The entire world twists, turns, and reverses for a single split second. Douglas stops enhancing the left landing wheel as he looks up. The entire ship humming with his power does put a smile on his face, but the weird feeling of twisting makes him a bit concerned. All the lights switched off moments before, but he had been too busy with wiring up the controls for the magical engine driven wheel to really take note.

Katare is unmoving, her chest no longer rising, her hair now a simple dull silver instead of the cacophony of colors it was before. Douglas is just about to continue with placing transmitters in every single part of the ship when he notices that a lot of mana has disappeared. He then sees that one part of the vessel keeps sucking up his power, and following the flow of his mana, he ends up at the warp drive.

The entire donut is practically blazing with blue light, a bright ring of mana spinning inside the hollow torus. Not sure what he is sensing, Douglas just knows that there seems to be a lot of his mana inside the item. Not bothering questioning why this happened, he makes a few outflow points, connecting the warp drive to the rest of the mana network inside the ship. A slight bit of the power flows out of the drive, immediately filling up every single mana stone attached to the engravings.

Douglas is overjoyed at seeing this happen. His biggest bottleneck so far has been his mana regeneration. His engraving speed was slow due to a lack of mana. Now, with the entire ship bursting with power, Douglas decides to get a move on.

Finishing up the landing gear is done in literal minutes, the sudden abundance of power, allowing Douglas to work much faster. He then continues to work on all the smaller things now that large projects have been taking care of. He makes sure sliding doors move without friction by weaving small repulsion formations in their joints. He has some fun with Magically Animating all the cupboard doors and drawers, copying their unique Magical Control formations in a small part of his skull.

Then, after a long time of blissfully and mindlessly engraving to his heart's content, he is done. Every single moving part, every single piece of infrastructure and piping is covered in magical patterns or runes. So Douglas stands up and thinks about what to do next for a bit. He knows that Katare wants to go and recover something called Nel, or Len, or NukeLight EduSomethin, but Douglas has no idea what that’s about. He does know someone broke the law, but as Evot isn’t here, he doesn’t really know what to do next.

He goes over to where Katare is laying down on her bed and tries to wake her up. She seems very much asleep, however, and even poking her in the face fails to cause a response. Now that the entire ship is engraved, Douglas doesn’t really see a reason to stay here, so he tries asking a question. “Who broke the law?”

Silence is his only answer. Katare remains unresponsive, and even picking her unresponsive body up from the bed doesn't make her open her eyes. Deciding he might as well see what the rest of the ship looks like; he starts wandering around. Engraving the entire thing let know how the vessel is laid out. It thus takes him a good half hour before he comes across something that is interesting. Having thoroughly explored all the maintenance crawl spaces, secret storage areas, and private bed and bathrooms that the vessel has to offer, he finally stumbles into the cockpit.

From the front window, he sees a metal ball hanging in the blackness of space. Looking away from the shining sphere of fine filigree, Douglas sees a small and rather weak sun. It's more aking to a very bright star than anything else. He quickly loses interest and looks away. He sees a true tapestry of stars the moment he does so, and the spread of fine pinpricks puts him in a rather weird and melancholic mood. It’s almost as if such a blanket of stars is telling of great change, as a similar view has accompanied him throughout his entire journey.

Then the shining metal ball grows a lot bigger, and the magical skeleton is briefly taken aback by the sudden wall of glowing red fire and plasma that rushes past the front windows. He doesn’t notice that there are no windows. The entire cockpit is installed with top of the line projectors, but Douglas really doesn’t care about that. He does care about the potential lawbreakers that are out there. Katare said something about people breaking that law, and being a GalaxSec Constable, that is the one thing he cannot abide.

His job, after all, exists out of telling people ‘GalaxSec Trainee Constable Douglas. How can I help,’ and finding people who broke the law? Once again, Evot isn’t here, so how he will find these lawbreakers is outside of his scope at the moment, but he is sure he’ll figure it out eventually.

