She finds herself in a white room. Roughly cubical, maybe three meters across.

Rubbery padding composes its walls, floor and ceiling. These surfaces are uniform... apart a few gaping, ragged holes with bits of splintered metal and torn wiring poking out from them.

The space is near-weightless.

A humanoid figure hangs limp in a harness anchored in the room's approximate center by eight elastic cords.

All is dark. All is quiet.

What in the world did that cryptid do? "Woah, zero gravity" turns into "ooh, zero gravity" turns into "zero gravity in a dress is kind of annoying, but no way am I potentially disabling my danger sense with pants."

The limp humanoid over there is concerning. Margaret appears a long plastic rod in one hand and shoves off the nearest wall, then uses the opposite wall to stop herself next to them.

The limp, concerning humanoid turns out to be inanimate.

Margaret’s proximity causes the figure to ragdoll back and forth a little in its harness, but its eyes remain blank and its gelatinous body remains lifeless.

That's much less concerning! But now she's all alone in here, and that's pretty concerning too. At least her danger sense isn't going off. She looks around for anything that might be an exit.

"Learn the language of the scions from the videotapes," she announces to the empty air. Okay, she's somewhere they don't speak English, which isn't surprising since this isn't any space station she's ever heard of, and she needs to find videotapes somewhere. There clearly aren't any in this room, though, so she returns her attention to getting somewhere else.

A hatchway on the wall behind her hangs slightly ajar.

Margaret pulls the hatch as wide as it'll go, pulls her wings close to her back, and tries to fit through. She doesn't, quite, so she momentarily has a belt squashing her wings against her back a little harder than she can manage without. (It doesn't occur to her to take them off, any more than it occurs to her to take off her legs.) Now she is through the hatch.

She emerges into a much larger space, cluttered with strange machinery. The white room she just exited is near the larger chamber’s center, surrounded by support scaffolding. The scaffolding is damaged and the battered metal cube containing the white room tilts off to one side relative to the floor below.

Micro-gravity conditions continue to prevail. There are several passages leading away from the chamber but most are blocked by wreckage. One of the less obstructed passages emits a distant, ruddy glow.

Light means more functional machinery and maybe people. She's not sure what kind of people, since this situation is not entirely unlike what she'd expect of being abducted by aliens, but she heads that way anyway.

One of the walls (the ceiling?) (the slight pull of gravity tugs in the opposite direction) stretches transparent for a five meter stretch midway down the corridor.

Outside shine a field of stars—not twinkling, not blinking, but just staring down icily. A sun of sorts shines upon the window as well, but it isn’t like the one orbited by the planet Margaret came from. It’s a small, timid thing colored dull red. 

Oh, wow. Wow. 

She's completely alone in outer space with no way to get home and she'll probably never see anybody she cares about again.

Well, nothing for it but to keep moving down the corridor. The last ten minutes of staring blindly at the stars didn't help anything.

Further along, several rooms branch off from the corridor. The first couple have no contents—just barren walls forged from the same featureless black material as the hall.

The third room has a door, wrought of corroded iron not unlike the ruined machinery in the first chamber she emerged into, whose hinges look to have been attached in a rather haphazard fashion.

The door hangs ajar. There’s a human-sized bedframe beyond it. On that bed frame a slim hinged device. A laptop.

Okay, the humanoid statue in the first room could have been aliens, but if this is aliens they're the low-budget television kind. She goes straight for the laptop, praying to whatever governs her current bizzare reality that it has charge and something useful on it. Maybe it has the videotapes her prophecy mentioned.

It doesn’t have charge. None of the keys below the screen cause the device to light up or produce sounds. The hardware’s overall design doesn’t match anything from Margaret’s home—it has a different keyboard layout, its plastic casing is absurdly durable, and apart from one port that looks sorta-but-not-quite like it’d fit a USB none of the indentations along its edges resemble familiar manufacturing standards.

There’s a rubbery cord on the ground running up from a haphazard mass of metal on the wall. At the end of this cord is a jack that looks like it might plug into one of the aforementioned indentations.

She plugs the cord in; it's not like she can brick it harder if that didn't turn out to be the problem. Also, do the keys have single characters on them and do they resemble in any way any of the Roman, Cyrillic, Greek, Chinese, Japanese, or Korean alphabets? Those being the only ones she would have a prayer of recognizing.

