THE SPACE NAVY AU (18+)

It's not so difficult once you get a few rows down: though you drop and miss a lot of stitches, pulling the whole thing apart is tremendously satisfying, and it gives you plenty of practice casting on.

"It doesn't look like other knitting, though," you point out, when you've finally gotten enough done to learn to cast off. "Those little, whatists, those chevrons. The proper knitting."

Jethro starts trying to teach you to purl, but halfway through casting on a new set you shudder, suddenly nauseous, and look around in confusion. The warm studio feels as if it's sort of... crawling, sort of a collection of churning, boiling parts rather than anything solid.

"I don't... I don't feel good..." you say, knuckling at your eyes.

 

"That'll be the chemo," you say sympathetically, putting a steadying hand on his shoulder. "Take deep breaths, bro. Focus on your senses. What do those metal needles feel like. Cold? Smooth? Are they heavy or light?"

 

"I don't know, I've never held any needles..." You bury your face in your palms and peer out through your fingers, struggling to keep your breathing even. Every last particle of you screams not to fall back into that jittering static prison. "...cold? heavy? like the iron pipes they keep in the foundry...." dropped against your legs, the virtual needles gain weight and temperature.

 

"Good," you encourage. "Good, keep at it. You can do this, brother. Can you feel my hand on your shoulder? What's it like? Warm?" You give a little squeeze.

 

"I— yes, you're warm, but you smell like snow." You lean into him. "I wouldn't have thought I could even recognize snow, anymore." Slowly, fumbling, you pick the imaginary needles up again. The knitting's fused into a grainy mass, so you pull it off and carefully wind it back into a ball, working out how yarn must feel as you go. Something in you feels better now, that you have a challenge. No 'just lie there' or 'take it easy'. Now you have something to push against.

You swallow against a lurch of nausea, and make a slip knot. "Show me again how to do the new stitch. I want to get this down."

 

"That might not be junk data, I might actually smell like snow here. I grew up someplace snowy and I like to remember it."

When he resolves to keep trying on the purl stitch, you're surprised by a sudden intense feeling of pride for him. He's a fighter. You... you really like him a lot, don't you? "You got it, bro," you say warmly. "Okay, let's cast on twenty stitches..."

He's clearly struggling against distraction and loss of focus as well as nausea; he's scowling, his avatar's smooth face taking on more realistic detail as he projects himself. Brows drawn down and fins spread in concentration. You think you understand a little bit, maybe, why his crew seems so attached to him.

 

You work slowly and methodically for several rows, concentrating on setting each stitch just so, then have to be reassured that the curling up the fabric is doing is normal and you haven't made a mistake. You're not entirely sure you buy this.

"Sweaters don't curl themselves up like this," you protest. It turns out that evidently they would if they weren't shaped like sweaters, somehow. Or they're made so that they curl up into being sweater shaped? You're starting to misplace words and noises. You're getting the hang of purling, though, you can handle that and concentrating on language.

"Here, can you knit and talk?" you ask. "Tell me a story, tell me a story with snow in it. I think I must have been about six the last time I was around any. Well, that wasn't just shredded meteor ice. What were you up to when you were six?"

 

"Mostly just running around the woods with Paw an' catching stuff to eat. Ice bears eat a lot in the dark season, and a growing troll ain't no cheap houseguest neither, so we spent a lotta time hunting. Caribou, seal, musk ox -- great thing about musk ox, their winter pelt's hella warm, so I'd try and keep that clean so I could use the wool. Paw's not such a clean hunter, though, and my distance strifekind's slingshot. Made it something of a challenge." You chuckle.

But he wanted a story, not just information. "Hmm. Well. I also did some ice fishing when the lake by my hive froze over. Deep, dark valley lake between mountains, you know, it'd get a good meter of ice on it by Twelfth Perigee's, but the fish were still up to all kinds of business down below. So you take a auger, drill yourself a hole, sit down with your fishing line and wait. Or if you don't wanna lose the points off your ears to frostbite, you build a little shack over the hole to keep the wind off. Anyhow, my lake had hella fish, tons of pike and salmon, delicious. I wasn't hungry much as long as I wasn't too sick to get out to the fishing shack.

