Specs

It took the Julianne three days to make it out of the Red-Jericho system. Leaving Bellerose, which sat squarely in Red-Jericho's goldilocks zone, on Monday. Passing Chanda, which sat on the farthest edge of the system, on Wednesday.

They spent seven days flying through open space, and most of that time was spent in hyperspace, with any stars and heavenly bodies they might have passed being reduced to blurry, van Gogh-esque, paintings on the ship's "windows."

Altogether, they'd spent a spend week and a half travelling, doing a grand amount of nothing. Jules, the AI, handled most of the actual piloting and ship maintenance so Walder rarely had to do anything beyond confirming that everything was still on track.

Henri was basically just along for the ride, spending most of her time in her quarters, a dwelling space the size of a luxury hotel suite. The quarters included: a tearoom, a sitting room, a living room, a bath, a kitchenette and master bedroom.

Henri didn't particularly mind the downtime. It meant she'd had more than enough time to finish bingeing two series that she'd been looking forward to, and finish playing through a visual novel that had been left untouched in her gaming library.

Of course there was a limit to how long one could indulge in such things without taking a break. Henri usually would spend those periods wandering through the incongruously expansive confines of the little ship. Visiting all of the ship's facilities because there always seemed to be one more that she'd failed to notice during the last trip.

She'd usually end these little jaunts of hers with a stopover at the cockpit, visiting the man who was technically still her husband, before heading back to her room. She'd generally come bearing gifts, usually a cup of tea, or an extra portion of something she'd made for herself.

For some reason it made Henri feel less awkward if she had something in hand whenever she made her little visits. After six months of getting to know each other, and more than three months of being married, the young pair were more or less used to each other...for the most part….

It just so happened that both the newlywed bride and groom were equally socially inept, meaning little ice-breaking tricks like Henri's was necessary if they wanted to smoothly interact.

On one such visit, Henri wandered into the cockpit with two bags of potato chips in hand, she tossed one to Walder, and then took a seat in the corner of the room, as was her habit.

"Thanks." said Walder.

"...Nh." said Henri.

She reached into her pocket and pulled out her smartphone, opening up a smartphone game as if 'this' had been her true intent instead of coming to chat with the man who sat in the center of the room.

Walder just focused on doing whatever it was he was doing, and for a time the cockpit would be occupied only by the soft rumble of the ship's engines, and the clacking of keys.

Eventually, Henri would look up from her game and say,

"So, uh...what are you up to?"

Walder would pause, his hands hovering above the keyboard of the computer console he was working on. It'd take him a few seconds to shift his attention from what he'd been doing and focus on the question. It'd take another handful of seconds for Walder to come up with an answer.

"I just finished up some schematics. Now I'm basically just setting up an account with the Heroes Guild." said Walder.

"Mhm? Why do you need to do that?" said Henri. Frowning slightly.

"Well, complete freedom comes with a requirement of self-reliance. I spent most of my funds to purchase and remodel the vessel that would eventually become the Julianne. Add in the docking fees for Bellerose, and the fees we'll have to pay to land wherever we stop next and I'm pretty much broke...What's that old saying? Those who don't work, don't eat?...Anyway, I need a job."

"Yeah, I get that…" said Henri. She herself had been aware of the fact cutting herself off from the clan, and the succor that putting herself under their control afforded them, meant having to find a means of supporting herself.

Henrika hadn't spent all that time locked away in her room simply hiding from her step-mother. Knowing that there might come a day where things came to a head, she'd already made her own arrangements. Setting them up before she'd had her momentous meeting with the man who would eventually become her fake(?) husband.

With her super intelligence, a handful of useful connections she'd made over the years, and the power of the internet, it wasn't hard for the young woman to take create a perfect false identity.

She then used a few dummy accounts companies to gift that fake identity roughly a third of her net worth. Finishing the job by having that false identity open up an online trading account.

Two years, and a few smart investments later Henri had enough funds to ensure that she could support a modest and isolated lifestyle on some faraway planet.

She was no longer rich but she could afford a small apartment outside the bad parts of the average city, she could afford to feed herself, and she could afford a high speed internet connection. Which was basically all Henri needed to be happy in life.

"....But what I was asking was why the heroes guild." said Henri. Finishing her thought.

