Barrens · Part 2
Her Situation
Episode 2
Everything hurt. Torso, leg, other leg; she could feel bones she never realized she had. She'd just woken up, and didn't know how long she had been unconscious. It had been less than five minutes. She soon realized a few things; namely, that she was, despite all of what must have happened, belted into her seat, and that her seat adopted a most curious angle relative to many of the visual indicators she previously used about the viewport to ascertain the direction of 'up,' leading to those very same indicators suggesting that up was left, and that left was down. After this, she made the mistake of looking down by turning her head to the left; most ominously, where much of the left wall of her protruding pilot's deck had been completely lost, she saw neither the ground, nor any great deal of distance between her and the ground, or really anything dealing in the ground at all: just a completely visually untangleable mess of green-needled branches, the thickest she'd ever seen in all of her travels, obscuring anything but themselves from view. She knew they were holding her craft in place against gravity, but she had not one clue what lay between her and gravity, or even how much of it there could be. Worse yet, everything hurt. It was coming to her attention, now, the exact nature of the assault waged on her shoulders during the crash - but as much as it hurt, it only made her think about what could have happened on the way down to cause it, which made her want to vomit. It would have been a terrible way to treat the branches beneath her that perhaps, maybe, might have saved her life (optimism was not a skill of Alastel's), jury still out, knock on wood, or don't - so she tried to think of something else, something easier to solve. Her feet hurt quite a bit too; D-spec boots weren't built to keep your feet perfectly intact during something like this so much as they were to set right away on helping them recover, so she set about on setting them off on setting right away on the task. It involved tapping a code into a region on her thigh, via the outsuit - the code was L44 - and it triggered a diagnostic protocol.
The specification implementation, at the time at least, for Jinrekians, was quite painful. All-purpose sensor electrodes attached to the feet, which didn't hurt so bad, and then actuators in the boots delicately manipulated both feet while reading countless known-and-unknown electrochemical signals via the electrodes, which hurt bad enough to make you want to amputate the foot with the boot included, but brought along specifically in the cross-section of the cut, so as to damage it, too, out of spite and - notably - entirely worth the wound contamination. She allowed the process to happen, gripping the armrests of the chair for dearest life during, opting to save code X21 - autoinjection of limited in-suit supply of a Jinrekian painkiller - for later attacks on her will to keep going. She'd moved around a bit during the process and hadn't noticed much of anything in the same way from the branches below her, but in the middle of a key discovery by her left boot, she recoiled quickly, almost as if bit by a rattlesnake, and screamed. The branches shook. She went to scream more, but her left boot had yet to cease, and she couldn't do it; her lungs were empty, and tears were streaming down her face now. Even in the face of near-death, this wasn't like her, but she thought she was dead. It was different to her, but not to fate; she certainly was not dead, the branches merely shook, and she noticed something weirder yet during the process: the craft had actually worked itself farther down now, and the branches started to seem displaced by something else. She had her first hopeful thought in a while, but she didn't want to screw herself out of it yet, so she sought further confirmation, barely caring that both of her boots had moved from diagnostics to therapeutic stiffening, and she was starting to get some relief from other means too.
Not there... No...
Finally, she had an idea. She looked to her right, and, yes! In whatever hell the impact had been, the upper-right seams of the cabin had also been separated significantly from each other; better yet, her right was her up, and 'above' her, she could see nothing but tree cover for what had to have been hundreds of meters. Considering these trees were already of completely incomprehensible size, she classified this as convincing enough evidence that she was quite close to the ground, and it was the ground displacing the branches; her craft was smushing them down against whatever else other than trees and snow covered this godforsaken planet. In tending to various other injuries, as well as generally calibrating her outsuit for however the hell she was to disembark from her seat, and, and also or, survive this, she decided to simply not shy away from disturbing the craft, allowing it to work even further to the ground; it did, working out perfectly, and for a quick second she was nothing but thankful for that. She was finally on the ground. It had been only two hours since she was at the Jemel-side of an exolane gate, explaining relatively simple subjects in magnetism to a robot that she knew she shouldn't be putting on magnetism tasks but could scarcely avoid having to do so, hungover as all hell from the rest she'd, somehow, acquired after her night of silence sat across from a stranger.
She looked out the viewport, finally right-side up (the outside, at least). She considered it might be, after all, time to assess herself more thoroughly. It probably wasn't any use doing whatever she was to do next if she were to die halfway to her first destination, she thought, and she also thought that her head hurt quite a bit, but other than that, nothing terrible. Still, it remained a priority, but not to a degree worth panicking about, so she decided to fully assess her surroundings.
She, of course, remained in the captain's deck. None of the walls fit together anymore, but internal framing, now exposed, still banded most of it together, and she figured the cabinetry she was standing on, and the table-top she was resting her back on, all quite naturally, didn't seem to mind providing the normal forces she asked of them, which was an added plus, as she had not much else on which to stand or lean. She looked to her side, opposite the viewport now, looking at the doorframe around which her landing-preparatory activities focused, but never involved. The door inside of it was gone, and the area beyond it was now warped upward. Almost without thinking, she started toward it, continuing to feel whatever foot injuries she'd acquired in the crash with every step, but knowing it was much less than she probably should have felt. Fortunately, clambering through the horizontal doorframe didn't involve the feet much at all, and it served as the strangest session of foot-rest she'd ever appreciated.
