Aaron was already awake and packed for our excursion to resupply the estate by the time I awoke the next morning after a solemn, but otherwise uneventful night's rest.

Before we left, Aaron led me down to an old cellar beneath the house, where I was shown a small armoury of sorts. After having told him and Ben that I lost all of my weapons when I was captured by the combine, Aaron saw fit to equip me with a couple of firearms to get me by. I was given a small sidearm, which fit snugly in my leg holster, and a quaint machine gun with a second grip and a large circular iron sight on the front, which Aaron had called an 'MP5K'.

Aaron had given me a brief handling lesson on my weapons before we would head out, which I was thankful for. The guns I was familiar with, however, used energy cells as ammunition, whereas these Earth weapons used metal bullets housed in external magazines as ammunition. I was hoping I wouldn't have to use these any time soon, but I was a little curious to see how well these would work out in the field.

A short time later, me and Aaron strapped ourselves with large tattered backpacks and set off for the village on the other end of the valley. I was anxious about leaving Ben behind all alone, but I was assured that he kept his own company through the vortessence. I knew nothing about this vague vortigaunt practice, but I was certainly curious about it. I decided that I would learn more about it from him after we made sure that we got that inhibitor off of his body for good.

The village was only about a mile away from the refuge, so the walk was not long. Small avian creatures chipped pleasant songs to each other as the sun rose over the dewy hills, making for an otherwise pleasant stroll if one were not on alert for danger—which I was. I didn't start getting concerned until we made it to the outskirts of our destination, where I saw overt signs of abandonment.

This small farming village only had about forty small buildings in it, huddled close together and surrounded by spacious fields on all sides. The buildings were consistent with the ones I had seen before; primarily white with reddish-tiled roofs. The silence carried up by the breeze was deafening, and I began to suspect that I was about to explore some more ruins.

"Here we are, my biggest―and closest―supply well," Aaron presented, waving an arm out towards the village while we stood behind a rotting old wooden fence.

"It's deserted," I concluded, curling my fingers around one of the fence spokes. "I can't sense anything lurking within the village. At least anything sentient…"

Aaron adjusted the large strap over his shoulder, which was connected to a huge duffle bag-like satchel that was big enough to fit me inside. He looked at me with intrigue, peppered with a little amusement. "Can you tell because of your mind-reading powers?" he asked.

I looked up at the giant man as he wore a tempered expression. "Do you not believe I have them?" I wondered.

"I never said that," Aaron insisted, "I'm just curious to know just how far intuition like that can go. That's all."

I had wondered when Aaron would start asking me about my telepathy ever since I had told him and Ben about it over last night's dinner. I had sensed last night that he was sceptical about that, which was often the case with most I broke my case to. However, I was willing to indulge him a little bit now that we were out here together.

"I can give a demonstration if you'd like," I offered, leaning on the fence. "Anything on your mind?"

Aaron smiled as he accepted the invitation. "I guess you would know, wouldn't you?" he said. "Okay…what number am I thinking of?

"Thirty-eight."

Aaron looked stunned that I answered so quickly and so accurately. "Huh…" he nodded, setting down his massive supply bag. "All right, what's my middle name?"

"Murphy."

Aaron's eyes expectedly bulged. "You're the only living soul to ever know that, and I didn't even tell you."

"Oh, you did—just in another language no one ever realises they're speaking," I said, having a little fun with his befuddlement.

"Touche," Aaron said. He continued to ask a series of trivial questions that he unwittingly kept giving me the answers to for another minute before inevitably conceding. "Well, colour me impressed, Krystal, I won't even attempt to rationalise the kind of stamina it would take to pull a trick like that off," said, removing his cap to wipe his thinning head, though oddly keen on keeping his scalp out of my view.

"It doesn't require any, really," I admitted, pushing off from the fence. "I put as much effort into it as I do breathing. I've been able to do it as long as I can remember."

