Welcome back to the Atlas, friends.
In our first chapter, we experienced the heartbreaking, silent sacrifice of Elias as he was torn from his world. Now, we flip the script. We are seeing the mission through a completely different set of eyes—and a very different kind of consciousness.
This is Cas’shya’s story. She’s a brilliant, proud, and wonderfully grumpy rabbit who has a very different perspective on this whole human-rabbit collaboration. Get ready for a major shift in tone as we see our human characters from the outside in, and learn what it truly means to be a “prey animal” in a room full of predators.
If you’re just joining the expedition, you can start from the beginning or catch up on the last chapter below.
Cas’shya - rabbit - Female: Testimonial 001
The corridor of the earth-forum satellite was distinctly human. It was human sized, made from human materials, and the design sense was so rigid and square. Nothing fun about it at all. Boring, some might say. Why did everything have to look so… tedious.
I looked about the obstinately cuboid corridor to make sure there was no one around, and when I was sure the coast was clear, I had a little excited bounce off the nearby wall to express my frustration at the room’s ridiculous shape.
“Of course they have!” I bounced into a side panel. “Three thousand years of being mostly hidden in plain sight,” I leapt off the nearby windowsill. “Cajoled, joked about, sidelined, mistreated, and made to feel useless.” I did a giant leap to try and touch the ceiling. “Finally we have an expedition with a Rabbit at the helm, and they put me in a human space station and pair me with a human colleague! What have I done to deserve that?”
I made one last big jump towards the wall, but seeing a bank of switch panels, I instinctively tugged at my heart string. Gravity shifted. I adjusted my trajectory mid-air, landing soft as a whisper. I was prone to expressing myself this way, as most rabbits are, so there was always a perpetual risk for clumsiness to manifest.
‘But not this day! No flashing red lights, no alarming sounds, no rushing engineers, we are all good’.
With that little jolt of energy expended, I bounded into the meeting room to go and introduce myself to some new colleagues, and greet some old. The room itself was cast in light reflected off the moon. The intense white light carved the room into a chessboard of blinding white and hiding-hole black, and rendered half the attendees in bright light, and half in the dark shadow cast by the window’s end.
As I made my way in my nose twitched a rapid, uncontrollable rhythm. A prey response. I hated it. I had been working on this project from very nearly the beginning, recruited by Ori’on himself, and so I had become quite attached to the idea of representing everyone involved by showing a calm and collected demeanor.
Ori’on was here already, looking out of the window at the Moon below and the Earth just beyond it. Staring mysteriously out of windows was his way, he spent a great deal of time connecting himself to the fabric of the universe. Juni’per, his much older mentor, was with him too, looking similarly peaceful and content, eyes closed. You rarely saw these two apart from each other despite their relatively large age gap. But then it made sense, Ori’on needed his heart-guide to keep him mentally prepared for the journey ahead. Juni’per may be old, but he was as wise as they come in the lore of rabbit-kind and in his mastery of the strings.
The other people in the room were mixed. There was a stoic-looking human in the corner, looking, as humans often do, ill at ease in these new surroundings. Scanning all the time for a new threat or something to be concerned about. ‘And they call us the prey animals.’
He was tall, and quite skinny for a human, wearing loose fitting clothes that hid most of his shape. Perhaps that was on purpose, to hide his true potential. According to the reports I had read on this man, he was an intelligent and shrewd security officer, ex-military, and had worked as an intelligence agent ever since. With that first impression of him, I didn’t know what to think. His wariness was a physical weight. My fur stood on end, prickling as if the air itself was charged with his anxiety. The result of a strange quirk of rabbit evolution, one that makes us feel deeply what others are embodying. I looked about the room for someone else I might know in the hope it might relax my body from that intense feeling of anxiety I got from the eagle-eyed man.
