Terra is a land scoured by natural cataclysms called 'Catastrophes,' where a mineral called Originium spreads wealth and power while at the same time sowing an incurable disease, Oripathy. Rhodes Island is a pharmaceutical company on wheels, sailing the desert with a vow to cure those infected.

The commander of that Rhodes Island, the Doctor, was ambushed in Tikaronto, a metropolis of Columbia. The group was scattered, and the Doctor ended up dumped in the middle of an unfamiliar wilderness together with the leader, Amiya.

But the real problem lies elsewhere. The Doctor right now barely even knows who they used to be — they lost almost all their memories not long ago.

And every time they fall asleep, a certain voice keeps whispering.

To hold on to hope is a very cruel thing.

— A certain voice

Ever seen a cop who fires a crossbow before asking questions?

What remained in the raided city were Dylan, a low-altitude aircraft pilot, and Blaze, a Feline operator. Dylan, more at home in a cockpit, ended up scrambling through back alleys clutching a crossbow that had snapped in half.

The fallen attacker wore a 'police' uniform, but the ID badge was fake to anyone's eyes. Blaze remarks, dumbfounded.

You really think there's a cop who fires a fully automatic crossbow the moment they ask a question?

— Blaze

The ones chasing them this relentlessly were mercenaries hired by Mamazons, Tikaronto's biggest corporation. Their target: the Oripathy medicine samples Rhodes Island had brought. They had already seized a good portion of them back at the hotel.

I woke up in the wilderness, and there was a guy in an iron bucket helmet

Having barely escaped the city, the Doctor and Amiya landed in the Gaspar Wilderness. When the Doctor came to, a man wearing a crude iron bucket helmet stood before them. A self-proclaimed merchant, Canot — he'd like to be called 'Mister Good Enough.'

In exchange for two Originium Primes as a guide fee, Canot agrees to take the two of them to the nearest Disaster Messenger outpost. A little farther south, he says, and they'd have plunged straight into a poison-gas swamp.

When night fell, Amiya deftly picked out wild greens and mushrooms and stirred a mess tin. Most people of the mobile cities can't survive outdoors, but Amiya was different. It was the Doctor, she said, who had taught her directly a few years ago.

The Doctor has no memory of that. Amiya smiled a little wistfully, then went back to stirring the mess tin as if nothing were wrong.

As long as you're here like this, Doctor, someday everything will be all right.

— Amiya

The 'suppressant' handed out to the Infected was actually just a painkiller

Arriving at the outpost, Canot takes the Doctor's group to a Mamazons pioneer corps office. There, the Infected who were pioneering the wilderness were being issued 'Oripathy suppressant' every month. But the medicine Amiya was handed wasn't suppressant at all — it was a painkiller and a nutritional supplement.

Mamazons, it turns out, was originally a doughnut chain. With no pharmaceutical technology of its own, it bought up others' production lines and passed painkillers off as suppressant. And if it got hold of Rhodes Island's samples too, it could manufacture an even more convincing fake 'hope.'

Canot says it plainly. Even if you tell people the truth, in the face of immediate pain relief, the truth doesn't matter — the very same words as that voice in the Doctor's sleep-talk.

People come to Columbia carrying hope, create value within hope, and die within hope.

— Canot

Even so, Amiya said she couldn't just stand by and watch this. And the Doctor quietly asked Canot for something.

Instead of taking the goods from the enemy, the Doctor walked into a jail of their own accord

A few days later, the Doctor walks out of a Columbia detention center. What the Doctor had done was this: turn themselves in to the Border Administration, confessing that 'our company smuggled Oripathy medicine.'

In Columbia, Oripathy medicine is the most strictly controlled of all. The Bureau, by regulation, confiscates and destroys all the contraband — that is, the samples. And so the path for Mamazons to upgrade its fake suppressant with Rhodes Island's technology was blocked. The price was three days' detention for the Doctor.

Before leaving, Canot bids farewell, saying it had been a delightful journey. But this slick merchant had another face: what he had with him was a band of wilderness outlaws, the 'Rusty Hammers.' Even that, the Doctor had seen through long ago.

Steering a ship into the eye of a storm — isn't that just suicide?

Back on Rhodes Island, the Doctor is met by the physician Kal'tsit. Over a month, Kal'tsit had scanned the Doctor's brain seven times. Her conclusion: while the memories of the Doctor's own self were lost, the procedural memory ingrained in the body was rapidly returning.

