Contact: Fear of The Unknown

[Legens Legentis]

Flight Recorder found on Kepler-22B
Journal 01 (plot): We had no idea of knowing what would be on the surface once we had finally landed. The United Nations assured us that this planet, Kepler-22B, was a lifeless rock once the rovers scanned it. That was the last thing we heard before going into cryosleep. The truth, however, is a bit more complicated than that. Our ship was the Perseus-7, one of the most advanced carriers in the galactic fleet. Perhaps we should have noticed sooner, but it's not common for a valuable carrier to be sent on a research mission. We were fools to follow that signal. We were told that the surface had enough resources to prevent Earth from succumbing to another energy crisis. After all, that was the entire point of the Interstellar Colonialism Project. Kepler-22B was the first big target for terraforming, since we had already colonized Mars, Luna, and Venus. I'll try to speed this along. This planet is not safe. For those listening to this, avoid all contact with the Kepler 22 System at all costs. No rescue mission, no supply drop, wait... what was that sound?----*static*

Rules:
1. No godmodding whatsoever.
2. No harassment of any kind to other players.
3. Please use common sense! No, you're not going to use that Organ Destroyer Rifle/Nuke Launcher to crush your foes. Weapons will be rare, and ultimately, useless against the real threat.
4. All Iwaku rules apply.
5. Romance. Is. Not. Here. I'm sorry, but love is difficult to find when stranded on a distant planet and hunted by an unknown creature. But who am I to judge.
5. Yes, characters can die. You can RP as a survivor from the Perseus-7, granted that you obey the following rule to a higher degree.
6. DON'T DESCRIBE THE CREATURE! This may be a bit confusing. We're talking about a predator that is highly proficient in stealth. If you do see it in full-view, it's the last thing you'll see. If you wish, you can describe other things about it, such as claw marks, injuries on cadavers, etc. (We're also trying to maintain tension)
7. Please inform me if you wish to make multiple characters, or have any ideas you wish to share.
7.5- As a side rule, the creature's nickname will be 'The Manticore'.
8. If you choose to play as any of the non-human races, you are welcome to provide their history, mythology, or anatomy so long as you tell me beforehand. I decide everything else on humanity. *evil laughter*

+(Intro)+
The dark room, occupied solely by the chief executives of the Virgo Corporation, was more smoke-filled than it usually was. Billions of dollars were being pored into their latest business venture, and there was a great many things at stake. The Hydra was one of the more experimental kind of ship in Virgo's pocket. Enough bribes were given to inspectors that few seemed to mind that the Hydra carried anti-matter engine thrusters, far more efficient than the cheap, ion-charged ones. The whole situation was just bizarre. The Perseus-7 was the flagship of the United Nations and their display of humanity's technological progress, yet it ends up missing around a stray exoplanet. Peculiarities like these always caught the attention of Virgo's CEO and CFO. But today, it was different. The CFO, holding a cigar firm in his hand, knew relatively nothing about the Hydra's latest mission. Heck, its construction was fully completed only recently. There was still plenty of room for testing and examination. "Sir, we are wasting massive amounts of revenue on this expenditure of yours." the CFO proclaimed. "Why not just leave the Perseus-7 investigation to the UN?" he angrily questioned, holding the cigar closer to his mouth. His boss was sure to respond calmly. "Who says they know it's gone missing? The ship in question was always more than a mere warship. It was designed to hold the population of an entire city! But that's not the reason I'm investing Virgo's attention there. In due time, my friend, I promise you that. I say we share a drink when the Hydra launches out of Earth's orbit. It will be quite some time until we can give full view to the results." ​

 

[ze_kraken]

The Hydra had been unlike any ship Sam had ever piloted. Her work with Virgo had involved guiding the large, rectangular slabs of space-born metal that composed the shipping units. Before Virgo, it had been an equally unattractive and ungraceful asteroid miner. One with an established orbit at that. The space-bound leviathans she had piloted before never had to enter atmosphere, and thus didn't need curves and edges to cut through air and work in orbit. The Hydra, being designed to work as well in airless space as in atmosphere, had form. Shape.

