I spun around to locate the speaker but discovered no one behind me. The voice spoke, again seeming to come from behind me. “No, I’m not here physically.”

“Ah.” I relaxed a bit and walked back to a desk so that I could make sure that I didn’t mess with the drafting table while I spoke. “You’re the Vestige.”

The voice rumbled for a moment, in an expression that I slowly realized was affirmation. “Yes. You may call Teldin, it is the closest approximation in your phonemes to my language. I’d rather be called that than ‘the vestige.’”

“Alright, Teldin it is.” I let out a breath and settled a bit more into my seat. “Are you going to explain why you were so hostile to me in that dungeon?”

“It is complicated,” Teldin began. “But I will endeavor to explain as best as I might.” Teldin paused here, seemingly for effect, before proceeding. “I am uncountably ancient, in large part because my memories have fragmented to a degree that I cannot remember the totality of my existence. I believe that I came into being sixty-five iterations ago, but I might have completely forgotten some. And I can’t even begin to count all the years of each iteration.

“But the exact amount of years that I’ve existed is ultimately useless information. Perhaps my existence before I became a Vestige might be of more use, but that is even more fragmented than the rest of my memories. You see, at the end of each iteration my lingering sense of self is damaged in the process of the world ending. I wish I could remember how the worlds end, but that is also fragmented more heavily than most.

“No matter though. You see, it is not just my memories that are damaged, it is my entire personality, my entire conception of self, that receives a heavy blow. And it seems that over the course of dozens of destructions, the pieces slowly ground down into fine vapor, leaving me as a creature of raw anger and despair, remembering only the death and the devastation but nothing else, nothing that might help to keep me sane.

“And yet in you, I find stability. I don’t know what it is about you that makes me remember who I am. Perhaps it is some aspect of your Chosen path, perhaps it is some part of you as a person that resonates with me. All I know is that here, in your heart of hearts, I find succor, I find peace, and I find myself slowly knitting back together from the myriad fragments I had been broken into. Some pieces are just gone, lost to the winds of time, but the rest… as I said, I’m becoming more myself.”

I nodded, taking in Teldin’s explosion of words, processing them slowly. There wasn’t necessarily a lot to unpack, but it was still a large amount of information to fit into the large understanding of the world. “What pronouns do you use?”

“What?” Teldin’s voice seemed a little surprised, then fell into a moment of thoughtful silence. “Well, I am not your species, so I do not have the same relationship with gender as your species does.”

“My species has a more complicated relationship with gender than you might think.” I said with a wry grin.

“Fair enough,” Teldin said. “I am distinctly not enough male or female in accordance with your species’ conception of it, even if we apply the closest analogues from my culture. Nor do I exist in a place of neutrality. Hm. Perhaps the ey/em pronoun set might best describe my relationship with gender closest?”

“Ey/em it is. Do you remember much about your species?”

“You know, I remember less than you might think. I have these fuzzy recollections, but what I remember the most is my own position within my culture and my species, rather than the broad universal details. While I’m certain you’re aware of your symmetrical physiology, I suspect it’s not something you define yourself by, for instance, as it’s something that’s largely shared across your species. You, instead, note the places where the symmetry is off, where one leg is longer than the other, or one ear lower.”

“Yeah,” I said. “That makes a lot of sense. You know, individualization coming from a process of differentiation, of unique identities coming from places of distinction rather than places of conformity.”

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Teldin rumbled in agreement once again. “I think that I just wanted to say hello at the moment and also, well. I need to apologize for my behavior in the dungeon. While I wasn’t entirely myself, I was also partially myself.”

“I can understand that a lot.” I leaned back and sighed softly, turning my gaze to the ceiling. “It’s not hard for me to think of all the times where I have been at my worst and hurt people around me.” Sam’s flashed in front of me, followed by a myriad of others that I had let down over the years. “I wish I could apologize to a lot of them, so I’ll start by accepting your apology.”

“Thank you.” Teldin’s voice was rich with sincerity, before ey continued. “I want to make it up to you, but I’m not entirely sure how just yet. I do want to stay with you, that I do know clearly. Being in your heart, it is still helping, even if the improvements are smaller.”

“Yeah, no problem. Anything you can do to help, I’d appreciate.” I fell silent for a long moment. “Honestly, I’m still feeling overwhelmed. Like, I’m doing okay mostly, but this is a lot of stuff on my shoulders. Fate of the world stuff, ya know? And I’m not exactly hero material. I’m a failure and a fuck-up, but my understanding is that there’s no one else to do the work, and if it doesn’t, then the results will be extinction, so I gotta do it.”

