Down on the Disk (Graverobbing for Fun and Profit in an Original Science-Fantasy Universe)

You'll be skirting the edge. Good luck!

Winner: Skirting the edge

Day 56 - A walk through the valley

You were not a cautious man by nature.

Those first few months on the Disk had rankled; the slow built up of progress when every bit of you was raring to go off and just find stuff. But you knew it had been the right choice. Even if you did skip it initially you would only have to do it later, once you found something worth working on. Still you had been eager to get started on what you still thought of as the real work that you'd come to Mu for.

And now with it so tantalizingly close you weren't willing to be slow and cautious anymore.

Of course that didn't mean you were going to be a complete idiot. Diving headlong into a forest ruled over by something that the locals called the 'God of the Deep Forest' was a good way to end up dead, something you want to avoid. Dying would put a significant damper on your plans. So you opted to stick to the outskirts of the valley.

Minutes after your glimpse of that vague something down in the valley you and Opal-Nine were carefully picking your way down towards the valley floor. It was tricky to manage with the sled, requiring you to cut a shallow path across the incline of the hill, which limited your progress but at least kept you heading in the right direction.

Beneath your feet the ground grew gradually rockier as you went and the forest thinner until it finally fell away completely on your left as hillside became cliffside. It levelled out significantly too, the steady incline turning to a gentle slope that was only perceptible in the gradual drop of the ridge up ahead. You can just make out where it finally slides into the valley floor up ahead, a little grey streamer trailing off into the sea of green. Really you're actually very fortunate, you think, the cliff forms an easy and recognizable path, vastly simplifying your journey for all of that first day.

It also forms a sort of natural road which makes moving the sled much easier.

Nosta also enjoys it greatly. Back home on Golac, raroh hawks hunt either by snatching small(er) prey into the air and then flinging it into the nearest cliff face or by pouncing on larger prey and beating it into any nearby hard surface, and though they are smart enough to adapt to other environments, Nosta enjoys letting instinct take over for a few hours. She catches a pair of song birds and tears into them with abandon from her perch on top of the covered corpse of the basilisk.

By early afternoon her feathers are stained ever so slightly darker red.

She preens under your attention as you use a piece of cloth to clean her, turning this way and that as you wipe.

"Once we get down from this cliff, you can't go flying off so much," you say.

Puffing out her chest, Nosta clicks her beak and turns her head to stare at you with one large liquidy eye. That one eye fixes you with a steady gaze. Unflinching.

As if to say, 'I know that.'

You roll your eyes and keep cleaning. She can clean herself, raroh hawks are fastidious creatures in the wild, sometimes flying for hours to find the isolated springs sprinkled throughout the canyons in order to bathe themselves, but you like doing it.

After all these years it's almost a mindless sort of action, something that you could almost do in your sleep.

All throughout those two days of working your way down to the valley floor (you reach it just three hours from sundown on the second day) you and Opal-Nine spot outcroppings of stone and potentially value old growth wood. Mostly Opal-Nine for the latter. The valley is much less of a 'sea of green' once you've seen it from more than one angle.

There are of course the obvious towering titans you spy in the distance, cloud shattered giants that sprout from the midst of their lesser cousins like stones tossed into a pond, but those clearings are only the most obvious. Ponds fed by winding streams glint like brilliant gems at noon. In the darkening afternoon the shadowy forms of rocky outcroppings spring from the forest. Small fields dot the tree cover, breaking it up in something that almost looks like a pattern.

You are startled at how diverse the carpet of green appears once you have time to examine it. Opal-Nine names more tree species than all of Golac has. You spy gnarled trees with their branches weaving together like a spider's web and conifer growing so precisely — branches radiating out in a perfect cone — you are tempted to think someone is maintaining them. There are flowering fruit trees and black barked dwarfs that you swear are dead.

"Lath milk trees," Opal-Nine says, "Bad wood, but their sap can be used to make rubber."

Hmm. That is interesting.

Plenty of uses you could find for a source of rubber, though what exactly you could use it for will depend on the specific properties and the process needed. Might not be worth it.

"Any idea on the quality?"