Most of the keys have single characters, a few have doubles. They resemble simplified chinese/japanese logograms, but don't quite match up to Shinjitai or the PRC official alphabet.

One of the buttons is definitely a power button. Pressing it, this time, causes the screen to light up.

For a second, hundreds of lines of text flash by too quickly for the unaided eye to follow. After that, a login window appears. A cursor blinks in what is probably a password field.

She's not going to get the password unless she gets a prophecy about it; she packs up the laptop and its cord in case she finds a way to get into it and moves on.

As she starts to stow the laptop, a face appears on the screen: a boy about her age. He has pale skin and platinum blond hair and is dressed so fashionably that, were he a magical girl, he'd probably be entitled to a spell or two.

He says a bunch of words. About a third of these words are recognizable, though not all from the same language and many of them ambiguously pronounced.

Legible tidbits: somethingsomethingsomething special access mode, somethingsomething history and culture and art, somethingsomethingsomething royal library?

She's so surprised she almost drops the laptop. It looks like a recording rather than anything live, and possibly like the thing her prophecy was about. For lack of a better idea, she transcribes what she can of the speech and then tries parroting bits back in case there's a voice interface.

The recording continues a minute longer, with the boy making an apparent attempt to describe the planet earth (possibly to an audience he doesn’t expect to be familiar with it?)

Then the recording concludes and the screen displays a desktop. There are many folders containing many icons, some of the latter resembling movie logos that Margaret has encountered before but other ones looking quite alien. (The folders and icons are all labeled in the same not quite familiar logograms as the keys and login screen.)

Looks like it's time to sit down and watch all of these movies!

Interestingly, none of them feature or even mention magical girls. Even more interestingly, one of them is the original Star Wars movie. There are a couple more she recognizes, and several set in the same science fiction future which don't seem to have anything to do with each other continuity-wise. "Some sort of weird alternate future" ends up as her dominant hypothesis for where she's landed, as she figures out the language from the subtitles.

Many of the films—especially the recognizable older ones—have subtitles in languages she’s fluent in. By cross referencing these subtitles she can learn how to say phrases like “may the force be with you” or “frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn” in the weird alternate future language.

One of her arms acquires a bracer with a scroll mounted on it; she takes copious notes on endlessly appearing paper.

After a while she gets rather insistently hungry, but looking for food here seems like a losing gamble. Instead, she grits her teeth and deletes her wings. It's not pleasant--it's bizarre and jarring and puts her both physically and mentally off balance--but it takes her far enough from the cryptid threshold to let her safely sprout a small plant from her arm. She eats her way through several rounds of fruits and nuts of various kinds, and stashes more in her pockets so she doesn't have to do this again any sooner than necessary. Then her wings can go back on and with a sigh of relief she can return to watching movies.

...and then halfway through Citizen Kane, something changes. The jagged machinery and the corroded electric outlets and the imminent proximity to vacuum had all created a dull background haze of environmental danger since Margaret's arrival in this place, but now there's a specific pinpoint of something else there with her. Not a swarm. Not quite a person or animal either.

It's about a hundred fifty meters away, in the direction she'd been heading when she ducked into the room with the laptop. It's a significant physical danger. It's getting closer.

Yikes. Margaret pauses the movie and goes to check the door. If it shuts, she wants to shut it; if it locks, she wants to lock it. Running away is a lost cause in this environment, so her next best option is to fort up somewhere.

Also, she is now holding a large sword. With opals on the hilt and swirly engravings that match her lace going up the blade, because she has built good habits about this sort of thing.

The door shuts. It doesn’t shut very well—it seems that the doorframe doesn’t have anything for the door itself to latch onto—but there’s a heavy rust-encrusted deadbolt welded into place halfway up the door’s length that can still be wedged into a locking position if it’s shoved on hard enough.

...the dangerous thing keeps getting closer.

She has a hammer long enough to move the bolt, then she's standing in the middle of the room with the sword out, being as quiet as possible.

She can hear it coming. First there's rumbling in the distance. Then comes intermittent thudding and sounds of clattering metal.

(But every now and then it goes dead silent. Pauses in place. Listening.)

It's not quite beelining for her, at this point. The danger doubles back on itself sometimes, darts off briefly to one side or the other as though searching other rooms or side passages.

