Aetheral Space

Ruth Blaine wasn't one for drinking, really. Alcohol tasted bad and made you stupid, which weren't really the best selling points for her. If you drank water instead, you could stay smart and not get thirsty. It wasn't even a choice.

What she did like, though, was a bar. A place where people could come together and throw away the anxieties and responsibilities that plagued them. It was where humanity was able to take a break from being human - the all-hours job that didn’t pay for shit.

And what she liked even more than a bar, was a bar fight.

Her fist found its mark on the jaw of a burly Pugnant, and he went flying backwards into the wall, sending splinters of wood flying in every direction. One of his companions, a wiry-looking man with a thin moustache, snarled wildly and swung a bat towards Ruth's head.

Years ago, that bat would have seemed like a threat to her, most likely. Something that could cause her pain, at least. Now, though, after all she had been through?

Now it just seemed slow.

Ruth ducked, dropping to the ground in less than a second, and the bat sailed over her head. Then - just to punctuate her point - she jumped back to her feet with such speed that her skull met the wooden bat from below and shattered it, leaving the wiry man holding its wrecked handle. He looked at it, gaping in disbelief.

She simply grinned, showing her fangs, and motioned for him to try again with her hand.

They weren't fighting about anything in particular, no bullshit ideology or anything like that. The wiry man's Pugnant friend had been annoying her, so she'd started fighting them. There wasn't anything complicated to get in the way: no hidden pasts, no politics, no secrets. Just them trying to hit her and her trying to hit them.

This kind of simple fight - this was what life was all about, the way Ruth saw it.

The Pugnant - a burly, red-haired man - pulled himself free from the wall with a roar, leaving a noticeable impression in its surface. He grabbed the nearest table - its occupants shifting their chairs out of the way - and charged at Ruth, lifting the furniture over his head as a weapon.

Her grin widened. This was more like it.

Until now, she hadn't been using her Aether - her fighting buddies didn't seem to have it, and it seemed unfair to give herself such an overwhelming advantage. But if they were going to start swinging tables at her…

Just a little bit.

Ruth took a deep breath, and a few subtle sparks of red Aether began collecting around her fists, barely perceptible. Her hair, too, brightened just a shade or two - not enough to be noticed unless you took a good look. Her Aether tic made real stealth a tall order, but stealth had never been her style.

She preferred to solve her problems with a fast-moving knuckle.

Her arms lashed out like a pair of snakes, striking the surface of the table just before it hit her, and they went right through - impaling the table on her arms and bringing the object to a sudden stop. She heard a gasp of surprise from the big man on the other side of the weapon, and she adjusted her positioning, securing her arms in the table like hooks going into a fish's mouth.

She had him. Now to finish the job.

Ruth brought her head back as far as she could, channeling her Aether into it and infusing it until it was harder than brick. Then, with a grunt of exertion, she brought it forwards towards the table, her vision a blur from the sheer speed.

"Dude, move!" shouted the wiry man to his Pugnant friend, but it was too late.

Ruth's head split the table in two with its impact, and then kept going - striking the Pugnant right in the chest. Right before connecting, Ruth lessened her Aether - she didn't want to kill the poor guy, after all - but that was still enough to send him down to the ground with ease. He rolled and moaned, nursing the spot where she'd hit him.

She wiped the sweat from her brow. "And stay down!" she laughed, enjoying the limber feeling a few minutes of fighting gave her.

The wiry man glared at her, looked for a moment like he was going to spit some other insult or throw another punch, but he relented and marched out of the bar, his thin arms crossed - and a moment later, his Pugnant friend crawled after him.

A murmur of disappointment rang out from the bar's other occupants - they'd clearly been enjoying the show. Well, Ruth wasn't here to entertain them. She sat herself down at a stool on the bar and looked at the automatic bartender.

"Input order," it said in a drawling artificial accent, multiple limbs mixing and serving drinks even as it's glowing-green eye was focused on Ruth's face.

"Glass of water," Ruth said, catching her breath. Without the reinforcement Aether offered, fighting like she usually did really was tiring. How had she ever managed without it?

"Glaza Tar," said the automatic, in that same calm tone. "Confirm order?"

Ruth rolled her eyes. Whoever owned this place had clearly got the bartender for cheap. "Glass of water," she repeated, making sure to enunciate clearly.

"Invalid response," bleated the automatic. "To revise order, state 'please revise order'."