He shakes his head, the motion sending his antennae wobbling briefly back and forth.

"I know there are plantations south of Thyrus, but I'm not one to ask about such things. Should we meet with Three-Trees and the others on our return they ought to know better."

You suppose they would.

Before you descend to the valley floor you take note of the site and make a careful note of its heading. Your PalmDiv has a fairly basic compass which should keep you fairly well oriented even if the map you bought turned out to be all but useless.

And with Opal-Nine taking point you're fairly confident in a speedy arrival. So far you've been making good time. Nothing nasty has popped out to harass you, the worst you've had is something sniffing around your supplies at night, but the (now breathing) corpse of the basilisk seems to have scared whatever it was away.

So despite your previous conclusions you do occasionally take out the map to study it. You just can't stop yourself.

What you conclude after your second study of it is that whoever drew it seemed more concerned with make it look a certain way than with any sort of accuracy, what you first took as 'crudeness' actually seems to be a style. You can't say you appreciate it. It seems overly busy and… confusing to you. You like your maps clear and informative, not as art pieces. AS an actual map it really fails; not only is the crash site (or what you think is supposed to be it, at least) in the completely wrong area — on the map it's situated in the center of the valley, while in reality is sits very clearly to the northern end of it — but it marks out several 'mountains' and 'lakes' which you see no evidence of. Possibly those inconsistencies are due to changes over centuries, you have no idea how odl the map is, but the crash site didn't move.

Something you did miss on your first examination of it though is that there appear to be several other locations marked around the map. All around the valley. Most aren't labelled and those that are have names like 'Urtog's Spring' or 'Sryaoth's Plot.' Not particularly informative names.

Though they do at least indicate someone once lived here. None of them are located close to the crash site on the map though so you have little hope of investigating them on this trip. Maybe if you make enough to buy a vehicle or better sensors.

Eventually you put aside such thoughts, by your mental calculations you should be approaching the site.

Your whole body practically hums with excitement. It's so close you can taste it on the air. Though that might also be pollen.

There are a lot of flowers in this part of the valley. Large ones that hang off of thick, leathery vines trailing down from tree branches and small ones that spring up from out of the dense grasses like they were spring loaded. Surprisingly few animals about though, and nothing larger than your fist.

It's odd after the last few months. Back in Pravj, or rather outside of it, large animals weren't common but since you've been down on the Disk you've gotten used to seeing all sorts of things. From a distance of course. But still.

You find it kind of eerie how quickly things seemed to have fled.

Not for long though, because even as you're having that thought the forest parts in front of you; opening onto a wide flower meadow, at the center of which sits the towering mass of creepers, mosses, steel (and other more exotic materials), and trees that once plied the vast fathomless reaches of space.

Pitched maybe twenty degrees up, you guess that maybe forty percent of the ancient vessel's overall bulk is currently buried in the ground. And seventy percent is buried under foliage of all kinds. Through both layers you can just about make out the overall shape of the vessel; formed from several intersecting eggs arranged in a cross, the outer hull is made up of hexagonal 'scales' of a blue-grey metal. For the most part. Once there were large sections of clear 'glass' domes — now cracked open, likely in the violence of the crash — from which now flows the ship's verdant camouflage like a series of waterfalls.

There is surprisingly little evidence of damage beyond the broken domes. In fact the only openings on the ship that you can make out from a distance are the aforementioned domes, and what you assume are access hatches and cargo doors. Not so much a crash site then as an unplanned landing. That's encouraging.

"Rivers and stars," chirrups Opal-Nine.

You nod, though the phrase is unfamiliar. When you were in school, before you started your apprenticeship under your and Natya's master, you saw pictures of the hydrogen siphons around Pesht.

Massive installations floating through the upper layers of the gas giant, each larger than ten Pravj's put together, capable of fueling hundreds of ships all at once.

You thought you understood the scale, but standing here staring at this ship (which would be nothing but a smudge next to them) you find that you really didn't. Somehow, the ship you came to Mu on, big as it was, failed where this ancient wreck succeeds.

Trees as big as the ones next to you sprout from those shattered domes and whole mats of vines drape down from the sides of the ship. Carpets of moss cling to the crevices and clefts. Tiny dots of color dance in the shadows, flowers.

