Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

It starts with a dream.

It's a very strange dream: you stand on the surface of a lush, vibrant planet filled with life—an experience wholly unfamiliar to you. A brisk wind is blowing, unseen birds are chirping in the distance, the local sun is shining softly upon you, and above your head is an endless expanse of blue.

From what you can tell, you're standing within some kind of surface settlement. Except, it's strange: instead of metal plates and hard pavement beneath your feet, you walk upon smoothed stone bricks and soft green grass. The structures around you aren't sleek, generic industrial steel boxes; instead, they appear to be built from simple wood and stone, and all of them are unique, with varying designs, colors, and decorations giving each building a distinct identity.

Most strikingly, you're not surrounded by crowds of people rushing to their work and business; instead, there is nothing but solitude and silence, all around you.

Still, you are no stranger to isolation, so you pay this no mind as you proceed.

You wander through the empty town, down numerous stone steps, utterly fascinated by the strange and unfamiliar buildings all around you. Eventually, you reach a dirt path leading south, past an unattended cart and an empty wooden house.

The path, in turn, leads to a large clearing, bordered by forests and streams; the land is seemingly abandoned and overgrown, with rocks, foliage, and trees everywhere. To one side of you is another small house—this one built with stone blocks—and to your other side...

...to your other side is a stone statue of a dragon, clearly weathered by the passage of time.

You approach the statue out of curiosity, and stand before it in silence, looking up into its serpentine gaze—and you sense that the dragon is staring back down at you in turn, its stone eyes piercing into you with an intensity that nearly makes you flinch. You can hear the hum of power all around you, low and intense, like the hum of high-voltage electricity; and yet, in spite of the hum's intensity, it also seems quite far-off, power scattered and slumbering.

Still, you somehow know that you are standing before the eternal guardian of these lands.

From what you can read of its expression... it seems to be scrutinizing you; contemplating your presence in its domain; judging your nature, in relation to this world you stand within. And you think you can see a hint of surprise in its expression, too, as if it were expecting someone else to appear before it—an adventurer, perhaps, one born and raised within this world. Someone who set out with the intention of answering a humble town's plea for assistance. Someone whose soul is one with the blessings of the earth and the essence that flows throughout this world.

It seems that fate has other plans, though.

You are no native adventurer, but rather a foreign traveler, wandering among the stars in search of the unknown.
You are not here by choice, but rather by complete circumstance, drawn here by a thread of fate well beyond your control.
You are not one with these lands, but rather have a soul of an utterly unfamiliar nature, forged among worlds entirely unlike the guardian's domain.

And yet, you are here all the same... or at least, you will be.

What will you make of this place? the guardian wonders.

Your recollection of the dream fades as you awaken, but the feeling of being watched lingers for some time afterwards, settling into your gut as a faint uneasiness.

That aside, however...

As a space explorer and a scientist, you normally don't listen to your gut—it's not like you need it, not when you have reasoning and logic at your disposal.

Still, as your ship hurtles through hyperspace towards this next system, you can't shake the feeling that you're about to find something big here. Something that could make or break your career as an explorer.

Nonetheless, you try not to get your hopes up. At the end of the day, this is just another star system, and you'd survey it like any other.

The yellow-white light from the system's Class G primary star leaves a pleasant warmth across the side of your face as you enter the system and settle into a solar orbit, about half an AU out. Meanwhile, out the windows to your other side, you can see the galactic plane, with the rest of the Milky Way stretching across your field of view, a gold-and-white streak amidst the black void of space. Finally, in-between these two sits your Mandalay: a cutting-edge exploration vessel, a marvel of aerospace engineering—and ultimately, just a tiny speck of metal dust floating through the vast cosmos, with you nestled somewhere inside, fiddling with the dials controlling the ship's full-spectrum system scanner.

Your heart jumps when you see the characteristic signal peak on the scanner indicating the potential presence of a rare Earth-like world, and it jumps again when you focus the sensor arrays and find that the readings are indeed genuine. Your first look at this world comes through your ship's computer screens: a beautiful blue and green marble, bedecked with swirling white clouds and hints of yellow from the solar light reflecting off the oceans, surrounded by the faint sky-blue glow of its atmosphere. Soon enough, that same sight fills the glass of your cockpit canopy as you fly out to the planet, your ship dashing across the intervening light-seconds at superluminal velocity.

You can't help but stare in wonder for a few moments as you ease your ship into orbit around the planet. As a lifelong spacer, born and raised among metal corridors with nothing but the stars outside, planets like this are a sight that's never failed to awe you, even if this isn't the first or even fifth time you've seen one.

Your heart jumps a third time when you notice a faint radio signal source in orbit around the planet—one that is not only clearly artificial, but apparently human in origin. At first you wonder if you've somehow run into another explorer out in the black by coincidence, but quickly dismiss that hypothesis: the signal is far too weak and degraded to come from any ship built within the last two centuries.

Indeed, when you fly out to investigate the signal, you find that the source is none other than an old, derelict generation ship, with unmistakable spinning habitation rings between a massive umbrella-like frontal shield and gargantuan sub-light thrusters at the back, all connected by a spindly spinal metal truss. The generation ship seems remarkably intact considering its age—at least eleven centuries old, if not more—and so you're more than eager to get in close and start investigating in more detail.

This is, of course, when everything goes to hell.

As you draw to within five kilometers of the derelict, your consoles light up with alarms and warnings: incoming transmission, multiple contacts detected, hostile radar spikes, laser thermal blooms detected. You must have tripped some kind of automated defense system: your eyes catch upon what looks like a flight of sleek fighter drones racing towards you.

You immediately flip the ship 180 degrees and try to run, but the hostiles are upon you before you know it. Your ship is, of course, built purely for scientific exploration, with no weapon systems to speak of and all protective measures stripped to the bare minimum to save on mass; it's not long at all before your puny shields have evaporated, leaving nothing but all-too-thin hull plating between you and a startling amount of weapons fire.

A pilot trained in combat maneuvers might have started dodging and weaving at this point, jinking wildly to throw off the enemy's firing solutions... but unfortunately, you're just a scientist whose only experience with spaceborne combat is the one introductory lesson the Pilots' Federation requires of all trainees. Instead, you simply aim your ship—now wildly careening through space—in a random direction, mash the engine boost button, and start praying for the explosions to stop, please.

And, amazingly, they actually do stop, with the hostile drones suddenly peeling off and returning back to wherever they came from, leaving you at just over 50% hull integrity. You only get a few seconds to celebrate your continued existence, however, before you suddenly realize why the drones turned tail: when you look up, you see the planet's surface is alarmingly close and approaching rapidly.

You frantically try to pull up, but with how damaged your thrusters are, you're not able to avoid entering the atmosphere. Fortunately, even as damaged as it is, your hull is more than capable of standing up to reentry heating, and you have just enough flight control authority to pull up into a glide, as opposed to a 90-degree vertical death dive towards the ground.

As you glide over one of the planet's oceans towards land, you try to look for anything resembling a flat, empty landing spot up ahead, and fail; not only are you landing on the night side of the planet, but much of the terrain ahead beyond the coastline is also covered in thick forests.

At the last second, you get a glimpse of what looks like a small clearing in the trees, and desperately aim your ship at it.
(You also briefly see what almost looks like light just past the clearing, but quickly dismiss it a a HUD malfunction.)

Unfortunately, the altimeter is still spinning down way too quickly to be safe, and the terrain proximity warning system is screaming at you to pull up pull up PULL UP GOD—

—and then there's an earth-shaking CRASH and a horrible grinding, scraping sound as the roughly four hundred tons of metal beneath you hit the dirt at half the speed of sound—

—and then there's nothing but quiet and stillness as your ship slides to a stop amidst a pile of snapped timber and churned earth.

The last thing you see before your vision fades out completely are numerous lights flickering to life in the distance.

All things considered, it's a miracle you manage to wake up at all, afterwards.

Nonetheless, you awaken, and the first thing you see when you open your eyes is a vague golden-yellow blob.

You blink, and your vision starts to clear up. The fuzzy shape resolves itself into the clear image of a human girl, roughly around your age, with waist-length blonde hair, wearing a teal capelet over a white shirt; judging from the expression on her face, she's as surprised to see you awaken as you are at being awake.

"Oh, you're awake!" she says. "Um, don't worry! Doctor Valen will be back in a few minutes, just hang on."

You simply stare in response, trying to make sense of this situation.

As far as you can tell, you crash-landed at a more-or-less random point on an uncontacted, undiscovered planet; the odds of you running into not only intelligent life, but other humans that you can actually understand, should be so slim as to be statistically impossible.

So, being the logical, rational person you are, you start thinking of other explanations for this, and quickly come to the totally reasonable conclusion that you must be hallucinating.

You test this hypothesis by poking the hallucination in the cheek with your finger. Unexpectedly, the results come back soft and squishy.
You test again to double-check, to the same result.
And then you test a third time, just to make sure.

"Ah!" the girl says. "Hey, that tickles!"

Well, your sense of touch seems pretty congruous with what you're seeing and hearing, at least, which suggests you're either not hallucinating at all, or that you have an alarming amount of brain damage.

You're in the middle of thinking of ways to test and elaborate on the 'brain damage' hypothesis, when your thoughts are interrupted by a white-haired woman walking into the room. She coolly regards you with a raised eyebrow, before glancing at the blonde girl.

"Well, it would seem our mysterious visitor's finally come to," the white-haired woman—the aforementioned Dr. Valen, presumably—says to the blonde girl, before turning back to you. "Hello? Can you understand me?"

A million questions are running through your head at this point, so to keep things manageable, you just pick one to start with and go from there.

"Where...?" you rasp, suddenly becoming acutely aware that you don't have nearly as much energy as you initially thought. Even just speaking takes effort.

"Oh, good, you can understand us," the doctor smiles. "To answer your question: you're currently in my clinic, in the town of Mistria, in the kingdom of Aldaria."

The place names mean absolutely nothing to you, of course, leading you to wonder why you even bothered asking in the first place. Something about the word 'kingdom' scratches at your brain, but you're too tired to consider it for now, and instead try to ask 'who are you'. Unfortunately, when you next open your mouth, what comes out is an aching cough instead of words.

"Hmm... It looks like the remedies might not have had time to take full effect yet." the doctor says in response. "Perhaps you should rest for a while longer still. Don't worry, you're in good hands."

Now that you think about it, resting... sounds like a fantastic idea to you... right about now...

maybe...

...for just a bit longer...

To your surprise, you genuinely feel much better the next time you wake up—it's almost like you didn't crash your spaceship into the ground at 150 meters per second a day or three ago. You're not entirely sure how that works, but at this point you've come to realize that maybe you don't need to question everything.

...at least, not for now.

Speaking of questions, many of yours are answered when you wake up next, courtesy of Dr. Valen as well as two others: Adeline and Eiland, a pink-haired sister-brother duo, with the former seemingly being the town leader.

To summarize your situation:

• No, you're not hallucinating.
• No, you don't have brain damage. Probably.
• No, you're not dead, and this is not the afterlife.
• Yes, the people you're speaking to are actually human, and not some kind of human-mimicking alien species.
• No, you didn't damage anything or hurt anyone during your landing. (You breathed a huge sigh of relief at this point; you'd never have been able to forgive yourself if you hurt someone on your way down.)
• Your ship is still intact, as far as anyone can tell—or at the very least, it hasn't gone up in a fireball yet.
• For that matter, no one's dared touch your ship so far, not least because nobody here knows what it even is, really. They'd appreciate it if you could deactivate it ASAP.
• No one's familiar with 'Sol' beyond it being a word that means 'sun'.
• For that matter, nobody recognizes any of the stellar governments or organizations you name, nor do they have the means to send an interstellar message out asking for someone to come and pick you up.
• On top of that, you also don't remember the last time you tested your ship's emergency beacon. With your luck, it's probably inoperable.

You were about to start panicking at those last revelations, but fortunately Adeline stepped in before things got out of hand.

As it turns out, the town was looking for someone to help with some kind of reconstruction effort after a recent natural disaster. They'd sent out requests for help to the region's capital city, to no avail... and then you dropped in on them. Since it doesn't look like any help is coming from the capital, Adeline (and really, the whole town) would be extremely grateful if you could stick around and help out—and they're willing to let you move into an old abandoned farm if you do, one that's coincidentally located across a stream from where your ship crashed.

You, of course, take Adeline up on her offer immediately. It's not like you have anywhere else to go, and you don't particularly want to try your chances at surviving on your own, out in the woods. You'd much rather not have to learn what your own piss tastes like, thank you very much.

Admittedly, it's not like you know much about farming either. Sure, you visited your birth station's hydroponics bays a couple times while you were a kid, but you suspect that growing plants in carefully-monitored, automatically-maintained hydroponic planting modules is nothing like growing them in patches of planet surface. Still, you don't really have any other options here.

What could go wrong?

Shockingly, not much goes wrong.

This is in large part thanks to Celine, the blonde girl you saw when you first woke up. Far from being a hallucination, she's actually your new neighbor, living in a cottage not far from the farmstead you've just moved into. She helps you get started, even going so far as to give you a spare hoe—as well as showing you how to use it properly, after you get confused at first and start trying to use it like a shovel.

At some point your other new neighbor—Hayden, a burly man who runs another farm to your direct west—shows up and is just as helpful, gifting you another piece of equipment: a watering can. They both also give you some seeds as a final welcoming gift; you don't think you've ever seen either a tulip or a turnip with your own eyes before, so you're not sure what to expect, but you can only hope what you produce resembles the plants depicted on the bag.

And then the impromptu housewarming party is over, and the two of them leave you with an overgrown field, some basic equipment, a handful of seeds, and nowhere to go but up. You're a bit uncertain at first, but...

...well, once upon a time, you stepped out into the galaxy with nothing but a tiny, cramped Sidewinder ship and a thousand credits—and eventually you became a renowned, Elite explorer with so much more.

Compared to that, this should be nothing, right?

Chapter Text

The next few days go by in a blur of names and faces and farm work. You go around, meeting people and introducing yourself—and are pleasantly surprised by the warm hospitality you get in return. Everyone seems quite eager to meet you, greeting you with smiles and curiosity (...well, okay, everyone except for one guy, but he doesn't count). You do your best to match their enthusiasm, even if by the end you're exhausted and your name feels worn out from how often you've said it.

You settle into a routine of sorts: wake up, check the mail, water and maintain the plants, check the board, and then move on to whatever it is you're working towards for the day. Make sure to say hi to the people you happen to meet, of course, but always keep yourself busy: if living as a ship commander has taught you anything, it's that time is the most valuable commodity of all.

Still, you make some time to check in on your crashed ship in the middle of all this. The poor battered Mandalay lies in the field across the stream to the east of your new residence, still within the deep furrow she left when she came down.

Her hull, surprisingly, is still spaceworthy, but her internal systems are not: the thrusters are damaged, the Frame Shift Drive is inoperable, the power distributor has major internal faults, life support is red across the board, the communications equipment (including the emergency beacon) is out of order, and more besides. Normally, your ship's Auto-Field Maintenance Unit would be able to repair all of this... but the storage bay for its supply of spare parts and repair materials must've gotten holed at some point while you were getting kicked around by the hostile security drones, because it now reports having no supplies to work with at all.

A smart explorer would've outfitted their ship with a second, redundant maintenance unit as a backup. You, on the other hand, ditched your second AFMU for an extra fuel tank, a decision you now regret.

You could, in theory, have the ship synthesize supplies for the AFMU using a handful of relatively common metals as process inputs, which in turn would let you get the ship back into working order. Unfortunately, you have none of the necessary metals on hand, and no idea where to get them—at least for now.

You really are stuck here, for the time being.

You power down the ship completely to conserve reactor fuel. As you step out, you look back at the cockpit one last time, before returning to your new life in Mistria.

Still, it wasn't as if being stuck here was a bad thing by any means.

Sure, you're definitely not used to this kind of work, but you're an explorer and a traveler; venturing into the unknown is literally your life's work. And this is certainly uncharted territory for you: learning to grow and care for plants, working with dirt and soil... hell, even just living planetside for more than a few days at a time is a new experience to you. More than once, you've walked outside in the morning and looked up, expecting to see stars twinkling in the void, as if you were aboard an orbiting station—only to be met with nothing but endless blue skies above instead, reminding you that you're on a planet now.

Still, your efforts do start to pay off with time. The plants grow surprisingly quickly, and within a matter of days you're shipping off your first harvest, the profits from which you immediately reinvest into more seeds. The same goes for the second harvest, and the third, and so on, and soon enough you're growing a variety of plants in an ever-expanding field.

Even as your repertoire grows, though, you find yourself growing more and more fond of the tulips, almost from the day those three little bags of seeds Celine gave you first sprouted. If you had to guess why, it's probably because of their their colors: splashes of vivid red, yellow, orange, and white, brilliant and striking, not at all unlike the main sequence stars you travel between as a stellar explorer.

You mention some of this to Celine, when you run into her one day during your regular trips to the store a couple of weeks after your arrival, and ask her about how to expand your growing collection of colorful flowers. As you'd expect, she's more than happy to help, pointing you towards seeds and bulbs that you might find interesting, describing each species and cultivar with a passion and depth of knowledge that surprises you. Before long, the two of you have strayed away from the original topic of just selecting seeds, as Celine starts animatedly talking about the intricacies of tulip cultivation, and the way the flowers cross-breed and hybridize to produce petals of all sorts of shapes and colors.

The exobiologist within you—the part that sends you scurrying across desolate planets in search of alien slime molds to sample—marvels at the genetic adaptability Celine describes; it's genuinely fascinating to hear about how a single plant genus can seemingly invent and re-invent itself so many times over, in so many different ways, changing to fit every situation and desired appearance.

The rest of you, though, marvels at Celine herself. The way she looks now, chattering in detail about her passion, can only be described as 'radiant': the brilliance of her smile, the excitement with which she waves her hands and gestures as she speaks, and the rapid, eager tempo of her voice all give her an energy that's positively infectious; you can't help but be swept up along with her as the two of you talk, and the feeling is completely new to you.

It only ends when Celine's mom—Nora—gives the two of you a Look, reminding you both that you're still in the middle of the store.

The two of you quickly make with sheepish apologies, returning back to the reason you were here in the first place: buying seeds for your farm. Before long, you have a wide variety of seeds and bulbs to try cultivating for your next harvest, selected with the help of Celine's expert guidance.

As you make to leave the store with your new purchases, though, Celine stops you briefly.

"Could you come by my house tomorrow, when you have a moment?" she asks suddenly. "If you're not too busy, I've got a question about a flower that I hope you can help me with!"

