"There, there," said Ted softly, wiping a wet piece of cloth against Lily's sweat-drenched forehead. "You work too hard, boss."

If there was a word to succinctly describe Ted, the resistance's medic, it would be round. He was huge, with a face a little too small for his head, but there was a great sense of delicacy and care in all his movements. Watching him, Ruth was reminded of a classical watchmaker more than anything -- someone who could put an inconceivably complex machine together without his hands shaking even once.

After the end of the fight against the old man -- the resistance had secured him for interrogation -- Lily had straight up collapsed, her body smoking. Funnily enough, the resistance members hadn't seemed too shocked. That was when Ted had gone sprinting out of the medical tent, demanding they help him get Lily into a bed.

His urgency had been such that Ruth couldn't even protest -- and before long, she'd found herself in this situation.

Lily's wasn't the bed that Ruth was focused on, however. No, she was kneeling down next to Skipper's.

He was pale, his breathing ragged but steady, hands down on the bed at his sides. His eyes were closed, and his demeanor so tranquil that he couldn't have been anything but asleep. Ruth vaguely wondered what he was dreaming about.

She'd assumed he would be in a much worse way without the wonders of modern medicine, but apparently that wasn't the case. A floating purple glyph hovered over his chest, and from what Ruth understood that was keeping him stable. Her eyes drifted to the source.

A flat-faced, morose-looking sloth thing hung off of Ted's back, placidly chewing a leaf in it's toothed beak. Three long legs dangled freely from the lower half of its feathered body. An identical glyph shone on its forehead -- and as Ruth watched, yet another glyph appeared hovering over Lily, and her ragged breathing began to calm down.

Ted caught Ruth looking and gave a reassuring smile. He had kind eyes. "Don't worry," he said. "Amabie can only heal slowly, but it'll keep them stable while it does. Your friend is safe."

Ruth stared at the thing -- Amabie, apparently -- as it messily swallowed the leaf in its mouth. "It's called… Amabie?"

"Mm-hmm," Ted reached over and scratched Amabie under the chin with one beefy finger. It purred approvingly.

Ruth blinked. "And it needs to eat?"

"Why wouldn't it need to eat?" Ted frowned -- not disapproval, but confusion. "It's a living thing, isn't it? If it doesn't eat, it'll grow weak."

"But it's made of Aether," she protested. "That doesn't even make any sense! I don't need to look after my armour. It just remembers the way it should go together."

"Aether..." Ted rolled the word around in his mouth, evaluating it. "The others were right. You do talk strange."

It was obvious she wasn't going to get anywhere like this. Clearly, nobody had any idea what she was talking about when she mentioned Aether. Maybe they just called it something else here?

"If I may ask," Ted turned in his chair. "What is yours called?"

Ruth furrowed her brow. "My…?"

"Your Guardian Entity," Ted continued patiently, clearly thinking she was a little slow. "The armour you wear -- it's an unusual form, but I've seen stranger. What's it's name? If you don't mind me asking."

She sighed, sitting back on a spare bed -- it squeaked alarmingly under her weight. "Dunno how many times I gotta tell you guys this," she said, rubbing her hands over her face. "But I've got no idea what the hell a Guardian Entity even is."

"That makes three of us," Lily mumbled as her eyes fluttered open.

Ted smiled. "Welcome back to the land of the living, idiot. What were you thinking, using it? Did you want to die?" Despite the harshness of his words, his tone was soft.

"Die?" Lily snorted. "I wanted to win."

"There's no point in winning if you never get to see the victory."

Lily ignored that. Instead, her gaze turned back to Ruth. "You really don't know, huh?" she mumbled.

Ruth's grip on the duvet beneath her tightened in annoyance. "I'm getting really sick of people saying you really don't know to me. No. I really don't know. So tell me."

Lily smiled humorlessly. "We don't know much ourselves."

"Then tell me what you do know."

