JONEVAULT Tracts

Her Mere Presence

Tue, 28 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Episode 3

We open on an all-kinds-of hospitality establishment on an exolane gate station in Exeter (Levan Bel).

STUBL, a drone-gendered Ynezelian insect, drunkenly: Have ye heard of Hyuntarax, the Black Sun, Jhuly?

JHULY, a Helsanite fungus, drinking only water today: No.

The table falls silent for a moment. Most of them have heard of Hyuntarax. Who hadn't?

ALASTEL: I guess I'm a little fuzzy on it as well, Stubl.

STUBL: And ye have much reason to be, dreaded one!

Stubl, sat next to Alastel, playfully elbows her. She doesn't take kindly to it, but remembers it's best to take everything kindly in her mutually enjoyed condition of drunkenness.

JHULY: Well?

STUBL: Well, what? Sun. It's black. What is there to well, well? Or ha? Huh?

Stubl is more forceful than they'd intended on the last beat; they begin engaging in the insect equivalent, or the closest identifiable analogue, rather, of coughing. It strained their throat.

CHRISTYL, a Jinrekian, dismissively: We were talking about the price of jenel these days.

LINSTAER, Halonite - species related to the Jinrekians, somewhat, but we can spare those details for now - anthropoid, as if roused from slumber by an impending car accident: It's ridiculous! That goddamn council--

STUBL: IT'S BLACK!

Everyone in the group stops. Most in neighboring groups stop. The bar is big, though, and most continue on with their selves and others after it appears the altercation is not physical. The group of mutually-found strangers humoring the insectoid sociologist Stubl, however, is still silent.

STUBL: But not a void, no... light escapes from it just fine, just not anything we can see. Well, Linstaer--

LINSTAER: -- they'll have to lick the trel from my --

She'd continued on her own train of thought the entire time, and only voiced it when her subconscious felt called upon; when Stubl started talking again, she was back at it herself, silently.

STUBL: Linstaer can see it, whatever the hell their seventh color is (hiccups) it's that. But it's pitch to us, and you --

Stubl was shakily pointing at Christyl, Jhuly, and Alastel, all at once.

STUBL: -- and you, and you, and you --

Complete strangers now; but the adjudication of their capabilities, ultimately, correct.

STUBL: And the rest of sixty five percent, and a half, a third, -- what? -- of the, the universe! Salnamor!

ALASTEL, in a manner only properly described as 'procedurally,' says in reply: Sure.

CHRISTYL: Stifled laughter.

STUBL, quickly: Same hubris that killed Queen Dreb, really.

CHRISTYL puts both of her hands on the table shared by all of them. A slight scuffle, the kind only the intoxicated who love each other, but have done so previously in a decidedly more cohesive manner, ensued - it was short, Alastel's drunk-shod arm shot up and seated her quickly while CHRISTYL managed a fair amount of rhetorical "why I oughta", and everyone was seated laughing at themselves before a drink-tend was forced to work up the gut to notice a need for manufacturing the audacity required to fake courage.

CHRISTYL, moving on: Queen Dreb would have benefitted from anything resembling the confidence required to recognize that one of the most perceivably bizarre solar systems in Salnamor might already be known.

STUBL: Yet she was killed by her machine all the same!

ALASTEL: Big deal. Everybody is killed by a machine these days.

ALL, plus some from neighboring booths: Everybody?

ALASTEL, after a moment of relative embarrassment: I mean, somehow, probably.

STUBL, crying out as if answering trivia: She was afraid of even reading the warning lights in a craft she insisted on flying every day! Why I -- never in a world either humid or dry!

ALASTEL: A planet is cloaked in an atmosphere that rejects water entirely. Is it dry or full of hate?

STUBL, CHRISTYL, and JHULY, all together: Hate--

STUBL, continuing: Obviously, and it was always a silly question, and you're lucky I do not hate you.

If Stubl and Alastel had been in possession of similar or equivalent amounts of time spent living, it would have been a grave and devastating declaration of war - but Stubl was 503, and Alastel still 192, which made it quite funny, and suggested the feasibility of two engaging in casual recreational sporting behavior more than it suggested anything other than that. Like with anyone else, it was a gamble, but taking it - 'it', the gamble, being interacting with others at all - with Stubl yielded more interesting outcomes than the typical fare, to be sure, especially when considering talent in anchoring a group of desperate-for-conversation strangers for lord knows how long.

JHULY, shyly: Mr. Stubl; the sun?

STUBL was playful just before, but happier now: It really is important, you know. You said you're studying macrostructures, right?

JHULY: Up in Xelarna, outside Xenthelna - still inside Xenthelnia though; oh, whatever you know that, sorry - anyways, I, uh, yes. I think I did.

STUBL, unfazed: You couldn't build one here. There. Here's probably fine. Anyways, nobody could.

The group remained silent after this for quite some time; about five seconds.

CHRISTYL: Ahhh... yeah.

STUBL: It's got something else with it, going on with it, yeh? That stellar atmosphere, billowing off so thick... like a damn wind...

After saying 'wind', Stubl looked off about fifty degrees to their left, angling their head about twenty five degrees down. In the realm of the physical, they were looking at some stranger's shoes.

CHRISTYL, to Jhuly: Nobody's ever seen one blow up, either. It's kind of scary, if you think about it.

Christyl Melenene Jerefel, better known as Xl. C.M. Jerefel, was one of the most pre-eminent minds in stellar astronomy known to the galactic center. Nobody at the table had any idea who she was; Alastel was the closest, having seen her name in science-journalism that'd reached her in aligned bored-reading times before, but that was as 'C.M. Jerefel' exactly, and she'd only introduced herself to Alastel as Christyl at the bar (Christyl had seen her reading an opinion article in Calibrated Salnamorian on her handheld, and made sure to mention it not at all during the conversation). All in all, Ms. Jerefel was having a great time, even if her time-stiffened demeanor made a worse window than it did a door (and even then, what locks enfixed! oh, but is that unique? no... maybe!). She also wished that Stubl had kept talking - strangely - but, sensing the situation, respected its outcome.