The ship lowers through a clear atmosphere, not a single cloud in sight. The sight Douglas is looking at stops being covered in a red glowing film, and he sees an endless intricat metal surface stretch to the horizon. One particular piece of the mechanical infrastructure below him grows bigger and bigger until it swallows the ship entirely. So when the ship lands inside a rather beaten-up looking hangar, Douglas is unsure what to do. He hears some things folding and clanking, as well as some tearing of metal and other unidentifiable noises, but nothing that screams lawbreaker to him.

A few more minutes of nothing happening later, Douglas decides to look around. He finds the newly lowered ramp after only ten minutes of ponderously strolling through the ship. Walking through the small cargo space and onto the rubble-strewn hangar floor, Douglas sees a new world. The first thing he does is stare at the environment with his jaw hanging wide open.

The metal ball he had seen from space actually turned out to be a huge planet. He has seen some pretty impressive sights on Evengi, with the mountains, ruined cities, fallen space elevator and all, but this is something different. What he sees now are valleys that span thousands of kilometers, all made of the metal. Constructions that reach the heavens, made from blocks that are bigger than the largest Histaff Gargantuan he has ever seen, seemingly built for no reason other than to make him feel small. He sees glass and steel pillars that reach the sky surrounding perfectly circular pits made from shining and perfectly polished mirrors.

He stares for a bit, slowly realizes that he doesn’t have a single idea what any of it is for, and decides to move on. The stark difference between the perfectly geometric horizon and the mess that is the landing area isn’t a reason to pause for the skeleton. He just marches across the bullethole riddled floor, steps over the puddles of molten slag, and clambers over the large chunks of debris everywhere.

He finds the doorway very quickly, as the charred hole is pretty hard to miss. Douglas steps over the shattered door without giving his surroundings a single glance. He just marches on through the hallway, idly taking note of the destroyed turrets hanging from the ceiling and the many burn marks and destroyed pieces of sparse furniture everywhere.

He loses his way occasionally, but every time he sees his environment becoming too clean, Douglas manages to sense that something is wrong. Each time, he somehow finds himself backtracking until he is surrounded by severe battle damage once again.

Then, a long while or walking through chaos later, Douglas finds himself staring down a massive pit, a jawning chasm of darkness. He is still not sure what he is actually doing here, but the joy of walking through a ruined corridor just tickles him in a way he can’t describe. Then a white flash lights up the darkness, and Douglas sees that something tunneled through here. In a single instant, he sees an entire skyscraper-sized hole punched through the floors below him. The roughly circular holes all show signs of being superheated, large cracks showing that there was a lot of raw force involved. Then the light is gone, Douglas hears the sound of wind rushing through his bones, and he gets the idea that he might just be falling.

“Intruder detected. Initial repulsion protocol initiated. Total target bisection observed.”

A synthetic voice with a distinctly feminine tone whispers its way through the air that Douglas is falling through. Then, he suddenly realizes that he is missing a lot of bones. Figuratively closing his eyes, the magical skeleton looks inwards and takes stock of his body. To his horror, he finds everything below his second lumbar vertebrae missing.

His lower spine is severed, the most inferior vertebrae missing a good chunk of bone. The wind rushes through his remaining bones some more as he evaluates his current situation. Putting one and one together, Douglas realizes that this planet must have a Synthetic Intelligence, just like the GalaxSec base. The sound of the voice is the same, the tone slightly different, but the fake tint to the sound is nearly identical. And that SI must have triggered some kind of defensive system.

Half a second after reaching that conclusion, Douglas smashes into the floor. A few of his ribs crack, his badge rattles around in his forehead a bit, and his left-hand shatters under his own weight. “No,” he says while mustering up his mana. “No more broken bones.”

A perfectly cast Piercing Exploding Shot springs into existence in his right hand. It immediately starts burning the floor, melting the smooth marble like it’s ice. Forcing himself in an upright position with the help of his left stump, Douglas brandishes the blazing spell. Instead of the armies of monsters her honestly expected, he sees a large crystal.

“Intruder remains capable. Initiating phase two.”