Once through, she, once again, took in her surroundings. More ship in tatters, more cold, frozen, towering-tree world shining through the cracks. (As is standard unless absolutely impossible, her craft had intentionally landed on the day-side of Jemel-III.) She also couldn't help but notice the first non-tree foliage she'd seen yet: poking through the much-more-destroyed flooring of this section of the craft was a jagged, almost-horrific thicket of bushes of needles. Like anything else on this planet, the needles were green, and the stems a deep red. Close up, disambiguated from the rest of the plant (she was prodding around in it; more foot-rest, technically) the branch structures were absolutely unremarkable. The green was typical for the type of light emitted by Jemel, and the branches themselves were also of a standard build. It was the macrostructure that put her off; the bush, when perceived in isolation, looked like a fire breaking out, and they were everywhere; she felt as if she was standing in a finely manicured garden retelling the story of her own yet-to-be-determined demise.
Most ominous was the fact that when she finally turned her head right, it seemed that, in its final fall from the lowermost treecover to the branches on the ground, this section (much larger and more significant than the actual captain's deck, which was, again, an almost awkward protuberance off of an awkward-shaped craft saved by its somewhat sleekly angled metal-plate cladding) had, due to torquing from tree branches on the way down or perhaps sheer luck, landed right-side upward -- where she expected to see her personal living quarters and the better of the two "kitchens" the spacefaring craft had -- was gone. She was again looking at foliage, fortunately more varied than the fire-bush and the towering behemoths, but foliage nonetheless. She saw more, tinier trees laden more densely, but with smaller needles. She figured they ought to be about as tall as both layers of her ship, which froze her, near-dead in her tracks, again.
Where was the 10-P's bottom story?
The only thing that she could think to do was sit down. She did. A panel of the floor steadied itself for far too long to accommodate this, and it only angered her more -- yes, she was angry, at least in part. It wasn't that she couldn't believe any of this, but that she could. It made sense. She was there for all of it. It had stopped feeling like a dream, and, like many in this abstractly shared challenge, she took one of her first dream-like actions in the entire sequence. As she was sitting, she looked at the cracks in the walls. The trees were poking through, still and again. She thought it might be early in the day; she was somewhat cold, for one, and the suit she had on was rated for warmth in her species down to 180 K, and she recalled somebody in the Exeter gate remarking that it might get up to 235, or so, Kelvin - a unit of your own invention, Earth-folk, but a good one! Theirs is similar, a bit more finely graded - on Jemel-III by mid-day this time of orbit. Hopefully that was right, and not some ghost of a fact that'd come to haunt her; those always seemed to happen to her. But she couldn't dwell on it much, and didn't really want to do so, either. The trees were in sight, the thin layer of thick snow dousing them was a pleasant sight, she'd been habituating to the bushes, and then, only then, she thought she'd heard a sort of bird, chirping away.
I don't get to see many birds, she thought.
It'd taken her a while, but she had finally accumulated all of the emergency supplies she could recall being in the sections of the craft immediately accessible to her. This amounted in quite the haul: two miniature injury care kits, emergency rations - a sort of dried-nut-and-berry formed bar treat created by the Jinrek and sold across the known galaxy, she made her own; it wasn't hard, that was basically the point, but they themselves wouldn't be enough forever - a serious length of rope, a utility edged weapon meant for just this scenario (but perhaps warmer environs), a Zenlot-Pentax-Fel 32.00004 - a specialty plasma subrifle, outdated as it is trusted, using one of the most accessible plasma cartridges in the galaxy - and, perhaps most importantly, a sizeable bag for carrying all of it and whatever else she could find; and she truly had so much room for more that she took the body harnessing kit for the (again, large, very large) bag she'd found. It wasn't high-tech-looking at all; basically just ropes and binding points, but this time the technological advancement clearly shone through the experience, exclusively in said experience; thousands of years of Jinrekian living-and-dying, more often in occupations involving physical work than not, led to apparatuses of this kind tending to be extremely well-fit for their body plan, however individualized it may be with respect to their species; put another way, support for their hardware was extremely mature, and highly optimized. The bag didn't even have that much in it, and yet, it felt as if there was, quite literally, nothing there. It was impressive, and weird; she was glad she wouldn't be taking it off as often as a person not fighting for their life would, that's for sure, but when fully suited, she felt a strong desire to pack stuff in the bag just to see how it went with respect to her anatomy. It usually went quite well.
Though, to the uninformed observer, the most impressive object Alastel had just haphazardly stuffed into a comically simple bag was the Z.P.F. 32, by a parsec. There were two dominant plasma-rifle designs in Salnamor as of Standard Year 9,954: one-stage, and four-stage. One-stage designs are self-explanatory, and four-stage designs are out of the scope of this text, but what matters here is that the Z.P.F. 32 employed a more-traditional two-stage method of operation. In simple terms, the first stage (one chamber in simple weapons, two in the '32, but up to eight have been used) prepares the substrate for plasmification using whatever means necessary for said substrate. Much like a 'one-pot' reaction, the one-chamber constraint required significant engineering effort to render this possible, and was largely driven by the circumstance of having only one pot - or, in the case of the gun, room for that pot. Rest assured, there were many individual steps also-known, also overly thought-out occurring within this chamber and the next, but they too are outside of the scope of this text due to the sheer number of them; it is interesting to note, though, that Z.P.F. weapons use hydrogen gas as a co-reactant in the process, unlike a more traditional directly nuclear fuel. It simplified the process somewhat, but made it more expensive for those actually buying the hydrogen; but nobody operating a Z.P.F. bought their own hydrogen, anyways, unless they spent their whole life on the same planet, accumulated wealth there nonetheless, and wanted to live a slightly different life. Alastel was living the life those individuals purchased a taste of, and to say she was thrilled would be a dangerous overstatement rendering you liable for treason charges in any nation she controlled (none). Still, she did love her subrifle. The second chamber, much more boring, was fed plasma by the first, and (more or less) injected energy into the 'round', and emitted magnetic fields shaping it into the desired projectile geometry, with associated differential performance properties. The '32, mind you, had only two: bluntly, one was for killing things that moved, and another was for destroying things that usually didn't. It didn't look like some dangerous, all-powerful weapon to operate - the emitted bursts of plasma, termed 'rounds' but usually representing only a fraction of a plasma cartridge's stored fuels, were spherical, and about a third the size of Alastel's fist. In the day, they looked like a byproduct of laser tag, and only looked truly ominous at night, but in both cases would leave a hole in you the size of them, straight through, cauterizing you in ways of which even an unethical surgeon wouldn't dream - but it was, or he was, whichever, cauterizing you anyways, and the fact that it inflicted said borderline insane torture on recipients of its wrath made it an incredibly controversial weapon in a world that was distinctly naive of the weapons that preceded it (not that they were any better; though, to stand as an object of horror all alone... it wasn't good, and only continued because of the versatile utility, whole-fleet synergy, and general productivity boost the platforms conferred). And no, the newer plasma-based weapons aren't any better than the '32, either - the subject of the preceding text was, more or less, the state of the art in induced ballistics as it came to the avoidance of killing or maiming, which was to say, abysmal in every sense of the word. The only thing Alastel could do about it, on this planet, in the context of what had suddenly become her life, just now, without any consulting of her even a little bit, except perhaps at her last meet with the spacecraft mechanic, was not point it at herself. She obliged her task.
