Not all omens have the power to shake the universe. They don't all suck, either.

WARNINGS:
Not all that spoilerish, but having played both games is important to understanding what's going on.
Brief homoerotic imagery.

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Kinnick sucked beer off his fingers quickly before draining off the rest of his mug. "Best damn planet in all the 'verse!" he bellowed, thrusting out his mug for a refill. The ship's boy took it and filled it for him, laughing, and Kinnick beamed soddenly and threw a companionable arm around the boy's shoulders. "I swear, chaos, I'm never lettin' you out of my sight again. Your first jaunt on the Peerless and I trip over a world so close to Miltian spec that the Colony Offices aren't gonna know whether to come in their pants or make me a rich man first!" Squeezing one of the boy's narrow shoulders Kinnick thrust his refilled mug in the air and roared, once again, "SECOND MILTIA!"

"SECOND MILTIA!" his crew answered him in a ragged shout, and even chaos joined in, murmuring the words with a smile and raising his own half-full mug. The pure clean oxygen-rich air was almost a drug in itself after the thin recycled stuff on board the Peerless, and even the very few of them who hadn't been drinking might as well have been. The crazily buoyant mood was infectious.

"I'm gonna be a rich man," Kinnick told the night. "Richest man on Miltia! I'm gonna have more money than I know what to do with!"

"But that's not what's important, right, Captain?" chaos teased him, and the rest of the crew groaned. They'd heard Kinnick's speech too many damned times already.

"Damn right that's not what's important," Kinnick said, quick to pick up on his cue. "What's important is that Miltia's got the colony world it needs. And you know what else is important?"

"What?" chaos asked, still teasing. He knew the answer already; he'd heard it a thousand times.

"That it's me and my boys that found it," Kinnick said, his voice suddenly hushed with import. The crew's babble died down. For a moment the night was still and reverent, save for the slight sweet breeze that made the bonfire snap and ruffled the surface of the tiny pond they were camped around. "We'll all go down in the history books for this one, chaos. Nobody's ever going to be able to talk about Second Miltia without mentioning my name."

"And that's what's important," chaos finished for him, no longer quite teasing.

"That's what's important," Kinnick confirmed, "but the money's damned nice, too." And then he took a deep breath and thrust his mug high. "SECOND MILTIA!"

"SECOND MILTIA!" the crew roared back at him. Kinnick gave chaos' shoulder one last fond squeeze and went to plop down on the grass by the campfire with the rest of his men.

chaos watched him go, smiling. It was nice to see Kinnick so happy. He liked the bluff explorer and his mad crew, and he even liked the Peerless, battered old tub that it was. If he really had been the luck that made this find possible (and he suspected that he was), well, they deserved this. Miltia deserved this. It was, in some ways, the least he could do.

Turning around, chaos picked his way around the edge of the tiny pond, with its sweet, pure water that had had the crew in such ecstasies not five hours ago. It was a perfect colony world. It was incredible. It was the find of a lifetime, and as far as chaos was concerned it couldn't have happened to a nicer gang of roughnecks.

"Some day maybe this very spot'll be a public park in the middle of a city with a plaque and a statue dedicated to us!" Kinnick roared from behind him, to general approval. chaos privately considered that unlikely; the broad and shallow bowl of plains that stretched out to the south of here seemed more suited to a city, in his experience. But, still, it was a lovely thought.

The breeze picked up, whistling thinly through the narrow gaps between the Peerless' battered old plasteel habitats. Fat chance of anyone going to sleep in there for hours yet. chaos turned into the breeze, letting it blow his bangs back and make his ponytail thump against his shoulders. Suddenly and perfectly happy, chaos took a couple of ambling steps away from the pond, taking in the night, the huddled round habitats, the black stretch of water, the bonfire--

--the smoke from the fire swirled and chaos saw ghostly hands form in it.

He smiled. Signs and portents and minor foretellings had always swirled excitedly around his ankles like enthusiastic puppies, eager to spill all they knew to him despite his repeated protests that he could do almost nothing about them in return, not any more. And in truth he liked it like this, these tiny reminders that not everyone had forgotten or was blind to him.

Keeping his eyes on the plume of smoke chaos took another careful step away from the lake, and another. The vision firmed in the Second Miltian night as he moved, confirming chaos' hunch: a foretelling, then. A thing to come, here on this very spot where he halted, ten feet from the pond.

chaos looked into the smoke and the sparks and saw hands, large and pale and graceful and marked with scars, pressed against skin the exact shade of his own. His little smile grew a hair wider and he watched as the foretelling grew, showed him his own bared hips and the pale hands curling over them, pressing thumbs gently into the hollow of his belly in the dimness while outside the translucent paper walls torchlight still shone... ten years from now? A thousand? Two thousand? Who knew? Not chaos. Not any more.

The torchlight faltered and became the bonfire once more, the smoke belatedly noticing itself and dissolving into a cloud. "Well," chaos murmured, and the word hung portentously in the night, trembling in front of him. He touched his chest, over his heart. "I look forward to that," he told the smoke, still smiling, and it writhed in bliss before the foretelling let it go.

"chaos!" Kinnick bellowed from the bonfire, and chaos chuckled and called "Coming!" and jogged down to join them, around the fire.

The way I want to see it, Second Miltia was settled a thousand years or so before the games start. It was a colony world, mostly being mined and farmed, and only after the destruction of Miltia proper was that big city built to house the new planetary government. The planet was already there and waiting for the survivors, I think.

So, yes, I'm trying to say that chaos had that vision a thousand years before it came true, and that pond is the pond in Jin's garden. Why? Because I can. MMMM LEEWAY.

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