and yanks the handle to the closed position with a squeak of unlubricated steel.
Scrambling through the vent, she’s forced to pause for breath as the exertion quickly drains her limited constitution, but just as quickly she’s pulling herself out into her home and sprinting through the cloth partition and down the hall.
As bad as this job is, a lot of people want it, and she’s disposable enough that the foreman has a zero tolerance policy to not adhering to company policy.
Sprinting down the hall, Lian knows the speed she’s moving at is unusual, almost no one moving faster than a brisk walk, and that speed has her almost colliding several people in the half full hallway, forced to stutterstep past one person carrying a some kind of box then half step over a small child as he’s pulled out of her path by an irritated looking mother.
“Sorry!” She calls breathlessly over her shoulder, lungs beginning to burn with cold fire at the abuse.
But even as the scrapper feels her malnourished body crying out in protest at even this mild exercise she still pushes herself to be faster.
She sprints into the atrium and from there things begin to blur, and after that smear of absent time scrapper finds herself pressed against the wall of her work’s waiting room, heaving for breath, with no memory of how she got there.
Blinking rapidly, she offers a wavering smile at her coworker’s sympathetic or confused looks, then slumps as the buzzer for shift start goes off before she even has the chance to catch her breath and the foreman’s voice buzzes over the speaker.
“Right! First shift! Remember today is tithe day! If even a single one of you comes up short and makes me look bad, I swear you will have to be carried home!”
The scrapper blinks as the door to the scrap room opens and the others begin trudging through, then releases an exasperated groan.
Right, today’s tithe day.
Pushing herself off the wall, she staggers through the door and into the scrap room, pulling her cloth mask over her face as she does.
She needs to be quick, or this is gonna get ugly.
–––––
Lian breathes a sigh of relief as she pulls herself up the final distance to where she was yesterday and confirms it’s the same as when she left it.
It’s very lucky that her compressor hadn't been discovered since yesterday, it’s essentially her only hope for actually meeting her tithe for this week, since she’d forgotten her savings at home.
The scrapper grunts with effort, shoving the slab of metal off her compressor before looking down the tower of scrap she’s atop to make sure there’s no one below.
“Look out below! Dropping heavy metal sheet!” She calls, awaiting a response.
A few seconds later she hears a male voice call back from below.
“Hold!” He shouts, sticking his arm out from beneath an overhang he’d been obscured beneath. “I need to finish unspooling this copper!”
“Got it!” Lian calls back, adjusting her grip on the plate slightly. “Say when!”
She’s answered by silence for a few long minutes, and as the time ticks on she’s forced to confront and suppress her anxiety for the wasted time.
He’s on just as much of a time crunch as her, complaining or asking for him to hurry doesn't help.
Eventually, after what feels like half an hour –but is more likely somewhere between five and ten minutes– Lian hears the sound of rubberized footsteps on metal before seeing the other scrapper pull himself out from beneath her at something approximating a safe distance and giving a wave.
“I’m out!”
“Dropping!” Lian calls back, shoving the metal slab off the stack and watching it tumble and slide down the heap, coming to a rest at the bottom third.
Seeing the hazard has passed, he looks from the plate back up to her, gives another wave, then clambers back out of view beneath her.
Lian gets back to work as well, hurriedly scanning the machine for the quickest way to the compressor blade.
She really hopes it’s in the center like she thinks it is.
Grunting with effort, the scrapper picks a place to start, and throws her entire bodyweight behind the first bolt holding the casing together only to get perhaps half a millimeter of movement. But the next yank gets a little bit more, the same after that.
She needs this to be worth what she thinks it is. A turbine blade at that size, even if it’s not made of a nickel dominant alloy, would be more than enough to pay for her tithe all on its own.
As she works, with the exhaustion of her sprint faded and the fear of not making the quota alleviated with a plan, Lian allows herself to mentally grumble at the fact that she has to pay this ‘tithe’ in the first place.
She doesn't have an exact population census on hand, but she’s built and managed this kind of station before when she was in her ‘clan’ phase. For a medium sized station operated by a stock martial sect like this one, it’s looking at a population of around five to six hundred million people.