"How long has it been out here?"

You blink and turn to Opal-Nine, one of his antennae raised in question.

"Twelve hundred years, at least… maybe six thousand. Depending on who built it."

His antennae rub together in thought, "It… it's remarkably well preserved for so long a time."

"Brum'gehad Fleet Senate controlled seven percent of the galaxy at their height and held it against all comers for near nine centuries. Half the space stations in the outer Ultum and Sacrum arms are old Fleet remnants… the Scar-Faced People, well, building to last was a thing for them, religious-like."

He nods as if any of what you just said made sense. As if it's useful information. You're still not used to that, back in Pravj people would usually tell you to shut up about stuff like this.

Or at least most of the people you hung around with.

Opal-Nine turns back towards the ship, casting his eyes over it's considerable length for a moment before saying, "There," he points to a spot close to the buried end of the ship where one of the intersecting eggs creates a shadowed overhang, "We should make camp there."

You shrug. Seems as good a location as any to you, it meets the only criteria you have; close to the ship.

While Opal-Nine takes care of organizing the campsite you start taking a long slow circuit around the ship. Start because the unburied portion of the ship measures at least 300 meters long and it's already afternoon, as much as you are eager to get started you are not reckless enough to rush headlong into a centuries old (at least) shipwreck in the dark.

Not that daylight has any hope of penetrating the interior of the vessel, but you don't want your first attempt to end because you break a leg or something just trying to get into the chert damned thing. So over the hour and a half of daylight you have left and five hours the next morning you prowling around the exterior of the ship looking for any good entrances. Of the openings you saw heading in, most of the hatches are too buried under soil to make much sense as a first attempt. You'd need to dig them out to even get started. The big cargo door seems promising; only the forward third of the bay is buried under a significant amount of dirt and through the dense press of vegetation growing over the empty cargo cages you think you can make out some doors leading further in.

Another hatch nearby hangs half open, which has prevented too much dirt from filling in. It would take time and effort to pry it open, but significantly less than digging out any of the other hatches.

On the opposite side of the ship from your campsite the problem is actually inverted, most of the open hatches are too high up to reach easily without climbing across the hull and those that aren't too high up are flooded by encroaching marshlands. There's one that's lower down than the rest, but it would still mean several minutes climbing. You could also try wading into the least flooded of the hatches, it seems like it might head off in such a way that the whole section of the ship might not be flooded.

Your only other quick option is actually the broken dome right over your campsite. Due to the angle the ship is sitting at, you could climb up about twenty meters along the forward hull and then crawl along the cleft between one egg and another to get to a point that you could jump into the dome. It would be dangerous but you're fairly sure it would also get you into the heart of the ship the quickest.

Whether or not you want to be in the heart of the ship that quick is another question. It's not like you have a map of the thing.

What is your choice?

[] Partly-open hatch
[] Cargo bay door
[] Climmable hatch
[] Flooded hallway
[] Broken dome

Sorry for the long and unexplained hiatus.

I want to get back into this, for whoever is interested. Update incoming.

Winner: Cargo bay door

Day 60 - Charging in head first

In the end you decide to go for the cargo bay.

Dense trailing vines, some as thick around as the handle of your hammerpick, make gaining entry into the cargo bay a hassle but not overly difficult. Though just a few minutes in your tool and Opal-Nine's blade are both covered in sticky whitish sap and takes some serious effort to clean off.

Afternoon light streams in through the hole you've cut. You take a few minutes to let your eyes adjust, scanning the bay for anything of value. Nothing.

Hardly surprising; you were already thinking someone had survived the crash-landing, they must have cleared the ship out of everything they could make use of. Plus a fair number of things they probably couldn't. Time will have put paid to a lot of the rest.

But some parts of the ship will have been well sealed or simply well built enough to still be intact.

A sparse carpet of grass peters out to leave bare soil stretches across the back half of the bay, dotted by patches of small yellow mushrooms that also snake through the occasional join in the ancient composite paneling. Your eyes follow a muddy meandering trail up the slanted bay floor to where two halves of the ancient doors have the equally ancient skeleton of one of the ship's former crew or passengers trapped by the hips. Ribs yawn open like the teeth of a misshapen mouth, an opening just large enough for something small and furry to make its way through.

