At the same moment, Buster was in his small room. He was sitting on the edge of his bed, naked as the day he was born. His black and white fur was damp from the shower and hanging limply off of his enormous body. He was holding the pink scrubs he had worn just days ago, freshly laundered but still tattered from the rough riding.

On the panda's homeworld, their dominant religion proposed that when we die there is a paradise that awaits us up in the sky beyond the reach of the living. That death is our spirit leaving our body, and that all the good deeds you do in life form a series of steps leading up to that paradise. Each time you help someone, no matter how small, you make one more step in the long climb that every good person has to make to reach their final reward.

Pandas who didn't do enough good in their lives were doomed to come up short, paradise forever out of reach. They are left only two options: remain isolated at their peak and look down in judgment on a world they no longer belong to, or descend and vicariously experience the happiness and kindness of others from the shadows while never being able to experience it again themselves. They called those tormented spirits Obrigars.

Like most Nakunan races, their civilization saw a dark time when their religion was used to justify countless atrocities across generations. In those darkest of days, Obrigars were thought of as monsters as demons. A thing you used to scare a disobedient cub or a snarl word for people you disliked. For some, the fear of becoming an Obrigar was a very real thing that affected the way they lived their lives every day.

Then as their culture grew and pandas were more able to take care of each other, their interpretations changed as well.

When Buster was a cub, his mother told him a story. It was about a wicked panda woman who lived a life of hateful loneliness. She never did a kind thing for another person her entire life, and she found herself ailing and alone and miserable in her old age. Still, she did not look inward or change. Instead she cursed the world outside her door.

One day a homeless vagrant passed outside her home and asked her if she could spare a bite to eat for a panda in need. In irritation, she grabbed a bamboo shoot that was starting to turn brown at the tip and angrily lobbed it out the window at him. Here's your meal, I hope you choke on it!

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A few days later, the woman died. When her spirit left her body, she didn't have a single step leading upward to paradise. She was all alone.

And then what comes descending down from the heavens? The bamboo shoot she had thrown at that vagrant just days before. An act done in anger with no concern for the other panda. Yet still, he had not gone hungry that night because of her. In an entire awful life, that was the single good deed she had ever done.

It wasn't enough. So all the good pandas in paradise went down to her with that bamboo shoot, and she grabbed onto it with her paw, and together they carried her up on her single good deed. Together.

Because paradise is helping other people and being helped in turn. Nobody who has seen and done enough to reach it could stand by and let someone else suffer.

So long as there are good people in the world and in paradise, the only Obrigars are the ones who have given up on ever becoming something better.

They weren't demons and monsters, they were lost souls. Something to be pitied, not feared.

Lance had been right about one thing: All Buster's life, he had never really made a choice. He was told what to do and he did it, because he wanted to help and he trusted that the people telling him knew better than he did. He studied biologics because his Biology teacher was the only teacher who ever told him he was good at something and suggested that there was a career in it. His wife had been the first person he dated, and he dated her because she was the first person to ask him out. The only reason he even spent quarantine stuck with Lance was because he didn't care enough to decline the promotion even though field work wasn't what he wanted.

In the days after that fateful confrontation, Buster had looked back over his life trying to find any real meaningful choice he had ever made. Desperately grasping at significance to cling to.

All he could find was his scrubs. The one time he ever made a choice for himself. Most of his peers just went with standard-issue black scrubs, but he chose to wear pink because he liked the color. He knew it made him stand out, but he also knew that he was big enough that nobody would really bother him about it. And during quarantine he couldn't help but find himself thinking that everything would be just a little bit better if he could be wearing his special color through all of it. He had missed pink.

Ever since the awful realization of what his life's work had truly accomplished, Buster had been feeling a lot like an Obrigar. Alone, hopeless, surrounded by a world he no longer felt a connection to.

So that morning, just as he had in that cramped maintenance room on Martenwol, he climbed into his pink scrubs with a sense of great purpose.

As far as he was concerned, they were going to be the bamboo shoot that would take him to paradise.

One way or another.