Prospect, Carli City

Carli was a shanty town turned city-state on the far side of Prospect, which had among its rising spires and numerous hangar bays gaggles of pilots of every profession.

Here, voidsmen of every stripe intermingle with one another and exchange information. Usually, this is done over drinks, cards, or vapor, with the participants telling tall tales of their encounters along the Fringe. It's here that most learn about the dangers that lie beyond the known stars and hear about what treasures are out there.

More importantly, it's in these cardhalls and bars that the charters ply their trade. A charter is a sacred man, given more reverence than any priest in these parts. These sapients, for the right amount of coin, will pass along maps, coordinates, and directions to safe lanes of travel. Liminal travel is dangerous; even a slight miscalculation could lead to your ship being ripped apart by unexpected gravity wells or arriving deep in the void with an overloaded engine and nowhere else to go.

Due to the sheer importance of their work, charters are highly guarded and protected. Harming a charter or even stealing from one carried a death sentence, no matter where you were in the galaxy. Pretending to be one or passing along false information as a charter also carried a death sentence. Dell recalled seeing those condemned for being charlatan charters chained in the open void, their mouths frozen mid-breath as if their spirit was frozen in the icy void.

After drinking, mingling and gambling with the right folks, Dell eventually found himself a charter willing to speak to him. A pair of felius whisked him away, their blue fur and red eyes making them stand out among the other voidsmen. They carried on their belts plasma blades, their hips home to hefty revolvers, they eyeing Dell like a predator eyes prey. As they escorted him, Domitia shadowed them, keeping a distance behind them but always keeping enough of an eye on Dell that he didn't need to rest his hand on his pistol.

He's taken to a hanger bay and then up a flight of stairs. As he approached the attached apartment door, he could smell fine incense, inner mixed with dank canni. Along the way up, he could see the ship docked in the hanger, a Voidsprinter. It's a long, thin ship, the nose of it a deep sapphire, the paint job slowly transitioning lighter and lighter until it was a pure pearl around the engines. Expensive, yet having one of the best drives in the Coalition, Dell could feel his hands twitch looking over it as he envisioned himself helming that thin, blue-tinted vessel like a fish swimming through water.

One of the felius turns to face Dell as they reach the door, "Nothing funny. You understand?"

"I think I do," Dell answers.

The felius looks to his comrade, there being a silent exchange between the two before he opens the door and ushers Dell in. He finds that the vapors he detected earlier fill the room like a cloud. The whole living room is a scattered mess of boxes, suitcases, and bags. Clearly, he has just arrived or is preparing to leave, Dell thinks.

Toward the end of the room, he finds the charter, this 'Blue Mage' he has been told so much about. Apparently, his intuition is something mighty, and he can pick out routes by consulting the night sky. He is sat upon a throne of pillows, a vapor in hand, his eyes red as a supergiant. True to his name, the rest of his attire is some sort of shade of blue. The bathrobe that hangs loosely around him is a sky blue, his short, pixie cut hair is dyed a sapphire blue, and even his nails are painted a brilliant cobalt.

"Dell, is it?"

"It is."

"You're seeking safe passage to where?"

Dell mulls that over, "See, I need a place few know about."

"Prospect is that place," The Blue Mage takes a pull, and waves his hand, he then exhales, "You get that one for free."

"Hey, hold up, man." Dell takes a step forward. "Look, things aren't working out well."

"It seems like it." His eyes finally meet Dell's, "You're running from many things, or at least feel like you got too."

"Life as a bounty hunter has as many pains as it does charms," Dell admits with a smile, "So I need a place that's... Quieter than here. Understand?"

"Do you?" the Blue Mage asks, but before Dell can answer, he leans forward and pulls a data shard from the coffee table in front of him. With preternatural ease, the shard flies from the man's hand and right into Dell's open palm, the pilot not even realizing he caught it before it was in his hand. "Two."

Dell sighs, "Right." He reaches into his coveralls and produces an envelope, "As I was told." He steps forward, the felius right at his back the whole time, and places the package of two thousand real dollars onto the man's table, "We done?"

"We are, but," he breathes in and closes his eyes, reaching into his robe. Before you go, take a seat."

Dell looks to his felius escorts who wordlessly snarl at him and he finds a pillow and sits down before the mage. He pulls a deck of cards from his robe and begins to shuffle them around in hand. Dell chuckles nervously.

"Listen, you already sold me on this, you ain't gotta go through with the theatrics."

He does not answer, the man's eyes open, only for the whites to be showing as he produces the first card, lying it before Dell. The artwork of the card is highly stylized, the lines done in brilliant gold, the line work itself rigid and angular. The card before Dell depicts a charter, maps and other instruments of their trade falling upward away from them as they slip into the abyss.

