Where is she?

Where... was she?

Who is she????

She squints her eyes open, sees nothing, and gives up.

Those voices, though—

—ugh, she's so tired...

The voices cannot be made out, they become more distant, and for a few minutes, silence returns. Devoid of distractions, you drift back into slumber.

That is, until the noise puts an end to that. Everything is shaking violently, the sound of heavy machinery and crumbling rock is your whole world.

"Yeegh!!"

She comes awake in a gluey tangle of half-formed dreams, full of questions she doesn't have time to answer, and flails around in a desperate effort to find somewhere less terrifying to be.

In your flailing you find that you don't actually have enough headroom to even sit up straight. The vibration makes it difficult for you to get your bearings, but now that you are looking for it, every surface is curved, the ceiling the floor, the walls, its all just one continuous surface. 

Bad! Bad!!!

She scrabbles at the surface of her Terrifying Egg with both hands, everywhere she can reach. Come on, there's got to be something, right? She can't be crushed by falling rock before even managing to remember her own name, right?? Right???

Your desperate scrambling yields nothing but a reassurance that your panic is warranted. There is no way out.

The sound sharpens, as if the distance between it and you was shortening. It gets closer and closer and suddenly...

CRACK!

There is light, which gets brighter when something that looks like a drill moves out of the way of the hole in Ellen's prison.

She squints into the light, shielding her eyes with a trembling hand, and trying her best to get out of the way of that big pointy thing even though it doesn't seem to be killing her quite yet. And is in fact leaving. That's, good, probably???

The light is obscured as an eye peaks in the hole.

"A lady." Says a feminine voice. 

"What, are you sure?" This one is a little less audible, male.

"Hhhhh—"

She clears her throat and tries again.

"..hello?"

The bodies on the other side of the hole shift. "Bleeding... heck." Says the man. "Hello lass, we're gonna get you out of there, alright? Just sit tight, cover your ears and try to stay away from the hole."

He moves away as the sound of scraping metal can be heard, as well as the bickering of the people making use of the heavy machinery.

Clear and simple instructions that seem very reasonable! She will do those things.

The next minute is loud, the hole is intermittently widened as they carefully drill the hole wider. There's more light now, the smooth surface of the inside of this chamber is gleaming mother of pearl. The chamber itself seems to form an egg shape.

Rock and dust fall in, they stop to fish debris out before continuing. Finally wide enough, a man offers Ellen a hand. "Hey lass, you ok?"

"I, uh, well, I'm alive," she says, accepting his hand and trying to climb out of the Terrifying Egg.

Revealed in the light, she proves to be a medium-tall, medium-young, medium-pretty woman in a workmanlike outfit: white shirt, wool vest, beat-up denim trousers, sturdy brown boots. She's a little clumsy at first, but finds her balance quickly.

Ellen is helped onto a wide and rickety metal platform, exiting her prison of rock and lacre. There is so much to look at, the massive egg-shaped vessel to her left, floating in midair; floating rocks like an asteroid belt, the shafts of light peaking from between the masses of stone above, warm on the skin. The metal platform leads to the floating vessel, bordered by a knee-height parody of a safety measure, guard-rails completely inadequate for shielding any of the seven workers here from falling into the pitch black abyss below.

"Ah, lass who-"

"Get her out of the light." A woman with mirrored spectacles says.

"Yes, yes, c'mon lass." The man says, leading Ellen to the vessel.

She is happy to be led to any place with a lower risk of falling into an endless void!

One doesn't appreciate the curvature of a planet insulating them from the vastness of the horizon until it is gone. There must be hundreds of miles between Ellen and what she can see. Hundreds of boulders hanging stationary in the air, each one miles away from each other. Above them the stone field gets denser and denser until something approximating a loose ceiling forms. The light from on high seems omnipresent, as if it didn't have a singular source. Everywhere the light touches, moss, lush fronds, and even trees grow. In the distance there is movement, something vast and long that dips below the ceiling before returning to it.

Below it is dark, there are some landmasses there, but they are far apart. 

The workers are all wearing heavy clothes, goggles and hats, a couple of them are hammering at the rock with pickaxes. The lady with mirrored spectacles supervises.

The man beside Ellen leads them inside, the hallways are cramped, metallic and lined with pipes. The clicking of an idling engine echoes throughout. "C'mon, lemme get you something to drink, we can talk."

"...yes. Good. Um, thank you." Wow, she feels extremely discombobulated. This is not actually the most confusing and alarming moment of her life, because that was a short while ago when—they must have been drilling into the egg, and she thought she was in some kind of landslide and about to be crushed inside its shell. But there's a particular kind of discomfort to being totally adrift in a social situation rather than totally adrift in a terrifying convulsion of the physical universe. And she is discovering that on some level she kind of preferred Oh Fuck I'm About To Die over Oh Fuck I'm About To Be Rude To This Stranger.

Well. She'll just have to do her best with what she's got. It's not like she has any other options. Crawling back into the egg seems like it would both get her killed and make her look totally insane, the worst of both worlds.

She can follow the man to wherever he thinks is a reasonable place to talk.

Ellen is led to a small room with a desk, a cot, small shelf with books, a little table with a couple of chairs, and a couple of cabinets. "Here, have a seat, have a seat..." He pulls out a kettle from a cabinet. "Do you like tea? Water? Coffee?"

"...water?" she ventures. It feels wrong to be so uncertain of this. Surely she has beverage preferences. Beverage preferences are a normal thing to have. So are memories. At the moment she seems impoverished in both.

"Right, one sec, I'll be right back." He steps out of the room, with the kettle, leaving Ellen alone. Light shines in from an oddly tinted porthole, and a lamp on the ceiling.

She takes a few seconds to just breathe. A moment alone to appreciate how much she is neither dying nor offending anyone seems like just the thing right—

—?!