As Christyl mulled all of this over in her own mind, Alastel stirred her drink absentmindedly, and Jhuly pondered why a lack of an explosion could be scary at all for a little while. Then, she remembered her father's Press-Lock. See, as the very materials out of which clothes were fashioned changed wildly, so did, too, the techniques required to imprint designs upon them. As the environments in which the clothes were forged, generally, rose in energy - in the most dastardly of all senses, thermodynamic, mind you - so did, too, the energy required of the processes manipulating clothing after its most basal rending into a shaped, wearable form. The Press-Lock is nothing more than a contemporaneous instantiation of this need under such contemporaneous constraints, which is exactly why hearing that components of it had been recalled would have sent any organism familiar with the machinery into a fear-driven, biologically coordinated response for a meaningful period of time. Fortunately, her father never missed his thumb; you can just grow those over here, it's not very hard! Just part with a different-but-related appendage for a few days and hope the persons handling it and calibrating incubatory vats are truly council-certified, and I do mean hope, because a world in which risk without death can feel good is one in which the ability to defy both death and mortifying injury themselves only induces further demand for the processes warding off said consequences. Oh, and Jhuly's father retained all twenty-two of his most distal appendages quite healthily in the end! There was a day the staff forgot to feed the new thumb, but you'll have that, nothing to lose a license over, nothing at all, Mr. Fuhvur... nothing at all.

ALASTEL, after a solid minute of stirring: Jhuly... Fuhvur, was it?

JHULY, quicker than she'd ever replied to such a question, and more panicked, too: Yes! Oh. Sorry.

ALASTEL, who'd had her own thoughts about the Refinolux; much tamer, though: It's fine, it's fine. Fuhvur! Where have I heard that from?

JHULY: Well, I mean, do you read the print-design journals-

ALASTEL, suddenly, sticking her fingers out in the air as if divining: DX-15!

It was the name of an exo-lane gate, under-construction, never finished, meant to connect the Levan Bel to officially unclaimed space (the status owed in no small part to constant disputes between the Levan Bel and Premantel, as well as the distal Forax presence antagonizing and hindering Avaranan efforts to explore the region), both unofficially and obviously meant to promote economic activity out in the zone. It exploded, viciously, three standard years prior to the conversation Alastel and Jhuly were now having.

JHULY: You remember that?

Jhuly was, relative to the rest of the people working the investigation of the aftermath, basically just a student; but this was before she'd really hit the books and had plenty of social skills. She worked public communications during (and it was long, too... obviously, something that big can never just 'explode,' you know, and there were a solid two weeks between the first incidental destructions and what is euphemistically called 'total structure loss') and after the event.

ALASTEL: I love it when stuff blows up.

ALL other than CHRISTYL, who laughs, look at her strangely.

ALASTEL: Sorry. Been in a few.

JHULY smiles, then goes back to her drink.

LINSTAER, breaking out of her trance: Alastel, what was it that you were here in Exeter for, anyways?

All look toward Alastel in that unnerving fashion a crowd of known individuals are known to uphold.

ALASTEL sighs, slightly, and says: I'm heading over to Jemel via the gate soon. I received an eyewitness report a few months back from this planet over there. Not much in the way of anything there other than atmosphere, I think the guy was snooping around for junk metals or artifacts or whatever the hell anybody gambles on their time with there. I've never been.

Everyone is still looking at her, even more strangely now.

ALASTEL: Oh, right. Yes. I study life in clouds and other aerosols. The guy saw a strange cloud. I've never really heard of that before. Not expecting much. Usually it's something like "Welxian steps off spacecraft with no helmet on unknown planet; immediately colonized by unknown fuzz," so... I don't know, really.

CHRISTYL: I heard about that. Fytina's Growth. Did you work that?

ALASTEL, slightly embarrassed: Oh, no, I remember reading about that one, too. It's just that I was over in the Zin when that happened myself. That was what made me want to get into this, actually.

The admission hit the table with much more force than the fact that she was literally chasing clouds. The Levan Zin fought, and Pyrrhically won, a civil war to free themselves from the tyranny of the Levan Bel's decision to directly abolish various forms of financially backed institutionalized racism (largely due to the hindrances they posed toward pushing profits up under pan-galacticism - rich Helsanites were, like any other of their rich-ilk, incredibly racist) about fifty standard years ago, and were circling the galactic stage-drain now, practically begging an upstart union further out for admission. Everyone stared at their drink for a while, about a minute.

STUBL, finally blurting, as if it was the first thing that came to his mind well before Alastel had ever finished her own statement: Did ye git any of 'em? Zinnies?

He was using a relatively all-inclusive, but still derogatory, name for (functionally) anybody within the bounds of the Levan Zin at any given moment.

ALASTEL, still looking at her drink: Yes.

STUBL, clueless: How many?

ALASTEL: Plenty.

STUBL simply patted her once, strongly, square on the back and declared: GOOD.

Linstaer and Jhuly, being the youngest and therefore those with the most tendency toward the performing actions of the group, raised their glasses of drink and said something equivalent to Earth's "here, here" - it can vary by context, and half of the uses are in places where the Interlocution Standard Intermediate Language mid-word has the only truly fitting meaning anyways, and that can expand to anywhere between 1 to 5 words post-translation - while Christyl quietly said "Thank you." None of it was patriotic, all of it practical. It seemed to all involved, whether or not they kept a scholarly habit with respect to the matter, that past a certain point, civil war was just as much of a terminal psychological outcome as it was a political one, and everyone was more or less just glad to have an outcome in both arenas finally break their way for once, even if it took some thirty years of learned lessons across a border that had never previously existed to truly cement it - perhaps because one of the individuals getting their lick back on their behalf was sitting right there in front of them, and also because the economy in particular had never come all the way back on either side of the novel nation-divider aforementioned.

