Aside from Kalani, the rest of the crew stared at Aurelio with open suspicion.
“Phineas here informed me of a little trick you performed with… you described it as the ‘ember core’ correct?” Kalani inquired.
Aurelio smiled, “I take it you weren’t able to replicate my results?”
“Just what are you planning, huh? You think holding secrets from us is gonna make you worthy of our trust?” Elena snarled.
“I received instructions from the monolith,” he lied, “And it seemed to be a blessing that all of us could take advantage of. Guess I was wrong and only I’ve been chosen by the stone as its confidante.” He did his best to avoid having venom drip into his words. The hunk of rock had considered him a disappointment and Aurelio wasn’t going to forget that fact any time soon.
“Well,” Kalani gave Elena a look he couldn’t see, “I think I’d like to see this trick of yours if you don’t mind. We’re operating in the dark here and if I’m taking you at your word like we discussed, you’re going to have to be cooperative with the rest of us.”
“I already planned to be cooperative with the rest of you,” Aurelio’s patience was being tested, “But I haven’t exactly gotten a warm welcome from anyone else in your crew to make our union an easy and pleasant one.”
“You’re a stranger.” Cantwell chimed in.
“A shifty one at that. Fresh out of a pod from who knows where in gods know what time, bundled with that fucking Exo-Suit monster.” Phineas added.
“That wasn’t something in my control and I’m equally in the dark about that as you are,” Aurelio rubbed the bridge of his nose in exasperation, “Now are you going to accept my help without the open hostility or not?”
Kalani sighed and looked at the rest of the crew.
“Until further orders are given, you’re to set aside any hostilities or suspicions you have of Aurelio and accept his induction into our crew.”
Elena stomped on the ground, “You want me to put aside all of the weird shit up in the ship and trust him?”
“I don’t expect insubordination from you, of all people, Elena. Keep your suspicions to yourself. Am I making myself clear that we are to give him a chance?” She juggled her glare between Elena and Phineas, who were the serious holdouts for his induction.
Elena looked down in frustration, “Yes commander. I’ll keep my comments to myself. For now.”
Aurelio clapped his hands together, “Well I’m glad to be involved! At any rate, we’ve got a couple of things to do as we set up for our excursion.”
“Excursion? I thought you said that we’re not well equipped to handle the pinged ship parts?” Kalani questioned.
He nodded, “You’re correct. That’s why we’re going off to hunt another one of those Vessels you all fought.”
That caught their attention.
“Now wait just a minute,” Phineas piped up, clearly incensed, “I nearly lost my fucking eye dealing with that hunk of junk and you’re asking all of us to follow you into the wilderness and take on another one?”
Aurelio shrugged, “I don’t plan to do this empty handed, mind you, but we have to start somewhere and with our current equipment, those are the safest things to hunt here. They’re plentiful too.”
“And they’re naturally aggressive? Wouldn’t it be easier to just claim scrap from the environment?”
“The planet is a deathtrap in and of itself. If the monsters don’t attack us, the environment will. It’d be easier for us to get on the offensive and hunt down one of those walking concentrated scrap sacks than scrounge around the environment with an equivalent to greater risk of death.”
“What makes you think they’ll even have scrap worth salvaging?”
“They have scrap worth salvaging.” Cantwell chimed in.
A pause.
“Are you gonna elaborate on that Canty, or are you just gonna look at us all slack-jawed?” Phineas pressed.
Cantwell had some showmanship in him because it only took him a moment to reach into the cooled pile of ship debris and throw onto the ground a pile of sludge, scrap, and sentient wiring that writhed towards the closest power source.
Aurelio smiled, “I could kiss you Cantwell.” He looked at the pile on the ground and identified a whopping ten resources. Equal division of salvage, sludge, and biotics. And even a dying stone mixed into it all. Some of it was specific to the Vessel they’d fought while some of it was just the basic resource.
Which meant that those blueprints would function in a similar manner to the game, by his estimations.
“Stuff there’s high quality scrap. Even if the suit looked bad from the outside, the insides were more advanced. It’s useful stuff.” Cantwell elaborated.
“And what are we meant to do with all of this stuff? Even if it’s worth salvaging, we don’t have a welding tool to fuse our metal with it nor a cutting tool to shape the metal into what we’d need. Can't wrap my head around the functionality of the sludge and… wiring worms.” Kalani stated.
He rubbed his hands together, “Cantwell, grab all of this stuff and follow me. The rest of you too. I’d hate to repeat myself.”
“Where are we going?” Elena asked.
“We’re going to the outpost’s junkyard.”
They were confused but the demonstration, he hoped, would showcase his usefulness, along with the rest of the plan he was prepared to provide to the crew.
---
The outposts Junkyard was also known as the ‘scrap smith’ within the game. The facility was massive and mostly barren on the inside, what little scrap the former residents of the outpost left behind still sitting inert within. The ember sconces on the walls were properly juiced up with power, illuminating the area to showcase its sizable area.
The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.
In front of the loose piles of junk was a smaller monolith built up with geometric blocks, a symbol of a glowing hammer slammed into an anvil at its center.
“Place the resources in the pit behind the stone, Cantwell.” Aurelio gestured at an empty patch of space and the man silently lugged the objects to it.
“What is this place?” Kalani asked.
“It’s the junkyard. We have access to this location and access to the gearworks facility just a building over.” Aurelio replied.
