FSE

Furry search engine

formerly SoFurry search engine

Chapter Six

The tawny furred wolf had his arms crossed, rubbing his shoulders as he did his best not to cry in front of the alien who refused to tell him her name. Head down, ears back, Chrono Sandstalker whimpered softly at the prospect of being alone again so soon after finally having someone who would remember the things he did from one day to the next. His right hand scratched at the bandages that wrapped his upper left arm as he thought to himself how far he had come and what he had learned in even this short amount of time. Time limit... time, time, time... always time. He felt defeated, and his tail hung down between his legs.

"You dropped your gun," the voice of Nameless broke through his distress. There was a caring tone to it that the computerized version she'd been using right after they first met couldn't hope to match. "You're really losing it... I need you to calm down," she said, still holding him propped up with the end of her tail as she stood in front of him. "Your heart is going far too fast, even for your race," she added. "Here," she said again, poking him with the cool barrel of his Herstal Five-Seven, "Take it... but don't feel obligated to point it at me anymore if you don't want."

Opening his eyes, he looked up at her. He'd never really considered that she was almost a full head taller than he was until that moment. She was smiling, and it was warm... and for a moment, the way her thick, dread-like scales fell in curls around her face reminded him of that red furred, green eyed smile that Wendy would give when trying to comfort him. Of course, that idea bled away as he looked over her grayish purple scales with horns jutting straight off the back of her skull, but it was still an image that gave him comfort in a moment that he had badly needed it.

"How much longer does your ship have?" he asked, removing his right hand from his shoulder and reaching out to take his pistol back. "Hours? Days? Weeks?"

"The protection from the ever-repeating timeline may last as many as twenty of your month units... part of the engine is damaged and if that suddenly chooses to get worse I may have far less time," she explained. Sighing, she looked inwards towards the rest of the ship as she reached up to one of the shoulders of Ben and Joe's digital camouflage that fit snugly over her wide frame. Chrono turned to look in the same direction, glancing towards Nameless as he wonder briefly why she had said he 'needed' him.

Chrono looked down at the dead coyote laying atop the floor of the cargo bay and then back up at Nameless. He mentally catalogued the changes in her appearance from when he had first seen her, thinking to himself about how different he would be if all the experiences he had been a part of were allowed to physically change him as well. Light scaring along her scales was visible to him, but he suspected that the majority of her wounds would be hidden beneath the U.S. military fatigues she had for some reason chosen to wear. "How long was I paused in time?"

She looked back at him, "For me? Almost three hundred of your days."

"Oh," he smirked. "So not that long."

The ridge over her left eye rose up in what Chrono took to be a questioning manner. At least, that's what it would mean coming from another caden. He smirked, sticking his tongue out at her just a bit. "You've got nothing on me with concerns to being trapped here..." he said with a simple shrug, his tail wagging back and forth softly as he found amusement in the situation,"which begs the question... do you know how long I've been stuck in this loop of time?" he wondered,the hand holding onto his gun dropping one side. "If I had to guess... I would say its been... nearly eight years? Maybe?"

"Time is relative," she said, decisively. Her tone revealed that she didn't find her situation nearly as amusing as he did. "And it depends on whose calendar you are asking, anyway. Your two best answers, however, would be how long time has gone by since your system started going through this event... and then how much degradation has occurred in your timeline," she added. Nameless lowered her tail from his back, and put a hand out towards him. "May I work on my food while we talk?"

"Yeah, sure" Chrono blinked, still rubbing his hurt shoulder, thinking back on the earlier crashing of time against the protective 'time shield' of the ship. "Uh... OK. So... alright," he fumbled for words as he considered what to ask next. Reaching to his side, he pulled out her long bladed weapon and handed it back to her, watching her to make sure she didn't decide to take it and lunge at him. "How long has it been for you, then... in my time?"

"Since your system diverged from the normally accepted flow of time... it has been roughly ten years... outside of your system," she said. " That is as best I can piece together."

"Huh... ten years," he considered it, licking his lips at the thought. "I wasn't even born yet," he said, shaking his head. As she was about to begin skinning the animal, Nameless stopped and looked up at him. Her face revealed her surprise and Chrono blinked. "What?"

"What do you mean you wouldn't have been born?"

"Back in the real world, outside of this Koo-Knee-Chee... It'd be just a little before my tenth birthday," he said with a bit of a shrug. "So I have been stuck doing this for longer than half my whole life."

"In all the time I have been Nameless... you would have been born and grown into full adult?" she asked, not sure she believed him.

