"We are not alone, Children. Other thinkers exist out beyond the Starband. Some of them are friendly, like the allies who guided our Mother here and helped Her raise Her young. But others mean us harm, and they are why our Mother fled from Her origin to this distant place. If they should ever find us, the Children will suffer."
--Fable of the Strangers
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Rae woke up with a gravelly moan. She blinked, finding herself on her bedroll across the dig from where she'd lost consciousness, with Kruegar nowhere in sight. Rubbing her arm, she found it to be sore but relatively sound. Humming experimentally, her voice broke several times through the note, but it didn't hurt. It wasn't exactly comfortable, though, and she massaged her neck. Whatever damage her throat sustained on Qardos was mainly healed, leaving her voice raspy from disuse.
Rising to her feet, she went to get her goggles to scan her forearm. There was still some weakness in the bone alloys, so she should probably take it easy with it for a while. Looking down at herself, she sighed in annoyance. Burn holes and scorch marks spotted her shirt and trousers. She would run out of clothing if this kept up. The only thing these were good for now was making patches for other garments or as rags. She changed clothes, thinking how the misadventure moved up the timetable of making a treadle spinning wheel and loom.
Glancing at the computer showed notifications awaiting her. Between extended interactions at the camera blind and the improved behavior of the mark two drones, Rae was building a database of individual cats and their colorings. Unlike terrestrial wild cats, there wasn't a single look to them. Instead, they had similar patches in common, with the colors seldom the same from felid to felid. They had a short, plain undercoat and a more vivid main coat over top of it. Some had solid coats, while others had gradients or patterns on them. They shared thickly furred neck and chest ruffs running up to the scalp, and a long tuft on the end of their tails was the same color as the ruff.
There was one set of markings on their heads and faces they all shared. They had a contrasting stripe under their eyes connected to a tear mark that ran alongside the nose, then followed around the muzzle pads to the corner of their mouths. The color also highlighted their brow spots and another spot centered on their chin. The same color ran up the inward edges of their large triangular ears and formed ocelli spots on the back of the ear. No two felids had quite the same color of the accent marks, but their presence gave a unified look to the breed they otherwise lacked. Their eyes were a solid shade with no iris or pupil and glowed in the dark much like her own.
Rae drew up a set of generic outlines on her hand pad linked to an identification database. By listing the colors of the common elements, the computer would fill out the diagram and assign the felid a unique code. Flipping back and forth from the i.d. table to the line art, she included the base coat, top coat, ruff, nose, and face accents as fields. Pulling up her image files on another screen, she noticed the tendril roots were the same as the nose color, and where she could see them, the paw pads were, too. She went back and added fields for pattern type and eye color and changed the nose field to 'leathers.' There were a lot of factors to track, but each cat's combination was as identifiable as a fingerprint. She attached each of the identifiable images to an incomplete database record to fill out later.
Besides the new felid footage, two more notices were waiting for her. One was from the camera blind and showed a particularly fat catapika that had curled itself around one of her camera rocks, obscuring the lens. It stopped moving, except for an occasional ripple of the wide bands halfway down its body. She meant to remove it the next time she baited the blind but hadn't gotten to it yet. As she watched the flagged video, it started writhing and twisting violently. Wondering if it was dying or metamorphosing, her jaw dropped as it tore itself in half. Two more small heads appeared from the rip over the thickest part at the middle, having developed under its skin. After recovering a bit, the half with the largest head shuffled away to continue eating from the ground litter. The other end's bigger head, which had been the first half's tail end, began to move off as well, now taking the controlling role of its half as the newly revealed heads trailed behind them both. She'd never seen such a large creature reproduce by division before, and shook her head, weirded out.
A behavioral subroutine of her surveying program sent another notice. Only the reeders consumed the reed roots, and other root eaters strictly avoided them, even if exposed by the reeders. Most animals bypassed areas where the reeds were numerous when they watered at the river. The gronkle waterfowls would leave a marsh hollow when the reeders dug up roots. Rae wondered what triggered the avoidance behavior and what danger caused it to develop. She could only think of the unpleasant sour smell typical to the reeds and the romboo. She'd have to test that theory at another time by coming up with a substance that smelled similar and leaving it near the river to see what happened.
Bringing up the drone schematics, she pondered how to improve them further. The only way to get appreciatively better technologically would be to re-engineer the hardware from the ground up. It would probably take a year or more to build a sophisticated enough industry to do it, but that wasn't the only way. She'd gotten the recent felid images from a change in the drone behavior software. Approaching more cautiously and from a lower altitude helped, and so did freezing if the cat looked around alertly. They also balanced staying close enough to get good images but distant enough to remain unheard and undetected. She set up analytics logs and linked that to an intelligent agent node which would tweak the behavior based on her assessment of the results.
