Something rose gradually but conspicuously through the atmosphere from depths so dark and dense the air acted like water. An incredible gust of wind accompanied its arc into the sky, which caught and tumbled the pillar boat like it was a mere grain of sand. The boat drifted for seventy or eighty kilometers before Terra could finally use words that meant something.
"Oww. My head is spinning... You okay, Die-san?"
"Well, I'm all right, more or less." Diode was still sloshing around her pit but managed to respond with a flat tone that was likely made possible by her recent endurance training. "I didn't try to fight the wind because we would have taken a huge amount of damage if we got careless, so I let it quietly carry us away. Sorry, that must have been really hard on you."
"What was with that huge gust just now?"
"I think it was an ejector. Could you bring up the radar?"
"An ejector?! Really...?"
Terra adjusted the VUI and shuddered when she realized the noise filling half of the laser screen wasn't a cloud, but a gigantic rocky mass roughly two hundred kilometers in diameter. The thing they were looking at was an ejector, assumed to be a fragment of a celestial body located deep in FBB's atmosphere known as Iron Ball. Pieces of it blew into the skies due to explosions or other disturbances.
"This is the first time I've seen the real deal. It's huge..."
"Same. At least it seems our luck didn't run out here."
"Don't you mean our luck definitely ran out here?"
"If it had run out, we would have been squashed instead. Alright–"
Diode corrected the pillar boat's attitude with a single stroke to the trim slider, evading the rocky mass with a gentle turn. Now that they had a better view of it, they could see the ejector had already lost its upward momentum and was beginning to fall. It sank slowly, with the water and methane clouds it had dragged up from below shrouding it like a veil.
Terra started to feel a little ambitious. "Do you think we'd make the scientists happy if we brought a sample back with us?"
"They'd definitely be happy. But even though it seems like it's moving slowly, it's falling at almost the speed of sound, right? The shock waves just from being near it are dangerous."
"Ah, you're right..."
For a moment, they stopped to take in the rare sight. That turned out to be a mistake. The VUI sounded another warning, and Terra looked over at it.
"It's a bake concentration warning... in an inversion layer?"
The bake was coming at them from above, not below. Terra glanced up and immediately let out a hoarse scream.
"AHHHH, we messed up! It's an ejector storm, Die-san!"
Diode looked up for herself. Clicking her tongue, she quickly fired up the turbine engines.
"Yeah, that's definitely an E-storm. I got careless."
Something resembling a muddy whirlpool had formed in the skies overhead and loomed over the two as they flew the pillar boat at high speed.
An E-storm is a local storm generated by the appearance of an ejector. Ejectors drag up a huge amount of heavier air from the middle and lower atmosphere alongside them. That air wouldn't pose much of a problem if it quietly fell back into the planet like the ejector did. However, since it originated from deep inside the planet, the heat it contains generates a vast 'expansion dome' above the tropopause. Simple expansion wouldn't be much of a problem either, but naturally, hot air cools off and descends. When that happens, the entire air mass condenses and turns into an instant downpour.
The sight they were witnessing overhead was the expansion dome in question. What it was, how it formed, and what it did were all things taught in cruise school. However, because they had been slow to evacuate, they were both about to experience the full reality of one.
"Gwah! Die-san, don't! Nonono! Don't speed towards it!"
As the pillar boat ascended to escape, it met with a dense cloud of bake unlike any of the easily navigated clouds found in the upper atmosphere. The moment they entered the cloud, they were met with a noise like a hail of machine gun fire. The two were attempting to fly through what was essentially abrasion powder, and large areas of the hull were quickly being stained in danger reds on the VUI display.
"Tch... is it impossible to go through this?"
"Forget it, please go back! Hurry!"
It was also too late for that. Once the heavy air reached the cold tropopause at fifty kilometers altitude, an eerie black, muddy rain began to pour. As the last of their ability to see vanished completely, ejector mini-fragments rocks about the size of a house also began raining down around them. It was too dangerous to fly any faster.
Terra began wailing. "I'm sooorryyy! We should have evacuated the moment I heard the 'e' in ejector, but all I did was sit there in awe!"
"If that's all you have to say, then it's my fault, too. That should have been my cue to quickly dump out the catch."
