Synopsis:

One day, a (mostly) subconscious prompting urges you to travel to the distant snowy planet of Keksplen, where an interesting, strange, slightly frustrating man informs you of an inconvenient truth and subsequently offers to dull the shock with an irrelevant story told in the oddest of formats...

Ten short years ago, Plague D boiled across the galaxy, leaving in its wake damaged, weak and ugly children - pale with harsh blotches of pigmentation scattered across their faces, nearly deaf and retaining little sensation in their rotted maroon extremities. Ten years ago as well, disturbing signs of stress-induced structural damage were reported in Spacetrain Terminals K-W; meanwhile, as predicted, Terminals F, H, and Y collapsed within the year, giving way finally to millenia of rot. At the same time, the Prime Ribosome began to falter in its hitherto regular production as the Ray birthing rate entered a decade-long crashing decline; for the next ten years, the Void Corps of Blessed Imperfection maintained a calm outer facade while behind the scenes their pilot training program slowly ground towards a halt. Efforts to the contrary produced no relief.

But time passed anyway.

Today, the Corps finds itself training the pilots of the tiniest, most meager clutch of Ytsnavi Space Rays it has ever been their misfortune to obtain - sickly, strange creatures. Next year, they will be lucky if they obtain any rays at all. Of late the public facade has cracked; the ailing organization has lost the trust of the common people and only the incredible charisma of its seasoned leader calms them suitably to keep the aging Union from falling into turmoil and bloody revolution. If that weren't enough, the pilots - oh, the pilots...

Chief among their incongruous ranks is Duriban Sekichi, quiet plague-baby from a backwater planet; her phenomenal scores on the suitability tests shocked and amazed her friends and family, the Corps, and to some degree herself. Duriban, who can be described as a smiling blotchy wad of passive-aggressiveness, finds herself processing the thoughts of both herself and her new ray Pseriyune while she navigates a new world of rules and regulations and crisp uniforms and wide spaces. In Pseriyune, she finds a friend and confidant of a kind she's never had before, a well of new senses and colors and sensations, and a new piece of soul; and in her fellow pilots, a colorful and diverse rush of rivals and friends from every leg of the sky and every walk of life. With the help of the allies and enemies the two of them make in their new life together, this fresh conglomeration of one soul in two bodies has the potential to change the course of history. Whether such is for the better remains to be seen...