A couple of days had passed since the Cloud Runner was found and secured in Red Bay.

I was a keen observer of all the parties involved as they tried to get to understand the alien hardware, both human and vortigaunt alike, and spent many hours trying to help them get acquainted with my ship. However, one particular morning, I was preparing to do something a little different. I was going to perform a little meditational transcendence with a willing participant: Adrian Shephard.

There were a couple of reasons I was doing this. I had managed to score a favour from him after an arm wrestling match we had with each other the day prior and he easily overpowered me without an issue. He would have forced the back of my hand against the table in seconds had I not sent a telepathic yelp to the back of his head, making it sound like someone was crying for his help, opening the window for me to force back his arm while he was distracted, winning the show of strength.

Shephard was not a fool though and knew I had messed with him just now. He found the whole thing rather amusing and agreed to do a favour for me purely because he liked me and my "friskiness". While that was how I persuaded Shephard to involve himself in one of my meditations, that was a greater reason why I opted for it.

While Shephard might have more or less adjusted to his circumstances in a Combine-ruled future, that did not mean he was holding back critical anxiety from the whole ordeal. He was always a little on edge and never fully seemed to trust people while his back was turned. I knew his past terrors and his imprisonment by the G-Man all played major roles in this behaviour, and I wished to alleviate them in perhaps the best way I knew how. This wouldn't have been the first time I meditated with somebody to quell their woes, so I hoped that it would end just as well for Shephard as it did for wounded EarthWalker.

The morning was about halfway done when Shephard came to visit me in my room.

His place of dwelling was in one of the offices on the floor above mine, and I was able to sense him leaving his room on his way to come downstairs to my floor. I had been peacefully grooming my tail in the meantime with my hairbrush, lying on my bed as the sun showed through my window. It was a healthy habit to brush regularly, especially when one was a fox, and we can be prone to shedding considerable amounts of our coats during certain yearly periods the body was set to. Thankfully, my shedding season was not right now at this time, but my tail could get clumpy given how large and plumy it was.

Minutes later, I could sense Shephard at my door and gave it two knocks with his knuckle. "Reporting for duty, ma'am," he announced, loud enough for me to hear through the door.

"You may enter," I replied, suppressing a giggle. My door handle cranked downward as Shephard pushed the door open before stepping inside. He was wearing his bare white undershirt, socks, and large baggy trousers, which took me a second to realise that it was his provided jumpsuit that hadn't been fully covering him. It was a particularly warm day today and there was no working air-conditioning in the building. This made it a little more challenging for me having fur all over my body, which was why I was wearing only a long pair of slightly tattered cargo pants and a bra.

"Good morning, Corporal," I greeted, beaming in a way I only could during sunny mornings. "So wonderful you could join me."

"Yeah, whatever, you lil' cheat," Shephard dismissed, though I could sense he was in good humour. I swung my legs off the bed as Shephard closed the door behind him. I leaned forward on the edge of my bed, taking note of the short whiskers growing on his face and the weightier amounts of hair on his head. The once clean-shaven and tapered marine looked like he was growing out a little bit now that his former job had been rendered null for twenty years.

Shephard looked around my room for a second, apparently finding the tidiness attractive. "So, uh…how's this supposed to work?"

"Oh, it's easy. We just have a seat on the floor first."

Shephard conceded and found himself a spot on the floor between my bed and the door. Though tolerant of these instructions, Shephard was a little incredulous about what I planned to do as I found myself sitting in front of him. "I don't really think I'm the kinda guy for this, Krystal. The whole meditation gig never resonated with me."

"What precisely do you think my conduct will be?" I wondered, crossing my legs as I sat across from him.

"I dunno…pinching your thumbs and fingers together and humming while taking deep breaths and stuff while your back is cramping up?"

I thought about that for a moment. "In some fashion. Yes."

Shephard smirked, both endeared and a little annoyed by what he got roped into. "I'm gonna make a pretty lousy meditation partner, just warning you. Sitting still for so long has never been easy for me."