Sitting in a comfy looking armchair in the corner of the room was Anya, whom I had a fondness for despite our natures being almost perfectly opposite. She was the chief engineer for this project, and one of the most interesting humans I had ever met. Rabbits by and large weren’t logical creatures naturally, and so talking to her, candid and open as she is, was a bit like peering through a window into another world. Her ability to piece together things, to find solutions, to be able to conceive of stuff that didn’t exist yet… It was magical. It’s fair to say I fan-girl over her sometimes. So as I bounced into the room, I immediately went to her and sat on the arm of her chair at the back of the amphitheatre.
“What do you think about these two new guys?” Anya whispered into a carefully cone shaped hand, directing her quiet voice in my direction.
Anya lowered her voice to a frequency that would be silence to a human, but rang clear as a bell to me. In her ingenious way, Anya had developed a small earbud for herself to enhance her hearing capacity and overcome her limitations, and so she was now ‘one of the long eared club’ too. It had never been clear to me whether it was a nod towards integration of our species, or because she was a giant gossip.
I looked about for this second man she mentioned as I hadn’t noticed him immediately when I had walked in, despite being the very human I was to be paired with for the remainder of the mission. For a moment it wasn’t clear where he was, but I noticed two other human scientists pointing at someone whilst whispering to each other and giggling. Following their pointed finger into the shadowy quarter of the room, I saw him. Sat in the farthest, darkest space he could have possibly occupied was a human. He sat small, looking completely withdrawn and haggard. His clothes were threadbare and his hair was disheveled and slightly thin. His eyes were puffy as if he hadn’t slept for weeks, and it was clear he had been crying. And yet, there, hidden quietly underneath this ghost of a man, was the person I recognized from the inner flap of his books. The rabbit historian, Elias.
“I’m not sure” I said to Anya in response, - “I was not too thrilled at being paired up with a human, no offence.” I gave Anya a quick glance to make sure she hadn’t taken the comment badly. As usual she had a degree of understanding.
“It’s just, you know, rabbits and humans think about stuff so differently. The way we each consider history for example, it’s so vastly discordant. In some ways I would rather have been paired with a human historian who didn’t care about rabbits, but the fact he is a human scholar on rabbit history… I worry it will make him arrogant. I remember reading his first book on Rabbits and rolling my eyes”.
Anya nodded empathetically. Quiet and considerate. A slow smile crept across her face.
“One might wonder why we need historians on a mission like this at all,” she remarked slyly. Her eyes twinkled with a mischievous glint. Perhaps she wasn’t so different from rabbits after all, with a cheeky attitude like that - I couldn’t help but smile back.
“Go over to him and introduce yourself,” she nudged. “It’s not as if we have much choice at this point, our departure date is next week. He is going to be our colleague whether we like it or not”.
I nodded thoughtfully and hopped down and over to him, making sure to give the security officer a wide berth. His eyes watched me hawk-like as I passed around him, and they seemed to bore into me, making me deeply uncomfortable. Quite why this confounded historian had chosen to sit in the darkest corner of the room was beyond me. But I swallowed my discomfort as I approached him anyway.
“You are Elias, right?”
Elias looked up and refocused, as if he had been staring into another world and was slowly pulling himself back to this reality.
“Yes”, he mumbled, “yes indeed, and you are Cassia I presume. I have heard about you. It is sad that we have not previously had the chance to meet. I can’t remember reading anything of your work, and yet your fame precedes you…”
Slightly annoyed at the implication, and at the mispronunciation of my name, I responded tersely.
“Rabbits don’t often write, I’m afraid”. I held up my paw as evidence. Elias looked at it intently, a mask of confusion on his face, as if a paw of all things was the most unusual thing he had seen.
It was a very true statement as well. Rabbits often had to rely on human help or a speech to text recognition software to jot down their thoughts. An expensive hobby.
“Hmm yes”, - he replied, looking at my paw with sudden dawning realisation. “I suppose your oral traditions are still very much a lived belief system aren’t they. Still, I hear we are to work together. Am I expected to help with that? I understand you more scholarly rabbits sometimes hire a Human hand to get stuff down into the written form, is this to be my new… role in life?”
