Somewhere Someplace

Dark and mellow. It was night; clouds above obscured the half-crescent atmosphered moon and the taunting stars up high. The world around had frozen for all that which was not nocturnal. Night insects and other assortments of relevant nightly creatures were making their many noises, signaling to everyone and everything around and about that they, indeed and in fact, existed.

They had stopped for rest—or rather, the unicorn had stopped because it no longer wanted to move, forcing them to stop for the day. Everyone was quite exhausted, however, so there were no complaints.

What a long day it had been, indeed…

Red and Blue had opted to…actually establish a ‘camp’ away from the road this time instead of sleeping in the cramped wagon’s back.

Indeed, it turned out all those many supplies and such they had shoved into their wagon were not just for show, but rather included things for establishing such…temporary resting spots. Blankets made from the furry skin of an animal, soft-surface rollable…carry-bed things of sorts, portable tent-shelter…things—although such had gone unused this night—, and such…

They also had dry wood and stone to make an improvised ‘campfire’. Additionally, they had cooking instruments—pots and wooden bowls—for preparing equally basic meals; though, such had also gone unused this night—condemned to remain stuffed within that cramped wagon’s back, to the dismay of Blue’s wailing stomach.

Antica’s ignited eyes scanned around as she…patrolled about—circling around this so-called ‘camp’ of theirs… Red and Blue were sleeping away next to the now…extinguished campfire. Novea, however, had opted to…rest in the wagon where she usually would. Her corvid was…somewhere around here; Antica did not know where.

Although Red and Blue were now in a considerably more…comfy and secure position, they were nonetheless prepared to react if any happening should befall. Red’s…perhaps still damaged…Far Eastern polearm was right next to him; he remained in his armor, likewise…

Truly, one could only wonder how he had managed to fall asleep while wearing all of that…stiff heavy weight, for he certainly did not appear comfortable—not that Antica was in any position to provide commentary regarding such notions of ‘comfort’.

Blue, likewise, practically slept with her staff tucked in hands; she had opted to take off her chest-piece, however, because she was, in her words, ‘not a savage’.

The unicorn, likewise, remained practically affixed to that wagon… All so that they could make a quick escape of required.

Certainly, these two remained precautious. Yet the fact they had opted to stop and establish camp at all instead of remaining, relatively, constantly on the move as they usually had been, was indicative of the…improved confidence in their safety.

Indeed, they were now passing into the so-called ‘loyalist strongholds’. Despite having only arrived from Upperberry just this day, the security differences between here and…everything before here…was…immediate, almost jarringly so. Local security forces were abundant enough, suffice it to say, as evident from…the screeches of griffons and war-beasts on patrol being carried through the winds from far off and away.

Truly, travel was a lot smoother and more efficient in absence of all those…distractions and delays encountered prior throughout… However, due to the presence of security, there was thus…the return of those ever-beloved clearance checks.

Almost every patrol they had stumbled into these past several hours alone prior to this stop would halt them, demanding to know ‘why they were with a unicorn’, demanding ‘recognized clearance’, and wanting to search for ‘contrabands’ and ‘evidence of abetting treachery’.

However, such was nevertheless a surprisingly swift and fast affair… As soon as the local security forces saw that Red and Blue were adventurers, and more especially saw the accompanying Raven, they…simply let them go. No doubt, such was an indicator of the Guild’s stronger influence in this locality.

However, despite the noticeable security, the signs of conflict remained evident nevertheless; from the unmarked graves dotting next to the roads, to the residual signs of recent skirmishes—albeit small in scale—, and such and such…

The most prevalent in her mind was the…continued abundancy of improvised encampments of those victims and survivors who had fled from those intermediate areas caught between the two principal belligerents. In so many ways, such peeked at sights and auditorily visualized sounds had reminded her of everything she had witnessed and heard in Coastfield. And just as then, she still could not understand the why…

Ultimately, all such things she had seen and witnessed…was the expected tendency of denizens and places like here, even if this one was most certainly a playground conjured and contrived for the amusement of a spectating abomination—or rather…also for other…complex and multifaceted reasons and varied possible motivations…

Most certainly, unlike these denizens whose imagined delusions and contrived abstractions could filter reality into such reductive simplicities, her domain was hardly so ‘simple’… Always obscured behind layers after layers of complexity, often to the point of absurdity.

