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"Even nothing is something." (Jerry Seinfeld)

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['-ment, 'void,' while it's sometimes compared with the Greeks' 'aether,' is also quite distinct from it in its own way. It connects with the importance of space, silence, everything that shines by its absence, from the black void of outer space to the spaces between words that make them possible to understand. The best defense, it was argued, could be absence, not to be there, to get out of the way. As their fifth element, it was also associated with one of the five directions of attack. When they say that 'form is emptiness, emptiness is form,' what they mean is they-']

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['-never wanted the cockroach to be shown. They hoped the unresolved tension between the literal and metaphorical would give the story more resonance. The important part, the part the reader was supposed to focus on, was that being unemployed made the protagonist feel like noth-']

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['-hing house centipedes and spiders do is harmful as such and they help control the population of bugs that are, it's best to just ignore them and accept that-']

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['-atheists have to do all of their bragging ahead of time-']

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***

Work on the desert planet turned out to be very different from what work on the ice planet had been like in some ways but also very similar to it in others. Fran found it easier to tolerate than the ice planet had been, in any case, at least at first. For one thing, it wasn't quite as hard to get pills compared to solute on the desert planet, which meant fewer injections and less stress. For another, it was definitely warmer and, even though days were way too hot for anything that could've been called comfort as such, she would still have always taken them over the alternative, if she'd had to choose. She was a jackal through and through. She felt like she could soak up sunlight like a plant at times. It would've been too dry for most plants, though.

Nights could be almost as cold as days could be hot, at that. People mostly thought of the desert as hot as part of how they usually thought of day more than they thought of night, but really, the desert just had a lack of resistance to whatever came at it. It was just like anything else, only moreso. Like a thermos, it could keep cold cold and warm warm - it didn't need to know which was which. It reminded her of the surface of the moon. At night, Fran's dark fur almost seemed to merge into the starry night sky around it sometimes, as though a part of space had been snatched up from above to be brought down to earth as her. It was sure dark enough to draw the sun's heat to it, conversely.

Of course Jackie had died of heat stroke working there a few times. She'd died in quicksand more than once. Heck, she'd even been burned to a crisp by that very same sunlight concentrated through a giant pane of glass - it was a long story. How hadn't the roach died by now? (She knew that of course - she'd never been blown up)

Jackie worked in a glass blowing plant run by a blowfish. In the System, not just the different technology but also the different way the economy worked made it possible for glass blowing to still exist on a wider scale. There was no shortage of sand to turn to glass around, that much was for sure. Glass blowing turned out to have been another one of the many skills that the roach had picked up over her centuries in the System, even though she used it less often. Knitting needles and a wood carving knife were easier to carry around than glass blowing material, for one thing. Demand for it could shift unpredictably. You could trade blown glass with scientists, and large quantities of it would get shipped to the water planet for its undersea bubble cities.

The jackal ended up being assigned to help lay the bricks for what was going to become one of the walls for a building that was being built near where Jackie worked. Like some of Fran's previous jobs, it could seem a lot easier in theory than it was in practice. It was "only" a matter of putting down one brick after another superficially - but it was a lot of bricks, for a long time, under a sun that felt hotter the longer you worked there. It was easy for the jackal to imagine just how much solar power Macha could've stored up in her leathery wings working there before. Again, she caught herself wishing she could've had something like that put in herself. Something that could've formed a connection with her surroundings to her advantage.

It was one-blocking it, just like in gaming. How do you build a pyramid? One block at a time. At least it was finally work-that-stayed.

As she'd worked laying bricks in the hot desert sun, Fran's mind drifted back to the earliest bricklayers who had first built the pyramids ages before she'd ever been born. (Had people in the System ever been born? How... how far back did their memory go?) She knew that, conceptually, the pyramids had always been seen as this symbol of the grandeur of the rich people that they'd been built for. Personally, she thought they said a lot more about the laborers who'd built them themselves. While the jackal knew they'd done so under a form of duress, not as an expression of some creative drive, still, they'd persevered, and they'd made it to the end of the thing. She respected that.

Most Earthlings contemplated the majesty of a bygone era when they'd looked at pyramids today. As someone who'd grown up wanting to work in a museum, she'd thought about this kind of thing extensively sometimes. For a moment, Fran imagined what the pyramids must have looked like to the people who looked at them after they'd just finished building them themselves. Certainly some part of them must have resented the pyramids terribly, these structures that they'd sacrificed so much of their lives to build that some of them had not survived. Still, the jackal wondered if she'd have derived some twisted pride from it, looking back defiantly at these things that had tried to kill her but that she'd finally survived building after all.

'Goddammit, I built this!'

***

"I hate it when people say aliens built the pyramids," Fran's roommate had started. "On some level, people say that because they can't imagine anyone but Western civilization being able to build the damn things, don't they?"