The more this man spoke the more my back foot began to tap a sharp, irritated tattoo against the floor. He just didn’t get it. It was what I had expected, and yet it is still shocking to meet a human who professes to study Rabbit-kind, and yet has no understanding of our ways and perspectives, our grievances, our habits in life.
‘Humans!’
It was time to lay down some foundations.
“I am excited to work with you, Elias.” I was careful to pronounce his name correctly, out of spite. “It seems as though you still have some adjusting to do with this new ‘role’ you have accepted. In the meantime I will get you up to speed on the ways we rabbits interpret and understand history. In that sense there will be no need for scribing, we can simply discuss, as per our ‘oral traditions’. If that sounds acceptable?”
Even to my own ears I sounded wooden and a bit rude. But I didn’t care. I had learned quickly that with humans, sometimes you needed to be exceedingly clear and that meant setting up frameworks inside their heads to boundary their expectations. Poor, easily manipulated minds.
“Yes, quite. That sounds… yes quite right.”
With that said, a cough brought me back to the wider space. I looked back and Anya was gesturing her eyes to the front of the room. More people had been slowly filtering in, and the space was now quite full and expectant. Ori’on had stepped down from his windowsill and looked calmly about the room waiting for the gravity of his presence to bend their ears towards him. I hopped back to Anya’s armrest and admired Ori’on from there. It was an incredible thing that he could command so much presence that even humans seemed to stop to listen to him. Expectancy was also on his side. This was to be the final briefing and the full unveiling of what this mission would entail. There were still a fair few here who had not been privy to all the details.
Ori’on nodded to someone near the door and the room went still. The door hissed shut and a holo-projector flickered up into the center of the room showing a schematic for the ship, if you could even call it ‘a ship’.
The schematic filled most of the room, encompassing everyone in its breadth. From the angle I was sitting it was hard to really tell what was being looked at. Certainly a construction of some kind. To the more informed eye, the general shapes were apparent, with the ball of the ship at one end, and the stem with its petals stretching out behind it. But these engineering drawings didn’t do it any justice at all. It was, in my opinion at least, a poor illustration. People and Rabbits alike were muttering amongst themselves, unsure what they were supposed to be looking at in this floating maze of curves and lines.
It was then that Ori’on did something most Rabbits would never dream of doing in front of a mixed gathering of both species. He pulled at his strings, invisible to all but himself, and glided up into the air. Gracefully he floated his way into the center of the schematic, and hovered there, like a myth made real. The lines of the drawing seemed to react with his passing, glowing faintly where his soft fur passed through them. Parts of the schema moved and came alive in his presence, the petal sails of the ship flowed around him like water, and electrical pathways pulsed with radiant energy.
The gathered group of Humans and Rabbits were shocked, both species for entirely different reasons. Some gasped, some made noises of awe, some muttered in dismay. But eventually all became silent as Ori’ons gaze drifted about the room, carrying with it a sense of gravitas and ease. His eyes seemed to penetrate everyone, but not unkindly. To each pair of eyes he met, there seemed to be a momentary pause, a small act of recognition. As his eyes met mine, I was sure he felt the little jolt of excitement I was a conduit for, excited as I was to see a fellow rabbit so boldly show our true nature. I could almost swear I saw a slight twitch of his muzzle, as if grinning at me knowingly. But in the moment I thought I saw it, it was gone, and his sombre professional expression remained intact.
Bobbing gently in the middle of the room, he began his speech.
“Dear honoured colleagues. Do not be alarmed, what you are seeing is perfectly natural.” It was clear that most people thought it was anything but natural.
“To the humans in this room, this skill I am demonstrating will have informed many of your myths and children’s stories about us rabbits. Our unnatural speed, our ability to seemingly be in two places at once, those odd moments when it seems we defy gravity itself, and the stories of when we have aided, or tricked humans in ways that seem magic.”
