onemorebounty | Someone to Count On

There's not much of a wait before she replies.

Not busy. When and where?

She really hopes the favor goes better this time.

Where we meet to run. Or somewhere else you'd be comfortable. Situation is portable.

Be there in five.

And she's true to her word (if we're not counting seconds).

*Samus is pacing when Verity gets there, alternately massaging the palm of her left hand with her right thumb and feeling the skin of her T-zone. A good ten feet from her are a duffel bag with a bright yellow, rectangular device on top. Her expression breaks into a smile of relief when she sees Verity.*

There you are! Good, thank you. Don't come any closer than you have to, yet. I need you to pick up that yellow thing, scan me with it, and tell me what it reads, please.

*The yellow thing is a futuristic Geiger counter.*

She's got a bag too. When Samus asks for a favor you come prepared, damn it. But she'll put it down next to Samus' before picking up the device. "I. Okay. Why?"

She'll look the thing over while waiting for an answer. Future tech is very user-friendly, but it's still good to know where all the buttons are.

*She's back to massaging her hand.*

I got hit with something in the Nexus. I think something extremely bad is happening to me, but I also have reason to think that I shouldn't be trusting my senses implicitly right now. If this is a hallucination, though, it's cracking complete. Does anything seem strange about my face, to you?

*It's a Geiger counter--whether Verity recognizes that or not is likely to depend on her background. But it's very user-friendly, indeed: just point the sensor end at whatever, and the crackling sound and meter on the readout tell you how much radiation you're looking at.*

She can figure it out. She'll start at the top, working her way methodically down, following limbs and covering the torso thoroughly. If there is something, it won't be missed because she wasn't careful.

"Not really. You look worried. But you don't look sick or anything. Tell me about what happened?"

But there aren't black veins breaking through my skin? No glowing blue cataract on one eye?

*There's the tiniest, faint crackle, but there's background radiation everywhere. Eating nine bananas will get you some radiation, even.*

There was this guy in the Nexus. Dr. Hill, sitting at a desk, had a little ticking thing. Talked to me like he knew me. Asked me to look at a card, and then... things started getting strange. Visual hallucinations, auditory hallucinations, even started feeling a rad-burn at one point. Half the time, the counter says I'm fine, half the time I think I'm holding a big syringe.

*She sighs.*

I think he was running some kind of el-oh-el. I feel like I did when I had the phazon in me.

She pauses, checking the place that got a crackle again.

"No black veins, no glowing anything. I promise you, Samus, if I saw anything like that I wouldn't be wasting your time with this thing, I'd be getting you to that space station where you live so you could get medical treatment. Also, there are no syringes around here."

She's making a mental note to avoid this "Dr. Hill" like the plague. "That sounds really uncomfortable. I hope it doesn't last long."

*She gives a sigh of relief.*

Thank you, I hope the same. But if you ever do see me like that, you're absolutely not taking me to that station, or anywhere that has a hundred million people all in one place. I'd be several more kinds of dangerous than I am right now, and I wouldn't be in control of all of them.

*As mental notes go, that's a good one. But now that she has external confirmation that there's no crisis, Samus relaxes a little, chuckling.*

Well, I blew up his desk, at least.

"Sounds like he deserved it," she agrees with a smile. She's not going to put down the device until she's done, just so there's no question that she's trying to hide something.

"In case of emergency, where should I try and get you?"

He certainly did. He claimed I'd made an appointment, had me thinking I'd stumbled over something I would be arranging in the future, so I rolled with it. Feh, no chance of that now, if there ever was.

*Verity's commitment to a thorough check is appreciated. And now that Samus knows the heaving in her gut and the prickle of radiation in her hand are just phantoms, they're easier to ignore.*

The bunker where you recovered after last time. I've got it stocked enough for decent first aid, and if I need more than that it's still a good place to stabilize.

"Okay. You'll have to show me how to use your... PINpoint one of these days."

When she's done, she offers the device to Samus for review. Nothing particular was found, but she has a feeling Samus needs to double-check the results anyway.

"You're going to be fine, Samus. Physically, you are fine. Whatever that jerk did to your head, it won't last forever. I'll stay with you until then. Okay?"

I have to get you your own PINpoint one of these days. You'd be more trustworthy with free interdimensional travel than many who have it.