"Well, perhaps therein lies your problem," I guessed. "Restlessness can be a sign of anxiety. Discontent. The whole point of the meditative process is to help achieve a state of peace―perhaps one you may have never known was possible of reaching."

Although Shephard continued expressing uncertainty about the whole thing, I could sense some consideration coming from him after I said that. It may have been the case that he never quite looked at it that way before. "That still means it's gonna take some work to get there―somewhat undermines the goal of 'relaxing', doesn't it?"

I chuckled a bit. "Nothing of true value is ever easy to obtain, not even inner peace," I said. "Fortunately for you, in this case, you have me to help you get comfy with the process. You will find that reaching inner peace will be easier than previously thought if you follow my lead."

"Who says I need inner peace?" Shephard asked, raising an eyebrow slightly. He didn't seem to take well with whatever subliminal suggestions that I was airing, though I don't believe I was―at least not deliberately. However, I sometimes forget that one doesn't need the senses that I have to decipher hidden meanings, and maybe Shephard might have caught on to an unvoiced reason as to why I was orchestrating this.

Feeling he had a right to know what I was feeling, I exhaled softly through my nostrils as my shoulders and ears lowered a tad. "Adrian," I began, uttering his first name, "I will not pretend I do not sense your existential turmoil. Your will to carry on with your psyche still intact is a tremendous feat on your part, but you can only stave it off for so long. We must not overlook everything that has happened to you in such a short amount of time. I wish to help you disarm the lethality an impending relapse will bring you."

Shephard's hard inquisitive look softened just a little. His default response to something like this, I could sense, would be immediate dismissal when being confronted on what effects certain trauma might have had on him―especially if it were recent. Shephard seemed to understand that maybe I had some authority on issues like this given certain traits that I was known to have. Even still, Shephard remained reclusive on such issues.

"I can handle it myself, Krystal," he said. "I appreciate the concern, but you don't have to worry about it. I've been trained to survive in combat. I can handle this too."

"Getting screamed at by an instructor can only do so much to help you thrive in stress, Corporal," I refuted, assuming that was the method of training the Marines tool. I reached my hand out to caress his, which was resting on his knee. "I want you to see that there are other ways of being resilient."

Shephard was quiet for a moment, briefly glancing down at my hand. His thoughts were doubtful ones, but I also sensed a willingness to listen to my alternative measures for keeping a level head. I got the striking impression just then that he may have been a lifelong pursuer of finding the ideal method of disciplining himself. He ended up taking many cosmic detours, but that path ended up bringing him to me nevertheless. And even now, it looked like he had yet stopped pursuing mastery of himself.

"All right then. Enlighten me," Shephard nodded, giving me the benefit of the doubt.

I smiled as I slid my hand away. "Brilliant," I said, my ears perking up alongside my optimism. I slid my hands over my own knees as I straightened my back a little. "Although, there is perhaps one thing you need to know before we begin, Shephard," I forementioned. "I partake in a…how might you say…interactive sort of meditation?"

"What's that supposed to mean?" Shephard wondered.

"It means we won't spend so much time just sitting around. Though, in truth, we will not technically leave this room. At least our bodies won't."

"You're confusing me, girlie."

"Let me finish," I insisted, giving a patient smile. "While I was on the planet Sauria, to quell wounded and despairing soldiers in their camps, I would help ease their shock and their pain by soothing them with Krazoa Rhijx: an ancient art of meditation that had been largely forgotten by the ground-dwelling tribes―unlike the CloudRunners, who had honoured me as one of their own."

"Krazoa…Rhijix…" Shephard repeated, feeling muddled by this alien language. "Krazoa are those alien ghost things that supposedly brought life to that planet, if I recall?"

I was pleased that he remembered. "Well, they didn't quite 'start' it, but they helped to make it flourish," I nodded. "The point is, when their power is channelled through a worthy vessel, they receive access to their boundless life-restoring capabilities. Not just in the physical, but especially in the mind. I have not tested to see if their power can still be summoned in this universe, so I hope you don't mind becoming a sort of test subject for me to dabble with."

