No Man's Sky [SMR8]

[Bomilcar Thorvald]

"No harm," he sighs, her mood swings being difficult to keep up with. "Trying to learn, to understand. Tied to Dune now. By blood. Protecting Dune is protecting them. Fremen know Dune, protect it."

He coughs again, this time with a bit of blood.

[The Shadout Mapes]

"Each knows what they must know, and doesn't know what they mustn't know. Naibs don't know all, only God. Challenge a naib if you must before you challenge God!" Clearly, Mapes was hostile toward the idea of telling him too much about the Fremen, for any number of reasons. His platitudes of good intentions and strong personal reasons couldn't convince her. His honesty and dedication had to be tested and proven, but she didn't see herself as the one to do it, not to any greater extent than she already had. "Go rest and stop wasting water! If you can't manage your body's water, what use can there be from any other water you have?"

[Bomilcar Thorvald]

He licked the blood from his hand as he walks away. They all say that I'm will need to be tested. But there's no damned test. Just try to fucking kill me already you damned planet. Figuring out the wrong shit isn't helping. Hell with it.

He pulls out his little pouch and takes a hit of spice as he heads toward the tent.

They're giving me the runaround and a headache for trying to help this world. Like jackasses.

The pain in his throat subsides almost immediately.

[Kannon]

The pain eased, true, but something happened to his mind as well. The canyon seemed sharper at the edges but blurred on surfaces. The world with boundaries, defining lines. A question appeared in his awareness: what would you do, being them?

[Bomilcar Thorvald]

What would I do? I would build. An army. I have done so to protect what is important to me. They are protecting themselves and each other. But building an army has costs. Weapons, supplies, food... and they don't trust or trade with offworlders that much. So they must produce at least a majority of those things somehow. Was hunting somehow better elsewhere?

Is that what is there? Secret industry? Army?

But I want things to be better here. For them and my child. I want to improve this world for the future.
How would I do that... I would just bring more water... that is what I am trying to do... but what would they do with more water? What good was water in abundance to people that considered being water-fat a negative sign? They would build reservoirs of it.

His mind skipped around not quite grasping something that a more deductive person might.

[Kannon]

That was mentat's work, but even their projections were only as good as the data they were fed with. Bom's instincts led him in interesting directions; it was hard to tell if he was right or wrong. But one thing flashed in his awareness: one of the most brutal, wealthy and well-armed Great Houses effectively controlled only a fraction of this planet. Here he was, on a firm rock in a habitable polar region, and there were no Harkonnen outposts in sight, no patrol thopters in the sky. Was it truly just worms and storms? That event at Kedem, that had drawn away Rabban, how was it possible that a whole airbase was compromised?

Storing excess of water seemed like logical course of action for those people, if there truly was any excess. There were indications that this is how they counted communal wealth. But to what purpose? Their stillsuits provided water sustenance enough in most cases.

[Bomilcar Thorvald]

He was certainly no mentat, and the spice did not fuel his mind quite the same as it did others. It helped, but he imagined that there were synapses he simply lacked, that the spice could not touch because they simply were not there.

But he was calming down thanks to it. ...he was using too much recently. Was he addicted and not avoiding because of its prevalence? Or had he simply not been paying attention?

[Kannon]

Most nobles in the Imperium could only afford pinches into daily meals, just enough to unlock beneficial geriatric effects without causing addiction, though the main limiting factor was the price, especially now. The planet, however, was spoiling him; so far he could take as much as he wanted, though his supply was getting depleted at an astonishing pace ever since he'd acquired it. But what came next? Sudden withdrawal could be lethal, they said, and there were no substitutes. He remembered the story of aylar from the heighliner, which that Dinovo girl had overdosed, but even if it were more tried and tested Ecazi semuta, or sapho the mentats imbibed, they would probably not compensate. Piter de Vries' eyes were almost as blue as the Fremens'. One way to flaunt wealth - I can feed my mentat as much spice as I want!

Here, the spice residue was everywhere, in the air, in layers of dust in places where winds didn't reach. Perhaps enough for the minimal acceptable intake. But could he even safely leave now? The spice flowed into the Imperium through Harkonnen hands exclusively, if he were to believe in their complicity in the back channel they were trying to track down.

[Bomilcar Thorvald]

It was good he didn't intend to leave immediately. He would need some time to come down off it. To reduce his intake. He had no doubt that he could do so, but it was a question of time.

Regardless, the opportunity to spend more time with Zenzi, figure out the water smuggling, and better ingratiate himself with the Fremen all would be welcome. He may be frustrated by them, but he still wants to understand them and Dune.

[Kannon]

It was very odd, that a man who'd spent his whole life on cold planets took so well to this furnace that he wanted to stay longer.

Ironically, his nemesis from Lankiveil was perhaps similar. Rabban enjoyed Arrakis way more than his own frigid demesne.

[Bomilcar Thorvald]

Probably odd, likely strange to most, but temperature was a physical sensation. And he had trained his body for years to ignore discomfort in favor of obeying his commands. In some ways it was more difficult than resisting pain, since it was always present, in others it was easier because it didn't actually cut tendon or muscle so didn't mechanically stop him. But in the end it was just another discomfort for him to resist, and he was good at that.

[Kannon]

That benefited him in more than one way, as the insides of the stilltent, this yet another device for closing water circulation, were hardly pleasant even for a shut-eye.

/scene