"You look tired," a voice behind her remarked. Lash dismissed him with a wave of a hand as the projection towered next to her.
She had taken to coming to the sensoriums a lot more lately. They offered her a time off from everything; the engineering (which was fun and interesting) and the ranger training (which she might call Morphnominal ...if that didn't sound so cheesy). But something had been bothering Lash a lot more lately, even more so than she liked to admit to herself.
It was already hard to be a growing teenager stuck inside an intergalactic spaceship, yet it certainly had its merits, especially for someone who knew if she had continued to live in her World, would have ended up somewhere imprisoned for her crimes, but...there was worse.
Feelings. Black Hole was very discouraging of them. After all, conquering nations didn't want sympathetic officers, they wanted brutal commanders, something Lash had taken a liking most of her young life. She had been all that Black Hole could have wanted in a child soldier; brilliant, deadly and ruthless even to her own troops. How many weapons of hers had been used to murder countless others? Too much to count. Did she felt guilty about it? Maybe. A bit. Certainly a bit more than before.
And that's what scared her the most. Caring suddenly made you fragile. Her life was suddenly a lot more complicated; even looking at some of the guys on the ship, and that tiny pang of jealousy as soon as she saw them talking to other girls. It made her in turn notice how she suddenly felt, well...alone. Sure she was in a team now, and sure it reminded her of the happier days with Black Hole, but in the end the Rangers couldn't ever replace them and they weren't here with her now. The people she knew, like that tall guy next to her, with his tell-tale mohawke. Just an illusion, like the others around her. Was the real deal in the pods waiting? Each month made Lash less and less hopeful of his return and as her feelings grew and changed, she began to realize how much she missed his company.
"Nah, I'm just thinking of my next move," the wunderkind explained as she clasped her hand under her chin, looking down at the glowing display before her, and an all too familiar
scenario. "Fighting against an A.I. is much harder than I thought it would be." All of her data on the other nations she had once carefully stored and kept so she could analyze what had gone wrong that day of the battle, now based mostly on her memories. And yet now she found herself on a very different situation; this time she was letting the A.I. play the role of Black Hole as she played the Allied Nations. As she walked, the scene around her changed. She pushed a few tanks backwards to bait them. Seven days had passed, and the laser fired at her units. Her Laser. The five hundred foot Death Ray she had built for Sturm those years ago. It felt so incredibly ironic.
"Damn it! At this rate I'm gonna lose. OH! I HATE loosing so much!" She pouted, crossed her arms in anger and nearly threw herself down to sit on the ground as the laser hologram harmlessly pass through her. The units behind her were completely obliterated. Well at least she could rest easy knowing how efficient that laser was?
"I'm not worried." Ha! For a few seconds Lash looked up at the man before returning to the puzzle before her. If she hadn't known any different, that could have really been Hawke sitting next to her. Wordlessly, she grinned and shut him off.
"Thanks birdbrain. Wherever you are." Holographic representation of him or not, Lash felt a tiny little better.
[[Open Log! Come bother Lash and talk with her as much as you like.]]