"Well, one time I'm out there, and it's dark dark season, like a month without moonrise dark season. I'm out there in my lil' fish shanty, got a line out, I'm sittin' on the pole and I got the line froze down and my boot on it so I won't lose the thing down the hole if I get a bite, and I'm doing a little writing on my tablet. I made myself gloves with metal thread on the fingertips so I could use a touchscreen without freezing my hands, I was so proud of that. Outside it's pitch black and howling cold, but in my shanty it was maybe a tidge above freezing, I had a battery lamp on, I had some music playing, it was real cozy. Just tappin' away at some schmoopy fanfic and dreamin' about dinner.

"All of a sudden, I get a bite -- and I mean a bite. If it wasn't for my precautions my pole woulda been gone before I blinked. As it was, I managed to grab it as the fish ripped it out from under my butt. I was thinking, dang, this is no salmon. This is a bigass pike or something. Course I couldn't see what I had hooked, the water was blacker than black. Anyhow, I'm fighting it, and a couple times I think it's gonna snap my line, or even that I might have to cut bait so it doesn't break my rod or pull it -- or me! -- down the hole. But I was hungry and stubborn, so I kept at it. For six hours I fought this fish. I mean, it wasn't a constant battle, sometimes I'd let it run the line out so I could shake feeling back into my hands, or whatever. But that beast was not giving up. It was like it knew how close it was to winning free, you know? It knew if it could just outlast me, I'd cut the line and say adios to my dindins. Or, I figured, from how big it felt, three or four dindins.

"The fish wore out first, though. I was about at the end of my tether, but it finally gave up. I finally reeled it in just under the ice hole -- and fuck me if it wasn't a seven foot sturgeon. It wouldn't fit through the hole!

"I hollered for Paw, and convinced him to hang onto the fishing pole while I drilled my hole bigger. Took me another hour, I was just shaking by then, I was so tired. Got Paw to help me haul the fish out, it weighed more than me, and I had to have him pull it on a sled to get it home. I fell asleep on his back on the way. But it was worth it, man. That bigass hero fish fed both of us for a week."

 

While telling his story, the greenblood grows gradually more animated, his eyes bright, smile wide, and his voice picking up a lovely sort of burr. A sweet, cool wind is blowing through the little studio program's block, and you lean against his warm side, charmed and more than a little excited by the hunting tale. You love hunting tales.

"Well, it's no seven feet, but something like that happened to me once," you say, and launch into the story of how when you were just about eight you'd stuffed your arm into a chink in the volcanic wall at the edge of your territory, with intent to eat whatever it was in there that was growling at you. A tremendous battle ensued as you tried to pull it out, it tried to pull you in, and neither of you went anywhere for the whole day while your back turned to bacon.

"Well something finally shifts, towards evening, I've been straining and kicking and there's finally a crack! and a big rockslide, and what's clamped on to my hand when I pull myself out of the scree's not a monster. It's not even a meal! It's a little spikeback turtle, about—" you indicate with your thumb and forefinger, "—it'd gotten crushed in place right back at the very start, it'd been dead the whole time with its jaw locked. I was fighting this entire fucking cliff over a turtle. This big!"

You grin. "I kept the shell, though. Glued it back together with needleplant resin and used it as a little cup, I think. My finest hunting trophy."

 

"Hahaha, aww, I like that. Not that you didn't get no breakfast, but that you had a sense of humor about it and kept the shell. Man, sunburn freaks me out. It wasn't really a problem where I was, the woods were thick enough you could go around in the day with no problems if you stayed off the beach, but the thought of stayin' out overday in the desert? Huuuuh." You give a theatrical shudder. "You still got the turtle cup?"

 

You laugh. "Oh, goodness, no, when I was bagged up for Ascension most of my things got left behind— my sylladex broke down after awhile, started losing things, couldn't say why. So I'd taken to using an actual knapsack when I needed to carry things about. It probably got burned, too, the smelly old thing. Tanning isn't one of my talents, I'm afraid."

