...what in hells.

A falling star from a crumbling moon. No, no star—a person, falling to their likely death.

This has nothing to do with him. Nothing. He should turn around and pretend he didn't see it. Nevermind that the moon was a creation of that ten times damned self-styled god. He should look away and pretend he never saw it.

Damn him, he does not. Instead he—what is he even doing?—stills that person's fall. Not by much, the device he's using can't very well stop them—but maybe by enough. Maybe, if they are lucky and well-built, they will survive.

Maybe, but he has to go check anyway, damn him twice over.

The dome had been impregnable before, completely without any kind of obvious entrance and about as nondescript as anything else in the Reef of Fallen Worlds can be. Just one more bit of random, complicated tech that washed up ashore. Apparently the person's entrance was enough to crack it open, because there's a hole in the ceiling and a crack down the side that's big enough for Aleks to fit through. He gets what lots of hopeful reef-sifters hope for their entire lives to get; first grabs at whatever's inside.

Unfortunately, the main attraction of whatever's inside looks like it's been broken into pieces by this person's landing. The large crystalline object (coffin? pod? it could certainly fit a person) is in pieces, cracked open to reveal its hollow center, like an empty eggshell. Even the array of five arms around the main attraction wasn't spared this wayward not-star's wrath; one is lying in pieces on the floor, sparking unhappily.

And in the middle of the destruction is what looks like a young woman, lying broken in the crater of her own creation. Her short hair is a familiar shade of red, and there's a mark like a stylized pentagon on her temple. Aleks has seen both it, and her, before.

"—you!" hisses the man, drawing a pistol more quickly than the eye can track and pointing it at the prone form on the floor.

...prone and unmoving. Is it... are they... dead? He dares not approach, not yet. He merely observes, gun at the ready. And he waits.

For a few seconds, there is no movement. The person looks, for all intents and purposes, dead. Then there's... some kind of pressure building, in his head. Not physically, but on Aleks's mind. Pushing uncomfortably at him, at his sense of self. And then in a rush it releases, and the broken woman takes a shuddering breath. The black bodysuit she's wearing conceals a lot of the details and seems to have succeeded at disguising the blood, but there is no disguising the unpleasant cracking noise of bones being shoved back together.

Her eyes flutter open, and she lets out a low groan.

The man tenses, gun still pointed at her, safety clicked. Not that it will work; if this is them, if this is the Changing God...

Still. Better with a gun than with no gun.

Eyes search above and then around for something recognizable, eventually fixing on Aleks.

".... I'm sorry," she mumbles to him, a little dazed, "was this yours?"

"What."

"I thought I beat the dome in resilience, but upon reflection, there were no winners here," she elaborates. Then, hissing with pain, she starts attempting to sit up—there is another unpleasant crack. She makes a face, but continues her motion, and now she has a better vantage point to look around in clear confusion.

"...are you them. Are you the Changing God."

".... Maybe?" she says after a thoughtful pause, looking genuinely stumped.

The man starts cussing in some other language and reholsters his gun.

Okay, well. Apparently she is not the Changing God. Okay. She resumes looking around to see where she's landed. Her eyes fix on the broken shards of crystal behind and around her.

"... Oh, skist," she mutters, blinking at it. "I think I might have needed that."

"Why."

...............damn him thrice over he offers her a hand to her feet.

"Um. It's supposed to stop a... bad thing. A bad hunting murder thing." She blinks at him with confusion, then takes the offered hand and (clumsily) stands, wobbling a bit. "The.... Sorrow? That's a dumb name, why is it named that."

"You seem to know a lot for someone who doesn't know if they're the Changing God."

"Honestly what I do and don't know is completely nonsensical! Why do I know language, or what gravity is, or the difference between a stratosphere and a thermosphere! It's kind of frustrating."

Castoff or self-amnesia, then. He wouldn't put it past the bastard.

"Do you at least know why you fell?"

"Something... was attacking." Confused blink. "The Sorrow? Maybe because of the dumb name, I'd be mad if someone named me 'The Sorrow.' Um. And then I was in a... cocoon thing... and then it broke open and I was falling."

"I see."

He doesn't, not really. He starts looking around, himself, for anything of value (although he thinks the Changing God's latest castoff is very likely to be the most valuable thing here).

The interior of the broken and sparking arm looks like it has some kind of synthskin container. The end of the arm itself looks like some kind of injector, or perhaps scalpel, so plausibly the synthskin was for fixing the subject after they were cut-or-injected-or-something. There are some devices arrayed around the perimeter of the interior of the dome, but if any of those hold easily scavenged prizes, they're not obvious about it.

The latest castoff (probably) is investigating the crystal chamber itself. And talking. She seems to be talking.

"How is this supposed to help with the Sorrow, though?" She leans down and carefully picks up a shard of crystal for inspection. ".... 'Resonance chamber'? Resonance of what? Was it for making sure it couldn't find me? Disrupt resonance between us? Or amplify it as a weapon to, deafen it or something? Why was I supposed to go in it." She eyes the pointy arms skeptically. "That does not look like it would have been good for my health."

"Falling onto it can't have been a better option," says the man without turning around to look at her, still examining the various (apparently useless) things around.

This earns a little giggle!

"It might have been, though! It depends on how it was going to do... whatever it was going to do. You can achieve world peace by killing everyone in the world, but that doesn't make it a good solution!"

"That was a very specific and entirely unenlightening comparison."

"Was it specific? It doesn't seem very specific. There was no specification about how the horrible genocide would be achieved, which I guess matters... any... for how good of a solution it isn't. There are worse ways to do it than others. But anyway, the rhetoric is just obvious, right?" She leans over to peer inside the hollow crystal shell. "You can technically fulfill criteria without the end result being anything like what you want. Maybe this is like that. I don't know, I don't know how it does what it was supposed to do."

"Which is stop whatever 'The Sorrow' is from doing whatever it was trying to do to your sire before they decided to jump ship again and leave you to your death."