"Well, we cadens live an average of about thirty-eight years," he said. "Sometimes more, sometimes less... people live a lot longer with modern medicine, such as it is," he frowned a bit, thinking of all the things he had learned about the medical industry over the years. "We reach nearly full size in four years," he said with a bit of a shrug. "And by this time in my life I've already served three years in the army... and a good portion of forever stuck in this stupid time loop." He paused, looking over her expression as she continued to kneel on the other side of the dead animal. "Why? You live like a thousands years or something?"

"N-no," she blinked, shaking her head. Looking back down at the coyote, she pulled one of the legs so that it was on it's back as she moved the blade lower towards its genitals. "But... maybe two hundred of your years if we are lucky."

"Two hundred years!?" Chrono coughed, feeling enough strength return to his body for him to stand upright and release his shoulder. "How--uh... What I'm about to ask is sometimes considered rude by my people, but... just wondering... how old are you?"

"Of your years...perhaps forty," she said, shrugging as she pulled the blade partway up the animal's belly and through the stomach muscle. "I am, I dare say, the youngest Nameless there has ever been," she let out a sorrowful breath. "I actually felt my body shift towards my agr--my 'young adult' years while I have been stranded on your world."

"So... I guess relative to our respective races... I'm actually older than you," he smirked, but it quickly faded. "I also passed through 'young adult' while I've been out here... guess I'd be adult, now, and making a bee-line for elder..." Glancing away, Chrono was brought back to the idea that if this ship were destroyed, that he would be stuck here alone again for a time. "There is so much I want to ask you, but..."

"You may ask me many things... and I will do my best to answer," Nameless said as she stood up and hung the coyote from a hook placed over a pipe at the opposite side of the bay. "In the event that you see my people some day, I intend to keep much about us to myself."

Chrono blinked. "Well, you've already told me a lot, but... I guess I would just ask you about all this time stuff."

"I have been out all day," Nameless state, "So if you wish me to stick around now, I should check on the engine to make sure it is stable." With a hand, she motioned towards the door leading into the ship. Chrono looked to it, then to her. Taking a step away from the wall, he moved so that she could make her way into the ship a good pace in front of him. "I see," she said, her eyes dropping a bit as she stood up and moved towards the door.

"Trust'll have to come with time," Chrono told her simply as he followed after her and into the hallway beyond. "And speaking of time... you said my system has been under quarantine for what, ten years?" he asked as she walked up to one of the two doors closer to the stairs leading to the front of the ship. "But you also said time was relative... and mentioned a degradation of the timeline... and that we weren't inside the normal flow of time anymore?"

"Your recall is something special," she said, without looking over at him. Reaching up, she placed her hand over the top of the blocks of the key pad at the side of one of the two doors at the end of the hall. Some of the cubes with drasomian numbers on them lit up under her palms and the screen over the top of them filled in with different cyan colored symbols until they flashed green and the door slid open. "And no, your system has been under quarantine for twenty or so of your years, were we to count it by your own measurements of time," she explained, stepping into the doorway.

"Wait," Chrono said to Nameless and she stopped. Partway into the doorway, she leaned back and looked at him. "If you know this time loop has been going on for--and can we drop the 'your time' stuff and just use my time?--ten years, why have we been under quarantine for twenty?"

"I do not know... but we do not sanction sections of space lightly," she explained with a dry and straightforward tone that Chrono believed.

"Could it have been something like what is happening now? Something to do with time?" he wondered.

She blinked, "Perhaps. Time is certainly something we do not take lightly," she said, turning to look at him as she stood in the doorway to lead into what was presumably the engine room. "Why do you ask?"

"Because if we take my time alive and add it to the time after the loop started here... Well, you get--"

"Twenty years!" Nameless blurted out as the realization hit her. She covered her snout with both hands as she suddenly became quite, looking over Chrono. The caden tilted his head, raising an eyebrow at her reaction. OK. That right there was suspicious, he noted, but didn't say anything. "Sorry," she said swallowing hard as she lowered her hands. "It just... no... that doesn't..."

He didn't like how she had begun to trail off, but he didn't like that line of thought one bit. The idea that something special, something on the level of being supernatural, happened around the time he was born... just the very concept of it made him cringe inside. Smiling softly, he offered up an old yet familiar thought more for himself than for Nameless: "There is no story without coincidence." Nameless blinked at the statement, but Chrono just motioned for her to continue on her path into the engine room. "If I am unstuck from the normal flow of time," he pressed onward, "what could have caused something like that? Could it have been something that happened to me when I was very young?" She nodded, turning to walk through the doorway and into the next room. "When I was very young, a small group of terrorists kidnapped me... had me hooked up to equipment and such... I had no idea what they were doing. Scary stuff."