The Silver Firmament Sect, if they spec their entire elder’s council into management, loyalty, and spycraft, could have a battle ready population of maybe ten thousand. More likely they’ll have somewhere between three and four thousand, assuming the council build is how the game naturally generates sects like this one.
Lian gets the first bolt undone and moves to the second.
Four thousand cultivators, including initiates, is not enough to manage this many people, so they foster the development of smaller sects throughout the station. In the in-game menus they’re called ‘client sects,’ functionally an extension of the Silver Firmament Sect but they have their own little loyalty bar and are partially autonomous, collecting tithes and managing their own area of the station with minimal oversight.
It’s useful, not just to reduce the debuff of bureaucratic strain, but client sects can follow a different cultivation path to help shore up weaknesses in the central hegemon.
So whenever tithe day comes along, the client sect in charge of her area comes calling for their cut of everyone’s weekly earnings, not the people in white.
Pausing to breathe as the fifth bolt is removed, Lian flops over to the final one and clumsily attaches her wrench.
For obvious reasons unions aren't a thing here, because collective bargaining doesn't really work if the boss is personally powerful enough to beat their underlings to death by themselves. From there it doesn't take a genius to see that the system naturally self-selects for people who are ruthless enough to actually use that power to get what they want.
She’s seen what happens to people who don't manage to get the tithe on time, it’s just coinflip odds on whether the beating comes from the cultivators or the foreman’s own mortal enforcers.
It’s that… ruthlessness that Lian needs to emulate if she wants to have even a chance of surviving in this universe.
Releasing a tortured whine with the strain, the sound transitions to a pleased hum as Lian yanks the final bolt loose and sees the panel loosening from its mounting.
No matter how abhorrent, how evil, the Unconquered managed to escape this place and become one of the most powerful people in the entire universe by sheer uncompromising will. From where Lian is right now, she beat every enemy at their own game by grabbing even the smallest chance of an opportunity with such intensity that all challengers broke. She got out of here, she lived because she understood better than anyone what it takes to survi–
“Ohhhh yea baby.” The scrapper mutters to herself as she manages to remove the thick steel backplate for the compressor chamber, revealing the gleaming metal of the compressor blades. “That’s the stuff.”
Even partially obscured by the shadow of the poor lighting, the mental calculation on how much this blade is worth causes saliva to pool under her tongue and a full body tingle to run across her skin.
This is so much bigger than she’d expected! She’d disassembled the machine from the inlet so she’s looking at the widest point of the compressor, it’s as wide as the base of a christmas tree.
This is probably worth more than everything she’d gathered this entire week. Once she gets it to the counter…
The thought trails off as she looks at this massive single piece of monocrystalline metal, the central rotor thicker than her calf, and the thought of the payout is moderated by a simple reality.
How, in the heck, is she gonna get this down?
Lian pokes her head back out of the compressor and looks down at the ground, a two story descent at an angle that ranges from seventy degrees to vertical.
After a few seconds, she reaches into her bag and pulls out the coil of rope her company sells for this very purpose, then looks between it and her surroundings to try and struggles to figure out how she’s going to do this by… herself…
Oh. Duh.
Looking back down at the ground, her eye is drawn to the sound of the other scrapper worthing away somewhere beneath her, and Lian rolls her eyes at how stupid she’s being.
…Shoot. What was his name again?
Cupping her hands around her mouth, she leans a bit more over the side and shouts down to get his attention.
“Hey… Hey Wrei!” She calls. “You got a second!?”
There’s a pause, followed by an unimpressed looking Wrei poking his head out back up at her.
“It’s Wei.”
Lian winces.
“Sorry!” She shouts back. “But I got an offer for you! I’ve got something big I need to take to the counter! If you help me out we can split it!”
Wei stares up at her for a few seconds, squinting, before slowly pulling himself further into view.
“...I’m getting half.” He states firmly, answered immediately by a nod from Lian.
“Right!” She calls back. “Finish whatever you’re doing and get up here! I need to get this done today!”
With that she ducks her head back behind the ridge of the scrap pile and starts mentally pulling apart how they’re going to do this.
As she works, some small part of her regrets losing so much of this payday because she needed to get help. But those thoughts are rationalized out of existence by the fact that if she didn't ask for help, instead of half, she’d get nothing.