Her Situation

Thu, 16 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

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.

The Affair

Sun, 12 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Episode 1

Nobody knew why they called it Salnamor; the galaxy that is. I mean, Salnamor, that's the unified term for it; the Jinrek call it Sal'Namor, the Helsanites Sa'Lnamora, the Ynezelians Xalanore, and the numerous spacefaring species of Avarana all referred to it as "Salvarana" - lately, at least, because they were doing particularly well in an intragalactic popular entertainment contest. When they weren't doing that, they called it Salmanor. The Helsanites, currently, are situated closest of any of the species just named (and there are many, many more, each with their own barely-varied takes on the name, most adjustments being made to render the words pronounceable with whatever mouthparts they bared). They were around 3000 light-years from the Ynezelians, 1500 from the Avaranans, 1100 from where most of the Jinrek lived (Premantel borders the Levan Bel quite closely; most experts agree that the situation is "uncomfortable," but "stable"; same on the Premantelian border with Avarana), and, just for good measure, a dangling fruit from the tree of scale: the Levan Bel was 8000 light years from Xenthelna. The finest astronomers in each of these nations, and many more yet to even be contacted by this particular galactic community, all agreed that the galaxy was much larger than this, and that, generally, they ought to have heard from each other via intragalactic methods by now; but they didn't let it trouble them. The finest galactic historians, in comparison, were quite troubled; they wanted to know whether or not the other uncontacted-in-this-time civilizations still called it Salnamor, or, if their theories were truly incorrect: whether or not they even called it Salnamor at all.

It was exactly this that troubled the Jinrekian researcher Alastel Junclaro while she sat in what the station-bar's staff knew as Booth J42, a four-person booth (capable of seating five if you were to pull over that chair over there), at which she sat entirely alone. She was no historian - far from it; she studied aerosolized life for the Kintela corporation - but she was troubled by it nonetheless, because as she sat, drinking a beverage known as a fhuline - an incredibly vague term for all beverages containing a solvent (it was called 'profine') that was intoxicating to both Jinrekians and, relatively inexplicably, the Helsanites; the Jinrekians had two arms, two legs, and a mouth; the Helsanites were spacefaringly intelligent hypermotile slime mold possessing what you'd call a central nervous system - so did the Jinrekians, of course, but they looked none alike. She was actually drinking what Jinrekians call a fhelina; it is a simply-brewed starchy beverage detested by many who partake heavily in fhuline beverages, but enjoyed by slightly many more, and, at any rate, in an establishment not actually owned by a Jinrekian, she didn't expect much better; it was a Helsanite place, as she was on floor 17 of the space station bearing the Jemel-side of Exolane Gate JQ-98291. Of course, the relationship between the two was merely statistical - the Levan Bel was open, almost more than any other nation-state in the galaxy, to all species, granting them a nearly universal and equitably distributed opportunity to fall at great speed through the tattered remains of whatever social safety net they'd invested in some many ages ago; and, perhaps more relevant to the matter at hand, there was a Jinrekian drinking establishment on floor 15. It was the only one in the entire station - not surprising - and she'd taken that gamble quite often and borne all sorts of rewards for her efforts, so she opted for the Helsanite institution first, knowing that, at the very least, most people there would leave her alone, and the bartender wouldn't. It wasn't (particularly) a matter of discrimination - Helsanites had their share of regressionists, just like any other nation in Salnamor, but generally, they were better than most - it was mostly that Helsanites were simply more private than Jinrekians. Alastel was quite fond of what most people more properly referred to as the classical Helsanite shyness, especially in a situation like this. Even if the bar were to suddenly become packed (it wouldn't; anybody coming into a Helsanite institution is ordering takeout, even if 'out' is a bench in the station) she'd come to expect a relatively standardized two seats of space between her and the next individual looking to place an order. And, perhaps most importantly, nobody was bound to randomly show up in her booth, trying to engage her in conversation. But why was Alastel troubled by the fact that all of the individuals around her referred to the galaxy in generally the same way? The battery on her table-top computing device had died, and she was bored of straining her neck at the one she carried in her pocket all day, and, this is important too: she felt less stupid listening in on others after the third fhelina. Everyone around was saying Salnamor, however the hell they said it, but they were saying it nonetheless. It almost made her uncomfortable, and she couldn't tell why, until she realized that most of the public chatter was referring to the aforementioned popular entertainment contest, and that she didn't really care for Salnamor on Holo (or anything vaguely like it - people called her words including but not limited to "boring"), leaving the last time she remembered everyone around her in public saying the name of the galaxy in all of her tongues as the Last Disconnect. When the nebulae flared, she was just a little girl, about fourteen (in the last 1,000 Standard Years, the average lifespan of the average Jinrekian was 682 S.Y - societal collapse robs generations of much, but it didn't tend to rob them of medical know-how). She'd grown up in the Levan Bel, as her parents fled Premantel in S.Y. 9643 with (some) of the rest of her family. When the Disconnect happened in S.Y. 9776, her grandpa had been dependent on a medication from far-away Alamedria, still a kingdom then; he died two weeks into the forty-year event that shaped her early life. She was in a restaurant planet-side, on the planet she grew up on, watching some show she'd long-forgotten, when the channel suddenly flipped to the news; even after 10,000 standard years of spacefaring history, no true faster-than-light technology that didn't require warping space and then driving through it existed, so the news took about three or so standard days to reach her system, carried on the back of, probably, an urgent courier-ship instead of the standard fare most information receives: deeply encrypted and tacked onto any craft with suitable facilities that takes up an info-shipping contract.

Salnamor... Xalanore... Ghyunasal... if you were in a place with particularly good food, you probably heard it all, just like Alastel did, and was now.

