Intergalactic Summit

I did not have a planet to call home but I do remember my childhood residence.

I remember the austerity of its empty space and blank walls. The cold concrete against the tips of my fingers and the soles of my feet. The many stairs and rooms devoid of anything but myself. The motes of dust I would watch as they caught the light and lingered upon the air. It was beautiful in its own way. People always seem to clutter. Clutter with the detritus of their own lives. The little bits of paraphernalia they desire others to remark upon. I prefer the emptiness. Solace is a comfort especially when everything just is. Just so. Just as it should be.

I do not like diversions that distract and deter. From the task at hand or the thoughts that linger.

I remember some rooms with glass walls. Opaque. Obfuscating the voices. The voices that gave me games to play.

Veikitamo. Look at the sequence of lights. Repeat the sequence of lights.

My highest score was six hundred and forty six.

Veikitamo. Make the jigsaw puzzle pieces fit.

I always did but it was only later I learned jigsaw puzzles were not always blank white.

Veikitamo. You have three colours. Fill in the patterns on the page without two colours touching on a side.

Colouring in is always fun when it is NP-Hard.

Easy and simple games at first, the harder ones would come later.

Other rooms had different games to play. I just had to get to the other side. To the end of the maze. Then I would get cake with my dinner. I always got the cake. It was not a lie.

I remember the library. Only Father knew how to get there. He would hold my hand and show me the way. Sometimes he would let me put on the cotton gloves and read the old books. The special books. With the words lost and forgotten to memory.

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

I remember them.

Father taught me many things. He taught me to be strong and defend myself because I was different and others would try to hurt me, to humiliate me, to deride me because they did not understand me.

Lupus est homo homini, non homo, quom qualis sit non novit.

I am a stranger to everyone; everyone is a stranger to me. All that remains is to be as the wolf.

I did not know at first why Father would send me to bed to cry myself to sleep with the taste of blood on my lips and the bruises on my thigh. It was only later that I learned to love him for it. The first and only man I would ever love.

One day there was a new and different maze. A forest. I did not know the word at first. I liked the different kind of light. That would break in new ways. The way the soil felt between my toes. Walking between the rows of bamboo stalks that shot upwards. The feel of the wind through my hair and against my skin. The strangeness of new smells. The cold water of the streams. The slick way the rocks felt in my hand as I piled them up one on top of the other.

It became my favourite place.

I was only allowed to go there when the strangers were there too. Sometimes they were alone. Sometimes they were in a group. Always I had to show Father I could be a wolf too.

It was easier when they were alone. Help. Help. I'm lost and alone and afraid, won't you help? I liked it better when they were alone. They would tell me stories and sometimes if I liked the stories enough I would wait before I got rid of them like Father showed me.

It was harder when they were together. I wasn't good at pretend then. Sometimes they wouldn't believe I was alone and afraid. I learned to get rid of those strangers first when it was dark. There was usually someone who believed me and said the other ones were silly, she's just a little girl they would say. I would try to get rid of them last.

Sometimes they would try to run away from me. They did not know how to hide in my favourite place and I already knew all the good spots. I did not know why they never looked up.

I always felt better once they were all gone floating away down the stream.

Then everything was just as it should be again. Quiet. Beautiful. Just so.

If I were to call anyplace home it would be somewhere that made me feel the same as I did in the forest of my childhood. A long hallway. A rooftop. A crossroads at night. The middle of a bridge. The staircase of an emergency exit. Inside my walk-in wardrobe. An abandoned factory or house. Sitting on top of a wall or fence. Big server rooms. Maintenance ducts and ventilation systems. Underground service systems in cities. Alleyways. Behind a building. Offices at night when everyone has gone home. Waiting lounges at a spaceport.

I do not why. I just do.

But the foremost place that comforts me and makes me feel at home is still inside the hydrostatic capsule.

I tend to react poorly to physical intimacy unless under the right conditions, yes.

I find it... suffocating.

For good or ill, my lord, if there's a consistent theme to Veiki it's that you basically can't believe a word she says, good or bad, especially about herself.

Look, it's not that I like or dislike much of anyone. However, when I can barely trust myself most days I'm hardly going to trust anyone else. The obfuscation of truth with lies is just due diligence for me. Sure, it reduces the potential for that close personal rapport some crave but in the end I know myself, and what I do, and the last thing I want is someone complaining, "But I thought I knew you!" When I make them subject to defenestration due to a sudden lack of impulse control during coitus.

Those not ready to embrace a person in a state of surrender, and the many many variations of their responses shouldn´t even start playing with fire anyway.

That being said.

Hello there.

If I hadn't seen so many different masks-- including a male one who claimed you never existed as a distinct person, and might even have been telling the truth about that-- I might actually buy this, Veiki. What was especially hillarious about that one was that he claimed to have been playing you all this time like some part in a holo-drama and seemed to think that because he'd only been acting the part of a borderline-genocidal mass-murderer, all the masses he'd murdered in the process shouldn't be held against him.

At this point, it seems safest to assume that whatever I'm currently looking at is just another illusion.


Ms. Tsukiyo:

I offer this warning as a courtesy, and not because I particularly care, but: "Fake Veik" has an apparent "thing" for Achura and a bit of a body count.

If you're going near, keep your backup copies updated.

The most brutal and honest of admissions will generally buy only a few fleeting seconds of anyone's attention

Whatever else might be, the staffing gaps and some of the situations I've had to clean up in PY-RE certainly weren't illusory.

And with that said:


You're very dumb, very courageous, or maybe just very thirsty. Good luck, I guess.

Planets don't have windows! Bulkheads have windows! Planets have... big, empty oceans of gas trying to crush you! They're unnatural, I tell you!

Warm and dry. I remember brown grasses in summer, houses made of wood. Barren trees and dried up streams followed by intense rain. I remember a town of white stone glaring in the sun. I remember livestock complaining in the sheds and the blissful cool of evening.