"Even better," Aaron believed, motioning that we continue moving, which we both did. He still wore an enraptured grin as we came back onto the dirt road. "Oh, what a boy like me would have done if I could read minds back then. School life sure would have been a breeze. Tell me, have you ever cheated on a math test by probing the smarter kid next to you?"

I laughed at his question. That was just one of the many he tried to ask me all at once that managed to get out. "I never went to any school," I admitted. "I was too busy surviving in the wilderness of Fortuna. Besides, I doubt I would have prevailed in education even with telepathy. I could never find my place amongst the children my age, let alone any caretakers."

"Hmm, neithercould I," Aaron said, putting his cap back on his head. "But, none of that matters now. Looks like we're all doing the survival thing—some of us lucky ones, that is."

I didn't follow up with anything, mostly because I was pondering over that faint glimpse of Aaron's past. As if by chance, Aaron then unwittingly addressed the only practical limit to my telepathy. "Say, by any chance, can you read someone's memories?"

"What?"

"You know, things that I remember for instance? Or is all of that a package deal kind of thing that goes without saying?"

I was pleasantly surprised that Aaron was taking so well to my admission of having the ability to access his thoughts on a whim. Perhaps he didn't fully grasp what that meant. However, fortunately for me, and especially for him, my telepathy had its limits.

"No, I cannot read memories," I said. "They are much more solid, and I would imagine take an even greater effort to decipher."

"Solid?" Aaron wondered. "How does that work?"

I was silent for a moment as I tried to think of a good way to explain. I had never really put into words how an ability that came so naturally to me worked. Nevertheless, I think I made a decent analogy. "Well, think of your subconscious thoughts as sand. It is much easier to read any messages in it because of how light and mouldable it is. Memories are like stone. Solid and weathered; the result of the sand fusing over time into something much stronger. If there is any way to read memories, that's well beyond my current capability."

Aaron considered what I said for a moment. "Hmm. Fair enough," he said. "Nice to know that I got a head full of sand and rocks. That actually would explain quite a lot."

I enjoyed Aaron's company. I had only known him for less than a full day and he already felt like an old friend of mine. I suppose one of the few saving graces I gained while being stranded on Earth was friendship, right alongside being alive and having a place to sleep, and I had found the treasure of obtaining all three. Perhaps my luck in being the last living Cerinian was finally seeing me through.

After a few minutes of wandering down the main street of this village, a couple of key details stood out to me.

This place had not been abandoned for too long, and all the former residents had left very quickly. The cobblestone streets were mostly clean save for a few knocked-over large cans and scattered garbage. Many of the windows in the surrounding buildings and houses were broken, and many doors were open.

An evacuation perhaps? This place was in far better condition than the ruins I had seen so far. I asked Aaron if he knew anything, but he just shrugged his broad shoulders.

"Beats me, lassie. This town had remained this way ever since I started squatting at the estate about a month ago," he said. "Wherever the people are now is anybody's guess."

"Do you think they fled?" I wondered. "I don't see many signs of conflict. Swift vacancy, maybe, but not conflict."

"Potentially, but it's hard to be so sure of things," Aaron said, looking up and around at the houses surrounding us. "There are so many ways to disappear out here."

I was a little surprised at how long it took for me to start thinking about the Combine and their tyrannical rule over the planet. Perhaps I needed to get over the shock of my predicament before I began confronting the problems I would likely face while I remained here. A multi-dimensional empire sounded like a particularly horrifying threat with endless implications that unnerved me just as much. I realized that maybe I should try to know more about them and how they came here.

"Do you think the Combine had something to do with this?" I added after a lengthy pause. Aaron had been looking around at some neighbouring houses, wagering whether or not they were worth poking through. I didn't know how much of the village he looted from before I got here.

"I feel like if they did, there would be a lot more evidence of them," he said. "They can leave pretty big trails. I haven't found any remnants that they had a big presence here, and it's best for my bed and breakfast gig that I don't find anything. I would probably have to pack up and leave…"

I watched Aaron walk up to the doorstep of a corner house, peeking through a window that hadn't been smashed. Eager to begin extending my knowledge on this important matter, I decided I would now ask a substantial question that I probably should have asked last night. "How did the Combine come across your planet, Aaron?"

