The room they placed her in had an embossed door sign pronouncing it "Quarantänekammer 4". This was presumably high billing, as the corridor they had lead her down, dim and with a faint coat of oil garnishing rusty red slag-metal walls, had easily dozens of rooms, occupancy rates minimal. Only a scattered few of them had their doors sealed shut, and fewer still echoed with the muffled sounds of their occupants, shouting out in incomprehensible languages that nobody seemed keen to tune in on to hear. Even the man working the desk, face obscured by a solid, bare-metal shutter, had not spoken English, requiring her captor—the armoured man—to adjust his collar and shut off its speaker modules so that he could reply in kind.
She hadn't seen anyone else since he had ushered her into the room and stomped away.
Room was perhaps too kind a term. She would have preferred "cell", but felt that the accommodation had not yet stooped down to the kind of spartan fittings that word implied. It was clean, certainly, with dark grey walls and faintly blue-white recessed lighting. She had a bed, and something that approximated a sheet—a sort of sweeping, curved sheath along the sides that swept a soft, airy something over her body when she lay down, providing her with a cover, even if not one she could remove.
There was a chair, not lavishly fitted but comfortable, and small closet that served as a combination shower and bathroom. The fixtures were unusual, certainly; the toilet was positioned such that one needed to crouch down near the wall, a plastic sheath that almost suckered itself over her genitals, but once she had inculcated herself to that strangeness, it did not overly offend her sensibilities.
And yet, there were no windows. There was no way to see beyond the locked metal door, sealed with a rubber lining. Food was lowered in once every few hours on a kind of actuated tray contraption, a sleek track-following device reminiscent of a dumbwaiter that was recessed into one wall. There was no way to tell the time or to pass it, and there were cameras, multiple lenses affixed at the high corners of the room. The bathroom was not spared from this intrusion.
When April had first been deposited here, she had sat down on the over-light mattress and looked down at her body. What she had seen, now that the adrenaline haze had finally departed, was the thin, pallid body of a gently shivering woman, dressed only in dirt-soiled leggings and a sports bra, body smeared with a caustic combination of mud, rancid muck, miscellaneous biological slime and blood—of others as well as her own, ripped out of her across a tapestry of scattered bruisings, gougings, burning red bands of contact rashes and hangnail sticking plasters.
Looking at it all, April lost her mind a little.
Only a little, but then that is still kind of a big deal. Merely catching sight of contaminating blood, let alone whatever other bacteria-laden horrors were now smeared across her bare skin, was often to petrify her mind, or spur her into reckless action. Up until then, the near constant danger had flipped her brain into some sort of primal survival mode, shunting away that fear until she could deal with the more present impending danger. Now that there wasn't anything hanging over her except for a more abstract, anticipatory dread, her subconscious decided to allow that avalanche of trauma and disgust and hatred and denial to cascade across her at once, spreading out over her body in a suffocating wave of pain and emotion to blanket her skin, mouth and eyes with layers of panic.
She fell onto one side against the mattress, hyperventilating softly, and then kicked out her leg with a scream, bare foot striking hard against the blanket-sheath contraption. It rebutted her with a stinging reproach, but not before she had planted a muddy imprint of the side of her foot against the bare metal. Looking back at the stain left by her touch, April felt heat rising at her chest and flushing her cheeks again.
She fought back a pulse of bile, and twisted to claw at the foot with her hand, scraping away at the layer of dirt with her nails in a manner that mostly just spattered the stuff elsewhere across her body. One of the puncture wounds on her arms began stinging viciously as the mud smeared across the exposed blemish, its attendant sticking plaster having long since fallen away. Staring more closely at it, she caught a hint of green amid the red.
She ran to the bathroom closet and, not understanding the toilet, vomited onto the floor of the shower box instead.
She then had to reach across the cubicle in a stooping lean to reach the controls, feet sliding for purchase against the plastic tiles lubricated by her coating of various slimes. For one teetering moment, she felt herself almost fall victim to that unsteadiness, an action that would have sent her toppling into the puddle of her own sick, but despite her shaking arms she managed to catch herself on the opposite wall at the last moment, propping herself up in the air at a diagonal.
