Questions for Questions
"So," Nari asked between breaths, "I'm still wondering...why the hell are you...here?"
Visk grumbled and kept running. "I told you, I'll explain when we're safe."
"We're still not safe here?"
"No."
Visk had been navigating back to his base for 15 minutes or so at this point, with Nari close in tow. He wasn't quite sure why she was so distrustworthy of him; surely the fact that he was still alive was evidence enough that he knew what he was talking about?
Regardless, it was nice to have some company. He'd been alone for a long time.
For the last five minutes, there'd been the faint noise of a trickle of water in the distance. Gradually, that trickle was getting louder as they approached a location Visk had simply dubbed "the Waterfall." Not that Nari knew it, of course; he could show her his maps once they'd gotten out of the Swarm's territory.
Frankly, he had several questions himself. The...purple creature - he wasn't quite sure what she was - had thrown out several terms he wasn't remotely familiar with. He suspected she might have some answers to many of the open questions he had about his predicament.
His mind lit up in recognition as he walked through a doorway and found himself in a familiar room. The water noises were a definitive roar at this point, flooding the background with the low frequencies of a river crashing against stone. This part of the structure had a slightly raised metallic walkway, and in this particular room, that walkway split off into a raised portion of black steel bridges that passed over the lower passage.
One of the bridges had caved in at the bottom. Effortlessly, Visk stepped up the stairs and hopped over the gap, reaching the other side and continuing forward. He glanced back to check on Nari; she hesitated for a moment once she saw the gap, then sprinted forward and made it across with a stumbling leap, regaining her footing after a few seconds and trying to catch up with him.
She stopped as they made it to the Waterfall.
Here, the self-contained rooms of the facility opened up to the large chasm that surrounded the whole thing. Beneath them was the scene of a crimson forest; a terrace somewhere further down the structure had an artificial river flowing across and out into the chasm, roaring with an enormous volume of rushing water and providing moisture for the ecosystem surrounding it. A catwalk bridged inwards from the chasm, hugging the outer wall of the room they'd just been in, and providing a route to a higher terrace atop a waterfall that flowed down into the one below.
Even beyond that terrace, another one was somewhat visible looming above, the source of yet another waterfall that crashed down onto the one level with them. Visk hadn't fully explored this room yet, but given the scale of this place, he suspected there were at least a few more layers of terraces he hadn't even seen.
It was an enormous garden, and quite pretty. He'd seen it enough times to become desensitized to it. That being said, it did have quite a lot of that mushroom he ate, so he'd come here often to stock up on food.
Speaking of which, he noticed one of those mushrooms out of the corner of his eye. Desaturated purple cap, no spots, dense gills. His supply was actually running low currently, so this was a good chance to grab some more. Once he'd made it to the terrace level with the catwalk, he made his way over to a tree, then bent down and picked a few of the mushrooms around it with his lower hands. He'd probably need extra now that Nari was here, anyway.
Wait. Nari. He turned back to see if she'd caught up with him. She was still on the catwalk, her jaw agape as she stared at the view of the waterfalls cascading down into the chasm.
"You coming or not?" he hollered.
That evidently snapped her out of her thoughts. She turned around and jogged over toward him as he picked more mushrooms.
"Do you really not know how...different this place is?" she asked.
"What do you mean?"
"Like, I've never seen or even heard of a Precursor ruin this large," she said. "Imagine how many relics there must be here, how many pieces of technology survived that were thought left to time. It's like a whole Precursor city."
"I don't know what half of those words are," Visk said. "As far as I'm concerned, this place is useful for getting resources to not die, and that's about it. Like these mushrooms."
Nari glanced at Visk's fistfuls of fungus and raised a brow. "Those are compatible with our biology?"
"Our"? Odd.
Visk nodded. "Yeah, I've been living off of them and chunks of bird meat. Tastes like shit but I'm still alive."
"You a biologist or something?" Nari asked. "I probably would've eaten something hazardous and died in that situation."
"Nah, I died a few times," Visk replied. "Eventually found something safe to eat though, so it's all good."
An expression of bewilderment came across Nari's face. "'Died a few times?'"
"Yeah."
"But you're still alive."
"Yep."
Nari sighed. "I have no idea what you're on about. I'm glad you found something we can digest, though. That might save my ass."
"Good," nodded Visk, shoving the mushrooms into his satchel. "Okay, let's keep going. We're almost there."
"This is it?" Nari exclaimed in bewilderment.
"Yep," Visk nodded.
The duo stood before an old vent that had been pulled open a long time ago. There were some signs of struggle - the metal was bent instead of being cleanly removed, for instance - though no hint as to why this particular vent was open. Behind it, though, was a partially collapsed ventilation shaft, a sheer climb upward to a location he'd found to be safe so far.
Visk stood in the middle of the shaft, Nari stumbling through the vent behind him and trying to fit her wings through. Its once-sheer metal surface had long since been crumpled and pulled apart, with various bits of metal poking out the side and giving the entire thing the vibe of a gaping iron maw. He'd found that his grappling hook didn't help much here, but evidently he'd evolved to climb, since he was able to navigate the environment with relative ease. Given the clear evolutionary similarities between them, he hoped Nari would too.
