[X] No more beating around the bush. Equip your space suit and prepare for an adventure.
-[X] Enter the lift codes and head to the Astrodrome. Requires the space suit to be equipped.
--[X] Go pick up the grappling hook and Signalscope, then launch the LCAV and fly to Lofted Ether.
Your trip to your suit's hiding place passes in silence, yet you cannot still your thoughts. Every time you run your mind over the unknown civilization you've discovered, the ground seems to crumble just a little further. What you were taught by the grown-ups, by your grandparents, by your
mother, on Sauriankind's past was completely wrong from the start. Ages ago, your kind had also looked up, not just wondering about their place in the stars, but reaching for them. Yet, scant little remains of the ancient Saurians, and modern Saurians have completely forgotten about them. What could possibly have transpired to erase your ancestor's accomplishments from the records? Or more accurately, erase the records themselves?
You feel the familiar sensation of your mind's churning, and you just know it will drive you crazy if you keep obsessing over it. As agonizing as it sounds, there's nothing you can do to answer the constantly-growing number of questions you have about the ancient Saurians until Ruby tracks down their ruins. Best get on with your travels.
Proceeding down the familiar path of retrieving your suit before traveling to the Astrodrome and gathering your equipment gives you plenty of time to ponder your destination. In all honestly, any excuse to not return to Shrouded Ember is one you'll happily embrace. As for your other options, you could conceivably find a Far Beyonder beacon signal at the Biohazard Laboratory or the Wandering City. Yet, there is one destination that your mind is drawn towards: Lofted Ether. You'll admit your bias right away: the unearthly moon has stolen your heart ever since you first gazed upon the photos of it in the Museum. Yet, this conviction feels more than a mere whim, despite the fact that you wouldn't know where to look for a Far Beyonder beacon on that moon. You can't quite put your claws on it, but there's something buried deep within you that is being called to Lofted Ether.
Even if it turns out to be nothing, you'll at least make another childhood dream come true.
Mercifully, there are no wandering MBV personnel at the Astrodrome, allowing you to retrieve the grappling Hook and signalscope without incident. As you approach the Starflyer, you feel a slight, yet familiar shift in gravity. The Wandering Moon is once again close to Wild Nest. Out of curiosity, you aim your signalscope at the cloudy orb, and out comes the faint yet unmistakable signal of the quantum shards. Does this mean the Wandering Moon is a shard itself, or do all quantum objects sound this way?
Discovery Log updated.
You put aside this line of reasoning for now and enter the Starflyer. You get to work, securing all your items before activating the ascent autopilot. Once again, you feel the rumble of the Starflyer's landing thrusters as you ascend off the ground, followed by main engine ignition. This time, the ride into orbit is nothing but exhilerating, and when the main engine finally cuts out, you almost regret it's over so quickly.
Not wanting to waste any time, you immediately begin plotting a course to Lofted Ether. Unfortunately, it seems the current launch window isn't quite ideal, thanks to the two hours you spent helping Ruby. With aerobraking, you'll have enough delta-v to make it to Lofted Ether and descend into its interior, but you won't have much ability to manuever using your main engine. Fortunately, you remember that the interior has powerful air currents that were used by the original MBV expeditions to explore the moon, with which you have no choice but to try your luck.
It seems that with the "efficient" trajectory CORS has plotted for you, reaching Lofted Ether will take... 20 hours?! You'll definitely need to go to bed early to wake up in time for the aerobraking! Good thing the Starflyer has a built-in alarm clock.
After selecting this course, you spend the next thirty minutes waiting to reach the right place in your orbit around Wild Nest for the escape burn. Your home moon offers its usual views of splendid ocean and verdant forests, alongside an oppressive volcanic smog. However, your eye notices a feature you did not catch in the previous loop: patches of sickly yellow terrain coating the surface. You recall the maps of Creep growth in Mission Control, laid out with dark crimson hazard shading, and a pit begins to form in your throat. Imagining the surface of Wild Nest with these patches brings to mind a Saurian wasting away from an awful disease.
