Dawn Garden

(As written by Fishman and Dashmiel)

Diarneus kept them floating stably just above the shifting masses of grey dust that churned the ground beneath them. It was next to impossible to perceive anything happening beneath them, visually speaking. At least where sight in the human-visible spectrum was concerned.

“It’s not that I see more with my ‘special eyes’, Ms. Vang,” explained Diarneus. “I don’t see more spectra than your equipment. I just see with a bit more resolution, and I can see it all at once.

“The advantage is in my brain,” he said. “My kind has been seeing the world like this for a very long time. Here, try this,” he added as he thrust his hand palm upwards towards Tatiana’s. A small black polymer oblong was rising through Diarneus’ palm, like a diminutive oily tadpole rising from a pond.

“Press it against your helmet.”

Tatiana stared it at for a long, flat moment before deciding she’d seen stranger things. As she took it up in her hand, the edges of her eyes crinkled. The lines reached her forehead as she pushed it against her helmet.

“Now what?”

As she spoke, the bundled nanites packaged within the small oblong set to work, melding into the helmet and modifying its structure.

“Now we’ll remain connected through my own internal network, free from any interference that might get thrown into this planet’s datasphere. I can also show you how I see things, and make sure the image is modulated for you to be able to interpret it.”

As he explained, Diarneus sent Tatiana copies of the musical notations he had seen within the yurt, and explained how he’d noticed them written in UV reflecting pigment. This was his first clue, and after the encounter with the child and how it ended it, it was where his attention was focused on.

“As best as I can tell without a labspace to study physical samples, whatever this grey stuff is, seems to react rather strongly to a very complex system of resonance. If you look here,” he said as a flurry of images from his point of view flooded Tatiana’s vision at a rapid pace.

Tatiana’s eyes grew wide. She had been so preoccupied with the tracks that she hadn’t been flipping through her visor to see something this obvious. “They don’t match up, though,” she told Diarneus. “The notes that we’ve been hearing, they’re not these notes but they have to be linked somehow. How many combinations can come out of these five notes? You- you don’t need to answer that, because I know the answer is a lot.”

So the grey matter was synergizing with the humming. “But we can hear it. Why aren’t we being affected? Because we’re not touching it?” Shaking her head, Tatiana urged them on. “We need to find our teammates. We can theorize while we make the search.”

There wasn’t much of a hint to push them forward, no clear indication of where to go. All seemed for naught until the hums started once again, and shadows in the ash appeared in the distance. They waved at them, beckoning them close.

“Diarneus! Tatiana!” the figures cried. “Over here!”
 
As Alyssa and Daniel made their way cautiously to the wreckage of the downed hovercraft, they would become aware of yet another oddity in the way the ash behaved. As they neared, they would notice that the ash around the fallen craft was pulsing.

As if on the wings of an unseen—and oddly spherical—wind, the ash was caught in a state of flux. It rushed swiftly inwards towards a globe shaped boundary surrounding the immediate area around the craft, and moments before contact, it was evenly repelled outwards. The timing of the anomalous pulsing behavior followed a strict pattern, and every time the ash was repelled a small amount of faint static disrupted the visuals on their helmets.

Suddenly, a section of paneling fell out from the wreckage releasing a plume of smoke and flames. It looked like there was at least one survivor.

"Hurry, you must..." the figure broke into a series of harsh wet coughs. Vivid carmine blood dribbled from the man's lips. He attempted to crawl towards the approaching duo, but his movement was impeded by a large section of metal paneling lodged through his torso.

"Take...this...Pioneer outpost...south...pole...it's the last...bastion," he said weakly. He held an arm outstretched, palm side up. Within it, a small spherical device sat upon it. It looked like a brassy metal orb with transparent circles throughout of what looked like crystal. A glance inside it revealed some sort of machinery, but it didn't seem to have a way to open it.

Every time the pulsing repelled the ash, a faint light glinted deep within. Careful observation would reveal that with every pulse, the light seemed to grow dimmer.
 
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Alysa remained close to Daniel as they headed towards where the hovercraft had been taken out. Her eyes cautiously took in everything and she sighed deeply, hating how hard her heart was beating. It felt like for a few minutes that was the only thing she could hear. Forcing herself to take in a deep breath and release it slowly, the redhead cocked her head to the side, watching the ash closely.

