Upon returning to her new abode, she spied foreign thoughts in a neighboring room. Only for as long as it took to identify whom they belonged to, which wasn’t long because it was Amy. End of the corridor on the left, checks out. Going by what she could gather about the walking good mood dispenser from their brief encounter today, her mind was most likely going to be filled with pixie whistles and rainbow vomiting unicorns, so Avelyn counted herself lucky. She could’ve had Navi or Nero for neighbors. ‘Sweet’ kind of broken and ‘Holy shit’ kind of broken. Yes, this was a victory.

Avelyn left her room and crossed the corridor to Amy’s door, about to press the ‘request entry’ button when she heard voices from the inside. The beauty of youth was that you had time to spare. Returning back to her room, Avelyn lay back down, scrolling through the textbooks she had saved on her Omni-tool. Physics, history, economy… Arithmetic. She groaned. Last opened eight months ago, at the insistence of an elderly Rau’ve. The sacrifices one must make to further their understanding of their powers. Resigned to the following minutes being spent struggling to make heads or tails of the equations, she hoped whoever was currently in Amy’s room would hurry up. Wasn’t math supposed to have numbers, not letters? Not two minutes later, she fell asleep like a log.

[hr]
The wake-up call was a harsh mixture of people’s thoughts and her Omni-tool whining through her right ear straight into her mind, indicating a received message. [i]’Eh… ”Bridge. Now!” Did I oversleep?’[/i]. The message fortunately identified the entire crew as recipients. Sealing her brain from others, she was up in what she humbly considered to be record time, though she had the unfair advantage of sleeping in her boots… and everything else. Ah, they were going into a fight, who cares she looked like she got chewed up by a cow. At least orders were simple enough. For now. No plan ever survives first contact with the enemy, much less multiple things being done at the same time. [color=#FF2E00]“Of course I remember.”[/color] Avelyn tapped her temple with her finger in response to Natasha, wearing a cocky smirk, [color=#FF2E00]“The day I forget something, worry.”[/color]

As she was leaving the bridge, Avelyn walked past Amy, briefly touching her hand as she did to share a memory of something she thought of on the way to the bridge, unaware of Amy’s exceptional willpower. Should she get through, the shared memory itself would fade away faster than a regular human could even notice it, but it would linger long enough for Amy’s brain to remember the words it contained, effectively passing a message. [i][color=#FF2E00]“Meant to pop in yesterday and warn you that a mind reader has taken up residence in the room across the hall from yours. Normally I keep people out but I can’t do that when I’m trying to sleep, so don’t think private thoughts in the evening, and if you get fucked up nightmares I’d like to know in advance.”[/color][/i] The memory of Avelyn’s voice cautioned in a friendly manner, [i][color=#FF2E00]“Or just say ‘Nay.’ and I’ll grab a blanket and set up in the cargo bay. Wouldn’t be the first time.”[/color][/i]

Reaching the cargo bay, Avelyn put on some music and started going through the bay in a lawnmower pattern, hurling suitable pieces of material near one of the airlocks. [i]’Hope Kherol didn’t pull some super precise gravimetric or magic detectors out of his arse in the year we were gone, else we might as well be sending him our coordinates.’[/i]. In a few minutes, she assembled a decent pile of scrap metal, empty boxes and even included the forklift, saving it for the last decoy. [i]’Eh, screw it, Most of what it can do, I can do better.’[/i]. She divided the pile into six smaller ones, seven including the forklift, and banded them together with a roll of steel straps she found. The preparations took a few minutes, and in about fifteen seconds, she had the first bundle of scrap glowing faint red, indicating about 500 degrees celsius, more or less the temperature of starship radiators under normal running conditions. [color=#FF2E00]“Cap, on the slim chance comms are up and you can hear this, I’ve got seven decoys and one primed to go. Expect about fifteen seconds to get one up to temp, so if you want them all going at once, now would be the time to tell me.”[/color] She was reasonably certain she could keep reheating them once they were all glowing hot if the need arose, and in the meantime busied herself with familiarizing herself with the airlock controls and trying to straighten out her jacket a little.