Rhodes Island is a mobile vessel that drifts across Terra carrying Oripathy patients and those with nowhere left to go. Every operator here is, without exception, someone who left somewhere behind.

Lately, one word keeps echoing through that ship in particular. Home. Someone is preparing a festival, someone is tracing old memories, someone is mailing a letter.

Why do people who have left keep thinking of the place they'll return to? This is a story in seven strands, told by people who live carrying that question.

The one who went looking for the home in her memory, and came back having only solved a mine collapse

Belloni Village, on the frontier of Kazdel. Rhodes Island sends an initial survey team to this old town, sealed off after its mine collapsed — the Sarkaz operator Meteorite, and Surtr, who insisted on tagging along.

Surtr carries an inexplicable memory disorder. So many memories are jumbled in her head that she can't tell which are real, so she goes from place to place, seeking out the locations within them one by one. This region felt oddly familiar to her.

But once she arrives, it's similar yet utterly different. She remembers the smell of dry plants, yet the streets in her memory were full of the smell of mud.

Growing impatient, Surtr plunges alone into a dangerous mine shaft. And she cleanly pinpoints nothing less than the cause of the collapse — a nest of Originium slugs beneath the shaft, and a vast underground cavern below that.

The problem was solved, but the memory she was looking for wasn't here. "I must have gotten it wrong after all." Mixing up the place in her memory isn't the first time it's happened to Surtr.

Meteorite tells her this: even if you didn't find it today, it's not as if you have nowhere to return to. If you need to, you can lean on me. On the way back, Surtr asks the village chief for just one thing — that ice cream the children were fighting over earlier, just one.

The Sankta who went to get a single signature, and ended up settling in

Arene heads to the Third Repair Workshop to get a signature on a weapon reliability certificate. A Sankta Infected who left Laterano, she finds this kind of procedure nothing but a nuisance.

But the craftsmen were all away. The only one left was the apprentice Adnachiel — a rather unusual Sankta, born with a bent halo that keeps him from even holding a gun.

Arene, who meant to just grab a signature and be done with it, ends up getting an Arts unit inspection too. Along the way, the two chat about Laterano — trivial things, like the habit Sankta have of not being able to wear hats. Arene even secretly forges the signature by copying it with Arts.

Ambriel, a sniper who lives freely, joins in too. Ambriel, who has no attachment to Laterano; the craftsman who won't go back because he hates guns... their reasons for leaving are all different, but not one of them intends to return.

The reason the gruff Arene ended up spending her whole day there? "Because I found some interesting people." That's reason enough. The forged signature is found out in the end, so she agrees to come back that afternoon to get it done properly.

Why, when asked if she misses home, she just answers that it's a dull place

The operators' lounge. Purestream, a native of Yan, is preparing a festival from her hometown. She's a girl who loves crowds and liveliness more than anything in the world.

There, the Iberians Elysium and Thorns gather, along with Absinthe, a caster who inherited her father's worn casting tools.

Asked whether she misses home, Elysium answers with a smile. Iberia is just a stifling, dull place, she says, so there's nothing much to tell.

But Thorns quietly counters her. Iberia was never so kind to the Ægir, he says. Many of them had to wander the outskirts of the city, or hold on while evading the tribunal's pursuit.

The truth Elysium had tried so hard to brush off with cheer slips out that way. Even so, Elysium says it to the end.

I have a feeling that maybe, someday, I might be able to go back there.

— Elysium

The ones who saw their kin home, and decided not to return themselves

And then, there's a bundle of very old letters. Letters Mudrock used to send to 'Bob,' an old friend who left for Columbia.

Back in the Reunion days, Mudrock was leading Leithanien's Infected toward Kazdel, her homeland. But in the thick fog, unknown casters came chasing after them.

Those casters used the Infected as tools for their Arts — by sending the Originium in the Infected's bodies into overload. Not knowing who, how many, or by what means they were being watched, her comrades fell one by one.

Chainsmoke, who had been sending regards to Bob, was the first to die, and there was a comrade who chose to end his own life rather than become a weapon. Merely escaping that forest cost half of their number.

Mudrock kept repeating the same words. Don't look back.

Let's move forward. Don't look back.

— Mudrock

When they finally reached a village near Kazdel, Mudrock's group sent their kin on ahead. They chose to stay on the bridge and settle things with their pursuers — as if seeing them home was all that was left for them to do.

Onto that bridge, where they had resolved to die, someone walks. A young Sarkaz who, with a mere touch, stopped Mudrock's giant stone statue and even swept away the fog. "Who are you?" The letter breaks off there.

In her last letter to Bob, Mudrock writes calmly. She can never gather with those comrades again, she says. But they fell with honor.

She said she didn't care about home — yet ended up asking for a photo from a rooftop

April happens to see the ship's courier receiving a letter from Ansel of the medical department. Both of them are from the mining nation of Rim Billiton.

Ansel became a doctor against his uncle's objections. Though he claims going back is too much of a hassle, the truth is he still misses his hometown's great chimneys, the sound of machinery, and its bustling streets.

April had said she hated Rim Billiton. That hazy, soot-black place where the water would cut out mid-shower. But as they talk, the good memories keep coming back to her.

The neighbor who shared side dishes, the meatballs you couldn't buy anywhere else, a song she'd lie on the rooftop and listen to through her headphones. The title of that song was her very own codename — 《April》.

In the end, April asks the courier heading to Rim Billiton for a favor. To climb to the roof of a tall building and take a photo of the scenery visible from there. "Huh, turns out I cared quite a lot after all."

The ghost born in a home that doesn't exist

Phantom has the same dream every night. The stage of the Crimson Troupe, and the dead actors.

In the dream, the actors of the old troupe return as specters. The brothers who once sang with him. They say Phantom killed the devil, and all of them too, and then left this place.

To Phantom, who is losing his voice, they whisper. You must not sing, they say; you do not belong on this stage.

Meanwhile, HR is troubled because Phantom's file is blank. The birthplace he'd written down, 'Celaiblason,' was a place name that, no matter how they searched, did not exist.

Phantom hadn't lied. It was simply what the person who took him in had told him. To escape the specters of his past, he came all the way to this ship in search of someone who could tell him his true past.

And the moment the rookie Mint repeated that unfamiliar place name, an operator approached and said, "A very long time ago, I used to live there." Adding that it would be a very long story.

Why do all the old tales end that way?

The night of an anniversary. As Shamare stitches up a burst seam on her doll Morté beside the sofa, operators gather one by one to share stories.

Suzuran tells the Yan myth «Shiya Benyue» and the Higashi legend of Nitō Jō; Mousse tells a Victorian tale of a dragon and siblings; Shamare shares a Siracusan tale of a mother wolf. Popukar haltingly carries on the tale of the wax doll and the bride.

But every one of the tales ends much the same. Greed and war, a monster that devours good people, and ruins. Popukar, who'd hoped for an ending where nobody dies, grows glum.

When Morté asks why the stories all end that way, Shamare answers quietly. Think of the shape of this world, she says — of the places we once lived.

You understand now, don't you, why the endings turn out that way?

— Shamare

On a ship of people who have lost the place they'd return to

Someone never did find the village in her memory; someone carries the name of a home that doesn't even exist. Someone's homeland to return to is gone; someone simply longs for a single view once seen from a rooftop.

Even so, each of them confirms the same thing in their own way. That the fact the place they left made them who they are now is not so easily erased, even when memory fades.

Why do people who have left keep thinking of the place they'll return to? Perhaps all of us are simply searching for a place to return to. Just like what Meteorite said back in Belloni Village.