"I just can't believe it," her step-mother was finishing. "How could you have been gone almost two years?"

"Maman, it doesn't work so linearly," Eva explained. "The fact that it caused me to return moments after I left is significant."

Although there was no difference in the world to which she returned, to her it was foreign. She was out of place, and people were curious of her seemingly sudden change. All that time, she had been trying to get back to Nievre, and....once she finally did, it held little appeal. Certainly, she had missed her family. She loved her step-parents dearly and was nothing if overjoyed to finally see them again. But there was so much left to know, to see. It was more than a world. It was a universe full of facets that she hadn't known existed until one chance event opened her eyes. In her notebook, Eva noted the coordinates that would return her home. She checked the initial settings and calibrations to ensure they had not changed. She made sure that nothing had been warped by the jump. Everything was in working order. The thing worked. She had not yet reproduced the result, but it was certainly an uplifting start. She hadn't been torn to shreds, and she had seen her family again.

But she wasn't satisfied, and her mother knew that she was no longer the same little Evanya who could have been by such a life. For them, the farewell was tearful and heart-wrenching. But Eva was hopeful. She'd come back someday, and likely would show up minutes after she disappeared from their sight. She was hopeful. And excited.

She couldn't wait to see what was out there.

Life on the rig was teaching her a lot. Anything she didn't want to lose got strapped into place, and she could twist in a screw in five seconds flat. The rig was like a living, breathing thing, and she, as mechanic, was learnings its nuances, its temperament and biology, so to speak. Life on the rig was a life on the run. They rarely stopped for anything and never for more than a minute. Sometimes they lost people, but there was nothing for it. People were replacable, like cogs in a machine, as useful as their functionality but interchangeable. After a month, only Gaz and Rizo were left from the crew who originally found her.

She was getting sick of the sun and the dust and how the air stung her from how fast they moved. The landscape went by in a blur, and, even as she had gotten used to it, it was still dizzying if she stared at it for too long.

Eva leaned against the railing and sipped vile coffee from its can. Her hair whipped about her face as she looked down at her pocket watch and turned it over and over in her hand. A simple, fat timepiece, tarnished brass and unadorned. She popped the cover with her thumbnail and peered at the surface plate. The hand of the watch moved at a steady pace.

Tick. Tick. Hick. Sputter.

That drew her out of her reverie, and she dropped what she was doing. The can clattered to the floor and rolled off the side. Her pocket watch swung wildly about her neck as she turned. "Why are we slowing down"!" she shouted in a panic to anyone who could hear her.

Alongside Gaz and Pirrit, she dashed down into the engine room. In there, it was even hotter, and she wiped away the sweat that was quickly beading on her brow. "Not good, not good," Gaz began in a worrying cadence. Pirrit was staring at the dials in alarm. She hadn't been with them for very long, but she was talented with machines and was welcomed aboard when they had found her. "It shouldn't be doing that..."

"It's shutting down. Merde!" Eva raked her fingers through her hair before pulling down her goggles and peeling back a panel. She flinched at the steam that hit her face but peered past it nonetheless. She was desperately hoping it was nothing more than a misaligned gear, but something in her gut told her it couldn't have been that easy. "C'est des conneries..." The entire left side, gears, connections, everything, had melted. "Gaz, I thought you were supposed to be doing routine maintenance!"

"I was!" he insisted, and he was about to go into a defensive list of just what he had done, but Eva cut him off.

"Pirrit, shut it down. When it's cool enough, take out the ruined sections. Gaz, with me. Scavenge whatever you can for replacement parts. If we can't move, we're dead." She raced up and began taking apart all non-essential machienery, beginning with conveniences but eventually turning toward weaponry as well. She could hear Pirrit swearing down below as she burned herself. After all the speed, it felt like they were crawling. There was no time to lose. Eva brought the parts down, Gaz following shortly after with his own armload of gadgetry. He had the most experience with the engine, so Eva let him take the lead in rebuilding it. She felt useless, just a pair of extra hands at this point, not a brain, but there wasn't any time for her to tinker around in there. They needed the speed of one familiar with the terrain, and that was Gaz.

