The lost Protan device was stuck under a mountain of rubble at the foot of a cliff. Probably had gotten caught in a rockfall. His legs were stuck under the stone, together with one arm, while the other was destroyed and unusable. His face was severely damaged, half of it with the skin peeled back, revealing countless little cogs and tubes and wooden shafts that made up what for a human would have been flesh.
His eyes were still moving, but erratically. Plants had overgrown him. He must have been stuck for a long ti, barely surviving by absorbing the rich ambient mana of the planet.
Theora lifted the boulders. Slowly, he crawled out. Then, he kept lying on the side for a while. Theora knelt down beside him, unsure how to help.
“Recovery— in progress,” he said in a deep and grumbly voice. True to his words, the exposed machinery flesh in his face slowly moved itself back into more organised structures. He had short, brown hair and a very full and well-kempt beard. He was large, his muscles thick and his upper body shaped like a triangle, but he wasn’t thin at all, the muscles buried beneath a layer of fat.
Finally, he started moving, pushed himself into a kneel, and then unsteadily into a stand. He nodded, his face almost fully patched back together. He was almost twice as tall as Theora. She stared up into his brown eyes and kind of wanted to hug him.
“Boulder—,” he went slowly, “Squeezed a few tubes. Self-repair was impaired.” He took a deep breath. “Thank you.”
“I was sent on a quest to lend aid to you,” Theora explained, tilting her head as she looked up at him. She wasn’t alone anymore. She could talk to soone. Then why was it she couldn’t find anything to say?
He nodded. “You did. Quest complete.” Then, he walked off.
Of course, Theora hurried to walk with him, but as she was still trying to figure out what to say, Isobel’s voice cracked back into her head. “Hey,” she said, sounding tired.
“Hey,” Theora answered. “I’m sorry. Was I unconscious for long?”
“We don’t have a lot of ti left. About an hour, and there’s a lot to get through still.”
Theora nodded, again forgetting that Isobel couldn’t hear that. “So, what’s the plan?”
“The plan,” Isobel said, “is for you to make it to the other side of the planet.”
Ah. That sounded bad, alright. Theora stumbled over so kind of rock, trying to keep up with the device’s large steps. “I can’t wait a day for it to rotate?”
A pause. Then, a clack of mandibles. “No,” Iso said. “It’s like our first moon. The planet you’re on seems to turn at the sa frequency that it takes to orbit around the sun. So… your side of the planet will always face inwards.”
“Ah. How big is the planet?”
“It’s very large. Larger than Himaeya.”
Of course it was.
“Alright,” Theora said. “I’m ready. You can tell what I already know.”
The connection went idle. Isobel seed to be the one who wasn’t ready. Theora started rummaging in her interdinsional clothing.
“I’m sorry,” Isobel eventually said. “You don’t have any propulsion material left, so you’ll need to spend a day or two loading rocks you find on the planet, to do course corrections. And on top of that, traversing the planet on foot, even if you’re fast, might take weeks, especially since you are not aware of the geography, and we don’t have enough ti to guide you — not that we have any idea of the geography either.”
“Yes,” Theora said.
“So,” Iso went on, “you’ll have to… Have to…”
Theora pulled out the second-to-last Orb of Seven Wishes, and gently turned it between her fingers.
“I’ll have to.”
“Yes…” Isobel sounded desperate. Theora couldn’t imagine the length Isobel must have gone through to avoid this. The amounts of calculation, and how often she must have checked them. “You’ll have to use an Orb.”
Isobel used about ten minutes to give more details of the plan, gave Theora a ti window for when she needed to jump, and outlined so other information on the planetary structure. Then, she clicked offline.
anwhile, the lost Protan device had stopped walking, and Theora only realised after a few steps, and looked back.
He stretched and plucked a few fruit-like spheres growing on a tree, and then knelt down, extending a hand as if offering them to sothing.
Then, that sothing appeared. Theora couldn’t believe her eyes — a creature of so sort started moving out of nowhere, and snatched a fruit from the device’s hands. It had hidden itself before by looking like a rock. Soon after, several more creatures started moving; their presences fully hidden away until offered food by the giant.
This place wasn’t without life at all.
Once the creatures had fed, the man rose up again, and moved on.
“What’s your na?” Theora asked when she caught up again. “I’m Theora.”
“V47,” the man said.
“Hey.” She swallowed, looking up at his face. “Would you mind helping with sothing? I need to… to… Well, I need rocks. If you have ti, that is.”
He stopped. “My task is to survey the planet. It is not currently an urgent task. I can help.”
“Thank you,” Theora said, and started to describe the kinds of rocks she needed, after which he nodded, and changed course.
She still had one day before she needed to use the Orb. One day she could spend here, not alone. And then she’d jump into nothingness and get stranded forever. So a day spent with company sounded fine. Sounded… excusable. Almost.
“So the Protans knew this planet existed?” Theora asked.
V47 shook his head. “This planet cannot be detected from the outside. This planet attracts objects through magic ans. I was on my way to survey a different object, and crash-landed here instead. Other beings and objects have crashed here before and after, but as far as I am aware, you and I are the only ones to survive impact.”
Ah. So that was why the System had referred to him as ‘lost’.
“Do you need help leaving?”
He shook his head. “I don’t. My task is to survey this planet. I do not wish to leave.”
Theora frowned. Was he not aware? Should she tell him…?