Shephard shrugged, somewhat undecided whether or not he should take what I was doing too seriously. He did not realise what he was truly in for, and especially for what was about to happen to him in a few moments. "Anything for a friend," Shephard smiled, willing to help me anyway.

"Splendid," I replied. "Let us begin, then. Sit up straight; place your arms on your legs and relax your shoulders. You might feel a little discomfort, but it's necessary to keep your mind focused without the risk of dozing off. And make sure to breathe in heavily and slowly. One must never forget to breathe during these activities."

Shephard did as he was instructed, as a good soldier always does. He straightened his posture and relaxed his arms. For somebody who claimed not to care much for body meditation, his posture was spot on.

"Good," I approved. "Now, close your eyes. I'll commence the ritual…"

Shephard did just that. It was clear to me that he was purely humouring me at this point as he awaited my next move. It had been a considerable while since I had done this, so I prayed that I would get it right.

"Tajfcu0… Holouc… Jivvohadw den udt jivvohadw kxod…" I muttered softly, though resoundingly in a melodious rhythm after I too closed my eyes. "Krazoa, kx0 wiatadw xudt, kx0 fiho cawxk, kouh efod xaj neidtj hun udt kawxk…"

The ritual affected both of us, even as I was casting it. I spoke with my soul as I said these words, tapping into the dormant, but still present spread of spiritual essence that the Krozoa had left behind in me. One does not harbour so many Krazoa spirits in oneself and not come away unaffected by them.

My arms rose almost automatically towards Shephard's head as the Krazoa's power resonated with me, entrancing me, and I was seconds away from enlisting Shephard into the Life Givers' stream. "…udt juck akj rcawxk vhem kxei jawxk!"

My palms clamped down on Shephard's temples, and his mind and spirit were immediately expelled from his vessel in the physical plane. And what does one naturally do once they realise that everything that they are is suddenly removed from the body they had been in all of their lives for the very first time? They panic quite radically, and Adrian Shephard was no exception here.

"HOLY HELL!" the resonating beacon generated by his spirit screamed out into the next realm above. "WHAT'S HAPPENING?! THE FUCK IS THIS?! I'M FALLING! FALLING! CAN'T FEEL MY ANYTHING!"

The transition from physical to ethereal was an incredibly disorienting process, especially for a first-timer like Shephard. It took me a moment to readjust myself, but I was quickly able to rise towards his drifting spirit and close my vaporous hands around his. "Hush, Corporal…" I soothed, gently destabilising his spirit from its spiral.

The realm we were in now was dark but peaceful, with only gaseous clouds of ethereal mists swirling calmly around us. Shephard appeared as little more than a vague outline of himself in the physical plane, the same as myself, as bright orbs of light filled the space of his eyes, and were still just as expressive. I held his hands tightly, reassuring him that he was not adrift and was anchored in place. Knowing and feeling these things were just as important in the spiritual world just like it was in the physical.

"Whoa…" Shephard's outline flickered with disbelief as his addled spirit eyes gazed upon me, his echoey voice permeating throughout the realm.

"Hmm. Forgive me for leaving this detail out," my spirit form regretted. "I was afraid it would deter you from participating."

"You're nuts, Krystal," Shephard said. "This is nuts. The whole world is nuts! Everything's nuts! I'm going to die a―!"

"Hush…" I gently commanded once more, caressing the Corporal's vaporous face with my misty hand. "For the moment, where you stand in the world does not matter. You have been removed from it temporarily. Now is a time of reflection. Nothing can hurt you or find you here. It is just you and me. You are safe. Take solace in this…"

My words came out as nothing more than gentle whispers, but they rippled through Shephard like a gong in some sense. It took him a moment to fully realise it, but all the stresses and restrictions his spirit was subjected to while in his body in the physical world were no longer there. This made him more vulnerable to darker forces that sought to manipulate and undermine those in the waking world, but at the same time, he was more receptible to what was good and pure now that worldly distractions had been removed.

