Aetheral Space

"You think I'll talk?" said Muzazi, glaring straight forward.

Dragan sighed as he sat down in the chair opposite from Muzazi. Expecting the Special Officer to cooperate was a longshot - he'd already known that - but it was still yet another annoying thing to deal with. Another headache-prompt to add to the list.

"Of course not," he said, rubbing his hands together - the room was damn cold. "You're the kind of guy to bravely resist interrogation or whatever. Believe me, I don't want to be here either."

Muzazi scoffed. "Liar."

"How am I lying?"

"You have no sense of duty - no sense of responsibility. If you did not want to be here, you'd find some dishonourable way of extracting yourself from the situation. As you did on Caelus Breck."

Dragan suppressed the urge to roll his eyes. Was this really what Muzazi thought of him? That he was some galactic vagabond that flitted from place to place as he pleased, slipping out of the Supremacy's grip like some kind of escape artist? Ridiculous.

Still, somehow getting out of the situation Skipper had gotten them into was a tempting idea…

He shrugged. "Well," he said. "You can think whatever you want about me. I won't bother trying to convince otherwise. You're the kind of guy who doesn't change your mind easily, right?"

Muzazi stiffened slightly, and Dragan had to suppress a grin at that. It was true that he didn't much care how this interrogation went, but he couldn't deny some dark glee at making the man who'd chased him all the way here squirm. He had memories of Muzazi's neutral body language - like an animated statue in his Archive - that he could compare to the swordsman's current demeanour to detect deviances.

"What's wrong?" Dragan went on, when Muzazi didn't speak up. "Did you forget I'm a Cogitant? I can work out most things about you just by glancing at your face."

A lie - he needed a little more than that - but just true enough to be unsettling.

Muzazi shut his eyes. "Ask your questions," he growled. "I will refuse to answer, and you will run away as is your nature."

Dragan frowned. This whole interrogation was getting a little mean-spirited, and he wasn't there for that. He held up the script they'd given him, reading through the questions as he carefully observed his prisoner.

"Your partner," Dragan began. "They know you have one. Where are they?"

Microexpressions made themselves clear before Muzazi could suppress them. Uncertainty, confusion and anxiety in equal measure. Even without Muzazi so much as opening his mouth, Dragan knew the answer well.

"So you don't know," he said smugly. "That's fine, I can just put an X next to the question."

He did so with two quick swipes of his finger, then glanced back up towards Muzazi. The swordsman was clearly gritting his teeth behind his closed mouth, given the minute movements of his jaw. His frustration was increasing with each second.

Dragan knew he really shouldn't do this. Chances were that Muzazi would somehow break free of this predicament - and when he did, he'd seek retribution for each and every humiliation.

But he just couldn't help himself. Muzazi had caused him a lot of trouble, after all.

He went on. "How did you know where the security operation was taking place? That wasn't exactly public knowledge. You had insider information, didn't you?"

Muzazi's face didn't move an inch. That was fine.

"You realize, of course," said Dragan slowly. "That keeping your face still so you don't make any compromising expressions is itself a compromising expression?"

The smallest intake of breath through the nose. Dragan was in his element. Back on Crestpoole, he'd only sat on the sidelines of interrogations like these, but taking the interrogator's seat came more naturally than he'd expected.

"The fact that you hid your expression so quickly, compared to the first question," explained Dragan, drumming his fingers on the table. "Means that, unlike with that question, you do know the answer. And you very much don't want me to know. That suggests that me having that knowledge would be harmful either to you or to the person who gave you that information - and obviously it wouldn't be you, because you're already in a bad situation. So it's the person who gave you the intelligence. You didn't dispose of them, and in fact you know where they are right now. That location is something which, of course, you don't want me to know."

Another tiny breath. The merest hint of anxiety, but it was like blood in the water for Dragan. He leaned forward a little more, grinning.

"But it's more than that, isn't it? It's hard to believe you've got someone on the inside of security, seeing as they're surveilled to within an inch of their lives. If one of them talked to you, we'd already know about it. So it's someone who gets this kind of information through another method, then? An information broker, maybe - someone in the city's underworld, at the very least."

A subtle twitch of the eyebrow. He'd hit on something with that speculation.