But it's still steadily getting closer on net. Twenty meters. Fifteen. Ten.

(Something further down the hall gets noisily smashed. The danger strafes off to its left. Stops. Listens. Backtracks left and then continues down the hall.)

Five meters. Four. Three.

Margaret thickens and strengthens her natural armor, adds a clear plastic visor protecting her eyes, holds her sword up with white knuckles but steady hands. Thinks about what it could be, what kind of attacks she can try, anything but the fact that if she dies here nobody will ever know what happened to her.

It stops outside the room. Listens. Sniffs the air.

Suddenly, Margaret's vision goes double.

The future vision version of the door shudders, tears loose from its hinges and goes hurtling across the bunkroom. Not long after that, a metallic screech echoes through the enclosure and the actual present door follows suit.

Margaret jumps back out of the way of the door, muttering "oh crap oh crap" and wishing she knew enough about guns to assemble a working one in starscape.

The door sheds some momentum as its lower portion collides with the bed, then sheds most of the rest in a collision with the wall. The small room reverberates with impact tremors and echoes.

When the door's past, Margaret has a clear line of sight to the hallway. To the danger...

...it's a huge, meaty thing. Scarred fissures and oil stains and small bits of debris cover its bare, leathery hide. In one of its forelimbs it grips a long, misshapen block of metal.

It looms ominously in place for a couple seconds--drifting back in the microgravity after slamming into the door. It watches her through a single glittering eye recessed deep into its bony face.

(In Margaret's future vision, it's already found its footing again and is leaping back towards the opening. It lashes out with its crude weapon, trying to skewer her against the rear wall.)

The monster finds its footing. With a guttural cry, it leaps.

There's no room to dodge it entirely; she ducks under the spear and braces for impact. If it keeps coming it's going to slam into her, but it's going to get full of sword on the way.

It gets full of sword.

This doesn't stop it. The thing's clearly wounded--the blade's sunk up to the hilt into its flesh and there's blood pooling up around the fatty tissue exposed by the entry wound--but it doesn't flinch or cry out or slow its assault.

(Its future assaults are barely altered either. It's like it committed fully to its line of attack before lunging and doesn't even notice that it's been impaled.)

It slams into her. Its right forelimb--not quite a hand, more like a fleshy vice--scrabbles for purchase on her glittering scales. Its left limb, the one holding the weapon, winds back for an overhead swing that even most people without precognition would consider telegraphed.

(The awkward weapon, edged along one side and heavy, could cave her skull in so easily if it struck cleanly.)

Her sword gets longer inside the enemy's body, acquires more blades forking off the main one--

Her future-vision starts weakening but she deletes the blood from her dress and it returns--

She wrenches her head to one side and the weapon almost misses, catches a horn and breaks the tip off and the shockwave through her head is painful and dizzying but she clenches her jaw and puts it back--

The present and the future and the starscape fight for position in her vision but she can handle it, she has to--

The blade blossoms, some of its tips getting lodged between bones while others rupture organs. A bloody mist erupts from the back of the monster when a sword end punches through its back after bisecting a blood-pumping organ.

The thing still doesn't flinch. It tightens its flesh vice around her armpit and jams a meaty foot down into the bedframe and drives her bodily along the length of the wall--slamming her wing-first into the corner of the enclosure.

(In the future it's already pinned her there and driven the grime-coated spike it holds into her sternum.)

Its breath smells of rot and its saliva froths near-weightlessly from its lips. Two more eyes, smaller than the first, open up as its face fills her field of view. It stares at her without apparent grief or fear or rage--it'd be hard to put an emotion to such alien features, but some human onlookers might consider those eyes and conclude that they looked happy.

The noise her wing makes as she hits the wall is even worse than the pain that follows it, and she screams, and she can't let it pin her! She has a spiky piece of metal on her arm shredding its flesh-vice as she wrenches herself free so hard her arm hangs useless and wrong, drops the sword and lets it vanish so she can circle around to its side and buy a precious half-second to heal herself.

Its damaged vice slaps wetly against the wall, trying and failing to find traction on the smooth surface despite the blood and grime. It doesn't manage to redirect its momentum as it whips its weapon forward again--the spiked tip clacks against the corner Margaret just occupied (but fails to embed itself there--unlike the brittle and rusty doors/furniture, the walls of the structure resist harm quite imperviously).

