SEQUENTIAL ━ Connor // RK800 ✔️

twenty-eight ━ finding the limits

• • •

She didn't believe what was happening to them at first. She simply couldn't bring herself to.

But like most things which have occurred since they started that field trial, life was adamant in changing every limit and boundary she had drawn around how much she can actually take, physically, mentally and emotionally. It turns out, Mia Wilkins is a lot more resilient than she herself would have thought a couple days ago, and that... She wasn't quite sure if she should be proud of it just yet.

Very little was anchored in certainty after seeing for herself the bag of biocomponents had been opened. The passage from that bottom-of-the-freighter dark room to the top of the ship where the control room was became but a blur that acted against all odds to bring her there, locking a strange door while her own lungs tried their best to keep up with her heart turned into some burn trying to escape out of her ribcage. Her temples were drumming with this rapid pulse, ears ringing and taking away one more sense that would have otherwise added too much stress on her mind, but most importantly, she was there.

Though eating would have given her back some strength in the long run, Mia was almost glad she hadn't really dug into that soup, because now, she had nothint her nauseous sensations could force her to puke out. She was left instead to sway her steps away from the door, advancing in a far from straight line to the control panels of the freighter's bridge section integrated in the medium sized room. Completely ignoring the maps on the table to the side and deliberately avoiding the bright light coming off of the bunch monitors broadcasting the security footage from all across the ship, Mia made a beeline for the central desk.

As soon as her hands met the edge of the control panel, she looked up and sought some comfort in the sight of the ocean, or at the very least as much of it as she could see through those dirty windows now that the sun was beginning to set.

Her eyes filled with tears for a reason she couldn't quite grasp from behind the walls of her denial of the situation she's found herself into. Only a couple of rapid blinks later, Mia had to detach her right hand from gripping the edge of the console and drag it across her face instead, stopping to rub that blur out of her eyes.

"Get it together," she commanded herself with a wavering tone, pulling her thoughts into whatever order she could find when all her mind spun around inside her brain was how trapped they actually were — out in the ocean, hours away from their destination, with nothing but freezing cold water around a ship now filled with danger. "Get it together...," she repeated weakly, bowing her head and dropping her right hand back to that cold metal edge.

After a sharp, deep inhale she forced upon herself in order to bring in all that oxygen she required to clear out some of her more fatalistic thoughts, Mia opened her eyes and focused on reading the name tags under all the buttons before her. Or at least the tags that haven't been damaged by time and have turned totally useless in the meantime. Most of the buttons, she discovered, were in that advanced state of usage, making whatever was left a puzzle of abbreviations she simply didn't have the time to begin solving.

Though she hadn't stopped to acknowledge and believe what was happening outside her locked door yet, she was aware of the urgency of the matter, so she cursed under her breath and gave up on doing this the way a worker there would.

Promptly, Mia turned her attention to the one chair in the room, currently left in front of the single computer she could see in there. It was an old thing, from back when monitors were as thick as a box and their screen was curved forward, buzzing through as soon as you switched it on. Those were the only type of monitors that winded up in her father's garage for fixing and she now had the proof that it so seemed those rust buckets were yet to go completely out of style.