Okay. Okay. Don't panic. There is a perfectly reasonable explanation for why she woke up inside a ROCK with NO MEMORIES and the second she got a moment to herself afterward her mind was ASSAULTED BY AN INEFFABLE SENSATION OF BEES.

...

Yeah she's got nothin.

"Alright, I've got the-" He looks at Ellen. "Ah, right, sorry, this all must be very confusing for you." He tries to hand Ellen a glass of water.

She is capable of being sufficiently normal to accept a glass of water. She is going to hold this glass of water like a pro. Drink from it, even. Okay? Okay. Okay.

Wow, she is not okay.

"It, um, yes. Confusing is a good word for it." Does he have an explanation for all this??? She is deeply eager to hear it but on no account is she going to try to ask. That might involve explaining about the bees. No. Not happening.

From the looks of it he lost vision in his left eye, there is some scarring around that side of his head. "Right, right, well, let me introduce myself, my name is Giles Roderick, I'm the captain of this vessel. We do deliveries, exploration and occasional mining. We honestly didn't expect to find a person in the stone. I figure you must have a lot of questions." He takes a sip of water.

"I'm... Ellen. I think. I don't, um, I don't know how I got into the rock. Or anything about where I was before the rock." No, stop! Be normal! ...being normal is a lost cause, isn't it. "I just sort of... woke up... in the rock."

"Ah, that's rough Ellen, sorry. It makes sense given..." He hesitates. "Well, I-"

"Given that-" The lady with the spectacles interjects "-you were in the stone for any length of time between four months to over a thousand years, most likely the latter."

"Maria!" Giles scolds.

"...really?" she says, fascinated and disturbed. "How do you know? What... what was that rock?"

"The rocks are woven by the supplicants down below." She serves herself a glass of water, sipping before continuing. "They've been doing it for over a thousand years, weaving all manner of things inside them. Books, technology, furniture-"

"A box of stamps, bottles of water-" the captain says.

"All manner of random things. The purpose for this practice is largely unknown, as is where they get these things, though the abyss is largely unexplored and unmapped. Why they would weave you into the stone, though... Supplicants aren't in the habit of letting go of life in their grasp."

"Well. I wish I could tell you what happened, but I have no idea." She remembers the glass of water in her hand and takes another sip.

"That's natural, given the time frame. Even in stasis, I would expect memories to degrade. Or perhaps you are just groggy and they'll come back with time." She turns to her captain. "We're done here, shall we move on to the next one?"

The captain nods. "Yes, go ahead."

She nods to Ellen, then leaves the room. "Right," the captain says. "We should figure out what comes next."

"With me, you mean?"

"Yeah, with you. With no memories and no documentation, there's no telling who you are and where you came from. Assuming you are even native to here. So the way I see it you have two choices. The first is that I leave you at port. We'll feed you for the time being and you can sleep in one of the bunks. The other option is that I hire you, pay you and help you get on your feet. Afterwards you can quit whenever you want, leave you wherever strikes your fancy."

"...seems to me the second one's a better deal," she says after a moment's consideration.

"Great, I'll get you a contract, discuss pay, get you settled in. Don't be afraid to ask any questions. I expect you to work, but we'll take it slow, ok?" He smiles.

She smiles back, tentatively. Has she ever smiled before? She isn't sure. It feels weird and unfamiliar but so do most things.

He hands Ellen some papers, and a fountain pen. Eight hour days, 'except in emergencies' her duties would include cleaning, manual labor, and 'whatever the captain deems necessary, within reason'. She will be provided with lodgings, food and water for the length of her employment. She'd be paid in shillings, one hundred of them per week. However much that is.

She reads it through. Twice. She doesn't feel familiar with how much a shilling is worth, but a hundred of them still seems like a lot? Eight-hour days feel like a normal and reasonable amount of work in a day. 'Whatever the captain deems necessary, within reason' seems like it could be either totally normal or very ominous. Thanks, sourceless intuitions about how the world works, your assessments are so clear and informative and helpful.

Her alternative is being dropped off at the next port with no money and no idea how to navigate the world around her. She signs her name, possibly for the first time.

He scoops up the contract, glances at the signature. "Alright lass, lemme show you around." He gets up, gestures for Ellen to follow.

She finishes her glass of water and doesn't know what to do with the glass and just sort of keeps holding onto it as she follows.

The lamplight fails to make its way into the pipework lining the corridors, the captain leads his new crewmate through the patchwork of darkness until the two of them find themselves in a room lined with bunk beds. "Here are the sleeping quarters." He points to a top bunk. "This one's empty."

She nods, looking up at it. It's certainly a place to sleep. She has the feeling that she's used to sleeping in places with... walls... between her and other people... but it's not like she's in much of a position to demand better. She can deal with this. If she doesn't deal with this it'll be a big problem, so she had better deal with this. She will deal with this.

"Thanks," she says, feeling vaguely like it's the wrong thing to say but unable to come up with anything better.

"Right, so, lemme show you the rest of the ship real quick." He leads Ellen away. Through more cramped corridors they find themselves at what seems to be the front of the ship. A wide, curved pane of glass reveals the outside, behind it are two seats surrounded by a series of buttons, dials, wheels and levers manned by two crew members. "And these are our helmsmen, Edmund Graves and Carol Williams. This is our new recruit, Ellen." The turn around. "Ah, the rock girl, hello!" Carol says.

"Rock girl. That's me, all right," she agrees, attempting a smile. Is she succeeding? Only time will tell.

"Sir," Edmund says. "we've got something on the horizon." He points towards somewhere in the distance ahead, something long dips in from the ceiling, traces a lazy circle in the air, then returns to the ceiling.

At this distance it is hard to make out, but it might be the same serpent-like creature Ellen spotted earlier.

"Tch, just give it a wide berth for now." The captain says. "If it doesn't come after us we'll try approaching, see if we can't harvest that stone in peace."

