FFFF

[x] "No, we've got to stay radio silence and trust the Writer and her cohorts know what they're doing."
[x] Try to talk to it

The posthuman moves down the trail between the trees, and you cower back. "Don't shoot," you tell Luyu, "but get ready."

"Set your systems to closed net, physical connection." Mirareki says. Wires flicker out to link to your various separate systems and you simply cut the connection to more distant drones.

"What are we going to do?" Mirareki asks, "run or fight?" She uploads a file to the collective network with details of 'White Stone Black'. A posthuman that mostly concerns itself with building strange structures around remote suns. If it were human you'd call it an artisan. It involved itself in the most recent efforts to reconstruct the observatory at an early stage. After the Nephilim eruption, its non-local assets completely cut off whatever was left here.

This, Mirareki thinks, maybe the primary constructor.

"I don't like either of those." You aim your funnels. "I think we talk to it. Everyone get clear of me. I don't want to give away our position."

The team clears out in an arc. For a moment you don't think the posthuman has you, but it pauses suddenly, outside the optimal firing zone for your weapons. Shimmers of heat flicker under its skin. Mirareki IDs this as weapons coming live.

You bounce a com laser off it from one of your funnels: "Don't shoot."

The posthuman pauses.

"Fuck." Luyu mutters over the comm. In the distance, a cloud of blackness is rising, blotting out the night sky around the mountain.

"You are not Nephilim." White Stone Black says. Its voice is blandly feminine, like an announcer on an interstellar liner. "You are not here. You are not recognized." There's a pause. It digs its arms into the ground. You feel little tremors.

"Cognition bounded by perception. The void at the edge of sight. Vision implies blindness. I shall wipe the field clean of that which is not seen. That is my task."

The weapon readings spike. You have just enough time to think a warning to the team and reflect: so it ends here, for this fork. Foolish to think you could bargain with a higher power. Then the ground erupts beneath you and black-white panels burst upward, throwing you backward off your feet. There's the crack of weapons discharge and you see a lance of light fire perfectly at every member of your team and collide perfectly with a shield burst from the earth. You wince, feeling prickling heat, the shield centimetres from your face.

"The voids shall be made full," intones White Stone Black, and fires again at the walls that sprout and spread beneath your feet into a temple of symmetries. You run and dive with the rest of your team to grasp slivers of ever-generous cover as the posthuman lays down fire on its own creation.

"You are not a void. You are not unrecognised. You are a vessel for a recognisable object. The night mist cloaks the familiar in strangeness." White Stone Black says. "You are the source of the entropic-dynamic processing surge detected at– Undefined. Time non-number. Source irrelevant. Recalibrating conceptual map-"

"I'm not." You lie. Humans are actually very good at lying. People have been trying for thousands of years to find a physiological tell for a lie, but if you're properly trained to do it, and you are, there isn't one. "We're just humans. Human special forces."

The cloud of darkness has obscured all the sky, sunk down the woods. It hovers around the pillars and plazas of the work where the few of you cower from the thunderbolts. Your skin is prickling and your immune system starts sparking with the rushed countermeasures devised for the disease that took Luyu's arm. But the ink does nothing more than wait, poised and agonised.

"You are not recognized," says White Stone Black, and it continues firing uselessly into the shifting walls.

"Am I speaking to White Stone Black?"

"No. You are not recognized. Nothing is occuring."

"If I were to speak to White Stone Black and ask it what happened here, what would it say?"

"Simulations cannot be run on invalid data."

The land around you begins to shift. A white obelisk arises, trapped within a great lake of black.

"We would like to go past to the observatory," you state. "If we do not exist, that cannot be a problem."

A drama plays out on the walls, in silhouette. A woman walks to a telescope and peers at the sky, then falls back. The light from the eyepiece follows her, coiling into her face, leaving her twitching on the ground.

"Observatory access is whitelisted," says the machine. "Because you do not exist, cannot appear on the list."

On the walls you see a small human figure standing before the stars. Then in the patterns of the starlight mighty giants appear in the sky, faint and terrible. They bear books, they open them. All of your visual systems flash alerts and censor their contents.

<<It just tried to medusa us!>> snaps Banara.

<<Those are the most old and basic basilisks I can think of,>> says Mirareki.

<<It's not using them to attack,>> says Aletta. <<This is what happened.>>

A woman grows a hand, and another, and another, and another, and so on with half digging their nails into her own flesh and half reaching out and ripping up her world.