I looked about the room to see how people were reacting. The annoying eagle eyed man seemed to be ignoring the speech altogether and instead was doing what I was doing, scanning the room for other people’s reactions. Our eyes locked for a moment and I desperately pulled away and averted back to Ori’on. I wondered what his problem was.
“Many know of this ability to manipulate gravity as fact, but due to our shy nature and our deep-seated distrust of human-kind, it is rare indeed that any rabbit will show this openly unless they have to. Therefore it has always skirted the line of make-belief. Like the dinosaurs, it might have been hard to imagine there were such creatures that existed, if not for the fact that we know they did through the fragmentary remains of their existence that have made it through the veil of time. Such is also true with the Rabbits ability to defy gravity, a fact that is only known in part, due to the fragmentary fossil-like records and scarce eyewitnesses that have seeped through into Human folklore.
To my Rabbit colleagues, some of you may know the full nature of this expedition already, and will be aware of why I show this ability of ours. To those others who may be dismayed at me showing one of our society’s most carefully protected abilities, please know your fears and doubts about this action will be addressed. I do not laugh at our history and mock our ways, rather I invite you to keep an open mind for what I will speak about next.”
By this point most people in the room were simply gazing with awe at Ori’on as he lingered in the air, slowly spinning like a planet on its axis. All but one. Elias, the historian, was still in his dark corner and didn’t seem to be engaging at all. My first reaction was almost annoyance. Here we are showing one of our most vulnerable sides as a species, something that even he, as a rabbit historian never have actually seen, and he doesn’t seem to care. As Ori’on continued to talk, I continued to observe Elias out of the corner of my eye. I felt as though I was missing something…
“For many millennia, even before the dawn of the rabbits claiming their seat at the table of awareness, humans have held the heavens in reverence. They have sought for a nearly equal amount of time the means, as a technological species, to claim them. For us rabbits, the sky has always been our friend, and the heavens have always been an intrinsic part of who we are. We celebrate the moment a child rabbit finds their heart string, in the same way that a human celebrates a baby’s first steps. It is through our self awareness that we discover our abilities.”
I noticed Anya was almost on the edge of her seat. All of this stuff about Rabbits was new to her, despite having worked alongside us for such a long time. She turned to me briefly, and whispered at rabbit volume, “You kept all of this very quiet didn’tcha!” Her grin implied that she was more impressed than annoyed.
“The thing that I describe is an intrinsic ability to sense the movement of space and time through gravitational fields. We are beholden to all gravitational pulls, but one stands stronger than any other. It is a connection that is felt in our hearts and minds that pulls gently in every moment. It is not always noticeable, in the same way that you humans do not notice yourself being pulled to the ground, but it is there.
Many times in our history humans have sought to use this ability of ours, and sometimes we have obliged. But at nearly every turn this has always led to confrontation or mockery of our ways. That is until now. In the last 53 years a project has been devised, a joint collaboration between humans who sought to reach their hands into the galaxy, and rabbits, who felt a pull towards the sky but never ventured any further than the edges of our breathable Earth atmosphere. Our human colleagues have built something that is truly the marvel of anything that has ever been created. Every ounce of ingenuity has been spilled into this craft.” The hologram that still floated about him pulsed with a light neon blue glow as if to emphasise his words.
“But what humans could not build was a way to reach the speeds needed to leave this solar system and traverse the stars without considerable passing of time. Nothing theydesigned could ever reach the theoretical speeds needed to truly travel in one lifetime. And so we worked together. This craft has been co-designed with rabbits in mind. For we are not builders. But one thing we can do is travel at great speed, and with the genius of this vessel and myself at the helm using my heart string to pull us, we are going to leave this solar system and see what exists beyond the furthest edges of our explored universe. We are going to see what this gravitational connection to the centre of the galaxy holds for all of us”.