You concentrate very hard, trying to remember, then form the turtle cup in your palm: black and grey, with intricate gold whorls. "I think it looked about like this," you say, handing it over.

 

"Oh, cool!" you beam. "Hey, the spikeys are different, but the swirlies look a lot like some turtles that lived around my lake. Hmm, how can I..." You empty a basket of yarn (a kitten materializes to chase the rolling yarn balls, out of sheer cliché), set it on the floor, and concentrate on it becoming a terrarium instead. Sand and pebbles and grass, some leafy plants... clear, rippling water... and your memory of turtles you played with in childhood, propping your wooden toy ruffianihilator on their backs and pretending they were charging (very slowly) into battle.



You tell Captain Aspera about that game as you construct the terrarium and the turtle. Also about the game where you'd build a little sled out of sticks and grass, and harness up a turtle and make it pull a SUPER HEAVY LOAD of like... flowers and beetles and maybe a frog or two. "That game usually ended with the turtle eating the harness and half the payload. I guess it's like having a barkbeast pull a sled full of steaks." The turtle shell cup he gave you is kind of great as a cup, but it was probably pretty great as a turtle too. You turn it over and imagine it alive again. The terarrium sprouts a dry rock for it to perch on, and you put the desert turtle in to make the lake turtle's acquaintance. "What do desert turtles eat, do you reckon?"

 

"Pupa fingers, at a preference!" you say promptly, waggling the stiff, mutilated last two fingers of your turtle-afflicted paw. "This sort uses those front-angled spikes on its shell to lock itself into a chink in some rocks. Then it waits for something to go by and takes a big chunk out of it— see how oversized the beak is? Takes a tremendous scoop. Then it curls those armored forelegs over its head while it chews and that's that. I figured out eventually that you can smoke them out: their armored legs prevent them from burning, but they'll just suffocate if you hold the fire up against them for long enough. Then you pry the top off the rock and have lunch."

You prod the turtle with decreasing lengths of a stick, watching it snap chunks off and scatter them, then leave it alone when your fingers start to get too close to that dangerous beak. You feel sick enough without having to deal with virtual bloodshed.

"There was this very titchy species of aquatic turtle that wound up in my home oasis," you offer. "About the size of a caegar and about as shiny, big dark eyes, just adorable. And they attracted a lot of flying types, scavengers and raptors, so I started brooding all their eggs myself to keep the population going and the featherbeast dinners coming along. Had quite a number of them by the time I was, oh, nine-five. They'd sing at dawn. Well, scream. Same thing to a turtle, I suppose. Their eggs looked like little pearls..." You make one up and give it to Jethro for a look.

 

"Ooh, make it hatch! Wait, lemme get Grump Rump outta there so he don't eat the baby." You neatly grab the biteyface turtle by the shell edges, flip him over and turn him back into a cup with a flick of your wrist. "Think I'm getting better at freestyling this VR stuff. Aright, show me the lil' seadweller turtle."

 

"Hmm, I wonder if they were originally seadwellers, the spring was freshwater but the pools always ended up brackish, from the salt crust seeping in. I suppose that'd make us match." You duplicate the little pearl about a dozen times, then set them hatching: the first one to get head and forelimbs out of their little slip of eggshell rounds on the nearest hatchmate and bites its head off. After about six or seven minutes only three significantly larger turtle wigglers are left, with one exhaustedly asleep and the other two trying to eat each other hind-ends first.

"I tried separating them out to hatch and giving them other meat to fill up on, but they only know to eat their own kind for the first little while," you say. "So they just all starve... If they were real I'd wager this little sleeping one would be final champion. By the time he wakes up the other two will have gutted each other and died, and he'll eat them up without a struggle."

You run a finger over the tiny, pale gold dome of shell. "They're all vicious, disgusting little bastards," you say fondly.