"There," you point out to Opal-Nine, "We'll have to force it open by hand. Iron and Steel, what I wouldn't give for a blasting charge."

Craning forward over you, the khar shakes his head.

"On a wreck like this? End up burying all the loot under ten meters of XXX that way."

You frown, taking another look at the structure of the cargo bay around you. Some of the wall and ceiling plates are cracked, but that looks — you can't say for sure without knowing the exact composition — to have been a result of the initial impact rather than fatigue.

Twelve-hundred or four-thousand, both are long stretches of time. But uurz tend to build for durability. And the Brumehad senate Fleet and the Scar-Faced People were advanced and their creations were often built to survive the harshest conditions with minimal intervention. Pesht's hydrogen siphons, an ancient installation of the Senate Fleet, were all but abandoned for at least four centuries and needed only a few decades for Golac's native spacers to get running again.

Still they didn't take a dive from orbit to ground at any point either.

"Could probably take a few good shakes… but, I didn't bring any," you say before your companion can argue any further.

Climbing slowly up the steep slant of the floor you both manage to make it to the door without issue.

Once you get within a few steps you begin to pick out details from the skeletal structure that confirm it indeed belonged to some ancient uurz. Of course the clothes are long gone. No telling from that, which of the two candidates the ship belonged to.

Working together, you from the top with your hammerpick and Opal-Nine with a crowbar from the bottom, you manage to slowly (so, very slowly) force the two sides of the door open just enough that you could squeeze through. By the end you're sweaty, covered in grime, and exhausted but that single glimpse into the dark hallway beyond is worth it. You feel an electric thrill run up your spine.

It's nothing more than an empty hallway littered with the scattered remains of small forest creatures, dark, save for the sliver of dim light splitting it down the center, but still you can't help but grin.

You have to stop yourself from squeezing right on through if only because of the weakness in your legs and arms.

Turning away you lean back against the cool paneling of the wall and slide down, stupid smile still plastered across your face.

"Pleased, Ivan?"

Glancing up and over at Opal-Nine you think you detect a hint of… something in his voice. You're not sure what, only that it's not what you're used to hearing.

Your grin gets wider and you raise an eyebrow at the khar, "As a midder-bug in garbage."

He lets out a long chitter in response, what you think is the khar equivalent of a snort.

"Never heard of a midder-bug… You know, Ivan I've been hanging around the Disk for near a century; seen brash fresh-molts and old, cautious egg-mimics get themselves killed. Put down more than a few myself," if Opal-Nine thinks anything about what he's telling you he's not letting it show.

What you think is that this is a lot more serious conversation than you were expecting.

Part of you is also wondering if he's about to slit your throat. Not a big part of you, but a part of you.

"Know what they all had in common?"

You shake your head. Still kind of baffled at this turn.

"No? Being stupid pissers? Assholes? Trying to rip off corpos? They were arrogant?"

His antennae shake in the way that you've labeled as a laugh. Then he shakes his head.

"Close. Each of them thought they understood the Disk, that it was like the rest of the galaxy smashed altogether or that it was a place apart from the galaxy where laws don't apply."

Now it's your turn to snort, " 'Course there're still laws, if someone can pay people to make 'em stick."

Laws barely apply in the rest of the galaxy anyway, so far as you can tell, if you don't have the power or money to make them. You learned that long ago on the streets of Pravj.

Every bit of hard fought knowledge you bought under the cover of night was matched ten times over by what some guildmaster's kid was being given, there weren't enough grime covered apprentices on all of Golac dabbling in secret arts to turn a profit. You were only getting the scraps off the table.

Opal-Nine shakes his head though.

"Disk has its own rules. Power and money still play plenty, don't mistake that, but the Disk has its own play and it'll smash you quick as you breathe if you don't have people watching your back. Keeping you from being something's lunch."

You're not really sure you're getting what he's talking about. So far the trip has been downright boring; tedious and exhausting sure, but not particularly dangerous.

