Even though the Doctor's grand strategy was to wait out the clock until Jeanne approached them to negotiate, that didn't mean she was content to sit on her hands indefinitely. After all, the leadership team of Babel wasn't exactly swimming in a surplus of free time.
She had set a strict internal deadline of one week. If Jeanne failed to break the ice and bring up the cosmic anomaly within those seven days, the strategist would swallow her pride, reverse her tactics, and approach the girl herself.
Yet, this passive waiting game dragged on for six grueling days. Throughout this entire near-week block, the Doctor didn't catch so much as a glimpse of Jeanne coming to find her. The absolute radio silence was so prolonged that the strategist actually began to suffer an existential crisis, wondering if her flawless psychological modeling had completely missed the mark.
Is it possible... could there be a statistical reality where Jeanne doesn't actually have a practical use for a massive, continent-spanning chunk of Originium? the Doctor mused silently, rubbing her temples in the quiet dark of her mind, her legendary confidence wavering under the pressure.
And what, pray tell, had Jeanne been occupying her hours with during this tense interim? Frankly, nothing out of the ordinary. Her daily routine consisted almost entirely of visiting the medical wing to stabilize the agonizing progression of the most critical Oripathy patients, interspersed with casual, leisurely strolls around the various decks of the landship.
Her reason for completely ignoring the Doctor was laughably simple: she genuinely believed that asking Babel to deploy heavy machinery to excavate a giant, cosmic rock for her personal benefit would be incredibly rude and inappropriate given their current circumstances. From what she had observed, the organization didn't exactly have spare labor to throw around.
Over her days of quiet observation, Jeanne had quickly realized that her initial impression of Babel's operational stability had been far too optimistic. If Theresis hadn't just suffered two consecutive, devastating military setbacks that forced him to halt his advance and stabilize his own front lines, she was reasonably certain Babel would have been forced to drag their heavily wounded soldiers straight out of their medical cots and hurl them back into the meat grinder!
Even if those broken soldiers were statistically guaranteed to perish on the front lines, the leadership would have had no choice. As it stood, Babel was effectively waging a desperate, asymmetric war against the collective military might of the entire Kazdel region; managing to force a bloody, grinding stalemate was already a historic achievement.
Under such razor-thin operational margins, if they diverted valuable logistics to unearth a giant rock for her, wouldn't it create a defensive vulnerability massive enough for their enemies to completely overrun their headquarters? Jeanne had spent the last six days trapped in a cycle of internal debate and anxiety, actively volunteering around the landship to clear her head, which caused her to completely forget to schedule a meeting with the Doctor.
On the bright side, her dedicated service over the past few days had allowed her to build a warm rapport with a significant portion of the crew. Among her new acquaintances was Warfarin, the ancient Vampiric fiend who had initially spent her days staring at Jeanne as if she were a five-star gourmet delicacy. Their sudden closeness was primarily rooted in the undeniable fact that Jeanne had recently saved the Medic's life.
It was a universally acknowledged truth across Terra that standard human blood represented an overwhelmingly potent, intoxicating nourishment for the Sarkaz sub-species known as Blood Demons. To a creature of Warfarin's refined palate, Jeanne's blood didn't just smell like food—it resonated like the absolute pinnacle of legendary, mythical ingredients, carrying an almost irresistible genetic pull.
Despite possessing an immense, centuries-old well of mental discipline, Warfarin's self-control had completely redlined while she was assisting Kal'tsit with Jeanne's comprehensive biological examination. The moment the two senior staff members stepped out of the examination room to consult on the data, the Vampire had succumbed to temptation, plotting to sneak back inside and secure a single, harmless taste from a stray sample.
Fortunately, Jeanne's spatial awareness was razor-sharp. She had detected the stealthy approach and burst back into the lab, startling Warfarin so badly that the Vampire jumped out of her skin, accidentally splashing a few stray droplets of the blood sample directly onto her own bare forearm. In an instant, the flesh of her arm suffered a violent reaction, rapidly calcifying into solid, gray stone! If Jeanne hadn't instantly surged forward to deploy her purifying light to reverse the curse, the damage would have been irreversible.
If she had been even a few seconds slower—or if Warfarin had actually managed to swallow the fluid—the Vampire's internal organs would have instantly petrified into a solid block of granite. If that horror had manifested, the elaborate mourning shrine the Doctor had constructed in Kal'tsit's office wouldn't have gone to waste; they would have just needed to swap out the portrait and keep the incense burning for a second funeral.