“Daniel… do you see that?” She questioned softly as if afraid the ash would hear her and suddenly attack them. Fingers clenched slightly into a fist while she kept herself moving, though the slight static disruption of their visuals made her a little hesitant. Yelping, unable to help herself when the panel fell, Alysa gasped at the sight of a survivor. Rushing over to him, no longer cautious, Alysa knelt down beside him, struggling to hear what he was saying.

“Shit, you’re hurt pretty bad. I am not a doctor… Daniel?!” Alysa glanced back at her teammate before returning her attention towards the figure, realizing that he was trying to tell them something. Looking down at the small device, she slowly took it and cocked her head to the side, not understanding. “The South Pole?” She questioned, wrapping her fingers around the orb while glancing down at it. Taking note of the pulsing repelling the ash, she just blinked.

“Whatever is going on… the light is dimming…” Alysa noted, wishing she didn’t feel so out of her element. “Daniel, we got to get in contact with the others… get to the south pole.”
 
Moving swiftly through the ash, Daniel glanced back towards Alysa as they neared the fallen hovercraft. They were close enough, and as they got even closer his eyes started to focus on a new pattern to the ash around them. It seemed like it was being repulsed, but then rearing back towards the hovercraft in a consistent pulse. His own visuals being interrupted in the same rhythmic pattern, "This doesn't look good-" Daniel started but then the sphere came into view, and he noted how the ash was being kept out at the regular intervals. Maybe it was something of use after all.

The sudden fall of the paneling startled Daniel as he shifted his feet to move in front of Alysa, but after it collapsed and the form of a man was revealed he let out a small breath of relief. Alysa quickly overtook him, rushing in to the survivor's side; he moved in shortly after, eyes searching for any further threat from the wreckage bearing down on them.

His search was interrupted though as he listened to the man's faint words, his message ringing clear; one good look at the situation told Daniel that saving the man would prove difficult, but possible; the real issue was the faint response the orb was giving off. "We'll have to get out of here first, if we can get back to our ship we might have an opportunity to get to the southern pole but that's not happening if we can't regroup with our team. See if you can get their attention through the comms, if that doesn't work try climbing the wreckage if you're confident with it. If they're looking for us from above, they might see the pulsing from that device; just please, make sure we stay in it's radius. I'll see what I can do for him."

As he finished speaking Daniel fished out his medical bag, immediately going to his side and inspecting the metal paneling. Thankfully, it wasn't embedded deep into the ground beneath him or he would have had to find a way to cut it; "Stay awake for me alright? I'm going to need you to fight a little longer." He told the man, looking for a sign of acknowledgement before pulling out some equipment from his bag. The first was a numbing agent which he applied around the wound, this would keep the nerves from registering the panel leaving his body and sending him into shock when he did so. His next step was to ready a bio-foam, meant to seal the wound and help limit internal bleeding, he saved a few supplements for afterward that would speed natural recovery of his own body, which would in turn cause his body to replicate more blood at an accelerated rate to make up for what he had lost. Recovering the tissue would still take some time, but still cut it drastically; this was something Daniel had worked on studying his own genetic makeup, an easier way to do this was to work with his parasite but opening his suit up was a bad idea.

With a sudden heave Daniel removed the paneling, grip was difficult through the suit but the weight of it didn't prove a problem for him once his body strained to lift it. He immediately got down to the man's side and started to apply the foaming agent, carefully moving him over so he could address his front after taking care of his back. "Stay with me here, no need to talk just keep looking at me alright?" He offered a smile to the man, but continued working. With him on his torso Daniel reached back into his bag, leaving the foaming agent there before pulling out the supplements and popping two into his hand. "I'm going to need you to eat these, just swallow alright?" Daniel affirmed, looking for affirmation of some sort before proceeding.
 
The wounded man grimaced, eyes wildly casting about in a near panic, before alighting on the young man giving him medical attention. He nodded weakly, and accepted the proffered medicine wordlessly.

Meanwhile, the ash continued to pulse in time with the device's functioning.
 
Always a follower and rarely a leader, Alysa was looking towards Daniel for guidance. Thankfully, he appeared quite apt for the job, and she found herself nodding at his instructions. Almost saluting before realizing that would be stupid, the redhead kept a hold of the orb with her right hand while her left reached up to touch the button that was in control of their communications. Holding onto it, she attempted to reach the other two teammates, ignoring the static that played hectic with her ears.

