After a lengthy conversation with Kalani, Aurelio continued with his course of action.
In the junkyard, his heart felt heavy when he asked the mini-monolith to synthesize the Corroded Shell into a piece of salvage for crafting purposes.
There’d be more shells like that walking around for the taking but the dire straits their resources were in was an ever present ache to Aurelio’s mind.
The wreckage of their first successful hunt became subsumed by the rust colored nanites and the smithing stone reflected the added resource to their coffers.
Fiddling through the menu, the [Scrap Blaster] came out soon after and he was down two salvage and 1 unrefined stone.
The metal handle was slightly warm in his hands and had a freshly printed copper smell to it. It was a retooled welding gun, the power source replaced with the unrefined stone. The stone would heat up bits of scrap fed into its ammo compartment and spit out molten slag at their enemies.
The weapon looked lethal enough and a quick test run in their makeshift training arena confirmed its destructive capabilities.
“It’s not a [Mine Cutter] but it’ll do…” Aurelio whispered.
Looking at what resources he had left pained him to no end. They were in desperate need of salvage. They had enough biotics and sludge to make something like [Combat Optics] or [Thrusters] but they lacked the damn salvage to put it all together.
His fault in throwing the bulk of their salvage reserves towards the [Slab of Iron], a whopping four units of it by his recollection, but Cantwell was in need of a weapon and Aurelio wasn’t going to skimp on his friend.
No, this dearth of resources was an opportunity for Aurelio to test out whether it was possible to fish for critical strikes like in the base game. The denizens of the planet, while incredibly dangerous to an ill-equipped scavenger, were loot pinatas if dealt with using proper tools and combinations.
He wanted to enter the gearworks and see it breathe life to their auxiliary equipment but would only do so when he had the resources to spare.
“Soon.” He assured himself.
Aurelio’s final preparations for the third solar cycle were in the Radar’s nest with the Monolith…
His skin crawled. He was the crew's middleman for the obsidian tyrant and now that the {Connection} innovation was up, he was more than certain their process for establishing new innovations would be as much an inspection of his leading capabilities as it was an investment of their resources.
The walk to the Radar nest was quiet with all of his other crew members preoccupied with their own obligations.
He felt… happier.
Aurelio’s relationship with the rest of the crew was overtly hostile at first and after more turbulence over his affiliations and abilities, the fact that no one was hounding behind him to make sure he wasn’t doing anything shady felt like a milestone for him.
He felt trusted and that made him even more motivated.
Aurelio crossed the facility's threshold into the nest where the Monolith and the radar’s communication console laid. The various screens at the end of the room buzzed with the pleasant white static, the shifting pixelated snow displaying that the machine was operational and hungry for a connection to an event on the planet.
The Monolith reflected that eager anticipation, its core already lit and humming with energy. It knew that Aurelio was there.
It knew what he would need to do.
Aurelio took a deep breath and pressed his hand on the stone's warm surface.
|Advance the Colony|
It was no longer a question of ‘if’ but of ‘when’ for the system now. He was roped in for the long haul and despite the Monolith’s dismissive attitude for its chosen champion, the system was at least acknowledging him as worthy.
Unlike before where the emotions of the stone were inscrutable to his touch, he could now feel the entities massive presence on the periphery of his mind. A leviathan monitoring a minnow for it lacked the confidence to leave him to his own devices.
He confirmed the request and invested the last mote of salvage he could afford to spend, along with a mote of sludge and biotics. The innovation point burned at the stones center and the prompt fizzled out from his view.
At once, he was presented with his choice of innovations for their current solar cycle.
{PROVING GROUNDS} {Martial Innovation Type} - Fight. Violence is your equalizer against monsters and titans alike. | CHOSEN gains the FORTIFY action. | Increase Weapon Proficiency gained by SUBJECTS by 1. | (3 Innovation Point) Commit to Training.
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{ORATION} {Entertainment Innovation Type} - The power of the spoken word, to relieve the mind of its worries and the body of its stress, is vital to the longevity of the SUBJECTS. | CHOSEN gains the SOOTHE action. | Increase Ignition Gauge for CHOSEN and SUBJECTS by 1. | All SUBJECTS gain +1 Heart at the start of the SETTLEMENT PHASE.
{COMMUNITY} {Piety Innovation Type} [REQUIRES CONNECTION] - The COLONY works as one towards a common goal. SUBJECTS and CHOSEN find strength in bonds and can discover infiltrators. | (2 Innovation Point) Reinforce Bonds. | (1 Innovation Point) Reassimilation.