And it handled beautifully.

Sam had been so infatuated with the Hydra that when the time for the long nap came, she hadn't wanted to let it go. She had only been able to manually pilot the ship for hardly over two months before her new obsession had been taken from her. Forced away by practicality and reason. Jokingly, before she went under, Sam said she would at least dream of the ship over the long, thirteen year trek across the known universe. If she had dreamed, she couldn't remember it when the cold prick of stimulants hit her system when at last the sleep came to its close.

---

"Caution. Your body is still prone to post-cryo shock," warned the calm, female voice of the automated medical station the crew had hunkered down in. The chamber itself was cramped with hardly any space for Sam to move her arms or legs and she couldn't quite see past the frozen, fog-clogged glass of the coffin.

"Status?" Sam croaked out, her voice cracking from its long period of dormancy.

"Unable to comply."

Sam nodded, the gesture causing her head to bang painfully against the lid of the coffin. Cursing, the pilot disengaged the lock of the chamber and swung the door outward with a hiss and a rush of chilled air meeting warmer air. Gingerly, she strode out to the readout screen. Life support was at full capacity in the cryo-chamber, having turned on twenty four hours before the set wake date of the pilots and mechanics. No vital systems had worn away and they hadn't hit anything on their path. She had woken up to worse.

Overriding the the automated medical unit and accessing its communications channel, Sam opened a link with Walker, "Walker, rise and shine. We've got a life support system to get running. Acceleration gravity's at a nice and easy .33g, so careful gettin' 'outta there. I'd hate to scribble out thirteen years of 'days without accidents.'"

Next was Rune. "Time to warm up the engines, Rune."

Short, to-the-point. Though Sam herself was inept at picking up on social cues, she could tell the Xendak was particularly prone to his species' inherent paranoia and distrust. With the first steps out of the way, Sam clung onto a nearby beam and hurled herself over to the opposite side of the cryo deck, catching herself deftly on two locker handles: navigation in low-g came to her as naturally as breathing. Once there, she searched for her own locker and opened it, grabbing for her vac-suit. Once comfortably inside the all-encompassing suit, helmet locked and air flowing, magnetic boots clinging to the floor below her, she consigned herself to waiting.

After all, she'd waited for thirteen years to get here. What were a few more minutes?

 

[Legens Legentis]

The cryo-sleep which Rune was subjected to was, by far, the most surreal experience he had ever felt before. To think that he spent more than a decade, trapped inside a makeshift coffin, was astounding. There were plenty of lucid dreams; of light and shadow, mixing into dozens of incomprehensible shapes. The Hydra was lucky enough to have well optimized resting pods, ones that didn't burst or shut down during travel. Even on normal ships, events like that were rare, but Rune was still concerned enough to consider all the possibilities.

The Hydra definitely had more aesthetic than both Xendak and Nelurr ships. Rune believed humans to carry a bizarre quantity of vainglory, but then again, so did his kind. The sharp sting of the waking stimulants pulsed into Rune's veins. He opened his mildly transparent eyelids to the sight of a foggy glass shell. Undoubtedly, the medical bay's AI detected that the Hydra had found its destination. Another strange idea came across the young Xendak. Beyond these metallic walls awaited a cold, unforgiving vacuum of darkness. Rune cursed to himself inwardly, despising his own state of mind.

"Time to warm up the engines, Rune." apparently Sam was the first to wake up. He could never tell what ran through that human's mind. Perhaps that was for the better. The glass lid slid back into the pod, allowing Rune to finally stand for the first time in 13 years. The individual pods were all lined around the center in a circular formation. The co-pilot could still see the other crew members laying in a state of virtual death, their skin being much paler than before the long sleep.

