[X] Stay in the bag for as long as one can reasonably can unless danger arises like being thrown into a smelter. try and use the Languaginator v0.9 to overhear and eavesdrop some of their conversation and after getting a feel of the people, if it's safe try to communicate with the person who... won't panic at a talking rock.
Surprisingly, there is a minimum of shaking and jangling from the bag, despite the almost certainly rough terrain.
Unsurprisingly, it is extremely boring to sit in the bag.
You give up on preparing to laser something a few minutes after its clear they just collected you as a bonus, as you end up buried underneath a vast quantity of plants, monster bits, and after having discovered this bag also has pockets by being banged into from one, what seem to be spent heat sinks by the looks of things. You'd pulsed a tiny scan through the bag out of boredom, and saw they were fairly small, round things covered to the exclusion of all else in scorch marks. A few of them even seem to have begun to melt, as you can feel their residual heat seeping through the pocket's wall. You also start up the Languaginator and let it have a go at the running conversation. It takes quite awhile (compared to its usual near-instant state) for it to not give you gibberish, but it succeeds.
"Are you really sure its a good idea to just let that fight happen? Four monster brawls do not happen accidentally."
"It wasn't a four monster brawl you idiot. It was our hunt, and a separate fight between the Rathion and the Kuras, that ended up mixing together. These things happen all the time. The forest might be big, but so are they. You're lucky you weren't Tim." A collection of agreements and regrets for Tim follow.
"What did we need the Legis parts for anyway? Its not the Heat Time, and the fridge works just fine."
"Experiment."
"Examination"
"Construction, of course"
There is a lengthy pause before the next thing to come up, as if everyone had been planning on using the parts for something different and now wasn't sure if they would get the ones they wanted first. "So what was with the big crystal? You usually just chip enough off and leave it be, Faru."
"Looks like pure Stellar Amethyst. We could make a fucking huge amount of cash if we found the right lapidary. One that doesn't worry too much about how, technically...neither we or they actually own it under that stupid new law." You aren't sure if "Faru" was the one to say that or not, because one of the reasons your Languaginator doesn't have a full version number yet is the problems with multiple speakers it has. Up to this point all the output has been in the same mish-mash of voice tones you can vaguely make out beyond the pile of junk on top of you.
"And then what? Slowly spend it on fancier hunting tools? Buy Meg more than a month of ammo at a time? You know our asshole of a governor keeps track of taxes like it is personally his money and not there to only be spent supporting the town and its careful warding away of the bigger, dangerouser monsters."
"Dangerouser? Really?"
"Its an accurate description and you can't tell me otherwise."
"You can't just use one more word and be sensible instead of making one up?"
"You write the reports, I speak the faster descriptions. I've read a couple of them, I'm sure you could manage to describe that double double fight in a way even a scaredy little girl could enjoy with your fake words like 'largesse' or 'immunomagery'."
"Dou-you did that one on purpose! And those are dictionary words! The thing you never read!" is shouted in response. The lack of non-bag noise stands out afterwards.
"Sounds like the answer is we just don't make the purchases here, really. Get it on something disposable, or just straight up coinage, and take it to say...Morkwind, perhaps? Somewhere where they don't mind if you pay in cash. Then just do not mention how much we did not spend elsewhere because we did not have it, and if anyone insists, it was a gift."
"Why is this piece o' rock even a problem? Space rocks is space rocks. Jus sell it."
"Because until the inevitable riot-causing screw up by StarCom gets them to void it, the answer the bureaucrats figured was good enough was that they own all of space now except the moons, and stuff from space is still part of it. And at the rates they give in exchange for materials you might as well just not bother to even admit you found it."
The rest of the conversation descends into muttering, whining, and threatening in relation to various presumably-political figures or groups. While you're sure it must be interesting to someone, that someone is not you, and instead you turn off your device and take a nap. You can still hear leaves crunching and branches branching, and if the forest is big enough for those gigantic things, you doubt they'll be home anytime soon.