There it was. Our mission in one sentence, to follow our heart strings and find out where they led us to.
For the moment Ori’on finally had Elias’ attention, but it wasn’t in the way I had suspected. At the mention of leaving the solar system I saw a deflation, almost as if the air had been taken out of him. I suspected he had not heard the whole story yet. Perhaps he had just assumed that the cover story about working on one of the solar colonies was true. There was an air of desperation about him, like a creature caught in swirling waters, being sloshed and jostled about against greedy rocks. I saw fear, regret, and something else…
I peered intently at Elias, at the way his eyes locked onto Orion, the way his eyes seemed to shine with wetness beneath his spectacles. Within his lap, his hands fidgeted, twisting and turning those big human fingers. Like snakes in a pit, writhing together. Suddenly he clasped his hands and pinched them between inward facing knees. It seemed to be an unconscious action, a moment where some subconscious wisdom in the body suspected that if it could just calm his movements down, it might calm down his brain too.
No one else had noticed Elias of course. Everyone was still transfixed by Ori’on and his speech. Few people on the project had ever really known the extent of the mission they worked towards. Many had suspected the nature of the project and some had even gotten close with their guesses. Scientists, engineers, designers, had all wiled away many an hour speculating over the purpose of the machines that they had been building all of this time. But due to the siloed nature of the teams, and the various NDA’s in effect, it had remained a carefully held secret. The cafeteria had, for a decade and a half, been a hive of speculative enthusiasm, but nothing more. Now the audience, having their vaguest hypotheses and wildest suspicions confirmed - least of all by a fairy tale-like floating rabbit, well, it was inevitable that everyone was too transfixed to have any space in their attention span for anyone but Ori’on. Except for me it seemed.
I struggled for a while with what I was seeing in this dishevelled man. Wondering what compelled me to be so transfixed by him. What was it about this behaviour that so vexed me? It then dawned on me. I saw a rabbit in him! Not literally of course, but an approximate behavior. I suddenly realized why I was so transfixed. My body suddenly tensed up as if I had just seen a lion, and it was then that I knew what I was witnessing. He was behaving like a prey animal. Right now in this room, he was trapped under the gaze of a predator and he didn’t know whether to run or make himself as still and as small as possible. My heart twisted, and the frustration and snarkiness I had felt for him earlier melted as I recognized this behavior and felt it for myself in my empathetic reaction.
Something else entered into my consideration. I’d never seen a human like this. I had never seen such fear, and such a rabbit-like reaction in any human. Even in rabbits it wasn’t that common for the prey instinct to kick in this hard without the immediate presence of a large predatory animal. What had terrified him so much? My ears flattened against my skull. I had expected feelings of awe or wonder to fill the room, nervousness even! But this was something I had never anticipated.
I looked at Ori’on once more, now talking at length about some of the core aims of the mission. Still floating, still breaking so many of our species conventions and taboos by doing so.
An impetus came over me. I figured, If he can do it, why can’t I? Hopping down off the arm of the chair, initially only drawing Anya’s attention, I made my way around the edge of the room.
Before Elias could even notice or resist I had rounded on him and jumped into his lap, like a common pet. A few people gasped, a Rabbit squealed in shock, and in the distance a device clattered on the floor from shaky hands. The room stilled and even Ori’on faltered, turning to stare for a moment. I met his gaze.
“Do carry on, time stops for nobody after all”. I implored him, hoping that he at least would understand.
The room couldn’t help but stare and blink in shock. The heat of all those eyes seemed to momentarily burn into my fur, carving within my skin the branding of a traitor to the rabbits, and an utter enigma to the humans. My nose twitched at the scent of the room’s sudden aversion to what I had done, and I picked up a small comment from deep in the room, a rabbit swear word, quietly whispered. ‘Well, this will be a meeting they will never forget.’ I thought to myself. How many conventions could be shattered in one hour? I suppose this must be a new record.