Antica sighed and stood in place…

And unlike the rest, she was not sleeping this night—as with all the other nights before ever since entering Huckleberry. Even if she wanted to, she could not sleep. Truly, it was as if a switch had been flipped as soon as she had crossed those…arbitrarily made abstracted boundaries that separated this locality from the rest; as soon as she had reentered what had been, and still technically was, her designated operation zone…

Already it was harder to focus on anything; it was harder to think and cogitate; this lack of sleep was certainly not helping. Although she remained attentive to her locally given mission—the location and extraction of Blossom—, her mind…continued to drift to those unknowns or…more especially…her true mission.

Despite all of her adaptations and recent experiences this past year that had affected her, her aged mind was unable to so easily escape what was, in the end, its default state and dispositional tendencies. Indeed, this past year of happenings and experiences was ultimately miniscule with respect to all those experiences accumulated over a time-interval that surpassed history itself.

Not that Antica herself was cognizant of such, of course, for she was…not necessarily the introspective type.

Nevertheless, with thought after thought invading mind, she extended her left-arm out from the obscurence of her smart-cloak, glancing at the terminal device affixed…

Indeed, all throughout the remainder of this…perceptually long day, one task which had so popped into her mind earlier had yet to so unpop itself. And she had waited long enough.

Antica did one last circling, looking at Red and Blue… Considering their typical nightly patterns she had observed and the length of time it was since they had fallen asleep, both should be in…the deepest stage of their sleeps—least likely to be awaken.

She then, quickly and quietly, approached the wagon, cyanic eyes peering within… Novea was…uncomfortably positioned…but was nevertheless asleep. Albeit Novea was likely not in a deep sleep, and, likewise, she had an evident tendency of sporadically waking up in the middle of nights.

Hm. Acceptable. Nothing of concern.

Antica then quickly glanced at the unicorn… Surprisingly, it too was asleep.

Such all confirmed, she swiftly repositioned herself to the other side of the parked wagon so that her figure would be more obscured from the field-of-view of the camp now behind. Pressing and tapping, her terminal device’s screen flashed on… And she promptly got to work.

-||-

Antica’s baggy ignited eyes stared down, strained and almost reddish from how long she had been gazing into this screen—odd, indeed, that her eyes could even become so fatigued in such a way. So focused, so fixated, she was… that she could no longer feel and sense the world around.

She had spent hours on this singular task… What would have ordinarily been a streamlined, automated, and simple endeavor had required quite the manual work—more than she had anticipated—, all due to that ‘security lock’ which she had to either navigate around or…override outright—and she did not want to override too much, lest she put her terminal device at an increased risk of being…easier to compromise.

Nevertheless, having done what needed to be done, she was now thus done—or, at least, kind of…

Before her cyanic eyes, digitized and glowy, was an ‘integrated composite coordinate map’ of this entire continent.

Indeed, she had just fully reconfigured her ‘Map and Coordinate System’—or ‘M.C.S’… More specifically, she had reconfigured her integrated M.C.S… Her general M.C.S having been of only limited functionality hitherto, being at least able to generate proximity or ‘small-scale’ coordinate maps such as the one of that cavern’s interior generated from Fly’s collected data.

Although such was usually managed by her HUD-mask’s systems, being without that, she had to…completely reconfigure her integrated M.C.S onto her auxiliary terminal device—something which would have been an automated procedure were it not, once again, for that pesky security lock…

Nevertheless, compared to a localized coordinate map, this integrated coordinate map was both a single generated ‘large-scale’ map and a composite collection of local ‘small-scale’ generated maps—hence ‘integrated’. It inherently involved more…sensitive and multi-sourced data collected and distributed throughout the entire operational network—hence the added…difficulty in making it function without her ping—and was handled by a distinct subsystem—hence the distinction between ‘general’ and ‘integrated’.