Lily hesitated for a moment -- as if she was going to just be annoyingly cryptic again -- before she opened her mouth and began to speak:

"This was around a year ago. Ted had recently defected to our side -- he'd been a Regulator before, so he had a Guardian Entity. Of course, we all wanted to know how he'd got it, how they worked, what they really were. He couldn't answer any of those questions."

Lily kept close to the walls as she snuck through the monastery, ready to turn and run for it if she ran into any Regulators. Sweat trickled down her forehead. She was following the directions Ted had given her, but there were no guarantees he wasn't some kind of mole out to get her caught.

"Ted had only recently gotten his Guardian Entity -- but he had no memory of the thing. All he remembered was being escorted to a forbidden chamber by two other Regulators, being made to drink some kind of potion before going in -- then waking up in his quarters with ol' Amabie by his side."

If Ted was a mole, though, he was an astoundingly bad one. Before long, Lily found herself in front of the room he'd described -- a simple wooden door, with an 'X' carved into the stone above it. If she hadn't known this was something to watch for, she'd probably have walked right past it. It was certainly nondescript enough.

She turned the handle and entered.

"I'd never seen anything like it."

There was no real room beyond the door -- just a small, cylindrical space, barely wide enough to hold three people. The walls were made of seamless dark metal. On the far wall was some kind of painting, but the painting was moving -- a square on it blinking blue. She stared at it, uncomprehending, her hand reaching out -- pressing against the painting.

There was a quiet beep -- and then the room shook, sending Lily falling down to the floor. As she looked up, she saw that the door she had entered through was ascending -- no, no, she was going down. The whole room was going down, the floor descending through this strange vertical tunnel. Eyes wide, she just stared up at the door as it vanished into the darkness.

"Whatever that place was… no human could have built it."

There was another quiet beep -- and when Lily whirled around again to catch the source of the sound, she saw that there now was another door behind her. Not the same as the wooden one she'd entered through, no -- this one was made of the same dark metal, and it opened by itself as she drew near. What kind of magic was this?

Tentatively, she walked into the massive chamber beyond. It was huge, but cylindrical like the tunnel. The walls were lined with glass tanks, but the white mists that swirled around within them prevented her from getting a good look at what they contained -- just dark, indistinct shapes moving around.

Lily had thought she'd already thrown away her childhood fears -- but here, in this darkness, she was suddenly sure that the Blindman would appear and rip her to shreds. A shiver went down her spine.

Another of those strange animated paintings was held up by a stand in the centre of the room, just in front of an object that resembled a giant metal casket. This painting was much more complex than the one in the tunnels -- words and characters Lily didn't understand. Another blinking square remained at the bottom of the painting, though: just like the one she'd pushed to make the floor move.

"It was the most reckless, most idiotic thing I'd ever done, but…"

Lily pressed the square -- and found she couldn't move her hand away from it again. Panic beginning to bubble inside her head, she grabbed her forearm and pulled with all her strength, but it was already too late.

The painting spoke. "Host identified," it said chirpily in a strange, unfamiliar accent. "Beginning transfer of Aetheral signature."

Lightning flashed in the tiny room.

What happened lasted only for a moment, but it felt like an eternity. Electricity flowed through the console, through Lily's arm, and into her body, tearing her apart as it went. She'd never felt such excruciating pain -- it was as if a knife was slicing at her from every possible angle, cutting her down to the bone, through the bone, sparing not a centimeter of matter.

A word echoed through her head, each time accompanied by a vision, an indistinct silhouette.

Raijū. A wolf howling at the sky.

Raijū. A long, winding centipede.

Raijū. An ape thumping it's chest.

Raijū. A great bird soaring through the skies.

Raijū. A humanoid corpse, a harpoon gruesomely protruding from its stomach.

And then -- with a final flash of lightning -- it was done. Lily was released from the painting, staggering backwards and falling on her posterior. Her heavy, ragged breathing echoed through the chamber. Sparks of electricity still ran along her hands, smoke rising from her fingertips.