"What is that?" she asks, fascinated.

"What? Oh you're not-" Carol hesitated, trying to find the words. "Well, it's a light-tempered air beast, these things are hard to classify, since the light mutates them so heavily. I think there are broad categories for them, but I don't really know them."

Okay. Reasonable. She will not interrupt these people at their work to demand a thorough grounding in the theory of air beasts.

...she will not interrupt these people at their work to demand a thorough grounding in the theory of air beasts. Won't! Will not!

After a second or two of internal struggle, she nods carefully.

"You should ask Maria about it, she knows tons." Carol says.

"Alright then, let's go, I still have to show you the engine, the guns, the mess hall..." The captain trails off.

Mental note: go to Maria with your air beast theory questions.

"Okay. Thanks."

'Engine room', it turns out, is a shockingly poor description for the area basking in the brilliant purple light of the single large hole on the far side of the wall. The light is brilliant enough to be difficult to look at. A lanky old man with a mustache like a walrus and an expression like an angry walrus shuts the cover on the hole, revealing the rest of the room. The floor is a mess of iridescent purple rocks mostly in barrels, the pipes from the corridors converge here, into the far wall. There are an assortment of dials scattered haphazardly around the room and a panel of buttons next to the hole.

"Hullo." The man wheezes in what could charitably be referred to as the tattered remnants of a voice.

Ellen attempts a smile. "Um, hello."

Is this what engine rooms are supposed to look like? She feels, looking at it, like it is not. What does she know, though, she woke up in a rock with no memories.

"Ellen, this is James Archibald, our head engineer, James, this is Ellen, our new crew mate, the one we found her in the stone, I'm just showing her around. Ellen, here's where the engine is controlled and fueled." The captain says. "You can ask James here anything you want to know about how this ship runs, he knows it in and out." He beckons Ellen away from the engine. "C'mon, I'll show you the cannons."

Right, cannons. Those are for... shooting things? What is there to shoot? Air beasts? Other vessels? Those both seem like such concerning answers.

She follows, anyway. It is not up to her how concerning the universe turns out to be.

The gunnery deck one level above is the largest room on the ship, open from side to side. It's pristine, nothing out of place, all the ordinance carefully packed in crates and stacked on shelves. One of the walls has lockers, along with a warning next to it:

'ONLY FOR EMERGENCIES!' The sign reads.

The brass cannons are mounted on swivels, with grips and reticules to allow one to aim. Maria is sitting at a desk, tools in hand, the shell in front of her half covered in strange curving lines. Upon closer inspection the rest of the shells on the shelves have similar markings.

"You've met Maria, our gunnery officer." Maria doesn't lift her head at the introduction.

"...what's only for emergencies?" she asks, studying the sign and the lockers.

"The rifles." Maria says.

...what sort of emergency is best solved by rifles? Nothing good comes to mind. "Okay," she says, disquieted.

"Y'don't want the crew playing with them, now do we?" The captain smiles. A soft whine can be heard outside, Maria turns her head, getting up from the desk, leaving the engraving on the shell unfinished.

"What is it?" He asks. Maria, in lieu of answering, takes hold of the controls of one of the cannons. "Company." She says, before taking careful aim. An alarm blares while red lights blink over the doors. A loud, metallic female voice echoes through the ship: "Battle stations everyone!" Carol, by the sounds of it.

Maria fires twice in quick succession, the sound is low and bassy, two brilliant purple streaks paint the sky out the window. Ellen can see the serpent from before, speeding towards the ship, it dodges into the second shot, slowing it down in a spray of viscera.

"Go to the crew quarters!" The captain yells at Ellen before running out of the room.

—well fuck.

She goes to the crew quarters, doing her best not to fall over or get in anyone's way. Navigating the vessel's narrow and unfamiliar corridors is a daunting task, but she turns out to be all right at it if she focuses. These are not ideal conditions under which to focus, but, you know, could be worse.

A couple of people push past Ellen to get to the gunner's deck. The bassy rumble of the cannons fills the hallway and rattles teeth as Ellen makes her way to the crew quarters. 

The alarm is still blaring, louder here, probably to wake up the crew. There's a porthole in this room and the battle raging outside is visible from here.

Wow that's really loud. She was told to stay here, though, so here she'll stay.

...the ineffable sensation of bees itches slightly in the back of her mind. She ignores it in favour of staring out the porthole; the middle of a battle with a loud alarm blaring is not the ideal time to sort out her mysterious bee feelings. Perhaps the ideal time will never come, but if so, she is going to pick a non-ideal time that is later than now.

The long serpent-like creature approaches the ship, slowed down by it's need to dodge incoming projectiles. It seems to be having quite a hard time of this, as while many of the shots veer wildly of course, occasionally a purple streak will be perfectly timed to force the creature to move awkwardly out of the way. In these moments it becomes easier to hit, meaning it has to retreat a bit to regain momentum.

Now that it is closer, Ellen can more easily make out the creature. There are eyes scattered haphazardly over it's long body, it has limbs of varying sizes and positions emerging at strange angles. It has what appear to be horns around its midsection. 

Oh wow what a creature. What's it like to be that shape? What's it like to see like that, to move like that? What's it like to fly?

... that's not a normal response to looking at one of those, is it.

Whatever motivates it, or mechanically propels it onward, are both unknown. It dances through the open air, weaves between bright purple streaks, it makes little headway until something shifts in its demeanor. It dashes towards the vessel, heedless of the impacts and explosions. It's mouth, Ellen can see, is arranged lengthwise on the creature, coiling around it twice, making it look like some kind of eldritch zipper. A high pitched whine is heard as it roars.

It's headed straight towards Ellen, and doesn't seem keen on slowing down.