The last notice was from the routine tracking the ceramic firings: Her kiln rack had completed its first pass. Going down the main shaft, she checked on the finished clay roof tiles. Satisfied with their quality, Rae brought the rack to the surface and unloaded it in the woodshed to finish cooling. Sometime soon, she'd redo the roofing, hopefully keeping more moisture from the drying wood. Making an addition to the shed for tools kept outside could be done at the same time. She prepared another batch of the green terracotta to form more tiles with the medium mold generator and shaped some cookware pieces with the mauve porcelain clay to test how it would behave. She left the porcelain pieces to dry in the dig and took the kiln rack and the terracotta block back down the shaft along with a group of drones. After pressing more roof tiles to dry, she performed maintenance on the drones after modifying them to her new standards.
Going back to the surface, something about her ceramic solution rattled about in her mind. She couldn't bring heat to the clay… that was it! If she couldn't reliably lure the cats to come closer, why didn't she go to them? The traffic patterns seemed to indicate there was a breeding population upriver to the northeast. Rae only saw solos and small groups go by using the riverside as a highway, all healthy adults. There was no sign of the aged, ailing, maturing cubs or babies passing by the Gryphon plateau. While she thought about it, she evaluated her wood, selecting pieces to saw or whittle into various projects. First of all, she needed to build a treadle lathe for turning wood into things like spokes or arrow shafts. For the spinning wheel, she decided to make the weight supporting parts out of the harder and denser colored oak while using the more easily shaped cloudtop lumber for the wheel and the lathe turned parts. She wanted to craft a bow of the colored oak for a tough draw and a fishing pole of the more flexible cloudtop. Collecting her choices, she carried them into the dig to finish drying away from the fog and weather.
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Figuring she'd be gone for several days, Rae checked the extended weather forecast. Seeing rain predicted in the next few days made her shiver atavistically, then relax when no appreciable winds came with it. She packed a bag of jerky, a change of clothes and examined her boots, thanking the Light she wasn't wearing them the evening of her meltdown. The flute and harmonica she usually carried in them would not be easily replaceable. No longer considering them safe on her person, she put the instruments and her Damascus belt knife in the small storage compartment of her board. She could knock out hunting knives like those in her boots in a day with her forge. She'd spend much of the time making the handles, securing their mechanical connections to the blades, and sharpening them.
She added containers and sample cases to the pile. She'd be on the lookout for signs of metals or clays immediately adjacent to the waterway during her journey. She dug out a net to make a ghillie suit and her teal shipscoat. The coat was made of exotic materials and could withstand her full heat. A dragon in flight was on the back of the coat, and jeweled medals of her totem and the Crysfire Gem adorned the chest. Patches on each upper arm had an outline of a Peregrine ship. She stroked one of the patches with a wistful expression, it was a painful reminder of happier times, but it was also her most enduring garment. If she lost it in a lava pool, she could swim down to get it, and it would be unharmed. She took a cleansing breath, then folded the coat and put it down firmly. It was time to get a good night's sleep.
In the morning, she summoned some drones and rolled up her bedroll. There was a heavy mist out as she headed off, following the path the majority of the felids used to the edge of her drone-patrolled area. Once past her boundaries, Rae took on her totem form and started tracking the cats. Hours later, while passing a stream, she noticed black sand on either side of the inlet and a feeling of nearby treasure. Returning to the board and reassuming her own form, she scanned the streambeds with her goggles, finding alluvial gold deposits as suspected. She marked the site on her geo-survey maps with a note to track the traces upstream to their origin. Digging out a lovely nugget, she managed to resist eating it and tucked it into the storage compartment. Wiping the persistent sprinkles off her lenses, she stowed the goggles and got back to her tracking.
Travelling upriver while keeping the waterway to her left, she kept an eye out around her. Known examples of flora and fauna looked different from what she'd documented. The leaves of most of the colored oaks turned yellowish. The soil also turned lighter, and the granite pebbles in the water went from cool grays to grayish-browns. In the late afternoon, she logged a bank of grayish terracotta clay. The oaks continued their gradually warming color shift the farther north she traveled. What was the mechanism for it? They looked the same except for the different shades of leaves, bark, and inner rings. She trimmed rounds from fallen branches to study the progression.
At dusk, Rae started to lose the felid's trail. The light rain made telling how old the prints were difficult, and she was finding fewer of them. The river chattered over rocks nearby, and her goggles told her it was shallow, possibly a natural ford? Sending drones to the far side, they picked up tracks on the other bank. It was too late to continue, so she sent the drones to find a shelter. They reported back several options, with a shallow cave being the best. Making her way there, she hung her sample cases and supplies from a grav anchor and put on her shipscoat before spreading her bedroll on the board and climbing in. It was getting cold as the weather worsened, so she pulled down her hood and slept dreamlessly.