"Please revise order," Ruth growled, glaring at the machine. She wondered how much force it would take to tear the damn thing in two, and how much she would have to pay the owner afterwards.

"Restarting order," the automatic said. "What can I get you?"

"Glass of water."

"Glaza Tar, coming right up!"

Ruth's fist hit the bar, shining with crimson Aether, leaving a deep indentation where it came down. Again, the other barflies gave her nervous glances, but none dared speak up against her.

The only one who took no notice was the automatic bartender, who placed a glass of viscous black liquid in front of her. "Please enjoy," it said. "This beverage will automatically be charged against your UAP credit account."

Ruth looked down at the glass of opaque liquid, feeling her teeth grind against each other. Skipper's lies, their current situation, this whole stinking damn fucking city - it all seemed to be contained in that glass. She really wasn't in the mood for this.

"Listen," she hissed, as calmly as she could. "I really -"

The automatic giggled.

Ruth looked up, brow furrowing. Automatics didn't laugh - and if they did, it didn't sound natural. It didn't sound like that. What Ruth had heard there was the laughter of a human being.

The automatic had stopped, multiple arms frozen mid-motion, one hand just allowing the bottle it was holding to spill onto the floor. Ruth glanced behind her - nobody else seemed to have noticed. They were much too busy trying not to look directly at her.

She looked back towards the automatic. "Uh," she said, if you could consider that speech.

"You're funny," said the automatic, in a voice that was very subtly different. This wasn't the automatic speaking anymore - someone was speaking through the automatic, modulation masking their voice. Still, even through that static, Ruth could tell that the person talking was a girl - and a young one, at that.

"Wasn't trying to be," muttered Ruth, hunched over against the bar, eyes looking this way and that.

"But you're not stupid," the automatic went on, limbs still frozen in mid-air. "The way you're looking around - you're trying to find me right now, aren't you?"

It was true. Ruth had been watching the other occupants of the bar, trying to spot if anyone's mouth was moving in time with the automatic. More than that, though, she was trying to figure out what was going on. Was this a trap? Was she in danger? The girl's voice was friendly, but something about it made Ruth's stomach drop.

"Where are you?" Ruth mumbled, doing her best to prevent the other customers from hearing.

"Sorry," the automatic said, followed by another modulated giggle. "No matter how hard you look, you won't find me. My Digital Complex lets me control simple machines like this from a long way away."

Digital Complex. Ruth wasn't entirely sure what that meant, but the way the girl had said it demanded the capitalization. Some kind of Aether ability, then.

"What d'you want?" said Ruth. As she spoke, she brought her glass up to her lips, only to slam it back down when she got a good whiff of the contents. Whatever the hell Glaza Tar was, it wasn't entering her body any time soon.

The automatics camera rotated slightly, clearly zooming in on Ruth. "One of my drones saw you fighting," the girl said sweetly. "You looked strong, so I wanted to meet you."

Ruth glared. "You still haven't met me, though. You're looking at me on a computer monitor, right?"

"Well, it's a script screen, but I get your point. You're mad because I'm being sneaky, huh? Are you the kind of person who doesn't like being sneaky? Do you think it's cowardly or something?"

Ruth shrugged noncommittally, glancing towards the door. If she just got up and left, would this girl try to stop her? Could she?

"I think," said the girl, still happily having a conversation with herself. "That it's very easy to call other people cowards when you're able to take a bat to the head no problem. I mean, if you've no reason to be afraid of that, what is there for you to be afraid of? Sure, I'm a coward. I'm scared of a lot of things. How about you, fighting girl? What are you afraid of?"

Ruth's gaze returned to the automatic, memories bubbling up to the surface. A lashed corpse, strapped to a metal post. A skeleton, sizzling with plasmafire on the floor of a Supremacy warship. She wasn't scared of pain, or being attacked, or anything like that. What she feared was losing what she had.

"That's a tough one, huh?" the automatic prompted when it got no response. "I get it. It's a little personal. How about another question?"

Ruth narrowed her eyes. Until she knew exactly what kind of situation she was in right now, it was probably best to play along.

She nodded.

"What do you hate?"

Ruth furrowed her brow. That wasn't the kind of question she'd been expecting. "What?" she said.

"People say that when you hate something, it's really because you fear it. That sounds pretty good to me. I mean, it's like how some people hate bugs, right? They hate them because they're afraid of them. They're scared of being webbed up and eaten, having their insides turned to soup and drank through a straw. I mean, I'd hate that too. Wouldn't you?"

