I don't really have a plot for this story. I don't really have the confidence to do full on science fiction. I just had a grain of an idea for this chapter, so I wrote it out. I may just make this a series of one-shots. I was also afraid I was getting rusty because I hadn't written anything in a long time.

Scar may seem OOC, but he's in character for this fic.

A man with dirty blond hair drops into the seat across the table from me. When I say dirty blond, it's not just the color. His hair has that unwashed, matted look of someone who has just come off a lengthy space voyage and the first place he goes is a bar rather than a shower. He smells like it, too. A group at a nearby table all have the same look to them and the same imbecilic grins on their faces. They are watching the progress of their comrade with interest and with an air of anticipating something that will keep amusing them into next week.

"So, like," the gentleman before me begins as though he's going to share some stunningly pithy anecdote. "So we've been out in space a lot, y'know?" He indicates himself and the group at the other table with his thumb. No. Really? He chuckles to himself, unable to hide his delight at just how much he's going to set me straight. "And we ain't seen Ishvala anywhere. Like, anywhere, y'know?"

I regard him expressionlessly. I've run out of fingers on my hands to count how many times I've been told this in a myriad of variations. I've been told this by much better people than the person across from me, often in tones hinting at pity.

I've stopped trying to come up with answers. I've stopped trying to debate. I know for a fact that if I start trying to explain the finer points of Transcendental Metaphysics that the eyes of the individual in front of me will swiftly glaze over like ice on a piece of meat floating in space. His jaw will slacken like so many other slack-jawed space jockeys before him.

What do these people want from me? Do they want to know if I find comfort in my tenacious devotion to a God who seems to offer only challenges? At one time I got a little mileage from asserting that Ishval is a people, not a place. But when your home is wherever other people allow you to be, that assertion wears thin after a while.

O Creator, have you forsaken us?

I tell myself that Ishvala must have been preparing us for the cataclysm that destroyed our homeworld by causing the planet to slowly fail. We had plenty of time to get off it before the Amestrian Federation blew it up.

Oh, sorry, that wasn't supposed to happen.

Don't ask me how or why I believe what I believe. It is so organically a part of me that words don't exist to describe it. I just do. I know that there is a further purpose for us, something that transcends solid planets and incorporeal space. Ishval is a people, not a place, but also something more. Something I cannot see but I believe in the very depths of my soul.

But if I try to explain that to the leering moron who invited himself to my table, it would be absorbed and subsequently lost to a vacuum deeper and more empty than deepest space. So I skip that part.

I reach across the table and grip a handful of his dirty, matted hair and I slam his head down against the surface of the table. Before this spectacle registers into the brains of the man's companions, I get up, wave my credit chip in front of the reader to pay my tab, ignoring the scowl from the proprietor, and leave.

Once again, I'm going to have to find another place to drink.