An uncaring void stared back at Donovan through the open cargo bay door, the entity concealed within its own infinite darkness taunting him. He didn't know why though. Even if the star would eventually 'revive' on the time scale of thousands to millions of years, it was still 'dead'.

"What is it you need to do?"

"Eat the fruit, throw the seed." Donovan looked down at the wooden ellipsoid in his hands. "How do you think I'm supposed to open this?"

"Given the shape, I would suggest cracking it like an egg."

Donovan shrugged, knelt down, and slammed the egg-ish orb against the steel floor. Unsurprisingly the impact made a sound confirming the hollowness of the object, several other objects bouncing around inside like a maraca, however no cracks formed. He hadn't put the entirety of his strength into it, however he doubted the Great Csillacra would have wanted him to be so barbaric with its child.

"Brute force probably isn't the solution." Donovan inspected it again, spinning it between his fingers. It was very 'clean' for a piece of wood, devoid of knots and irregularities in the grain, which spiraled smoothly from one end to the other.

"Would you like me to cut it open?"

"No. I think I know what it wants me to do." When he stopped for a moment to think, the hints to this puzzle were fairly obvious, it just wasn't something he had ever considered needing to do. Donovan took a seat, legs crossed with the egg-orb on his lap. Clearing his mind of all thoughts, he spooled up a thread of Split, sending down the length of his arm before gently feeding it into the shell.

Passing it through the shell was much easier than anticipated, though this really should not have been a surprise considering what he knew of the Great Csillacra's tendencies and the Arboreal Maiden's staff. The issue was that he didn't know what to do after this point. Reasoning and intuition told him he needed to use Split to open the egg, but his relative lack of ability and knowledge on the subject matter obscured the specifics.

It was like a puzzle box of sorts, he knew that there was a way to solve it and could jiggle the mechanisms that would eventually open it, however he had no idea what he was supposed to do with those mechanisms. Did he need to push? Pull? Spin? Shake? It wasn't immediately clear to him, but he felt there was something like a 'hint' in the way the Split moved.

"I should have guessed Split would be involved."

Donovan ignored his compatriot, focusing on what was happening to the strand. It responded to his command, moving forth across the surface, but there was a tugging on it. He didn't know if this was supposed to be a clue or merely a property of wood. Surely there was a reason Sanna used that as the material of his staff as opposed to something like . . . bone? Stone? Or maybe wood was used because it was easier to work with. Nobody seemed to be able to use Split with metal, after all.

He flinched as the string suddenly dissipated, a twang of pain streaking back through his hand and up into his chest. For a moment he assumed his concentration had been broken by this errant train of though, however a moment of reflection suggested that shouldn't be the case. Previous failures never had this pain associated with them.

"At least it has the courtesy to tell me I'm wrong . . ." He immediately recognized this to be a 'buzzer'. If he got the password wrong it would tell him, which at the very least opened the 'brute force' method of code cracking. There were still a ton of 'combinations' though. "Guess I just need to put my head down and get to work."

- - - - -

Spool, lead, insert, wander, snap. Spool, lead, insert, wander, snap. Spool, lead, insert, wander, snap. 

Over and over and over and over he repeated those actions, making minute adjustments every time. He lost count of his attempts about half an hour in, the impact of the steadily growing number on his morale worsening his already poor performance. He had also given up on trying to 'understand' the clues given to him through intuition. If there was any subject Donovan could be described as 'inept' in, Split would be one of them, so he decided to try everything. Hopefully a pattern could be deciphered from the results of his failures, though by this point he still didn't have much to work with and his patience was running thin.

At the moment he knew that Split would only be 'accepted' through one end of the egg, everywhere else would result it a broken strand quite quickly, and that he had approximately three seconds and half of the egg's circumference to whatever it was he needed to. He found this left a surprisingly small number of 'options' he could choose from to solve this puzzle. None of those options seemed to indicate success.

"Am I doing something wrong?" So much effort and yet he didn't have an idea of what his victory condition might be. This victory condition wasn't the end state of the egg being 'open', the end state is merely the desired outcome, the victory condition was to crack the mechanism that would facilitate the end state. 

"What would doing it right look like?"

"I don't know." He couldn't score darts thrown in the dark without turning on the lights, and he didn't have any lights. "Any ideas?"

"Start again. If you've spent this long and haven't figured something out, then you are likely chasing a wild goose." Arc offer his advice in a flatter tone, evidently having become bored watch Donovan try and fail so many times. There wasn't any interesting data it could gather from the interaction either.

