Doctor Adam Alphonse should be feeling lucky right now.
A tall, blonde woman with a scandalous body is currently pulling him by his tie while she leans on his desk.
She’s wearing the sort of one piece dress that might as well be a towel from how scant it is, her perfume is overpowering, even her breath is a delight.
Then why oh why, must he be in this glorious and enviable situation with Doctor Regina Tempest of all people.
“And then as I’m waiting for the launch logs what do I see but a message telling me that the launch sequence was starting! How funny is that Doctor Alphonse, my dear colleague?”
Doctor Alphonse… Regina only refers to people by their proper name and title when she’s particularly angry or particularly sarcastic and right now she was being particularly both.
He had read her reports, he heard her on the phone, he knew how this tale went and yet here she was in person making her point again.
Well, nothing for it. This wasn’t the first time Regina was doing this and just like her namesake the solution was to wait for it to pass.
Regina gently let go of his tie, slid out of the desk and laid in a nearby sofa while still facing Adam in a position where, in any circumstance but this and with any person but her would be a clear invitation for naughty action.
“You know, I read this really fascinating paper on the way back to entertain myself…” Regina kept eye contact with Adam as if daring him to be the one to look away “It was a study on the evolution of the Operative System of flight ships.”
Regina reached for some papers she had left in a nearby table beforehand and perused them.
“It was a really stimulating read! Why, I wasn’t aware that the Yung dynasty building so many personal crafts 400 or so years ago was such a big catalyst in their downfall!”
Regina kept switching between looking at Adam and the papers as if hoping to catch him looking away.
“The most interesting element is the one near the end however, where it talks about how ships from 200 years ago stopped using automated launch sequences in favor of manual ones as a cost-cutting measure so the section dedicated to launching the ship was repurposed to log the ship’s launch.”
She then sat up on the sofa.
“But the conclusion of the paper is what really gets me. It says, and I quote: ‘Being mindful of this is of utmost importance for any researcher seeking to extract information from ancient ships. A diagnostics tool with its software modified to skip the launch section of the system is pivotal to avoid tragedy.’”
The papers went back to the table and Regina leaned back with one of her arms in the arm rest.
“That paper’s author sounds like a very smart man, you could afford to learn a thing or four from this Doctor Adam Alphonse fella, I feel.”
Regina finally stopped talking, leaned forwards, and gave Adam a stare that even he was having a hard time matching.
“If you’re so desperate to eliminate me, by all means try your best. I will take on any challenge you throw my way! But! Do. Not. Mix innocent people with your clumsy assassination attempts.”
“Poor Malice can’t be everywhere at once, you know?”
A new voice interrupted Regina’s beatdown. It was Tim, Doctor Adam’s research assistant, who came in to give both of them drinks.
The phrase that Tim cut in with was born from a popular tale in the Khanon Belt. It’s a fable about two characters: Foolishness and Malice, who represent their eponymous characteristics. The tale has Malice be so generally unpleasant that when Foolishness made a mistake, everyone assumed Malice was the one responsible.
The moral of the tale was that sometimes Foolishness is the one responsible instead of Malice, but whole dissertations have been written by sociologists trying to understand why the language has become more sympathetic to Malice when crafting idioms around the tale.
“Doctor Alphonse, if I may…” Tim added after setting both glasses.
“By all means.” Adam signaled with barely disguised relief.
“While I normally agree with your method of handling Doctor Tempest, I suspect this might not be the right time for it.”
Tim then stood in a way where he addressed both
“Please put yourself in her very uncomfortable-looking high heels. Repeated attempts to point out that something a colleague of yours was entrusted with almost caused a tragedy are met with nothing but seemingly indifferent silence. Is it so weird for her to assume you want to kill her?”
Adam sighed, here was another case where he felt like Tim chose the wrong career by going for academia instead of psychiatry or diplomacy.
“You’re absolutely right” Adam said with no visible trepidation.
He then sighed yet again and turned to Regina, whose icy glare had melted a little.
“Regina, contrary to what you might feel like sometimes, I don’t actually want you to die. Why, it would be a massive loss for the whole scientific community and an even bigger one for me personally.”
Her glare was now just intense instead of icy, Adam continued.