There was far more in the bag than just the weapon and the food, though - most notably water-refining equipment, which she'd carried as a matter of habit for cheap(er) access to the life-sustaining substance when on the "road" - but most of it would, hopefully, not be relevant today, and in any case was so generic and anonymous as to make presentation of the items both halting and purposeless. The bag was slim, though, owing to both the, again, excellent design, as well as to Alastel's notable skill in packing such bags. It hadn't been her first time evacuating from a site that only used to contain everything you needed, even if it had been the instance in the most treacherous of environmental circumstances, but it didn't hold onto that title lightly, and usually only in the minds of those other than Alastel, as she was more partial to the cold than hot; and, ignoring all of this, she still considered that night on the ceded Alamedrian moon of Gh'Fria the most harrowing.
As she began punching out the shattered, destroyed wall of the semi-kitchen (it had a refrigerator, even before the crash, this much could be granted to it; there'd also been a window she'd never gotten around to placing a chair underneath) in which she'd acquired the food in which much faith had been placed, none totally improper, she found herself once again thinking about how remarkably engineered the systems suspending the bag from her body were. The wall was budging, and she could see plenty of (dimmed, shaded) sunlight illuminating the brush through the jagged metal edges she'd been working around in throwing her mass at the barrier, but it wasn't going fast enough. Like anybody else under the bodily duress of such a scenario, she haphazardly leaned her head around the corner of the entryway into the kitchen, peering back to the massive cross-section in the craft, an injury sustained at some completely unknowable point in her unconscious fall, finding that, indeed, it was still entirely obstructed by brush, and her previous actions had been, in fact, the only justifiable course of intent. She returned to it, decidedly pissed off this time, and a little panicked; she knew a day would last a bit longer on this planet, but she had no clock, and she'd never been that great with time - which always served to be its own iniquitous complicating factor - so she wanted to take care of this, and quickly. She decided to try something that had occurred to her moments earlier, but had been discarded because it would have stressed the more injured of her two shoulders: she twisted her hips and abdomen substantially, lined up her entire forearm with a piece of the wall she felt more comfortable with throwing her suit against - the fibers out of which it was woven were end-all, be-all, as you can imagine; they'd erased much danger in this activity already after catching the bent-and-twisted edges severally, never passing on the destruction to her via protective entangling mechanisms she'd never had any hope to understand in the first place, as the lightest, sanest atomic species with only four valence electrons never, ever entered that picture - and violently threw the entire mass of both her body and her severely packed bag and whatever momentum she could build up in the time to impact directly at a part of the wall in which her subconscious brain felt most confident. It worked, the wall separated from the frame cleanly, and - as expected, mind you - instead of falling forward into where a restroom had previously been before being sheared off by a protruding branch home to three intermediate-sized birds' nests nearly two hundred and thirteen meters above her, she fell about four meters, using the detached-and-battered kitchen wall in a way nobody in recorded history had ever managed to use the detached wall of a spacecraft before; she ended up straddling it, as if she was a flying squirrel, and the wall her thinly-strung membrane, but the kinetics of it all implied an aerodynamic stall had occurred, and in the strictest sense, it had, given the entire assembly was certainly not capable of generating lift even if it had acquired a forward velocity from a source other than beating.
Being mostly-clad in a suit made of the most valuable spun fiber in the entire galaxy, she stood up, mostly unaffected by specifically that fall - of course, everything else remained in pain, and the fact that the suit was providing compression to several, we'll say, significant injuries did nothing to blunt what another, albeit braced, impact felt like - and dutifully started walking. With everything in her bag, and no other crumbled, destitute facilities worth reconnoitering in sight, she decided it was her best option. She realized, quickly, that there had been other forces acting to funnel her craft downwards into its delicately survivable final resting spot (at least, the cockpit's): she was at the bottom of several hills. Even if she had fallen through the bottom layer of brush completely, she would have just slid, or perhaps rolled, in the craft (via the craft) to a similar spot. She'd summited one of the less-steep hillsides, still requiring a good deal of vertical motion, pulling and tugging at exposed roots, and hoping rocks were lodged in firm enough dirt for similar tasks; in exchange for her trouble, the hill had granted her the knowledge that the forest was dense, but not too dense for seeing through, but certainly too dense for doing so at anything other than a leisurely pace - also, that even after fighting through such a leisurely pace of ogling for long enough to notice the shadows had moved (on a slower-turning planet, too!), any other pieces of her craft were unable to be seen, nor were any signs of their having crashed down through the mind-rendingly towering foliage surrounding her even then at the top of this "hill," which was a hill to her, but the upturned heap of soil making way for a more proximal, massive root structure for any of the largest trees around her to anybody that made more of a habit of frequenting the surface of Jemel-III; this being true even though the nearest truly huge one (millions upon millions on the planet, mind you) was over one hundred meters away, as judged by the nearest portion of the trunk-surface to her most extended hand.
