Destiny Among the Stars - Scifi - LitRPG - Adventure

"The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places."

– Ernest Hemingway

The soft, slightly acrid scent of nail polish remover mingled with the sterile, recycled air of Emily's cabin. She and Zoe were cross-legged on Emily's newly assembled bunk, a chaotic but colorful array of polish bottles spread between them on a protective data-slate. Outside, the Triumph hummed its steady song through the void, a temporary pocket of calm after weeks of near-disasters.

"Okay, seriously, this 'Cosmic Coral' or 'Nebula Blue'?" Zoe asked, holding up two shimmering bottles, her brow furrowed in mock concentration. Her own nails were already a vibrant, electric purple.

Emily leaned back against the bulkhead, inspecting her freshly painted thumbnail, a deep, star-flecked crimson. "Blue, definitely. It'll match your eyes when you're trying to intimidate Ryan into actually following instructions."

Zoe snorted, uncapping the Nebula Blue. "As if intimidation works on him. He just thinks it's foreplay." She began to meticulously apply the first coat. After a comfortable silence, punctuated only by the click of polish bottles, Zoe spoke again, her tone more serious. "So… Pierre. You haven't mentioned him much since we left. Everything… okay there?"

Emily sighed, setting her own polish brush down. The question had been hovering, unspoken, between them for two weeks. "We broke up, Zoe. Right before the launch."

Zoe paused, brush mid-air. "What? Em, why didn't you say anything?"

"It was a whirlwind, you know? Boarding the ship, running for our lives… 'Oh, by the way, my long-distance boyfriend and I are kaput' didn't exactly feel like priority information." Emily picked at a non-existent cuticle. "He was great, mostly. Charming, smart, that accent…" She trailed off with a small, wry smile. "A good distraction, I guess."

"Distraction from what? Or who?" Zoe asked, her gaze knowing.

Emily met her friend's eyes. "You know who." She looked down at her hands. "Pierre wanted me to join his team, Les Aventuriers. Said we could make a great partnership, exploring the outer systems under their banner."

Zoe's eyebrows shot up. "Seriously? After everything with the Triumph? After this team?"

"Exactly." Emily's voice hardened slightly. "It felt like… a betrayal. This is my team, Zoe. Luca, you, Ryan, Danny, Joey, even Chris… this is where I belong." She sighed again. "When I told him no, that my place was here, with the Triumph Initiative… well, he wasn't happy. Said I was choosing a bunch of idiots over a real future."

"Asshole," Zoe muttered, resuming her painting with slightly more vigor.

"Maybe," Emily conceded. "Or maybe just… self-absorbed, like Luca said. After I turned down his 'proposal,' he didn't contact me again. Not a word. And then the launch happened so fast…" She glanced at the red hoodie, Luca's hoodie, wrapped over her pillow. She'd practically lived in it during those first chaotic days, a familiar comfort. She still hadn't given it back. "Everyone else has gotten a message or four from home by now. But him? Silence. So, yeah. Over."

Zoe nodded sympathetically, the vibrant blue on her nails stark against her warm, caramel-toned skin as she finished her last finger. "Men are idiots. Some are just better at hiding it." She waved her hand to dry the polish. "My family, on the other hand… I swear, if I could block their comms, I would. Mom sent a three-hour lecture on vitamin supplements, and my little sister, Maya, is convinced I'm going to come back with an alien boyfriend. It's… a lot."

Emily smiled faintly. Zoe's sprawling, boisterous family was a whirlwind, a stark contrast to her own fractured quiet. "At least they're… enthusiastic."

"Enthusiastically invasive," Zoe corrected, but her eyes softened. "Still, I'd give anything for just one more annoying, over-enthusiastic message from…" Her voice caught, just for a breath.

Emily's heart ached in instant understanding. She reached out, her fingers finding Zoe's. "From Darron," she finished softly. The name hung in the small cabin, heavy with shared memory. Three years. Three years since he'd been gone, since their world had tilted on its axis. They'd all been seventeen, on the cusp of everything, when he'd died defending their town during the worst portal overflows.

"Yeah," Zoe whispered, her gaze distant. "My stupid, twin." She squeezed Emily's hand back, a flicker of the old pain in her eyes. "He would have adored this, wouldn't he? This ship, this adventure."

A watery laugh escaped Emily. "He absolutely would. And he'd be insufferable about it." The Triumph of Darron. The name was a constant, bittersweet reminder. A legacy. A tribute.

