In the hours following her declaration of their path forward, the mortal tried commendably to obey Kaido’s edict of no disturbances, sitting silently as hour after hour rolls by, drifting through the void.
In the heat of the moment, the cultivator did not internalize the full implications of the fact that they’re incapable of leaping between stars, that until another ship comes for them to travel alongside they’re trapped at this near-empty jump beacon for an indeterminate amount of time.
Time continues on, the clock ticks over past a seemingly random number, but Kaido’s own internal clock says is the normal time most lights would be shut off for an artificial night.
The mortal also keeps to the routine, reaching up without a word, she flips a switch, shutting off the light and plunging the cabin of the craft into near total darkness, lit only by the starlight and the glow of the indicator lights and readout screen.
Kaido does not move from her meditative crosslegged pose high on the wall, knees wedged between the ribs of the ship’s structure to keep from undignified drifting as the mortal unclips herself, floats over to a wall mounted locker, opens it, and pulls out a large blanket of coarse looking cloth.
It’s clear from how she moves that the near-mortal is unused or completely new to movement in the absence of gravity, struggling to maneuver the cloth around herself, then equally struggling to find a comfortable way to sleep, all while staunchly refusing to acknowledge Kaido’s existence.
Eventually she manages to half wedge herself into the still open wall locker and bundle the blankets in such a way that she’s unlikely to drift in her sleep, turned to be facing the stars and thus her back to the cultivator.
A few seconds later she feels the intent of the mortal settle on her, a complicated mixture of emotions that Kaido would struggle to parse if she were so inclined.
“...You want some blanket?” The near-mortal asks. “I’ve only got the one, but you’ve got the sword and it’s big enough to split.”
Kaido takes another glance at the course looking grey cloth, imagining the feel of it in her hands and on her skin, then scowls.
“No.” She refutes. “I am beyond the frivolity of the discomforts that such… cloth could shield me from. By the time I need aid from cold it will be no help.”
The near-mortal says nothing, but the cultivator feels her attention drift away and toward whatever it is her ilk thinks about when they’re not interacting with her.
Adjusting herself slightly, Kaido looks at her own garments and feels a wave of disgust rise within as the sight brings all the sensations she’d been ignoring to the fore. The slick and oily sensation of the almost inert poison residue from the scrapyard, a mixture that mingles and swirls with blood, both hers and others, splattered across the formerly white silk and her own skin. The near microscopic threads of the torn silk brushing against her skin from the bullet holes and tears, the hard places where it had been melted and burned, and the innumerable other ways her clothing and skin make her want to rip off both and burn.
Then the crowded shouts of her mind are forced to silence with sheer will and the cultivator returns to slow breaths before staring straight ahead from the wall to the floor.
She’s been trained to move and fight in the absence of gravity, just as she’d been trained to fight on the ground, but she’d not been trained on how to live in it. So despite the fact that she needs at least another two hours of sleep to recover her energy fully she’s unable to force her mind to quiet.
It’s not the only reason.
Kaido keeps her breathing slow and steady as the memory of the Traitor’s voice and the coiling black smoke wrapping around her station causes her core to flare in power with the fuel of raw hate. A hate the cultivator does not suppress, rather she fosters it, tempers the powerful but unrefined emotion into a thing she can incorporate into herself. Binding these emotions to the structure of her being so that every moment spent here stewing in this violent and explosive rage can be called upon at any time forward, so that she can push through any limit or obstacle keeping her from ripping the Traitor’s throat out with her bare hands.
But the hours continue to roll on, the leftmost digit on the clock on the dashboard clicking over three times, and she finds her emotions exhausted, left to sit with numb patience for sleep to come, reviewing her memories over and over in the dark and quiet.
And it is very quiet.
Kaido shifts, the cloth brushing against cloth sounding louder than a gunshot.
Not just in sound, though it’s almost quieter here than in her meditation chambers if not for the hum of electronics, but in Qi, as there is such a lack it almost feels like she’s lost the sense entirely.
