Fortuna Verto

67-Scorched Earth

Kori gradually stirred awake, taking account of the medical nature of her surroundings. A quick surveillance across all of her surroundings had her spotting Rosa and Velvet talking not far away, she had a pretty good idea what she might have missed.

"Kori! You're up!" "Thanks to you, I'm guessing. Couldn't help but rush out to pick me up, straight out of your own sickbed, then bring me to this side and carry me over to Velvet's battlecruiser." "Well, yes, of course. Mheridz wasn't going to do anything, she just said you would be fine." "Ah, well, she wasn't wrong." "Says the girl who had to recover at medbay." "According to the medical report, I wasn't doing badly at all. I expect the only problems I had when you found me was being excessively tired and in need of repairs to my arm. I also expect you totally ignored such repairs and never noticed." "I uh.. Maybe. Getting you to a safe place was far more important!" "I also expect you had nothing to fight on that side, and only had to resort to holding a defense once you reached this side." "Maybe.. but switching over was Mheridz's idea!" "Well, it wasn't as if she would have seen the situation, she would have been taking care of actually important problems. You should have taken account of the situation and came up to your own decisions." "Oh sure, I'll start being better at planning once you learn to be more creative." "Ah, well.. about that..." Rosa was flustered at this onslaught of critique from Kori, a fluster which started to grow into frustration. Kori herself was still in a daze, taking account once again to the exact terms that had caused her to even lose consciousness.

"I would have you know that I actually did some repairs to support the healing instruments there too. Mheridz had things in order before I left, but leaving you to sleep there any longer would have been outright stupid and inconsiderate. I'm certainly not going to do nothing at all for you when there is an opportunity to actually help you. All things considered, I still don't see it as a dumb decision either. Like Mheridz said, we would have things to clean up here, and we certainly do. I know I was out of commission as you busted your butt out there, but I can darn well show you that I can carry my own weight. Here, watch, you get things in order and I'll go show our enemy a thing or two about what I can do out there, maybe then..." "Shut up, please! You're both getting carried away here, and I'm sorry but I'm getting the worst feelings of deja vou here. This is a really really bad scene we're painting here, and I would really hate to revisit it. In all considerations, I simply couldn't take it. Kori, please, fix this somehow." Rosa stopped her angry rant at Velvet's sudden outburst, of all things. Rosa had not expected Velvet to suddenly get set off so explosively, but the girl was outright pale as a ghost and visibly panicking with uncertainty.

"Ah, I see what you mean. Yeah, Mheridz told me that story.. I can see the similarities here. Rosa being away from the action, I get left shouldering too much of the burden, she shows up eager to make up for the lost opportunities. Yeah, that's exactly the same way Rosa had died." "I.. what?" "Velvet's timeline, that's the basic circumstances behind your death. Because you're always one to go flying off the hook when provoked like that." "I don't think I was alone this time, I got to see the wake of your own work. What in the hells did you unleash?" Kori took the opportunity to go over the details of her efforts while Rosa had been left to recover, leaving Rosa to go pure scarlet. Velvet wasn't even fairing much better, such certainly wasn't something she would have expected Kori to resort to. "So you opened a black hole on the moon and forced it into the temporal plane?" "Uh, yeah, basically. I quite honestly hadn't expected such a dramatic reaction from a spanning rift, but I had to.. how did you put it.. get creative." "Black holes are dangerous and life threatening. That world doesn't even know black holes, so I don't even know what such a disaster of a failing rift would have ensued." "Apparently it wrecked massive destruction in the temporal plane." "Hells, no kidding, such probably is destruction no matter where you put it. We had agreed that there would be no sacrifices, that includes you, by the way!" It was Kori's turn to feel a bit flustered and offended by Rosa's critique, herself determined to be in the right there because she had been as careful as she could have been, given the circumstances.