Almera blinked. "You don't - well, OK. The Dimensional Sea is the space between worlds, more or less. All universes and worlds float within it, like islands on the ocean, if you could move on the ocean in three dimensions instead of two. Anyways, while a given universe might not have that many inhabitable planets, the same region of dimensional space might have many. So moving through the Sea is much better than just trying to travel in realspace, you see?" she asked.
"Ugh. Who knows? Could be none, could be all, could be like, half?" "Yeah, it sounds really interesting. Have you found anything really cool?" For fuck's sake, she sounded like a little kid. Yay, storytime! But, this all was really, really interesting...
"Well, I'm actually working on an investigative ship, not an explorative one," Almera said. "So my job is to hunt down criminals and such. But sometimes we find artifacts from the previous age, that always makes things - uh, fun."
"It's just tiring. We weren't even alive back then but they're still punishing us for it now. I don't want to rule over people. I just want to be a person."
"You're an interdimensional police officer? And what sort of artifacts?" "...yeah, that sounds awful."
"Do you eat people and have poisonous blood? Emerge from underground led by a demon in the form of a corrupted dragon to take over the world, capture women and turn them into grotesque abominations, et cetera? If not, you're probably safe from me."
“’Poisonous’ is overstating it, but I wouldn’t eat me anyway. There’s a myth that khetten emerged from underground but I can’t say I’ve ever heard of demons being involved,” Katters says.
Whatever that's supposed to accomplish, Nacre doesn't actually need it. She's just. Kind of shocked. "They make Qua- soldiers- out of people who aren't? You're very calm about something so terrible."
Almera nodded cheerfully and waved her hand. In front of her, a holographic screen appeared in front of her hand. The writing on it looked vaguely like English, albeit with a variety of odd lines intersecting the words. "Yep, it'll be three years on the Apsara in a few months. If everything goes well, I'm going to try and get assigned to some good Enforcer, so I don't have to just be a grunt worker. And artifacts -" she paused in thought. "Well, they're Lost Logia, from the Warring Ages or even as far back as Al-Hazard. Just - anything that's really old and works in some way that we can't figure out. Really absurdly complex spellwork in some system that no one uses any more. If they fall into the wrong hands, they can cause a lot of trouble, even if they're just Al-Hazardian power cells. Like - a few months back, we were trying to track down these people digging on an officially-blocked off world, because it was only cleared for archaeologists and such, and so people will pay through the nose to get some ancient bit of wall or whatever. Anyways, we're getting up to their campsite, getting some ridiculous readings from control, and then we find out that the idiots unearthed the power core of a Praovéan war kaiju and it was still working."
"Vot do hyu tink pipple iz born soldiers? Vell, sum ov der construct sort ov are but most pipple izn´t."
"I'm guessing that's a very bad thing. Like, explosions bad, or things trying to kill you bad?" Leah wasn't totally sure what she was talking about, but she had the gist of it. Probably.
"Well, luckily the rest of the thing was still buried, but they set off all of the automatic defenses," Almera said. "Minidrones, firing platforms, all of that mess. Still, we managed to seal it and arrest all of the smugglers. Got a commendation for it, too!"
"Wow. That's awesome." As she said that, she felt her phone buzz and winced. Jake had probably noticed she was gone now.
Leah flinched. Just a little bit. "Yeah, I'm...I'm fine. My older brother's just asking where I am, that's all."
"To be honest, most of my issue with darkspawn is because of the constant, indiscriminate murder, which is not a problem you two seem to have."
