frankenstein complex ⇢ q.k | ✔

twenty-two

After breakfast, you took an extra plate of food to Kun's office, knocking firmly on the closed door. When ZEN had called him for mess earlier, the AI reported back that he didn't want to be disturbed, and the other six of you were to eat without him.

"Come in," he voiced from within.

You entered, spotting him at the desk, hunched over reports with his head in his hand. "You missed breakfast."

"Sorry, I... thinking."

"About?" You asked, setting his food on the only empty space left on his desk.

"Thanks," he took the food, moving some of his papers aside to put the plate front and center. "The Skippers that were on Aegeum, we still don't know why they were there."

"No, we don't. Or why they were flying Fishead pods instead of their own ships."

"I was just re-reading this report from the Admiral from before we entered slipspace. List of attacks by Fishead pirates, but there's something off about a couple of them. The targets are all UHN scientific sites, not military vessels or trade outposts, and nothing was pillaged. Just destroyed."

You tilted your head thoughtfully. "Were any K'llor spotted at the attacks, or only their ships?"

"It looks like they were just aerial attacks, cannon blasts. So, it would seem like a no."

"If we assume those weren't K'llor pirates driving those pods, and were actually more Skippers looking to destroy rather than plunder..."

"Two's a coincidence, three's a pattern."

You sat in one of the chairs across his desk from him. "Were the facilities bigger or smaller than Aegeum?"

"Sites, not facilities," Kun corrected you. "They weren't even buildings. One was an unmanned space station in orbit around a meteor. It was ran entirely by robots, so it had no defenses. The other was a solar farm installed on a colony planet. They left the city it was powering alone."

"So... no fatalities?"

"None. The city that lost their solar farm is running on back-up generators until the solar farm gets fixed."

"If they were all Skippers, and they were all together, then what the hell happened on Aegeum?"

"They may not be in the same faction. Or they may have been at some point, then diverged only recently because of... differing ideals."

"Still makes you wonder how they ended up at Aegeum in the first place..." You mused. "Doesn't seem like a place you could really stumble upon accidentally."

"No, not particularly." Kun shook his head. After a beat of silence of him pushing food around on his plate and you silently mulling over what you had just been talking about, he changed the subject, "You got up early this morning."

"Yeah, I was thinking, too."

"...About?"

You shifted forward in your chair, resting your elbows on the desk in front of you and folding your arms together. "I understand that you're worried about my having a lack of... choice in the matter, when it comes to this. And I can appreciate the sentiment, Kun, and where that concern stems from. But don't you think, that in unilaterally ending our relationship supposedly for my own good, that also takes away my agency? The thing that you're so worried about me keeping through all of this?"

Kun's fork stilled over his food, and he swallowed as he held your gaze steadily. He slowly nodded, the weight of your words clearly resting heavily in the creases of his forehead. "I-I didn't think of it like that. I'm sorry."