#understandable really

“Boat?” Stress pointed out towards the ocean, where an icebreaker ship was indeed floating on the horizon.

“Yep, good eye, Stress.”

“Big boat!” Stress seemed quite pleased with her understanding of the English language. To be fair, she was basically learning from scratch.

“Big boat,” Alex agreed. “Supply ship.”

Stress hummed and patted the penguin still in Alex’s lap.

-

Alex glanced up when they heard a quiet chime. Surprisingly, it seemed to have come from an odd device Stress had produced from thin air. Alex could see a line of characters in the Ancient language on the top half, a thin pane of dark glass.

Stress seemed to fiddle with it, and a range of text popped up on the screen.

The strange woman suddenly turned and ran.

“Stress! What’s going on?”

“ᔑ ∷ᒷᓭ!¡ᔑ∴リ!”

Well that explains nothing, Alex thought as they chased after her, but was forced to stop when they reached the ice. Stress ran over it without fear, but Alex knew that parts of it could be thin enough to fall through into the freezing water below.

“Stress! Come back, it’s not safe!”

She ignored them. Alex had never seen her get like that before.

They followed her more slowly, cautious on the ice.

-

Alex yelped when Stress suddenly smashed the ice and dived into the water. They hurried to the hole- a perfect 1m square- and peered through. They could make out the outline of their friend swimming around underwater, but they weren’t game to jump in after her.

She’ll be okay. She’ll be okay. She’s immune to blizzards, for god’s sake WHY ARE YOU PANICKING ALEX.

They yelped as an unconscious man’s head suddenly popped out of the hole in the ice, and saw Stress beneath him, pushing him up.

Oh. Oh.

Alex scrambled to pull the guy onto the solid ice, hoping his weight wouldn’t be enough to break it- although judging by the hole, it seemed pretty thick in this area. Much like Stress, he seemed woefully underdressed for the cold, and his blonde hair was plastered messily to his head. Steam was quietly curling off it.

Stress bundled him up, lifting him with very little effort. “Station,” she insisted quietly.

“Yeah, we should probably get him warmed up,” Alex agreed. Stress set off over the ice, carrying the strange character bridal-style.

-

Unexpectedly, Stress veered off the familiar track to the research station.

“Uh, Stress? The station's that way.”

“My station.”

“What?”

“My station,” Stress repeated.

Alex had no choice but to follow her.

-

When Stress came to a small hut, it took Alex a moment to recognize it.

“Oh! This is the place you took me to in the blizzard!”

“Door?”

Alex reached over and opened the door, glad it opened inwards, away from the snow piled in front of it. It seemed to ‘lock’ open, but Stress was already weirder in a dozen different ways.

They closed the door once everyone was inside.

Stress carefully placed the blonde man down on the ground and started rummaging through chests Alex was fairly sure hadn’t been there last time. Had she come back here?

Alex squeaked when Stress pulled out some sort of heat source- they could feel it from across the small room. She turned to punch a hole in the ground, a two metre square.

Then she dumped actual lava into it.

Alex said a great deal of words that got Stress looking at them reproachfully, and even more when Stress dropped the guy into the lava what the actual fuck.

Alex stared at the cloud of steam evaporating off his body, despite the fact the man himself seemed fine. Better, even, as the blue retreated from his fingers and colour returned to his skin. His hair was still a rat’s nest, but Alex suspected it always looked like that.

The man groaned, and blinked open his eyes.