“Yes,” Teldin said. “That is a heavy burden to put onto anyone’s shoulders, let alone someone so young. You’re not wrong about the stakes, but the creators of your path knew what they were doing. If you are Chosen, it is because you can handle being Chosen. You might just need some more successes under your belt.

“How about this, I keep an eye on what you do and if I feel like you need any advice to make the right decision, I’ll help you.”

“Yeah, that sounds good.” I smiled, just a little, but it was a smile.

“Good, I should let you get back to work. You do have a time crunch, after all.” I heard a slight trace of amusement in Teldin’s voice before ey went silent.

Glad to have that settled, at least for now, I returned to the drafting table. Fortunately, my progress there was saved and I was able to get back into the design process for the demo-bomb. I gripped the sides of the drafting table firmly in my hands before diving into the thought-space of it.

I threw myself into the work, trying to ignore the lingering doubts in the back of my head. The demo-bomb refused to easily cohere into a singular concept, refused to become the creation that I needed it to become. Instead, it burst into a thousand complexities, none of which allowed themselves to be resolved, resulting in a mounting chaos that flooded my consciousness. I had the real world engineering knowledge here, but my skills were failing me.

I could do it though, I could bring it all into order. I began removing concepts that wouldn’t aid me, I didn’t need a timer, I needed a complex fuse, all I needed was pressure, and the best way of building pressure was steam. I just needed some way of sublimating the metal into pure steam, a radical transformation yes, but something within the limits of the system. The system could turn wood into rubber, it could handle this.

Sweat rolled down my forehead in waves, but I ignored it as I thrust pure mathematics into the chaos, using it as a sword to part the waves of disorder and impose upon it a more complete understanding of the interrelationships of concepts. Finally it clicked into place and the schema flooded instantly into my mind, not giving me a chance to refuse. I think I blacked out from that, as the next thing I knew I was laying on the floor gazing up at the ceiling.

But I had the schema.

From there, the rest of the designs followed easily enough. The smoke bomb simply required a weaker hull and less steam than the demo-bomb. Less of an explosion, but still a large cloud released on demand. The camo cloak derived readily enough from the principles found in Battle Harness Customization and, strangely, Automation Tools, allowing it to automatically blend into the background. I developed a secondary version to serve as a cloak for my power armor, which was a much simpler job.

Finally, I turned to the job of a communications device. This one resonated with my Helmets skill of all things, though in the doing I saw a potential evolution of Helmets where it focused primarily on sensory upgrades. I realized that resonance would work here quite literally for the construction as well, using air ingots that were ergonically attuned to one another so that they vibrated the same on both sides, carrying the sounds waves.

Despite the design work getting progressively easier as I went along, I still felt extremely drained by the time I was done. So, I went upstairs and got myself some fresh water, before heading outside to see how the cooking was coming along. Seeing plumes of smoke and Artemis and Jen sitting happily around a fire, I smiled and let them be for the moment. Instead, I took out the last few items from my queue and arrayed out a series of farm plots along one of the long edges of the crater. That way they’d all be conveniently close to each other, but also not get in the way of any external developments of the factory.

With that job finished, I finally approached Jen and Artemis. “Smells good,” I called out to announce my arrival.

Jen looked over and offered a broad wave. “Hey, it’s almost done, you’re just in time!”

I flopped down onto a log, feeling the exhaustion work its way through my body once again. “That research lab is no joke. I managed to get a schema for everything, but I feel like I just ran a marathon.”

“Then you must be starving!” Jen grinned and pulled a haunch off of rudimentary spit and set to carving it up on a neary tray. Once the meat had all been properly extracted, she piled a plate up with slices and handed it over to me, splitting the rest with Artemis.

I drooled at the sight and the smell of the food, not realizing how much my hunger had built up since all of this began. How long had it been since I had eaten something that was actually food? I just couldn’t remember anymore. So, I dug in with a relish and enthusiasm that was perhaps little less than proper manners, but I couldn’t hold myself back. I devoured and devoured, filling my gut with the steaming meat.

Once I cleared my plate, I fell backwards onto the soft grass of the crater floor with a satisfied sigh. “Ah, now that’s the stuff. I’m going to get the freshman fifteen all over again if you keep up with that.”

Before Jen could say anything, though, the system messages began popping up.