Troja Major

Chapter 6 - A Memory

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"Nautica... or may I call you Nautie? I do consider you a close friend."

Nautica set down her glass. "No offense, but only Krang calls me Nautie, and a lot of other endearing terms."

"All right then, Nautica." The Curator paused a moment to study her face. "I wanted to tell you that I'm working on something big. Something very big, for the museum, and that an old friend of yours is involved."

Nautica's interest perked. "Oh? Which old friend?" There were quite a few people scattered across the galaxy who would fit into that category.

The Curator picked up his drink and twirled the stem of the glass between his fingers. He'd brought her to a lounge in the next town up the valley with promises that the proprietor knew exactly how to distill and blend engex, as opposed to most bartenders who relied on the pre-packaged stuff. "Rodimus of Nyon."

"Oh! Goodness." It had been ages since she'd heard his name.

"I hope you two parted on good terms. I understand that your former captain is either all charm or all claws with little in between."

"Charm or claws depended upon which side of the war you were on," Nautica informed him.

"Touché."

"Rodimus and I were on good terms. Very good terms actually. I think all of us were at the end there. We'd been through a lot together on that quest." She set down her glass and leaned closer to him. "So, what is this 'something big' you've got going?"

"There was a mech with you on that quest, a psychiatrist by the name of Rung of the Pious Pools. Do you remember him?"

Nautica thought for a moment. "Rung...Rung... I guess. Something about the name seems familiar."

The Curator's lips curled in a half-smile, and he reached for a datapad, presenting it to her. "Does this mech look familiar?"

Nautica scrolled through the pictures, a good number of which had obviously come from aboard the Lost Light. And all of them included a mech with orange plating, and he did indeed seem familiar—the orange Lunarian haunting her memories of Skids—the orange Lunarian that sat at the foot of the imagined grave on Luna One. "Yes, definitely familiar." And then she gasped. "Oh! I guess I must have known him." In the photo that had come up next, she sat next to the Lunarian in question, their heads leaning together comfortably. "And this is Rung?"

The Curator nodded. "That is Rung...Rung of the Pious Pools. Do you know what happened to him after the quest ended? Where he went?"

She scrutinized the picture. It must have been taken in happier times, before Getaway's mutiny and the battle on the Necroworld. The background looked a lot like Swerve's bar, and that had to be Riptide's arm at the side of the image. "He... I don't know." She set the datapad down but her optics never left it, even as she picked up her glass and drank. This Rung looked an awful lot like Vision.