Shephard's spirit soon began surrendering to his new set of circumstances, getting comfortable in the tranquil lucidity of a boundless realm without earthly pain and strife. "Oooooohkay…" he droned slightly, his orbed eyes dimming contently. "I suppose…this ain't so bad…"

"You have endured terrors beyond what you had been trained to face, Corporal," I said, considerably more attentive than he was at the moment. "Unfortunately, you still may face many more to come. Let this first transcendent flight serve as a reference for―"

"Hey…is that us down there…?" Shephard blared sleepily, pointing a misty finger down below our equally misty forms. A hazy window to the physical world was indeed visible further below us, depicting an outside image of our bodies in the same positions that we took before removal, though remained alive and largely asleep in that perfect balance between relaxed and strained.

The reverberating qualities of the spirit realm made my short laugh sound deeper than it really was. "It is, and our bodies are waiting patiently for our inevitable return," I said.

"Wait…so like…am I dead right now?" Shephard questioned. With all the earthly cares removed from his severed psyche, he asked this question far more calmly than he would have otherwise.

"Not quite, Corporal," I said, suppressing a ghostly chuckle. "We still have a tether to our bodies. Now, please do quell the questions and focus on relinquishing all focus."

"That makes no sense…" Shephard corrected, clear-minded enough to discern this.

"That's why this practice works so well," I said, not oblivious to the humour in this.

I did not intend to keep Shephard here for too long.

This meditation session was much more of a trial run for both me and him, but we did spend a considerable amount of "time" here, long enough for me to pinpoint the areas of stress that affected his mind. His mind and spirit were in their rawest form here; the wrinkles and scars visible in more ways than several. I did my best to soothe them as tenderly as possible.

Shephard was not that much different from the wounded I helped treat on Sauria, who was more so affected by psychological trauma than physical. Having the planet literally coming apart and nearly having your throat gouged out by General Scales himself doesn't leave one without mental scars in addition to physical ones. My own encounter with him on his flying galleon often got to me as well; I remember vividly how the tyrannical brute dragged me across the deck and how close he came to breaking my neck when he held me aloft by one arm.

Removing myself from my body in sessions like this helped me recover from such events tremendously, and I was pleased to see that it appeared to be working for Shephard as well. While memories were still inaccessible to me even now, I could feel the confusion and the terrors he had experienced when deployed at the time of the Resonance Cascade. His senses and perception of reality had been stressed and warped beyond their limits. The mind often took much longer to heal from scars than the body did, and I made sure that he knew this for the remainder of the time we had spent here—which we were now nearing the tail-end of.

"Many have perished in the chaos, but you have survived," I told him, amid his mind's cleansing of anxieties. "You must not get caught up in what happened. You must not get caught up in what could have happened. And most crucially of all, you mustn't dwell on what may happen. A survivor's journey can be harder than most, but you are still whole, even when it doesn't appear so."

I had been holding his hand throughout much of this session, transferring my own present peace of mind to him with this simple connection. Shephard hardly made an ethereal sound as he listened to my words, and seemed content to do so for the rest of his existence. Unfortunately, so long as our spirits remained tethered to our bodies, our place was not to remain outside of them for long, so the time to return to the world came much sooner than anybody ever would want it to―especially me and the participants I treated.

"Your respite is drawing to a close, Corporal. We must return to our vessels."

"Hmm…?" Shephard's consciousness murmured blearily. "Why…? This is a nice place…"

"I know it is, but we cannot stay. Not forever."

"Figures…" Shephard's outline flickered slightly in disappointment, though he begrudgingly resigned to his changing circumstances, which made our return to the physical world much easier. I did not need to utter a series of words to sling us back into our bodies; the tethers around our essences were thin but still quite strong, almost like a paddleball toy. We would eventually 'fall' back into our bodies after leaving them. But hit the ball hard enough to break the string, well…it is not difficult to imagine what would happen to the body when the soul was no longer tied to it.

The transition was a little tremorous on the disengaged senses as to be expected naturally, but everything that made us 'us' slinked their way back into their worldly forms snuggly, enabling us to open our eyes again for the first time since transcending. I pulled my hands off of Shephard's head and began to shuffle away from him.

