Against the Night (Mass Effect post-cycle AU)

HEY KIDS WANT SOME MAPS?

[X] Plan Secure and Repair

The rain poured down, drowning the typical jungle sounds in the sound of a steady susurrus of droplets impacting ground and foliage. For the first time since the planet formed, the lighter sounds of rain-on-metal and rain-on-plastic and rain-on-glass joined with the symphony.

An Asari sat, eyes closed, beneath a roiling barrier of blue-black energy. Gentle waves of various blues washed over her color-shifting skin in time with her steady breathing. Water slid off the Biotic shield even as its surface ripped, surged and distorted it time with its creator's thoughts, for despite the expression of calm neutrality, her thoughts raced even as she knelt upon the apex of a clear dome, palms held upward before her chest as though in supplication.

Time passed, and gradually the barrier calmed as its maker found herself.

At last, she stood, and allowed the rain to wash over her.

I am Nylaria she thought, as she opened her eyes for the first time in hours.


The first order of business, Nylaria decided, was to explore and secure the perimeter of her home for useful resources. Her flash-education was often frustratingly disconnected for the Asari- she knew things, but often did not know that she knew them until she stumbled into the right mental connection by accident. Thus the moment she began to seriously consider means by which she could prevent wildlife from investigating or bothering her new home, a burst of designs for fences and shields and even modest gun turrets raced through her mind, before settling comfortably into place.

Equally, she knew that she would only be able to explore a short distance along the tree-line on foot, to properly search the area she would need transportation. Which would require her to repair one of the rovers at her disposal.

All of which lead up to why she was looking into a room filled to the brim with a complex array of machinery from a small observation and control blister, working through an exhaustive tutorial on how to make said machinery make things.

It was a thoroughly annoying process, so she took time to walk a segment of the treeline each day, taking samples of plants and soil as she went, to check for analysis. On a few occasions she had heard shuffling, rustling or other sounds indicating the presence of an animal- or several- but it appeared that, at least for now, nothing was willing to bother a creature with so many strange scents.


Days turned to weeks as Nylaria gradually refined her understanding of the Fabricator and began to put it to use, towers of simple but durable ceramicrete growing section by section, metal catwalks fused together by omni-tool or fabricated rivet gun- amusingly a low-tech, compressed-air-driven tool that would have been recognizable to any race who'd invented rivets, despite the advanced factory that had created it- and little by little, a simple perimeter fence took shape.

The fence was, by the standards of the Citadel Alliance, a fairly modest thing; three and a half meter ceramicrete towers, each with a sunken pillbox set at their base, with a dual-barreled automated heavy machine-gun turret crowning the pillar, and a small, solid-sided catwalk allowing the guns to be serviced as well as forming an elevated palisade for a defender to use.

Kinetic barriers protected various parts of the structure, but also ran from tower to tower, walls of shimmering blue preventing passage- or allowing it, should its controllers so desire. They could even stretch to cover the loss of a tower or two without losing much strength, a highly useful feature.

It took the better part of three months of hard work, but the reassuring glow of the Mass Effect barriers eased a tension in Nylaria's mind she'd not even realized was present.
The decision to construct the fence proved precinct, as a week into learning how to repair her damaged rover, the sudden, throaty chatter of heavy machine guns followed by a familiar insectile screech of pain penetrated the open garage doors. It seemed some old 'friends' had decided to investigate whether her presence remained, and the turret network had taken offence.


While the fabricator trundled along, Nylaria's mind returned to the mummified Asari she'd encountered in only minutes out of her pod.
She returned to the first room she'd ever seen, and gently moved the slumped form next door where dedicated scanning systems awaited. It took her over a month to learn enough to use those scanners, but preliminary investigation revealed an ID card much like the one now adorning her own breast slipped into a pocket. It seemed to have taken a bullet, however, as a neat hole in its upper-right corner betrayed glittering circuitry around its edges. Perhaps with some time, it's data could be recovered.

Equally important was the small omni-tool bracelet on the corpse's wrist- long since out of power, but otherwise seemingly functional. Retrieving its stored data, however, would be a matter for a more dedicated effort. It was highly unlikely anyone involved with the Seedship project walked around without a password-lock at the very least.

Her examination only raised more questions, however. The mystery Asari had, to use a human idiom, blown her own brains out- with the very pistol now hanging at Nylaria's hip, if she was any good at guesses- and proceeded to gradually desiccate over months in the carefully-scrubbed air cycled through the bay- air with even the barest traces of humidity ruthlessly removed to prevent machinery from breaking down- but equally gave her no clues to age, for the basic instruments at her disposal could only tell her the body had spent at least a century in open, if arid, air.

Who were you? She wondered, staring at the shrunken form, left with more questions than answers.


Compared to the other things done with her time, fixing a rover was seemingly simple.
Of course, as Nylaria as swiftly learning, things are rarely as simple as they seem at first glance. In the end, she practically had to rebuild the rover's suspension from the ground up, and the number of things that had been jarred loose, broken off, or crushed by impact beggared belief.

Ironically, despite being the simplest task at first glance, fixing the rover took nearly five months, becoming the thing she worked on when she needed to keep her hands busy. On the plus side, the intimate experience with the rover's systems had given her some ideas on how to improve its capabilities- at the very least, it was going to need something to help it cut through the thick jungle that surround her in every direction. A gun wouldn't go amiss either, given she'd already encountered one large, hostile example of this planet's fauna. Any major refits will need the garage operational first, though.


Resources:

Population cap: 1/0 |WARNING| Population cap exceeded. Insufficient Food production. Colony failure in 40 turns. |WARNING|

Tasks:
You have 12 AP to spend. You may select up to six actions.
To gain more actions and AP, you will require more people.

A/n: character sheet and settlement map updates… sometime before next turn.
Edit: by the way, try not to be too alarmed at the large red warning notice next to your population cap. until you can either work out some sort of automated garden setup or have enough people to stick a few on food gathering/growing duty, it's not going to go away. It's mostly there as a reminder that you need to keep an eye on your ration supply for now.