Rune stretched his arms and legs right after finding the strength to stand, hearing his bones crack and pop with sound. The AI would be responsible for waking the others. He pressed his hand over a large, red switch that led to the central corridor. From there, he could walk to the control room. It was during that walk that the sensation of fatigue began to wither. Rune sat down in the co-pilot chair, reveling at the pristine sight of his control panel. There was a yellow-marked dial close to the windshield. Before Rune warmed up the anti-matter engines, he peered out to the unending void before him for the longest time. He had seen it hundreds of times before, but now it looked more ominous. Rune shook his head, thinking it to be the affect of cyro-sleep, and swiftly turned the engine dial.

 

[Krimp]

The first thing Jrl'na did upon returning to consciousness was evaluate his condition. They had been told that the stasis-chambers they had been frozen in were able to do all sorts of helpful things, including a full-body scan upon awakening if one wished for it, but Jrl'na did not trust machines one whit when it came to the evaluation of living tissue, and had turned off communications with the AI moments before the induced sleep had hit him. Using machines to assist - well, that was an entirely different matter, but he'd trust the evaluation of even an apprentice medical officer over a machine.

Brain function seemed to be normal. He listened for the steady double thumping of his dual hearts. Everything there seemed as it should be, too. As the front of the cramped pod swung open with a hiss of hydraulics, he tried out clenching and unclenching his massive hands. Slower than normal, but that was to be expected, considering his body had been far, far under its optimal temperature for the last thirteen years.

Well, everything seemed to be functional. There was nothing left to do but step out of the pod, and Jrl'na did so, one slow, ponderous step after another. Damn if it didn't feel good to be able to stand up straight again: Jrl'na was tall even for Y'unkeh standards, and had spent the last thirteen years standing in a mild slouch. Not the most comfortable way to sleep, that's for sure.

Now that he had ascertained his own state of wellbeing, Jrl'na's next thought were for the other members of the crew; his flock, as he liked to think of them. All but two of them were still in stasis, which meant the machines would still be taking care of them; he checked a read out of the vitals of each of them just in case, before turning his attention to the room at large and realizing that one of the awakened members was in fact still in the room. He made his way over, recognizing the slim, somewhat distended figure of Samantha. Jrl'na found the human fascinating on account of her strangely proportioned body, something he had not witnessed while residing on the human home planet of Earth. It was truly remarkable how the species could adapt to the environment it grew up in.

"Hello, Ms Bailey," his voicebox said in its usual deep, calming voice as he approached her. Looking down at the woman, Jrl'na made a gesture with his hand, forming an 'o' with his fifth finger and thumb - the Y'unkeh equivalent of a smile. "I take it your awakening was pleasant? No strange tingling, altered perception, loss of memory?" He crouched in order to reach her height, his bright eyes looking through the clear face-plate of her suit as if it would help him in his scrutiny.

 

[Windsong]

The waves were crashing against a white beach. Sol was low in the sky, just enough to keep the cool of night from pervading the two entwined bodies just yet. It was serene and blissful as Tommy planted another kiss to her forehead. 'You know this moment can last forever..' The woman's voice crooned.

"Man's gotta dre--Walker, rise and shine!"

The rest was lost upon the dreaming engineer as reflex kicked in to cause his entire body to jerk out of a blissfully long dream. With lungs full of freshly cycled air there was to be expected some form of.. Adjustment. A spattering of phlegm and oxygen rich fluid spattered the inside of the casket, such a poor name for these devices, seconds before it began to rise into a white light that only belonged to a medical area.

Momentarily blinded he eased himself out slowly with the least amount of effort. With only a third of the gravity there wasn't much worry about pulling a muscle unless too much force was used. "G'mornin', girls." Thomas Walker was tired, he was groggy, and above all; naked.

Atop his pod in bold black letters was written Engineer, below that it had been scrawled with a marker 'Wake up in case of shit hitting the fan'. Regulation be damned, he knew it would make him chuckle and spit out the last of the lung-gunk when he read it. His locker had not been forgotten when walking around pre-flight with that permanent marker.