“In any other circumstance I would point out that you’ve conditioned me to let your barrage of emotions fly by until it leaves, but considering how this time around you’ve done that to address a gross case of negligence on my part rather than the usual fare of typos or table manners, I will admit I didn’t react accordingly.”
To his shock, Regina didn’t look fully pleased, merely pacified. Then he remembered…
“The scanner error will never happen again, I will make personally sure that any scanner sent to ancient ships is properly modified and sign on it.”
“Was it that hard…?” Regina muttered under her breath as she stood up “You better keep your word or I’ll stop talking your ear off and bite it off instead.”
Without saying anything else, Regina left the office, swinging her hips very visibly side to side as she did.
“Would she actually…?” Tim wondered, picking up the full glass she left behind.
“When that woman is involved, I’m not taking any chances…”
Adam leaned back onto his chair relieved that the situation had ended for now.
“Sometimes I feel like I don’t pay you enough, Tim.”
“You don’t.” Tim retorted.
“Well… remind me sometimes to push for the budget for a raise, then.”
“I already do.” Tim replied pointing to the pile of memos to one side of the desk.
Regina’s life looked from the outside like she was a high roller, one day she’s in Station 22 leading an expedition and now here she is sipping expensive coffee in a fancy cafe in Kaina, a region on the westernmost section of Valvion.
Should anyone approach her to point this out she would gladly exclaim that she WISHED she was moving around so much for pleasure.
Then she would agree that that’s why you should make the situation as pleasant as you can when you can, and if it means paying for overpriced coffee because the view and ambiance of the cafe is nice, so be it.
“Giiiiiiinaaaaaaa!”
Someone called out to Regina from the floor below the balcony, and there’s only one person thus far that has called Doctor Regina Tempest “Gina” and lived to tell the tale.
Regina looked down to see Marival, a young woman of dark skin and really curly hair waving some paper rolls excitedly at her.
With a smile, Regina called for her to come in and get up to the balcony.
They kissed each other on the cheek as a greeting and Marival sat across from Regina.
“Fresh off the printer!” She exclaimed as she unrolled the papers she brought with her.
They were diagrams, heat maps of the sort that weren’t about actual temperature, and just in general a bunch of graphs and numbers superimposed over maps of the Western Belt.
Marival looked on in admiration at Regina as she analyzed everything with an intensity that could burn through the paper.
“Doctor Gina Tempest’s protegeé” is how Marival calls herself full of pride. Regina would disagree but only because as far as she’s concerned “Riva” is a dear friend and not someone below her.
After all, not only is Marival the vice-principal of the Western Expansion Committee at just age 26, but Regina wouldn’t be able to do half of her investigations if not for her. Regina has never understood Marival’s insistence that she’s Regina’s protegeé when as far as she’s concerned they’re as equal as equal gets.
Anyone that saw the face Marival makes when she’s near Regina would immediately understand why, but it falls into the one field that Regina isn’t really good at even to this day.
But case in point about Marival’s resourcefulness: The diagrams currently on the table. Not only was she able to convince expeditions to install the devices that Regina requested be put at specific points of the Western Belt but she was able to keep enough info on them logged to make all of the heat maps and other graphs on display.
“Something wrong?” Marival asked finally after a few too many minutes of silence.
“Absolutely not…” Regina replied without peeling her visible eye off the papers “The data is clean and uninterrupted, it’s all been graphed so well you’d swear I did myself and… rusted teeth Riva you shouldn’t have splurged so much on the quality of the paper!”
“Well we don’t see each other as often lately, so I figured why not?” Marival then went a bit more neutral “You’re still making a face that something’s wrong though…”
Regina held a hand to her chin for a few moments more before sighing in frustration.
“Perhaps what I need is a fresh perspective… mind if I bounce a couple of ideas off you, Riva?”
“Oh! Is this like… a toy floater exercise?”
“A toy floater exercise…” Regina repeated slowly “What is that?”
“You remember my brother, right? My little brother, not the older sleazebag.”
“Oh right! The small sleazebag. How’s he been lately?”
“Fat if I’m honest, too many calories in, not enough calories out…” Marival shrugged and continued “Anyway, he’s been studying programming as a career and he told me about this thing called the toy floater exercise.”