And a beating.
Lian takes a loop of rope into her hands and starts trying to tie it around the sharp edges of the compressor’s blades, looking deeper to see how the other end of the rotor is attached to the casing.
Ah well.
CH4
“Ok! On three I’m gonna start to pull!” Lian calls up to Wei, standing at a forty five degree angle over the sheer drop, protected from falling to her death by the rope wrapped around both her wrists.
After a few seconds to do some last checks on the ropes tied at key areas, Wei takes up his own position on top of the compressor casing and tensions the vertical rope.
“Ready!”
“Alright!” Lian nods back, tightening her grip and shoving down the wave of fear that this makes her feel. “One… Two… Three!”
She pulls, throwing her entire body into pulling the blade out of the compressor as Wei pulls up to remove angular strain at the back of the rotor. For the first few seconds nothing happens, so Lian crouches down on the flat bit of metal she’s angled on and shoves as if she’s trying to throw herself off the heap to certain death.
Metal pops and groans, rope whines, and things sound as if they’re shifting all around them, but they don't pause in their effort, and after what feels like an eternity of exhausting work both scrapper’s eyes sparkle with elation as the rotor begins to slide out of its housing with a tortured shriek.
But that sudden drop of tension in the rope causes Lian to stagger, struggling to keep her feet planted on the metal beneath her feet as she’s standing near horizontally over certain death.
It’s moving…
She’s got it…
Just a bit mo–
Abruptly, the rotor seems to leave its housing, sliding freely the rest of the way out of the compressor and slamming against the attached stop rope with a humming clang.
In a fraction of a second Lian can see the approaching wave of slack in the rope like a whipcrack and there’s not even time to blink, let alone process what she’s seeing, before the slack hits her.
She can feel the tight loops she’d wrapped around her forearms loosen with sudden loss of resistance as the slack allows her legs to straighten.
And she’s flung into the open air.
Time seems to slow, and for a single instant Lian feels as if she’s floating.
Then pain erupts across her entire right side as she slams against the mound of jagged metal, scraping across for a second or two before the rope she’s holding into with a deathgrip tightens and the loops burn as they dig into her skin.
It takes a second for the scrapper to regain her bearings, blinking rapidly and looking around to figure out what happened.
A second later she hears an alarmed yell from above, followed by an incoherent stream of profanity, before Wei’s head cautiously pokes out over the edge.
The horrified expression on his face eases only slightly at the sight of her.
“...You alive?” He asks cautiously, easing further after she nods back..
“Yep, still kicking…” Lian groans, pushing through a slight mental fog to take a more detailed self assessment.
That was a mistake.
She winces as she realizes everything hurts even through adrenaline. “Ow.”
At the confirmation she’s not immediately dying, Wei breaks into a relieved smile.
“Lady, you've got the luck of the dead to survive that.” He says with a slightly hysterical chuckle. “Hold tight, I’m gonna make sure the blade doesn't start sliding then pull you up.”
Lian grimaces at the order of operations, but gives a shallow nod.
“Arlight, I’d say no hurry but…” She says with a weak smirk, which drops immediately after his head pulls back over the ledge.
Prioritizing both their safety is more important than her own momentary discomfort, an unfortunate reality.
Her ‘hang time’ allows the scrapper to plant her feet back against the wall and check herself over more thoroughly.
It’s more than enough time to groan in frustration as she looks at the goo covering the metal she’d just scraped against and immediately recognizes the smell.
Great, not only is she going to have to buy another boilersuit from the company store, but this is the stuff that dissolves skin, which can only be good for her health.
She feels her mouth twitching into a half smile.
…On the plus side, it’s the best exploitation anyone’s ever seen. Beauty nuts wish they knew this ‘one weird trick.’
Lian laughs at her own joke as she listens to her boilersuit pop and hiss.
To Wei’s credit, it sounds like he’s trying to work as quickly as he can, and it only takes him a minute or so before she feels the rope pulling her back up the arms length distance separating her from the relatively level area they’d been working in.
Pulling herself over the ledge, she grabs the offered hand and allows herself to be helped to her feet.