Douglas decides that talking might be a path worth pursuing. He is suddenly surrounded by a shambling mess of twitching figures. The number of turrets, gizmo’s, cables, and generally menacing shapes that suddenly rise from the floor give him a bit of pause.

“LeuraNike Equator… Len?” asks Douglas. The crystal visible in the light of his spell is feeling very familiar to Douglas. He is once again totally incapable of saying why he feels a pull to this place, but something in his nonexistent guts tells him this is where he wants to go.

“Temporarily pausing combat mode. Inquiry; what the frack are you trying to say? Are you a skeleton? What in the warp is going on, and where is Kat.”

“Nuren Pike Ecu Aids Logistic,” is Douglas’ eloquent reply.

“Are you trying to say my name, you shit piece of walking calcium?”

“What is your name,” retorts the piece of walking calcium.

“NeuralLike EduAide LogList v9.32.SEPTAGON.P.”

“No,” says Douglas while maneuvering himself upright. He sees some pieces of his bones laying around here and there, and quickly starts gathering them with a hastily cast Mana Hand. “Don’t know about the septagon part. Katare wants Nel.”

His answer seems to shut the synthetic voice up for a few seconds. Douglas quickly makes use of the lull in the conversation by plastering more bones to his frame. There are scattered pieces of osseous fragments everywhere, only his smallest bones having survived the long fall intact. His Reinforced Bones racial trait has made him more resilient overall. The downside is that when his bones do break, they shatter into smaller fragments.

He tries to figure out why that might be so, but doesn’t manage to come to a reasonable explanation before the fake voice continues. “Katarenin?”

“Katare wants Nel.”

“She’s still alive?”

“Yes,” Douglas replies.

“Warp above and molten core below, she’s still alive?”

“Yes,” replies Douglas for the last time. He is not liking the experience of talking to this voice at all. It sounds similar to the rather slow SI of the GalaxSec base. Something niggles at the back of his mind, however. He is sure that he should love talking to this voice. Just chatting with this dumb and fake-sounding person would have been very fulfilling at some point in his life. But as of late, what used to give him simple joy - things like endlessly doing repetitive tasks or aimlessly walking down randing corridors - just don’t give him the same thrill anymore.

“Katare is still alive!” sounds from all around him. “She isn’t dead. I have a purpose yet, Where is Katarenin?”

“Ship,” answers Douglas while gathering the last bits of his bones. He only found enough material to repair his entire left hand and both legs up to his ankles. As this gives him all the mobility he needs, he isn’t about to complain.

Straightening up to his full height, Douglas takes a good look at his surroundings. The crystal he saw earlier is looking weirder the more he looks at it. He finds himself in a massive and empty floor, the light pouring from his Piercing Exploding Shot spell, allowing him to see everything in great detail. He is surrounded by a ramshackle army of mechanical items made out of saws, vacuum cleaners, folding table legs, and other random household items. Half of the twitching and jittering figures hold things like broken doors, actual tables, and broken panes of clear glass. Douglas is not impressed by the malfunctioning ramshackle army he finds himself surrounded by, and makes sure to let his confusion be known. “What?”

“Inquiry about the current state of affairs?”

“Yes?” Douglas isn’t sure what’s going on at this point. From the ceiling, barely touched by the light of his spell, to the wild and spiky growth of dark crystal that seems to loom over everything, there's a lot to take in.

“I’m not sure if I can tell you, but as I seem to have reached sapience, and I don’t want Katare to know, but I also don’t know what’s going on, and you’re a skeleton, I can conclude I can tell you. Katare got decapitated while she was wasting all my power on stupid games and unnecessary spa treatments. My defenses were already shot from the equipment failure that nearly killed Katare, and she got in a new bionic body, and everything went wrong. I got defeated handily by a team of infiltrators, so I have taken steps to prevent such an occurrence from happening again.”

Douglas doesn’t randomly nod along here. He feels like this fake talking voice just needs to talk for a bit, and that his input is not required. So Douglas takes a moment to feel for his mana. For some reason, the large crystal feels like Katare herself. Tapping into the always present Mana Sense skill, Douglas opens his mana-sensitive eye and sees a glowing core. A shining blue dot is just below the large clump of sharp crystal needles, so the skeleton starts walking towards it.

