"Alright, go for it."

Krill stood behind the waiting blast shield and covered his antenna waiting for the eruption that was sure to follow. With him waited what was probably half of arcadia. Ok, granted that was probably an exaggeration but that's sure what it felt like. They had returned to their dark home moon defeated. The plan had been to go out and deal with the void once and for all, but instead they came limping back not a few months later with their captain missing his heart and one lung and hovering near death.

Arcadia was poised on the edge of disaster.

Celex and Kelly's return had proven that dying didn't mean the same as it used to, but they were almost certain that if Adam died, his anima was unlikely to make it to revelation, or back home. Kazna would make sure of that, wherever she was. Sunny was almost sure he would be destroyed and harvested out of spite. If there was anyone Kazna blamed more than Sunny for everything that happened, it was Adam.

Kay Peered around the side of Krill wide green eyes both confused and eager to see what was going on, though Sunny kept a tight hold on one of his upper hands. Kay had hit a growth spurt while they were gone and was now almost as tall as Krill. Kay's continual questioning as to where his dad was, was beginning to affect everyone.

Sunny had tried to explain that his dad was sick and needed to rest, but still kay at least wanted to visit to help make him feel better. How did you explain to a toddler that his father had about a fifty percent chance of survival.

They would cross that bridge when they got there.

On the other side of the blast shield, Celex stood sleeve rolled up to his elbow, which was gloved, hair tied back in a surgical hairnet. He wore a mask and a gown and even surgical booties over his shoes. A glass wall separated him from everyone else along with the aforementioned blast shield.

The room was completely sterile, and glowing light from the DECOM chamber glowed a dull green through the room.

Next to him, celex stood by an open top glass cylinder bubbling with a strange clear blue mixture.

The Tesraki had explained the fluid was a special mixture designed to facilitate the growth of stem cells, while simultaneously containing all of the material required to keep the organs alive while they were being grown. There was something else in there about how the water contained certain types of elemental metals to augment the building of the artificial bla bla blam or maybe he had just heart that part wrong. He had been to focused on the biological nature of the heart and lung.

As far as krill was concerned, and he was always very concerned, there was one big issue that they needed to address.

Energy.

Anima energy was powerful and ran through Adam's body with Krill's most recent augmentation. Power surges in the anima had already proven trouble for Adam's mechanical leg and eye, so it wouldn't do to give him a mechanical heart just for it to rupture and overload from too much anima energy.

That wouldn't do at all.

So there was only one way to test it.

They were either about to do absolutely nothing, or completely destroy a multimillion dollar set of artificial organs.

Celex flex his hand over the water, before slowly sinking his hand into the slightly viscous fluid. Or perhaps, viscous wasn't the right word, it was thicker than water, that was for sure, and rather slimy, but it wasn't syrup either. The fluid itself was rather warm at around 98.6 degrees, or the average temperature of the human body. He paused only a little before gently cupping his hand around the artificial heart.

The organ for all of its human attributes, didn't look much like a normal organ. Red tissue was suffused with lines of silver and black, and if Krill hadn't gotten a closer look he might have assumed necrosis on first sight, but of course on closer inspection, the black was simply made of the same material that made up the rest of the heart, a sort of fibrous material neither quite biological or completely metal.

The heart pulsed gently to its own electrical rhythm, and the lung rose and fell with some regularity.

Celex made a face, "Now this is.... Odd."

"Odd, out of everyone on this planet, I thought you of all people might have had the experience of ripping someone's beating heart out of their chest."

Celex snorted a laugh, "Funny enough, but that is actually on a long list of things that I have never done." He took a breath hand still cupped around the heart.

Kay turned to look at Sunny, "Momma nin nee dar-d-d..... Doing?" Kay's throttled hybrid of both the Drev and english language was always rather endearing. It made him almost completely incomprehensible to someone who only spoke one or the other, but sunny understood him well enough.

"We are testing to see how durable that heart and lung are."

Kay looked very confused, "Dur-ble?"

"How strong." She said

"Heart- lu-ng?"

She took one of his hands and held it over his chest. "Feel that twitching, that's your heart." She took a big deep breath, "And those are your lungs."

Kay didn't entirely understand what she was talking about, but he got the most important bits, turning his head back to the scene ahead of him, "Dur-ble." He muttered to himself, locking another word away in his child mind, which at three years old was basically a steel trap for language related items.

