The moment the words "colossal Originium meteorite" left the Doctor's mouth, Jeanne's focus was entirely hijacked. She became so utterly preoccupied that she was noticeably checked out during the rest of their conversation, barely blinking as the strategist finally excused herself and slid the door shut.
The second she was alone, the sheer, unadulterated longing on Jeanne's face was practically printed in bold neon letters. She harbored a massive, burning fascination with a deposit of that ridiculous magnitude—and more importantly, she knew it could serve a monumental purpose for her.
Going by the descriptive picture the Doctor had painted, this wasn't some run-of-the-mill cluster left behind by a standard localized Catastrophe. This was a singular, historic anomaly, a textbook leviathan of a rock that was guaranteed to go down in the history books!
For Jeanne, a massive crystal hoard like that wasn't just a golden ticket to top off her own personal magic reserves; it was a definitive way to hyper-charge the overall combat potential of her entire faction! Granted, under their current operational parameters, their baseline fighting power was already bordering on the absurd, but when it came to a tactical edge, who in their right mind would ever complain about having too much?
Of course, actually getting her hands on it was an entirely different logistical nightmare. Between the bureaucratic mess of legal ownership and the hazardous layout of the impact zone, Jeanne knew securing this prize wouldn't be a walk in the park—especially since she didn't even know the exact geographical coordinates of the site yet.
A prize like that was a researcher's wet dream. As the largest, most structurally pure Originium meteorite ever recorded in history, its scientific and analytical value was practically incalculable. Every major laboratory on the continent would be foaming at the mouth to get a piece of it.
Then Jeanne recalled a crucial detail: hadn't the Doctor mentioned the meteorite struck somewhere in Rim Billiton? If that was the case, it meant the top-secret project Babel was currently excavating over there was none other than the landship itself! If that was the reality, drawing a massive global spotlight to that specific region right now was the absolute worst-case scenario.
If the surrounding superpowers caught wind of the fact that Babel was actively unearthing a massive, intact pre-civilization landship, Theresis wouldn't be the only predator crawling out of the woodwork to slit their throats... From a security standpoint, maybe she could use that as leverage to strike a deal with the command team.
Yet, as desperately as Jeanne wanted to claim that crystal, she forced her impulses down. She wasn't about to immediately chase after the Doctor and barge into the command room to demand a meeting; that would make her look entirely too desperate and expose her hand. It was far wiser to let the information simmer and find a natural, strategic window to bring it up later.
While Jeanne was pacing her room and mapping out her options, the Doctor—who had already yanked her heavy visor back over her face before stepping into the corridor—rounded a quiet corner only to bump straight into Kal'tsit. The ancient lynx was leaning against the bulkhead, clearly waiting for her.
The moment their eyes met, Kal'tsit locked onto her and asked a single, blunt question: "Well? How did it go?"
It turned out that after dropping off the heavy cocktail of medication earlier, the physician hadn't actually returned to the medical wing. She had been loitering in the shadow of the hallway this entire time, waiting for the strategist to emerge so she could get an immediate debrief on the situation.
The Doctor, caught entirely off guard, instantly stiffened under the gaze. Her mind immediately flashed back to the utter disaster she had left behind in the feline's personal workspace, assuming Kal'tsit was cornering her to finally settle the score for the office property damage.
Once she found her voice, she stammered out a hasty, overly casual defense: "Everything went completely according to protocol! Honestly, she was just incredibly curious about how things operated back in our original era. We actually hit it off beautifully—you could even say we're on the exact same wavelength..."
Naturally, she chose to conveniently omit the fact that she had just gleefully broadcasted Kal'tsit's ten-thousand-year age to a total stranger. Even if the ancient white feline didn't explicitly treat her past as a forbidden taboo, she notoriously loathed having her deeply buried secrets turned into casual locker-room gossip behind her back.
Fortunately, Kal'tsit didn't possess supernatural echolocation, and the thick, tinted visor of the Doctor's helmet completely masked the guilty, sweating panic painted across her face. Relying on her formidable intellect, the Doctor felt reasonably confident she could bullshit her way through this.
"I didn't ask for a summary of your social calendar," Kal'tsit interrupted coldly, cutting through the Doctor's rambling nonsense with surgical precision. Her piercing green eyes bored into the visor as she demanded the actual data she was looking for: "Did you bring up the matter of the meteorite, and if so, how exactly did Jeanne react to the intelligence?"
Frankly, Kal'tsit didn't have a single second to waste listening to this idiot run her mouth. She had far more pressing operational duties to attend to—like checking if little Amiya was asleep, or heading back to her quarters to refine Theresa's ongoing Oripathy treatment protocols.
Furthermore, just looking at the Doctor's slouching posture was actively triggering Kal'tsit's migraines. The vivid image of her personal office—which this absolute menace had single-handedly transformed into a horrific, blood-soaked shrine—flashed through her mind, causing her blood pressure to spike into the danger zone!
She hadn't even found the time to survey the full extent of the wreckage, let alone request a maintenance crew to repair the shattered, structurally compromised walls. And don't even get her started on the absolute nightmare of analyzing the biological anomalies left behind by those fleshy, mutated corpses...
The sheer mountain of urgent labor piling up on her desk—half of it caused entirely by the strategist's chaotic methods—sent a powerful, primal urge surging through Kal'tsit's veins to physically throttle the woman right then and there.
To take someone like Kal'tsit—who had spent thousands of years refining her mental discipline to a point where she could face an apocalypse with a completely detached, serene composure—and reduce her to a state of raw, violent fury was a testament to the Doctor's status as a once-in-a-generation talent.