After taking an indeterminate time-out to still her fingers, she slowly clawed her nails up the wall, gradually walking her fingers towards the control panel. She felt smooth nondescript plastic give way to the uneven surface of bare, rough-worked metal, and twitched her fingertips towards the array of unfamiliar controls. No tap valves, knobs or dials; only recessed switches. She stabbed at them randomly until a cold stream of water began pouring from the ceiling and down on top of her, running off her back and onto the floor, exposed injuries stinging brightly through her mental fog. Staring down at the drain, she watched as the discoloured chunks of bile began their meandering journey towards the hole the floor, which eagerly slurped them up.
She had been standing there for fifteen minutes, blankly gazing at the now mostly clear water spiralling into the drain, before her aching back reminded her to move. As soon as she did, she realised that she was still wearing clothes; her bra and leggings were clinging to her body, saturated with cold water and stains of the more stubborn grime. Sliding down onto the ground, she slipped them off, letting the water run down over her bare chest and legs.
The time that she had already spent under the shower nozzle had washed away the worst of the muck, but removing her clothes and changing position had exposed a few holdout areas to the stream, sending a fresh surge of murky brown-red fluids spiralling down the drain. She stared at the bloody hole for a few seconds, then closed her eyes, threw her head back, and screamed upwards into the downpour, fat droplets flooding her throat. She gave it three good yells, then bit the sound off, spitting the trapped water uglily onto the floor where its constituents rejoined their brethren.
When she opened her eyes again, she just barely caught the movement of the glass eye of the room's camera as it refocussed on her. She gave it the middle finger, not bothering to cover her breasts or crotch. Glancing at the raised arm, the sticking plasters uniformly detached and washed down the drain by now, she got a good look at the row of pucker marks from her first encounter with Kroakli, a few of them leaking thin streams of red amid the water and her exertion. They were interwoven with the welts left by the creature under the mound where its tentacles had gripped her skin. Disgusted, she bit her lip and looked away.
*****
Ninety minutes later, she stepped out of the bathroom mostly clean. The shower had not come equipped with bottled soap, but when trying to alter the water temperature she had discovered that one of the switches converted the stream to a sort of foamy lather that she could readily use. It was a convenience that she didn't employ gratefully, but with at least a begrudging kind of respect.
As she back over the threshold, the recess in the wall clunked loudly, the metal tray contraption dropping down bearing a pile of folded cloth, something that looked like a roll of bandages, and a towel. April, who had jumped about a foot in the air and landed in a fighting pose, naked and dripping, eyed the package warily. She very nearly ignored it, but ultimately allowed herself to snatch up the towel and give her body a once over before discarding it next to the bed while she lay down, curling up into a ball.
Her eyes focussed on one of her arms again, tracking the raised redness across its surface. Something about the colour plucked at a thread of recent memory, and she was abruptly brought back to the interior of Michelle's bathroom, the bloody stain spattered across the ground amid scraps of entrails and the discarded ends of limbs.
Whimpering, she balled herself up more tightly, and waited for something new to happen to her.
It didn't. The room echoed with the silent stillness, and a soft, barely-audible background hum of machinery.
After several hours she untangled herself to stumble to the bathroom, and upon returning reluctantly walked over to the wall to retrieve the folded cloth pile and bandages. As the aperture cleared, the mechanism clunked again gratefully, replacing the items with a queued-up platter of some sort of foodstuff. She ignored that for the time-being, but unfolded the cloth pile, revealing a set of undergarments, and an outfit composed of matched airy white fabric, with a mesh under-layer. It wasn't exactly a fashion statement, existing at a midpoint between athletics gear and pyjamas, but it felt soft enough to the touch, and it was clean. That was good enough for her for the time being, her mind forcing away any fresh worries to focus on the prospect of dressing in something that wasn't stained with horrifying splotches of blood.