Diode grudgingly reflected on her actions. The pillar boat was loaded with excess catch. It was a large-class besshu, an eight-thousand tonne black-veined squid they caught that morning. Terra's decomp had tightly bound it to make a fish pouch structural substitute like before. It was impossible to get rid of unless she liquified the boat.
"Well, I really don't think throwing away 8000 tonnes would make that much of a difference either way..."
"That's true, the weight's not really an issue. More to the point, how long do you think this storm will last?"
"I thought the normal curriculum taught you about this."
"I meant how long are they in your experience?"
"This is the kind that'll end in an instant. Since this splash was from a rock less than a few hundred kilometers—" Four seconds of quiet passed before Diode finished with an annoyed tone. "I'd say a day at most."
"That's what I thought, too!"
When textbooks discussed the gas giant's weather, an instant often meant "less than a year." It was inevitable that "instant" would take on that meaning when living around a world where so-called "long-lasting storms" continued for around a century. However, while a storm lasting a day might be an instant for a planet, it was an eternity for fishers. Idly expending propellant to wait for favorable winds instead of practicing their trade was never a happy situation.
"What should we do, Die-san? We have a couple of options. We could harden the bow and break through the expansion dome and then fly as a blimp until morning, or we could blow around in a fluttering form until we're out of the storm. We could try other things, too."
"Where do those insane ideas you always get come from?"
"Ehehehe, from my brain."
"All of those use a huge amount of clay though, so I guess we're giving up on fishing."
"There's not much of a choice. Our lives are more important."
"Well, yes, that's true. But..." Diode was deep in thought, frustrated. "It's just not a great look for a Tsunami Search captain's daughter to be outwitted by an E-storm, but I guess we really don't have any other good options...'
"Ah, that's it!"
Diode had casually just tossed those words out, but Terra bit hard. She bent forward in the rear pit and shouted.
"A Tsunami Search! Let's seek shelter in one! Doing that would save on our clay, right?"
"Are you serious?"
"I am serious! Boat, show us nearby Tsunami Search vessels!"
The search results flooded into the VUI, producing a map that illustrated where the various Tsunami Search vessels were drifting around the planet. Two huge circles, which had looked like deformed human eyeballs on the upper half of the striped Fat Beach Ball since ancient times, were displayed in high resolution.
An example of a so-called "long-lasting storm", the Left Eyeball was an immense anticyclone located on the northern fringe of FBB's northern tropical belt. A deeply colored spot that looked like a pimple on the corner of the Eye was the E-storm the two were trapped inside.
Terra shouted with glee when she saw another glowing point right beside the storm.
"There's one!! There! Tsunami Search TE508Q!"
"TE508Q... I've never heard of that boat before."
"That really doesn't matter when it's so incredibly close to us! It's practically a miracle to find shelter like this in the vastness of FBB, so we should absolutely stay there!"
"A Tsunami Search in the Left Eyeball...? Guh."
"What's wrong, Die-san? You're not going to stay out here in this storm, are you? You might as well be a stray cat running around in a landslide."
"You mean that mollusc you showed me the other day? I don't think there's any way to make the pillar boat as soft and melty as one of those... Ok, no, I get it. Let's get going."
Diode reluctantly turned the bow and got the turbine going. She grumbled as she thought through her options, unable to speed up in the hectic winds that were frequently shifting and reversing direction.
"Well, there might be several tens of Tsunami Search vessels, but only the very best are capable of cruising long stints around here, so hopefully..."
It took less than two hours to crush her hopes.
"It's probably not that one. I don't want it to be that one. Why does it line up with that one so well?!"
A thick wall of clouds off to the right suddenly lit up from a source in the clouds to its left. Like a dream, a tower slowly emerged as the clouds around it faded away.
The tower looked like a natural crag carved by the passage of time, standing imposingly against the dark, violent winds. Around it, hollow floats that looked like giant petals spreading radially gave it buoyancy.
Its top section was as complex as a spire for primitive religions to display their icons. It seemed to be the observation mast's lighthouse. The flashing high candela light slowly rotated past a telescope, radar antenna, and communications antenna. While a pole with a fluttering cloth streamer jutting out at an angle from the mast's side was probably an anemoscope, it was incredibly odd to see its streamer painted as a clear imitation of a besshu. Below the pole was a catapult with a small single-wing aircraft neatly parked on it.
