==> Nicole: Find answers

The console began beeping at me. We were nearing the exit node. I stretched out my arms and prepared for the shift. Connie put her fireballs away and glared at me. "You're really not gonna like what you find here."
There was a jolt, and we were through to reality. We were in orbit around a dark planet. Only a single point of faint light was coming from the surface, and even that was only barely visible. Clearly, not many people lived here. But I was feeling an itch, like we were close. Connie seemed to be feeling it too. Her tail was flicking about like she was nervous.
We flew down towards the glowing point. It was dark, as if smoke covered the surface of the planet. In fact, the whole atmosphere was smoky. I suspected some volcanic activity. The ship wobbled as it tried to keep us from falling too quickly through the thick air.
It chose to land us on the top of a tall cliff. I stepped outside and looked over the edge. A single building, glowing in the valley below, seemed to be where the light was coming from.
Connie came and stood next to me, staring down at the building. "You want answers? Well...they're in there."

 

((Sorry for the super late reply. Had work going on, and I had to come up with a good ending for this particular part of the story I'm planning out.))
I gestured to Wing to follow me down into the valley. Connie wordlessly trailed behind us.
I reached the door. It was a huge, hulking steel door, at least twice as tall as I was. There was some kind of camera mounted on top of it, and it seemed to look at me as we approached it. The keypad mounted on the side of the door had a hand scanner on it, and as I put my hand on it, the background turned from blue to green. Connie sighed, and I assumed she had been hoping that it wouldn't open for us.
The inside of the building was silent. Everything was neat and tidy. It didn't seem like the kind of place that would just get abandoned. The silver corridor veered off to the left in front of our group, and we continued following it down until we came to another, smaller door. This one didn't seem to have any visible mechanism for opening it. Connie jumped out in front of us.
"Okay! Looks like there's no way in! Hah, guess we'll just have to...go..." She trailed off as the door seemed to recognize her and slid open to reveal a small pod sitting on a pedestal. I resisted the urge to make a face at Connie like a snotty five-year-old and went inside. As soon as we were all in, the door slammed shut, leaving us in the pitch-black room. A few moments later, the pod opened up into a hologram.
On it, a man wearing a lab coat stood up and walked in front of the camera.
"Greetings," he said. "If you're seeing this, congratulations on reaching the first checkpoint!"
"Checkpoint?" I asked, looking at wing. He shrugged. I turned back to the hologram.
"You are an experiment of mine. I wanted to study what combination of things would yield the best results. An experiment of accelerated Darwinism. And you're the first to get here. When you came in the door, you were registered as one of the survivors."
Survivors?! I began to feel a bit nauseous.
"This is the current leaderboard." A screen appeared, overlaid on top of the video feed. "You're in first. But the others are likely to be just behind you, so you may want to get a headstart!" The feed shut off, leaving just the leaderboard with my face stamped in 1st place. The lack of sound coming from the feed made me realize that there was a sound. Of someone waling towards the room.
The door slid open, and in the sudden light, two figures stood out. One was clearly a daemon like Connie, and the other seemed to be another person with cat features, judging by the silhouette.
The lights in the room came on, and everyone blinked with in the sudden brightness. With the lights on, I could clearly make out the figure that had been standing in the door.

Spoiler: A picture speaks a thousand words

We both stared at each other for a while before any of us said anything. It was actually Wing who said something first.

 

Wing had been glancing back and forth between Connie, Nicolie, and the hologram as soon as the hologram appeared. They couldn't see much, but she had lit himself up with some shapeshifted bioluminescent scales. Not enough to make out any details, but enough to avoid walking into anything.

As soon as the other cat-person came in, Wing turned to look at them.

"...Is this guy actually expecting you two to fight to the death when you could just leave or team up?"

 

The person who just walked into the room had an angry look in his eyes. His ears were flat against his head. In his hand was some kind of sword, sparking with electricity. His daemon's tail had an electrical aura around it as well. The video loop hadn't started again.
He ignored Wing, instead jumping in the air and coming down with his sword pointed at me. I jumped out of the way.

Spoiler: dramatic music to listen to while reading

Connie and his daemon were wrestling in midair, each holding weapons they'd gotten from...somewhere. I jumped out of the way and began to try to stop the fight.
"Please, stop! You don't understand what we're both up against!"
He didn't stop. "I've traveled so far to get to this place. You're just another obstacle in the way of me getting my goal!" He twirled around and managed to slice open a gash along my right arm.
I screamed out in pain. It wasn't bleeding (I had no heartbeat) but it still hurt a lot. As soon as he cut me, Connie cried out and flinched. His daemon kicked her in the stomach, and I felt it, too.
The cat-person stood above me, smirking. "That's what I do to people who stand in my way." He turned to the pedestal, trying to grab the orb.
*If you were following along with the music, you should turn it off now.*
But as soon as he did, the lights dimmed and the doors slammed shut. The video came on again, and his face went from victorious, to shocked, to the same queasy expression that I must have borne when I saw it.
He saw his face register on the leaderboard, and he sank to his knees. "No..."
I stood up weakly, and stumbled over to him. My arm still really hurt, but I put my other arm around his shoulder.
"Hey...it's okay."
He turned to me with sorrow in his eyes. "I...Mint and I knew we had one purpose, and that was to get somewhere. I wasn't...going to let anyone or...anything stand in my way. But this is sick." He seemed to be on the verge of tears.
He had cut my arm open, but I still felt bad for him. "Look, you're going to be okay. What's your name?"
The cat sniffled. "D...Dorian."
I smiled at him. "That's a nice name."
Dorian smiled back sadly. "Th-thank you."
The daemons had stopped sparring and were looking awkwardly at the floor. I had an idea.
"Look, Dorian. Why don't we team up against this guy? Who says we need to be competing?"
The fire I'd seen in his eyes earlier seemed to be returning. "I...think that's a good idea."
I smiled, because I had a plan. To get revenge on the man who had turned my life into a game. Well, I was going to game his system. Maybe I couldn't take him on alone. But it was unlikely he'd just made two of us. So I began to plot.
"Dorian, I think we're going to make a good team."

 

~End of Part One~
(more forthcoming when I don't have a ton of work going on)​

 

Wing tried to intervene in the fight, but had to dodge the two daemons, leaping out of the way with a startled squawk and landing, tangled, in a pile of boxes. By the time they had managed to untangle herself from the boxes, Nicole and Dorian were already negotiating.

He struggled out of the Box Heap, one box impaled on their horns, and sat near the two catpeople and their daemons, facing the door in case of further interruptions.

 

~Part Two~​

Dorian had never seen a place like the colony of Kintsugi before. He kept looking around wide-eyed at the mixed styles of the buildings, the diversity of the people, and everything that was discouraged and shunned in other places. He seemed almost hypnotized by the whole thing.
We reached my workshop, but he didn't seem to notice. I tapped him on the shoulder and he jumped a little bit. I pointed at the ship that I used as my workshop. "We're here."
Wing squeezed through the door after us. It wasn't designed for anything that large. I made a mental note to fix that.
The five of us -- Wing, Dorian, myself, and our daemons -- sat in what used to be the bridge of the ship. I was the first to speak. "So. What's the plan?"