First Reply A Dire Star's Repose

[Ives]

"Don't you ever wonder?" Wirtram slurred the words through breaths so acidic and pungent they might have put a wookiee to sleep.

"Wonder what?" Ives asked, holding his nose regardless of if the older miner would get offended.

"If you'd walked through that other door, if you'd still ended up dancing in the muck with us down here," Wirtram managed to, for once, develop the thought to a complete one.

He'd been a good friend, though somewhat timid, which made for a strange sight. The older miner stood at almost twice Ives' height and had a build that allowed him to carry one of the ore-carts by himself. And yet, when he had to open his mouth he became more awkward than a rancor on a ballroom dancefloor. Never judge a datacron by its cover, Ives supposed.

Usually that meant he kept quiet in some corner. But today he'd picked a spot at the bar. Next to Ives. And it seemed he had nothing better to do than dig into matters that weren't his business.

"And what's the point of wondering that?" Ives replied. "Seems a waste of time, if I'm honest, Wirt."

Wirtram considered that a moment, staring into the orange, bubbling contents of his mug. He sniffed once.

"Suppose you're right, four," Wirt said finally.

Four. A nickname on account of the fact none of the crew were able to pronounce Ives' name properly.

Ives watched the taller miner for a few moments. The man looked to be deep in thought. The miner normally lived up to his stereotype. Despite being a tall, silent type he usually lacked the 'brooding' part. Tonight was different, it seemed. Ives rarely saw the man so despondent and lost in thought.

The air hung quiet between them. An awkward silence seeped in. More awkward than a conversation with Wirt usually was. Ives shifted in his seat attempting to shake the discomfort seeping under his skin. Something was clearly troubling the older miner, and Ives had the sense the question, about past decisions, had been meant to open up a deeper conversation. That he'd meant to gather a new perspective on a problem he'd been pondering for a while now. Some mistake that Wirt regretted making or some decision that had led him down the wrong road to end up among the dregs of civilization. Heavy shit.

Ives hopped off the barstool.

"Well, I've got to go. Difficult shift behind me, I want to catch some shuteye before the next one," Ives said. He gave Wirt a pat on the shoulder, and headed off.

—

Ives steped off the surface-access elevator and headed up the path along the crater to the plains. Getting free elevator access hadn't come cheap, but that investment had been worth it. He took a deep breath of the air up on the surface, a refreshing contrast to the stale, recycled-to-barely-breathable, company-approved air down in the mines. The stars shone.

This far in the outskirts there weren't any cities to pollute the night sky. The mine, situated on some obscure moon orbiting an equally obscure gas giant, wasn't unimportant. By no means, it was a rhydonium mine. Precious fuel was pumped through the pipelines daily. It was just that no one sane wanted to settle near a rhydonium mine. Bless their hearts for it, because that meant that clear night sky didn't belong to anyone else.

Ives felt around in his pocket for a cigarette and pulled out a crooked, crumpled thing. He straightened it out, lit it, and took a drag. The smoke from his exhale was barely visible.

Unbeknownst to him, down below, an old artefact of dark power would be unearthed.

// This is pretty scattered, I do apologize. First time back to writing something proper in a hot minute. I dig horror-adjacent things and thriller-type themes. Feel free to make things the heck up, tho. I know I will.

 

[Milla]

She didn't put overmuch thought into where she was going these days. She followed a scent, an urge, a lock of hair that looked worth collecting. Sometimes she bought a ticket. Sometimes she stowed away. Sometimes she bullied someone into bringing her to the next port. The next planet. It was the existence of a shadow, or a weak breeze, rather than a life lived true and with intent. Meaningless, really, never knowing where she'd sleep that night or what face she'd peer up at the next day.

Milla was loving every second of it.

A new place, a new thing to collect, to ferret away. No one telling her Milla go here. Milla get this. Milla you're in the way and you are creeping me out.

Wonderful, truly.

Granted, she wasn't doing much DIFFERENT. Just. On her own terms. Untethered.

So when the last ship had brought her to a backwater mining world, she hadn't blinked. There was always something there, for one with the curiosity and lack of manners necessary to take it. Milla had both in spades. And a freeing lack of weight from their life before, except for the occasional, irritating words, bouncing around the back of their skull. But that was, usually, easy enough to ignore.

Like right now, there were things to find, and while things were no longer the same, Milla had always had a nose for the esoteric, the strange, the - frankly - upsetting. Whistling to herself, in a atonal rhythm more like a bird's call than a true song, she scrapped an interesting fungus from a rock at the entrance to a crack in the surface, peering over the edge of the crater beside her. A sniff at the air and her nose wrinkled. Something of interest was.... near by. Something she wanted. Following an innate urge she couldn't have resisted even if she could have named it, she lurked along the inner ridge of the crater, trying to figure out -

"You know, those stink." Came her voice, seemingly out of nowhere, as the smell of the tabacc caught her nostrils. The top of her head poked up over the rim of the crater, giving Ives a bit of a baleful glare, as if her opinion had any weight with a total stranger. "And its distracting."