Ever since she finished foundation establishment she’d honed her Qi sense to the limits of her ability and beyond, such that in exam she could surpass less skilled practitioners a stage higher. As a consequence she is intimately familiar with the landscape of Qi in a place.
Everywhere, everyone, and everything has some small amount of Qi, all things are made containing a unique mixture that blends and changes with the history experienced.
But the void has no substance, its very nature is the lack of being.
The souls of mortals are dim, but when a cultivator is burning Qi in exertion she could detect them almost from on the other side of her sect, a constantly shifting aurora of unique histories and passions singing over the background like distant music.
Now there’s silence.
Kaido blinks as she’s brought out of her half-asleep musing by a harsh but quiet noise from the front of the cabin.
It’s a sniffle, coming from the bundle of coarse cloth the mortal is bundled within, a disgusting noise followed by another, even louder, and a shaky exhale.
It’s disgusting, the cultivator's inhumanly perfect senses allowing her to faintly hear the oozing of those… fluids as they exit the mortal’s body. Made a thousandfold worse with every snort.
Minutes tick by, and Kaido feels herself gag slightly at every chunky squelching noise that erupts every few seconds.
She wants it to stop, she wants to scream at the mortal, ordering her to desist in this disgusting display.
But she doesn't, the cultivator just watches the blanket shift, and when the movement knocks loose a few droplets of water, she tracks them with her eyes as they wobble into perfect orbs and float slowly across the cabin, sparkling in the dim starlight.
She watches one until the droplet hits the opposite wall and attaches through surface tension, then looks back at the blanket containing the mortal.
She’s stopped making noises now, at least loud ones, though her blanket is still shaking slightly.
Watching across the cabin, Kaido stares at the bundle for a second longer, watching the mortal shake in silence.
Then turns her head away to face forward.
_____
The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.
_-__-_
–––––
Slowly drifting through the center of the cabin, Lian takes another bite of her cold block of nutrient mash and struggles to figure out how to drink water from an open top metal thermos. The water naturally forms a bubble of surface tension at the rim if she opens it right, but it’s taking some practice to not break the fragile film as she tries to drink. If she does it wrong the water either tries to escape and float around in the cabin full of very not waterproof electronics or starts climbing up her face.
The last time it escaped it got into her nose.
Lian carefully brings the water up to her face and takes a sip, hurriedly closing the lid with a mouthful of water and looking at the spigot she pulled it from.
Water is the core of how this entire ship functions, electrolyzed it becomes oxygen and hydrogen, the hydrogen ends up in the reactor which powers the lights, the excess reactor plasma is used to power the thrusters so they move, meanwhile the oxygen is mixed with their very finite nitrogen supplies to breathe or mixed into the thrust plasma to increase specific impulse.
So Lian is quite literally drinking the ship’s lifeblood with every sip.
Taking another bite of nutrient mash, the scrapper hears a quiet gagging noise, and her aimless floating has her drift to be looking at her travelmate from where she’s barely moved on that wall since last night, watching her like a disgusted gargoyle.
Or rather, her attention appears entirely focused on breakfast.
“Hgk–” She makes a gagging noise, then forcibly controls her expression and looks away from the room temperature mass. “Mortal, tell me what that is and why you are shoving it in your mouth?”
Lian blinks at the extreme reaction, chewing her mouthful of food more quickly to be able to answer.
“It's uhh… It has a more proper name Miss, but the common name is nutrient mash.” She says, holding up the remaining bite. “It’s food.”
A flare of anger appears in the cultivator’s eyes, but it’s replaced with more disgust when Lian pops the last of her breakfast into her mouth.
“Gk– I know what it claims to be, despite every sign to the contrary, I ask what it’s composed of.”
Lian hurriedly swallows and takes a sip of water to wash away the last of the oily film the mash leaves in her mouth.
“I don't know for certain Miss, but I’m reasonably certain it’s made of… reconstituted waste produ–”
She’s cut off by the cultivator making a violent retching noise and looking away from her so violently her head is nothing more than a blur.
“Desist! Say no more!”
Lian obliges, reminding herself to put away the second block she’d pulled out for the cultivator and swallowing a few times to get the mildly sulfurous aftertaste out of her mouth.