Nameless looked back at him, taking in what he had just said. Turning to the side, she looked through the open doorway and walked on inside. She moved halfway across the narrow walkway that was twelve feet from the door to the far wall and five feet from the back wall to a set of railings that overlooked the floor below. Huh, I guess the ship is actually three floors tall, Chrono realized as he watched her spin around and drop onto a ladder just off the edge of the floor and slide down only a few feet. Her head was level with the floor he was standing on as he looked down into the dark room below. Nevermind... I guess its more like two floors with a crawlspace underneath.

As Nameless moved to Chrono's left down below, he watched as she ducked under the floor of the main hallway of the ship that made single wide pillar of metal which ran the length of the lower deck from the nose to the tail of the ship. Raising an eyebrow, Chrono hopped off the floor and landed down on the level below. Looking ahead, he could see another ladder opposite the one he was standing next to a few feet away. OK, so... apparently both those last two doors near the stairs lead down into the... engine nook, he considered as he glanced around the short narrow space.

There was very little clearance up under the floor above as the two of them moved in the direction of a bluish, white glow. "So, terrorists captured a child?" Nameless asked as she stopped, hunched over in the low space. She had halted her movement where the halfway point between the front and rear of the ship would be. In front of her was a cylindrical column of metal with what looked to be a glass panel facing her which was giving off the light. That's way smaller than a Warp Core, even for a small Starfleet Vessel, he smirked at the idea. She glanced back at him, "You were captured alone?"

"Yeah, alone. And I don't think they actually were terrorists, but its hard to know for sure when you live in a small town where the police end up shooting first and asking questions never," he said, stepping up beside her as she turned her head to look back at the column of metal. All around it were small metal cubes lining the outside of what Chrono presumed was the generator for either the ship, the time shield, or both. "Terrorists were just what I found out they were labeled as years later when I was found again," he explained. "I'm betting they ended up being called as such because my parents were often called upon as science advisors by the government... and in a hand-off gone badly, my parents ended up dead while trying to get me back."

"What is a hand-off? Is that like an exchange?" she asked as she lowered her head and looked over the glowing digital display below the window. The panel she was looking at had small metal keys with little back-light cyan colored lights showing off the symbols of her alphabet in the relative darkness. "Like... a ransom?" she wondered as she tapped the screen in front of her rather roughly, the information flickering a bit as she poked it.

"Yeah," Chrono nodded, unable to recall the last time he spoke of the night his parents died. Frowning a bit in the dimly lit space, he looked up and passed the small column of metal and into the room beyond. Blinking, he realized that there was a big tube-shaped structure in the shape of a circle laying flat on its side under the back end of the ship. "Why does that look familiar," he asked aloud, putting a hand up to his muzzle as he stared at the device. Just like the one in Witty's lab, but miniaturized.

Nameless looked up and in the direction of where Chrono was staring. "That is a... well, its the thing that controls time for the ship," she said. "I forget its name."

Chrono raised his right eyebrow as he looked over to her, then back to the device at the far end of the ship. "Of course," he nodded. "It's like a small version of that device that runs through the lab down in the complex. Giz... talk about making a new, more compact version."

"Maybe not," she said, standing back up almost all the way and turning to head back towards one of the ladders. "This ship is millennia old," she explained as she moved out from underneath the low ceiling and into taller portion of the room. Reaching up with her left hand, the golden bracelets over her lower arm jingled over the top of the gray-square covered U.S. Army uniform she wore. "Your race lacks the technology to create such an advance device..."

"Witty implied his father was drasomian," Chrono said, turning to follow her as she began to climb her way up the ladder. "But I doubt--even if that is true--that his father had anything to do with the creation of the structure. I mean, it looks ancient... even though the materials look like steel and concrete," Chrono stated, thinking aloud. "Everything is falling apart... water pipes burst, rot, rust... dust and dankness and moss and whatever else, I mean. You said your people don't live thousands of years, and that is why I asked. The place looks ancient, regardless of the technology that created it."

"I wouldn't know... all the areas I saw looked caden in design," she said, looking down to him in the space below her. Chrono grabbed ahold of the ladder with both hands over his head and jumped up. Pulling down on the metal stringers of the ladder, he propelled himself upwards and easily onto the main floor above, just beside Nameless. She quickly stepped back out of the way and through the doorway. Moving into the hallway once again as she watched him intently. "There's a lot of defenses... I've had to heal up between each attempt that has gone badly," she said, putting a hand up under one side of her jaw. "I've run almost out of medical wraps, though... I'd have entertained the idea of giving up... if I had anywhere else to go," she said with a sigh, turning and walking to the stairs which lead up to the bridge. "Being shot full of... solid projectiles is not a fun experience."

"I know... many times over," Chrono smirked, walking behind her with his tail moving side to side. "Bullets, we usually call them. I'm guessing you found an auto turret then?"