—her first instinct is that it's literally coming for her in particular, and from there her mind skips straight to wondering how fast she can cast herself free of this vessel to draw it away, the clear and obvious solution to the problem in front of her. But that's insane, right, to think that it's coming for her rather than coming for everyone. That's an insane thought and an insane response to it.

The creature's desperate charge is still pretty alarming, though, and her options for dealing with it are pretty limited, so fine, okay, now is the time to consult her ineffable bee sensations. O apian mystery, what have you got to contribute to this situation? Anything that will turn that beast away?

The first thing it offers her is the knowledge of how to collect nectar and pollen from a flower by giving it a magical kiss.

Then the knowledge of how to process what she collects into honeycomb.

Then, how to add someone to her hive, for which the most prominent method is also a magical kiss, though there are others.

Then, how to establish her hive base, a permanent and irrevocable claiming of a certain area as her own. This room is too small; she needs something bigger, for the hive base to fit.

The alarms are still blaring and the enormous beast is coming to eat them all with its terrifying spiral of a face and Ellen is BEDEVILED by MAGICAL FLOWER KISSES.

She stands at a sort of mental crossroads between three options. One is a fragment of another life, an artist of exceptional talent and hard-won skill. One is a magical pot that can cook meals of surpassing quality with magical effects. And the last is a more elusive magical ability, harder to understand—something about augmenting items and materials by combining them together into a result that's greater than the sum of its parts, though not necessarily by much.

Under other circumstances she'd jump at the chance to experience another life. She thirsts instinctively for talents and memories of all kinds.

However, art seems like it will not help her survive the next ten seconds. Honestly none of this will help her survive the next ten seconds, but her options are limited, so she's going to seize that third thing as hard as she can and hope something useful ensues. Something more useful than flower kisses and frying pans.

The power solidifies, crystallizing in her mind and descending out of its place in the three-way path; another power sprouts up in its place. Another arcane and elusive one, this time about investing part of herself into an object to become able to watch over it from a distance.

It's not a frying pan, so she'll take it.

Instead of crystallizing, it just hangs there, waiting patiently to be filled up with—something—

Yep, okay. The bee powers have nothing to contribute to this situation.

How's Spiral Face Thing doing?

Approaching at unsafe speeds. A couple more shots hit it, but it's not enough to cause it to deviate off it's spitefully chosen course. Ellen has maybe a second or two before impact.

Fuck.

She dives away from the porthole and tries to shelter behind the nearest bunk.

The serpent hits the vessel with a meteoric crash, the whole vessel tilts with the impact. Out of sight glass shatters and metal bends, the entire wall facing the outside now concave. Some of the creature's teeth, fangs, incisors and molars, are peaking in through the wall. Metal groans as the hull starts giving way under the force of it's bite.

A flash of inspiration lands.

The power she chose after the other one crystallized is still 'empty' but she feels like she could use it if she had to. Therefore, if—

Yes, it turns out, she can choose a different power before crystallizing her current one.

She is now holding a heavy cast iron pot in both hands and bashing at the creature's teeth with it.

Ellen repeatedly brings down the heavy pot on the teeth, which crack under the impacts. What looks like blood comes out from the broken teeth, the serpent shudders as Ellen does this. As it does, the mangled tooth that Ellen was working on falls off. The strugles of the beast grow weaker, whether due to Ellen's efforts or it succumbing to its wounds is difficult to say.

She's going to keep hitting it with this pot until it stops moving, regardless.

Ellen knocks off a few more of the monstrous molars off before it stops moving. Save for a few errant twitches, it appears to be dead. 

Great. Okay.

...how does she explain where she got the pot?

Good question! Her bee powers have no answer.

Useless fucking flower-kissing bullshit.

... that's not fair, it did give her a weapon, sort of.

Hesitantly, she tries swapping back to the other power.

The pot vanishes back to wherever it came from.

Now she has no way to explain what she smashed those teeth with, but that's fine, she can plead innocence. Or demonstrate her ability to conjure kitchen equipment from thin air, but that seems like a drastic measure.

The alarm stopped blaring with the impact, with the beast's body blocking the only porthole a quiet gloom falls upon the crew quarters, only the flickering red lights above the doors to provide illumination. Without all the loud noises to drown them out, the voices and footsteps of the crew are audible, some of which are probably approaching Ellen.

...she sits on the floor, next to the bunk where she was trying to shelter. It isn't difficult at all to act like someone stunned by the danger and violence of the encounter. It was dangerous and violent and she's stunned by it.

A voice approaches. "...is not normal, but it's difficult to establish a baseline when every beast the light touches-" Maria stops at the threshold of the door. "Ah." She says, her voice lacking emotion or surprise.

"What?" The captain says. "What is it, what-?" He pushes past his gunnery officer, only to stare stunned at the extent of the damage.

"That's going to be expensive to repair." She walks towards Ellen. "Are you hurt?"

She shakes her head slowly. "What... was that thing? I thought it was going to kill us all."

"A beast heavily mutated by the light above. The light gives creatures life that their bodies cannot adequately hold, and change as a result. There is little consistency between creatures, but a suicidal charge such as what killed this one is out of the ordinary."

Maybe it really was coming for Ellen specifically. What a comforting thought that isn't.

"Do you know what—" no, not 'what it was looking for'— "what drove it to that extreme?"

"Hm." She pauses to think. "It's difficult to say." She grabs a broken fang, held together by the flesh underneath. "See, the light comes from beings up high. It's... believed that the changes their light makes are purposeful." She pushes at shards of enamel with her fingers, parting flesh, closely inspecting the foul-smelling viscera. "I'm unsure. Though it's clear that not every light induced mutation is totally random."

The captain leaves the room, Ellen can hear him bark orders.

"Its mouth made a spiral all the way around it. That can't be how creatures are normally arranged, right? It's almost more like—a weapon than a living thing."