First she needed to see to the wounds themselves, though. The cuts on her arms had bled a little again, so she hurried to the bathroom to run them under water, dried herself on the discarded towel, and then awkwardly unstrung the roll of bandage-stuff, doing her best to avoid looking too closely at the wounds themselves. Attempting to do so invariably resulted in a dizzy wooziness that made her feel like she was balancing on the edge of a cliff.
April didn't know how to dress a wound in bandages, so instead she awkwardly wrapped the strip of gauze-ish material around her forearms in a spiral, tearing off the lengths by hand, and leaving her arms covered in the manner of an Egyptian mummy. She didn't have anything to pin the bandage with, but the material the strips were made of had a tendency to self-adhere, and she used that alongside her tight binding to hold the dressing secure. Once her arms had been tended to she did her best to replicate that approach around her ankles; although the welt marks that the tentacle beast had applied to her weren't actually bleeding, perhaps it would sooth any rubbing. To finish off, she wrapped the remaining material around the scabbed over abrasion gash on her shin, the result of the bike crash that was simultaneously a memory from the other day and, somehow, several life-decades ago.
Wounds staunched, she pulled on the airy white clothes and sat back down on the bed, preparing herself for another several-hours-long curl-up session. This time, however, she found herself staring at the towel on the floor, a different thread of her mind being pulled at, teasingly.
When was the last time I was lying down, staring into a piece of ugly fabric?
A sudden excitement shot through her, the prospect of an escape route manifesting in her brain. Stifling any sort of emotional outburst, she redoubled her focus on the towel, staring deeply into the cracks and crevices of the folded material. She then deliberately unfocused, letting her attention blur into the object in front of her. Sure enough, after a few seconds, it began to fuzz and move, to unfold behind her eyes into a fractal pattern that- BANG.
Something struck April hard across the side of her body, glancing against her shoulder with the weight of a heavy mallet. She shrieked and rolled backwards off of the bed, vision focusing back on reality just in time to see something retract up into the ceiling. Some sort of alarm had started pulsing nauseatingly, and the recessed wall lighting had shaded to a dim, throbbing red that matched the hue she had seen in the corridor outside.
She pressed her hands over her ears, closed her eyes and waited, trembling gently. The alarm continued for another minute or so, before it abruptly shut off, the lighting returning to normal. She opened her eyes slowly, glancing up at the camera on the ceiling, which was eyeing her reproachfully.
She sat back on the bed and made it another ten minutes before the door slid open.
The armoured man stepped into the room, for the first time sans-armour. Instead he was dressed in a black shirt, trousers, and a long jacket that hung down him in uneven strips, a couple of bright metal pins attached at his breast. A strange metal collar hung loosely around his neck. The monkey Navique clung to him, balanced on top of his shoulder, blue-violet facial colouration contrasting violently with the backdrop of red light before the door shut again, sealing them inside with her.
He gave her a long look.
"They asked me to speak with you."
The voice she heard didn't quite match up with his lips, and she realised that even without the suit, she was hearing sound emanating from speakers embedded in the collar around his neck. She didn't say anything, holding her knees up against her chest and watching him warily.
"Do you know my name?" he tried, speaking again. "I suppose not. I'm Tavistre." He gestured at the monkey. "This is Navique."
She glanced at Navique, meeting its eyes briefly before flicking back to Tavistre's. There was another moment of silence.
"I see you put on the clothes," he continued, nodding at her. "I asked for them to be sent over for you."
"What, got tired of staring at my tits?" She held his gaze, until he glanced away, up towards the ceiling.
"Hardly. Please, miss...?" He trailed off expectantly.
"...April," she eventually allowed.
"Miss April." He smiled in the face of her glower. "Please recognize that this is not something that we are doing for fun. We are within our rights to take precautions in order to protect you, as well as ourselves and others-"
"Oh yeah, because I'm so fucking dangerous, clearly," she spat.