She'd heard nothing but birds for a while. It was soothing. On her home planet - not the home-planet of the Jinrekians, just the place she was from - there were many birds, and they weren't a threat to you much at all, unless you happened to have hand-food held in, well, hand. It wasn't always like that, though. Well before the Jinrek achieved space travel, or even a notion of it, these birds were massive, heaving terrors of the sky and land, and all other life on the planet ran from them, often at any and all cost, considering the environments in which some prey animal fossils had been recovered. Relatively recently, before the arrival of the Jinrek but much too recent to be considered eligible for inclusion in the fossil (or nanobiological) record, something changed; the atmosphere had become imbalanced, and the largest birds couldn't sustain themselves anymore, and life, overall, became smaller and more varied. It was a typical story (one she was incredibly bored by, working at the microscopic edge of evolving life, too), and she couldn't figure out why she'd been thinking of it until a bird landed on the gnarled branch of a bush directly in front of her, here, on Jemel-III. She'd been cluelessly listening to the birds, rustling in the foliage, an entire blurred-together milieu of noise on this planet, and not once did she ever consider that she might need to discharge plasma toward the fauna. She tensed up, substantially, enough to be plainly visible to the bird more or less in front of her. It flew off, darting through the foliage as if every branch for almost a halved kilometer's worth of distance in any direction from here was perfectly loaded into working memory, but it wasn't; Jemel-III had looked as it did now to Alastel for some hundreds of millions of years, and the birds - the one she'd seen was known to science, locally, as a jyuili'el fintal, which is translated rather unremarkably as "red-horned hovering bird," but it did, remarkably, have horns, not that Alastel noticed, but it did - had adapted with immense success over the same period of time. Looking up at the sun, noticing - once more, really - that it was almost entirely obscured by hundreds of meters' worth of trees, she fell back to judging the time of day by the general luminosity in which she'd been traveling, and, noticing that it'd brightened, meaning more of the day had progressed, and seeing as she still had no clue what, hell, time itself even meant down here, she continued walking through the flora, half-thawed slush (Alastel was, for a moment, concerned by this; and then she tripped on a rock and it slipped her mind), and needle-ridden mud gunk, hoping to find anything worth calling a destination, and soon.
She was continually trudging along; through brush, underbrush, thicket, and the rest of it, careful not to step into anything obviously strange (believe me, there'd been opportunities - the massive root structures she'd been navigating bore plenty of opportunities for cave-like structures to occur) and noticing her obvious injuries less and less, probably more through slow acclimation than anything else. She'd made it a good distance from the slain hunk(s) of metal formerly known as Alastel's 10-P, and seen enough disassembled debris on her way to know that the missing portions of her craft could really be anywhere, including in pieces, but without any further insight on how exactly the crash played out vis-a-vis the trees around her, she didn't have the faintest idea about where to start looking.
Before she could even realize the slope at which she was declining had been decreasing, or that the brush obstructing her movement was wearing out, or that the light-ish snow cover on the ground was thinning up, she'd happened upon a lake. It, having frozen over a long time ago, had piled up snow on top of its ice for the same amount of time and never looked back - but it was still clearly a lake, as no foliage was poking through. Merely a vast, white, finely leveled void. From her viewpoint, she felt she had discovered a brand new land; one almost devoid of the towering behemoths and their associated consequences that nearly killed her just hours ago, but, clearly, not for long: as she looked across the lake, it was also obvious that it was but one pooling region of a larger region of water channels, maybe around five to ten kilometers squared of area's worth of land, surrounded in all directions by more, and more, and more of the massive arboreal land-cover. Within the channel-clearing, the tree cover was of a much more manageable size; they reminded her of the trees on her home planet, at least from the perspective holding that they were not the size of an unfinished (well, just-started) space elevator.
It was good news and she knew it. Not only would it give her a chance to siphon what was hopefully actually water and refine it to a point of potability, she figured from how achieving landfall on this planet went for her, this place, marked by a dearth of aerial obstacles, probably contained a starport of some kind - whether it be a minuscule trade depot, a barely-anything research outpost, or even just some farmer (was this land even arable? she had no clue). However, compelled far more by thirst than by sudden stranding-induced loneliness, she set out immediately toward the center of the lake. When she reached the center, she got down on one knee - thankfully, it occurred to her, protected by a knee-pad - and set her bag down to her right. After unclamping the clasps, and unzipping a zipper made of a most precious galactic alloy not entirely relevant to the story, she dug out the only two devices relevant to her task: a fluidostat, and a Refinolux. The fluidostat, having been released into the galactic intellectual commons on the advent of its discovery, was a near-ubiquitous item in galactic survivorship circles, and it only did one thing: tell the user exactly the nature of the fluid into which it is placed. This was, of course, about five hundred things, split nearly evenly between contributing to resisting nearly every fluid imaginable, and helping actually assay the collected fluid, and it did collect, not just observe; the fluid must be drawn into a chamber for this, and measurement does change the nature of the fluid, but in a carefully calculated order so as not to render the measurements useless; oh, and also, hers, of a design she'd found online and served to an equipment-tender with her research-corporation for tailored fabrication, was capable of storing up to five samples for later. It was a very neat thing, in her eyes, though few saw it that way, other than the other "cloud chasers" (the pejorative language for her field adopted by those who fund it) she'd either been employed alongside or ran into on the 'road.' Most other individuals collecting fluids - a laughably vague construct possibly applying to an entire five percent of the working galaxy, indeed - needed to collect far more than the scant volumes afforded to her by her fluidostat, so it seemed almost as if a plaything to them. The Refinolux, on the other hand, was an item under galactic patent protection, and it cost her employer a petty fortune to acquire. Trifunctional, it was capable of refining potable water from air, sea, and even the land at a much-more-significant energy penalty, itself being debited to the emergency plasma battery built into the thing - it certainly wasn't a thing meant for using in your daily life, and getting the battery replaced, of course, required a visit from a technician. She felt a certain product-fondness for both objects, but she certainly felt it much more overwhelmingly for the fluidostat.
