To the east of the repair bays the dock opened up to a view of the planet... whatever the fuck it was, the horrible ball of blue churning death, and the wine-stained, endlessly swirling and sparkling reaches of the universe reaching out to grab her. The colors looked even brighter here than she remembered them. The painted spirals of red, yellow, and green reaching out across the field of blue like grasping fingers stretching painfully across a wound that was always visible in the night sky no matter who looked at it or from where. 

Funny, how she can't pull her eyes away from it. Funny, how for the first time in her life the sky was the least terrible thing she could be watching. It steals her eyes from her and turns her head without consent so that she can see more and more and more of its gaping maw, and instead of a shiver down her spine and the crawling sense of dread, what she feels is more, is almost like a, can only be described as.

A hole.

In the middle.

Of her heart.

She watches. She stands there and she watches, until the whims of gravity spin her away from the planet and there is nothing to see but Poseidon's miracles. She sits down, and she watches. Her tail twitches. She watches. Her legs tingle under the weight of supporting her body as they sit folded up beneath her, and she watches. They turn numb. She watches. They burn. She shifts to let them flop out beside her. And she watches. She watches the colors, and the vast ripples of motion that make space feel so sickeningly alive. She watches the tiny twinkles that hide the wrath of stars burning with the full might of an imperial starship. Do all them smile like jackasses too? Her eye goes wide with wonder and narrows with fury as she traces imagines paths across the stars.

She would have found this one pretty. This one blazed with the heart of adventure, Bella! Over here she'd test her might against the legends of the Azura Empire, before coming to rest by the pools that were hammered into place by Heracles himself. And she'd say it all with the dopiest of smiles on her face, heedless of the danger, confident that every adventure was another holonovel she'd worn down to uselessness in refusal to put it down in favor of her textbooks. Those stupid old rags with their exotic veiled warriors wearing bits of cloth and Starsong Privateers trading jabs between volleys of gunfire where she saved some helpless useless cunt of a princess and got a kiss and a golden apple for her troubles, every single time. 

"She's got no fucking idea how dangerous anything really..."

Redana. Bella's mouth flops open so that she looks almost as stupid as the princess she's grousing about. And she watches. And she sees it. Aphrodite's Rift. The one place more beautiful and more dangerous than the entire rest of the sea. There's no other place her princess would be heading but down the ultimate cliff in pursuit of her useless shitty little girl dreams. The weight of realization sinks in her stomach. Did she swallow rocks with her food this morning? She turns away; suddenly the voidskiff is the less terrible thing to look at. 

"This is stupid this is stupid this is so [i]stupid![/i] I'm gonna die alone in a tube in the middle of nothing and it's all your fucking fault, Redana!"

She scowls as she passes Apollo on her way to the tools. These are familiar. ELF welding clamps and grease smeared spanners, drills and belts for grinding, the long series of delicate little knives and needles that assisted clumsy servitor fingers in performing the delicate operations that sealed all those thick plates of alloy seamlessly against one another. How many nights had she lost in the docks fixing plovers with no instruction manuals to guide her? This was simple, by comparison. Child's play. There wasn't even anyone waiting for her with a whip if they didn't like the job she did. She grabs a visor and sets herself against the skiff. 

She puts the tools down and slinks away. This is not defeat, she swears inside her head as she races through the corridors away from the hateful thing. Her feet ring loudly through the corridors, stomping at first, until she breaks into a run. And then a mad sprint. Her throat feels tight. Her eye stings and waters, but she knows where she's headed. Of course she does. The library will have organized information on the building and repair of personal spacecraft. As stupid of an idea as that was to begin with, the Order of Hermes was stupid enough to make it sound smart somehow. They'd know what the fuck they were doing. And one of them would even have managed to spit it out as something other than a rant or a song or a double-secret code to trick her enemies. 

She passes another window on her way, and all her momentum comes to a crashing halt. Again, the hollowness claws inside of her. Again, the... the [i]ache[/i] takes hold. Because she is alone. No. She's so good at being alone. She's been alone her entire life, hasn't she? The Empress was too far above her to care. The other servitors were too far beneath her to connect. Mynx was a lying, scum sucking whore who couldn't keep her stories straight in her own fucking head, let alone to anything or anybody. And Redana...

Bella howls and smashes her hand through a table. The library comes to life with the sound of splintering wood-analog and the thud-clatter of a hundred different books and tools slumping downward after it to roll whatever ways it pleased the gods to make them go. Her shudders wrack her body with waves of paralyzing spasms. Her breath is a thing of ragged, seething groans. She does not cry. She does [i]not[/i] cry. She is doing this because it is her job.