Your homeworld is sick, isn't it? Even worse, all of Sauriankind's brightest minds have no idea what to do about it. Perhaps you'll be able to live out the rest of your days in the Valley without ever encountering the Creep, but someday, the Saurians will find themselves on a world overrun with it. Then what will happen? You honestly don't know. The grown-ups told you that the Creep was a beneficial plant that provided much of the Valley's energy, but even the snippets you have uncovered from MBV conjures a pit in your stomach when you think about them. Just what is it about the Creep that terrifies them so much?
You put these thoughts aside, preparing for the escape burn. Sure enough, CORS fires up the main engine and sends you zooming away from Wild Nest. You watch the diseased moon receede in the distance, then try to occupy the unexpectedly long journey to Lofted Ether in whatever way you can. The first order of business is finishing up that manual. It takes you four hours, but you finally get the job done. Once you skim past the last appendix and reach the back cover, you feel a wave of... relief? Gratitude? Pride? Wash over you as you process all you've learned. You can't say you can operate the Starflyer from memory, but its myriad systems now start to make some sense in your mind. You look over the many labels on the instrumentation and can actually guess what they
mean.
It's... exhilerating, honestly. For the years spent in the City, you've lived among its countless technological marvels, yet to you they've always been indistinguishable from magic. The craft practiced by Tinker and the Twins seemed to come from an entirely different planet, but now, after studying the intricacies of operating such a complicated machine as the Starflyer, you are starting to understand how it all fits together. At the very least, you have a much better grasp on dealing with any problems that may arise in working with such technology.
Due to your successful studies of the Starflyer's manual, you have reached the Fledgling rank on your Interface skill!
The rest of your slightly shortened day is spent with far less direction. Fortunately, the sight of Firmament's drifting cloud banks and the eternal cosmic dance of the moons is mesmerizing enough to lose hours without you noticing. It is only when your sleep timer goes off that you drag yourself from the cockpit visor and tuck yourself into a sleeping harness. It takes more than a few minutes of tossing and turning before you descend unevenly into sleep.
Your body is out of order and your limbs are not your own. Once again, you are surrounded by walls on all sides, your surroundings undistinguishable. However, you feel as if you are floating, and you see a strange crimson light shining on your right side. A familiar warped voice pierces through the fog:
"Shouldn't be long before we slip through the atmosphere. Better check our trajectory, 'cause I'm pretty sure Mission Control screwed up the burn."
You feel panic start to well up in you, but the voice speaks again:
"Now don't you worry, hatchling, we'll make it down there just fine. You're flying with the best pilot there is."
Suddenly, a screeching noise blares throughout your surroundings. You scramble to find the source of the noise, but to no avail. It grows louder and deeper, until-
You are catapulted out of sleep, now aware of the alarm clock's noise. You groan, struggling to retain the fleeting images of your dream, as much as you can call it one. There were points where it felt more real than most other dreams you've experienced, but you can't understand why. You wrack your brain, trying to understand. Then, a memory comes to light:
One day, you and your mother had been passing through a vast redwood forest. The light was dimming, and the shadows grew long: another crimson-tinted afternoon on Wild Nest. You had been gazing at the bark of a nearby tree, when suddenly, you felt like you were falling out of your own body. The surroundings grew hazy, yet the bark in front of you was as clear as ever, and the sky turned an even more crimson shade. Not a moment later, you heard a twig snap. From the corner of your vision, you saw a vast shape racing towards you, and felt a jolt of fear like you had never felt before. Out of instinct, you leaped forward, only to painfully slam snout-first into the ground. When you came to, your vision was back to normal, and you saw your mother crane her long neck towards you.
"Littlefoot?! Are you hurt?"
"No, uh, I just..."
You shook your head.
"I thought something big was pouncing at me! Like a sharptooth!"
"Well, there's no sharptooth here. Perhaps the shadows were playing tricks on you?" replied your mother.
"Yeah, but... I don't know, it felt different. My sight went all blurry, and the sky turned redder," you said. After a moment of thought, you tried to provide more details.