So why is Opal-Nine going on about—

"Like the basilisks," you blink.

"Exactly. Been here for years, killed maybe a hundred of the things and they still caught me. You saved my life. And your bird— Nosta," you nod, he continues, " —saved yours. That is what keeps you living on the Disk, not genius or power or strength or mercenaries; trust, friends, allies."

And with that he hands you a water bottle, pressing it into your hands briefly firmly before stalking off.

You're kind of lost. Trust doesn't come to you easily but those you do trust you trust pretty much implicitly; Natya knows every last secret you have, and you would kill and die for Nosta. Opal-Nine is himself a prime example, he's had literally thousands of opportunities to kill you and Natya both of the last couple of months and you've barely given him a second thought.

So, who was that little speech really for?

---

Just a few minutes later you find yourself standing in the dark corridor beyond the door, only slightly bruised from squeezing through. Turning on the lamp clipped to the chest pocket of your sturdy red coveralls you give it a once over as you cautiously test your footing, the floor doesn't give out beneath your feet or even so much as creak or groan and you don't fall flat on your ass.

Good start so far.

This is only an initial probe to see how hard things might be going forward. Most of the day is already gone and even if daylight isn't dictating your work schedule, it took you most of the day just to work yourselves to this point. From cutting your way into the cargo bay and then forcing the doors open wide enough, as well as just the hours you spent just searching the outside of the shipwreck for a suitable entry.

You turn back towards Opal-Nine.

"I'll go slow and— "

He covers his eyes with one one midlimb against the beam of your lamp. You cringe and cover it quickly with your free hand.

"Sorry, " Opal-Nine waves you off, "I- ah, I was saying, um- I won't be more than an hour."

The khar nods, "I will move our gear into the bay."

With that you're both off.

Few signs of life stand out to you; some piles of old animal shit and dead plant life, streaks of grime along the floor and in the corners, bits of fur and small bones. As you move deeper in from the door you find less and less.

Tall enough for Opal-Nine to stand up straight and still not touch the ceiling without stretching and wide enough for three khar to stand side by side the hallway is obviously designed for the movement of the cargo and equipment that would have once been stored in the bay behind you. It ends after just five-ish meters in a t-junction with another hall that disappears into darkness to your right and cuts off in a thick set of bulkhead doors bent into a twisted ruin there's no chance of getting past without heavy equipment to your left. Given the cargo bay's position you think this corridor probably runs the length of the ship. At least it's still clear in one direction.

You turn right, ready to press on, when something blinks in the corner of your eye.

Weakly and only for a brief instant, but impossible to mistake in the darkness. Turning back around you take a tentative step forward and then another before you see it again, another faint pulse of pale green light that is all but washed out in the glare of the lamp attached to your chest coming from a pile of twisted debris that you mistook for part of the crumbled bulkhead. Something is still active in the wreck.

That… that shouldn't be possible.

Even with the most advanced tech and powerful magic, twelve centuries should have turned most of the ship into scrap. You weren't expecting anything of real value outside of the core or certain sealed sections.

But your eyes don't lie.

You move slowly until you're practically on top of the pile of debris and discover that it's not so much debris but a body. Or the remains of one.

Mostly intact too. Skeletally speaking. All the flesh is long gone of course. Eaten by whatever has been making a home of the hall or rendered into stains on the fraying fabric of their clothes.

Not an uurz either. Too tall. Too thin. Skull the wrong shape too; thin jaw, no tusks, larger eye sockets.

This was a yddr.

Whoever they were, they died years ago. Decades maybe. Certainly not centuries. Their legs were broken in a dozen or so places, shortly before they died, and there's a large crack in their skull. Glancing up you spy the ragged hole they must have fallen through. It extends at least four decks up, maybe five. You can't quite tell.

Bad way to die, though they lived long enough to drag themselves into sitting upright.

And there, clutched in the fingers, is the source of the intermittent light. Flattish, oblong made of a glossy black crystal with two 'handles' of ivory and gold set into the back, with the light coming from a spot at the bottom where the thumb of the corpse was still pressed to the screen.