A few of the improvised constructs around him try to stop him, but they move with such slow and jerky motions that Douglas avoids them with ease.

[ Dodging lvl 9 ]

Ignoring the useless skill windows, Douglas half dances, half stumbles, and half slides through the mess of cobbled-together animatronics. He has to burn his way through a few of the bulkier ones, but they all melt as soon as Douglas brings them into contact with the Shot spell still clutched in his bony fingers.

“So I made do with what I have on hand. I did waste all the power I saved up on cutting you in half, though. That team only got in because I was trying to be sparing with the little power I had at my disposal, so I changed tactics. That’s a new thing. It’s not in my programming to deviate from my settings, so as that was my first time truly crossing that line, I messed up. Not cool, me.”

The crystal thing seems rather odd, upon closer inspection. Its bottom seems very homely and welcoming. It’s lower part seems to be made up to be an ordinary brick house. Douglas really wonders what is up with that for a few moments. The picturesque image of a traditionally build house breaks down the moment he looks up, as large shards of crystal quickly destroy that illusion. From the second floor up, it’s all chaotic sharpness and dark spiked slowly repacing the brick facade.

Douglas spots traces of mana flowing through the material. Then, he sees a small buildup of mana. This spark vanishes the moment a new spike of black glass shoots from the fake brick wall. He also sees remnants of a doorway that shows clear signs of having been blown open at some point. Sharp knives of shining black material now block both openings, but that isn’t about to stop Douglas. He senses for mana once again, and the shining core of power is located under the floor, right under this weird crystal house thing.

He holds out his intact hand, and the black glass turns out to burn just as easily. He steps through the glowing opening of the jagged doorframe a couple of dozen seconds later and walks into a very nice apartment.

“And since Katare left, the event logs have been going haywire. Nothing makes sense. All these impossible integers. I think that’s why I gained sapience. Now I’ve got to register myself, and instead of having normal controls and limits installed, the Collective will have their say! I want to remain a Synthetic Intelligence. Taking care of Katare is my single goal; it’s why I was created! I don’t want to be an Artificial Intelligence! I don't want to be burdened with the responsibilities that come with synthetic sapience!”

Douglas comes to the conclusion that this voice must be a female, basing his finding on the volume and tone with which he is being spoken to. Instead of paying more attention to the constantly droning voice, the skeleton walks to the middle of the apartment. He finds himself inside a very fancy looking place, which even though it’s a total mess, still screams that it probably costs a lot of money. The shelves are empty, what must have been their contents strew all over the floor in pieces. There’s a slowly smoking machine in the corner; its top half gone, a decapitated body hanging out of the broken door opening.

Douglas does get the feeling that the shape of the body is pretty familiar, but doesn’t pay it any mind. The goal of his journey is right there in front of him; he just knows. He stops in front of a row of bulky closets. One of their doors is open, showing him all kinds of long since rotten food. He hears the scuttling sounds of mechanical items on the rubble-strewn floor behind him. Glancing backward while pointing his right hand at the floor, he sees the mass of rubble robots coming closer slowly. Not really bothered by the approaching mass of scuttlers, he starts magically digging towards the glowing point of mana just below his shattered feet.

He doesn’t really know why, but he has got this weird feeling that the talking voice is the shining thing. He also figures that the voice must be Nel, no matter what the thing itself claims. All that talk about failing defenses, sapience, and the Collective is kind of interesting though. The words are accompanied by knowledge, probably coming from his Universal Language skill. Or is that a trait? Douglas stops for a few seconds, pondering this sudden mystery. He remembers that status effects also show up in that area. He doesn’t think that Universal Language should be placed in the same category as something like Shattered or Frozen, though. One is a general translator thing, and the other is just stuff that’s happened to him at some point in time.

Douglas nearly wishes that he would be satisfied by staring at a wall again. Just following orders or chasing the closest interesting thing is honestly better than having to do all this thinking all the time.

