I was born and raised in a research station underneath the earth. The research conducted on this station varied from generation to generation but the focus of my generation was one of archiving the works of our ancestors.

Their work haunted our halls like displaced specters, each new discovery in a dormant terminal or etched piece of metal a puzzle piece to a tapestry simply impossible to comprehend.

Even the original name of the planet was lost to time but my generation that lived within the subterranean station referred to it as Ebb, after the ebb and flow of solar winds that licked at the surface of the planet receding like an ocean tide come nightfall.

The archival work was balanced with the sought after prospects left behind by the Ninth generation; the archaeological delves in the ruins underneath the sand.

Ebb was a living time capsule, stratifying civilizations past in layers of sand and limestone for the next generation to uncover. The stratification went as far back as the Fourth Generation and we were the next batch of survivors interested in peeling back the historical layers that laid beneath our feet.

Our excursions occurred at night. During the day, the surface was an intolerable mixture of heat and wind that disoriented the senses and destroyed the refurbished sensor in our exploratory suits. The air was dense with micro-particulates. Granules of sand and glass that gave the wind a mesmerizing visibility also threatened those careless enough with excruciatingly slow deaths.

Aptitude tests for tolerating the harsh physical tolls on our bodies were conducted regularly by the automatons that were tasked with assisting the next generation. We’d have sent some of them out with us if it wasn’t for the limitations built into their composition and coding; their bodies were purposefully ill-suited for the rugged desert terrain and their coding shut down their sentience upon crossing through the metallic threshold separating the station from the surface.

Mentions of a quarantine imposed on our mechanical brethren gave hints as to why the later models were built with these handicaps in mind…

I apologize for jumping around so much, Aurelio, but the memories of my time on Ebb shift just as often as the sands did then.

My life on Ebb was small and stifling.

I committed myself to learning about the Great Reset and its iterations when the concept was taught to us by our village elders. That knowledge instilled my chafing at our subterranean dwellings. Scholars in my circle talked about the Great Reset as the ‘abandoned question’ because of the futility left behind by countless other eras and their attempts to answer the ‘why’ of it all.

I was strong-willed and determined to prove their attempts wrong and to so would require a great deal of clout within the station to even work on projects on the scale I was considering.

And so I filled my brain with all manner of knowledge and wormed my way into the prospecting block of the research station. With joining the prospecting block came my access to forgotten texts hidden deep within the archives of past civilizations and the tapestry building before me grew to encompass something beyond Ebb.

This newfound freedom and exploration birthed within me a solitary need; I needed to leave Ebb.

I was happy among my close peers exploring crystalline walkways, decrepit stone bricks, and alien architecture that skirted the line in defying physics as we understood it, but these brilliant showcases of our lost past simply fed into another question that still burns within me today; what else is out there?

I’m still answering that question. And with the experiences I’ve had with Elena and then Phineas and Cantwell, their perspectives have given me new tools from which to broaden that answer.

I remain curious despite the hardships, the most tragic of which occurred in my meeting with Elena. She wasn’t on Ebb with me. Not a single day passes that I wish I could reach into her past and give her what I had for a childhood.

It is not my story to give and I will not share it without her presence…

It was not enough for me to simply be content in my warm hovel beneath Ebb’s surface. Yes, I was happy to dig through the sands in our refurbished equipment and explore the various civilizations lost to time but my heart was called to the stars and the ruins far beyond us.

I was not going to find my answer to what else was out there in the desiccated texts of generations past and I was not going to answer the origins of the Great Reset living beneath the surface.

If this one planet could hold so many mysteries underneath the surface, what other mysteries were yet out there for us to uncover? Was it not our responsibility as scholars to go out and stir the gifts our ancestors left behind? If not for ourselves then certainly for our forebears? Would they view us kindly to know that our generation lacked the backbone to face uncertainty in the eye, diminishing the prospects of the future to live comfortably in the remnants of today?

These questions left a sour taste in the mouths of my elders. And how could it not, this rash, wet-eared child impugning the moral character of the station's leaders.

Despite the quality of my work, they refused to tolerate my needling opposition any further and they exiled me from Ebb.

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The elders refurbished a ship from our unused hangar and asked others in our colony whether they wanted to join me in exploring the stars.

No one did.

---

Time spent underneath the outpost was the closest Aurelio had achieved in acquiring a moment to breathe and relax. Despite the harbinger of their eldritch masters looming over the back of his mind, he was able to let that danger slip into the negligible periphery and enjoy the heart to heart he was having with Kalani.

