The curate swallowed down a sigh, tried to focus on Sun and the great gate coming into a more present visual state. “You must’ve met so many interesting people. Who stands out in your mind? Anyone famous? Strange? Alien?”

A grin spread across Sun’s face as they started remembering years upon years’ worth of passengers walking through their decks, sharing meals, talking, waiting out their journey. They wondered where to start.

“There was an abbess, I remember, from the Kvaldite order, looking to found an abbey in a part of the fragment that hadn’t seen any Kvalds for almost fifty years. She traveled with a whole entourage, and there was a lot of fanfare for the mission when she left. Very dignified. Very good at picking her nose when she thought no one was looking.”

They glanced at Indy and winked. “I got a batch of posties once. Post-humans, or so they say, anyway. Wore their veiled suits the whole time, never a face or an uncloaked hand. Spooked the rest of the passengers at first. But they put on a show in the common room doing feats of strength or speed and magic tricks, the usual kind of postie show. The kids on the ship warmed up to the performers fast enough. They always regrouped in the baths, where I wouldn’t have a camera on them. I always wondered if they clocked me for what I was.

“Oh, and speaking of kids,” Sun added, animatedly, “one time, an Elevation prodigy was on board. She was traveling to a tournament with her mom. Couldn’t have been more than eight. Every day she’d sit—”  Sun took a seat on the floor “—in the common room, cross-legged, just like this, lay out her cards, and go through her forms. One day, an older guy from another group learned about her, came up to her, and challenged her to a match. Wanted to see how good she really was. He used to be sapphire rank, you see.” Sun raised their eyebrows with this last declaration.

“No,” Indrani gasped, eyes widening. Posties and Kvalds he had little idea about, but Elevation was a game he was familiar with. “Don’t tell me...he lost?” he said, hanging on Sun’s every minute expression for a clue. “He lost, didn’t he!”

“Spectacularly.” Sun clapped their palms on their thighs, amused at the memory. “Most of the other passengers stood around them, watching. One by one, they started to see the trajectory of the match. The murmurs got louder with every laid card, like the game exuded an energy that the crowd amplified. Her mother saw the shape the girl was building towards, an advanced Divine Ladder, and gasped. From that moment, I studied every face in the crowd, looking for the moment where they also saw, and understood.” 

They chuckled. “When her challenger saw it, understood there was no way he could elevate past her shape, he crumbled and admitted defeat. And this is the best part. The girl was a professional, after all. She didn’t smile or cheer or clap, since gloating is disrespectful to your opponent. So I watched this guy bow his head to an eight-year-old with the most severe, stone-faced expression I’ve ever seen.” Sun attempted the expression, brow furrowed, eyes dark, mouth set in an unbreakable straight line. “It was the closest I’ve gotten to entirely losing my shit.”

A delighted laugh escaped Indrani, and he rocked back on his heels, shaking his head in disbelief. “I wish I could have seen that! What a game.” He scratched at his chin in thought. “I’m not much of a strategist myself. Sadly, most of the games I play, I lose. But back on Malakar, one of the other Curates was in a week-long game of Serpent’s Tapestry with a High Paragon—” he held his hands up, as if warning Sun to brace themselves for the twist, “—with the condition that they fast for the duration of the game! They were delirious by the end of it. Making crazy moves, hallucinating different board patterns.” He chuckled, thinking back to the ridiculous game, of High Curate Lussena’s green eyes swimming in their head. It wasn’t unusual for Curates to undergo tests of endurance, but a week of testing the body and mind in such an intense manner was impressive, if not unsettling.

“Finally, of course, the Paragon won, and the curate passed out immediately, like they’d flipped a switch in their brain, turned their mind out. They fell backwards and immediately started snoring. The Paragon didn’t even flinch! They just bowed, thanked the unconscious curate, and walked back to their quarters alone. She was almost two hundred years old then,” he said, affection tinged with sadness. He pressed his lips together, felt a sudden onrush of homesickness. He missed them, missed Malakar.

Something twinkled near the ceiling at the top of one of the Gate rings, floating stationary next to one of the fractured sections. It didn’t look like a ring fragment; it was too symmetrical, tethered strangely to the structure by what looked like jointed arms. 

Indrani blinked, distracted from the slow wave of nostalgia that had crept up on him. “Sun? What is that?”

Sun turned their avatar’s head in response to the question, but they’d caught the change a few microseconds earlier, and started a more intensive scan. Their shipself was catching up with the light far closer to the source of its reflection now—this object was a recent development.

“A ship, I think,” Sun murmured, magnifying the projection as far as they could go. “It hasn’t been there long. Is it looking for scrap?” After all this time, what could possibly be left, that anyone alive could actually use? 

The image shifted again, and the ship, barely a fleck of light, resolved into more clarity. It was a featureless orb, its hull hinting at a mosaic work of panels. A dozen grappler arms sprouted from one of the hull’s open panels, latching them securely to the gate’s splintered shell. Indrani squinted at the projection. “Have you ever seen a ship like that?”

Another moment, another rush of new light, and with it, something strange. Where the ship was anchored, the Gate was turning green. “Whoa,” Indrani muttered, straining up on his tiptoes to peer at the strange bloom of color on the ruins. 

Sun scoured their memory for anything remotely close to what they were seeing now. “The ship appears to be a construction vessel for zero-g manufacturing,” they offered blandly, but didn’t know where to start on the color spreading out from it. No attempted jumpgate repair they’d ever witnessed looked like this. The mass accumulating on the shell looked almost…vegetal.

“We should be careful,” Sun said, trying to regain their air of expertise as they straightened up and smoothed their avatar’s clothes. “This could be a wild experiment underway, and we don’t want it to blow up in our faces.”

“It looks like...the topiaries we kept at the monastery,” Indrani whispered to himself, in awe of the sight. “How is it surviving out there, Sun?” 

As the scan updated second by second, it was clear there was some translucent membranous layer stretching across the damaged gate, containing the sprawl of vegetation that seemed to be growing denser and darker, sprouting out through increasingly more distant deteriorated spots on the gate. Second by second, more progress, more greenery. Soon, all of the wrecked parts of the structure exhibited some touch of the flora, thick vines snarling around exposed circuitry, banding together glassy Empire hull fragments in an arboreal embrace. It almost looked...whole.

Sun slowly shook their head as they stared. Was this ship… reconstructing the gate? Repairing it? They’d never encountered technology like this before, and felt uncomfortably out of their depth. There were few things in the fragments that they’d never heard of.

But if the gate had truly been repaired…

 “Go get ready,” Sun turned to Indrani. “We’ll be in communication range soon, and then we’ll see who we’re dealing with.”