At first it didn’t seem too bad to navigate the dense cloud of detritus. Sure, they had to stick real close to not disturb the surrounding rocks too much, but carefully grasping and moving pieces out of the way seemed to be easy enough.

“We’re going under this next piece,” Lia said as she lead the way, being the spear point of this delve into the cloud. “It’s pretty big.”
“Uh-huh.” Alicia agreed as she squatted down. The Squat Walk wasn’t her favorite exercise, but she was familiar with it, and so she made decent pace under the large, arrowhead-looking detritus rock. “I’m seeing some plank-looking stuff further ahead. Are there barrels you think?”
“Hm, possible,” Lia said, “We have to… ooh fire and stone,” she exclaimed.
“You ok?”
“Yes,” Lia said through clenched teeth. “Had a little shit of a fragment bounce off my knee… ok, it opens up a little two paces ahead.”
“Alright, want me to take the lead?”
“I wouldn’t be opposed to it, you can pass here.”

Alicia would say it perhaps was a bit ambitious to call the open pocket big enough for such a manuever, but after brushing against some dirty ice, Alicia managed to take the lead as the oppressive roof they were squatting under gave way to smaller rocks that could be brushed aside with relative ease. The planks turned out to be mostly pieces of some sort of wall.
“Well, that’s a bust,” Alicia mumbled. “You see anything that might be useful around here or should we move on…”
“Get down?” Alicia ducked, but it was a millisecond too late, and something sharp bounced off her head at a pace that was just shy of causing any damage, while still hurting like hell.
“Oww what the fuck?”
“I don’t know where it came from. I just barely dodged it myself.”
Alicia sighed. “It’s ok, let’s go deeper, there ought to be some kind of something worth the effort in here somewhere.”

The journey onward toward the center of the cloud went slower the closer they got. Alicia tried to clear a path to the center with some sort of expediency, but as the field grew denser, the resistance to moving also grew, and try as she might, Alicia couldn’t help but view it as less of a cloud and more as a solid wall around them. It wasn’t that Alicia was claustrophobic, necessarily, but she disliked the way she had to work her shoulders through a tight squeeze, and how it seemed that her elbows always bumped into something somewhere no matter how careful she tried to be.

Finding the empty waterskins was a tipping point.
“What the fuck,” Alicia said as she shook the last of the empty containers. “Has someone been through here, or what?”
“Unlikely,” Lia answered the question that wasn’t really a question. “The cloud’s too dense”
“I know, I’m doing my best here,” Alicia answered the accusation that wasn’t one. “This place is what you’d get if you constructed a temple to inconvenience and minor cuts…. Just look at this bullshit.” She gestured for an empty amphora. The plan was to not actually hit the thing, but in the daze of low-level pain and wariness, she struck it with the backside of her palm, causing it to smash into shards and fine clay dust against a rock. “Son of a bitch,” Alicia cursed.
“Be careful!” Lia admonished her. Or maybe it wasn’t an admonishment, Alicia felt herself entirely too tired and entirely too annoyed to care.
“Oh fuck off with that,” she found herself saying. “I’ve been nothing but careful and you know what that has giv.. Oh… shit, ow,” A rock bounced off Alicia’s splint, sending a spike of white hot reminder of why she should not let that happen up her arm.
“We need to get out of here.”
It took Alicia a second to recognize the hurried tone of Lia’s words in her pain and anger, but once she picked up on it, and her tired, pained, and angry brain got around to processing it, she could clearly see why. There was movement around them now, rocks colliding with pieces of ice, wayward planks pushing their way through the detritus. Alicia wasn’t sure if it was an outside force agitating things, or if this was their many failures at moving without disturbing the cloud coming back to haunt them. Either way, one thing was for sure, getting the fuck out had just become a priority. Somewhere far away, Alicia could swear she sensed the Deep Song, like some wayward voidling was singing the base code of the universe for some reason, but there really REALLY was no time to dwell on it.

“Fuck this,” Alicia said as she seized the biggest piece of rock she could find. “I’m blowing us an exit, damn the torpedoes.”
“No, wait, Alicia,” was all Lia could say before something hit her low and fast, causing both an unseemly crunching sound that Alicia couldn’t help but hear, as well as a scream of pain that somehow seemed undersized coming from the dense, formidable woman that Lia was, at least in Alicia’s estimation.
“Lia!” Alicia let go of the rock. “Are you ok?” Once her mind managed to partially block out the nascent chaos around them, the rocks that were pinning Lia’s left leg didn’t look large enough to do so, until you noticed the larger rocks they both were wedged in. The cloud, in all its chaotic creation, had produced a perfect Lia Trap, and now there was the question if this type of trap could be disarmed or if Alicia would have to break it and just take what consequences there were. Something shattered into gravel behind Alicia, raining pinprick rocks across her back. The pain brought her back to reality. “Oh, ow fuck,”
“You should leave me here,” Lia observed, her voice strangely calm given the pain she must’ve been in and the chaos of the situation. It could be it was exactly these things that gave her that calm, mind. Alicia had heard of the Clarity of Death, where steppefolk warriors who had accepted that their deaths were just around the corner gained important insights in the nick of time. It was possible this was a case of survivorship bias, the little imprint of Lex that Alicia carried in her soul opined, but Alicia did not have the time to take the conversation.