"The question is," the jackal's best friend had countered, "would aliens be offended if other aliens told them we built their pyramids?"

"'I used to make Earthlings build all my pyramids but I had to stop,'" Fran had play-acted in a jokey alien voice. "'Earthlings can't build worth shit.'" They'd laughed.

***

"So the scans didn't pick her up at all either," Orchid observed.

"That's just it," Ghost turned over in her head. "It was like she was dead, but not dead, somehow." They'd never seen anything like it.

"We still don't know how Kacey was taken out," Orchid noted.

"It may not have been the same way," Ghost acknowledged. "It may not be the same person for all I know." It was important not to infer too much from too little, after all. "I don't know what I know anymore." She sighed and shook her head, trying to make sense of it all.

"I do know this, Ghost." She looked up at Orchid. "We have worked a lot of cases for a very long time." Ghost nodded. "This doesn't happen for that entire time and now, it happens twice, just like that. That's not a coincidence."

***

"Say it!" The bully had been holding a bug hostage trapped in their hands. "Say you're nothing!" Most kids would've killed bugs as readily as the bully would've.

"Let it go!" They'd known Fran's weakness.

"You have to say it." It was weakness to care about things, the bully had thought.

"I'll say it if you let it go." A weakness that had to be used against her.

"I'll kill it!" That'd been how to show you were strong.

"I'm nothing!" The jackal had already believed it anyway.

The bully had killed it anyway. Fran had jumped at them and punched them in the face. They'd gotten into a scuffle and had to be separated by the adults in charge. "That was still the wrong thing to do," they'd told the jackal.

"Then I don't want to be right," she'd spat back.

***

"Now, fighting isn't just about power." Jackie paced back and forth on the desert sand in front of Fran as she spoke. "It's about flow, range, leverage, and..." She stopped then snapped her fingers for a second. "Direction! It's about direction." How many centuries had it been since Dex had taught her how to fight after having rescued her from those space pirates again? "Pay attention." One of her four hands pointed two fingers at the jackal's eyes while another pointed two fingers at her own eyes.

"I have a hard time looking people in the eyes sometimes," Fran admitted.

"Doesn't matter. Look at the center of their body to gauge their movements then. The important thing is don't take your eyes off them." The roach would try to adapt her teaching method to her student, just as Dex had done with her. "You have four limbs, not six." People would've given a lot to be taught by Dex in the System - and did. "That means there's things I can do that you can't, but then you do have those claws and fangs." Everyone had their own advantages and disadvantages, Dex had taught her. "I can still adapt most of those six-limbed forms for four limbs, mind you." This time it had been Jackie who'd been the one to rescue the jackal from space pirates not so long ago at that.

"That's good to know." If they were going to be partners, it made sense to do what they could to make sure they could have each other's backs, didn't it?

"You seem to have good endurance, you might be able to wear opponents out," the roach noted. "Sand is good because it'll break our falls, especially when I teach you throwing, but you'll want to adapt your footwork to different surfaces as you see fit." At least they had relatively more similar kinds of legs this time. "Footwork's important, it's how you get in and out of range." You could get sand kicked in your eyes, if you weren't careful. "Watch your surroundings, go for openings, keep your guard up, right?" Jackie was trying to incorporate Dex's encouraging teaching method into hers.

"Sounds good to me." It seemed to have helped.

"Now, there are five basic lines of attack: down, up, left, right, and through," the roach demonstrated as she spoke, "which means the same goes for defense, obviously." The specifics of what Dex had taught her had receded to the back of her mind over time as she'd internalized them. "We'll start by having you practice them all one by one on each side." The more of it she had to spell out for Fran, the more of it was coming back to her, though. "Then we'll teach you to string them together in a way that feels right for you." Jackie briefly demonstrated what part of one of her 'forms' looked like.

"Wow, that kinda looks like tai chi," the jackal commented, "what's it called?"

"Hitting Things."

"Ah." The System was a matter-of-fact kind of place. "Who taught it to you?" Fran had never taken a self-defense class before.

"Remember that girl who invited us to a Jamboree while I was showing you how to pilot that one time?"

"Dex taught you?" The roach nodded. "Whoa, that must've been something all right." The jackal should thank her for teaching the one who'd taught her when they'd meet each other, she figured.

"You know, it really was." Dex had believed in Jackie when no one else would. "I'd be lucky to do half as well, probably." She'd built the roach up when it'd seemed like so much else had been there to tear her down. "Let's try those five directions now, shall we?" Fran moved to Jackie's side to start doing her best to slowly imitate the roach's attacks and defenses through, up, down, left, and right. "These are like, the basic building blocks of fighting." It was like learning the alphabet before learning how to write. "Everything else we do after this builds on this, is a variation of it somehow."