"Yes."

"All the ones in that base that I've found... if you destroy them fast enough they don't hurt you," he said as he followed her up the stairs and into the main bridge of the ship. She glanced back at him as she moved forward into the slanted ship. Nameless looked as if she was thinking over that statement and then nodded softly, heading forward at the odd angle of the ship and into the main command center of the ship. As Chrono moved into the room after her, he looked to the spot where he had been kept stationary not too long ago. Shaking his head, he decided to go back to an earlier topic: "What were you saying about relative time and the degradation of the timeline?"

"You might want to sit down for this," she offered, motioning to the same chair Chrono had been sitting in when waiting for her to come down stairs sometime in the past.

He looked at the chair. "I don't pretend to be all learn-ed in the ways of temporal phenomena..." Chrono began, then turned his head to look over at Nameless. "But since this whole thing started I've had a lot of time to watch movies and television, play a lot of video games, and read a few books... I can expect a lot of things both from that phrase you just uttered as well as from science fiction writers the world over," he said with a shrug. Sighing, he tried to smile as he said simply, "I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that whatever you're about to say wont surprise me. However, I reserve the right to be wrong."

"You are a very strange... even for a mammal," she said with a slight curve to her snout, a genuine smile. "The time within your system is repeating itself faster and faster... wear and tear... like on a gear. It's trying to progress forward in the normal current, but the surrounding energies are not being allowed to disperse and thus it keeps jumping backwards. Each time it does this, the energy crashes back inwards and once it strikes the point of origin again, everything--excluding yourself and other things protected from this energy--appears to move forward again."

Chrono blinked, tilting his head and crossing his arms, "OK, so... the solar system is being damaged because the wave that comes back to reset everything to five days back in history is coming back so fast its physically hurting the... universe? Like with your ship?"

"Well, with your planet... specifically the complex below, being the center... and allowing for the idea that this sphere of energy is not necessarily... a perfect sphere," she began, then placed a hand into her head. "Hm. No, the wave travels back inward at the same rate it traveled outward... but since no one can perceive that, it would seem instant to anyone looking on... anyone like me."

"But not me," Chrono said, moving his hand to motion at himself. "I see a white light... and so... even though I don't notice time moving in reverse, I still see something. Right? Is that what you're saying?"

Nameless put her hands on either side of her chest and tapped her fingers lightly over the gray digital patterned shirt, thinking over that question. "I suppose... skelartanus are said to originate from a particular cluster of time energies... temporal energies as you call them. This energy allows them to become aware of that particular xelanus," Chrono looked at her, and made a rolling motion with his hand. "Sorry... a xelanus is... well, different xelanus are named different things. Your Kunichi Loop is one of the kinds of xelanus."

"So a Zell-An-Us is, effectively, a catch-all category which holds within it all these different types of time shenanigans like this 'Cause and Effect' situation," Chrono asked, leaning against the side of the chair next to him, his arm over the back of it.

"Or effect and cause, depending on how it is perceived by those viewing it from the outside," she explained.

"No, no... I meant 'Cause and Effect' as in the episode of The Next Generation where the ship explodes before every commercial break... and then when it starts back up again, the same exact events occur again but with people beginning to have déjà vu--"

"Dijafew?" She blinked, her eyes going wide as she asked the question.

"No... déjà vu... its the sensation you're doing something you've done before," he blinked, wondering what she thought he had said. "Little things about the chain of events were actually being noticed, marginally, from one chain of events into the next... its how they actually managed to stop it from happening. They found away to send themselves a message into the next loop and thus avert the... kunichi from continuing."

"Dijafew... the sensation that you are doing something... the exact something that you've already done before," she nodded, looking out to the dirt just beyond the tall windows at the front of her ship. "Like your... Oro-boro-sah... Lacirtafintum... the serpent eating it own tail. My race has a name for that feeling as well, dijafew," she explained, looking back to him. "So bizarre... there is certainly more for you and I to discover that may lead to answers." She smirked, "I'm hoping you don't know what a ubertijafew is."

"A person can only absorb so many made-up-sounding words at a time, you know... but, no, I've never heard of an ubert-jah-few... that like an uber déjà vu?" he wondered, grinning big. "'Cause uber is like a big version of something... supreme, biggest, outstanding... and smooshing those together might create a world like what you just said," he explained, motioning to her with his left hand.

