I knew you were leaving. I know that you didn't want to tell me, but I also know you kept it from me as an act of kindness. I could tell in those last few weeks by the way you squeezed my hand extra tight, or the way you stayed up later than usual talking with me. I've known you my whole life, Korra. You didn't think I'd notice? It hurt, but I knew you had your reasons.
On that night you sat atop your favorite hill in meditation, and you turned to look at me as I approached.
You were crying. I hadn't seen you cry in decades. You lifted off the ground and floated with bits of debris. Your lips formed the words "I'm sorry," and in a loud clap of thunder and flash of brilliant light…
You vanished.
-Asami Sato, Age 74, The Avatar Journal
Aya flicked her finger on the touch-screen, revealing the passage on the previous page as she brushed her teeth. She had read this passage several hundred times, but it was still her favorite. It gave her goosebumps, the way it trailed off like that. It seemed to be the beginning of a story, not the conclusion.
She sighed. Here she was, in a very rare stretch of leisure time, reading old passages she could quote from memory. She couldn't help it. Aya Sol was an Avatar junkie. She'd read nearly everything she could find on the subject, especially on The Vanish in particular. The disappearance of Avatar Korra was possibly the greatest mystery in the history of the United Republic. It consumed historians and spiritual leaders for decades before fading into the obscurity of academia and enthusiasts. Aya was no professional historian, but she spent nearly all her slivers of free time studying the Era of the Avatar.
Aya stretched her arms, causing her body to begin a slow vertical roll through the air. She heard the high chirp of her door signal, and said "Come in!"
The door hissed open, revealing a man in a warmly colored orange and yellow jump-suit. A badge on his right breast pocket bore the blue arrow insignia of the life-support control crew. He seemed to hang by his feet from the ceiling from Aya's perspective, and she pushed off the countertop to fix her orientation.
"You reading that old journal again?" he asked. "Has it changed since the last time you read it?"
She switch off the tablet. "Hey Tashi, shouldn't you be venting the waste-tank gas into Hull Maintenance again?"
Tashi waved his hands. "Save the ball-busting, twinkle-toes. I'm here to watch you rip the universe apart." He made a wild grin and airbent a small explosion of wind from his palms.
"Very funny," she chided, but the hairs on the back of her neck bristled. Experiment day. The words echoed in her head, tightening her nerves like a vice. She extended her leg, did a quick pump action with her fists, and she fell towards the floor, catching her balance halfway into her fall and rocking up onto the tips of her toes before wobbling into a resting pose.
Tashi laughed. "Stuck it! You know I get here early just to see you do that, right?"
"Shut up," Aya retorted. She blushed, shrugged it off, and tied her hair into a ponytail. "I swim through Oh-G like a fish," She flaunted. "It's not my fault the earth fleet has this weird fetish with walking around on the floor…"
That got another warm laugh from Tashi. She took a glance in the mirror, and they were off on their walk to the lab.
"Aren't you the least-bit curious what happened?" She prodded as they passed by various other personnel.
"You mean The Vanish? I think what happened, happened. dissecting every single detail of what is in the past is spending too much time looking in the wrong direction."
"Oh, come onnn," She chided. "Don't start your predestined Air-Temple philosophy soap-box. I know you want to know. How can you not? It's just so…. so…. Juicey!" She continued to gush about the various details of The Vanish as they climbed into a shuttlepod. The door slid shut and it began the trip up to deck 3.
Tashi smirked and leaned against the wall. "So, are you nervous?"
Aya barely waited for him to finish the question. "I'm freaking out!" She exclaimed. "I mean, if my math is right, then this thing is going to change everything…" she trailed off as she let the weight of the sentence sink in. "I mean, d'you know how many gravity benders and physicists have tried and failed at this? There have been hundreds." She ran her fingers through her hair and sighed. "Where the hell do I get off thinking I'll be any different?"
Tashi turned to face her. "Your experiment will work." His eyes sparkled. "You have this face you make when you've solved a problem." He assumed a thinking position, then his eyes bugged out and his jaw dropped open. Aya laughed and elbowed him in the ribcage, but he continued. "Not once have I ever seen you make that face and been wrong. It's like…" he smiled as he settled on the words, "in that moment the solution completes you." He closed his eyes. "A moment of pure joy. I was there when you solved this problem. Trust me, your expression was a dead giveaway. The math checks out."