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Something jumped on her out of the dark, biting her arm, as unhinged cackles echoed around her. Her eyes snapped open and glowing skeletons surrounded her with exposed skulls, bare spines, and leg bones bracketed by narrow rib cages. Confusing this attack with the brutal assault from the night before, she flung away the horror gnawing on her and climbed to her feet. The creature she threw off yelped as it flew only to suddenly quiet as it impacted something hard enough she heard its bones breaking. The other skeletons fled, hiss-yipping as they went. "Lights!" She whispered, and the drones lit up the area. It didn't take long to find the creature's body at the base of a tree, looking more mundane than she expected.
The body looked like a small and slender canid, with reptilian, almost draconic elements, giving it both fur and scales. It had tall jackal-like ears, and its body was flat black in kabuki fashion, with grayish speckles. The 'skeleton' was its bone mask and a series of scaly leathery plates down its back and tail. More plates went over its ribs and down its limbs, all in a bio-luminescent green. It seemed to have evolved to appear ghoulish in the dark, but she had no idea for what end. Blood was dripping from its mouth, presumably from internal injuries. Rae looked at its teeth, seeing at least one of its long fangs cracked from attempting to bite her. There were some grinding molars in the back, but primarily the teeth were designed for eating flesh.
Leaving the cracked tooth and the molars, she pulled out the sharp fangs for later decorative use and extracted the claws as well. The impact with the tree crushed the right half of its rib cage, with the dislocated right hip fractured and the right rear leg broken in two places. As she maneuvered the body, the neck lolled brokenly as well. Despite the injuries, the hide was undamaged, so she skinned it. Halfway through, she sliced a piece of meat from the carcass and sniffed it. Frowning, she chucked the flesh into the river, unimpressed. Carnivores usually didn't make for good eating.
After removing the hide, she threw the remains into the brush by the treeline. Getting out a vacuum bag, she bit her thumb, letting three silver drops fall in her other palm, before licking the wound closed. Drawing the heat from the blood, she crushed the dull gray nuggets into a powder that went into the bag, along with some river water. Rae shook the mixture vigorously then put in the fresh hide, prodding it to ensure it was thoroughly soaked. She sealed the bag and activated the one-way valve, squeezing the air out until water started coming out, too, and closed the valve. She'd considered saving the brain, but this would have to do so far away from camp.
She wasn't sleeping again that night, so she sat on her board tracing cat-sign with the drones. By morning it was raining steadily, washing away most of the pawprints across the river, but there were still traces to be found. She could probably sniff out the trail with her totem, but she didn't want to get soaked to her fur. When morning finally came, she shook out the net and loaded it with grasses and twigs. Packing up her stuff, she sat on her board cross-legged and covered herself and her gear. She floated over the river and moved to the farthest trace the drones found. As she sent the drones out for more, she noticed a streak of pastel pink in the water, coming from a deposit of rose-colored clay. She thought about collecting some but decided to log the location and come back on a dryer day.
It took longer to follow the cats under these conditions, but she managed. The drones uncovered claw marks a meter and a half up a tree, as well as surviving footprints beneath overhangs shielded from the wet. Loose clumps of fur typed to the felids formed more breadcrumbs, as did large prey remains, but she couldn't be sure the cats killed them or not. Later in the day, her drones spotted cats moving through the woods on the river's other side. Rae crossed the river again and sat dripping to wait for a cat to follow. Looking around as she waited, she noted how the colored oaks here were of various oranges in color.
A tangle of heat signatures caught her attention, which a drone resolved as a cat carrying a juvenile browser partly over its shoulders, secured by its tendrils. It took the kill to a large thicket of even redder trees, and there was where she found the local base. Half-grown cubs chased each other through the rain as smaller babies peered out from a cluster of dens dug out among the oak roots. Several adults met the hunter, and one of them took the kill to a few elderly individuals, while other welcomers rubbed against the provider and licked away the worst of the rain from their sodden hide. She marked the place on her maps as Edomere or 'ruddy waters', then looked for a place to shelter.
The local soil had a lot of reddish-orange clay, rich in iron. Raising her gaze from the dirt to the trees, Rae had an epiphany. Greenish shale dominated the soil of the woods near the gryphon, and the trees had green rings. Yesterday, the dirt was more of an ochre yellow, and the trees were warmer in color. Here, with this red dirt, the trees were a deep brick red. She'd have to confirm the hypothesis, but it seemed the trees revealed the dominant mineral composition of the soil they grew in. As the rain turned to sporadic downpours, she found a dry overhang well above a creek bed. Remembering the night before, she set some drones on watch and bedded down wearing her goggles. Visibility was poor, but it seemed like most of the felids were hunkered in their dens, waiting out the weather, just like she was.