“I will do no such thing,” Alicia said through gritted teeth as she got down on her knees, the rock she was standing on wasn’t parallel to Lia’s rocks, so the angle was awkward, but she managed to get a closer look all the same. “You wouldn’t leave me behind, would you?”
“It’s different,” Lia’s placidity felt grating on Alicia, like it matched the numbness of someone on heavy painkillers but also annoyingly above it all, like the most annoying guy you meet at a yoga retreat were to take up an oxycontin habit. “You’re special,”
“Oh, and you aren’t, Ms. Post-Apocalypse Moses? You gotta take that line to someone who’ll buy it Furiosa.”
“I don’t know any of those references.” It didn’t sound like it bothered Lia much, but then again, the actual end of the world probably wouldn’t rock her placidity.
“Never mind that, let me know if this hurts.”
“Everything hurts, that’s how you know you’re…”
“Yeah yeah I’ve heard it,” A rainfall of what felt like shards of ice bore down on Alicia’s back, more things were colliding, it was a stroke of luck that bordered on the improbable that nothing bigger had smashed together with Alicia in the middle. “Just scream if you feel like it.”
“You’re wasting your time Exalted, you really should…”
“Shut up, just… shut up, give me a second,” Alicia felt the cold, liquid grip of panic seize her mind, spreading like a sleet rain across her forehead, causing her heart to beat faster, her muscles to tense, even the ones she weren’t using at the moment. “I said give me a second…” Alicia wasn’t talking to anyone right now, her consciousness was trapped in a small bubble around her. She couldn’t move. Nothing restricted her but the knowledge that any movement could be moving into harm’s way, and knowing that staying put probably wasn’t all that much safer somehow didn’t help. It felt like she was hearing something, an overwhelming cacophony of sound that she had no reason to believe was actually real. It was like something, her panic probably, just stimulated the part of her brain that did hearing without actually giving any sensical data, giving her the sensory equivalent of white noise. Her heart pumped in her ears, in her temple, somehow the beats expanded and contracted the edges of her vision. Knowing this was a panic attack did nothing to quell it, it was like being aware you had been hit by a wave and was currently caught in the undertow. There was no grounding herself out of this one, and so Alicia found herself following the tide, deeper into herself, into what she expected to be darkness, but instead felt like some vast, colorless light. “I said GIVE ME A FUCKING SECOND” Alicia’s voice erupted out of her, as sudden and unexpected as a lightning bolt. The shout carried something with it, something hot and compressed and unmistakably immaterial that all the same carried immense force, carrying with it a storm of tangible emotion.

By the time Alicia’s eyes could focus again, things had changed, things had changed a lot. For one, the detritus cloud was gone. Entirely gone. The only thing that remained seemed to be Alicia and Lia, who hung on to her arm as they floated in the void, looking at the same time both more lucid and more like she had just witnessed Jesus of Nazareth breakdancing.
“Holy fuck.” Alicia muttered to herself.
“While I am not convinced we both use the same definition of ‘holy,’” Lia said. “I am inclined to agree with your phrasing. Holy Fuck.”
“What happened?”
“You happened, girl. You sent the entire swarm flying, it was all I could do to hang on myself.”
“Ok, I kinda figured that part…” Alicia said. “I have no idea how I did it though. Is that a… uh… deep song trick you’re familiar with?”
“Not as such, but I guess nothing I know of the Song says it couldn’t be. Moving things without touching them is one of those things that’s seen as too inefficient to really get into, but I won’t argue it wasn’t exactly what we needed this time.”
“I don’t know,” Alicia said as she took in the scene around her. She could see the occasional larger piece still spiraling into the darkness of the void, but most of the former dense field was no longer to be seen. “I do seem to have stranded us a little bit, as well as sent any possible landmarks flying… so it’s hardly a miracle…. More of an Equivalent Exchange situation really.”
“I suppose,” Lia said, “but all things being equal I’d rather not be trapped and in danger, so I’ll take what I can get.”