“Diarneus… Tatiana, this is Alysa, do you read me? Over. I say again… this is Alysa, do you read me? Over. We’re by the downed aircraft and need an extraction immediately. Over.” She was supposed to say over, right? Hell, she didn’t know anything about communicating like this, aside from what she had watched on television. “Please acknowledge… over.” Without waiting for a response, desperate to get to the South Pole and out of this hellhole Ash-storm, the lithe female carefully climbed up the craft, still clutching the orb securely.

“Daniel, try and get more information from him. The more we know, the better off we’ll be. I’m going to raise the orb and see if we can be seen by the two. Static is all I hear right now.” With that, Alysa finally got to the top of the downed hovercraft and, while still grasping the orb, raised it high into the air, hoping that the others saw the light. As she did this, her emerald eyes peered around the area, trying to find something that would fill in the many blanks that the werewolf had.
 
Diarneus saw the beckoning figures through the ash, and pointed them out to Tatiana. He tried hailing them on comms, but found the interference through the ash insurmountable. Without a bridge link through his Va'nyr like he'd done for Tatiana, their stock helmets couldn't penetrate the hash that the ash was making of the EM spectrum within the planet. They needed more info, and his auditory matching was at least an 80 percent match for Daniel...

He descended towards the figure, and as he got closer, he saw that it was indeed Alyssa and Daniel. They were in a featureless plain surrounded, by the whirling ash. It seemed they hadn't gotten very far from their first encounter with the figure before getting lost amidst the maelstrom.

Diarneus landed next to their companions, and gently set Tatiana down. "Daniel, Alyssa," Diarneus said with relief. "Glad to have found you amidst this. We've got some things to discuss."

"I didn't see this fog when we touched down, it's possible that it's reacting to our presence here." replied Daniel.

"I agree with that hypothesis, and I think I've narrowed down how. It's a matter of resonance." Diarneus said.

"Yikes...Interesting," said Alyssa as she turned towards Tatiana. "I can’t even imagine living in these conditions. If there are survivors, God only knows just how this has affected them and what their demeanor is going to be like. Might be a hostile situation.”

Alyssa and Daniel fell silent, turning towards Tatiana.
 
When Diarneus put her down, Tatiana put a hand on one of her pistols, looking around the greyscape stretching out around them before her eyes landed on the other two members of their team. Briefly, her eyes closed and she hefted a sigh. They were alive!

"What happened to the man that you found?" she asked, looking between them. Something in the very back of her mind buzzed when they fell silent and looked at her. Something also went off after hearing Alyssa's speech. "Did something bad happen other than the fog? Something like this happened to us, as well."
 
Daniel was glad to see the man was aware of his surroundings still, it would make things easier for the both of them. "Alright, take a few deep breaths and get a rhythm; when you can, talk to us. It doesn't look like we have a quick way out of here, and finding a ship may be difficult." Daniel remarked, glancing towards the wreckage of the ship. "What's the fastest way to get to the south pole?"

A glance towards Alysa confirmed that she was hailing for support, thankfully the aura of the bubble still contained them but he worried foe the devices battery life. With no knowledge of it he wasnt confident trying to supplement it, but Diarneus potentially could. Just where were they?
 
Alyssa and Daniel's unblinking stare persisted as they replied to Tatiana:

"Hey Captain, Alyssa and I..." Daniel began, an awkward pause to his statements readily apparent. "..."We have to stay close, we might lose each other here..."What's the fastest way to get to the south pole?"

“Diarneus… Tatiana, this is Alysa, do you read me?" added Alyssa.

The tone of their voices sounded like them, but their expressions were strangely robbed of emotiveness. The continued their unblinking stare upon Tatiana.



The wounded man followed Daniel's advice, and he his breathing under control as the Daniel's ministrations began to take effect. He squirmed a little with abdominal discomfort as he replied:

"We're thousands of miles away. What happened to your hovercraft? And where's your capta–" the man's reply cut off his mid-sentence as he doubled over in pain. "Hey Doc, I have a fierce stomach ache. Feels like it's trying to explode out of me. Have anything for that?"
 
Tatiana's pistol zoomed up from its holster into her hand the moment Alyssa's speech reached her ears. Instead of unloading a bullet into her head, she brought it down on the back of her neck, aiming to knock her out.

"... this isn't them. Something's wrong!" she warned.
 