"I guess," Ruth said.

"So what do you hate? I already told you I'm afraid of everything, so I guess I must hate everything. I hate this city. I hate this planet. I hate this whole entire galaxy, really, now that I think about it."

Ruth stared, befuddled. She didn't quite understand the philosophy this girl was ranting about. "Because you're afraid of it? Why?"

The automatic didn't move, but Ruth could almost see the girl's grin through the tone of her voice. "Because I'm afraid of it eating me. I'm afraid of becoming part of it, of accepting my own meaninglessness. This whole world is trash, and so are all the people who live in it. You agree with me, right?"

Ruth pushed her stool back, put distance between herself and the automatic. How the hell could this girl think she'd agree with her?

The girl seemed to take Ruth's silence for an answer. "You think you don't agree?" she muttered, voice slippery and cold. "Disgusting. You're not even lying to me, you know? You're lying to yourself. You're so afraid, you won't even let yourself know it."

Ruth growled deep, her hand holding onto the bar tightening with a squeal of metal. "I'm not afraid of anything," she said, deathly serious.

The girl laughed mirthlessly. "Liar, liar, pants on fire," she said, with none of the childishness the rhyme required. "Everyone's afraid. You're scared of someone coming up behind you and killing you, right? Don't you think that'd be a scary thing to happen? Everyone's scared of that. That's because they know it can always happen. That's because everyone hates everyone, deep down. Without exception. Because they understand the shape of this world."

Ruth slammed her fist down on the bar, encased in a glove of red Aether that quickly solidified into the claws of her Skeletal Set, the recorded armour reflecting the lights above. The customers, who had withstood a great deal over the last few minutes, finally decided now was the time to leave.

"Are you mad?" the girl giggled. "You're mad, right? Because you know I'm telling the truth. That's so weird!"

The girl went to say something else through her automatic puppet, but was interrupted by the fact that Ruth's claws sliced the thing to pieces in less than a second. Her laughter trailed off into a distorted screech as the pieces of the machine rained down upon the ground.

She felt her teeth grinding together. She'd come to this place to calm down, but it seemed she'd done anything but.

-

As she walked out of the seedy bar - nestled as it was in an alleyway - Ruth stuck her hands into the pockets of her hoodie, angling her head down to avoid having the occasional dripping of water from above splash into her eyes.

"There you are," said a voice. It wasn't the girl; Ruth looked up towards the mouth of the alley.

It was Dragan, stood there in a coat that was a little too big for him, looking severely unimpressed. His arms were crossed, and one of his eyebrows was raised to such a degree that it looked like it might just escape his face entirely.

Ruth shrugged, smiling wearily. "Here I am," she said, feeling like a child about to be scolded by an adult. "You here for a drink?"

Dragan wrinkled his nose. "That stuff's not for me. What the hell are you doing?"

She chuckled. "You know, just, uh, just hanging out."

His eyes drifted down towards an unconscious drunk, crumpled on the ground towards the side of the alley. With his dark coat and bushy beard, Ruth had almost missed his presence.

"Just hanging out?" said Dragan, hand on his hip.

"Woah, woah," Ruth waved her hands in a placating gesture. "That one wasn't me!"

Dragan glanced towards the bar behind Ruth, where the 'open' sign was still flickering on the door. "That one?" he said, sighing.

Again, Ruth shrugged. She really wasn't in the mood to deal with this kind of thing right now. "Yeah, yeah, whatever," she said. "What do you want? You're not the kind of guy to come down here just to hang out."

"What the hell are you doing?" Dragan snapped.

Ruth furrowed her brow. "Excuse me?"

"You hear some news you don't like, and you go storming off to wreck a bar? You've been gone for hours without a word. What would we do if you just didn't come back? It would be annoying having to search for you, you know?"

Well, clearly he had searched for her - he was here, after all - but she decided not to mention that.

"It's not me hearing news that I don't like," she said. "It's having secrets kept from me, when I thought I knew where I stood. I thought that I was trusted!"

Dragan crossed his arms, his expression shifting from annoyance to outright anger. "You think I'm not having secrets kept from me? I don't even know why I'm here!"

Shit. That was a good point.

They stood in silence there for a minute, angry faces staring at each other, the only sound being the occasional drip of water from the buildings above. Eventually, though, Ruth sighed and relented, letting the tension drain out of her body. Her balled fists returned to her pockets.