“And how do you know that?” Elena inquired.
“I’m wasting my breath by repeating myself because it’s the same answer I’ve given you before; the big glowing stone told me.”
“And what of the other buildings? Even after unlocking all of the power, some of those doors are still shut.” Phineas pressed on the inquiries.
He sighed, “The stone is unwilling to unlock the outpost unless we meet its strict criteria. The former residents of the outpost maintained order through a ranking system and the facilities function in a similar manner. We have to rise in rank to gain access to the other locations.”
These were half-truths. It was true that the stone was measuring their progress but that sort of progress was measured in what quarries were slain within the tabletop game. The cultural assessment, admittedly, was something he’d posited to his brother in an attempt to contextualize the artificial progress for unlocking functions within the outpost, but this theory was never corroborated with the texts the game came with.
“And what’s the function of the stone over there?” Kalani asked.
Aurelio scrutinized the stone and came up with an idea.
“How about you handle this one,” Aurelio gestured for Kalani to come forward, which she did so apprehensively, “This is a fabricator of some sort. The mechanisms are fuzzy to me but it’s going to assess the resources that Cantwell has just dumped in the pit and do something with them. It has recipes for stuff it’ll be able to produce with the stuff we bring in.”
At least he hoped that was the case. Far be it for his luck to turn sour and force their group to craft those weapons by hand. With just Cantwell containing engineering experience between the five of them, their odds of survival would plummet.
Aurelio motioned for Kalani to press her hand on the stone and after a bit of prodding, she did so.
An orange mote of light jumped out of her chest and into the stone. The field beyond the miniature monolith became cordoned off by thin beams of fire.
“Should it be doing that?” Phineas asked, a hint of panic in his voice.
Aurelio shrugged, paying attention to the process in silence.
Within moments, the useful scrap they’d thrown into the pit was subsumed by a cloud of black and orange dust, until nothing but the old piles of junk remained.
“What’d it do?” Cantwell asked, eyes fixated on the field.
Before Aurelio could answer, a display appeared before Kalani in the same orange hue as her flame.
YOU HAVE ACQUIRED
Kalani let out a nervous chuckle, “Oh, um, wow. I’m getting a read on the… material that the yard has made with the stuff?”
Aurelio smiled. Their cores were functioning properly then. The lack of a diagnostics sheet worried him but that was a backburner problem.
Looking at the stone in front of them, faded symbols at the base of the structure filled up. He recognized them to be the symbols of the resource types they’d acquired; a bundle of gears to represent salvage, a teardrop to represent sludge, a small geometric rock to represent unrefined stone, and a heart to represent biotics.
“Aurelio,” Kalani called him over, “Why is there a prompt here?”
He zeroed in on the new prompt that had appeared at the stones center, the language clearly reading ‘Craft’ to his sight.
“That’s the craft prompt. I’m guessing if you click that, you’ll get a list of all the things the fabricator can generate for us with the resources we have on hand.” Aurelio replied.
Kalani scrutinized the prompt, “You can read all that?”
He paused, “What does that prompt look like to you?”
“It looks like a bunch of blocks. As a matter of fact, it looks like the same sort of runic script that was all over the station back in the center of the outpost. Can’t make heads or tails of it.”
Another peculiarity to their predicament. Would the {Archives} be filled with books containing the same language then? Too many unknowns.
He shook his head, “Let's focus on the task at hand for now. The prompt in my eyes looks like English to me so I’ll guide you through the next step. Click on the prompt and it should give us that list.”
With his guidance, Kalani activated the crafting menu and the display expanded to showcase the retinue of weapons and Exo-Suit available.
WELCOME
[Heavy Metal Exo-Suit] - x5 Salvage
[Birdcage Core] - x1 Corrupted Core + x2 Salvage
[Scrap Blaster] - x2 Salvage + x1 Unrefined Stone
[Crackling Staff] - x1 Salvage + x1 Unrefined Stone + x1 Sludge
[Slab of Iron] - x4 Salvage
[Industrial Chain Cutter] - x3 Salvage + x2 Unrefined Stone
[Jagged Steel] - x2 Salvage
[Carbon Cleaver] - x2 Salvage + x1 Sludge + x1 Biotics
Each piece of equipment came with a small image of what the end product would look like. The Exo-Suit was faded out, their resources insufficient in fabricating such an item, much to Aurelio’s chagrin. They had the gearworks to invest their resources in as well but their fundamental pieces of equipment revolved around what armor they were wearing and which weapons they were gaining proficiency on.
Equipment from the gearworks shop were supplemental, an addition to shore up potential holes in a given build.
Kalani turned to Cantwell, “You should come look at this.”
Cantwell obliged and looked over her shoulder at the display, transfixed by the depicted equipment.
“This is magic.” Cantwell whispered.
“Hey, I wanna see what’s happening!” Phineas yelled, muscling his way to the junkyard's stone. Elena stayed at the back, uninterested in the current developments or unwilling to yield to her curiosities when the source of their discoveries had been the ‘untrustworthy stranger’.
Hopefully they’d all come around. Elena especially.
Kalani looked to Aurelio, “You seem to be the expert here, Lio. Have any weird space knowledge on what we should do or are we gonna go in blind on this?”
These were small steps forward.
“I’m sure I can sift through my head and pull out the knowledge if you give me a moment.” Aurelio replied.