"The Starband has many members, but the most visible are the rarely seen hunters. They leave long trails of fire behind them as they race after their game. When they appear, the Children watch them every night until the end of their hunt."
--Fable of the Starband's Hunters.
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Rae woke to a feeling of liquid periodically lapping over her right foot. Struggling upright, she found herself just barely above the lava level of the volcano, wearing nothing but ashes and specks of rock from the ongoing eruption. In the wan sunlight that reached through the plumes of gases rising from the caldera, she could see how skeletally thin she was. Her mass must be near the minimum to sustain consciousness, down in the two to three hundred kilos range, and it showed. Rae's bones were visible, with shrunken ropes of muscle twisting under the thin padding of her flesh. Her ribs were prominent, and when she rubbed the grit from her eyes and face, she felt the bony ridges of her skull. A stiff breeze would likely blow her away.
Scooping up some of the lava to drink, she then gathered rocks to consume them. Rae visibly began to fill out to her optimum physical build. She was still on the light side, at maybe five hundred kilos, so she decided to keep going towards the higher end at double that. While there was a dramatic difference in her appearance between close-to-starving and optimal, that was where the outward changes stopped. The next five hundred kilos wouldn't change her appearance; they would merely increase her density as the mass packed into her bones and tissues. The maximum she could carry was a hundred or so more kilos beyond that, but this was enough for the time being. There were no obese Qards.
A Qard had to deliberately protect their clothing from their internal heat, same as they shielded all the flammable material around them. The meltdown she experienced threw that control out the window, and she lost every stitch of clothing she'd been wearing. Rae would have to make her way back to camp naked. Standing, she expelled the particles away from her in a cloud of dust. Trying to send her sense of perception out to the plateau made her stagger. She had the mass to power her psi but not the focus or will. If she couldn't see her destination, she wouldn't be able to teleport there, so she'd have to travel on foot.
Rae couldn't feel the wobble inside and hoped that her instability was gone. Climbing up to the northern rim, she froze briefly at an unwelcome voice. "Well, well, Lařaė, you're looking outstanding today." Her teeth grated together at the sound of her true name coming out of the Shadow's mouth. From the corner of her eye, she could see him openly checking her out. She bristled but couldn't summon the energy to engage with her narcissistic side and continued over the rim.
Halfway down the outer slope, she found the skyboard waiting for her. She was glad to see it, not looking forward to a kilometers-long trek in her current state of undress. She sat on the board and put the volcano she was already thinking of as 'Monkey' behind her. She put her face in her hands, letting her mind drift during the flight, wondering what else she could do to recover. She'd been here for months, and a part of her just wanted to go home, but it still felt risky. When the plateau came into view, her mood lifted. She imagined the gryphon it would one day become and let it soothe her and make her feel safe. Well, safer.
Then with a mental lurch, the image changed and corrupted. The gryphon sprouted grotesque nodules across its body and dulled to a gray, spotted here and there with points of an eerie violet glow. Rotting flesh spread over it, and the purple light reached its sunken eyes. Some of what she saw looked like the symptoms of the plague described by the beacon up in orbit but far more exaggerated. Her breathing hitched, but she forced herself to ignore it and to dismiss the dark vision.
By the time Rae calmed herself, the board coasted into the entry of the dig and stopped. She stepped down and dressed from the outfits in her bags. She'd have to work on making more clothing before long. That involved finding the right plant or animal fibers and the equipment to work and weave them. Carding mills, spinning wheels, knitting needles, crochet hooks, and looms… she jotted the list on a handpad. Now, where had she left her goggles? Ah, she'd lost them when she fell over the side.
She climbed up the slope of scree rock, past the evident marks from her tumble down. She found the goggles about 150 meters above ground level. Patting the dirt off them, she looked up, watching some craghorns hop awkwardly over the new gaps disrupting their narrow paths. She should shear some of them while summer still lay ahead. Hunting ungulate herbivores for their leather was something else she needed to do. It was wasteful for her to hunt for food, but if she were killing animals for another reason... With her predator totem, she enjoyed the taste of meat, although it was insignificant for her as a food source.
