[center][h1][color=9e0b0f]Ava Lane[/color][/h1][/center]
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Ava walked out of the classroom in a pensive mood.

Unlike one might have thought after being shown the horrific video of the Cruxi laying devastation, that was not the source of Ava's pensive mood. Rather, it was the small discussion at the end regarding the shapeshifting Cruxi assassins.

Ava had never encountered one herself, but she, of course, had heard of them.

And among all of the Cruxi's capabilities, there was none she feared more than the shapeshifting Cruxi assassin.

The reason was, of course, the existence of Luke Chapman, or rather, the existence of the possibility that a Cruxi assassin was impersonating him.

Of course, Ava realised that the possibility was rather low, near non-existent. After all, neither she nor Luke's father, Colonel Chapman were particularly important for the Cruxi to specifically impersonate someone to target them.

But the mere possibility terrified her.

It was easy to say, 'Well, obviously, I would just not believe it's really him. He is probably dead already'. Add to that the idiosyncrasies exhibited by the Cruxi Impersonator, there was no way she, who knew Luke intimately, would be fooled, right?

But just like she was cognisant of the fact that deep down she has the illogical wishful thinking of 'If enough Cruxi were killed, Luke would return' despite knowing full well it was a distorted mental state, and something she tried to suppress.

The human mind was a curious thing, able to believe in things even if they knew it was illogical.

If someone with his face and voice appeared before her, even despite the verbal difficulty, would she simply accept it as a 'miracle' and that his verbal difficulty was simply a 'medical condition due to the harsh condition he endured during capture'?

That terrified Ava because not only would it mean she would endanger the other, but it also felt like she was disrespecting her former lover's memory for accepting a fake that easily.

Ava sighed. She needed to clear her mind.

At times like these, she wished that framewerks were more like a personal vehicle one could operate freely. She had heard of people just driving around the city to clear their minds and to think. But obviously, she could not do that with military-grade equipment like framewerk.

Piloting a framewerk always seemed to calm her down, almost paradoxically, as piloting a framewerk meant she was about to enter combat. She heard it was rather common for those who had high synchronicity with their framewerk like hers, though. She had heard that some even needed to sleep in the framewerk's cockpit to feel safe.

Ava was not that bad, but she did feel calmer inside a framewerk. She had read various theories on how, with the most intriguing, yet bizarre one about how pilots with high synchronicity were reminded of being in the womb while inside a framewerk cockpit, and thus they felt safe.

That one was too far-fetched for Ava, but regardless, it seemed that it was a rather near-universal experience for those with high synchronicity to feel safer inside a framewerk.

Since she could not simply enter Argent Wings and pilot it on a whim, Ava settled on the next best thing, which was to do training simulations.

As she entered the simulation room, however, she saw that there was a bit of a commotion, with an engineer looking exasperatedly at a pilot she was not familiar with.

She did hear that they were possibly getting new members; perhaps this was one of them?

"Did something happen?" Ava asked as he approached the two.

[@AtomicNut]