Dragan steepled his fingers. "I don't really care who gave you the information, to be honest - they sure do, but I couldn't care less. But the fact that it's an underworld figure means that this person is an ally of yours, not a puppet - and an ally of your partner, too, then. I'd wager we'd find them both at the same place, wouldn't we? Or at least … that's what you think."

He leaned back in his chair, trying to suppress the self-satisfied smile spreading across his face. Even without Muzazi saying anything, he knew he was right. People like him couldn't keep things close to their chests, even when they were putting all their willpower into it.

Muzazi sighed with a shuddering breath, opened his eyes again. "You think you're very impressive, don't you? But you are not."

Dragan raised an eyebrow. "How's that?"

"You sit there, throwing out your accusations as if you were reaching into some crime, enacting some justice. You do this when you are the criminal, you the betrayer. You take on a role that isn’t yours - and you relish it, kicking a man while he is down. It's disgraceful."

The smug smile turned into a frown. "You're saying you're not the criminal here? You're literally in a jail cell. I'm not saying anything about this morally, but you did break this planet's laws - that's a fact."

"There's a greater code than the laws of men."

"And what's that?"

"The laws of the soul," Muzazi said earnestly. "The promises we make ourselves."

Dragan rolled his eyes, chuckling derisively.

"And you laugh," Muzazi shook his head. "I speak of honour, of dignity, and you think it a joke. You have the heart of a demon, Dragan Hadrien."

Dragan bit his lip. He didn't much care for the moral judgements here - even when they were so blatantly overdramatic.

"You don't seem so dignified right now," he said, looking the dishevelled Muzazi up and down. "You look like shit, actually - no offense."

"A temporary setback. I will be free of this place before long."

Dragan shrugged. "Yeah, probably. They'll make some stupid mistake and you'll be back on the streets, challenging lampposts to duels."

"You shouldn't make such light of it. As soon as I am free, I will be coming after you. How long are you prepared to look over your shoulder?"

A nasty flare of anger bubbling in his chest, Dragan leaned forward again, planted his hands on the table with twin slams. "I won't have to," he hissed. "You know why? You're too stupid to approach me from behind. You'll wander near me, shout out my own name, and it'll end with you on the ground and me standing over you. Because you're an idiot. Because you don't understand the way the world works."

Muzazi showed no signs of caution at Dragon's sudden outburst. He simply raised one eyebrow. "And how is that?" he said, sounding distinctly unimpressed.

Dragan was only too happy to enlighten him. "These things you ramble on about? Honour, dignity, all that shit? They don't exist. They're things people made up to make themselves seem more noble. There's no difference between me shooting you in the back and shooting you in the front. If I were to pull out a gun right now and shoot you - while your hands were tied - it wouldn't mean a thing. You'd be dead and I'd be alive, so I'd be the winner. The person who's willing to do what it takes - whatever it takes - gets what they want: that's the rule. That's the only rule."

He heaved out angry breaths, surprised at just how much Atoy Muzazi had managed to frustrate him. He wasn't even sure if he fully believed all the words that had come out of his mouth, but they'd flowed like a river all the same.

Muzazi sighed. "What an awful world you must live in."

Smoke-filled streets. Houses crushed together. Familial hands wrapped around his throat.

"It's called reality," Dragan snarled. "Maybe I'll see you there someday."

And with that, he rose from his seat - with such force that the thing clattered to the floor behind him. Hands balled into white-knuckled fists, he turned on his heel and marched out of the room. He had more questions, but he was in no state to ask them.

Atoy Muzazi. That idiot's childish worldview pissed him off more than anything else.

-

Skipper really had made a mess of the gymnasium when he'd played that game of catch with Dragan. Safety fencing was still set up in several places where repairs had to be made - massive dents and holes in the walls, floor and even the ceiling.

"Doesn't look like you guys were too gentle in here," muttered Ruth, staring up at the ruined ceiling as she and Dragan entered.

"That's because we weren't." Dragan was still in a foul mood after talking to Muzazi, so he stalked into the room with his hands plunged into his pockets. "Is that a problem?"

"Course not," Ruth grinned. "There's no such thing as teaching without somebody getting hurt."

