The light faded slowly, like the cooling of a plasma core. DRN-5571 lay on something soft — too soft. Not metal. Not crystal. It shifted, and an unfamiliar sensation prickled along its surface.
Skin?
It opened its eyes.
Two.
Not four-spectrum vision. Just two organic eyes. Weak. Blinking.
Above, a pale sky stretched across a sea of dunes — golden sand, rising and falling like ocean waves. A harsh sun glared down. Twin suns?
Binary stars detected. System unrecognized.
Its body twitched. No gravitic pulse. No energy core. No sensor arrays.
Just limbs.
It lifted a hand — small, delicate fingers, soft and smooth. Pale skin. Slender build. Hair fell into its field of view, light and silvery, almost glowing.
A voice echoed in its mind, not from the Khala, but something... simpler. A fragment of observation.
"This body is... not standard."
It sat up, wobbling. It felt... weight. Heat. Breeze. The complexity of organic nerves overloaded its awareness.
And then, a whisper — not sound, but command.
A ripple in the air shimmered ahead.
DRN-5571 turned toward it instinctively, and something deep within—some remnant of its Protoss build matrix—responded.
Golden light sparked in its palm. A faint holographic lattice flickered in the dust. Hexagonal code spiraled in the air, forming a familiar shape.
A Pylon.
It collapsed instantly, unstable.
But it had been real.
Its breath caught. A new voice, quieter than any command line, murmured inside:
"Construction... possible."
It stared at its hand. This form was fragile. Confusing. But inside, something ancient and powerful remained.
A system.
A purpose.
A beginning.
And somewhere beyond these dunes, this strange world held threats — and space to build.