Aaron stepped back from the window, apparently not enthused by what he saw inside. "How?" he asked, turning around to look at me. "Black Mesa is how."

He sounded quite serious. That name felt like it carried an identical weight and significance to the Combine's own. It almost felt cursed; forbidden to speak about. If it made Aaron lose that unending inviting expression of his, I knew its importance had to be great.

"What is…Black Mesa?" I asked.

Aaron nodded his head forward to continue walking, which we both did. "It was a big research facility way, way out west over the continent on the other end of the ocean. I don't have the full details of what happened, hardly anybody does, but some scientists who worked there tampered with things they really shouldn't have, and in doing so opened up a dimensional floodgate that brought hordes of aliens of all shapes and sizes over here, appearing all over the world. We call this the 'Black Mesa incident'."

Aaron began to peek through an open door to another building we stopped at, though he continued to recap his story to me. "Oh, it was a real nightmare that day when it all started. Nobody knew what was going on. My country's military was completely overrun, and so were all the other countries. Everybody fled into cities for protection but that hardly made a difference. Oh yeah, and that's not counting all the portal storms. Those first few days truly were the beginning of the end of the planet Earth we used to know."

Even though Aaron tried to sound accepting of it all, a present sadness lingered in his voice. Learning that all of this happened is one thing, but hearing it from somebody who lived through it made it all the more personal. It was enough to make my ears lower a few degrees as I listened. "Was it this phenomenon that brought the Combine here?"

"Something like that," Aaron said, pulling out of the doorway before moving onto another building, prompting me to follow. "It's not certain whether they were ripped through to our dimension alongside those other monsters or not, but the only thing that mattered was that they showed up. They had guns. They had armies. They had ships. So many ships and they never stopped coming…" he said, shaking his head as if the memory distressed him, and I didn't need telepathy to know that it did.

"Humanity's proper fight with the Combine was pitifully brief; only lasting a meekly seven hours. Us survivors call it the 'seven-hour war'. They nearly wiped all of us out completely if it weren't for those desperate negotiations—set up by Black Mesa's own administrator, no less."

"You don't say," I noted, though I returned to silence once Aaron continued his story.

"Oh yes. Doctor Breen was apparently gifted with enough alien lingo to convince our new 'benefactors' that we were worth sparing and thus initiated the groundwork for Earth's formal surrender. It was a good bargain for Breen in the end because now he governs the planet on the Combine's behalf, and things have been a consistent crumby for a good twenty years since."

I didn't know what to say. What could I say after hearing all of that? My silence was obvious, but Aaron smiled humbly and nudged me on the shoulder in response to that. "Ah, well, it all could still get much worse, I suppose," he considered, trying to bring himself back into good spirits. "At least the air hasn't been turned to poison. We still have most of our oceans, and the skies are still blue. My mama always told me that blue skies were God's way of saying that things would work out somehow in the end. I hold onto that; it's probably what's kept me going this long."

That made me look up at the partly cloudy, but mostly blue sky up above us. A tad bit presumptuous, maybe, but it no less gave me a sliver of comfort too. I hoped his mother was being truthful.

"I'm sure she would have been proud of you having done so," I said, hoping to bring some amount of encouragement, which made Aaron smile at me.

"And wherever your folks are now, I reckon they feel just as much the same for you as we speak."

Not long after, Aaron had found a couple of neighbouring houses he deemed worthy of sifting through, and sift through them we did.

While finding preserved food was a big priority, specifically anything sealed in a can or preserved in jars were clearcut items of value, Aaron also encouraged me to find anything else of potential interest, whether it be any potential weapons to add to the little armoury or anything else that would 'spruce up' the estate a bit more. He specifically advised me to keep a lookout for some good dining plates, as he only had so many bowls to use back at the estate.

We both stuffed what we could in our bags of anything useful and moved on the next few buildings over and repeated until noon rolled around. It was a mindful time for me before that as I had a good many things to ponder over, as well as observe. Aaron's goals were set and put in a greater effort to find food in the pantries and cellars when all was said and done—plus his bag was much larger than mine to accommodate it all.