From the moment Diarneus heard “Daniel” and “Alyssa” greet them, something began nagging at the back of his mind. He allowed his personality construct to engage “Daniel” in conversation, as this was a fairly autonomic process on his part. But still...something wasn’t quite right.

It wasn’t the lack of emotion behind the words that unsettled him—the intricacies of human behavior were not innate to the non-human, and he wasn’t currently running the correct subroutines—but something else. Something in the words themselves.

He retreated inwards down into the mental space within where time had no meaning, and left his personality construct to handle the conversation. They seemed to be primarily addressing Tatiana anyways, low risk of committing a faux pas.

He began to review everything he knew of Dawn Garden, and everything they’d seen thus far. He set about collating all the clues he’d gathered thus far and sought to come up with the most likely theory of what transpired here.

It was the emphasis on music that he kept coming back to. Not sound, but music. It featured too heavily. Because of the requirement to remain shielded and lack of access to a proper workspace, he hadn’t been able to do a physical examination of the gray ash that coated everything. Except it couldn’t really be ash, not with what happened in the Yurt and the way it interacted with normal matter.

He’d been heavily in favor of a mechanical malaise, a runaway cascade of out of control nano-scale machinery of some sort. It would make sense for the Pioneers they’d been sent to help to utilize those means in their attempts to have minimal impact on the ecology.

Except the music. Why music? As a method of interfacing, he couldn’t envision a less apt and more error prone approach than atmospheric vibrations.

Something was…anomalous.

At the thought, all of the disparate elements in his mind began to coalesce. He began thinking of the placement of the orbital structures around the planet, and was in the process of running the equations on how the other heavenly bodies in the system would feature in his resonance theory.

That was when Tatiana pulled out her gun, and struck Alyssa.

Except it wasn’t Alyssa. There was no Alyssa here.

At the point where Tatiana’s gun seemed to connect with the entity’s neck, it phased through as if she had struck water. “Alyssa’s” body thrummed, the skin rippling from the point of impact as if Tatiana had thrown a rock in a human shaped pond.

On the wake of the ripples, the body turned the gray-ashen color of everywhere else, leaving behind a vaguely humanoid gray figure. Vibrantly shimmering violet pinpricks floated within the tight mist, roughly where the eyes in a person would be.

“Alright, take a few deep breaths and get a rhythm,” “Daniel” said, a moment before his form exploded into a gray cloud of ash that swiftly encircled Diarneus and Tatiana.

Before Diarneus could manage to reshape his magical cocoon to move to close the distance, the figure in front of Tatiana reached out and grabbed her shoulder. Sparks flew as Tatiana’s energy shield and whatever made up the creature began to grind together at the microscopic scale.

“We mean you–” the figure began with a whisper as the “ash” encircling them began to churn madly, pulling more of the surrounding disparate flakes into itself before stretching to form a shifting dome above the unfolding scene.

Atonal beats began to rhythmically ring out in the air, without an apparent source.

“–HARM” shouted the figure, it’s voice sounding nothing like Daniel’s or Alyssa’s.
 
(As written by Fishman and Dashmiel)

Tatiana pulled back hurriedly as the ashen figure laid a hand on her, shredding her shield and sending a million warning messages inside of her helmet, telling her the extent of the damage. She raised her pistol, the barrel covered in a plethora of glowing runes that gave off a low hum before it was fired. The projectile wasn’t a simple lead bullet- it left the barrel with the same glow as the runes and cut through the air white-hot and blazing, straight for the imposter’s face.

An incandescent void was burned in the center of the figure’s face, just below the shining pinpricks that stood for its eyes. The beats playing through the air took on more substance, the music in the air shifting into a more energetic sound.

It sounded animalistic and faintly mocking.

Diarneus glided through the air, rushing to Tatiana’s aid. His shoulder collided with Tatiana’s side, pushing her out of the way as a mass of ash in the shape of a spear descended from above to the space she had just stood in.

With derisive slowness, the ash filled in the hole in the figure’s face. This time, a sneer plainly decorated its features.

“Fuck,” spat Tatiana as her heels skidded across the ash after being pushed back. She looked at Diarneus, then to the ominous, grey figures before them. It looked like they weren’t going to get much done in their territory. “Diarneus, retreat!” she called, turning towards the path that would take them to the green side of the planet.

But it was all ash, encircling them, cutting off their escape. The certainty of death surrounded her, but not all avenues were lost. “You got any ideas I don’t?” she asked her comrade, raising a brow. “Because I only have about two.”