But that required her to be outside, and Rae didn't want to today. The heat of the volcano was enjoyable, but she wanted a source closer to home. Deep under the plateau were pockets of the same lava that created the granite above. Heading back in, she pulled up detailed sensor logs. Calculating the depth of the nearest pool, she began plotting where to place a shaft that could go to a roughly 750-meter deep basement level. The same shaft would go up to around the same distance to the top of the plateau. She might eventually carve stairs to wrap around the opening, but her board would serve as a lift in the meantime.
She cleared and marked the shaft location and checked the other markings and work she'd done. Examining them with a clear mind, it was evident she hadn't always been fully conscious of her design decisions. That explained why she had to keep adjusting the chalk marks. At times Rae only knew what she'd done when she saw the work completed the next time she went to work the dig. It was both exciting and, at the same time, off-putting, and she honestly didn't know what the results would end up being when it was all done.
Initially, the plan had the ceilings at four meters high and flat, like the upper part of the opening to the dig. Instead, Gothic arched ceiling vaults reached another meter or so higher in between the regularly spaced columns. It was fancier and more overbuilt than it needed to be, but Rae rather liked the way it was heading. The roughed-in vaults would go even higher when completed, but there needed to be enough material to define the ribs and inverted finials at the top of each vault.
She updated the plans to this new style, allowing for potentially six-meter tall levels with six meters of rock in between, and began to dig the three-meter square shaft straight downwards. Over the next few weeks, she used every means at her disposal, hand tools, energy devices, and her psi, to reach her target depth of roughly three-quarters of a kilometer or 63 levels worth. If she fully completed the levels, they'd potentially be hundreds of square kilometers in area.
It was stuffy down here and hot. A mortal could probably bear the initial heat, but not the poor air quality. The air didn't bother her, and she began to hollow out a portion of the level adjacent to the shaft, creating an area big enough that the lava pool wouldn't be next to the shaft. She used the excavated stone to make a raised pool and piping made of hyper-compressed granite that could withstand the lava she brought up here without slagging from the high temperature.
Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.
Directional paddles in the pipes kept the pool from overflowing the sides and kept the lava circulating. One of the lines drew up the molten rock from kilometers below, and a higher intake pushed it back down when it got to a certain height. The slanted pool had a lower end smoothed for Rae's bathing. The shallow end passed under a set of grates where she'd heat crucibles to smelt the harder local metal ores. This chamber would be her foundry, and using the raw geothermal heat would allow her to work with native materials without wasteful and polluting fuels. The room had exposed lava now and was hot enough she could fire ceramics here, as well as produce ingots to work in the planned levels above this.
Skipping several levels worth of stone up the shaft, Rae opened up another space. This level would be a forge, where she'd either cast or hammer out the harder metals to make components. Another set of crucibles to smelt softer ores like iron and bronze would use some of her inner heat to melt. Skipping up again, the next chamber she started was a metal shop. This level had the last set of crucibles, designed for the softest metals, like gold, lead, and copper. Higher up still, she'd eventually create an electronics shop where the most delicate parts and pieces would be crafted and assembled.
Over her lifetime Rae learned many human skillsets, and these were just a few of them. They only took twenty years for one to be competent and half a century to truly master. While they were pointless mortal pastimes from her elder's point of view, she enjoyed practicing them. She could do everything from gathering fibers and creating fabric, tanning and working leather, and taking raw metallic ores along the whole process to create finished pieces. Specialization, after all, was for insects.
She used her board to rise back to the surface level, done with digging for a while. Settling in front of her computer, she started skimming the backlog of bio-survey samples and videos. Before the thunderstorm, a pair of the big cats traveled southward through the region around the plateau, and she paused and informed the algorithms to always flag footage of them for review. They had passed by in the night, so she didn't get a good look, but the heat map sub-channel revealed odd motions along the back. As the storm was winding down, the pair came back, heading in the opposite direction. They traveled upriver in a hurry, on the west side, and she stared in shock when the tentacles came out near their shoulders.
The rope-like tendrils moved objects out of their way or pulled on things to give them leverage. No cats seemed to be in the region now, so Rae ordered her drones to actively scan for them and inform her when they came near and directed a few drones to follow the river to its source and then return. She queried the survey records to flag images of exposed bones, like the browser skeleton by the green shale rise. After another query to catalog wildlife footprints, she went to her bedroll to think about what she'd seen.
