The Foundry | Chapter One
Chapter One of The Foundry
The Foundry
Daphne
Part One | Thrice Bled Heart
Chapter One
Echo Béleaph felt as if her presence was returning while finding residence within the abundant waves of energy pouring off her long-lost home of the heart. She was back aboard The Foundry at last.
Magnetic stripping in her boots activated with a click. Their dark metallic gleam was a shimmering sense of her own individuality—programmed before exiting the carrier which fed her back into the system—ensuring she’d not float off into the free space surrounding its outer deck work. One clomping step at a time, Echo was making her way through the space-side entry-portal. “Fuck yes,” was all she could think to herself as her spirit grounded back in Boreál.
Flow was being found after her longest sleep, detoxing, surging along with the mass of citizen-spectators, alumnus, instructors, Foundry administrative leadership, and those she soon hoped to call her peers once again. While Echo hadn’t recognized anyone yet, nor known herself to have been seen in return, her eyes couldn’t help but dart through the crowd in search of someone who might bear patterns of recognition within their face.
Many would be surprised to see her back. Part of her wondered who would even recognize the woman she’d become; her truest form now boldly shown. Echo’s short-cropped hair had been synched to black and blonde, and she was decided that natural teal-blue eyes would be the way to show herself most earnestly.
Echo flunked out her first time around, flaming into a burst of explosive death knell. Looking back, after such time in travel, she seemed but a child who was too nearly killed in that firestorm of her own making, feeling as if almost another person entirely. There wasn’t one part of her who’d been truly ready to face The Foundry’s challenge before.
The people of Atreya were showing out. Their habited moon’s bluest gleaming reflection of Mother Sun glinted off its near-endless ocean. Citizens lived primarily in orbit, but all shared a right towards time spent on its precious surface area; those three perfect islands.
Chiron loomed, always.
Encompassing enormity shown by a gas giant’s raging whirls of storms was a sight to see of psychological significance for all. Even the crowds of Boreálians were keeping their focus upon entryways to the Aeronauticus ahead. Humanoids who had been grown, founded, or raised in Boreál found themselves most different by the sight of Chiron so present in their core-memories. They’d seem quite off to travelers from about; ponderous, stoic, without the ego borne into mankind apart from such constant witnessing of the universe’s epic grandeur.
Echo tried not to look too often. Its permanent looming presence in her peripheral vision was of awe aplenty. Having come from a far-off world, its sight was constantly tripping her out.
Palpable excitement was buzzing through the crowd, and its ever-shifting glaciers of humanity were roaring in some synchronicity with the Aeronauticus’ Great Generator. Once beyond the gateway, energy barriers, feeding into the entry-plaza, there was relief felt in all by Echo.
Helmets came off, personal protective shielding was disabled—people from all destinations of the greater Elarian scope would make home in Boreal; all makes—and everyone but the most rote mechanical humanoid enjoyed a ceremony for which they might dress up and attract eyes in more style than space-walking their way inside The Foundry’s atmosphere had allowed.
Removing her own shield pack, worn as such a weight upon her back, Echo made her way along with the spectators into the arena itself. That causeway she took was packed forty wide, and she was dead center, taller than the rest, with her eyes fixed on the generator; Galleleus. She had missed it most of all, The Foundry’s thrumming heart of energy replication. Its veins coursed through the entirety of the station, and the roiling blue of its inner fusion core was a feedback loop with more traditionally mechanical geometric generators in the station’s bowels.
Variations of skin and hair, and the orientation of one’s standard features, were rich intricacies which would be studied by many a geneticist in the system burgeoning towards its destined place amongst the civilization of Elaria.
Sight of Galleleus, The Great Generator ahead, bore a tactile wave of jaw-dropping wonderment which Echo had made her detour for in specificity. She still wore her spacesuit and felt her nature as out of place, while touching that energy coursing through the crowd. In herself, she’d felt dread, remembrance, and her heart ached in her chest at the memories borne to mind’s vision.
Coming to pierce the splitting streams of crowd, each pathway borne taking aim towards their booths throughout the opposing lengths of the colosseum, Echo stepped forward into a lonely spot before a parapet overlooking the great drop towards Aeronauticus’ floor. Before her spun Galleleus’ three mighty rings, ever-rotating around its glowing azure sun of fusion energy; an armillary sphere of epic proportion.
From beneath this clearest dome of engineering prowess were sights one wouldn’t witness anywhere else in the universe. Chiron’s weighted tower of onyx and amber owning such space, Mother Sun’s planetary illumination highlighting its epic horizon-line, and Atreya—the life-giving moon in a perfect pirouetting rotation only just visible by The Foundry’s unique tilt and location in the loom of Chiron; reflecting it all in its storms and seas. Along with that most vivid roiling sapphire sphere at the center of this arena which surged with sparks of whitest light, and its trio of furious twirling metallic rings.
Just then, two combat mechs in warship-form tore a streak of flame up the Atreya side of the dome. Graduates, no doubt, soon headed out to the frontlines of expansion after one final show.
Echo felt truly home at last.
Spotting those two warships of fiercely immaculate grace and velocity, unable to recognize the mechs themselves at her distance, holographic displays began projecting into the broad space beneath the dome. Close-up imagery of their flight; such plethoras of spectacle they were. Layered imagery both borne to air and upon the surface of the dome itself would gift access to the eyes of the cockpits, the geometry of their flight seen from sensor drones deployed about The Foundry’s time-space, along with echoing and engineered auditory depictions of ferocity which would not prove true to the quiet of space.
It was Silence and Epoch. Echo had always been a fan; they were nothing but incredible. She was only surprised they hadn’t already graduated.
That was where Echo’s heart knew she was meant to be; flight had always felt a part of her soul. The ways in which it was told Foundry warriors found oneness within the consciousness of their warships had always made her belly tingle in a strangely futile way.
It was her destiny, the one she’d known her whole life; to be a pilot of The Foundry.
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