She looked down at her feet and elbowed him again. "Stop being nice to me, you're making me nervous."
They exited the tube and made their way towards lab 7. She beamed in anticipation as they approached the observation deck. Her heart started pounding. This was her favorite part of her walk to the lab. As she entered from the aft-side door, The ceiling arched upward until it was high above her, and the wall to her right fell away and was replaced with a stunning, floor to ceiling view of the Gyatso Nebula, as well as the singularity named Beifong.
I'm not going to stop this time, I'm not going to stop this time. Aya repeated it in her head as she turned to take in the sight. She slowed, caught her breath, and once again, despite her resolve, felt her knees go weak. The S.S. SkyBison had been here for two weeks taking readings and testing stability, but she could stare into that window for years, and she would still be overcome by its sheer, daunting scale. The bright neon nebula scattered translucent shredded cloths of lime green light across the expanse of the void, its surface speckled with stars of varying colors. In the middle of it all, in daunting proximate relief, sat Beifong. The accretion disk shimmered as it slowly swirled towards the event-horizon. Like light, energy, and everything with mass, Aya's gaze was being pulled ever into that single point in space. The way it warped the stars behind it broke her instinctive understanding of the universe, and she felt like if she stared too long into its incomprehensible depths, she'd get lost in it, and all that she was would pour out through her eyes.
Aya was about to will her legs forward, when a distant streak of light shot into view. She'd seen it so many times before, that she not only knew what it was, she had also internalized its implications. It was a jump trail. Her adrenaline spiked as she frantically searched her memory for a rendezvous memo or supply delivery, but nothing came. That trail could only be from one source.
The Spirit Crusade.
She stared, immobilized as the lighting dipped to red and the klaxons sounded. The seconds ticked by for centuries as she watched the geometric speck that would ruin her life's work draw closer. The alarm sounded in her ears. The captain's voice barked over the comms. "All crew to combat stations, this is a situation black! Metal-heads to the deflection system, pilots to docking bays A and C, and sparkies to the Plasma Array!"
Why today… She wasn't scared. Aya didn't fear death, she was a child of the black. In space, a fear of death just becomes a hassle. No, she was frustrated. She was 20 minutes from the first trial…
She pounded her fists on the glass. She would die, here, within arms reach of the answer. She noticed a glinted line of light flicker for a second, and then she was rocked off her feet.
She slammed into the wall and winced as distant rumbling and explosions tore through the lower decks. She knew what that was. It was a rail gun, and it was a big one. She heard a loud tink, followed by scores of others as small explosive rods buried themselves into the hull. One such rod was now embedded in the window, and it stared her in the face. A loud hissing ripped through the room as the air escaped through the fissures in the wound, and the blast clamps on either exit locked down in response to the breach.
The blinking light on the rod grew faster and then finally clicked on. She felt a force slam into her as Tashi pushed her aside. The rod detonated, and everything went black.
As the ringing in her ears slowly faded, Aya opened her eyes and pain tore through her temples. She grimaced as her blurry vision began to focus. Tashi lie in a crumpled heap against the wall. Everything snapped back into place.
There was a giant, impossible, meter-wide jagged hole through the window. Aya stared into the abyss, unbounded by any sort of tangible barrier. The raw, naked edge of the vacuum in front of her filled her with dread. Looking back at Tashi, she noticed his hands shaking. Tashi was desperately bending the atmosphere back into the chamber. It swirled all around them and leaked from the gash in the window.
Aya tore off for the emergency station. She ran to a panel on the back wall of the Obs deck and hit a few buttons, then pressed her hand on the screen. A smooth, diamond shaped object popped out of a compartment. Its underside had a rounded curve, and a large, gangly needle. She grabbed it and swished her arms back. She created a subtle gravity well that launched her towards Tashi, and she skidded to a halt at his side. He was badly burned and bleeding heavily. He turned to her and looked up with his still-functioning eye.
"Heh, stuck it, twinkle-toes," he said through staggered breaths.
