The first few hours upon the crew's return played out with a loop of questions and answers.

Aurelio did his best to keep focus but his frayed nerves meant his mind drifted off more than once towards thoughts of rest and resource preoccupations.

It was a good kind of overwhelming.

Analysis paralysis found him rarely, and with the repetitive advocacy for Aurelio to act like a leader by the ancestral apparition and the entity sponsoring his involvement in all of this, he’d fight to make sure that hesitation never found him.

“Aurelio.” Kalani called out.

He blinked and apologized.

Kalani sighed, “Go on and rest. Cantwell, Phin, and I’ll hold the fort while you get your mind in order.” She’d taken pity on his current state and sent him off to the barracks to recuperate with the only injured crew member.

Aurelio caught Elena at the tail end of her injury dressing. She’d peeled off her exo-suit to reveal burn marks across her muscular arms and legs. Her face was stoic as she applied a green gel to her skin, the topical tonic hissing as its active properties addressed the situation.

As well as any medicine could address burns on what Aurelio now believed was calcified skin.

“Gr.” Elena sent one grunt his way and it was enough for him to give the woman her space as the pair rested.

His mental recuperation involved the comforting space of spreadsheets. He couldn’t spend his rest idling away the hours.

Moreso, any amount of idle time caused him to drift back into his conversation with the Monolith.

Aurelio shuddered underneath his blanket in revulsion.

Eventually sleep did find him, a gift from his body to his mind for finalizing a course of action he was confident in taking.

There were variables he noted while drafting his plan that involved resource acquisition, or the lack thereof with the latest haul.

It was a bog-standard drop. Four monster parts and four generic parts with no additional material found in the overworld or gained through critically striking the Vessels various weak points.

When sparing the mental bandwidth to listen in on their journey descriptions, he couldn’t shake the feeling that they’d experienced a typical adventure. Almost like a rehearsal of a group of adventurers auto piloting a monster hunt.

“NPC’s…” the intrusive thought whispered. Mona had brought the notion into his head but he just as quickly disregarded the idea. The fact that they’d only earned the resources from the hunt was uncanny though. The statistical likelihood for an event like that was quite low.

No, Aurelio assumed that his presence was required if they wished to earn an excess of resources. It only made sense considering those resources only popped up during his interactions with the system and not with the end card he’d been provided.

They’d need him to participate in the next couple of missions if they were going to survive this ordeal because their coffers were emptying out far faster than he wanted them to.

The silver lining to their dearth of resources was that it’d made his course of action simpler as a result.

He’d secure a [Scrap Blaster] for Kalani so she could start accumulating weapon proficiency points towards that necessary weapon tree.

He’d sacrifice the Corroded Shell to the Monolith along with a Sludge and Biotics resource to gain an innovation. That pool was thickening with choices but Aurelio was certain in his ability to mulligan into the {Oath of the Scribes} innovation safely and finally get a Role of his own.

The Radar event threatened to shift the capstone of his course of action in one direction or the other.

Aurelio was certain that his capacity to escape the Monolith’s influence fell under the purview of the system he operated under. Understanding the boundaries of the system would give him an estimate on what sort of rules he could break without suffering reality warping retaliation.

If the Radar event proved to be too chaotic, he’d commit their path to the threads of fate and operate strictly under its guidance. If things were less turbulent in the Metal Mire, he’d introduce the system to a new method of doing things by purposefully straying from the path.

Mona had discussed venturing towards the Coral Grove and the Bed of Giants without a party of three others and that alone was enough to spur him into thinking he could do something similar.

Whether she was capable of leaving the outpost because of this failstate she’d suffered or the system was amenable to her path straying was something he needed answers to.

Where he would go on his path… Aurelio was inclined to follow threads towards certain optional events he’d come to enjoy in the base game.

Assuming the encounters would remain static like in the board game, that is.

---

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Aurelio woke up with a spring in his step and no metaphorical fires to put out. He looked at Elena’s end of the barracks and saw she’d already departed, her blanket neatly folded and tucked back to pristine condition.

At the back end of the barracks was Cantwell mending the damage accumulated on the exo-suits from their excursion.

“Do you finally have the hang of all this?” Aurelio asked.

The rusted jagged cloud hovering over the metallic plating paused as Cantwell removed his engineering visor, “Hm?”

“Oh, I was asking-”

Cantwell nodded, registering his statement just a moment late in the back and forth.

“Well I’m glad to hear you’ve got a handle on your side of things.” Aurelio reflexively chuckled, doing his best to salvage the conversation from its awkward opening.

Cantwell stared at him for an uncomfortably long time.

“The commander was looking for you.” He finally stated.

How one idea led to this other, Aurelio wasn’t sure.

