Ceremony 1

"It's almost time." The Captain had invited the duo to the bridge. "Just stay calm. The acclimation might give you a headache, but the Healer is here to make sure nothing goes awry."

It was finally time for them to breach the veil.

"We'll just have to eat another one of those beans right? It shouldn't be too hard." Don was very nonchalant about this. They had a month to prepare. At this point, whatever happened, happened.

"You might be safe from split decay, yes, but there are other physiological risks to a sudden increase in split. Stay calm and inform us if anything feels wrong." The Captain nodded at the Healer, relinquishing control of them to her.

"This is it Don... Keep a hold on Mercedes would you?" The dog, a little too big to be a puppy anymore, was seated between Donovan's legs.

She was seated, not calm.

Her tail was polishing the wood down with how fast she was wagging it, and she was choking herself against Don's arm in her excitement. At least Mercedes was remaining disciplined, she wasn't whining or barking.

"I know." He ruffled the fur around her neck. "Good girl Mercedes."

There was a loud pop, and the background once choked in darkness found itself littered with specks of light, the same sight they were used to seeing in the night sky.

But there was something different.

Something they had been expecting, but was off-putting nonetheless.

The stars where not the white lights they were familiar with, a collage of red and orange with some pricks of yellow. There was a part of Donovan that wanted to belch at the sight of it.

He hadn't realized it until now, but he was something of a purist when it came to the night sky.

It was an inviolable beauty, the result of billions of years of natural processes, and one in which man had no hand in manipulating. The white was pure, a symbol of hope to him and many others.

Now it just looked like the bloody aftermath of a murder, even the black 'empty' spaces had a red tint from the countless indistinguishable red stars that filled the gaps. The red made him angry, irritable.

Diana had a similar reaction, but her focus was more on how ugly it looked, unappealing to the human eye. To her it looked like a blistering, infected, necrotic wound. The work of some incompetent doctor having failed to properly treat a patient.

It saddened her to see the universe in such a state, it's glimmering beauty lost forever. A memory relegated to images and diagrams.

Anger and sadness was where their emotions diverged, united in disgust of this abomination they now found themselves in.

But hate it though they may, this was home now. They had to survive here, thrive, and they couldn't pay heed to appearances. It was time to get to work.

"Do you feel anything off?" The Healer asked the two of them that question upon seeing their expressions. Naturally, she had assumed something had happened.

As she couldn't understand them, they just shook their heads. At least body language for yes and no answers could be translated properly.

As they were seated on a somewhat lower level than the captain, they didn't have a complete picture of what was going on outside, but there was definitely something in front of them.

Given its distance, it was probably pretty big too.

Planet sized at the very least, and it gave off light. Not a star, it wasn't nearly bright enough for that, so what could it be.

"Do you see it? The Great Csillacra?" The Captain called down to them. "You will get a better look at it soon, but for now keep your focus on your bodies."

"That's the Great Csillacra?" Don was incredulous. He understood it was going to be massive, this ship was a mere branch after all, but he didn't expect it to be quite THAT big. "How far away are we from it?"

The Scholar answered his question this time around, he actually had a grasp on the distances they were familiar with. "Right now we are a similar distance from it as the average distance between your star and its closest planet were."

Immediately Don sent a request to ARC to get a size estimate of it. With the complex imaging equipment on board and a distance reference, it was a simple trigonometric calculation for ARC to give a rough estimate on the volume.

'400 - 600 thousand km diameter depending on measurement location and given a sufficient margin of error. Estimated to be around 1/25 the volume of our sun. Is that the Great Csillacra?'

An almost instantaneous response, expected given the simplicity of the calculations involved. Don replied with a 'Yes, we'll talk later.'

"Hey Diana, ARC says that thing's almost a 25th the size of the sun. Is that even possible?"

"How should I know? I'm not a physicist or whatever the hell it's called." She wasn't as much snapping at him as she was wondering why he would ask her something she couldn't knnow the answers to.

"I'm not talking about the gravity or shit like that, I'm talking about trees, you seem to know about them. Isn't there some sort of genetic limitation to their growth?"

Don had long since conceded that there were just some things that wouldn't make sense with their current understanding of the laws of the universe, he just wanted to know if there was any connection to botany on this subject.

"I don't think there is a built in genetic limitation, no. Usually trees just get too big to support themselves or are killed by something external. Height may have a limit as a means to keep them from becoming unbalanced, but total volume and maximum width are unrestricted in most cases I believe."

"Okay then." Don made a mental note of that. "In that case, how long do you think a tree would have to grow to get that big?"

"That's what you're worried about right now?"