It stands half again as tall as a man, and as wide as one too. Burning eyes peer upwards as whatever confusion as to how its prey got up there is replaced by wondering how its going to get to her now. It would seem that it can simply wait for her to come to it. The monster takes advantage of the ample warning and steps aside, and readies a swing with the greathammer clutched between its claws. It's perfectly timed.

When the swing is loosed the weapon hits only rain.

Her teleport sends her back above her target, and crucially, she stops screaming. The monster only has a second to look around confused before her sword hits the back of its skull at terminal velocity, plunging all the way down to the hilt. "Ha ha!" She cries triumphant. The magical girl rides the beast as it collapses, using the sword as a handhold.

"Time for your pre-frontal lobotomy, bitch!" She punctuates the statement by pulling out her sword.

Tries to remove the sword. Her hand comes back empty. She looks confused for a second before she sees that its still in there. Wait, pre-frontal is the front, what would the back be? Strawberry grabs the sword and tugs at it, its stuck in there good. "Time for your... post...? Back... lobotomy?" Ugh, what was the back part of the brain called? 

She puts a foot on the skull and pulls. "C'mon!" Superhuman strength fights against suction for agonizing seconds. "Gahhhh!" The sword emerges with a wet pop as the girl is sent sprawling backwards.

She spends long seconds getting rained on. A sigh. "I have pulled the sword from the bastard, I am now the queen of Crucible." She deadpans.

She puts her feet beneath her and approaches the corpse. "Alrighty, come to mommy." the purple warmth of Azoth crawls up her arm and into her chest as she sets a hand on the body. It feels like a good amount. "Good, good. But that's not all I need." She eyes one of its horns. That looks like one of the things I need for my flask. Or its ashes, at least.

Whatever the clean and efficient way of removing a horn from a monster was, Strawberry did not know it. She was left kicking the damn thing for minutes, then wrenching at it for many more. Her colorful string of curses did nothing to loosen the accursed anatomy, but she liked to believe that it was helping.

Eva stares at Journeys of A Conduit, leafing through pages. The train-ship's in station off a siding. "So we think the bad luck is a living bridge effect from this, uh, academy place, right? I think in order to figure out how to control it we're going to have to go there. I can't justly keep inflicting our random misfortunes on our poor parkour instructor." 

Sable laughs and shakes her head. "They've put up with so much. We should get them something when we come back, maybe, as a thank-you for putting up with it." She stretches and hops into the pilot's seat.

"Well. I think you're right, heading there next is the best plan. Can you give me a bearing on the nearest Academy bridge, sweetie?"

Her fingers dance across the controls as she boots the trainship up and gets it ready to roll.

Eva focuses, then points. "North-northwest, through the city. I think it's near the docks?"

She nods and throttles up. Once the trainship's in motion, she starts flicking through the routing system until she finds an entry for the docks in that general area, then locks it in.

Off they go.

It's not until she has the horn and is strolling through one of the Academy's many, many idyllic beaches that she realizes that she doesn't actually know how she's going to cleanly combust that horn. The most obvious place to start would be a bonfire, but she'd need something to catch the ashes. Can I do it in an oven? That... might work? Do they get hot enough? Maybe she can just... hold a light to it? "Bone doesn't burn well, right? Maybe I can ask the next time I'm at-"

She feels the Academy. A bridge to the Academy. And Earth, and Bevin, and Rorch.

"Conduit."

"Okay, so the whole place is one big huge college campus -"

She blinks, pauses. "Wait, is that another Conduit? I feel - a feeling of safety and boredom, coming from somewhere out among these buildings..." 

Sable looks up as well. "Huh. Yeah, think so. Distinct Bevin vibes, and maybe some other stuff too."

She links arms with Eva and starts walking toward the unknown Conduit. "Hopefully a new friend?"

"I really hope so. Let's investigate, though. We've got the train, we've got your electricity, if we have to we'll be able to fight." 

The Pirates smirk, Hailey slipping into front for just a moment as a little bit of electricity crackles between the fingers of her free hand. "Damned right we will."

"Hope it doesn't come to that, though."

They're flying. Flying in a... "What the fuck is that?"

If she didn't know any better, she would say it was a-

Her fancy new wingsuit appears in her hands. She frantically starts putting in on. She doesn't know if the conduit on that train is friendly or not, but she is going to say hello.

As it approaches she transforms and finds that the wingsuit has morphed to fit her dress's aesthetic. No time to gush! I gotta catch that train! She jumps horizontally in the direction that the flying train is travelling to build up momentum, then teleports vaguely above it.