Around that time, the Disaster Messenger Earthspirit picks up anomalous data. A massive cyclone was gathering ahead and forming a core. To hold course meant colliding with hundreds of ore bombs, and it was already too late to retreat.

To the Doctor who appears on the bridge, Amiya hands over all command authority of Rhodes Island without hesitation. In that brief window, the Doctor calculated a safe route and drove the ship right through the storm. The result: less than 5% deck damage, and zero casualties.

The closer we draw to despair, the more magnificent and beautiful the scenery becomes when gazed upon with hope.

— Amiya

That formula was, in fact, made by the Doctor of the past themselves. Kal'tsit says: not for a single moment did you ever forget that you are an Originium researcher. Eyjafjalla, the young volcanologist who first pinpointed the anomaly, said too that people like the Doctor kept showing her the hope to keep moving forward.

The red safe the whole ship couldn't open — turned out to be full of beer

And so three months passed. The Doctor wandered every corner of Rhodes Island, picking up fragments of who they once were. Every one of them was nothing but a sensation of 'unfamiliar yet nostalgic.'

In the memorial storage room, the Perro operator Beagle was polishing a badly broken shield — the shield of Ace, an old comrade no longer at her side. In that room were also piled the keepsakes of the Reunion members who had fallen at Lungmen.

There were enemies, and there were friends. The Doctor may not know each person's story, but the suffering of the Infected — that, they know. Beagle said the operators sometimes ask themselves.

Was all of it — truly worth it?

— Beagle

Amid the heavy questions there was a rather absurd incident too. A red machine in a corner of the warehouse — something the chief engineer Closure had failed to open even after wrecking three cutting machines — slid open the moment the Doctor gave it a tap. Inside was a beer vending machine. Around that time, the Sarkaz mercenary W was quietly leaving the ship, heading for Londinium.

It wasn't Her Majesty they betrayed, but the Her Majesty they'd painted in their own mind

The rising fragments of memory keep taking the Doctor back to Babel, to the days when the Sarkaz king and leader Theresa was there.

On the day Theresa, pushed out by the Military Commission, decided to withdraw from Kazdel, a Sarkaz soldier raids the Doctor's camp — furious that a member of another race stood by Her Majesty's side. But the Doctor stops the veteran mercenary scout who tries to kill him, and instead says this.

What you don't believe in isn't me — it's your own Her Majesty.

— Doctor

As the Doctor saw it, that soldier was less a traitor than a man shifting the blame because he was terrified of himself for no longer being able to believe in Theresa. In the end, he called himself 'a Sarkaz of Kazdel' and said he would accept Her Majesty's judgment; not long after, unwilling to be a burden to his king, he took his own life.

Theresa received the news with a sorrowful face. The road is long, she said, and that is exactly why people crave answers they can see right now. That Theresa is no longer by the Doctor's side.

So — what is it you fight for?

On the deck as the sun sets, Kal'tsit asks the Doctor: how must one live to truly be alive? If you've submitted to another's will and lost your reason to move forward, is that being alive?

And finally, she asks them to look her in the eye and tell her: just what is it you fight for? In that moment, every memory since waking in Chernobog surged up, and the Doctor blurted out an answer almost unconsciously. What they said, though — we couldn't hear it.

Because even if no one understands, we have to walk on like this.

— Kal'tsit

Insufficient authority — one question no one can answer

On the last night, the Doctor goes to the ship's brain, PRTS. Just moments earlier Closure had been telling PRTS all about the Doctor she'd been watching all this time — that Doctor who, before and after losing their memories, was clearly the same person and yet somehow different.

The Doctor poses PRTS a single question. But instead of answering, PRTS only sounds a warning tone.

Among the members currently registered, no one holds the authority to answer that question.

— PRTS

Instead, in the middle of a self-check, PRTS turns up an old recording that wasn't even password-protected. Date: unknown. Title: 〈PRTS First Function Test〉; filename: 〈Onboard Video Record 000000001α〉.

'I have provided the answer to your question, Doctor.' So says PRTS, and three seconds later it begins counting down, announcing it will lock the authority. 3. 2. 1. There the story stops.

The voice heard every time they fall asleep still whispers that hope is cruel. Still not knowing who they once were. And yet the Doctor — and Rhodes Island — walk forward again today. Because even if no one understands, this is the road they must take.