Upon Vestia: Chapter Twenty-Five

First topic message reminder :

Starr shrugged and looked out the window again. "I don't know. I just want things to be normal."

Ethan nodded. "You can learn a lot from fiction that way," he agreed. He looked at the pile of books Sawna had found, and looked pleased. "Well, we've found more books than I ever expected today."

Sawna chuckled softly and nodded, looking to the pile then around the room "Yes, seems they mostly just put them on the closest shelf."

"Lazy book thieves. I should put these back in the library before I lose them again," Ethan said. "And your coffee shop is completely unattended right now, isn't it? You should get back before someone steals the chocolate syrup."

Sawna chuckled and motioned to the cameras "Remember, I asked Vestia to let me know if anyone came, so the cafe is safe, but you should go ahead and get those back to the library and checked in. Maybe get a list of the missing ones so we know what to look for." She suggested

Ethan nodded. "Good idea." He headed for the door, then paused uncertainly, "Thanks." That word always sounded so strange when he said it, but he looked like he was grateful.

Sawna dipped her head a little "Youre welcome, my friend."

Friend. It was always so weird when people used that word to refer to him. It meant nice things, right? But Ethan was never quite sure if they meant it or if it was just a pleasantry. He was pretty sure he wasn't really friend material. Hmm.
Oh well.
Ethan nodded uncertainly, and headed back to the library to shelve his books.

Sawna smiled and headed to her room to make sure she didn't have any of the books herself and just forgot about them.

Kay smiled at Asher and started the movie again.

Asher would watch the rest of the movie with Kay, and do his best to not think about mortality and lifespan differences. It would all be fine. Somehow, it would all be fine.

(Shall we timeskip to when Daniel wakes up, maybe?)

(unless anyone has anything they wanna do)

(go for it)

MAY 14, 2790

Vestia probably would have left the Beach Planet sooner, but with Daniel on board, she couldn't rush away yet. The android needed to defrag, and couldn't be interrupted, so there he sat in Mourn's room, motionless.

After two days though, it looked like the long process of reshuffling all his memories was just about to finish.

~~
Ethan was reveling in the freedom of being back on Vestia. On the Celestial Tiger, he'd constantly felt claustrophobic and like he could be cornered at any moment. Vestia was completely different though, and to the extent that he could ever be described as happy, he seemed pretty darn happy to be here.

~~
Asher was, as always, trying to keep himself busy and not worry about things. More legalese, more computer projects, and his usual bouncing between being social, and avoiding people like the plague. Being here on the Beach Planet, with Scott and an android who was close to death's door, was seriously stressful.

~~
Ellie worked on the treehouse sometimes, but didn't make the mistake of expending all her energy on it again. She also spent a lot of time on the beach, enjoying the water and the shops.

~~
The five androids Mourn had bought were all settling in. They'd found a variety of jobs, and were helping out with everything from cooking, to cleaning, to electrical repairs. All except Naomi seemed to have excellent work ethics.
They were worried about Daniel, but they knew Mourn could work miracles with code, so they tried not to worry too much.

Sawna helped as she could to find the rest of the library books, even when they had to look in bedrooms. They did manage to find them all eventually and return them to the library.
~~~
Starr and Helen helped with the playroom as they each could, though more of the work fell to Helen than Starr. The aunt was pretty protective of the queen and didn't want her to wear herself out even when she felt more like herself again.

Mourn slept near Daniel, in case he woke up. Not that he'd hear him, but it made him feel better to be there to "guard" the robot.

When he was awake he worked on the code change and demanded a lot of room service.

---

Kay was worried too, he wanted to get underway and away from this place. Away from Scott who already knew too much in his opinion.

He made some last minute orders of medical supplies, just in case and allowed himself to be dragged out to the beach by Matt a couple of times, even though he wasn't nearly as enthusiastic about the ocean as his brother was.

He also continued to keep up Matt's physio appointments in the hope Matt would soon be strong enough to at least take a few steps. His recovery mattered for so many reasons and yes, Kay was aware he was fixating on it probably for entirely selfish reasons. he wanted his daughter back, and getting matt better would hasten that process.

---

Matt was trying hard to hide his low mood. He let Ellie drag him about on all manner of trips but it was pretty difficult to get down onto the beach in a chair. Still, he did get to the water a few times and lay in the surf, actually content for a while.

The heat of the day bothered him, the sunlight hurt his eyes but he still went out, sunglasses and a hat on, putting on his usual show of being fine and happy and for the most part, succeeding at keeping up the facade.

---

Armin wasn't comfortable leaving the ship, he was scared of this planet and the winding alleyways and dark corners of the town. He made numerous excuses for not leaving the ship and stuck close to Starr, completely and utterly devoted to helping her in any way he could and keeping her company until she got sick of him and told him to go away.

---

Amity worked in the cafe and played cards with Hewitt and talked merrily to anyone who spoke to him.

The Professor meanwhile had tried to rope a few of the androids into playing chess with him and doing odd jobs. He had no problem ordering androids around, he did after all, rather enjoy bossing others about.

---

(How long until hatching now?)
Starr liked having Armin around, chatting with him to distract herself from not being allowed to help as much as she wanted.