"It's like... like I felt out of my body. Like I wasn't really there."
"How curious," your mother said as she looked at you curiously. After some time thinking, she ventured an explanation.
"I've heard a few stories about something like this, though I'm not quite certain. Very rarely, a Saurian will, for a moment, feel as if they are experiencing things that aren't actually happening... but I do not think these experiences aren't real. Some elders say that, in these moments, a Saurian is living out the memories of someone else... like them, but not the same Saurian."
"So, the sharptooth attack was something that happened to someone else, but I felt it like it happened to me?" you asked. Your mother nodded.
"Yes. You definitely are becoming quite a clever longneck, aren't you?"
Your mother gave you a loving lick on the snout, then pulled back to think further.
"Perhaps it was another hatchling longneck? One of your ancestors, even?"
"What's an ancestor?" you asked. Your mother chuckled.
You don't think the rest of the memory is relevant, but what you do recall gets you wondering. You don't remember your mother telling you about reliving another Saurian's memories in your dreams, but if it can happen while you are awake, why can't it happen when you are asleep? You narrow your eyes, thinking of the fragment's original owner.
...Didn't Parker say something about a "Project Starchild?" Then, perhaps you were remembering the hatchling who got sent up all those years ago.
A longneck such as yourself. Your suit's previous owner. Now, you find yourself relieving their journey to the hollow moon.
The sudden rumbling of the Starflyer takes you out of your thoughts. Panicking, you scramble out of your sleeping harness and bound towards the cockpit. Outside the visor, you see a sliver of rust-colored atmosphere peeking out from below. Another volley from the vessel's manuevering thrusters sends the cockpit tilting towards you, and you unceremonouisly push yourself off of the control panels before securing yourself in a safety harness.
It is not long before you see pale blue flames on the visor's rim, and feel the floor of the vessel push up towards you. You strain against the sudden return of gravity, though the aerobraking manuever is mercifully shorter than the ones you experienced in the previous loop. Once it is over, you see the Starflyer's display show a quite enlongated orbit which still enters Lofted Ether's thin atmosphere. You suppose it's good enough for landing.
You switch over to the landing autopilot. Surprisingly, the Starflyer is only picking up a single landing beacon signal eminating from the large crack in Hollow Ether's crust leading to its interior. You don't see any of the early Farsoarer landing sites at all. Perhaps MBV just didn't bother to go back and plant beacons on them, as they are more interested in what's beneath.
Shame. Part of you wanted to visit them.
(AN: There are no important locations or other discoverables on the surface on Hollow Ether)
You select the lone landing beacon and activate CORS. However, you receive a concerning message:
"WARNING: AUTOMATIC LANDING IMPOSSIBLE FOR TERMINAL SEQUENCE OF LANDING. MANUAL GUIDANCE REQUIRED."
You start feeling nervous. Parker may have taught you a few tricks, but you don't know if you'd be able to pilot the Starflyer through the breach if CORS can't. You may very well end up disintegrated into a million bits. Grimly, you note that you technically can try again forever. Plus, you can't just give up and fly home; the Starflyer is almost out of propellant!
You feel that strange compulsion reemerge in the back of your mind. For some reason, it tells you not to be afraid. Somehow, you will find your way through the crack and witness the wonders that lay within. You can't find any way to justify it, but you decide to push ahead nonetheless.
It takes two hours for the Starflyer to swing around its orbit and return to the bottom of Lofted Ether's meagre gravity well. Along the way, you angle the vehicle to get an up-close look at the moon. You are shocked how
rough the surface looks - its rust-red form covered with mountain-sized dimples, cracks, and other distortions. It's strange because you'd expect the iron and nickel alloy that makes up the moon's shell to be far more rigid than even the rock that makes up the other moons, yet powerful forces have shattered the surface nonetheless. You suppose that, on a planetary scales, even metal will flow and warp.