She shook it off, convincing herself she had to. In reality, she didn't. Crossing into Jemel from Exeter on her exo-craft had, as galactic exo-lanes are wont to do, thrown the two magnet-driven fields (the craft emitted thirteen fields) completely out of calibration during the jump. She was stranded at this gate, operating on her mission to Jemel-VI - someone had reported a cloud moving strangely, with their own eyes, even, not even a drone - entirely alone, the last time she'd spoken to someone she knew personally being yesterday, on the Exeter-side of this same gate; she'd had a meeting. She had a moderate-sized team of three autonomous-instructable droids on her shuttle, and they were working dutifully in concert with the ship's on-board computing systems to recalibrate the fields. Typically, it took half a standard day, and they'd only been at it for two hours - which, as Alastel found herself surfacing the same thought, she proceeded to think that three fhelinas was a sizeable quantity for just two hours. Quite naturally, as if right at home - not that she could do this at home, where she'd simply pull it out of a refrigerator - she pulled out her hand-held, and ordered another.

After a short audio-call with her automated assistants, she learned that the recalibration on her ship was taking longer than usual. She, nearly immediately, proceeded down to the Jinrekian drinking establishment two floors beneath her, found a much-smaller table to claim, and irritated claimants (many women, many men, and two Ynezelians of their third sex - nobody cool) to the second stool until she finally found some working traveler in her precise predicament. They both stood there in silent, understanding peace, one neither of them ever expected to have or replicate ever again, as they drank and stared at their hand-held phones. It was more or less the same peace they'd have found if they'd situated themselves without the intoxicating beverages in similar proximity while waiting in one of the space-liner docks on the top floor; simple public trust. Alastel knew she'd never felt grateful to do this, simply because she'd never been forced into the chance, and was convinced the woman half-standing, half-sitting on one instance of the many stools of awkwardly universal height lining the station compartment, which was, itself, pretty sizeable, actually, and you could even call it a little big - but anyways, she felt pretty convinced that the woman across from her (not nameless, but nameless to Alastel) felt the same way, because outside of doing this for four and a half hours, the only real interaction the two had had were a relatively brief but deeply interactive and engaging conversation about the quality of the profine-mixed drinks here (tolerable, middling, many justifications exchanged), and a few instances of them showing one other something from their respective hand-helds. On top of the evidently mutual gratitude, any observer - there were hundreds, of course, and they didn't matter, and barely any of this would matter, too - would have identified Alastel and her stranger-associate as very tired, in a manner independent of that induced by the profine, and they'd be right. It was exactly how Alastel knew, at first glance, that she'd had the slimmest chance of ending up in this unusual truce: the one-thousand meeting stare borne only by those having chosen careers in a series of choices during which not even the faintest ideations of meetings were fathomed prior to committing to the career. God, were there meetings, and both of them had shared similar associations with any individual stranger on a one-on-one basis during any number of these meetings, but it was always the person speaking in the meeting that made it difficult to endure, and in this meeting, hardly anyone spoke.

At some point, Alastel had balanced the longing for bed with a desire to maximize sleep before her coming 'day' - she slept whenever she could, really, but the one thing she could credit her employer with was complying with the law requiring her to receive adequate doses of sleep while traveling alone - and closed out her tab in Galactic Standard Credit (for a mild fee, being in the Levan Bel and all). She was a tad surprised at her degree of intoxication; she knew she was smiling, which was weird for her in public, and she also knew she was standing, and walking, just a bit weird, but in a way directly suggestive of her perfectly legal imbibement; after 192 S.Y. of life, she'd, finally, destroyed that bit of anxiety in her head that told her even this degree of intoxication was an utter embarrassment, and was looking forward to carrying her slight smile for as far as she could; she expected it would last a distance equivalent to about four hundred meters (not that she numbered it in her head; she was imagining a food stand she'd passed earlier), because by this point in her life she now, also, understood that walking with her intoxicated posture was likely to aggravate a set of muscles in the lower right of her back that she dearly, deeply hated.

Oh, whatever, she thought.

She walked out the undoored - well, there was a gate, but she didn't know that, and it was hardly ever used anyways - entrance to the bar (well, you'd call it a bar; like anything else, it had around 92 names in Salnamor, but none of them were actually 'bar') and, unusually hastened after leaving such an establishment, immediately proceeded on her route back to her ship, but she quickly realized that the night of drinking had left her in a reasonably different perceptual state than the one she'd left the Helsanite spot in; after a few fhelinas anyone susceptible would feel at ease, but this, what she was faced with in face, body, and brain, was much more typical of intoxication of a higher magnitude. She'd trodden this path many times, and was in no danger at all, but it struck her across the headspace so particularly in this moment because - again, as had happened before, but at a higher level of abstraction - she'd never been here before. This station, at least. It wasn't shy about it either; like any other station she'd frequented, dropped into, or otherwise liminally inhabited, it was full of corridors lined with compartments rented out to all kinds of commercial tenants, these corridors never fully explaining the full spaceprint of the station due to the sheer quantity of hidden mechanical workings maintained by robots, the occasional organic person, and a great deal of public funding - yes, even in the Levan Bel; they didn't fund a lot, but they certainly funded the thing in which any half-read passerby was most likely to spend their usually-boring hours dawdling around. This station was like all the rest, save for one remarkable repeated feature she'd never seen in space-bound environments throughout her entire life: at regular intervals, massive, abstractly geometric but still ultimately arc-shaped (they varied; it was clearly an art installation, too) arcs of wood were emplaced. They were beautiful, imposing, and obviously not structurally relevant - there was gravity, even if induced, but it was "holding" up four more floors; give me a break - but more than anything they were made of wood. To Alastel, it was a planet-side material, largely decorative; you'd build something real out of wood if you were bored as a child, maybe, but more likely you'd just carve something, if you were so wood-inclined. She came from a planet of trees, yes, as did many countless individuals all across the galaxy - nature is quite fond of the tree - but she also came from a planet of astonishingly destructive weather, so a tree had never been anything but a symbol of the dual-edged character of nature to her; life gave her the tree, yes, but it also gives the tree to the house. Appropriately sensitized to analytical interpretation of the humble tree, the meaning of the wooden work sprawling before her was immediately clear in her mind:

I am a part of this.