 

You're kind of gawking. "Wow. I was not expecting that." Your lake turtle, which was avoiding the feeding frenzy, comes over to check whether the sleeping one is a beetle maybe. It'd probably get its face bitten off in real life, but since this is a simulation and you don't want quite that much realism, it gets distracted by a juicy leaf.

"I guess in the desert there ain't a lotta food, so they can't let there be competition. Still seems like a waste. It'd suck bein' a mama turtle, layin' all them eggs knowin' they was all fucked but one." You realize abruptly how far you've slipped into your old accent and manner, talking about your wigglerhood so much. Whoops. You have to remember, even if this guy's not haughty like seadwellers usually are, he's a captain and your patient. Your speech is a lot closer to Standard Alternian when you go on, "Those tidepools you said you have here on the ship, what kind of critters do you have in those?"

 

"Maybe they think they're laying one grub and a lot of snacks," you suggest. "Mammals produce direct sustenance for their offspring, too."

You're disappointed by his return to a formal manner, but, then again, you're the one in full fancy glitter. You can hardly complain about excessive professionalism. You shape a large box with your hands, about an arm's length on each side, and form it up to be a crisp cross-section of your tidepool, with a selection of lifesize flora and fauna.

"Top to bottom: algae, plankton, seagrass, several salt-adapted lichen and fungi, about a hundred corals— I trade clippings with Captains when our paths cross, even the chaps that couldn't identify brain coral with a diagram and a dozen guesses usually have someone on staff to maintain an aquarium. And of course I have to pretend like it was all Lord or Lady Yes That's A Shrimp And That's Also A Shrimp Probably Everything Pink Is A Shrimp's genius that cultivated such a stunning treasure, or no trade." You roll your eyes expressively. "It's excellent fun watching them toss a branch at me that's worth more than all their rings and medals, while some poor green aquarist tries to go NO DON'T at their Admiral with just their eyebrows."

You've gotten sidetracked. "Er, to summarize, here's the fish that prune the corals, here's the fish that eat the fish who prune the corals, here is Big Bettie who eats nearly everything, here's some shrimp, down there are a whole mess of bivalves— they keep the water quality up and are delicious— and on the shore are three species of gourmet crabs. Plus sandfleas to comb organic waste—crab crap— out of the sand. There's a lot less diversity up top because I have a million other biomes to fuss over the balance of landside creatures without taking on the absolute headache of a realistic shoreline ecosystem. It's just a snack bar and that's that."

Prodding at one of the crabs, you feel a horrendous wave of nausea come over you. Talking about gourmet edibles was a mistake.

"We are going to not talk about food right now," you decree. "When I'm out of here you can come over and try them out, though. The blue ones are— are, urgh. Not talking about food, starting now."

 

You can't help laughing at his anecdote about 'everything pink is a shrimp', even if laughing at seadwellers is something you probably shouldn't indulge in. He's just so good at sketching word pictures. And picture pictures too -- the ease with which he built that model was impressive.

When the nausea grips him again, you give a wryly sympathetic half-smile. "Gotcha. You wanna go back to working on knitting? I could teach you how to combine knit and purl into fabrics that don't curl up. Or we could move on, try a different craft -- you could show me how to draw a shrimp, shrimps are cute." And delicious, you don't add, because you're not a disaster. "Or coral, I haven't really seen it up close, it didn't grow near shore where I was. Too cold. We had mostly kelp and sea grass."

 

"Mm, I wish I could grow kelp, but it's too fiddly to fit into the existent system." You shrug and put the gently rotating tidepool cube on the 'ground' in front of you. "Right, let's try drawing, we can draw this lot. I'm sorry, you asked before, I didn't mean to brush you off. I'm just, er—" you wave a hand, "—well, distractible. Lainey tends to tweak my fins over it. Kadros just pulls Very Serious Faces." You imitate your favorite Sir Why Are You In The Vents My Last Boss Never Went In Any Vents Once I Was A Man Of Great Dignity And Pride And Now My Boss Is In A Vent face of his. He has many.

 

You crack up. "That is the best Bel impression I ever saw!"