And that's how you found yourself digging around in the dirt alongside Celine, one Thursday afternoon, looking for special seeds.

You're not actually entirely sure what you're trying to find specifically, but countless hours of exobiology field work have given you an eye for spotting odd-looking organic growths among dust and dirt. Still, after half an hour, all you've managed to find are a couple of odd-looking rocks, a handful of regular native seeds, and a few insects you've pocketed for later.

You are nothing if not persistent and meticulous, though, and so fifteen minutes later, you manage to dig up something hitherto unseen: a large-ish rounded seed, with a hard shell and a deep purple hue. You wave Celine over, and her face lights up when she sees what you've found. She inspects the seed closely and carefully after you hand it to her, turning it over and over in the afternoon light.

"Hmm... I've never seen a seed like this!" she says after a moment. "Could this be the seed of the flower we've been hunting for?"

You can't say for certain, of course; whoever it was that penned the Codex that Celine's been looking through failed to include any sort of physical description for the seeds of the flowers they observed. Still, even if it's not be the exact flower you two are looking for, it's still an interesting find in its own right, you reason.

"You're right!" Celine happily agrees. "I'm sure it'll grow into something beautiful and unique! ...though it still would be nice if it was that flower I saw as a kid."

"Either way, at least you'll have something new to discover," you muse. "Maybe you could even update the Codex with what you find."

Celine positively beams at your suggestion.
"That's such a great idea! ...Well, I don't think Errol would want me to write in the Codex, specifically, but I've always loved looking through books like it about flowers—maybe I could make one of my own! I could write down how this seed looks so others can find them later, write down how to grow and care for them, how they look when they're in bloom... oh, maybe I could even draw pictures! And maybe..."

She continues chattering excitedly with brainstorming and ideas; some of what she's talking about goes over your head, but it's still fun to watch and listen to her go on like this, in and of itself.

Eventually, though, the sun starts to set, putting an end to your little excursion.

"Ah!" Celine says as she notices the time. "I'm sorry for keeping you for so long—I need to get this seed home and plant it! I'll let you know as soon as it sprouts!"

With that, you two part ways, with Celine returning to her cottage and you returning to your farm.

Your life continues on, and things continue to eventuate. Your plants continue to grow, as do your fields and your collection of materials and knicknacks; so too does Errol's museum, as well as the town as a whole. You see bridges repaired, roads rebuilt, and markets return.

On one Saturday in particular, you come across a telescope for sale: a long tube of bronze, filled with glass lenses polished to perfect clarity, on a sturdy tripod mount. You don't even bother looking at the price tag before deciding to buy it.

Merri smiles and chuckles as she rings up your purchase.
"I should have known that the mysterious traveler from the stars would have wanted the telescope," she says. "I hope you enjoy it!"

As you walk back to your farm with the telescope tucked carefully and securely beneath your arm, you spot Celine eyeing you curiously from a distance.

As evening comes and night falls, you realize you can't put any local names to the stars in the night sky around this planet, nor do you know any constellations people may have identified here. You'll have to hunt around for a locally-produced star chart or an ephemeris at some point, and figure out what everyone calls the stars around here.

Still, you'd spent quite a bit of time exploring the stars around here before your arrival on this planet, so you have plenty of stellar cartographic data stored on your ship's computer. You spend most of the evening in your ship for once, running the computers in low-power mode so you can jot down observation data for the stars you've mapped, as well as the astronomical coordinates for the other planets in the system, a couple of nebulae, and some other stellar objects of interest.

By the time you step back out into the night, you're well-equipped with a variety of interesting things to look upon in the sky, with a small astronomical catalogue written down on a few sheets of paper. Right ascensions, declinations, and apparent magnitudes are written out in your crisp handwriting, and collected in a neat and tidy table, with figures relative to the local pole star: a blazing Class O main-sequence star, burning a bright, deep blue.

For that matter, Polaris—the 'traditional' pole star from humanity's cradle, or so you're told—is a 'mere' Class F, burning cooler and whiter compared to the pole star here. It's also close to the horizon from your perspective, due to your position relative to it within the galaxy. The night sky varies from planet to planet, after all: even if the stars themselves are the same, the view from every star system arranges them differently, with each one offering a unique perspective out into the cosmos.

To start with, you try to find the last star you visited before coming here. It's predictably easy to locate: a bright blue-white class A main sequence star, made all the brighter by how relatively near it is—only 34 light-years away. You chuckle to yourself as you remember how, when you'd first entered that system, you'd done the usual discovery scan pulse, only to find a whopping sixty celestial bodies that all needed to be scanned and catalogued. You'd been exasperated at the time, but you'd still gone over each body carefully with your ship's full-spectrum scanner, dutifully identifying each one's orbit, composition, and other parameters. Along the way, you'd even identified one or two of the planets as being terraforming candidates for future planetary settlements.

That already feels like it happened a lifetime ago, and yet it's only been... what, a few weeks since then?
The thought suddenly settles into your gut with an uncomfortable, somber feeling. Has it really only been that long ago?

You shake your head and try to push the thought out of mind, as you look over your handwritten star catalogue and decide what to look for next.

As you do so, however, you hear footsteps in the grass behind you. You turn to find Celine approaching, illuminated by the small, flickering light of a lantern she carries in her hand.

"Oh, hi Celine!" you call out to her. "What's going on?"

She waves back to you, though it's a bit hard to see in the dark.
"I saw you with that telescope earlier this afternoon, so I got curious... what are you looking at?" she asks.

"I wanted to see if I could find some particular stars up there," you reply. "Would you like to join me?"

"Sure!" she replies, and walks over next to you.

She watches you with curiosity as you pick out the next system to look for, and aim your telescope accordingly. This star is much further away and far less luminous than the class A star you were looking at earlier, but this planet has blessedly little light pollution, so it's not too long before the orange-yellow light of the Lave System's class K primary star is centered in your telescope view. You smile to yourself a bit as you look back at its familiar flickering hue from thousands of light-years away.

"Here," you say to Celine, stepping aside so she can look through the telescope's eyepiece.

"Oh, how pretty!" she says as she looks out through the telescope. "Which star is this?"

"Well, I'm not sure if this land has a name for it," you admit, "but we called it Lave, where I'm from. I was actually born there, in the system's major starport: Lave Station."

"Lave Station... is that a city there?" Celine asks.

"Yeah, it's a big Coriolis starport, orbiting around the system's first planet," you reply reflexively, before catching Celine's look of confusion. Right, she wouldn't have any concept of what those words mean... you wrack your brain for a bit, trying to figure out how to explain it to her.

"Imagine a city. A massive, bustling city with towering buildings, filled with millions of people all going about their lives," you begin.
"Now, imagine if instead of building it on the ground, you built it way, way above the surface of the world, out among the stars," you then add, pointing straight up into the night sky to illustrate your point.

Celine listens with rapt attention as you continue talking.
"That's what it was: a whole city, built out among the stars instead of on the ground," you continue. "What's more, it wasn't flat like a regular city. The whole city was a structure in and of itself—one that kind of looked like a big playing dice, spinning gently in space."

"Spinning?" Celine echoes in confusion.

"Oh, um... up there, in space, there's no gravity. If you jumped up, for example, you'd just start floating away," you reply, "so to simulate gravity and give people something to walk on, the whole station spins around."
"...it's something that makes more sense if you see it in person," you admit. You get the feeling you're not really explaining this in the best way.

"But, well, anyways," you add, trying to move on from the topic. "I was born in space, around that star, Lave."

"I've lived out in space for pretty much my entire life, in stations like that one and aboard ships," you then say. "This is actually the first time in my life I've lived on solid ground for more than a week. Er, living here in Mistria, I mean."

"What's it like?" Celine asks. "Are there any big differences, living up there as opposed to down here?"

"This is going to sound a bit stupid," you say first as a preface, "but down here, there's just so much dirt, and grass, and trees, and... well, you get the point. Most of the stations and ships I've lived on were all just urban metal, concrete, and glass on the inside. Any plants and soil you'd find were either in the hydroponics sections where food was grown, or in tiny community relaxation spaces that were only about the size of this field, if not smaller."

Sure, the concepts of things like giant forests and planet-spanning oceans made perfect sense to you at a logical level, and of course you'd seen them plenty of times before from orbits high and low. But there was a difference between seeing them from a distance, or in a picture or in a recording, versus actually being there, face-to-face with it. Hell, just last week, you'd stepped barefoot onto a beach for the first time in your life—and no pictures or words could have captured the smell of the ocean breeze, or the feeling of the sand getting between your toes. You'd never stood beneath a green forest canopy until the week after you arrived here.

"But what really gets me is the sky," you say. "Stations and ships have windows, but even in the biggest habitats, there's nowhere near enough atmosphere to have a colored sky. So no matter what time it was, if you looked up or out of a window, you would always see the stars. Like, it sometimes throws me for a loop when I walk outside down here, and see nothing but blue over my head."

"And of course, there a bunch of smaller things, like having a sun that actually rises and sets, instead of just timed station lighting everywhere. But needless to say, I've had to adjust ever since I arrived here."

When you look back at Celine after saying all of that, you find to your surprise that she looks... sad?
"I... can't imagine what it must be like, to grow up like that," she confesses. "Living without the sky? Or the sun? Or even just dirt and grass? You must've missed out on so much!"

"I mean, I don't think it was bad at all?" you say, a hint of defensiveness entering your tone, which you have to push down.
Taking a deep breath, you add, "...maybe it's just because it's how I was born and raised, but I've never really minded it. It's just a different mode of living, that's all."

"Plus, I got to look up at the stars whenever I wanted," you add with a smile, before looking back up at the night sky. "Here, I have to wait until the sun goes down."

"I guess that must've been nice," she admits with a smile to match yours, though you can still detect a hint of dubiousness in her tone. "I don't think I'd want to live like that, though."

You just shrug in response. "It's a good thing you live here, then, right?"

"Definitely," she nods in agreement. "I don't think I'd trade Mistria for anything!"

Your words and hers hang in the night air for a moment, before you turn back to your star catalogue, pulling it close to your face to read it in the flickering lantern-light.

"...well, shall we continue?" you ask. "There's a few more things I'd like to try and find before it gets too late."

And so, the two of you spend the rest of the night together like this, taking turns looking through the telescope.

Chapter Text

The world keeps turning, the celestial spheres keep twirling in their orbits, and life continues on as usual for you, as spring gives way to summer.

Your routine becomes an ingrained habit as the weeks pass; your feet carry you through your pattern from the moment you wake up in the morning, even as you rub the sleep out of your eyes. You're busy from sunup to sunset, constantly in motion and determined to make the most of every moment—and you're nothing if not hard-working and efficient.

(You think you once heard March say, "of all the people we could've gotten, of course it had to be another Adeline." You decide to take this as a compliment.)

As you step out beneath the light blue sky this morning, your eyes end up catching upon the dragon statue out in the corner of your field. It's been there practically ever since you got here, silently watching over your work, day and night. You remember Eiland mentioning it had something to do with an ancient local religion, but the details escape you. For you, at least, it's nothing more than just another statue, albeit an impressive-looking one.

Every time you look at it, though, you get the strange sense that you're not getting something—that there should be something more to all of this. Like a puzzle with missing pieces, though, the answer remains stubbornly out of reach for you.

...Nevermind, you say to yourself, brushing aside that particular thought. Surely, whatever it is, it can't be that important.

As busy as you are, though, you still make time for stargazing. The telescope becomes a fixture in front of your farmhouse residence, and on almost every clear night, you find your eyes drawn skyward, searching for all of the stars from your past, retracing your winding journey up to here from a distance.

Celine joins you sometimes, the two of you chatting as you look through the telescope together. You have some story or anecdote to tell about pretty much every star in your catalogue, and so you end up doing a lot of storytelling as you seek out stars in the night sky.

Some of them are small and short, like that one time you fell asleep at the helm while scanning the far-flung and utterly obscure Pha Aoscs RH-V D2-9 system, and woke up to your ship's computer announcing that you were dropping out of FTL supercruise into a planetary atmosphere.

Other recollections are more involved and somber, like when you tell Celine about how you helped evacuate refugees during the Thargoid attack on Sol, temporarily refitting your ship with passenger cabins instead of your usual explorer's kit, cramming as many people on board as possible during each run.

Celine, for her part, is an attentive listener, always happy to listen to you ramble on and on about your travels.

Speaking of Celine, you end up spending far more time around her than you'd ever expected. You seem to gravitate towards her naturally: meeting her as you pass by her cottage on your way into town, running into her at the store, or even just bumping into her coincidentally in the forested areas around town.

Other times, though, she seeks you out specifically, coming up to chat as you make your way to visit the inn or the bathhouse, or coming to visit as you water your fields, bringing along some of the flowers she's grown and showing them to you. It helps that your routine and patterns make you rather predictable; sometimes, it seems like she's even learned your schedule, waiting for you to pass by in order to strike up a conversation.

You don't mind at all, of course—far from it. Spending time with her never fails to liven up your spirit, and you grow to look forward to meeting her practically every day, listening to her chatter about gardening and foraging and even just the general goings-on in Mistria.

You're looking up at the stars again one night, when an idea strikes you.

As much as you love telling Celine stories about the things you've seen out there in the cosmos, you can't help but feel like they're always missing something. You don't know how to describe, for example, the beauty of standing on a moon and watching its parent planet rise up over the horizon, limned by the light of the system's sun peeking out from behind it; or how it feels to skim over the rings of a gas giant, watching the banded hues whizz by seemingly just beneath your feet. You don't think you could ever capture something like that in mere words.

But what if you could show her?

You've taken plenty of pictures on your travels before, both as part of your stellar surveying duties and also just for fun; and you might be able to jerry-rig your ship's equipment into synthesizing hard copies of your photos. It wouldn't be perfect, of course: you're only just an amateur photographer, and even the best photos couldn't hope to capture it all. But it would at least help you express that beauty more accurately, closer to the truth.

So, that's what you do: you spend hours in your ship once more, coaxing her into synthesizing ink and paper with what few materials remain in her hold. Frankly, now that you think about it, you're surprised your ship can even work with such old techniques—digital photo printing like this is a technology from, what, 1300 years ago?—but the options are there, buried deep in your cartographic software suite as an information archival format.

You also spend a lot of time hemming and hawing about what photos you'll pick, limited to just a handful of photos by the damage to your ship's material storage bays. Nonetheless, you do settle on a decision eventually, and by the end of the night you've got your photos in hand.

By the time you leave your ship, though, it's really late at night: probably a few hours or so after midnight, if you had to guess... and as sweet as Celine is, you don't think she'd appreciate you knocking on her door at 2:30 in the morning. So, instead, you dash off a quick note to leave in her mailbox—hi Celine, I came up with something neat to show you, would you like to come by and check it out if you're not too busy?—before flopping face-first into bed as soon as you return. You're out like a light before you even know it.

You're looking over your photos again the next day, late in the morning, when Celine knocks on your door.
She greets you with a simple, yet light and airy "Hi!" before saying, "I got the letter you left for me last night! You said you wanted to show me something, right?"

"Yeah!" you confirm, leading her to a nearby table, where the photos lay spread out. Her eyes light up as she takes in the images in front of her, and likewise, you're eager to start talking about them.

You pick your first photo at random: an up-close picture of a black hole in the Gru Hypai DL-X sector. At this distance, the black hole's gravitational lensing dominates your field of view, bending the light from a distant nebula behind it into swirling bands of whitish-blue and reddish-pink. Near the event horizon, the effect is so pronounced that the diverted light forms an Einstein ring, looking like a giant marble suspended in space around a pitch-black core. Meanwhile, the stars fill the background, countless pinpricks of light glimpsed through cosmic clouds.

You spend a surprising amount of time talking about this photo: explaining what a black hole is, and how its mass influences the universe itself to bend around it, so much so that not even light can escape its grasp. You try to describe how it looks to fly by one in your ship, and how it makes the stars behind dance, as their light passes through the distorted spacetime around the singularity. You find yourself wishing you'd taken a video recording as well, honestly.

Your next photo is one of your ship flying by the relativistic particle jets of a neutron star, taken with the help of a remotely-controlled camera drone. The neutron star itself is almost blindingly luminous, with the particle jet bursting forth from it like a swirling river of blue and white. Your ship, meanwhile, is just a silhouette against this backdrop, with her upper surface illuminated only by a handful of running lights and the orange glow of your thrusters. Naturally, you can see other stars in the background too, their distant lights visible even through the pulsar's glare.

You get a bit side-tracked while talking about this photo, when you mention how explorers such as yourself often dive into the jets themselves while in supercruise, scooping up the energetic particles within in order to supercharge their ships' FTL drives. By doing this, you could catapult yourself across tremendous distances, traveling hundreds of light-years in a single hyperspace jump... though of course, pushing your Frame Shift Drive past its safety limits like this was not without its risks—not least of them being the possibility of accidentally disengaging your drive and dropping into normal space inside of the jet; such a ship, without the protection of the warped bubble of spacetime formed by its drive, will generally get fried in short order by the cascade of charged relativistic particles thundering around it.

Afterwards, you turn to yet another photo of your ship, this time as it's flying through the rings around a gas giant. Dark asteroids lie scattered throughout space, with your ship flying between them, illuminated from behind by the system's primary star; said star is so close that you can see solar prominences—thin white streams of plasma that flare outwards from the star's surface into its corona, before looping back down again. Amidst all this, the gas giant looms, a shadowy black ball that partially eclipses the sun. And again, you can see a star field in the far distance, their tiny lights shining in-between the rocks and through the primary star's rays.

You have stories to tell about this photo, too, and about how you once tried to help out with efforts to resupply a deep-space fuel depot by mining tritium from an icy planetary ring like this one—only to nearly wreck your ship in the process because of your inexperience with close maneuvering in space, crashing and scraping against one asteroid after another. You'd been so frustrated, back then—but it's honestly pretty funny now, when you look back at it.

...

...but...

The more you talk, though, the more you start to feel that feeling from before, gnawing at you from inside: the sense of something being missing, that you're not getting everything you want to say across to Celine, that you still can't fully express yourself. The photos are a step in the right direction, to be sure—but even they are limited, with frames too small to capture the enormity of the cosmos and ink too shallow to fully recreate the rich hues and vivid colors from your memory. Compared to this, what you can recall almost seems like too much to be true, too large for life.

And yet, it was your life, wasn't it? One you've now left behind up there, in the endless night sky. Some of it was happy and some of it was sad, sometimes dull and other times dangerous—but it was yours, all the same. Now, the only things you have left of it are the recollections locked within your mind and the data locked within your ship.

...you decide not to tell Celine about any of this; it's just a bit of homesickness, after all. No need to make a big deal out of it.
Fortunately, she seems too preoccupied with the photos to notice how you're lost in thought.

