Astra Raksell — Field Logs

[ Log-001 ] — What I Am. Or What I'm Told I Am.

There is no species classification for me. Not really. The closest anyone has gotten is "Aurorian" — a term that exists more as a placeholder than an answer, a question mark dressed up as a category. Someone at some point needed to write something in the box and that's what they wrote.

I woke up in a capsule. But before that there was nothing. No "before". Just the moment of waking, the unfamiliar weight of a body, and somewhere underneath all of it, a feeling I still don't have a name for. Something like unfinished business. Something like a promise made by someone else on my behalf.

The dream was already there when I woke up. It's always been there. A woman with platinum-blue hair, looking at something she sealed away with the kind of expression you wear when you're saying goodbye to a thing you love and trust completely. I call her mother. It's not quite the right word. But it's the closest one I have, and language does what it can.

She left no instructions. No map, no objective list, no note explaining what I'm supposed to do now. Just the world, and the capsule, and me, the last remnant of something so old that the world it belonged to has been classified as pre-history by everyone still alive.

So I did what anyone would do. I picked up a sword, picked up a blaster, and went looking.

[ Log-002 ] — On the Arm.

People stare at it. I've made my peace with that. It's not subtle.

From the shoulder down, the right side of me doesn't follow the same rules as the rest. Purple. Luminous in the way that something is luminous when it refuses to obey the normal definitions of light. Plasma-like smoke drifts off it constantly — lazy, inevitable, the kind of thing you can't look at and still pretend is normal. I can't hide it. I stopped trying a long time ago.

What it can do is harder to describe than what it looks like. It extends past any reasonable definition of distance. It shapeshifts. It absorbs things and releases them in other forms. It remembers, on some level below whatever counts as my conscious thought, that it is not limited by the shape it currently occupies.

The Aurora Core — the belt buckle — is the other half of it. Press it and this armor appears. The arm sheds whatever it was wearing. Maximum "Aurora". People usually stop staring at that point and start doing other things instead, which is generally the intended effect.

I don't fully understand it. I understand it the way I understand the rest of myself — functionally, from the inside, without any access to the documentation. Someone built this. Someone decided this was what I needed. I've been using it long enough now that the questions feel less urgent than they used to.

It hasn't let me down yet. Defense is another matter entirely.

[ Log-003 ] — On Humans.

I meet humans sometimes. Out here, in the parts of space that humanity scattered to after they left home, they show up in all kinds of places, carrying all kinds of versions of whatever they used to be. Different planets, different generations, different languages that forked off the old ones so long ago that some of them can't talk to each other anymore.

They look at me differently. I noticed it early and I've never stopped noticing it. Not the "you're famous" look, I'm not famous, there are no records of me that predate my waking up, nobody officially knows what I am. It's something else. Like a face that's familiar without a reason attached to it.

Some of them go quiet. Some get almost reverent in a way that makes me uncomfortable, because I would genuinely just like to finish my coffee. Some of them say things that sound like half-remembered fragments, things passed down through enough generations that nobody saying them knows where they started.

I haven't figured it out. It goes in the same drawer as the platinum-blue-haired woman and the persistent feeling that I'm carrying something I don't have the context to understand yet. The drawer is getting full but I keep moving anyway.

Current working theory: I got some personal charm. Possibly also the arm.

[ Log-004 ] — The Code.

I have rules. Six of them. Not for anyone else's benefit, just for mine. Written down because some things need to be written down or they stop being real.

The first one: no job is worth doing for less than the cost of a good meal and a coffee. Everything else is negotiable — emphasis on negotiable. There's no fixed number, I didn't post my rates. It just covers the meal and the drink after. Below that, it's not work, it's a favor, and favors run on a different ledger.

The second: large monsters are personal. The bigger it is, the more it costs in gear and recovery time and the part of your brain that takes a while to go quiet again afterward.

The third: chocolate first, everything else second. No exceptions. This is the rule I have broken the fewest times and I intend to keep that record.

The fourth: rest as hard as you move. A body running on empty isn't brave, it's just broken. Speed at 100 means nothing if the legs giving it out are too worn down to use. I know my limits better than I let on. I sometimes ignore them anyway. That's why the rule is written down.

The fifth: find the thermal somewhere. Every planet has one if you look. Hot springs, vents, float chambers on the nicer stations, that one moon three systems over with the underground pools nobody's charted properly.

The sixth: leave every place better than you found it. Or at least try. Clean endings and no loose threads, no collateral left unaddressed. The metaphorical version matters more than the literal one, though I make a genuine effort at both. Some jobs end in more debris than originally planned. That's just the reality of the work.

[ Log-005 ] — What I Actually Am, Day to Day.

Coffee in hand, nowhere to be immediately, my arm not doing anything dramatic. This is what I am on a regular afternoon:

Curious about everything. Stubborn in a way that logic alone won't fix, you need actual evidence, and sometimes not even then. Comfortable in my own skin in a way that I've never had to work at, which is either a character trait or just the result of being a few thousand years old and running out of things to be anxious about. Wild when the mood hits, and the mood hits unpredictably and with full commitment.

I find bureaucracies genuinely funny. I find big monsters genuinely annoying. I find most people — across a lot of species lines — worth talking to, if you give them half a chance. I have strong opinions about which coffee is worth drinking and no strong opinions about almost anything else.

Left hand on the coffee. Left hand on the sword hilt when it comes to that. Left hand already reaching for whatever chocolate I've stashed nearby, because there is always chocolate stashed nearby, because I have priorities and this is one of them.

Whatever the real reason I exist, this is what I chose to be inside of it. Curious and always movin' forward.

The last piece of a world that's been gone for a very long time, carrying it forward into a future it never got to see. Still looking for the next adventure.