She'd gotten ahead of herself, perhaps out of that same fondness. She ruffled around in her bag, again, hoping to find the hand-axe by the blunt handle instead of even the (covered) edge. Much like anyone else might, she found about four things matching the tactile description - she hadn't turned over to look; her mouth was drier than the surface of a sun - and was forced out of her previous resting neck position, now ogling inside the bag. After - finally - finding the hand-axe, she began, perhaps anti-climactically, perhaps quite climactically, swinging it ferociously at the surface of the lake, clearing maybe a meter of distance from her body, if that, in the process. It was a clumsily risky decision. The ice beneath her could give way at any moment, and who knows what kind of water-adjacent bath it might actually reveal? She wouldn't pay for this decision today, though, and she'd had enough reason to suspect that, anyways; the ice barely made much in the way of any noise at all when she'd crossed it, even when she'd tested it aggressively closer to the shore. A moment's hacking had made for only about six inches of progress; the ice looked the exact same. She spent another three moments on hacking, smashing, and otherwise annihilating the ice beneath her. She didn't sense her own position move much at all save for that caused by said hacking and smashing, so she wasn't particularly hesitant about any of it at all. Eventually, she finally broke through to the fluid treasure, and treasure it was, for it was a brilliant blue, of quality and magnitude she'd never, ever seen. It was amazing, reminding her of the deeply blue skies of Xenelene-IX, a blue so prototypically, archetypally, overpoweringly blue that it formed the bedrock of the entire Xenthelnian - it came from that planet - religious practice (if you put the whole deity thing, briefly, out of the picture, at least - it was complicated, like any good religion was, and she didn't practice enough - at all - to be able to dwell on the matter any further than this, anyways). With the water in sight, and her desire to skip straight to lapping the (surely!) aqua vitae directly into her mouth sufficiently restrained, she bagged the hand-axe and returned to her fluidostat, using her index finger and thumb (of course, no Jinrekian ever called them that, let alone even heard the words, but you surely assumed as much already) to delicately draw out the pipette-end about four inches (again, completely foreign concept, though the quantity, completely sane), which was plenty; her destruction in the ice had left more of a crater than a finely calibrated sampling hole, so, to put a scientific spin on the matter, she could get her arm plenty up there anyways.
After sampling, it was clear that her restraint had been justified. The water was driven toward its blueness by a significant presence of copper, and, while it seemed to be more or less sterile to the fluidostat, it was packed with complicated organic acids. It was very interesting to her, sorely tried to near-death as she was. How could these trees, I'd think, at least, be doing this without anything around here bothering to stop and eat some of this? she wondered. She'd seen life in far colder places than this, but she'd never been quite this thirsty in one of them, so she proceeded with her next task. She pulled the hand-axe back out, and made sure to retrieve a bucket as well (remarkably high-tech stuff!). After widening the hole she'd made, she stuck the bucket directly in, now reassured that any contamination in the water was more than survivable by her suit, and that the solvent was actually water. Finally, closing in on a chance to be battered by the icy wind, alone, with no other tasks, for about five minutes, she prepared the Refinolux. It's important to remember that your standard-issue Refinolux is actually a reasonably big device - the closest comparison, in both your galaxy and theirs, is that of a mid-sized speaker "bar," typically employed underneath large entertainment screens, but in reality, it was meant to be stood on its length, and it was both shorter, and reasonably wider. She used her primary fingers, once more, to draw up an implement of this, too; this time a funnel, at the top, and she uncorked a drain in the top, and, lastly, extended a faucet about mid-way up the length of the device, hurrying so fast she almost cut herself on the obnoxiously edged corners of this device, for which the manufacturer had been sued in Smaller Claims Courts for over 10,000,000,000 unitarian mark. (One of the main social innovations of the Galactic Federation, ruled over by the Council - which, surprising or not, had a turnover rate similar to several establishments in the exo-gates she depended on for travel - in the last three hundred standard years had been in the field of lawyer availability, to mixed acclaim.) She put a bottle from her bag underneath the spout, flipped a relatively tiny button now sitting beneath the funnel on the top of the device, and, simply, started pouring her fluid harvest from the barren(-ish) bottoms of Jemel-III directly from the bucket. A fair amount splashed on her suit; she didn't care, and she hadn't any reason to do so. She stopped when her bottle filled (actually, the machine stopped filling on detecting this too, but that didn't help a one-girl team much anyways), put the bucket down, grabbed another of her total of six bottles, and repeated the process until nothing but extremely pure, relatively dehydrating water completely filled all six bottles. She took out a packet of Jinrekian-tailored electrolyte blend (conveniently stored in empty compartments on the side of the Refinolux) and salted-in one bottle of water with it, to a mostly-adequate dose (she hadn't measured it out, obviously), shook it briefly, and then drank around five eighths of the bottle in forty five seconds. She took a brief pause, and downed the rest in about ten. She wanted to drink the other five remaining, as well as five more, and then probably another five bottles of water, but she knew that she didn't know how long a day lasted on this planet, and that she ought to keep moving - and so, she did.