 

[Ives]

"You know, there's a simple solution to that," although he did his best to sound tough, but his Ghor accent came through on that first vowel of "there", detracting from the tough-miner persona he was trying to summon.

Undeterred by his self-conscious slip, Ives took the step(s) and a half to close the distance and crouched down to put himself face to face with the stranger-well, almost. From his vantage he still looked down at her. Without much ceremony, he exhaled a lungful of the lifespan-reducing tabacc right in her direction.

"Do your thinking somewhere else."

Mmm. An instinct hit him with a cold shiver. Perhaps...perhaps that hadn't been the greatest idea.

Now that he actually looked at her, that scrawny, small, and surly varmint she looked to be, he didn't recognize that face at all. The part of him that was still sensitized to conventional, polite society recoiled with anxious energy. That city-boy shadow of himself squirmed under the uncertain tension of guessing at how this absolute stranger might respond to his knee-jerk rudeness, cursing the foul social habits he'd adopted from the other miners.

The rest of him, the "I just got done breaking my bones for twelve hours straight" part, didn't much care for those idle worries.

"Who even are you?" He rasped, watching her like he might still, somehow, recognize Milla . "Your face doesn't fit."

 

[Milla]

His slip, fortunate for him at least, was lost on the woman squinting up at him. She didn't recognize one accent from the next- everyone spoke in a slightly strange accent as far as Milla was concerned, but that also made her own difficult to place. Just a few degrees off of anything it could possibly be.

The only thing that saved her from a completely lungful of smoke was that Milla's head moved back like there were magnets attached to them both, but pointed in the wrong directions. Already making a screwed up ew gross face as he leaned in, reflexive and without any thought to how rude that sort of thing could be.

It wasn't enough to avoid it completely, mostly because in her wildest dreams Milla had never even considered someone would do something like that. A sharp breath through her nose in surprise- which sucked the smoke right up in against her sinuses, sharpish and acrid- leading to a series of hacking coughs.

Right back into Ives face.

Snarling wet coughs, and no, Milla didn't cover her mouth.

"Wild-" hack "biological-" wheeze "response." The last word more than a little strained. "Felt that all the way-" clearing her throat, wetly- still in his face, following him even if he'd tried to move back, climbing out of the crater if need be- "Into my diaphragm. Why don't you-" hack "Cough when you breath it in, hmm?" A sniffling, throat slapping snort into the back of her throat, and then spitting the phlem out on the ground. "Oh even that's a little grey now. No particulate processing? Worthless," muttering the last part more to herself than to him.
I'll show you worthless you ridiculous little shi-
"My face fits FINE- your face doesn't fit," defensively.

Somewhere below them? Something was happening. In the moment at least, Milla was too distracted by the other person in front of her to notice, but it wouldn't be long before the hairs on the backs of their necks would start to rise. But for now nudging the spit on the ground with the toe of her boot- too large on her foot- checking the viscosity absently even as she gave the young man (human? maybe. probably, close enough) in front of her a bit of a glare.

 

[Ives]

The response to his rude little stunt came in the form of a disgusting spray of unwelcome snot directly to the face.

The response to that response came as an intrusive—though undeniably pragmatic—instinct. Kick her down the crater's edge. Kick her and she won't be coughing in your face anymore.

Ives instead stood up, hoping to escape, though to his dismay she simply followed him. He grit his teeth and closed his eyes through her coughing fit. It wasn't easy, but he ignored the building desire to do something. Part of him still could act rationally, despite the aching in his back and the hazy headache building, so he endured the coughing.

After she'd finally concluded her onslaught with a disgustingly impressive snort, he waited a moment to confirm that an attempt at cleaning his face wouldn't result in another attack (he gauged she'd be that sort of petty). With her attention focused on...her snot of all things, Ives pulled the tattered remains of a rug from his back pocket and began to clean the detritus of a devastating, if brief, biological war.

While he wiped, he kept his retort rattling inside his mind, choosing instead to think angry words at her while glaring, rudely.

What did she mean by his face didn't fit, anyway. His face looked perfectly fine on him. Better than fine. With the right lighting, he looked downright handsome.

He cleaned up enough to look—for the circumstances—presentable.

"You don't fit because you're not part of the crew," he amended his previous observation.

He flipped the cloth onto the side he hadn't used and held it out in a silent offer to Milla . It had seen plenty of rock-dust, grime, and dirt in its months of use, but it had done its job in making Ives look a bit cleaner, somehow.

"And since you're not part of the crew, company policy is I have to ask you who you are. Mostly so I don't lose my job if you decide to report me for not following said policy in case you're an inspector," he continued.

"And especially so I don't become obligated to call security about a trespasser."

 

[Milla]

Ives

Milla cleared her throat once more. No, twice necessary to stop the acrid burning still coating everything, though the smell still lingered, high in her sinuses in a way that dulled her sense of smell a little and make she rub at her nose roughly with the back of a fist.

She was immune to the nasty looks he was giving her, she'd had worse leveled in her direction, this scarecrow's ire meant little to nothing. It honestly didn't even occur to her that it could be anything else. Being liked, appreciated was alien, not the looks he was giving her. Rudeness was like breathing. Anything else was strange and uncomfortable.