Watching where the tower poked through the clouds, it was possible to see the mast's foundation peeking in and out of sight. It had an opaque sheen that resembled obsidian. The foundation was most likely a sintered bake ballast to keep the tower floating upright.
At the center of the tower, along what seemed to be the boundary between its upper and lower floors, three ancient characters that looked like they had been gently written with a brush were written in a row.
孀婦岩
"Hey, pillar boat out there! You're flying like a squid swimming through asphalt. Why don't you come stay at my beach house Sōfu-iwa for half-board? A night's sleep and two meals can be yours for 10,000 tonnes of clay—wait, this ID tag... Kanna?"
After she heard the voice over the radio, Terra turned and stared at her twister. She was covering her face, which was a shade of red Terra had never seen before.
"That's my mother."
Even a petite woman who normally weighed 50kg would get hit hard by the 2.1G gravity in the upper layers of FBB, where she would cross the 100kg mark. Fishers fly pillar boats inside gel-filled pits for that reason, as the fluid's buoyancy allows their bodies to cope with the gravity. The same applies to the facilities stationed in the cloud decks. The use of a living pit is necessary to live in a Tsunami Search, even for a short period.
Terra and Diode got into large, transparent self-propelled bubble pits loaned out to them. Once she did, Terra faintly smelled the original source of the pleasant, bittersweet scent that always hovered around Diode. The two boarded the Tsunami Search from their pillar boat, gliding along in their bubbles.
They paid 10,000 tonnes of clay as agreed, and soon they were automatically brought into the facility's interior. However, one of the two was more than just a guest. Terra had been secretly looking forward to how the drama of a moving mother-daughter reunion after a long separation would play out, at least until the war broke out in Sōfu-iwa's residential sector lounge.
"DIE-OD"
Rock burst into laughter the moment she caught on to the meaning behind the name signed on the temporary shelter request Diode transmitted to the Tsunami Search.
"Ahahah, overdose? As in death from a drug overdose? Hahaha Kanna, you're the best. That's the kind of thing that only sounds cool when you're young. It's adorable."
"Shut up, you freaky shut-in hag! Stop laughing and keep your mouth shut!"
"I also heard you got caught at Fuyo once you left here, but it doesn't seem like you had any problem escaping. You even had the guts to come back with a girlfriend! As expected for a daughter of mine."
"Stoooop! I mean it!" Diode yelled with a bright red face, unable to stand what she was hearing.
Diode's deckwear was a shadow dress with diamond and graphite studs. In front of her stood a black-haired woman with a similarly small stature, her doll-like face laughing wildly. Since they were in different pits, they couldn't touch one another. If they could, though, there was no doubt that parent-child hug would turn into a serious wrestling match instead. Terra could only watch with the cartoonishly vacant, wide-eyed stare that accompanied a cringey memory.
"So that's what... her mother is like... and Die-san is also like..."
A woman standing off to Terra's side asked, "You've never seen Kanna-san act like that?" She was a beauty who seemed to be in her 20s and wore a monotone server's dress. That was Terra's introduction to Linia Xīnxīng, an assistant to Rock who permanently lived and worked in Sōfu-iwa.
Terra nodded. "Yeah. Though every now and then she accidentally uses some slang. But basically, whenever she asks for something it's along the lines of 'She and I would most like...'"
"Rather reserved, isn't she?"
That handful of words felt like a deep stab to Terra's chest.
"Hey, you're Terra-san the decompa, aren't you? Allow me to welcome you," Rock said, turning to greet her. "Could it be that you brought Kanna back here with you on purpose?"
"Not really, it was a complete coincidence. Actually, I should be the one asking that. How were you able to find us...?"
"That was a coincidence too. The Tsunami Search's course is at the mercy of the wind. We're talking golden encounter here. What are the odds a decompa-san washes up here with my Kanna in tow?"
"If anything, it's Die-san who brought me here with her. She's been a huge help to me."
"Hah, really? She's been helpful with you? This asylum case was capable of helping a proper young lady like you?"
"Stop that, youuuuuu stuuuuuuupid haaaag! You're just a damn clam who says she's a rock, Iwana!"
Rock's smooth addition of a barb to the otherwise sociable chat set Diode off. Terra was overwhelmed by the scene and ready to retreat, but asked Rock, "Iwana?"