I did my best to satchel what I could find, but my pursuit soon turned into observation as I ended up spending a greater amount of time studying these residential enclosures than I was trying to pillage from them. Many of these homes were compact but cosy; many either had wood floors or lovely tiled floors. Traces of former habitation were abundant, and it saddened me.

I explored the different rooms and floors within these buildings, which were filled with all kinds of belongings; trappings that I knew held sentimental value to someone some time ago. There were also photographs hung on the walls and on nightstands in numerous places around these homes, though some had their frames broken and laid about on the ground amongst broken glass, likely caused by the abrupt vanishment of the residents.

I spent a good amount of time studying them, as these were my first exposure to what human life on this planet could have looked like. There were large group shots in various locations, pictures of couples, children playing, and even youngsters showing off an impressive wheeled vehicle they were driving with shades covering their eyes. The families I glimpsed in these pictures, and the greater community here as a whole, I had a sickening feeling no longer existed, and had not existed for a long time.

While perusing through these homes I kept thinking about what Aaron had told me about the failing war with the Combine. They had conquered the whole planet in a measly seven hours? I had never heard of such a thing happening before; the entirety of the Cornerian fleet (pre-Aparoid invasion) was nowhere close to substantial enough to conquer even a modest civilised planet within a few days without resistance. Not even Andross and his Venom forces could have hoped for such an effortless conquest.

I didn't know how advanced Earth's defences were in the past, but I still found it immensely difficult to comprehend the implied magnitude of the Combine's invasion force. Even with the fallout of the Black Mesa incident straining global defences, I had an ill inkling that being "ready" for the brunt of the Combine would have made little to no difference in the end. What in all of the universes did I just get lassoed into while answering a simple distress call?

I knew it was only inevitable that I would encounter the Combine again soon so long as I remained stranded on this planet. But until then, at least until I felt I was ready, I had to keep pillaging for my new little commune. I would find my staff again. I had to. The question was where to look, and I hoped it hadn't been whisked away by the wrong hands.

While these thoughts swirled in my weary head, I kept myself busy by stashing whatever I could find in my provided backpack, mainly various small things that I felt were sentimental to the former tenants—things like old stained-glass cups, and paperweights with intricate floral patterns painted being among them. I felt that this was the best I could do to keep these abandoned memories remembered if they were placed around the estate, and they had the bonus of also being lovely decorations.

Towards the latter end of our resupply excursion, I stumbled across an empty room on the first floor of the last house we looked in. My pack was stuffed with miscellaneous contents and could hardly fit much more, yet I was still determined to make the most of this outing. I was surprised to see how empty it was as I looked around inside; there was nothing save for a few wooden chairs stacked on top of each other and a large wooden trunk tucked away in the corner of the room.

I was naturally inclined to peek inside the trunk, and I was startled at what I found inside. It appeared to be filled with old faded toys that had seen plenty of usage, all stuffed away and forgotten. These were rather large and didn't look like they would fit in my pack, but one of them stood out to me, and it was buried near the corner end of the trunk where one of its rusty hinges was.

I gently pried it out of the heap and discovered that it was a sort of stuffed doll, hardly much bigger than my hand. It was made of some kind of dense but soft tan fabric, and some of its stitches were loose and undone. The doll had a little black skirt sewn onto it along with a white flowery shirt. It had messy black hair that had not been combed in ages and wore a sweet little sewn smile with black buttons for eyes.

I just looked at this thing I held in my hands for a decent while, occupied with jumbled feelings as I ran my finger through the doll's messy hair. I felt a few emotions as I held this, mainly remorseful ones as I recalled my earliest childhood memories of being looked out for in an orphanage on Corneria. I remembered a few other orphan girls offering one of their dolls to me so that I could play with them, but I never reciprocated and wished to be alone. I was never really respectful when I declined because I read their thoughts and sensed that they felt sorry for me given how different I was from everyone else. My younger, lost, and alone self, could not understand why I could hear a second set of voices for each person when no one else could.