"He'd be so proud of you, Zo," Emily said, her voice thick with emotion. "Proud of all of us, but especially you, flying his namesake to another star."

Zoe managed a shaky smile, tears welling but not falling. "Yeah, probably. He'd also be hitting on you relentlessly, you know. Telling you your nail polish perfectly complements your strategic mind."

Emily laughed, a genuine sound this time, the shared grief momentarily lightened by the memory of Darron's irrepressible charm and terrible pick-up lines. "Probably. Not like there's a huge dating pool out here to compete with him, anyway."

They painted in comfortable silence for a bit, the only sounds the hum of the ship and the occasional soft clink of polish bottles, the unspoken presence of a lost friend and brother filling the space between them.

"So," Zoe said eventually, screwing the cap back on her Nebula Blue, the mischievous glint returning to her eyes. She leaned back, surveying Emily. "Speaking of the boys… when the hell did they decide to grow up on us?"

Emily snorted, nearly smudging a fresh coat of polish. "Tell me about it. One minute they're all elbows and annoying jokes, the next… well."

"Next thing you know, Ryan's looking surprisingly… buff these days," Zoe continued, a smirk playing on her lips. "All that heavy equipment and tools must be agreeing with him."

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Emily felt a blush creep up her neck. "He is… not bad looking," she admitted, remembering how flustered he'd gotten in the lounge. "And Danny, with those freckles and that curly red hair… he's adorable when he's not blowing us up."

Zoe sighed dramatically. "Tell me about it. Danny is a cinnamon roll, too pure for this world, and completely oblivious. I practically have to wave signal flares to get him to notice I'm not just another piece of lab equipment. All those dimples, though…" She let out a wistful sigh. "It's a struggle."

"Chris, though..." Emily said, a little quieter. She found herself tracing the rim of a polish bottle. "He's… a lot. All that muscle, packed into that bodysuit like he's about to burst. Not to mention he's charming. And confident. Did I mention his muscles already?" She could feel Zoe's eyes on her and knew her cheeks were burning up. Chris was objectively gorgeous, and his easy confidence was a stark contrast to… well, to others.

"'Confident' is one word for him," Zoe said, smirking. "More like a walking, talking thirst trap. But hey, if you're into the 'alpha male rescuing you from a rogue asteroid with his bare hands' fantasy, he's your guy."

Emily just shook her head, laughing despite herself. "You're terrible."

"Which brings us," Zoe continued, leaning forward conspiratorially, "to the Captain. Your Captain. Luca 'Painfully Oblivious' Rossi."

Emily groaned, falling back against her pillow. "Don't even start, Zo. I don't understand him! He looks at me like… like that. What am I supposed to do with that? I've been dropping hints for four years, Zoe! Subtle ones, not-so-subtle ones… He puts his arm around me, it feels… right. And then, nothing. He's just… Luca. Dense. Beautifully, infuriatingly dense"

Zoe nodded, her expression a mixture of sympathy and exasperation. "He's got blinders on when it comes to seeing what's right in front of him. Or he's terrified. Or both." She picked up another bottle, pretending to consider the color. "Honestly, Em, sometimes I think you and I are doomed to pine after ridiculously cute but emotionally constipated nerds for the rest of this voyage."

Emily sighed, looking at her newly painted nails, she'd gone with Nebula Blue, matching Zoe's. "Maybe you're right." She managed a wry smile. "At least our nails will look good while we're doing it."

Below, in engineering, where the smell of nail polish gave way to sweat, and that particular smell when a car's been baking too long under the hot summer sun, the overhead lights buzzed faintly, throwing shadows against the piping hanging off the ceiling and walls. It reflected Ryan's personality perfectly; it was messy, chaotic, and dirty, but Luca didn't mind. It was Ryan's world. Built on intuition, long hours, and barely-controlled genius. Messy, sure. But at least Ryan knew where things were.

Ryan was crouched at the open access panel of the drive housing, tools scattered around him. A diagnostics tablet was propped against a crate beside him, flickering with readouts that made no sense to Luca. He was fast and confident, tightening cables and checking power flow. He moved as if he'd done this a hundred times before. Except he hadn't. None of them had. He was winging it, as always.

Danny sat nearby on the deck, his laptop balanced on one knee. He was typing quickly, eyes locked on lines of code and sensor logs as he ran calibration routines. His brow was furrowed, the kind of focused tension that meant he was either close to solving something or about to hit a wall. The kid was good, even if he did crack under pressure.