"Okay, up we go," he announced, flashing a thumbs-up on his lower left hand as he began to zip upward. After a minute, he added a "let me know if you need any backup!", his voice reverberating down the dozen feet or so of metal he'd climbed so far.
"I'll be fine," the purple thing grumbled below. "You're fast."
"I can slow down if you need!"
"No, it's okay. It's just a straight shot up, right?"
"Yep."
With that mini shouting match behind them, Visk continued the climb up. Every so often, he glanced down at Nari to check if she'd caught up to him yet. No dice there, but she did seem to be making the climb, albeit a little slower and more methodically than him.
"Why the fuck do you...live up...here?" Nari yelled from below, sneaking words between breaths as she pulled herself up a metal slab jutting out from a wall. "This is a...pain in the ass to...get to."
"I know," Visk chuckled. "It's out of reach of the swarms, though. It's a lot harder to sleep at night if you think you're going to get dissolved by a bunch of nanobots."
"How do you know they'll dissolve you?"
He grimaced. "Did it to me."
"They, uh...dissolved you?" she repeated as if she didn't believe his story.
"Yes!" he stressed exhaustedly. "I just died. Wasn't too big of a deal."
"What do you mean you died? You're here right now."
Visk frowned. "Exactly!"
In response, Nari just scowled and shook her head.
Looking away from the purple lizard, the...liralen, was it that she'd called him? He wasn't familiar with the term - continued on his journey upward. He'd stalled for a minute while talking to her, and she'd gotten a chance to largely catch up with him, though he could feel the distance between them growing again as she failed to keep pace.
"Ugh, how much farther?" she muttered, her strength clearly waning.
Visk glanced above him. "We're about, uh, two-thirds of the way up or so. You need help?"
"No, no...I've got it...I'm good," she replied, still sounding very much like she wasn't. "I do this stuff for a living, you know...I can handle...this."
"If you say so," he grumbled, not quite believing her. "I'm staying put until you catch up, though."
Nari continued upwards at a snail's pace. The lack of a retort from her didn't fill Visk with a great degree of confidence, to the point where the liralen had started to climb back down to spot her. He wasn't particularly interested in the first guest to his home dying on the way there.
She lifted an arm, and her foot slipped; that stumble was all that was needed for her traction to fall apart completely, her opposite hand scraping off the the side of the ledge as she began to fall, her wings involuntarily unfolding and scratching against the sides of the shaft.
In an instant, an arm was out for her. "GRAB ME!" Visk shouted, his eyes alight with concern as his words echoed down the shaft.
Her eyes blinking closed in fear, she tried to flap her wings closed, flailing toward him as her lower arms and tail struggled against the metal walls. After a brief panic-inducing lurch of free-fall, she felt a hand grab onto one of her wing-hands, then another onto the other, the fingers of his regular hand and her wing-hand intertwining funnily.
"You alright?" the liralen asked. Nari was barely able to muster a weak nod.
"I'll take us the rest of the way," he announced. Continuing to hold her by the wings in his lower arms, he used his upper pair to continue the climb up the shaft.
"And home sweet home," grinned Visk as he gestured towards his haphazardly-adapted fan barrel that he called a residence.
It wasn't a particularly comfortable spot, but it did the job well enough. The main fan was inactive, allowing him to stand without getting chopped up, and a square carbon fiber lattice above allowed a little bit of sunlight to filter through, faintly illuminating the space below in a pale green.
The fan was quite large, and its barrel even larger, which had allowed him to fit his living space within, like a giant artificial cavern. He'd strung a piece of ragged cloth above the fan blades, sheltering most of the floor from the elements while still allowing light in. Another piece of fabric billowed out from the wall, blown by a much smaller fan that joined with this chamber in a sort of T-junction, filtering some fresh air into the room.
Crouching down slightly to fit underneath the blade, Visk made his way to the corner, where he had a small electric burner and pot, with slightly burned cubes of bird meat sitting directly on the pot's surface, missing any sort of broth or meat.
"Bon appetit," he nodded, giving a thumbs-up with a lower hand while grabbing a cube and popping it down his gullet with an upper one. He immediately gagged a little, the food's bitter taste hitting him like a truck the moment it touched his taste buds. After forcibly swallowing it down, he weakly smiled at Nari. "Want a bite?"
"I think I'll pass, thanks," the purple thing replied. "You've been living off of these?"
"I wouldn't call it living," he sighed, sitting down and catching his breath. "But yes, I have been surviving."
"Where's all the grease go?"
"You don't want to know," he frowned, sneaking a glance at the small pipe in the wall smeared with stains of bodily fluids of himself and all the birds he'd killed. He wasn't thrilled about it, but he was still alive, so it was working for the time being.
Nari frowned and sat down in front of him. "Fuck, you really have been living here, haven't you? I thought that was a ruse."
