Chapter 77

Menseio Station, orbiting Veria
Menseio Station
11:02 Ship Time
September 18, 2019

The previous three days had been interesting to be sure, and it all started when Ben had asked where the table had come from. The Fa’iir contingent thought that I had purchased it, while my friends and I thought that it was a gift from a third party. We ended up being right, but no one would have imagined that it had been gifted long ago.

Or was supposed to be, anyway. Mere weeks after receiving ownership of the highly sought after wood, Kaldrus Dhir made his move and those beginnings came to a very abrupt end. It was such a mammoth undertaking to build something that would last generations, but there was no one else who had the clout or the wherewithal, nor the respect that Derech Kidravia commanded.

Oh, there were those that tried, and some were even slightly successful, but none even came close in scope to what my father envisioned. As I sat there, scrolling through the tablet that contained all of his grand plans for the second time, I realized that it would’ve been his life’s work. His goal wasn’t just to see his own people prosper and remain safe; that was his hope for the galaxy as a whole. It was as if he knew something was coming and he wanted to be prepared for it. Whatever that was, it was known only to him.

Everything that had been in Abi the day my father passed and the bond between them was broken hadn’t been destroyed like everyone had previously thought. The moment the bond was broken, three protocols had been automatically activated. The first was to get every living thing onboard to safety, which was done by teleporting them down to the surface of Nedovis. The second was to move everything else that remained onboard into Abi’s dimensional storage. Only once those two protocols were finished did the third begin, which was the process in which Abi shrank from a ship that was kilometers in length, down to the small crystal that easily fit into one’s hand.

She didn’t explain why she had waited so long to tell my sisters and I, but it was clear that the table wasn’t there by accident. When our new Fa’iir friends had departed and everyone else was catching some much-needed shuteye, my sisters and I were headed somewhere else. Abi had something to show us, and it was beyond anything we could have imagined. It was also closer than we thought.

(Three days previously... )
a lot of vacant rooms on the port side as well. The area we were directed to had a cluster of six rooms that were completely bare, with none of the usual features. No room numbers or names associated with the rooms, nor any visible ways to gain access. All six of them were missing door handles and the security systems were nowhere to be seen until we stepped up to the indicated door.

It had one of the unmarked rooms to its left, and one to the right, with the other three being right across from it. When we were standing in front of it, it lit up like a screen and a square appeared. After a moment, that square was divided into four smaller squares, each with the outline of a hand with a name above it. Jonuth Kidravia in the top left, followed by Leenah Kidravia in the top right, Leksi Kidravia in the bottom right, and Lucia Kidravia in the bottom left.

After looking at one another, we positioned ourselves and then placed our left hand where it was meant to go. Without so much of a command, each of us channeled our mana into the door. Almost instantly, the door retracted ever-so-slightly, and then slid into the wall like most doors did. While we had expected to see a bedroom when the door opened, that was not what awaited us on the other side.

It was a family portrait that covered a good portion of the left wall when you stepped into the living room. It was that of a young boy, a man and a woman who were quite obviously his parents, and then another woman. Although she didn’t look it, it was easy to tell that she was the oldest of the three adults. Even captured in paint, her eyes held more wisdom than both of them put together.

“Great grandmother Ateru...” Leksi said quietly as the four of us gazed up at some of our ancestors.

“That’s dad as a young boy, isn’t it?” Leenah asked.

“And our grandparents,” I replied with a nod, having seen some images of them. “Enoch and Erydah Kidravia.”

“She’s beautiful! Both of them are.” Lucia said.

Although the rows of sharp pointy teeth were a little terrifying, still, I couldn’t disagree with her. It was a formal family portrait, and as such everyone was dressed up, albeit not in royal garb. Ateru and Erydah could have almost been twins in their identical mauve maxi dresses. Truly, the only things that set them apart were the differences in their crowns, and how well-endowed they were. Erydah was quite lucky in that regard, and had no qualms flaunting it, if only slightly. It
was a family portrait, after all.

The men, on the other hand, wore Scyftan-style suits that were a darker purple, but still went well with the dresses that the two women wore. Enoch was flanked by Erydah on his right and his mother on his left, while Derech sat on his father’s knee. As I looked at the image and saw how happy they seemed to be, I couldn’t help but realize that it had to have been done only a short time before an explosion killed all but Derech, since he was at home asleep. The small plaque below the portrait only confirmed it. The portrait had been done only a little over a month beforehand.

We looked up at it for a short while later, but as soon as we turned around there was another portrait waiting for us. One that was a little more difficult to look at. There were four subjects in the portrait, just like the last one, though only three of them were Scyftan. The fourth? A little white phenidae named Vixa.