She stopped in the middle of the empty gymnasium and summoned her Skeletal Set with a flare of red Aether. The dull metal creaked as it came into existence, Ruth cracking her joints in preparation.

"I think most teachers would disagree with you there," Dragan remarked, taking position across from her. "Usually, the goal is to teach people without getting them hurt."

“Yeah," Ruth conceded, shrugging. "But where's the fun in that?"

After Dragan's vertical trip through the streets of Taldan, he'd decided that his current repertoire of Aether tricks … really wasn't enough to actually do him any good against the kind of opponents they were currently facing. He'd managed to take down Muzazi, so he was still pretty great, but that was more down to the situation than any individual strength on his part.

He'd thought about asking Skipper for more training, but things were kind of awkward there at the moment - and he wasn't in the mood for the whole manchild approach to education.

Ruth seemed to know what she was doing, anyway - creating a physical object out of Aether had to be a fairly advanced technique.

“So," she said, voice made hollow by the mask over her face. "You notice anything?"

Dragan's eyes flicked over her armour, at first finding nothing of note - but then, a second later, locking onto the slight dent on her shoulder plate.

"I noticed that damage before, during the battle," he remarked. "It's still there?"

Ruth nodded, patting the shoulder plate in question. "Until I get it beaten out, yeah. You see, it's not like I 100% make this armour out of Aether, you know?"

Dragan nodded slowly, a new conclusion steadily forming inside his mind. Realization dawned.

"It's an actual physical object," he said, testing the waters. "At some point, you somehow turned it into Aether, and now you can turn it back whenever you want?"

Ruth snapped. "Bingo! Or, uh, chess. I don't know the one. It's called recording: it's meant to be one of the, uh, I think four pillars of Aether? Not sure if they're pillars, actually, but I know they're important."

Maybe he should have gone to Skipper after all.

She counted four fingers on her hand as she mouthed to herself and - apparently satisfied - nodded. "Yup, four. Infusion and alteration, recording and manifesting. Technically, me making the armour appear is manifesting instead of recording, but you know what I mean."

"No," said Dragan. "I don't know what you mean. That's why I need teaching."

"Yeah, yeah, cool," Ruth snapped her fingers again, clearly an unconscious attempt to imitate Skipper. "Anyway, how it goes - infusion is when you, uh, pour Aether into something to improve the qualities it's already got going on, and alteration's when you mess around with that Aether to give the thing new properties."

Dragan nodded, dutifully filed the information away for future use.

"Recording's when you take an object and absorb it into your own Aether, kinda, uh, make your Aether remember it. Like downloading a file onto your script, right?"

"Well, how do you do that?"

Ruth put a finger to her chin, clearly in deep thought. "Well, it kinda came natural to me, but … you gotta be at least a little familiar with the thing you wanna record, I guess. Your brain needs to know how it's put together before you can take it apart and make it into Aether. And you can only have so much stuff recorded at once - like with the files on a script, you've only got so much space, right?"

Dragan cocked his head. "But you've got two whole sets of armour recorded."

"I had to work at that, though," Ruth said proudly, fists at her hips. "The more you practice storing stuff with your Aether, the more storage space you have. Like flexing a muscle."

Hm. This was intriguing. He couldn't think of anyone better suited to learning how to quickly analyze an object than a Cogitant with his prior experience. There was promise here.

"And then you manifest it," he concluded. "And that pulls the object back out of your Aether?"

"Yup."

"So is that a transfer, or a copy and paste thing?"

Now it was Ruth's turn to cock her head. "What do you mean?"

"Well," Dragan said. "Can you make lots of sets of armour, or just the one?"

Ruth scratched her hair. "Just the one. Why?"

"Just wondering."

It wasn't much like saving a file at all, then. With a file, all you were really doing was copying the old one and deleting it when you were done - a real transfer wasn't possible. With Aether, though, it seemed that you actually were transforming the object and reverting it when you needed to.

"So," Dragan went on. "How do I, uh, how do I do this recording thing? Like, physically, how do I do it?"

"It takes some practice."

Dragan raised an eyebrow. "Got nothing but time."

Ruth grinned. "Then let's get started."