Kneeling down you pried away the hand, leaving a perfect oval of desiccated skin stuck to the smooth reflective surface, and grabbed the device by its ends. Nearly the second your hands touch it the front lights up and there, staring you in the face is a schematic of the ship.

---

This… this- you have just struck the motherlode.

"It looks like he- they, whoever it was came in through one of the 'Preserve Domes,' " you frown, hands idly running across the feathers down Nosta's neck, "For whatever reason. Made their way through the engineering decks; no luck there, seems whatever brought the ship down slagged everything aft of this section— "

You turn the Ten Springs Personal 'Frame (trademark proudly displayed in the upper corner) to show Opal-Nine the part of the ship in question, helpfully marked in an acrid yellow color by its previous user. He grunts and continues counting the credit chits you found underneath a pile of petrified cloth.

Other portions of the schematic are highlighted in purple and green and red. What any of it means you have no idea.

" —and opened most of the compartments to space at the same time. No chance of recovery. Must have had a hell of a pilot to get it down as smoothly as they did."

You also have confirmation of who built the ship, assuming you trust your unfortunate predecessor's information; Brumehad Fleet Senate.

Fits with what you've seen so far. Scar-Faced People were supposed to have been much more into random murals and artistic flourishes than you've seen so far from the wreck, which means anything you find is much more likely to be up your alley. Both candidates were very into the material sciences but the Brumehad also dealt in the biological sciences while the Scar-Faced were more into the arcane.

If the broken blisters you've seen so far really were 'preserves' of some kind it does point to that too.

"Seven-hundred thirty-eight," Opal-Nine announces.

You hum, hands stilling "That's enough to keep us from starving for a good few months. Or allow us to afford some decent gear for a return trip… depending on what we find."

"We should investigate their basecamp,' he gestures to the personal comp in your hands.

"Body was there a while, but I'd like an idea of how likely someone is to come looking for them."

You can see the sense in that.

Probably plenty of clues on the thing in your hands too, but every time you try navigating away from the map it shuts down completely and won't turn back on for at least ten minutes. Whatever is powering the thing apparently can't handle that. You're tempted to try your hand at fixing it, but you aren't really sure where to even start.

Might be best to leave it for Natya.

A sharp pinch on the back of your hand alerts you to Nosta's displeasure, her large black and golden eyes admonishing you for your failures with a familiarly regal forbearance. Rolling your eyes you start working your fingers back through her feathers. You turn to Opal-Nine.

"Start with that tomorrow, then?"

He nods.

In the morning you get started early, before the sun's even started rising. Your first task is to force the door open far enough for your companion to fit through without cracking anything and though it takes the two of you a couple of hours of frustrating, exhausting work you do manage it.

After a bit of a rest and some rations heated over glowing coals you both set out. Opal-Nine can see much better in the dim environment of the ship than you and has considerably more experience with these sorts of expeditions than you do so he takes point as you begin the task of finding a way up. It involves a lot of wandering down darkened corridors, turning back at dead ends made by collapsed rooms and halls, and embarrassed corrections when you realize you've read the schematic wrong, but eventually you start to make actual progress.

Deck by deck you climb 'higher' into the ship. Soon enough you start to hear the distant howl of wind and even see the signs of actual wildlife and plant life.

Mostly just stray leaves and dried pellets of shit, but the occasional small bone manages to give you a scare or two as it cracks underneath your boots.

Three hours or so after midday you find yourself nearly blinded by sunlight as you round a corner. It hits you almost like a physical wall, overwhelming and disorienting you so badly that it takes you a few moments to actually register how drastically the environment has changed around you. Ahead of you lies a large open chamber four or five times as big as your shelter back at the base, filled with wildly overgrown plant life engaged in a fierce battle for dominance with invading specimens from outside. Waxy leaved jungle giants war with pine-y titans in the canopy, long creeping vines strangle tiny green sprigs and bright pungent flowers sink roots into rough bark.

Overhead the thick canopy of glass is split by a jagged sawtooth opening down its middle and you can see the lichen coated tips of its fallen shards poking out of dense vegetation atop the central hill.

After some search you find the mossy, overgrown remains of a campsite tucked into an alcove at the chambers edge. Rusted metal and mossy scraps of synthetic fabric are all that's left.

