Careful Not To Break Reality

Zel slept so peacefully in the infinite slumber as the tides of tiredness constantly rushes up the shore like the morning waves and envelopes him in the gentle light of sleep. He can go on like this forever, and it's a peaceful sleep that he has never really had. Throughout his life, he has always been on the move. Whether ever since his beginning on the ship as a cleaner and worker, then being a thief for the captain that lead to her death, or being a thief for himself, he can never truly rest like this.

Not until now. This is somehow different.

RG just seemed like her, and Zel had a feeling that may be true. The coincidences are just too noticeable, but what was equally noticeable was the exploding ship and the marks it's flying shards left on his body.

He needed to wake up. He needed to know.

Zel compelled himself to withdraw from the sleep, and his eyes shot open. He is currently sleeping on some soft mattress with a thin blanket over him. His body felt boiling to the touch in the cool room and a light near the bedside table lights the room barely. He is currently in a cave of some sort. The room has no doors, and the corridor is quiet. Zel turned on his personal interface to check the date, and he has been out of it for good three days. By the look of things, nothing have gone horribly wrong for the past three days.

He went gingerly back onto his feet and feel the weight of his body pressing down on his feet once more. His lower limbs swells slightly from the hours of prolonged bed riddening, though he can still move about just fine. He cracked his back and did some simple stretches to move his body around before exiting the room and slowly walked outside of the room.

He was thirsty and starving, but first things first, he needed to pee.

The corridor lights up with his movement, and he can confirm that he is indeed in a cave of sorts. And when he looked back at the 'bedroom', it's just a storage room with a multitude of boxes. The bedside table is really just a taller box.

'You are awake at last.' RG's voice came from the opening beyond the end of the corridor, and it sounded like there is an open space there. Is that the 'living room'? Her voice went back to normal before the voice box was damaged in her fight.

'Thank you for taking care of me.' Zel said, 'but I knew this isn't the last time, right?' He walked out of the corridor into the opening, and it's a much bigger cave formation with lots of items and equipment scattered all throughout. This must be RG's lair, as the variety of holograms and maps on the tables indicated the latest theft.

'I do not understand.' RG said.

'I was born and abandoned on a pirate's ship, and someone took care of me. She was a great thief, and I never learned her name...' Zel continued onwards, slowly approaching RG who's suspended by the work bench with wires and her prosthetics disassembled piece by piece, 'to me, she was like a ghost from my past.'

As Zel got ever closer to RG, he can finally assess the amount of damage as well as break down that's occuring. Through the glass segments that continued some of her inner organs, the progress of breakdown is actually a lot worse that he would have imagined back on the Spotlight, as dark rotten edges have already begin to form in the interface of tissues and metal.

RG coughs gently and didn't say anything. She is currently focused on disassembling her right leg as quite a large parts of it is deformed in the fight against Sir Deva. His mass projection abilities have caused quite a lot of unseen damage to her machine parts while her organic parts are just squished quite hard before returning to normal shapes.

Zel went to her side and helps her with the move, and she allows him to do so. Her arms dropped to the sides, and she finally spoke.

'I may have been the one you were looking for, but I am not the Rogue Ghost you might have known then.' RG said with a low voice, 'my current earliest memories dates back to when I first became a cyborg. I was salvaged from a destroyed spaceship and saved by fusing with technology...'

As the rivers of memories began to flow, let's take a trip back to that fateful day in both Zel's and RG's life.

Zel's crew have just barely escaped the grasp of the pursuing forces blowing up their main ship, though the cargo was not transported onto the escape shuttle in time. The captain ordered her to go back for it, and there simply wasn't enough time.

'Target the shuttle and only break it's connections with the main ship.' The commander of the pursuing sh.i.p.s ordered coldly, 'we want the cargo intact, spare some of the forces in pursuit of the shuttle.'

'Yes Sir!' The crew did as instructed and fired on the connection ports between the shuttle and the main ship, shattering the umbilical cord between the two and permanently disfiguring Zel. The shuttle snapped off and flew away with a number of sh.i.p.s in pursuit while the main ship approached the damaged cruiser and dispatched a boarding party.

As the forces walked through the empty and abandoned hall way, there was nothing except for rubbish and thrown away items on the floors. The cruiser itself is quite run down with grease and dirt being a common theme within the pipelines and floors. The boarding party quickly spread out and searched the entire premise, starting from the far end and working towards where the shuttle bay once was. There was as expected no one left on the ship, and the cargo bay is full of empty packing boxes, rations and fuel. The cargo they were looking for seemed to have been moved already.

The guards looked at each other for a moment before reporting back, 'The cargo is not in the cargo bay. It might be on the shuttle. We will resume the search.'