Rock laughed as her cheeks quickly reddened like a little girl. "That's 'cuz my real name's Iwana Ishidoro Gendo. Long, innit? Iwana means 'rock fish', so just Rock is easier." Giving her daughter mischievous side eye, she added, "My nickname isn't because I have eighth grade syndrome. Though if you really insist on a diagnosis, you could call it thirtieth grade syndrome instead, ahaha."
"Aaargh! You're making my skin crawl!"
"Oh, uhh..." Terra felt a little shy, but still had the determination to step between the two. "Please don't... tease Die-san that much. I think those traits of hers are wonderful, name included."
"Oh?"
Rock blinked, and Terra bowed.
"I introduced myself over the radio, but allow me to do so again. I'm Terra Intercontinental Endeavour. Thank you very much for allowing us to shelter on your ship. I'm very grateful for your help tonight... Umm, I think Ishidoro sounds nice, and it's not all that long, wouldn't you agree?" Terra said, attempting to smooth over the situation.
Rock tilted her head and replied, "Hmm, Intercontinental... between landmasses, right?"
"What?"
"Yeah, if I remember correctly, that's what it means. It's an old Endeavour word," Rock explained. "On rocky planets, a continent is a large landmass that isn't flooded with water. So, I wonder if your family name comes from people who used to travel between continents."
"Really? I had no idea that's what it meant, wow." Genuinely impressed, Terra turned and smiled at Diode. "So that's what it means. Die-san, your mother knows a lot, doesn't she?"
"She... this person... you... Terra-san..." Feeling squeezed by the simultaneous feelings of hostility towards her mother and feelings of something else towards Terra, Diode made fists with both hands and pounded the air a few times before rushing out of the lounge.
"Ah, Die-san!"
Terra had failed in her unconditional support for Diode, but just as she was about to chase after her, Rock stopped her.
"Hold up, Terra-san. Now that we have the chance, why don't we chat for a bit? Don't worry about her, it looks like she went to her room. She'll shove her face in her favorite pillow and scream all night before she calms down."
"How is she going to shove her face into a pillow while she's in a pit?"
"Figure of speech. I always end up teasing her because she's cute. She's cute, isn't she?"
"I agree completely."
"You're an odd one... The rumors have even made it out here to the middle of nowhere, by the way."
Rock took a close look at Terra's figure. Her deckwear for the day was airy, dark green and gold Victorian-style dress. Although she had forgone the traditional corset because it was a hindrance, she had made sure to tie the waist as tight as possible to emphasize her bust and hips.
"Have a seat now."
Rock signaled to Linia and brought Terra to a table. Terra chose something with just the right amount of alcohol from the selection offered in the drinks tube. Linia brought over a basket of sealed food items and offered them to Terra, demonstrating how to bring them into the pit using the fastener pinned to her chest.
"As you can see, this ain't the most convenient place. I've got Linia here with me now, but way back it was just the kid and me. Our only source of entertainment, if you could call it that, was the kayak. We only had a few visitors or temporary residents over the years, to say nothing of the difficulty of 2G life. I raised her in an extreme environment."
Rock's hair had spread like a black fan inside the gel. Her gaze had the same romantic appeal as a legendary jewel from 5000 years ago known as the pearl. She was no doubt older than thirty, but her exact age was impossible to judge from her small stature alone. The contrast between the casual language leaving her mouth and her attractive, elegant face was so excessive that the effect was refreshing.
"I get where she's coming from, though. Ever since she got her first period, small arguments always escalated into blowout fights that ended with her running off. Normally, people in that kind of situation would wonder why it turned out that way, but I want to say–"
"That your family is actually one of the oldest in Gendo, right? You don't happen to be a descendant of that Magiri, do you, Ma'am?"
For the first time, Rock's eyes shot open in surprise. Quietly, she responded, "And whose idea is that? Highhertz?"
"What? Ohhh, no, our Clan Chief doesn't have anything to do with this. It has more to do with the Endeavours' archives. There are a bunch of old documents there, so Die-san has come over a few times to help look through and figure out what's in them."
"Heh. What did you find?"
Terra told her about how the true history of the early Circs was unclear, about the two peculiar people known as Magiri and Eda who were very active in that history, and about the possible role they had in the creation of besshu.
"I'm not sure what it is, exactly. But I was wondering if it could be something to do with your family's heritage, since Magiri was a past Gendo, Die-san is a present Gendo, and the Gendo have even gone so far as to send trackers after her—are you okay, ma'am?!"