Something that might have once been a tent, covered in a slime of algal growth, and hanging ragged from bent and corroded poles. The misshapen corpse of something once furry now lies curled amidst the shredded remnants of a bedroll, the stained and pest eaten filling matted into a bed of filth.

Cooking implements sit scattered around the site, eaten through by rust.

Whatever else of their supplies are long scattered and eaten through by whatever lives here. Everything except for a gray suit of a woven material thick as your finger buried beneath the nest, grime streaked and shattered helmet still attached. You heft it up by the shoulders, stretching the body into a vague facsimile of life; the legs still trail in the dirt and refuse.

"Emergency suit?"

It looks like the kind of thing they had in lockers on the freighter you bought passage to Mu on. Though of distinctly better quality. Those things wouldn't have been good for more than a few minutes of exposure or the gentlest sort of depressurization conditions.

He shakes his head, fingering the webbing between the arms and the body.

"Wingsuit. Good quality. Solid recyc' functions."

Opal-Nine takes the arm from you with the tip of his forelimb, rubs it between the fingers of his midlimb.

"Septuple layered… positive and negative pressure resistant. Custom fitted. Vacuum rated— " he pauses, inspecting a thick bangle at the wrist " —reentry shield projectors. This was designed for an orbital drop."

You blink. That's insane.

"So, you think the guy down there, came down all the way from orbit? In this?"

He nods.

"Piss on my back," you mutter, "Must have been rich as shit. And paranoid as all fuck… " you stop and think about it, "Or just rich as shit."

" 'Rich as shit' indeed."

Something occurs to you, "That means a ride. I mean, either their own ship or they hired one to jump from."

You begin folding the suit up, even if the major systems and components are shot the material might still be good. Or at least you or Natya might be able to learn from it. Quality like that can last.

Opal-Nine lets out a chitter of agreement, "My bet is on one of their own. Gear like this and that comp aren't one-offs. Faded bone scarring on the skull might also be from implants, the kind that don't make you look like— "

Something prompts you to turn. Maybe you hear the rush of air or feel a shift in pressure or maybe it's something deeper.

Frame against the bright afternoon sun, just under two meters of feather and muscle twists underneath the outstretched forelimb of your khar companion, coming within a few bare centimeters of the long serrated edge of his main claw. Her eyes meet yours as she lets out a fierce cry— kreeeeee-aaaagh! —before, with a great beating of her wings, she pulls sharply up and lands all seven and a quarter kilograms of her weight against your chest. You stumble back a step under the impact of her momentum and feel Nosta's wings wrap around you in gentle embrace.

"Fuckin' egg-mimic," swears Opal-Nine.

"Reckless, pissing, idiot bird," you join him.

At the same time your arms instinctively move to hold her to yourself. Nosta lets out a happy chirrup, uncaring of either of your outbursts.

How did she even find you? You know all too well the why of it; she got bored and though she understands your words and obeys them most of the time, boredom is the bane of a raroh hawk. Two days without being able to go out and explore was apparently her limit this time.

---

Several days pass in a relative routine.

In the morning you and Nosta explore your surroundings; she hunts for new and exciting prey while you use the schematic of the ship to better identify the various structures and components you can see from the outside. Knowing what you do of the Brumehad Fleet Senate you suspect this was some manner of exploratory vessel-slash-personal yacht; the personal fief of someone rich and connected to the research divisions. A lot of unlabelled empty space on the schematic and the abundance of the so-called 'Preserve Domes.'

Then you and Opal-Nine head into the wreck itself for exploration. You take things slow, wary of the fate that befell your predecessor and inadvertent benefactor.

Mostly you find empty rooms full of dust, emptied of any value by either time or their once inhabitants. Occasionally you find more corpses, the clear evidence of their traumatic deaths apparent from the impossible angles of bones and limbs and even more occasionally you find faded and crumbling mementos. Their forms only preserved by sealed doors and a lack of disturbance.

As you go deeper you find less and less evidence of the outside world until it might almost be as if the whole ship were still sealed tight against the vacuum of space. You don't detect even the slightest flicker of power at any point.