"Whoa, they suddenly got a lot closer - I can feel more worlds now, ones I don't recognize -" 

Eva flusters a little and rubs a hand through her hair. "How do we hail them? I don't know how all the controls work on this thing!" 

As she skydives recklessly towards the flying train, it occurs to her that other conduits can probably sense her from far away and that they were probably headed towards her anyway and that this method of approach could be seen as hostile. The rest of her brain was more fixated on the fact that skydiving onto a moving train housing an unknown, potentially hostile conduit is fucking cool so her brain could just shut up now.

She lands onto the train with a thump and a squeal as her fingers find friction. "Ok!"

"That... sounded like an excited teenage girl," Sable remarks in surprise as she brings the trainship to a smooth stop. "Still don't know our guest's not a threat, though. Dark magical girls are a thing."

The thump sounded directly overhead, so she heads to the door. "Stay in here at first, since we're better armed than you."

She opens the window and leans out, bracing the small of her back against the frame as she peers over the roof, right hand pointed cautiously toward the new arrival but not sparking.

"Hi. Quite the landing."

Wow, this is awkward. "Hi!" She shouts over the howling wind. "Deep in my soul I want to say that I can't explain this. But I think I actually can."

Hailey slips into front, arches an eyebrow, and grins. "Oh? That sounds like it's gonna be one hell of an explanation. Does it include anything about who you're friendly to and when?"

"What? No I was gonna say that some things you can only do once."

"Cute," she replies with a snicker. "Well, if you promise not to attack us, you can come inside to chat. I'd make a threat about kicking you out to fall if you tried anything, but," she gestures at the wingsuit, "I doubt it'd do shit if I did."

"I'm immortal!" She says, excitedly. "But I won't bite," first "promise!"

"I mean, in the right sorta context, bites are great. But the first time meeting a new friend we haven't even flirted with yet probably isn't that context."

She leans back in the window and then swings the door open wide. "Can you make it in on your own, or do you need a hand getting off the roof?"

She also steps close to Eva and murmurs, "Seems friendly enough."

"We're bound to get unlucky eventually," Eva murmurs back. "But for now it's okay."

"Uh, one second." She aims downwards, then teleports, faceplanting on the floor of the train cabin. "I'm ok."

"You can teleport!", Sable exclaims excitedly, reclaiming front from Hailey. "That's so cool."

She gestures around at the cabin of the locomotive, then at her girlfriend. "Welcome aboard my trainship. I'm Sable, and this is Eva."

"Nice to meet you." Eva offers a hand up to Strawberry.

"Hah, thanks." She allows herself to be helped up. "My name is Strawberry." Nope, still weird. "What brings you here on a flying fucking train oh my god this thing is so cool." She gawks at the cockpit interior.

She bounces in place excitedly. "I know, right? It's awesome! Can fold in new train cars, too, if we find something we want to add. As for why we're here, a mix of exploring and," she trails off and looks over at Eva. Is the leaky bridge aura problem private information? She doesn't really know.

She peers at Eva questioningly.

Eva simply nods. "I have a bridge to this plane that's a bit too strong, and bad luck's been bleeding through. We're here to try and fix that with practice."

"You have a bridge? Do you mean, like, how conduits feel like bridges?"

"Sorta yeah, the — idea is that conduits are sort of the same thing as bridges, in a way? Something that spans the worlds. So you can get some of the effects of bridges near conduits who are attuned to worlds particularly strongly. The Academy leaks corruption, so bad luck can happen near its bridges, which is what's happening to me. Basically my connection to this world is leaky and I need to figure out how to isolate it."

"Corruption, right." Like that stuff that transformed the Mu creatures. "I've seen that before. But, uh, I'm getting ahead of myself. I'm a conduit, and I can tell that the two of you are conduits, so maybe we can compare notes. I've only been doing this conduit thing for a little over a month, I'm big into exploring too."

"Yeah, we just started a few weeks ago ourselves. I almost died, I can tell you the story later, and while I have an immortality it kind of sucks so I'm trying pretty hard not to get killed. We've been logging kelp for cash, and once we figure out how to stop the random strokes of bad luck we're probably going to go hang out on Rorch and learn parkour."

"We have a few books from some older conduits and have been cribbing from them a bit. Trying our best out there, you know how it is."

"Eva's the reason we have access to the books, honestly. Most of what I bring to the table is just the trainship," Sable replies with a shrug and a smile.

