SARAH GREENLAND
The group met at the teleportation station. She had not made friends with any of the other drop bears and while she was on friendly terms with Teki, she would not see him until a long time later. She stood next to Cvetka, who also was a bit isolated from the others and who also was on the bad books of Rush though not to the point that Sarah was. The two had no real connection but proximity. Cvetka was a studious person who meditated a lot and did all the right things. Sarah knew that she always was a bit of a failure. She cared more about music and about getting away from people wanting to tell her what to do. Cvetka was a bit of a social butterfly. She had made deeper connections in the few months she was part of the group that was somewhat like a school: a group taught together by the best teachers that their parents could afford, than Sarah ever had. It was not even that Sarah was trying to be antisocial, it was more that she always seemed to be too busy just getting by, avoiding scolding and sneaking tiny glimmers of joy to have time to hang out with people who seemed to see social relationships as a complex game with winners and losers. In addition, Sarah had one iron-clad rule: If the other side didn't even bother to feign caring about her interests, she would stop doing the same. And that stopped others who just wanted her to listen to their matters without reciprocating. Sarah asked Cvetka about her plans but Cvetka didn't really have plans except for training a lot. Sarah nodded. Then, the queue moved forward and Cvetka stepped onto the teleporter and disappeared.
Sarah stepped forward cautiously: "Hello. Sarah Greenland is present for teleportation to Kha Zha mountain compound."
The operator grinned lewdly: “Good news: Your boyfriend made sure you get a special placement with him. I kinda don’t see what he sees in you, but I certainly think you will enjoy your stay and don’t get preggo!”
Sarah wanted to object but the teleportation started.
The place she dropped into had thick stone walls, windows that were higher than she could jump to, a door and in front of it, Rush.
Sarah wordlessly walked towards the door, steeling herself for getting touched by the creep and tried to not even look at him.
“Hey, Sarah, my love, where are you going?”
“Main compound,” she said.
“There’s no room for you in it. You’d have to sleep on the floor.”
She moved past him. There was a hallway that led to a door. A door with a window, through which bright daylight streamed.
“System, if you are up already, I would like one integration please!” she said as she ran to the door, with Rush following her.
SHIVERS-IN-SUNLIGHT
The mountains were cold, but Shivers had to get up there. There was a settlement up there by the Spiders-of-Tsanh, who, while being another species, also fell under the purview of the System and their settlements also count.
The secondary matter was that these spiders were active in the day, which Shivers could do but preferred to avoid. As such when xe arrived in the area of the repository, Shivers only added the skill to the repository and left a message: “Hello Net-of-the-climbing-mountain, this is Scorpion-of-Tsanh Shivers-in-Sunlight, a nocturnal quester. I have added the Barrier Builder skill of level 4 into the repository. I would appreciate if for my quest, someone could implement it despite being less relevant for your settlement.” Xe checked the open quests of the settlement to see if xe could be helpful in the meanwhile. Most of them were very settlement specific and Shivers couldn’t do them as xe could not spider-climb up the sheer walls. However, one seemed made for xir as it would allow xir to use longstrider to scope out the mountain that the system translated as avoiding-mountain, which had emitted some kind of tremor and dust clouds last night. In addition, she realised that Spiders-of-Tsanh were slower than Scorpions-of-Tsanh even without Longstrider. As such, xe added: “I am going to look into the avoiding-mountain quest for you in the meanwhile.”
Then xe ran off.
SARAH GREENLAND
She woke up in white light. There was nothing that she could see. There was nothing that she could feel, or hear, or taste in the air. Nothing but a feeling of oppressive heat, that this planet seemed to always have. Then, a message slowly emerged in the air: “You desire integration into the system (Solidarity)?”
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Sarah nodded: “I do.”
The message re-formed: “What do you desire from integration?”
Sarah asked: “Short-term or long-term?”
The message formed into one word: “Yes.”
Sarah breathed in: “Short-term, I would like to get away from that guy Rush because…” she paused.
The message said: “Please continue.”
“He wants to do things to me that I would deeply not appreciate being done to me. Potentially of the nature of humiliation, violence… or the sexual kind,” she tried to remain calm, but her voice trembled.
The message reformed: “Understood. And long-term?”
“Long-term, I want to live life in search of something to strive for. All my life, I had to learn what people wanted me to learn, but which I am not good at. But I want to do a lot and I am not even sure what I need to do to find my niche. But I want to find a niche to make the place I lived in far better circumstances than most, but I realise how that was on the backs of others. And I don’t want that. I know how much suffering there is and that parts are due to my family… and it aches me, but I am not even sure how to alleviate it at least a bit.” she realised that she never had talked to anyone about this before and this was an unprocessed rambly mess, so she added: “I am sorry for the incoherence.”
The message reformed: “Are you currently affiliated with any skill repository?”
Sarah tilted her head: “What is a skill repository?”
The message once again dissolved into glimmers which then reformed: “Understood. What is your homeworld?”
Sarah said: “It’s called Earth. Tsanh is about 300 lightyears away from it.”
The message dissolved again and this time, it seemed a bit brighter: “Understood. Integrating you into the System.”
SHIVERS-IN-SUNLIGHT
Shivers compared the mountain that the Scorpions-of-Tsanh called “Mountain-That-Stings-The-Sky” and the Spiders-of-Tsanh called “Avoiding-Mountain” to the information that the system provided. That was when xe noticed a few rectangular structures rather high up that had not been there before. Shivers clambered up the mountain and towards them.
Approaching the structure, xe realised that the structures were made out of a kind of stone material that xe didn’t recognise. Xe scurried towards it and examined it. The structures looked like houses except that these were made for taller and narrower creatures. Xe couldn’t see an opening into the structures but could see there being rectangular holes in them that were blocked by a transparent material akin to fulgurite, a material caused by lightning striking the sandy parts of the desert, or by a wooden material akin to the stems of oasis trees but flat and in a more consistent colour and without bark. Shivers examined the structures and peered through the transparent ones, but could not understand what they did. There were many rectangles of various kinds in them. Some looking like the weird wood-like material, some looking like membranes.
Xe documented this for the system, but realised that in the starlight, looking into transparent fulgurite rectangles led to too little information and thus found a somewhat sheltered area of the mountain to rest and to do the rest in the light of the day, regardless of how difficult it was for xir.
CVETKA KRALJ
Something was not right. She immediately realised that something was off when she arrived. Everyone was running around scared. There was a loud and consistent sound of scratching of claws against stone. She asked one of the other students: “What the frick is happening?”
The boy didn’t even respond. He just pointed to a window.
Cvetka looked and saw a nightmare that unfortunately was real: It was huge, black like the night and… it was a giant insect, no, a spider, no, spiders didn’t have such a long curved tail, a scorpion! Cvetka realised that it was the source of the noise. It sounded as if it was trying to get through the window, or rather the wall, as that window was too small. And it sounded like that monster would succeed, the question was not if but when.
She ran to the weapons chamber but found it empty. That was when she heard a scream.
Running to a window, she saw that the door of another of the buildings opened and Sarah, that foolish, grumpy girl who sometimes bothered her, ran out, screaming.
The monster moved faster than such a huge thing should be able to. Looking at its movements… it felt off but in a way that looking at an optical illusion did. It grabbed Sarah and scattered away, drumming on the ground while doing so.
“At least it didn’t happen to someone we care about!” joked the boy from before.
Cvetka looked at him, shook her head and looked downslope where the scorpion scurried off with a person she had just talked to moments ago.