Dedicated to someone who helped publish this earlier than I could have hoped, thank you for the encouragement!

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Crawling out of her dormitory unit, she inched her way across the barely lit hallway late at night, black nothingness staring back at her from the void, and hoped no one would notice she was sneaking out past curfew.

Surely saving someone in distress was more important right? Although she got the feeling that Major Gideon, the head of SET, wouldn't be amused.

Having grabbed a handy flashlight with her, she turned it on, and was met with the most unusual sight.

Two black orbs staring at her.

She covered her mouth, stifling her yelp as her flashlight dropped, and turned off abruptly.

The creature continued staring at her, opposable thumbs looking up with...what looked like to be relief in their eyes.

Suddenly, the automatic lights switched on.

The creature was gone.

"What was that?", she whispered. Not once in her life had she been so frightened.

She wondered if it had been a hallucination, but she was not known to have those before so why now? Had the void of space made her imagine something that wasn't there?

Staying completely still, she breathed a sigh of relief when the hallway lights switched off again as she made no movement, and she was again greeted by darkness.

Okay, time to get out of here...

"Help me," cried out someone in the distance. She groaned, only wanting to go back to bed, but picked up her flashlight and turned it on once again.

It was the creature...only looking closer at it, it was a human!

At least that's what it appeared to be. What if this was all a dream?

Pinching herself, she found she was still awake. Unless...lately, her dreams had made her question reality and fiction, so she walked into a wall and stubbed her toe on purpose.

OW, she murmured, massaging the foot on the ground as the creature/human strolled over and started examining it.

"Bandages?", it said. Wait. Did her ears deceive her? It could really talk.... like humans?

Shining her emergency flashlight in its face, she saw green slime covering the face, but it clearly seemed humanoid in appearance. Eyeing the rest of its body, it appeared to also be scrawny and malnourished. The black orbs that had stared back at her seem to be extremely dilated pupils.

"No, I don't...have any," she answered.

The slimy human tilted its head to the side and offered her a hand to get up.

"Dangerous...at night," a growly deep voice told her.

"You would know?", she teased, then realizing it might not understand her jest.

It smiled, showing pearly whites...oh my stars and stripes! It seemed this was a human after all!

"What's your name?", she asked, holding one of its hands in an attempt to shake them.

"Tito," it responded back before shuffling noises made them crane both their necks to the farthest reaches of the hallway going left as they were currently at an intersection of four passageways.

Looking at her surroundings, she realized she had wandered far from the West Dormitories.

"No... time explain. Go. Hide. Before..."

"Before what?", she inquired.

"Before Doctor finds you..."

Suddenly, the automatic hallway lights turned on again, the sound of footsteps echoed loudly, getting closer and closer...

She rounded a bend, and stuffed herself inside a custodian's closet, praying whomever it was would pass by.

The footsteps stopped just at the door. For a few moments, she held her breath in anticipation.

Then, the person walked away and continued on their merry way.

When the coast was clear, she checked the passageway.

Tito had disappeared.

Stranger was that traces of the green slime, covering him head-toe, were nowhere to be found.

Maybe...that had been the Doctor he was warning her about.

What kind of doctor would do something like that to a patient? Also, did he mean a medical doctor? Were they performing unsanctioned medical experiments at this academy?

She remembered during her first days here she had found it unusual that there was a whole area of the academy where the students could not go. The official story was it was reserved for transitioning ISS astronauts when the new ISS was being built, but as far as she knew, Jeolgeon Inc was still in the early planning stages.

And if Celine was right, which Cadet Celine Rayapudi would make Quibilah pay their side of the bet if she was, President Seon was the transferred Navy Korean Captain on deck...then, wouldn't plans on the ISS be delayed? Or was he working it on here...

Too many things just didn't make sense to her at this point in time, but she hadn't had enough sleep the night before so that could explain away most of her inquiries.

Also, when did grownup's decisions ever make complete sense to her?

Especially because...she couldn't be completely certain, but his appearance reminded her of the thing she had seen on the early morning of the 'false alarm' when she had come back from seeing Doctor Zhao...

Doctor...Sitting upright in bed, now having reached her dorm without a hitch, she realized that the administrators had still hidden from the cadet populace that the alarm had been activated for good reason. There had been a breach.

Of course, she would know, she was there! Wouldn't cameras record it...unless...they mysteriously went down, and they didn't know she had seen it.

Somehow, that news did not bring her relief as it should. It would mean that not only faculty could not come to question her, but also now she did not have a chance to pry for answers.

Due to being the only one who visited the clinic early that morning, she also knew for certain that the kid they had 'suspended' for doing it had been lying in bed...really sick too.

Could he have walked up and pulled an alarm by himself in that state? There was no way!

Her mind went wild with theories as she was just roused from sleep, and slowly, she began to wonder if Tito had ever existed at all...and if maybe she was making giants out of windmills...

Memories came to her in her sleep. Long buried ones. Thinking about her father earlier might have triggered them because there was one that came back in particular.

"The elements are spread across the cosmos; the percentages of heavy metals are dense..."

His voice kept coming in and out, she couldn't remember all that he said back then.

"And..."

"Explain it to her simpler, darling. She's only six," her mother asserted, her voice wafting in from the indoor kitchen. She was making hot cocoa, her daughter's favorite drink.

Even though it was a memory, she could smell it from the swing in the porch in their home in New Mexico.

"We are all made of stardust," explained her father, a man with several degrees under his belt.

Pointing at the starry night sky , he said, "Soon, our bodies will disintegrate, the sun will end its journey as a star, and our particles will be returned to the universe."

"That's morbid, dad," she joked.

"Who's teaching words like that to my child?", yelled Ms. Abdel, clearly not amused.

"It is part of the cycle of the universe. Conservation of Energy, you could say," he teased.

She got her humor from him, she remembered that at least.

"Dad, when will you go back home? To Mexico?", she squeaked.

"Mija,", he started. He held her finger to the sky, and stated, "Space is my home."

She once again woke up with a start.

Space...Space was her dad's home? Wasn't he a Mexican national?

He wasn't that type of alien...he had a work visa, right? That meant he was a legal immigrant.

Nah, they all lived in space technically. He meant it metaphorically, as a figure of speech.

She recited to herself things she knew for certain as she gently swayed on her bed. First, she was human, he was human...Secondly, they lived on Earth; outside Earth was Outer Space. Finally, Earth was in the Solar System situated in the Milky Way Galaxy of their universe.

Calming herself down, she hit herself gently with a pillow before having one last crazy thought before going to sleep.

Perhaps there was another reason the Academy was built...to protect from aliens.

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Vocab note: Mija- shortened version of Mi hija, My daughter

Side note: Secrecy from administrators, or in the military, isn't a bad thing. However, in this story, it might be both hindering and helping the people under their care.

Author's note: RISING ACTION!  (Who am I kidding? We have been in the rising action since Chapter One's end...) Now we get to the meat and potatoes! Also, at this point, what aren't the Administrators hiding? A mysterious virus, aliens, sabotage, the UN getting involved with a US service academy, a breach etc. Also, does her weird dad have anything to with this?