Shephard opened his eyes slowly. They were dilated to the max, and he took a long and hearty gasp of air as he reassimilated his body. The bewilderment of the grandest kind was plastered across the marine's face, eventually regaining enough focus to notice me again as he breathed heavily, but serenely.

"Welcome back," I greeted, sensing an overall improvement in his state of mind now that we were back―even if it was but merely marginal. "How do you feel?"

Shephard blinked slowly as he readjusted to the material world, looking at his hands and arms like they were the strangest things in the world. "Holy cow…" he uttered eventually. "That was… Jesus, that was so crazy. I could…see myself. Smoking peyote can't hold a candle to what that just did."

That could have meant a few implicit things, though I did not bother prying his mind to figure it out. It always took me a moment as well to reacquaint myself with my own body after being removed from it after any given length of time. "Did you enjoy it at least?" I eventually asked.

"Yeah. Yeah, you can say that," he answered, still sounding quite spacy from the experience―another common symptom for first-time transcenders. "Maybe there's something more to this meditation business than I had first thought. I could see myself getting used to that for sure."

"It is a lovely feeling, isn't it?" I added. "It's almost like stripping yourself of all the things that are weighing you down. I hoped to have maybe helped to shave a little bit of that dreadful background noise this session."

"Hey, maybe. I might be a bit high at the moment to tell. Am I high? I feel kinda high…"

That goofy look on his face made me smile. I wasn't used to seeing an expression like that on that face. "I suppose it's similar in some way, but it doesn't last too long," I said. I then shuffled just a couple of inches closer to him, intending to ask him something, but Shephard came first and asked my intended question to me instead.

"Say, when could we do this again? I can see a lot of potential in being your meditation buddy now."

The end of my tail began to tap gently on the floor after being confronted with such a wonderful question. "Oh, absolutely," I said, a little excitedly as I put my hand on Shephard's knee almost as a means to contain it. "We could potentially make it a regular occurrence if our semi-casual schedules will it so. If it would be―"

Suddenly, without any warning, my arm began to flicker with tendrils of sporadic green energy, the same arm that had a hand on Shephard, and in a flash my eyes, ears, and mind were assaulted by images and sounds that exploded to life in my mind.

I suddenly found myself looking through the eyes of someone else as they ran across battle-torn desert fields, firing upon grotesque monsters and squads of armed men in black clothing with my weapons, and trying to find my hardest to survive the chaos around me as I survived alone while remaining separated from my fellow soldiers.

The inserted memories were lifelike enough to feel like my own, and they rolled back even farther to when I was training at boot camp as a recruit making my way up the ranks. The memories quickly went back far enough to when I first scurried off the bus along with the other fresh recruits, and they quickly went back even farther than that before I ever enlisted. I eventually found myself in a painfully familiar living space, a house or an apartment if I could recall.

Frighteningly, I found myself in a vicious verbal fight with a young human woman with brown hair in the kitchen. I could not quite make out or remember what we were yelling about, but I was seeing and hearing only red. The conflict grew to such horrendous lengths that I found myself smashing the countertop with my bare hands, snapping the marble edge off and managing to punch a hole in the wall seconds later.

"AH, DAMMIT!" Shephard suddenly shouted, snapping me back to my senses as I held my head in discomfort. I hissed a little from the surprise, but my attention returned to Shephard rather quickly when I noticed that he too was clutching his head in shock with shut eyes and a pained grin. Where once Shephard radiated with post-transcendent euphoria was now seething with immense despair, which pushed me to try and soothe it as I did in our session.

"Adrian… are you all right―?"

I reached out to him and touched his leg again, but fury and even more despair lit his eyes ablaze as he promptly swatted my hand away―and not gently either. "Get the hell away from me!" he demanded before jumping to his feet and marching out through my door after he yanked it open.

Amid the pounding sound of Shephard stomping away down the hall outside, I was left to process what had just happened. While I was still reeling it in, much slower than I wanted, one thing was apparent. Somehow, I had unwittingly resurfaced something in my friend. Something horrible; something that I had accidentally witnessed. It was something I was never meant to see, and he knew I saw it.