J
Morning on Pandora came in early, and entirely with no sympathy.
I had found a ridge to sleep behind, wedged between two boulders that blocked the wind from two directions and only one direction of potential ambush. I had absorbed small stones throughout the night without really meaning to, the Ruin Engine idling at the edge of my awareness like a background process I havent closed. By the time the light changed, I had a small reserve of refined iron and tin sitting in my internal storage like loose change.
Cortana was already active when I opened my eyes.
"You slept four hours and twenty minutes," she said. "Dehydration is a growing concern. Your Ruin Engine filtered some atmospheric moisture while you were under, but not enough to compensate."
"Good morning to you too."
"I'll extend pleasantries once you've had water." Her hologram flickered in the corner of my HUD, posture precise. "We should establish a baseline for your capabilities before you run into something with teeth or guns."
I sat up, my joints complaining. The HUD blinked awake along with vitals, hydration markers, the skill tree icons sitting untouched at the edge of my vision. "What kind of baseline?"
"Absorption limits. Ejection precision. Blink range and recovery time. We know what the abilities are supposed to do. We don't know what they actually do at your current level."
"Fair." I stood, stretched, and looked out at the flat expanse ahead. The horizon was brown-orange rock and pale sky and nothing else for a long way. "Short version: Ruin Engine absorbs, refines, stores, and ejects. I can merge identical materials in storage into larger, better pieces. I can shape ejections but my precision is roughly 'vaguely the right direction.' Blink is a short-range teleport with a cooldown and a learning curve I am personally losing."
"And the abstract materials? Air, light, space?"
I've been curious about that too.
I tried air first simple right? Drew a breath and directed the Ruin Engine inward on it, the way I tried with a stone and immediately started coughing, hard, my vision started blurring as something obvious as needing to breathe and absorbing air forcefully from your lungs and around you didn't occur. I let it go, hands on my knees, sputtering.
"That could kill you," Cortana said, with the calm of someone filing a report. "I advise targetting the area of absorption better"
"Yeah, I worked that out." I straightened up. "Light?"
Light was different. focusing on the mid-morning glare and let the Engine reach for it and it responded, drawing in a shimmering distortion that cost me effort way out of proportion to the result. Sweat pricked at my forehead. I managed to hold it for three seconds before releasing.
"Absorbable," I said, breathing deliberately. "but really tiring."
"Noted. Space?"
He considered the empty air in front of him and reached for it with the Engine — not the dust in it, not the light passing through it, but the space itself. The nothing of it.
The Ruin Engine responded like a car trying to start in weather it wasn't built for resulting in a labored, reluctant turning over that produced nothing except a headache behind my eyes and the distinct impression that he'd tried to pick up something that didn't have a handle yet.
"Nope," I said. "not yet maybe"
"Understood." Cortana's tone was even, but not dismissive. " this can be considered your ceilings at your current moment. They'll move up later hopefully."
"That's the optimistic read." Rolling my eyes
"It's the accurate one."
we moved through the morning, testing the Engine in practical terms. Iabsorbed rocks and broke them down — found iron, tin, trace copper, calcium, things I couldn't name by heart but that the Engine catalogued automatically. I pulled smaller iron pieces in storage into larger ones. Ejected them as shapes with varying degrees of success. A spike came out slightly curved. A flat plate came out thicker on one side. A projectile came out well, cleanly, with more force than I expected, and buried itself three centimeters into a boulder.
"That one was good," Cortana noted.
"That one surprised me," I admitted.
"You should start surprising yourself less. The Engine is consistent. Your expectations aren't."
I didn't argue. She was right.
Blink remained the problem child. I was getting slightly better at not running into things, which was a low bar, but progress was progress. The issue Cortana had identified held true I kept trying to see it as movement but its closer to relocation, and I am instinctively trying to move as I relocate which leads it astray
"What if I stop trying to aim and just pick a point?" I pondered.
"Try it."
I tried picking a flat stone roughly nine metres ahead. Not moving toward it. Just: that point, exists I now exist there.
I blinked two metres past it, stumbled once, and caught myself cleanly.
"Better," Cortana said.
"I'll take it."
By dusk, the horizon had developed a feature. A thin wisp of smoke rose from somewhere to the northeast with pale grey against the darkening sky, too steady to be accidental.
I stopped walking and studied it.
"Settlement or bandit camp," Cortana said.
"Could be both."
"In this universe, frequently yes."
I watched the smoke for a moment. My legs are aching from the practice, falls and my water situation wasnt helping much, but the smoke meant people, and people meant at minimum that I wasn't the only living thing in this immediate vicinity that had to choose between eating and breathing.
"Tomorrow," I said.
"Rest first," Cortana agreed. "You've earned it."
I settled behind a rock outcrop, the revolting revolver at my side, the HUD dimming to low-light mode. The Engine continued its quiet background work in absorbing particles, logging materials, doing the minor domestic tasks of a power that didn't know how to be fully off.
Overhead, stars came out through Pandora's dusty atmosphere. Much brighter but none matching what I can remember.
I watched them for a while before promptly falling asleep.