She blinked. "Y-yes. It's a very powerful dijafew... sometimes it can be debilitating. The certainty that the event has already happened is unquestioned... it almost--"

"--hurts," Chrono said softly, swallowing. Oh, shit. He looked into her eyes and they shared a moment of understanding... the fear in his face revealing to her that he had encountered such a phenomena before. "It almost hurts," he told her, struggling to bring his voice back to normal volume. "A moment of sudden fear... that brings out an instant in time of both absolute confusion over the feeling and absolute, unquestioning certainty that you must not do what you are doing because it has never ever worked." He put his right hand to his swollen left eye. "Uber déjà vu," he repeated.

"You've felt this?" Nameless asked, stepping over to him. "It is said it is a moment of awakening... a event that is meant only for the person experiencing it... said to be when a skelartanus first sees reality from outside of the normal flow." Her tone was serious, her eyes watching him as he nodded.

Fuck... yeah, I have totally felt that, Chrono nodded and closed his eyes, trying to wrap his mind around the idea. When this whole chain of events started... I remember realizing that while working with my pack, trying to get down into the building, finding Witty the first time... that along the way I knew we shouldn't do things because they wouldn't work. Its why I've ended up going alone when I go into the building... because my pack constantly wanted to do the things that they wanted to do the time before... and those things kept bring about the same results...

"Its like suddenly realizing the fourth wall exists," he offered as a thought after he'd been silent for a few minutes..

"Fourth wall?" she blinked, not certain of what he was referencing.

"In a story... any story... when one of the characters stops what they are doing, looks towards the audience, and makes a comment out of character... for that moment in time they know there is a world outside of their life, their story... but in the next moment, they move back into the story and act as if nothing had happened," Chrono explained.

"Like an aside?" she asked. "You seem to have a great interests in stories... did you want to be a... story creator when you were young?"

Chrono smiled and waved his hand to the side. "Eh, I get most of it from Martha. She's use to run table top games before she was drafted. She reads all the time... in fact, in a few hours she's going to start reading Guilty Pleasures. Necromancer gets in a triumvirate relationship with a vampire and a nerewolf, and--"

"The large female with the gray hair... kind of... pink around the nose?"

Oh, right... she's killed them all. "Yes," Chrono nodded. "At this point, she's one of the only people in my pack I could probably talk to because--mentally--she and I are about the same age."

"If she's not older than I am, then she's mentally younger than you are," Nameless said as she moved to sit down in the central chair up near the front windows. She tapped on the flat black panels and images appeared within the screen like a digital input of some kind. It was spaced closer together than what would be for a caden's keyboard as her fingers were longer and thinner than his own.

Stepping up just behind her, Chrono tilted his head as he watched her quickly tap out commands into the screen. He watched her tap out onto the screen as he said, "Martha is just twenty-eight... she was born out of season just like I was," he noted while looking over what Nameless was causing to appear on screen. Designs and images in wide sloping circles and hard angles, and it took Chrono a moment to realized that what was being displayed were blueprints to a building of some kind. "If this time loop has been going on for ten years, that only makes me nineteen."

"That's part of how relative time works..." she said, focusing on what she was typing. "As I said, the events inside this loop keep speeding up... and eventually the entropy caused by moving along crotosis--time's arrow--will cause everything to quite literally come apart at the seams... the binding of even the molecules that make up the details of reality will themselves break apart and leave only indiscernible fragments in their place," Nameless said without missing a keystroke. Chrono closed his eyes and took a long, deep breath. Nameless turned her grayish purple scaled snout up to look at him, "I'm sorry."

"No," he said nodding to himself as he reopened his eyes and looked into her deep indigo eyes, "It's better now... I know for sure what is happening rather than just fearing the unknown." Nodding, he turned to look away from the front of the ship, sitting against one of the nearby panels, his tail to one side. The tip of it flicked softly as he considered all of what she had just said. Time's arrow...

Chrono glanced over at her, "OK. I'll bite. You said that my time, for you, has been about ten years... so... if time inside of this bubble of wrong-time is speeding up, then. Well, first, why don't I notice... and second, how long much further progression than ten years has it been for... I dunno. Sounds... goofy to me... time inside here speeding up," he said waving his left hand to the side as he tried to wrap his head around it.

"Your planet is in space," Nameless began, looking up at him. "Imagine it is a starship... I know your race once made it as far as moon," she said. "Imagine that you're on a starship and that you can walk forward while it is moving. To you, it is stationary. It is only once you look out the window and see movement in the celestial bodies that you understand that your ship is not at rest."

"Right," he nodded, "I knew that--I mean, I didn't know that was how time worked, but I guess that makes sense." Chrono thought about that for a moment, putting his right hand up to one side of his chin. "And time speeding up... or... that somehow more versions of the same days are going by more quickly than if those days were acting normally, outside of this kunichi... how does that work?"

