The next moment shall be burned into my memory forever, or at least as long as synapses still fire. The door zwooped automatically to the side with a soft whoosh. There directly ahead of the three of us, was what could only be described as a ‘cute behind’, the owner being bent over to grab something. Bare-assed as the day she was born. “Uh? Erin? I assume we might be early.” a startled eep and a scramble to the side resulted in her tripping on the inner suit she had been in the middle of pulling up.

Jester couldn’t seem to contain himself. Speaking with a straight and even tone. “Perhaps we shouldn’t have butted in early.” The sound of Exxes hitting her face with her palm was the only thing you could hear over the soft groaning of Erin as she was still smarting from the near faceplant maneuver she had just managed.

“Jester, perhaps we shouldn’t make butts of ourselves and wait outside while Exxes helps Erin up.” I intoned as I turned on my heel and waited for Jester to do the same, then slapped the sensor on the door to give the two ladies some privacy.

“I hope our buns aren’t in the oven. This is an honest mistake! Normally that wouldn’t have been a big deal. Usually, it’s just a shared locker room for the pilots. It just feels different when you include an outsider. You know, an unspoken truce among the pilots that it’s, ‘Nothing personnel kid’. “

“Wait someone still knows that meme?”

“Yeah. especially considering that some of us can actually teleport. You, my new found friend, will enjoy the memes from the Coffins. Most of us have pretty twisted humor honestly. Skeletons tend to just be a little more open about it.”

“Wow. Memes...memes everywhere.” We both fell into a fit of snickers. “You have anyone on this side Jester?”

“We normally don’t talk about stuff like this. Especially in the Skeletons, we tend not to. I know a well-honed sense of the ‘dad joke’ when I see it though, and yeah I got a little girl. It might seem callous of me to be here and not with her, but I’m ‘doing my time’. I fucked up bad and this was my one golden opportunity to get back. I don’t even know when my time is up anymore. Time gets funny on the other side. They have some trackers that log our time. I just keep at it. It’s better this than never getting to see her again.”

“Well, I know we all have our own reasons for being here, but I got your back as much as I can. My wife’s dead, my sons a wildling, and I don’t know if anything is going to work out. ...I feel your pain.”

The silence was affable, but it was still a heavy silence. It was a moment later that the door zwooped open again. Exxes had a huge Cheshire grin on her face as she waited for us. “So Jester, Doc here is a Natroll.”

“A Natroll? What’s his threshold and base resonances?”

“He apparently is a 4, out the gate. He has almost no elemental resonance other than electricity, at a 3 out of 5. Out of the specials, he registers 4 out of 5 on metal, force, light, and a 5 out of 5 on dark on entropy. He has a focus specialization in almost all except dart, with at least a 3 out of 5. High points include 4 out of 5 in special uses of burst and blast, and a 5 out of 5 on Rail. His melee rating is a 5. The Doctor here destroyed 2 rooms one all the way up to 4:1. For a prodigy, he rates higher than you did at your start, but he was one of the first cases of wildling exposure, so he cheated a little.” She finished clearly trying to provoke a reaction.

I had been listening, trying to parse the information. Apparently, my scores were quite high for a start. I was also guessing Natroll had something to do with a high natural roll. Possibly jargon that developed out of the D&D culture. I know, hard to believe. Real magic exists yet people still play it, granted it uses more modern elements now. Last I knew we were up to 11th edition. I was in the middle of my reverie, a veritable deluge of my thoughts and memories when I heard the last part of what Exxes said. I lost it. “Yeah holding half of a wife is what it takes to get where I am. Don’t forget, having a son tortured and experimented on in order to trigger a wildling event, luck to survive that first bit of the event, and then some luck to survive a VALENT install. Yeah, it’s easy. Anyone can do it. We done fucking around here?” I moved through the door, ignoring Exxes’ sputtering attempt at a recovery. Suddenly being reminded of all the reasons I was here, was not the motivation I was hoping for, but nothing moves you forward like running from the ghosts of your past. I made it just into the pilot fitting area.