Then as they continued towards the connection between the cruiser and the shuttle, the air became thinner and thin layer of smoke and crackling sound of electricity filled the room. They slid on the masks and continued forwards. This area was fired upon by the pursuing ship and almost completely destroyed in this case. The ship's internal computer immediately kicks in and isolate's the area that's already wide open and prevents any further leaks to the best of its ability. Near the end of the corridor the pair of guards are currently on lied a giant square box.

This looked just like the cargo that was mysteriously taken from their home planet a few days ago. They approached carefully and performed a verification scan, the results confirming their suspicions.

'Ah...' A light growning sound came from the other side of the box, and the two shot to attention, their guns pointing at the owner of the voice. Using the torches attached near the end of their rifles, it became evident that whoever's in front of them is certainly not a threat. It was a human heavily injured by the blast. The fire have cauterized the wound but not before the blast snapped away most of her limbs but one and sends shards of metal deep into various parts of her body. She is bleeding from almost everywhere, and her breath is weak, but she was holding on.

She was still holding onto something. WIthin her barely attached palm, she was holding onto a shiny sphere that reflects the light off the torch.

'Grenade!' One of the guards yelled and kicked off her hand, the barely attached ligaments snapped off from her elbow and rolled three feet onto the ground. The disconnected hand finally releases its grasp, and a metal ball rolled down the hallway until it hit a wall and stops.

The two braced for an proximal explosion, but nothing happned. The faint breathing are the only sound in this area.

'Alert the captain. We have found the cargo and there is also someone that are critically injured who is still on the ship!' The guard reported, and soon the captain's reply came back.

'Bring the cargo and the injured back here. We will question the prisoner once he wakes up.'

'It's a her...Sir. Just like the suspect for the thief.' The other guard corrected, 'but she is in critical condition, and we may need to perform the procedure here if we are to save her life.'

'I will assign a medic to your location.' The captain answered without a moment of hesitation. In the wild regions, the most valuable resources are not food, fuel or currency. It is competent people. If he can save the thief and control her to do his bidding, it would only booster his forces!

The cargo was one of his pride and joy possessions, with the security surrounding it being the top quality systems he could find in the wild regions, and yet the thief still managed to pull the stunt off from right underneath his nose. The only shame is that the get away shuttle was not to the best of quality, and the back up for this poor thief was really sub-par compared to her skills.

Never rob a bank when your getaway car has a flat tire.

The operation continued on for five days, with some of the spare prosthetic parts the big cruiser ship have on standby. When RG finally woke up from the coma, everything changed for her. For one, she can now only recall pieces of her past, when flashes of memories only come in and out of frame in her sleep. She still retained most of her skills, but she couldn't provide any valuable insights as to what she had done to get the cargo out of the security systems in the first place.

This isn't too big an issue for the Captain though, as he simply instructed RG to do the theft again with everything being the same set up. He allowed her the time and resources to plan the theft, and through that, the weakness of the security systems are exposed. The people, are the weak link of this supposedly impenetrable system. It looked like RG performed some expert seduction techniques in her first way around, but it obviously worked less efficiently when she is now mostly cyborg.

Over the next many years, the captain kept RG under his wing as a thief, very much like before. She complied because they not only saved her life, but also owns her life with multiple control mechanisms that linked directly with the machine parts of her body. If she tries to escape, then they can easily end her life then and there.

There are ways to work around it, however, as RG began to formulate a plan to escape the moment she found the multitude of kill mechanisms hidden from within her cybernetics. She started working around her body one part at a time, using the excuses of upgrading her body for better stealing and performing modifications on the run and in the spare time of a stealing job. The captain knew that for RG to work the best, she will need all the freedom and available information in order to formulate the best plan of action. This freedom also gave her time and room to temper with her own body.

One by one, the kill mechanisms are removed from her body and placed into an incubation chamber set at the expected conditions for the sensors in the kill mechanisms. This strenuous work continued for another five years, as she did job after job for the captain, gaining more trust and freedom in the process. Though the freedom here is merely an illusion, as the hand of control still looms over her at every moment.

But with the last kill mechanism in her stomach removed at last, she can finally make a run for it.

But she didn't.

She just knew deep down that she wanted to get out, but she had no idea what she can do once she is out. There are parts of her mind that are blank and directionless, and she always had this unexplained urge to do something, and she simply can't figure out what it was.

There is someone she cared about out there, and she wanted to protect that person. This primal feeling of maternity is what kept her going. However, who this person is is lost from her memories, and this gaping hole inside her heart hurts more than the wounds ever did. That person is Zel, but she just doesn't know.

She continued working free of kill mechanisms for another five years, and that's when the captain met the original pursued crew on another job. They ran away successfully the first time, as it turns out the shuttle is actually a modified fighter ship. It effortlessly tore through the pursuing shuttles and disappeared into the dark sky ten years ago, and now as the attention of the entire local region focuses on this alleged reality altering weapon, they have returned once more.

