Buckled back into the pilot’s sea, Lian keeps her eyes glued steadfast out the window and carefully ignores what she hears behind her.
When she’d suggested the decon water, she’d not really considered the full implications of what that means, because it’s not like the cabin they’re in has any walls.
She assumes the area behind the pilot’s chair was full of seats at some point, but those were gone when she found the thing, so it’s just locker covered walls and an empty cabin about the same size as a medium van. So when the cultivator grabbed the decon water and a few pieces of scrap cloth and instructed her to ‘avert her eyes’ Lian realized very suddenly that she needs to obey these orders on pain of death.
She can feel the weight of the cultivator’s suspicious gaze glancing at her through the back of the pilot’s seat every few minutes.
But as the minutes drag on to half an hour, the anxiety fades and boredom sets in again, so the scrapper starts to fiddle with the dashboard and the controls.
For obvious reasons, this escape pod was not designed for a starmap, it’s not like the intended use case has them going anywhere. So the way Lian managed to get the starmap hooked up was a splice job she admits is… pretty hacky, even by her standards.
Almost without thinking, she realizes a screwdriver is in her hand and she’s digging around in the internals to see if there’s a better way she could have done this.
The current configuration has the starmap output plugging directly into the readout monitor, bypassing the piddly little ship computer completely due to some incompatibilities with the cable types between the two pieces of tech.
But now what she wants is to link the starmap to the window hud, which will make determining where any of the ships that do come are going a lot easier. Something she’s… pretty sure she can do, as it looks like there actually is an input channel for it, but requires the computer to get involved.
Failure does mean frying the piece of electronics that keeps… everything from exploding, shutting down, or overpressuring the cabin to the point she dies of oxygen toxicity. But she’s reasonably sure she knows how to avoid that, and it needs to be done if she wants to hitchhike properly.
With that thought in mind, the scrapper gets to work carefully teasing wires apart and plugging them back together with careful attention paid to the ones she’d determined are a bit too hot for her to be comfortable plugging them into the computer.
It takes a few minutes and more than a few false starts to troubleshoot everything while making absolutely sure she’s not putting anything vital at risk. But in the end, as she twists two wires together and presses a screwdriver on the exposed contacts that causes a soft reboot, the lights flicker, several warning lights around the fusion reactor start to blink before settling down, and faint hud outline on the ship’s window begins to stutter.
Unfortunately the stutter doesn't go away.
“Hmm.” Lian mutters, completely focused on her task. “Do I need to…”
She giggles a wire, and the interference clears temporarily.
She giggles it again, carefully trying to find the place where it works, but can't seem to get it to hit that sweet spo–
“Ugh.” The scrapper grunts, thudding a fist on the external casing just above where she’s working. “Why cant you just wo– oh that fixed it.”
Sure enough, the interference clears and Lian quickly starts locking everything down exactly how it is now and sealing the console up to keep it that way.
Looking up at the hud, Lian pokes at the console for a few seconds before the jump beacons appear as diamonds on the screen, overlaying seemingly random stars and points of space. In her opinion it’s a bit too cluttered, and while she thinks there’s supposed to be a setting to reduce the draw distance for the beacons, she can't find it.
The thud of a hand grabbing the back of her seat has the scrapper yelp in alarm, reflexively turning to look at the cause even as she remembers too late exactly how hazardous that is. Thankfully, instead of something that would get her killed, she sees a slightly damp and fully clothed cultivator holding the decon water thermos and some thoroughly soiled rags as if they’re a rotting mouse.
“Mortal. I have removed the bulk of the filth from my skin and clothes. I require another container to do the same with my hair.” She says in a tone that could almost be described as thankful.
Lian is halfway through nodding before she realizes what the instruction is and winces.
“Ah…” She says, looking between the presumably empty thermos then to anywhere else.
“What?”
“I’m sorry Miss, that’s the only one I had.” The scrapper apologizes, looking at the long and thoroughly ruined braid that stretches to the middle of the cultivator’s back. “I could get you some water–”
“Do not give hollow platitudes and answer honestly.” Kaido interrupts. “Will water do anything to this substance?”
Lian hesitates, looking at the hair, then feels her eyes almost forced to meet the other pair as she shakes her head.
“No Miss.” She says, almost wincing at the frozen expression on the cultivator's face. “...I’m sorry?”
There’s a long few seconds of silence before the blazing fire behind those golden eyes seems to dim and the everpresent oppressive pressure dims in time.
Kaido slowly reaches out and grabs the middle of her braid, grimacing as she pinches it with two fingers.
“...Then it must be done.” She says with no change in her tone or inflection from before, yet something is dimmed as she draws her sword and looks back at the scrapper. “Turn back to the window.”
Lian obeys without a word, pressing herself hard against the back of her seat and focusing entirely on the window, and as the sound of humming silver shearing through hair fills the cabin, it feels like she’s an intruder to a moment somehow more private than before. A sense of uncomfortable voyeurism that drags into minutes even after every sound falls to empty silence.
–––––
Hours pass, spent in the quiet nothing of this single blip within the void and leaving Kaido with nothing to distract herself from the reminder of her loss with every movement of her strangely light head.
She’s wedged back on the wall, and in the entire day no ships have arrived at the jump beacon, leaving her in hours of near silence suffering the increasing impatience from the near mortal, lacking the discipline to simply be still for longer than a bare few hours.
The mortal seems obsessed with doing things, forever moving around for seemingly no purpose as she crawls over every surface of the cabin with tools in hand, pulling everything apart only to put it back together after appearing to do nothing in particular. All this activity seemingly for its own sake rather than being directed to a productive end.
