Private Nature's heart

[Iveri Senadre]

Every living creature has its own laws of pain and patience, every single weak sprout that has broken through the icy soil has its own wind and solar permafrost, whether you are a creation of the hands of other intelligent mortals, i.e. an artificial creature, or an element of a vast social organism - society, With our own tastes, with our own blood circulating through the gradually growing body on top of the basic skeleton and organ systems and with our own plans - almost all of us are united by an innocent, but in its power and overwhelming ability to adapt the ability and burning desire to survive. And who better and more familiar with this phenomenon of the nature of life than doctors, true healers of the heart and soul, saviours from terrible nightmares and throwing into sweat kinds of brutal war and violence, in whose minds, being witnesses of the miracle in all its mangled and sometimes horrifying forms, and born the most frank and sincere attempts to save and help anyone passing on the street, at least with a word, tasty food and warm clothes, if possible. At her core, Iveri was just such a person, quiet, dedicated and completely forgotten about among the distant northern mountains of Rothana, the main centre of civilian and military shipbuilding for the needs of the Mandalorian Enclave.
Normally, after a light, rather nutrient-poor breakfast, Iveri would spend her mornings exercising outside, hardening her already scarred and burned body from the humanitarian operations that had taken place during the fighting, and after meal she would then return to her small underground medical lab, where she would connect to the virtual world and work on the latest research into the treatment of both cancer and all sorts of deadly diseases until late in the evening, without a break for lunch or going outside, but today promised her something very different. After an hour or so of running around the surrounding area, in sweat-soaked light clothing Iveri suddenly wanted to walk further north, a direction in which she had noted about a week ago the presence of chemical elements of interest, stored in underground rivers and caves, with the unique ability to actively and effectively neutralise any psychological stress and uncertainty about the future associated with both acute memories and other inexplicable physical and spiritual anomalies that life is so full of.
Taking with her only a long working dirty black coat and a backpack with some tools, basic first aid and a small amount of liquid and food, without covering the top of her head with anything, Iveri headed into the depths of no one's deeply explored zone beyond the polar circle, with a slow enough step and a light crunching of several tens of centimetres deep snow, hoping to find the nearest sources of the substance. Left sensually alone with the boundless world of ice and cold, to which Iveri had become accustomed for so many years of life isolated from civilisation, she was once again overcome by various thoughts and doubts, both directly related to her professional activities and a kind of personal life, which, after a couple of decades, Iveri had never had, the reasons for its absence were mostly reduced either to self-loathing and fear of harming others, or simple emotional misunderstanding of how to build and maintain a deep spiritual and physical relationships between two or more individuals, because of which Iveri had never been able to learn and discover the deeper levels of relationship with her patients and temporary friends, who, as a result of the tragic events, she had never got to know well enough, and they had never been able to give her even a little bit of warmth and care, which was considered to be a natural result among countless close friends and couples living together. After a couple of hours of severe pain in her frozen hands (Iveri had forgotten her street gloves, she was wearing only doctor's gloves) and a slight dizziness due to the too early finished breakfast, Iveri finally found a passage to one of the many caves going hundreds of metres into the depths, and after little brushing of her coat she went inside, into the realm of surreal silence and chilling beauty of the primordial untouched nature of the caverns below....

Rayia Asai

 

[Rayia Asai]

Iveri Senadre
Location: Rothana, northern mountains

---

It had been a few weeks since Rayia had faced the Mandalorians in defense of Ukatis. Since that time, she'd been captured by bounty hunters intent on taking her to Enclave space and seeking a reward. Though the bounty hunters had soon found the Felacatian impossible to contain. And after making short work of the guards to her cell, Rayia had stolen an escape pod and ejected into the orbital pull of a nearby planet. Space travel was by no means comfortable for the Felacatian. It felt as if Rayia was hurtling in free fall, drowning in the sensation of sinking endlessly. The sensation was the result of the Felacatian's sharp senses and their sensitive tails, attuned to the displacement of air around them and capable of detecting the slightest tremor of motion in a good range around them, being forced to acclimate to the empty vacuum of space. It had made their people less inclined to seek space travel. Indeed, a voyager such as Rayia would be considered an oddity amongst her people. But perhaps this familiarity allowed Rayia to overcome the roiling, churning throes of the beast within as she huddled in one corner of the escape pod. And it was this familiarity that told Rayia she needed to muster her strength despite her quivering legs, and the sweat beading her face, when her pod crashed through the trees and trawled its way across the forest floor snapping tree roots and uprooting bushes. It finally came to rest at the foot of one of the northern mountains, where Rayia could see snow draped across its top and a maze of icy caverns waiting above her.