After collapsing her equipment and repacking her bag, she stood up, careful not to take a dip in the subdued-by-temperature copperous pool around which she planted her legs; a splash was one thing, but real water in the utterly frigid temperatures she found herself in? She wouldn't last long. Properly situated now, she realized that at the shoreline opposite the one from which she had originated stood a survey canopy. It was peeking out over one of the many smaller needle-based tree structures still covering the ground near-completely; and while the trees might have been smaller, they were not small, so she knew quickly that reaching the top would require some summiting. She didn't mind that; it'd probably be worth the windbreak alone, not to mention the obvious benefits an elevated position would provide for the scouting mission in which she was engaged. Alastel continued in the direction of the canopy, thinking more of the windbreak than the scouting. It wasn't just wind, either (never really is, is it?) - it was a blistering headwind, throwing microscopic suspended particles of ice at speeds fast enough to pierce an insect directly at her face. It was impossible to distract herself from via any means other than aggravation of the now-dormant foot injuries she'd sustained. So, onward she, not walked, but stomped toward the canopy, locomoting in such a manner so as to suggest to any (imaginary, nonexistent) bystanders that the very ice that bore her was indebted to her at a magnitude to which only, typically, a nation-state is indebted. If it weren't for the snow overlying the ice, or the fact of her boots being - subtly, as they were all-terrain - studded, she probably would have slipped.
She never did - not on that lake, anyways. Upon reaching the shoreline, she was greeted with a momentary serenity, the kind she'd expected to feel after finally acquiring water; not powerful, but powerful enough to make her finally slow down enough to notice the plants that were not immediately gashing through her tattered exo-craft. The foliage on this shoreline was different from that on the last, and it was strange: almost like a reed, it had a long, green stem, but the surface was broad, instead of circular, and at the terminal edge of the stem, the broad singular structure became tattered, ragged was the way to describe it, like a tassel cut to an almost fractal-like pattern at the end. At each of these structures' edges, they stopped being broad, and rounded out; and at those cylindrical stem-ends, there were the most tiny, but evidently there, buds.
What could possibly be budding here? The locals in Exeter said this place was snowy for its entire orbit...
Whether out of curiosity alone, or stress-induced habit regression (she loved to collect clippings on her home planet), Alastel collected some of the ends she'd been fascinated by, and threw them in a pocket of the bag - sealable - not exactly meant for this, but perfectly suitable to the task regardless. Other than those plants, there wasn't much to see here; with thinner trees came thicker snow, and she was consciously thankful for her studded boots this time, and made good use of them - and, at one point, a rope, as the slope of the hill she'd summited, carved out by whatever erosion left the lake she drank from, briefly exceeded fifty degrees - as she ascended yet another hill. It was not a flat planet, at least, not in her experience. Only after reaching the top of the hill, finding the base of the survey canopy, did she realize it was this hill accounting for a substantial proportion of the perceived tree height she'd registered earlier; she didn't have much of a climb left at all, but she was still hesitant, because it was also, only, at this time that she'd realized the survey canopy was made of wood.
Even in S.Y. 9,954, because galactic history simply never proceeded in as straight a line as imagined from the ancestral stomping grounds of any of the many spacefaring species populating said history, life was full of many pragmatic choices made purely circumstantially. Wood construction was perhaps the most pragmatic among them that remained in use. It was why she'd brought a hand-axe - better to have some structure than no structure at all if push really came to shove - but, as most anyone else probably would be, she was stunned to see it here, right in front of her, subjected to the same biting wind her breath became visible inside, for who even knew how long? It wasn't necessarily that wood would explode in the cold - that was known in irregularly cold planets, but none like this - it was a matter of who was using that regularly enough to require it but not regularly enough to prepare a proper structure? It wasn't like there were building codes out in the middle of an icy tundra only ever valuable to scientists in its anonymity, when any discovery at all on it was still a discovery worth reporting, because nobody even knew that it was basically just a big forest. Yet. Fortunately, obstructing further bewilderment, the wood did, at least, appear to be that of the trees around; a storm, or she expected a storm, at least, had felled a few around her, and it seemed to be the same material.
But the storm didn't destroy this...
At that moment, a chunk of snow only barely interspersed with ice was blown off of a tree behind her, at an angle perfect enough to strike her awkwardly; if it were any smaller, it would have slipped between the left half of her jawline and the top of her left shoulder perfectly, but it wasn't, didn't, and she would have fallen over if she hadn't remained in a state where she felt, as a consequence of said state, happy to have pain in the feet as a distraction from the cold. It hurt - it all hurt - but she turned to the steps of the canopy, and ascended them, too, having to climb over the top of the wall she found blocking further progress, as it, curiously, had nothing in the way of a door. At the top she found nothing at all, other than a peculiar piece of wood jutting out from the side of one of the walls of it. After a brief moment of deliberation, she figured she'd rather bend over for items from her bag than sit on the floor, placed her bag on the floor, and took a seat.