“Thanks.” She says offhandedly, rolling her shoulder to work the strained muscles as she looks at the tapered compressor blade almost as tall as her. “Ready to continue?”
There’s a pause as Wei looks at her incredulously, but then he shrugs and claps her on the shoulder as he walks back to the blade.
“You’re the one sizzling. Let's hurry.”
Lian nods as she feels large portions of her side begin to go numb.
“Please.”
–––––
Moving the blade down from where the compressor had been stacked wasn't easy, but in comparison to the first step the hours of tedious ropework to get the thing down was a cakewalk.
Walking across the fields of metal, thinner half of the rotor resting on her left shoulder, Lian offers a smile to the surprised and envious gazes from other scrappers at the sight of their haul.
She’s not gotten to be on the other side of this interaction before.
She likes it.
Stepping off the packed scrap and into the thick rubberized plastic surrounding the desk, Lian’s eyes trail down the line of clerks behind the glass, feeling a dim sense of amusement as they try to act like they’re too busy to look at her.
Then her eyes land on the eighth clerk down the line, gaze narrowing as her amusement grows stronger and she slowly walks toward him.
Almost everyone else here is rude because they’re tired and underpaid. But this guy by contrast constantly exudes this smug sense of superiority, lording his elevated social status over literally the only people lower than him.
It’s literally just the fact that he has a family name, but with how he talks it’s like he’s nobility.
Lian’s smile widens at his irritated frown as she steps up to his booth and lowers the blade to the ground.
He doesn't speak, simply glaring at her until she raps a knuckle into the glass, leaving a smear of black tar as she does.
“Hello? I’ve got some scrap to deposit. I think it’s in the large size class?”
The clerk doesn't respond for a moment, then his eyes flick over her shoulder, to where she knows the foreman’s office sits high above, the heavily tinted windows acting as a panopticon over everything within his domain.
After a few seconds, he presses the intercom button.
“Step around to the service entrance, you’ve got ten seconds.” He growls, pushing back his chair and speedwalking out of his booth.
Lian hurriedly throws her half of the burden back over her shoulder and hustles to get through the secure door, brushing past an irritated looking clerk and relishes at the sight of him gagging at the smell.
She’s gotten used to it. But intellectually she knows it’s bad.
The service room isn't much, just a large raised scanning platform with a terminal at its base. Once the two scrappers place the compressor blade down they hurry off the platform as the clerk taps a few buttons and the room is filled with an electronic whine.
A second later the darkened floor of the platform illuminates with the outline of hexagons, glowing an iridescent blue they sweep across the scanner and the hard drive platter inside the terminal begins to whir and chatter.
A few seconds later there's a single electronic beep and the screen is illuminated with a detailed composition analysis of the blade.
A few seconds later, the payout value flashes at the bottom of the screen and Lian almost chokes on air in surprise.
Two thousand marks!?
Immediately she cuts the amount in half but that’s still a crazy amount of money.
The clerk looks similarly shocked at the total, looking between the terminal and the two scrappers he shares the room with.
Locking eyes, she can see him consider it.
But, after a few seconds, he seems to slump in on himself, pressing the button on the terminal that confirms the amount.
“Your total has been calculated. Would you like to pay a small fee and have your earnings dispensed now or add them to your tab?” He asks in a tired monotone.
Lian winces at the eight percent fee she’s about to eat, then holds out a hand.
“Now please.”
The clerk looks momentarily surprised, but obliges, walking over to a secure door, knocking on it to be let in by a security guard, and a few seconds later he comes back out with a plastic dish full of coins.
He shoves the dish into her chest and walks back through the secure door without another word.
Looking down at the coins, she’s almost surprised to hear Wei’s voice cut through the silence.
“...How much did we make?”
Lian blinks looking up at the other scrapper and doing some quick math in her head.
“Uh… two thousand times zero point nine two is uh… eighteen fourty. Divided by two… Nine hundred twenty marks.” She says after some muttered calculation, looking back up as Wei sputters in surprise.
“There’s nine hundred marks in that thing!?” He asks incredulously.
Lian shakes her head.
“No. Nine hundred twenty each, there’s almost two thousand in this. Here.” She says, reaching in and quickly sliding fifty mark coins to the other side of the dish until they’re split evenly and holds it out. “This is your half.”