"You want me to come back, then?" she said quietly, looking down at the ground.

"I … I just want your word that you'll come back before tomorrow night." Dragan seemed unsure of the words even as he said them.

She smiled bitterly. Of course they wanted her back before the niain. "Sure. I'm more useful that way, right?"

Dragan's face didn't budge. "Of course you are. Don't make it sound like a manipulation thing. It'd be stupid to go into battle without our best fighter."

She smirked. Liar. No, he was just wrong. He hadn't seen what Skipper could do when it came down to it.

"Fine," she muttered, looking down. "I'll come back."

When she looked up from the water-streaked ground, she saw that Dragan was walking away, apparently satisfied. She hesitated for a moment, then called after him.

"Hey, Hadrien!" she said. "Hold up. Let's talk."

-

The traditional design didn't quite work as well when traffic had the vertical element as well as the horizontal. The kind of bridge that you'd put over a river ran the risk of having a car drive too low and decapitating everyone standing on it, after all. Dragan would agree that that was a definite design flaw.

On Taldan, then, bridges were more like glass tunnels, built to connect the districts that made up the city proper. Looking left, Dragan could see a mass of shopping malls, stadiums and fast food places, all clumped together like a convention for tumours. To his right, he could see a depressing landscape of cold grey towers, stretching up as far as possible - a residential district, where people went to sleep once the rest of the city had drained the life from them over the day.

Below, though, he could see the void - the gap between districts - a pit going so far down he couldn't see the bottom, just the subtle shifting of mining equipment at the very limit of his vision.

Traffic passed below and, yes, traffic passed above, so many cars packed so close that each line of traffic sometimes seemed like a single object. Pedestrians mimicked their vehicles behind Dragan and Ruth, a tired babble echoing throughout the tunnel as they made their way home from work.

Dragan and Ruth stood a little distance away from the crowd, leaning on the bridge's railing as they looked out at the city.

Ruth sniffed, getting a whiff of that awful Taldan stench. "I don't like this place," she said. "There's just … something awful about it."

She wasn't wrong. "What's there to like?" Dragan said, droll. "I guess if you like choking on mining fumes all day, this place might be for you, but I'm having trouble thinking of any other selling points.”

Ruth chuckled. "Shut up," she said, without any real anger in it.

Well, at least she wasn't pissed off anymore. "Maybe one day," Dragan smiled.

They stood there for another minute or two, just watching the cars pass by, before Ruth spoke up again.

"It's not keeping secrets," she said quietly. "I mean, it's not just keeping secrets. It's just … you know, the idea that I'm fighting for something without knowing about it?"

Dragan glanced at her. "What did you think you were fighting for?"

She seemed to consider that for a moment or two, eyes gently closing. "I guess … I didn't think I was fighting for anything. Fighting for fuel, maybe, for food, for my buddies. Just … fighting to keep living, you know? Because that's what I thought Skipper was fighting for, too. But if he's got secrets he can't talk about, that could … that could mean he's got a reason for me fighting that's a secret too, right?" She looked to him, as if for affirmation.

Dragan blinked. Once again, he'd underestimated Ruth Blaine's intelligence. With just one clue, she'd managed to figure out what Skipper had told Dragan at the hospital.

Well, she'd known the man for longer, anyway. She had an advantage in that department.

Was it alright for Dragan to confirm her suspicions? While Skipper hadn't exactly sworn him to secrecy, he felt like the implication was still there. It wasn't his confession to give.

"I think," he said, as diplomatically as he could. "That if you're fighting for something, it's not a bad thing for there to be a real cause behind it. That way it, uh, it all means something - even if you lose, right?"

She shot him a glare. "That's only if you know you're fighting for it. If you don't know what the cause is, you could be fighting for something you hate. Dying for something you hate."

That last sentence had memory behind it, Dragan noticed, real sentiment. Ruth's gaze turned down into the void below.

"Have you been told about North yet?" she said quietly, almost imperceptibly.

Dragan shook his head. "No."

She sighed. "North was … North was part of our crew before you. He wasn't very strong - like you, heh - but he could do things with Aether that you wouldn't believe. Do you, um, do you know how holograms work?"

He nodded. "Sort of. It's all about reflecting light in specific ways, right?"

"He could do that more easily than any machine, he could just pour his Aether into the light around him and force it into whatever shape he wanted."

"Sounds like a good skill to have."

