Beneath the sky from which hung the sun, a murder of crows flew and cawed to gather and perch themselves atop a clump of trees, their black eyes reflecting an escape pod before which stood a pink-haired maiden, seemingly talking to herself.
“Tsk,” Vivian clicked her tongue. “Why isn’t she picking up?”
Sounds of shuffling and rattling could be heard from inside her escape pod as Zevach rummaged through the storage compartments.
“I’m properly getting the signal from her pod, and she’s not all that far either, so what’s the problem?”
The pods sometimes split into three when the pod AI judged the situation to be dangerous enough, but the pods rarely strayed too far, so the next closest pod after Zevach’s should belong to Marianne, but no one was picking up.
“Welp, looks like there’s no other way to it,” Vivian said. “Hey, Zevach, it looks like we’ll have to go there, after--- Mmph!”
Vivian turned around to call out to Zevach when something soft was shoved into her face. She yanked it off to find Zevach standing before her. He was dressed in a dark jumpsuit and a hooded jacket, as well as a pair of boots and a pair of gloves. His dark eyes bore into her.
“You need to get changed,” he said.
Vivian looked down at herself. She was still in that pink dress she wore to the party, not to mention, her pair of high heels. Clearly, Ill prepared for any sort of hiking, short trip or not.
“Okay, okay,” Vivian pouted. “I was planning on changing anyway. I mean who’s dumb enough to try and hike in high heels?”
She went to the escape pod with the set of clothes Zevach shoved at her. They came with the escape pod and were meant to accommodate most environments, but just before she closed the pod’s door, she turned to Zevach and teasingly said, “Don’t peek, okay?”
But the response she got was a flat, “I won’t.”
Vivian pouted. “Tsk, you’re no fun.”
As a hiss sounded, and the pod door closed, Zevach wondered how he was even supposed to peek, but he quickly swept such thoughts to a corner of his mind as he went through their backpacks one last time. The pod came with an array of equipment, apparel, and consumables, from nutrient bars and water flasks to keep them fed and hydrated to explorer apparel and healer serums to protect them from the elements and heal them should anything break, and of course, extra batteries for their multitools.
“No guns, though,” Zevach muttered. “No Blue Dust too.”
The multitool could be transformed into a variety of tools, even a drone, but while it could be used for all sorts of construction and deconstruction, it was by no means a proper weapon. Zevach fiddled with his multitool and transformed it into an energy saw. Cutters made of light quietly spun around the multitool as he held it tight.
“Am I supposed to fight from up close? What am I, some kind of samurai?” He grumbled when a hiss sounded from behind.
“These pods are for civilian use. The people that prepared them never meant for the guests to roam around and hunt. Besides, it’s illegal for civilians to own a gun,” Vivian said.
Zevach turned to find Vivian dressed in a pink jumpsuit and jacket, complete with a pair of boots and gloves.
“Protocol says that we should just stay inside the pod and sleep in the casket until help arrives. That casket, also known as the Cryovault X-7, could protect us even from the hardiest of beasts, and the pods themselves are always transmitting our location,” Vivian said.
“Then why don’t we do just that?” Zevach asked.
“Because it would be a huge waste?”
Vivian stretched out her arms. “Look!”
She pointed to the sky above. “It’s the same blue sky you’d find on Mother Earth.”
She pointed to the ground below. “The same tawny soil on top of which are littered the same leaves that you’d find near the end of autumn.”
She pointed to the trees around them. “Barren trees too!”
She pointed to the crow sitting on it. “Not to mention that crow!”
That seemed to spook it, for it cried out a scandalized ‘Caw!’ and took flight for the skies at once.
“This is a world where flora and fauna are abundant. A world just like the birthplace of humanity! And yet!”
She turned to Zevach and looked him in the eye. “This is not Earth! Nor is it any one of the few Earth-likes that humanity has found in the millennia since its departure.”
She approached Zevach, her face just inches away as she asked, “Where are we?”
And Zevach answered, “the Periphery.”
Vivian grinned. “Yes. The Periphery.”
Her lips parted as her face split from side to side to beam with a smile as wide as the crescent moon. It was a smile full of mirth. “We are at the edge of human space, no, really, we are past it already. And in that space that should’ve been void of anything lies a planet.”
She walked past Zevach to look down the cliff to peer at the barren trees that extended infinitely and rivers running downstream.
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“A planet teeming with life. In the Unnamed Sector, no less!”
A mechanical arm unfolded from behind her to reach out in front, fanning out at the end with five cloves to resemble a radar dish. That was a type of infantry scanner, used either for scanning the area for signals or extending one’s own signals for communication.
“Doesn’t it make you curious? What could be in this world?”
As the scanner spun, a map of the local area taken by her pod in its descent appeared in Vivian’s field of view. She zoomed in on the next closest signal, a beacon coming from Marianne’s pod. It was just down below the cliff.
“Above all,” she turned to Zevach. “What secrets does it hide? After all, there’s no way that the government would be ignorant to something this close to the Periphery.”
From the mirth that filled Vivian’s face, it was clear that she was by no means bothered about potentially being stranded out here.
Zevach smiled. “You really are the Electronic Fairy, huh.”
Vivian laughed. “But of course.”
Under Zevach’s breath, he muttered to himself, ‘Hopefully, not as crazy as the rumors suggest, though.’
“Anyway,” Zevach put on one backpack on himself, then pushed the other to her. “Let’s go find Marianne, then we’ll figure out what to do next.”
