Damn, managed to break my streak.

Okay, so in my defence, my new plan was working!

…until it got busy at work.

Even then, I got it under control after a couple of extra weeks and started writing again - only for my colleague to metaphorically flip their desk and storm out, leaving me their (very badly managed, hence the desk-flipping) task list on top of my own. And I was still expected to onboard new clients at the normal rate.

Sigh.

Lets try again!

Pandora

It isn't much later that Mo'at has enough of him and stalks off.

They didn't make any landmark inter-species agreement, but… he doesn't think they'll attack him any time soon.

Maybe.

Hell, what does he know? They attacked a fleet of airships not long ago with bows and arrows. Is a floaty tiny human with the power to 'trick' stone into acting like a cat all that scary in comparison?

He reaches out as the aliens leave his sight - and thus his senses - to the human-ish one.

Jacob Sully. The marine who betrayed his people for innocent natives just trying to defend their home.

His mind is… strange. But… not only is it human enough…

Jake is still human where it counts. It would take more than a few cycles through this world before his soul shifted away from its inherent, alien nature.

Hah. Those are going to be some awkward reincarnations.

It doesn't take much to make him stay, to make him think its his own idea. Another alien stops – he can only see her through Jake's eyes – touching his arm lightly in confused query.

"I'm gonna try talking to him." Sully says, out of earshot of Harry's ears but not his own. "I may not be Tsahik, but I used to be human. Maybe… maybe there's some kinda common ground we can find."

"Be careful, my Jake." The girl alien is pretty. From Sully's height, her angular face is looking up slightly and her eyes are huge – in a cute way. There's also… something. Not quite a glow. Maybe a… softening? Like a filter, added by Sully's own mind whenever he looks upon her.

Oh.

It's love.

He doesn't pay attention to the end of their exchange but neither is he surprised when the hybrid steps out from between the trees – knife sheathed on his chest and hands deliberately away from his body.

"Corporal Sully." He greets.

"Sully's fine." A twist of blue lips. "Pretty sure I've been court martialled in abstentia by now."

"Sully." Harry nodded. "You can call me Harry."

Surprise, not shown on his face.

"Then, it's Jake."

Harry nods again, glancing around and wondering how many aliens are still within earshot, but not his sight or other senses.

"Let's head back out to the clearing." He suggests, Jake nodding easily enough that he might have been fine with it even if Harry hadn't insisted.

He eases back a little more, feeling a pang of guilt. But this… this is…

It's not good. But. It's easier.

And he has so much to do.

Mo'at was a wall he couldn't read and regardless of how he felt about it, not being able to just… smooth things over the way he needed them to be had…

Unsettled him.

He shakes it off and tries to just enjoy the sunlight as they leave the dense forest cover. Across the cleared land, base camp sat ringed by stone and armed guards and metal modules, huddled against the side of the mountain.

He steers them away, vaguely towards a middle point and circling around the camp as they wander.

"So," Jake started. Harry glanced at him. "What was with the lightshow back there?"

"You heard what I told Mo'at." Harry shrugged, gaze dropping to the browning, mostly-dead vegetation under them. It still lit up at night but Baker had taken to running patrols with their stolen vehicle during the day, as much to help hide the tracks their mining runs made as anything else, and the plants weren't loving it.

"Gaia's Hand. I mean. I know was never into, like, historical shit and all, but… I've never heard about stuff like that."

"Me neither." Harry tilted his head at him. "Until right before they knocked me out. They left me some writings but.. Even then… I think I picked up more from when I left Earth than from anything they left behind."

"Since coming to Pandora?"

"No. When I left… That was the first time I realised Gaia actually existed. The way people here know Eywa exists. They-you-can connect to her, right? With your, um…"

"Ponytail." Jake supplied, grabbing it to hold the pink squirmy end up. "Yeah, basically. First time was a real trip."

Harry just nodded.

"Well, Gaia is like wi-fi to Eywa's wired." He explained. "Near as I can tell – mostly from weird subconscious knowledge that keeps popping up when I least expect it – everyone used to have things like these." He gestured at his head.

Jake squinted down at them, crouching a little as he walked to get a good view.

"Gross." He opined.

"Show me the octopus brainstem again?" Harry asked. Jake grinned, a flash of sharp white teeth, and straightened up.

"Fair." He agreed.

They walked some more in silence, keeping the camp to their left. Flying creatures that looked nothing like birds screeched and circled overhead. Once, Jake raised a hand to something distant – one of the bigger things. Banshee?

"So what's really goin' on?" The hybrid blurted eventually. "I heard what you said, yeah. Earth needs to eat Pandora's metal or whatever. But I gotta say, that sounds like bullshit for natives who don't know better. I know how much that metal is worth to the RDA."

"More now than it used to be, I bet." Harry remarked. "But no. Crazy as it sounds, it's true. Both Earth and Pandora have the ability to 'store' excess energy. Like built-in naturally occurring batteries. The RDA had no idea until I came into the picture and some other company entirely was messing around investigating the materials where I was hidden. A little experimentation and, boom.

Pandora has unobtanium. Earth used to have avalonium. Earth is dying, and here's me, able to turn one kind of energy into another. Suddenly, we can literally recharge Earth's batteries by draining another's."

"Okay…" He couldn't see Jake's face very well from his short height. "Okay. But… how will that actually help? Energy won't… clean the air or the oceans or make all those lost species come back to life. Right?"

"Not on its own." Harry agreed, lifting a hand and wiggling the fingers, manifesting sparkly little lights.

"Right." The doubt deepened. "The guys mentioned you had… magic."

"Didn't you see the cat?"

"…uh?"

