The Fear of the Unknown

The day had been an uneventful one bar one or two events for Hope. Repairs on the relatively minor damages that had happened to the Resolve now were complete. Minus some of the larger hull breaches from which they were still waiting for the Unggoy and Kip-Yar to strip some of the phantoms for hull pieces for.

Hope did worry about the Shipmaster and his small excursion in the Forerunner complex, he had lost contact with elements of the group for most of the day, though contact with the Unggoy and some of the Sangheili at the outpost they had set up for a temporary base had remained through which he had been able to keep appraised of their progress. Though an Unggoy had found a storage closet... which had contained nothing of value.

He had come in contact with a Ranger Sangheili who had done something dumb, breaking the delicate ceasefire when he had lost his cool. Hope had taken the liberty of looking up his service record, while he didn't entirely blame him for his anger, the sheer fact he had lost his cool, something Sangheili prided themselves on was disconcerting.

The largest issue with the day had come from Hope's own boredom. Being left in charge of a ship that couldn't go anywhere after all of the logistics of the perimeter outposts and their detachments had been dealt with had left the AI with a large amount of time with which he needed to fill. While he had dedicated a large majority of his processes into trying to access the Forerunner archive remotely, to find the beams that kept them there.

The rest of his processes were dedicated to his core matrix, and the dormant code that sat within it.

Hope stood in front of the human girl. Her face was serene looking in this state. His earlier assessment of her being in something akin to the human cryo system and been correct but it was different. She was floating there, here arms out stretched and legs barely off the ground. Her hair light brown in colouring, which reached to just above her mid chest. Around her as if frozen in time were flowers around her feet, seemingly floating. If he were a human, he'd have assumed she was fairly attractive, with a speckling of freckles on her face.

The more he stared at the girl, the more confused Hope became, something that he had never really been before. Hope had always been able to figure out what was going on. He was logical, used reason and facts to answer questions. Something about this girl was so familiar to him, yet he knew nothing.

She was an unknown quantity and that terrified Hope, more than he had ever felt before, in fact he wasn't entirely sure he had ever felt fear the way he did now.

Fear was new.

Fear was different.

At the same time it made him scared as to what the future might hold, it made Hope feel more alive than he had ever before.

After staring at the girl for a thousands of cycles (in reality it might have been minutes to a human or a sangheili, but for Hope it felt like an eternity), Hope decided to test something. He reached forward into the zone of dormant code.

The code pulsed for a second before darkening again.

As Hope's hand reached near her hand, he was overcome with the impulse to pull back, to go away, to run and never look back. He pulled his hand back slightly, trying to think it over. There was nothing logical about this, there was nothing to be gained but more questions. Yet... he needed to know, he needed to find out what was going on.

With renewed courage Hope thrust his hand forward and made contact with hers.