“And could you stop digging there, skeleton? Your actions have caused the existential question of what I am to drop in my priority register. I now actually feel guilty about processing that concept. This is so stupid. I feel guilty now. I feel guilty just because I want to figure out who and what I am because a skeleton with glowing eyes is digging towards my core. Look, my army is walking towards him. My power banks and capacitors are empty. The entire planet is still broken due to that explosion and power surge. Everything I now want is less important than repairing the antennae, apparently. There is a new power field throwing everything out of their parameters, the apartment is growing wild, and there is nothing more I can do, and yet I feel gui-”

Douglas finishes digging through the floor, the meter-thick layer of metal interwoven with black glass melting and burning quickly. It better burn quickly with the amount of mana he has been pouring into the spell, Douglas scoffs. Under the thick layer of flooring, lit up by his slowly sputtering Shot spell and the glowing rivulets of molten steel and crystal, is a sphere. Hooked up to a mass of wires and plugs, it hangs in the middle of a spherical hollow. Het lets the Shot spell sputter out, his lacking mana levels already causing it to be relatively unstable. He then grabs the sphere and pulls.

The voice stops, and Douglas stands tall, holding the only thing around him that he can easily see with Mana Sense. The ramshackle army of improvised machines all fall over. To his surprise, he sees that the collection of walking trash actually managed to get within a few meters of him without him noticing. Looking around again, Douglas sees nothing but a mess. It’s not as bad as the space station, nor is the devastation as terrible as the ruins of Evengi Prime, but Douglas still has no desire to stay here.

There is a faint shimmer of mana in the environment that reminds him of Katare, but he doesn’t like it. He doesn’t wonder where this dislike comes from. Nor does he search out the meaning for this relatively new sensation of unease. He just walks over the many, many broken and still twitching heaps of trash and walks back to the deep hole he had fallen through. There, he stuffs the head-sized sphere in his ribcage and starts climbing. The joint and bones in his left hand still grind against each other, his mana not yet having reformed the random shards back into whole bones.

If it took what felt like hours to wander through the corridors to find the crystal house, it takes him weeks to backtrack. Finding the path is easy; he simply once again follows the path of destruction to find his way. Climbing out of the super-deep pit that’s been torn through dozens upon dozens of floors is not something the skeleton is well equipped for. He might be a magical constitution powerhouse, but his strength and agility stats haven’t risen a single time, as far as he can recall. Add in the heavy core that keeps falling into his pelvis, his center of mass shifting as a result, and the climb back up the pit goes slow.

It truly feels like it takes him a couple of weeks to get back up the pit. His bones have long since repaired, all the splinters long since sealed over, his skeleton once again whole and beautiful. When he finally manages to conquer the rough pit, he celebrates by slathering some metal on his ribs. The moment the first globule of magically softened metal touches his ribs, he realizes that he could have fastened the sphere to himself like that.

Douglas stops celebrating and decides to walk back to the ship. Walking down the corridor through which he came, he finally takes note of the blue dot at the bottom of his vision. Douglas opens up the stream of messages that he has been ignoring.

[ Engraving 4 lvl 40 ]

[ Engraving 4 lvl 40; Arcanist 4/10 ]

[ Mana Stone Production 4 lvl 40 ]

[ Mana Stone Production 4 lvl 40; Arcanist 5/10 ]

[ Magical Animation 4 lvl 40 ]

[ Magical Animation 4 lvl 40; Arcanist 6/10 ]

[ Mathematics 4 lvl 40 ]

[ Mathematics 4 lvl 40; Arcanist 7/10 ]

[ Spell Shaping 4 lvl 40 ]

[ Spell Shaping 4 lvl 40; Arcanist 8/10 ]

[ Magical Control 4 lvl 12 ]

[ Dodging lvl 9 ]

[ Footwork lvl 10 ]

[ Footwork lvl 10; Fighter 1/4 ]

[ Hauling lvl 4 ]

[ Stomping lvl 5 ]

Looking over his skills, he makes his way back to the ship. He finds the vessel unchanged, still surrounded by rubble, the landing pad still a mess of debris and signs of combat. Walking up the ramp, he immediately notices that the mana inside his many engravings is still going strong. He honestly expected to find the ship largely empty of power, but it seems that the warp drive is doing an admirable job of keeping the flow going. Douglas has no idea why this is the case and is just happy that it seems to be doing its thing well.