"With respect, you just attempted to escape the quarantine centre by Travelling, and you have already more than shown the disregard you hold for the ordinary conventions of Travel—even with respect to your own projective. Our initial scans indicate that you no longer seem to be carrying the orgoane, but we have yet to complete a full evaluation to confirm that matter. Seeing as you seem so unaware of the impact that can come from introducing a dangerous foreign predator to a sterile memory world-"
April scoffed, looking down. "Christ."
"What? What is it, April? What is so objectionable to you that you are clearly biting your tongue so as not to speak on it, even after people have already died-"
"Don't talk to me about people dying-!" Her voice raised to shout with the last word, and so she paused to catch her breath, stifling the sound, before continuing more calmly. "-don't. Just don't. Fuck you. None of this is my fault."
"Really?" He walked over to the chair and sat down in it, Navique hopping off of his shoulder and onto the armrest while he twisted around to face her. "Then pray, tell me, who is? Are you perhaps working under somebody else? Under the control of an outside force, maybe, that is compelling you to do these things? The constant wild Travellings, the fissuring, the lack of simple precaution-"
He caught himself for a second, closing his eyes and pressing a finger to his temple. Navique put one tiny hand on his arm. He readjusted his collar a little in silence, then opened his eyes again, refocusing on her.
"Let's start with this, perhaps. Who gave you the ability to Travel? It is not something that is native to a memory world." He looked at her expectantly.
She frowned in response, still unimpressed, but answered. "When you say travelling, you mean the thing where I look at something for too long, and then I end up in another world, right?"
He blinked. "I, um... In essence, I suppose yes."
"Or, I guess, sometimes I end up in a tunnel that I go through, until eventually-"
Tavistre waved a hand. "There are many lesser throughways in the latent strata bridging projective space, that, when accessed through an undirected travelling, would carry you across the wider topology to bring you back into alignment with- well, it does not matter. This is immaterial. Please, continue."
"Yeah. Well," April kicked back, lying down on the bed and staring up at the ceiling, "I have no idea how I any of that."
He paused for a moment, and Navique chirped, softly, before he continued. "Are you trying to tell me that you don't know how you're doing this?"
She chuckled softly. "Yep! Got it in one- although actually, no, I'm pretty sure this is at least the third time I've tried to tell you. And now here I am, in fucking, I don't know- space prison? Is this space prison?" She cast her eyes across the blank grey surface above her, a light on one of the cameras blinking, softly. "I thought that I was the insane one for a while, but now I'm pretty sure it's actually all of you who have that one covered."
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"Now, listen to me, because this is important." She heard shuffling as Tavistre sat forward in his chair, but avoided looking over at him. "There are three ways to Travel. One is via a static bridge, but there are none of those that lead from your projective. The second is by using a device to make the link, like we used to get here, but we had you scanned on arrive and turned up nothing of that sort. Nonetheless, you were able to connect a detectable bridgehead just now on your own, which implies that you were already destabilized. Now-"
April spoke over him. "Is this all meant to be important to me? I already told you, I don't know what's going on."
"It should be important to you! If we don't get to the root of this, then who knows what further damage could be caused to your projective. The fissuring of a stem memory world would be an incalculable loss, for us as well as for you. More people could- would die. Do you understand?" He waited a second, and she didn't answer. "Are you listening to me?!"
"Yeah. Sure," she said, finally, rolling back over to look at him. He sat back in the chair again.
"Then please. Help me to understand, April. Destabilization is an involved process. You would have had to have been taken physically inside an exposure chamber, secured there, and remained in place for quite some time. It is the sort of thing that would need to be overseen by multiple attendants, and besides, we think- we hope- that there are no such installations in y- in, where you came from. Think! Has anybody ever taken you to a place like that?"
"I- no! No, and- I don't know what to tell you!" His face was sceptical, so she ploughed on. "Please just listen to me! I'm a regular person, I haven't done anything, just, all of a sudden this crazy shit started happening around me and now everyone is trying to tell me that it's my fault that everything is falling apart! I don't even know what this is! I don't know what your Travelling is! Everything I've found out so far has been because a fucking, talking slime told me- Maggot gods, and ghosts on the high street, and a Cthulhu under a hill, and-"
She gestured wordlessly towards Tavistre and the little monkey sitting next to him. The pair were staring at her quizzically.