It occurred to Jackie that, while Dex had encouraged the impatient roach to slow down, the jackal, being more timid, might benefit from being encouraged to move forward instead.

"Wanna try these face to face?" It was one thing to perform these moves on your own against empty air, even against an opponent you visualized, but quite another to do so with another person in front of you.

"S-sure," Fran gingerly agreed.

"Cool!" the roach chirped. "Let's see your defense."

"O-okay." Jackie started out slow enough, making sure to perform her deliberate attacks so the jackal could see her coming and get out of her way in time. She even did them in the same order in which she'd made Fran practice them to make it easier for her to know what to expect. She could always mix things up to work on the jackal's ability to adapt later.

"Not bad!" Fran seemed to be getting the hang of it. "Now come at me." The jackal hesitated. "C'mon, don't worry, you're not gonna hit me," the roach gestured, trying to lighten things up. Fran started by repeating the same five attacks that Jackie had just performed against her at the same speed, in the same order. The roach dodged them all easily enough, some the same way, some a different way. As soon as she'd dodged the last one, Jackie followed up with an unannounced punch right away to make sure the jackal was paying attention. Fran dodged it by reflex, without thinking about what she was doing.

"I, uh..." She wove left and right around the ol' one-two, ducked under the roach's spinning heel, and grabbed the following punch on its way to her at an unnatural angle. Jackie kicked at the jackal's front leg but Fran raised it behind her, leaning forward to shove the roach away as she did so her leg and arm formed a straight line for a second. Jackie staggered back, stunned to actually lose her footing, forced to roll back up into a fighting stance to stand face to face with the jackal again. Fran had moved seemingly effortlessly, with the same reflexive grace of her first dodge, not taking her eyes off the roach or changing her facial expression as she had. Now she stood still artlessly, with no fighting stance to speak of.

It'd been like trying to hit a wall. "You know what?"

"What?"

"I think we found something you're good at," Jackie grinned.

***

"They're still on that?" If Amber shared Grades' incredulity, she was doing a good job of hiding it. "How long are they planning to waste on this, exactly?" The deinonychus gave the tardigrade a look. She did have those eyes.

"I know you never liked Kacey but," Amber countered, "if someone's targeting Arbitrators, I'd like to think you'd want to know who as badly as I would." Grades tried to stare back.

"I did want to know in less time than this." The tardigrade didn't quite have the eyes, though.

"They found another victim."

"Was she an Arbitrator?" The deinonychus shook her head. "What's the big deal then?" Her eyes narrowed to slits.

"If people figured out how to cause perma-death, none of us is safe, Grades." Amber allowed a glint of menace to seep into her tone. "None of us."

***

Fran had always avoided killing bugs whenever she could. She'd stayed still and watched a mosquito bite her from beginning to end without interfering rather than killing it. She'd been the sort of person who would literally not hurt a fly. She'd always taken bugs in her house outside rather than killing them. The jackal had even taken drowning bugs out of water when she could. She hadn't bothered them, they hadn't bothered her. It worked for everyone involved.

Much later in her life, when she'd lived out on her own, she'd ended up in a situation where bugs had invaded her living space. If they had reached Fran's pets, they were the type of bugs that could seriously have put their lives in danger, perhaps even killed them. She had not even been able to call an exterminator to do her dirty work for her, or the toxic products would have harmed her pets as well. She'd been forced to kill them herself to save her pets' lives.

The jackal's pets had cuddled her ferociously, as if thanking them for what she'd done to save them. Trying not to cry, she couldn't help asking herself how she'd have liked being killed by a bug that much bigger than she'd been herself. It couldn't have been all that pleasant, she'd told herself. If only they hadn't gone after her pets. Fran loved them more than life itself...

***

It happened suddenly, without warning. Most Renegade attacks did.

It was nothing like the time they'd been kidnapped by space pirates at all. Was something an 'attack' because of intentions, or because of results? If you defined it by its results, it was definitely an attack. There was widespread destruction, people were hurt, even killed. If it was intentions, though, it was something else. There was no intention behind what happened, not as such. There couldn't have been. It happened right by the brick wall and glass blowing plant where they'd been working. The jackal found herself invested in the wall and plant not being destroyed, even though she still believed people were more important ultimately. They'd put so much of themselves in their work that it almost felt like a part of them by them.

A giant centipede came right out of the sand around them, shrieking its unearthly shriek. It wasn't some predetermined plan of attack. The centipede writhed and thrashed about all over the place heedlessly like a worm on a hook. It didn't seem to be paying attention to which parts of its segmented body were under the sand or over it. It didn't need to, not really. It moved as easily under the sand as over it, as unfettered when its resilient body crashed through brick and glass as when it burrowed through the dunes. Shattered bricks and shards of broken glass soon littered the sand around them as their fellow workers screamed their heads off and ran for their lives as fast as they possibly could, with sand falling through the air everywhere around them.