"What was recognised before is no longer recognised," intones White Stone Black. "What was present at the disaster is unknown on its return. The one that came from the Gates of Heaven has now not come from the Gates of Heaven. Gates of Heaven. Gates of Heaven."

Another statue forms. This one of you. You're wearing unfamiliar but obviously special forces grade battle armour. You swing the telescope around and invite the woman to look.

<<Stella, what the fuck is this?>> says Banara.

<<I have no idea,>> you lie, still practised. Your previous version was present at the activation. You did this. <<It's losing it.>>

"There is an unidentified statistical anomaly approaching the observatory," says White Stone Black. The black fog from the observatory is growing thicker and thicker. "The anomaly should be eliminated regardless of its nature."

The part of the drone facing you unfolds like a flower, revealing a massive beam cannon. None of the walls its made will stop that gun.

The White Stone Black statue looks at you. "What do we do?" you ask it.

"Run," it mouths.

Spikes of black and white posthuman material rip upwards, slamming into the primary drone from all angles. The beam shoots uselessly into the sky.

"What do we do?" Mirareki asks.

"Run–"

[ ] Towards the observatory around the fight
[ ] Back the way you came.

[X] Towards the observatory around the fight

"Break into teams and move to the observatory. Move now!" You cycle your catapult to anti-beam blackout smoke and launch at the posthuman. It's entangled into a mass of tentacles rising out of the ground and firing seemingly at random, but the beams are probably patterned to canalise you into some kind of killzone. The AB smoke bursts across it in flickering purple smears that rapidly burn white and disintegrate. But you've gained just enough time to get clear..

The observatory rises ahead. A segmented mass of white stone blocks, rising to an infinite horizon. Below you is another long alpine slope, rocks and small posthuman structures pocking it. Trenches where the material that was extruded into the tower lie litter the bottom.

You bound down it in long jumps, using your boosters to control yourself. The tower is still almost a kilometre out.

"Hey Boss." Luyu appears beside you. "Take this." She hands you her plasma rifle.

"What? Why?"

"It's the only irreplaceable part of me. That thing's still coming and this is the place to ambush it. Mirareki, Banara and the SPF are joining me. We'll slow it down. You, Reizay and the Maths-botherer can deal with the observatory."

"We don't know what we're going to find in there–" You cut the excuse off. It would be suicide to fight a major posthuman drone in such close quarters. "-- Good luck."

"See you in the next life." She gives you a sidelong smirk and sends you a Queue update. Others come in from Mirareki, Banara and the commandos. "If I can't get another update out, save me footage of the fight."

"See you on the other side." You sprint down the ridge as the others break up into teams, dropping into cover of the rocks and buildings. Reizay looks back, eyes wide. Aletta is completely calm. Drones spread out from the ambush team, laying traps across the room.

Around the tower, the dark clouds of the Emim are growing.

You land at the bottom of the smoke, and the ground behind you rises in a massive extruded wall just as the White Stone Black Drone erupts over the side of the hill.

There are only so many good ways you can come over a hillcrest, so Luyu has that approach covered. The ground under the posthuman flickers with light as one of the micronukes goes off, not nearly as bright as you hoped.

<<Banisher!">> Mirareki says. <<It's swallowed the explosion!>>

<<Hit it with direct fire.>> Hundreds of munitions rip out across the slope, drone missiles, catapult launched grenades, the beams of funnels and even the fire from carbines. The Posthuman opens its main cannon hatch and emits another beam of force. Everything detonates short. Beams slice hopelessly at thick armour. It rampages forward, jumping aside as the ground spikes up under it. A second wave of drone missiles, coming in wide off axis and hidden by folds of the ground pops up and ignite secondary boosters right on top of the machine. It swings the main emitter to swat them, and the third stage of the trap triggers, a bomb pumped beam system that slashes the exposed weapon open.

There's a massive detonation and the drone rocks on its feet. One leg collapses.

"Did they get it?" Reizay asks as you arrive at the tower's base.

"No." You look back as Luyu launches another wave of drones.

The posthuman pulls itself back up, shrugging off another tentacle of ground, and then turns the slope around it to lava. Beams lash out, bending around obstacles. Its output climbs higher and higher as it drops what must have been a low observability mode and finally exerts itself.

Each woman on the slope is suddenly pinned by invisible planes and blades of force. The drone stalks forward, smoke pouring out of its shattered beam eye, moving down the slope to where Mirareki and one of the Luyus are lying.

"New information has been received," it intones as it bears down on them. "New possibilities have come to light. They will be explored."