"Indeed, it's not a reasonable feature on a normal animal, neither are its excess of eyes and limbs. Light-tempering making a creature more deadly is fairly common to see, but I think there's a selection bias. The kind of light-tempered creatures we do see mostly fly because if they didn't they'd just drift towards the abyss and be picked up by the supplicants." She tosses the shattered fang aside.
"What I'm trying to say is that this serpent resembling a living weapon isn't that unusual."

"So you're saying that it's not that they can all fly, but that the ones that can't fly fall out of the sky and die? Have you seen any falling, or had pieces of them come up from below?"

"Mm, no no, they don't fall, per se, gravity isn't consistently present in the open air enough for that to be the reason they all perish. Rather, anything that can't change its trajectory in midair that makes its way below the ceiling will be moving towards the abyss. At that point they are easy prey for anything that can fly or that reaches up from the abyss."

"Oh, that's fascinating. I didn't realize that falling wasn't consistent here."

"A scarcity of gravity is a persistent problem around the Constancy. Though, if it were omnipresent everything above would fall into the abyss, which would certainly be a different, more cataclysmic problem."

"Yes, I for one am glad to not currently be falling into the abyss."

"The feeling is mutual." She leans over towards Ellen, tugs on the back of her collar. "Hm, are there any identifying marks on your clothes? Tags? Something in your pockets perhaps?"

"I'm not sure; I haven't looked."

The back of her collar doesn't have any obvious tags; neither do the side seams of her shirt, when she untucks it to check.

She leans back, then stares at Ellen for a few seconds. "There are people who care about what is found in the supplicant stones, they pay for any records people keep of what they find, when and where. They are very meticulous about keeping accurate records." She looks towards the dead beast, now leaking red and magenta fluids on the deck.

"I've worked there myself, poured over those records to search for discrepancies and human error. Which is why I can tell you that you are the fourth person to be extracted out of one of those stones."

"...oh? What, um, what were the other ones like?"

"You can ask me about the first and third one some other time." She gets up. "But the second one. The second one is her majesty, our Empress in Veils." She moves to leave, but lingers at the door. "I wonder what the two of you might have in common."

"I don't think I'd make a very good empress. It sounds like a demanding job." She wants to ask what Maria meant about the two of them having things in common, but it sounded so portentous that she's afraid to inquire further.

"It takes a special kind of person to manage the entire Constancy. Come, there's work to be done." She leaves the room.

She follows.

The interior of the ship is in much better condition than the rest of the vessel. Furniture in passing rooms are tipped over and shelves have spilled their contents on the floor, crew in those rooms nod to Maria as they clean up the mess. Ellen is led to an airlock, the walls are lined with numbered lockers, Maria pops one open, pulls out a thick full body suit from it, she hands it to Ellen. "Here, put it on, then the helmet." She points to a head-encompassing helmet with a respirator and glass visor tinted the same color as the windows in this place. "This suit will you from the light, and the helmet has a filter in case of airborne toxins or particulates."

She nods seriously and suits up, careful to examine the structure and fastenings of the suit so she doesn't miss anything important.

Ellen's breath is loud in the suit, Maria grabs two cables, clips one end of both to Ellen's suit. "These are your lifelines, do not unclip them from your suit unless you are in the airlock. One of these should be clipped to the vessel at all times, you have two so you can remain attached to the ship when you are swapping rails. Grab that." She points to one of the loops of cloth hanging from the ceiling, which she takes hold of before pressing the button that opens the airlock. "Any questions?"

She grabs the loop when told, and instinctively tries to breathe more quietly. At 'any questions?' she shakes her head. The situation as presented so far seems well enough explained. Unless—she hesitates a moment, reluctant to contradict the answer she's already given, before tentatively inquiring, "What are we going to be doing out there?"

The heavy door hisses as Maria answers. "We'll be prying the beast off of the ship as best we can, while securing the carcass to ensure it doesn't float off. After that we'll be hauling it into the cargo bay for dissection, the captain and I have an interest in the anatomy of these beasts." Maria, clad in a matching suit, clips one of her loops to a sturdy looking metal bar and motions for Ellen to do the same, then carefully exits the vessel.

Right. She can do that.

She follows along, paying close attention to what Maria is doing and how.

Maria peaks out the door with her second loop, then unclips the first one, she helps Ellen do the same, then exits out of sight. Upon inspection it seems that she clipped the two of them on a long railing on the hull.

Sensible. Ellen follows after her. Is maneuvering out here going to be difficult? She expects it will be, what with the safety lines. You don't need safety lines for things that are easy.

There's no gravity, and the hull of the ship seems to be lined with these rails, such that crew can navigate the exterior without having to worry about... floating off. It's not exactly hard, it's just a matter of reaching the end of a rail, clipping oneself to this new rail and unclipping from the last. The most difficult thing that Ellen needs to deal with as Maria leads her is coping with the breathtaking openness of the space around her.

The openness is a little disconcerting, but she adjusts. Clip the new rail, unclip the last, haul herself along the rail, repeat.

The shallow horizon of the vessel gives way to the slain body of the creature. The wounds it has sustained are deep, but in rigor mortis it remains anchored to the hull by its teeth. Maria pops open a panel, retrieving a couple of prybars, she hands one to Ellen. "Try not to lose it."

Many of its eyes are missing, damaged or burst. They look oddly human from up close, but given their haphazard arrangement its a wonder how they were supposed to make sense of the visual information they provide.

From the looks of it some of the rails have been broken, one could theoretically become unhooked if they're not careful.

As soon as she sees a broken rail, she points it out to Maria. "How bad is that? Should we be repairing it first before we work on the creature?"

"No, it needs to be removed before proper repairs can be made, just be careful." She moves towards the carcass. "We're going to pry it's teeth out, and secure the body with wires as it comes loose."

"All right."

She can pry things, she's pretty sure. Prying things is not difficult. She will pry the creature teeth.

