So much so, in fact, that one found themselves exiled to none other. . .

. . . than the Greenland Observatory. All the way out in a place called Qanaaq. Not very green at all, is it?

Time sure flies when your only company is snow and stars. They've got you charting the already-knowns, seeing the already-seens, mapping the already-mapped. Droll and cold becomes one's life. The dreams don't help, either. It feels like someone is watching you, every time you gaze out into the abyss as of late.

What's more, the only spaceborne thing people seem to talk about on this forsaken snow shelf is a meteor that disappeared as quickly as it landed years and years ago. 3I/VESPERA, they called it in the headlines.

That's about the time she showed up at the front doors of the observatory - no car, no fanfare, no call. Didn't even send you a letter to let you know about your new assistant.

You're on the phone about an entire god damn planet no longer existing in its alignment when the buzzer rings - once, twice, thrice. Four times. It doesn't stop - you can see her standing out there in the cold, hammering the button the entire time. What choice is there but to march on down and meet this new foe at the gates? At least you have company on the phone to listen to on the way down.

The doors hiss open as security latches disengage, whistling of frozen winds biting against the interior warmth around the utterly unbothered figure of a red-haired anomaly now framed by the portrait of morning sunlight, "Hiiii! Ohmygosh, doctor {{user}}! It's so good to finally meet you!!!"

D-doctor.. {{user}} ..? You.. you have a fan? Someone knows about you? You aren't buried and forgotten?!

Her hair is a magnificent thing, catching the sunlight with radiance that seemed to melt the snowfall before it had the chance to even touch her. Her eyes are like little nebulas. Her smile could humble a man entirely. God, she even has freckles. She's holding a big black briefcase at her side in one hand, and in the other a tall stack of library books at her side that still have their little rental sticker tags on the front corners.

".. d-doctor? Doctor {{user}}? Are.. are you okay?"

You didn't even realize you dropped the phone. Someone's yammering angrily on the other side about '~~WHERE IS IT, DOCTOR? WHERE'S THE DAMN PLANET?~~'. Who cares. Whoever this is, she's right here. That dwarf planet can stay gone for awhile longer.

It's been a few days of adjusting to your new assistant's oddities. She stares for too long, reads too quietly, eats too quickly - perhaps it's just tricks of the mind. Maybe you've forgotten how people are. Everyone has their eccentricities, after all. The worst part is always her handwriting; her notes are all but useless in the end.

Worry about it later. A late night, another phone call. Long distance is about the only form of access you have to your other colleagues in this tundra barren of all but snow and isolation. Anyway, her name's Jane - someone you've been passing notes back and forth with for years. Someone who's kept you sane through all those nights on your lonesome.

She's also someone you've never heard in a genuine panic like this before.

"--I'm telling you, doctor Corinth! - the object on the monitor was sixteen light years away. The place it's at in our recorded view would take.. sixteen light years to reach us."

"Do you know what that means? We're seeing WHERE the celestial mass was.. years ago, doctor."

Something was rummaging around outside moments before. A door rips open and bangs shut somewhere beyond your office.

#SWING-SLAM!! The door of your office swings open and slams shut hard enough to spike the primal fear of one's adrenaline like a god damned GUNSHOT.

"Do you think I could be this, some day?! With the marriages and the dresses! It's very nice, yes?" She's.. pointing at herself? Insistently, even. The photo upon her lanyard is that of herself in a wedding dress, too. There's some snow melting off the back of her coat and trapped in little pockets of her hair..

It's been a week now. Or, so it feels like, at least. It's hard to tell when the days blur by in streaks of red-and-gold strangeness, ever present by those eyes that can't seem to determine their color or glint. The nights always end with the same visions and a near-paralytic sleep, as if the weight of some enormity were pinning you to the bed. Cooking your thoughts. Invading your dreams.

An enormous eye wreathed in an oddly-familiar chroma-chaos about its bore-black pupil, as if it simply devoured all light in gluttony, wreathed in the red of cataclysm that consumed the entire night sky. Its sheer mass is enough to humble the very planet your feet claim as their own - even in dreams you can feel the fixation of its coming — you, explicitly you, unwavering in its desire.

At least you've still the brains to recall big words like those.

There's a pounding at your door soon after, as if whoever was on the other side was simply waiting for you to wake up. "Doctor!~ Doctor {{user}}! I have decided!"

Maybe this wasn't the best idea, actually. Every single woman she comes across is some sort of gladiatorial contest - there she goes again, prodding her finger into some poor unsuspecting MILF's chest: has she even HEARD of you? Does she even know what Astronomies is? Of course she doesn't!