Eventually, you run through the entirety of your small photo collection; meanwhile, Celine realizes she still has to run an errand this afternoon, so the two of you say your goodbyes for now.

"Thank you for this," she says. "I had a lot of fun talking with you, and looking at all of those beautiful pictures."

"I had a lot of fun too," you add with a laugh. "Being able to revisit all of this again was nice, I have to admit."

Once again, there's that sunny, cheery smile of hers. For a moment, you can feel your feelings from earlier fade, just a tiny bit.
"Mhm! You certainly have a lot of stories to tell, don't you?" she says.

"More than I can count," you nod. "I don't think I'll ever get through them all, honestly!"

"I'm definitely looking forward to hearing everything else you have to say," Celine says. "But for now... see you later?"

"Yeah. Seeya!" you reply in kind, with a small wave goodbye.

What you're feeling is just a little bit of homesickness, nothing more, and you know full well that it'll clear itself up with time; you just need to settle more firmly into life in Mistria, is all. Hopefully, these memories and these feelings will be as distant as the stars themselves one day, and you'll be able to push them out of mind for good.

All you need to do is just hang on, until then.

A few days later, you find Celine's left a letter of her own in your mailbox.

"The seed we found still hasn't sprouted..." the letter reads. "I've been doing research into it, and I'm starting to think its growth conditions might be very particular. Could you come over and lend me your insight? It'd be very appreciated!"

You visit her house later that afternoon, curious to see how you could possibly help.

"Oh, hi! You got my letter!" Celine says happily, when she opens the door. "I'm so glad! Let's solve the mystery of this seed!"

As the two of you walk over to the seed in question, Celine talks about what she's been able to find so far. Apparently, she's been able to pinpoint the specific section of her Codex that describes the seed, and decipher text noting that the seed is sensitive to soil type, watering, and as-of-yet unknown 'special conditions'—but nothing more than that.

"Oh, I'm just not sure!" she concludes with a sigh. "What on earth could it be?"

You stare at the pot of soil in silence as you think.
Of course, you're well aware from both your exobiology work and from farming that certain organisms can only grow under certain environmental conditions... but for the most part, you've always thought of those conditions in terms of planetary and stellar characteristics: crust composition, atmospheric temperature and pressure, local solar light spectra, local gravity, and so on. Now, though, you're struggling somewhat to transfer that knowledge into practical terms for farming and gardening.

Still, you try to think everything through methodically. You know already that you can eliminate some of these variables from consideration: you're not exactly about to change the atmospheric composition or air pressure in Celine's house, nor can you do anything about the gravity on this planet. So what does that leave?

Soil composition? From what Celine's told you so far, she's done her best to replicate the soil at the site where you two originally found the seed. Likewise, she probably knows more than you ever will about how to give a plant the exact amount of water it needs, so watering probably isn't the issue...

Temperature could be a factor, you suppose—you're well aware of its importance after having had to switch what crops you've been growing, now that the days are getting hotter with the arrival of summer. Lighting conditions and spectra are another possibility; you're pretty sure you've read somewhere before that light can be an environmental trigger for seed germination.

You mention all of this to Celine, and she closes her eyes and thinks.
"Hmm... I remember, back when I last saw this flower by the ruins as a kid, it was a cool spring day. And if I recall correctly, it was growing next to one of the ruin walls..."

"...maybe that means it needs to be in the shade to grow?" she wonders.

Now that you think about it...
"We found the seed out in the open, right?" you ask. "If it needs shade, that would explain why it wasn't already growing when we found it."

"You've got a good point. Let's try moving it!" Celine says. "Hmm... where to put it, though?"

After looking around for a bit, she moves the pot of soil to a spot near one of the front windows of her house, which open to the south. It seems like a relatively shaded spot to your untrained eye—or at least, one that's mostly away from the sun's glare.

"There! That should be just the right amount of shade, I think," Celine says. "Next, I think this seed could use a good wake-up call of nutrients!"

She walks over to the back of the house, and picks up a heavy-looking jar.
"This is my own special blend," she mentions with a cute wink. "How much do you think we should add?"

You scratch your head for a second.
"...maybe just start small and go from there?" you tentatively suggest. "We can always add more if we need to, but we can't un-fertilize the soil if we add too much. ...well, probably. I think."

"That's sensible," Celine replies with a laugh as she begins adding a pinch of fertilizer. "I'm sure we can be patient and careful. After all, this seed's already been so patient for us too, right?"

"And now, finally, we need to water it. The seed has been dormant for so long, and the pot has excellent drainage, so I think it'll be hard to overwater it, but..." she says, trailing off.

"...but, well, I'm just not sure," she finishes. "I've tried looking in the Codex, but it's no help. There's some parts and words that I just can't translate."

"Do you have any ideas?" she asks you, finally.

You think.
The water itself doesn't seem like an issue—but the two of you were talking about temperature earlier, right? And, well, it is summer now...

"You said you saw the flower as a kid on a cool day?" you query, to which Celine nods. "It's been getting pretty hot lately. Maybe we need to add more water than usual, to cool the soil?"

"That makes sense, but..." Celine begins hesitantly. "...but you'd better do it. I'm too nervous!"

To be honest, you're probably even more nervous about this than she is! But you give it your best shot anyway, trying to gauge how damp and cool the soil is with a finger as you pour water into the pot.

Afterwards, the two of you are left looking at it quietly, wondering if you've gotten things right.
"Come on, little seed..." Celine says with a determined frown. "You can do it!"

After a few moments, though, she sighs.
"...well, I guess it was a bit silly of me to think anything would actually happen right away—"

This is, of course, about when the two of you notice a small sprout begin to poke up from the dirt, surprising you both.

Celine rushes over immediately, crouching down next to the pot and leaning in to get a good close look at the green sprout. Her eyes glance between the plant and the open Codex beside her.

"Oh my!" she gasps excitedly, beaming. "It looks just like the sprout from the book! It is the flower from my childhood!"

Pretty soon, Celine's tugging on your arm, pulling you towards the tables and chairs by the front of the house.
"We should make precise notes of everything we did, while we can still remember!" she declares. "I'm sure you don't mind, right?"

You don't mind, of course. You're a scientist, after all—you know how important it is to record your findings.

"Great!" she cheers. "I'll go put on a pot of tea!"

You help Celine compile her notes. You might not have any of the measuring instruments you're used to, but you think you've done a good job of capturing the important details, all the same. By the time the two of you are done, you've wound up with a pretty thorough account of everything, from both of your perspectives, along with a table of everything you could measure, all on a couple of sheets of paper.

"...and there, finished!" Celine says happily. "This is the start of something amazing, I just know it!"

She turns to you.
"Thank you so much for all your help! You have no idea how much this means to me."

"It's not a problem," you say with a carefree smile. "I'm just happy to have helped."

"No, really! I..." she begins, trailing off uncertainly. She looks out the window in silence, seemingly lost in thought. Outside, the setting sun has set the sky ablaze with orange hues, and the light filtering through the glass casts Celine in a soft glow.

"I've just been thinking lately, about the future..." she begins. "You see, I think... no, I know that I don't want to take over my family's store. But at the same time, I've never really had anything lined up. I've always known that I want to keep pursuing my love for gardening, but beyond that... I didn't know."

She looks down, at the collected papers in her hands.
"But now... I think I know what I want to do. I want to keep doing this. I mean, I'm sure now that I'm onto something with the Codex, this seed we've found, and these notes we've taken—but I'm thinking about more than just that. I want to take this further... and maybe even write a Codex of my own, someday."

She laughs quietly, a sound that's relaxing and almost melodic in its quality.
"And I have you to thank for that," she says with a soft, grateful smile. "I never could've gotten this far without your help."

Her heartfelt confession catches you off-guard; you're pretty sure you're blushing.
"W-Well, um..." you stammer, before taking a breath to steady yourself. "...I'm just happy to see that you're happy, Celine. I'm glad that you've found a path for yourself!"

She just giggles again, with a hand on her cheek, but doesn't say anything further.

Your conversation turns to lighter topics after that, stopping only when the two of you notice that darkness has fallen outside. As you leave, the two of you linger on either side of her doorstep for a bit... but eventually the two of you part ways.

Celine waves goodbye as you walk off into the night, with your eyes looking up to the stars above as always.

Chapter Text

More weeks pass.

You keep to your pattern: wake up, work the fields. Walk into town. Talk to people. Check the board. Walk back to the fields, or back to your residence, or out into the woods, or even out to the mines sometimes, and keep working. Go to sleep at some point, before waking up the next morning.

Your efforts net you a decent chunk of change. More importantly, though, they continue to help revitalize the town; you've heard Adeline mention a few times that Mistria is starting to attract attention from the rest of Aldaria, thanks to your efforts. You're really putting the town back on the map, from what you can gather, and that's fulfilling.

It's just a shame that it sometimes feels rather... repetitive. The same actions and the same sights, day in and day out. The days blending into each other slightly at the edges, like running paint.

The homesickness, too, hasn't faded yet, not in the slightest; you find your gaze being drawn upwards more and more often, up to the night sky. And every time you look up at the stars, something new from your past comes to your mind: another story, another sight, another memory.

Of course, you know that not every job can be 100% exciting all the time: even back as an explorer, there were times when you'd wanted to fall asleep after scanning the 50th lifeless, uninteresting ball of ice and rock in a row. Likewise, it's not like your life here is complete clockwork: there's things, here and there, that keep your days from getting too stale. In a way, the dreary moments help make the memorable parts shine all the brighter.

Chief among the highlights of your life here is Celine, of course. Whether it's helping her with the flower from her past, or looking up at the stars with her through your telescope, or even just chatting as you walk to town together, being with her never fails to give you a boost of energy, as if your soul itself were awakening with the sunrise. In some ways, it almost feels like your life here revolves around her—and strangely, you don't seem to mind.

It's an odd feeling, and one you can't recall ever having felt before. Then again, you were never the most social person to begin with: the life of an explorer is a lonesome one, by nature. You'd accepted that long ago.

You have to wonder if this is love. It certainly seems to fit the bill: at this point, it's difficult for you to imagine what it'd feel like to be separated from Celine, and you can't imagine anything you wouldn't do for the sake of her happiness. And... well, saying that you think she's cute would be an understatement, to say the least.

Honestly, viewed in that light, the answer is quite obvious.

The revelation is... not nearly as earth-shaking or dramatic as you'd imagined it would be. You're not sure what you expected—a searing flash of insight, perhaps; or a blaze of reckless, fiery passion; or maybe even some kind of internal emotional turmoil, as you tried and failed to deny your feelings. But, no, this just feels like a natural conclusion: something you'd known all along, even if you couldn't put a name to it.

...so, then, you're in love.
You have to wonder, though: what happens now?

You wake up and walk outside one day, at the end of summer, to find Elsie walking up to your door.

She has a smile on her face and a purpose in her feet as always, and you think you can see something in her hand, glinting in the morning sunlight. As you two talk, she tells you about the traditional Shooting Star Festival, set to happen tonight. That explains all of the preparations and decorations you'd seen Adeline putting up yesterday.

And then she suggests with a wink that viewing the shooting stars tonight would make for an ideal romantic date; one that's said to link your destinies together like the stars in the sky.

"Of course, I think we both know that you already have someone in mind," Elsie laughs, before handing you a star-shaped brooch. "So, here—take this, and give it to her sometime today. It's a Mistrian tradition going back centuries; she'll know what you mean. Later that night, you two can head up to the summit. I suggest going up at around eight o'clock to get the most spectacular views."

"Well, then," she says. "As much as I'd love to stay and chat, I have a few more things to do today, so I'll leave you to it! I wish you the best of luck."

As Elsie walks away, you're left alone with your thoughts and the brooch in your hand.

She's right, of course: there's only one person you'd even think of giving this to. The question is: how?

...now that you think about it, you wonder if Celine even sees you in a romantic light. Sure, you two might be close, and spend a lot of time together—but astronomy and gardening are things platonic friends can do, too. Does Celine even want to be in a relationship right now?

...well, at the very least, you know you don't have to worry about getting shot down harshly.

You look up to the fields in front of your residence, and try to clear your head. For now, at least, there's work to be done.

Still, once you're done watering the plants, you still haven't come up with a plan or anything at all. Nonetheless, you keep thinking as you walk down the path leading to town.

You wind up trying to approach the problem methodically, as is your habit. There's three things you need to do, here:

1. Get some alone time with Celine, somehow.
2. During your conversation with her, somehow turn the topic to the festival, and give her the brooch.
3. Deal with whatever consequences might arise afterwards.

You already know there's no way to plan ahead for that third part: there's just too many unknowns to consider, and a lot of them are unpleasant to think about. That leaves the first two parts, which you probably need to consider in order.

First, you need to find some way to talk to her alone. You realize that if you're going to do that, it'll have to be sooner rather than later: everyone in town will probably begin to gather together with family or friends later in the day as the festival approaches, so if you take too long you run the risk of having to give Celine the brooch with her family watching. You would probably die of sheer embarrassment if you had to do that, so it's out of the question.

You'll just have to 'coincidentally' run into her while she's working in her garden, you suppose—which, admittedly, you could probably just do while walking back to your house from town. And if you miss her the first time, maybe you could just... keep walking back and forth, to and from town? It's kind of a dumb idea, but it could work...

(Your ears vaguely register the sound of someone calling your name, but you're too busy thinking to notice.)

After that, though, you'll actually have to give Celine the star brooch. You can't feign ignorance as to what the brooch means: after all, you want her to know you're giving it romantically. You're also not nearly stupid or gutsy enough to try some kind of grand, sweeping romantic gesture; it's best to keep things simple.

Your feet carry you up the stone steps running through town, operating on autopilot as you mull over that thought.

Simple, simple... perhaps you should just take the direct approach? But how direct is too direct? Surely you can't just blurt it out as the first thing in a conversation. Not to mention, you first have to make sure she doesn't have plans of her own.

(You hear your name again, louder and closer this time, but you're still lost in thought.)

The festival itself would be a natural starting point to talk about, though. After all, it's what everyone is going to be talking about; it'd be weird not to bring it up in conversation. You two would talk about your plans, of course—and, well, it's not like you have family here, or anyone else that people may expect you to spend the festival with. So, naturally, you'd mention you'll be alone for the night... and that's when—

"Watch out!"

—that's when your feet trip over the fountain in the town square.

You reflexively try to catch yourself as you fall, but all you manage to do is twist your body around, so you land back-first in the water instead of head-first.

"Oh my!" someone says. You think it's Celine.

Unfortunately, you're not exactly in a state of mind to be sure, because the fountain's cascading waters are pouring directly onto your face. You flail around in a blind panic as you try and fail to extricate yourself from the mess you've landed in.

"Here, let me help you!"

A soft hand takes hold of yours, and pulls you out of the fountain. True enough, your savior turns out to be Celine.
"Oh dear... are you okay?" she asks, voice etched with worry.

You try to wave off her concern with a sheepish grin.
"I-I'm fine!" you say. "I was just, uh, kind of lost in thought, ahaha..."

Celine giggles.
"I could tell," she replies. "I tried calling out to you a few times, but you just kept walking!"

"Though, um!" she continues abruptly, tucking a stray strand of golden hair behind her ear. "I wanted to say—I wanted to ask you something! About... erm, the Codex!"

"Okay?" you wonder. "What did you want to ask?"

Celine just shakes her head.
"N-Not here, I mean—I was hoping I could show you? Back at my cottage?"

You suddenly realize that this is incredibly convenient for you: you now have a valid excuse to go visit Celine alone today! Score!

"Um, sure!" you say quickly. "Lead the way, Celine."

Fortunately, you end up air-drying a bit as you and Celine walk back from town, so you at least don't have to worry about getting water all over her floor.

You still have plenty else to worry about, though—chief of which is: how are you going to handle this upcoming conversation? You can't exactly go with your 'direct approach' strategy of opening by talking about the festival anymore, not when Celine wants to talk to you about the Codex first. You need a backup plan, and fast!

You're too busy planning to offer much conversation as you walk, your eyes constantly fixed on the sky as you think. Fortunately, Celine herself seems equally lost in thought, apparently intent on studying the dirt at her feet. Perhaps the question she has for you has to do with the soil?

Celine seems oddly stiff and jumpy as you reach her house and step inside. You, meanwhile, still have no idea how you're going to lead into talking about the festival.

"Do you mind if I put on a pot of tea, first?" Celine asks. "A-After all, I think you could probably use a bit of warming up after... you know."

You nod immediately, grateful for the few extra minutes you'll have to think things through.
"Yeah! I, uh, sure could use some warming up!" you say awkwardly. "That'd be great."

...damnit, you need to get your nerves under control! You'll never get anywhere like this!

Celine preoccupies herself with the tea, while you do your level best to burn a hole in her ceiling with your gaze. As you think even more, you wonder if maybe the only way out is through: wrap up whatever question Celine has ASAP, so you can get to talking about festival matters.

"So, um," Celine asks suddenly, interrupting your thoughts. "Are you sure you're okay? You seemed pretty lost in thought, so..."

"It's nothing, really!" you say, trying to wave her off. "I'm more interested in what you have to ask me."

"Eh?" Celine squeaks. "Are you sure?"
She has a deer-in-the-headlights look on her face—like a Sidewinder pilot passing through a station's airlock, and realizing their tiny ship is about to get squashed by a massive oncoming Type-9 Heavy loaded with cargo.

"Um... I-I'd need to look in the Codex, first!" she replies hastily. "Just a second!"

"Ah, don't worry, I can go get it!" you say as you get up and get the book in question, sitting on a table in the back. "You've got your hands full already."

"No, really, it's... fine..." Celine says in return, before suddenly trailing off into silence.

You turn back to see her staring at something on the table—the star brooch that'd previously been in your hands.

You'd set it down on the table without thinking, when you got up to fetch the Codex for her.

...holy shit, you are an idiot.

"Um, ahahaa, so, funny story about that, Celine—" you chatter, verbally flailing. "So you know that thing later tonight? Yeah, um..."

Celine just looks at you and giggles.
...what does that mean?

"Yes, I do know 'that thing'," she echoes mischievously. "Did you want to ask me something?"

Welp, looks like the jig is up. Time to go for broke.

"...yeah. I, um, wanted to know if you wanted to go to the festival with me? Maybe?" you finally say.

"This is the part where I'd give that to you," you add, nodding to the brooch on the table before her. "But, um... well, I kinda messed that part up, haha."

"That's funny," she says, as she steps up to you and takes the Codex from your hands. "Because, um..."

She flips through the the ancient book, turning to what you're pretty sure is the section on that seed you two have been working with, before handing the book back to you.