A second pistol was retrieved from its holster, both aimed at the figure as she started to blast away and walk backward.

“I am analyzing the situation–” replied Diarneus as another ash-spike rose from the ground behind him, seeking to impale him. The still animated cloak upon his shoulders moved on its own accord, forming a giant fist knocking the attack aside.

“–It’s...an ongoing process,” he added.

The Va’nyrian was having trouble mounting much more than a defensive screen, however.

He hadn’t considered that the ash itself might have had awareness. The voids in the planet’s magical sources he noted earlier were now surrounding him. Only the magic he’d already fueled would work, and he would need more time than they perhaps had to fashion more technological-based weaponry.

Meanwhile, the sneering figure began to slowly walk towards the defending pair, matching its pace with Tatiana’s. All the while, new ash rushed in to fill the void left by Tatiana’s attacks. The sneering grin seemed to get fractionally larger with each successive restoration.

As they neared the edge of the dome, the woman sneered. Every time she blew a hole in the thing’s face it was just replenished. Their options were running out, but she had one more trick up her sleeve.

“Diarneus, I’ve got a plan.” Tatiana looked behind her, then grabbed at the armor covering her chest. “It’s only going to work if you’re 100 percent on board. I’m gonna blast a hole in this dome and you’re gonna fly out.”

Her eyes, though trained on the threat before them, were pleading.

The look in Tatiana’s eyes momentarily confused the tall Va’nyrian, enough that he was certain he was missing something. With nary a momentary pause, he loaded the appropriate files he’d assembled on human communication and the subtext they were fond of using into his personality construct.

“Oh. If you’re certain?” he asked sheepishly.

He had yet to fully understand humanity’s relationship with death and the acceptance of their own mortality. He himself had no reason to fear falling here. If he died, he’d just never get to add this experience to the Seed. He’d also fail in helping set things right here, which motivated him to survive. But death itself or a lack thereof didn’t really feature into his decision making.

However, he was not sure if such a thing carried the same lack of meaning for Tatiana as it did for him. He’d met some humans with varying methods of transcending their own mortality, but he did not know if Tatiana was such a one.

She didn’t expect Diarneus to accept the plan so readily, but she was glad for it. After they’d made some distance between the ashen figures and themselves, she grabbed the eye of her watch and twisted it, causing the straps to retreat inside of it. The digital display swirled and became a single glowing light at its center. Tatiana handed this to Diarneus, then opened her mouth to speak until she saw the ashen figures draw too close.

“Get ready,” she warned him, facing the wall of the dome.

The woman took hold of the side of her mask and heard the blaring voice of the automated warnings from her helmet go off:

Initiating Self Destruct Sequence​

She felt a place in her chest grow hot, a hollow spot nestled right between the heart and the lungs. It spread throughout her torso and fried her organs before evaporating them altogether, spreading a great light throughout the dome that soon swallowed the woman up. The faint silhouette of a skeleton could be gleamed through the light, something not entirely human but in an image too fleeting to pick apart, gone as the shining pillar ate away at the dome, giving the Va’nyrian an exit.

He might have heard it from the watch, that automated voice:

Termination of Tatiana 571 Complete​
 
After accepting the watch from Tatiana, and cognizant of the fact he’d soon be left on his lonesome, Diarneus dispensed with the frankly inordinate waste of clock cycles that his personality construct imposed upon him.

As the shackles of artificial empathy faded away, the Va’nyrian was free to be himself. Without another entity to concern himself with, he was able to actually get some work done. Now that he no longer needed to engage in mimicry, he allowed his movements to match the frenzied pace his internal thoughts had.

He brought the watch Tatiana had given him towards his chest as Tatiana’s helmet began blaring warnings—which were fully captured thanks to his earlier intrusion into the Sierran systems—where a spot in his chest opened up to accept it. Once it was nestled safely where he could prod it at his leisure, he settled to observe the spectacle before him.

Diarneus was curious what this self destruct sequence would be, as he hadn’t noted any sort of explosives hidden within the helmets when Freyn’ja scanned them for him. With a perception significantly faster than a high speed camera, he turned to watch dispassionately as Tatiana exploded.

The rapid build up of thermal energy within her body was plain as day, the infrared portion of his vision quickly threatening to blind him and forcing him to make adjustments. The question of whether or not the woman had some sort of device implanted was swiftly resolved as the exothermic cascade reaction got underway.