Jester clearly unfazed by the exchange moved up to quickly catch me. “Hey, Nikolai.” He placed his hand on my shoulder with a surprising amount of firmness. “Exxes is just a kid. I know she doesn’t always think before she speaks, but she was just trying to give me a heads up on what we have to work with. Take a few minutes before getting suited up. I want your best in there. We are going to be working together for quite a while and we need to be able to work this out. Exxes has survived for about 8 years worth of time out there. She is one of the longest standing members of Skeleton. Being out there so long messes with your head. There is a reason most corps will only do 2 years worth of time consecutively. Give the kid a break, for me maybe, she has been in a Coffin since she was 14. Most of us in Skeleton are hard cases, try not to take anything personal.”

I take a breath. I take another as I start to collect my thoughts. “Honestly. I regret that. I normally don’t let stuff like that get to me, but with having something happen earlier and seeing someone like Exxes, who looks so young, pop off about it like it’s such a trivial thing. It really took me by surprise. Yeah, I’ll take a minute. Can you let Exxes know that I didn’t mean it?

“No can do on that. She might be a kid and need a little leeway, but she deserved that tongue lashing. I just don’t want what she said to keep us from working together as well as we can. It can be hellish out there. She has survived a lot of shit, but sometimes only by herself. She hasn’t hit S rank on her own so she isn’t cleared for solo forays. Which means she still has to work with others. Nothing wrong with her getting taken down a peg so she can learn to work with others. We all have our problems in the crew, but this last minute sortie group change was clearly designed to wrangle all three of us. Let’s try and get through this together.” He clapped me on the back with just enough force to come across as fatherly. “See ya in a few. “

“Great! Way to ruin the moment!” I hollered back. I moved forward to the only inner suit hanging on the rack. I see the label on the right shoulder. With the suit being so slinky it just pops out there like a sign. “N. Wolfe. I wonder if that makes it into my ‘moniker’?” Musing out loud to myself. I sit down on the bench next to the open locker slot where the suit is hanging. Was I really that raw? I haven’t gotten upset about it in ages. I mean it didn’t help that she looked like a kid, or Erin bringing up the whole mess earlier, but I still don’t know what got into me. Did I cheat to get here? I guess I did. I had no right to be here, but here I am trying to get to him, and breaking all the rules to get there. Fuck. I’m the bad guy here. Erin walked around the corner trying her best to not look embarrassed. I straighten up and wiped the corner of my eye as I run it through my hair, trying my best to be nonchalant. “Uh hi there? Everything okay?”

“I was going to make sure everything fits with the inner suit. ...I’m sorry for earlier. I’m not a pilot, I’m just a tech. I’m really not used to being naked around people, like you guys.”

“I’m not a pilot yet, you know. I just have experience being around naked people from my time with the military. I’m not going to lie, most of that was not around cute girls though.”

“What do you mean? Wasn’t the military desegregated by then?”

“It was for all intents and purposes, but not a lot of women actually wanted to be on the frontlines.”

“Wait, did you say I’m cute?” sudden realization sinking in. She blushed bright red.

“Huh? You say something?”

“Nothing!”

“Hey, could you give me a moment of privacy? If these are like the kinetic barrier sensor under layers they take a little shimming to get into.”

Clearly taken out of her cycle of embarrassment by the question. “You don’t have to shimmy. These suits will just seal down onto you once you’ve put it on. Also, these suits don’t actually take impacts out in the mining zones. They facilitate the high-speed information and Aether pulse transfers between your body and the Coffins. In turn Coffins relay that information out to the Deadweights to anchor your position into one of the mining zones. We will be doing an 8-hour dive to start. That will be around 64 hours under compression. We will be taking camp breaks to give your brain time to process as it would during normal sleep cycles as mental fatigue is what will cause us the most difficulty. It will be the limiting factor.”