Shephard had left to work at the marina shortly after our meditation session had abruptly ended on such a sour note.
He left our building in quite a fluster, not wanting to be anywhere near me. My heart was in pieces over how badly I affected him. I felt awful about what I had done, and I hardly knew how I did it.
The monsoon of images in my head that were not mine were as debilitating to me as they were to Shephard, which I realised quickly thereafter were his memories. That tiny discharge of green energy I remember flickering around my arm before the rush confirmed to me that I had somehow, accidentally, dabbled in the vortessence whenever I didn't intend to. It is only when I am immersed in it that am I able to access the memories of others. I knew right away that I had to consult with the vortigaunts about this vortal misfire, and most, if not all of them, were hard at work helping restore the Cloud Runner.
After an uneasy walk across town to the warehouse, I was let inside by two armed guards guarding the entryway along Main Street. Seeing my Cloud Runner (now propped up several feet by hydraulic lifts) having much of her outer plating removed was equal parts mortifying and exciting upon walking inside. It was a busy scene as more than a dozen humans were currently working in and around my ship, all of which were the engineers that had been sent over here by the Limpiadores and resident tech consultants.
They had essentially taken up residency here in Red Bay ever since they started working, receiving their own temporary living quarters in one of the buildings down the street. Their first few days on the job had been spent trying to understand the intricacies of this marvel of Cornarian engineering, and the latest report I had was that they had already begun "spit-shining" its internal mechanisms. Doctor Mofuni was acting as the director of operations, personally overseeing the restoration process while simultaneously leading the study of its fusion-based technology.
Meanwhile, the vortigaunts helped by utilising their vitalities to numerous energies in helping to guide the technicians to certain points of interest. It was they who delicately removed the outer palmer plating with their conjured powers, giving everyone greater access to my ship's vital innards. I regretted deeply that I was little to no help in providing insight into how to fix my Cloud Runner or explaining how she flew to all those who were dedicating themselves to fixing her.
I walked towards the Cloud Runner, gazing up at her partially dismantled state. Soft background telepathy always deterred me from becoming absentminded, so I was able to detect Doctor Mofuni wandering obliviously in my direction while speaking into a handheld video recorder. I stepped out of the way as he cruised right past, too absorbed in his log to notice he was about to drift into me.
"All right folks, we are already two hours into the workday―workday number two―and our faithful human and vortigaunt grease monkeys remain hard at work at getting to know this beaut a little more. Look at this thing. I can't get enough of it, and neither will any of you who may be watching this in the future…" Mofuni said with a giddy undertone, getting many shots of the Cloud Runner with his video recorder while its flip-out screen displayed the feedback.
I smiled a little as I watched him begin another lap around the ship as I resumed my path forward. It was great seeing him this active and invested in a project this grand, where he had been mostly toiling with measly tasks like tinkering and maintaining the cloaking pillars outside the town for most of his days. A scientist like himself lived for breakthroughs, and my damaged ship was like a uranium mine to him. While Mofuni had already circled to the other side of my ship given his faster pace, telepathy allowed me to hear him as I trailed along his path.
"As of now, we have still yet to work our way to the 'Cloud Runner's' plasma engine due to tedious but predictable delays in our schedule," Mofuni said, still keeping his camera angled upward. He may have been paying too much attention to it because I could hear some of the humans working on my ship complaining to him, telling him to watch where he was going. They were all ignored.
"While we have yet to officially deduce the direct cause of the engine's malfunction, my hypothesis in the ship's resonance displacement crosscut remains the most likely reason. Discharge from such phenomena has proved to be disruptive to many forms of electronically powered systems, though the effects it may have on a fusion-based power core remains unexplored―by human science, anyway. This baby just might be the informative nugget that we need to know for sure once and for all. All of you future learners who will be watching these feeds can thank our lovely Krystal for unwittingly bringing such a specimen right to our doorstep. Ah, and what perfect timing!"
Mofuni had rounded the nose of my ship to see me about to walk past the tail's propulsion boosters and sprinted to me with startling velocity, leaping over one of the crouched engineers in his wild dash. I was prepared to leap out of his way over the appearance of him about to charge right into me, but he stomped to a stop just barely a foot from me, holding his video recorder up to my face. "Gaze upon all her fuzzy blueness, future scientists! Here we have the piloting operator of this technological benchmark, Krystal! Say hello to the future generations, my dear girl."