Chris was behind them both, checking the power feed from the auxiliary capacitors. His work was slower and more methodical. Solid, reliable, but a bit too... ordinary. He understood what they were doing, but he wasn't on Ryan or Danny's level.

And then there was Luca. He stood a few feet back, arms crossed, sweating under the collar of his uniform, and doing his best to look like he was in command of the situation. He wasn't. This was beyond him, technical, unfamiliar, and completely outside his control. He was good at people. He was good at decisions. He was not, it turned out, a miracle worker.

The FTL drive hadn't come with an instruction manual. No startup wizard, no neat boot sequence. Just the best efforts of Dad's engineers, who were experienced, smart, and thorough. But they'd had to leave before the calibrations were finished. Now it was on them.

"What's the holdup?" he asked. Time to show that leadership bullshit they always went on about.

Ryan didn't look up. "The power sync between the containment coils and the field anchor is drifting. Might've been from the surge last time."

"The logs show the last calibration was clean until we got pulled out mid-sequence," Danny said. "The field anchor wasn't fully mapped. It's like trying to align a magnet to a shadow."

Ryan snorted. "It's not that bad. We've got most of the mapping done. But we still don't know what this secondary channel is doing. It's pulling load, but it's not reporting."

Chris leaned over the tablet. "Could it be cooling? Some kind of passive bleed? If it's not wired to a monitor circuit, it won't report."

"Maybe," Ryan said, tapping his fingers against the floor. "Or it's shielding, and we've just been lucky so far."

Danny glanced at Luca, then back at his screen. "Do we know what Athan's crew used for baseline field alignment? We're guessing at their settings."

Luca shook his head. "They didn't have time to send anything over before we lost the uplink. Last message was that they'd tuned the anchor coils to match the ship's mass distribution, but nothing about the subfield geometry." He didn't know what that meant, but they did.

Ryan muttered a curse under his breath. "That's half the equation. No wonder it nearly blew."

"Can you finish the calibration?" Luca asked, his words came out a little sharper than he meant. He needed to know they had this under control. It wasn't too late to turn the ship around. But if they didn't finish this mission it would all have been for nothing.

Danny gave a small shrug. "We're close. I've got the field resonance under one percent drift. If Ryan can stabilize the feedback loop from the secondary core, we should be able to finish the alignment without another surge."

"I'm working on it," Ryan said. "Just don't ask me to explain it in plain English." Smart but so stubborn. Luca could rely on them to give it their all.

Chris wiped sweat from his brow. "Good. Because Luca's about two steps behind already."

"Three," Luca said, feeling a pit in his stomach. It was beyond anxiety, more like distress, an innate feeling of helplessness and lack of understanding. Imposter syndrome, or something. "And I'm not even pretending anymore."

He should get Emily down here. She'd cut through this technical maze in minutes, ask exactly the right questions to get Ryan and Danny talking solutions instead of problems. She'd probably walk in, assess the situation, and have three backup plans before he finished explaining what was wrong.

The way she'd catch his eye across a room, and he'd know she was thinking the same thing he was. How she made him look like he actually knew what he was doing, even when they both knew he was flying blind.

But he could handle this. Hell, they were flying to another star system; a little FTL calibration wasn't going to break him. Still, it would be nice to have Emily here, watching his back while he kept everyone focused and moving forward.

That's when it hit him, nobody was cracking jokes, not even the kind of snide throwaway comments that usually filled Engineering. Not even Chris, who could usually defuse a meltdown with a smirk. And that scared Luca more than anything they'd just said.

Ryan gave a tired grin. "Worst case? We boot the drive, micro-jumps collapse mid-run, and we have to recalibrate in deep space. We figure out how far we got, realign, and try again." He said it like it was no big deal.

Danny nodded. "As long as the stabilization field holds, we don't get turned into spaghetti."

"Comforting," Luca muttered. At least Danny was confident.

He looked at the drive, this quiet, humming piece of salvaged insanity jammed into the heart of their ship, and wondered how many other crews would be flying something they didn't really understand. They might as well be waving their arms and chanting.

"Alright," he said. "Finish the calibration. I want it done today. We can't afford to wait. We hit the passage in two days. If this thing doesn't run, we don't make it to Alpha Centauri. We need it ready." He needed it to work.

Ryan nodded once and bent back over the panel.

Luca stayed near the wall, trying to stay calm.

Doing his best to look like a captain in control of his starship.

But mostly, he was hoping that the people he trusted most knew what the hell they were doing.

Spaghetti...