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A big backpack that irregularly shifted, the sound of laborious breathing, and the muffled yet firm steps of a person. That was none other than Zevach, who begrudgingly trudged down the descending path, while Vivian happily jogged from up ahead. As for why he was like that, the culprit was none other than the second backpack that he dragged along the ground.
“Zev, can’t you hurry up? At this rate, the sun is going to set before we get anywhere,” Vivian said as she checked the field watch on her wrist. It read: 3:00PM.
A vein popped on Zevach’s forehead.
“How about you carry your bag yourself?” He asked.
“I can’t carry something so heavy. I’m a frail young lady, and my systems have been optimized for research.”
“Yeah, well, I’m a baseliner!”
Vivian blinked at him silently for a while before eventually saying, “Just leave the other bag then. But still, a baseliner? Most people would at least go through strength enhancement.”
“Most people can’t afford upgrades,” Zevach’s face twitched when he noticed Vivian grabbing at a leaf nearby before putting it into her mouth.
“What are you doing?” He asked.
“I told you my body is optimized for research. That means I’m also packed with all sorts of sensors,” Vivian stuck out her tongue. It looked like a normal tongue anyway you cut it, but apparently it wasn’t. “My tongue for one is able to analyze the chemical composition of anything it can taste sufficiently, as well as test for biological contaminants. It’s a useful little tool, you see.”
“So did you find out anything?”
“It’s basically a maple leaf. Not normally edible for us, but the tree itself has plenty of uses. Not particularly interesting, though.”
Vivian walked ahead to find herself before a river flowing slowly for the precipice, where it would plunge down the cliff to crash into the waters below.
Vivian poked at the river before pulling back in a jolt. “Cold,” she said, then she tasted the water on her fingers. “Hmm. Seems clean enough.”
When sounds of ragged breathing reached her from behind, Vivian turned to Zevach. “Look. Clean water. I told you you didn’t need to pack so much. Marianne’s pod shouldn’t be too far now too, so we could’ve just gotten more supplies there if it was necessary.”
“Better safe, than, sorry,” Zevach said in pauses, clearly exhausted despite the short trip.
“Tired already? Sad.”
“Maybe, you, should, try, carrying it, yourself.”
“Maybe you should try analyzing the water yourself?”
Zevach and Vivian stared at each other before Zevach eventually shook his head and asked, “So, it’s good?”
“More or less. We’d need to run some more tests to be 100% sure, but I didn’t detect any pollutants or heavy concentrations of metals. Pathogenically, it’s good too,” Vivian smiled. “It’s a nice little piece of nature, but I was hoping for something more exciting.”
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The sun yet hung from the sky, but with the thick fog that blanketed the barren forest, the area grew dim, and the crows perched atop the trees took flight. Two figures soon came into view as they pushed through the cloudy veil. Vivian took the lead as Zevach trudged from behind. Their implants could draw a line on their field of view from their current location to their destination, so the fog proved no impediment to their gait.
“We’re almost there,” Vivian said, and soon, the cloudy veil parted to reveal the last third of their pod, but the sight of it did not bring joy but a horrified gasp.
“Marianne! Are you there!?”
Vivian ran toward the pod and Zevach chased after her, leaving the other backpack on the ground. He watched as Vivian rummaged through the pod, but while he was by no means an expert on anything technologically related, he knew enough to tell that the pod was in dire state. Unlike the sleek and sturdy exterior that he was familiar with, most of its surface was marred with melted patches, and there were parts too that were charred black.
“What in the world happened here?” Zevach asked, but Vivian did not answer and instead ran off.
“Hey!” Zevach called out.
“Marianne! Marianne! Can you hear me!?” Vivian yelled in search of the missing blue-haired maiden, but it was in vain.
Zevach sighed and left her to her own devices, so he could examine the pod himself. Unfortunately, the interior was no better than the exterior. In some ways, it was even worse off. Melted patches, charred surfaces; he tried opening some of the storage compartments, and it was as though they’d been welded shut.
Zevach clicked his tongue as he tried one compartment after another until he found one that opened. It contained nutrient bars, but unfortunately, they’ve all been melted down along with their plastic packaging.
“What in the hell,” Zevach remarked in disbelief. “Just how hot was it in here?”
Records in his pod had mentioned extreme lightning fields in the upper atmosphere, but was it really this bad? How did he even survive?
Flicker
Darkness spread everywhere, only the sound of water pouring in could be heard in the narrow confines of what was once his pod. The AI was unresponsive.
Flicker
“Argh!” Zevach palmed his head as he found it aching suddenly. He reached for his pockets by reflex, only to remember that he left his Blue Dust at the Titanic’s rest room.
Zevach leaned his back against the charred walls of the pod as a sharp breath left his lips. Oh, what he would give to have one puff right now. Even a hard shot of liquor might do, if only to ease the pain with which his head pulsated. Fortunately, it was quiet. Silence was its own analgesic. Wait? Silent?
“Aaah!”
Then a shrill cry echoed in the foggy forest, and before Zevach knew it, he was running for that voice.
“Vivian!” He yelled, but no answer came, at least, not in sound, only the parting of the fog as Vivian came to view. Her head was tilted up, eyes looking at something up above, and when he followed the direction of her gaze, he saw it.
Three half-naked men with bronze skin hung from the air with arms stretched out to their sides parallel to the ground; their eyes completely white. It was as though they had been nailed to a cross in reverse, but there was no cross. Against all laws and common sense, they hung there perfectly still in the air, as unmoving as their eyes that have been stilled in white.