"Ah, yeah, I have a friend with a library in their Bevin, there's some scattered stuff in there about the other worlds. I know about four other conduits besides you two."

"You're the second we've met, not counting each other."

"Was this conduit a brass butterfly by any chance?"

Huh. "Nnno. A black-haired dude who made stuff from glass." Sable shakes her head. "A brass butterfly, huh? I suppose we'll find all kinds out here."

"So that makes eight of us so far." Well if nothing else I should tell Fib, Cean and Groundskeeper about these two. "Hey, can this thing go to space?"

"Yep. She's rated for all environments, from the depths of the ocean to the empty black."

"It's amphibious too?"

Sable grins wide and nods. "I love my trainship."

"Ok, well, there's a bridge high up that I wanted to check out. Have you been to Kuiper? A vacuum with lots of empty space?"

"Connected, haven't visited. Wanna go see?"

Go to space with two conduits that are basically strangers and can't actually trust yet. "Absolutely."

She points somewhere above. "I think its that way."

Yeah, sure, she'll go along with that. 

"Just to be clear, I can't breathe in space, so I'm going to be relying on the trainship here."

"Honestly neither can I. Trainship for the win."

She feels out into the sky for a Kuiper bridge... there. Yeah, pretty close to where Strawberry pointed, and very high up. Well, no time like the present. 

She sits down and buckles up in the pilot's seat while she gets the trainship ready, fingers flipping switches swiftly. "Strap in, girls. We're going all the way up."

"Yeah, I can go up there, but, like, a vacuum will still fuck me up." The urge to explain the many little caveats in that statement in excruciating detail is potent, but there was mention of opsec, so maybe she should wait before she gives them an exact rundown of what she can and cannot do. She takes a seat and straps herself in. "Spaaaaaaaaaaace." She mutters instead.

"Space. Space. Gotta go space." Eva grins.

Sable laughs, grins, and starts throttling up. The trainship picks up speed, and she tilts the pseudotrack attitude control back to roll skyward.

The ship thunders into the sky.

"Woah." Strawberry glues herself to a window as they rise. The sparse clouds and sky blue sky give way to the darkness of a thinner atmosphere. She has been on planes before, and she has teleported as high as she could one time, so she has this sense that they are going through the layers of the world a little too fast. She's not actually sure how to phrase the question she has. "Is the atmosphere... a little small or is it just me?"

Mental math flits through her mind for a moment: velocity, time, distance, size, all in a blur. "You... have a very good point. How small is this place?"

"I... I don't know. But, like, the gravity would be different, right?" She shouldn't be too surprised, this isn't Earth, but she expected...

What did she expect?

For things to be like Earth, unless otherwise specified.

"I mean... unless something about the planetary composition was different enough to compensate? Or weird magical fiat? Or something?"

"I don't know why I expected any of these magical worlds to behave like Earth. They could be flat, or cake-shaped, or bowl-shaped."

"For all we know it could even be a person."

"Spooky thought." They approach the bridge. "So how does this work?"

She grins wider, rolling down the non-existent track directly at the bridge. "I mentally grab the whole ship as we approach the bridge, and everyone aboard is jumped together at once, all under my power. Pretty sure it would work even jumping a non-Conduit."

They get closer.

"Thirty seconds to jump."

She braces herself. "Well, here goes nothing."

"Everybody hold on to your nonexistent hats!"

Sable grins, holds steady, and then a few moments later the wold falls away, replaced by somewhere else. Outside the window, brilliant stars twinkle in the distance, and slightly less distant drift enormous clouds of gas, occasional lightning sparking between them.

"Welcome," she says, gesturing expansively out the windows, "to Kuiper."

"Woah." She breathes, in pure awe. There is a moment of disappointment at the lack of zero g before realizing that the trainship must have artificial gravity. "What a time to be alive."

"I know, right!? We're in space! In my trainship! So, optional things to do: fly around and check out some pretty clouds, see if there's anything else to see, maybe spend some time bouncing around the cargo hold if I turn off the gravity..."

She grins curiously at the other girls. "Any other ideas?"

The many lights of the city she used to live in was both a sign of life and a shroud that drowned out the night sky.

Stars and swirling nebulae, delicate and nude before her, no atmosphere between her and it.

She is unworthy of it. How many people wished for this? To be free, to see the stars, to go where they please? To bear witness to the firmament?

Her eyes burn up.

"Huh?" She says, voice slightly shaky. "Oh, uhm, let's look around."

