Christina stood at her grandmother’s room. The old woman laid on the ground, barely breathing. On Christina’s hands, a strong and stout hunting knife her old grandma kept close to her bed - “a memory of your grandfather”, would she say and would Christina believe, even if it was a lie.

The floor boards next to Christina had been dug with the knife. They were old, wood-type boards, and had been glued to the floor, differently from the other boards - which were nailed.

Inside the small hole beneath the boards, wrapped in plastic and covered in wood glue, two shinny headsets could be seen.

Those were Jack’s and Elicia’s spare neurosets.

Christina took the neuroset, dumbfounded. Then, as Sasha hit the ground with her hand, she finally woke up to reality and went next to her.

The girl put the neuroset on her grandmother’s head and caressed her face. Sasha smiled, and, as soon as Christina plugged the neuroset on the telephone socket, left reality to Another World.

***

Christina had arrangements to make.

Her grandmother had clearly died, and her thoughts and emotions had yet to settle.

“That’s an opportunity” - would be what her reason would say, had it a mouth to speak which wasn’t connected to her emotions.

While still in a certain amount of denial, she rose to her feet and hurried outside of the house.

She went to a department store and brought glue, a telephone, a music headset and a few other things.

After getting home, she then took the other headset in the hole, put it to the side, and carefully began to assemble a simple home-made headset for drug use.

She made it not overly simple nor overly complex. Using some parts from her own headset, she then wrapped that up, put it on the hole, and covered everything with a little bit of wood glue.

She couldn’t make it so secure as her grandma’s storage, since it would be weird for such a common drug-use headset to be so heavily hidden, but it still needed to look like a buried treasure.

Then, she took the neuroset on her grandmother’s head and marked it with a red pen, whilst the other one she left unmarked.

Neurosets would become useless if someone used them to enter Another World “forever” - that was a truth, but also a lie.

The headsets would indeed become useless for this process, since a few core components would burn, but it could still be dismantled into amazing parts which would allow someone to do amazing stuff.

Wasn’t it for the fact that no one had managed to reproduce a full-functioning neuroset (even by mimicking every piece on every place), then it would also make a great material for creating new ones.

Those two neurosets were a treasure, even if only one of them could get someone into Another World.

She had to hide them well before breaking down from the emotional downpour which would eventually come, and way before the investigation which would follow.

The death of a Squeam Soldier or its relatives was always thoroughly investigated.