After thanking the space-whale for the map its psychic powers had granted him and inquiring after its health, Nathan somewhat grudgingly moved on. Whether it needed further assistance or not, it had no interest in asking it from him or from Saucer, and so he was left with the completely unsolved mystery of the pipes and tubing; whatever ailment the great titan of the void was suffering, Nathan had no clues as to how to even begin learning about it.
He did have a great curiosity about it… but it would not be fulfilled, at least neither in that life nor for many lives after.
Instead of hanging about and risking the ire of a creature whose mild annoyance could see him splattered into a haze of atoms evenly distributed across a hundred million cubic miles, Nathan left the chamber of the Ultra-Short [1 LY] Psionic Sensors and made his way back to the bridge to organize his thoughts, have a minor emotional breakdown, take a nap, hydrate, eat, and plan, though not in that order.
The hydrating came first, Nathan successfully exhorted himself. Then the breakdown.
There were a great number of things on Nathan’s to-do list, and he had not expected any of them to involve curling up into a still-suited (because after all, it remained the case that there was no atmosphere, and unsuiting in a vacuum seemed like a pointlessly awful way to die) ball, floating in the middle of a corridor. He had gotten as much magical, mystical trauma suppression, mitigation, and remediation boosting as his soul could handle, after all! Was he not fully qualified to be an isekai protagonist, breezily sauntering forth into the wild unknown unknown with bold assumptions about how it was clearly familiar territory?
Reader, he was as qualified as any human ever was, which is to say: no. No amount of boost that his youthful soul could handle would suffice for what he had seen and done in the several hours he had spent on the space station.
He had, at least, gotten something of a name for the place. It was a name that he instantly loathed and yet couldn’t find it in himself to argue with, since he was from Planet Dirt in the Sun solar system; but that didn’t remove the antipathy he felt towards Cephalohome, a small, out-of-the-way waystation in the midranges of the long-dissolved Benthic Federation. At least I can call it Cepha for short, he thought to himself forlornly, and that turned out to be just what he needed to cancel the apocalyptic panic attack.
With the resources he and Saucer had scavenged from the long, drawn-out running, skimming, flying, and madly swerving battle against the rats, Saucer had materials to spare. With relatively full reserves, it could dedicate some of its capacity to mundane matters, and operating a personal-scale utility nanoswarm was a negligible drain on the suit’s power. This meant that the snot, the tears, the sweat, and the vomit were all whisked away as though they’d never happened, with nanites even invading Nathan’s nostrils and throat to do their invisible work.
You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.
The acrid taste and smell of stomach acid disappeared, even if the rawness of his voice and esophagus remained.
“Weird as shit, but I'll take it," he muttered. Then, more firmly: "I mean, thanks, Saucer. That sucked. You absolutely kicked ass that whole time, and I appreciate you picking up the cleanup. That doesn’t even make sense, but whatever, you probably know what I mean.”
Quest Completed: We Need A Map
Status Note: 17% Suit Power Remaining
“Oof,” Nathan muttered in response to Saucer’s reply. “Good point. So we need, what, to either find a battery bank that you can drain or find a power generation solution—I mean, obviously there’s other options, but they also boil down to that, right? Though abstractly, all power generation solutions are kind of like a battery bank, it’s just that draining the sun through solar panels is… no, actually, that’s a terrible analogy, I’m sticking with them being two options. I didn’t see anything about either of them on the manifests, but we can literally see one of the solar panel fields out the window, so the manifest can’t possibly be complete.”
Estimated suit power required to repair solar panel field (per mundane 1 sqmi): 3%
Estimated suit power recovery per hour (per repaired mundane 1 sqmi): <0.001%
“Right.” Nathan looked lost for a moment. “So that’s not going to be an option. We’re going to have to find a battery bank that wasn’t connected to anything and still has power after millennia of deterioration and hordes of psychic rats running around, and whatever else is going on. Unless… are there some sort of exotic solar panels? Instead of mundane? I mean, they aren’t in the manifest. But neither was the swarm of rats, so there’s always a possibility. Ugh, and if the whale had been willing, we could have done something with gravity waves or tidal power.”
Failed Diplomacy Checks Are Ineligible For Re-Attempting
“Yeah, yeah, yuk it up, Saucer. I figured there was nothing to be lost by asking, and I still don’t know what I ‘should’ have gone to get on its good side. I mean, obviously maybe I should have hinted instead of asking, but there wasn’t any way to know ahead of time, right? The whole social power dynamics thing didn’t come through the fish. Which is… kind of a helluva sentence, alright. Anyway, is there any way to track, like, anomalies? If the rats were an anomaly, maybe there’s other anomalies. Hopefully we can find a side quest that doesn’t involve having to… well, at this point, just unceremoniously die, if we have to fight something like the rats again.”
Anomaly Map Processing Commenced.
Other Duties Await You.
“Yeah, yeah. Food and a nap.” Nathan yawned, letting the exhaustion surface from the shallows of his psyche. “Maybe in the reversed order. Wake me up if you need me, or whatever.”