Marival then started folding one of the napkins into some shape as she kept talking.
“The idea is that if there’s a mistake in your code you pretend like you’re explaining your code to a toy floater that doesn’t know anything about programming and by trying to explain what you’re trying to achieve that way you can find where the problem is.”
Marival finished a bird-like craft from the folded napkin and pretended that its “beak” kissed Regina’s nose, prompting her to let out a small chuckle.
“Mind being my toy floater then?”
“Wherever, whenever!” Marival exclaimed, giving Regina her undivided attention while playfully resting her chin on both hands.
Regina stopped for a moment to consider where to start and then took a pen from her cleavage to note things around one of the maps.
“You’ve heard of Griefite, right?”
“That’s… the scientific name of Onyxglint isn’t it? That ‘miracle mineral’ that was a fad a few years ago?”
“The very same… except it’s not quite a dead fad. Long story short there’s people out there that are using it with ill intent and I’ve made it my mission to stop them.”
“Oooh!!” This exclamation from Marival wasn’t just her being wowed by Regina, but also her finally having context for so many things that she did.
“They do that with… let’s call them monoliths” Regina turned one of the papers around and started drawing on it to explain “Normally they remain dormant and are unrecognizable from other rocks, but with the right stimulus they activate and bad things happen.”
“What kind of bad?”
“Meriem.” Regina replied dryly.
Marival had every word on her mouth run away in panic at the realization of the stakes with just a single word.
“The group of people I’m looking for are activating monoliths from a distance and I suspect they’re hoping to cause a cascade effect.”
“Cascade effect?”
“In this case it would be them finding the right monolith that when activated, activates other nearby monoliths in turn.”
“Ah…” Marival paused and then asked “…what’s so cascade about it though? Like a waterfall?”
“You know…” Regina added genuinely intrigued “That’s a great question…”
Regina kept quiet trying to remember anything that made waterfalls worse than any other sort of fall to the point language shaped around them, but Marival snapped her out of it.
“But anyways, bad people want to make something bad happen… I assume VERY remotely?”
“Yes, and all these maps with the data from the instruments you so graciously pushed to have installed where I requested have registers of where that… ‘vibration’ has been detected in the Western Belt.”
“And the problem is…?”
“There’s no visible pattern…” Regina held her hand on her chin again “Due to the way those ‘vibrations’ travel there’s no way to tell where they come from, only where they hit; and the places where monoliths have activated don’t show any specific intent…”
There was a small pause, and then Marival started talking.
“So here’s what my silly toy floater brain thinks…”
“Please share with the rest of us.” Regina turned the small napkin bird around to face Marival as she said this.
“If I was an evil sneaky evil group of evil sneaky people and I wanted to cause a chain reaction like the one you talk about, but I was in the distance, I would’ve just… started blasting in random directions until something hit and then hope it’s the right thing.”
Regina’s one visible eye opened up to twice its normal size as if realizing something. Marival kept talking but she stopped hearing her words.
So far she was so stuck in trying to identify a goal or a clear pattern that she failed to see the information as more of a consequence of something else.
But if it was all a consequence rather than the intent itself…
She spun one of the maps around. Regina already suspected the people she’s looking for were hiding in the Forsaken Belt and the way the vibrations were detected reinforced this idea. But she shook her head to keep focused on the current problem and not get distracted with other theories.
“There were strong transmissions here and here… there’s been smaller incidents here, here, and here… if they were stumbling around to find their goal, then the only missing spot is…”
Regina singled out a section of the map that was lacking in some of the numbers but was high with others, cross referenced some of the other maps and let out a triumphant laugh.
“Riva you’re a genius!” Regina said without looking up.
“Am I?” She asked with a giggle “If I am it’s only because I learned from the best.”
“The lives you’ve helped today are worth more than this but…” Regina handed her the menu “Order however much you want! I won’t have my friends work for free.”
“Really?!” Marival grabbed the menu excitedly “They started serving a strawberry cake here that I’ve been dying to try.”
As Marival went excitedly through the menu, Regina started making a mental inventory of what needed to be done now.