Next to that card lies a card Dell knows well: the Fool, upright and elated, stars shining overhead. On the last card, eight pistols pivoted towards the stars, shining with power. Dell felt a chill as he looked over the cards. He knew what they were. He had heard of tarots being read before voyages deep into the void, but never had he been forced into it.

"Here," The mage croaks out, producing one last card, faced down, "Your comrade's card..."

The card hits the table and the man falls back upon his throne of plushness, blinking for a moment, the red in his eyes reappearing, "Now. Off with you."

"Oh, uh, okay." Dell barely manages to get the shard and the cards before his escorts usher him out.

He steps down the stairs at a hasty pace and eventually ends up back on the street, the whole experience taking him a moment to process truly. When the rain starts to come down, Domitia calls out to Dell. He shakes himself into action and crosses the street to meet up with the bellator.

"You have it?" She simply asks.

"Yeah," Dell shakes his head, "Why do they gotta be so weird?"

"Part of the trade," Domitia answers, "You know that as well as I."

"Right well, this one was especially weird, read me cards."

"Cards?" Domitia asks.

"Yeah, uh," Dell reaches and hands her the card that is face down, or at least the one he thinks is face down. "Here, I think this one was yours."

Domitia took the card and looked it over, letting out a hum before pocketing it, "Let's move. No reason for us to stick around."

"Right."

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----

Leaving Prospect couldn't have come sooner. The weather had begun to turn. Cold rain turned to sleet and eventually snow as the brutal winter Dell and Domitia had heard so much about began to take hold. As Providence began to burn upwards into the void once more, a great wall of white could be seen bearing down towards Carli. The sheet of snow seemed thick as the glaciers beyond it. As they made it out of the atmosphere, the city-state disappeared underneath that great blanket of ice.

Now in the void, Dell throttles the ship, making sure to hide his various signatures, heat, ions, whatever it may be. Not being an official settlement, few enforce the normal flight restrictions, allowing Dell to fly by scanner rather than locator. After ensuring no one is tailing him, he burns hard toward the jump point.

He then enters the Blue Mages' shard into his cell and converts it into plain text. From there, he punches in the coordinates for their first jump point. He counts three jumps and auxiliary coordinates here and there for alternative routes. The whole document being labeled as 'Veridian Sector Map.'

From the coordinates alone Dell knows this will be way out in the sticks, further than Domitia and him had ever been before. He feels excitement well up in him, the inner child expressing excitement in seeing stars he's never seen before him. The adult in him cringes at how much the fuel is going to cost.

"Well," He thinks aloud, "At least we had one good pay day before all this nonsense."

He punches in the coordinates and wakes the liminal drive. A low hum goes through the whole of the Providence as the drive spools up. Reality begins to fold in on itself directly in front of the ship, and in a mere blink, the Providence slips out of this reality.

----

The ship rocks back into reality, leaving the inky blankness of liminal space and back into the mundane. The Providence arrives in the light of a grey, old star. Around it, the ruins of a star system float around it in gentle repose.

Dell finds the next jump point and lets the Providence do the flying. Initial scans of the system find it completely empty, devoid of even other planets or planetoids. No signs of life or even the trails of others passing through, it's Nothing but cosmic rays and stardust.

As Dell returns from a quick bite to eat, only keeping an eye on the instruments of the Providence, he spies the way the fading light of the dying star plays across the countless stones trapped in its orbit. Be some perceptual illusion or the asteroids and other debris turning aimlessly, colors play across the massive ring that the star has accumulated.

Bits of red and spots of blue inner mingle with splotches of green and dots of yellow. Larger fields of purple and orange come and go and great rays of magenta or crimson appear just as the light of the star plays off them. It's beautiful, and if Dell didn't have the need to be somewhere else, he might consider staying in this system for a while just to watch the colors dance in this cosmic playground. Even Domitia takes an interest. Leaving her quarters at Dell's insistence as they watch the cosmic lights play across the ring of the grey star.

Eventually, the Providence finds its next jump point, and the bounty hunters slip away from the light of that dying star.

----

After another indeterminate amount of time, the ship reemerges, and begins the journey of burning through reality to make it to its next jump point. It's here, in this system, that Dell is awoken by the sound of sensors beeping, and when he checks to see which sensor is whining, he finds that all of them are.

After ensuring that he's not being set upon by some pirates that were trailing him, Dell looks into it further. About that time, Domitia came in to check what was happening, thinking that they were under attack as well.

It doesn't take long to hone in on what disturbed the instruments of the Providence, as the fourth planet from the purple sun of this system glows on all the scopes. In particular, the planet is highly radioactive, beyond anything expected. Curious, Dell diverts the Providence's course to get a better look at it as they rocket on past it.