“What does the commander need?”

Cantwell shrugged, “Dunno. Didn’t ask. Just remembered to tell you if you woke up.” The two blinked at one another before the engineer strapped on his visors and poured back into his mending project.

Aurelio dismissed himself soon after and walked the open compound in search of Kalani.

He finds her where he expected her to be; typing away at her gloved interface with poise and perseverance.

“Fucking christ!” Kalani yelled.

Poise and perseverance.

Her eyes locked onto Aurelio’s presence and she waved him to a seat next to hers.

“Cantwell said you were looking for me?” Aurelio asked, stealing a glance at what Kalani was working on.

Her visual screen was chaos made manifest with the way she bounced from written list to word chunk to spreadsheet boxes.

“Yes. Since there’s nothing to worry about at the moment, you and I will work on getting our books in order. You’re a resource, Aurelio, and I’d be a bad commander if I wasn’t tapping it for all its worth.” Kalani answered.

He nodded slowly, refraining from making a comment and derailing her train of thought.

“You’ve already come up with a plan for how to proceed, yeah? Talk to me while we go through it. What do the first ten solar cycles look like for us?”

Aurelio chewed on the question before replying, “There’s a lot to get done. We’ve only fought one kind of creature on this planet and my expectation, assuming that the fates are kind, is that we deal with a biome head at the start of the tenth cycle.”

They’d burned through the first two and this third one was still going to be spent on a Vessel. They were fodder enemies to be picked clean of resources but the heavy hitting materials were going to be found by the heavy hitters, naturally.

“So we need to be well equipped for the tenth cycle, where we’ll fight this biome head and claim a ship piece to build a way out of this place.”

“You remembered.” Aurelio was genuinely moved.

Kalani nodded, “Of course I remembered. Speaking with confidence like that made you a nut or a boon and it cost me nothing to assess which you’d land on.”

Aurelio laughed as Kalani jotted down their primary objective in her notes.

“So, we have solar cycles three through nine to measure up against the enemy. What does being well equipped look like for us?”

He sighed, “Each biome head is like a puzzle now that we don’t have the benefit of throwing meat at the problem until it’s solved,” Kalani blinked in confusion but he continued, “So being well equipped means having a few weapon proficiency milestones under our belts, replaced exo-suit cores and exo-suits proper, and a number of passive and active equipment to deploy against the enemies more unsavory effects.”

If Aurelio had to place them on a resource hierarchy, it’d go weapons at the very top, then suits, and finally cores. Their weaponry was a solved affair since he’d thrown all their resources towards arming them to the teeth early. The best way to avoid damage in the base game was to never put your Scavengers in a long enough fight to risk taking a hit or three.

But they needed better suits to handle the damage the biome heads were capable of dishing out and the sooner they got their hands on some ideal merchandise, the sooner they’d be taking advantage of the piloting experience.

The cores… well they needed to replace their [Faulty Cores] quickly if they didn’t want to meltdown into a blaze of charred paste.

“What should we expect in events moving forward? And be straight with me, Aurelio. I don’t want to have this paranoid feeling hanging onto me whenever I hear you ‘suddenly recall’ an event.” Kalani paused her note taking to stress the importance of her statement, boring her eyes into Aurelio’s soul.

He gulped and did his best to recall the scripted events from the tabletop game.

“We’ve had some differences show up already so they might not be one to one, but there should be another static event tomorrow. It’ll involve the outpost making a refinement of our character, using one of us as their avatar.”

Solar Cycle 004 - Holistic Refinement. The final static event to introduce a player to the T.E.A.M system, with technique being the theme in question.

“After that, I have a vague recollection that we should be armed to the gills by the eighth solar cycle. There’ll be an omen in the sky that proceeds with bloodshed.”

Aurelio remembered the feelings of anguish and trepidation he’d experienced with his brother each time the unlucky number nine approached their game table. It was a resource drain with a fight on their home turf against an enemy from up in the spatial graveyard that surrounded the scrap planet.

A good method for the game designers to hint at the dangers they’d need to prepare against once the players succeeded in building a ship. A deadly randomized milestone that always left them licking their wounds, even under the best conditions.

The rest of their time was spent organizing the stray variables that Kalani wanted to account for. He informed her of the non-static events that would occur after each solar cycle. They worked together to build a rudimentary alphabet from the runes she’d etched in her notes while Aurelio rested in the barracks.

Their time was fruitful but the more he spent time with the commander discussing strategies and recordkeeping, the more unsettled he felt. It might have been his imagination but he felt the woman's eyes linger on him for just a moment longer than he was comfortable with, appraising him with a menacing curiosity before breaking contact and reverting to neutral conditions.

Aurelio shook his head.

The stress was really getting to him.