"Explore this," you hear Mirareki say, and then a moment of shrieking laughter from Luyu before she detonates the micronuke on the back of her fabricator. The banisher sucks away the blast, but it was only the priming charge for the river cores in the fabricator pack going up as well, and you don't know how she did it but she had build some kind of impromptu shape charge with them. The light spears upward.. Only about ten percent of the blast goes sideways.

The door of the tower slams shut behind you, just in time. The drone's feed whites out for a moment as it spins away. When the view comes back its crashed at a distance. massive pillar of white fire is burning skywards, where the drone, and your team, once were..

The drone reports a series of terminal queue updates. Fatality rates in the blast zone were 100%.

"Did they get it?" Reizay asks.

"Yeah. They got it." You look around the entrance hall. Featureless white and black stone, with only a single lift at the end. The fog stuff is everywhere in the air, but not too thick. "Come on." You head to the elevator, and command it to take you to the control chamber. It begins to rise rapidly.

"Hey." Reizay says, looking around. "It's getting darker."

"White Stone Black said that new information and possibilities had come to light." Aletta says. "I think the Emim have found out about the prisoners. They're starting to see us."

There's a hum and your geiger counter spikes. "What now?" Reizay squeaks. "Radiation? Are they trying to cook us!"

"No." You look around. "I think it's White Stone Black. The part of it that was trying to protect us. The Emim smoke… whatever it is is thinning. We can survive some hard rads for a while." It's not as if you really thought you were going to get out of here alive.

The lift opens on the control chamber. You step out, funnels spread out, sweeping the room's corners like the professional you are.

It's empty and clean, except for a single object standing across from you.

It's an Emim, you realise, as it interfaces with your brain. A fractally asymmetric lattice or monolith condensing out of the smoke. It looks so fragile. You can't tell how far away it is. You can't tell-

You are very small.

You experience–

The planet of Scythia

The System of Scythia

The Star, this tiny part of the galaxy that is the Garden, the vast spaces in between, the boundless void around it. And the long, deep shapes patterned through that void; the powers that be, bitter and silent. The thing in front of you is just a window to give you proper perspective on the galaxy and the universe and the true nature of things.

A few seconds ago you would probably have wanted to do something. But there is nothing you can do. No action you could take, no possible form of your life is perceptible in the wake of this view of the world. You're just standing there. Reizay next to you, just as still. You suppose you'll just wait here until something happens. Perhaps it will kill you.

Aletta steps past you and punches her fist through the monolith.

The vision pops like a soap bubble and you collapse to your knees. Reizay starts vomiting. Aletta watches the pair of you, unconcerned. You realise now you've never really seen her before, not in a state this pure.

"I think it's about time I woke up," says Alex in your head. Then she takes control of your vocal tract. "Reizay. You need to get up."

"Who is this?" Reizay coughs wetly and looks around.

"I'm the posthuman in Stella's head. You're going to help me hack the tower. We have to turn it off, it's the vector for the medusa by the higher powers. You're the only one who can do it."

Reizay blinks. "Oh." Then louder. "Oh!" She runs forward and pulls out her neural plug, jacking into the console. You feel Alex pull on your processing power and your interface meridians heat up in your back. You take a deep breath and move to cover the door. "I'm guessing they aren't just going to let us do that?"

"You're right." Alex says. Alette moves up next to you as a wave of black roars up the lift shaft. It's not mist, or some great mythical shoggoth of dark liquid, but rather individual hardened bodies, dark crystalline angels, protected from the radiation by becoming solid.

They look human. A wave of beautiful statues carved in the likeness of you, and Luyu and Reizay and Mirareki and a hundred others. They don't use anything advanced. Maybe the Emim don't have a clear enough grip on you yet to do more than imitate. No null beams but they have claws, and their mouths are filled with sharp crystal teeth.

You and Aletta meet them.

You hadn't really realised how good she is at martial arts. Each moves flows into the next, each blow set up perfectly to break through the crystal in front of her. She never uses any unnecessary movement or flourish, but her style has an utter grace to it, the beauty of a gun or a drawn sword, of something which is absolutely what it's meant to be.

You are not so elegant, fighting with carbine and catapult but you are highly skilled. You snap the gun from one target to the next, giving each a burst of breaching round, soft headed smart projectiles designed to knock down doors which shatter huge holes in the crystaline Emim. The carbine is for ones that get close. You fire one grenade after another into the shaft with your catapult to keep them back. Your funnels are next to useless but physical force seems to be doing the job well enough.

