#springworldserial

A/N: Yes, it's finally here! I don't know how many of you were waiting for it, but Springworld is back and it's getting gayer as we speak! Follow for Part 3, or if you're feeling nostalgic, head on over to the Springworld site on Neocities which I have somehow taught myself enough HTML to make work on both desktop and mobile. (There's a cute cursor on desktop though.)

[art by @rain-bowflame]

[Part 1]

Petal was a smuggler. You wouldn't think that looking at him. Or maybe you would. I don't know you. But be aware, he was just a little guy. A bunny boy! Even for a lagoform, his ears were big, and the way they flopped down beneath that fluffy mess of red hair obscuring his face gave him the air of an adorable plushie come to life. He was a lop, and with all the intended impartiality in the world, it was hard for most creatures to see him as anything other than a cute, cuddly fuzzbrain who didn't know the meaning of the word "smuggler," let alone how to trawl nullboards for illicit spacehop jobs.

Their mistake.

It's not like Petal had intended to be a smuggler. Few young bunnies stand up at Show & Tell with a hacked datapad and regale their classmates with aspirations to a life of crime, danger, and paranoid self-isolation, and fewer still are the guidance counselors who might advocate for such a path, or the career aptitude tests that would mention the criminal profession outside the bounds of a heady word problem on the math and logic portion. But things happen, life doesn't always go as you think it will, plans change, and career aptitude tests have always been of more use to the people who run factories and armies than to the people taking them. Imposed destinies are a dime a dozen, but they don't come in very many sizes, after all. The fact is, Petal was good at smuggling, though he hadn't been doing it very long, and if creatures tended to underestimate him due to silly things like the shape of his ears, so much the better—as long as his employers knew he meant business, it was better that way. Who did he think he needed to impress?

It's not like he had many folks to impress, anyway. Planetside, maybe. Not out here where you weren't weaving through traffic so much as looking for three molecules close enough to juggle. It was quiet out here, not in the way that nighttime is quiet on the far side of your local star, but in the way that death is, or the time before you were born. Fathomless, both in yawning depth and mystery, unshrouded but empty, unresponsive, baffling in every way. It was space, but it wasn't a place—just an unlit alleyway between where one system ended and another began. A distance like that couldn't be reckoned like a little jaunt between planets, the numbers lost all meaning in the face of actually traversing such a gulf. Even time didn't work right out here, not if your engines were functioning properly, and you couldn't rely on your own senses to tell you much more than if you were hungry, sleepy, or needed to piss. A trip like this, a job like this one, could only ever be properly accounted for by the fuel it took to propel the agreed-upon cargo from point A to point B, and by the evident wear on the ship whenever the work was done.

There was a reason most of these long-haul jobs went to bots and augments—nobody paid extra for the psychological toll it took to spend so long alone, surrounded by nothing but the ship you rode in on and the certain knowledge that, if something were to go wrong, the chance of a rescue was effectively zero. It wouldn't even be worth trying to recover the cargo. Nobody with a lick of sense was going to let themselves be implicated in this venture, even if they knew where to look, because plotting a course through deep space meant sticking to approved lanes for approved travelers, or avoiding them like the plague if you weren't one.

Petal somehow got the feeling that he wasn't one.

That had never stopped him so far, though.

Turning to the viewscreen, Petal once again examined the readout: SHIP ON COURSE. NO EXTERNAL HEAT SIGNATURES DETECTED WITHIN HAILING FREQUENCIES, it had said for the past however long. Though he wasn't technically supposed to be using this lane, the chances of running into anyone else out here, even on an approved shipping route, were literally astronomical, and the onboard navigation system collaborated with an impressive array of sensors to make sure he really was alone out here. SHIP ON COURSE, he read at a quick glance. EXTERNAL HEAT SIGNATURES DETECTED WITHIN HAILING FREQUENCIES. There, you see? Nothing to worry about.

He sighed, curling up in the pilot's seat, once again thanking his past self for having the foresight to install aftermarket smart-gel cushions in the old craft. They buoyed his soft body up against the effects of artificial gravity out in space, or real gravity planetside, and protected his neck from whiplash during sudden bursts of real acceleration. He didn't know what the old transport pilots used to do in such situations, back when this ship had been used for more above-board operations. Die, he guessed. Maybe that was the reason he'd gotten the ship so cheap, after all. Damn. He thought it had been his boyish charms.

Petal pulled out his datapad and checked the manifest for the 13 billionth time. Of course, it didn't have the actual names of what he was carrying, that would have been a risk, and boyish charms or no, Petal was not inclined to fly in the face of fate from too many directions at once. A light on the primary viewscreen blinked, barely registering in the corner of his vision as he scrolled through the list in front of him. PREFABRICATED ALUMINUM SANITATION UNIT x12, said the first entry, causing him to yawn at the sheer dullness of it. That was good, maybe too good. He'd intentionally chosen aliases for his illicit goods that wouldn't inspire many questions, but now he wondered if he'd gone too boring. He'd have a hard time accounting for his supposed cargo if simply reading the names was enough to put him to sleep. Then again, it didn't take much. He was a cozy creature, at his center. It didn't matter if he was curled up in his overstuffed bed at home or halfway through a perilous leap between the stars, he couldn't help but get comfortable wherever he was, and if you were comfortable, who could help dozing off a little from time to time? Or all the time?

"And there's nothing wrong with that," he said to the absolute absence of anybody, who listened dutifully.

He turned back to the manifest again, blinking slowly just as the viewscreen blinked back, missing it entirely this time. PREFABRICATED ALUMINUM—no, that was the first one again. His head nodded downward as he put one small paw on the datapad, underlining the second entry.