She took the chance provided to her by the momentary peace to dig around in her bag for the fruit-and-nut dried concoctions she'd made so-sure to retrieve when rifling around in that dreaded kitchenette of hers (as dreaded as it was, it was still nearly always going to be where she stored her food items of the snack category - or was, always was - due to its proximity to her captaining perch). They were chewy, as you might have expected from the description, but the berries, coming from a planet very, very, very far from here, but capable of being farmed in many places across the galaxy, were, more than perhaps any other berry known to galactic science, perfectly suited for the rendering in a pot required for the preparation of the relatively berry-agnostic Jinrekian cooking tradition, the end result of which being the thing which she was, of course, struggling to chew without a more readily accessible beverage within grasping range. She dug in her bag after unzipping it slightly more, this time surfacing one of the five remaining bottles of water she'd harvested earlier, and set right to work, genuinely, in good faith, alternating bite of cake-fruit and decoppered water, almost glad for those strange, forbidden, mushy chews that always came after a too-hurried sequence of said alternations.
Eventually, she'd finished about two and a half of the time-baked goods, as well as another (entire) bottle of water. The wind had lightened up, a little bit, at least, and, feeling the relevant urge, she clambered down the surveyor's structure and half-waddled, half-walked (it'd really only been about a standard hour or so since she'd last chugged from her now-replenishable supply), near-randomly sampling the land immediately around the tower for the location most insulated by wind. After she found a suitable location, she kicked away the snow covering the ground where she was - about three inches or so - and, undoing the requisite compartments in her suit, relieved herself, and then reburied the patch which she'd cleared. It was a harrowing scenario, perhaps the first time she'd ever engaged in such a, well, the activity, on-planet away from civilization, in anything other than a facility on a spacecraft designed for just that, precisely because of whatever it could mean - not that you'd usually know, exactly at least - for your fate on the planet at the hands of the wildlife. Smell was one of the most common sensory languages of the galaxy, what with being just chemicals suspended in the air and all, and it quite simply wasn't ever safe to assume you could just throw yours about on a planet with which you were familiar, because you weren't familiar with the planet, nobody was, and on the planets where people really were familiar with them, you'd more than likely be seeing the wildlife behind a fence, or a force-field, or some other container, anyways. So, yes, Alastel was scared, and if any creature had been watching her engage in such an act, it could have deduced so from the anxious nature imbued in the way she was stamping the snow-cover particularly packed over the spot in which she'd urinated. Aggressive, terrified, nearly panicked; at some point, the wind, quieted overall, threw a short impulse of gusting directly at her - at everyone, of course, but as far as she knew, only she was in the way to feel it - and she realized she didn't actually need to be doing this, for this long at least, and she clambered back up the stairs of the canopy, and noticed something: when looking in the direction that had led her to this structure two shorelines ago, she could see yet another frozen-over lake now; it had been obscured by foliage, as many things on this planet loved to do, but the source of the clearance had been the loosing of a branch she now realized had been trapped in the confines of several other branches of a neighboring tree, probably blown into its prison by a past instance of the wind now engaging her, bitterly, once more.
The wind was picking up again, well and good now, perhaps stronger than it ever had been while she'd been on the planet as adjudicated by the degree to which the trees were swaying. Both in spite of it and thanks to it, walking across the lake that had just been revealed to her, she could now see a horde of quadrupedal creatures running in a loosely-determined formation; the front of the herd continually broke away from the rest, then, realizing it had done so, would slow up, allowing the latter half of the lot to catch up. They were a gleaming unadulterated white, with a reflectivity she could tell was designed for a day not quite as cloudy as the one she was now experiencing; without the overwhelming glare of the star of Jemel cleanly punishing the surface unobstructed by clouds, ambiently refracted light led the horde to be, visually, much easier to distinguish than they probably would have been in direct sunlight. She estimated she was of a distance equal to one of the behemoth trees' height laid out, top to bottom, from the herd; and in spite of this, she could still see much more detail, probably because the animals were very large. Alastel could tell they had heaving bodies because of the awkward silhouette they cast in the overcast environment, seeming almost to have several hump-like structures on their backs (but this, because of their quantity and thus, their diminutive size, was harder to say for sure), and legs suspending them over the icy snow-laden lake surface that were at least one and a half times the height of the body itself. It was, undeniably, a most disturbingly proportioned animal, and watching them locomote across a frozen lake without fear or any kinetic reason for it nearly extinguished any hope she could place in the one vulnerability the creature appeared, to her, to have, which was that it was so bizarrely suspended from itself that it seemed like it could be pushed over on complete accident, and I do mean complete; she wasn't sure how one of them coughing didn't knock itself over, but she'd heard one cough up what, auditorily, could have been a rock, so she couldn't even engage in her typically humorous acclimation to unseemly sights such as this.
You may find yourself asking, but Alastel, was there anything else about these creatures that may have imparted such an ominous feeling onto your thoughts? and she would probably reply, No. For all intents and purposes, these seemed to be their major external variations from an archetype of creature known well around the galaxy; the ominous component of this was that these external variations were so well-defined, so clearly beneficial, and so directly enabling them to engage in a task she'd need several species' collective intellects to solve, which was, not fearing the water underneath the ice.
At least, this was her judgment prior to a sudden realization, that being the fact that the horde of creatures was traveling, quite steadfastly, in the exact opposite direction that the wind was blowing. She stuck her head over the edge of the canopy she'd been standing by, as far as she could, and then craned it to look in the direction away from which the stampede was progressing, and through the trees, still whipped and blown by the wind, she could see that, in this direction, the sky had darkened so much that it looked like night had been cast over just that region in particular. It wasn't the case though, as she could clearly see the structure of the stupidly dense clouds and, likely, storm system that had formed.
