Brinn sat on the edge of the desk chair in the room that had once been her bedroom when she’d been growing up. There was still a bed in it, of course, but now her parents tended to use it as more of a guest room than anything. Nevertheless, there were still a number of pictures, toys and knickknacks scattered around the shelves that were leftovers from her own childhood.

Like the small stuffed toy the young titan now held in her hands, the brown synthetic fur faded and smudged from many years of rough but loving use.

Brinn ran her fingers along the toy’s plush form, barely noticing the sensation as her mind wandered without direction.

Inevitably, Brinn found her thoughts turning to her recently deceased sister. As was often the case as of late, her insides seemed to clench and roil at the same time whenever her mind turned to Trell.

Brinn had gone over every childhood memory of her sister that she could recall attempting to find that one moment that had put Trell on the path to becoming the irredeemable monster that she had eventually turned into. Despite seemingly spending hours inside her own mind, endlessly reviewing the snapshots of her own childhood, Brinn couldn’t seem to find the turning point.

She could seem to find that one particular moment, the one instance that could be pointed to and declared that here, here was the one crossroads. The one point on the continuum where if events had just been a hair different… then Brinn would have had the sister she should have had, by rights.

Brinn was therefore forced to conclude that such a moment didn’t actually exist. That while Trell hadn’t exactly been destined to become a homicidal monster, neither could the blame for her fate be so simplified.

The fact was there were likely many things that had led to Trell’s end. Some blame lay in Brinn’s own hands, some in those of her parents… but the majority of the blame lay with Trell herself. Her own actions led her where she’d gone.

Trell’s remains had been released to her family after the military had finished their autopsy and examination. The funerary service had been small, quiet. Attended by Brinn, her parents, and a handful of family members who didn’t really know what sort of person Trell had become. That was by design… Her parents had known, of course Brinn had told them, but they’d all agreed that nobody else needed to know.

It had been rough, attending the service. Sophia had requested to stay at her parents’ home, which Brinn understood. Trell had come terrifyingly close to murdering Sophia after all, not to mention Nick, and Alex, and Zhan… and who knew how many humans she’d successfully killed… It would have been terribly crass to ask Sophia to help Brinn mourn for her.

So Brinn mourned for Trell alone. She’d elected to take Pryvani’s advice and mourn not for the woman her sister had become, but rather the sister she’d never had. The sister Trell could have been… had circumstances possibly been just a little different.

“What are you thinking about?”

Brinn started out of her melancholy train of thought and looked up from the toy in her hand. Her blue green eyes found themselves trained on the human woman who was sitting on the edge of Brinn’s desk, legs trailing over the side, seemingly oblivious to the long drop directly below her.

“Oh… nothing important Sophia…” The young veterinarian muttered, eyes falling back to the small object in her hands.

“Do you want to talk about it?” The dark haired woman spoke softly, gently.

Brinn chuckled bitterly and shook her head. “No. Even if I did, it wouldn’t be fair to you to have you help me sort out my thoughts on… her.”

Sophia sighed and shrugged her shoulders. “Give me a little more credit than that, Brinn. I’m not going to say I’m sorry Trell is dead, or that I miss her or anything like that… God no!”

“Well, I wouldn’t even go that far, Soph…” Brinn muttered wryly.

“…But I know she was your sister, regardless of whatever else she did… and I know that it must all be confusing for you… I just want you to know that I am here to help, if you need it.” Sophia finished.

Brinn chuckled humorlessly. She carefully took Sophia in hand and raised the smaller woman to her own lips, gently pressing them into her body.

“Thank you.” Brinn said when she’d pulled away. “I appreciate the offer, really, but in all honesty I think I’ve done enough thinking about Trell for one day.”

Sophia found herself lowered to the Titan’s lap and settled atop Brinn’s thigh and against her stomach.

The two of them settled into a comfortable silence that seemed to stretch between them like a shadow at sunset. Sophia’s mind began to wander and her eyelids had just started to droop when Brinn cleared her throat.

“Sophia… what did you want to do with your life?”

The young woman blinked in confusion and looked up, and though her eyes were sightless, she nevertheless met the titan’s inquisitive gaze.

“What do you mean?”

“You know what I mean.” Brinn said. “Before you were taken from Earth… what did you want to do? What did you want to be?”

Sophia bit her lip and thought. She cast her memory back to before she’d been taken from Earth, before meeting Zara… back when she was living with her foster parents.

“I don’t… I don’t really know… I guess I never really thought much about having an actual future. Not on Earth, and not after… with Zara.”

“Well… think about it now…” Brinn smiled.

Sophia bit her lip. Several seconds past and Brinn waited patiently as the small woman on her thigh considered the possibilities.

“Teaching.” Sophia finally said, looking up at Brinn. “I think I would’ve wanted to become a teacher.”

The titan smiled and laughed, leaning back in her chair. “I think you’d make a lovely teacher.” Brinn’s fingers idly tapped on her thigh across from where Sophia sat. “You know, once we get Avalon settled… they’ll probably need lots of things, like teachers…”

“Assuming we do get Avalon settled.” Sophia muttered.

“I think we will.” Brinn replied optimistically. “It may take a lot to do so, but I think eventually we can get Avalon on the right track. And when it is, they’ll need people to show them the way. You could help with that, Sophia.”

There was a long stretch of silence, before Sophia finally responded. “I suppose I could.”

“Definitely.”

“Why are you asking me this?” Sophia asked, looking up at Brinn.

The young veterinarian sighed and shook her head. “Well, mainly because I was curious but more than that… I’ve been thinking of making a change.”

“What kind of a change?”

“…Well…” Brinn began, before clearing her throat and trying a second time. “I’m thinking about going back to school.”

“You are?” Sophia sat up in surprise. “Why?”