"Ready." Celex said.

Sunny turned her body to get between herself and any potential explosion.

The others hunkered down as well, katie and Krill at the front.

It began with a soft glow around the palm of his hand, which quickly escalated into an eruption of searing golden light. Sunny kept a hand over Kay's eyes as she turned herself away, energy pouring out around them. Celex held it for a good minute or so before exhausting the power, and the light slowly died away, leaving the room comparatively dark and gloomy.

Krill quickly turned to look at his monitoring screens, and Celex withdrew his gloved hand from the water, mucusy hand dripping with long strings of sticky fluid.

Below his hand.

The heart was still beating happily away.

Krill hummed with interest as Katie leaned over his shoulder.

The lung took a long slow breath, and then another, unperturbed by the sudden rise in temperature, or it seemed the sudden diffusion of power.

"Well I wasn't sure what I expected, but I don't think I expected nothing." katie commented.

Krill nodded along with her, "The water rose at least eight degrees in a matter of seconds, which for the average person would likely be fatal, at least if it increased that quickly, and the power output was higher than our instruments can chart, but according to my readings is seems to have dissipated through ambient contact with other objects..... Why wouldn't it fail like his mechanical eye/"

"Well to be fair mechanical is the term of voice here." Sunny said, "There are no strictly "Mechanical." Components in that heart, "Its biomechanical, a fusion between the two that heavily negates that strict 1s and 0s and optimal power levels usually required in traditionally mechanical objects.

Kay rested his head against his mother's shoulder.

He didn't understand most of what she was saying, but he liked the sound of it, and he liked being involved in all of the excitement.

Katie exchanged a look with Krill.

"I think its worth a shot?"

Krill was more hesitant, but looking at the upsides and downsides there was plenty to consider. The biggest issue with the biomech was just how unknown it was. There were very few causes of people actually using them, and those cases that did exist had happened only in the last few years, so it was hard to say anything bout their longevity. Not to mention that none of those people would be putting themselves under the same sort of pressure that Adam put himself under on a daily basis.

WIth all the fighting, the stress, and the constant run of anima energy there was no telling what that could do to the artificial organ. Of course then there was natural lab grown organs to consider, which were common enough that there were plenty of peer reviewed studies about their longevity.

Depending on the skill of the surgeon, the average artificially grown heart could last for a very long time, if not indefinitely. However, because they are lab grown, there can be unseen defects during the growth process, and the longer that a surgeon took implanting one meant the more damage to the natural tissue and the shorter that the heart would last. That was always a danger of implantation.

Then of course there was the length of the surgery to consider. It would take a very long time to do and Adam's chest would be open for the whole procedure, and even as cautious as they were, you couldn't make a completely sterile environment, at least not when there were other living organisms in the room, not least of which was Adam himself.

But.

A lot of those things would be negated with the artificial organs.

He thought about it for what felt like a long time, but for others it was no more than a few minutes as all four of krill's cortical hemispheres debated the problem.

Eventually he came to a decision.

"He looked over at sunny. I think the artificial heart is the way to go, but this is your call."

Sunny nodded, "I trust your judgment doctor." He knew she was likely to say that, but he wanted to make sure anyway.

"Very well, we will prepare the surgical suite."

Katie gave a nod.

The surgery would have to be performed here on the empyrean as there was no way for them to transfer Adam safely from the ship to the hospital on arcadia. The empyrean was doing her best to keep him alive, and no one wanted to tamper with her streek so far.

All around them, the Empyrean watched with something akin to the AI version of interest.

Looking from the outside, it was hard to know how much the empyrean understood about what was going on. Simultaneously both more and less than Kay understood, but over the past few days she had been working to prepare a state of the art surgical suite for Krill. It was hard to explain how she was doing it, but it was almost as if the empyrean was manipulating her own insides. One day you would walk in and suddenly feel like certain rooms had gotten bigger or smaller, though the changes were so minute it was hard to pinpoint them.

In krill's case, random objects began appearing in the infirmary. Objects he never remembered acquiring for the ship but those which he knew he might need for the surgery. The change was so gradual, that it took a direct comparison from old photographs before anyone realized how much things had changed.

The room was bigger, and more accommodating to his needs. Krill din't like it, but he was going to need a massive team of support staff to do this surgery, and there were plenty of doctors waiting in the wings to help.

And now, he had finally made his decision.

It was time to prep.