Lofted Ether is surrounding by a very thin orange atmosphere, hard to spot unless you look for it. You know that it's primarily made of carbon dioxide - the moon isn't massive enough to hold on to much else for long. Aerobraking required you to get uncomfortably close to the moon's uneven surface, as attested not only by the Starflyer's altimeter but also by warping of your worldsight. It appears the surface has been magnetized by the interior's dynamo, and you can only hope it won't be a problem for you during your descent.
The Starflyer burns near the highest point of your orbit to put you on a near vertical trajectory towards the breach. You eye the propellant display nervously - only ten seconds of full thrust left. Once you're inside the shell, you'll have to use the landing thrusters for manuevering and find a pool of water near the base camp to refill your tank.
An hour after the burn, you find yourself approaching the now-visible crack in Lofted Ether's surface with increasing speed. All the while, you have tried your hardest not to think about the fate that may await you. It's strange, to know that Firmament is going to explode in fourty hours, yet still fearing an immediate demise.
Some moments before entry, CORS orients the Starflyer so its belly is pointed into the breach - a neccessity to survive the mother of all aerobraking manuevers. You start to feel the force of atmospheric entry before the fringes of the canyon appear on the bottom edge of the Starflyer's visor. It quickly increases to a crushing intensity that pins you to the floor, all while the edges of the visor are licked with blue flames. More concerningly, you find that, whenever you turn your head, your worldsight begins to bend in strange ways and you feel an unfortunately familiar tingling sensation in your nostrils. Somehow, you barely manage to keep an iron grip on the controls with your tentacles.
It is then that CORS disengages. You look up at the visor and see vast, unearthly walls stretch out on both sides, with your craft plunging downwards at unfathomable speeds. To your horror, you feel the craft start to slowly wobble around its center, slightly at first but then faster and faster. An image flashes through your mind: a tumble too strong, and then being torn into a thousand pieces.
You can't think, can't act. This is it. You are going to meet an early end to your loop, a greasy smear on the walls of Lofted Ether's grandest canyon. Did you really think you could be an astrosaur.
It is then when you find yourself in a body that is not your own. All around you, the walls of the place you are confined in are shaking, and you can see an incandescent glow out the window.
"We're falling fast!" you hear yourself scream.
"I said we gotta go down fast!" shouts the familiar male voice.
"I'd rather get down in one piece!" you shout back.
"Same thing, hatchling! If we don't pitch forwards, we'll lose control! We'll ride the aeroshell all the way through!" the voice shouts back. Suddenly, you are back in your body, feeling the floor sway beneath you. Before any conscious thought crosses your mind, you grip the joystick in front of you, now filled with determination.
View: https://youtu.be/c1pPGdFncO4?si=sWWnkhukZyQSFmSj&t=60
Manuever Roll (Legendary): 3 + 6 + 2 (Manuever) + 6 (A Premonition) = 17
17 vs. 14 = Success
Guided by inexplicable instinct, you tilt the joystick forward almost completely. The Starflyer pitches downwards rapidly, the force throwing back. Yet, your grip remains steady. You can now see pale flames licking the rims of the cockpit visor. Alarms start blaring in the cockpit, with the engineering display showing significant overheating at the nose of the craft. Yet, you do not falter. The craft attempts to tumble once more, but you answer that with a twist of the joystick. The Starflyer banks to the right, and soon flies steady. You can now see the empty bottom of the crevasse in front of you, glowing with a pale light.
The flames surrounding your vision are beginning to subside, and your speed is steadily decreasing. Yet, the bend of your worldsight is glowing brightly, and whenever you turn your head, it twists in an unnatural manner, disorienting you. You continue to guide the Starflyer down.
Suddenly, the entire vehicle jumps, and a creaking noise echoes through it. Even after the turbulence subsides, you are now pushed back harder than before, as the Starflyer's speed drops precipitously. There's some force pushing you to a halt, and you don't know if you can make it through-
Once again, your body is not your own. A thunderous rumble echoes throughout the space, and you hear the male voice call out:
"Pushing through the dead zone! Hold on!"