"Whose crew? Your crew? Shows what you know," she retorted, again, like a ten year old in a school yard squabble more than as a coherent argument against his point.

Eyeing the cloth for a moment, and it looked like she was about to do the sane thing and dismiss it. Who in their right mind would accept a handkerchief that was half covered in something wiped off of someone else's face- even if it had mostly originated in their own sinus cavity.

But then she reached out, hand fast and sudden, snatching it. She looked at it critically, confirmed, why yes, there would certainly be flakes of his skin on it, and unceremoniously stuffed it into her bag without looking away from him as he continued talking. Milla had no particular intentions for it at this time, it was the act of collecting that was impulsive and unrepentant. She wasn't so far impressed by the specimen in front of her, but one didn't look a genetic gift horse in the mouth.

"I have every right to be here, you wanna know why?" Breathing in and about to tell a whooper of unprecedented proportions.

The problem with that however was that while the two of them had bickered like siblings, the unfolding events had continued, perfectly apace with a thin, unwaning indifference to the two beings at the crater's edge. As Milla breathed in to summon the words she was sure were about to get her out of any possibility of trouble, there was a loud CRACK, plummeting into a disgusting SQWELCH.

The crater gave out beneath them, rumbling crackling of stone and dust intermixed with the wet sound of something unsettlingly organic and disturbingly WET as the two dropped into the darkness beneath their feet.

 

[Ives]

She stole his rag of cloth right out of his hands. Ives's eyebrows arced up in surprise.

What the fu—

Ives barely had time to register that, as Milla moved on to what would have been an explanation for her presence here, if they hadn't been interrupted by the ground falling away beneath their feet.

A yell escaped Ives as gravity abruptly took away his agency, and he was forced into a free-fall. He managed several moments of panic before something struck his head and darkness crept in.

———

Ives woke to a lungful of dust and stale air. The world didn't appear when he opened his eyes.

He'd lost a few moments. A moment ago he'd stood on the surface, arguing with some reprobate, and now he was back down in the mines, trapped in utter darkness, lying on the—strangely warm—stone floor.

He groaned, registering the dull pain coursing through every part of his body. Pain, but seemingly nothing worse. His satchel hadn't been lost during the fall either, its weight rested on his chest.

The only casualty, so far, seemed to be a few seconds of awareness and his cigarette.

Bummer.

Ives sat up and rummaged around in his satchel for his torch—mercifully spared from breaking in the fall. He flipped the activation switch, but it produced no light. An anxious pang moved up his spine. Being trapped in one of the tunnel mines, in complete darkness, had been a recurring anxious thought while he worked.

Fortunately, the particular model of torch he worked with was a sturdy one. Whenever it didn't work he just had to—he struck the housing with the palm of his hand. It flickered with dim light, the battery inside sputtering back to life. The light barely managed to break a few paces into the darkness. Beyond that, the void swallowed the light. Ives breathed a sigh of relief nonetheless, clinging to what small glimpse of the world around him became illuminated.

His surroundings turned out to be mostly rocks and rubble, interwoven with something he couldn't quite place. Dark lines of a glistening, black substance coiled between the rocks and traced arcs along the ground, away from where he'd landed, into the darkness beyond where the torch could reach. An oil spill?

Ives didn't touch the stuff. Instead, he kept looking.

There was no sign of the woman anywhere in his immediate vicinity. He didn't write her off as dead quite yet, though. The tunnel was wide and the torchlight iddn't even reach the walls. They'd probably been tossed different directions during the drop.

He stayed still for the moment, choosing to look around a little more. Darkness met him everywhere he looked. These must be the deeper tunnels, Ives thought, too fresh to have mounted wall lights. Except...in the distance, a small contradiction stood out. A faint light barely pierced the darkness. A red glow, far away, almost like the ones found on the signs attached to the "buildings" the company had provided down here. That suggested they weren't in the deep tunnels at all, but somewhere a lot closer to a surface access.

Ives breathed a sigh of relief. The lack of light, then, had to be the consequence of a simple power outage, most likely brought about by whatever had caused the collapse. The cause for that still eluded him.

A strange sense overcame him. He hadn't heard any sign of the miners yet. There were usually several crews in the mines at all times, up to roughly a hundred-and-fifty souls during shift change—which should be now. An area this close to the lifts should be teeming with activity, especially during an emergency.

Ives listened, but he heard no voices.

The only sound he could make out came from the direction opposite the red light. A quiet something, carried through the tunnels. Distinct, rhytmic scraping. A noise that repeated, again and again, with the steady sureness of a clock-hand. Something like bone—maybe chitin—scraped against an uneven surface. It struck one ridge, a second, and a third only to stop abruptly, pause for a few heartbeats, and start again.

Ives let out a nervous breath. A subtle tremor worked its way into his hand, making the torchlight tremble. That rhythmic scrape sounded miles away, and yet Ives felt a grasp of phantom claws around his rib cage.

He felt the urge to let a question slip into the near-silence, to ask if the woman—if anyone who might help—was there with him. But his voice couldn't make it past his throat.