In the middle of their conversation, Rock spat out her cocktail and began choking in her pit. Unable to reach her to help, Terra started to panic. Linia promptly fastened her pit to Rock's, but she quickly stepped away once it was clear the situation wasn't serious.
"*Cough, cough* What, trackers?! They came? For you two...?"
"Yes, they came, but I scared them off."
"How?!"
"With a bang. Like this," Terra smiled, making a pump action gesture. Rock, dumbfounded, and Linia, relieved, exchanged glances.
"Is everyone in your clan like that?"
"No, I believe the people in her clan would usually be afraid, too. She's an exception."
"That's just normal for us Endeavours," Terra said. Then she got worried. "Um, are the trackers really that hardcore?"
"It's more like it's hard to make them back off. Even I feel like running away when I argue with them."
Linia cut in, "In your case, Rock-san, your character is 50% to blame for that."
Rock replied, "Wrong-o. It was their fault, 80%."
"If that were true, then Kanna-san's attitude wouldn't resemble yours so closely."
"C'mon, that's 'cuz she grew up on the sidelines hearing me argue with them."
"But I was there too, and you don't see me taking after you."
Linia shut Rock down with a calm look. She was a beauty tall, but not quite Terra's size. Although she seemed difficult to approach, she acted rather close with Rock. At any rate, there was no way a normal person would willingly come to work in a place like this.
So, Terra decided to try asking. "Forgive my asking, but just what kind of person is Linia-san...?"
"Ah, she's Kanna's polar opposite. She moved to Fuyo from the Xīnxīng clan but came here with me after she got disillusioned with life there. She likes it here. Linia doesn't bite, she's just not very social," Rock explained. Linia only nodded, not adding anything in particular.
If that's how she is, I guess her own circumstances must be complicated, too...
"Anyway, back to what we were talking about." Rock ran her fingers through her hair for quite a while, then suddenly gave Terra a serious look. "Terra-san, thank you." She put both hands on the table separating their pits.
"Huh? For what?"
"For how much you seem to love that difficult girl. She's very important to me too, so I just knew she would leave someday from how she was always out in the kayak."
"By kayak, you mean that? The small aircraft attached to the tower?" Terra asked, pointing above her. Rock nodded.
"That's right."
"Ah, was that how Die-san got her veteran-level 9500 hours of flight time...?"
"Yeah, and since she was a brat, she spent hours every day out flying around in it. Sometimes she'd be out for more than three days."
"Isn't that dangerous?!"
"Do you hear yourself?" Rock chuckled, sticking up her white, nicely shaped nose. "Tell me, Terra-san, has she ever listened when you tell her to stop doing something dangerous?"
"...She hasn't." Terra shook her head with a sour look on her face. "She's the same with me, just gives me a 'What?' and that's the end of it."
"Well, we really didn't ignore the danger of it. The kayak is guaranteed to surface. Its structure is full of hollow microspherules. It wouldn't sink even if you smashed it down to a centimeter. Completely opposite problem, actually, it gets stuck on the tropopause and often just doesn't come down. When the inevitable happened, she never cried, even when she had to be rescued with the comms aircraft. She'd spend days out there alone, totally calm and living off pemmican. The moment she saw me she'd give me a dirty look, like I had finally captured her in a chase."
Terra could imagine the sight easily. Night at 50,000 meters a dark, purple-red sky spreading over a slice of the planet as base ships crawled overhead. Diode as a kid, fitting comfortably into the kayak's tiny seat—I wonder if back then she couldn't print deck dresses as elaborate as the ones she does now?—and gliding through the boundless skies, thinking of how she'd travel beyond them as she calculated an orbit's full-element.
Or maybe it was the complete opposite. Maybe she watched over what she could catch from high in the sky, her field of view extending to FBB's cloudy horizons 3000 km away. Admiring all of it: besshu schools here, changing clouds there.
And the little girl who wanted to do those things—as she thought that, Terra suddenly realized she probably completely misunderstood what Diode had been thinking.
"Ma'am! Could it be that Die-san didn't stay on the Tsunami Search but went–"
Terra bent forward to bring herself closer to Rock. She had already drunk quite a bit, and whispered with a faint, devious smile on her elegant face.
"You're a good catch. You becoming Kanna's wife would be wasted on her. Why don't you come live here together with me?"