The engine room lurched. "What was that?" Pirrit called. But Gaz and Eva knew. They had disabled the weapon systems for parts, and the blue elf ran above deck before anyone could stop her. They were being swarmed by runners like hyenas surrounding a dying carribou. The crew was defending the rig with handguns, swords, pipes, whatever they could find. Eva ducked inside her shared quarters and grabbed her bag off of her bed, slinging it over her shoulder. In one hand, she pulled her wrench from her belt. In her other, she held a rather odd-looking gun. She dashed back out in time to see Rizo in a losing battle against three runners, lizard-like things the same dusty brown as the land, quick and with rows of very sharp teeth. She cracked one in its head and sent it tumbling over the railing, giving Rizo the advantage he needed to ward off the other two. "What's goin' on?" the man demanded when he had the breath.

"Engine's melted. Gaz and Pirrit are on repairs. So I'll help mount a defensive until they can get us moving again, d'accord?" Rizo looked skeptical at the 5'2" woman resting a bloody wrench on her shoulder, but he was in little position to argue.

"If ya ain't any help down there, then might as well make ya useful," he relented.

She raced down the rig to check on the others. They had lost another. Eva couldn't even remember the woman's name, and she let herself feel sad for a moment before more runners distracted her. She knew it was a losing battle, and she wasn't a fighter. She only hoped she could buy enough time...

They needed a diversion, something to draw the runner's attention away from the rig so Gaz could make his repairs. An idea quickly sparked in Eva's head, a risky, foolish, stupid idea. She raided the larder, pulling out a large supply of the most pungent food she could find, mostly canned fish and the like. She pulled the tabs, opening all of the cans and filling a sack with it. Then she fished around in her bag until she found something useful and deadly, and she carefully set the device inside as well. Then she pulled out her watch and gave the dials a whirl, which was just as dangerous as staying.

"I'm gonna need fifteen more minutes at least!" she heard Gaz calling from below. As things stood, they weren't going to last five. Eva made a run for the railing and lept off into the wilds, the first time she had set foot on solid ground since she had arrived in the world. They had slowed enough that she only stumbled when she landed and kept running away from the rig. The smell of food was doing its job, drawing the beasts away from her crew and toward her. "Lance, are you insane?" Rizo called.

"Little bit!" she yelled back and flashed a smile before she was overtaken. She pressed a button on her watch, and her disappearance was covered by an explosion as the runners attacked the sack of food and the pressure bomb she had left hidden inside.

For a time, Eva simply lay there, breathing and dripping and ignorant of the fact that she was something of a spectacle. A tap on the glass caused her to sit up and push her hair out of her face. The air in there was a little thin, but she could hardly complain. A webbed hand pressed against the glass, and large, dark eyes inside a scaled face peered in at her. Eva wondered if that was the clever person who had saved her, and, in a show of good faith, placed her blue and gloved hand against the image of the other. She tilted her head and looked back, wondering how they communicated, what they ate, how they lived. A technologically advanced people, perhaps a bit intrigued by the surface, to have air-breathing plants housed and catalogued so. The figure left, and Eva instead inspected the plants, ran her fingertips over the little plaques in front of each specimen. The writing was strange, angular and alien. The plants were odd and clearly out of home in their glass prison. A tree was trying to grow into a corner and was instead flattening to the sides like a square. She had to be thankful that they oxygenated the room as they did.

Or perhaps they respired like she did, and the grate pumped in oxygen. There was no way to know until she could find a way to communicate.

There was no pressing need or danger, but she pulled out her watch and inspected it, popping it open and checking its functionality. She smiled a little. It had been a solid piece before she gutted it, and her work was precise. It wasn't completely waterproof, certainly not enough to open the lid while submerged, but it kept most of the damp out, and what bit had seeped in hadn't done any damage. She left it open to dry and instead turned her attention outside.

Everything was dark and greenish-blue, but she saw lights in places. A city, both modern and organic, loomed before her. It grew out of caverns and spiraled up toward the surface. The view was somewhat unbelievable, all glass and metal and more curves than straight lines. Where was the surface, even" She peered up but saw only water. Could a world be just water" She didn't think planets worked that way, and those plants keeping her company seemed to confirm it.

Although, she supposed there could have been pockets of air elsewhere on the world. Eva wondered if she'd ever have the opportunity to explore it. And that triggered another thought. How did they manage to harvest these plants from their airy environment' How were they tended" Did some manner of water-breathing aparatus exist for them to venture out of their oceans" And if so, could she cobble together something to suit her seemingly unique needs"

A second tap on the glass stirred her from her thoughts, and she met the eyes of another inhabitant of the city. Or was it the same one from before" At first glance, those people almost looked like humans, with arms and legs and heads and lips, but their mouths were much larger, and their eyes were far-set. They had no noses, and although they seemed to have ears, those were covered by a translucent membrane that made her wonder what they might be. As she looked closer, Eva noticed that over one ear, if it was an ear, he or she had hooked a small, circular device with a connected tube that went into the mouth. That was odd, and when she went to study it further, she heard a small splash. Turning around, she saw a similar but obviously modified device.