The monster wrenches itself around, just as Margaret's future sight snaps back into focus, its perforated insides tearing further apart at the strain... and the movement and the future sight converge on the blunt end of its weapon slamming into the small of her back a moment later.

The blow lands with inhuman force, but it's a weaker hit than the one that broke the door from its hinges earlier. Her assailant is losing a lot of blood now and that seems to matter at least a little, even if the initial injuries gave it no pause.

(Its future movements--clambering after her and hacking at her and trying to bowl her into the opposite wall--will be a little slower and a little less vigorous, though no less single-minded in their aggressive intent.)

Something makes an awful crunch, but she's already in starscape, and heals again before she hits the ground. She doesn't manage standing up, just stays on her knees and makes a massive shield, basically a small titanium wall curving back over her head, with blades that materialize into the monster's insides as it tries to bowl her over. Shield and terrified woman alike slide along the floor with a screech of scraping metal and a shriek of frightened lungs.

Future vision flickers out again.

There’s so much blood. The air tastes metallic and salty and wet. Blows keep hammering down on the aegis enclosing her; bones shudder and titanium dents...

And then it stops. The sounds, the movement, the impacts.

(The taste in the air persists.)

For several moments, Margaret is too tense to do anything. Then she heals herself more comprehensively, exploiting the symmetry of her body in places where her bruises aren't visually obvious, and steps out from under her shield to clean up. This is something of a production, since she can't just get rid of the shield without dropping the corpse on her head. Instead she gives the shield a long handle so she can crawl backwards and only have to shove part of the thing aside to get space to stand up. 

When the last traces of blood and wrinkles are gone from her dress, and the urge to vomit has come and gone, she goes around to the now-doorless doorway.

The doorway is doorless.

The hall beyond is quiet.

(The huge fleshy thing behind her remains lifeless, sinking to the bloodsoaked floor with glacial slowness.)

Good riddance to the thing. She recovers the laptop and sets about exploring further.

She finds a couple more incidental signs of human habitation in nearby rooms--a couple human sized chairs, some badly damaged electronics, a couple kludged together power outlets like the one she found the laptop near, another bed, and a refrigeration unit that doesn't appear to have successfully refrigerated anything in a century or two.

When she wanders off further into the smooth-walled structure, though, the human artifacts becomes sparser and then nonexistent. The halls here stretch out in many directions, and have such uniform features that in some places it might be easier to navigate by danger sense than by visual landmarks.

She may explore this wider expanse for as long as she likes without finding any further pockets of prior human habitation. She does occasionally find less human traces though: more strange objects wrought from strange materials, more wide windows depicting alien stars, and more monstrous corpses--most of them desiccated husks, some so brittle that they crumble if disturbed.

The arm opposite the scroll of language notes acquires a scroll of station map. After she's pretty sure she has it all mapped, she settles down on the bed that doesn't have a rotting monster corpse right next to it and takes stock of her situation.

Given the presence of at least one movie she recognizes, she appears to be in the future, on a station made by a civilization descended from her own. For some reason, they took all the magical girls and references thereto out of their media, which has troubling implications for her reception if she gets rescued. And she does need rescuing: even with the starscape letting her handle all her biological needs safely and cleanly, she probably has a couple weeks at most before she starts cracking up from the isolation. The movies help a lot, but by a week in as counted by her sleep schedule she's talking to the characters (haltingly, in the local language) and she doesn't think it will be very long before she starts imagining their responses.

"I am Prince Leon of House O'Cuana. I hope you will protect and cherish this curated selection of art from the Heptarian Royal Archives..."

It probably doesn't help that the recurring recordings of the blond haired youth are all addressed directly to the viewer.

(A second week passes.)

Margaret gets much better at the language, and is all alone in outer space. 

She has elaborate three- and four-sided conversations with Prince Leon and several other characters, and is all alone in outer space. 

She fidgets with one of the gems in her arm so much she pulls the attached scale out, which is awful. She heals herself and goes right back to fidgeting, and is all alone in outer space.

She forgets to eat for a while (if she knew how long it was she wouldn't have forgotten, now would she) then remembers and eats twenty bananas in twenty minutes and is violently ill, all alone in outer space.