Aurelio already knew he would be attempting to fish for the {Oath of the Scribes} innovation but felt compelled to at least assess the other options. He drew a repeat with the {Proving Grounds} and considered saving it as an option were it not a recipe for decreasing his chance of drawing into his required innovation.
{Oration} was an option he now considered vital if only to provide the rest of the crew with downtime that was not work oriented. Even if they were scrambling to gain power quickly to put together a working ship out of the planet, it wouldn’t do any of them good to have morale hinge on their successes and failures.
Plus, {Myths and Legends} was a worthwhile secondary innovation to acquire when repeating fights with monsters and he was certain they’d be repeating fights with at least the Vessel until he felt comfortable enough for them to pivot towards something else.
Looking at the text on the {Community} innovation sparked a crumb of knowledge from his tabletop days. Reassimilation was one of the games methods for dealing with the scavengers that manifested the Something Different impairment.
A nasty flaw to succumb to and one that he wanted to avoid at all cost, if only because he didn’t want to find out how the game interpreted the method a scavenger manifested the flaw.
He shuddered.
With a wave of the hand, he wiped the three options to the side and drew from the deck for his remaining innovations.
{OATH OF THE SCRIBES} {Scholastic Innovation Type} [REQUIRES ARCHIVES] - The ARCHIVES hide an oath. The Scribes have found you worthy. Seek their guidance and become an ARCHIVIST | UNLOCK THE ARCHIVIST COMBAT ROLE.
{ART OF REFURBISHMENT} {Scholastic Innovation Type} - All things must come to an end. You hold the ability to choose when it does. | The COLONY can now invest TRIBUTES to strengthen their ARMOR.
{KINDLING} {Life Innovation Type} - The SPARK is the source of will and life. Feed it and all will grow. | CHOSEN gains the NURTURE action. | Increase Ignition Gauge for CHOSEN and SUBJECTS by 1. | Departing SUBJECTS gain +1 to their first Event roll.
“There’s another action that I have no clue what it fucking does.” Aurelio grumbled. The innovation tree would certainly bear fruit if he invested time into it but he wasn’t interested in pursuing the Sunspark role for himself or any of the other crewmates.
Considering they were lacking resources to make use of the {Art of Refurbishment} innovation, he happily selected the first option and allowed the options to dissipate from his view.
Nothing in his world visibly changed but he felt a mote of knowledge implant itself into his mind. The key to the metaphysical lock found within the Archives, one that would register Aurelio’s successful investment into unlocking the inner sanctum.
He’d save that for last.
Not wanting to lose momentum, Aurelio shifted to the Radar console and spun it up for a scan of the Metal Mire. He was going to hunt another Perfect Vessel.
The dormant monitors flared with chaotic activity, the dim room now blanketed in a shimmering blinding white.
One by one, screens dimmed with activity until the main monitor came into focus on a ping in the map.
A distress signal.
Aurelio’s heart skipped a beat.
A familiar prompt popped up on the console.
|?Let Fate Decide?|
He could reject the signal. Aurelio was familiar with the benefit of doing so as well. One point in technique and another heart to protect against mental attacks.
The alternative was that he’d connect with an ethereal song and get stuck with an insidious impairment, connect with a recorded message of a scavengers dying moments, or connect with a living scavenger. The second and third option were resources he could tap into on the combat arena…
What would happen if he connected to the distress signal without letting the system mold reality to his game conventions?
He allowed the fuse to disappear and found out for himself.
Aurelio patched into the distress signal.
“Hello?” Aurelio whispered.
“Well look at that! Who am I speaking to?” the voice on the other line asked. The signal was choppy and their syllables were fragmented and robotic.
“You’re speaking to an Archivist.” Aurelio offered. He wasn’t comfortable offering his name up to the mystery caller yet.
It didn’t seem that the mystery caller cared all that much about his secrecy.
“Great, great. Someone with two sticks to rub! Call me Doc. I’m a resident sawbones in need of extraction, A-S-A-P. Do you have a team that you can send over?” Doc requested.
Holy shit.
“Let me get the commander in here. She’ll sort out your fate.” Aurelio replied before sprinting off to find Kalani and the rest of the merry band.
Here’s hoping they’d be willing to make room for one more member.
Aurelio was not cognizant, however, of the radar booting up the sequence for the biome-specific radar event, his mind entirely preoccupied with how best to deliver the news to the rest of the crew that they might have discovered a cooperative denizen in that death planet.