Beepo_404
- Reads 529
- Votes 21
- Parts 20
(It is highly recommended to read "Alterra: Foreign Eden" before this, as certain characters and events may carry over or be mentioned in passing.)
Not every Alterra assignment comes with a battlefield. Some of them come with a class schedule.
Kusunoki Sakuta's reassignment to Thasselia brings him to Prometheus Institute, Alterra's prestigious research and academic subsidiary in the heart of Caelum's most scholarly nation. By title, he remains an Android Inspector. In practice, he has been given an office, a student caseload, and the designation of counselor, which means his responsibilities now extend well beyond hardware evaluations and behavioral reports. The students at Prometheus Institute are brilliant, eccentric, and occasionally in genuine need of a functional adult. Whether Sakuta qualifies is a question he has chosen not to examine too closely.
Thasselia is a different world from anywhere he has worked before. Its sprawling campus, Olympia, sits like a city unto itself: observatories, research halls, lecture theaters, and the general atmosphere of a place where serious inquiry is the default mode of being. Prometheus Institute draws students from across Caelum, and the lives those students bring with them are complicated in ways no inspection protocol was designed to address. Interpersonal conflicts, academic pressures, questions that arrive in Sakuta's office wearing the face of ordinary paperwork-his new role has a talent for producing exactly the kind of problem he is least equipped to solve.
(Content Warning: May contain swearing, suggestive imagery, graphic description of violence, and AI-generated images.)