It reminds her of when a lord of trade patroned her sect and he’d displayed a few of the more interesting curios he’d gathered in his career, and among the exotic cloned geonomes and artifacts of the ancient past, he showed a rare example of a working piece of lost technology from the old empire.
It was some kind of… many armed machine to which its purpose remained a mystery as, due to its damage, the only thing it could do is disassemble whatever was put in front of it then reassemble it with perfect dexterity. Its actions reminiscent to the mortal’s.
If it were drunk and blind, but similar nonetheless.
But as the self imposed rest time draws closer, the mortal grabs another one of those disgusting smelling cubes of brownish mash. But before she begins to eat she glances up at the cultivator.
“I’m sorry, I get it, but this is all there is.” She says, reaching back into the cabinet to grab another one of the cubes. “Are you sure you wouldn't–”
“Do not finish that sentence.” Kaido grunts back, looking away from the disgusting block. “Leave me be.”
Her order is heeded, but as she moves her head to look away she feels the distinct lack of resistance to the movement, no tugging at her scalp, and a cold lack in her senses where she knows a part of her should be.
Her braid, her mark of honor and allegiance to her sect, doesn't even give her the dignity to disappear from her senses. It cannot, for there is nowhere for it to go, instead it was stuffed in a plastic bag with the rest of the soiled bits of cloth and shoved into the waste locker like some common trash.
She wishes she could shut off her senses for even a moment, so she’s not burned with her own stained Qi judging her from where it sits saturated with a substance so worthless even poison Qi cast it aside.
Even here, in this tiny blip barely distinguishable from nothing, made of refuse and things cast aside by others, it was deemed to have no value.
She feels her cultivation, the core of who she is, start to bubble and waver as her foundation begins to crac–
No.
Kaido of Silver grabs her mind and cultivation both, pulling them back in line with a lifetime's discipline and raw hate.
This is nonsense. Metaphor and this abstract flowery thought is the domain of those whose emotions outstrip their ability to express them. Forced to play games with language as a crutch where their bodies have failed.
Poetic thought and metaphor is the domain of weakness. Of someone who has given up on expressing their emotions directly and accepted the limits of their body.
Kaido feels her foundation stabilize and her cultivation fall back into its steady rhythm in time with her heartbeat.
She has committed herself to the path that will allow her to express every indignity to the perpetrator directly. To be defeated by the Traitor without even his presence would be the final and greatest dishonor to her sect she could give.
The cultivator turns her attention away from the rope of dirty hair and focuses on the desperate nothing beyond the thin walls of this craft..
Thus it will not happen.
Unfortunately, in her search for something else to occupy her attention, her senses are assaulted by the smell and sounds of the mortal taking another bite out of the… substance with a wet crunching sound.
With how long it’s taking to get on a ship for their first jump it’s appearing increasingly likely that she’ll be forced to eat one of them. Not for a few days yet so she may still find a way to avoid it, but unless their travel time is drastically reduced she’ll be forced to eat at least one before escaping this cursed vessel.
Observing though her Qi senses as the mortal continues shoving the vile product in her mouth, she sees the mortal’s soul flare in a violent burst of native Qi, a unique and unreplicatable substance produced by a soul. Any cultivator knows the utility of these flares, especially early in their accumulation of power.
But as this native Qi presses out, it comes in contact with the vague mass of poison drawn into her soul, and instead of being fed into the cultivation to strengthen it, the native Qi seems to violently reject the poison.
In time with the flare of native Qi, the near mortal devolves into a fit of coughing, struggling not to spew the disgusting half chewed crumbs of her ‘meal’ as well as the blackened phlegm of impurities and poison anathema. But Kaido almost ignores it as she studies the interaction.
She has never seen a soul outright reject its own cultivation, it calls into question how the girl managed to draw this much poison Qi into herself if it would be violently opposed with every attempt.
After a few seconds the near mortal gets her body under control, grabbing a few crumbs from the air in front of her and waving an apology as she spits into a bit of cloth she pulls out of her garment.
“Mghm. Sorry.” She mutters.
But Kaido almost doesn't hear the apology, instead the brief flare of poison Qi is drawing her mind back to the moments where she’d been trapped in that air vent, feeling the substance press into her, trying to eat her from within and without. Being trapped in the burning and absolute dark, feeling her essence being attacked and trained, weakening with every instant. A final desperate blind leap in the direction of the memory of where she’d seen the open airlock door, the mortal waiting for her on the other side.
…Why?
It’s the mortal looking up at her in confusion that informs the cultivator that she’d spoken aloud.
“I… coughed?” The girl answers. “I–”
“No.” Kaido refutes, looking across the space and into the pale blue eyes opposite. “Why did you wait for me?”
The mortal, if anything, looks more confused.
“...When?” She asks, then flinches. “Er– I mean. What time are you talking about Mis–”
“At the bolt hole, the airlock to get into this vessel.” She interrupts, a shade of anger coloring her tone. “Why did you wait for me?”
There’s the light of recognition in the mortal’s eyes, but the confused expression doesn't disappear after a few long moments of silence. Long enough Kaido almost elaborates further, rage building as she can't get an answer for this simple question, but then the mortal just shrugs, almost helplessly.
“Well I couldn't just leave you.” She hums, turning away to start grabbing the floating crumbs again. “What else was I supposed to do?”
At the response, Kaido opens her mouth to refute the claim, a thousand good reasons to close the door and leave her to die on her tongue
There’s silence, where Lian continues busying herself with catching a few wayward crumbs before they can float out of sight, paying careful attention to the electronics panels.
Then Kaido closes her mouth, and looks away from the strange mortal, turning her attention inward to suppress the growing gnaw of hunger in her stomach.