Red Dragon Spaceship Awakening: I Gain Alien Abilities on Mars-Chapter 195: Girls’ Day Out [2]

Lyra paused in the middle of a bite, blinking at the sudden shift in topic. Then she set her fork down and nodded slowly. "Yeah. I actually did. Once."

Riven’s eyes lit up with interest. "Oh, really? I had one too—"

They both started talking at the same time, their words overlapping in a jumbled mess of half-finished sentences and competing anecdotes. They stopped, laughed, and then Lyra held up a hand.

"Okay, okay," Lyra said, still grinning. "You first."

Riven smiled, leaning back in her seat. "Alright. So, mine was back in college. University, I mean. We dated for like three months."

"Three months?" Lyra echoed. "That’s... not long."

"Yeah, I know," Riven said, shaking her head. "He was sweet, though. Really sweet. Just... way too shy to do anything. We went on dates, hung out, talked for hours. But he could never quite work up the nerve to, you know, make a move."

Lyra raised an eyebrow. "Wait, so you guys never...?"

"We kissed," Riven said quickly, a faint blush coloring her cheeks. "Once. Right at the end, actually, when he told me he was relocating to another city for work. That was it. One kiss, and then he was gone."

Lyra let out a low whistle. "Damn. That’s... kind of tragic, actually."

Riven laughed, shaking her head. "Yeah, it was. But honestly? Looking back, it was probably for the best. He was a good guy, but we weren’t really... I don’t know. We weren’t really compatible, I guess. It was more like we were just trying it out to see if it worked."

"And it didn’t."

"And it didn’t," Riven confirmed. She took a sip of her drink, then nodded at Lyra. "Alright, your turn. What about you?"

Lyra hesitated for a moment, her fingers drumming lightly on the edge of the table. Then she sighed and leaned forward. "Mine was... different. He was a fellow fighter in the Red Crest Clan. We weren’t at, like, serious relationship level or anything. Just... starting out, I guess. Seeing where it went."

"And?" Riven prompted.

"And he died in battle," Lyra said bluntly. "Head chopped off by the edge of a plasma blade."

There was a beat of stunned silence. Riven’s eyes widened, and then, against all logic, both of them burst out laughing.

Actual laughter!

"Wait, wait," Riven said, wiping at her eyes. "His head was chopped off?"

"Yeah," Lyra said, still laughing even as she shook her head. "Clean off. One swing actually, it was brutal."

Riven covered her mouth, her shoulders shaking. "Oh my God, that’s horrible."

"I know!" Lyra said, her laughter finally starting to subside. "And the thing is, I was really sad about it. Not mainly because he was my boyfriend, but because he was a good friend, you know? We’d trained together, fought together. Losing him sucked."

"But now it feels funny?" Riven asked, her tone somewhere between disbelief and understanding.

"In a sad way, yeah," Lyra admitted. She shrugged, a faint smile still tugging at her lips. "I don’t know. Time does weird things to grief, I guess."

Riven nodded slowly, her laughter fading into something softer. "Yeah. I get that."

They sat in silence for a moment, the weight of the conversation settling between them. This heavy yet weightless weight.

Then Riven tilted her head, curiosity flickering in her eyes.

"How old are you, anyway?" she asked.

"Eighteen," Lyra said. "Just turned it a few months ago. You?"

"I’ll be eighteen in a few months," Riven said. "Still seventeen for now."

Lyra grinned. "So I’m older."

"By like, three months," Riven shot back, rolling her eyes. "Don’t let it go to your head."

They both laughed, and the tension that had briefly settled over the table dissolved completely. They finished their meal, paid the bill, and gathered up their bags, stepping back out into the glowing, bustling expanse of the mall. 𝚏𝕣𝐞𝗲𝐰𝕖𝐛𝐧𝕠𝕧𝚎𝚕.𝐜𝚘𝗺

As they walked, Lyra glanced over at Riven, a small, genuine ( really genuine) smile on her face.

"This was fun," she said.

Riven smiled back. "Yeah. It was."

Truly, it says fun one. That talked freely and casually like they had known each other for long.

And they had a good time.

———

Now, if anyone from... (the author’s time) had been listening to Lyra and Riven’s conversation in that restaurant, if they had overheard two young women: one barely eighteen, the other still seventeen, discussing past relationships, loss, and life with the calm pragmatism of people twice their age, they might have found it strange. Jarring, even. There was a certain maturity in the way they spoke, a self-awareness and emotional intelligence that seemed incongruous with their youth.

But that strangeness would only exist if you were looking at them through the lens of the past. Through the lens of Tatehan’s time, or the Earth that came before the Space Dragon Wars, or any of the old centuries where childhood stretched long and adolescence was a prolonged, fumbling transition into adulthood.

This was not that world anymore.

The future had moved on. Humanity had moved on. And with it, everything about how people grew, learned, and came of age had fundamentally changed.

In Tatehan’s time: back on Earth, before the space dragons came and the world burned, education had been a slow, methodical process. Children started school at three... four... or five, spending years working their way through a rigidly structured system.

Preschool. Elementary. Middle school. High school.

Each stage carefully delineated, each one taking years to complete. By the time you finished high school, you were seventeen or eighteen, and only then did you move on to university, where you would spend another four years, sometimes more, earning a degree that qualified you to actually do something with your life.

It was a system built for a world that had the luxury of time. A world where childhood could be preserved, where growing up could happen gradually, where there was no urgent need to rush people into competency because society was stable enough to carry them until they were ready.

Mars did not have that luxury.