Noticing the tense, dangerous aura radiating off the physician, the Doctor's heart did a violent flip. She broke into a cold sweat, genuinely terrified that Kal'tsit was about to resort to her signature move, lift her off the deck by her collar, and spend the midnight hours thoroughly re-educating her on basic manners.
"I told her! I laid it all out," the Doctor blurted out, frantically delivering the report while taking a few subtle, unprompted steps backward. She was desperately trying to put some physical distance between them, clinging to the pathetic, incredibly fragile illusion of safety it provided. "I didn't even have to prompt her; Jeanne brought up the topic herself. And let me tell you, even though she tried her absolute best to play it cool and maintain her poker face, the look in her eyes completely gave her away. She wants that massive chunk of Originium more than anything!"
Kal'tsit watched the Doctor's cowardly backpedaling with a look of pure, unadulterated pity. Did this idiot honestly believe that if she truly wanted to break her, she wouldn't be able to find a thousand creative ways to do it? Besides, where on this claustrophobic landship did she think she could actually hide?
It was always the same routine with her—pulling these petty, childish little stunts that even a toddler would find embarrassing. It made Kal'tsit seriously question where that legendary, terrifying tactical intellect disappeared to the moment she stepped off an active battlefield.
Fortunately, the Doctor's data was accurate enough to keep her out of immediate physical peril. Kal'tsit simply offered a slow nod and fell silent, her gaze drifting into the middle distance as her mind began calculating the variables. The Doctor, letting out a silent sigh of relief, didn't dare disrupt her train of thought.
Instead of slinking away to her room, the strategist simply lingered in the dim hallway, quietly standing by the ancient lynx's side, offering a rare, silent companionship as the heavy silence stretched between them.
"Even though there isn't a shred of empirical data to back it up... I still can't shake the suspicion that the descent of this specific meteorite is somehow tied directly to Jeanne," the Doctor murmured, finally breaking the long silence with a heavy, contemplative voice.
This had been nagging at her from the very start. Kal'tsit, on the other hand, remained deeply skeptical of the theory; she had never bought into the Doctor's wild hypothesis that Jeanne possessed some sort of localized, absolute authority to consciously manipulate Catastrophes.
"But I do agree with your previous assessment on one front: Jeanne herself is completely oblivious to the mechanics of how it got there," the Doctor continued, beating Kal'tsit to the punch as she elaborated on her theory. "It behaves almost as if some unseen entity is deliberately orchestrating events from the shadows, using our operational hands as a proxy to deliver this specific prize straight into her lap."
This was the definitive conclusion she had arrived at after closely studying the blonde girl's micro-expressions during their talk.
As for why she was so adamantly connecting a celestial Catastrophe all the way out in Rim Billiton to a girl who had just stepped aboard their vessel? The simple reality was that the sequence of events was entirely too convenient. It crossed the line from a statistical anomaly into a glaring, manufactured coincidence.
Catastrophes were a dime a dozen on Terra, but an anomaly of this magnitude usually required days, if not weeks, of atmospheric energy accumulation. For a planet-shattering rock to materialize, condense, and strike within the span of a few chaotic hours defied every known law of meteorological science.
The circumstantial evidence didn't stop there. By a sheer stroke of impossible luck, the exact sector where the meteorite struck had been entirely cleared of personnel just hours prior, all because a sudden, unprecedented emergency had drawn the entire workforce to a separate location.
And to top it all off, this impossible rock landed precisely when Jeanne was on the verge of arriving at Babel, providing the exact type of massive, hyper-pure energy source she desperately required. When you chained that many astronomical coincidences together, it ceased to be statistics—it became a script. It was a sequence that actively challenged Kal'tsit's imagination.
"So, what is your grand strategic play here?" Kal'tsit asked, turning her sharp gaze back to the strategist. "Are we going to expend our limited logistics to dig it up and hand it to her on a silver platter?"
The Doctor, clear as day, had already formulated a precise blueprint for this exact scenario. Hearing the inquiry, she puffed out her chest with an incredibly smug, theatrical air, launching into a breakdown of her operational timeline—though Kal'tsit could only visualize the arrogance through the shift in her posture.
"We play the long game and wait!" the Doctor declared confidently. "For now, our team on the ground will continue to engage in standard bureaucratic delays with the Rim Billiton government. We bought and paid for that parcel of land fair and square. In the short term, their officials aren't going to pull a stunt as data-defying as tearing up a legally binding contract; a single meteorite, no matter how grand, isn't worth completely destroying their international credit and integrity."
While the cosmic rock was an invaluable asset, it still didn't outweigh the long-term economic survival of Rim Billiton's governing body. They wouldn't risk their global reputation as a fair trading hub just to violently seize a piece of land from a legitimate contractor.
According to the fine print of the standard mining charters, any anomalous phenomena or Catastrophic deposits that materialized within a leased perimeter were to be handled entirely at the contractor's discretion. Whatever fortunes or horrors you dug up belonged to you—it was a pure gamble of fate.
The Doctor's actual trap was designed to make Jeanne take the initiative and approach them first. Babel currently had a few major, high-risk operational hurdles that required a powerhouse of Jeanne's caliber to clear, and having this meteorite as leverage gave them the ultimate bargaining chip. It was a vital insurance policy.
After all, even with her vast psychological modeling, the Doctor couldn't say for certain whether a girl of Jeanne's profound, unwavering religious piety would willingly compromise her morals to help them rescue the absolute Monarch of the Sarkaz race!