As I stood there panting from the fight, I thought that maybe these Wardens of Life had been onto something; not enough to justify what they had done to us but enough that I had some hope for my larger plan coming together. All I needed was people like me, dumb enough or desperate enough to grab the opprotunity that they could offer us; the opprotunity to be something more than a drone for a society that we didn't care for the way it didn't care for us. People who could dream enough to see beyond the issues that were glaring us in the face and see what I did, a world in which we could be more than we were.

"Cai, which way to the pod?" I asked after I had slowed my breathing enough to talk somewhat normally.

"The pod is still to the east," he answered. "Is there anything else?"

"Which way is east?" I asked, less than thrilled with the apparent sarcasm and sass that my AI was giving me.

"One hundred and seventy-three degrees to your left," Cai answered me clearly and exactly.

"Turn around, got it," I said as I spun to face the correct way. "How'd I do against the Scourge?"

"Very well," he said. "Most who face quadrapedal Scourge alone find themselves unable to surmount the odds that come from being outnumbered. The pack mentality that they display is difficult to face without equal or superior numbers. Few are able to face three of them alone in single combat and recieve minor injury while slaying all of them."

"I wish I could say that it was all planned," I admitted. "When I tripped and fell I think that if they hadn't been fighting each other to get up then I wouldn't have been able to kill the one, and then I'd have been dog chow for them. Then the one that ripped out most of its mane only hurt itself in the long run."

"Indeed," Cai agreed. "Had you not had circumstances go in a suitable direction for you to survive then they could have easily overpowered you."

"Yea, on that note, what's up with my sword?" I asked. "It cut through them easily and I would have thought that it was more difficult to do that since they had so much muscle and bone to cut through."

"Warden of Life weaponry is made with the natural strengths of the weilder in mind," Cai explained to me. "Humans were studied enough that the Warden Commanders learned that your species has many muscular redundancies that most species do not have. Your abdominal muscles work in conjunction with your muscles in your upper back to allow you a much greater range of motion than most species within the Wardens of Life. Many of these species have only one of these muscular groups and must expend much greater effort to move through a similar range of motion as Humans. Furthermore.."

Stolen novel; please report.

As Cai went on about how Humans had an advantage over almost all the species within the Wardens of Life collective, I walked eastward and tried to pay attention to how all of that translated to my sword working so much better than I had expected it to since I was a total newbie with it. Eventually I decided that it all came down to the alloy they made the sword with, don't ask me to pronounce it, I can't, and the fact that they needed to make the edge of the blade much sharper and stronger than humans needed to. Either way it worked for me really well in my opinion.

A while after I had left the site of my fight with the Scourge quadrapeds, I think I'll call them Hellhounds instead, much easier, I began to see signs of the wreckage from the crashed pod that HW-00-MA would have touched down in. Poor guy, no idea what was going on and he's dead before he even had a chance to figure it all out.

"Be cautious Rickshaw," Cai warned me as I approached the largest piece of wreckage that he said the comms device would be in. "There is no data for what may have destroyed the other Atmospheric Entry Pods so there may be dangerous things within the wreckage that surrounds us."

"Thanks Cai, I'd have never figured that out for myself without you," I quipped at him in response, hoping that my slowly rising fear wouldn't show too badly.

"You are welcome Rickshaw," he answered me, refusing, I think, to acknowledge my sarcasm.

I walked up to the wreckage that we needed and, after one last look around, knelt down to try to open it up.

"Given the state of the damage the storage module has sustained, it is likely that we can conclude the pod's destruction just after entry to the atmosphere of BS-HP-003," Cai told me as I searched for a latch.

"What does that mean then?" I asked as I pulled out my sword to pry open a promising crack in the piece.

"It means that the entry burn from the atmosphere will likely have welded the module shut," he told me just as I pushed on the sword and nearly impaled myself when it popped out rather than open the container.

"So how do we open it?" I asked as I patted my stomach and tried to shake the image of laying there bleeding out with my own sword in my gut.

"There is a laser torch attachment to your armor that will serve you well for this task," Cai answered, I was sure his tone was dry but somehow it didn't seem any different from his usual bland, artifical tone.

"How do I use it?" I asked as I sheathed my sword and looked around for anything that might want to eat me; really needed to make a habit of that.

"I will guide you," Cai said and guide me he did.

To use the laser torch I needed to touch my thumb and pinky on my left hand together and then slowly run the tip of my middle finger down the line I wanted to make. Once I had done that, I needed to raise my hand and form a triangle with my other three fingers. From the tip of each finger a small red laser shot out and met midway to the container before combining into a larger and much hotter single beam that cut easily through the container's side. I got the hang of it all as I was cutting the last side to open up the container and get my first look at the communications device that was going to get me off this weird planet.