She dreams that the station has come apart around her, and all that exists is her and the stars and the monsters, maybe alive and maybe dead and maybe drifting toward her, with some incomprehensible awfulness awaiting when they converge on the point where she floats all alone in outer space.

When she wakes up, Prince Leon has started telling the story (for the umpteenth time) of how his parents' royal astronomers discovered a habitable paradise more than twenty light years from Earth.

"--the corporations had all stopped looking to the stars. And so, uncontested, Heptaria cobbled together our space program from the leftovers of an earlier, more curious world..."

There's something wrong.

Everything looks the same as when Margaret fell asleep. The prince speaks familiar words and no worrisome new sounds echo in the distance. The air is still, stale and cold as always. But something's different.

As the seconds pass and wakefulness fully returns, the nightmarish sense that everything's falling apart doesn't lift. Danger. It's not a single mote of threat like the beast she fought before, or a heterogeneous smattering like she picks up from the station's less safe environmental features. It's subtle, but it's everywhere. It's everything. Diffuse, imminent peril blankets the entire interior volume of the structure she occupies.

"...and we explored the night sky in search of something more important than quarterly profit."

"Legacy."

Margaret shuts the laptop and hugs it protectively to her chest, trying to shield her only friend from she knows not what. She pulls the shreds of her brain together and examines the danger sensation--is it the hostile intent of an enemy mind, or the unmalicious peril of an environmental hazard? Is the station disintegrating into the void of its own accord, or is someone out to bring her nightmares to life?

When she focuses she notices that the haze of danger isn’t quite uniform. It has a center point, like what she’d feel before the imminent breach of an enormous swarm...

And then it breaches. It starts near where she first appeared in this place, near the old room with the dummy in the tattered white cube. And it spreads. It spreads quickly, in every possible direction.

It can't actually be a swarm, swarms have their own unique sensation twice over, but she isn't sure what else it could be. She can't run, she can't fight, maybe she can hide--she makes a titanium sphere around herself, leaves airholes but holds ready to shut them at a moment's notice even though her powers can't clean the air.

It doesn't have the texture of a swarm, no. The new hazard bears the lifeless taste of environmental peril but it clings and flits and skitters down corridors in the way a swarm would.

Closer.

It's in the hallway where she first saw the alien stars. It's in the room where she found the laptop. And then in that room it blooms again, redoubling its rate of expansion as though a second breach had occurred.

"We found Gliese 581. Just twenty light-years from earth, a red dwarf star system with three visible planets... and two less visible ones, whose attributes our royal astronomers painstakingly determined through chartered use of corporate AI."

Leon's voice continues to play from the closed computer.

"One of those planets, they discovered, was an oasis ripe for human habitation."

"The royal families pooled their resources, and built a vessel that could weather the eons between my birthplace and the ground upon which you now stand."

"The road ahead may challenge us, but it'll be worth it for the splendor you now enjoy. Worth it for the continuation of our line."

"Be brave. Be proud. Vivat Heptaria."

"I'll be brave," she murmurs. "I'll be proud. I'll be brave, I'll be proud." She replaces the metal sphere with a tower shield that wraps most of the way around her and shuffles to the door to look out into the hallway.

A thud, a cry, and then one of the monsters rounds the corner.

It doesn't register to her danger sense. It doesn't even seem to see her. It doesn't even seem to have eyes. It has lots of pieces missing.

It shudders and coughs up a slurry of blood and organ meat.

The bigger hazard she's sensing hasn't reached her yet, but it has reached the monster. And the monster is dying. Not just dying, decomposing right there in front of her.

Oh no that's disgusting ew ew ew, she should not vomit that will not help anything. She steps well back, opens her mouth to avoid breathing through her nose, and says, "This was not natural; humans did this."

Her mind races at the implications of the prophecy. If humans made the danger swarming through the station, they might be near it themselves. They might have a way to turn it off. She dodges the monster and sets off in the direction it came from, calling "Is anyone there?" in the language of the videos.

It doesn't feel like anything, at first, when she passes into the space occupied by the invisible hazard.

The halls remain weightless, dark, and quiet apart from the fading sounds of the monster she darted past.

Then bits of her start to itch.

Then sting.

Then burn.