Eva walked over, picked it up, and carefully maneuvered it around her piercings as she hooked it over her pointed ear. The mouth piece, however, remained steadfastly outside of her mouth.

She heard a woman's voice through the speaker. "Me Mirai. Me friend." The scaled woman on the other side of the glass tapped her chest.

"You speak the common," Eva practically laughed. "Now that is coincidence. Although, it is strange, if you think at it. Every single place I go, people speak this language. How is that possible? It makes no sense. Oh, and do not vivisect me, if you please. Or disect me."

The woman seemed surprised and confused.

"But of the two, I suppose I prefer the former."

Certainly, it was a story made so by the foreign concept of a bipedal elven species who travelled to a predominantly human world (which of course prompted an explanation of humans and how they differ compared to elves, the means of her travel which Eva honestly knew little about, and several pointed questions about how creatures could survive properly on the surface), and then made another willful leap to another, more fantastical one.

Mirai was still stuck on the notion of moving around without water. "So....so you are....tied to the surface?" she asked, somewhat unable to comprehend.

Eva stood up in the glass box. "Yes, it is like this!" she explained as she started to walk about in the small space. "The legs and the center of balance throughout here," she said, gesturing through the core of her skinny frame, "makes the method less....maladroit....clumsy! Less clumsy than you might expect."

"And you cannot move around?"

"Not through the air like you do through the water, in all three dimensions with ease. Air is thin, gravity is ferme, and humans and most elves do not have a biological means to propel themselves through it. We instead use vehicles, such as the balloon, dirigible airships and the like-"

"Dirigible airships?" Mirai interrupted.

"Torpedo-shaped ships that use large quantities of helium to overcome the density of the atmosphere and become airborne and engines to allow for controlled propellation via engines," Eva explained. "It is like....if you used balloons filled with air to assist ascension to the surface. The air is less dense, so you would move up by that force alone."

Mirai paused as she considered all that Eva had told her, and the blue elf tapped her hands against the glass. "So....how about letting me poke at one of your water breathing aparatuses?" she hedged with a little grin.

The water-breathing aparatus reminded Eva of a far more sophisticated diver's suit she had seen at an inventor's fair. That one had been rather clumsy and fully contained, enclosing the diver in a water-tight environment with a tube for breathable air extending all the way to the surface. But this device was a work of brilliance. She lifted it up, testing its surprisingly light weight in her hands. It was a self-contained, above-water respiration aparatus. For a moment, the series of descriptors seemed familiar. It was constructed entirely for the needs of their species: the tank held water (which limited them, as water turned to ice at high pressures, independent of temperature as far as current application was concerned), and the mask was made to extend over their gills. Eva wondered if she had the tools to alter the plastic and make it fit snugly over her own face. At least she didn't have to worry about fashioning an eye piece. She had her own goggles, and she pulled them down over her eyes.

Eva turned the nozzel on the tank, and she was somewhat surprised at the force at which the water sprayed her, catching her in the face and nearly knocking her over. She turned it away, toward the hole in the floor, so at least it would drain as she inspected it. Then she tightened the nozzel when she noticed, belatedly, the regulator inbetween the tank and the mask. A second tube was to expel water as fresh was sent from the tank, the regulator matching the respiration speed of the wearer. That would be useful, if it compensated for pressure differences.

Making certain that she did not breathe, she placed the mask over her mouth. There wasn't much room for her nose, but other than that the general face shape was the same. It extended down to her neck, where Mirai and her people must have had gills, but it fit tightly. Still holding her breath, and with the mask strapped in place, Eva removed the communicator Mirai had tossed her and dunked her head down in the pool. Her mouth still felt dry, which meant that the mask would trap air the same as it trapped it out for them.

She dragged herself back up, tired from nearly drowning, from the hours spent in relative solitude, from the thinness of the air. Eva pushed her waterlogged hair back again, pulled out a screwdriver from her belt, and began to carefully pry open the regulator. Before she could make any adaptations, she first had to see how it all worked.

And, admittedly, she was very curious how it worked.