---
You are woken up by a table. Not a work table, not a forge table, not even a dangerously shiny table. An ordinary one, upon which a pile of ordinary junk has been dumped. A scan reveals that no, the room isn't pitch dark, you just were not left out in the open, and instead have a small mountain of metal and metal-adjacent things on top of you. Most of it looks like scrap metal, with discarded heat sinks scattered around the pile. There do not seem to be any voices nearby, and both the table and the floor of this ground level room would be no challenge to break through if you wanted to dig your way out of here.
So now what?
[] Wait. They haven't threatened to melt you or anything, and it sounds like it will be a while before they find this 'lapidary'.
-[] Convert some of the metal in the mean time. You need more crystals more than they need to hide you.
[] Leave. You do not plan on being a commodity, even if you apparently resemble some form of good precious stone.
-[] But convert some of the metal first. You could use the extra crystals.
[] Write-in (Something else?)
If we are converting things but you don't specify what we want out of it, I'll just make some of it storage crystals and use those to hold the material. We have anything that would be considered basic infrastructure for a space crystal available, so (very basic) energy production, storage for holding things, energy, or just more bulk, one built for talking to non-Crystalline (seperate from the Languaginator, this one just outputs what you say vocally), things like that. Status is unchanged from last threadmark.
@Aklyon , if we convert some of the metal while waiting into a basic energy generator, would we be able to hide it in us or would it just be out their for the other humanoids to see? Also convertingto another device to vocalize our voice to non - crystaline people.
i would prefer to not have what we make be stolen or taken.
Also here's my attempt at a vote plan
[X] Wait. They haven't threatened to melt you or anything, and it sounds like it will be a while before they find this 'lapidary'.
-[X] Convert some of the metal in the mean time. You need more crystals more than they need to hide you. (convert it to a device which allows you to speak to non - crystalline people)
--[X] guide your growth in such a way to look like similar to the head of a native even if riggid and low faceted
would like to talk with fellow humanoids at least before considering going guns blazing and yeeting our selves out of here.
Having allies is better then just being thrust into wild i guess.
To the aliens, it would either just look like the potential Stellar Amethyst got bigger out of nowhere (which wouldn't be that strange, for reasons related to other materials on this planet), or they'd chalk it up to misremembering how big it was because it wasn't that important. If we turned the whole table's worth of scrap into crystal it would stand out.
We do not currently have anything big enough to need to be detached to function, the new fragments would just be formed around us.
[X] Wait. They haven't threatened to melt you or anything, and it sounds like it will be a while before they find this 'lapidary'.
-[X] Convert some of the metal in the mean time. You need more crystals more than they need to hide you. (convert it to a device which allows you to speak to non - crystalline people)
--[X] guide your growth in such a way to look like similar to the head of a native even if riggid and low faceted
[X] Leave. You do not plan on being a commodity, even if you apparently resemble some form of good precious stone.
-[X] But convert some of the metal first. You could use the extra crystals.
OCPs are most fun if the natives don't get an explanation for them until later.
Normally it would mean they'd hide us and cooperate with us in the hopes of making a fortune by selling us to the right buyer.
But no, we can try to find a metal deposit on our own and get something to barter with, first.
[x] Leave. You do not plan on being a commodity, even if you apparently resemble some form of good precious stone.
-[x] But convert some of the metal first. You could use the extra crystals.
[X] Wait. They haven't threatened to melt you or anything, and it sounds like it will be a while before they find this 'lapidary'.
-[X] Convert some of the metal in the mean time. You need more crystals more than they need to hide you
(Votes are pretty close and theres not many of them, so I'm gonna combine them: convert metal first, wait, and then leave if nothing happens)
Priorities were priorities, regardless of where you were or how many ginormous beasts were in alien walking distance. You started conversion from the bottom of the pile up, trying to cause as little clatter as possible in the process. The resulting glob of metal and crystal was turned into what would normally be considered barely a pocket of storage crystal. In your current state it was a fairly large amount and easily covered your whole core structure, and when you realized this you stopped converting and started absorbing instead. You could use these metal-filled storages as makeshift armor!
