Elena stood staring at the note for a few more seconds after she spoke, gears turning behind her eyes, then peered back at him.

“What do you want to do?”

Malan had to supress the surprise at the question. The change in their dynamic hadn’t seriously registered in his mind until now. Elena was no longer his captain. Technically speaking, he no longer had one. Running things by her was almost second nature to him, but he was no longer required to at all.

“Do you think its genuine?”

“I do,” she said, nodding sharply. “Given the scene we saw outside Talorcan’s office. You’d be asking a lot of some farm worker to put on that kind of show. Her pain was real. It would also explain the caginess of just about everyone here connected to Talorcan. It’s above and beyond what I’d expect for folk just hiding a few small-time illicit operations. There’s some shit going down here—it’s just a matter of whether or not you want to be the one to start shovelling.”

Malan ran a tired hand across his face and chin, mind swimming in possibilities. “I could make things worse. That’d be something—start a diplomatic incident in Independent Space in my first twenty four hours as Starbound.”

Elena simply nodded. “You definitely could. I think you’re within your rights to respond to a request for your aid, though. You’re not technically considered UGC—you can take private contracts. But you’ll have to accept nobody here will see it like that. They will see the UGC sticking their noses in places they aren’t wanted.”

He began to pace. Elena seemed to think the plea for aid was real enough. Which likely meant the threat was, too. He wasn't ready to face any major criminal outfit, regardless of his new abilities, and Elena was implying that was exactly what they had on their hands.

“But if the note is legitimate, it means potentially leaving children in the hands of someone who means them harm. If anything happened to them, and I might have been able to prevent it by acting…” he trailed off, and Elena nodded.

“That’s the responsibility your bear now, whether you like it or not. Even if you could decide it was all too much and give up on being Starbound, the lives you could have saved had you stuck it out will be on your conscience forever.”

He smiled weakly. “You sure I can’t just go back to scrubbing sensors?”

“Bet you never thought you’d say that,” she said, a slight smirk on her face.

Malan scoffed, and took a measured breath. “I think I need to look this person in the eye and find out what the deal is. I’ll make a final judgement then. My gut says this is genuine, and my conscience say I couldn’t leave without at least attempting to see if there was real danger to these children.”

“And if it’s all bullshit and there’s a dozen guys waiting for you with rifles?”

“Then I guess I find out what this suit’s really made of, and hope to hell I can take at least a few of them with me.”

Elena’s lips twitched, and she stretched suddenly before turning to her bag. “Good answer. Fortunately, that pulse rifle Beric lost me saving your ass wasn’t the only weapon stashed on the Sparrow.”

Malan started. “You’re coming?”

She rolled her eyes, strapping a holster holding a stone grey sidearm to her waist. “And just what do you think it would do to my conscious if I let your skinny ass wander into an ambush in the jungle. Besides,” she said, pulling on a loose grey jacket and making for the door. “If some asshole really is snatching kids, I can’t think of a single better way to spend my first day off in two years than shooting holes into the bastard.”

Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

With most of Caezo’s residents still sleeping, their walk through the central building to the outside was far quicker than their arrival. Outside, a thick layer of mist sat atop the concrete paths and the jungle was alive with the dawn chorus of millions of birds hidden beneath its canopy.

The coordinates they’d been given led them deep into the jungle itself, and they made a beeline straight for the trees at the outskirts of the settlement, apart from any of the proper roads and paths that led into the jungle proper. Elena’s dark eyes scanned the treeline keenly, and she and his helmet’s display alerted him to Juliann’s presence stepping from behind a warehouse wall almost simultaneously.

His eyes narrowed, and he felt energy begin to flow toward his gauntlets before the conscious thought struck him. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Elena’s arm drop to her side, fingers grazing the hilt of her sidearm. His display flickered with information about Standarr. Name and position, and some detail about the pulse rifle slung across his back were there, but Malan was far more interested in the stark [Lvl. ???] beside his name.

Curious, he slid his eyes across to Elena, and saw exactly the same mark appear next to her name as she stepped forward to address the approaching Standarr.

“Can we help you?” she asked, bluntly.

Standarr’s face twisted into what looked to be a rough approximation of a smile from somebody who was struggling to remember how.

“The jungle is dangerous. Mr. Talorcan has asked me to ensure your safety during your stay.”

“I take it you’re simply here to offer your company and protection, then?”

He bowed his head in a way that felt a little too close to mocking. “Unfortunately my duties require me here. I’m simply recommending you remain her for the few hours it will take your ship to be repaired and not risk any… unpleasantness.”

“Luckily for me, I’ll be taking my walk with one of the Starbound, so I’d pity any jungle creature that decided to get in our way.”

Standarr’s eyes looked him up and down, and this time his smile bared yellowed teeth as he stepped aside. “On your heads be it. I did try and warn you.”

Malan felt the man’s eyes on his back long after they had disappeared into dense trees of Mykeser’s jungle.

----------------------------------------

It had been over twenty four hours since Torai’s life had been turned on its head. In that time she hadn’t slept a wink as the usually cemetary-esque Nexus archives came alive with a level of activity she’d never seen. She was lucky she had found a quiet enough corner with a table to stack up the documents she’d been assigned to pore over looking for information.

Scribes she’d never met shuffled back and forth carrying towering piles of tablets and ancient, handwritten documents, and crowded normally abandoned corners to pore over tomes and files. Even now, this long after the call had come from the Nexus Core.

One of the Lost Fallen had been found again, and even more, they had been bound by the person that found it.

Just the first matter would have been enough to shake even the dustiest of the scribes free of their stupor, but the fact that it had been bound too? There had even been rumours that—

“Report, Scribe Tarai.”

Muin’s sharp voice had her back straightening, even as she cringed at being caught daydreaming. “I’ve found nothing significant in the official records of Saren’s travels in the Scucin system, nor in his personal diaries—other than a few run of the mill celestial storms. I’ve made a note of them regardless, in case he missed something significant about these anomalies.”

Her mentor nodded slowly, but it was already clear he wasn’t paying too much attention to what she was saying past her first few words. The information the senior scribes were really looking for were clues to the identity of the Fallen that had been discovered, and the few records they possessed old enough to help with that were far above her clearance.

What she had been assigned was simply due diligence. More modern records were almost never going to have any truly useful information about the Fallen, but the fact that it wasn’t impossible necessitated that someone checked to make sure.

In truth, she didn’t mind that much. She had joined the Scholarium to be left alone to her books and maps and treasure hunts. This many people swarming the sections of the archives that she normally treated as her own personal space was deeply disconcerting. The opportunity to hide away with a pile of painfully dull and long documents until all this blew over was a great relief.

“Good work, Tarai,” Muin said, eyes still never really looking at her properly. “But you’ll have to put a pin it for now. The full compliment of Adepts are waking, and the Senior Scribes have been called to attend. As my apprentice, you are required to accompany me.”

The stylus she’d been holding clattered to the floor. The Adepts only woke when one of the Fallen were bound, but more than one hadn’t woke at the same time in hundreds of years—possibly longer. And now it was all of them.”

She rushed to her feet, awkwardly brushing dust from her robes and straightening her round thick-rimmed glasses.

“O-of course! When do we go?”

Muin’s eyes finally slid to her properly, and he sighed. “Now.”