Sable looks up at the hint of shakiness in Strawberry's voice, and her smile softens to something small and gentle. She reaches out a hand to each girl, a bit shyly in Strawberry's case.

"We can take some time to just admire the view first, though. There's no need to rush off immediately, what with this being all our first time in deep space."

She blinks at the hand offered from the girl she barely knows. Every concern she might've had in this exact scenario seems so small right now. And yet as her hand inches towards theirs, as her fingers curl around a soft hand, her heart hammers in her chest.

She doesn't trust herself to speak, turning slightly to gaze out the window.

Eva's just been staring starry-eyed at the view; when Sable extends a hand to her as well, she takes it too, a slight tremble in her own hand.

"For all the strange places we've been to together, I think this is the first time I've really been awed. I dreamed of going to space someday, back on Earth. Never thought I'd get the chance."

Sable's smile widens a bit, and she gives each hand a gentle squeeze as she gazes out the window with her girlfriend and hopefully a new friend.

"I'm glad we can see it together. Girlfriends, new friends, sharing in the wonder."

She squeezes back. "Yeah." Strawberry whispers.

The inconceivable vastness housing an emptiness rich in color, light and detail. In its observing it becomes something more, transcending mere light and matter to become a memory, a pattern of thought in a conscious being. Something that might catalyze a change within its observers. More of an effect on the universe than any of the image's constituent photons could achieve on their own.

Patterns of light transmogrified through the engines of change that are human beings into something greater.

Eva closes her eyes after a moment, commiting the image to memory, then looks back out at the starscape. 

"We are a way for the stars to know themselves."

The words are barely a murmur, but a small smile lingers on Eva's lips afterwards. 

"Strange to find something so alien and yet so familiar out here."

The Pirates relax into a blur, burning the moment into their hearts with a tender sigh: girlfriend on one side, new friend on the other, stardust all, gazing upon radiant stardust. Truly a beautiful experience to share.

"Nothing so beautiful as animate stardust, sharing wonder with each other."

They squeeze the hands they're holding again. "Hello, stardust," they whisper.

"Hello Stardust." She whispers.

"Hello, Stardust. Glad to see you're here to meet us."

Eva smiles. 

"So what are we waiting for? Let's go explore."

"Yeah," She takes a steadying breath. "yeah, let's go."

She squeezes both girls' hands, leans over to kiss Eva's cheek, smiles gently at Strawberry, and steps over to the pilot seat.

"Any requests, girls, or better ideas than 'aim at a pretty cloud'?"

"Nah, a pretty cloud sounds wonderful."

"Yeah, a pretty cloud sounds..." She spots a distant pinprick moving in front of the bright backdrop of nebulae. "Hey, do you see that?"

Eva's eyebrows rise. "What is that?"

Scale is not something that comes easily in the void, especially to fallible human minds with no points of reference. As they approach it slowly becomes apparent that it is big. Very big.

Its front is like a flower, with massive petal-like fins bulging like sails, reflective from the back. It trails behind a long, thin, grey body, like an eel.

Just saying that it is many times larger than the trainship doesn't do it justice, it's body could be better described as a landscape, it's length measured in kilometers.

It doesn't seem to react as they approach. Strawberry's mouth hangs open.

"Holy fuck that's a huge creature. What the fuck. Unreasonably large. Okay, let's try aiming to go around it and see if it diverts to intercept or not, that way I can figure out whether I need to flee at hard burn."

She puts word to deed, adjusting the pseudo-track attitude orb to starboard to pass on the enormous entity's port side. It slowly grows larger-still in their view as they approach.

"Woah." Strawberry breathes. The being doesn't seem to react at all to their presence. The front of the petal fins aren't reflective like the backs are, instead they have a grayish-orange color to them. Nothing obviously looks like an eye, though the center point where all the petals meet could be a mouth.

"How does it... exist? Move? Eat? Metabolize?"

"Good question. Maybe gravitics or something? Maybe it eats nebulae?"

She... would not say no to some reassuring togetherness-ish physical contact while they marvel at this enormous beastie, actually, but isn't really up for asking.

Mostly she just marvels at it and keeps flying.

"Whoa..." Eva smiles and watches the creature, floating soundlessly in the hard vacuum. "That's amazing..."

"I sure hope it's friendly, or else slower than our ship."

"We don't have a top speed, just a top 'thrust' force of three gees, so unless it's got a frankly ridiculous way of moving, we can accel much faster, given our relative size."

She sighs warmly and smiles.