The broken rails disrupt straightforward paths, forcing the two to take circuitous routes to navigate the bulk of the corpse. Prying it off is tedious work, a matter of hooking onto a tooth and applying a little more force than one thinks necessary. The teeth are made from hard bone and enamel, so it's a good thing that the rest of the monster is held together by flexible cartilage, otherwise Ellen would have to break bone each time she were to pry a tooth off due to how much she has to deform the mouth to do so. Maria directs Ellen tooth to tooth, fang to fang while she alternates between doing the same and tying it to the railings via sturdy looking rope.

Through the work, it's hard to not peak at the horizon, the impossibly distant geology, and the abyss below. Over the course of, frankly, too many miles, the features of the horizon are obscured by the atmosphere itself, wreathing them in the blue tint reserved for mountains seen in the distance. In that distance, many times further away than the serpent was, does Ellen spot movement, down below.

Maria makes navigating the gravityless environment look easy, she seems to always know how and when to move from one position to the next. After a couple of hours it has completely been detached from the ship. At this point Maria leaves and comes back with a couple of crew members to assist. She unties ropes, directs one of the three of them to hold ropes in place so she can tie it closer to the cargo hold, then quickly and efficiently maneuvers to secure the beast to a different railing. Through this method the four inch the thing closer and closer to the cargo hold and it's not long until they are pulling the serpentine thing into the maw of the vessel. It closes, and gravity reasserts itself upon Ellen for the first time in hours.

It's a fascinating process—tedious and effortful, but fascinating all the same. She develops her tooth-prying technique over the course of those hours, first gamely applying as much force as it takes each time, then gradually learning how to place her pry-bar more and more effectively until she feels like a bona fide expert in getting just the right leverage to extract tooth from hull with a minimum of fuss. There are really a lot of teeth on this creature. An absurd and somewhat disturbing number of teeth.

Is movement in the abyss the sort of thing one comments on, normally? Maybe she'll just focus on her tooth-prying and not say anything about it. That seems socially if not abyssally safest.

When gravity resumes, she stumbles, nearly catches herself, then overcorrects and falls on her ass with an 'oof' and a wry chuckle.

"Ah, I should've given you more warning." Maria says. The lack of emotion in her voice makes it difficult to tell whether or not she's actually remorseful, but she helps Ellen up all the same. "Now to pry it apart for secrets, would you like to watch?"

"YES," she says, much too enthusiastically, to her immediate regret. An embarrassed cough follows.

"Ah, enthusiasm is good!" The captain says, voice slightly distorted by the protective suit he wears, similar to the ones Maria and Ellen wear. He carries a case that he deposits upon a small metal table. "We're on our way to Riotinto to get repairs." He opens the clinking case, revealing an intimidating amount of shiny, sharp objects. The captain frowns. "Or at least enough for a patchwork job to tide us over until we can make our way to Inocencia."

Ellen is slightly distracted from their itinerary by trying to guess how all these objects apply to the situation at hand. Are they going to let her dissect the horrible beast? Probably not. Probably that job is reserved for people who have any idea what they're doing. She wants to dissect the horrible beast though. It's so fascinatingly horrible.

There appear to be scalpels of various sizes, lengths and shapes; one has a curious hook shape about it. A bonesaw, syringes, vials, forceps, tweezers, some sort of small metal paddle, scissors, a magnifying glass, a whole bunch of replacement blades for the scalpels, thin rods with bends in them and more, though it's difficult to tell what else is in there.

"Alright then." The captain said, knife in hand. "Shall we?"

"I want to find out what's inside the creature!"

She's nearly certain she should have said a different thing, but the thing she said is this. Oh well.

"Ha! That's the spirit." Captain Giles rummages around in the case, pulling out a large knife, hooked inwards. "The light from above, is, in a sense, life. Under that light, wounds close and plants grow, and if that's all it did, then all would be fine and dandy. But the light, the light is indiscriminate." He holds the knife handle first to Ellen. "Here, take it, I'll show you how this works."

She takes the knife, doing her best to stifle what she suspects is an expression of unwarranted glee, and pays close attention.

The pale skin is shiny and rubbery, between distant patches of purple scales, and littered with stretch marks. The eyes are the more prominent feature, but it's only now in the gloom of the cargo bay that a peculiar quality of the wounds is revealed: That they seem to glow ever so slightly with inner light.

"You want to start with a shallow incision. You are an explorer, and must act cautiously. You do not know how thick the skin is, what organs are where, whether or not anything is at high pressure. Cut, then cut in the same place a little deeper, and so on until you have just barely pierced skin."

She nods thoughtfully, and follows this procedure. A tiny shallow cut, barely a cut at all; and then a little more, and a little more...

"The light won't restrict itself to merely touching wounds, maladies, or other deficiencies. It seizes everything." Under careful, repeated cuts, the skin and fat parts to give way to the viscera of organs. The aggressively vibrant reds, purples and oranges that paint the surface make it harder to make out individual parts. "A body with more life than it knows what to do with will grow to accommodate it. And once it has done so there is no turning back, that is it's new baseline, and leaving the vitality of the environment high above would kill it. Normally anyway."

He pauses, to survey the incision, and its contents. Using two sets of tweezers, he carefully picks out a strand of gore, holding the section between them taut. "Sever this, carefully."

He said to be careful, so she's careful. She's not quite sure what to be careful about, exactly, so she settles for just being very precise with the knife, holding it firmly but with caution, feeling out the level of resistance the strand of gore has to offer and only applying as much force as necessary to get through it.

It parts cleanly, it's a tube, like a vein. But the substance inside is thick, viscous, crystal clear and glowing. Something holds it together, such that when the pressure of the tweezers eases, the droplet is pulled back in to its vein. "Aha, yes, look at this!" When the glowing drop is pulled back in, the light it emits is focused, into a spot of light that grows brighter and smaller, illuminating a patch as big as the width of the tube itself. The organs seem to ripple when Giles points at them with it.