Wei stares at the coins, then quickly begins grabbing them from the dish and stuffing them into the collar of his boilersuit. A moment later Lian follows suit, shoving the coins into her bag.
Normally she’d shove a loop of wire in the central hole to turn the money into a kind of necklace, but she’ll need to pay the tithe soon, so it’s a waste of time.
In under ten seconds the tray is empty and dropped to the floor and, after adjusting her bag, the scrapper holds out a hand to her co-worker.
“Good working with you.” She says with a smile.
Wei looks… confused, looking into her eyes as if searching for something, then returns the firm handshake with a nod.
“...Sure.” He says, before turning around and leading them out the secure door to the main room again.
Stepping out and blinking in the harsher light, Lian makes one meaningful step toward the decon showers, but when she sees two security staff flanking the entrance she abruptly changes directions back out to the scrap.
She’s not technically allowed to use the decon until the end of shift, but the security is almost never at their post, why…
Out the corner of her eye, she catches sight of the clerk staring at her, an arrogant smile on his face, and all becomes clear.
Ah…
Lian turns her head to look away.
Well screw you too.
–––––
It’s another hour or so before the buzzer signaling the shift change sounds, and Lian didn't manage to find anything even close to her earlier haul. So as she drops the assorted garbage at the counter and takes her money, her attention is already focused on the procession of cultivators who are waiting at the door to the decon shower, a line already forming.
Taking her place at the end, the scrapper rummages in her bag for tithe money as the line slowly trudges forward.
About halfway though the line, Lian is taken from her blank musing by blaring claxons and flashing slights that signal another deposit of fresh scrap.
Idle curiosity has her looking at the ceiling to see which of the building sized hatches will deposit more scrap.
It’s near the middle of the room, slightly to the left, flashing orange for a few more seconds before the groan of straining metal provides an equally comprehensible warning.
Lian covers her ears and watches the sparkling metal begin to shower down, getting larger and larger as the crack in the ceiling grows.
But as she watches, about halfway though the doors opening, she catches sight of something that has her attention snap to a razor focus.
It’s a ship. A real ship.
The scrapper’s eyes trace every detail as it falls to the ground below.
It looks as if it’s been crushed, or collided with something, large sections with the metal and blackened while the superstructure is warped as if hit by a redwood sized baseball bat.
But with so much damage it looks like whoever sent this here was lazy in getting usable components out.
The bridge looks almost intact.
Lian stares, burning the position of that ship into her memory as it crashes to the ground, even as it slowly gets covered in detritus still falling from above.
“Mortal!” A voice shouts, grabbing her by the jaw and wrenching her head to look at him. “Eyes front!”
Lian flinches at the sight of the enraged cultivator, reflexively tugging against the iron grip then almost staggering as it’s released.
She immediately drops into a low bow.
“Yes honored cultivator, sorry honored cultivator.” She mutters before placing her palms together and holding out the tithe. “It will not happen again your excellence.”
She feels the coins being snatched from her hands and hear them being counted off.
“You’re short. New price is four hundred thirty.” He says, these words sounding rote, as if he’s had to say them often.
Lian’s wince is hidden beneath her bow as she reaches into her bag to count off the difference.
It’s gone up almost every week since she’s been here, but this time the jump is steep.
The extra coins are taken just as quickly before she’s grabbed by the shoulder and shoved into the decon room.
The scrapper straightens up and sighs.
Nothing for it then.
Just a little longer, and if that ship has what she needs?
There’s a finish line in sight.
Stripping as she steps into one of the decon showers, Lian grimaces at the blackened mess stretching from the small of her back to her ribcage that was once her boilersuit.
It’s completely dissolved, the fabric just isn't there anymore as she removes the clothing.
Pressing the button to start the timed flow of decon water, as it washes away the blackened sludge she can see it removing burnt skin, leaving bright pink and incredibly tender flesh behind.
Lian watches as a thousand microscopic pinholes seep a tiny dewdrop of blood, stinging in the air.
And groans.
…This job is going to kill her.---A/N: Well... It's live. Now if it goes badly I can blame all of you for not warning me! (JKJK, love y'all)Fingers crossed people like this! Ta-ta All!