"So please; please, could you let up for just a second, assume I really don't know anything, stop trying to discipline me now that you have me locked up here and tell me what is happening."
There was silence that spanned a space of several heartbeats before he spoke.
"You truly do not know?"
"Yes! How many times do I have to-"
He held up a hand to silence her. "Okay, okay. Fine." He sighed. "This is going to be difficult. If what you are saying is true then it may be unprecedented. You will be met with a great deal of scepticism and the Committee will find it difficult to determine how to proceed. But as you are now here, I will do my best to attempt to explain things, if you are sure."
He looked at her intently, and she stared back, expectantly, until he opened his mouth again, taking a breath.
"Did the orgoane tell you of the Sigmoid?"
She had to cast her mind back for a moment before extracting the reference from the chaotic melange of the previous day's memories. "Uh, yeah. I think so. It said it was some sort of... corpse god, that dreams the universe into existence?"
He frowned slightly. "The creature's objectivity left much to be desired, then, but in essence yes. It may come as something of a perspective shift for you, but this entire world, yours and mine, exists within the mind of the Sigmoid."
"Okay, sure. Let's pretend I believe that, because- because why not, what with everything else that's going on. So it's like, a pantheistic type of deal? The universe exists because it's all inside some big fuck-off god-creature?"
"I- well, no, not exactly." He frowned again, pressing his fingers into his forehead like he was trying to smooth out the wrinkles there. "The universe exists regardless of the Sigmoid, and the Sigmoid exists within that universe, but- April, you must understand this first and foremost. The outside universe; the 'real' universe, if you like- is dead."
"Yeah, the slime man told me that as well, but I still don't get what it's supposed to mean. How can a universe be dead?"
"How can a fire go out? How can the sun set? Sometimes things come to the end of their lifespans, and then they are dead."
"That doesn't explain anything-"
"Listen. Please. I believe your world has the relevant science. When a star dies, what happens to it?"
"It... explodes?"
"Right. It explodes, and the leftover gases are released to create more stars. But what happens when every star dies? When all the gases are used up, and no new stars are born? What happens then, April?"
"Heat death, right? Everything goes dark and cold. But even then there'd still be stuff out there, yeah?"
"For a time. There will be black holes, and the cores of the old stars will proliferate, and for a while there will be collisions and very occasionally new stars, that themselves last for a few billion years. But I need you to think even longer than that—because black holes die, too, and so do atoms. They will decay, one by one, over incalculable eons until, given enough time, there will be no lights amid the dark, no black holes born of dead stars—just constituent particles, each spread far enough apart from each other in the still expanding universe to never encounter one of their fellows. And what, April, what do you call what you have then?"
"That's what you mean by dead?"
"Yes. The universe, as you think of it, has been dead for a very long time."
"But-" she looked around the room, sweeping her arms about broadly. "What is... okay, right, sure. This is all in the mind of your Sigmoid. But if the universe is just darkness and dust, where did it come from?"
"Quantum noise."
April looked nonplussed.
"See, this is the thing, April; you still are not thinking on long enough timescales. Once the universe reached its ground state—this was uncountable quadrillions of years in its past, by the way—it had already done so through the fuzziness of quantum tunnelling, collapsing the remnants of stars in on themselves despite their chemical inertness. But that is a two-way street. If you wait longer—much longer—then collections of matter can manifest spontaneously, via quantum entropy decrease, and nucleation through the radiation of the cosmic horizon. And if you wait even longer than that, then wait the whole thing over and over again, once for each microsecond of time elapsed so far, then you might even get the spontaneous creation of something useful. That is what the Sigmoid is. There is a term for this, if I can tune your equivalent."
He reached up to the collar at his neck and adjusted a dial, cocking his head as if listening to some sort of feedback.