~~~
Sawna still tried to heal Matt a little at a time to get him better too, though he had to come to her, she didn't want to force her healing on him.

The numbers on Mourn's monitor steadily grew smaller, occasionally jumping up or progressing slowly, but gradually making their way to zero.

Finally a new message appeared on the monitor:

> Defragmentation process complete! Your computer can now boot safely.

~~
Tobias and Bess seemed to especially enjoy spending time with Hewitt, playing chess. He was entertaining!

When Ethan found out, he reacted a bit oddly. He huffed, pretended to not care, and spent more time with Sawna.

(Hatching is still about 2 months away, I think)

Hewitt found Ethan's totally not jealousy extremely entertaining and seemed to make a genuine effort to make sure he KNEW that he was spending time with other androids. He'd pop into the library to get books every so often too, threatening to write annotations in them again purely to irritate Ethan. He really did seem to enjoy riling people up over petty things.

---

Mourn noticed the monitor and clapped his hands together eagerly, pressing a few keys to tell the android software to reboot.

Now he got to see if this had worked.

---

Armin helped with the playground as much as he could, he couldn't do that much physical labour without hurting his leg so he stuck mostly to weaving ropes and such. With that done he turned his attention to plushies as suggested by Ellie, sitting with Starr as he carefully sewed together abstract dragon shapes in beautiful shimmering fabric. It was a good use for offcuts now that the little borrower wasn't about to make tiny dresses for.

Starr smiled at the little plushies Armin was making, they were cute and the fabric was pretty. She was sure the kids would like them

Hewitt's antics did annoy Ethan. He threatened to ban Hewitt from the library sometimes. He made sure Hewitt didn't know that he still had those annotated books stored safely in his room, and sometimes looked at them. That would have made things way worse.

~~
Daniel booted up slowly, much more slowly than a seven series android would. Eventually he did boot up, looking around the room in confusion. He stayed seated on the ground for now, trying to make sense of his surroundings. "Hello?"

Mourn waved. "You alive!" He grinned. "You remember who are?"

Daniel watched Mourn. "My index isn't working," he said. "I remember booting up and talking to someone forty-eight years ago, but everything more recent isn't indexed." He looked worried. "Who are you? You aren't my owner, you don't match the owner file."

Mourn made a face. "You sit, I see if can fix." He started tapping away at the computer still linked up to Daniel, finding the index files and seeing why they'd disconnected. "Boss man not here, I engineer. I fix. " He navigated to the index section/

Daniel stayed where he was and watched. This wasn't at all like the first time he'd booted up. He had no memories to help him, but this time he knew he should, and that scared him. "Why can't I remember?" He asked.

The index was trying to direct Daniel to relevant memories, but it couldn't seem to locate them. The timestamp and the physical location didn't match what the index said, and it didn't know how to reconcile that, so it just kept throwing out error messages.

Mourn frowned and worked at trying to find a solution, he didn't respond to Daniel as he couldn't hear what he was saying to him. He was absolutely focused on the computer screen and telling the stupid code to stop being dumb and read these indexes. He might have to manually repair each one, eugh, that was going to be time consuming.

Hmm. Daniel wondered why Mourn wasn't noticing him talk. Could he be deaf?

Mourn might be able to write some sort of tool to scan through Daniel's files, find the matching timestamps, and update their locations in the index. Manually changing the information would be a pretty agonizing process, there was a lot of data to go through, so it would probably be a good idea to use a program to automate the process.

Mourn tapped away, trying to fully diagnose the problem and work out a solution.
He'd have to get the system to reassign all those locations, which even with a tool was going to take a while.
Still, a small program didn't take long to code and with that done he tried to get it to run through the index. Stupid android code, so ineffecient and so stupid in so many ways.