–––––
Hours roll by, and of all the things Lian planned for she overlooked something very important.
“We could just beg to be rescued by a passing ship?” The scrapper says out loud to herself.
She is.
So bored.
The cultivator says nothing from the wall, where she still hasn't moved since they entered jump space yesterday.
She’s the polar opposite of a conversationalist, not a surprise, so Lian continues.
“...Nah, they’d ask for money too, so maybe we get in the hangar bay then we’re back to square one, and that’s if they pick us up. We’re a jump incapable escape pod floating at an empty beacon, that’s mondo suspicious." She answers her own question, watching the ship readouts gently fluctuate.
No ships have appeared at the beacon, at least none broadcasting an IFF tag or close enough to be visually seen, and as ships with IFF off are typically military or pirate ships, trying to hitch a ride with either would be a pretty bad idea.
Her travelmate says nothing, perhaps exhaling the slightest bit harder than normal.
There's a half minute of pure silence.
…Lian is going to start ripping the walls off of this place if she doesn't find something to do.
“I mean we’re not that far off the path between a few stations big enough to get on the starmap database. How much longer could it take for someone to show up?” She muses, glancing at the cultivator. “Actually, since you’re clanborne, maybe they’d stop to pick you up? But because your clanborne they’d probably want to take you back to–”
“If you cannot be silent under your own will. I will make it so.” The cultivator says in a threatening monotone, golden eyes sparking violently. “Should you have a thought worthy of the breath in your lungs let it be heard, but otherwise I demand this smallest decorum.”
Whoops.
Lian nods hurriedly as the flare of violent intent presses down on her soul and looks away, but as the fear fades into monotonous silence the scrapper finds she preferred the fear in an odd way. Anything being preferable to the blank silence.
She shakes the thought off, because while she’s not certain what the threat was, good odds it would be something like chopping off her tongue. A little bit too much excitement for her tastes.
The scrapper is forced to stifle a laugh at her own humor.
Unfortunately the silence continues, and after another two hours of floating around Lian actually does start disassembling the controls around her with nothing better to do, performing minor maintenance and cleaning things up.
But as time goes on she finds herself catching the familiar and off-putting whiffs of the scrapyard every time the air scrubber kicks on. Which, considering how bad that stuff is for… everything, having it be inside the life support system can only be a problem.
She’s about halfway through disassembling it, looking for the rotten filter, when she realizes where the smell is truly coming from.
High on the wall, the cultivator is still just sitting there, unmoving, so quiet and still that the only times Lian pays attention to her is when she draws it to herself, and at those times she’s being a bit too… intense for the state of her filth-covered clothes to be of any concern.
But now, having spent the past half hour digging through the systems looking for the source of contaminate, finding it poses a new host of problems.
This air scrubber is not built for durability in operation, it’s built to filter carbon dioxide, maybe ozone, and a few of the more important organic compounds. Whatever is offgassing from that scrapyard cocktail is above this system’s paygrade.
Thankfully, because decon water is an excellent cleaning product and solvent, she has some onboard, but using what will probably be all of it…
Lian sighs.
If only she’d managed to get both of her boilersuits clean and onboard, then they would have this problem.
She catches the thought, looking at the cultivator and actually considers the geometry of that idea.
Well… probably not actually. Too small.
Unprompted, the cultivator opens her eyes and glares at the scrapper.
“What?” She growls.
Distracted with her thoughts, Lian barely flinches as she reaches over, opens a locker, and pulls out her thermos of decon water.
“The… stuff on your clothes is offgassing compounds that I’m worried the scrubbers can't handle. You need to– Er… I would… advise her Excellency to dampen some cloth with this decon water as to neutralize and clean yourse–”
Lian blinks as she feels the entire cabin shift around her as, between one instant and the next, the decon water is ripped from her hands and she’s being held against the wall by the shoulder and a very firm grip by a cultivator who’d moved so fast she couldn't see.
“Yes.” The cultivator says, pressing well within Lian’s personal bubble before blinking, pulling back, and recomposing herself with a cough. “Yes, we will do this immediately.”