However, to not her surprise, what she was staring at was…largely simple and monotone in the spite of the ability to configure a multitude of modes of various details regarding topography and geography. The majority of this…digitized outlined shape in the foreground of a black-blue background…was left almost completely blank.

Although she was hoping during this process that…her terminal device and M.C.S would have had saved or stored at least half of the operational data from the last generated integrated coordinate map, as it turned out, such was…not the case at all, having had largely…borrowed such data from that which produced it.

This digitized coordinate map was dynamic, and thus would be actively regenerated and updated by her M.C.S with respect to data and information sourced from the greater network, such as from geo-spatial surveillance above—which had mysteriously disappeared—and or terrestrial surveillance, recon, and such collected and collectively distributed across their entire synchronized operational network—which had collapsed completely… no longer existent.

In other words, the majority of the data that went into her large-scale integrated coordinate map had been sourced from things outside of her own HUD-system, terminal device, and thus her own M.C.S.

Thus, as soon as she had fully reconfigured and accessed her integrated M.C.S, it immediately regenerated or ‘updated’ the generated large-scale coordinate map with respect to the data and information it had immediate access to, and since there was no longer an operational network and active surveillance, it deferred to that which was directly stored—that being not much. And because of the security lock on her records, it could not…necessarily borrow from the pre-operational surveys.

Essentially, her M.C.S had overridden what had once been a more detailed digitized map…with this empty blob of hollow details and absent data.

Though, not completely so…

Macro-level details generated from imaging and surveillance above aside, terrestrial survey and reconnaissance had provided ample data regarding their designated operational zone—that being not only what constitutes this ‘Huckleberry Dutchy’, but areas around it too.

And it just so happened that much of such doings…had been handled by…assets belonging exclusively to her and thus directly retained by her terminal device.

However, such was not to…invalidate the contributions of those now…deceased troopers and their assortment of toys and gizmos; much of the data came from them too.

And the separation between the general and integrated M.C.S, in addition to the…difference in handling, so to speak, between data distributed directly between troopers via their ping-connected HUD-mask systems or auxiliary terminal systems compared to data sourced from…a device or interconnected autonomous surveillance, reconnaissance, and imaging satellite system, all seemed to have allowed for…some of the data collected by other troopers and handled by her general M.C.S—not integrated— to…be saved, and thus capable of being utilized.

Whether this peculiarity was a general Remnant affair or…a unique characteristic of something she herself had intentionally done to her terminal device in times immemorial was…hard to tell.

Regardless, thus in spite of the monotone blankness, there were still…sporadic ‘pockets’ of varying detail concentrated in what had been—and still technically was—their… her… operational zone. However, this continental coordinate map was only a piece of what an integrated M.C.S coordinate map offered.

Using her fingers, she began to ‘zoom in’ on the detailed zones, viewing localized generated coordinate maps of prior surveyed, surveilled, and imagined areas—of varying detail, precision, and accuracy, of course, all dependent on the completeness of such operations and…the data gathered; likewise, there still seemed to be data anomalies present. As such, those areas she herself and her assets had…directly focused on were the most accurate.

And, of course, since there was no active…anything really…to constantly source present and or updated data from, all of these coordinate maps were…static and unmaintained—snapshots from more than one year ago rather than dynamically generated in the present. And although an integrated coordinate map could mark and track her position at all levels and scales, such was also non-functioning due to those same reasons—besides, of course, on an immediate proximity scale due to…

Right, Bee…

Bee was synchronized to her terminal device, but nonetheless had its own…separate data storage. Since many of her own…assets…had been used as secure localized relays and information transponders—or ‘bumpers’—by the others during the operation, her personal sentinel—operating under its own…Bee-specific…handling discretions—had likely held onto most things that had gotten ‘bumped’ to it by those assets, to which it was the ‘parent’ or had oversight.

Likewise, Bee was actively monitoring above—obviously—and, even though her M.C.S overall had been inactive for the majority of her journey since departing Coastfield, such did not mean her sentinel was not at least…keeping track and storing data…of their journey and its observations throughout.