Rayia spent the next few days recuperating in the maze of caves, developing a cycle. The days she would sleep away, letting her lungs heal from the sores that the gas the Mandolorians had used had inflicted. Her Felacatian heritage meant that she could heal faster than a human, and her extreme inherent durability had protected her from other injuries. At night, she would allow herself to sucuumb to the ache of her battered body. The stress would cause her to shift, and she would rush down the sides of the mountains in bestial form using the blistering, blurring pace her Felacatian heritage afforded. Then she would snatch one of the livestock animals from the nearby farms and drag it off, leaving the sight of broken fences and bloody marks that soon vanished to come to light in the morning sun.

Rayia's tail bristled as she felt the tremors of movement clambering up the mountain and her ears flattened in alarm. She sensed an individual striding towards the cave in which she was sequestered. 'No, no no. Don't come here,' Rayia thought, bemoaning that she would be discovered before she had worked up a plan to make it off this forsaken rock. 'And I was so careful too. Not to harm any farmers or settlers,' Rayia thought, remembering that there had been times when she had almost been discovered. Not that she would have been in danger in any way. Her bestial form required serious firepower to wound, let alone endanger, and was more than capable of tearing through durasteel at break-neck pace. It was more the fact that Rayia was reluctant to harm these civilians, as they reminded her of her own people and that she had been cautious of the potential for any more bio-weaponry. 'It feels like if you flip over a rock these days, bioweapons just seem to come skittering out,' Rayia cursed. She opted to remain very still, hoping the individual would go away and never venture into her cavern. But if that didn't work, then a soft voice would croak out. "W-what do you want?" Rayia winced, hearing how her voice sounded strained. Her tail retracted, and her ears flattened back in preparation for if this stranger had hostile intent.

 

[Iveri Senadre]

With subterranean surroundings being as far removed as possible from Iveri's not so ideal artistic and poetic descriptive abilities, it would still be disrespectful to anyone who would ever lay touch upon these memories and the inner sparks of the girl's mental and sensual memory not to recount at least a small part of that incomparable icy grandeur, which was both the given deep cave separately and the whole potential collection of amazing intricacies of chasms, voids and unexplored passages of various sizes and at various angles of inclination in relation to the depth of the given planetary body, going hundreds of metres deep into the surface of the planet. Covering her eyes with medical gloves to somehow protect her eyes from the lonely prodigal wind wandering through the cavities of the recesses of the earth and picking up shards of ice and snow, Iveri moved step by step crisply between the mighty stalactites and half-frozen blue-white ish mini streams, coming to the surface from the planet's cavernous water reserves and pristine lakes hidden by many kilometres of ice and metal-rock, giving her eyes only a few seconds to scan the terrain no further than ten metres away, with her eyes set on finding exactly the minerals she needed for her independent medical practice and the tests she was conducting without any approval from research organisations and universities(although on this planet they weren't very well endowed and were not well known outside of the tech cities within which they functioned as a temporary intellectual refuge for groups of professors and the children of local labourers who didn't have the time nor energy for their children), but for the moment there was nothing to Iveri's hearing except the increasing frostbite of body parts from the cold and the howling of the wind mixed with the water flowing in some places, what could be labelled as an object or process worthy of her attention and her powers, to a fleeting voice, though amplified by the very structure of the locality, that clearly put a stop to the question of the extent to which the place was known and inhabited, even though it might be one single intelligent person and no one else. Iveri had never been a diplomat, but in this case she had to recall from scratch the bases of deontological and Kantian ethics and their more modern developments and modifications, and in the best, giving the limitations of her now half-frozen and tired body, voice she tried to concentrate all the most important information she could utter. "Please don't worry, I just want to collect minerals to treat life-threatening diseases. My name is Iveri and I am a research doctor by vocation. I am unarmed. The state of my body is far from good either. Can I go any further or do you require medical assistance and help?" With that, she immediately and roughly found something that looked like a surface to sit on and immediately sat down there to catch her breath and give whoever was inhabiting or had just happened to be here accidentally time to think things over and get visual and other information about her.
Iveri tucked her hands deeper into the pockets of her thin jacket , trying to keep them at least warm at the same time with the help of force took out of her backpack a small sized bluish thermos and taking the top off placed it in front of her adding.
"I have warm drinking water and a minimum of nutritious food. I can share, you don't even have to show your face, just tell me where you are roughly and you'll have the food in front of you."
The wind made it difficult for Iveri's only eye to see around even within a couple of metres, though of course she could sense the weakened life energy of the other person, but that was her special medicine connected ability and she tried not to use it now, so she looked around cautiously, waiting for an answer in return.
Rayia Asai