It has been thirteen days since Kaido of Silver, first disciple of her order and fourth stage apprentice to the mirrored sword art, has eaten anything.
She can feel the fat and muscle of her body being drawn away, cannibalized to keep her body functioning as the near-perfect machinery that constructs her reaches the limits of what it can do.
The esteemed cultivator, prodigy of her order and generational talent among her peers, sits with her knees pressed against the ribbing of the vessel and stares down at the brownish puck of indeterminate origin.
Because the mortal must be mistaken on it being created from… waste.
Kaido watches the mortal chew on her own bite of mash without moving her eyes, then turns her attention back to the puck.
It stares back, a faint film of oil giving the sand-like substance a similar sheen as fine porcelain in the dim light.
…Perhaps she could abstain from food for another few days. Though she’d never practiced it all that much, she’d read a technique in the archives that claimed to be able to put a person in a state of near catatonic stasis, allowing them to subsist for decades on nothing more than a breath of air every day.
But even as she considers it, she knows such thoughts are pointless, perhaps if she’d started trying from the moment she’d entered this pod, but now it’s too late.
She needs whatever nutrient this… substance has. Thus she needs to consume it.
She needs to put it in her mouth.
She just needs to get it in there, she’ll drink as much water as it takes to get the taste out of her mouth, then it’ll be over for at least another three days.
Her hands don't move.
…On three.
One–
In a blur of motion, Kaido stuffs the puck past her tongue and halfway down her throat then forcibly swallows without chewing, and for the barest of moments she thinks she’d gotten away with it.
Then the residual oils from the puck hit her tongue, and she learns she was mistaken.
“Hrk!” She wretches, barely restraining herself from ripping the top off the canister of water and shoving the open top over her mouth, shaking the container to force as much water as possible down her throat as possible and clear the taste from her mouth, only coming up for air once the container is empty. “That’s foul!”
The mortal is either incredibly bad at hiding her emotions or is barely trying as she looks up from her own almost finished block, amusement clearly on her face, only dimming slightly at the sight of the empty container for some reason.
“I apologize Miss.” She says with strained passiveness. “They’re normally heated, but that only changes the texture, I don't think there’s a way to improve the taste.”
Kaido swallows her spit repeatedly, still tasting the disgusting substance even after her mouth is completely dry.
“How can you do this to yourself?” She gags. “Is your sense of taste so diminished by your nature?”
A thought occurs that this tolerance to the intolerable might be somehow related to the poison in her soul, but before the thought can be fully formed the near mortal shakes her head.
“No Miss, it’s very bad.” She says, stuffing the last of the puck into her mouth and swallowing quickly. “But it’s always the same kind of awful, so you get used to it.”
…Impossible.
Kaido works her tongue in her mouth as if trying to scrub away the still lingering taste.
Simply impossible.
_____
-_-_
–––––
“...Is it the half peeled label on the second locker from the front on the right wall?”
“No.”
“...Is it that bit of exposed wiring?”
“No.”
“...Is it uh… the washer that’s floating over by that vent?”
“No.”
“Actually why is there a loose washer over there?” Lian asks instead of another question, waving her arms to rotate until coming in contact with a surface and kicking off.
Most important stuff is riveted, most, so it’s unlikely that they’re about to spring a leak in the hull.
But at the same time, the fact that this is floating so close to the vent suggests that it came from the air system, which has several spinning fans and vibrating components that very well could have knocked something loose.
Grabbing the rouge washer out of the air as she catches herself on the other wall, Lian turns the disk over in her hand and looks around.
“...Where did you come from?”
She’s got a few spare parts, but she’d give herself fifty fifty odds on being able to fix the life support if a loose bolt or washer started rattling around in there.
Twenty five seventy five if an entire fan knocks loose.
But just before the scrapper has the chance to start pulling things apart in the search of where this loose washer came from, she hears an irritated grunt from the other side of the cabin.
“I take it you’ve given up?” The cultivator assumes, grabbing onto the ribbing and unfolding her legs into a stretch before repacking herself against the space in the cabin she’d claimed. “That was a complete waste of time, mortals consider that pleasurable?”
Lian shrugs as she pulls the vent cover off and pokes her eye inside to make sure it’s not something easy and she doesn't need to start digging into the life support system.
“Not really. Most of the actually good games need a deck of cards or a board or something. Twenty questions has actual strategy, but it’s no fun if we don't have a common set of things we both know. But it’s better than nothing.” She says offhandedly. “I can keep guessing if you want, or do you wanna be the guesser now?”
Kaido doesn't answer for a few long moments, but Lian is used to her travelmate dropping conversations or ignoring her, so she’s almost surprised when the cultivator does.
“...I doubt having me guess will work, unless you’re hiding an ability to mask your intent.”
Lian blinks at the nonsensical remark.
From what she knows about ‘intent’ it’s a very nebulous thing that lore and flavor text mentions as an explanation for doing ridiculous things like dodging a lightspeed attack from behind by reading their ‘intent.’
Is she saying she can… see what everyone is focusing on? Just in general?
That’s ridiculous.
“Wait, hold on.” Lian says, blinking heavily. “Are you saying you can actually read my mind?”
Kaido seems confused by the question, looking at the scrapper as if she’s an idiot.