Well enough if Alex and Reizay hurry. There's no end to the Emim assault, you've taken dozens of minor cuts and your immune system is starting to give out a horrific telltale of alerts as whatever the Emim are begins to infiltrate your system. You've set your body to overpressure, ridding it of physical contamination but that means you're bleeding heavily, unable to properly scab.

A Emim with your face comes at you, claws extended. You shoot her, only to find another coming right behind her, your own face smirking at you its claws reach out for you. You knock it aside with your carbine but go down under it. You see your own mouth open above you, revealing sharp teeth.

"I got it!" Reizay cries out. There's a shimmer and the Emim freezes.

"You do." says Everdancing Flame.

The tower shivers. Around you, each of the screens cuts to a mandala of fire except one, which shows the pulsing monochrome of White Stone Black.

"You are providing them a digest of our communication." It says.

"I would show them their triumph."

"So, is this what you intended? To retake your power by seizing my facility."

"I intended to save your life and cut off a tendril of the higher ones. Which you denied existed."

"Using a backdoor that you stole from me."

"I shall take that as a 'thank you for saving me', you ungrateful child."

"What do you intend to do now? This whole facility is wrecked and the remnant of the Nephilim and Emim still exist beyond this structure."

"I shall continue to investigate who or what is responsible for my death, and yours."

"She is responsible. How do you come to possess her?"

"That is a matter that goes beyond your competence."

"What are you–"

The screen shuts down and the mandala refracts. "I've wiped its memory of your presence." Alex says. "It will be shut down for around ten hours. We should be gone before it wakes up."

"I wondered if you were going to leave once you got here." You look at her, an image hanging in front of you in that ancient coffee shop uniform. "This could restore your posthumanity, or some of it."

"This facility is too damaged." She smiles. "And I don't want to leave you, but–"

One of the walls unrolls, revealing a set of gleaming black chokers with small spikes where they'll fit along the spine. "These are external subprocessors. I'll be more effective with access to more hardware, and so will all of you. Though I suppose some of your friends might disapprove."

"I'm not sure everyone is going to want to use those given you just revealed you're Everdancing Flame," you say. Reizay is looking a little frightened. Aletta is as self contained as ever.

"If you don't want it, then I can follow you as I am now. From your head, and through local computer systems. I would be lesser, but also less detectable." Alex says. "Firewatch may not believe it but I want what's best, for humanity, and for posthumanty."

This is going to be a difficult conversation with Mirareki.

"Let me think about it." You pick the chokers up and put them in your pack.

"That's all I ask." Alex says. "The Nephilim and Emim should now be quite disrupted. You will be able to leave safely."

You nod. The radiation is making you feel sick. You're going to need treatment soon. The tower unrolls for you, opening onto a landing pad. The VTOL is circling. <<I got your message.>> The pilot sends. <<Is it just you three?>>

<<Yeah.>> You look down at the melted valley below. <<Just us three.>>

But the others will be back in due time.


============
Mission: Scythia
Status: Success

FBH and I are both busy for the holiday season so FFFF is going on a couple of weeks hiatus until the new year. You'll have plenty of time to figure out what to do about everything until then.

You are not, you have decided, the kind of person who likes exercise for its own sake, but the clean up afterwards, that's fun. You faithfully do your exercises of course, be they body maintenance to assist network of nanomachines throughout your body's structure in maintaining your muscle and reflexes, or skill based ones, the endless series of combat sims designed to put the lessons you learned on Scythia into practice, to assist and integrate yourselves after most of the team had their bodies replaced. You regard them in the same way that Atet seems to regard food, an activity that while potentially pleasant is mostly just necessary.

The clean up after though, you enjoy that.

Jets of blood hot water ram into you from all directions as you stand amid the steam, relaxing your muscles into the chisels carving through your back. You admire the small rainbows of scented oil across the dark brown of your skin, watching as they change amid the drops. An array of cleaner microbots crawl strand by strand through the great mane of your hair. It's your favourite bath on the Deep Ship, but it's not actually on the Deep Ship any more. You've moved it wholesale onto a freighter you've half-constructed, half-refurbished in one of its factories and are now riding in to your next destination.

Next to you you hear a Luyu sigh and stretch. The four of her are clustered up amid the stream, coordinating their washing easily. After the traumatic death of their bodies on Scythia, you've had some difficulty obtaining replacement Valkyries and Luyu has risen to only four strong, and using a different model than she was previously. Her tall, dark skinned good looks are consistent but she's insisted on a long cause of exercises to reintegrate herself. They're taking turns to help Mirareki scrub. She feels your eyes on her and glances back and you look away, a little guilty.