The impulse that had driven me to do this was still being felt, but I could sense its conviction wilting like young leaves under a too hot sun. Fortunately, Jun’ip, and by extension, Ori’on were wiser than most. Jun’ip had now noticed Elias too, and being the sage rabbit he was, it seemed as though he immediately understood the justification. Ori’on closed his eyes for a momentary second, connecting to the strings and he sensed in them the same fear I had noticed.
He cleared his throat and with a commanding voice slowly drew people’s attention back to him, continuing on with his talk, almost as if there’d never been a pause. The intense sun of people’s stares began to go back behind the clouds and the heat of their attention on me lessened slowly. I calmed back down, my own prey instincts beginning to drain away. Sinking lower, I settled into Elias’s lap.
It was an odd sensation being ‘on’ a human in this way. Not only was it highly undignified and some might even say improper, but the thing that really was sticking thorn-like in my mind was the vulnerability: the trust. Here I am, sitting in the lap of a deeply distraught giant who could theoretically hurt me without a second thought. The fear of this submissive position on his lap was not something I had expected. Why would I suspect it? What rabbits, except for a few oddities in history, ever did such things? I sat still controlling my breathing so that I wouldn’t shake visibly, and I resolutely kept my eyes firmly on the proceedings, terrified of what I’d see if I made eye contact with Elias.
It was then that I felt the next newest most unusual thing I’d ever experienced. Elias put his hand on my back and gently stroked me like I was a lap cat. His hand was heavy, a dead weight on my spine. But then, a twitch. A clumsy stroke. It was rough, human skin is like parchment compared to ours, but the heat radiating from him was a furnace. At first I was a bit appalled, but if I’m honest, once the initial shock passed, i was comforted by it. It was almost reminiscent of when I was young and my brothers and sisters would groom each other. There was an odd but deeply reassuring feeling to it. I detected no venom, no animosity, no - gods forbid - hints of anything romantic. Nope, it was simply a touch of sudden astonishing connection, and an acknowledgment of our mutual existence. I heard him whisper, just like Anya could, in that barely audible way that only rabbits can hear.
“Are you… Is this okay?” He asked. I nodded subtly.
“Thank you.” He whispered, perceptibly relaxing.
Suddenly, everything I had done began to feel okay. The feeling of warmth I felt at having done the right thing for Elias pervaded the next half an hour.
Ori’on spoke further about some of the more nuanced aspects of the mission such as the crew makeup. Some of the scientific aims. Aspects of how the vessel we were to travel in would need maintaining. I found myself instead re-centering. After all the ups and downs of emotion that had coursed through me, I needed it. As I settled into his lap further and allowed the weight of his hand to rest on me, I closed my eyes. I already knew most of what was being said anyway and my role was hardly mission critical. Instead, I sank into the present and began to try connecting to the strings.
Unlike Jun’ip or Ori’on, I was less adept at this particular skill, but curiosity drove me to try anyway. First, I connected to the central string, that intense link that draws us gravitationally to the center of… Well, we didn’t know yet. It was the same link we were all born knowing, before we even formulate our first sounds as babies. Finding that string was the easy part. The hard part was detecting the much more subtle strings around it. Like trying to hear a quiet whisper at a live music venue during a concert. The central string is so strong that it nearly drowns everything else out. At least, that’s my experience. Other rabbits made this look much easier.
Frustration started to seep through me, but I remembered my education and breathed softly. Surprisingly the presence of Elias’s hand, now that I was getting used to it, was actually helping me to relax further. Slowly the fragments of string awareness began to arise in my consciousness like steam condensing on a pane of glass. I looked for the familiar strings first. Yep, there was Jun’ip. His string always felt so still and calm. It vibrated but in a very deep way, like the slow progress of a glacier. There too was Ori’on. His string is much more pulsing, his passion and conviction felt like waves washing over you. And there was Anya. Her string was more weird. Human strings always felt different, more like an erratic song. I was told this is a side effect of their monkey minds bouncing around all the time. It had an exhausting and yet subtly hypnotic effect; a bit like a very fast song in that indefinable human style of music they seem to like.
