You walk back into the main factory room. It hasn't been long since you left, but the construction is still progressing, possibly even faster than before. You stop over by Tachibana and have to wait again before he can get a chance to speak to her. Again, you're too far away to make out the details, but Tendou explains when he returns.

“She said they should be getting the shipment of chi soon, we just have to wait a bit. I'll have to negotiate the price though...” He sits back in his seat. “Well, it'll be a use for all this,” he eventually sighs, looking down at the miniature lake of blue covering the floor of the cockpit. Despite his earlier revulsion, he seems to have gotten accustomed to it for now, even as it squishes around his feet.

To kill time, you head back over to the store room, so Tendou can grab another big barrel and scoop the BP off the floor of the cockpit. It's a long, slow task to get it all out, but the way the strange blue stuff clumps together when he grabs it, the job is much more feasible than if it'd been a normal fluid, seeping into every available crack. He also uses the time to gather all of the dropped screws and metal plates, storing them in one pocket of his bag for later.

When he's finished up and walking back to where you have your computers, you see an opportunity to ask another question.

Since you don't have any experience with ray frames in the past, how did you learn to work with machines as well as you have?

You can't help but wonder about that. A couple minutes of casual conversation and one look at your schematics doesn't inspire confidence in his abilities. Yet, he still managed to disassemble the canopy of your cockpit and remove your primary computer system without any apparent issues. Unless of course, he did make a mistake somewhere, and it just hasn't come to light yet.

“Hmm...” Tendou taps his chin in thought briefly when he looks over the question. “I don't know. We only had this one farm tractor. I don't actually remember this, but I heard that I messed around with it when I was really young. Ever since then, everyone in town came to me whenever they needed anything fixed.

That sounds... odd. What could he have done to convince a small town to bring him all their repair jobs?

What did you do with the tractor exactly? And how old were you during all of this?

“Well... I don't think it worked when I was born, and I remember a few years when the elders said that the harvests were a lot easier using the tractor again, so I probably fixed it. But I was like four years old, so it couldn't have been that messed up. Probably just a clog or misaligned gear or something.” He shrugs, but there's still a pained look on his face while discussing his old life.

There's a lot of guesswork in his explanation, but even so, a four year old fixing a piece of heavy machinery is certainly unusual. Whether by accident, pure luck, or something else entirely, it served as a catalyst to give him experience doing various repair jobs since then.

Still, nothing he worked on could have been remotely as complex as a ray frame. You're logging that when a human comes into your line of sight, riding in an especially small vehicle, like a cart, with two seats and a little flat bed in the back. It doesn't even have any doors.

“Excuse me,” the man says, raising a hand to get Tendou's attention, just as he's settling the barrel down between you and the pair of computers.

“Yeah?”

“Tachibana was asking if any pilots are still here. She wanted to speak with you.”

“Oh, sure,” Tendou responds. The man slaps the seat beside him, and Tendou quickly climbs in. The vehicle turns and speeds away.

You remain at rest for some time. It took about forty minutes to clean out the cockpit, so it could be that the chi shipment has arrived.

Five minutes pass before Tendou returns, hopping out of the same vehicle and jumping into the cockpit. Given the distance to the other side of the factory and back, the conversation couldn't have been particularly long.

“Tachibana needs help,” are his first words as he's closing the hatch. “She said they lost contact with the chi shipment, and I'm the only pilot still here. Everyone else must've gone back to town while I was asleep.

I'm not in very good shape for going on another mission.

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You immediately point that out. While operating on your backup computer hinders your movement somewhat, it isn't that bad. But your armor is seriously damaged from the last battle, so combat would be particularly dangerous.

“Yeah, I know,” Tendou admits, “but we need that chi if we're going to get all your parts changed over into that Firebird.” He has a point. Without that chi, you can't move forward from here.

And besides, if you do sustain more damage, it won't matter as much since you'll be changing the parts out soon enough. But that's assuming you make it through at all. “We'll move fast, and avoid any fights if we can,” Tendou explains his plan.

Looks like that's what we'll have to do.

On your way out of the factory, you run a quick systems check to make sure everything is still working, and it is for the most part. Your fuel, ammo, and energy reserves all check out, and all systems are operational.

Then you get to the doors, and see nothing beyond. Even though it's the middle of the day, it's completely dark, with heavy rain pouring down, and thick storm clouds completely blocking out the sky and sunlight above.