After staring death in the face, Warfarin had completely mended her ways. She finally internalized the terrifying reality that while Jeanne was undoubtedly a top-tier, mouth-watering delicacy in terms of aroma, this specific ingredient was highly toxic—a single micro-gram was lethal enough to end her immortal life.
Having thoroughly learned her lesson, Warfarin had accepted Kal'tsit's subsequent disciplinary write-up and heavy punishments with a bizarre, cheerful compliance. Her unnaturally bright attitude had actually left Kal'tsit deeply suspicious, wondering if the Vampire had sustained permanent brain damage from the scare.
"Oh! Doctor? I certainly didn't expect to run into you out here!" Jeanne blinked in surprise as she emerged from the communal cafeteria after securing a quick meal, nearly colliding head-first with the approaching, cloaked figure of the strategist. The sudden face-to-face encounter instantly jogged her memory, causing her to realize that she still had important business to discuss with the woman!
Every single time the thought had crossed her mind over the past six days, the clocks had already moved past midnight, prompting Jeanne to promise herself every morning that she would seek out the command staff—only to immediately get distracted by medical duties and forget the matter entirely.
The Doctor, of course, had marched down to this sector with the express purpose of tracking Jeanne down. After days of fruitless anticipation, her analytical patience had run entirely dry, prompting her to seize the initiative and launch a direct, face-to-face dialogue to hammer out the terms.
The two women locked eyes in the corridor, pausing for a fraction of a second before speaking simultaneously, their voices overlapping perfectly:
"What a coincidence, I actually have an important matter I need to discuss with you!" shouted both parties at once.
Neither of them had anticipated the other sharing the exact same intent. They stood frozen in the middle of the hallway, engaging in a silent, dead-eyed staredown that stretched on for five awkward seconds. Ultimately, it was the Doctor who cleared her throat and shattered the thick silence, gesturing down the corridor.
"Since it appears we both have pressing agenda items, let us relocate to my personal office," the Doctor suggested calmly. "That sector is heavily secured, ensuring our dialogue won't be disrupted by standard operational traffic."
Although the Doctor was privately riddled with questions as to why Jeanne had sat on her hands for six days if she truly wished to speak, she wisely chose to suppress her curiosity for now, guiding the blonde maiden through the labyrinthine corridors and into the heart of her tactical sanctuary.
This marked the absolute first time Jeanne had ever stepped foot inside the Doctor's personal workspace. Sweeping her gaze across the room, she noted that the perimeter was reasonably clean and organized, save for the staggering, borderline apocalyptic mountains of physical paperwork piled across every available surface—a stark, visual testament to the crushing administrative burden the strategist carried.
The documents stacked alongside the primary desk were literally high enough to match Jeanne's physical stature! She couldn't help but wonder if those were actual operational files. Shouldn't sensitive, high-clearance tactical data be immediately fed into a heavy-duty document shredder the second it was processed?
However, Jeanne quickly dismissed these trivial logistical observations from her mind. She remained acutely aware of her primary objective for this meeting; any questions regarding the Doctor's filing system could wait for a future casual conversation.
"In truth, my team has been preparing to negotiate a specific matter with you over the last few days," the Doctor initiated, cutting straight to the heart of the matter before Jeanne could even open her mouth. "However, due to a severe bottleneck in our recent operational schedule, the proposal was pushed back. To put it plainly, Babel wishes to enter a formal... joint cooperation with you."
Her immediate forwardness was entirely logical; from a strategic standpoint, Babel's time was significantly more compressed and desperate than Jeanne's.
For Jeanne, while the prospect of claiming the hyper-dense cosmic crystal was undeniably attractive, she had never adopted an unyielding, fanatical mindset that she must possess it at all costs. Overall, her internal disposition toward the entire matter remained remarkably detached and serene.
The moment she heard the word "cooperation," Jeanne instantly intuited that the leadership team was seeking her formidable strength for a difficult task. Her mind began to wander, wondering what kind of mission required her intervention. Were they planning to launch a decisive assassination strike to eliminate Theresis once and for all?
But would they truly gamble a critical, war-defining objective on an unknown factor like her? Weren't they terrified that her involvement might accidentally ignite a massive, continent-spanning Holy War? Or did they have an entirely separate, specialized task in mind?
Fascinatingly, Jeanne's brain completely skipped over the topic of the meteorite; she was operating under the assumption that the Doctor and her peers would be concentrating every ounce of their cognitive focus on the active war zones.