Thus, all she would have to do was instruct Bee to transfer all of that…hoarded data to her restored M.C.S and fill in what blanks could be filled from such. Furthermore, from Bee’s observation scope and active surveillance above, her M.C.S could maintain a dynamic proximity or small-scale coordinate map of her immediate area—though, that was already a given.

She zoomed out, evaluating the large-scale continental map as a whole, making ready to press her communicator-scanner… Only to…not…do that…

Right… Bee was synchronized with her terminal device… Thus, her sentinel was seemingly able to know that her integrated M.C.S was…once again operational… Indeed, as she quickly saw, Bee was already buzzing away like a busy bee. Blanks were being filled with the data her sentinel had held onto, her immediate proximity updating.

She noticed a weird noodlely string of detail emerge within the featureless void of this digitized continent, the path and areas through which they had traversed since departing Coastfield…being filled in. Yet, nevertheless, most of this continent…remained a blank void. However, the more she traveled and…operated in this continent, the more her M.C.S would update and ‘fill in’ her integrated coordinate map.

And…she did not need to rely exclusively on Bee so glued to her in the sky up high; she could, indeed, expand her…surveillance scope, and establish a proper interconnected reconnaissance network, retaining active updates on areas beyond her immediate proximity and Bee’s observation scope.

Though, for now, this was…more than enough. She could keep track of where she was on an immediate proximity scale, in addition to keeping track of any designated highlights, tagged markers, and…so much more—even if by significantly…less convenient means than her HUD-mask.

Antica…proceeded to zoom in and out over and over… seeing the digitized details pop in and out, from the largely blank large-scale coordinate map, to the static localized small-scale coordinate maps, to the newly generated dynamic coordinate map of her immediate proximity… She began to focus on this…generated map.

Bee’s observation scope was…admittedly limited; her sentinel was not…necessarily a specialized observer. As such, this proximity coordinate map was most accurate when centered at her position—the focus of Bee’s attention—, with accuracy gradually diminishing the farther out it extended and expanded…before becoming largely probabilistic and inferential near the edges of her sentinel’s observation scope.

Yet, nevertheless, there she was… Her position on this immediate local coordinate map was marked with a prominent cyanic tag—because of course. The three denizens with her were marked in…denizen blue, although outlined in cyan to designate…added significance as collaborators—even though she was…technically the…collaborator. The unicorn, likewise, was marked as a…grey-pink highlight tag… Chimera though with apparent degrees of designation uncertainty—she could not blame Bee, to be honest.

She zoomed in on her position, as closest as possible… There was only so much precise micro-level detail that could be generated in absence of proper imaging and reconnaissance…gizmos. Nevertheless, a rectangular little box outlined in white was behind her marker—inanimate object, that wagon… And within that box, a denizen blue cyanic-outlined tag… Novea.

Hmm… She zoomed all the way out to her large-scale continental coordinate map…

Deep down within, she…could not help but…perhaps…be a little…proud of her…manual efforts. Though, such pride was immediately confounded by the fact that…she ought to have had done all of this…many many days ago.

Nevertheless, exhaling out a relieved breath, Antica finally detached her focus from the screen… She was rather exhausted, indeed… Her eyes burned; her mind throbbed… Yet she knew—or presupposed, rather—that even trying to sleep would be pointless. All she could do was tolerate this…yearning and allow her brain and essence to readapt around this…shift in habit and schedule.

As she attended to the world around at last… All sounds were finally able to be heard; all senses finally able to be felt from the nightly cold air to the sensations hollowly felt within; all manners of her existence within this physical reality returned…

Yet almost immediately, the nerves in the back of her spine began to tingle in this…piercing alertive sensation; one so familiar yet…distinct from that to which she had become most accustomed… She was being watched, and had been… All from behind…

Realizations instantaneous, Antica spun herself around, nearly tripping, as her ignited eyes lanced their gaze to she who so silently snooped from behind.

“Someone seems surprised…” Novea, awake and attentive, so spoke as she stared; she was leaning herself forward from the wagon’s edge, her corvid-masked face gently resting against one hand. Her posture and stature implied she had been watching for…much longer than a minute; quite longer.

