i'm really bad at math so like feel free to correct me
thinking about gath and zood and the time fuckery going on, and a rough estimate of ~1000ish years of ludmila being queen (being queen mind you, and she waited "a long time" before giving up but how long was it really? long enough for even the automata to think of it as such, and i imagine their lives are much longer than a human. a hundred years, perhaps? two?)
anyway thinking about the time fuckery, i vaguely remember it being somewhere in the realm of a decade ago that straka destroyed marya's last skyship. it's been at least a thousand years in zood/zern time since, so a rough ballpark of zood/zern time moving ten to eleven times faster than gathian time seems reasonable
boil that down by the minute and for every minute in gath, it's ten in zern. an hour in gath is ten in zern. a week... a single week in gath is over two months in zern.
[editing break: it's so much worse than that! a minute in gath is roughly equal to an hour in zern going by this very vague math! an hour in gath is equal to roughly two days and a week is nearly a year]
in the immediate aftermath of the horrific events that took her crew and her ship and her heart, while marya would have been just barely accepting what happened and an entire world away, ludmila had already waited days, because she was right behind me. a week for marya saw nearly a year for ludmila, still waiting, still sure, because "she was right behind me"
a week to... a year, ludmila thinks. marya doesn't heal, not really. she compartmentalizes and swears off the sky and opens a toy shop so she never puts anyone in that kind of danger again, and on the other side of a door she doesn't know exists yet, ludmila is waiting, waiting, tinkering like she's always been so good at, forming a gateway that won't burn and sear marya like it did her. because marya was right behind her. she must be coming.
a month to... god, five, six years? the pain lingers for marya. she doesn't fight it; it's an ever-present reminder of her own hubris. she needs it in the absence of her heart. ludmila is in pain, too, chronic and unforgiving from the fall into zern, and beyond it there is another kind of pain. a gnawing emptiness. she hasn't given up, yet, but she is so, so tired and hope has always cost more to scrapsylvanians than the rest of gath. she hasn't seen zood yet. she hasn't left the door long enough.
a year, now. marya is not a version of herself that any of her old crew would recognize, were they still around. even less so for her first crew. a copy of monty's latest book always finds its way to her, often scribbled in, always signed, never with her name, always a castoff. fitting.
it's taken a century for time and grief to erode hope. ludmila was always stubborn in her optimism, more than she had any right to be, but even she can't hold it forever. she is asked again by those she's helped to help them one more time, to leave her sentinel's post and help them, and they saved her, so finally she does. she waits one more day. one last shift guarding her own hope.
there is a blip, in the middle of the day on gath, where marya's eyes refuse to look away from ludmila's portrait.