There, lying on the pages in front of you, is another star brooch—identical to your own.

"...I also wanted to ask if you would go to the festival with me," she admits.

After a few moments of stunned silence, you just start laughing in relief, and Celine joins you.
"You have no idea how worried I was," you say, "I kept trying to come up with half-baked plans for how to ask you out to the festival, haha."

"Though, I have to admit, your plan was way better than mine," you add.

"Why, thank you," she says, with a radiant smile. "...so, I suppose I'll see you at eight, then?"

...you'd almost forgotten that the festival only starts at night. At least you have time to prepare.
"Yeah, I need to change out of these clothes anyways—I think they're still a bit damp from the fountain," you reply. "See you at eight!"

Your mind is buzzing as you go to meet Celine, later that night.

The two of you ascend the mountain, up and up and up, and when you reach the summit, Celine lays a blanket out for you two to sit on.

The night sky stretches out above you in all directions, like an ocean swallowing you whole, flecked with starlight as always. Directly in front of you is the galactic plane, with the Milky Way's core spanning the sky as a wide band of stars and cosmic dust clouds. All the while, numerous streaks of white leave luminous trails amidst the black, shooting stars burning brightly as they pass overhead.

You wonder if your ship looked like them as you fell from space, half a year ago.

Celine breaks the silence first.
"Ah... the stars really are beautiful tonight, aren't they?" she says softly. "They're so clear from up here!"

You have to agree, honestly. Perhaps you should take your telescope up here, one of these days.

"To be honest, I was a little nervous about watching them from up here," Celine adds with a small laugh and a sheepish grin. "Last time I was up here, I was reminded that I'm not so good with heights!"

You turn to her with some concern, but she's still smiling serenely.
"But, well..." she says. "Somehow, I don't feel scared, this time."

"...I'm glad you're here with me," Celine finishes. "Truly."

"Of course," you say back to her. "There's no one else I'd rather be here with than you."

As you and Celine keep watching, you find yourself thinking about what else is up there, among the stars.

You know that up there are countless explorers like yourself scattered across space, braving the black of night and the cold of the void.
Up there, too, are innumerable civilizations; cities and stations and ships teeming with people of all walks of life.
Up there are the adventures you've had and the journeys you've made; memories etched into your soul.
Up there are wonders you can't put to words, vistas and sights that beggar belief, cosmic beauty beyond all imagination.

Up there, most of all, is the unknown—the promise that, even after all you've seen, there is still more to come, and something new to find.

Now, though, it all feels so distant. Like the stars themselves, always overhead and yet always unfathomably far away.

Up there is a horizon you'll never be able to reach. The thought wrenches at you from within.
You can't deny it anymore: you miss it dearly. A part of you longs to return to space, to blaze a trail across the stars once more, to see everything that lies beyond the view of your telescope.

However, guilt starts to eat at you, as you come to that realization.
After all, you have a perfectly fine life down here in Mistria, right?

You have a cozy farmhouse, fields overflowing with life, and friends aplenty.
You're helping people, doing good in the world, palpably changing things for the better through your efforts.
You even have the newfound love of your life, here with you now at this very moment.

So, why is it that you can't help but turn your eyes to the stars overhead, every night?
Why can't you just be happy with what you have here?

Celine's voice breaks you from your thoughts.
"Is something wrong?" she asks. "You've been pretty quiet."

You shake your head.
"No, no, I'm fine," you reply, doing your best to push down the feelings within. After all, the last thing you want is for Celine to think that you don't appreciate her company; on the contrary, you'd probably go insane here without her by your side.

Celine just looks at you thoughtfully, expectantly, in silence.
"Just... a bit lost in thought, I guess," you add eventually. "Thinking about the future, mostly."

She continues to listen, her silence prompting you to elaborate.
"I guess I'm just wondering what to do next," you say. "Things are going well with the farm, but... I can't help but feel a bit restless. Like I should be doing something more."

It's not even a lie, per se, but you still can't help but skirt around the real issue eating at you. Shame fills you at the thought, but you do your best to keep it from showing on your face, even as Celine looks at you with sympathy.

"You've been doing a lot already," she points out. "You don't need to push yourself so much."

"I know, I know," you respond. "But... that's not quite it. I'm not sure how to put it into words."

That, at least, is a lie: you do know how to put it into words, to some extent... they're just not ones that you're satisfied with. Or ones you feel comfortable saying, for that matter. You sigh.

"Sorry, Celine," you say, shaking your head. "I didn't mean to derail our night together."

"It's okay," she replies with a wave of her hand. "I've actually been thinking of the future, myself."

This time, it's your turn to listen to her, as she talks about her own troubles.
"See, I was talking with my mom, earlier, and it got me thinking about the future of the store..."

"I know the path I want to take," she continues. "And so do my parents. You know already: I want to keep gardening, and I don't want to take over the store."

"But, I wonder... am I just being selfish?" she asks.

You shake your head.
"No, I don't think it's selfish to want to pursue your own path," you reply, even as self-awareness digs into your guilty conscience.

"It means a lot to hear you say that, but..." Celine says, before ending on a trailing, uncertain note.

Her circumstances are different from yours, so it's okay for her to take her own path forward, you rationalize. She's not the one contemplating throwing her whole life away, after all.

...and for that matter, neither are you. Where did that thought come from?

At any rate, the thought leaves your mind as a gust of cold mountain air blows past the two of you. Celine shivers a bit in the resulting chill.
"It's getting a bit cold, huh..." you muse. "Fall's right around the corner, right?"

"Yep," Celine agrees.

She taps her fingers together nervously.
"Um, if you want... we could stop by my cottage on the way back?" she suggests, blushing. "I'll put some wood on the fire, and we can warm ourselves up!"

"That sounds like a fantastic idea, honestly," you reply, to which Celine's eyes light up in response.

"Great!" she giggles. "So... shall we?"

The two of you walk together down the mountain, away from the stars and back to the warmth of the town below.

Chapter Text

And just like that, Fall arrives.

After those disconcerting realizations up on the summit during the Shooting Star Festival, you're making a concerted effort to try and refocus on your new life here, instead of getting so hung up on your past life. Aside from that, though, you try to keep roughly on the same course as before.

You're still the same hard-working, supportive, helpful person you've always been during your time here in Mistria. Your farm is booming now, with field plots and plants as far as the eye can see, as well as a few animals; you're still not that adept at handling the latter, and you're not sure you ever will be... but you're learning on the fly, at least.

The town around you, likewise, continues to change and grow for the better. You've helped supply materials for the major repairs, of course, but as it turns out, there's a long tail of smaller fixes that needed doing as well—things that had to be deferred until after the most pressing problems were fixed. You throw yourself into that work: seeing to small, but worrying structural cracks and breaks; helping with cases of "this was damaged but we haven't had time to fix it yet" here and there; and even resolving some situations where "we were thinking of that before the quake, but...".

Admittedly, between working your ever-expanding farm, handling repairs and renovations around town, and still other things like mining, you have a pretty heavy workload. All things considered, though, you're actually grateful for the non-stop work; you don't think you could stand sitting around with nothing to do. Plus, being constantly in motion from task to task helps keep your mind and eyes from wandering up to the sky.

You do have to make some sacrifices here and there, of course. Sleep is one of them, but you're managing just fine with just 3-4 hours of sleep every night—no matter what Valen might say. Eventually you do end up making a brief, abortive effort to get healthier amounts of sleep, after a lecture or two from the good doctor... but unfortunately, it turns out that you can't stand lying in bed, alone with nothing but your thoughts.

Fortunately, coffee is the solution to all problems—or so Adeline claims, anyways. You're inclined to agree with her.

Chit-chat is another unfortunate casualty: you don't exactly have time to stand around and chat with all the work you've taken on, so for the most part your conversations with others in town are just business. It's just as well for you, honestly—you're not the talkative type, anyways. Really, you're fine with just being the unseen helping hand around town.

And it's not like you haven't gotten to know anyone, quite the opposite: you've gleaned bits and pieces of everyone's lives, here and there, while helping them with their various requests. You're more than happy to just sit and listen as they talk about their lives, because it means you don't have to think too much about your own.

On the whole, that's the niche you've fit yourself into, over the course of the last half-year you've spent living in Mistria: you're the quiet jack-of-all-trades, always hard-working, always with a smile, and always happy to help. People like you that way: pretty much everywhere you go, you're greeted with smiles and words of appreciation. Everyone in town is counting on you, it seems.

And, of course, you don't want to disappoint them—not now, not when you've finally found a place for yourself down here in your new home.

You're not able to fully get rid of your wandering mind, though. Far from it.

You're able to bury those feelings beneath non-stop work and endless blue skies by day, but your longing for the stars always returns at nightfall, when the celestial firmament unveils itself overhead.

On some nights, when your wanderlust gets too strong, you set up your telescope and look up once more. You look between the stars you love so dearly, and imagine all that is up there: the sights and vistas, the experiences and adventures, the sense of discovery, the freedom. For brief moments, the earth beneath your feet falls away, and you return home, to the flight deck of your ship and the embrace of the darkest void.

Of course, reality always comes crashing back in the end, bringing with it guilt. You know this isn't healthy: you can't keep clinging to your old life like this. You have to learn to let go.

Fortunately, this only happens on a few nights. Outside of that, your telescope remains tucked safely in storage, out of sight and out of mind.

On another note, despite everything you've done to try and refocus on your new life in Mistria, your relationship with Celine has only stalled, since that night at the end of summer.

You two still talk regularly, of course—she's one of the few people you talk to outside of everything you're working on around town—but your conversations are just words: the weather's lovely today (it's getting pretty cold though, isn't it?); how are the plants doing? (just fine, thanks!); well I have to get going, see you later! (bye!); all of this repeated not quite verbatim, but still ad nauseam, sounds devoid of substance or meaning.

Celine catches you a few times as you're looking through your telescope at night, and you never have the heart to turn her away, even as your guilt begins to war with your wanderlust.

She asks about the few stars you do see together, curious as ever, but you force yourself to keep your words short, sticking to just brief summaries and quick descriptions. Every now and then, afterwards, there'll be an awkward pause, where she'll look at you as if expecting something more; though you always catch yourself in those moments, holding your tongue—because, again, you know that clinging to the past like this isn't healthy for you at all.

You're usually forced to pack up for the night shortly after she arrives, because the juxtaposition between your old and new lives is too painful for you to withstand for long.

The flower from Celine's childhood—the seed that you two found and planted all those weeks ago—isn't faring much better either, remaining a tiny sprout despite having had plenty of time to grow.

Neither of you are quite sure how to help it. Celine gives it nutrients and water, light and shade, heat and cooling, all to no avail.

"I just don't know what it could be," she says. "We've tried everything, right?"

You certainly don't have any ideas that she hasn't tried yet.
"Maybe it just needs more time...?" you tentatively suggest, but Celine shakes her head.

"I don't think that's it," she replies. "Even if it was just growing slowly, we would have seen some change in it by now. But it still looks the exact same as it did when it first sprouted."

She has a point, of course. You just sigh in defeat, staring at the strange, inscrutable plant before you.

"Perhaps... it needs to be somewhere else?" you guess, truly grasping at straws now. "A different environment. Or something."

Celine ponders the idea for a few seconds, looking out the window at the sunset.
"Well, it can't hurt to try," she says. "How about we bring it to your home? I'm worried about what the cold might do if we leave it anywhere outside."

You don't have any real reason to refuse her suggestion, but...
"I mean, that's fine, but, um... my place probably won't be much help at all," you say hesitantly. "You'll see what I mean."

You lead the way back to your place. Meanwhile, Celine carries the plant, carefully shielding it from the dusk breeze as best she can on the way over.

As you open the door, you can practically feel her eyes widen behind you.

"What...?" she says, looking around in confusion.

"Yeah, that's about what I expected," you mutter, as the two of you enter your residence.

Your house, such as it is, is pretty sparse when it comes to comforts... to say the least. You have the fireplace set into the back wall, empty of everything, even ashes; your bed and nightstand, crammed together into the far corner of the room; a table with chairs for two, jammed up against the front window, next to the door; and no other furniture to be found.

This is because the rest of the space is taken up by crates: dozens of them, in varying sizes, all uniformly made of wood with the same basic design throughout. It's not even a pretty design, at that—nothing more than planks you've nailed together into sturdy, rigid wooden cubes. Even the most basic chest would look elegant next to these things... but they're practical and, more importantly for you, efficient in both space and manufacturing time.

At least you had the foresight to put up wallpaper early on: the walls are a uniform, inoffensive white-ish beige color, not unlike a hospital room. That's more than you can say for the floor, still made of the same worn planks that were there when you first moved in.

Even you can't call this a farmhouse. Really, it's a warehouse that just happens to contain your bed.

The one thing you can say is that although the space is cluttered, it isn't messy: everything is quite clean—aside from some dust beginning to collect on a few of the crates here and there—and very meticulously organized. Every crate has a defined purpose, and each bears a clearly-visible label to that effect written in your crisp, neat handwriting. There are no loose items to be found either on the floor or atop the boxes, nor are there any stains on the walls or floor. Even the crates themselves are lined up into neat rows, albeit ones that are so densely packed that it's difficult to move between them.

Celine sets the precious plant down in the center of the table next to the door, and the two of you sit down. It's a tight squeeze, with there being only just barely enough space between the crates to pull the chairs out so you can sit. Even then, it's impossible to lean back and relax without banging your head against one box or another.

After a second of dead silence, you look up from the table, meeting Celine's stare of mute disbelief.
"Yes, before you ask: I actually do live here," you say tiredly, pointing with a thumb at the old, threadbare bed in the corner behind you.

"Why?" she asks. "Why is your house so... so...?"

You sigh, cutting off the question she's clearly having trouble articulating.
"What, do I look like an interior designer to you? I don't even know what else I'd want in here, to begin with."

And then you shrug helplessly.
"And, well... it's not like I have the time or energy to decorate, either, so the point's moot."

That answers absolutely none of her questions, apparently.
"But this place is so soulless!" she cries. "How can you live like this?"

The only answer you can give is another shrug.
"I mean, the only thing I do here is sleep, and sometimes eat, so it's not like I spend much time in here anyways."

"But... don't you ever invite people over?" she frowns.

You shake your head.
"Everyone who comes around to visit stays outside, so all I need to do is draw the blinds so they can't peek in."

"And, well," you add, "the exterior is as nice and rustic as ever, which is all everyone really cares about in the first place."

Celine looks disturbed at that—incredibly disturbed—but doesn't say anything for a good few seconds.
"...how long?" she asks eventually. "How long has it been like this? It can't have been this way when you moved in."

"The crates, at least, I've been building up over the past season and a half, or so. I forgot when I put in the wallpaper. Everything else came with the house."

"So you've been living this way for weeks?" Celine asks, "Without anyone noticing?"

"I mean, if you want to put it like that, yeah," you frown. "Are you going somewhere with this?"

"Ah, no, but... okay, one last question," she sighs. "Do you want this?"

You just close your eyes, and chuckle quietly to yourself.
"No, of course not. But I'm used to it anyways, so it's fine."

She departs eventually, leaving you painfully alone in your empty shell of a home.

Late the next morning, as you're finishing up with the plants for the day, you catch sight of Celine coming up the path to your farm, along with...

"Adeline?" you ask, eyebrow raised as you look between the two girls. "What are you two doing here?"

Adeline just shoots Celine an uncertain glance, playing with something—a pen, it seems—in her off-hand.
"Um, yeah, actually!" she says. "What are we doing here, Celine?"

The gardener grins sunnily as she holds up a large basket with both hands.
"I wanted to go on a picnic with the two of you!" she says. "At the summit! I wanted to bring Reina along too, but the Inn was pretty busy when I visited this morning, so she really couldn't make it. But she still prepared this for the three of us!"

Wait, what?

You look nervously off to the side, as you try to figure out how to work your way out of this situation.
"Ahh... okay, this is a bit awkward, because I'm actually kinda busy too," you try to explain. It's not even a lie. "See, I need to go down to the mines today, and, uh..."

Adeline is also stammering, apparently caught off-guard much like you. She's also pulled out a clipboard at some point, which she now holds in front of herself with both hands, as if trying to hide herself from Celine.

"Y-Yeah!" the pinkette exclaims, latching onto your rushed excuses. "I also have a lot of reports to work on! I need to go and triple-check our stockpile ledgers, and—"

"I said," Celine sharply interrupts. "We're going on a picnic at the summit. You two are coming, right?"

That serene smile is still on her face, but you suddenly notice a dangerous edge to her tone and an unflinching strictness in her posture. And, um, you're afraid she might break the basket handle if she grips it any harder.

You and Adeline glance at each other in mutual terror.
"A-Actually, that sounds fantastic, Celine!" Adeline says eventually. "I'm sure the stockpiles can wait a bit..."

"Great!" Celine replies, before turning to you, her eyes boring sharply into your own. "And you?"

"Errr, yeah, same here!" you quickly surrender. "I'd love to go with you!"

"Perfect. Come on, then!"

Celine marches the two of you up the mountain paths, keeping a watchful eye as she follows along from behind.

At one point you spy, out of the corner of your eye, Adeline turning her clipboard over and over in her hands, clinging to it like a wrecked sailor to driftwood.

And then you blink—and when you open your eyes again, Celine is already there beside her, quietly tucking the clipboard away into her basket, with that bright smile still carved onto her face.

Adeline looks a bit stricken at first, but eventually sighs. All throughout the rest of the walk up, you catch her sneaking glances at the basket and the clipboard within, every now and again.

Eventually, the three of you reach the summit. Celine begins setting out the picnic blanket and food on her own, before you or Adeline have the opportunity to get an offer to help in edgewise.

In the meantime, you and Adeline walk closer to the edge of the summit. The view is breathtaking: the rocky cliffs below rapidly give way to the vast forest that surrounds Mistria, as usual—but with the arrival of autumn, that forest is now nothing less than a sea of gold and scarlet that stretches as far as your eyes can see. The colors ripple and shift here and there, as distant winds blow through the trees, while sporadic white clouds break up the endless blue above the horizon.

"I'd almost forgotten how beautiful the view from here can be during the fall," Adeline whispers, awestruck.

You briefly break from the sight to glance back at Celine, who has almost finished setting everything up—and who is also, you notice, pointedly not looking at the edges of the cliffs.

"Are you okay up here, Celine?" you ask, walking back to her, with Adeline also following shortly after. "If you're not comfortable up here, we can always go somewhere else—"

"No, don't worry about me!" Celine cuts you off. "I'll be fine. And besides, I've already set everything up here, so we might as well eat!"