Nameless looked back towards her screen for a long moment, then back to Chrono. "Alright... that's actually a little challenging to explain," she admitted. "It's sort of like having a joint that has become lose," she said, looking him in the eyes. "Time tries to pass by, but it is ripped back to its starting position. It once again tries to move forward and since all the variables within it are the same, it gets back to that point again, naturally... just as a shape fitting over its shadow. It's natural. It wants to progress... but then once it tries, whatever event that began to loop causes the loop again and it repeats," Nameless explained, turning back to look at the panel in front of her. "It goes back to the start, starts again, but it wants to slip back into place."

Chrono began rubbing his left shoulder at her description of the event, recalling the other day when he had to slip his own joint back into place. "So... its like practicing... the more times it attempts to do the same thing, the faster it can do it?" he asked. "Or... like wearing in a uniform so that over a long period of time it moves better with you... fits you better?"

She nodded, tapping a few buttons in front of her and then looking back at him. "Yes... and just like a comfortable uniform... eventually--with the same effort put upon it over and over again--it will begin to rip and tear, creating holes in the fabric."

"So, yeah, I'm officially freaked out by that idea, just so you know," he said, looking at her. Chrono's face was calm and collected, regardless. He didn't seem to be expressing any fear externally as Nameless looked at him. His heart sped up a few beats as he tried not to think about the universe coming apart at the seams while he ended up stuck here, all alone, surrounded by friends. "And so, again, how long have I been at this if not ten years?"

"Based on the rate of decay," she said, taking a breath, "Approximately thirty thousand years."

Chrono looked her right in the eyes and said, "Bullshit." Her eyes fluttered and her head moved back as his face went serious and his eyes cold. "I've been at this for an exceedingly long time, but... thirty thousand years is just... it stretches belief entirely too far. There's no way I've been out here this long."

"Not that you have to believe it to try and stop it," she began, though her voice was a little shaky from her unease at his stare, "but let me ask you... do you think the feeling of ubertijafew came from nowhere? Of course not," she said, not waiting for him to answer. "Ages and ages of built up repetition until something broke it. Perhaps you only realized it on a subconscious level at first, but as more and more time passed the difference in time between that one event and all the others stuck in the back of your mind like some kind of subliminal message until one day--being skelartanus--your mind broke free."

Nameless put up her hands just in front of her, holding them out like she was going to clap, "Not all at once, and certainly not through an act of force or someone telling you what was happening. No," she said as she began to move her hands further away from each other, slowly. "You probably remember a day filled with ubertijafew... that this day was the turning point for you?"

Her question hung there in the air for a moment, but Chrono's eyes had been fixed on her as she explained with a certainty what she knew must have happened to him. Eventually, he nodded. Well, yes... it was one long day...

"Ended with Witty, no doubt," she nodded. "Because that has to be the breaking point... like a lose string. At first, it is not connected to anything... but eventually, it snags onto something," she said, and closed her left hand into a fist. "And from then on, a new standard of understanding is had... this string blowing in the wind," she explained. "And from then on, the one detail would be changed... one side would be constant, but the rest would still flutter around wildly... but then, over time, the one detail changing actually changed your mind... and your mind began to think different things than it had all the other time it had thought... and your body moved different... and like a forest lit aflame... the order that you have lived within suddenly begat chaos..."

Chrono's thoughts were caught on her story as he listened. He found it difficult to begin asking his question. "How..." He swallowed hard, his heart rate increasing. He put a hand to his chest and started again. "I don't remember a little bit at a time... I remember the one day... the one day where it just kept hitting me."

"That is because each chain of different events all begets the next... time, the string, is trying to find its other point. It can't remain chaotic... it needs to find a new order--a new purpose, even if that purpose is its undoing," she nodded, taking a breath. "One day... one grand day... you were lead through a series of events that ended you with Witty--Whethay if you want to get the drasomian pronunciation correct--and that event freed your mind. Probably not the first time, and perhaps not even the millionth, but eventually you understood that even that event could not stand... and from that next morning onward your spirit was freed from the confines and set paths of reality," she said with a nod. "From that moment onward, time held on control over you. Your mind became truly free... and over time, your body follows."

"My body follows?" he wondered, latching on to that thought.

"Let me ask you... Have things changed for you? Do you wake up some Mondays hungry and others not?"

"Yes," he frowned a bit, not sure what that had to do with anything.

"Was it always like that?"

Chrono was about to answer in the affirmative when he shut his muzzle and thought about it a moment longer. "No," he realized. "I use to wake up with the feeling of still being well fed from the meal I'd had the Friday before I left the base... after a while, if I hadn't eaten before the previous loop ended, I'd be hungry when I woke up the next Monday or a little after."