It takes some time, and delays the flight of the Providence by a whole day, but they get a better look at the world as they pass it by. It's a grey, ruinous thing, hung in the obsidian void, its moon a shattered mess that is decaying around it. Most of it is covered in sickly green and grey clouds, and what spots are not concealed by that miasma are burning with nuclear fire.

Domitia and Dell both come to the same conclusion and while it's speculative, it's probably the grim truth. This world was perhaps host to some alien, a creature of sapience, and by most measures, would be considered as having a soul for those who believe in those things. Whatever the case, that creature also seemed more than capable of waging war. The fires that burn below are those of a nuclear holocaust. Done entirely in the dark, far from anyone to notice.

It's a bitter thing to witness, neither bounty hunter knows what to do with this newfound knowledge. Did others know? Do they care? As the planet fades back into the velvet oblivion of the void, and they arrive at the next jump point, Dell puts it out of his mind and flys on.

----

Returning to the material world once more, the burning red light of a red giant greets both bounty hunters as the liminal shielding is pulled back. For a moment, Dell thinks he might've made an error and flown back to Mayden Station.

After doing a sweep, he finds a distress beacon instead of a space station. Dell focuses on it, seeing it drifting towards its inevitable end in the perihelion of that red monster. Dell would rather ignore it; the signal is an old one, yet Domitia, looming over her partner, insists they do their common courtesy of at least investigating it and shutting the beacon off so pirates can't use it as a way to ambush good samaritans.

Dell agrees, but only if Domitia does the space walk, which the bellator has no qualms about. The journey has been stretching on for long enough that Domitia is beginning to get cabin fever. She suits up and waits for the Providence to get closer.

Once they're within touching distance, Dell gets a better look at the source of the beacon, a Coventor Yacht. It throws him for a loop, he has to rub his eyes a bit. It's a rare thing, seeing one this far out, usually posh voidships like that stay in the safety of the Core. The idea of it being this far out intrigues him. Not enough to go out and investigate it, no, he let Domitia do that.

The bellator finds her way in through a great gash in the ship's hull, which is probably the reason why the yacht died to begin with. Muscling her way through the bulkhead, she finds herself in a stateroom, anything of value or significance having long been sucked into the vacuum of space. She tries the next bulkhead, expecting it to be locked, but it gives with ease. Inside, she is greeted by a former voidsmen, most of his head missing, and a pistol frozen in his hands.

She pushes past him, venturing deeper into the yacht, trying to find the control room. Most of the dead are without void suits, their bodies having contorted and frozen after years of exposure. The few that made it into their survival suits are mummified within, hollow cheeks and dried lips telling a tale of starvation.

She passes through another room, finding it filled with men and women in dated suits, bodies frozen to the wall or floating in the middle of the room, the glow of a single terminal indicating the last vestige of power on this luxury vessel turned tomb. She examines it, finding the initial tab being a screenshot she knows well. The Horizon Crash, every line of every company on the exchange disappears into the screen below. With care, she finds the power cord of the terminal and pulls it, the screen dying, the image of that line burned into the monitor.

With that, the signal dies, and the bellator returns to the Providence. There is a brief discussion of picking over the wreckage for salvage, but neither Dell nor Domitia feel too interested in picking apart that vessel. They mark it for later, figuring that it'll be a few decades before the ship gets too close to the sun and, therefore, forever out of their grasp.

With that, they burn on.

----

Finally, they emerge from liminal space one last time. Upon entering reality, they see a great collection of void ships backlit by a neon sage and magenta nebula which fills the whole view of space before them. Dell picks up a handful of heat and ion signatures dancing around that ramshackle hulk, picking up on what it is.

"Ah, so that's Veridian." Dell thinks aloud.

He's heard of this station before, one of the few anchors of civilization this far out on the Fringe. Infact, from what he's heard, this is the very last one. Beyond Veridian is Nothing, supposedly. Few have ever ventured beyond Veridian Point, and those who do, don't come back. Charters have spoken about exploring it for years, yet none seem too eager to try and figure out what's out there.

"A station?" Domitia asks, joining her partner in the cockpit.

"Of sorts." Dell begins to punch in some autopilot commands as they approach the rust bucket. "We oughta be able to find us some fuel, maybe even some work as well."

"Thought you wanted a vacation?" Domitia asks with a smirk.

"Damn, nearly two-week flight is a vacation for me," Dell says as he stretches in his chair, "Besides, fuel is going to be the death of us out here. It ain't gonna be cheap. That money from Ms. Mori ain't gonna last forever."

"Right," Domitia sighs, looking over the station, "Least we'll be able to see if that ion lance was worth it."