First she would need to be close to Station 51, the closest settlement to the area she singled out… That would require a Griefite scanner and a tectonic sensor. She needs to book a Meteorotive for it too.
If it comes to that she might need to get collaboration from the Station’s managers to prepare security staff for what’s to come if it comes…
…and if it does come to that she’s going to need some explosives and…
“GINA!! PLANETS ABOVE LOOK AT THIS!!!” Marival pointed excitedly at an item in the menu “THEY HAVE CAKES THAT LOOK LIKE GRASS SKIPPERS THEY’RE SO CUTE!!”
Well, that would be work for later.
For now, Regina was going to enjoy her day with a dear friend.
She had a feeling that after this, it would be a while until she saw her again.
Not even a full day later Regina was already on her way to Station 51, where her fears got confirmed.
Her instruments detected the “vibration” that Onyxglint responded to accumulating at a steady pace, reaching a very critical point.
And so a macabre sort of routine set in. She started stocking up on explosives, mapped where the monolith was likely to be and the points where “the mess” would start “pouring out”.
But there was another problem looming over her and it was one she was not looking forward to.
She had dealt with this sort of incident before but never in a big settlement, it was always in small caves really out of the way of civilization. When that happens the logistics are easy because she can just give a warning to small settlements close by and deal with the situation herself.
Station 51 was close to the point of danger, it was the biggest settlement in the area, and on top of it all there was a festival about to happen.
But none of that was what gave Regina pause for thought.
“At what point of my proposal did I even suggest stopping your precious festival?”
If there’s anything Doctor Regina Tempest dreads more than the perils of Onyxglint, it’s the perils of bureaucracy in any form.
“It is very much implied in your statement that-”
“And what part of my appearance suggests I’m the type to imply things rather than slap you in the face with them?”
As if to reinforce her point, she leaned back in her current, very revealing one piece dress as she addressed the rest of the people in the meeting.
Currently she was meeting up with the board of directors of Station 51 and her worst fears about how it would go were already panning out.
“I tell you that I just want to set meeting with as much security staff as possible to explain how they might be able to keep the situation in check, I tell you what I intend to do on the outskirts of your Station, and I explain to you what might happen, and I will emphasize ‘might’ because even I’m not bold enough to assume it’s going to happen with 100% certainty.”
She was counting with her very long fingers, gloved for this particular occasion, and then shifted to leaning seductively on the table.
“But the moment I mention that there’s going to be the possibility of a disaster, the POSSIBILITY, and despite clearly communicating that I want to disrupt as little as possible because it is, AGAIN, just a possibility, all you can hear is me threatening to stop the one thing that brings money to your station and get really defensive.”
“With all due respect Doctor Tempest, you are acting very defensive too.” Interjected a second voice, that of a bespectacled older man.
“With no respect whatsoever, Mister Idrian Lombardi, I’m not being defensive. I’m very much on the offensive here.” She replied without even looking at him.
“I say, it’s already preposterous that this brat somehow managed to corral us all into a meeting on the same day…” A female voice, that of the sole female member of the board added incensed “…but what guarantee do we have that she knows anything about-”
She didn’t finish her sentence, being silenced by shock.
Without saying a single word, Regina had pulled the hair that covers half of her face and let that speak on its own.
“Let it be known that I tried to go through the regular channels and through all the nice formalities.” Regina shook her head from side to side and her hairstyle returned to its usual shape covering half of her face “I’ll be instructing as much security personnel as I’m able to even if none of you will help.”
Regina stood up to leave and as she did, the female board member also stood up, her shock gone and her anger very much back.
“I WARN YOU! AS SOON AS YOU DO ANYTHING ILLEGAL-…”
“IF I do anything illegal…” Regina clarified, barely turning the covered side of her head towards the board of directors “It will be a very well-earned charge of assault should one more word come out of your mouth before I leave this room, madam.”
It didn’t take much time for Regina to gather the attention of the local security staff.
She would be running a very tight schedule since she only had time before their businesses opened up but the tales of “The Man Death Forgot” had spread wide enough that they were intrigued if nothing else.
It also helped that opening up the meetings by saying she didn’t have time for “that question” regarding the discrepancy between her nickname and her very flaunted gender was cathartic for her.