"…Never mind. Look, just… think of Gaia as a… a God, who created herself first and then moved on to everything that lived on her surface. Her energy – presumably like Eywa's - was inherently capable of creation and change."

Jake drew breath to speak. Harry ignored him.

"But unlike Eywa, some of her creations inherited that same ability. Creation and change, at an infinitely smaller scale. And when it came time to name things, we called that ability 'magic'."

"So, how come Pandora didn't…"

He was trying, Harry had to admit. The man was actively trying to fit his mind around extremely foreign concepts. Fairy stories, stuff he'd been conditioned to view as made-up his entire life.

Harry shook his head. "I can only guess."

And he guessed it was the difference between being built to connect to their God-world intermittently and physically vs constantly and telepathically. Early design decisions influencing everything that came later.

He wondered what it said about Gaia's design that seemingly nearly every species within her actively evolved away from such a connection.

"Back on Earth, I was working with the GLF." He felt the man's recognition so he kept going. "They figured out that I could absorb energy of any kind – heat, kinetic, even living energy – and convert it into magic. Which is basically what Gaia does too. Solar radiation, electro-magnetic, impact from meteorite strikes…. It's all just a matter of scale. The problem started when we as a species basically consumed her and polluted her faster than she could absorb the energy needed to maintain and repair herself. It didn't help that her most effective tools to moderate the damage we were doing were magical species. It was like… and invisible tipping point. They all died off and the world only had mundane species left, unable to carry the load."

"And that's why… you want to… eat Pandora." Jake reasoned through, still with a thread of incredulity. "Because then you can convert her stored energy…"

"Feed it to Gaia, topping up her levels, making it possible to restore the magical species who could fix a lot of the damage the Muggles have done. Yeah."

"But… they couldn't fix it before…?"

"They didn't realise there was a problem before. A river has to get pretty low, for quite a while, before people think maybe there's a problem upstream. And even then, it usually has to dry out completely before they stop thinking it'll all be sorted in the next big rain."

"Yeah. I guess that's human nature in a nutshell. But. I mean. I don't wanna be a downer, but…"

Harry brushed against his mind. No matter whether he believed him or not, there wasn't any hope there. No despair, either. Only resignation.

To Jacob Sully, Earth was already dead.

"The acid rain, the holes in the ozone layer, the blight – last I heard, that affected almost a third of major crops. Then there's resistant bacteria and REVs, the 70% chance for birth defects, all of that?"

"Yes." One way or another.

One large golden eye stared down at him. Harry could feel the shape of his thoughts. Two legs, two arms, too good at fucking things up. That was humanity.

He dipped deeper.

Cynicism. And also…

Apathy.

Jake… really just didn't care. He never… never really had.

Growing up, turning his face into the wind meant catching the stink of it right up his nose, burning his sinuses. Warm summer rain meant holding a bag over his head and sprinting for the nearest shelter, heart hammering with fear for himself and his brother while his fingers prickled and stung.

Earth was his parents arguing because one of them had forgotten to pick up a refill for their day-masks. It was getting the side of his head slapped for forcing open a sealed window so he could sneak out. It was Tom studying everything he could get his hands on and Jake not understanding how his idiot twin brother wasn't getting it. That there was nothing and nowhere his smarts would get him that wasn't some lab churning out new things to sell people. Even when Pandora was first discovered and everyone was going crazy over it, it wouldn't be people like them who got to escape there.

It was signing up for the army because his whole life he'd grown up with snaps, promos and people telling him about service and honour and protection.

It was learning that armies were just another tool of QGAEs, competing for ever more scarce resources. It was getting his spine shattered and all his 'benefits' only good enough to keep him alive and fed and out of the rain.

It was his parents getting sick while he was gone, then Tommy getting shot for his wallet, all three of them cremated in a world so over-crowded that even their dead became just another product on a factory line.

Jacob Sully had never walked barefoot on the grass in his life.

Jake Sully had been a fighter who genuinely did not believe there was anything left on Earth that was worth fighting for. Small wonder that after coming here, after feeling what it was to be alive, he did everything he could to put down roots.

Pandora was no Earth, but…

To the people born into bare survival on her withered husk… she must seem so close.

Harry, gently, eased back out.

Bizarrely, Jake's utter lack of give-a-shit actually reassured him.

"Earthquakes, floods, plagues, swarms, drought… even in her infirmity, she had enough for that. Give her just a little more and there'll be no place she can't hit."

No place she couldn't send him.

"But, more importantly, she can do so much more than just destroy. Give her enough strength back and she could re-grow the Amazon a hundred times over in under a week. There are species which literally feed on so-called 'forever chemicals' – the only reason people think they're 'forever' is because of a missing link in the ecosystem they didn't realise was missing. I have eggs, cuttings, all kinds of samples and the ability to propagate them all. Restore what they need to survive? And Earth could be as she was a hundred thousand years ago in less than a decade."

"And when the humans just turn around and fuck it all up again?" Jake asked doggedly.

They won't be allowed to, Harry didn't say. Eywa had the right of it there. Gaia's children should never have been allowed to evolve away from her reach. Once she had them again…

He stopped. Turned to the hybrid creature. Tested the edge of his mind, the edge of his soul, brushing aside the slick strangeness that coated it all and seeing if…

Yeah. Yeah, it should work.

"I can hide Pandora from them." He side-stepped the question, distracting the man with what he really cared about.

"There's a piece of magic that can hide a location from reality itself. Every map, every mind, every computer. None of them but those you chose would be able to know it. If humanity fucks it all up again, they won't be coming here for another go."

No.

If it got to that point…

It would be Harry coming back for seconds.

Pandora

REVs (Rapid Evolving Viruses)