Beginnings

Two weeks. It's been only two weeks since I met her, and my life feels like it's been turned upside down.

Actually, it feels like I'm still spinning. Sometimes everything is up, and sometimes everything is down.

Matariki says writing it down might help. I'm giving that a try, though it may all be a waste of time.

It started in the Bazaar... actually, it started before that, with a different person.

It started in a bar. In Pator VII Kulheim station, at the Shackled Amarr. It was after an early shift op, and I decided to drop in there to hang out and relax with the gradient pilots. The only pilot there was Sarrapis, and she hadn't been on the op. She was drunk. She was sad, and she wanted to get drunker.

Sarrapis is a hauler pilot for Gradient. She says she was a slave, and she has no memories prior to being rescued by a Gradient pilot from a slave hulk - something about Vitoc side-effects. She seemed lonely, and when I talked to her it felt like I was throwing her a life-line. She was hanging on my every word, but I knew it wasn't because of what I was saying, just that someone was paying attention to her.

So I did a bit of drinking with her, and she did a lot of drinking, and we talked. And I discovered she had never been on a planet - or didn't remember being on a planet, so I offered to take her to Matar.

The next day, I took her sailing, on a lake near Paiho. It was a slightly windy day, so the boat was pushed and blown around.

Sarr loved it. Loved the wind in her hair, the sun on her face. She was fun to be around. It was nice feeling like the virtuous warrior in the white interceptor. She didn't drink anything all day.

We got back to station, wind-burned and happy, and she had a hot-chocolate drink and went to bed, looking like a new person.

And then I wandered Heimatar feeling ... like doing good deeds, or rescuing someone.

And in the Rens Bazaar I ran into Camille again - she's 7, and intelligent and vivacious, and she talks to strangers in the streets and she has her own security team of hard people following her around. What changed the world was that she introduced me to her sister - Cia...

Cia is Gallente, tallish, maybe 15cm shorter than me, and looked scared. She looked like she'd been in a crash or something, and had some scary looking guards around. She seemed interested to talk, and reminded me a lot of Sarr only not unhealthily skinny. So naturally, I got into the white interceptor again. I gave Camille some suggestions and she went off with her security team, and I got to talk to Cia.

Cia was sad and hurt and twitchy at the most unlikely topics. I set out to right wrongs and save her...