Ow ow crap it must be in the air. It's getting inside her, attacking the flesh under her titanium scales. She seals bejeweled goggles over her eyes and a gorgeously embroidered filter mask over her mouth, replaces her scales with new identical scales everywhere the pain underneath them is especially bad, and breaks into a run. Maybe she can get out the far side of it, maybe she can find something to counter it, maybe she can just drown out the horror with the thudding of her footsteps. None of those seem very likely.

She rebounds from wall to wall, retracing her steps from who knows how many days before as she seeks to cross the hazard's centerpoint.

She passes the room where she found the laptop. The monstrous corpse she left there has vanished. As has all the blood staining its walls and ceiling. No sign remains of the mortal struggle that occurred there, as though time had been rewound and it never happened in the first place.

She reaches the hallway with the wide window gazing out into space. There's something new there. Outside. A titanic outline, looming off to one side and eclipsing the pinprick stars that ought to shine there. A persistent hiss breaks the silence of the enclosure, emanating from a fist-sized patch of window that looks to have been broken open and then plugged with rigid foam.

The burning sensation persists, though seems not to be radiating to her core. Her wings feel like molten metal courses through their insides. Her vision becomes increasingly blurry.

On top of everything else, she's losing air now too? She stares at the patch in the window but she can't do anything for it without staying next to it and she sure as hell can't stay here. She deletes her wings and puts them back on, for a minute's relief from the pain, and if she was brave enough she would do the same thing to her eyes but she doesn't know she can put them back right and anyway she can't, she just can't, it's all she can do to keep moving into the next room.

The next room is the one where she first appeared in this place. The big, damaged cube is still suspended in its center. The passages that were obstructed before remain obstructed, and most of the passages that were dark remain dark.

One of the passages, though, shines. Beams of light sweep back and forth against its walls, conical like searchlights.

A voice carries through the stillness--small, alert, human: "Ma'am, I hear something coming..."

She can't be sure she's actually hearing a voice and not just imagining things, hope was overtaking reality in her beliefs even before her mind was fogged with pain, but hope is reason enough to shout "Hello? Help!" and stumble half-blindly toward the voice.

Two armed figures float in the passage, bracing themselves against protrusions on opposite walls. It’s hard to make out their features: they’re backlit by an open airlock and they both have flashlights slung under their rifles.

“It’s big!” The nearer of the figures takes aim at Margaret as she tumbles into the open. “Make your shots count!”

“Wait! That voice..?”

Margaret puts her hands up. Empty palms don't mean as much from a magical girl as they would from someone else, but it's the clearest gesture she's got, and she means it quite sincerely. "I surrender! Don't shoot!"

The closer figure hears Margaret clearly this time.

She takes her finger off the trigger.

“What are you?”

"Magical girl--is there a doctor, please, it hurts--" she flickers her wings out of existence and back again, temporarily whole. A drop of blood leaks out from under her goggles.

The further figure starts to draw closer, slinging her weapon over her shoulder and reaching for a case at her hip.

"I've got a medkit, but..."

The nearer figure holds up a hand to halt her comrade's advance.

"It's going gray. Medkit won't fix that."

A voice from a radio asks an indistinct question.

"Yes, the sterilization agent deployed successfully."

The soldier carrying the medkit answers the radio.

"Yes, we're past the window for full saturation of the facility."

Only one half of the conversation is legible to those nearby.

"No, there's something here." She speaks urgently into the device on her shoulder. "Something's still alive. I don't know. I don't know how but it is..."

(The airlock behind the two soldiers begins to cycle as this exchange takes place.)

(When it opens again, a third new arrival emerges onto the scene.)

Are they talking about her? They didn't answer her, maybe they can't help. At least she's not alone.

Margaret can pretty much only see dim shapes at this point. She pulls off her useless goggles, grits her teeth, and tries starscaping her eyes back how they were, silver irises and slit pupils and all. This takes a lot longer than it should, because fixing her eyes involves looking at them with the starscape's magical third-person vision and she keeps flinching away.

The two figures that Margaret has been speaking to have dark skin and soft features. They both wear contoured bodysuits, with intricately supported joints and tactical gear clipped all over the less mobile stretches of fabric. Their faces, though, are exposed. The invisible Hazard swarms around them yet they show no apparent harm.