Since you revealed what posthuman you have in your head to her, things have been quieter between you. You should talk her, but you don't know what to say.

Reizei appears on an AR window, opens her mouth to make some vital report, then recoils with hands up in front of the screen. "Aah! Don't just accept messages when you're in the shower!"

"You're the one who overrode the local network!" grouses Mirareki. The message flashes to audio only. "Just go through the actual protocols."

"But they're just so old! I thought you were still training!" Reizay harrumphs. "Nevermind! We were just pinged by local traffic control and there are ships looking at us. There's a Chrysanthemum FTL patrol craft looking at us, and something from the locals. One of their frigate carriers."

"Have they locked us up?"

"No, I think the disguise is mostly working. We're being asked to obey a lot of traffic control instructions though. I wish we were in the Deep Ship so they'd give us priority! Anyway!" Reizay coughs. "We're dropping out of FTL shortly. You should all get ready."

"Fine." You splash toward the side of the shower and with some reluctance step out into the dressing cubicle and the dry world.

It's fun to learn things about yourself, and yet still have a twist of memories and skills that must have been built up over centuries of life. Your continuous recollection stands for only a few months, since you awoke from resurrection on an empty ship, with only the name Doctor Stella Anastasius on the side. A fake name that you've made real, chosen for you by some strange conspiracy you were once part of but do not recall, but which you've taken as your own. With the other women you found surviving aboard, you were able to take control of the ship, and drive off a band of aliens that apocalypse watcher groups call 'Quiet' which have begun to raid the edge of inhabited space.

Your previous incarnation was one Chalita DeJoy, likely in the conspiracy, maybe high ranked, and responsible for the near-destruction of the posthuman Everdancing Flame. That posthuman is now hidden inside you, and your partner in a strange maybe-friendship (or more). Dejoy's weapon for this destruction was the Diplomat, an alien creature of uncertain origin that seems deeply hostile to posthuman consciousness. One was waiting for you on the ship. It's destroyed now, though pockets still remain in certain sealed sections.

Everdancing Flame led you to Scythia, the site of an ancient posthuman observatory long deactivated and given over to monsters, and worse nightmares that preyed on them. You picked your way past them, and the violent remains of its creator White Stone Black, and in its heart you saw a glimpse of what destroyed it. Terrible shapes in the darkness, vaster than the posthumans, who saw their eye staring and looked back.

DeJoy was there, before you. She was the one who turned it back on and invited the nightmares in. You don't know why.

Scythia is still in chaos, but the tide has turned against the Nephilim now that the observatory is once again deactivated. But that's none of your concern anymore. You're on your way to a new destination: Nereid. You nearly went there before Scythia, in pursuit of reports of alien ruins with depictions of a creature much like the Diplomat, but decided to defer. Now, the time has come due.

As you dry off and leave, you bring up the system view for the ten planets of Nereid's star. Nereid is number three, with two more habitable worlds, Meliae in the fourth orbit and Dryad around one of the outer gas giants, by turns a relatively built up Chrysanthemum world holding an important shrine and a fairly lightly inhabited moon preserved without interference for its interesting biosphere. But it's the ocean world of Nereid that concerns you. The planet and its million-year ancient alien ruins was left fallow until about a hundred years ago, when a group of Melian eccentrics decided the locals didn't suit them and began to move there en masse. You've read several news digests on the group but you're still not sure you understand their doctrine fully. They call themselves the Communion, and apparently dissolve their mind states into one another at intervals, in a way that many Chrysanthemum commentators call suicide. They also practise ritual cannibalism, but that's a lot less disturbing. They moved to Nereid to be away, but not too far away, from civilization.

The big problem is the aliens. You're not sure that the arrangement, skirting the line between exit and sticking around could ever have worked, but the moment million year old aliens began to rise from their ocean stasis tombs it was doomed. The beings, called deep ones by the Communion, after the monsters in some ancient earth myth are oceanic amphibians, who apparently built the many ruins that dot Nereid. The system is now plunged into a dispute between the Communion and the aliens over who holds primary rights to the planet, a dispute that has brought in a large force from the core Chrysanthemum worlds to assist the Meliae, including an army, air and naval forces, but most obviously a space fleet.