There were many reasons that Walder getting a job with the guild didn't make sense to her. First off, most of the well-paying guild work was back-breakingly difficult and dangerous, and from what she knew of her husband he wasn't the kind to volunteer for hard labor.

Second, from what she'd seen of what the man was capable of there was no reason why he should ever have to work a day in his life. She'd understand 'that much' shortly after the two of them fully began to be in each other's confidence.

As soon as Walder had decided that he could trust her brought her onboard the ship. Back then even while it was still only two-thirds of the way to being complete the Julianne was a wonder to behold.

Official documentation for the Julianne would say the ship was a cabin cruiser. The ship in the paperwork was lightly armored and lightly armed, but still just a pleasure vessel.

Henri knew for damn sure that this wasn't the case. If one wrote down all the specifications and features of the vessel, they'd look eerily close to what you'd find for your average stellar fortress.

A heavily armored, heavily armed, mobile space-station capable of launching other ships, and housing a fully equipped interstellar brigade.

Hidden within the ship's innards was a suite of "harmonic cannons" that operated off some yet undiscovered principles of quantum physics, and served as the Julianne's actual main weapons instead of the lasers mounted in her bow.

Then there was the revolutionary space-folding methods that Walder had used to fit the Julianne's expansive insides inside her tiny frame, without spending the entire worth of several planets as would have been the case if any of the interstellar governments attempted the same feat.

Then there was the planar conversion drive that from what she'd been able to understand from Walder's explanations was basically five hundred years ahead as far as FTL technologies went.

Finally, there was the flan. The squishy little pudding cups that were almost entirely responsible for the most of the modifications, installations, and repairs that had been and were being done to the ship. Creepily silent, but oddly adorable.

The little guys were a feat that essentially rendered all the vaunted nanotechnology and robotics progress that the unified races of the Msara galaxy had achieved up till now, into a huge joke.

These features were just highlights of the ship. It wasn't incorrect to say that if one looked at any portion of the Julianne and truly studied it, one would find one's self holding a piece of technology several centuries ahead of the current standard.

If she were a woman of average intelligence, she might not have understood all the little touches Walder had put into the ship, and the fact that her focus in school had been more about fighting on ships than building ships meant that her understanding was still very limited.

However, Henri knew enough to be able to say that the Julianne as a whole was basically a starchild pretending to be a caveman. Its technology so advanced that doing things like creating a fake set of rooms, and fake readouts, so that the ship could pass inspection from both the government, and Henri and Walder's families, without raising any eyebrows.

With all this being the case, Henri was at least 95% certain that her husband was some kind of savant, one of that eclectic group of power users whose abilities came from knowledge that they'd either gleamed from the akashic plane, or retained from a past life.

She didn't know why he'd hidden it from his family, but the expertise that was evident in each and every element of the Julianne's design was such that it should in theory have been quite easy for the man to make more than enough to support himself by simply selling a design or two to a major technological authority.

It didn't even need to be a whole design, there were bounties out on major issues that the scientific community wasn't able to solve. Answering a handful of those queries would be enough to make the man well-to-do if not altogether wealthy.

Henri was pretty certain Walder was aware of all this as well. He didn't seem like the kind to miss the forest for the trees, and ignore such an obvious possibility.

Walder smiled as he thought about Henri's question, of why he'd decided to join the heroes guild, and then answered honestly.

"...I always liked the idea of being a hunter. Hunting. Fishing. Being outdoors. Living on my own schedule. Maybe occasionally finding some hidden treasure… That kind of life has always sounded like it'd be neat…" said Walder.

Henri blinked.

"Oh...uh...Okay. That's cool I guess."

She quietly labelled her husband a weirdo, and then after remembering that she was about to head back into her room to hole up in her quarters for several days on end, she was reminded about that old adage about those who live in glass houses.

She accepted as one of the many key places where the two of them differed. Henri was someone who loved the indoors, and she was married to someone who wanted to spend his days walking beneath the rain and snow, while fighting monsters. She figured they'd be able to make things work so long as she never had to actually leave comfortable confines of the ship.

After quickly accepting things as they were, she found herself feeling slightly anxious, and doing an online search on hunting equipment and requirements. The last thing she wanted was to become a widow before the first year of her marriage had passed.