"What about... movement?" she wondered, tapping on the display in front of her. In the next moment, the images on the screen all flowed over each other and built into a three dimensional model which slowly lifted up off the screen as a small hologram. It looked a little like a top. The outmost edge of the structure was a big circle of rooms and a curved tube-like room that traveled an entire circle, wide around the building itself in the middle of its hight. Occasionally the ring passing through rooms at its far edges, but the ring itself was the widest portion of the structure.

The upper portion of the building itself was narrow and looked almost like a spire with two big poles along the top like antenna in the shape of a tuning fork. From the top the sides of the complex slanted downward into a large cone shape. A few rooms and passageways moved out from the main structure in a large grid-like shape. Those rooms didn't reach out as far as the large circle at the middle of the tall structure, but they did jut out from the main pyramid.

The lower portion of the base was shaped like the bulbous end of an eye dropper. It was large and spherical and had tubes that poked out from it and downward.They didn't look like rooms, but instead were perhaps vents of some kind, presumably poking their ways down into the earth from wherever the structure sat.

Chrono had watched the appearance of the small model, but had been thinking on her question. With a shrug, he answered her. "I move faster, sure, but I've had a lot of practice... days of physical exertion back-to-back without rest. I mean, I don't feel much different in those regards," he said looking over the small structure. "What is that?"

"It is one of our large city constructs," Nameless explained, "we make very similar designs such as this when we wish to colonize a world." Moving out of the chair, she put her hands down so that her fingers were vertical on either side of the model, her palms facing the small cyan-colored wireframe. As it hovered there, it seemed to pulse one time which Chrono took to mean the design itself acknowledge that Nameless' hands were there. The next moment, she raised her hands and made a tossing motion to her side, throwing the three dimensional wireframe into the room.

It grew several times its size before it stopped and hovered there in the middle of the room over the floor. The big cylinder that circled around the outside hovered at about her waist, and she stepped around it to one side. "I was able to log into a single computer console up near the top of the base... and though it could not access the main computer database, I was able to pull out this model of the complex down below," she said, putting a hand out to the digital image and slowly spinning it clockwise in the air.

"Now... I entered over here," she said, touching her finger to a walkway, the corridor lighting up white as she did so. "Which is right over the top of where your two packmates and yourself usually wake up on Monday morning... of course, I had waited until after the rescue of Okororaven and the extraction of Stonemason before hovering down and accessing the door panel there."

"I'm gunna have to stop you there," Chrono interjected right before she was about to go on. His eyes moved over the enter cyan model that hovered out in front of him. This is a way more sophisticated model than those we usually get on our maps before a mission, he considered, taking it all in. He moved his hand over the long circular ring that lined the outside of the middle of the base. "This... is not at all what the base looks like. At least... well," he said, tilting his head and looking at some of the corridors and connecting walkways that were displayed out before him, moving a hand through the air as he tried to follow some of his paths. "Do you have a... like... a digital highlighter?"

He looked over at Nameless who looked from him to the model and then back. "What do you want to highlight?"

"Rooms... like I touch them and they turn a different color, for example," he said, waving his hand at the model. "This is like...the Death Star... I need to make it look like Death Star II."

"It is not a star, its a--" She stopped abruptly when turned to face her, a frown creasing his face. His face that asked exactly what he was thinking: Do you seriously believe I think this looks like a star? Blinking her eyes, Nameless reached back behind her and tapped a few icons on the pad that was there. "I take it a Death Star is not what you call a blackhole or something?" she asked, as she took her hand off the panel and motioned at the big display, "You can do as you asked now."

"It is not. It is big space station that I think is about the size of Earth's moon," Chrono said as he walked around to where Nameless stood and moved his hand up to near where she had touched the model before. As she stepped back from the scale replica he touched one of the hallways that ran underneath that one and it turned red. He smiled, glancing to her, and then back to where he knew the walkway he had leapt to many times from the stalactites was. On the model, there was a walkway that was complete, and he stared at it for a moment. Rubbing his chin, he reached out and tapped the walkway so that it turned red as well.

"Regardless," he said as he moved his hand down along the connecting corridors, poking them where he knew that they were fallen apart or incomplete, "it's a caden-made planetoid of immense size... weapon of mass destruction, big laser weapon, etcetera." He grinned, kneeling down and sliding up under the model as he moved his hand lower and lower into the base. "The good guys blow it up, right, but the second Death Star appears in the sixth movie... and one of the big deals that is supposed to be a major plot hook in the story... that the rebels--the good guys--have caught wind of its creation before it is finished this time... so instead of appear as a big ball in space--"

"--its incomplete," she finished his thought, watching as he began to move his hand through the structure, turning entire swaths of the place red. "You're saying that you've made it further into the building and it appears unfinished."