"A Boltzmann brain," he said, finally, "but on a scale large enough not to immediately disintegrate into the vacuum. A scale large enough to simulate entire worlds within itself. Including..." He gestured around the room, and then back to April.
She sat with that for a moment. "But how can you know all this?"
"We asked. And at some point, somewhere, it took it upon itself to answer. It is how the first Travelling was developed, between different projectives—between the separate pocket worlds that it simulated. Most know some version of this."
"But not mine?"
"Yours is a special case. We cannot know much of the specific motivations, but our best guess is that different projectives are created with a purpose. There are not infinite such worlds, and those that persist are cultivated with care, as their own self-contained experiment. The Sigmoid is a scientist of sorts, but also a speculative historian. In many worlds, the population can be allowed the full picture without disrupting its outcome, but your world is untouched by outside influence; an attempt to capture a snapshot of the true universe as it might have been in its earliest years. We call these memory worlds, or sometimes a 'Land of the Dead', because-"
He paused, looking at her. April connected the dots.
"Because... because the real version of me died a long time ago? Because I'm just some sort of simulated copy in a giant science experiment?"
Tavistre shifted uncomfortably. "We... we can't know that. Whether you existed and then died, I mean. Even the Sigmoid could not have enough concrete data to build a clear picture of what the early universe truly looked like. Your projective is more like... a hypothetical. A speculative reconstruction of one version of what it may have looked like. The reality was likely very different, in specifics if not in overall physical structure."
"That's... actually, that's even worse! You're saying I'm not even a ghost, but a concept sketch? A piece of fucking paleo-art?" She put her head in her hands. "Fine. Sure, whatever. Sure, I'll accept that, why not. Everything else is already fucked."
He hesitated, dithering on the edge of his seat like he was contemplating walking over to pat her on the back, but ultimately seemed to decide that she wouldn't appreciate it.
Finally he hedged with some words instead. "For what it's worth," he said, sitting forward, "I wouldn't place the value of a conscious being on whether or not the medium it exists within is natural. The Sigmoid can shape Its creations, yes, but the parameters It sets are free to play out how they may. You are still your own person, April, as am I also. As we all are."
He sat back again. "Besides, as projectives come, yours lies very much at the centre of things. Memory worlds can also serve as stem worlds—they are grown into templates for the worlds that exist around them. This projective you are in now—my own world—began as a fork of your own, several million subjective years in our mutual pasts, and tuned further to remain in accordance with it since. It is why we look so physiologically similar, even if there will also be many divergences between the natural and cultivated outcomes. Memory worlds are a big deal; centre points in their coinciding cluster-space of related projectives. They can be reference points, and transit vectors for peripheral Travellings. As such, the prospect of yours fissuring into a dead world, like the one we just escaped from- that rang many alarm bells for a great many people."
She looked at him, meeting an intense gaze.
"That's... that's what would happen? Those... cracks?"
"Or something equivalent. Any major isolation breach of the simulation would nullify the purpose of a memory world, and the Sigmoid isn't..." he considered for a moment, before switching direction. "Sometimes It will allow a world to fall into ruin rather than account for the breach. With no support, a projective can dissolve rapidly, taking everything and everyone still inside with it, if they do not escape first. I doubt that you want that?"
She shook her head, numbly.
"Then understand this. Whatever you think of me- of this place, and of the my fellows who you will meet very shortly, then know that preventing this fate is my number one priority. It is why I pursued you from the projective where we first met. It is why I hunted the orgoane that escaped from there, and it is why I have brought you here now. Please understand, April. The actions that have been taken here are to benefit- not only to benefit you, but everyone you have ever met, and everyone who you haven't ever met. Does that make sense?"
He eyeballed her in much the same way that a teacher might look at a small child they were lecturing on elementary mathematics. April met the stare wearily.