Yes. She was given a job to do, and it's unfinished. A good girl does what she's told, and finishes every task without complaint. An idle Servitor is a mistreated Servitor. And [i]that[/i] is why this empty, hollow castle full of leisure and safety feels like a dungeon. She has to fix it. Fix it, find the Princess, and drag her back to Tellus. Then she could go back to work. Then everything would be fine. Forever.

So she reads, when she should be connecting power supplies. She flips through schematic after schematic, tossing hundreds of complicated, convoluted sketches and boring, impossible treatises on the forces of physics and known space and shut the fuck up you stupid bastards, blah blah blah. She reads and she learns nothing she didn't already know, because Tellus was the source of all knowledge in the universe and it was only natural that the tasks it would set before her would be equal to anything the backwaters of space could demand. 

"Waste of time. I'll fix it myself."

Hours pass, or maybe days. The skiff lies untouched. She puts the tools down, and slinks away. This is not defeat, she swears inside her head as she limps lamely from shadow to shadow as though missing her [i]Anemoi[/i] and shunning all light for some semblance of its silent embrace. She just can't focus. Every time she moves to try anything the damn window catches her eye and she loses it all staring at space again like some useless fuckwit. She could name six without trying. 

So that's why. That's why she's heading there now. Her feet carry her back to her nest where the projector waits like loyal pet. Chan-barra-chan-barra-chan. She grabs the mannequin with her final dress and drags it to the repair dock to slam angrily near the back of the voidskiff. An irritated huff. A twitch her her tail. She slinks all the way back to bring the movie here. The third trip to wheel the projector. The fourth for her blankets. The fifth for her snacks. And the sixth just because she might have forgotten something important.

She simply needed the distraction. Something so drilled into her brain that she didn't need to pay it any mind, just mindless noise that she could tune out with zero effort. Tuning it out would destroy the rest of the universe with it. Chan-barra-chan. Her third failure is instant. Her fault. She hadn't actually [i]watched[/i] the film in a long time. She just wanted to see it again. Full focus. The second play would go better.

She works. The smell of sparks and melting metal stings her nostrils, but the visor blocks the worst of the light. The sound of alloys screaming smashes full on against the keening of sharp blades bright enough to save the universe, even from itself. This foil needs adjusting, but her hands know what to do. This plating wouldn't hold up if she kicked a rock at it. She tears it off and sears it on again, thicker.

But in the end, she makes precious few changes after all. There is a sense to the design, after all. To be lithe and quick enough to move out of the way of everything and stay alive scratched a very special itch among her instincts. Cutting her way through the sea, a lone dervish amid a storm of brutes, that's how everything always was to begin with. She could trust herself to be delicate and precise. She could trust herself to be perfect, because she knew what waited for her if she wasn't.

She could not trust herself to be strong.

So she works. She spares glances to the smiling god. Even dares to scowl at him before she returns to the infinite job ahead of her. But even work that lasts forever someday has to end. Even she has to admit eventually that a voidskiff is as perfect as she can make it. It's not like she deserves a better tool for her redemption, anyway. Nobody here to beat her, didn't she say that? Don't worry, Your Majesty, the gods have done it for you.

"You're not, not coming. Are you?" She eyes Apollo suspiciously, "No room. Find your own way. Something better. This one's mine."

A voidskiff is not a pleasure vessel. It's barely even a kayak. There's hardly room for anything, once she's crawled inside it. She peels her dress off the mannequin and folds it to make it fit. She grabs the pearl headdress she made to finish it, and sets that on top. No food. No wine. If she took the time to use either, she would die anyway.

Bella turns to the sound of a film reel flapping as it winds down to stillness. In her ears, it always sounds so satisfied with itself. Wasn't it loved? Wasn't it cherished? Wasn't it a wonderful film, if it could convince somebody to play it, over and over and over again? You might call it her best friend. You might call it her lover.

Bella reaches for the projector. Her thumb brushes against the reel with a touch soft enough for the bedroom. Her eye turns glossy with the flood of memories. She plucks it from the machine as carefully as she would hold a kitten. 

She drops it to the floor. Her eye glints with horrible determination as she watches it roll around on the floor, around and around and around on its lip until it runs out of energy and wobbles stupidly to a stop in front of her. It must have been so love. It must have done such a good j--

Bella's boot crunches as it grinds through the case. The film whines pitifully under her heel. She drags it back and forth, back and forth, and then with a final wrench and a stomp, she twists away from its corpse. A lone frame capturing Prion Paula with her sword glinting in the stagelight against the backdrop of a thousand savage opponents flutters in the air behind her, but she doesn't spare it a glance or even so much as a single twitch of her ear before she climbs aboard the skiff.