Terra headed towards Diode's room. The girl invited her inside and apologized with an embarrassed look.
"I'm so, sooooo sorry for screaming like that in front of you. I don't mean to, but I get full of rage whenever I'm in front of my mother. I just can't control myself for some reason."
"I understand, I've argued with my mother too. There are some things we just can't stand, right? I've also done what you'd call 'going off somewhere' because of it."
"Yeah, even though it would be better if the parents went off somewhere inste–" Diode quickly cut her sentence short by covering her mouth like she was trying to slap a bug on a wall. "Um."
"Yes?"
"I'm sorry..."
"It's okay. I was watching because I felt a little jealous. Of course there are going to be things about your mother you just can't excuse, so I'm not going to force you to love her."
"But, but still, I'm soooorry!!" Diode glued herself to her pit's walls, pounding her hands against the transparent divider. Terra, who had been intently watching the girl, immediately burst into laughter.
"It's fine, you don't need to apologize so much. Like I said before, it's been six years already. I've still got my aunt, too."
"Okay..."
"I was a little surprised though. Aren't you always using that fragrance your mother gave you?"
"Yes, that was the story I gave, but I never thought I'd end up coming back to the place of the person in question." Diode turned her head away again before continuing, "It's a long story, but back when I was at the girls' school, there was a phase where incense and perfume was popular as hell. I kind of went overboard back then, and the backlash made me settle on the scent of my old home."
"Wow, everything I've heard about your past so far has been fascinating."
Diode covered her face with a hand and staggered to a corner of the room, where she curled up.
"I really can't with this place... nothing good ever happens here..."
"I'm sorry, I wasn't trying to tease you."
For all of Diode's pride, it was easily damaged. She was very particular about her own territory. Trying to be mindful of Diode, Terra said, "I'll go out for a bit, then. Your mother asked if I'd like to come up with her, so..."
"What? Up?"
"Mhm, since an e-storm is a pretty unique phenomenon."
The Tsunami Search's equipment automatically gathers and transmits meteorological information to the Circs, but its staff usually have the special privilege of witnessing certain phenomena. After they finished their chat in the lounge, Rock told Terra that they'd be watching the storm in the meteorological observatory and departed, so Terra had come here.
"I've been wondering how the storm will progress, so I'm gonna go have a look. I heard there's a room up there, too–"
"You can't." Diode banned Terra from going with zero hesitation, cutting off the conversation off at the root.
"Huh? But–"
"No, you can't go. Uhh, the meteorological observatory is full of control panels for strange and complex measurement devices, and I worry about what might happen to the body of a complete novice like you, Terra-san. Leave it for those two and stay here, please."
Diode again firmly barred Terra from going there. The way she said it was incredibly unnatural, but since Diode must have had a reason for going as far as to say that kind of thing, Terra accepted it.
"Got it. I'll take your word, then—but is it okay if I get out of the pit? There seems to be some furniture in here..."
Terra took another look around the room. There weren't any windows, just a damp-looking desk, a few shelves, and what seemed like a wall-mounted bed for a 0G environment. Although Diode's old bedroom looked like a ruin, it still felt more like a home than a pit.
"No, stay in. That stuff is in here because you need it for normal life when the room is completely filled with gel. We're just using living pits right now because we're guests. You don't want to breathe the same gel as someone you just met, do you?"
"Ahh, I see..."
Terra felt like the mystery of how Diode had lived inside a pit for the dozen odd years from infancy to her departure had been totally solved.
Night came.
The light turned off, and Terra heard a howling noise like a small and big flute being blown at the same time, ebbing and flowing like waves. Terra wondered if it was the sound of the wind swirling around the rocky tower. There could be no doubt the sound was coming from the environment, since the Tsunami Search was unique in its ability to stay afloat without the use of power. Her pillar boat's engine was much louder, so Terra had never heard that sound while she was aboard it.
As Terra focused on the noise, she noticed the room swayed gently every six seconds. She could feel the gel pulse inside the pit. It seemed like the huge, tower-shaped Tsunami Search was swaying the wind.
Terra hadn't experienced the rocking motion in a pillar boat either, but she found it unexpectedly comfortable.
"This is making me sleepy..." Terra whispered.
The immediate response was, "Really? Aren't you scared?"
"...Of what?"
"Of falling."
