Rosa

When I got back to the guild hall, everyone was waiting nervously in the foyer. Bia spotted me first, and she nudged Ame, who turned to me with a profound expression of relief on her face.

“Rosa!” she blurted, and rushed forward to sweep me up into a full body-to-body hug. “Are you okay? How did they even get you? I felt you die through party sense when I was trying to get to you and there was a lot of fire everywhere. I’m sorry I wasn’t able to protect you. I’m so sorry. I—”

“Ame!” I blurted, covering her mouth with my hand so she’d stop blabbering. “I blew myself up, it’s fine. It lets them get a bit of a win, shows them I’m not immortal, and teaches them not to get closer to me again. I’m okay.”

Rather than reply, I was startled by a kiss pressed directly onto my lips. Oh. That was really nice. I wasn’t used to sudden and extremely welcome affection like this, and it showed in the way I almost immediately melted against her.

How was this me? How was this a situation I was in? I was kissing an incredibly beautiful woman who had actual real life feelings for me. This wasn’t a dream, this wasn’t idle imaginings to pass the time. This was my life. We were in a relationship!

It was a relationship with another trans woman too, which was awesome. Cisgendered people could be extremely scary sometimes, whereas at least with another trans person you know they’d understand some of how your life worked.

There was an element of fear in this relationship, though. Even if I managed to save her from the train, would she stay with me? How would I ever even find someone else if she did? Now that I’d tasted what it was like to be liked by someone, there was no going back. I was addicted, completely addicted. Gosh, love was scary. Except, it wasn’t love! Not yet, at least. How long was acceptable for it to be called love? Wait, did I even love her, or was this just me latching on to the first person to show me kindness in a very long time? Oh no, what if it was me who lost her feelings? What if I—

Tim: Hello Rosa! The shipment of extremely expensive technology has arrived! They want you to sign for it, considering that it is worth a significant amount of money.

I froze, the notification making me realise that I’d been about to dive off a cliff into a spiralling whirlpool of anxiety. Impeccable timing from the delivery company, that was for sure.

Rosa: Okay. Let them know I’ll be right there. Thanks Tim.

“You okay, little ghost?” Ame asked, pulling out of the kiss that I’d managed to ruin with my own anxiety.

I nodded, and pecked her quickly on the lips again to reassure her. “Yeah. Some stuff just arrived at home, so I need to log out to sign for the delivery.”

“A delivery person or bot that’s willing to wait for you to finish snogging your new girlfriend?” Amado asked with a chuckle. “That doesn’t seem realistic.”

“It is when you’re getting a skyship delivered,” I shrugged. To Ame, I said, “I’ll let you know through a message what’s going on, okay? Be back as soon as I can.”

****

Logging out after so many months of immersion was an experience. Everything was in the wrong place on my body. My legs were too long, my eyes were slightly further apart than I was used to from my bodies inside CORA, and my feet had this funny tilt to them because of my work boots. This led to me wobbling out of the house on unsteady legs to sign for the ship and the fabs.

Goddess, and what a ship she was. At thirty metres in length, and with an overall width that was twenty percent less than her oceanborne counterparts, she was a sleek and graceful vessel with the same lines you'd expect from a luxury yacht. I opted for a dark grey colouring when I ordered her, because I didn't expect to be using her for entirely legal purposes and I wanted to be able to hide her at night.

Due to the fact that she was built to fly rather than float, she had two decks, one underneath and one above the main hull of the ship. Both decks could be either open to the air or sealed with sliding windows to allow for pressurisation. The bridge of the ship was at the front of the ship, where large windows provided a panoramic view to the pilot.

Inside the ship was a kitchen, lounge, pod room, master bedroom, three extra cabins, the engine room, storage rooms, a small hot tub, and a hangar for light single person aircraft. Honestly, there was entirely too much room within her hull for me alone. I'd need to rescue Ame to help fill the space out, if not for the burgeoning affection I felt for her.

Yes, brain, I'm aware I'm not fooling anyone as to my motivations. I'm a gay woman catching feelings. It's obvious what drives me.

"What will you name her?" Tim asked, trundling up to me while inhabiting one of the small weeding drones.

Looking over the ship's hull, with its various windows, curving lines, and carefully concealed utility nodes, I hummed in thought. "How about… The Crescent Cottage?"

Tim's robot puppet turned and gave me a long amused stare. "Mistress, the ship is neither a static place of residence with a flowery aesthetic, nor shaped like a crescent."

"The weapon I use when I'm the Witch is called a crescent pendulum, and witches live in cottages," I shot back, poking my tongue out at him. "I don't care that it doesn't make sense."

"I guess it is better than adding to the pile of skyships named Cloud Princess or what have you," he replied grudgingly. "The modern rich and powerful are so creatively bankrupt as a class."

"Please don't tell me you're pining after the aristocracy of old, Tim," I giggled, gently tapping the bot with my foot. "The men who held dinner parties, painted, and ran around the world doing science also owned slaves and butchered entire cultures for the sake of profit."

Tim grunted and began trundling his bot towards the fabs. "I am well aware, my most benevolent owner."

I laughed. "Touché, little bot."

Over the next few hours, Tim and I got to work around the Cottage and the fabs. I was mostly busy moving my more immediately important belongings into the ship, while he got the larger fab into the workshop and the smaller one into the ship along with my pod.

The crucial part in my plans were yet to come, however. To pull all of this off, I was going to need equipment, and it needed to be good. Again, I was relying on Tim and his SAI friends.

Over the past few months, Tim'd been bored out of his mind without me around, so with my encouragement, he turned to study. That was partially why he seemed significantly more mature now, too. Subjectively, he'd aged several years.

As for his chosen area of study, it was engineering. No, not mechanical engineering or structural engineering or any of the other disciplines. Just engineering. As in, all of it.

Thus, after some consultation with May, I asked him to construct an artificial body along the same lines as the one Amelia had inside the game. I also asked him to work on one for me. Just in case. After all, I was at my core, a small swarm of nanites. I wouldn’t be surprised if I could jump to a new body when I figured out how to keep myself coherent without the structure of my brain.

There were a few things I’d need to get, though, in order to speed things along. Not physical materials, mind you. No, we needed research, data, and schematics from highly classified and secure databases.

So once everything was loaded and ready to go, I hopped aboard my new ship and settled into the unfamiliar bed. Tim would handle navigation while we flew to Canada. Meanwhile, I intended to see if I could access the FTLN without a pod.

Now that I’d crossed the digital veil a few times, it was remarkably easy to slip beneath the waves of data and begin my search. The faster I ripped through the security of the top defence contractors and stole their data, the faster I could return to my pod and log back in for a more extended period of time.

QuietValerie

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