“Woah,” Tendou mutters, holding your hand out into the downpour. Your metal fingers practically disappear into the sheets of water. “I didn't realize a storm started, no wonder why they lost contact,” he sighs.

Even so, you press on, walking out into the rain. At your size, the high winds blows off harmlessly, and the water scatters across your metal exterior. It's a good thing all of your electronics are waterproof, because there are whole sections where the armor is too damaged to protect them from the storm.

You move carefully, walking between the structures put together by the humans. Many of them have bright lights to shine through the weather, which helps you find your way back into the valley. In fact, you find that they've rigged the entire way back with flood lights on either side.

“How are we going to find anything in this?” Tendou questions when you finally wiggle back out past the surrounding cliffs, into the middle of the dense forest. With the tree cover and rain. That is a very good question. You think about the possibilities briefly, but before anything definitive comes to mind, Tendou asks, “Do we have a map of the area from before?”

It's not the best, but you do have a good chunk of mapping from when you initially scouted the area with Mouse. You pull that from your storage and display it onscreen.

“Ok, so let's start with what we know. They're coming from here,” he indicates to Shado, “and they're going here.” He puts a hand on each spot, then begins to trace a line between them with his fingertip. “They would want to follow this line,” he thinks aloud. “But they wouldn't be able to. They'd be in trucks, so they'd need a path through the forest.”

There's in incline in this area that would be difficult in such vehicles, they would need to come from the east.

You make a note beside the map, highlighting the eastern area you believe they would need to move through.

“Right,” Tendou agrees. “And wasn't there a stream right around here?” He taps on the screen. “They'd have to cross it right around here. If we head in that direction, I think we might find them.”

You agree, and slowly begin to make your way through the rain. It's hard to navigate with such bad visibility, but your radar turns out to be invaluable. Despite the already bad resolution, and the damage from the battle, and the rain on top of that, it still gives a better map of your surroundings than your eyes do.

Moving forward is a careful process, matching the surroundings on your radar to the terrain you have recorded on your map, picking your way through the trees bit by bit, headed east. It's very slow going compared to your earlier trips, but staying on track and not getting completely lost is already doing well in these conditions.

It takes more than twenty minutes of walking before you are coming up on the stream Tendou mentioned. But there are lights in the distance, barely cutting through the deluge. Could those be from the humans? You can't think of anything else that would light up like that like that out here.

You walk closer, trying to get some better indication. But sight, sound, radar, it's all too garbled to find anything definitive until you've crossed most of the distance to the lights. You keep trying over comms too, broadcasting for anyone around to hear. But no one is responding.

Your pilot eases the controls forward carefully. One step at a time.

Just as the shapes are beginning to resolve, a bang rings out ahead. Suddenly, gunfire scatters across your upper torso. After an instant of shock though, you realize that it isn't doing any meaningful damage. Some of the gunfire starts to train in on your face though. You alert Tendou, telling him to block the significantly more susceptible visual sensors there, and he quickly does, holding a hand over your face. It blocks your vision, but you couldn't see much anyway.

These must be the people you're looking for, so you walk slowly forward, one hand covering your face, the other held up, intending to be non-threatening. After a moment though, you begin to take heavier fire, from something clearly larger, meant for dealing with ray frame sized targets, not human ones.

“Don't you have speakers?” Tendou barks, even though he already knows you don't. The best you can do is waving your hand up in the air to try and show you aren't a threat, while continuously trying to get some kind of message through over comms. Thankfully, you only take a few more hits before they apparently realize you aren't an enemy, and the gunfire soon peters out.

Clearly not wanting to open the hatch, Tendou moves your hand from your face, to finally see what appears to be a convoy of trucks, barely visible with their lighting cutting through the dark.

You take two more steps forward, both hands held aloft. Coming within a hundred meters of them, you finally get some indication of the radio working. It's more of a crackle of static than anything resembling a human voice, but Tendou responds, repeatedly, trying to establish contact.

You're inside seventy meters from the nearest lights when you can finally tell they are attached to a particularly large truck. That's when the crackling radio noise finally turns into something intelligible. The words are garbled, but they're words.

“This is Strider, Tachibana sent me.” Tendou says. After numerous times repeating his message, they finally seem to indicate that they understand, and the tension eases.