I didn’t fully understand the chemistry involved, but I’d studied the basics of these machines in my Practical Starship Maintenance class. As the icy fog turned into thin strings of white smoke and got sucked into the ceiling vents, an amber glow came from the emitter assemblies on the sides, and the final stage of the revival process began.

A cryosleep pod would progressively restart the body’s metabolism and wake the brain from stasis at exactly the correct time. I remembered memorizing that the precise calibration of this function was so important that a small mishap would result in memory loss in the very best of cases.

The person inside shook awake and immediately tried to sit up. However, her muscles didn’t quite respond, and I found myself catching her before she fell back down and hit her head against the cryo-pod's not-so-comfortable mat.

“How do you feel?” I asked, trying not to manhandle her too much as I helped her sit leaning against the wall. It’d take at least a few minutes for her muscles to warm up to the point where she could walk.

She gave me a furious glare, and I recoiled slightly. While unable to move much, she scoffed in a language I didn’t understand. I showed my palms as a sign of peace. “Calm down. I’m not the pirate who bought you. I’m just some guy who found the starship.”

Confusion mixed into her expression, but she didn’t look any more friendly. Urgh. I don’t like dealing with crazy screaming women, but I guess it’s better than fighting an armed pirate with a welding torch and some screwdrivers.

“Do. You. Speak. English?” I made gestures to accompany the words and tried to make my tone as friendly as possible. The frozen woman didn’t seem to understand me, but she did tilt her head as if she had at least begun trying to. “Finally,” I muttered to myself.

It was a confusing interchange, but she relaxed once I managed to explain I was not a pirate. Wherever she was from, the stereotype of space pirates wearing eyepatches seemed to translate.

I offered her a hand and she took it, leaning on my shoulder when her legs gave in and didn’t hold her weight. I carried her to the aggressively pink room and had her lie down there. I was worried she’d mind the aesthetics, but instead, she started poking and squishing the plushies.

Taking a breath of relief, I leaned against the opposite wall. It wasn’t cramped enough we were breathing down each other's neck by doing this, but we weren’t too far either.

I pulled out my terminal and navigated to the translator app. Hopefully, whatever language she spoke would be among the ones it kept cached for offline use. I held the microphone button and asked her to say something.

“Что?” She certainly didn’t get me, but she spoke a word that was surely a “What?” However, the terminal didn’t recognize it. This pulled a deep sigh from me, and I put the device down.

“Mark,” I said, touching my chest. She seemed to understand.

“Fir” She mimicked the gesture, although hers was followed by a soft wobbling noise.

I couldn’t help but stare.

Fir had the type of beauty that betrayed some rich heritage. Either she was from a pure bloodline of good-looking people, or her parents had the money to get her the fanciest type of gene therapy at birth. She had burgundy red hair, cream-white skin, and the curves of a woman who’d never missed a day of training and dieting under a top-tier AI assistant.

“Извращенец...” She put her eyes in the way of mine and gave me a judging glare. Embarrassed, I quickly gestured an apology. She seemed to accept it, putting her hand to her mouth for a giggle.

A wide movement of her arms, followed by a quizzical head tilt— She asked me where we were. I looked at my terminal again, bothered by the translation app’s failing. “Perhaps...?” I said to myself while navigating to a different app.

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Taking out the stylus with a click, I handed my terminal to her and proceeded to draw a doodle on it. She made a fascinated sound before trying it herself. Before long, we were exchanging drawings, and though neither of us was great at it, we finally started to understand each other.

Fir had never seen a terminal before. The first thing she did was ask me about it. I tried to explain it was a computer, which brought a line of questioning where I ended up describing a central processor as “a rock that was taught to think.”

I tried to tell her my background — but to my drawing of “engineer” and “university,” she responded with a little wizard in a magic tower.

Is she teasing me? I took that as a joke and laughed, but her eyes were resolute, and soon confused. I circled the wizard and drew a question mark, which I’d earlier taught her the meaning of.

In the next few attempts, Fir would go on to confirm that wherever she came from was a land of honor, swords, feudal lords, and “magic.” I was very interested in this “magic,” but the examples she drew sounded more like chemistry and astronomy. That was disappointing, but it certainly was more believable than if she’d drawn a man casting lightning from his palms.

Her expression became progressively more dreadful as I proceeded to explain the situation we were in. In the process, I started to teach her words like “spacesuit,” “void” and “starship.” She taught me her versions too, and I made my best attempt to memorize them.

However, by the end of the 2-3 hours we spent doing this, the fiery woman before me had been reduced to a shaking, desperate girl. Shyly and slowly, she drew me one last thing: a tiny red silhouette with triangle ears on her head, a silly string-like tail, a simple starship around her, and a question mark beside a skull amidst the inky darkness of space.

“What’s with the ears and the tail...?” I recognized that drawing was her, but this question took priority in my train of thought. Shaking it off, I sat beside her and drew myself holding her hand. Then, I thoroughly crossed out the skull she’d drawn. I smiled as big as I could and gave her a thumbs up.

She looked at me and said something I understood as “Really?” So, I nodded my head.

I didn’t expect her to hug me. It tugged at my heartstrings.

I’d been doing my best to keep my fear locked up for a while, and I’d rather have kept it that way. I didn’t want to think about how close to death I’d been, how hopeless the situation was, or how little time I had left. Every minute I spent in doubt was a minute I could have put towards cracking the wall between my safe return home and starving in deep space.

Feeling my composure fall apart like a car without nuts or screws, I put my arms around Fir as well. I was scared too, but at least I knew what our chances were. I knew exactly how much time we had left, and I knew what I could do to get us out of here.

While I was slowly rebuilding the walls inside of me, Fir started crying. I felt bad for her. Perhaps I should have woken her once I was sure we were safe. Once we were about to be rescued by a Falcon Empire cruiser. Then she wouldn’t have to go from worrying about serving a pirate to dying in outer space.

I rubbed her back and pressed her close. Her chest squished against me, but I paid no mind to it. She kept weeping. I looked down, lost in thought, and... Wait, what?

There was a dark red tail coming out from her back. The base seemed seamlessly attached to her spine, lacking the metal seams you’d expect from an implanted one. Furthermore, it was tensed against the bed, shaking side to side as she sobbed on my shoulder.

I placed my hands on her arms and pulled her back for a moment. She stared at me confused, and her cheeks turned red under her tear-soaked eyes. In retrospect, meeting my stern eyes, she must have thought I was about to go in for a kiss — which would’ve been terribly inappropriate. We’d barely just met.

But I was dazzled by the fact that there was indeed a pair of feline ears on her head. As politely as I could, I brushed away her hair and confirmed what I thought I’d seen earlier — she also had human ones.

Did the cat ones just “pop” out when I wasn’t looking? I was incredibly confused, but considering her background, perhaps this made sense after all. In holo-movies about swords and fantasy, catgirls and wizards went hand in hand. But how would an underdeveloped world where astronomy is considered wizardry have the biotechnology necessary to put a cat's tail and ears on a human?

Out of consideration for Fir, I decided to silence my doubts for now and continued to hold her close until she stopped crying.