Antica stared, bemused on the inside; breathing in and out, much suddenly began to ignite within; all inhibited. Novea…had been…silently observing her without having even… She looked down at her terminal device, the screen still on…which she promptly booped off.

“What were you even doing, anyway?” Novea plainly asked, her voice…somewhat hollow.

“I can ask the same to you.” Antica so replied, her eyes being the most expressive they had ever seemingly been—from Novea’s point-of-view.

Antica obviously could not…truly comprehend these…strange feelings emerging within, yet she could still…feel the physiological sensations. Her heart seemed to be beating faster, a strange…burn igniting within—one that wanted to make her voice louder, more assertive, and…threatening.

“Yeah, you could…” yet Novea mellowly acknowledged, no longer leaning.

“For how long were you observing me? Why did you not tell me that you have awakened?” Antica sharply interrogated, that strange burning feeling only…growing.

“I hadn’t exactly awoken quietly, you know? I am surprised you didn’t notice…” Novea replied; “Besides, I didn’t want to interrupt; you seemed so…enthralled…”

Antica, however, glared, her ignited eyes flattening; “Of course, you would not want to interrupt me, spy.”

“Yeah…” Novea looked down and away… Such stung more than needed; “That’s quite the thing on your forearm, though; I still do not know what it’s supposed to be or what’s supposed to do… It’s really pretty though, and I can tell you have a favorite color…” she remarked, her voice mellow yet…so detached and colder…than it usually was.

“It is nothing of relevancy to you.” Antica bluntly stated, her arms now tucked beneath her smart-cloak.

“Yeah, I know… And I won’t ask, as I haven’t… But…” Novea replied…

“Why are you awake, anyway?” Antica interrogated.

“Well, it’s…” Novea was about to reply, yet her breaths stopped as she looked down and away, her fingers…playing around as she did so… “It’s not…relevant to anything, so doesn’t matter…” she said instead.

« … » Antica simply stared… It was obvious from Novea’s voice that she was on the cusp of speaking sincerely, before…abruptly shrouding such in vagueness.

Novea sighed; “Listen… You should be aware that…just because people are asleep does not mean they aren’t potential eyes; they still are, and it’s best to assume they are awake and peering even if they aren’t…when it comes to things you want to keep ‘nothing of relevancy’.” she stated frankly.

« Yes. I am not retarded. » Antica…more blurted than said, surprising herself to be frank; “Ahem. I know that; I am not the stupid. I just assumed that I would not have to be concerned since—”

“Well, that was your mistake, then.” Novea cut her off…rather coldly.

« … » Antica stared… That burning within only seemed to grow further, for reasons beyond her comprehension. « Rectë loques. Síc j’era erratù, nê’ro-que ģe çertissimë rursos repétere. » she stated; indeed, Novea was correct: Antica was mistaken, and she was certain to not repeat such again.

Novea’s mask-obscured eyes drifted further away… She did not need to understand those words to feel the tone. “Anyway… I am going try to go back to sleep… Not sure if I will be able to, but… Anyway, you should try to get some sleep—this isn’t the first time I’ve caught you still being awake, Ni… Yeah…” thus she said, her figure slumping into the wagon’s confounds.

Antica did not reply; she simply walked off and returned to patrolling around. She could not sleep before, and now doubly—triply—so. Much festered in mind.

Indeed, such was a pattern abruptly emerging this day alone ever since Upperberry… Novea was being exceptionally…distant and cold with Antica.

There were greater implications to this, most certainly…

But in this moment, truly, Antica was so thoroughly reminded of the reality regarding her…relationship with this ‘Bureau’.

Indeed, had these past couple weeks blinded her so? To that which was so bluntly obvious; to that which she had known and always known since the start, yet she still…nevertheless…

Ultimately, despite their cordiality, Novea was an operative in service of that Bureau and its directives, and she needed to be treated as such. Ally, but not truly friend. An obvious fact, yet Antica needed to remind herself, nonetheless; that she could not become too comfortable and complacent.

Ah, and there lays the answer

As to the why

The realization of what this truly is and has been

Truly, to remain ever so blind despite having the most seeing eyes