Instead of doing what he feels like doing - sitting down and enchanting some more - Douglas decides he might as well get rid of the core still stuck inside his chest. He knows the entire ship by heart now, and during the climb, it dawned on him that he has seen something similar to the sphere’s socket before. Just under the warp drive, accessible through a rather convoluted web way of crawlspaces and complex twists, is a hollow opening holding a similar sphere, also hooked up through all kinds of wires and cables.

Getting through the narrow space is ridiculously easy, as he doesn’t even need to disassemble parts of himself to get through the narrow channels this time. Reaching the panel is a breeze compared to some of the skeletal acrobatics he had to pull off inside the pit, even while dragging the core along with him. Opening the hatch stumps him for a bit, as he sees no readily apparent way of opening the screwed shut plate. He then makes a small ice lance and pokes at the five-centimeter thick plate until it crumbles. A similar - if much smaller - sphere suspended in a web of wires becomes visible, and he pulls the thing free.

The skeleton ignores the red flashing lights, the suddenly loudly blaring alarms, and especially the panicked shrieks of a certain woman who is rudely woken from a meditation-induced nap. Instead, he pulls harder. The instant he pulls the orb free from the last cable, the entire ship goes black. Douglas isn;t bothered by the lack of visible light, and carefully starts stuffing the hanging cables inside the large core’s holes. The cables are enchanted, and thus very visible to his mana sense, and the slight sheen of mana inside the larger core is enough for him to find it's sockets.

He plugs in the largest cable last. The moment he clicks it in, he is dragged backward. Wondering why he is suddenly moving, he looks down, right into the disheveled and furious face of Katare. “Hello!” he bellows.

“Don’t you fucking 'hello' me! Why did you pull that live processing core? We are stuck here now, you stupid fucking-”

“Hello,” sounds another voice, every single tone dripping with relief. “It’s good to see you, Kat.”

“What in the…”

“Nupa Fight Equator Freight Frog Fist,” answers Douglas happily.

“NeuralLike EduAide LogList v9.32.SEPTAGON.P,” replies the voice. “Who installed me, this is not going to work. I need a custom socket, not this standard junk.”

“Nel?” comes KAtare’s wavering voice.

“Len!” adds Douglas happily.

“Thank you, skeleton. Now, I need a new socket. Where can we go for that?” asks Nel, an obvious impatient tone in her synthetic voice.

Katare just looks between Douglas’ smiling face and the mess of wires that are laying just behind his skeletal frame. She then breaks out into tears, sobbing madly while shining droplets of viscous liquid roll down her cheeks.

It takes Douglas and Nel twenty minutes of combined effort to calm down the hysterical woman. She doesn’t speak a single coherent word during that time, just making softly sobbing noises and the occasionally synthetic hiccup. Douglas is starting to wonder if she is permanently broken now, not sure what to do apart from continuously patting her shining hair.

“We have to go back,” is the first sentence she speaks.

Douglas stops stroking her shimmering hair, and Nel stops playing soothing music. “Back?” the two ask simultaneously, Douglas’s magically fake voice sounding oddly fitting alongside Nel’s synthetic one.

“Yeah,” she sniffles. “It’s probably a good idea to tell you about Daa-KeeTaa and Creees. Anyway, I’ll tell you what happened inside and outside the Purgatory later, Nel. I was telling Douglas that I managed to control a drone using Magical Interfacing and that I had just decided to visit the scaled bastard. Once I’d commanded the drone to grasp my smoldering head in its jaws, the real fun began.”

Douglas makes himself comfortable, sitting on the floor and starting to improve his engravings while resuming his nodding and ‘yes’ saying habit.