"Hold still and Stop talking!" Aya yelled at him. She steadied her hands, took a deep breath, and jabbed the object into Tashi's thigh. It started to glow and Tashi immediately gasped in relief. The rushing torrent of air grew still, and the bubble settled into a uniform shape.
"You know how I feel about these things, right?"
"GIVE IT A REST! I'm not going to sit here and watch you kill yourself so you can have a showdown with space!" She drew in a shuttering breath and the first of her tears smattered onto his jumpsuit. "Aya... listen, there isn't much time…" He reached into his pocket. "I- need you to take this."
He opened his fingers to reveal a little beaded necklace with a stone-carved pendant attached to it. The color had long since faded, and the surface was smooth with generations of touch, but the pendant was unmistakable.
It was a Skybison.
"I-I-I d-don't understand…" Aya stammered through her tears. She reached out to touch it and Tashi grabbed her hand and held it in both of his. "You have to run that experiment, Aya. You know what to do with this…" He struggled, each breath was harder and more jagged than the last. "Your experiment will work… it is… written…"
"Tashi! Don't let the spirits take you, stay with me!" She watched as the Metalbenders and Firebenders of damage control shot a metal patch out towards the window. A thin stream of plasma met with it and it shot onto the hull, sealing the breach in the observation deck. The second the seal was made, Tashi's taught muscles loosened, and he was gone.
Air flooded in through the vents, and Aya squeezed his fingers as her tears mixed with the blood on his wrist. The lights flickered on and the blast clamps hissed open. She looked at the Spirit Crusade ship. She stared it down, seething. She beckoned for it. She hated it. Then it started to grow more distant. She furrowed her brow. Why would they be backing off?
She wiped her tears with her wrist and got to her feet. There was no time for the luxury of mourning the dead. She had to do something. That railgun shot looked and felt like it was near engineering. She'd head there. They needed to get out of there as soon as possible, and she knew they'd need gravity benders for the Cosmic Jump. She sprinted down the hall and scrambled into a mobility pod. "E-engineering," she said. Now that she was still, her legs started to shake. She felt her forehead, and her palm entered her vision smeared with her own blood. Looking down over her uniform, she realized she was covered in Tashi's. The necklace was also smeared with crimson, and she rolled it around in her hand.
Suddenly the pod lurched to a stop and Aya braced against the wall with her legs. The screen flickered on to reveal the Chief Engineer, a Gravity Bender named Vars. "Aya, don't come down here!" She shouted over the comms.
"But I'm good with the drive! You need all the help you can get!"
Vars sighed and closed her eyes for a second longer than a standard blink. "The Jump Drive is fatally destabilized. That first rail-volley pierced her straight through. We've got minutes before the fucker overloads. We're ejecting it, but when it detonates, the EM pulse is still going to knock out all of our systems."
Aya froze. That's why they backed off… "You still need me. If I can activate the-"
"Aya! We're screwed down here, and you have eight minutes of power left. Get your ass over to Lab 7 and run your experiment! The UR spent a fortune getting us out here to Beifong, now make it worth something!"
Aya opened her mouth to speak, but the screen faded to black. She pounded her fists against the wall and screamed. That thing about fear of death being impractical holds a little less weight when death is staring you in the face. Even still, Vars was right. Not knowing would be a fate worse than death. The doors slid open as she arrived at the deck she left from, and she peeled off down the hall. Now she had a task. It was all that mattered, and it conveniently distracted her from her inevitable end.
She clapped her hands and made a swirling motion, launching her body into a horizontal position, and the hallway became a shaft that she fell through. She looked down to see an explosion tear through the path ahead. She put out her arms to try and slow her momentum, but she was going too fast.
She felt a hard tug on her wrist and her shoulder made a horrible popping noise. She fell to the floor and cried out as the hallway shifted back to being a hallway.
"Are you out of your mind!?" She heard a nasally voice bark at her. She staggered to her feet and her eyes met a gangly man with wild hair and a red engineering uniform. "Hall-diving in a damaged ship? Are you trying to die faster?"