And on that note, the three of you do so, sitting down and promptly digging in. The food is, of course, delicious—Reina's cooking never disappoints, after all—with the main dish being seasoned rice and sliced fish. You're not quite sure what kind of fish at first, but Celine answers that question soon enough.

"It's tuna," she explains. "And then there's the rice and cucumber, of course, along with some sesame for seasoning. Terithia caught the fish this morning, actually!"

Celine then turns to you.
"But now that I think about it, I'm pretty sure the rest of the ingredients came from you, actually."

Adeline laughs.
"I guess that means we have you to thank in part for the meal!"

That's news to you, honestly—through it makes sense on a logical level, at least. You hadn't really considered it before, but of course there has to be someone buying all of the stuff you chuck into your shipping bin, right? Still, it's hard to reconcile the mental image of the crops sitting in your bin with the delicious meal currently in your stomach.

"It sounds to me like you should be thanking Reina and Terithia instead," you say. "And, I mean, I'm pretty sure Reina can make literally anything taste wonderful, anyways."

"No, Adeline's right," Celine says back to you, frowning. "Your produce is always top-notch, you know."

...perhaps you should just take the compliment as given this time, rather than try to litigate the point further.
"Um... thank you," you respond. It's nice to be appreciated, at least.

And then you move on to dessert: pumpkin pie, apparently also made primarily from ingredients sourced from your farm.

The pie is, to put it simply, fucking sublime. You really don't have any better terms to describe how the flavors come together in just the right way, how the heavenly aroma hits your nose, the richness of the textures, everything; you're certainly no food critic, nor are you a chef, but you're pretty sure this is perfection.

Once more, you're genuinely unsure how all of those raw ingredients you've shipped off over the past half-year could possibly come together to make something this wonderful—though, funnily enough, you're not inclined to argue with the results this time, all of a sudden.

Adeline, meanwhile, is practically glowing as she savors every bite of her slice of pie—or rather, her third slice of pie, if you're counting her stack of plates correctly.

"Ahhhh, I'm in heaven...!" she squeals. "This is exactly what I needed!"

You just have a good-natured chuckle at her enthusiasm. Between the three of you, the pie is gone before you even know it, leaving the basket empty save for your discarded plates and utensils.

Afterwards, the three of you just... talk.

Admittedly, at the start, it's mostly just Celine and Adeline doing the talking, while you're content with just being there and listening quietly. But to your surprise, the winding conversation eventually ends up on your stargazing sessions with Celine, and from there turns to you, specifically.

"Now that I think about it, you really are from a whole different world, aren't you?" Adeline says. "It's easy to forget sometimes, considering everything you've done since you arrived here."

You're not quite sure what to say to that, but fortunately Adeline doesn't seem to be looking for a response. Instead, she tilts her head, apparently lost in thought.

"I wonder, what kind of paperwork do you have up there, where you're from?" she muses.

...you really should have expected this. The question still baffles you, nonetheless.
Celine, meanwhile, just giggles.

"Paperwork," you repeat, just to double check. "Out of everything you could ask about... you're really asking about paperwork."

"Of course!" Adeline confirms eagerly. "It's not every day I get to hear about foreign bureaucracy, after all!"

Well, if she's asking... there was plenty of bureaucracy to go around, up there.
There was everything you needed to fill out to get and renew your pilot's license, for starters. Contracts and forms for purchasing and installing all of your ship's equipment. Maintenance logs. Flight logs. Stellar survey and planetary scan reports. Ship insurance. And, of course, who could forget the most thrilling part of buying a new ship at a starport: registering it with the local Department of Space Vehicles and with the Pilots' Federation—with entirely separate forms and filing processes for each, of course.

It was even worse back when you used to do cargo hauling and commodities trading around the Core Systems, as a rookie pilot. You had to deal with customs, invoices, waybills, customs, cargo manifests, flight plans, customs, proofs of delivery, sales and import agreements, customs...

And to top it all off, practically every star system and government had its own sets of forms for everything, different ways to submit documents, different rules and regulations, the whole nine yards—and that was before you considered how political power in some systems could change hands entirely at the drop of a hat. More than once, you'd arrived at a starport, only to suddenly find that all of your forms were invalid, because the government you'd filled them out for no longer officially existed. The one saving grace is that everything you hauled at least stayed legal during these regime changes—which is more than you can say for some pilots you've heard.

You're both completely confused and utterly unsurprised to find Adeline almost salivating at the thought of all that paperwork. Seriously, you can practically see the sparkles in her eyes as you rattle off everything you had to file, fill, document, declare, itemize, affirm, report, sign, and submit during your time up there.

"Are you... fantasizing about submitting customs declarations?" you ask Adeline at one point, flabbergasted.

"Yes!" she all but sings, causing Celine to break out into a fit of yet more giggles.

You end up talking far more than you'd expected, and to your surprise, it doesn't hurt at all.
Instead, it's funny, comfortable, relaxing, and everything you've ever wanted.

At some point, though, Adeline suddenly yawns, stretching in the crisp autumn air.
"Oh, it's nothing," she says sheepishly when she catches your glance. "I think I'm just... a bit more tired than I thought, that's all."

You flash her a sympathetic smile; you know the feeling. Frankly, you're also starting to wish that Celine had packed along some coffee in that basket of hers, after that meal you just ate.

Adeline takes a deep breath as she tries to fight off another yawn.
"I-I'll be fine..." she insists, though you can clearly see that her smile is a bit strained from fatigue, and that her eyelids are drooping.

She starts to lean on Celine, too tired to keep herself upright.
"Honestly, Adeline," the gardener chides. "You really need to take better care of yourself."

"I know," Adeline mumbles. "I... know..."

And then she falls asleep soundly, on Celine's shoulder.

Celine herself just sighs, gently shifting her friend to a position that's more comfortable for both of them.
"Oh, Adeline..." she says quietly. "She really worries me, sometimes."

And then she glances sharply at you.
"And so do you, you know. Actually, you worry me even more than Adeline does!"

You look away guiltily, knowing that simple apologies aren't going to cut it, here.

"I'm glad you're doing so much for everyone," Celine continues, "but none of us want you to hurt yourself doing it."

"I know," you mutter. "I know, but..."

"But...?" Celine echoes.

"...but if I don't, then where will I go?" you ask, the words slipping through your lips like a confession.

Celine sighs, looking at you sadly.
"You don't have to go this far just to make everyone like you," she says. "We're not going to kick you out just because you don't put 120% into everything, you know."

No, you have it backwards, you want to say. I'm doing all of this because I want to focus on being here with you all!

But the more you turn the words over in your head, the less sense they make: you're working yourself down to the ragged edge of exhaustion... because if you don't, you're afraid you'll want to fly away instead?

That doesn't even sound like a real problem to you; that's just stupidity.

The silence drags on as you continue to think, and Celine starts to look more and more worried as the seconds pass.
"...you do know that, right?" she asks eventually, seemingly on the verge of tears. "We don't just like you because of everything you do for us—we like you because you're you."

Unfortunately, you don't know how to make your actual problem make sense, and you're out of time—so you panic and lie, by saying you have another problem that does make sense, instead.

"I know that on some level, but... well, I guess I just have trouble remembering it," you say to Celine.

You look away to where, past the edge of the summit, the red and yellow and orange hues of autumn stretch beyond the horizon.
"I just... don't want to be alone again."

You're pretty sure that's not a lie, at least.
Right?

Chapter Text

One Friday night shortly after that sees you at the Inn, drinking more than normal. For you, it's a bit of an experiment: an experiment to see if alcohol is what you need to shut up the voice within your soul that screams for you to return to space, and the part that stings from loneliness.

Fortunately, it doesn't work. Alcoholism just isn't in the cards for you, it seems.

Still, as the night draws on, you find yourself just... sitting there, drinking in silence as you watch everyone else making merry, already in their pre-established orbits. This isn't the first time you've done this: like everyone else in town, you wind up at the Inn every Friday, though all you really do during these gatherings is just people-watch, and maybe join in on a conversation or two at the bar here and there.

It's rather depressing now that you think about it, especially considering you've been here for over half a year now. But... well, you're used to this sort of thing, right? It was as familiar in your old life as it is in your new life—you should be more than used to the isolation by now.

Hell, isn't that what you want? To fly among the stars, free and unbound?

That doesn't make the loneliness hurt any less, though.

These thoughts and more, tangled and confused, bounce around in your head as you stare down into your drink. You almost wish you had someone who could help make sense of this for you.

The problem is, even when you do talk to others, it's just not a topic that ever comes up for you, and certainly not one you'd bring up unprompted.
Because... why would you do that?

The other day, on the summit with Celine, was a rare exception... but even then, you missed your chance.

This is, of course, exactly when Hemlock decides to bring the topic up unprompted for you, instead.

"Tesserae for your thoughts?" the bartender asks, leaning against the counter somewhat. "You seem a bit out of sorts, tonight."

Your anxieties drive you to try to play things cool, and to not let your thoughts show on your face—you don't want to worry anyone, after all—but the alcohol must have made you a bit more honest than you'd like.

"...just feeling a bit out of place here," you admit with a sigh, before you can really think about it. "And a bit homesick, I guess."

"Homesick?" Hemlock queries. "How so?"

It takes you a bit to compose your thoughts. There's a lot you miss, of course, but it's hard to explain everything succinctly—not least because of those parts of it that you still haven't managed to make sense of yet.

"Well... I saw and did so much up there, among the stars," you mumble eventually. Your words are masked by the noise from everyone else in the room, so that Hemlock is the only one to hear you speak.

"And although I know I'm helping people down here... I just miss the adventures sometimes, I guess," you confess. "Everything down here just feels so... static, in comparison."

Admittedly, you're downplaying your troubles somewhat; still, you say that last part especially quietly, afraid to let anyone else overhear.

Really, it's not as if you dislike this place or anything—you really do want to be here, you're certain of that much—but that doesn't mean that it isn't repetitive or boring at times. You're deliberately omitting the part where you feel like you want to fly away, but you're pretty sure the implication is there tacitly.

You're a bit anxious about whether Hemlock has taken your words to be some kind of slight against the town or something, but no, he just smiles.

"You know, you sound a lot like Terithia, when she first came ashore here," he remarks. "She looked just about as lost back then, as you do right now. And every day, she would walk down to the beach, and just stare out at the ocean. I don't suppose you do something similar?"

"...yeah," you admit, a bit surprised that he was able to guess. "I used to stargaze pretty much every night. Still do, sometimes."

"I knew it," Hemlock replies. "Caught up in memories?"

"...yes," you mumble.

...

"...do you know how Terithia dealt with it?" you venture to ask, after a moment.

"Who ever said she did?" the bartender says. "She simply moved down to the beach, so the sea's always close at hand for her."

"And, well, she has those stories she loves to tell," he adds afterwards.

And then he just looks at you for a moment, considering. You think he might be glancing around the room, looking for someone, but you're not quite sure whom.

"You know, I'm sure you've got some stories of your own," he says. "Why don't you tell some of them? Maybe it'll help you feel better."

Storytelling, huh? You can definitely do that.

It certainly beats talking about your thoughts, that's for sure.

It takes you a bit of time to come up with a topic, but as you stare into your glass, something floats to the top of your mind. Memories of other bars, other pilots staring into their drinks, mumbling about what they've seen out there. You latch onto those memories, doing your best to weave them together into something concrete.

You end up talking—or perhaps rambling would be the better term—about that mysterious dimension that ships like yours use to traverse the vast distances between stars: namely, hyperspace.

...or rather, Witchspace, as you've heard all those other pilots call it.

You're not normally one to repeat superstition or hearsay, but something about the topic, and the alcohol, has you loosening your tongue quite a bit.

Now, of course, there's no debating the fact that hyperspace, in general, is poorly-understood: even the brightest minds of 3311 have yet to understand much about the higher dimensions beyond their utility in flinging ships from star to star.

And it's no secret that the early days of hyperspace travel were fraught with danger and unexplained disappearances: records from that time list hundreds of ships that went into hyperspace and either emerged as scrap, emerged empty, or simply never emerged at all, for unknown reasons.

And, of course, as a starship pilot yourself, you know damn well the dangers of jumping with a faulty nav computer; misjumps can and often do lead to ships exiting hyperspace directly into planets, stars, or other ships—assuming you even arrive at your intended destination at all, instead of getting stranded in deep space, light-years away from the nearest star.

...However, you've also heard other, stranger stories about what happens to ships that misjump, like a particularly oft-whispered story about a prototype ship that came out of hyperspace with its pilot having been turned inside-out. And the rumors only get weirder and more fantastic the further back you go, with decades of repetition, elaboration, and superstition turning what began as mere hearsay into the stuff of myth—the myth of Witchspace, the void beyond the stars that all spacers must brave.

You start out talking with Hemlock about all of this, recounting what you know of these myriad rumors. At first it's nothing more than just light chatter, but soon it starts to take on a strange weight for you. The words you speak emerge from somewhere deep within your soul, the tales rising from you like the tide.

You tell the bartender about how some pilots believe Witchspace to be haunted, home to the ghosts of ship captains and crews who went into the abyss and never came out again. The stories and rumors have been around for over a century, you explain, and they're different from pilot to pilot: some speak of unnatural lights that follow them, others say they've seen sensor readings that they can't explain, and still more swear up and down that they've heard voices within the hyperspace tunnels. You even remember one particular captain claim that her ship hit something solid, dashing against some kind of creature in that mysterious space—though naturally, she had nothing but a faint, vague dent in her hull to prove that it ever happened.

You find yourself retelling some of these stories, peppered lightly with some of your own (re-)interpretation, and with the gaps in your memory (or in others' memories) filled in with your best educated guesses. Soon, you get into a groove of sorts, spellbound by the recollections and memories flowing from your lips.

It's not long before you start to gather an audience around you, too, drawn in by the fervor with which you speak. The first ones you notice are the kids—Dell, Maple, and Luc—listening to your ghost stories with wide eyes. Shortly after that, you see that Eiland, ever the curious historian and scholar, is not just listening but also writing, recording your story in a journal that he's produced from... somewhere. You think you see Balor, too, just kind of leaning back and relaxing, as if this were the hundredth time he's sat in a bar and listened to someone tell drunken stories (which, to be fair, it well could have been).

And Terithia? Terithia is grinning from ear-to-ear as she listens to you tell your tales, with a gleaming look of nostalgia in her eyes.

As you really get into the thick of things, you start to detail some of the things you've seen in Witchspace yourself, during all those sleepless nights spent wandering the stars: structures and lights, half-glimpsed along the dust (...or at least, you think it's dust) that permeates that mysterious space; strange tones and moans, heard through the creaking of your ship's metal frame as it jumps; figures that flashed briefly on your instrument panels, appearing and disappearing in the blink of an eye.

The scientific part of you knows these reports almost certainly have no basis in fact: perhaps the pilots you speak of were drunk, or sleep deprived, or just flat-out hallucinating. And maybe you, too, were just seeing things on those sleepless nights, after spending too long on the job. It's the nature of the mind, you know, to seek patterns in randomness, to find significance where it doesn't truly exist.

But as much as the rational part of you wants to deny it, there's a part of you that wonders what else is out there in the abyss—if there are beings that might call that higher dimension home: the alien Thargoids, maybe, or perhaps something even more eldritch.

And, well, you still find yourself drawn to the rumors and the whispers regardless of what reason might say; they're a part of the spacer life, after all, a tradition that's stuck fast across a century.

Honestly... it feels right to do this: to tell of what you've seen and heard, to speak of who you are and these things that shaped you. And as much as it makes you long for home, recounting your experiences like this is soothing, in its own way.

Maybe that's why you've been doing it so much, ever since you got here.

Still, your stories end eventually, as you run out of things to say and memories to recall about Witchspace.

Of course, that's when Terithia, inspired by you, steps in with tales of her own, stories of a life spent at sea. You're struck by just how closely her stories hew to your own: much like you, she tells stories of adventure and discovery, of long voyages spent with little more than the elements and the lonely abyss for company. The superstitions and rumors, too, fascinate you: she talks about spirits glimpsed in billowing storm clouds and whispers heard in the trade winds, and regales you all with tales of mysterious creatures relayed from others she'd met during her time among the waves.

Almost immediately, you find yourself swept up in and enraptured by her sea-stories. After all, it's in the nature of a sailor to gravitate towards tales and legends, whether they sail the seas or the stars.

She caps things off by recounting how she and her crew fought off a giant squid in the midst of a tempest, on a distant sea.

"'Twas bigger than the ship by half and then some!" she says, with her arms stretched out wide, as if she were trying to frame the leviathan's visage with her hands.

"Aye, and I swear, it was conspirin' with the storm itself! It knew we were comin', and it brought on a gale that pushed us right into a perfect ambush—trappin' us between it and the sharpest, meanest rocks I'd ever seen.

"So there we were, practically on the edge of the world, with nothin' but the ship, the rocks, and the beast. And that thing from the deep—it was hideous beyond words, with eyes that pierced through the dark like witchfire, and a giant gapin' maw full of razor sharp teeth!

"'Twas a sight I'll never forget for the rest of my life—and it scared the crew witless." she says in a low tone, pausing to let her words sink in. "Every sailor on that deck was sure we'd meet our doom that day, me included."

"But!" she says suddenly and sharply. "I figured we might as well go down swinging, rather than just let ourselves sail right into its jaws."

"So what did I do? I took hold of the helm and yelled, loud as I could, for the crew to man the lines!" she booms.

"Cause, if there's one thing I've learned out there on the waves," she says, "it's that when the storms and gales come a-callin', an order—any order, doesn't matter what—is better than nothing. See, all it takes is for one person to start moving, to get everyone else to start following, aye?

"So I led the charge! And sure enough, everyone started scurrying—to the lines, to the sails, to the cannons, grabbin' harpoons and spears and everything we could, to fight off the raging monster.

"And it turns out that something as big as that squid, is also slow. And no matter how mean a squid might be, it can't hurt you if it can't hit you. So I sailed like I'd never sailed before, twistin' the wheel this way and that, threadin' the needle between the beast's tentacles. We dashed in and out, coming up alongside to strike, before slippin' away as it tried to smash us to splinters.

"And it worked!" Terithia exclaims. "The monster nearly capsized us a dozen times over, but the ship, she held fast."

"And by the time the skies broke clear and the sun shined again, it was us who kept sailin', as the beast slipped beneath the waves," she says finally.

As you're snapped out of the reverie of the story, you get a good look at Terithia. She's grinning proudly as she recaps her victory, of course, with confidence that almost borders on arrogance. But there's something else there, too, that you can sense just below the surface—a hint of wistfulness.