“...No. I cannot read your mind. As I said I have been trained to detect where someone is focusing their intent.”
Immediately a request to explain how that is any different is on her tongue, an array of demonstrations and tests to see what the limits of this strange ability immediately after. But before she can say anything the sight of those faintly glowing sun yellow eyes remind the scrapper of exactly how little she wants to antagonize this woman, so instead she jerks her head in a nod.
“Yes Miss.” She says naturally, turning away to get back to work making sure they don't asphyxiate, or get metal shards thrown at them near the speed of sound.
Pulling herself up the wall and to the life support system, Lian digs around in her boilersuit’s pockets until she finds her screwdriver and gets to work.
But as she digs deeper into the nest of pipes, fans, and high voltage, she almost bangs her head against the ceiling when she hears Kaido’s voice calling from her spot on the wall unprompted.
“Why is your ankle still swollen?”
It’s only after catching herself so she doesn't split the back of her head open on a cooling fan, does Lian pull herself out of the life support machine and look first at her injured ankle and to the cultivator.
“...I… sprained it? I think?” She says in a tone halfway between an answer and a question. “Zero-G has been really helpful in letting me not be in constant pain actually.”
Kaido does her eyeroll equivalent and exhales through her nose.
“That is not what I asked, I asked why it’s still injured, your entire body seems slow to recover. How long do mortals take to heal?”
Lian raises her leg slightly and looks at the strip of torn blanket she’d used to bind her ankle peeking out from underneath the boilersuit pantleg and shrugs.
“It’s only been like… four days. Miss.” She says, reminding herself of the honorific a second later. “It’ll take a few weeks? Depends on how bad it was. It might just not.”
“...Not?” The cultivator asks, sounding at once confused and disbelieving. “You’ll let your body quit?”
Lian hesitates, then slowly nods at the odd phrasing.
“Yesss?” She offers. “I mean, if a muscle got ripped out of its proper place and it heals that way, all the damage my body knows how to fix will be fixed, but I won't be healed, and I’ll walk with a limp or something.”
With the question answered and feeling deeply uncomfortable with the life support systems open like this, the scrapper pulls herself back into the machinery to find if the washer came from in here, and if she should be worried.
_____
The fourth day is spent entirely in jumpspace, but sometime well before Lian normally wakes up she feels an arm grabbing her by the shoulder, to which the scrapper wakes with a gasp and begins to flail and struggle.
“Stop that.” A familiar voice hisses, Kaido she remembers after a second. “We’re dropping out of the jump soon.”
Lian blinks, looking around the cabin and ignoring the shooting pain in her leg from the panicked thrashing for any sign they’re going to be dropping out soon and seeing nothing.
“...How can you tell?” She asks with a yawn. “What time is it–”
“Enough.” She says, but her anger seems more anxious than directed as she looks out the window. “Rouse yourself and be ready to do… whatever you did last time when things started shaking. I do not need to reiterate how bad it would be if we were dislodged.”
The scrapper rubs her eyes and slowly nods, unwrapping the blanket and pulling herself out from where she’d wedged herself in a locker to sleep and floating over to the pilot’s seat with another yawn.
She’s still not seeing any sign of them approaching a drop out of jumpspace, the thought causing no small amount of frustration at the idea that she’d been woken up just to stare out the window for hours because of a bad drea–
Any tiredness disappears in a snap once the swirling blues and greens of jumpspace begin to twist and writhe, a tremble running across their tiny ship as the much larger ship their attached to begins to shake.
It grows stronger, lights flickering and electrical systems buzzing as reality itself begins to warp and stretch at odd angles, as if the bubble is being compressed and the incomprehensible beyond is pressing in.
This is different than last time, and the shaking is growing stronger.
Something in the control console pops and systems flicker, a result that has the scrapper watching the blinking indicator lights for any sign of a cascading failure.
There’s another pop, this time she smells burnt electronics and the console sounds out a warning as the entire craft groans and warps as the magnets holding them to the ship audibly buzz.
An alert fills the room with a deafening warning, but Lian quickly flips a switch to mute the buzzing, followed by a few more that might give the magnets holding them to the ship just a touch more power.
There’s another sound, almost like a sandstorm made of feather down, it presses and scrapes on the outside of the hull and the inside of her ears, almost drowned out by a blaring alert and the craft trying to shake itself apart.
But just as it seems like they’re going to be ripped off the side of the ship and sent into oblivion, they’re on the other side of the rift to realspace again, and the shaking fades.
And in that long and deafening silence, Lian is the first to break it.
“Hah. Ho ho HA!” She laughs, a mixture of relief and fear squeezed out of her body. “Victory for the Lian-mobile! Now where are we?”
In celebration she raises her arms above her head and waves them about triumphantly before looking back at the console and pressing a–
The console is off.
Hm.
She flips a few switches, and nothing happens.
“Hmmmm…”
“You’re mad.” Kaido hisses from behind in a tone that sounds like it's trying very hard to not be shaken.
“Ok the console’s off, and if I’m looking at this right…” She says, half to herself as she pulls open an access panel. “Yea the computer’s off too. We really need that turned back on, or the fusion reactor will probably explode. Also, something is still smoking. Give me a second.”
She really hopes whatever is on fire in here isn't important.