“I…I want to go back and become a full doctor, I mean, you know… a people doctor. I’ve been doing some thinking and I realized that I can’t advocate for humans being fully people while I’m treating them right alongside keiflars, shaars and pet tupps. I can’t say that humans are fully equal in intelligence with Titans while I put tracking chips in their backs. So… I decided I needed to make a statement. I’ll become a full General Practitioner, and bring those skills back to Avalon. You, Nick, Alex… all the humans who live there, you deserve to have a fully trained doctor overseeing your medical care… not a veterinarian.

“Won’t that take a long time?” Sophia probed.

“Maybe.” Brinn acknowledged. “But probably no more than a year or two… most of the basic science classes are the same for both fields… and really, there’s not that much difference between Titans and humans anatomically speaking…”

Brinn sighed and shook her head. “Frankly, that should have been my first clue…”

Sophia chuckled. “Don’t beat yourself up about it, Brinn. You had literally thousands of years of cultural programming to work past. It really doesn’t matter what you used to think you know, the fact that you’ve moved beyond that speaks volumes. I’ve long since forgiven you and Zara, and Taron, and all the rest of our little ‘family’ for how things were… I’m sure Nick has too.”

Brinn smiled softly and nodded, forgetting momentarily that Sophia couldn’t see her do such things.

“And I want you to know that I think what you want to do is fantastic, and that I support you fully.”

“Thank you.” Brinn murmured.

The two of them fell into a companionable silence for a few moments.

“At any rate,” Brinn suddenly spoke, breaking the silence. “This will be a good opportunity for Nick to learn a few things. He might have to do it on the sly, but every little bit helps.”

*.*.*.*

Alex sat in the stool at the far end of his bar and watched with idle fascination as the young woman named Shaar finished putting a metal and glass projector into the ceiling above him. In the chair next to him, a young redheaded woman sat giving Shaar advice and cheerfully instructing her in the proper method of installation.

Or rather… the image of a young redhead sat… the holographic avatar of…

Alex kneaded the side of his head as a sudden sharp pain appeared in his temples.

He decided to just not think about the realities of holographic technology. Myona sat in the stool next to him, giving Shaar advice. That was as far as he was going to go down that particular rabbit hole.

“So what exactly are you installing in my bar here, Myona?” Alex asked as he sipped a mug of his latest experimental brew.

“I’ve been working on a new emitter design.” The young woman said cheerfully as she watched Shaar work. “One that is far less cumbersome than typical models. Essentially, you can put them almost anywhere, rather than just in dedicated holosuites.”

“Hm.” Alex muttered. “Maybe once we get Avalon past the point where they’d be likely to burn me for witchcraft, I can use these things to put on a decent show or something.”

“Maybe.” Myona giggled. “I got the idea from looking over Niall Freeman’s work. He’s done some amazing work on holographics.”

“You mean for a human?” Alex asked archly.

“Not at all!” Myona replied cheerfully. “The fact he was able to invent hard-light technology and make the improvements to character artificial intelligence is astonishing regardless of what species he is. I only wish that we had the emitters ready, that way I could help Shaar install them.”

Alex’s headache came back as he briefly tried to parse his way through that particular paradox, but gave up after a few seconds.

“Yeah… but then how would you be able to sit there yapping at me?” Shaar grunted in mock resentment. “You might actually have to get off your big butt and do some of the work yourself!”

Alex smirked and took another sip of his beer. Over the past few hours that the two young women had been in his bar doing their work, he’d come to appreciate the contrast between Shaar’s biting sarcasm and Myona’s ineffable enthusiasm. They didn’t seem like they’d be a particularly good pair, but they worked well together. Somehow.

The sound of the two women bickering good-naturedly faded into the background as Alex’s thoughts wandered away from his bar. He wondered how Rixie was doing, or what she was doing for that matter. He really hoped she wasn’t doing something that could get her into trouble on his behalf.

He was pretty sure she was though. She wouldn’t be Rixie, otherwise.

Smiling despite himself, he took another sip of his beer and turned his attention to the small piece of paper in front of him. On it, he scrawled a number of notes as reminders to himself. Menu ideas, things he needed to get done, and in the bottom corner he’d doodled a number of different ideas for the sign to hang outside the door.

He didn’t really want to call it the Dodo Beak or whatever it had been before. No, while he was having a tough time settling on a design for the sign out front, there’d really only been one choice for what to name his new establishment.

Rixie’s.

“Hey, old guy, you still awake in there?”

Alex snapped back to reality and found Shaar’s inquisitive face uncomfortably close to his own as she squatted down on his bar top to address him.

“I told you before, I’m not that…” Alex cut himself off with a rueful shake of his head. “Yes, of course I’m still awake, what do you want?”

Shaar hopped down from the bar top and stood next to him, rolling her neck and cracking her back. “We just wanted to let you know that I’m done with the installation and Myona thinks we’re about ready to start testing them.

Alex perked up immediately. “Great. That sounds great, thank you so much for all of this.”

Shaar shrugged noncommittally. “Not like we weren’t being paid for it or anything.”

“Oh you’re quite welcome!” Myona enthused brightly. “I’m just glad we had a chance to check out this place. This whole moon is amazing!”

“Yeah… it really is something.” Alex chuckled.

“Maybe when I finish with school I’ll be able to come back here.”

It took a moment for what Myona had just said to register in Alex’s mind.

“Wait, you’re a student?”

“Yup!” Myona said cheerfully. “I’m almost finished with my holographics engineer degree. Pryvani said that when I graduate she’ll have a job all lined up for me, which is good because I have a few ideas that will be pretty awesome for this compound of hers.”

“All right.” Shaar interrupted. “All set, I think. Let’s test it out.”