Ah.

REFURBISHED PERSONAL/SMALL INDUSTRIAL CONDENSATION AGGREGATOR x8, he read, barely getting the words to sound aloud in his brain before tumbling out the back of his skull. He'd once heard that prehistoric lagoforms had had brains that were literally smooth, and while he'd have been insulted at the insinuation coming from someone else, he sometimes secretly wondered if he had more in common with his distant ancestors than not.

Petal sighed again, a comfortable sound, and let the datapad dip down as he held it, his eyes beginning to droop closed as his leporine face relaxed. It would probably all work out, he thought. It always did. He stretched his arms out and yawned wide, then gathered himself in, slipping further into the accommodating embrace of his seat and tucking his knees up beneath his chin.

[art by @pockamune]

Lylack fiddled with the controls. There wasn't really anything to do with them right then, so the fiddling was redundant. Like playing an electric fiddle that wasn't plugged in. Electric fiddle, Lylack thought. Electric griddle. Mm...

The lanky springhare stretched both legs out onto the control panel and looked to their left, where a monument of empty Zapfood boxes regarded them balefully. It had been too long since the last stop, Lylack decided. Stocking up on packaged food didn't mean stocking up on proper meals, and the sooner they got to where they were going, the better. Back home, they would have simply stopped off at whatever highway diner happened along, confident that, wherever you are in the world, a pancake is more or less flat and edible.

Only, they weren't in the world anymore. They were in space, and whatever its charms, the vastness of the interstellar universe meant it wasn't just lacking in diners, it was lacking in everything. Between the little life-preserving systems ringed around their favorite life-sustaining stars, you weren't looking for friendly rest stop billboards so much as for two full atoms to rub together. There was nothing. And...

No one.

Lylack wouldn't have told you they were an introvert. You never would have had the chance to ask. For as long as they could remember, they had been burrowed away working on their little pet projects and flights of fancy, taking in society as a snorkel takes in air: a regrettable necessity that prevents its wearer from diving even further out of sight. It wasn't a question of how often they felt the need to be around other people, but how often their presence was required. In fact, it was one of the main reasons they had taken this job as an intergalactic bar delivery driver—the solitude, they assumed, would be comforting. And as it turned out, it was.

Yet, thought Lylack, as they checked the scanners for the millionth pointless time. Yet.

There was a difference between solitude and being all alone. It didn't set in right away, and it had a habit of fading from your mind when you were back on solid ground again. But these times, these long hauls, halfway between somewhere and somewhere else, just as far from anything as anything could be—this wasn't just a quiet place to think, it was a silence so intense it laid a blanket on your brain. Dimensions lost their shape, time became confused and seemed to go on only when you looked the other way. The clear sense of identity that tended to emerge from contemplation lost its balance way out here, unsure of the borders between the fathomless recesses of your mind and the beckoning infinity of space. At least, it did without a couple decent meals to spice things up.

Lylack glanced back over at the stack of Zapfood boxes over there on the floor. The portside cabin deck, they tried to glue into their brain. Not for the first time this trip, they considered going back into the cargo area to liberate a case of what this whole workaday voyage was supposed to be about.

Any decently advanced outpost had a food substantiator capable of synthesizing anything a bar or club might need—everything, that is, except the alcohol it made its money on. It was true that some quaint little places here and there still brewed their drinks the old fashioned way, but by and large, an operation of that kind relied on too many moving parts when you considered that most planets didn't even have an atmosphere thick enough to support traditional agriculture, never mind a business-minded person who might be carrying such antiquated expertise. To synthesize alcoholic drinks, then, as was standard practice, you needed a Wine, Beer, and Spirits Substantiator (WBSS) and a license to operate it, both items prohibitively expensive for any average establishment to bear up on its own. (There were also similar machines and licenses for other controlled substances—Lylack didn't concern themselves with these because it was enough headache remembering their own employer's ones.)

In fact, there was no actual difference in hardware between a regular food substantiator and one labeled as a WBSS, but manufacturers were required to lock unauthorized features safely away from consumer use. Tampering with a food substantiator with the intent to create illegal goods was punishable by severe fines, or, if done with intent to sell, imprisonment. The law, as is typical, ended up as a matter of cost, and it was far easier for most bar owners to turn a profit ordering their stock from light years away than to invest in legal manufacture locally or risk getting caught up in the aftermath of a smuggling operation gone bad.

It was a long way of convincing themselves that this delivery job was necessary, Lylack decided. They didn't decide whether their job actually was necessary, though. Not now. That was too much to think about out here where a vague sense of purpose could be the only line towing you along. Here where navigating scattered asteroids would feel like walking happily among a crowded room. Here where you'd give anything to see the screen light up with anything you hadn't entered in yourself. Here where—

It was lighting up.

Lylack scrambled to pull their legs back off the panel, and in so doing, lost their balance completely, tumbling backwards over the captain's chair and accidentally mashing keys as their long feet bounced off the controls. A comm link opened.

Lylack bounded back up behind the chair, their black-tipped ears making the first appearance, followed by a mess of purple hair and deep brown eyes that looked inquisitively up at the viewing screen. "Hello?" they said, squinting at the fuzzy image wavering in front of them until it resolved into a fuzzy face that squinted back before opening its own eyes wide.

The face opened its mouth as the comm speaker chattered to life. "Lylack?" it asked hesitantly, in a voice that cracked like sweet milk tea poured over lots of ice.

"Lylack, is that you?"