"That's... Yeah, sure, I get it." She glanced down, them up at him again. "I get it, okay? This is important, and people have- I know what the stakes are. I have felt some of that already, believe me. But..." She straightened slightly, still meeting his eyes. "Did you ever think that maybe it would be a better plan to try to explain this to me to start with, to treat me like an adult and give me the benefit of the doubt, instead of chasing me across three different... projectives, tucking me under your arm and throwing me into a cell that has cameras on me while I'm naked? Did you think for just a second that maybe that wasn't the most appropriate way to treat another human being?"
"You have to understand that your situation, as you describe it, does not have any precedent-" he held up his hand abruptly as she made to interrupt him, scowling, "-but, yes, I am sorry. I admit that I perhaps could have handled this better. My concern was with securing the situation quickly, before its consequences could further proliferate."
"But... why? I still don't understand why! Why me? Why my life? I didn't do anything, and as far as I can tell, nobody did anything to me either, so- so nothing you've said so far has come any closer to explaining why this is happening."
"It... if it is as you describe, it is extremely troubling. Somebody becoming destabilized from their reality without any clear cause would be something we haven't encountered before." He considered for a second. "There are some tests we could perform, if you are willing? To investigate the nature of your condition."
She looked at him warily.
"Nothing onerous, I assure you. Just a small sample of your blood. We can ensure that you are not still carrying traces of the orgoane at the same time."
Navique hopped back up onto his shoulder, and reached for a pocket in his jacket, retrieving a small metal oblong that was reminiscent of a USB flash drive. The little monkey nimbly detached the cap, revealing a short, stubby needle, and then looked at her expectantly.
"If you please?" asked Tavistre.
April eyed the needle warily. "Will I have to watch you do it? I don't like blood."
He looked her up and down, taking in the slightly stained gauze wrapped around the majority of her limbs.
"You... will not have to, no."
April hesitated a moment more, then twisted her head to the side, eyes closed, and stuck her arm out.
"Fine. Do it. With everything that's happening, it's about time I got over this stupid fucking fear anyway."
Tavistre raised an eyebrow that April couldn't see, but didn't say anything. She did hear Navique scampering across the floor however, and the creature jumped up onto her knee, then gently probed along the bandages wrapped around her arm until it reached bare skin. The little creature's paws were surprisingly soft, but extremely grippy. April risked a glance at it while it prepared the needle device, and was once again taken aback by the stark colours of the markings in its fur. Even from this close, it was impossible to clearly tell if it had been painted with a bright dye, or whether the colouration was somehow natural.
She opened her mouth to ask Tavistre the question, but was distracted by Navique applying the needle mechanism to her skin. It hummed for a second, then made a sharp clicking sound, and she felt a sharp scratch at her inner elbow, the device retrieving a droplet of her blood. Navique replaced the cap, then jumped back to the floor and scampered back over to Tavistre, placing the device in his pocket.
"Excellent," he said. "Thank you for that. If I send that off right away, we should know the results prior to the trial."
She looked up at that. "I still have to have a fucking trial?"
"I'm afraid it is inevitable, yes. Even if I do believe you, the rest of the Committee will still need convincing. A hearing of the facts is the best route forward to that, I would imagine." He caught her anxious expression. "Try not to worry too much about it. You have until tomorrow to prepare yourself."
Somehow that made April feel even more nervous.
Tavistre stood up, Navique clinging to his shoulder as he rose. "Speaking of that, I will also need to make preparations. I'm sorry I can't stay to answer more questions, but we- well, everyone is extremely run off their feet at the moment. I'm sure you can understand."
April nodded wordlessly, and he seemed to take that as consent to walk towards the door. He stopped upon the threshold, and looked back at her.
"Oh, and I would try the food, by the way, even if it's cold. It's very good, and should be at least 70% compatible with your specific biology." He paused for a second while she stared at him blankly. "...That was a joke. It's a 95% minimum. We checked."
He winked at her, then turned around and walked out of the room. The door slid shut, sealing April in the silent space once again. She sat there motionlessly for a few minutes, then stood up and walked over to the forgotten tray of food, laden with things that looked like oversized spring rolls.
She tried one. They were indeed very good. She felt a little better, after that.