Alicia tried telling herself that Lia probably was right, and that while her big boom had come with some consequences, it had been the best option at the time. She found it incredibly hard to believe, though, and it wasn’t just the silent despair of not knowing where to go next either. Granted, she could still see the glow of Thereafter in the distance, but the question of how to get there was still a challenging one. They had nothing to kick off from, for starters, Alicia had seen to that. So in reality, Alicia figured, it wasn’t a question of navigation as much as propulsion. Alicia had gotten so deep into her thoughts that she was trying to figure out what they could possibly use to generate even the slightest push of propulsion when Lia spotted them.

“Exalted!” Lia exclaimed “I see… no, it can’t be… look over there.”
Alicia turned her head, and when she finally saw what Lia saw, she had to agree, there simply was no way. And yet, there they were.

At first, Alicia felt like she was watching one of those shaky-ass “UFO evidence” videos that people kept passing around. The sharp light making a clear turn in the air before heading toward them certainly had a bit of an UFO-ish flair to it, and even as the light dimmed somewhat and Alicia could make out more of the details, the feeling that she was witnessing something impossible didn’t quite fade.

The light, as it turned out, shone out of what appeared to be a large, round-ish rock. It was hard to estimate size in the void, but based on the two figures that stood at what would be the top of the rock, it perhaps had a radius of thirty feet. The passengers, if that was what they were, were humans, or at least very humanlike, standing with their arms spread, displaying the palms of their hands. It took Alicia a second, but she eventually recognized the pose she had struck while delivering her warning to their unseen pursuers. It was possible that the pose truly was universal, but Alicia took it to be an expression of recognition.
“Incredible,” Alicia mumbled to herself as she waved, a wide, open palmed wave that she hoped would read as welcoming.
“I don’t know if we can trust them,” Lia said, it wasn’t a statement of ill intent as much as a reminder. “Not that we have much of a choice right now.”
“I don’t know that we can’t.” Alicia didn’t intend for the words to sound like a rebuke, but there was no doubting that they kind of did. “But I’ll watch what I say, just in case.”

The sphere-thing slowed down as it approached. Alicia couldn’t make heads or tails of it, how it accelerated or slowed down at all was a mystery, as there were no clear sources of thrust anywhere on the thing, no clear source for the light it emitted, now a somewhat over-tuned living room lamp compared to the harsh searchlight from before. Even stranger, Alicia could feel herself being dragged toward the thing, falling in slow motion in its direction. Sure, it had a bit of gravity to it, but it was a lot more than anything of that size should have, surely? Alicia wasn’t sure of much when it came to the odd object, but after a day and a half, or what had felt like a day and a half navigating microgravity, she was damn sure this was some sort of magic going on with the strange object. That wasn’t all, though. Something nagged in the back of Alicia’s mind about the large spherical rock, but apart from how impossible it seemed, Alicia had no idea what it might be. The impossibility of the thing was plenty to keep her mind occupied, at least for now.

Then there was the sphere’s riders, or perhaps pilots. They were both approximately human-shaped, much of their faces covered by a shroud, their clothing light but layered, the entire getup was probably meant to isolate them, making sure they bled the least amount of body heat into the air field they had around them. The most striking part of their getup were the belts, heavy leather numbers with many a tool attached. Alicia assumed they were tools at any rate. Some of the hooks looked rather sharp, but the ropes they were attached to brought climbing to mind before dismemberment, and Alicia saw a few things that she recognized to be pitons, or something very piton-like. These probably were scouts or explorers of some kind, Alicia reasoned, equipped to do the best possible job of charting the void. No matter how the large spherical vessel actually worked, the riders navigated it expertly, bringing it just close enough for the gravity to snag Lia and Alicia, leaving them to make a clumsy, but soft landing on the sphere’s surface.

“Greetings,” The taller of the two explorers spoke, displaying both palms in what had, if it weren’t already, become a sign of friendly intention. “We are Finders of the Deep Dark, and we wish you no harm.”

Alicia mirrored the gesture as she replied. “Greetings. We are Scavengers from Thereafter, and we wish you no harm.”

Silence followed. What would be just a quick pause as the explorers took in the message stretched on, and from the change in their posture, Alicia felt she understood something. It took her longer than it would otherwise, but the months she had spent in Thereafter had dulled her consciousness of the culprit to the point where even its absence seemed impossible.
“They can’t understand us,” Alicia said, under her breath. “I thought the translation field was two way always?”
“In Thereafter it is,” Lia said. “Out here it’s tied to the void pearls. We have those. Whatever they use for air out here doesn’t translate, or doesn’t interface with the pearls cleanly.”
“In that case,” Alicia fought hard to not let a grimace take root on her face, “First Contact just got a whole lot harder.”