"That was the worst pain I'd ever experienced. I had nightmares about it for months afterwards. It was… it just was. Awful."

What had just happened? Lily blinked as she turned her hands over, as if the answer would be written on the back. She needed something to explain what had just happened -- some wisdom, some understanding, some realization.

A realization did indeed come to her. But it wasn't the kind that she wanted.

She wasn't alone here.

The voice that echoed through the room was like ice and metal all at once, resentment leaking beneath the steady words.

"You don't belong here."

"I was sure, more sure than I'd been about anything, that I was going to die."

Lily whirled around, the last remnants of the electricity still sparking through her body, each crackle accompanied by a jolt of pain. More than anything, though, she knew she had to focus on that voice. The malice she felt emanating from it was beyond anything she'd ever experienced.

"Who's there?!" she rasped, her throat cooked by the shock. A metallic taste lingered in her mouth. "I'm armed! I'm warning you!"

The voice continued, ignoring what she'd just said: "There are two paths before you. A path of blue, and a path of red."

"And then…"

She saw it.

Deep in the darkness of the chamber, staring at her, were two glittering sapphire eyes, black pupils dilated to dots of utter hatred. This was a thing that wanted her to die screaming.

Her body shifted into a fighting position, trembling fists held out in front of her. She'd come too far to run -- and Lily Aubrisher wasn't the kind of girl to turn and flee when someone gave her a scary look.

"Who are you?" she repeated, ready to strike whenever this thing rushed at her. If nothing else, she'd give the bastard a nosebleed.

The words that slithered from the darkness next, however, firmly slaughtered any fantasies of victory.

"The path of blue is to have your eyes ripped from your sockets and fed to you fresh," the voice said. "The path of red is to be skinned alive and left to bleed. Which do you choose? Blue, or red?"

"From the way it talked, you knew it was telling the truth. Knew it could do that to you. Knew that it was going to do that to you."

A curved blade glimmered in the dim light.

Lily turned and ran.

She didn't know how long she ran for -- with lightning instinctively pouring through her veins, giving her speed beyond humanity -- but she climbed up the vertical tunnel like a spider, charged through the silent monastery like a bat out of hell, and staggered through the dark woods like a lonely, dying insect.

When she reached the camp and fell, face first, she was mere minutes from the afterlife.

"It took six months for me to bring her back from the brink," Ted finished the story, the memory bringing an uncharacteristic scowl to his face. "I don't know what that Guardian Entity is, but I know it wasn't meant to be used -- not by a normal person, at least. It nearly kills her every time she uses it."

"But if I can just master it…" Lily made to try and sit up, but Ted's heavy hand easily pushed her back down.

"It nearly kills her every time she uses it," he repeated, permitting no rebuttal. He glanced at Ruth. "Believe me -- I let her get out of this bed, she'll fall over before she makes it five steps."

Ruth put a hand to her chin. She wasn't used to this -- being the one receiving information, making decisions based on it. That was Skipper's role, or Dragan's if he felt particularly cocky. She was a follower, not a leader. This wasn't her place -- surely Bruno should be doing this instead.

But she was the one in the room.

The place Lily had described sounded a little like a starship -- if this place had been some kind of colony once, could that have been the original vessel? If the systems were working, that meant they still had some kind of power supply, right?

Apparently, their ship -- the Shipstream or whatever Skipper was calling it -- had been wrecked when they'd crashed here. Was there a chance, then, that they could use parts from this older ship to fix it up? Bruno was good with machines, after all. Was that possible?

Lily spoke up, clearly noticing Ruth's uncharacteristically thoughtful expression. "Even after what I just told you, you're still thinking about going to Coren?"

Ruth silently nodded, hand still on her chin.

Lily sighed, a note of defeat entering her voice. "There's no stopping you, huh?" she said. "Tell you what. I saw you fight -- you're strong. Incredibly strong. You promise to do me a favour while you're in Coren, and I'll give you any support you need."

"What kind of favour?"

Lily's gaze was hard. "You kill the Head Regulator."