Akira's POV
The system's pause was, I was discovering, its own kind of strange.
I had been operating under a quest structure since I woke up in this planet. Jumping from one mission and feeding into the next, the progression constant enough that I had stopped expecting the space between deliveries as space and started experiencing each mission as a transition.
Something finished, something new arrived, the gap between them was narrow enough to step across without noticing the crossing.
This entire thing was different. The hold screen had been sitting in the corner of my peripheral vision for eleven days now and with the patience of something that was not dreaming of going anywhere and I felt my system was being sarcastic enough not to apologize for this unplanned break.
