Spacedock, Tseludia Station, Pantheonic Territory, Thirdmonth, 1634 PTS

  As the airlock door opened, the first thing I noticed was the stench.

  It is not as intense on a ship, where the small compartments allow for the air to be easily and regularly filtered and recycled. On a structure as large as Tseludia Station, however, the odor of Staiven body emanations is rampant. I’ve heard that few races can detect the scent, though at that moment I could not be particularly happy about my own ability to do so. It was as if a wall of musk slammed into me, and I was distracted for several moments as I was forced to adjust to the pungent air.

  Soon, however, my eyes finally registered my surroundings. Tseludia’s docks are designed in a rather organized manner, far more functional than the elegant architecture of my own culture.

  The passageway was roughly twenty meters wide, stretching far off in either direction along one of the station’s six spokes. The walls and floor were composed of a variety of materials, welded and forged together in a bizarre manner with seemingly no attention paid to aesthetics at all. It almost seemed as if it would be flimsy, though it was undoubtedly composed of a high technology supermaterial.

  Like most of their technology, the material science of the Staiven people far surpasses that of my own. The patchwork design of the hallway irked me, but I let the feeling pass. When visiting foreign territory, one must adjust to their peculiarities. It is not as if I could have expected a blind species to care about visual aesthetics, after all. The fact that the station has lights showed how much effort they put in to accommodate alien races like my own.

  The passage was busy, filled with passerby of various races, some of which I had never seen before. The other passengers who had been on the ship with me for the seven-year journey blearily stumbled around as they finished awakening from suspended animation. While they shambled in the hibernation bay, I had already made my way to the exit airlock, easily dodging the line that would inevitably begin to form behind me.

  Suspended animation technology does not function on my people, so I had spent most of the long voyage in meditation and training. The crew had taken shifts to be awake, and largely alone, I had little else to do.

  Standing before the airlock's entrance was a Staiven official dressed in a tight fitting uniform. From a distance, or if one squinted their eyes, a Staiven appears somewhat like my own people. Two feet, two arms, a head with two eyes, a mouth and a nose. When one looks closely, the differences become all too apparent, however.

  They had yellowish skin that built up in flaky clusters which fall off as they go about their day. Their hands and feet operated via hydraulic pressure rather than muscle, and white chitin plating covered all of their joints, as if they had small armored pads on their elbows, shoulders, and finger joints. The ‘eyes’ of the Staiven were solid spheres of a single color, but rather than organs for sensing, they were used by the race to filter and collect miasma. I had spent a great deal of time with Staiven over the past seven years, and had long since gotten over my instinctive revulsion to their appearance.

  This security officer’s eyes were a deep, brilliant vermilion hue. On instinct, I locked gaze with them as he inspected me, turning to the captain of the ship I had arrived on. The two spoke for a bit in the Staiven language, and I had difficulty following their conversation. I had put some effort into learning the language during my travel, but it had yet to pay off. One can only learn so much of a language without a proper conversation partner.

  I merely waited until I was addressed.

  After some discussion the official turned to me. My eyes once again immediately snapped to the brilliant red spheres within his orbitals, but I forced my gaze away. In his hands he appeared to be fondling an oddly shaped gray object, which I quickly recognized as the preferred interface terminal that his people used to access the station's network.

  “So,” he said, squinting his eyes at me. “A Seiyal taking the long journey, direct from Canvas by way of Staive, eh? Any relationship to the Hadal family?”

  His words were clearly directed towards me, and they tore me out of my observations as I heard him speak in my own language. I supposed it made sense that they would assign someone multilingual to duty in the docks. As he spoke, I could sense his attention drift towards the sheathed sword on my waist.

  “No, no relation. I merely wished to start a new life.” He grunted in response, continuing to input and read information from his interface.

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

  “I’ll take that into consideration,” he sneered. Breath spilled out of his air sacs, causing me to cough from the stench. “Any intention of using that thing? I’m aware that your people still prefer to use such… implements.”

  I glanced down to my sword, my hand having reflexively moved to touch its handle. I could sense his disdain for our ‘barbarity’, as he doubtless saw it. In my opinion, a blade in the hand of a Seiyal martial artist is far more dangerous than a gun in the hand of any alien soldier. I doubted he saw it the same way.

  “Don’t worry," I said. "It is a ceremonial blade. I have no intention of using it for violence."

