trans_9 | Pandora [OPEN]

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Pandora [OPEN]

Despite how long Trudy had been awake, she'd never really been tempted to use the sensoriums, not like the rest of the crew did. Of course flight training was there, but creating the worlds the Ohm had blown up? That was too depressing.

But when she stepped in this time, Pandora grew up around her. She stood on a wind-whipped cliff of the Hallelujah Mountains, overlooking the sunset over the jungle. As darkness touched the undergrowth, neon lights began to shine out. Pandora wasn't dark for long.

Trudy settled on the edge of the cliff, closer than most people would be comfortable with the long drop below. Behind her was a Samson helicopter with a tiger painted on the side - Trudy's copter, the way it used to look. It even had the Na'vi war paint on it. One very important thing was different - she wasn't wearing a respirator. Stacy had made the Pandoran air breathable.

She squinted into the sunset and down at the jungle, her thumb running over her cross in thought.

Maybe Kang was right. Maybe it was the end that counted, and you learned from the mistakes along the way.

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Training in the sensoriums was a very handy tool. She not only would summon up Angels now, but she had begun practising against various types of Ohms as well as doing battle simulations against their forces.

Of course, sometimes when she was looking for a sensorium to use, she would find someone else's projection. She usually immediately left, but this place was different. This place was beautiful. She was glad she had left her boots at her room, intending to train without them in case she was caught unaware, but it allowed her feet to feel the strange soil and the alien grass.

Not far away was the sound of a heartbeat- it appeared to be a human woman- and a giant metal craft, though it was rather unlike those 'mech' things that were in the hangar. She must have been the one to create the place. Nanashi walked up beside her, toes curling over the cliff edge. She looked over the edge with a look of peace and awe. Reverently she asked, "Is this your home?"

Trudy glanced back at the voice - of course she hadn't expected to be left on her own. The sensoriums didn't lock, after all.

"Depends on how you define home," she said. "I lived here for a couple years. It's the last planet I ever saw. It was home for a little while."

She had never really thought of Pandora as home, just a place where she was stationed. Of course, the wrinkled photograph she kept in the breast pocket of her plantsuit said something totally different.

Heights didn't bother Kang, since he could easily glide down to safety. It didn't surprise him that Trudy would be completely comfortable with heights, either, being a pilot. She was probably much more used to them than he was.

He paused for a moment, and then made his way over, sitting down on the edge next to her and looking at the planet visible in the sky. He'd never seen anything like it before.

"I'm guessing this is Pandora."

"Yep," Trudy said simply.

The last crescent of the sun was still visible in the sky, but in the next couple of minutes of comfortable silence, it slipped between the horizon and Polyphemus's bulk, and the Pandoran jungle was bathed in twilight.

The jungle's glow was even more pronounced now, and Trudy grinned. "Told you, lights up like a damn Christmas tree."

"...this is beautiful," Kang commented, his gaze shifting down to the foliage. "As far as I knew, there was nothing like this on Krynn."

He had better night vision than humans did, and after his eyes adjusted, he could barely pick out some of the larger shapes moving through the gaps of the leaves. Even the animals glowed.

Luis' inner biology nerd just about screamed when he saw what had to be the planet Pandora. Luminescent flora and all-- it was quite a sight for somebody who could be entertained for hours on end with nothing but a jar full of bugs.

"You weren't kidding when you told me about this place, were you?" he asked, coming up on the cliff behind her. "God damn."

She was quiet for a minute - a few cliff banshees flew past the floating mountain on their way back to the nests for the night, screeching to each other as they passed across the sky.

The light faded from above even as the light grew from below, and Trudy stood up, brushing her hands off on her pants - suddenly, she wasn't in her platsuit anymore, but her Rogue Squadron flight suit. The neon orange seemed to fit right in among the glowing foliage.

"Ever flown in a helicopter?" she asked.

Trudy looked back and tossed him a grin. "Nope, it's even more impressive up close. The animals bioluminesce," she said, watching glowing tracks begin to scribe themselves through the jungles in the wake of wildlife swinging through the trees.

"Sit down. It's like watching a screen saver."

Kang looked up at Trudy, surprised, before standing up as well and glancing over at the helicopter with a grin, "No, just a space shuttle. You offering me a ride?"

"Figured you might want to see some of this shit up close," she said. "It's the only way to really see it. Plus, Quaritch never let us run night operations, so I've never flown over the jungle at night before. It's pretty impressive in the daytime."

She walked over to her chopper, running her fingers across its nose. She had just begun gutting the wiring in the real version of this Samson, in case it was ever needed. But where she would get the replacement wires...

Trudy shook her head and popped open the copilot's door, swinging up into the cockpit and over into the pilot's seat.

"I could talk about bioluminescence for the next three hours if you got me started," Luis warned her, but he did step up to join her on the cliffside. "But don't worry. I'll spare you."

"It's okay, I flew the scientists back and forth across the jungle enough times that I learned to tune out when the words start approaching the five-syllable threshold." The grin still on her face said she was kidding, and she leaned over casually into his space, tucking herself against him. Trudy craved contact more than anything else, and being an officer was a hard, demanding life. It was nice to have at least one person on the ship that she knew wouldn't get complicated about things, but who would be there if she needed him.