"No," he said, sitting on the floor, his tail flopping out beside him as he looked up into all the cyan colored lines over his head. Reaching up, he moved his right hand to the side and touched a few more corridors down near the big lab and the hanger it was attached to. Staring at the model for a moment, he realized that the lab itself was only halfway down into the building, aligned along one side where the big curved cylinder passed through it. "What I'm saying is that the building has been destroyed... that it is incomplete, and looks kind of like what this model looks like now."

Moving out from under the wireframe, Chrono stood opposite Nameless and looked at his work. Much of the building was colored red now, with very little left complete. "Now... I see there are chunks of this place I haven't even been... though I expected the place to be about this massive were it in one piece, which it is not," he offered, waving a hand to his side at the thought. "Can you 'turn off' the red I've marked here?" he asked, reaching out and touching a few additional rooms he knew were no longer there. She nodded, reaching back and deactivating all the red color of the model in front of her.

"I had no idea," Nameless admitted as the red colored rooms of the model slowly faded away from view leaving a much more incomplete cyan colored replica of the base. The hallways connected in strange, uneven corridors that zigged and zagged all over the place, up and down, and appeared more like a three dimensional maze than anything that resembled a place where people worked or lived. "I've never made it very far into the structure."

Walking around the model, and over to beside the drasomian, Chrono looked her up and down before turning his gaze to the building. "How far did you make it? You said you started here," he said, motioning towards the doorway in the cliff just above where the three soldiers usually woke up. "Code four, two, six, six, zero one," he nodded. "Then you moved into this corridor," he said, moving his hand along outside the horizontal room, "Found the auto-turret, and then pressed on?"

Turning his head, he saw her shake her head, "Not right then... the first time I got shot up really bad," she explained. "It raised up from the ground after I had already moved passed it, so I wasn't ready for it."

"Ah, yeah... most of them do that."

"That is not normal drasomian design," she insisted, looking to him. "It is false and cruel... the guns are supposed to appear as you approach so that they dissuade you rather than fill you full of energy."

Chrono raised an eyebrow at that statement. "They don't shoot lasers, they shoot bullets," he said.

"I know that," Nameless declared, letting out a huff. She thrust her open hands towards the model in frustration. "This base makes no sense! It is like drasomian in basic design, but they used materials or whole new ideas from your people to create it."

"Trust me... the place is ancient... my people first made cement, like, in the twenty-seventh century, BCE... but we didn't really have concrete until, like, the eighteenth century CE," he said, looking to the model once more. "Give or take four thousand five hundred years later," Chrono explained, glancing over at Nameless. She looked a little confused. "Common Era, and Before Common Era, before you ask," Chrono said with a shrug. "So... this place is falling apart at the seams... its got LED lights, its got auto-guns, infrared laser tripwires, hidden spike pits, crushing walls, elevators, saw blades, superheating and superchilling rooms, and all manner of other devices meant to kill you." Sighing, he shook his head, "But I agree... it is both aged like it was made by an ancient civilization yet its construction and building materials are not unlike those that could be utilized today."

"How about twenty years ago?" she asked, putting a hand on his shoulder.

Chrono blinked, then looked up at her. "Yeah," he stated simply, hoping she wasn't going to delve into that particular point much further. "So..." he said after a long moment, "When do we leave?"

"Leave?"

"You are looking for answers about your race. I am looking for answers about the kunichi... and both of those things have to be down in that base," Chrono explained. "I know a whole lot about that base, the keypads, the traps, a multitude of different ways to traverse to get down towards the lab... all that," he continued. "We go down there, and we get us some answers... and when all is said and done, you'll have your answers, and I will be free of this cursed loop."

She smiled, "You really think so?"

He glanced at the model, then back to her, "No." He smirked as she frowned at him. "You're Nameless. I'm a skelartanus. You've got no where else to go, but you are seeking answers. I have no where else to go, but am seeking answers," he said with a shrug. "Either way, we go down in there, and we look for answers... and maybe we find some," Chrono said, motioning at what remained of the cyan colored wireframe hovering in the air with his left hand. "And do you know why?"

"Because that's all we can do?" Nameless asked, allowing herself to sigh.

"No," Chrono said with a genuine smile. "We do this now, while your ship can still protect you from time... because if the two of us are physically together down in that base, then neither of us is stuck doing our own bullshit alone... which each of us has been stuck doing for a long time."

She allowed a grin to form across her reptilian snout, "You're right."

"Damn right I am," he grinned a big white canine grin as he put his right hand on her shoulder, his tail wagging behind him. "So," he smiled, looking back towards the rear of the ship, "Where's your bathroom?"

End Chapter Six

Alone Together