'Don't touch, I make sure everything works.' His humor was a tad dry at times but he couldn't help but chuckle while glancing to the other two in the room. One human, one not. That was fine by him, his dealings with Y'unkeh had always been pleasant, if only because he didn't look for differences to point out like most others.

Not much later he was dressed and sort of standing there idly staring at a readout on the wall. Piles of numbers and text streamed by at a steady pace. The heartbeat of the Hydra, and he was her Engineer.

 

[Legens Legentis]

The light bulb placed on the panel made fair indication that the engines were operating just as well as they did 13 years ago. A monitor, which was placed between the chairs of both pilots, held the processor for the Hydra's AI motherboard, affectionately referred to as 'JNI-3000' (Jollity Neural Intelligence) or simply Jenny. This AI kept all others aboard the ship in check, as well as monitoring various times and distances according with the Hydra's own position. Rune could not help but marvel at such innovation. Jenny could calculate the time and distance from any location in their galactic quadrant. A wall of text sprung onto the monitor, showing a list of command options always available to the pilots. Strangely, vocal synthetics were still a bit off. The ones in the medical bay worked just fine, not to mention every other major section, yet the superior AI communicated in text.

Rune placed his thumb onto a small, blue button which activated the ship's intercom to the Hydra's mainframe. It was easier than manually typing every single command into the given JNI unit console. The black screen, still between the pilot chairs, aligned itself over to Rune's line of vision. "Jenny, is the entire crew awake?" he was still practicing human verbal pronunciation, albeit poorly. Green colored words contrasted the darkness and formed a response. "TWO SPECIMENS UNACCOUNTED FOR. MANUAL INPUT REQUIRED." it read. As impossible as it sounded, Jenny had a personality, and a despicable one at that. It greatly preferred making pesky organics doing all the work, or so the co-pilot wanted to believe. Rune sighed and ran through the input code, effectively forcing the last stasis pods to perform waking protocol.

If only for a moment, the Xendak male dreaded releasing that human 'Chloe' from her stasis. To know that there were humans that rivaled the aggression of his own kind was relatively terrifying. If he had wanted to, Rune could have easily deprived her pod of preservative stimulants, the same kind that kept the crew alive during cryosleep. Of course that command would likely be overturned, but the thought gave enough satisfaction. Rune then turned his attention to the Hydra comm channel, paraphrasing the information which Jenny supplied. "Alright, we are now approaching the United Nations Carrier Perseus-7. Approximate time until docking: about one hour. Please remember to follow Virgo protocol during the boarding process." Rune hated reading off those lines from a script given to all Virgo pilots. Not that many ever followed them, but anything said here was likely being recorded by the mainframe.

 

[ze_kraken]

Sam fought the urge to retort with some fake, wholly biting reply to the medic's question, "No, Jrl'na, I'm feeling as good as I can after cryo sleep. Some nausea, some dizziness. Occupational hazard."

Not wishing to stay a moment longer with the 'o' shaped "smile", Sam disabled her magnetic boots' pull with a quick flick of a hand-mounted switch in the vac suit and offered what she believed was an apologetic smile.

"I'll get going to the cockpit."

Before the Y'unkeh could reply, Sam grabbed hold of the locker behind her and shoved herself across the cryo chamber. With the engines waking up and beginning to accelerate, the push wasn't enough to get her all the way across and she halted a meter or two off. Moments prior to what would have been a messy series of tripping and stumbling, Sam triggered the magnetic boots, which drew her to the ground with a harsh screech followed by a thud. Pausing, letting the adrenaline pass, Sam recollected herself and made her way to the cockpit.

---

Hunching over to pass through the doorway a few minutes later, the pilot took her place in her chair and triggered the manual override for the automated engines. Then she looked to the readout the AI was giving. The Hydra had woken them up late enough that her job was essentially over. Had she been a few hours out, Sam would have ordered the others to crash couches and triggered a high burn, five g at least, and slowed at an hour out for a smooth docking. Now, all Rune and Sam were needed for was the manual process of docking and readjusting the ship once they were within a kilometer or so of the Perseus.