The centipede was a force of destruction unleashed on the world, with no trace of method to its madness to speak of. If Fran hadn't known better, striving to read a pattern in its seemingly random movements, she'd have said that the centipede almost seemed to be in pain. It was as though something invisible but completely unbearable had taken over its mind, reducing it to its simplest expression as its efforts to break free from whatever it was failed pitifully. For lack of a better plan, in the midst of everything, the jackal actually tried yelling at it to stop. It may have seemed crazy, but the System seemed to know no end of sentient life forms who could understand language, of every shape and size. This didn't seem to be one of them.

The means of defending herself that she'd been practicing suddenly seemed very small.

Without missing a beat, the roach leapt right on top of the wriggling behemoth to run across its length, its thousand limbs her steps and its back her bridge or slide. She reached the centipede's head at the end of her run just as the creature's giant mandibles were about to close around one of its hapless victims. Holding onto the centipede with one hand, she stuck her two knitting needles and her wood carving knife in the behemoth's head. As the centipede threw its head back and shrieked at these pinpricks to its thick hide, the yarn strings that Jackie had tied to the knitting needles and around the wood carving knife's handle slowed her descent as she fell from its back. She yanked them out after landing, modifying its trajectory yet again.

Though it had been slowed, ultimately, the creature continued its rampage undeterred, seeming even more furious that someone would have tried to stop it. It wasn't long before Fran noticed someone else already following into the roach's footsteps across the behemoth's back still. It seemed to be some sort of green mantis who looked like Ghost, but not? The mantis extruded vines from various parts of her body, thorny vines, from what the jackal could tell, if the way they wrapped around the centipede's segmented body were any indication. The mantis left the vines wrapped around the creature as she leapt off, slowing her descent much as Jackie just had, only to retract them back into her body upon landing, scratching the behemoth's hide.

It soon became clear to Fran that the superficial damage caused by the vine thorns hadn't been the primary purpose of the mantis' attack. Rather, the thorns had injected spores right under the centipede's skin and, after having gotten some distance from the creature, the mantis set them off, and watched the results. Pausing as if to wonder what was happening to it, the behemoth trembled and shook, quite unlike the way it had just been thrashing around. Giant purple flowers erupted all over the centipede's body where it stood, their roots killing it as they shot through its body much as it had burrowed under the sand a moment before.

The jackal barely had enough time to see where the last segment of the creature's body was going to come crashing down during the last spasm of its agony. Somehow she made a beeline right for the roach just in time to shove her out of the way so she wouldn't be crushed on the sand by the descent of its colossal mass. Fran had hoped they'd both go tumbling down on the other side of where Jackie had been as she'd leapt, but she'd gotten the momentum a little off. The roach's body was thrown clear but, in its previous inertia, it'd stopped the jackal's trajectory short. Fran ended up falling down right where Jackie had been just a moment before her, with no way for the jackal to get out of the behemoth's way herself by then.

So Fran died. Again.

***

"Ghost, I'm gonna tell you something," Collider started, "and I need you to listen and listen good," she went on, "but don't quote me on that to anyone, okay?"

"Are you sure it's safe to tell me?"

"You're joking, but I'm not," the hadrosaur gestured for emphasis. "It's about what happened to Sawtooth." The mantis had brought the frozen antlion to the Commission's Revival chambers, so a number of tests could be conducted to figure out what had happened to it.

"What about it?" The Tracker lit up, giving Collider her full attention as she did.

"We've never seen anything like this,ever, in the entire time we've been doing this." The hadrosaur adjusted her business suit. "There's nothing in our technology so far that looks like it could lead to this, no point A to lead to this point B." This sort of lack of professionalism made her most uncomfortable. "I don't know what this is supposed to be." She prided herself on her professionalism, after all.

"What are you trying to say, Collider?" If anyone was going to lie about this, it wouldn't have seemed in character for Collider to have been the one to do it, in any case. That the look on the hadrosaur's face would've seemed even more serious than usual suggested that she wouldn't have ventured what she did unless she'd been sure the outcome could be worth the risk to her credibility, if anything.

"Ghost, I think the tech used to do this may have been of alien origin."

***

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['?-me suis trouvée toute seule au désert éternel-?']

"Hey Fran, did you see something?"

The jackal had blinked. "You mean, just now?"

"She means when you died," Fran's roommate had clarified.

"Some people say they saw something," her best friend had shrugged. "A light, a tunnel, anything, you know?"

"Nothing," the jackal had shaken her head. "I got nothing."

['?-out le monde veut aller au ciel, oui, mais personne me veut mourir, personne ne veut-?']

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