The gist of Regina’s explanation, truncated into 10 minutes with leeway in case it had to extend to 15 was as follows:
“I have good reason to believe that an Onyxglint monolith will awaken soon. I have that situation under control so rest all of your heads easily. However, talented as I am, I cannot be everywhere at once and there’s going to be side effects that I need you to count on.”
She would then show pictures of what she called “Golems”.
“First there will be a tremor, after the tremor these creatures will come out of the ground. And I mean literally come out of the ground, it will look as if they’re rising from a liquid or something.”
Concerned mumbling would ensue, at which point she would demand attention via her usual means of making noise with a blank bullet.
“They look scary and can be dangerous if you let them touch you, but they’re slow and clumsy. What’s more, their structural integrity is relatively fragile so a good whack to their head would get them done. I should also encourage you all to only use blunt force because they’re still rock and bullets will bounce off them, trust me on that one.”
Some laughed, some remained concerned, Regina continued nonetheless.
“The problem is numbers. I should be done with fixing the problem before numbers become a problem but nonetheless make sure everyone makes distance so nobody’s overwhelmed by volume, you hear? And I do mean it, if you’re not careful it will look like a landslide walked towards you.”
During one of the meetings someone asked her something along the lines of “what if you’re wrong about this?”
Regina’s eternal half-smile vanished immediately as she replied to this.
“I want to be wrong, I want to be proven a fool, the best scenario that can happen is that next week you remember this and think of me as a sexy hot delicious idiot.”
The air of grandiosity flowed back into her face again as she answered more questions, but the words that left her mouth were echoing in her head all the way through.
For as braggadocious as she can be,the last 14 years of Regina’s life have been an eternal hope of being proven wrong on her concerns only to be proven right every single time.
And if she’s going to be proven right against her will so often, she might as well brag about it.
Regina’s never had much of a family to speak of.
Her mother, as she puts it: “Went crazy when she got pregnant with me and shunned everyone except my dad away from her life”.
Her father, meanwhile, lived in miserable stupor on their house to the point that even while growing up Regina often thought that she might respect him more if he cheated, because that would at least mean he had the spine to want something better.
Maybe then her own hopes would’ve been validated.
She couldn’t bring friends to her house nor was she allowed to go to others’ houses, which soon resulted in her not having any friends to worry about disappointing.
When Regina got into college she swore she would go wild and do everything she wanted… but she was so isolated she didn’t have it in her to actually go wild.
Eventually, her mother died of double pneumonia and Regina felt nothing, not even relief. If anything, she felt cheated out of any possible satisfaction on the strain the woman caused in her life.
Her father, however, did go wild. So wild in fact that he died of substance overdose during one of his party streaks.
Regina hadn’t even graduated college, much less started her doctorate when this happened.
Perhaps this neglect, this lack of a supportive family was what made her so vulnerable to-
“GRAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH!!”
She then growled out loud as if trying to scare that looming realization away. There was a time and place for nursing wounds from the past and it certainly wasn’t when she had her attention on a bunch of devices and meters.
It was these devices that brought to mind her family, since at the lack of anything positive to remember them by, they tend to come to mind in moments of stress.
The memory that she kept swiping away like a mosquito flying near her ear was one of being 13 years old and having her first period. That day, Regina’s mother told her something that stuck with her since:
“Congratulations Gigi, you’ll now be haunted by a friend with the worst sense of timing in the world.”
This comment didn’t just stick with Regina due to the momentous occasion it was accompanied by, it didn’t just stick with her because it’s one of a handful of moments where she can remember her mother’s voice being emotive in any way, it also stuck with her because of how true it was.
It’s not just with regards to how her body always decided to go through its natural cycle at the worst time possible though, it seemed like that principle of the worst timing possible extended to the world as a whole.
This was what occupied Regina’s mind as she heard the festival preparation in the distance while her measuring devices went wild.
Of course her worst fear would come to pass while there’s a void blasted festival nearby.
She crouched on the floor while clutching on her supplies. It wouldn’t be wise to be standing up when…
BRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR
“How rude to keep a lady waiting like this…”
Regina took a jump to the side as the floor cracked under her. This was the first time that her calculations were so accurate that they became a risk.
