Void had been up since late o'clock.

The lab - as usual - smelled like solder flux and... Burnt toast. She never remembered making toast. One of the servos must've triggered the microgrill again - probably that janky task queue she still hadn't fixed.

Her hoodie sleeves were pushed up, exposing ink-stained forearms and fingers twitching with muscle memory as she wired up a freshly milled PCB. A prototype signal conditioner, meant to stabilize Dee's ever-fucking-temperamental audio stream for that neural feedback rig they'd talked about. Even if the girl barely understood how it all worked, she cared to listen, and Void kind of liked that.

Liked it more than she wanted to admit...

There was a comfort in repetition. The soft whirr of the extractor fan overhead, the faint burnt-plastic scent of solder, the tap-tap of a booted heel nudging a drawer closed. Void's workbench wasn't clean - hell no - but it was controlled chaos, and right now that's all she could stomach.

Her bench was lit by the glow of an LED matrix, barely hanging on to its current animation cycle. Two columns had glitched out, frozen mid-scroll like they'd just given up on life. "Relatable," she thought. She rolled her wrist, cracked her knuckles, and hunched back over the board with her tweezers and cursed breath.

The code was a mess. Not because Void was some kind of a script-kiddie - she knew exactly what she was doing. It just refused to cooperate, and printf("fuck\n"); sprinkled every two lines was obviously the best way to debug. The matrix was supposed to pulse out little pixel hearts in magenta and white, a dumb aesthetic flourish for a synthpunk audio reactive badge she was prototyping. The one Aura always wanted to make. Instead, it spat out gibberish, mocking, taunting her "sucks to suck, bitch."...

Void stood in her kitchen, staring down a burnt grilled cheese sandwich as if it misgendered her.

Smoke curled lazily from the crust like the last fucks she was willing to give. The air smelled like betrayal, plastic, and processed cheddar. It hissed at her when she poked it with a spatula that had clearly seen one too many fires. Appropriate.

"That's what I get for trying to feel something," she muttered, flipping the blackened abomination over like she was burying a corpse. "Should've just licked a fucking battery."...

Building 11's inside didn't really look like it belonged to Gustav Klimt. It looked like a repurposed warehouse curated by a brand strategist - polished concrete floors, tastefully distressed graffiti, exposed beams that screamed authentic urban energy™. The kind of place where creativity wore a lanyard and reported to marketing. Everything felt calculated, clean, and utterly devoid of soul. But then they walked through a set of black curtains, and suddenly the world turned gold...

Void spotted her near at the platform - Uly, white shirt, lavender blouse, deep brown hair, eyes like smoke and secrets. She walked towards her like judgement towards a convict. Void felt her chest tighten in that uncomfortable way, like something old was trying to wake up in her ribcage. She told it to shut the hell up.

They hugged, but Void wasn't sure if that was a relief or a disappointment...