The smaller of the pair, with the slim box she called a medkit clutched in one tight fist, has short cropped and intricately patterned hair. She glances rapidly between the others present, searching for some cue as to how to proceed.

The larger of the pair, with her rifle still at the ready, has long unkempt hair and fierce eyes. She does not look to others for guidance, she speaks with a tone of command even when her words acknowledge the presence of superior.

"I advise caution, Founder O'Cuana." She gestures for the newcomer who just entered the hallway from the airlock to maintain distance from Margaret. "We don't know what we're dealing with here. We can't risk your life. If you need samples taken while it's still alive, send me or Trinket instead."

The newcomer, his pale features angular and wrinkled with age, wears not combat gear but livery--rich silks and supple leathers and glittering silver jewelry.

Unarmed and unarmored, he leaps weightlessly past his soldiers and comes to a sliding stop a scant meter from where Margaret sprawls flinching--never taking his eyes off her as his boots find familiar footholds on the station's walls.

"You're the reason I'm here." He crouches down before her. His platinum blond hair shines like a halo in the glare of allied flashlights. "You found my library. I feared it had gone dark forever." His gaze trails down to the laptop still pressed to Margaret's chest. "Thank you."

" . . . Leon?" She assembles a shaky smile.

He nods and smiles back slightly, but his brows remain creased.

"You're hurting."

"Yes--how . . . ?" How is this happening, how can it be stopped, how are you here and real and not a movie.

"The Type Eleven Nanoecology, my magnum opus. It eliminates potential threats--lesser nanites, diseases, larger nonhuman lifeforms--and then disposes of itself before mutation occurs."

"I don't know why you're in the state you're in. If you were human it wouldn't tag you as a threat. But if it has tagged you as a threat, you should already be dead."

"What if the damage isn't from Type Eleven?"

"Maybe the creature's infested with something slower acting, something that's fending off your new concoction?"

The higher ranking soldier moves closer as she speaks, steeling herself to physically drag her VIP to safety if necessary.

"Not possible."

Leon reaches out and places a hand on Margaret's temple. The grey film bubbling up around her eyesockets rubs off on his bare fingertips... and becomes inert once there.

"No wild strain could trump my handiwork."

"I'm mostly human--can't turn all human but I can heal myself--" her wings flicker out of existence and back in again, half-demonstration half-pain relief.

"Multiple species of DNA composing a single creature..."

The woman with the rifle eyes Margaret's scaled body with a new flavor of concern.

"...like the Enemy?"

Leon doesn't back away. His hand remains outstretched; his posture remains relaxed.

He leans in closer, in fact, and speaks in a whisper.

"Did Nerys make you, I wonder, before we abandoned this place... you do look like her handiwork... you must have been so lonely here..."

"Yes, very lonely--but I don't know who Nerys is. I came from Earth, weeks or months ago." She tries to shrug; it comes out as a pained whole-body flinch.

“It’s hurting less now, isn’t it, than when it started?”

”Type Eleven is approaching the end of its lifecycle.”

”Just stay alert, keep talking, wait it out. We’re almost there. We’ll have you patched up and on the mend soon.”

"Thanks." And he's right, too, there's more space in her head that isn't full of pain, and her vision is stabilizing at "really needs glasses". "What was it for? To kill the monsters?"

“Yes. The monsters, and also any less discriminant nanocontaminants.”

He pauses. Examines the rot still filming up from his interlocutor’s extremities.

”So you say you’re from Earth? That puts you in rare company.”

Yeah that's still really gross; she'll need to ship-of-Theseus as much of herself as possible and then take a shower sooner rather than later. "Might be an alternate Earth? Mine had lots of people like me and the movies you left didn't have any."

“A fascinating conjecture.”

Leon beams, even as his escort look on in increasing confusion.

“And you asked about Nerys? She was also from Earth, made the crossing with me and the other royal scions. She was the closest to me in age, we were practically siblings...”

(“Siblings?” In the background, one of the soldiers repeats an unfamiliar word to the other.)

(“I think it’s an old timey word for ‘sisters’?”)

"Why did you come to this station?" she asks. "Did you know there was someone here?"