Looking back at my early life, it was a good thing that I spent so much time in solitude to perfect my emotional discipline and hone my skills in various fields, but I regretted that it came at the cost of a social life. How different would everything been had I grown up within society like everyone else? I likely would not have wound up in another universe for one, but destiny was a tricky thing.

I sighed, continuing to dedicate many minutes to looking over this children's toy, only just now noticing that I had sat down in one of the chairs to do so. I didn't think it was reasonable for me to be fixating on an object like this for as long as I did, but something else soon grabbed my attention, and it wasn't a good thing. It wasn't clear at first, but my ears began to pick up something, twisting and twitching like they do whenever they managed to catch a distant sound in a still environment.

Moments after, the quiet, creaky ambience of the house began to gradually fill up with a low, ominous droning hum that grew louder and louder with each passing second, making the ends of my fur stand up. It was coming somewhere off in the distance outside, and I could feel it coming closer. I stood up and pocketed the doll inside the internal pocket of my jacket; I was about to cautiously make my way to the front door to peek outside before Aaron unravelled the mystery quite loudly.

"Dropship! Dropship!" he shouted in a panic from the upstairs. I tensed and bolted straight up the stairs to rejoin him. He was in a large room with a mouldy bed pushed to the wall. There were two large windows overlooking the street, both of which were smashed open, making the oncoming droning sound much clearer and all the more alarming. Aaron was currently poking his head out the window to see where this "dropship" was coming from, minding the shards of glass.

"Where's it coming in from?" I asked urgently, poking my head out the window too—also minding the glass.

"I can't tell; the acoustics around here are misleading," Aaron grunted, noting the reverberation of the humming bouncing around the deserted streets. "Why are they coming here? There's nothing here!"

"Except us…" I noted, which didn't help to calm Aaron's riled nerves, though he admirably held back quite a lot, which I knew from an impulsive scan of his thoughts. Nevertheless, I took his fear quite seriously and was anticipating a fearsome encounter momentarily.

"Okay, lassie, we'll make it out of this no problem," he reassured me, though I sensed it was just as much for himself. "These guys are likely soldiers; they're quick and ruthless, but they got their blind spots. We'll just have to quickly find a way out the back before they land and—oh no, get down!"

Aaron swiftly dove sideways, pulling me down to the floor with him, and I was completely helpless to resist given how much bigger he was than me. Thankfully he didn't crush me as he rolled away from me to give me literal breathing room. The noise of the oncoming dropship was so prominent and crisp that it almost sounded like it was landing on the other end of the street. Although I trusted Aaron's judgment, my curiosity was ultimately stronger as I risked poking my head up ever so slightly to see outside, making sure to fold my ears back of course.

I saw something large in the sky just beginning to appear above the roofs of the houses on the other end of the village, providing me with my first view of a Combine military transport, and it was like nothing I had ever seen before. It almost looked like a giant airborne creature that was flying without wings, holding a dark grey metal container underneath its belly. It flew with wave-like motions toward the centre of the village, revealing even more of its features as it curved around for a landing.

This did not look like a machine. It had rough skin with dark green and brown patterns dotting its flat backside, looking almost amphibious in origin, yet four large propulsion devices could be seen on the rear ends of its four back limbs like they were fused augmentations. This was the most anomalous thing I had seen in quite a long while, but my eyes were robbed of further gawking once this creature descended beneath the roofs ahead.

Huge clouds of dust were being kicked up into the air by the creature's propulsion devices as some kind of low-pitched siren was emanating from its location. I guessed that to be some kind of signal that the soldiers were unloading from their transport. Aaron seemed to lighten up just a little bit as he lumbered up to the window next to me to steal a gander while it was safe to.

"Ah boy, here they are coming to wreck our shopping spree…" he said, already beginning to think of a plan to outwit the Combine soldiers. I sensed five new entities appearing where the dropship was; something about the carrier they were in seemed to hide their thought patterns from me, much in the same way that the train I was imprisoned in kept me from sensing Aaron's. Perhaps this was a type of alloy that was resistant to my telepathy.