And suddenly, you realize that she's not quite looking at her audience, or at anyone in the room for that matter. Rather, she seems to be looking past everyone, her eyes tilted up just slightly, gazing at a point just over everyone's heads.

Somehow, you're certain that her eyes are fixed on the horizon, standing watch on deck once again as her mind sails for faraway shores.

Is that what you look like, whenever you look up to the stars?

All at once, you feel a lot less alone.
It's as if you've released a breath you didn't know you were holding; the tension leaves your muscles as you lean back a bit, just so, laughing a bit as you watch the awestruck Dragonguard excitedly ask Terithia all sorts of questions about her story and about the sea.

And then afterwards Balor, of all people, pipes up with a story from his own mysterious past—one about a trade deal gone hilariously wrong, from what you can gather—and you wind up pulling your seat just a bit closer to everyone else so you can better listen in, taking in the sounds and sights all around you.

Out of the corner of your eye, you think you can see Hemlock chuckling, smiling to himself in satisfaction.

As the night ends, you wind up stumbling back to your farm alongside—who else?—Celine, the two of you leaning on each other as you walk down the path that leads to both of your places.

You're chattering about one of Terithia's sea-stories or another as you walk, rambling about they remind you of the things you've seen out in space, when the blonde beside you giggles.

"You know, I think this is the happiest I've seen you in a while. I'm glad you had fun tonight," Celine says. "You always looked so lost, before."

"...was it really that obvious?" you mutter. "And here I thought I was hiding it."

"Ahh... well, you weren't really talking to anyone. You can't hide that," she says. "But I never really knew what to say to you. You're easy to talk to, sure, but it's also like no one really knows how to get through to you, a lot of the time."

"Well, I'm sorry for being so mysterious," you mumble. You have half a mind to make a joke at Balor's expense, but Celine interrupts you before you can say it.

"The worst part is that you're not even trying to be mysterious," she grumbles. "You're just always busy, and even now after half a year, it still feels like nobody truly knows you."

And then she turns to give you a stern look.
"Do you remember what I said a few days ago? We like you because you're you. We want to know more about you!"

You huff in frustration.
"Yeah, except I don't even know how to make sense of myself!" you snap.

Celine looks at you in alarm, eyes wide, and you immediately regret letting your frustration get the better of you.
"Sorry, sorry," you backpedal miserably. "I'm just... a bit overwhelmed right now, I guess."

"That was obvious," Celine says quietly. "But... you know you can talk to me, right? About anything."

You sigh, suddenly feeling quite exhausted.
"I know, I know... I just don't know how to describe it, really. How am I supposed to talk about something that I can't put into words?"

You're still trying to puzzle all of this together, spinning your wheels as you try to put a voice to your thoughts, when suddenly you feel a squeezing around your midsection, the scent of floral perfume, an unexpected but comforting warmth—

—Celine is hugging you, you realize. Rather tightly, too, with her head resting against your neck and shoulder.

You freeze up a bit at first—physical contact, in general, is unfamiliar to you—but eventually you wrap your arms around her in return, reciprocating her embrace. Only then do you start to unfreeze, taking a deep breath as you melt into her arms.

"Even if you don't know what to say right now," she whispers, "when you figure it out, I'll be here to listen. I promise."

Celine... you have no idea what you did to deserve someone like her. Whatever it was, it couldn't have been enough.

The two of you linger there together, linked in an embrace, until the swirling tempest in your mind calms and leaves behind tranquil seas.

Chapter Text

Two days later, your restless feet carry you out to the beach.

It's incredibly early in the morning, far earlier than you'd normally wake up—so early, in fact, that the sun hasn't even risen yet. Still, you can see its light approaching on the horizon, a band of pink where the water meets the deep blue twilight sky. The sea seems calm, though not quite smooth; you can make out the outlines of rippling waves all along the water.

A brisk breeze from out over the water tugs at you, carrying with it the scent of salt and what you think is seaweed.

"The sea's beautiful, ain't she?"

You don't need to turn to see who's approaching. After all, there's only one other person in town who would be out on the shore, this early in the morning.

You hear the quiet sounds of footsteps on the sand, as Terithia comes up and stands alongside you, the two of you staring out at the horizon together. She cuts a sharp figure in the morning light, relaxed yet confident, smiling with her hands on her hips as she takes in the sea breeze and ocean swell.

"The winds'll be fair today, I can feel it," she declares. "Couldn't have picked a more perfect day to set to sea."

"Going fishing?" you ask. Glancing further down the shoreline to your right, you can see a sailboat moored at the pier.

To your surprise, she shakes her head.
"Not quite," she says.

"Last Friday night brought back good memories!" she laughs, wistful and carefree. "Good memories, indeed. But now the ol' rowboat just isn't gonna cut it, methinks. I need to feel the spray on my face and a proper deck 'neath my feet again."

"So, I'm thinkin' I might plot a course this time for further shores," she explains. "Spend three, maybe four days sailing to a foreign port city I've been meanin' to visit. Then maybe stay a day or two there, before turnin' back for home."

"...'course, there's no reason why I can't spend some time out there fishin', too!" she adds with a chuckle.

"Huh. So you'll be gone for... a week or two?" you ask, tallying up the days in your head. "Just like that?"

"Aye," she nods. "Spent yesterday runnin' all over creation, squaring everything away. But it'll be worth it once I'm out to sea again."

"I'm sure you know the feeling," she says, giving you a knowing look.

She's right, of course. You turn your eyes upwards, slightly, to where you can just barely see the stars, now fading with the growing dawn light.

"...very much so," you admit. "But, well... I live here now, and I need to stay here."

Terithia falls silent for a moment, thinking.

"Tell me," she says eventually. "Who are you? What do you do?"

Your reply is quick, but uncertain.
"Er... I'm a farmer?"

The fisherwoman just raises an eyebrow at you.
"Really?" she asks. "Aye, 'cause it sounds to me like you have a sailor's heart. Or were those tales back at the Inn just bilgewater?"

"No, of course not," you say, shaking your head vehemently. "But that's not me anymore, right? This is my home, now. I need to move on."

Terithia simply... laughs, in response.
"Hah!" she says. "If only 'twere that simple!"

"I've seen it happen more times than I can count," she continues. "You see them in every port and on every shore: lost souls, staying on land but always lookin' out to sea."

"Like the two of us, right now," she muses. "Starin' out at the horizon."

She shakes her head again.
"No, the ocean won't ever leave sailors like us. It's a part of you, just as much as those plants you grow now. And it's only gonna hurt more, the longer you leave it."

That's... you have to admit, she's right. Maybe you are an explorer as much as you are a farmer—you belong here, just as much as you belong out there. Honestly, it seems almost obvious to you, when you say it like that. It feels right.

And ignoring it has hurt. Unbearably so.

"Right," you nod simply.

You take a deep breath. The scent of the sea—salt and seaweed and so much more—fills your nostrils. Out there in the distance, you can see the sun starting to peek out over the horizon, soft golden radiance beginning to fill the skies.

Part of the puzzle clicks into place.

As you return to your farm, you see Celine carrying around a familiar pot of soil—the plant you two have been working on. She looks a bit lost, wandering around at random while glancing down worriedly at the sprout in her hands, every now and then.

"Celine?" you call out to her as you approach. "What are you doing here?"

She perks up at the sound of your voice.
"Oh!" she says. "I was wondering where you were."

You just point behind you with a thumb, at the other path leading away from your farm.
"I walked down to the beach for a bit to clear my head. Is something wrong?"

There's a brief flash of concern in her eyes, when you say you needed to clear your head. But you smile reassuringly, which seems to put her at ease, for now.

"Ah, well... I wanted to see if maybe this sprout specifically needed morning light to grow," Celine says instead. "but that didn't work."

A brief gust of wind blows by you both; you feel fine, but Celine noticeably shivers in the resulting chill. You throw your jacket over her shoulders without really thinking about it, causing her to blush and look to you in surprise.

"How long have you been out here?" you ask.

"Ah... s-since before the sun came up, at least," Celine replies, evidently somewhat flustered.

Now without your jacket, you start to realize it is, indeed, mid-autumn. Still, you're fine for now... probably.

"And you've been freezing this whole time?" you ask, with a raised eyebrow.

"I didn't think it'd be that cold!" she objects. "But... um, yes."

Another gust of wind blows by. It's startlingly chilly. You're still okay, though.

"Is the flower gonna be fine?" you ask worriedly, crouching down a bit to look closely at the tiny green plant.

Celine nods, smiling.
"I know we've been treating it pretty delicately," she says. "But I actually think it's surprisingly resilient. It's not growing, sure... but nothing we've done to it so far has harmed it, either—and we've tried a lot!"

"You've got a point," you say, with a smile of your own. "Still, I wonder what it's waiting for?"

There's another gust of wind.
The cold might be a problem, you have to admit. Just a bit.

"I'm sure we'll find out eventually," Celine says.

"But, um..." she then adds, "Are you sure you're not cold, yourself?"

"Don't worry, I'm fine," you say—only for yet another gust of wind to come along and make you shiver involuntarily.

Celine just gives you a Look, in response.

"...actually, can we go inside? I can put on a fire," you add hastily.

Celine has a bit of a giggle at your expense, but nonetheless nods.
"Yes, let's do that," she says happily.

She still keeps wearing your jacket though, even after you two head inside.

Your home is, unfortunately, still chock-full of crates.

Nonetheless, a few days after Celine's last visit, you made efforts to clear up more space around the table; it took a lot of shuffling, but it's at least possible now for the two of you to sit down without needing to squeeze between the table and chairs. On top of that, you two can even lean back and stretch a bit without bumping into boxes!

Admittedly, you now need to climb over some of the crates in order to get in and out of your bed, but that's the cost of progress.

That aside, the upshot of having so many damn boxes everywhere is that it's really easy to find what you need—in this case, firewood and matches. You have the fireplace going in no time, and its warmth begins to fill the room, even from its place in the back.

As you return to the table, you realize that a part of you genuinely would miss the crates if you were to get rid of them, oddly enough. Or at least, you'd miss having this level of organization at your fingertips, not to mention having everything in a nice central location for easy access. And, well, you actually really do like being able to put things into well-defined boxes, in and of itself...

Celine notices you staring at the self-inflicted box maze that is your house.

"So, you still haven't been able to get rid of the boxes?" she says, sighing.

Maybe you could keep a few crates? Maybe, say, half of them? Or even three-quarters?

Really, perhaps it's less a question of how to get rid of them, and more a question of just moving them. You definitely don't want them taking up all the space here, of course, but you're sure you could still find a use for them elsewhere.

Maybe you should look into getting an attic or a cellar, for storage? Or even just a shed... but, no, a mere shed might not be enough for all this...

"...maybe I could ask Ryis to build a warehouse?" you wonder aloud.

You turn back, and once more meet Celine's stare of mute disbelief.
"A-Are you seriously considering keeping all of these boxes?" she asks eventually. "I thought you said you didn't want them?"

You raise your hands defensively.
"I mean, I don't want them here, definitely—but I happen to like being organized, sue me," you say. "Where do you keep all your stuff?"

Celine just looks baffled.
"In cabinets and shelves...? Where else would I put my things?"

"Do you not have a box, or a chest, or anything like that?" you ask, equally confused. "Surely you have some."

"One," she says, holding up a single finger for emphasis. "I have one chest that I keep things in. Not a house full of them."

"Just the one?" you frown. "I don't understand how you're supposed to organize your stuff with just that and a couple of cabinets."

"And I don't understand why you would even need a bunch of crates like this to store everything," Celine counters.

"Are you two really arguing about boxes?" Dell asks. "This sounds kinda dumb to me."

You and Celine think on that for a moment.

"Ah... well, you have a point," Celine concedes. "This is quite silly..."

"Yeah, this actually is a pretty stupid debate and also wait when did you get here," you say as Dell's presence catches up to your brain.

Celine's younger sister beams.
"I just got here a minute ago!" she says. "I tried knocking, but I think you two were too busy talking to hear, so I let myself in!"

"Also, wow! You have a lot of crates in here!" she says afterwards, darting to and fro excitedly. "It's like a maze!"

You crack a smile at that.
You might be stuck with a weird little self-inflicted box maze—but it's your weird little self-inflicted box maze, at least.

"Oh yeah! Also!" Dell remembers suddenly, looking to Celine. "Dad baked a cherry cobbler! Mom says you have to come over, 'cause me and Dad can't eat it all ourselves."

"Though, we totally could," she adds, frowning. "I dunno what she's talking about."

You glance outside. It's quite light outside, now, with morning having well and truly come.

"I need to get to watering the plants, anyways," you say, before looking to the plant still on the table between you and Celine. "Do you need help carrying that back to your place, Celine?"

"Ah, no, I can bring it back on my own! You should go take care of your own plants—" Celine says, before Dell interrupts her.

"Actually!" she says, pointing to you. "Mom says you have to come over, too. She really insisted on it, for some reason."

You genuinely do need to get to watering at some point, but you suddenly get the feeling that you really shouldn't bail on Celine's family right now. For that matter, Dell's words give you a vaguely foreboding feeling in general, though you're not sure why.

"Well... I guess my plants can wait," you say hesitantly. "I can water them when I get back."

Celine, meanwhile, seems to be thinking about something, looking at the potted plant in her hands.
"Hmm... why don't we bring the sprout with us?" she says eventually. "Maybe it'll like the change of scenery."

You shrug.
"Couldn't hurt to try."

Fortunately for you, it's warmer outside now that the sun's been out for a while.

Dell is still as excitable as ever, rushing ahead in front, clearly eager to get at the promised cobbler; you and Celine, meanwhile, trail behind at a much less hurried pace, walking side by side.

Celine seems to be scrutinizing the plant with a frown on her face, as if looking for something.
"Is something wrong?" you ask.

The gardener shakes her head.
"No, I just thought I saw something..." she says, her words trailing off at the end as she continues to search for... whatever it is she's looking for.

Actually, now that you look again, you think the plant might be a tiny bit taller than before. It could just be a trick of the light, though—or you could just be misremembering how tall the plant was before.

Dell just watches you two curiously, stopping for a second as you catch up.
"Soooo..." she starts, looking to you specifically. "You and Celine are, like, best friends right? She talks about you alllll the time!"

You ponder that for a moment.
You're definitely very good friends—of that, there's no doubt—but beyond that? You have no idea where you stand with Celine, you realize. You two may have invited each other to the Shooting Star festival, weeks ago, but neither of you have really said or done anything concrete yet, right...?

For that matter, it's not like you two have really done anything romantic at all as of late, considering how you've kinda had your head stuck up your ass for the past few weeks, psychologically speaking.

You frown. You'll really have to make that up to Celine.

...well, admittedly, there was that time when she hugged you, two days ago. But that's different. Hugging an emotionally distressed friend is normal and platonic, right?

Though, um, you have to admit... you wouldn't mind hugging her again. Not at all.

You look up, and see that Celine herself is blushing furiously now. Much like you, actually.

"D-Dell!" she stammers.

"Huh?" Dell asks innocently, her head tilted in confusion. "Why are your faces getting all red like that?"

"...w-why don't you run ahead, and let Mom and Dad know we're on our way?" Celine says, in lieu of an answer.

Fortunately for both of you, Dell just goes with this, instead of asking anything further.
"Okaaaaaay!" she chirps, before running off ahead.

Celine just laughs awkwardly as Dell vanishes down the path.
"Ahaha..."

You stay close by Celine's side as you two continue walking to her family's house.

Celine's mom is the first to greet you as you two enter the house.
"Ah, you two made it! We were wondering when you'd arrive," Nora says with a smile.

She and Dell are already seated at the table. You join them, taking a seat as Celine's dad steps out of the kitchen.

"I hope you all are ready for the finest cherry cobbler currently in this kitchen!" Holt says, carrying a large baking dish for the table.

He sets down the cobbler at one end of the table. Celine, meanwhile, sets the potted plant down in the center, before taking a seat next to you.

"I hope you don't mind," she says to her parents. "The two of us thought we'd try a little experiment with the sprout."

"Not at all, Celine," Nora replies. "A good dessert needs a centerpiece for the table, after all. That's what I always say!"

Dell just looks unsure.
"...I don't think I've ever heard you say that, Mom," she says, frowning.

"Do you think your plant would like some cobbler?" Holt asks with a wink. "Just so it knows we're all rooting for it."

The pun almost hurts. But two can play at that game.
"Oh, Dad..." Celine just huffs, with a flat look on her face.

"I'm sure it won't mind," you say with a cheeky grin. "After all, it ought to know that we be-leaf in it."

Celine gives you a look of further exasperation.
"Not you too!"

Nora, meanwhile, is laughing.
"Come on, Celine!" Dell says, also giggling.

Celine sighs.
"Well, I..." she says, smiling. "...I suppose this can be my good seed for the day."

You're all in the middle of laughing, when the plant in front of you abruptly grows, shooting up by several inches and even unfurling a few new leaves over the course of a few seconds.

You blink a few times, wondering if you're hallucinating... but nope, it's still like that even after you rub your eyes, new leaves and all.
"D-Did anyone else just see that?" you ask, looking around bewildered.

And then, as you all watch, a little bud appears at the tip of the stem.

Celine looks positively giddy, leaning this way and that as she cranes her head to see the plant's new look from all angles.

"Oh my gosh, oh my gosh!" she cheers.

A moment later, she's on her feet, leaning in close, as if she can see the plant's secrets etched into its leaves. She's practically bouncing on the spot with excitement, her body thrumming with a newfound energy. Her smile is one that's practically blinding in its radiance—and one you could look at all day. You wish you could capture it in a photo.

"A plant that's grow-tivated by puns, huh?" Holt says, chuckling. "Maybe I missed my calling!"

"Ah, no, no, I don't think it was that..." Celine mutters, clearly somewhat lost in thought.

And then she suddenly turns to leave.
"I should get home to write all this down, before I forget!"

You catch her before she can go, though, gently taking her wrist as she nearly flies away.

"No time for cobbler?" Dell asks from across the table.

"Yeah, you're not going to forget that easily," you add. "I'm sure you can at least spare a few minutes, right?"

Celine considers this for a few seconds, but still looks quite uncertain.
"Ah, w-well..." she stammers.

"You know, normally you're the one telling me to slow down, and not work so hard," you remind her. "But it goes for you, too. The plant and your notes aren't going anywhere."

Celine finally relents with a sigh.
"Okay, you're right," she says with a sheepish grin. "I suppose I can stay for a slice or two."

The cobbler is predictably delicious; Holt really knows his stuff.

Still, Celine scarfs her portion down with surprising speed. There's a restless energy to her motions, too, and it's no surprise to you when she practically jumps up out of her seat, as soon as she's done.