“No time to lose, I’m already stretching the safety margin very thin…” She mumbled out loud as she jumped down the new crack on the ground.
The cave was getting noisy and this put Regina on edge.
It wasn’t the golems finding her, and it also wasn’t the distant chaos in the town, it was more like someone or sometwos were making their way to her location.
She was so close though, she disliked how much she had to prolong the chaos in the Station by not dealing with the monolith immediately, but she wouldn’t get this good a chance to triangulate the source of everything otherwise.
Ten seconds more…
But then…
“Hooooooooooooooold it right there. Not one more step, friends.”
Regina turned around, guns in both hands reflexively aimed at whoever was making noise until moments ago.
But who would make their way down to this cave?
There was a girl, if she was over 20 Regina would be shocked, her hands were up and one of them held… a Planet Singer’s Fonologium? An authentic one no less.
Her intrigue over this was overwritten by the other person, however.
Regina knew when someone would be able to take her on, like a predator recognizing another predator in her turf. She got the distinct impression that were it not for the small girl this… this person in Royal Knight armor would’ve taken more direct action.
Then her eyes kept getting distracted by the thing on their back, but she kept her focus.
“If you two came to stop me, too bad!” Regina announced “The monolith is rigged and ready to explode.”
“So you’re trying to destroy it?” The silver haired girl said in a voice holding back some trembling.
“Not trying” Regina clarified “It’s a certainty that I can destroy it and stop the madness out there.”
“THEN WE’RE ON THE SAME PAGE!! STOP POINTING THOSE THINGS AT US!!!” the girl exclaimed with an edge of hysteria.
Regina paused to consider it for a moment.
If the one in Royal Knight armor didn’t see fit to immediately take action in this moment where the girl kept some of her focus, then perhaps…
“Alright…” Regina reluctantly said, holstering the guns “But don’t get close, the explosion will be nasty if you come near.”
With a very unorthodox pull, Regina grabbed all the devices and hastily pocketed them while she walked near where her two uninvited guests were.
“Over here” She indicated a rock in between them and the monolith “Take cover here and if you value your hearing hold your breath and cover your ears.”
They all crouched, and with a press of a button, a loud explosion with a nasty shockwave filled the whole room.
After the explosion, a wave of vibration flowed everywhere, almost as if it was all being contained by the rock that just became rubble.
Regina’s covered eye pulsed with pain at this “feedback” from the explosion. The girl seemed fine, with no side effects outside the usual affair from an explosion in a small space.
As for the Royal Knight…
“GRRRRRRRGH!!!”
By the time Regina registered their groan of pain they were already making distance while clutching their chest.
“You…!” Regina exclaimed as she noticed the black veins covering their pale skin.
“GRRRRRRAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH!!!!!”
The Royal Knight let out a guttural roar of pain, and a pale purple light emanated clearly from their chest, enveloping them suddenly.
When the light dissipated, something else entirely stood where the Royal Knight was.
It was clearly humanoid, but covered in some kind of white chitin-like exoskeleton. An imposing eyeless mask with a shut maw like a wolf’s breathed out purple smoke, like condensation on a cold day.
If not for the thing in their back, you’d be forgiven for thinking that this creature ate the Royal Knight and took their place.
The creature turned a hungry look towards Regina but then the thing in their back started pulsing with intense white light. The creature clutched their head in pain and, as if struggling with itself, slowly turned around before jumping towards the ceiling, clawing up a hole in the rock and into the surface.
“Oh no!” The silver haired finally exclaimed “We gotta stop them!!”
“Oh, don’t worry…”
Looking towards the hole above her, with a malevolent smile that seemed to extend ear to ear, Regina pulled back the hair that covered half of her face.
Her right eye and the area surrounding it weren’t flesh, they were made out of smooth dark stone with a purple glint to it, as if her face had been broken and someone sculpted a fix in a different material.
While her face seemed lit with hunger, Regina’s right eye then lit up quite literally.
The last thing the silver haired girl heard before Regina got covered in a similar pale purple flash was.
“I’ll stop them good!”
“I’ll kill them quickly!”
Forsaken Gaia – Chapter 6: Chronicle of an announced catastrophe
Written by: Fernando Damas (@ironiclark)