She panicked, again. Judging by the apparent distance of the storm, which wasn't much, and the fact that she knew of no other places on this planet other than a watering hole and a smoldering ship, she had nowhere else to go other than the spot in which she stood, staring at a cloud that she just couldn't believe was visibly moving, unquestionably, not in that questionable way clouds usually do, obviously billowing up at a speed which she could comprehend in something other than words. Breaking away from this thought, in the worst-case scenario that immediately appeared in her mind's eye, she'd be dumping her (massive) bag out and using it and the meager bit of canvas inside of it as impromptu, sure-to-be-lost wind shoring, stringing it up to cover the exposed - it was basically all exposed above the half-wall preventing her from falling out of the structure, other than the four minuscule posts extending above that implied height limit to support the roof - portions of the survey canopy. Hoping to avoid having to do anything as treacherously stupid as this, surely condemning both her canvas and her bag to disposal-at-sky, she presumed, in a moment of desperation, that others, those who had built this, had more likely than not been in such a scenario themselves, and, after another moment, this time of imagination, peered directly over the side of one of the canopy's four halved walls, and found exactly what she had hoped for: the missing portions of the walls. They were on hinges, and capable of being pulled up from their current positions via rope that was attached to their edges, and their sudden, confirmed presence explained a persistent knocking she had assumed to be branches from one of the many close-bordering trees around the structure, which she had been hearing for quite a while (her inability to notice the hinges, though, she had more trouble with explaining; she decided to chalk it up to her previously unfed state, and allow a bit of the fear she was feeling now to feed an increased vigilance she hoped would keep her from making a similar mistake in a scenario of elevated stakes). As quickly as she could, she moved to drag the wall-pieces up and latch them in place to dedicated counterparts mounted on the roof, and eventually, after having emplaced all four of them, took just the canvas out of her bag, and used some spare string - definitely not rope, too thin - to fasten it into place over the section that most directly buffeted the wind attacking her position. It made a detectable difference, even if her suit was doing an ordeal of work in harvesting excess energy and redirecting it to heating prior to this; the risk of her core temperature dropping, then-compared-to-precisely-now, had barely dropped at all, but the stress and physical discomfort of being cold had, and she was glad for it, and hoping the wind in the storm core (rushing toward her, now that the storm had approached more) wouldn't be strong enough to render the cloth she'd strung up meaningless when it actually struck.
Now, cut off from visual contact with anything other than eight halves of four walls, she realized that the reason she'd had to climb directly over the wall of this canopy after reaching the top was absolutely just for better sealing of the structure in this configuration, and also, that she had nothing to do but wait. She waited, and not for long; only for enough time so as to allow her to notice that the wood composing the structure around her all seemed to be cut to as few pieces as possible, except in the case of the many structural defects that Alastel could only assume had been acquired in the time this wood had stood as a structure, and not as a tree, as envisioning the unprocessed tree from which they'd had to be wrought produced a mental image of something no process-fearing lumberman would ever send for further treatment into structure-ready wood, even if that lumberman had but a hand-axe; but, they obviously didn't have such a mere dosage of equipment on hand, because many portions of the structure - such as, strangely, the bottom halves of three of the walls encapsulating her now - were still in their original, unmarred, one-whole-piece condition. As most of us are, were, and will be, the structure was obviously on the course of becoming, as opposed to merely being, but what it was becoming, other than a visually degraded, but perfectly functional version - yes, a version, not a progression, but a version; you could feel it - of itself, wasn't particularly clear. Any wordless concerns she'd generated in the course of this brief checkout though would be, to some degree, allayed with the arrival of the storm.
When the storm was truly over her, she knew according to two sensory detections: first, that the light filtering in between the wall-halves was of a notably lessened quantity now, and that it had taken on a decidedly greener character; and second, that the wind was blowing what had to be the most storm-adapted branches in the entire galaxy against her structure, and that, probably because it was made of the same wood as the branches thrown against it like the playthings of a child against a wall, the grievously aggravated contact wasn't doing much other than briefly deforming the wooden walls of the canopy, and - somewhat, sure, but not at any rate that worried her, even not knowing how long the storm was to last - deepening some of the preexisting cracks in the wood that had yet to warrant replacement by whoever had been maintaining it throughout the many standard years it had likely stood in this location. Feeling relatively at ease, for a bit at least, she thought back to the ominous white creatures - you, earthling, would probably understand them as something of a bison crossed with a camel crossed with a deer; I think it would trouble you, too - and remembered something from very deep within her, in halted, relevant selections. It was from one of the oldest preserved pieces of literature in the galaxy, a tradition kept and retold by an intelligent anthropoid species from the system of Avarana - this is, of course, the reason why the species need not be named; it would need to be distinguished from any of the other 13 intelligent species in this region commonly understood as the true historic homeland of galactic civilization itself, and that would take a while - and it was called only, merely Singal. It told of a man who, one day, under threat of the extinction of his entire species, went up to the heavens on an all-determining journey through the stars, meeting all sorts of imaginatively defined creatures of different species, all in the same plight, all, eventually, after sorting out their differences, banding together to defeat, well, the crisis. (Much of the meaning has been lost to time, but the words and their approximate connotations remained all the same). The lines bouncing around in Alastel's head most saliently were more mundane than this, though:
The White Beasts ascended the [Hill] and, seeing nothing But the Driest of [Dunes?], Stood, as if Divining, and they did. Out of the direction in which they All Stood arose a Storm.
The Preeminent Beast among them Spoke to his [Hand?] and said: "What is there to Do, [Hand?]", to which the [Hand?] replied: "Only what it is which we have Always Done." They ran Towards it, All of them, and the Storm saw this.
She'd forgotten what had happened after that, as well as the fact that most Avaranans had, too.