Our mother looked absolutely radiant. Radiant in a way that only a pregnant woman can look, and that was certainly on full display. It seemed like the portrait was a sort of tribute to the first portrait we had seen, as all three of us were wearing almost identical clothing to what was worn over a millennium earlier. That was, except for the modification that had to be made so our mother would fit into her dress. She was at the center of the portrait, with me on her left and our father holding Vixa on the right, and with each of us having a hand(or a paw), on her pregnant belly.

I looked over to my sisters and saw that none of them were tearless. Stepping over, I pulled all of them into a hug. I knew that seeing it was harder for them than it was for me. I at least got to spend three years of my life with them, even if I didn’t remember it. They weren’t even a month old when their parents were stolen from them. I was going to make it quick when the time came, but now? He was most definitely going to suffer.

Together, the four of us went room to room exploring what used to be, and would have been for my sisters, a home away from home. I knew that the floors and the walls were just a re-creation, but everything else was over fourteen hundred years old. The furniture, the art, even the plantless planters were transplanted from that original home.

There were no stairs leading down to a basement, so we went upstairs to see what else we could find. More so than the bottom floor, the second floor was almost perfectly symmetrical. The stairs gave way to a wide hallway with a doorway directly opposite, and then three more doorways spread evenly on each side. I figured that the door at the end of the hall probably led to the master bedroom, so we decided to start on the left side and make our way around, saving it for last.

That first room ended up being what was essentially an apartment all on it’s own, complete with three modestly-sized bedrooms with two beds a piece. Looking around a little bit more, it was clear that it was there for any servants our parents may have had, though it was completely bare of everything but furniture.

Moving on, we found that the next room was a bedroom much like the ones we slept in almost every night, although the layout was changed slightly and the bed was up against the right wall. The room was even more sparse than the previous room, with the only furniture being the bed and a desk in the corner.

It was the third door we opened where things changed, and it was obvious that it was a kid’s room. A very large kid’s room, at that, with something I had never seen before. In the far corner of the room stood some bunk beds, and while there was a ladder to get up and down, there was also a slide to get down even faster. Not only that, but the beds were also bigger than any kid would need--especially a scyftan kid--coming in at something that could be considered king-sized.

Surprisingly, the room was quite messy, with three toy chests open and half their contents strewn all over the place. It wasn’t the kids toys and stuffed animals that I noticed first, however. It was the small section of rope with the ends tied in knots, looking remarkably like a dog toy from Earth. The more I looked around, the more I saw toys that probably wouldn’t interest a kid, but would most definitely interest a pet.

“Be right back,” I said before turning and heading down the stairs.

I could have just had Abi disable her anti-teleportation field, but we were close enough to my room that it only took a minute to get there by walking. After opening up the door and calling an excited Vixa to come to me, the two of us headed back together. The moment the door opened, she barked loudly and then ran up the stairs. By the time I caught up to her, she was up on the bed sniffing around.

“Smells like me, huh?” I asked, scratching her behind the ears as I held out the aforementioned toy.

She sniffed the toy for a second and barked again, before grabbing the toy and running away with it. What she did next was quite surprising to all four of us, as she had made a beeline to the corner opposite of the one the bunk bed was situated in. After pressing her nose against a spot on the wall, a piece of the floor dropped away. Without any hesitation whatsoever, she jumped into the hole.

“Vixa!” my sisters and I yelled as we ran over to where she disappeared. Before we even made it halfway there, she poked her head up with an entirely different toy in her mouth. Her tails were wagging more vigorously than anytime I had seen before, except, perhaps, the day we were reunited a little over a month previously.

“That was one of Vixa’s burrows,” Abi informed us, speaking up for the first time in a while and then laughing. “You scared your parents quite a bit when they couldn’t find you one morning, at least until you poked your head out and asked why they were yelling your name. More often than not, your parents would find the two of you curled up together. Most of the time you would be on your bed, but sometimes it would be down there.”

“I don’t remember that at all, but she certainly does,” I said.

“Not surprising, very few intelligent species are able to remember things when they are very young, and scyftans aren’t one of them. It was only six weeks or so ago for her though, technically at least.”

“So this was Jonuth’s room?” Leenah asked.

“A recreation of it as it was, yes,” Abi replied.

We continued exploring the room for a few minutes longer, but there wasn’t much more to see, really, so we moved on. The room across from the servant’s quarters proved to be a laundry room, and the one next to it was another guest room. I suspected that the room across from the recreation of mine was my sisters’ room, and wasn’t wrong.

It was set up quite a bit differently, and had a distinctly feminine feel to it. Gone were the bunk beds, and instead there was an oversized crib in the middle of the room; one more than big enough to fit three small baby girls. It looked like everything had been made in preparation for their arrival, but it didn’t seem like the room had seen any use at all. The diaper changing area was completely untouched, as were all the towels and blankets that were stacked on a nearby dresser.