He tried to log the details of her inner structures into his memory—Frey was fond of new construct profiles to collect, and it would be good bargaining material for her to leave him alone—but the speed with which the reaction unfolded managed to catch him unprepared to record it properly.

“That was an impressive display”, he thought. He wasn’t sure if he’d be able to harden his body in time if such a weapon was deployed against him. He made a note to slightly elevate the threat profile of the Sierran rangers in the Va’nyrian archives.

He spared a quick glance back at the still approaching ashen figure, and matched it sneer for sneer. He was reasonably sure he had its number. His primary goal was still the preservation of this planet’s biosphere—Data must be given room to unfold—but he added himself the secondary task of containment of the anomalous entity. Assuming he wasn’t destroyed in the process anyhow. He was humble enough to recognize that the Starbreath’s data files he’d loaded earlier in the day may have been affecting his confidence levels; Diarneus was a scholar, not the badass that Alaxel was.

Even through his accelerated view of the world, he noticed that the ash was already moving to seal the passage Tatiana had sacrificed herself for. He wasted no more time, and coated himself in the massless, frictionless cocoon again, before firing off into the sky beyond.

“They made 571 of these?” he thought to himself as the watch played out its asinine report. Who would even be around to hear it, in normal circumstances? Well, different races had different ideas on redundancy he supposed. He split apart his inner awareness, and set an instance of himself into tinkering with the clock. His first guess was that the “Captain” moniker the woman had held implied that these units were responsible for some level of tactical command in the Sierran organizational structure.

With luck, her watch would give him access to some of the abandoned structures he’d noted around the system.

Diarneus reached an apex in his flight a few hundred feet away from the point where the planet’s atmosphere could be argued to constitute mostly space. He took in the curvature of the planet as he glanced down. As he watched, gray clouds streamed around animatedly in the direction of the planet’s south pole.

The Va'nyrian glanced outwards, in the direction of the nearest orbital station...and promptly decided it would be safer to go back down beneath the planet’s atmosphere once again. He compartmentalized what he’d seen moving through space towards him.

A full three cycles of his brain's assistive processors were dedicated to measuring the thing. Anomalous indeed. If they didn’t stop the entity on this planet, this system was as the humans said: In for some dire shit.

He needed to locate the others. While he may not particularly care for their well-being at a personal level, Diarneus didn’t need empathy to want to see them safe. Daniel was a wealth of unexplored mystery, and Alyssa was pregnant. Data must be allowed to unfold.

He had hoped the altitude would provide a way to bypass the comms interference from earlier, but no luck. The “ash’s” detrimental signal attenuation was too strong. He really wished he’d been more forceful earlier, but the politeness enforced by the personality construct had precluded his simply replacing their benefactor’s shoddy technology with his own.

It was then that he suddenly got a message from Alyssa.

“Alyssa, I read you. Maintain position, I’ll be there in a few s–” No that was foolish, he thought.

He couldn’t come in that fast, the back-draft would burn them to cinders. With an internal sigh, he reloaded his personality construct.

“–minutes. I’ll be there in a few minutes, maintain position,” he broadcasted.

After some quick triangulation, he sped downwards towards their position, leaving a trail of fire and unfolding space horrors behind.
 
Thousands of miles… fantastic. Keeping her thoughts to herself, knowing that negativity wasn’t needed in an already tense situation, Alysa glanced over towards the male and Daniel, glad that he appeared to be getting his breathing under control. It was what he said next that worried her and she had seen enough movies to know what happened when someone got a stomach ache. That was something they didn’t need, an alien bursting from his gut.

“Our captain and other crew member went somewhere else to check on stuff.” Alysa managed, realizing she hadn’t really paid attention to where they said they were going. Scrunching up her nose, she returned her attention towards the orb and kept repeating herself in hopes that Tatiana or Diarneus found them soon. Just about to give up hope, she heard Diarneus’s voice over the com.

“Fantastic! We’ll be right here, over! We have a survivor of a hovercraft crash from the other team. Over. He knows what we need to do. Uhh… over and out.” Shrugging a little, Alysa glanced down at Danie.

“Diarneus said he’d be here in a few minutes.” She smiled, keeping the orb above her to enable him to get to them.
 