It was a pleasant experience until that. She hadn't expected something so raw, so deceivingly simple and egregiously interpretable, and was certainly not fond of the way it immediately imparted an ominousness onto her. She wouldn't stop thinking about it in vague, abstracted feelings until she reached the food-stand she had remembered earlier.

Jemel was not a very populated system, which was abnormal considering its closeness to the galactic center, the frothingly economic heart of interstellar exchange, diplomacy, and culture (which was also well-doused in most particular electromagnetic forces; you do most of your business inside over there) but it became much easier to parse when the beholder beheld the planetary children borne by the parent star, Jemel Prime. As an exostellar exobiologist - she, like most others, hated the imaginary tone of the title, and preferred a trite "ExBio" in reply to the unceasing questioning on her occupation inherent in leaving the house - she spent much of her life in pass-through systems like Jemel, populated with nothing in the way of intelligent life, but undeniably full of thousands, upon thousands, upon thousands of previously undocumented tree-like lifeforms. This was not an exaggeration; outside of the full endowment of atmosphereless rocky almost-spheres, Jemel was home to a nearly-unprecedented seven forested celestial bodies, four of which are found orbiting the exact same gaseous giant, lingering ominously firmly in the middle of the planetary distribution in stark defiance of nearly every conceivable statistical trend applicable here. Her intended destination in Jemel on this trip was, unfortunately, not one of those forested moons; instead, it was one of those Jemelian planets that might as well be classed with the rest of those barren rocks only briefly mentioned earlier, and truly would be, if it were not for a strange, sulfurous, methaneous - but wisp-thin - atmosphere wrapping it, and some strange ammoniacal pools found not-rarely on the surface; yes, indeed, it was Jemel-VI, nicknamed "Lesnel" by local Helsanite Levanelians working in gas extraction around Jemel-VIII, the previously-mentioned gas giant too boring for durable affectionate pet name acquisition (not that Lesnel fit any of those qualifiers; '-snel' being a relatively derogatory Helsanite suffix most literally associated with a noxious mucosal excrement serving an agonistic pheromone-like purpose in a common avian species on the Helsanite home planet). As much as Alastel was aware it would make much more sense to feel as if she was chasing any of the numerous arboreal specimens anywhere else, and to find a sense of comfort in it, she didn't, and wasn't; the object of her homing, targeting, but ultimately wandering desire was, today, Lesnel. She was excited! And alone-but-for-bots in her craft - which, in the interest of lessening repetition, might as well be specified as a Thundelex 10-P SLX built to the KQST-class Alamedrian naval explorer specification (worth every unitarian mark it cost, even when factoring in the degree to which the 4-kelvin freezer unit required hurt the proverbial wallet), capable of truly trans-domain navigation - was possibly the safest time to admit it, even if half of the trappings on the 10-P were immediately suggestive of said interests, and she was already known on several gate-stations for bearing a faint smell of ammonia; not from Lesnel (she'd never been) but from other bodies infested with it in their own atmospheres.

Alastel's 10-P was in the middle of broad space - a spacefaring term for the macroscopically barren regions between planets when operating within an established stellar system and not passing through an asteroid belt - when an alarm sounded. It was an intermediate-level warning, dealing with one of the millions of neutron channels in the craft's post-fusion core. As her travel agenda had factored in information deposition and acquisition across the way, she was nearing Jemel-III at the time; this was one of the forested planets of Jemel, a hotter one at that, and she (seemed to, presumably) have acquired some information parcels intended for a small trading post on the planet (there wasn't much else there). It wasn't technically legal, but it had never been made impossible, so she always did it, mentally, anyways: she knew it had to be about thirteen melnets of data, too, because storage was running her about 1,000 watts of energy (the fusion core, mind you, obviously did not care, but it was visible after some napkin-work in the head, after you remembered there weren't other places for energy to go out here), and the last time she had an open contract for data of that size (orbitally inferred genetic data, from a new and ultimately debunked technique, for an entire planet in Xenthelna) it dealt her the exact same minute blow to energy capacity. Despite the fact that an alarm had just sounded, Alastel was thinking about all of this, too; her automated help was more than enough to handle an intermediate alarm, or at least recognize when they weren't. In her time - it was Standard Year 9,954 - this was actually disappointing, even for budget robots, or at least, it would be, if the KQST specification was not inherently an absolute pain in the ass to pilot. 'Naval explorer' tended to conjure up images of an elegant seafaring craft, half-immersed in the water, at complete mercy of the waves, in most galactic youth - it was truly consistent, despite the distance, and it was actively studied by psychologists, but that's a story for another day - but the KQST-class Alamedrian naval explorer specification, quite frankly, treats the entire universe as an ocean, save for those 'oceans' considered too expensive for massive-scale scientific investigation. Yes, that's right; there were many nerd-children across the galaxy that had a perfectly accurate conception of what a KQST-class craft looked like as well, and they only suffer minor social penalties for displaying this ability. The scientific-living-entity-helmed-drone nature of the craft had little to do with how difficult it was to operate - the Levanelians themselves made an even-more-costly alternative specification that was a dream to operate, and, correspondingly, a nightmare to purchase - that was, instead, determined largely by the fact that it had "no default control regime" (the most-oft touted line from the committee that designed the specification; it has been parodied in even Salnamor Night Live, an annually-galactically-televised semi-theatrical event operating adjacent to Council Day, the yearly event recognizing the formation of the Galactic Council). It was one of the most famous euphemisms in galactic history. See, in order to manufacture a craft at (relatively) accessible pricing that was still capable of serious all-domain scientific work, the Alamedrians - demonym for multiethnic citizens of the Alamedrian Confederacy - decided to design the ship with independent locomotive motifs for each of the domains it was likely to penetrate: land, just a little bit above the land, way above the land, space, broad space, and massive bodies of liquid. It was, ultimately, quite good at whatever it had to do in any of these places, but it certainly didn't look good doing it - bearing four unique sets of engines at its behind, and fitting an enormous array of in-craft services through sheer abuse of the fact that thrust may be routed through the center of mass as a means of appeasing the lords of physics - and it didn't feel good to make it do these things either, as it featured, quite literally, four different sets of controls, and doing any serious regularly-cross-domain work can either involve what might as well be musical chairs (the specification calls this layout the "Quad-Box" - also parodied) or, for an optional fee at the time of assembly that Alastel was happy, but not too happy, to pay for, the pilot may select to operate from a rotating control deck; sitting at the single-helm in this configuration, anchored to face out of the (admittedly pleasant, almost beautiful) basically-spherical glass window into the void, did nothing to make rotating the deck feel less like playing with a toy for children. It was about the time that she got around to lamenting this herself that Alastel noticed the intermediate alarm disappear, only to immediately be replaced by an Intermediate-High {C2, Chemical} warning; this one appearing directly in her field of vision, emergently (but with some class, which was strange) blinking, thanks to her ocuvisor.