The pirates and thieves in this region operates with a code of conduct, but the crew that RG and Zel was in seemed to look of themselves as ones above the code, taking advantage of it at every occasion possible and always trying to get away with it using one way or another. Eventually, karma catches up to them.

'What do you say, Captain? Should we deal with the annoying fly first before we compete for the so precious cargo?' The other major forces on the other side of the giant cargo ship hailed the captain that RG is sereving under, 'let's kill the annoying thieves first.'

'We actually have a history with them.' The captain said.

'Oh?'

'Don't worry, it ain't a good one.'

Then both sides opened fire on the sh.i.p.s in the middle, and that spells the end of the crew that Zel was on. That was also the beginning of Zel Frin, the owner of Pocket Domain.

The fight continued after Zel got away with the artifact by latching it onto a nearby ship and hitchhiking away from the battlefield, and the winner was award with an empty high energy container and pieces of a corpse that are torn apart by the escaped artifact. The only one so far to demonstrate consciousness.

'All I knew are what we did, and things changed when I saw this.' RG continued on as she pulled up the bounty she has been referring to. It was heavily annotated, and the data was from the bounty hunter's guild.

The sole survivor from the massacre from Zel's group was spared when he revealed who the person that breached the container was, and a bounty was put on his head as his body was not found despite days of searching.

'Z.' RG murmured downlow when she first saw the name, Z Frin on the board. Then, she formulated her escape, and she was successful, with a bounty on her head too. Four hundred and ninety thousand.

'Z.....Frin...' Zel murmured too as he lets out a long sigh and saw onto the ground.

'That is you, right?' RG said, 'I suspected so, but everything just seemed like too much of a coincidence when we first met. And then you activated your artifact...' she shook her head and reached a hand out to him.

'So you knew?' Zel asked, 'why didn't you say anything?'

'The Spotlight wasn't really the best place to ask such questions.' RG said, her voice low but happy, 'But I am glad fate brought us back together.'

'At least pieces of us.' Zel chuckled and took RG's hand, kissing it gently before helping her with the rest of her assembly, to which she rejected.

She pointed towards her rotting insides, and said, 'I told you that was my last job, didn't I?'

Zel's hands froze midair, and he didn't say anything.

So this is it for Zel and RG? She will be gone when they are finally face to face with nothing else to worry about? When he finally found her once more, reality is going to take her away once again?

His body shook as tears flowed down his cheek. Everything he has done so far was in memory of her. It was RG. She was only doing a temporary job for the crew, and then she met Zel near the end of the job and decided to take him in. For a thief of her talent, there are plenty of crews that will love to have her on board, but she stayed, all because of a kid who could barely clear the pipes.

'Z...I...I don't remember our past...' RG pulled him closer towards her and said, 'Why are you crying?'

'Because I do.' Zel replied, looking straight at her eyes. Now he can truly tell the extent of the breakdown, and it was way worse than what he saw the first time they met, 'Everything I have ever done so far, was thanks to your teachings.'

'I know. You have really made a name for yourself in the past few years.' RG said, 'I was keeping track with my contacts, and you seemed to always get away from the bounty hunters?'

'Five hundred thousand was a big deal then, but now nobody barely pays any attention to me anymore.' Zel shrugged, 'it's not as impressive as it sounds. Plus, no one in the galaxy have a counter for the pocket, until I met the other owners of artifacts.'

'Ah....And you got rusty.'

Zel knew it was true, that relying on the artifact was indeed making his skills as a thief go away.

RG, one of the best thieves ever in the wild region, was still able to pull of one impossible theft after another despite having a third of a human body that are breaking down, and Zel still struggled to steal a single piece of equipment from a god damn school!

'It's okay. Now I remembered...you always pulled that face when you didn't learn a skill back then.' RG chuckled slightly, the lungs bobbing up and down in the container.

They stayed together and talked for another long while, then RG showed Zel the stock pile of credits that she has earned over the past many years, precisely five hundred thousand.

'Take this, Zel, and be free.' RG said as Zel looked on in awe at the stockpile of data card. He looked at it for a long while, and then shook his head.

That was his freedom right there, with that he will no longer have to sneak around the Wild regions!

He nodded solemnly, and hugged RG tight.

They stayed together for another few days as the conditions in her body got worse with time, and finally, she has passed away in her sleep when the rotting spread deep inside her brain. Zel was with her til the very end, and he propped up a small grave for her, placing a shiny metal sphere as the tombstone.

'To the mother I never had...'

Before RG passed away, she left everything to Zel, including the new ship that she swapped with her old cruiser. It is a lot smaller but faster, and he took everything on board before leaving the small uninhabited planet.

He is heading straight to the nearest bounty hunter's junction.