Daniel's face stayed stalwart as the man mentioned his chest pains, while it was worrisome showing that concern would do the man no good. He needed to see that Daniel was confident in helping him. "I'll take a look at it, and we'll see what I can do alright?" Daniel remarked, pulling out a portable x-ray form his bag that fit in the palm of his hand. The display would render a 3D model of what he'd be scanning above it as a hologram, and he got about searching for the potential problem. He hoped it was just something wrong with how he had been impaled, that would be the easy fix.. But something told him that there was something causing harm inside him.

As he worked he listened on to Alysa as she spoke over the comms, speaking aloud back to him as she got hold of Diarneus. Her words of comfort letting him know that he would be there soon made him feel a bit better, but she hadn't mention anything about the party leader. Was she not with Darineus? Hopefully she had managed to get the ship prepared, if they had any hope in getting to the poles he doubted that Diarneus would be able to provide transport for all of them there.
 
The man simply groaned in reply to Daniel, and waved for the young doctor to carry on. On the holographic model, it was clear that the man was suffering from a fair bit of injuries corresponding with severe blunt trauma. However, that was not the extent of the image. As the image shifted around with Daniel's probing, a sort of fuzziness came upon the projection. The man's vitals began to spike, and his face flushed as he began to hyperventilate.

"Doc, I don't feel too good. My shielding–" the man said in between gasps of pain. The holographic imagery depicting the man's innards suddenly roiled as if filled with static...or ash.
"–The advantage is in my brain....It's a matter of resonance," the man said woodenly.

His vitals suddenly plummeted: heart rate, respiration, and brain activity crashing to just barely above detectable levels. The man it seemed had entered a vegetative state.

Just then, the air far above Alyssa and Daniel resounded with a sonic boom as Diarneus braked before his final descent. The Va'nyrian descended through the clouds of ash surrounding the crash site, landing near to where Alyssa was.

A look of intense curiosity blazed upon the alien's face, his expression filled with an inhuman fervor that his personality construct couldn't quite mask.

"Alyssa...what is that?" he asked, pointing towards the orb in her hands.

He had noted the strange man that Daniel was currently giving medical aid as he approached them, but quickly dismissed him in the face of the artifact. He could see the waves blasting from it, and was mesmerized by the beauty he found in the mathematical perfection they resonated with.

Advanced as the Va'nyrian was, he was not immune to folly.

Something in his hind-brain tingled, and the thought momentarily flashed: Maybe he should take advantage of the fact that he had line of sight with the Sierran helmets his compatriots wore again, it would take only a few seconds to review the visual data of their excursion...

But no, he was lost in the sight of the unfolding waves that thrummed with universal proofs.
 
Glancing back towards Daniel and the man, Alysa frowned deeply at his words. While not a doctor, the redhead had seen enough skirmishes to know that things with the stranger were not great. Would he even make it until Diarneus made it? Her brow arched at his final words and she just rubbed her forehead, not even sure what had happened other than it appeared he was no longer conscious. “Well, fuck.” Muttering softly, Alysa struggled to make sense of what he meant by the advantage was in his brain and what he meant by it being a matter of resonance.

“Daniel, is he gone…?” Her voice while clearly audible enough for Daniel to hear wasn’t extremely loud. Alysa no sooner got out her question when Diarneus finally arrived. “Thank goodness!” Her eyes widened a moment before they returned to their normal size when she realized there was no Hovercraft. Leaping off the craft she was standing on, in a haphazard sort of manner, Alysa eagerly moved to greet their missing crew-member. Not only was the Hovercraft missing, Tatiana was not with him. She had a plethora of questions to ask, but couldn't get anything out, especially when he immediately asked about the orb in her hand.

“Oh, this? It’s an orb thingy that is keeping the ash shit away. But, the light inside is fading. That guy over there, he said we have to get to the last bastion… the south pole. He uhh…” Pausing a moment, she glanced around and sighed deeply.

“Where is Tatiana and our Hovercraft?” She finally asked, fingers on her free hand running through her red locks to shove them out of her eyes. “Please tell me we’re not trapped here now…” Alysa added, her voice breaking just a little bit as it dawned on her just how screwed they potentially were.
 
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As the impromptu patient lost consciousness Daniel grimaced, the readings that he was getting from the scanner weren't helpful in this case. If that ash was already in him, he didn't quite understand just how to deal with that yet; especially with the device beside them that was consistently pushing the ash back. Alysa's concern filled his ears for a moment before he had the resolve to reply. "He's not entirely gone now, he's still alive.. But not for long if I think what's happening inside him is accurate."