"—is that... the light? Is it dangerous?"

"Yes, and yes!" He says cheerfully.

"Your suit will protect you." Maria says. "The light-tempered have few ways to categorize them, few broad commonalities between them, this is one of them." Maria passes the captain a couple of clamps, which he uses to force the light-veins shut, then an opaque black syringe.

She continues. "Since they die outside of the light, they need some way to carry it with them," Giles fills the syringe with the vitreous fluid, with some effort, then sets it aside. "such as a system of veins lined with a reflective surface such as these." She pauses to think. "I suppose it would be more accurate to say that those that survive coming down are ones that have some method of keeping light in their system."

"I see. Yes, that makes sense."

"A creature like this will have one or more nodes where the light becomes trapped, and is then released slowly throughout its body. Many of the eyes have probably been repurposed to catch the light." Maria says. The captain examines the body of the serpentine beast, moving away from the incision made at its midsection. Mismatched eyes glare balefully at the walls, the mouth is so long it almost looks like a wound, like a knife was dragged lengthwise across its skin and teeth grew instead of scar tissue.

He turns to Ellen. "Well Lass, the point of this little bit of butchery is exploration, what bit are you curious about?"

"...that vein didn't leak any light until we cut it. I want to see how they release their light normally. There could be transparent parts, or... the fluid was thick enough that it probably wouldn't leak much if there was an outright break in the vein, if it was small enough..." She studies the area around the vein, trying to trace where it goes and detect any such apparatus.

The vein in question quickly disappears between lumps of viscera, both sides of the severed vein, she'll have to dig in there to some extent if she wants to trace it.

"Don't be afraid to get in there!" The captain says, as he examines what could generously be called the head.

Well, all right, if she's supposed to, then sure. She goes digging.

Tracing one of the ends of the light vein deeper into the corpse, sticking her hand between slimy sacks of viscera. The gentle pressure of the squelching organs is the only protest the body offers to her intrusion.

There is a complexity to the texture, there seems to be little to no connective tissue to get in the way of Ellen's intrusion. Presumably everything she feels through the suit had some biological function in life, but the labyrinth of intestines and cartilage do not immediately yield any of their secrets.

Ellen has to bend over slightly to push her elbow into the incision, but at last she feels something: the vein leads to a small lump, hard but with a little give. Several other veins connect to it.

Intriguing!

If she wants a better look she's going to have to get all those other bits out of the way. She feels around to get a better sense of the layout and then pulls back to start planning an efficient set of cuts.

The lump is attached to one of the surrounding organs, it's also conveniently close to the skin facing upwards, so it could be accessed without having to roll the corpse over or too much digging.

Maria takes hold of the other end of the light-vein, freeing Ellen's other hand to make the extraction less awkward. Her arm slips out coated in vaguely iridescent blood.

"Did you find anything?" She asks.

"Well, I found this. I'm not sure if it's anything yet." She cuts delicately down to the lump, freeing it a bit at a time, ready to stop and reevaluate if it turns out to glow.

Maria looks over Ellen's shoulder as she carves a careful and deliberate path to the lump. Maria holds the skin apart as Ellen digs through proto-intestine, parting them to reveal the smooth, light grey nodule. It is attached to the organ underneath; something bean-shaped, like a kidney, only wrong. The lump almost looks like a tumor, like it doesn't belong.

"Ah, I see, lucky." María says. "This is probably where it stores its light. These are good for capturing and releasing light when needed, they're quite valuable. They keep as long as you keep them full with some light. What do you want to do with it?"

"I was looking for where the vein went to see how it released its light, since it probably doesn't cut holes in its own veins in the ordinary course of things. Probably." This seems like the right degree of doubt to have about any theory of how these creatures work. "I guess I found it." She studies its position and attachment. "How fragile is it? If it's valuable then I should cut it out, but not carelessly."

"Organs like these tend to be fairly resilient." She squeezes it gently. "You'd have to take a hammer to this one to break it, though cutting the skin might damage the reflective membrane some use to keep the light in. If you want to cut it out then the prudent thing to do would be to clamp down the branches first, to keep errant light from escaping."

She gives it a tug. "I expect it might have tiny openings to feed this organ it is attached to, so you'll want to be generous with the cut, give yourself a wide margin of error." She traces a circle about half an inch wider than the lump itself. "That's the cut that I advise, if you want to extract this one. I expect that this is not the only one, to maintain a creature this large."

She nods slowly. "Right then. Let's see if I can get it, and then see how many more I can find."

Clamp down the branches, give it a good margin of error, and cut. Simple. She hasn't consciously noticed until now how right this feels. Has she held a knife like this before? To what end? If only she could remember...

But she shouldn't get distracted. She focuses, prepares, and makes the appropriate incisions.

Maria presents the tools and a shallow metal bowl almost before Ellen has a chance to want them. The specimen is cut out with expert precision and deposited in the metal bowl. The gunnery officer gently sets it down on the metal cart beside them.

The incision has left a hole in the organ it rested on. Muscular, with chambers, perhaps a heart?

And Ellen smiles in quiet triumph, and then turns back to the creature. Interesting that it would have a heart here, or heart-like organ—but then, the light did seem associated with a fluid... She can't resist peeking into the organ, trying to figure out what it was meant to pump.

The inside is smooth, slick with the same iridescent fluid that coats the rest of the beast's insides. Probably blood, but given the colors involved there's at least a little bit of doubt cast on that theory. Three chambers, two on the sides and one central one, where the blood would intermingle. Several wide blood vessels branch out and disappear into a sea of iridescent gore.

Well that's fascinating but ultimately a distraction. She follows the light-veins instead, cutting where necessary to expose them. She never so much as nicks one. Why do her hands feel so confident at this grisly task? No matter; she has work to do.