The word 'tentacles' made her think of aquatic creatures, but that wasn't the literal meaning in the word's origin. It came from the Latin 'tentare,' a form of 'tento,' meaning to handle or to touch, modified by 'culum,' a diminutive. Together they translated to 'little feeler.' The feelers on one side of a cat worked jointly as manipulators, unconnected from their roots to tip and also acting independently. It was as if her separate fingers sprouted directly from her shoulder with the same amount of reach, just without the intervening arm. The tendrils were boneless, emerging from a bulge of the shoulder, only to invert back into hiding when unneeded. One of the cats showed six of them on each side, while the other had five.
It was fascinating, from an evolutionary perspective. Rae wondered if any other creatures on this world had this trait. The lack of bones made them potentially highly dexterous, but how did they operate? To what were the muscles attached? How did their mass disappear into the animal's torso? Were they merely grippers, or did they convey a sense of touch to the cat? The number of tendrils seemingly weren't standardized per cat but we're possibly symmetrical per side. Most animals that developed manipulators sacrificed their quadruped stability and gained intelligence to compensate. But not these creatures… The last thing that crossed her mind was how uncomfortable her bedroll had become.
Early the following day, she stunned a few groups of craghorns with her psi powers and sheared them. She put the shearings in net bags and washed them in stone vats, skimming off the oils to process later. She took the damp fibers down the shaft and scattered them around the metal shop chamber to dry. After washing up afterward, she went back to her computer. A new cat came near during the night, but when a stealth drone swooped down to take a closer look, its ears and whiskers twitched, and it ran away. Two more drones attempted to approach, and it responded to them by changing the direction it fled. The ears kept swiveling at the succession of drones as the cat retreated out of range.
Rae frowned and summoned a drone into the dig, directing it to scan her while stealthed. Listening with focused intent, she made out a faint buzz when it came near. When switching to her totem form, the annoying sound became more evident, and she could track the drone as it moved around her invisibly. If she didn't already know what it was, she imagined it would be scary to hear something that she couldn't see. If she wanted to study the felids more, she would need quieter drones.
She didn't have the manufacturing infrastructure to make them from scratch, at least not yet. For the time being, she'd modify her existing models. Pouring over the schematics, the first thing she could work on was new mounting brackets for the gravitic hover engines and thicker sound baffles. She could do those things in the metal shop when she wasn't using it as a wool drying room. A finished electronic shop would be necessary before she could make any adjustment more delicate than that. And a dedicated drying chamber. And processing quantities of various metal ores to create stockpiles because the materials she brought with her wouldn't last forever.
Comparing these things to-do with her previous list, Rae pulled out a coil of small diameter steel wire and started to cut several thousand short but equal lengths of it. Going to her woodshed, she used some cured cloudtop lumber to create a hand-cranked drum carder to align the wool fibers and prepare them for spinning. A few drops of her blood diluted in a big tub of water worked well as a tanning agent for most hides, and Rae carved a new vat out of a large chunk of granite to use for the leather-making process. But to have skins to tan, first, she must hunt. That night she prowled the plateau in her totem form, killing two craghorns by breaking their necks with a single blow each. One was older and having difficulty keeping up with its herd. The second was lame and unable to reach enough food to keep up its condition. She put their hides in a vat of water to soak and covered it. The meat wasn't the best, but good enough for something she had in mind.
Carving a ventilated firebox out of another block of granite, Rae slabbed enough cloudtop to build a smoking cabinet to fit around it. She inserted whittled sticks inside the enclosed top, sliced the meat thin, and salted it, draping the strips over the rods to cure them with smoke. If she couldn't get the felid cats to stay still for filming, she'd set up a feeding station baited with jerky in the woods and catch them with stationary cameras. She'd head out to the woods the next day to look around and find a good place for the camera blind.
She felt achy when she laid down for the night, a sign that a new Change was coming. She grumbled to herself. That was the only good thing she could remember about wearing the Chieftain's Gem… the bearer could delay or reschedule their Changes and make the discomfort easier, even if they couldn't eliminate them entirely. Without it, she was subject to the ebb and flow of her hormones, like any other Qard. She sighed and let her mind drift to sleep.