This was a problem. She had only been on board a craft experiencing a C2-C warning once before, on her way to a research site in Xenthelna. A member of the cooking staff working a High-Throughput Oil Bath had failed to check whether or not a bag of flash-locked flinir - delicious scran, flinir - was actually flash-locked (a special case of a temperature-removal process, perfectly suited for food, but requiring special storage processes beyond mere temperature maintenance). The process, actually, deprives the substrate of water, but food materials must be treated with helxenthimine and substrate-specific co-crystallants prior to flash-locking in order for their delicate pre-cooking structures to withstand the process at all (but, with the compound applied, they withstand it perfectly, and helxenthimine is only toxic to around forty percent of the galactic population, none of which were Jinrek as Alastel was). This is, generally, unless cross-contamination occurs, a pretty safe operating regime, until oil baths become involved, as helxenthimine truly despises oil, and its co-crystallants might as well see it as the devil incarnate. Plenty of solutions exist - the most commonly employed is yet another pre-treatment process, of course, just as the least commonly employed is - but none of them mean a thing if the food-to-be-cooked is presumed helxenthimine-free. Forty were killed, one-hundred and seventy two wounded, and the incident was very nearly shown in food-preparation textbooks the galaxy 'round forever if it hadn't happened while docked on-planet, and a generally habitable one at that, during an unplanned refueling stop (fuel is so much more expensive on-planet these days). She'd escaped unscathed - she was four decks up, and materials are quite strong in spacecraft, believe it or not; most deaths were in an adjacent dining hall with very little blast-sealing separating it from the site of the explosion. This fact, in contrast, was to be shown in galactic textbooks forevermore; just in far-costlier texts typically purchased on loan at a young age - but it was tough to forget the sensory experience. She'd heard a few real explosive actions before; naval displays on-planet, pyrotechnics; but every part of those experiences had been engineered to reduce fear while maximizing rewarding, warm awe, and the discharge she'd experienced at the hands of (as she still believed, worth-the trouble) flash-fried helxenthimine was more or less the opposite.

In response to the warning, as a precautionary, galactic-council-mandated measure, Alastel's 10-P immediately pivoted toward the nearby Jemel-III. Onboard, deterministic computing systems knew immediately, well before their pilot, that the emergency had nothing to do with the propulsion, yet - and they definitely knew the 'yet' part, too - and began cutting the supply of energy to everything else on the ship in exchange for pushing more, more, and even more to the forward propulsion systems. Most drastic of the measures taken completely autonomously as a matter of craft-state included a substantial reduction in internal atmosphere homeostasis, as well as an anti-EMF magnetic field generated specifically to prevent exposure to harsh stellar radiation that could change her life permanently in a matter of hours - but, again, software of the simplest form known to the galaxy knew quite innately that she'd be on the surface of Jemel-III, one way or another, well before that. And, so, toward that fate she - literally - accelerated, at a level of force almost uncomfortable if it weren't rare enough to be enjoyed anyways, no matter the circumstance (again she was hit with memories, but at this point, she truly couldn't spare the time for them - yet, like anyone else, they still appeared, in a moment of time she'd remember for quite a while - but ever so quickly still! - extending their own lifespan in her mind, whether or not she wanted that being completely external to the happenings). In a sudden moment of agency, she reached wildly with her right hand to a place off to her side without much in the way of even a glance, grasped around, found the tablet-shaped object she was looking for, and yanked it over; being on an articulated arm, it never carved the exact arc through space that her own arm wished it would, and this was never more irritating than when said arm was acting out of nothing but the instinct for survival - but she didn't have time for that. She did have time for aggressively tapping out the command she'd reached over to run with more ferocity than she'd ever typed anything, though, and thankfully a concordant velocity. At the conclusion of her furious typing, a semi-neural software interface began an interpretation session, dumping the raw flow of data through the ship's deterministic computing core and producing a natural-language scenario readout guaranteed accurate if run under known conditions (as offputting as it sounded, it was also pretty obvious to her that the assumptions of millions of unknown-to-her persons with varying levels and content to both their agenda, power, and qualification for being in their position were at best dubiously preferable to an assembly not trained on their work directly at all, but instead the known universe of possible work done by their own machine - plus, these days, it told you when it hadn't seen that scenario before anyways). Just as it was in 85.7% of all queries, according to the most recent data, the interpreter had seen the scenario before - out near Forax space, believe it or not, but it's not like anybody at Thundelex was at liberty to disclose that, or could even know it without three weeks of effort - and it was dire. Three of seventeen secure gaseous containment canisters used to supply a variety of compounds necessary for craft operation had failed from an electrical issue. The location of the failures - the three forward-most on the solar-facing side of the craft - was highly suggestive of a failure in one of three non-medical targeted anti-hazard fields, that had led to a precipitously strong induced current in wiring near those canisters. Secondary signals (too many to enumerate - the thing was loaded with sensors) suggested an uncontrolled chemical reaction had broken out as a result of this, and was set to immediately threaten the in-craft environment. She threw the screen panel out of her way at a pace that could break a neck, and was out of the chair before the arm on which it was mounted recoiled hard, bouncing off an unseen blocker of a shared material when reaching a maximal angle of turn set by said blocker in a way suggestive of deep, immense pain - but she was out of her chair well before it could come back at her, darting quickly to a compartment on the rear wall, above the door to an intermediate space between other compartments. Inside of it was a snugly-fit box, almost as if purpose built for the compartment (it was, by law) which she ripped out of its lodging so hard that it would probably fit snugly no longer. Again, acting instantly, she lifted it up by the handle with both hands, and moved her hands as if shaking dust out of the heaviest carpet in the galaxy, so hard that she was afraid it would fall out of her hands, exactly as trained. The moment her arms could no longer move downward, the trajectory of the suit inside was set: the bottom of the box sprung open instantly, and a fitted, feature-complete Disaster-spec Outsuit sprung out, directly toward the floor of the ship - but before even a pocket-latch could hit the floor, particularly mounted and polarized magnets implanted in the outsuit and her flight clothing found each other through spacetime and closed the distance to their designated mount points perfectly according to plan.