Settling into the strings more, I went deeper, looking for Elias. It didn’t take long. His string felt more like a musical game of tennis, bouncing between two opposing songs, confused and divided. I listened to his string for a while longer, and as he stroked my fur, his string became more assured and calm. It slowed. The game of tennis being played by his strings settled into a gentle rally. It was something, at least, to know he was relaxing a bit and calming down. However, another presence in the room was slowly drawing my attention.
Sometimes these strings would come together more like an orchestra, or I suppose more accurately, like ripples in water converging at a singular point to form a wave. There was a feeling in the room. It was a pervasive feeling too, and it took a while to recognize what it was. It co-mingled with many of the other emotions in the room. The ones I was expecting were all accounted for - some shock and awe at the scope of the mission, for example. Mixed in with that emotion, however, was something slimy, wet, and yet very familiar to me. It was secondhand embarrassment… And I was certain it was directed at me.
In shock I opened my eyes suddenly and noticed in my peripherals a few lingering gazes hastily averted themselves back to Ori’on. The security officer who I had avoided earlier was still openly staring at me as I sat in Elias’s lap. The heat of their eyes stripped me bare. I wasn’t a colleague anymore; I was a spectacle. A circus act. Any awareness I had cultivated of the strings dissolved under the influence of my sudden feelings of self consciousness.
At that moment, Ori’on stopped his talk and started to send people back to their day’s work. ‘Was it just me or some of them leaving unusually hastily?’ I suspected my gut instinct was true, people seemed to be scrambling out with extra vivacity, keen to get away. Indeed, one group of more elderly research-scientist rabbits nearly tripped over each other in their escape, thumping against the hard polished floor as they collided with each other. I jumped down off Elias’s lap without a glance back and started to follow Anya out of the auditorium.
“What was that all about?” Anya whispered, in that rabbit way, her coned fingers cupped around her lips.
Thank god that she didn’t seem embarrassed per sé. Just surprised.
“I just felt bad for him, okay? He was… well, it’s hard to explain.”
Anya looked over towards him. Subtly I stole a glance too. He was still sitting on that chair looking a bit stupefied, staring about himself in a half daze. Noticing me looking, he seemed to momentarily compose himself and gave me a half smile. I immediately felt sick and looked away, rejecting him. What had I done? The person I was to work with for the next however long, and already I’d given everyone a weird impression about our relationship.
“Yes, he did seem rather perturbed earlier.” Anya whispered, before turning back to me.
“Still there are better ways to weld a joint.” Her smile was cheeky. Ordinarily I would have appreciated the humour, but the claggy feeling I had sensed from the room was still sticking to my fur like oil.
Leaving the amphitheater I gave Anya a weak smile, and dismissing myself, turned back towards my quarters leaving her to bustle along elsewhere. My mind had become consumed with doubts, thinking about how many people would tease me now, or worse, avoid me entirely. This was seriously un-rabbit-like behavior. To have been in that man’s lap, and to have my thoughts swirling, human-like, around future potentialities like this, worrying about things outside of my control.
And yet, years of being the odd one out at school - the runt - had its effect on me. All the things I’d learned since about how to fit in better. How to not be such a weirdo! It all seemed for nothing again, as if I had undone a decades worth of self-work in one catastrophic move.
Halfway down the corridor, head adrift in my own admonitions. A voice brought me crashing back into the present.
“Cas’shya?” Ori’on called as he bounded up next to me. “So do you want to talk about what happened in the presentation?” He asked inquiringly.
“Absolutely not.” I kept my eyes firmly locked on my paws as we bounded together down the hallway. Ori’on said nothing and continued to match my stride.