"Alright!" she says, quickly yet carefully taking the potted plant into her arms. "I'm going to get to writing those notes now! Thanks for the cobbler, Dad!"

And then she's out the door before you can catch her again.

Her mom sighs as you all watch Celine go.
"That girl..." Nora says. "Sometimes, it's easy to remember how she was nearly as energetic as Dell, when she was a kid."

"Hey!" the younger sister in question pipes up. "What's that supposed to mean?"

It's a pretty funny mental image, honestly—a younger Celine, running around with the same energy as her sister.
"Really? I wouldn't have guessed," you smile. "At least, not at first."

Holt laughs heartily.
"Yep! She used to drag Reina and Adeline allllll over town, digging for seeds," he recalls.

You suddenly remember that one Thursday afternoon at the start of all this, where you'd found that special seed with her.

"Okay, that I can see," you say. "She got me to help with the same thing not long after I met her, earlier in the spring."

For a split second, you can see Nora share a glance with Holt, and then with Dell, before turning back to you.

"Actually," she says. "That's part of what we wanted to invite you over to talk about, today."

All of a sudden, you hear Dell excuse herself uncharacteristically quietly, leaving you alone with Celine's parents.

...oh, shit.
Your heart screeches to a halt as you realize what you've just walked into, body frozen like a deer in the headlights.

Nora's smile is still outwardly the same as before... but there's a familiar steely strength there, lying just beneath the surface, and a new, sudden edge to her tone.

So that's where Celine gets it from. It's absolutely terrifying.

"I see you already clearly know where this is going," her mom says. "So, let me ask you: what are your intentions with our daughter?"

...well, your desires are clear, at least: you're deeply in love with Celine, no question. You'd probably go off the deep end, without her to keep you anchored.

As for your intentions...

You'd like to go out with her, if she's interested—which you think she is, although there's always a small shred of uncertainty there which you can't get rid of. And, of course, assuming that you can just ask; you suddenly wonder if there's maybe a local tradition when it comes to this kind of thing, like something special you need to get to accompany your confession.

There's also your wanderlust to worry about, too. Terithia was right: you can't just ignore that part of yourself. You're not going to be able to stay on this planet all the time; at the very least, you'll want to go back up every now and again to explore, and to reconnect with your old life, even if just for a few days at a time before returning home. But is Celine going to be okay with that?

...no, now is not the time for doubts, you realize.
Deep down, you already know the path your heart is set upon.

You take a deep breath, and steel yourself as best you can.

"...I'm in love with Celine," you tell her parents, praying that your conviction gets through to them. "I don't think I could live without her in my life."

"So... um, I'd like to go out with her? If that's okay?" you ask, somehow managing to smile a bit in spite of your nervousness.

Nora and Holt share another look for a moment, apparently deliberating among themselves. The silence seems to stretch for an eternity, as you stew in your worries and anxieties.

You have no idea what you're going to do, if they deem you unfit.

Eventually, though, they both nod.
"Alright," Nora says finally. "You have our blessing to pursue Celine."

And then her smile gets even more terrifying, somehow. You can almost feel it radiating from her like an aura, commanding you to take heed.

"Though, I don't think we need to go over what will happen if you break Celine's heart," she says. "Do we?"

Oh, fuck. You shake your head frantically.
"N-No, ma'am!" you immediately reply.

And then that overwhelming presence is gone, as quickly as it came. You finally start breathing again, sweet oxygen filling your lungs as you relax just a bit.

"Good!" Nora says simply. "Of course, Reina and Adeline would probably kill you first, before I could even get my hands on you. Still, it's best to be clear, wouldn't you agree?"

You nod, gulping.
"Y-Yes, of course."

"Excellent. I wish you two the best of luck."

Chapter Text

By the time you leave Celine's family's house, it's late in the morning.

It suddenly dawns on you that you have no idea how you're going to do this.

Simply asking Celine out is nerve-wracking enough already, with a million what-ifs racing through your mind: what if you're just misinterpreting things, what if she thinks you're just a close friend, what if she's not into you, what if she doesn't want to be in a relationship right now, on and on and on.

Perhaps even more worrying, though, is the matter of what you're going to do about your wanderlust. You already have the vague idea of just leaving Mistria and flying out into space for a while, kind of like the voyage Terithia's embarking on now with her sailboat. A few days would probably be enough for you, you think.

You still can't shake the feeling of guilt and isolation, though, whenever you think about it. As much as you love the freedom, the quiet, and the solitude of space... you love everything you have down here, too. You want to be here, together with everyone you've come to know and love.

More than that, you're afraid of losing your place here, you realize.
The thought of you drifting away from here forever—of being alone in the endless night, yet again... it terrifies you.

Now that you've finally had a taste of what it's like to be part of a community, you can't bear the thought of losing it.

Most of all, though, you can't stand the thought of losing Celine—nor can you stand the thought of breaking her heart by drifting away.

But if she's here, and you fly away on a voyage... are you two going to be happy with that? Is there a way to make it work?

These thoughts plague you as you return to your farm.

You still don't have an answer in the afternoon, after you've finished watering your crops.

As you stand in front of your house, alone with nothing but your crops, your mind just keeps going in circles with questions, what-ifs, and guesses; you think and think, picking apart and questioning all of your conjectures, until you're left with nothing but a shifting mass of uncertainty. Even the things you previously thought were certain start to become shaky to you. You can almost physically feel your thoughts running over, like a pressure in your head threatening to blow.

And yet, in spite of all of this, you still don't have a clue as to how you're going to ask Celine out.

You need to consider that, too, and figure out a plan, or even just words to say so you don't make a fool of yourself. The last thing you want is to screw things up during a conversation as important as this, right?

You're way, way out of your depth here, you start to realize. Can you even do this?

Ah, but what's the point of trying to plan this out, if you don't even know what you're going to do afterwards? Even if she does agree to go out with you by some miracle, if you can't make things work afterwards, then that's going to be even worse than if you'd never asked her at all, right?

...you're not going to be able to do this, are you? Is there anything you can even do?

The world's spinning all of a sudden, now.
Sight and sound fall away, as you try to disentangle your thoughts, only to end up even deeper than before.

You mentally kick yourself; you were doing so well!
You were confident in your intentions earlier, so why is this happening?

Why are you only having second thoughts now, after everything you just said to Celine's parents? Were you lying to them? Or were you just overconfident and impulsive? You weren't even thinking at all back there, were you, running your mouth in the heat of the moment—damnit, you're such an idiot!

Distantly, you think you might just be standing in your fields, frozen as you stare blankly down into your hands, but you're not sure—you're not sure of anything, anymore.

No, no, no no no, this isn't going to work!

What are you even doing?
You need to—why is this happening here, why now—you need to—

—you need to breathe, damnit!
Stop and just—fuck, what's happening, it's too much—just breathe.
Just... take a deep breath...

...and another one, because you can still feel your mind spinning, thinking, thinking—

—no, stop, breathe...

...another breath, again...

...in, two, three, four...

...and again...

...again...

...

...

...

...how long have you been standing here? Your thoughts are all hazy—but the world starts to return.

You blink.

You're in front of your house, with your plants in front of you, and it's probably about noon, judging by the sunlight. It's quiet, with few sounds except the wind blowing through your crops. It's a bit chilly today, especially since it's getting towards the end of fall, but you have a jacket, so the breeze feels kind of nice.

You're acutely aware of your heartbeat still pounding away.

You're just... overthinking things. Overthinking things way, way too much.

You want to see Celine. You—you don't want to be alone, right now.

You'll just... go see what she's up to, and hopefully figure things out from there.

You freeze up for a few moments, when you reach Celine's doorstep.

You don't even know what you're doing here, do you? There's no way this is going to end well; you're going to trip over your thoughts, and then everything's going to be fucked. Maybe you should just take some time to figure things out first, and come back another day—

—no, stop, take another deep breath—

—you've already come this far, you're in too deep to back out now—

—and then you force yourself to just knock, before you can start overthinking again.

"Ah, coming!" Celine's voice calls out from inside.

You try to compose yourself as you wait and listen to her footsteps approach.
You can't look like a wreck now, not in front of Celine.

She opens the door, and you make yourself grin.
"Hey, Celine!" you say. "How are things going with the sprout?"

"They're going pretty well, I think," Celine says with a smile. "I was just about to go looking for you, actually. If you have the time, I'd appreciate your insight on what we should do next!"

"I'd be more than happy to help!" you reply. "I just finished up with my own plants, so I've got plenty of time."

Celine claps her hands together eagerly.
"Perfect! Come on in."

You find the flower in its pot, on the table in the back of Celine's house. The sprout looks the same as it did this morning: several inches tall, now, with more leaves and what you're pretty sure is a bud, at the tip of the stem.

Scattered around it, on the table, are several sheets of paper, filled with writing; Celine's been busy writing copious amounts of notes, you gather. Glancing at a few, you can see, among other things, what appears to be a thorough description of its appearance, a table full of measurements of various parts of the plant, and even a detailed drawing of its current appearance.

"As you can see, I've been taking a lot of notes," Celine says with a small laugh.

You laugh along with her; her enthusiasm is infectious, and it does a lot to put you at ease.
"Yeah, I can see that," you say. "I'm honestly not sure what more I could add."

"Ah, that's okay!" Celine replies. "Though... I still haven't figured out what caused it to grow, so suddenly. I was wondering if you had any ideas?"

It's a mystery to you, too. Still, you try to think it over.
"Maybe it was caused by a combination of factors...?" you venture, saying the first thing that comes to your mind.

Celine frowns.
"That's what I was thinking, and it makes the most sense... but that doesn't give us a lot to go off of," she says.

She's right, of course: 'a combination of factors' is a maddeningly vague explanation. Surely there has to be a simpler and more testable answer, right?

Still, nothing comes to mind that you and Celine haven't already tried before.
"I dunno, maybe it actually does grow on puns?" you say, half-jokingly. "Or maybe we need to get your dad to bake another cobbler."

Celine tilts her head at that... but doesn't immediately disagree.
"Hmm... I wonder," she says, looking at the plant thoughtfully.

She doesn't elaborate, though. She just stares at the plant in silence, apparently lost in thought.

...

"Um, Celine?" you say quietly after a few seconds. "What are you thinking?"

"I'm just... thinking back to the previous times it's grown," Celine says, absently.

"But the only thing in common that I can think of is... well, you," she adds, looking to you. "You've been there every single time."

You have to admit, that's true. But there's obvious holes in that theory.
"Well, maybe, but... I've been around it plenty of times before without it growing, right? I'm here right now, even."

"And besides, we could just as easily say that you're a common factor, too," you point out.

"But I'm around it every day," Celine counters. "If that's all it takes, then it would be fully grown by now, wouldn't it?"

"True, true," you concede. "...maybe it just likes your family's house? Maybe there's something special there that we haven't noticed yet."

Celine shakes her head.
"No, that can't be it, because I'm pretty sure it grew earlier this morning, too, while we were at your home."

Thinking back, you vaguely remember noticing that while you were walking together to her family's place. You'd figured you were just seeing things—but if she saw it too, then...

"...okay, I think I noticed that, too," you say hesitantly. "But that just makes things even more confusing. All we did back then was talk, right?"

"And pretty much everything in my house is packed inside of those crates," you continue, frowning. "It's nothing at all like your family's house. Or your own house, for that matter."

"And that's why I'm saying you must be the reason the plant grew," she says. "You're the only thing in common."

She's making a disturbing amount of sense, admittedly. But what are you supposed to do with that information?

"Does that mean we need to move the plant to my house, then?" you ask. "I'd be nervous about messing things up, though, especially after all the work you've already put into caring for it."

"Well... I can keep taking care of it, probably," she says. "I think you only need to be there, for it to grow."

You wouldn't mind at all, but...
"I'd hate for you to have to go out of your way, though," you say. "I mean, you'd have to come over every day, just to take care of this one plant, right?"

Celine blinks in realization, and... blushes?
"Ah... um, I-I'd be fine with that, actually," she stammers. "Er, if you're okay with it too...?"

...you choke a bit, as you realize what you just suggested to her.
You definitely wouldn't mind at all, but—that just brings you back to the real reason you're visiting Celine now, right?

"Y-Yeah!" you confirm hastily. "I-I'd be happy to have you around! And actually, um..."

This is your opportunity, isn't it?

It's now or never.

You take a breath to try and calm your nerves.
"I-I, um... I wanted to ask you something, actually—but also, I have a bit of a confession to make, first," you say.

"I-It has nothing to do with you or anything, don't worry!" you add hastily.

Celine doesn't say anything yet, instead just listening with her head tilted curiously.

You sigh. You've come too far to hide things, now—might as well just go for it.
"It's just that... I miss being in space a lot," you admit regretfully. "The sights and the adventures... the freedom."

Celine looks away, clearly downcast.
"I could tell," she says quietly. "You left behind an entire life, didn't you?"

She shrinks in on herself, just a bit.
"...does that mean you want to leave?" she asks, voice wavering ever so slightly.

This is the part you're having trouble figuring out, isn't it?
"No! ...but, also yes, kind of?" you say hesitantly.

You keep talking quickly, before she can get any wrong ideas.
"I love this town, and I want to keep living here, but... I'm just kind of restless," you explain. "I want to travel again. Not forever, or anything—maybe for just, like, a few days or so, but..."

You just sigh.
"...but I'm still afraid of drifting away, and losing my connections to everyone here. I'm scared that if I leave, I won't have a place to come back to, I guess."

"I want to go out and explore, but... I don't want to be alone again, either," you say.

You force yourself to take deep, measured breaths as you untangle your thoughts.
"I know it's contradictory. And I can't help but feel selfish for wanting both," you admit.

Celine thinks quietly for a few moments. You can't bring yourself to meet her eyes.
"If you did leave... would you forget about us?" she asks eventually.

Your answer to that is firm and immediate.
"No!" you say. "No, I don't think I could ever forget Mistria. I don't want to travel forever—I want to live here, too!"

"...and do you really think we'd ever forget you?" she asks immediately afterwards. "Or that we'd hate you, just because you want to leave for a while?"

"I mean, no, but—" you try to explain, before Celine interrupts you.

"Do you really think I'd forget you?" she asks.

She sounds hurt. When you look up, you can see she's staring at you, almost in disbelief.
"Do you...?" she repeats, on the verge of tears.

"...no, but that doesn't stop me from worrying," you say. "I've been alone for a long time, up until now, and... I guess I'm just terrified that I'll have to go back to being on my own again, forever."

She just stares for a few moments... and then she steps forward and hugs you. You can hear her sniffling.
"I don't think I could ever forget you, you know," she says. "I don't want you to be alone—I want to be with you!"

She sighs.
"And... I don't really want you to leave, and I don't think I'll ever fully understand what you're going through," she admits. "...but I know it's been hurting you a lot, too."

"So... if you need time to yourself, that's okay," she says, softly.

The tension leaves your muscles as you exhale in relief.
"...thank you, Celine," you say. "I... I really appreciate it."

She hugs you tighter. It's kind of hard to breathe.
"But," she adds, "...just promise me that you won't be gone for too long? I-I'm scared you'll leave me."

You return the favor, hugging her more tightly in response.
"I promise. I won't leave you, Celine," you say.

"...and, um, actually," you continue. "I was wondering if you'd want to come with me, sometimes? I-I mean, I know it's probably not going to be your kind of thing, but..."

"Of course," Celine says, before you can say anything more. "It'll be a lot for me to adjust to... but you adjusted to living here, right? I can at least try to do the same for you."

After that, you just hold her in your arms for a while, letting yourself relax and process everything that just happened.

"Um..." Celine says eventually, however. "Earlier, you said you wanted to ask me something else, right?"

That's true... and, honestly? After all that, this seems like a pretty trivial question for you to ask.
Still, you take a moment to breathe and steady yourself, first.

"I wanted to ask... Celine, would you go out with me?"

She's quiet for a moment... and then she giggles, though you can tell she's tearing up again, too.
"I had a feeling you were going to ask that," she says. "And... yes. Yes, I'd be more than happy to go out with you!"

It takes a moment to sink in for you: she said yes.

...she said yes!

She wants to be with you!
You two can make this work, together!

As those realizations dawn upon you, you start to laugh together with her, finally free of the worries that have been weighing you down for the past two seasons. The two of you fill the room with your laughter, a light and airy mix of relief and joy... and then you feel her hand reach for yours, and you take it, your fingers intertwining together.

...

It's hard to tell, considering your eyes are also a bit watery, but out of the corner of your eye, you can see that the sprout—the flower that first brought you two together—has finally bloomed.

You and Celine stand before the lowered access ramp leading up into your ship, later that afternoon.

You find yourself hesitating, oddly enough. Sure, you'd been back here once or twice over the past few seasons, but those were just quick trips to get small things. But now, though... it's more than just that.

You're returning home.
Or rather, to one of your homes.

Celine notices your tension, of course. She silently takes your hand, and gives you an encouraging smile.

With that, the two of you walk up the ramp, and step inside.

You relax a bit as you two reach the top of the access ramp, and enter the ship's central corridor. From here, numerous narrow passageways lead to the other areas of the ship, from the flight deck and cockpit behind you, to the main equipment bays lined up along the ship's length, to the main thrusters and Frame Shift Drive in the back. Wall-mounted ladders, meanwhile, lead to other decks both above and below the main level, with living spaces—bedrooms, a washroom, a kitchen, and so on—on the upper deck above you, and still more equipment on the deck below your feet. The lowest decks are reserved for storage, as well as a planetary vehicle hangar.

Your Mandalay may be a pretty big ship on the outside, but she's still a spaceship, with all the space, weight, and design constraints that implies. The interior reflects that: all throughout the ship are tight, unpainted metal corridors, with little decoration other than navigation markings. Every surface—walls, ceiling, and even the floor—is studded with small handholds at regular intervals to help with free-floating movement in zero-gravity, along with plenty of lighting fixtures, and numerous vents to maintain constant air circulation regardless of gravity.

All of this, from the bright white glow of the lights, the gentle hum as the ship's internal systems come online at your presence, the echoing patter of your steps as you walk around on the metal flooring... it's just as you remember. It's all coming back to you now, suffusing you in a soothing, comforting familiarity.

But you can't help but feel trepidation, though, as you look to Celine. She's looking all around with naked curiosity, intrigued by what's clearly a wholly unfamiliar environment to her. You worry about what she makes of it; your ship's interior is, after all, very austere—an artifact of the spacer lifestyle, with its emphasis on practicality and cutting down on mass where possible—and you know that she'd prefer something more lively. Still, you can only hope that it doesn't disagree with her too much.