She chuckled. "It was. Skipper thought so too - you should've seen how many credits he sent North each month."

Dragan cocked his head. "Hold on. The guy before me was getting paid?"

"Take it up with Skipper, not me," Ruth shrugged. "He wasn't easy to like, but North was … North was a good person to have in your corner."

"I'm noticing the past tense here," Dragan said somberly.

"A mission went wrong," Ruth said, her eyes far away, as if she were still there. "North got grabbed by the Supremacy. We went in to bust him out … but by the time we got there, there wasn't much left of him. Just … just bones and plasma. They'd drowned him in that shit."

He had nothing to say to that, nothing he could do except awkwardly look down at his shoes.

"It's just," continued Ruth, fidgeting with the railing. "Thinking that he died, like that, and he never knew what he was dying for … it's awful. I can't stand it."

Silently, Dragan nodded. It was an awful thought. When he died, Dragan didn't want to go out with questions unanswered. He wanted to understand why everything was happening.

A thought occurred to him. "Hey, Ruth?"

"Yeah?"

"You said you thought you weren't fighting for any particular reason - just to survive day-by-day, right?"

She cocked her head. "Right. Why?"

"If that's true, why did you think you were kidnapping me?"

Ruth bit her lip and glanced away, clearly uncomfortable with the question. Finally, though, she relented. "A friend of Skipper's asked him to," she said softly. "I think."

He leaned in closer, curiosity overriding the somber atmosphere that had settled over him. "A friend? Do you know who? Their name, at least?"

Again, Ruth looked away - eyes staring up at the sky, at the stars above the city. "I don't think…" she said. "I don't think that's something for me to tell you. Wouldn't feel right."

So you're keeping his secrets now, too?

The words almost left Dragan's lips, manipulative words that he didn't really mean. He knew for a fact that if he said those words here and now, Ruth would tell him what he wanted to know. Every facet of her face and body language was confirming that for him. All he had to do was say them.

But it was like Ruth had said: it wouldn't feel right. Besides, if he did that, Ruth would be sad later and that would be a pain to deal with.

Sighing, he moved back and went back to leaning on the railing. "Fine," he said, rolling his eyes. "If you say so."

They stared at the city like that in silence for a while, the stream of pedestrians behind them just as heavy as ever. This city never slept, clearly - when people were waking up, people were going to sleep, and that was a constant.

"Dragan?" said Ruth quietly.

"Yeah?"

"I'll come back."

-

At least, she'd be back by the time they needed her. Ruth still needed some time to think things over, so she'd decided to take the long way back, using the massive staircases that connected levels of the city rather than an elevator station like Dragan had.

In the end, she hadn't told him about the encounter in the bar. There was no need to report in about that unless there was something to report. For all she knew, some computer nerd had just decided to bully her for a bit.

Making her way home was one hell of a workout - even with her taking automated trams to travel horizontally through the districts, the sheer number of steps she had to climb meant that her legs were aching by the time she made it back to the district she'd first stormed out of.

Huffing and puffing, she stormed past a ragged, faded banner reading 'A New Dawn - Vote Chael' as she reached the last set of stairs. Just as she turned the corner, she skidded to a stop.

A girl was standing atop the stairs, wearing a fluttering winter coat and a beret.

She was young - likely only fourteen or fifteen - but her blazing blue eyes had a kind of cold fascination to them, like she were a scientist inspecting Ruth under a microscope. A smirk played across her lips, and her fingers twirled a lock of her dyed-blue hair.

Ruth gulped. She didn't know why - the girl wasn't doing anything hostile, exactly - but the way she was being looked at sent a chill down Ruth's spine.

Still, she was no coward. Hands in her pockets and eyes looking down at the floor, she made her way up the stairs, intending to walk right past the strange girl.

As they crossed paths, Ruth striding past the young girl towards the exit, the girl's smirk widened into a malicious grin.

She heard the girl's voice, the voice that she had heard in the bar: "You know," she said, childish cruelty evident in her tone. "If you stick your nose where it doesn't belong, Ruth Blaine…"

Ruth's eyes widened.

"...you'll die, okay?"

She swung around, claws already manifesting on her hands, ready to defend herself - but the girl was already gone, the only sign of her presence being a gentle breeze that swayed the ragged banner. Ruth stood stock-still for almost a minute, poised for combat, before she finally allowed herself to relax.

Ruth clicked her tongue. She really hated this city.