On the nearest wall to the table was an object that seemed out of fashion from what you remembered, but appeared to accomplish the same function as the many rectangular alien devices you'd seen brought aboard Tertius Crystal: A round clock. It had cycled four times by the time you were comfortable with both the amount of material you had stored as spare mass/potential trade good/armor, and having enough left on the table to look like nothing actually changed. Like many other places, it appeared their time could line up with twelfths of a cycle, which was convenient. What wasn't was the lack of happening.
You could see it was bright out, bright meant daytime meant they should be busy. It hadn't been bright out when they finally arrived here, but that had been after many subcycles of moving through forest. They had made it sound like you were a thing to get moved as soon as possible, which, unless something was different on Rock, meant you found someone who could pay and didn't ask for more details about whats in the storage cube within a cycle, made it their problem and moved on, much richer in resources that you could turn into what you actually wanted for your project. Taking too long meant you were either asking the wrong people or bad at looking like you had something for sale.
...Did these aliens even have that kind of network? Was their lack of attention to you for almost half a cycle because they had to actually go out and ask individual, suspicious-looking people instead of just looking for a suitably-shaded, minimally surveilled corner of the infinitely-cornered street that was a network marketplace and ask the first person to give you the right look? That would waste so much time your schedule would get laughed out of the room back home! But here was not home, so you could give them another clock rotation to make it an even half a cycle.
***
"Do you accept gemstones found in the north forest? There was a particularly unique-looking rock we found out there."
"No. You bring me the receipts and the stones and I will, later, give you the new receipts and the gems."
"Thank you for your time then, sir." said Ven as they left yet another jeweler's shop empty-handed. Why were they all so heavy-handed about rules? Who started the paper chain? This was getting nowhere and a waste of time. "Meg! Anywhere left?!"
Her friend, looking much smaller without the giant cannon today, pointed off to the south, towards the worst part of town. The part bordering the other, much more dangerous forest. Shit.
***
It had been long enough. There was things to do and Contact to be Made...later. It was mostly the former you were worried about as you rolled off the table, cracked the floor, and dug your way into a hole before covering up the top side of it and going down. You make it several minutes downwards before suddenly picking up on something.
Further down is not simply full of dirt, rock, and the remains of destroyed buildings. A sensor ping showed a very regular shape deep beneath this presumably-residential area, and one that is a very different shape to the buildings you'd seen while falling onto the planet. An echo of sorts also shows up, showing the same thing but in a way that could be easily dismissed as a glitch if you were relying on a device to do this. Then a third ping comes back while you are thinking about this, showing just ordinary dirt things. A fourth one also shows up right on the tail of the third, mangled into abstract noise but roughly the right waveform for breaking up a hypercom transmission.
There is someone down there, and they do not want to be noticed. This bombardment of conflicting signals mixed with higher-dimensional white noise is probably foolproof against the race on the surface, and also reveals they know about how most places communicate at long-distance. The hypercom scattering is probably why the surface folk don't have it too, it would be rather hard to make one that works from scratch with someone quite literally undermining your efforts.
Do we go after the underfolk immediately?
[] Dig Deeper! They can't fool us.
[] Don't. Maybe its a trap.
We have a bunch of material. Should it we make something with it?
[] More energy crystal (Boost energy output)
[] More storage crystal (Make some space to hold more things without converting them immediately)
[] More general crystal (Just get more bulk between you and the world)
[] Something else (Write-in)
[] Keep all of it for now.
Bob, Tertius Crystal, SCIENCE Division
SCIENCE: 2
Shardcraft: 1
Runic: 1
Current Energy: A Tiny Amount
Core Armor: Assimilated Scrap Metal
Attached constructions:
Languaginator v0.9
A handful of basic energy crystals
Several filled storage crystals of scrap metal
---
Sorry for the extended wait for a regular update, I'd been trying to work on this since the vote settled and past the outline it just...wasn't writing together in a way I wanted until recently. Ended up with a bunch of other partially written ideas. Maybe I'll find a use for them later. Lets just move on with it.