When you return, you know exactly what must be done. To overcome the pocket of trapped air, you slam the button igniting the main engine. The turbine spins up, and then you are once again pushed back as the engine roars to life. You are now falling once again at tremendous speed, and the walls of the previously vast crevasse are now closing in around you. Your sinuses start to tingle as your worldsight is now impossible to ignore. You feel yourself getting woozy and the world around you fading away. In one final, desparate act, you shut your eyes, and keep the joystick steady. The Starflyer is now rattling as hard as it ever has, and alarms are sounding across the cockpit. You ignore them, while your worldsight's twisting reaches a crescendo-
Just as quickly as it began, the turbulence disappears. You open your eyes and-
Hallelujah.
You spend a moment in mental silence, taking it all in. What lies in front of you is a sight few Saurians could fathom. An entire hollow moon stretches out across your vision, tiny clouds hovering above a rust-colored shell. At the center lies an incandescent ball of haze, casting an eerie, blue, diffuse glow across the surroundings. Occasionally, you spot miniscule bolts of lightning on its surface. Finally, between the shell and the glowing sphere are countless rust-colored islands, held aloft in chaotic orbits around the latter by an unearthly force.
It's all you could have dreamed of, to be able to witness this sight in person. You only wish you had been able to come here under more pleasant circumstances.
The spell is broken when a skyberg suddenly wanders in front of you. Panicking, you slam the joystick to your left, and feel the Starflyer bank away from the interloper. It takes a good minute for your nerves to settle. You realize that perhaps is not the time to be admiring the scenery, especially when there are so many roaming hazards.
It crosses your mind that you have absolutely no idea where you are supposed to be going. The only destination you know of is the MBV Base Camp, but such a thing would be impossible to pick out among all the skybergs in the-
Of course! The beacon! Quickly, you pull out your signalscope and set it to the MBV frequency. After some time waving it around, you pick up the unmistakable signal eminating from in front of you, slighlty to your right:
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Kfv1WeoAvk
A banjo is quite a fitting choice of instrument for a journey into uncharted wilderness. You examine the path to your destination. It seems to lie on top of a powerful air current, made visible by what you assume to be trace ice crystals following the current's path. This must be one of the convection cells you learned about in class, transporting air between the freezing cell and the superheated core.
The Starflyer is now out of propellant, but you think you can use these currents to your benefit. You tilt the stick forward, pitching the Starflyer towards the convection cell. Eventually, you reach the updraft, which pulls the Starflyer steadily upwards. All the while, you are monitoring the beacon, gently guiding the Starflyer towards it. At times, you risk ascending above the target skyberg, but a sharp pitch downwards soon corrects this imbalance. Perhaps you are getting the hang of piloting the Starflyer after all.
After many minutes of careful gliding, you find yourself on top of the Base Camp skyberg. With the object now blocking the air current, the Starflyer begins to fall, but at a surprisingly slow rate due to the minute inverse gravity of the interior. You switch to the landing camera for the final approach. Below you is a gigantic ironbark, its crimson leaves resplendent in Hollow Ether's glow. Next to it is a reddish-tinted lake of water and a protrusion resembling a mountain in miniature, with more ironbark saplings lining the shores of the lake. There are two clearings on this skyberg: one of which is occupied by the Base Camp, and the other totally empty.
You aim for the empty clearing, extending the landing gear and firing the landing thrusters just before you are about to impact the skyberg. The burn still slows you down far faster than you anticipated, and you end up hopping upwards a bit. After this, you just allow the Starflyer to fall the rest of the way, with a short thrust at the last second. The Starflyer lands with a thud, and you are shoved downwards. Fortunately, you do not see any concerning indicator lights, meaning that nothing broke on the way down.
Sighing in relief at your first successful touchdown, you unbuckle yourself from the safety harness. In this gravity, you feel as light as a feather.
You may have accomplished the impossible, but your journey here is just beginning. What will you do now?
[] Write-in actions
Time: 25 hours/65 hours
Health: 10/10
Food: 100%
Sleep: 15 hours of wakefulness remaining
Inventory: Bridge Drone, Grappling Hook, Signalscope