"As you have likely observed during your time in the medical wing, Theresa's ongoing struggle with Oripathy is approaching a critical, deeply concerning threshold," the Doctor explained, her voice dropping to a serious, grounded register. "We desire your direct intervention to treat her physical condition, alongside the stabilization of our most severely Infected Sarkaz personnel... Frankly, given the volatility of the procedures, you are the only practitioner we trust to oversee the operations."
The Doctor's deep-seated anxiety was entirely justified. The raw, celestial properties of Holy Water possessed a notoriously catastrophic, agonizingly lethal reaction when introduced to standard Sarkaz biology; throwing that fluid onto an ordinary demon was functionally equivalent to first-degree murder.
Only with Jeanne personally directing the flow of energy and managing the miraculous properties could the stubborn, battle-hardened Sarkaz troops find the peace of mind required to consent to the treatment, rather than stubbornly clinging to their deteriorating health and rejecting the medical charts out of hand.
More critically, the primary objective was Theresa herself. Even now, a significant faction of elite Babel operators harbored deep, unyielding reservations about allowing a complete outsider like Jeanne to perform a highly invasive, spiritually volatile operation on the person of their beloved King. The sheer risk factor was astronomical!
Even though Jeanne had managed to foster amicable relations with the crew over the past week, that didn't mean the veteran soldiers were willing to hand the keys to Theresa's life to a mystical entity whose true origins and long-term motivations remained shrouded in mystery. Who was to say this entire week of saintly charity wasn't merely an elaborate, deeply calculated deep-cover masquerade?
"And in exchange for your divine medical assistance," the Doctor continued, laying out her bargaining chips with a smooth confidence, "Babel will commit its full logistical and engineering capacity to completely unearth that colossal Originium meteorite, ensuring its safe transit to a secure territory of your choosing."
In the grand scheme of things, this wasn't a massive sacrifice for the command team. The excavation site was already directly adjacent to their primary objective; they simply needed to modify the heavy transport rigs of Rhodes Island to haul the massive crystal hoard along with the landship—though the mechanical execution would still be a formidable engineering challenge.
By framing this arrangement as a formal, transactional alliance, the Doctor was cleverly providing a psychological safety net for her paranoid operators. Once the crew realized that Jeanne was working to secure a massive, tangible prize that she desperately desired, their suspicions would evaporate, allowing them to relax and trust the validity of the contract.
Yet, to the Doctor's utter bewilderment, the blonde girl looked entirely caught off guard, realizing that before she could even pitch her own request, the leadership had voluntarily offered to handle her logistical problem in exchange for a task that didn't constitute any real hardship for her. Was the Doctor subtly trying to do her a massive favor?
Was she purposefully structuring the deal this way to prevent Jeanne from feeling as though she owed Babel an immense, unpayable debt of personal gratitude? Did the strategist truly view the excavation of a historic cosmic anomaly as nothing more than an effortless, casual gesture that required no heavy compensation?
"I have no objections whatsoever," Jeanne agreed with a bright, immediate smile. "In fact, I previously brought up the topic of Theresa's condition during my initial consultations with Kal'tsit, but she informed me that we needed to wait for a more stable operational window. Am I to assume the internal leadership has finally reached a consensus?"
Upon her arrival, Jeanne had actively pushed to evaluate Theresa's progression, but the ancient lynx had politely deferred the procedure, leading Jeanne to deduce that certain high-level factions within the organization were fiercely opposing her involvement.
She hadn't taken the rejection to heart; it was completely natural for an organization like Babel to demand rigorous internal debates before greenlighting a high-stakes medical procedure on their supreme ruler. Furthermore, Theresa's personal schedule had been utterly packed over the last few days, and since her Oripathy wasn't on the absolute precipice of a terminal collapse, Jeanne hadn't felt the need to force the issue.
"However, you can completely scratch the logistical transport phase from the contract," Jeanne added, raising a casual hand to dismiss the most grueling aspect of the Doctor's offer. "Didn't you mention previously that the localized Catastrophe had caused a structural collapse, completely burying the cluster beneath the terrain? There is absolutely no need to waste your heavy machinery. You only need to provide me with a guide to escort me to the impact site, and I will find a way to extract it myself."
Thus, the monumental alliance was finalized amidst a thoroughly amicable, lighthearted dialogue. The two leaders conversed with absolute harmony, cementing a massive, geopolitically significant "joint cooperation" with nothing more than a few smiles and a mutual sense of profound relief.