LOG-032.When pronounced to an English speaker, the name of my latest bondmate (or in this case, bondmates) was slyaja. Twinmoon. Twinhead. Twinsoul. It was a rather vague term, with multiple meanings depending on dialect, from what I’d been told. But no matter what name was given to it, the same general consensus remained.To ride a twinmoon, you required two souls. That was the poetic, superstitious Na’vi understanding of what was needed to bond with such a beast.I…had my own theory. The issue wasn’t as simple as just requiring two kuru, though that of course helped. In the time I’d spent connected to my own slyaja, I’d taken the time to…explore, so to speak. Poking around the link between my mind and theirs.The results of that exploration reinforced what I’d begun to suspect immediately before I’d passed out on my first flight. That my mind, or as the Na’vi would put it, my soul, was in fact two distinct entities, both stored into an upgraded, selectively evolved and genetically modified piece of meat that Eywa had put together to ensure they both fit in the same mental space.There was my human mind. My ego, perhaps. It did most of the higher level thinking. It made the decisions. It was what I identified as ‘me’ whenever I tried to think of myself.And then there was what I’d previously dismissed as…background thoughts. Instinct. Muscle memory. A second mind, practically dormant compared to the first, but far more in tune with the body I now inhabited.I suspected that it was in charge of lower level thinking. Of maintaining my long distance connections with the fauna I bonded with. Of ensuring I didn’t fry my own brain when trying to link with something.Combined, it allowed me to bond with both halves of the slyaja at once, one mind taking up each separate animal and then uniting the entire system within the biological supercomputer that was sitting snugly within my skull.Had I not known better, I would have assumed that the creature had been tailor made for me. But more likely was the fact that I’d simply been tailor made for it. Alongside any other such entity that would require the ‘increased bandwidth’ Eywa had been so kind to provide me with.It was…interesting, to say the very least. And riding it was a frankly novel experience, even in comparison to some of my other rides over the years.For one, compared to something like, say, an ikran, the twinmoon was a significantly less agile animal. Larger, slower, and with a far more intense diet that involved dive bombing smaller prey, before ripping them to sheds with its two heads.It was more of a glider than a flyer. Built and evolved to coast along the atmosphere of the moon it had evolved upon, high enough that it could survey all that sat beneath it and pick and choose its fights, safe even from the likes of the great last shadow, otherwise known as the toruk.When placed within the hands of the Na’vi, a twinmoon was not only the ultimate scout, but also a fine beast of burden. A living platform that one could freely move upon while in the midst of flight, so long as you were either fastened to its back or kept a careful watch of your own balance. It wasn’t quite the aerial equivalent of a dedicated pack animal, but it was close.All of that combined meant that I’d dearly wanted one for the purpose of actually getting a closer look at the ash lands without getting a spear through the eye. Oh, Quaritch had been kind enough to set me up with a decent force of men and women who could serve to hopefully set up a forward operations base, of course. But in terms of actual hardware, we were…Well, we were decidedly limited.The local section of the RDA still needed to make profit, after all. Maintain quotas. Sparing a few military vehicles was fine, since the primary aggressors harassing their operations (that being the local wildlife and the Omatikaya) had stood down, meaning most of their security equipment was kind of just collecting dust. But getting something like a valkyrie shuttle? No, pulling one of those things away from their transport duties (mostly spent going back and forth from the small stockpile of unobtanium being extracted from Kyra’meta waters) would result in questions from Parker’s higher ups that we couldn’t afford right now, not when we were trying to busy them with other things.Which, of course, was where Olan and Olana came in. The twinmoon could accomplish the same task, at a fraction of the cost, and was something that was entirely within my direct control.The fact that both heads accepted food, water and neck scratches as payment for their services was also a plus, something that an extremely nervous Lyle was slowly coming to find as one of the two unified animals trilled at him.Kept from asphyxiating by a modified exopack, the man nonetheless remained somewhat sweaty behind the confines of his mask, awkwardly moving his hands back and forth and putting his fingers to work, even as the harness connecting him to the makeshift saddle a few of my fellow Kyra’meta clansmen had managed to fashion together after a brief hunt kept him from falling to his death.It was my newly named mount’s first properly manned flight after all, consisting of myself and two others, that being Lyle and another sec ops marine named Davids, the dark skinned man proving significantly more composed than his counterpart and mostly lounging near the back of the platform-esque piece of leather we found ourselves on, staring out into the distance with his rifle loosely lashed around his chest.I, of course, stood near the front and in between Olan and Olana's necks, hair occasionally letting out a pulse of light as I sent feedback through our interlinked kuru, keeping the mated pair moving in roughly the right direction.That direction, of course, was tailing the floating forms of the living airships that composed the wind trader fleet we’d encountered previously, several Tlalim painted ikran launching out from the sides of one of the overgrown gasbags and weaving in between craggy pillars of rock to intercept us.Leaning down slightly, I gave my mount a gentle pat, earning an approving screech from Olana, even as Olan continued glancing back at Lyle, the soldier having since stepped back in an effort to avoid being blown off of the twinmoon’s back as we sped up slightly.“Just a quick courtesy call. They’re owed a bit of warning for helping me find you.”After all, it only felt polite to inform the peaceful merchants that their raider counterparts would likely be stirred up into a frenzy soon, assuming the worst happened.