“I was stupid!” I exclaimed. “People are going to be talking about this for years. There will be no more respect for me. I will be the oddball again, and with people who I might have to live with for the rest of my natural life. Only I could choose a moment like this to make a fool of myself, knowing I will never have a chance to make a fresh first impression.” I looked up at Ori’on, my guide and mentor. “And what was worse, I detracted from what you were…”
The words came gushing out like a stream and it seemed there would be no end to it. My self loathing and fury was such that a dam could not stem the flow.
Ori’on interrupted.
“I am proud of what you did.”
I stopped in my tracks. Almost unsure I’d heard him correctly, and yet there he was. His deep, star-like eyes penetrated as they always did.
“I don’t think anyone quite realizes yet what this mission really is. This isn’t just a galavant around the solar system and then back home. We’re going well past any of the charts and telescopes, past our best radio’s reach, and further again. We are cutting the umbilical cord from our mother.”
His eyes shifted to look out at the port side view as Earth and the Moon swam below us.
“Leaving mother is going to be hard on all of us. It’s going to test all of us and it could even break some of us. If we go beyond the known physically, we need to be prepared to go beyond the known in other ways too. Elias was clearly suffering at that moment. No one else knows what he has sacrificed to be here. Even he doesn’t yet know if he did the right thing…”
Orion met my gaze again and his eyes became like the heavens. They opened up and warmth flowed out of them covering me like a hot shower.
“I for one will be glad to know that I am sharing this journey with someone who can show such compassion as you have. Others will understand and appreciate this too, in time.” And with that he continued on his way down the corridor, pausing only briefly to mention.
“Oh, and try the new nutrient paste in Cafeteria C. The new batch is surprisingly decent.” Before he took a left turning down a corridor and out of sight.
I was flummoxed and just stood in the walkway with an unusually quiet mind. Somehow completely different to the state it had been in earlier. ‘How does he do that?’ I found myself wondering. For all the kind words and quietened mind, however, I still couldn’t quite shake the feeling that I’d made a mistake. After all, what did Ori’an really know about being the odd one out? He was one of the most celebrated rabbits of our time!
As if to confirm my suspicion, a couple of human engineers walked past having an animated and excited conversation that temporarily faltered as they passed me.
“So it begins.” I muttered, hanging my head. I waited till they were gone and then went to my quarters. Only pausing for a brief moment due to a maintenance drone that, against all reason, proffered to me a perfectly wrapped dried date. One of the few rationed sweets that you could sometimes find about the station.
And with that, the cultural divide, and the first, tentative bridge across it is established.
Cas’shya’s impulsive, deeply “un-rabbit-like” act of compassion gives us a raw, unfiltered look at just how broken Elias is. She’s mortified, but Ori’on and Jun’ip see the bigger picture: this mission will force everyone to break their own rules to survive. We’ve seen the launch from both sides now, and the two most isolated souls on the ship might just be the historian who’s lost his past and the rabbit who’s just made herself a social outcast.
Now, I’d love to hear your thoughts. What did you make of Cas’shya’s choice to jump into Elias’s lap? Was it a brave, necessary act of empathy, or a reckless mistake that could alienate her from her own people?
I’m fascinated to hear where you land in the comments.
Next chapter below
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How exciting! I'm very curious how you came up with the rabbits gaining conciousness and their heart strings. It feels like such a unique story idea.
Also, this chapter has left me a bit scared for Ori'on when he said he'd be the one to make the ship travel fast enough by pulling his own heart string. Something about that sounds like big potential for injury or worse. Hope I'm wrong there 😅
Cas'shya is a really lovely character, excited to learn more about her!
Oh, and I'd love something like a pronunciation guide for the rabbits' names haha
I obviously love rabbits and I adore all the little realistic bunny actions you’ve incorporated into the Rabbit kind.! And wow you also were right about the pairing for this chapter. Cas’shya is silly and happy but also has depth and layers that I imagine are just barely being explored in this chapter. Can’t wait to continue!