Not a surprise given the age of the ship and what you know of the Senate Fleet's systems. Though they utilized plenty of arcane systems they mostly trusted in the harder sciences for power generation and transmission.

Magic, outside of Life-Shaping, took a backseat for them.

The damage the ship suffered must have done enough damage to disrupt the regenerative systems that gave Brumehad construction much of their resiliency against time. Organo-Silicate coatings programmed to repair hulls and structural elements, semi-fluid neuroplastic channels capable of not only transmitting vast streams of data but also providing minute power for tertiary and secondary systems. Diamond-glass layered with microbial gels grown to produce not only light but also sense pressure, warmth, and changes in local charge concentrations. What you know is only a small pittance.

Violent civil war tore their empire apart and burned many of their secrets out of the universe. Leaving only scattered shells emptied of all their true majesty and mystery.

Even this wreck is more a tomb than a real prize.

You still inspect every exposed bit of decayed pseudo-biology and machinery you come across. Their dead and crumbled bits give you insights and clues that you might otherwise have struggled to ever grasp by yourself for who knows how long.

Those little bits help with your nighttime work.

From the door controls to what must have once been a secure biological lab you first grasp a method of generating and controlling electrical signals in neuron networks. A combination of the fire control systems and failing sample preservation systems leading to part of the local neuroplastic channels being rapidly mineralized, leaving a near perfectly preserved section for your inspection. You could see all the macrostructures; the long axons of dual-channel optic fibers connected to somata clusters linked by complex dendrite patterns, differential fluid density layers laced with free-ion pockets, and silicate ribbons worked with barely visible runes. You could literally see trapped life-energy frozen in its path from one part to another.

And from that you manage, just barely to get the, now technically alive, basilisk to move. Granted you have to consciously initiate each motion. And even calling it movement is very generations, it's more of a spasmodic twitching that results in a gradual crawl in the right direction.

Still, it's a lot more than you have before; actual guided movement.

Your first actual concrete discovery comes on your ninth day in the valley.

In the vast cavern of a cargo bay identical to the one you gained entry to the ship by, save for its still being sealed and thus the utter lack of vegetation, as you're exploring a series of empty storage containers twice as tall as you, you come across a partition. Barely more than a thin sheet of flexible plastic, you easily tear it down on your own, letting out the stale air trapped within.

What's inside though…

It almost seems miraculous.

Three meters tall from top to bottom, made of unpainted metal the color of storm clouds and flexible leathery material is an encounter suit of some kind. A pair of insectile like legs support a broad, curved torso like a beetle crossed with a round shield connected to another pair of limbs, one a set of long, heavy duty arms ending in four grippers and the other a pair of thin delicate arms tucked up beneath the torso with five digits. Across the torso a deep crack exposed layers of composite and metal down to a rough, porous material that seeped clear fluid where you touched it. Fine cracks spread along the leathery material at the joints, letting you stick your entire finger through at points to feel the mechanisms and sinews beyond. The cracked diamond-glass faceplate of the helm, an open wound and the seating of the seals bent into incompatibility. You detect no signs of power or life within any of its systems.

But it is still your first prize. Something that you might actually be able to entice a buyer with or perhaps repair for your own use; sealed doubly behind the cargo bay doors and the inner partition of this container it is more intact than any other piece of the ship you've seen.

How do you proceed?

There remain between 55 and 70 days before the Blunted Spears Caravan is estimated to return to Three Hills.

[] Explore towards the core. Behind the collapsed section where you found the corpse lies the core. Likely to be heavily sealed and to contain the most valuable prizes.
[] Explore deeper. You've stuck to the easily accessible sections along the central access corridor, but you now have some indication of where the secure labs would have been. Search them out.
[] Work on accessing more of the Ten Springs Personal 'Frame you recovered from the body.
[] Work on getting the basilisk to have basic locomotion.
[] Explore the surroundings of the crash site more thoroughly. Knowing what resources the immediate surroundings contain could be helpful in the future.
[] Work on (somehow) repairing the encounter suit you found.
[] Write-in: Subject to approval.

Plan vote, include however many options you want.