Opening the on-board PA system, Sam added to Rune's earlier scripted warning, "That means no sticking your head out the airlock until there's air in it, no standing around things that don't take kindly to organic bodies slamming into them, or disturbing your lovely pilots. Thank you for flying Air Virgo today, you can rate our performance at central office in approximately fourteen years."

Sam shut off the PA and turned to Rune, "Once the comms. specialist's up, I want him to get a tightbeam message out to Earth, tell them we're all a-okay. Lag's about twenty eight hours or so, but we'll want to go ahead and poke our head in the Perseus before their orders come back. Get a lay of the land, sound good?"

 

[Windsong]

Millions of kilometers of emptiness. A vast gulf that would take them a single hour to finish the approach. Quite the daunting task for the skilled pilot. Right..

"Everything's automated. If the ship doesn't want you then she opens the air locks in her own.." Tommy had made his way after what was the worst good morning he'd ever received in his life. He wasn't speaking to anyone in particular with the questioning, just the pipes and the hum of the reactors. "Shit. My jobs near obsolete too." The self-deprecation was necessary in his line of work. Optimists didn't last too long in solitude.

Near the core of the ship and it's anti-matter drives Tommy was still subjected to gravity and her bitch friend Intertia. Luckily it wasn't enough to warrant much in the way of drugs to suppress sickness as he did the rounds on gantries and through maintenance corridors running in between walls. A small data pad kept track of his location as well as a checklist.

A terminal made for quick access to everyone else aboard the vessel without allowing him control. "Hey, Sam, right?" Could name off every size bolt, rivet, and weld at a glance but couldn't pull a name to save face. "I know you said not to bother you and all but can you check with the ships systems for me? There's vibrations along the outer hull.." Briefly he relayed exactly where in a monotone voice. "Just double check. It might be deceleration stress but need to be sure.."

Anti-mat drives were ridiculously complex for what they did. Firing tiny pieces of stuff at not-stuff suspended in the center of the core by magnets capable of ripping a man to pieces without an atom of metal on him. All the while catching the resulting blast to aim them at a destination.

"Thrust impulse is steady at point-zero-zero-zero-five and.. Check." Another little pixelated tick marked off.

 

[Legens Legentis]

"Yeah, sounds good." Rune was weak in his reply to Sam. At least the transmissions wouldn't take weeks to get anywhere. It was good for the crew to keep in contact with Earth, if only to make up for the vagueness of the mission agenda. Rune went through on checking every monitor on the right side of the cockpit. The smallest one, difficult for any species to read, held the official agenda direct from Virgo. After all those comfortable years in stasis, it wouldn't hurt much to be reminded of what he was here for. Didn't Virgo have a reputation for its meticulousness? If not, that would explain the brief mission summary. Rune switched the puny monitor off, deciding that he had memorized all the essential steps.

Another screen showed the footage of the Perseus-7 orbiting some terrestrial planet, whose surface clashed in color between brown and purple. Kepler-22B. It was difficult enough to see it from the shaky camera footage, but the distance between Kepler-22B and the Perseus-7 was about three times the distance between Earth and Luna. For any other important information, Chloe was the only expert on board. She was the only one familiar with their destination's astral geography. On the bright side, the Kepler System had no asteroid belt to deal with; that much Rune was sure of. Many a horror story Rune listened to, where some poor fool led his or her ship into seemingly empty space, only to have their vessel torn to shreds by microscopic rocks. Rune tried to turn his attention back to the task at hand, checking all the operating functions several times.

---

Had she not been alerted by that annoying mechanical voice, Chloe would have punched through the glass in her pod. For as much as she bragged about being the toughest one on the Hydra, or in Virgo for that matter, she was heavily claustrophobic. It wasn't much a problem back when she entered cryo-sleep, at least then she was still in Earth's atmosphere. But homesickness would have to wait, she had a job to do. Chloe figured that there was plenty of nice loot to confiscate on the Perseus-7. Sure, Virgo paid enough credits to last anyone a lifetime, but nobody could object if the Perseus went derelict. It would be nice compensation for having the worst job on the Hydra. Chloe was in charge of its telescope sensors; basically, she sat behind a glass scope and mapped out constellations and planets. Sure, she wasn't exactly Galileo, but the job got done.