"Teelo!, I don't have time for this," she grunted frantically as she tried to move her right arm. "Come with me, I need a sparky to monitor the CPU's heatsink!" She lurched forward as her world slowly stopped spinning, then immediately took off running again. The hull rumbled as more explosions tore through the lower decks.
Teelo stared in shock, then took off after her. "CPU? What CPU!?"
Aya didn't look back. "The one in Lab 7."
Teelo stopped. He steadied his stance and thrust a hand onto the wall, causing sparks to shower out of the nearby control panel. The blast clamp thrust over the hall in front of Aya, and she threw out her arm to catch herself before colliding with it.
"What the hell is wrong with you?" He spouted angrily. "The electrical team is threading power through all sorts of emergency rescue systems and you want to throw the switch on the Temporal Translation experiment? Has it crossed your mind that energy on a damaged starship is a finite resource?"
Aya furrowed her brows. "Teelo, there isn't time. I need you to-"
"Out of the question Aya!" He shouted as he approached her "People will die!"
She shoved him against the wall and screamed in his face. "They're ALREADY DEAD!" Her breathing slowed and she loosened her grip on his shoulders. "That railgun torched the Jump Drive. Overload is inevitable..."
The look on Teelo's face embarked on a journey from anger, to shock, then fear before finally arriving at understanding. He nodded. "This way, we'll stick to the inner hallways."
They ran, dodging past other crewmembers, all scrambling desperately from point A to point B.
Teelo spoke up as they entered the final hallway. "Tashi said he was coming with you, where is he?"
She gave him a solemn look, her cheeks still flushed from crying. He nodded and lowered his head for a moment.
They arrived at the door and entered. Lab 7 wasn't like the rest of the science department. It was a vast, partially spherical room that was custom built into the SkyBison's inner-structure for the sole purpose of running the Temporal Translation experiment. The cavernous space had a flat, circular floor with a box to one side and a pad on the other. In the center, resting in an inlet, was a large, smooth sphere. Geometric panel grooves ran across its surface, and at its base it was connected to a bed of wires it now rested on. Aya ran to the box, and Teelo ran to the control center on the far side. He started to flip switches and touch various control screens with his fingers.
"Looks like we're running at seventy percent power, you've got 40 seconds 'til the Jump Drive pops off, move!"
She tossed a large switch and the box hissed as it broke the vacuum seal and opened. Aya froze. The test object was gone. Aya looked around, but it was nowhere. The tech that was running the pre-translation analysis must've gotten caught up in damage control. The experiment needed an object in the box. Without anything to translate, the experiment wouldn't be possible.
Teelo flipped a switch, and a hatch in the floor opened. Out of it rose a set of mechanical arms. The seams that ran along the wrists and up to the armpits glowed for a second, and then the apparatus popped open. "The bending Aug system is up and running Aya! It has to be now!"
She reached in her pocket and felt the smooth stone surface of Tashi's necklace. His words rang out in her head. You know what to do with this. She clenched her fist around the necklace, pulled it from her pocket, and placed it into the chamber. She threw the switch back and the box locked down and hissed again.
"Aya, that didn't look like the-"
"Shut up and watch that heatsink, Teelo! We can't have the CPU blowing a fuse while it crunches the numbers!" She ran over to the set of arms and backed into them. They automatically clamped over her arms and hands, and the seams glowed and pulsated with activity. The energy swell was furious, and she fought to keep her composure.
"Drive meltdown in twelve seconds!"
She flexed her fingers and took the appropriate stance. She raised her arm, and the orb in the center of the room rose, its bed of wires uncoiling into tendrils as it slowed to a stop at the center of the space. Lightning began to arc violently from the sphere to the walls and the floor. She balled her fist and the lightning focused onto the box and the platform. Here goes nothing, she thought. With another deep breath, she pumped her arm down, and the sphere filled the room with blinding white light. A shock-wave of force knocked Aya and Teelo against the wall. The comforting hum of the Skybison's reactor faded and died, and the chamber of Lab 7, as well as the rest of the ship, was overtaken by darkness. Before the light faded completely, Aya turned to look at the platform, and what she saw made no sense at all.
Standing on the platform of the Temporal Translation experiment, was the silhouette of a women.