"I didn't know, actually. In fact, up until half a cycle ago I wasn't even sure where this station was." The word he uses--cycle--isn't familiar from the movies Margaret watched. "The other scions and I used this place as a staging area not long after arriving in the system, but we had to beat a hasty retreat when the devastators assaulted it. We left things behind. Some of them quite precious." Leon lowers his hand from Margaret's brow and places it lightly on the laptop she carries. "We rebuilt elsewhere. Lifetimes passed. Then, half a cycle ago, a relay probe picked up EM chatter from this stretch of the debris disk that matched Old Heptarian frequencies. I grabbed a couple of trusted pilots and set out at once."

"It wasn't easy." One of the pilots speaks up. "Such a faint signal, washed out by background radiation far more often than not."

She clasps her fellow pilot by the shoulder. "But Trinket here still sniffed you out."

Trinket gives a small nod and smile, almost blushing with pride.

"Glad to be of service."

"Thank you," she says, to Trinket and the rest of them. "I would have--was going crazy here alone." Yes, it would have been nice if they hadn't injured her quite so badly on showing up, but they didn't mean to.

"The infection has run its course by now. Can you move?"

"Yes, I'm alright. Let me do one last pass of healing--" her various damaged parts flicker out of existence and back, replacing themselves with healthy versions. "Okay, I'm good to go."

"We've no reason to linger here longer, then. Follow me back to my ship, and we'll get you to a medical facility as soon as possible."

(To the soldiers: "We've secured the archives. Prepare to move out.")

("Understood.")

Leon leads the way back through the airlock, with his escort covering the withdrawal in practiced tandem.

The ship beyond the airlock is cramped, its single interior room cluttered with instruments and equipment.

Margaret stares around curiously. Her vision isn't quite as good as it was; if the medical facility can't fix it she might want to sit down somewhere and see if she can fix the nearsightedness she's given herself. She pulls her wings in close and holds her skirts against her legs so they don't catch on anything.

Everything has a proper place, clipped or strapped up to prevent it from drifting weightlessly into the cleared central expanse of the chamber. One clutter of machinery has the look of a work space, with a desk and a computer interface, while another has racks and racks of little drones in all shapes and sizes. A bed and other essentials are recessed against the back wall of the space, furthest from the airlock. Right beside the airlock is a probably excessive wardrobe--clothes wedged tightly into their storage crevasse on hangars that fit together like puzzle piece, a carefully curated makeup kit and a few combs slotted in beside. 

(The portal to the room closes behind Margaret with the two soldiers still inside the airlock. The pair were fitting helmets into place as the double doors seal airtight.)

"Welcome to my home away from home."

Leon kicks off the doorframe and glides over the the wide mattress across the way from it.

"You'll want to join me by the back wall for the initial acceleration..."

Margaret parks herself on the mattress and awaits the return of gravity. She wonders if she's had enough muscle atrophy to make it worth putting some more bulk on the quick way. Probably not; starscape muscle is less efficient than the ordinary sort.

The room rattles slightly as the ship disconnects from the station. It turns over once near weightlessly and then begins to accelerate, creating a facsimile of "down" in the direction of the wall the two of them have braced against.

"So. An alternate Earth, you say?"

"I think so. You had different versions of some of the movies. And no references to the magic stuff from my Earth--magical girls like me, and the swarms that attack us."

"You picked up on all that from a millennia-old archive... are you also a student of the classics then? Or, wait, maybe you're not just from an alternate Earth but also from much earlier in that Earth's timeline..."

"Magical girls? Swarms? How do those work?"

"Yes, I'm from the twenty-first century. Magical girls . . . a couple percent of girls, never boys or adults, we don't know why, get the ability to change their appearance. If they change it to something not human, they can't go back to totally human ever, but they get magic, and the ability to change their clothes, and the magic is stronger the prettier we are. Different people have different things, I have danger sense and seeing a little way into the future and uncontrollable prophecies and some people make ice or shoot lightning or heal or grow plants or whatever."

"Swarms are black stuff that appears out of nowhere. Smarter than bugs but dumber than people. They start out like a swarm of bugs but if you don't kill them they merge into monsters and get bigger and bigger. Magical girls can sense them; the ones with good combat powers fight them. The ones that start near people are easy to find and kill but the ones that start in the ocean get huge."

That's the most words she's said without stopping since she got eaten by the snake cryptid and now her voice is kind of worn out.