 

[ze_kraken]

"Just double check. It might be deceleration stress but need to be sure.."

Sam nodded to herself, barely visible through the confines of her vac-suit, and set about momentarily turning off the Hydra's deceleration thrust, letting inertia propel them. Odds were, since the computer had calculated a direct approach with a constant deceleration of .5g, she would need to overrule the computer and up the thrust on final approach. Once she felt the Hydra stop pressing her into her chair, the rate of speed constant again, Sam ran the diagnosis and adjusted the span of the search to the location Walker had indicated. The vibrations were still occurring.

"Think it'll make it to the Perseus? I can try put a bit more strength into our deceleration," Sam said through a private link, "but if it's just stress, I don't want to risk pushing it anymore. If it's crucial, think if I start I start moving around a bit without accelerating to avoid crashing into the Perseus that you can take a look out there?"

Releasing the 'speak' button of the link, Sam waited for Walker's response, patting the patch of inner hull to her right, "Don't quit on me now, girl."

Her tone was possessive and contained traces of true worry. By now, the Hydra was an old piece of hardware and the next-and-best was probably already available on Earth. As far as Sam was concerned, though they were thirteen years late, the Hydra was still among the best and brightest. But if the Hydra was already thirteen years old, how old did that make the Perseus? Space travel hardly seemed worth while when another bigger and better ship was developed while you were under...But then, her salary wasn't high enough for that.

Still get to fly ships like this, though.

 

[Legens Legentis]

Slowly but surely, the Hydra made its way across the vast stretch of nothingness before it. Rune focused on the approach as best he could, nearly breaking under the tension. Please, please work right. Switching multiple dials on his intimidating control board, as well as running a long button code, Rune prepared the docking bridge. It was Jenny who ran the smaller calculations. The rest of the crew's activities gave enough input to suggest that everything was turning out okay. Thus, all the co-pilot could do now was watch the slow crawl.

There wasn't exactly a word to describe the feeling when the Hydra connected with the Perseus. After all, no one was even sure that there were survivors on board, especially after the time it took to get to this system. If they were lucky, then the Perseus' crew had stasis pods as well. Rune leaned back in his char, trying to recall the reason for the ship's disappearance. Virgo gave the impression that this was more of a rescue mission than a salvage one. That, and he remembered that the Perseus belonged to Earth's government, not Virgo. Perhaps it didn't matter. After all, this wouldn't affect the Xendaks in any way. A loud screech erupted when the pressure stabilized in the docking bridge.

 

[Windsong]

"Nothing warped.. Nothing bent.." Besides the ever present hum of the reactor through the super-structure he could see no rhyme or reason to change how they were going. It's got to be just temperature changes. Tommy thought in on himself while pulling himself through the narrow entrance to a service corridor.

"It seems to have stopped." The headset sat in his ear with a wirey mouthpiece sitting against his cheek. "Probably just temperature changes. I'll monitor it closer and see if it persists.."

The Hydra had been fine on take-off and initial acceleration. Performing the opposite maneuvers shouldn't be any different. Even skimming the years of logs showed no real fluctuations or anomalies that would have to be looked at. Which was a great thing, because that chair he'd smuggled aboard was waiting for him. Plush cushioning with black leather made for the second best seat right after the pilots. It had been modified to fit regulation, able to be mag-bolted to the floor in case of emergencies.

For that remaining hour Tommy resigned himself to the engineering office above the reactor. Wrapped in enough shielding to stop a mac shot it was the safest he could feel in the entire ship. Miniaturized life-support to keep anyone alive for years in case of a reactor malfunction.

---

"Did the Perseus just clamp us!?" Any engineer worth his salt hated loud noises where they shouldn't have been. Metal on metal was the worst.