Daniel struggled with not knowing what to do, he found that infuriating. As Diarneus arrived he glanced his way, listening as the two spoke but he didn't have anything to contribute. There was still a patient here. "Diarneus it looks like the ash may have gotten inside this man, he may have some more information for us but it's going to be difficult to move all of us through this ash if that orb we have is starting to give out." Daniel sighed, the one thing he had planned for helping this man involved great risk to himself. Not to mention, even if he managed to get the ash out and keep his internal organs working... Transporting another individual, potentially without a hovercraft would prove rather troublesome.
 
Alyssa's first words barely registered as Diarneus' consciousness continued to spiral further down in his observation of the orb. The concerns of primitive meat really weren't all that interesting. Not in the face of this. Here was knowledge. Here was beauty. Such exquisite perfection could only have been crafted by a truly worthy intellect. Diarneus had his hopes and suspicions, but it clearly was not made by these Pioneers they had come to aid. This might have been their first clue in millenia, and absolutely nothing else mattered.

He had to get this artifact back to the All-Mother before this system entered complete disarray. Not all data is ranked equally, he thought as he absentmindedly began to stretch an arm towards the orb whilst beginning the mental command to re-summon his means of magical movement. It was time to leave, it was too important...

A sudden jolt brought him short, as his personality construct caught the break in Alyssa's voice. Nano-seconds before his casual disdain could disregard the alien emotion he was perceiving, a series of commands deep within him were executed as the personality construct overwrote his plans.

Precisely tuned electrical pulses fired off in harmony with equally measured neurotransmitter secretions in his bio-mechanical brains. Whether a shackling of self or deliverance from corruption was a matter of debate; Diarneus' planned ruthlessness was wiped away in a wave of empathy at Alyssa's distress.

"We are not trapped here," Diarneus replied with some–deeply hidden–chagrin. "I know how to get us out. But I am afraid Ms. Vang..." the Va'nyrian paused in the delivery of the bad news. A precise interval as dictated by the personality construct, accompanied by a set of facial musculature contortions that were supposed to translate as the optimal mix of empathetic pain/sorrow/calmness dictated by the human context in question.

"Tatiana did not make it," he continued. "She bravely sacrificed herself to allow me to come help you and Daniel." Euphemisms and well intended lies were the hallmark of human communication, he was sure. Diarneus did not share the fact that Tatiana was most likely an artificial lifeform, and the copy of a copy of a copy at that.

He was still thrall to the construct, which remained in overwrite mode. It seemed there was no helping it, he had to continue with the original assignment. He assuaged himself with the rationalization that there was still time left. Perhaps time enough to uncover where the locals got the orb from.

The tall alien gave Alyssa a gentle smile, and performed a come-hither motion with the remainder of his left hand. A gentle current of energy tugged the orb away from Alyssa and over to him. Before he could get further into any sort of appraisal however, it was time to address Daniel.

"Let me take a look," Diarneus said as he turned from Alyssa and walked up besides Daniel. The man was prostrate upon the rocky ground, clearly senseless. Diarneus closed his eyes and held out an out-splayed right hand over the man's form. A faint crackling could be heard as the alien's diagnostic tools flared to life beneath his skin.

"Ah. I'm afraid your patient is technically no longer a human being Daniel," Diarneus said.

The alien turned his hand around, and his own holographic projection appeared above it.

"As you can see here, his brain and nerve tissue is being suffused and replaced by the anomalous material. Interestingly however, it appears to be perfectly mimicking the previously existing structure. Not altering it..." Diarneus' assessment was paused, the construct suggesting a three second period of chin tapping. He accepted the recommendation.

"It appears that the process is being hindered. Most likely by the orb's effects. Which is fortuitous because I'm fairly certain you and Alyssa would already be dead otherwise. Very well, we can not stay here. Let's get to this planet's south pole and see what we can find. We can share notes on the way."

Diarneus turned away from Daniel next, and walked to stand as close as he could comfortably stand by the still smoldering wreckage of the man's hovercraft. Unseen currents of energy shifted around him as he set the orb to float slightly above his head and took a firm stance.

He imperiously raised his arms to the sky, lowered them back down to his chest level, and brought both hands together not quite palm to palm, fingertips touching.

The sound of the wind through the clearing in the ash rustled through as Diarneus stood stock still. It continued to sound like it had all along, as the Va'nyrian seemingly simply stood there.
 
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