A nervous laughter escapes her and a brilliant smile cuts across her face.

She stares at its fins long enough to recognize what she is looking at and gasps. "Solar sails!" She bounces in place and points. "It's fins are solar sails!"

Sable bops her forehead with the heel of her palm, then shakes her head. "Of course! Ugh, w—I feel like a ditz for not thinking of that. That's so fucking cool."

She glances at the two of them. "Second best day of my life, easily." She whispers.

"Glad you've had a better day than this one, because this is far out." Eve smiles and stretches, looking out at the whole scene; the starfield, the nebula, and the filter-feeder (?) floating through it.

It's hard to beat... becoming a... Even in her own mind she has trouble saying the words. She sighs.

As they brave getting closer to the beast, they spot a crab on its skin.

"That's a crab." She lies, knowing full well that she must have told a falsehood.

"But why would there be crabs in space -" 

The crab bunches its many legs on the surface of the beast, and leaps towards the ship. 

"It's coming this way!"

"CRAAAAAB!"

"Shit!" She cranks the attitude orb hard, pitching up and yawing right, aiming perpendicular to their previous course and also angled firmly away. She pushes the throttle all the way to the maximum, aiming to get as much distance as possible and dodge it. "Shit shit shit shit shit."

It's getting closer, gliding silently across the void toward them. She's trying to dodge it as best she can, but it has a little gas bladder it can use to course correct.

"Everybody brace!"

She grips her seat as best she can, it's a little awkward since she's still in her wing suit. A noise reverberates throughout the cabin as the ship rocks with the impact.

"Are we ok? Are we damaged?"

She looks over a few readouts. "We're not leaking anywhere, so the hull's holding at least. Gouged the plating pretty hard, though." She shakes her head.

"We need firepower on this thing. Either we need to find someone in Rorch's black market, or we need to look elsewhere, but we need a pair of turret cars."

"Turret cars sound awesome." She briefly tries to imagine how many sick jumps she would have to make to afford such a thing and gives up. "How do you even afford such a thing? I've only ever made pocket change through parkour."

"We can sell things from one world in Rorch, found a popular commodity, but also train cars are basically free for the taking if you have a locomotive. The problem is that turret cars are essentially a black or grey market product. Getting a new one made is expensive, and any abandoned ones are scooped up quick."

"Huh, y'know... I actually know some people who might be able to set you up with something. And are in the market for the services of a trainship." They're gonna love this.

"Oh really." Sable grins sharply. "Get the armament I crave in return for ferrying some friends of yours around? I think your deal sounds very interesting, Miss Strawberry."

I suppose it's technically Miss Shortcake now, huh? "Hah... yeah, I should give them a call, there's worry about opsec, since there might be dangerous people to us in one of the Earths, but they could really use you." She remembers the Orichalcum train that Fib was making. "And potentially provide amazing armor."

"We'd need details, and I need to talk with my girlfriend before agreeing to anything, but that sounds very tempting."

"Let's head back to the Academy for now?" 

"Works for me, I still need to figure out what the hell's going on there."

"It's mostly colorful pseudo-Japanese lesbians in colleges as far as the eye can see. Alongside weirdly indistinct ghosts and one monster that I've seen."

"Huh. That's certainly a way for a place to be..."

"Fascinating," she remarks as she steers the ship through an immelman back toward the bridge. "I have a sudden urge to spend time doing things about monster problems. I also have an urge to snuggle pretty girls, but that's a problem I can solve right here aboard my trainship." That last bit is a bit mumbled, but potentially still audible.

Eva giggles and kisses Sable's cheek. "Sure, we can try some monster hunting."

"Heck yeah! Snuggling pretty girls and monster hunting! We're living the dream!" She throws her hands in air. She realizes that she never took off her wing suit. "I should probably change."

"Probably, yeah." Eva smiles, and before she realizes what she's doing she's reached out and patted Strawberry on the head. "You're super cute, you know that?"

"You really are," Sable agrees. "Oh, you can duck back to the rest of the ship if you want privacy, by the way."

"I am! Isn't it great?" She gets up, drops her magical girl transformation, reverting the wing suit back to its original yellow with Rorchian labeling.

"So great," she replies as she speeds toward the bridge back to the Academy. "At a glance, you seem very snugglable. We shan't know for sure until we apply science to the question, though."

"Shall I volunteer? For science?"

"Well I do like me some science." She grins. "Ok cuties, I'll be right back, let me take off this wing suit first."