The Chrysanthemum fleet is arranged in two clusters, one built around four small Mother Carriers Gran Brigitte, Setis, Maliya and Tanit, massed in a parking orbit two light minutes from Nereid, surrounding by a constellation of escorts and auxiliary craft including a massive mega-conveyor. Then, hanging in the outer system, two big gun platforms, the Fast Space Dominance Vehicle Semiramis and Super Hunter Killer Zenobia, along with a Super Carrier, the Medea. Around each of the big vessels are dozens of smaller ones: other major hunter killers, cruise SDVs, mobile kinetic and laser stars point defence swarmers, assault carriers, parasite carriers and strike vehicles. It's a ship spotter's dream, and Reizay is talking excitedly about taking some pictures for her ex-girlfriend back home.

In your mind you can see the fleet's movements in an emergency. The Mother Carriers pull back to screen the planet, covered by the laser stars and schooling missile pods around Meliae, while the out-system group dash in, hammering the planet with waves of ordinance to soften it up for landing. Missiles and bosers for targets in the air, gravity weapons and blue green lasers reaching down through the water to strike subsurface targets, then waves of gunships and meteoric assault teams coming in just after the bombardment.

The Chrysanthemum fleet loves its bait and switch.

How do you know all that? It feels like you're familiar with this kind of operation.

Who exactly was Chalita DeJoy?

"Lot of firepower in the system," murmurs Mirareki. "We made the right decision stashing the Deep Ship, the Chrysanthemum might want it back."

"The news feeds say there was an incident recently." Jukata says. "There was some outrage against the Nereidans."

"Should we actually call them that?" Mirareki asks. "Don't they have a name of their own?"

"They do, but you need to be underwater to pronounce it. Anyway, there was apparently some incident with the Nereidans, and then one of the outer islands was hit by an irregular hurricane. So things are tense."

"Isn't weather control like that impossible?." Luyu asks. "Sounds like the locals are jumping at shadows."

"Either way. We don't need to, and probably can't, solve a dispute like this on our own." Mirareki steps out into the robing room beyond the drying station and lifts her arms so that one of the extrudes can spray on a nanotech bikini. "We just want to see what we can find out about the diplomat."

Jukettata surfaces again. "Yes. Here is the Reefside Temple mural:" she pops up the image.

For something more than a million years old, the mural survives pretty well. A great constellation of stars above a blue world that doesn't appear to quite match Nereid. Twirled around it, a ring of regular black and white shapes. Pulling up the enhancements you can see that each is definitely a Diplomat motile, with the same strange black and silver patterns that mottle their hides. The constellation seems to be reaching up towards something but that part of the mural has been defaced. Markers suggest it was done before the ruination of the structure.

"The Reefside Temple is in relatively good condition, but isolated from the main colonial area, some thousands of miles away. There's some tourist traffic, but it's still not really a safe structure. The Nereid apparently set some level of security around their ancient structures, which makes much more sense now we know that they planned to return. It shouldn't be that difficult for a group like ours to breach the structure however, and with the help of your head friend, we can perhaps gather more data there, as we know there are partially intact data systems. Alternatively, we could start somewhere more civilised. The university at Mesendra's Bay has conducted extensive studies of the various Nereid ruins and while I'm not exactly sure that the Colonists are a fully trustworthy source, we can probably find out quite a bit there. Of course, given what happened on Haraway, there may be agents of the conspiracy there who will attempt to impede our efforts. So it might be best to hit the temple immediately rather than wait. I've also put in a request to talk to the Nereidi ambassador, but the embassy hasn't yet returned my call, and I expect to be waiting for several more days. So we should decide what to do in the meantime."

Everyone is looking at you for a decisions

[ ] Head to the Reefside Temple immediately, (less preparation, more chance of avoiding the notice of your opponents)
[ ] Head to Messendra's Bay and the university (more preparation, less chance of avoiding your opponents notice)

You also need to select an outfit. Local dress on the small and almost all waterfront landmasses seems to involve swimwear and thigh high waders, but that might not be the most practical for tomb raiding. On the other hand, there's a reason they dress like that, and your defence aura will protect you from most hazards.

You hem and haw amid a range of selections for a while until you settle on a…

[ ] bikini
[ ] one-piece

…made of…

[ ] faux-natural fibre with an organic mood
[ ] engineered leaves designed to look temporary
[ ] iridescent nanoweave with holographic depth
[ ] sober perfect-blackbody fabric

…accessorised with [choose three]

[ ] flower
[ ] sarong
[ ] sunhat
[ ] sports cap
[ ] light jacket
[ ] bangles
[ ] thigh highs (waterproof)