"Chasing a wild goose . . ." Donovan hung on those words for a while longer than Arc had expected, his mind rejecting the encroaching idea on the grounds that it would render prior efforts foolish. "What if the solution isn't to . . ."

Donovan concentrated once again, the strain of constantly spooling making it much more difficult than when he first started, and sent it down that same path towards the egg. Slowly, carefully, he put the strand into the outermost portion of the shell, right on the point where all of the grains converged.

And then he let go.

Everything he currently knew about controlling Split suggested this was the wrong way to go about unlocking this, but he had a suspicion his understanding was not complete. Even if he expected it, Donovan was still surprised to find this strand of Split remaining constrained and coherent. Though it had grown a little weaker than when he controlled it directly the strand was in equilibrium, and it was slowly starting to move.

It wasn't too fast, a slight drifting across the surface at first, gradually accelerating along one of the darker fibers in the wood's surface as it reached the other end of egg. Once there it stopped, though it did adjust it's position ever so slightly to be underneath his finger. Now Donovan faced a different problem. What did the egg want him to do with the strand?

Decisive action was the play here given his waning focus so he decided to take the shortest possible solution, that being a return to his core. It took him a moment to gain control of the strand, numbly grappling with his limited ability, and pulled it along as gently as he could. He didn't know what rules were in play regarding the egg's ability to maintain the string on it's end, which in his assessment was quite frail. Fortunately it held up long enough for him to unite it with his core, though he once again ran into a lack of clarity as to what he should be doing with it. 

Clueless as to what a good next step would be, he continued to circulate Split through the strand while monitoring the egg's portion. This was half a game of chicken - seeing who would break first - and an attempt to understand what the hell he was supposed to be doing. Over the course of a few minutes, the thickness of the strand running through the fiber on the egg increased to match Donovan's, so he gradually began to increase it, supposing that maybe there would be a indication of success at a certain level. If there was he didn't reach it, his accumulated fatigue exaggerating a momentary lapse in concentration into the dissolution of the strand.

A bolt of pain immediately struck his chest, climbing up his spine and into his head. His body jerked back while his legs extended outward, laying him out flat on the steel floor before he further recoiled into a sort of bridging position. It was only through grit teeth and the tension of practically every muscle in his body that he avoided screaming in agony.

"Are you alright?" Arc's question almost didn't register through the ringing in his ears. "Do you need an injection?"

"NO!" The urgency his response required precluded him from inhibiting his strained and pained tone. "No, I'm fine. It was just a bit of pain, just a bit of pain."

It certtainly doesn't sound like a bit of pain. Are you certain that you do not require assistance?"

"I'm fine . . . it's already fading." The sharp stabbing had been replaced by a sensation more akin to being hit with a blunt object, still painful but much easier to manage mentally. "How much time did that take?"

"Ten minutes and thirty seconds from when you trailed off to when you recoiled in pain. Did you figure something out?"

"Maybe." Donovan groaned as he sat back up, his abdominal muscles screaming at him as though sore despite their near total lack of exertion recently. "Is it open?"

"No."

"Fuck."

"The surface has changed somewhat, though I have no idea what that might mean." Donovan slowly opened his eyes, squinting at the bright cargo bay as his eyes had been closed for a while. Sure enough, the fiber along which the strand had traveled was now a different color than the rest of the grain, a dull purple-red rather than the deep mahogany of the other dark streaks.

Now that he was taking a good look at the surface of the egg, it should have been obvious that the tugging of the egg on his strand of Split correlated with the direction of the grain and that the dark fibers were far too 'perfect' in their spacing to mean nothing. All of this left a question in his mind though, was he really going to have to this again?

- - - - -

Donovan slipped into a more comfortable set of clothes - sleepwear - as he stepped out of the bathroom. He had been a sweaty mess in the aftermath of the egg, subsequently being told to clean himself after getting the Pegasus out to a less risky orbit. For a brief time he had considered sleeping in the nude, but rejected it on the grounds that he might need to hop in the cockpit. Having his bare ass touch the cockpit seat would make it difficult for him to let other people take the reigns in the future. 

"Good night, Arc."

"Good night, Donovan. Rest well."

"Of course." He placed his tablet on the bedside table before crawling into bed, lazily pulling the covers over himself while rearranging the pillows. Diana wasn't there for him to spoon, so he needed something to hold . . . they smelled like her though. He only registered this smell for a few seconds before his eyes closed and mind shut down.