“I thought you were supposed to survey a different object?”
“I was,” he said. “But I crash-landed here, and now, I am stuck. Survey is my main directive, so I took the liberty of adjusting my programming to survey this planet instead. Thus, I am fulfilling my purpose, right where I am.”
Theora decided to address the topic gently. “Who are you surveying for?”
He said, “I was constructed by a Protan engineer and my task was to relay data back to Himaeya. For now, I am operating under the assumption that they have abandoned space travel and may no longer exist as a people. Thus, I am surveying for no one.”
Oh. “How did you know?”
He shrugged. “So communication still made its way here. I received a few transmissions informing other surveying devices that operations would be ceased. They also received information to unbind them from their programming. Of course, they did not know I was here, so I did not receive such a transmission. It is conjecture based on the stray transmissions I was able to intercept.”
Theora looked up at him in awe. “So you don’t survey for anyone, and yet you keep going.”
He nodded. “It’s in my programming.”
“Your programming,” Theora murmured. “Does that feel lonely?”
He jumped over a large crevice, and waited for Theora to join up, and then shook his head. “I like my programming. If I didn’t, I would change it. I can’t go back, so having a task feels nice.”
Theora gave a little frown. That sohow felt like it didn’t add up. “And if you could go back?”
He tilted his head. “Why would I want to? I have a task right here.”
“That’s circular logic,” Theora pointed out, and V47 laughed.
“Convenient, isn’t it?” he said, sounding proud. “I worked on it for quite a while.”
Theora’s mouth stood open. This man was a total genius.
“I wish I could do that,” she said. “I wish I could just keep going forever, doing my tasks without falling apart.”
“I did fall apart,” he said.
“Inside, I an,” Theora added. “Inside.”
He nodded. “You have been acting according to your programming so far? And you are worried you might stop?”
“Mostly,” Theora said. “I’m worried about what would happen if one day I can’t go on.”
“Is there a reason why you might one day not be able to go on?”
Theora looked at another creature he’d taken the opportunity to feed, in thought. “I don’t think so. But everything has to end at so point, doesn’t it? It can’t go on forever.”
He smiled, rising up again. “Why not? An object in motion must stay in motion.”
Theora twitched as she heard these words. She was sure there was another logical leap here, but she decided not to go look for it, and nodded instead. All she needed to do was stay in motion. She could do that. And so, she took one more step and then another.
Together, they loaded rock after rock into the scraps of her travelling attire. V47 didn’t say much without being prompted. He didn’t ask what the rocks were for, nor where Theora was headed. He didn’t ask anything, unless it was relevant to a topic Theora herself brought up. She did bring up so things — asked if he liked animals, to which he asked if Theora didn’t. She talked about flowers, and he nodded along. But most of the ti went by in comfortable silence.
“Thank you so much,” she said eventually, when they’d loaded up enough. Then, she offered to help with surveying for a while. She was strong, so she could move so boulders to give him access to places he hadn’t been able to go to before. She could also feed a creature living at the bottom of a ravine; V47 wanted to befriend it, but it was too strong and aggressive. It would have destroyed him.
The creature looked like twenty large worms with rock plate skin, many mouth-like openings with angry, teeth-like stalks, and it was coloured red and brown.
So Theora brought it fruits, and V47 made sure to remain in view, in hopes that it would build familiarity. Then, after the creature had given up trying to kill Theora, she brewed so tea for it to drink, and it cald down.
Finally, the ‘day’ ended. The sun was still in the sa spot in the sky, of course, but the trees folded up their canopies and it got darker, and the creatures went further into hiding. Theora and V47 were sitting at the edge of a silvery lake, looking over little fish-like things that had been hiding their presence until V47 arrived, and were now glowing in soft light beneath the surface.
“I need to go,” Theora eventually said, as ti was running out. “I’m glad I got to et you.”
“It was nice to talk,” he said. “From the way you’ve been crying, I assu things aren’t going well for you.”
Theora nodded, wiping her face again. Sohow she’d assud he didn’t notice, because he hadn’t reacted to it at all until now. She took out the Orb of Seven Wishes.
“This was supposed to get ho,” she said. “But I’ll have to use it to fly to the other side of the planet. I’ll jump to reach my goal. But it will be a very soft jump, don’t worry. I won’t cause an ice-age.”
He eyed the Orb. “The Wish of Yearning?” he asked. “Was that what you were going to use?”
Theora nodded, and pulled her legs closer. He had a wide database of knowledge, apparently — although it perhaps wasn’t too peculiar that a magitek device would be aware of the strongest magical artefacts from their ho planet.
“This is very sad to hear,” he said, and it was the first ti he looked sympathetic.
And with that, Theora snapped her ticket ho. She floated over the edge, hovering above the water, facing him. “Could we maybe hug?” she asked.
He got up and spread his arms. Theora pushed herself into him, and hugged tight.
“Thank you,” she said, and broke away. He nodded, and watched her fly away.
A few hundred years ago, the idea of her ever using the sixth wish on the Orb’s list was totally unthinkable. She had forgotten it even existed until Un had asked about it during the final strategy session. And even now that it was thinkable, that it was possible, it still would have felt unjust to use it. She was on this mission because she had dood her ho — the idea of her using the sixth wish to return after the danger she’d put everyone in was outright vile.
The Wish of Yearning. Teleport to a loved one.
That wish was not ant for her. It would never be.
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