Casimir Ruchana

Space sizzles. Boiling water, frothing, searing, burning forth the lightest of little cracks.

You had been called here. A cryptic apology. A searing enigma. A military summons, writ in language millennia out of fashion.

Your scanner informs you that this mission's OPFOR populates only a single other mech. You feel no need to correct its presumption that you are here to fight against an enemy. You are, to be fair, still here to fight.

The reeds brush against the still braces of your mech's lower body. You look. You see her.

Were you a less pragmatic individual, you would be inclined to call the body she now occupies beautiful. White as ivory. Pale as a moon. Flecks of cracked pink zigzag through the hundredfold ceramic platings and arcing, architectural pauldrons. Her thrusters are untarnished by gaseous fuel. The pallid robes encircling her anterior weapon arrays are silken-soft and pure as gossamer.

There is not a single optical sensor on the entirety of her frame.

As her weapon raises – a clearly alien thing, dark and solemn, fixed to her fourth forearm like a smudge of ash on a watercolour painting, her voice whispers to the part of you that lingers inside your cockpit.

“She who lands the first strike is owed the other's first answer.”

The same proposal as her summons. So, you're not surprised when the electrical bolt of silvery fire gouts from that outstretched weapon, like a lash of the Dragon's tongue, whipping and roiling and splintering straight towards you.

It incinerates several hundred meters of the moonlit landscape behind you. Your frame's perambulants already drum into the soil, closing the distance; eyeing the cooling of the gun's barrel. If you still had a heart, now would you feel only its roaring beat. You whisper back.

“You're getting rusty, you old hag.”

Her great ivory frame finally draws itself up to its full stature. Across the commlink, you hear a familiar hissing laughter. There are no edges of the eye to crinkle, no hoarse throat to mirthfully yowl. Still, Cassie speaks, her limiters decoupling, her cloak burning from the back of her frame in a meteoric wreath of pink.

She lunges towards you. You follow suit. Hulking metal engines, plasmatic blades, old war machines.

“Bet.”

—Written by Fionn McC.

One must relearn to crawl before one can relearn to walk.

It's strange to think of oneself as reborn, in any sense of the word. Nothing would ever be so complicated if the instantiation of a self could be singular instead of multivariate. Less to explain, and less, perhaps, to apologise for, unless the self in question is Casimir's own, in which case it feels like it makes no difference whatsoever. She still feels she owes an apology.

Alright, fine. Maybe more than just one.

She thinks she can almost see it, sometimes. That view held so strongly by a self so unrecognisable to her now that were she to look into the clear incandescent water-pools of this new planet, sable-yellow scales would feel far more self-alienating than the brand-new and flame-white and yet deceptively faceless form she inhabits presently. She can see what's attractive about holding one's fist so tightly around the glass marble of a world that it grows hot in one's palm.

After all, sphere worlds are not built so that they might shatter.

But to tighten your fingers so hard is to risk that your own bones might break.

It is, after all, like holding water in your cupped hands.

She can feel her tendons loosen; she can feel the senses return, warm and welcome, to her hands at long last.