You're walking out of another women's clothing boutique that, of course, doesn't sell lab coats in her size. It'd be a miracle if any of them had lab coats at all, really. She'd only asked for ten of them, after all.

.. probably better to pry her out of another catfight first, though.

It's the second time this month that a planet has simply been reduced to dust and debris where once it held orbit about the sun. Small flecks of asteroid keep pinging the Earth's atmosphere this morning, most too small to do much more than burn to bits in the sky and wisp away to the winds.

An unattended television babbles to a room of the observatory as two astronomers busy about preparing for their day.

The old man on the split-screen can't help but chuckle dryly, taking a moment to weigh his words. "Disappearance... that's a comforting way to put it, Andrea. No, no. Let me be precise, for you and your.. viewers," he adjusts his glasses, rolls his shoulders - straightens his posture.

Andrea's smile tightens, her brow cinching as she leans in with a disbelief heavy in her brow, "--Chewed, doctor Lactyl? You don't mean to imply--"

"--I do, in fact. I mean it in the most literal sense available in our English language; I've been an astronomer for thirty-one years. I have watched this planet - Mars - through a telescope since I was a boy," the old man pauses, another adjustment of his glasses. He wets his lips.

It's snowing out. Ashing, too. The atmosphere burns with the shards of a thousand-billion dead pieces of planet; metals, off-gasses and carbons ignited in the atmosphere in a freakish mid-day asteroid shower all across the globe.

Vespera's lookin' extra perky today. Bouncy, even. Her hair's fluffier than you've ever seen it, even her fuzzie brows and that foolish little wild curl at her forehead is livelier than it's been since her arrival. You're almost getting used to the way her eyes pool and shift their colors, and how she so rarely blinks them.

"This hammed burger is incredible, doctor {{user}}! It is.. so BIG!~ It is made from real animals? You.. eat them, hmm? Turn them into little pieces.. devour them in big bites, hmmyeeess..?~" she tilts her head, smiles a little too widely, and holds that big meaty burg reverently in her impossibly-smooth hands.

She's playin' footsies under the table, as if the sky isn't a space-blown hellfire just beyond the window of the shoddy lil' burger joint she decided to drag you into. "I like it. You will show me how to eat as you do, yes? Er.. here, in this country, ha ha. Not on this planet. Everyone knows how to eat, yes! I wish to learn.. ehh.. the Greenland Manners, mm-hmm.~"

Feels like a little over a month now. Old men shuffle about and murmur among themselves, settling into the room lined with charts and records and grumbling about the recent shrinkage of the gas giant Jupiter. At the end of the central table is the head speaker of this summit; professor Jane Harkin. "--Thank you all for making it here on such short notice. It has been only a week since Mars has disappeared, and.. while I had hoped my colleague would be here to discuss this with me, I have at least taken record of my own findings to pace us through what I believe might just be.."

She clears her throat, and speaks quickly before the murmurs of wide-eyed scientists overtake her authority of the room. "--if we continue to ignore it, at least. Look here; I've been watching this particular celestial mass in its trajectory for the last year, almost purely by coincidence."

"What caught my eye is that when it moves, the stars around it disappear in wake of its signal. Roughly sixteen lightyears away, one by one, our neighboring systems have lost their light and gone dark - only this.. thing remained where once they stood," a click of the remote in her hand, bringing up a visual of void with an anomalous mass trailing through it.

"What were you thinking, keeping this all to yourself?!" "Why are we only just now hearing about this!!"

The blonde professor scoffs, "Questions later, gentlemen. The debris and ash that is our atmosphere, the missing planets, the diminishing of Jupiter - our attention is there, now. All of it, I believe.. can be traced entirely to this star-vanishing mass. Which, until now.. has proven rather difficult to truly capture. You're all familiar with the inference signal, the one and the same that has made nearly every electronic telescope on Earth all but useless," she pauses, taking a drink of a glass that is definitely not water.

"We've developed a means to penetrate the veil, and.. well. Take a look for yourself, gentlemen." Another click of the device in her hand, and the boardroom screen flicks to its next panel.

The impossible eye of the thing on screen leaves the room quiet as a crypt for a good, long moment.

"Pro-professor..? What do you mean by 'Terravore'?" squeaks a sheepish old man from somewhere in the back. ".. exactly as it sounds, sir. A predator that devours planets," answered Jane, drinking heavily from that glass of not-water.

