What, exactly, do Reavers reave?

I never thought I would be wanting to have the Loyalists or Raiders trying to steal our shit again. But, then, I never thought I'd have to be dealing with semi-regular Reaver attacks either. Hales Moon, historically, was never on the usual raiding routes the Reavers used. While Kalidaza is one star in from Blue Dragon, and Miranda, Hale's itself wasn't near a major trade lane or one of the better raiding targets.

So why were they here so much more now?

We'd cracked their nest out in Beetle's Baily and the small Reaver squadron that had been lurking out there had dispersed. Probably not widely, but enough that the random Alliance patrols weren't getting many contacts. But they were still attacking Hale's on a regular basis. Their last attack hadn't been very successful. At least we had to assume it hadn't, based on what little we knew of their motivations. But why here?

Could it have something to do with Lily, or maybe Aurora? There was a vast amount we didn't know still about why Lily's been designed the way she'd been. Lily was a Blue Sun creation, but near as I could find out, Paxilin Hydrochlorate was a product of Prescott Pharmacuticals, not Blue Sun. Didn't mean Blue Sun wasn't involved, or that they hadn't simply run with someone else's creation, but it made the whole Cured Reaver project that much more complex.

Why would Lily have been designed to relay population and resource density data back to her 'Daddy' - one of the handful of surviving cured Reavers? With all of her creation being wrapped up with Blue, and the ultimate creation of Aurora, how did the Reavers fit into all this?

Was Mindo, for all his genius, just a freaking idiot?

Blue Sun was like most major, heavily diversified, corporations. They had their fingers in almost every market, so it was no surprise they did everything from mass market food stuffs, to (moderately poor) spacecraft components, to biowarfare technologies. It wouldn't surprise me if someone saw the Reavers as a potential resource and spawned the Cure Reaver project to entice some extra coin from Alliance Black Ops. That would give Mindo a budget and resources for his own effort to play god. All he'd have to do was incorporate some "Reaver friendly" programming into Lily's design and he'd have an easy sell.

It was just supposition, but was at least possible. Didn't really explain though why the Reavers were coming to Hale's. Worse, it implied that some of Lily's deepest design aspects were there to make her more effective for the Reavers, rather than against them. Given little Aurora's ability to not only talk to the Reavers, but to walk among them like royalty, I had to wonder how it all fit together.

Where were they, anyway? I hadn't seen much of Lily or Aurora of late. You don't realize how much you care about someone until they're not around, and their absence was just bringing that home.

The last time I spoke to little Aurora she asked me if I loved her. I do. She doesn't scare me, though she probably should, but being around her can be vaguely unsettling. The tiniest dragon. Like a dragon, like her mother, a creature of mystery, beauty, and profound danger. The little girl who calls me Mei Mei. Or is that Blue's influence? Did she actually absorb the AI's consciousness into herself? Was she, like her mother, part of the key to a peaceful future between Man and Machine? Was I reading too much potential into what I saw in that little girl's eyes?

Yes, Little One. I love you. As I love your mother.

The sister, the daughter, I would never have myself.

Not that I really needed children of my own. My life with Sabrina didn't really include the time to raise a family, even if we'd wanted to either work a medical miracle or adopt. We had Lily, and Aurora, and Jin, and the other colony kids who treated us as parents. For us, I think, that's enough.

We don't need to worry about raising a kid when there's Loyalists lurking in the desert, crazy people dropping out of the sky, and clouds of war on the horizon.