"Why would it be a ruse?" Visk asked, swallowing down another chunk of bird meat and nearly choking on it. "Look around you," he stated, gesturing to his surroundings with his lower arms. "What purpose could I possibly have to lie about this?"
"Well, that's the proof you're not," Nari said. "You know the LLF?"
"No?"
"Really? You don't know about the LLF?"
"Never heard about it."
"How long have you been living here?"
"Do you ever stop asking questions?"
Nari huffed. "Alright, I'll bite. I guess I am in your place, after all. A question for a question?"
"Pardon?"
"I get to ask a question, you get to ask a question in return. Wouldn't hurt to get to know each other more, since we seem to both be stuck here for the time being. You can start since I've asked a couple things already."
"Works for me," Visk nodded, leaning back a bit. "First question: what am I?"
"What do you mean? Like your species?" Nari raised an eyebrow. "You're a liralen. Technically speaking, I am too, though obviously, we're a bit...different," she muttered, glancing at one of her wings.
"Okay, my turn," she continued. "Where're you from? Lirune? Somewhere else?"
A sheepish look came across Visk's face. "That's the thing. I, uh...I don't know."
As Nari raised an eyebrow in confusion, Visk frowned and clarified.
"I have no idea where I'm from."
"What do you mean you have no idea where you're from?"
"One question at a time."
"Oh, alright," the purple liralen(?) groaned. "Your play."
"What are you?"
Nari frowned. "Since I already told you I'm a liralen of sorts, I'm assuming you're looking for further detail there. That correct?"
Visk nodded.
"Alright. So we come from what's often called a 'deathworld,' a home planet that's particularly dangerous for one reason or another. For us, it's the extreme bacterial activity and high rate of mutations from the radiation that hits our world. That means we evolved to be really resilient, but it also means we developed genetic modification technology really early in our species' history, before we were really responsible enough to use it. Like giving a toddler a gun."
"So...long story short, we mutated the fuck out of ourselves and split into several different clades and subspecies, all of which have different cultural identities and social stigmas. You're a typ liralen, the baseline species that evolved naturally. I'm a 'nerian' from a lineage of people modified to have wings for upper arms."
"Hope that answers your question."
Visk gave a stoic nod. "It does. Okay, your question."
Nari scratched her chin for a moment. "Do you remember your past?"
Visk stared her in the eyes. "No. Next question."
"Waitwaitwait, you can't just say 'no'-"
"We had a deal," Visk interrupted. "Ask me for your next question. I've still got several."
Nari glared at him. "Okay, fine. Shoot."
"What is the LLF?"
"That's a...long story," Nari admitted. "You know how I mentioned the different subspecies have different stigmas? Well, we...uh, got over that for a while, just in time for the space age so we could live in harmony with each other and stop treating each other like shit for decisions made 300 years ago. But people weren't satisfied. They needed someone to blame for all their problems instead of dealing with them themselves. So they elected a guy who transformed our nation into a...racist dictatorship, I guess. Part of the Lirune Liberation Party, and his paramilitary Lirune Liberation Forces took over the actual national military and started a civil war on the pretense of...taking out people like me."
"So that's why I'm scared of...fucking typ liralens I don't know. Because some of the people I used to call neighbors would report me in an instant and line me up to be shot. I can't afford to take those chances."
Her eyes were widened and she was out of breath. Visk could clearly tell the nerian did not want to talk about this topic anymore.
"I'm...sorry about you going through that," he sighed. "I had no clue that was going on back...home."
Home. He let the word simmer on his tongue a bit. Was it really home if it was a home he'd never known, or even known about?
Nari glanced up at him, a hint of a tear in her eye. "What do you remember?"
"I..." he started, rolling his eyes back as he jogged his memory. "I don't remember much. I woke up in some sort of escape pod about a month ago. No name, no past, and no purpose beyond an audio recording that played as I crashed here. Ended with a phrase that stuck with me. Go forth, ghost."
"It's...weird. I can remember concepts and ideas, and I think I'm forming new memories okay, but I can't remember names, events, proper nouns, et cetera before the crash," he listed, counting on his fingers. "I didn't know I was a 'typ liralen' or even a 'liralen' until you told me. I don't know what this language is or this language is," he continued, switching to the other tongue he knew. "I just know how to speak them."
Nari weakly glanced back up at him, the nerian's cyan eyes glowing softly in the dim lighting of Visk's hideout. He could almost make out a twinkle in them, like a hint of determination had just lodged itself into her brain.
"I could help you," she suggested. "I mean, I'm not a walking encyclopedia, but I have all my memories intact. I can explain things to you if you want. If it'd help."
A slight grin and chuckle broke through her demeanor. "By the way, uh...this language is Arcian, language of the Com...uh, Interstellar Compact. And this one is Lir, language of the Lirune Federation."
"Thanks," Visk smiled. "I guess that kinda leads into my next question, and, umm, this one might be a bit of a quicker answer. More of a yes or no."
Nari raised a brow and perked up her ears, staring at the liralen.
"Do you know how to get out of here?"