They had a good arrangement going on. "Good to see you out of the lab. I thought you were going to work yourself to death in there."

With little to no wind in the city, Goliath has to visit the Sensoriums regularly to keep himself in gliding condition. And this is quite a world to glide over, but right now, the most striking feature of the illusion (to one who has never seen a sunset) is its time of day.

"Here is a sight I have never seen with my own eyes."

"Yeah, pretty stunning."

Trudy, of course, had no idea that Goliath meant the sunset - she was focused on the nightly glow beginning far below her. She'd seen a hundred sunsets. "It's good to see you again," she continued. She hadn't seen him since her podpop, it seemed like. "How have you been keeping yourself?"

He sighed when she leaned against him and wrapped his arm around her. It was nice to take a break from the cold, hard science for a while every so often.

"Sometimes I think I'm getting closer to doing just that," he replied. "Though at least I've been productive lately, instead of my usual process of just staring at test tubes that do nothing all day."

Another sigh. "But enough about my exciting career. What have you been up to?"

"My exciting career," Trudy said, dry. "Running the Squadron ragged, or didn't you notice I've got stripes now?" She plucked at the sleeve of her plantsuit, where she had sewn on a couple stripes to signify her new rank in Starfighter Command. "We just got a shitload more ships, another couple squadrons - seems like every time we think we're settled, something else pops up."

She sighed, relaxing a little. "And then... well, Kawalsky." It was all she really had to say.

"Well, then. I'll be happy to take you up on your offer," Kang smiled eyeing the inside of the helicopter for a moment. The pilot and copilot seats were designed for humans, and looked cramped to him. "...I'm not sure I'll fit in the front, though."

Trudy had already been settling her headset on - even in the front, the wind noise was so bad that you couldn't really hear each other. She handed a spare one to Kang, sparing a second to hope it would fit over his head. "Hop in the gun bay, just make sure you hang on to something. None of the harnesses would probably fit you."

She turned her attention to the instruments and began pushing buttons and flipping switches, running through the startup sequence.

"Oh, right..." Luis made a bit of a face, feeling dumb for even bringing it up. "I'm sorry for your loss."

He patted her on the leg in an attempt to be comforting. "I got what was left of that parasite and we've got a way to get rid of them now. It won't happen to anybody else."

Sometimes Axl wondered why Stacy didn't have little signs on the Sensorium doors, like those VACANT/OCCUPIED things on airplane bathrooms.

But to be fair, you did see some pretty cool stuff when you accidentally walked in on someone else's Relax-y Unwinding Time. It wasn't like he'd never seen a jungle, sure. But the ones back home were all at least halfway mechanized, so before Stacy he'd never seen a jungle where the plants weren't mostly made up of nanomachines.

And there was something about this one that seemed pretty different than the one they'd simulated for Rogue boot camp. More...alive, maybe? (Though "alive" was kind of a weird way to qualify any statement when you were a machine that considered yourself as alive as any human. Ew, why was he thinking about philosophy?)

So he stopped and stared, instead of just making his apologies and heading out to wait until the place was vacant. "Wow. That's a lotta green."

You got used to this kind of thing in wartime, but it never stopped sucking. "I spent a couple days after that getting plastered. I'm pretty well over the mess by now," Trudy said. She'd had help with that of course - Kang had been pretty generous with his ale with everyone.

"You sound like you've made some progress lately," she said. "Good thing too - if you got any more frustrated you would've exploded." She nudged at his knee to let him know she was kidding - sort of. He'd looked really frazzled the last few times she'd stopped by contagion.

"I meant the sunset - but I have never seen this planet either."

There are a couple of clues suggesting that this isn't an Earth jungle. The gas giant in the sky is one of them.

"GLADOS has been making me its plaything. I understand the cause is necessary, but I am still not convinced it needs so many turret guns to test whether or not our souls are in place."

He rustles his wings, shaking off the irritation which comes of being continually shot at, and stands by her side for a moment. He thinks to ask her how she's been, whether she knew Kawalsky or Cassie Lang, the name of this planet, but for the moment is caught up in admiration of the view: the lights flickering on in the foliage, the winged creatures swooping to roost, the clean, wet smell of the wind blowing across the canopy. Good gliding weather.

"This is truly magnificent. Is it the Pandora you spoke of?"

That was a familiar voice - Trudy had heard him over the comms enough times to pair the voice with a face, especially after she'd had him in Basic. "Welcome to Pandora, Axl," she said with an abbreviated sweep of her hand. "Pretty impressive huh?"

"Really impressive." Axl stepped close to the edge of the cliff; he'd never had any issues with heights. "Does it just -- keep going like that over the whole planet? No cities or anything?"

Or did it, maybe he should be saying, but he didn't like the past tense. It wasn't like they all needed yet another reminder of how depressing the situation really was right now.

"Yeah, this is Pandora. Up there in the sky is Polyphemus-" she pointed at the glowing half-planet sitting in Pandora's sky, blue and swirled like Jupiter. It had taken some getting used to when she had just gotten there, but now it was just part of the sky, like the two other moons that also hung in the sky. "-We're orbiting Alpha Centauri A right now. It's a long way from Earth."

A long way. But she shook that thought away.

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Pandora [OPEN]

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