By the third day of your recovery, you can stand without Bedard's assistance. By the sixth, you are well enough to go back to your own quarters. Canala is keeping a hawk's gaze on you, making sure you rest and recover. Fortunately, the Ignis is undergoing 'routine repairs' and a general tune-up while you recover. You do note the increased shuttle traffic, so it's likely that several minor repairs are indeed underway of the loose-nuts-and-bolts variety.

That happy state of affairs is not likely to hold out forever, given the Ignis' Sprint Trader cover. Faunia is already looking for a suitable cargo, and Helheim and his team are quietly transferring off of the Ignis. Without serious oversight from the Deathwatch, and time on your hands, you decide to start looking into the history of Miotal Scathanna.

With not much time left in the Riptide system, your initial investigations have come up short. You know the information you want is out there, but all of your possible leads are dead ends for the moment. You need to either find Aunt Yasha, Tristan Von Sebastion, or Mu'randa Von Sebastion. Or locate the 'Sundered Wayshrine'. Or come across one of the AAs.

A fourth possible lead opens up as you run through a set of staff exercises with Miotal Scathanna. You decide to ask the staff itself. +What do you know of those that made you?+

+Only that which they left with us. Why?+

You start another form. +Because I'm left to wonder why they intended us to Merge, or what they want to learn from the Merging.+

+They did not tell us.+

You finish the form and come to a resting position. +Which means we need to find out. What knowledge did they leave behind.+

+Wardancing, how to Listen, and Shadowstepping.+

+Wardancing? What's that?+

+How to fight with a staff. We would have mentioned it sooner, but we know that we can fight if needed.+

+I am no master combatant. If there are other ways to fight, then let's work on them.+

+Accessing memnonic data.+

You feel a tickle in the back of your mind, and new information starts to flow in. Automatically, you quarantine it off for examination. +What is this?+

+Memnotic data, pulled from the staff.+

+From you, you mean.+

+No, from the staff into us.+

You drift down to sit cross-legged in your quarters and close your eyes. Opening your Third Eye, you turn your gaze inwards and examine your mind. You see all of the familiar sights and sensations. But dancing around the edges of it is a tracing of silvery wire. Carefully, you lift away the filter of memory to see flesh, and the wiring persists. You trace it down your spinal column, down your left arm to your palm where it forms a small circle, and down the left side of your body and left leg, where it forms a second circle on your left heel.

+Now you begin to See. We are one. Let us center ourselves and begin learning these forms.+

You close your Third Eye, let out a breath that you didn't realize you were holding, and rise to your feet. You begin to float through a new form, gathering strength and speed as you gain confidence.

By the tenth day of your scheduled recovery, you are back to your full strength, and perhaps a tad bit sharper than before. Certainly, your new workout regiments have rebuilt your body with whipcord muscles and your usual inhuman grace. You noted a pair of schools in the new forms pulled from the staff, as well as a distinct flavor to the forms you already knew.

Your pre-existing weapons drills were rather Imperial in nature: obstinate on the defense and powerful in the attack. They were also ill-suited to switching between the two, and favored heavy blows over economy of force.

One of the new schools is even more aggressive than the Imperial forms. It leverages your grace, strength, and speed into a flowing wave of go-for-broke ferocity backed by instinct-level combat awareness. This is balanced by its overemphasis on the attack, to the point of willingly taking a hit to end a foe.

The second is almost purely passive and defensive, all but totally reliant on using your opponent's moves to break them. It focuses on countering, evasion, and total economy of effort. It may not be aggressive, but it would almost never let you get hit.

With your recovery complete, Faunia sets to work finalizing one of the shipping contracts that form the backbone of her and the Ignis' cover. A shipment of radioactives and foodstuffs to a new Adeptus Mechanicus Forge-station / shipyard in the HJG-1034 system. Once again, it falls to you to plot the warp-course to your destination.