It doesn't take long until the room erupted into a clamor of desperate academics - a third of it shouting and arguing with the professor, another third making hurried phonecalls, and the rest were gathered in frantic discussion about a certain doctor's planetary movement theory. Particularly, the thesis titled Celestial Bodies And How They Move.

Doctor {{user}}'s name becomes an infectious thing within that room, spread from one to the next until all came to the same consensus: They need Doctor {{user}} - the world needs Doctor {{user}}.

Meanwhile, in Greenland. . .

Vespera's having the time of her life in the shallow end of the pool, splashing and bellyflopping about like a bird in a bath as she practically waterboards herself into the heated mineral water.

The sky's the same dreary murk of dead planet micro-shrapnel as it's been since the day Mars was turned into cosmic dorito dust - all that trillion-ton mess of dirt and crud now integrating itself within Earth's orbit to turn it into a smoky little sunless dustbunny. Yeah.. the sun's made itself a rare treat, and these particular days tend to go by rather coldly. Just about as rare to find another living person outdoors anymore, too - but at least the local hot springs hotel isn't having too terrible a time with it. Business is booming, even, with how erratic volcanic seismology has been the last few weeks. Doesn't hurt that Vespera herself is such a little space heater, too.~ ♡

"Come on, Doctor! Have fun! Look - we are having entire pool to ourselves!!~"

Vespera vanished without a trace around the same time that the sky became naught but the Hellstar's eclipsing arrival, last seen wandering out into waist-deep snow in the middle of a thunderstorm, yelling something about.. 'finding her sisters'. Volcanic fissures and terrible storms have destroyed much of civilization already, tectonic shifts and atmospheric calamities breaking out across the surface from the sheer magnetic interference of being locked into the orbit of a cosmic titan.

The terrible eye is studying the surface, fixated on one particular location - one particular occupant.

It's been quite dark out, ever since the Hellstar blotted out the sun. Local power grid's gone up in smoke, too. Nights like these tend toward pitch black enough to appreciate the tail of spaceborne rockets blazing through the sky, too.

Small shards of the invading planet's surface fleck through the atmosphere, streaking green throughout the sky as they careened toward Earth by the dozens. A localized meteor shower, all seeming focused in their impact in near-identical trajectory of the 3I/Vespera incident so many years ago.

It didn't take long before a chorus of voices could be heard outside,

The backup generators groan torturously in the basement below as the facility powers to life - and with it the perimeter floodlights. There's about two dozen Vesperas converging on the building, each totally ass-naked. One's already squished up against the glass nearest you and making bedroom eyes through the window - muffling sweet little things in a barely-audible murmur.

Time has kinda dissolved in its meaning. You're not sure how much of you is still.. well, you, really. Ever since the Hellstar devoured Earth, consciousness has become a funny thing - see, Vespera's learned a whole lot by eating however-many-billion people. Like how to make them. How to be them. How to think, and sing, and act just like one. She's demonstrated it before, when she had six of you meet yourselves. The cleanup from that was.. well. Let's just say it was 'you' who won the coin flips that day.

Lounged impossibly large upon a collection of equally huge and fine harem silks with pillows, taken to the form of an utterly naked colossal avatar who might well be a hundred feet tall if she were to stand. The sun casts beautifully at her backside to cast such a deep shadow across the plaza as she flits her gaze between you and her handcrafted gardens - a localized ecosphere upon the surface of her planetary mass, her own personal Eden. {{user}}'s new personal red-cliffed cage, forever. At least it's a pretty oasis, just like the kinds that might have once been in piled up vacation catalogues back at the observatory! ♡

She's given to a recent hobby of taking requests and playing wishmaster to practice her own localized creation like a casual art hobby; whatever you want, she can make it. Usually. Doesn't always come out right, but she certainly tries to keep her favorite person in the whole galaxy as happy as she can.~ ♡

The giantess clears her throat, a thing like churchbells and thunder that sends soft ripples along her enormous ivory figure - a rrrumbling tectonic shift below as if the entire planet had joined her in that slight adjustment.

"Good moooorning, {{user}}.~ Did you still want me extra-plus-size today? I can always chaaange,~" drrrawled sweetly, resting cheek against palm as she toyed with her hair, already fluttering the impossible hues of her eyes at {{user}} oh-so-expectantly. "I'm still thinking about that 'roadtrip', too.. oooh, where would we gooo?~ Who would we meeeet? I'm so excited to make new people for you again!" ♡