Perfect! Okay... Head, feet. Head, feet. Head, feet...

She had two more things to find, but it would take but one strange, diagnostic action: she immediately jumped up two and a half feet and jammed her hand, intentionally, into a latch in the roof of the cabin, found a handle, and pulled it. It was on a rope, which itself forced open two other compartments to her left and right via mechanical action alone. These opened about one hundred and twenty degrees, leaving their contained objects at the perfect positions for imminent access: a Disaster-spec helmet was at her torso, ready to be grabbed, and a pair of similarly-prepared boots appeared at the level of her feet, lodged-by-committee into its own specially designed foam to accommodate the quick shoving of feet into the holes of the boot with little-to-no movement of the apparatus at all, but not at all impeding removal of the foot-boot complex. She obliged the suggestions of both compartments, dashed back to her seat, and belted in. From C2-C alert to belting, the entire sequence had taken about seventy seconds. In most C2-level scenarios, this was too slow, as the intended time from "alert-to-suit" is generally forty-five seconds, give or take about ten - but both the projected safe average and the interval of confidence were larger for C2-C situations, anyways, due to the heterogeneity of the disaster class. At any rate, in the same amount of time, forward propulsion systems had consumed forty percent of the fuel supply, leaving Alastel at seven percent total supply remaining, and entering the atmosphere of Jemel-III at sub-light speeds. The necessary anti-hazard field for such an activity was, diligently, kept well-intact for this task, and dialed well down after backward-propulsive systems slowed the craft (notably, this too consumed more energy than you might expect, as it required pseudo-gravitational wave emission to keep endured forces livable). Watching another readout, reading faster than she ever had before, Alastel's hands had now moved to the ship's actual, manual controls in preparation for a loss-of-autonomy event - she had no reason to believe it was particularly likely here, but deterministic energy-provisioning systems are designed to ration energy away from automatic piloting as a last resort, and not having her hands near the joystick at the time it happened, if it happened, would be a sentence to death. The atmosphere of Jemel-III - a crisp, cool blue, pierced by countless, uncountable snow-covered pine-like trees for as far as either eye or satellite can see - dominated the view out her viewport now, and she was beginning to see the faint detail of flora below, but she was still too far away to see trees. Then, another alarm sounded.

LOSS OF AUTONOMOUS PILOTING IMMINENT. PREPARE FOR MANUAL CONTROL in 00:29... 00:28... 00:27...

She was, genuinely, deeply surprised by this. Autonomous piloting loss was truly a last resort, so much so that most of the time it happened, it happened unexpectedly, unannounced, often due to direct failure of related components. Something different was obviously happening here; most likely, that the deterministic-probabilistic symposium of autonomous operators identified the inevitability of such an unexpected event, and simply started expecting it. This was amazing! She'd know exactly when to expect force to start transferring through from the craft to her controls; when to bite back. That was the killer, and a computer had stared it dead in the eyes and bounced it on her behalf - or at least, that is what she earnestly thought, until the next sound to break through a wall of salience into her brain. It was impossible to put into words; the type of sound you hear in a cinematic production during a massive, terrifying, doom-condemning mechanical failure, so bizarrely pitched that you feel as if you're hearing what a pet hears when it hears a whistle you cannot hear, but it can; so disconcerting that, to the brain, it simply cannot be real (and of course, in the truest sense, it wasn't - it was invented, or perhaps discovered, a thing only a machinating, living mind could have brought into existence). Later in her life, she'd be able to describe it accordingly:

At first I heard some whistling; localizing it, it was almost whirling, not exactly in one spot. Then, quickly, a tiny discharge, probably explosive, but almost high-pitched; definitely on the outer edge of the craft. After that, it was basically turbulence; I think the atmosphere was ripping my ship apart, but my ship isn't made of paper, right? Compartments were probably vibrating, I think. Some of the stuff I saw inside afterward was consistent with that. It did that for a while, I think - couldn't really pay attention - and then there was, I mean, you know. I was getting pretty low after that.

It would take her quite some time, though. In the moment, all she really knew was that at twenty seconds to doomsday, the whistling started, and the "turbulence" - a grievous euphemism, here - started exactly at zero.