"Do you sense anything, Krystal? How many baddies do we have?" Aaron asked, leaning into my ear.

"Five," I relayed. "But they're strange. I haven't sensed any—"

My chance to elaborate was thwarted once the siren stopped and the dropship shot up above the buildings again, prompting me and Aaron to duck beneath the windows in the flash. I lay as flat as I possibly could as I heard the dropship orient itself in our direction. The sounds of the propulsion systems howled with power as the dropship passed over us, making the whole house tremble as it flew off into the distance elsewhere unknown, becoming quieter and quieter to the point where we knew it was going to keep going further away.

Me and Aaron raised our backs off the floor before coming to a stand again, though our tensions were not eased with the dropship's departure. Five new beings were now here and were currently dispersing into different sections of the village with one coming our way. "One's coming down on our street," I relayed to Aaron. "Be ready."

"You don't gotta tell me…" Aaron said, pulling out his large, silvery-wheeled handgun from his holster, cocking its mechanical hammer back with his thumb. I too had my hand around my sidearm, though it remained holstered as I waited to see what was about to reveal itself in just a few moments.

I could hear the entity's thoughts…but I wasn't sure I could even call them that. The only thing I could hear in my head was one signal, pinging over and over again, which translated to the cerebral equivalent of the thoughts, "clean…clean…clean…clean."

A long, ominous shadow was crawling across the alleyway as this new entity revealed itself onto our street down below, and what I saw frightened me considerably. A slender being that was roughly eight feet tall—just over a foot above Aaron's height—made its way into the clearing. It had long and lanky exposed arms with pale skin and was wearing some kind of heavy sleeveless plum-purple cloak around its body.

It was holding a massive device with a long-barrelled end in its hands, which had a couple of dense cords wiring out from its drum-like underside, linking up to some kind of canister on its back—and even to some kind of spherical protrusion on its belly. Its ovular head was smooth and white with large circular yellow eyes and some kind of circular filter where I guessed that its mouth should have been.

Oblivious to us watching it from above, this creature looked around the vacant street, releasing audible breathing sounds that rattled unsettlingly. "Oh my goodness…" Aaron murmured in disbelief, lowering his weapon apprehensively as he watched the tall slender creature slowly traipse down the street.

"What is that?" I whispered, leaning closer to him.

"That's a cremator," he answered quietly. Nothing about that name suggested anything cuddly, and I had a strong feeling that there was a reason for that.

"What's a cremator…?" I asked, watching the creature with an equal amount of curiosity and trepidation.

"Nothing you see every day," Aaron replied. "They're like creepy Combine janitors. They get deployed to…clean up big messes. But this is strange, cremators are usually dispatched to clean up hazardous environments around urban areas. Why in the world would they send cremators out here?"

"They have such…strange thought patterns…" I said, trying to probe deeper into that creature's mind, but I received nothing but directives that involved 'cleaning' and 'keeping it all clean'.

"I didn't know those freaks could think," Aaron remarked, continuing to watch the creature travel slowly down the street. "Well, the Combine never let these guys out into the sunlight without a good reason, and I don't think I want to stick around long enough to know that reason."

"Neither do I, frankly," I agreed. "What do you suggest we do?"

"Well, cremators don't bother you unless you bother them, so we theoretically could walk past 'em no problem, but I don't wanna risk your bodily matter getting incinerated. Cremators come packed with some serious waste-disposal equipment you don't want to be at the receiving end of."

I took one more glance at the heavy equipment in the cremator's hands and sided with Aaron's sentiment to stay well away from it. "All right," I nodded. "I can sense where its friends are in the village; we shouldn't have a hard time avoiding them."

"True, but we did find that big sewer hatch down in the basement downstairs, right?" Aaron recalled. "Since I don't wanna take a chance of you getting turned to sizzling mush, why don't we slip underground and make a clean and safe getaway out of this deathtrap that way?"