  This was a lie, and both of us knew it. However, it was not his job to police such things. His job would become much more difficult were he to try and dispute it. It was true that the blade was ceremonial, however. As the heirloom of the Downpour Sect, it had seen use as a symbol far more often than as a weapon.

  “I see. Name?” he asked. In response I recited a pseudonym I had prepared in advance.

  “Cyrus Yu.”

  I had known a Cyrus once. We had been friends, but in the end I had been the one who killed him. The official marked my words down and let me go. The immigration protocols on Tseludia were very lax, but of course it was not as if such things could ever be controlled by the weak Staiven government. They had expanded far too much, accepted too many alien races into their territory to ever hope of being able to keep track of people’s movements. Particularly because they lacked birth records for aliens, it was far too simple to just lie to them as I was doing now.

  “Noted. I sincerely hope you weren’t lying about your affiliation, Mister Yu. We get far too many of your type, and of those, plenty die young. I hope you won’t be the same.”

  My eyes met his blank orbs once more. It was a habit I was unlikely to break.

  “I’m not young,” I said.

  Hearing me, he laughed with a dark expression and waved me on. I left the discussion at that, finally able to enter the station proper. Merging into the crowd, I followed the general flow of traffic in an attempt to navigate out of the spacedock and into the city proper. The task was more difficult than I would have anticipated, as the passages were blank and wholly unlabeled. In the end I was forced to stop a nearby Telaretian passerby and ask in broken staiven for directions.

  It took me half an hour to navigate out of the tight corridors of the spacedock and into the greater habitat. Tseludia was designed to feel like a place where one could be comfortable, more like the open expanses of a planet than the claustrophobic interior one would expect from an orbital habitat. It was a place designed for people to live their entire lives within. To me, it was merely the first place I could imagine myself feeling comfortable within for the first time in years. Finally free to explore this new land, I quickly found my feet taking me to familiar territory.

  There are few places in this great starfield where one can truly relax. For me, nothing can compare to the experience of a warm meal in a Seiyal inn.

  The inn I had found was a beautiful building, with a wooden signboard where the name of the inn was inscribed in seiyin script gracing the top of the door frame. The White Sun was very unusual, designed in such a way that it appeared as if to be constructed of wood, though that was undoubtedly just an aesthetic, painted over the cold metal and stone of all the station's buildings.

  Any wood in this solar system would have to be imported, and was far too expensive to use as construction material for a building. Because of its appearance the inn stood out from the other buildings nearby, an elegant construction of curves and complex mandalas that did not match at all with the blocky patchwork of the surrounding buildings.

  As I walked into the open door, the sound of soft music was audible through a hidden speaker, and the tables were sparsely filled with other Seiyal, all speaking in the soft tones of my native language. A small smile lit up my face as I found myself a seat at an empty table, ordering myself some wine and snacks.

  The food was delightful. The taste of my homeland’s cooking is always enough to touch the heart of a vagabond such as myself, starting to ease the accumulated weariness of my long voyage. Suddenly, as I took a sip of my wine, I felt the touch of someone’s attention pointed down upon me from the second floor balcony. Swiveling my head to match their gaze, my eyes met with those of a middle aged man seated alone at a small table.

  He was a sei, bearing pale features and blonde hair, but his face was rugged and weathered with age. His eyes were surrounded by wrinkles, his face scarred in thick lines at various points. He wore traditional robes in a green and black pattern, one I recognized from my research on the station as belonging to the Hadal Clan, the foremost martial family in the system. A thin beard covered his chin, and as I looked at him, he gave me a wry smile and turned his attention back to his meal. Had his inner energy been weak, his gaze would not even have registered to me. Was he at my level, or perhaps a stage higher? I wondered. Cautiously, I lowered my own gaze as well, hoping he would not take any more notice of me.

  There was little chance that news of myself had made it this far out, but if my luck was poor enough someone might recognize me. Taking another sip of my wine, I turned back to the meal, making sure to savor every taste. I would need to get to work soon.

  Staiven: [The original native species of the planet Staive, the Staiven were genetically altered by a faction of ascendants to appear vaguely similar to humanoid forms. Despite their misleading appearance, Staiven are actually colonies formed of billions of microorganisms. They are genderless, but some of the various body types they can have appear visually similar to the genders that many humanoid races have. Staiven process miasma naturally, condensing and storing it within their ‘eyes’.]