Prologue

You never really know people until they're gone. Or at least, you don't appreciate them enough. You just don't think about everything they must do until they're not doing it anymore.

Maybe not. I guess I can't really speak for everyone, but I certainly know that's what it was like for us, after Nigel left. There was just this big, gaping hole where he used to be, this missing gap in the action that he used to fill. The first few missions we went on afterward, we even had this pause, this moment where we were waiting for him to make his "BATTLE STATIONS!" call. It was like the first time he went missing, except worse, because you knew there wasn't anything to do.

We got used to that, after a few rounds. But we couldn't get used to the feeling.

It was a feeling we all had. It's not something you can really describe, unless you've felt it before yourself, and then you recognize it whenever somebody else has it. I'd say it felt like a hole, except that a hole has sides. I'd say it felt like a whirlpool, but a whirlpool moves. It didn't really feel like anything, just this sort of vast emptiness inside where you knew you used to have something. It threw you off kilter, knocked you out of balance, just made things generally… just wrong.

And that messes other stuff up. Because everything normal seems wrong, you can't see when things turn generally wrong. I say you know when others have it, but you can only really see that if you're over it, because if you're not, you're too busy trying to sort yourself out to see anyone else.

I think, if it hadn't been for that, things would have never quite gotten as close as they did back before the Reworking. One of us would have noticed something, I'm sure. I probably should have been the first, even if I never was the most observant one. The funny thing about the Reworking was not that it happened, but that it got as far as it did.

We shoulda just gotten over it, grown up a little, but I guess everyone likes to hold on to their childhood memories. Most just vanish, whether you want them to or not. It's not often you get one that you need to get rid of. We should have, but, like I said, we weren't really thinking clearly. We all missed Nigel so much.

Yes, we all missed him, but I think Wally took it the hardest.

A/N: So, yeah, I promised this a while ago, but I'm a lazy cow, and some other things came up that I didn't foresee. This is meant to be a companion piece to my one GKND story, To the Stars (of which I have a grand total of ONE chapter written.) It will hopefully detail Sector V's response to Nigel's departure, and the subsequent history of KND in general. This chapter is nearly impossible to review, but please do so anyway, or just tell me ideas of your own you've had about the future.

I don't have much of this done at all, but I hope to update it more or less regularly. And I can nearly promise I will finish it. Nothing annoys me more than an unfinished story.