On that note, you also realize that this is actually the first time you've ever personally invited someone to come aboard with you. It's nerve-wracking, honestly, but still exciting—you're glad to be able to share this with Celine.

"It's so different," she says eventually, still looking around. "And I guess a bit... cold? I'm not sure what I expected, but there's just so much metal everywhere!"

You can detect a hint of sadness in her tone, though you know she's trying to be considerate and open-minded.
"I still have some trouble imagining what it'd be like to live in a place such as this. But I'm willing to try!"

You belatedly realize that the cramped, winding corridors and undecorated metal walls of your spaceship are, in a way, pretty similar to the the cramped box maze and minimalist beige wallpaper that currently defines your farmhouse. Viewed in that light, it's no wonder you were able to put up with the clutter there for so long; you're a spacer through and through, after all.

Still, though, you can't help but want some more color in here, now that you've come to appreciate just how warm and inviting Mistrian homes are.

"This place could definitely use some livening up, though," you say to Celine. "And so could my house, honestly."

An idea comes to you.
"Maybe you could help me decorate?" you suggest. "I'm not really great with aesthetics, so..."

Celine giggles.
"Gladly," she says with a nod, squeezing your hand a bit. "It'll be fun!"

Nickel, zinc, chromium, and vanadium, in a 2:2:2:3 ratio. That's what you need to get your ship's Auto-Field Maintenance Unit working again.

Unfortunately, you're not a chemist or a metallurgist, so you don't know what processes are necessary to extract those raw elements from all of the various metal bars, monster bits, funky-looking rocks, and other things you have lying around your house. Your ship also isn't equipped with a refinery module; you're an explorer, not an asteroid miner.

What you do have, however, is a Surface Reconnaissance Vehicle, sitting inside your ship's vehicle hangar; and fortunately for you, the SRV has its own small raw materials processing unit, which you're able to gain direct access to by a combination of finagling, jerry-rigging, and panel-ripping. From there, you just start chucking things in and seeing what the SRV makes of it.

It's a slow, slow process of trial and error, and one that eats up pretty much everything from the mines that you had in storage—but by the end of it, you have enough processed material to restock your ship's maintenance unit.

With that out of the way, you're finally ready to step back onto the flight deck, to orchestrate and oversee the self-repair process.

You release a breath you didn't know you were holding as you sit down in the pilot's seat for the first time in half a year, taking a second to savor the feeling of settling into its familiar cushions once more. You note that the seat has to automatically re-adjust itself to fit your physique: while you were by no means unfit prior to your arrival, everything you've been doing here has nonetheless changed your body for the better.

You almost grab the throttle and flight stick out of habit, before stopping yourself. That will come later.

Celine steps up beside you to your left, visibly tense as she takes in the view outside.

The Mandalay's cockpit is essentially a large bubble of glass, designed to offer an expansive, uninterrupted view in almost every direction. There's even a small window at your feet, below and in front of the pilot's seat, giving you the impression that you're floating freely above the planet's surface. The ship is also big enough that the cockpit is over a dozen meters above the ground—roughly level with the treetops all around you.

You take Celine's hand in support, interlacing your fingers between hers.
"Are you okay?" you ask.

She takes a deep breath.
"I'm fine," she says, with a shaky smile. "Being up high is... not as bad, with you here."

Still, she grips your hand rather tightly, and you can tell that she's trying to not look too far down.

Meanwhile, with a few quick taps on the panel to your right, you kickstart the repair processes that will bring your ship back into working order. You'll need to poke and prod the panel every now and again to you can repair each module in turn, but there's actually not much you need to do beyond that. For the most part, you two can simply relax and enjoy the moment as you wait for the repairs to finish.

Meanwhile, when you look around, you can actually see Celine's house from here, its brownish-grey roof poking up above the forest canopy, with the rest of Mistria rising up behind it. From this angle, the town's terraced layout is quite apparent, with each 'layer' going up and up and up, above even your elevated vantage point, capped off by the massive manor house. The mountain the town is built on, meanwhile, continues rising ever higher and higher behind all the buildings, until you have to turn your head skyward to see the summit.

You notice that you can also see people around town when you look closer, tiny figures moving around and between the buildings. For instance, up in the northern part of town, you can faintly make out someone with what seems like purple or pink hair, moving around in a hurry.

"Hey, up there," you say to Celine, pointing with your free hand towards the figure in the distance. "In front of the fountain... is that Adeline?"

Celine steps forward and leans in a bit, squinting to get a better view. Then she smiles.
"I think so," she says, laughing softly. "Who else would be running around town like that?"

"What do you think she's doing?" you wonder.

"Hmm... this is about when she does her seasonal town inspections, right?" Celine thinks aloud. "She's probably busy triple- and quadruple-checking everything, as usual."

And then she sighs in fond exasperation.
"I'll have to remind her to take care of herself, later."

The two of you go back and forth like that, talking as you watch all the people you know go about their lives, while the ship quietly continues to repair itself. And eventually, the conversation moves to other things: Terithia setting out to sea on her sailing voyage, the latest shenanigans Dell and the Dragonguard have gotten themselves into, the two of you brainstorming ways to decorate your house and the ship, and more.

You can feel Celine gradually relax as time goes on, the conversation apparently helping to keep her mind off the heights.

The repair process is a bit slow, but nonetheless completes by evening.

"Oh," you say. "Looks like the repairs are done. The ship's ready to fly again!"

And then you take a deep breath, before taking both of Celine's hands into your own.

"And... um, actually, if you're okay with going up for a bit now..." you say nervously, but earnestly. "There's something I really, really want to show you."

"I promise, it won't take too long!" you add. "Just an hour or so, tops. We're not going very far at all."

Celine giggles again.
"Of course I wouldn't mind going with you," she says with a soft, reassuring smile. "Especially since it sounds like this is important to you."

You beam with excitement.
"Great!" you cheer. "Trust me, this is going to be amazing."

It takes you a bit to help Celine get into a spare flight suit. It almost certainly won't be necessary at all for a short trip like this, but it's better to be safe than sorry. Afterwards, you get her situated in the copilot's seat, behind and above your own.

"I'll try to keep things as comfortable as I can for you," you say as she secures her seat's safety harness. "But, um, you'll want to hang on tight. First flights can be a lot to take in."

You power up the ship in full as soon as you're both safely secured in your seats. Fortunately, your ship still has plenty of fuel in the tanks—your ship was pretty much full on fuel when you crash-landed, and since then you've been careful to conserve fuel by keeping the reactor powered down. A short trip like this won't require much fuel at all, either; and of course, you can always scoop some more fuel from the local sun, though that's something you'll leave for later flights, down the line.

At any rate, you eagerly take the throttle and flight stick in hand once more, as the ship wakes to life around you. The familiar hum of the ship's reactor and the whirr of the idling thrusters resonates in your chest. You really, really missed this, you have to admit.

After executing a few basic pre-flight checks to make sure your control system is fully operational, you begin the lift-off process. You're extra careful with the controls for Celine's sake, applying low amounts of vertical thrust in order to keep your acceleration to a minimum, as you take the ship up.

Once you're at a safe altitude above ground, you pitch up slightly and slowly accelerate, beginning your ascent through the atmosphere. It's a lot slower than you're used to—normally, you'd just pitch straight up to 90 degrees and set the engines to max, to ascend as quickly as possible—but, again, you're doing your best to take it easy for this flight.

Even so, it's not long at all before the two of you begin to pass through the upper atmosphere. You can hear Celine gasp as the blue of the sky suddenly fades to the black of space within the span of a single moment, and when you look down you can see the planet already starting to fall away below your feet.

You ease up on the throttle as you enter low orbit, and when you finally cut thrust entirely, the familiar feeling of weightlessness takes over. The last thing you do as you reach your intended orbital altitude is carefully roll the ship over, to bring the planet into view.

"Alright, we're here," you call out to Celine, disengaging both of your safety restraints. Her eyes widen in surprise when she tries to stand up like normal, only for momentum to send her floating away from her seat.

"Uwah!" she yelps as she experiences microgravity for the first time. "I-I'm floating?!"

You catch her before she can go too far, though, taking her hand and pulling her into a midair embrace.
"Yeah, it takes a long time to get used to not having gravity up here," you admit.

Still, you try to give her your best reassuring smile.
"Don't worry, though. I've got you."

Celine clings to you tightly as you continue to float in the middle of the cockpit, but her breathing soon begins to steady.

"Okay," she says with a grin. "I trust you. It's new, but... it feels kind of fun, actually."

And then she rests her head against your chest and pulls you closer into her arms, blushing a bit at the intimacy.
"A-And, um," she adds, clearly somewhat embarrassed. "I definitely don't mind holding onto you like this..."

You two take a few quiet moments to just relax as you float together, enjoying each other's company. You find yourself playing with Celine's hair, gently running your fingers through her blonde locks. Meanwhile, she shifts here and there as she makes herself comfortable in your shared embrace, her legs intertwining with yours.

Celine sighs in contentment, sending a pleasant tingle through your body.
"Ah... this feels wonderful," she murmurs. "I'd really love it if we could spend more time together like this, from now on."

You hum in agreement.
"I was really hoping you'd like it. And I'd be more than happy to take you up here more often," you say.

"Though," you say, turning your head to look through the glass beside you both. "What I really want to show you is... well, take a look outside."

Celine follows your gaze... and you can practically feel her breathing stop as she fully takes in the view.

Out there, beyond your little glass bubble, is the planet below, stretching out before you in all its sublime glory. From here, you can see everything: the sapphire blue of the oceans, the deep, lush green of fertile lands, the swirling brown shades of deserts, the rough textures of vast mountain ranges, the uniform snow-white ice caps, and more, all topped by wispy white clouds churning over the surface. Even at your orbital altitude, the planet takes up almost your entire view, all-encompassing and almost incomprehensibly vast.

Down there, all across the green and brown and blue below, are entire countries, cities and towns. Countless people and countless stories are all playing out upon the tapestry before you, at once distant yet also inextricably intertwined. You know that Mistria is somewhere down there, too: the town that you love, the new home that you've settled into, all of the friends you've made and the people you've gotten to know, the sum total of your entire existence over the past half-year—now just a tiny, invisible dot on the surface of a giant.

And as you look out to the edges, where the planet's surface curves away and out of sight, you can see the atmosphere: a tiny, glowing, sky-blue band, sitting at the boundary between the dazzling marble below and the void of space above. It's striking—the seemingly infinite blue abyss overhead that had bewildered you upon your first arrival in Mistria, now looks like an almost impossibly thin blue-white line, sandwiched between two different unfathomable expanses.

Even as a lifelong spacer and experienced explorer, to see it all in front of you like this is profound. No photos nor words could ever fully do it justice—it defies all description.

And Celine?
She's utterly still, her eyes wide as she takes it all in for the very first time in her life. Ever so slowly, she reaches out a hand, pressing her fingers delicately against the canopy glass—

—and then suddenly your breath is taken away as she kisses you fiercely, with a passion and fervor that you never would have expected from the seemingly gentle, innocent gardener. She clings to you incredibly tightly, pulling you close, holding on as if she's afraid that you might float away forever if she lets go. She tastes like tea, you discover—a sweet and light flavor, perfectly mirroring the girl herself—while the scent of her floral perfume fills your mind with a fragrant and heady aroma.

You respond in kind, eyes fluttering shut as you sink into her embrace, trying to convey the depth of your feelings for her—your love, your desire, your raw need for her to be by your side—as you reciprocate.

The kiss lasts for what feels like an eternity at first... and yet when it ends, it feels like it all happened in a mere instant.

Her eyes are watering slightly as they look deep into your own, and you can see her mouth working almost without sound, seemingly lost for words. So, instead, you fill the silence with something of your own—with words you've been meaning to say to her for a long time, now.

"I love you, Celine," you say. "Completely and utterly."

She really starts to tear up, at that... before she kisses you again, and the two of you finally close the distance to become as one.

The two of you ultimately spend the entire night together up there, suffused in the light of the planet and the stars.

Chapter Text

Amazingly, your life just keeps going on after that night.

You and Celine get a lot of knowing glances around town afterwards—your ship's departure in the evening and arrival the next morning was not subtle in the slightest—and your shared refusal to reveal what happened up there only invites more speculation. At the very least, though, it's obvious to everyone that you two are a couple now.

(You also see a few people exchanging Tesserae afterwards. Apparently, there was a betting pool around how long it'd take for you two to get together. Yeah, you two were not subtle at all.)

It only gets more obvious when she kisses you in front of everyone, the next Friday night at the Inn. It's dramatic, exhilarating, and something utterly unexpected from Celine—but you lean into it, all the same, to everyone's cheering.

You end up leaving on another, slightly longer flight on your own about a week later, though, out to this galactic region's Deep Space Support Array fleet carrier: the DSSA Seeker of Dreams. Once docked there, you're able to get repairs for the remaining damage to your ship that couldn't be fixed on the ground in Mistria—specifically hull damage, for the most part—as well as resupply your ship's consumables, and also retrofit a second maintenance unit onto your ship as a backup, pulled from another ship you had mothballed in storage.

More importantly, though, from there you're able to make detailed preparations to live in Mistria for good. For the most part, this involves settling lingering accounts and debts, and also making sure people won't come looking for you. As far as the wider galaxy's concerned, you're a retired explorer now, gone to live on an anonymous planet.

You do, however, make sure to also set up a few contingency measures and backup plans, just in case: bank accounts with emergency funds, backup ships quietly standing by in unused hangar bays throughout the galaxy, and even a couple of open-ended favors with old contacts, here and there. You don't expect to ever need them... but better to be safe than sorry, right?

(And it actually does come in handy... many, many years later, when your kid decides to follow in your footsteps as an explorer. But that's a story for another time.)

Even after those first few days, though, things continue on.

The world keeps spinning, the planets keep dancing in their orbits, and the seasons keep turning—but you and Celine manage to remain constant.

You're practically always together in some way, whether you're physically together in Mistria, traveling together aboard your ship, or (eventually, once you get a self-powered communicator set) virtually together via long-distance FTL communications, on those occasions where your wanderlust temporarily carries you away from her.

You live on the ground for the most part, of course, working your farm, the mines, and generally just running around town, same as you've always been. Nonetheless, you still visit the stars on a semi-regular basis; for the most part, these are just brief jaunts to low orbit to relax and unwind together with Celine, or short solo exploration day-trips to nearby stars, to see what's in the neighborhood.

You do, however, also end up going on more extensive trips every now and again, taking a few days or so out of every year to travel to points of interest further afield, or even sometimes to visit the Core Systems. Celine actually ends up joining you on these longer journeys most of the time, even; it helps that the two of you have, together, managed to make your ship feel more like home for her, with interior paint, decorations, and even some plants where you could fit them.

(The latter took a lot of trial and error—adapting plant pots for zero-gravity environments is harder than you'd think. But it was all worth it, to see Celine smile in the end.)

Your first such extended journey, for that matter, takes you two back to your birthplace—Lave Station—sometime during your second spring in Mistria. You end up wishing you could've taken a picture of the looks on your parents' faces, when you showed up unannounced at your ancestral home with your new girlfriend in tow! You also make sure to bring back a few bottles of one-of-a-kind Lavian Brandy, so now the Sleeping Dragon Inn is the only establishment in Aldaria—or on the planet, for that matter—that can truly claim to serve alcohol from another world.

Your second voyage, the year after that, takes you out to a far-flung system known popularly as "The Top of the Galaxy"—a star that sits thousands of lightyears 'above' the galactic disk. The view up there is nothing short of spectacular: you can see almost the entire spiral galaxy from there, like swirling clouds of stars spreading at your feet. It's a stunning spectacle that reveals the sheer vastness of the cosmos around you, and like your first trip up into orbit together with Celine, the effect is utterly profound.

It becomes even more significant when you propose to Celine there, the ring glinting in the ship's interior lighting as you present it to her. You watch her freeze in shock for a few heart-pounding seconds, her face illuminated by the soft white glow of the Milky Way behind you—

—before she says yes, with a smile to outshine the entire galaxy a million times over.

Forget the stars: her smile, in that perfect moment, is a memory more beautiful than any celestial vista you could ever find.

No matter how far you travel, though, there's always a home for you to return to in Mistria.

Actually, speaking of your home: you do, in fact, end up redecorating it with Celine towards the end of your first autumn, pretty much right after you two return to the surface after that fateful first trip up into orbit together.

(You're never going to forget the look on Ryis' face when he asks why you need a storage cellar—right as he walks into your house, and is confronted by the sight of your crate maze.)

You and Celine together manage to transform your home from a warehouse with a bed, into an actual comfortable living space: you have nicer sleeping and dining areas, a large new desk for writing and other work, a bookshelf or two, and even a brand-new kitchen (...not that you're any good at using the latter). You also put some of your photos up on the wall, along with a few large-format star charts and galactic maps, which are handy to have when it comes to astronomy and travel planning.

You also end up with a good number of potted plants around your house. Celine, of course, comes by every day to check up on and care for them.

This plant collection expands dramatically when she finally embarks on her long project to write a new Codex Mistria, at which point she ends up growing so many potted plants at once that she actually has to move some of them to your place, in order to make room in her own cottage. She also transplants no small number of flowers from her garden into your fields—and then, eventually, moves everything from her garden to the plot in front of your house, to reduce the amount of back-and-forth walking you two have to do to maintain everything.

You, meanwhile, end up collecting a growing number of telescopes of all sizes and varieties, ranging from small, portable refracting telescopes on tripods, to a larger reflector telescope built behind your house, to eventually a very large, very fancy catadioptric telescope, housed within a special domed building on the Summit. The mountaintop observatory actually ends up being a local landmark in its own right, with astronomers from lands far and wide traveling to Mistria to make use of the telescope facilities—much to Adeline's excitement.

The desk Celine picks out for your house, meanwhile, also becomes quite important down the line, when she convinces you to start writing all of your stories down on paper.

It only continues to grow in importance when she finally moves in with you, and you two start sharing the writing space while she works on her new Codex.

Coincidentally, the day Celine moves in with you is also the day your shared home reaches the final phase of its evolution, as a strange cross between an astronomical observatory and a botanical garden. Flowers bloom between the star charts and vines grow around the telescopes; in front of your house are fields full of flowers and vegetables, right next to a makeshift spaceship landing pad. You spend your days working the land and writing about your travels between the stars, while Celine diligently compiles a wealth of information about the endless variety of plants and flowers growing around your town, around your home, and up your walls. And tucked away on the mantel, above your cozy rustic fireplace, is a sleek datapad, which you use every now and then to catch up with what's going on in the constantly shifting galaxy around you.

You and Celine exist between worlds—between the water and soil at your feet, and the distant stars shining high above your heads.

And you wouldn't have it any other way.