These light veins are disimilar to blood vessels, in that they are far less prone to branching. Each vein seems to cleanly lead to another nodule. At some point the captain leaves the room to tend to some errand, and Ellen continues her work. Maria remains, silently and unobtrusively making the tools she needs available in her peripheral vision, and taking any that she's down with. Nodule after nodule find themselves piling in the bowl, and the two of them need to dig deeper to find more.

Hours pass as incisions criss-cross their way up the beast. Ellen counts five "hearts" of various sizes, and what appear to be intestines snake their way through the whole creature. These intestines lead straight to the mouth, several times. It's almost like the mouth is several mouths side by side. Either there is more than one digestive track or there are several forks in it that Ellen hasn't found yet.

The hearts though, unless they pumped in perfect harmony, it would have severe blood pressure problems. And given the number of burst capillaries she finds, that's probably the case. So much of the blood seems to be outside where it's supposed to be.

As she approaches the head, she finds something strange. Threaded through a strand of what might be a nerve. Copper wire.

"Curious..."

She investigates. Studies how the wire is integrated with the nerve, and what structure it has, whether it's a single strand or many separate threads, how smooth or lumpy it is, how thin or thick. She can cut deeper if she has to, to follow it and find more.

A single strand, jacketed by the wire like a rubber coating and its length is smooth and even. Tracing it to its origin requires more cutting, leading up to the end of the creature. 

The beast's "head", for lack of a better thing to call it, is saturated with eyeballs, and here the beast has a skull rather than some assortment of cartilage. The wired nerve enters the skull through a small hole, making further progress difficult.

"Hmmm..."

Her attention is thoroughly caught. She examines the rest of the skull, looking for more navigable openings.

The skull has a number of holes, spaced around its surface, resembling eye sockets. Each one has an optic nerve coming out of it and connecting to an eyeball. There's a bit of distance between each hole and the eye it leads to, that, along with the fact that the hole is obviously too wide for the nerve itself makes it seem like the eyes have popped out of their orbits. The eye sockets are wide enough that Ellen might be able to shove her hand in if the path were cleared, but it would be a tight fit. 

More cutting will have to be done, to reveal more of the skull, or it's contents.

She picks the nearest eye socket to the wire, and starts excavating. She doesn't know if the eyes are valuable or interesting, so she tries not to destroy them while she cuts them away.

As soon as Ellen tries to carefully cut the first stretched out optic nerve that she sees the glint of something metallic, and sure enough, there are copper wires embedded here too. 

Testing another eye will yield the same result.

"...do we know why the optic nerves have copper wire in them?"

Up until this point the gunner had remained silent and out of the way, providing assistance when needed without interrupting or getting in the way. Over the last few hours it could almost be easy to forget she was even there.

A few seconds of silence makes it seem like she's not going to break it, until she says: "It's not unheard of for these creatures to have metal in them. The light can bring life to anything, but if it did so here, I would expect the shape of the metal to be erratic and distorted, instead it appears to be machined, artificial. I've never seen anything like it."

"And it's integrated, like it grew there, or was placed by really alarmingly impressive surgery..."

She follows the wire that started all this, in the opposite direction, away from the skull. Can she trace it far enough to find out if there's an eye at the other end?

"Impressive, yes, but perhaps not as impressive as you might expect. Light can and usually does erase scars, perhaps they devised some technique of growing or sealing the nerve around the wire."

It takes more digging, but yes, the original wire leads to another eye.

"Is wire like this useful, should we be salvaging it?"

"In poor and neglected areas telephone lines can be difficult to keep operational due to copper thieves stealing the wires. The metal has value, but I'm more interested in divining their purpose in this corpse."

"As far as I can tell, it's specifically in the optic nerve. At any rate I haven't found it in any others yet. Hmm, let's see..." She cuts into the eye at the far end of this specific wire, to see how the wire interfaces with it.

A small, very small black disk, with a number of copper pins is embedded into some sort of thin metallic membrane woven into the retina. It takes careful and methodical peeling to get a good look at it, its silvery, with an odd texture, the membrane is spotted with circular depressions in a regular pattern.

"...This looks... familiar," she muses. "A little. It feels like I should know what it means, but I don't."

The device offers no explanation, sitting quietly between tweezer prongs.

Equally silent is Ellen's assistant, who has nothing to add to this remark. The lightbulbs buzz softly overhead, and blood drips onto the metal floor.

She wants a closer look. She has a very irritating just-on-the-tip-of-my-tongue feeling about what the right tool is for getting a closer look. She tries leaning in and squinting but that is just not close enough. Eventually she just does her best to separate the metal and—the black stuff, what's the word—from the rest of the eye without damaging them so she can maybe study their structure later, and then moves back to the skull to snip a bunch of wires and clear out enough eyeballs to make a foray into the socket. What does the hub of all this copper look like? Let's find out.

A magnifying glass enters Ellen's peripheral vision.

"Oh, of course! Thank you." She picks up one of the eyeballs she just deforested and opens it up the same way she did with the other one—is it the same structure inside? If so, now she has a magnifying glass and she can take a proper squint at it.

They do. The metallic membranes appear to be delicate and woven between the back layers of the eye. Extracting it without damaging it is a matter of carefully cutting a circle around it, then peeling the back of the eye off and sever some tiny nerves that go through equally small nerves going through equally tiny holes in the silvery surface. Its a tedious and annoying process, but Ellen manages to gently peel off the metal without breaking it. The tiny black disk it is connected to comes off with a bit of wiggling. The magnifying glass reveals a complex structure of thin lines running through the membrane, spreading radially from the center, leading to where the little black disk was connected to it.

"It's clearly related to vision somehow," she muses. "But most creatures don't have stuff like this in their eyes, I'm fairly sure. So what does it do? Hmmm..."

She carefully sets down the freed membrane and takes up her tools of skull excavation once more.