 

[ze_kraken]

"Understood."

---

Sam had been disappointed to find, that although docking had involved the most manual interaction she had seen on the Hydra, that too had been little more than selecting a docking port and running small diagnostics tests. The ship had taken control of the stick from there, gliding itself more delicately to the external lock than any human pilot could. What would have taken Sam minutes to arrange and align took Jenny seconds, and before she knew it, the familiar clang of a registered lock ran throughout the entirety of the Hydra.

Then came the screech. An ear-splitting screech that sent chills down Sam's spine and her hair up like needles.

When the moment of agony passed, the Hydra having adopted the spin of the Perseus, Sam unbuckled herself from the pilot's seat and adjusted her boots to the ground: the Perseus' gravity was maintained at a near constant 1g, too much for her legs alone to process for too long. As an afterthought, she grabbed the controls for the PA.

"We've connected with the Perseus. All crew report to the mess. We'll take it from there."

That done, she turned to Rune, "As much as I love the Hydra, she sure takes the fun out of my job."

Before he could respond, the pilot hunched over the doorway and exited the cockpit, making her way to the mess hall, the same question going through her over and over again in different ways: what was waiting for them?

 

[Legens Legentis]

Rune nodded, feeling a bit smug over Sam's comment over her own ship. The Hydra was put into a sort of parking mode, and was expected to stay that way until the job got finished. He too got out of the cockpit in search of his holo-notepad. It was left inside his personal locker, installed nearby the command bridge's sliding door. Rune kept around a sort of diary; one that stored far more information than he could physically write down. Holo-notepads were a Nelurr invention from long ago, yet one of Rune's other bosses was kind enough to give him one as payment for a previous, and completely boring task. He could never confide any sort of information to the crew, unless it was related to the task at hand.

"Open holo-pad," Rune activated it through audio control, then keeping quiet until everyone else was gone. "Begin recording. It appears as though the Hydra has finally discovered the Perseus-7. We remain unaware as to how long it's been missing in exact terms, and most other details remain classified. All aboard this vessel have been instructed to search for survivors first and report back anything unusual. Hey, wai--" a human hand swiped the holo-pad. Standing before the angered Xendak was Chloe Avilov, casually chewing a piece of bubblegum.

"So, what'dya doing with this, empty-eyes?" she quickly turned her attention to Rune's diary entries, finding a great deal of entertainment in them. "Give that back." he took it back, quickly slamming the holo-pad back into his locker. As to why Virgo ever let her on their most expensive ship was a mystery. Chloe, feeling disappointed over how few embarrassing secrets she could tell the rest of the crew, expressed it in a wholly civil manner. "I'm just messin' with ya'. Back on Mars, keeping secrets got ya' killed pretty quickly. Maybe you should remember that our destination is as big as a space station. But anyway, I'll be seein' you on the Perseus. No time to waste now." the Russian girl walked off, prepared to annoy the rest of the crew accordingly.

 

[Legens Legentis]

Transmission P.1 (by J_"Kraken")

September 22nd
2098
---

Power couplings on Deck 4 are still disabled. A four-man engineering team sent down with security escort under authority of the captain, but a ceiling collapse trapped them on the upper floor of the deck. By the time we could clear the debris, they had been killed by an unrelated segment of ceiling collapse. This isn't right. Someone's doing this, and once we find out who, it'll be a quick trip out on the surface of Kepler-22B.

September 29th
2098
---

Orders from Earth are becoming less and less common. With our current communications lag at twenty six and a half hours, it was a slow progress, but it has been nearly a week without directives. We managed to find a crew capable of both clearing the debris on Deck 4 and establishing a secure point to enter through. The power couplings were torn by something, looks to be a large, serrated knife. Civilian survival knife, perhaps. Without a sufficient replacement, we were required to remove one from the Perseus-7. We are awaiting return from the shuttle craft transporting the object. With any luck, they will return before our coolant units are torn offline and the reserve generators are sucked dry.