*That thoughtful gesture gets an appreciative smile, before Samus looks over the readout, checks it twice, and nods, a relieved smile breaking her worried frown.*

Good. Thank you. I hope I wasn't interrupting anything.

"Even after what happened last time?" She's not so sure about this.

But the smile is reassuring. "You're welcome. It was nothing important. Nothing that can't wait." Verity puts the device back where she found it before nodding to the water. "Let's go wading. It'll help take your mind off things."

Last time was my fault. You wouldn't have been there if I hadn't asked you to be, and you wouldn't have eaten anything if I hadn't invited you to. And even for all that, you handled yourself well.

*Samus nods in agreement at the suggestion of wading, and stretches before striding out toward the water.*

You like stories, right?

"I'm the one who broke the time machine." Which is at the heart of her hesitation to be given another.

She takes a moment to pull off her sandals before following Samus into the water. "Love. I love stories." They're one of the two things she truly loves.

You followed the directions you were given, right? You can't be blamed if they or the machine were flawed.

*Verity might be getting a little more out of wading than Samus at the moment--Verity's not in a vacsuit.*

Well, this isn't a very nice one, but it's long, if you want to hear it. The story of phazon.

There's something to be said for her old-timey fashions. Right now, that she can feel the water washing over her feet and the sand between her toes. But the air is clean and full of the tang of the sea for both of them, and that's something too.

"Let me guess: it gives you black veins and cataracts?"

*That wins a laugh.*

Eventually. It was trying to eat the universe. But that all comes later.

*Vacsuits definitely have their drawbacks. That said, Samus is still deep enough in the paranoid delusions not to surrender its protection.*

It's a radioactive mineral that seems to also be a distributed consciousness. It converted nearly an entire planet into itself, twisted the surface ecosystem, and developed animals that could fly into space, use it as a power source to create wormholes, and then crash into other planets, to infect them. One of those leviathans came down on Tallon IV, a world where my people lived.

She's sometimes able to pick up on enough context clues to piece these things together. The fact that Samus is laughing is a good sign. It's not a crazy-person laugh.

"Radioactive consciousness? Never good. How did you stop it?"

Of course Samus has stopped it. She wouldn't be telling this story so casually otherwise.

With time, effort, spilled blood, and more luck than I'm comfortable counting on. But I'll take the win.

*She swirls the water a little with her fingertips.*

I wasn't looking for it, when I found it. I was chasing the remnants of the Space Pirates. I'd blown up Zebes, the world they'd been using as a base, and they were scattered, desperate. Looking for any advantage they could find: a weapon, a hiding place... and what they found was an impossibly high energy reading, on a quiet little planet out past the Federation's turnward fringe. Tallon IV.

My people had contained the phazon as best they could--most of it was concentrated in the crater where it came down, and the shield holding it in was what the pirates found. But the first impact also scattered some over the world, and phazon corrupts--it turns everything around it into more of itself. It was poisoning the ecosystem, mutating the animals, even corrupting the post-mortal spirits of the Chozo who'd lived there.

Not that the pirates cared. All they saw was a promising energy source and, once they saw its effect on the ecosystem, a drug for soldier enhancement.

Well, this is a horrifying story.

"Oh my gods. They actually chose to inject that stuff into themselves? After it messed with ghosts? What kind of idiots are you talking about here?"

*She did say it wasn't a happy one.*

The desperate, stupid kind, who'll try anything to get ahead. But they didn't inject it into themselves, they shot it into their next generation of soldiers. Most either died or went crazy and died, but a few survived with favorable mutations and were put to work, and a handful showed a very positive response to it. The biggest one was nearly twenty feet tall, in a species that normally averages around six, its body had refined some of the phazon into a crust of armor on its carapace that was very difficult to crack, and it could eat the stuff to heal more quickly. Like, raw, just scrape a handful out of the rock and rub it on the wounds.

*She gives an annoyed sigh.*

The heavy bastard fell on me when he died, too. All that bio-refined phazon bonded to my suit. On the up side, it gave considerable protection against pretty much everything. On the down side, I wasn't as desperate or stupid as the pirates.

No. No, she didn't. But it's what she needs to talk about, so Verity will listen.

"And it started to poison you?"

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