"You mean down there?"
"Yes," came Diode's voice from the dark. "I'm scared of falling down there."
"Ahh. If that's what you're wondering, then yes, I'm scared too. Today was really scary. If that ejector had hit us head-on, then we wouldn't be here right now."
"When I was a kid, I used to watch the trash being dumped out of the dust chute through the glass floor," Diode whispered. "Since the central opening here is a bottomless pit, I used to watch every time the trash was dumped, and how it would spin and spin until it shrank and was swallowed by the black and blue haze. I watched it fall like that more times than I can count... So, what do you think happens to it after that?"
"It gets crushed by the pressure, doesn't it?"
"Right, that's what they teach you. I did hear about somebody falling down there when I was around three years old. But then how would it feel? If a person fell down there, then what? Would their legs and arms get smashed? Would they choke? Would their eyeballs pop? Would their stomach, heart, and lungs–"
"D-Die-san, stop. I know what you mean, but that's a bit..."
Diode laughed faintly at Terra's easy defeat. "Are you bad with that kind of thing? Sorry."
"I imagined it..."
"Hah, of course you did. I think I get it, though. I've been scared of falling for as long as I've been here that's why I ran away."
Terra turned towards the dark and resolved to ask what she had tried to ask when she was talking to Rock. She placed a hand on the wall where she was about to direct her voice.
"Die-san, you want to leave this planet, don't you?"
Diode's breath caught. "How–?"
"For a lot of reasons, like how you request the full-element. I thought maybe it was to practice flying the boat on planets other than FBB or something."
"..."
"You left here, got caught and were forced to enroll in a girls' school at Fuyo, escaped from it, and even though you came to my place, you're not satisfied just being there, are you? You eventually want to go somewhere much further away, don't you?"
Terra felt a load off after she said that. She gently pushed her hand against the pit's resin wall, and she felt it grow a little warm another hand was touching it from the other side.
"This might sound weird coming from me, but I don't think you're afraid of things the way everyone else is," Diode said, which Terra found curious. "I mean, you're an insane decompa. You can think of hundreds or even thousands of flight forms. I always, always feel like crying when I see you make one shape after another. Like, how are you so capable of coming up with that many?"
"Isn't that only because you're incredibly skilled at piloting–"
"And skill is that is. I'm saying what you have is not just skill. I mean, if you're already able to think up all of those forms just from life here, then what are you going to be able to come up with in the vastness of outer space?" Terra's breath caught. Diode quietly continued. "A hundred million, a trillion, or maybe more than that but despite that, our lot was here with the Circs, isolated in a small corner of space. Being raised in the Tsunami Search was even more isolating..."
"I understand what your mother struggled with now," Terra said.
"So you get her, do you?" In a resigned tone, Diode continued, "If it hadn't been here, it would have been at Fuyo instead. I would have been raised there as a cute, fragile bird in a cage that would never even dream of going outside. So I'll put some effort into... not resenting that h—I mean, my mother."
"Speaking of which, could I ask you something?"
"Sure."
"Back at Fuyo, do they ever bring up the idea of leaving the planet? Like, when you were in the girls' school...?"
Diode went silent. Terra could tell she was vehemently shaking her head.
"They don't even think they need to mention it. To them, Fat Beach Ball is the paradise the Circs discovered on the edge of space. The Gendos' slogan is that we reclaimed paradise with pride, and that will sustain us into the future."
"Ahh, so if you ever said you wanted to leave, they'd treat you like a failure or an underdog?"
"I don't know who this Edna Dock person is, but yes What do the Endeavours think about escaping?"
"It rarely comes up," Terra replied in a tone that conveyed her bitter smile. "They believe this is a good place to live, so they don't feel the need to go anywhere else."
"But what do you think?" There was a small hesitation before Diode asked, and it cued Terra into noticing something was off.
Why did Diode flee her mother's ship during the Bow Awow?
"Die-san, this is just a hypothetical, but..." Terra realized she didn't want to ask what she was about to, but it was too late to stop herself. "If you could board the Dàxúnniǎo, would you?"
Diode was quiet.
It wasn't the response Terra expected, and she took Diode's silence as the answer. Not wanting to hear anything else, Terra curled up in the gel and did her best to sleep.
The fierce howl of the wind and gentle sway continued for 90 minutes until the trackers finally arrived.