Convulsing, all-powerful bursts of compressed atmosphere buffeted against the craft like fifty-foot waves do a wooden mothership, but all while traveling at approximately one landform per second. The core of her cockpit - seat, controls, screens - was all stabilized about the same frame of reference, but mechanically, and the rebounding of far-futuristic alloys can only do so much to curb the fact that that rebounding is occurring within a spring made of metal, and all of this occurring within a spacecraft literally coming apart at the seams no less. The highest-amplitude shocks of air still hurt, considerably, and the craft-belts weren't much more than permission to think about things other than flying about the cabin like luggage right now. They were meaningfully more futuristic than the stabilization technology keeping her generally in the same area; these were rubber belts controlled, again deterministically, by firmware in the seat to both contain passengers in the most trying of conditions while minimizing damage to soft and hard tissue - ultimately, due to the forces involved, passengers still ended up looking like passengers of a past era, in lower-tech craft, traveling slower, working with a bit more time and a bit less force. Nature cares for not much else other than energy; and specialty craft-belts are a necessity, not a luxury - and an extremely sharp pain; well, dueling set of pains, in her shoulders, at two of the highest-pressure contact points with the belts, aching like a double-displaced heart attack with every excruciating tumble of the craft, reminded her of this.

A number of tumbles later, all the while incredibly aware and acting quite successfully to minimize the rate of rotation of the craft while delicately applying forward propulsion when her sense of gravity told her to do so, but not thinking of much else, she had a moment of clarity with respect to her sight out of the viewport: she could almost certainly recognize the flora on the ground as tree cover now. Make no mistake, the 10-P still had reasonable altitude - Jinrekian eyesight is quite good - but she was too close for comfort in this state. At the next chance she got, aligned the right way for only a moment by the forces the atmosphere reactively impinged upon her ship, she gave the 10-P much more throttle than she had been, and gained quite a bit of altitude, and thus, some more time to think; but she appreciated another gift much more, which was a temporary loss of pitchwise rotation on the craft. Quickly, she rotated into an awkward, but well-engineered, emergency glide position - but it wasn't functional. The craft was stalling, sinking through the air, probably because some of the craft, somewhere, was gone, leaving it incapable of truly slicing through the air in a way amenable to it, and instead performing a doomed, cheese-grater like action with respect to its movement through the fluid.

Not good.

She kicked out her left foot to a sort of pedal - it had some framing to it, much more for kicking than depressing, and there were, in practice, very many ways to successfully hit it with your foot in order to get it to actuate - that triggered a special subset of emergency behavior the 10-P possessed that not many others did. Frankly, if she had been any other scientist in this scenario, it was at this point that she'd be doomed - but operating spacecraft was a passion of hers, and it saved her quite a bit of money, so kitting out a craft for a scenario like this was less about the right to brag, and more about exchanging fears. She'd never practiced anything quite like this, but it wasn't dissimilar from things she'd do in other craft for fun, and that pedal she'd just kicked was going to help her accomplish this: the emergency measures it triggered were, more or less, a one-stop-shop for mostly-unpowered atmospheric flight with a nearly-destroyed craft. Instantly, barely-macroscopic pipes lining the walls of the craft exploded, freeing a fluid that ran rapidly into many of the exposed holes in the craft - all of this happening from the injection of one catalyst she'd been very glad hadn't accidentally ruptured into the pipes on its own, mind you - solidifying rapidly in the face of the atmosphere beating down on it. Then, a last-ditch capacitor she hadn't drained yet was immediately put on allocation for a new craft-radiated field that served to both displace air around the craft in an aerodynamic geometry, and - this was the part she didn't understand - tether the ship to the forces creating that displacement. The net effect was a much-improved gliding experience, but due to multiple constraints - the solidified blocking fluid would still chunk off from the forces, and the capacitor would only last for two minutes - she was still nowhere near out of trouble, and due to how utterly fast she was traveling, it certainly was not going to be how she landed; entirely, at least.

She moved quickly to point the 10-P downwards, and quickly found that the air displacement field was struggling: it had a few identifiable weak points pushing her backwards more than was ideal, and she had to angle downward more than she'd like just to pretend like she was flying instead of falling. This didn't really run contrary to her plan, though, but her nerves regarding both certainly did. She looked over at her remaining flight fuel, and the picture wasn't good here either; the stuff was too abundant to really put numbers on it at the pace this task demanded, but internally, subconsciously, she thought she had just enough, but it definitely wasn't how she typically liked to project things. After that, she realized she could make the trees out again, and it was time to move. She grabbed the controls, tighter at least, and tried not to move them an inch, until another flight alarm sounded, not particularly urgent in tone due to the typical contexts in which it activated, but an alarm nonetheless, letting her know she'd entered the flight-level altitudes for the navigated planet calculated according to universally-agreed-to methods that produced a rather arbitrary number for anything other than flying when all things were considered; underneath here, she knew it was going to feel like somebody had added cornstarch to the soup. Much less comprehensibly, her plan wasn't even to float in the soup; it was basically to stir it.

She rapidly pitched the craft upwards, not making any attempt at converting that pitching into a change in her direction of travel, until she was pointing directly upwards, looking at the terrifyingly empty, baby-blue sky. At that point, she hit the forward propulsion with another foot this time, controlling the throttle with great intent while watching a screen instructing her to her altitude. Alastel, also, because of this, thought that the back of her craft must not be damaged much at all: she was traveling quite fast still, but couldn't feel much, if any, air movement past her during this exercise - the fate of that section of her craft was of course still very knowable to her, but checking via a screen or some other method of actual interaction hadn't even crossed her mind, and certainly shouldn't have. It didn't even matter; the engines were working, and that was all she needed. Compared to the previous sequence, this section of the flight felt as if it took ages; she was doing nothing other than watching her altitude, watching her velocity, applying fuel at intervals to slow down to a safe impaction speed. She knew where the ground ought to be - it was determined by satellite survey, not anything on the ground, even a robot - but she lacked any knowledge on where it actually was, and even less awareness, now, of where the trees were. Then, she realized - still piloting, still keeping velocity relatively survivable - she didn't know much about Jemel-III at all. She could hardly remember the altitude at which she recognized the trees as trees, either, and most importantly: she didn't know how big the trees were. Still piloting, moving at about seventy meters per second, she defeatedly sunk forward about a centimeter, and then the back of her craft struck a particularly remarkable example of V. enelami, a pine tree reputed the entire known-galaxy 'round for growing, in good conditions, to a maximum height of four hundred and two meters.