I looked at the lens pointed at me and just raised my hand a bit in a nervous wave. "Hello…" I said, smiling as awkwardly as I sounded before Mofuni wrapped his arm around me while holding the camera further out, intending to cram himself in the shot alongside me.
"No baits and switches here, folks, she's a genuine anthropological space vixen from another universe. Look at how cute she is! The clear and observable tangibility! Who wouldn't want to hug the stuffing out of this thing?" Mofuni said, bringing our heads together forcefully as I looked at the camera pleadingly. I was able to sense that Mofuni was doing this primarily to prove that I was real so that his colleagues elsewhere wouldn't think he was crazy. He was crazy about too many things, but at least he could physically prove he didn't make me up. I understood this, but it was a shame that he had to be so obnoxious in doing so.
Before the urge to push him off of me took over, Mofuni relented his hold and let me go, resuming his prowling orbit around my ship to further document their current progress almost like he hadn't even encountered me. I readjusted my diadem after being wrangled by that crazy man, watching him be a general nuisance to those who were working. The engineer that Mofuni leapt up looked at me and shook his head in mutual annoyance.
"Wonder if he can handle the 'tangibility' of a wrench going up his sphincter…" he thought to himself contemptuously, quite impatient with the doctor's antics. Whether he was aware of the fact that I could read minds wasn't the issue to me. I feared that if Mofuni misbehaved too badly he and his peers would get riled up enough to harm him if that engineer's thoughts were of anything to note. I made sure to preen the others' minds just in case while I was in here, and thankfully couldn't sense any shared desire to harm Mofuni. Not at the moment, anyway.
I found a few of the vortigaunts from the sanctum congregating around the other end of the warehouse, conversing with a couple of the engineers while standing around the large cases and crates brought over from their mine that could be seen piled on top of one another that were plastered with warning labels. Devices called mini reactors were said to be kept in those, amongst other Combine equipment said to generate power. All of these things were stolen from the same railway checkpoint that I had the luck of visiting the other day.
There was a gloomy certainty shared amongst all involved―myself included―that the Cloud Runner's plasma engine was irreparably damaged. Removing it was hardly a viable option either, for it was such an integral component of the ship that the ship itself would have to be completely dismembered to remove it and install a new one. Everything from propulsion, weapons, and even the G-Diffusers systems were completely dependent on the plasma engine's output.
While that would have normally landed the Cloud Runner squarely at the feet of the cutter's torch, we had another idea to save it from such a fate. In theory, Combine technology could be used to mend any damages done to the engine, as well as supply an alternate source of power, as many of their utilities run on a process that behaves quite similarly to plasma. Thanks to the joint research conducted on Combine hardware by the remaining Black Mesa science team and the broader resistance over the last twenty Earth years, figuring out how to convert my Arwing into a hybrid burner seemed like a prosperous possibility in the eyes of Gus's engineers. I was no learnt physicist, so I had to trust their judgement given their orientation with technology from other universes. Nothing from mine should have been much harder for them to tackle.
With all of this in mind, it was quite exciting to see that the hardware was already here to experiment with, though perusing the stock was not why I was here. I had hoped to find Ben among the small group that was looking over everything but I couldn't sense him when I walked inside the building. It did not matter, though; we all tended to meld minds whenever we transcend together at the sanctum, so everyone would be on the same page.
One of my vortigaunt friends soon spotted me approaching them, a fellow who I named Edy. He had been daydreaming and held little interest in engaging with those he was amongst, so he jumped at the chance to meet me halfway across the warehouse. "Hmm. The Krystal Randorn…" he growled formally. His raspy voice was deeper than most of his brethren, which landed him a much more thunderous attendance.
"Hello, Edy," I said with a little smile as we joined our hands together in a mutual greeting. Having been amerced in the vortessence numerous times with him and the others, I had very little to hide from him. Edy knew my visual cues to a tee.
"What has troubled you, Krystal? You do not appear in high spirits like you have been these recent days."
"I think I may have messed something up, Edy," I informed, hugging my arms shamefully.