As he suspected, her origin story was not something elaborated upon in the source material of the tabletop game. He knew she came from a desert planet and picked up her archaeological talents and eye for salvageable material from this childhood, but nothing quite as detailed as breathing in that moment with her recollections.

Aurelio offered a bit of himself as well to her. About his brother and his brother’s fiance. About his cat and how much he hoped his time here was not costing him time from his origin point.

The heart to heart was soured, however, with the responsibility the both of them held for the rest of the crew.

“We need to flesh out some rules for how to limit information leakage.” Kalani admitted.

He agreed.

“Do you know if the others have been contacted yet?” He asked.

Kalani shook her head, “Not that I’m aware of, no. None of ‘em have acted different either but I don’t know how overt or covert our mutual benefactor makes us when issuing directives. Don’t even know if we all receive the same directive from them.” She shuddered at the thought.

He bit his lip, “We can’t operate under complete paranoia over who might or might not be a sleeper agent. Let’s assume for the moment that you’re the probe for this operation that your mutual benefactor has. Unless you return, they might not ping another member, yeah?” He was about forty percent confident in that assessment. The Voice in her cradle in space was unknown in its method of operation and its interest in the current game board. He was assuming that as an ancient god, it wouldn’t trouble itself with the concerns of mortals until their power approached its desires.

But it expressed curiosity in him.

“What if we come up with an encryption method?” Kalani asked.

He raised an eyebrow and gestured for her to continue.

“We want to avoid leaking information but that won’t be necessary if we come up with a method of communication that obfuscates our messaging to outside observers.”

He shook his head, “Any method that we come up with comes with the encryption key already. If we bring our heads together and come up with a system, your benefactor can just reach into your mind and scoop out the bits it’d need to decode the system.”

The encryption system was sound if they had the means of blocking out sections of their memory from the unwanted observers.

“For now,” he sighed, “We’ll just have to keep our information vague enough that neither benefactors will be able to parse out the tidbits we leave behind for sensitive bits of information.”

“And what if we miss each others clue? Or come to an incorrect conclusion to the information's significance?” Kalani pressed.

He shrugged, “Its a faulty method of information trading but there isn’t anything we can do short of making your next visit with the Voice so banal that they lose interest.”

Aurelio chewed on his sentence and realized that there would be a way to do just that.

“I’m not suggesting we do so now, because we first need to know if we’d even have time to commit to this course of action, but there’s an innovation that the outpost can provide that allows a scavenger to… remove their memories.” Aurelio offered up.

{Memory Extraction} was an innovation that helped maintain the longevity of a scavenger by rolling back the clock on their spark level. It was also one of a few methods to remove a role from a character and one of a few methods that allowed for the targeted removal of a mental hazard.

There was also a chance that the character placed in the alien artifact might end up dead at the table, leaving only a [Complete Essence] behind.

Kalani contemplated the idea despite the disgust on her face.

“No,” She settled on her answer, “No. Whether we have time or not, I do not want to have my mind messed with any further. I refuse.”

Whether they had the option to refuse was another situation entirely.

The pair eventually returned to the surface to take care of the remaining ends for the next voyage.

Kalani separated from Aurelio, pouring herself back into the archives with a conviction to find a solution to their sleeper agent problem.

He went to the radar station and selected their next quarry.

Hunting the Vessel was great, but the resources it provided paled in comparison to the items they could create from the parts of the other monsters.

Their hunt would still be in the Metal Mire, but they were going to confront an enemy he hated going against.

The Malignance.

Aurelio retched, his imagination running wild over the potential stench the creature was sure to exhibit.

There were still five other domains to explore but he wanted to do so when there was little risk to their lives.

The resources that the Malignance dropped favored biotics and sludge heavily so he was going to gain little headway in his personal primary objective of upgrading the smithy to gain access to the higher tier items and his preferred [Pack Rat] suit.

No, the colony's appropriate primary objective revolved around unlocking the medical ward for their space faring vessel and that meant exploring more of the Metal Mire.

Aurelio flicked his ember to the dormant radar console and scanned the biome for this solar cycle’s conditions.

The main monitor lit up with an indecipherable static. He didn’t have the {Binary World} innovation to take advantage of this White Noise event but thanked his luck that it was otherwise benign.

The secondary monitors tracked a falling star streaking across the Mire.

The familiar dice rolling pop-up appeared before him and a smile crossed his face.

“Let's hope my luck holds.” He whispered as he allowed fate to decide what would result from the outcome.