The door to the cockpit clattered shut behind her. Two planeswalking lesbians- She doesn't actually know that for sure -girl-liking girls who are probably in a relationship with one another are flirting with her on their magic flying amphibious space-train.

"That can't be allowed, right? Can that happen?" She blinks, has a sudden realization, then teleports a foot in front of her, without her wing suit. It falls in a pile in the ground. She pats down her scrunched up skirt.

She looks back at the door. She barely knows them, as far as she knows there's something that down the line will push them apart: A bad habit, an incompatible personality, some strange belief... Strawberry spent a lot of her life aware of the ways in which relationships could fail, but even beyond that, right now, doing this? It filled her with a nameless dread she would probably spend the rest of her immortal life trying to articulate.

"Fuck it."

She opens the door. "I am ready to donate my delicate body to science, so that together we may advance this noble cause."

Eva laughs. "Alright! Where shall we snuggle? There are bunks in the back, or you could just sit in my lap, or...?" 

Eep. "Well, we're here to do science, let's see how lap-sitting works and we'll see where we end up from there!"

Unfortunately, this leaves her with the task of climbing onto a cute girl's lap.

You are god's gift to women (who are into girls) you are a monster slaying magical girl of lightning and teleportation and you can do this.

The temptation to try to teleport onto Eva's lap is strong, but she doesn't actually trust herself to do that correctly, so she settles for just... walking up to her seat and sitting on her lap. "Hey gorgeous." She whispers.

Sable grins delightedly as she keeps piloting. 

Eva stiffens a little, then very gently settles her arms around Strawberry. "Hey," she says. "Glad to have you join me."

"Yeah." She gulps, adjusts herself a little. "Is this ok?"

Eva exhales and smiles. "Yeah," she says. "I'm getting used to having cute girls in my lap still too. Sable is really helpful, but before I became a conduit it wasn't exactly an everyday occurrence for me." 

"Hah, tell me about it." She leans into Eva a little, gently. "I wasn't exactly super popular back on Earth."

Eva slowly relaxes as she gets used to having Strawberry in her lap, and after a few moments hugs her a little tighter. 

"Nor I," she says. "Nor I."

She hugs her back, maybe a touch too hyper aware of both of their breasts for her own good. She relaxes into her shoulder, letting their warmths intermingle.

Eva gently squeezes Strawberry, and smiles. 

"There," she says. "Nothing exploded." 

"Give it time, I haven't died in an explosion yet, but it's probably just a matter of time for me." She nuzzles Eva. "I live dangerously."

"You've died and come back? I don't have very good immortality, so if there's another option maybe we should spend some time looking into it...?"

"I mean, uh, snug!" She squeezes Strawberry. "Sorry, that was probably not a fun time for you!" 

"It was more embarrassing than anything." She runs her fingers through Eva's scalp. "Have you heard of Crucible? It has these purple bonfires, I respawn at the last one I rested at."

"Oh, yeah, those. I've heard they take a little every time, though... So it's not one that you want to use continuously for a long time." She touches her chin with her knuckles. "I wonder what else is out there..."

Also, she is enjoying being petted.

"The Rim has these ancient techno fortresses that, among other things, have clone tubes that take a year in Rim time to grow a backup body. If you aren't connected to the Rim it will only work while you are on the Rim, otherwise it works everywhere." Her fingers run gingerly down from her scalp to her neck, and then to the back of her ear.

"And they retain your memories and everything? I've got a save point in my Bevin that respawns me when I die, but it only "loads the last save I made", so I need to keep it updated and also if I die I lose memories, so in a real sense I actually do die if I die. It's not a very good immortality, as I said."

"Huh, so that's how Bevin does it? With Rim clones you retain your memories, I'm pretty sure. In Arbor, a forest world, you can be regrown over a period of months if you die, but I don't think it has any other downsides." From the ear back to the scalp.

Eva shivers softly at the gentle pets and lets out a little pleased noise, shifting in her seat to get a little more snuggly with Strawberry. "Rim clones would be better, then, I think..." 

She smiles. "I also think you're good at petting."

"They do sound better," Sable agrees over her shoulder as she continues piloting, "but if I remember correctly, Rim affinity accumulates in normal time, despite time in Rim being accelerated. We'd definitely want to bring a lot of projects and books and the like, to make it easier to fill the time, if we were trying for a connection."

"Mmmm." Her ability to hold a conversation is degrading. "You're soft." She breathes. She keeps stroking her, trying to elicit more good noises out of the girl.