"Tell me…" he rumbled like an ominous beast, though his helpful demeanour overshadowed his otherwise threatening-sounding voice. I told him of the concerning incident that occurred moments after I introduced Shephard to the practice of Krazoa Rhijx, when I seemed to have momentarily delved into the vortessence unintentionally as was shown fragments of Shephard's past. Edy pondered extensively on what I told him.
"This is a most pensive development," he said with one of his fingers tapping his fanged overbite. "Yet, supposing your nature, it hardly comes off as surprising."
"What exactly happened, Edy?" I asked desperately. "I thought it took some extensive preparation to peek into one's past through the vortessence?"
"For those who are newcomers to the climb, yes," Edy said. "Though, it is clear that you are making unwitting advancements in your training. One can peer past the shrouds of division between our realities on a mere whim if experienced, or if one is particularly sensitive to the process. I believe the latter suits you more in this case."
I thought about this for a second, finding little comfort in his words. I would have normally found a sense of accomplishment and excitement knowing that I was growing quickly in the process, but I was hurt by the demonstration that revealed it. The truest thing I valued more than anything was my friendships, and I feared that I had unintentionally endangered one of them.
"Your advancements are not what truly concerns you…" Edy deduced accurately. I sighed with confirmation.
"I have breached Adrian's trust, Edy," I further elaborated. "I saw moments in his past that I was not meant to see, and he knew I saw them. Our minds were temporarily one for a brief second."
"Quite so," Edy agreed, understanding the potential rift that this influxive, and involuntary merging of the minds had inspired.
"I don't want it to happen again, Edy," I pleaded. "I cannot risk subjecting another to such a thing as I unintentionally gave to Adrian. What must I do to control it?"
"Discipline," Edy said like it was obvious. "You are well acquainted with the practice. You will do the same with your maturing vortal hand in time, for time is all that you will ever have."
That answer almost made me fluster, but that wouldn't make it any less true. Whether I liked it or not, I willingly put myself on this path of accessing vortal transcendence. I had been warned of potential discontinuities by my vortigaunt peers after each session we partook together but have never sensed any. Perhaps they arrived a little later for me than most would likely experience them.
I was left a little disheartened by such a brutally straightforward resolution to this issue, but I was nevertheless aware of what I needed to do now. Disciplining my new abilities like I do my current ones was not going to be hard when compared to my current task of repairing the damage I had done to Shephard's trust in me. Being that discipline was on my mind when concerning new abilities of mine, I remembered that I was presently facing another issue that had been creeping up on me during this past week, and finally managed to address it before Edy had a chance to fish it out of me by just reading my muzzle.
"Edy?" I asked him.
"You have more that troubles you?" Edy guessed, blinking his single giant red eye before the three smaller ones above it did also.
"I'm afraid so," I admitted. "I feel I have been undergoing an unsettling trend as of late. I'm finding that I am starting to feel the emotions of others the same way I can read their minds. It is beginning to worry me. Could this too be a byproduct of my immersion in the vortessence?"
Edy pondered on that idea for a moment, squinting all of his eyes. "I cannot say for certain," he confessed. "You know as much as us that our hearts become as one as our minds once we delve. Tell me, Krystal, do you suspect that those you are feeling are also resonating with you at the same time?"
I hadn't quite considered that because I hadn't been paying attention when it happened. Maybe it did; but usually, one's mind echoes what their heart is telling them. I supposed that I would have to look out for that the next time around.
"I cannot say for certain myself," I said, unwittingly reciting what Edy first told me, which made him smile a bit. "This hadn't started until around a week ago, well after I began my journey in the vortessence. I'm open to the possibility that it is correlated somehow."
"Perhaps it is," Edy shrugged. "Or it simply may have nudged something to life inside of you. Another innate trait that had yet to blossom. The vortessence is the nectar of vitality; it awakens many aspects about ourselves we might have never realised otherwise. Perhaps you are correct, and perhaps I am. Have we not arrived at the same conclusion nonetheless?"
Edy gave me one last supportive smile before turning away to rejoin the others, convinced that our conversation did not need to persist past that vague deduction. The vortigaunts' passion for ambiguity could occasionally annoy me a tad, but I would always end up realising their wisdom in the end. Edy's theory was certainly some food for thought.