RP: YSS Eucharis [Mission 19.2B] Clues (HX-12 II Crashed Ship)

Once Natsumi was assured Sienna was alright she turned her attention to the wreck. There was a gash in the hull up near the top of the dune.

"Looks like our way in up there!" she said, pointing to the split in the hull that led into the pitch dark interior. With the wind getting stronger, they were going to have to get inside quick. She kicked in her thrusters, jetting up to the gash. She had to compensate with extra thrust from her control jets to counter the growing force of the wind.

Natsumi switched on her night vision and peered into the gash in the hull to see if they way in was clear.

Sienna looked up along the steep ramp made from the loose earth at the gash in the hull Natsumi had pointed at. Curiosity now starting to gain more influence over her, she moved to the base of the ramp. Without thinking, she placed a boot on the mound with the intent of ascending toward the opening, but after sinking a bit in the loose and uncompacted soil, she sighed and stepped back. She could possibly make it to the top, but it didn't seem that the "ramp" could convincingly hold her weight without dumping her back down to the bottom like the ridge had just moments before.

Movement in the corner of her eye made her turn her head to see Natsumi's armored exoskeleton floating up to the gash. She frowned jealously as she watched the Neko effortlessly alight on the derelict hull above her and peer inside.

Another gust of the thick wind staggered her, nearly knocking her off of her feet. Looking up, she noticed that in a matter of only a minute or two the ominously enormous sun hanging above them had dimmed, obscured by a thickening blanket of swirling dust carried on increasingly furious and frequent bursts of wind. "Crap," she muttered to herself. If she was going to get up to that opening, she needed to do it before she would be forced to add gale-force winds in a soupy atmosphere to the list of things she would have to struggle against.

She scanned the wreck, or what she could see of it. The ridge behind it loomed too high above to even consider jumping down from above, particularly in high gravity. She wasn't sure how she'd reliably get back up there in time anyway. There was a spot a few feet down the exposed hull from where the gash was that she saw enough handholds that she felt relatively confident she could climb, but again, the gravity was a factor, not to mention the age of the wreck. She couldn't be sure that any protrusion she grabbed a hold of wouldn't simply break off under her weight. Furrowing her brow, she put her hands on her hips in thought, and her fingers brushed some kind of tool secured to the left side of her belt that she hadn't noticed before. She looked down at it; it looked like some kind of pistol, or a miniature hair dryer. There was a neatly coiled lanyard linking it to the front of her belt. She blinked. How did she miss that?

It took her a second to figure out how to free it from the holster, but she pulled it out and looked it over. It had what looked like a standard trigger, as well as a button on the back that could be accessed by the thumb. It didn't appear to be a weapon, and she had a hunch as to what its function was, but she figured it was probably a good idea not to guess. "Hey," she called over the radio as she looked up at Takeyu. "This thing a grappling hook or somethin'?"

Derelict Ship

The ship had a rounded design but the interior compartments were segmented off into smaller spaces. The part Natsumi was looking into seemed to mostly be filled with sand, although the top of a submarine-style hatch was visible. Above, there was a tattered non-stick surface and tie-down points in this area.

Outside, the sandstorm suddenly emerged from the haze in the form of a deep dark red cloud that with the edges of an explosive cloud but stretching out from side to side as far as they could see, enveloping any terrain feature it reached. And it would be on top of them in moments.

Derelict Ship

"Get inside, now, before the storm hits!" Takeyu said, pointing toward the opening in the ship and then turning his gaze toward the storm headed their way. This was a fine time to get stuck on the ground, but at least it might prevent any possible enemies from paying them a visit - at least outside anyway, he couldn't say that for certain on the inside though.

Upon hearing Sienna's question; the Taii checked to see what she was using and nodded. "It is, should be full to so you can use it to get up to where we are," he flashed a smile, although hidden by his helmet.

Sienna nodded to Takeyu. It had been a good long while since she'd handled any type of firearm, but the little pistol-like tool felt familiar enough. Raising the barrel to aim at a surface on the ship near the gash in the hull, she let her breath out and squeezed the trigger. Involuntarily she flinched as the trigger clicked, expecting a recoil, but the gun didn't so much as shake. She lowered it slightly to inspect it, intending to look for a safety catch she'd missed or any other sign that it had misfired, but as she did so she felt resistance, like it was tied to something she couldn't see. Perplexed, she tugged against the invisible force, looking in the direction she'd fired. She was a bit surprised to see a thin fiber of thread extending out from the muzzle, almost rendered invisible by the blowing dust and haze. She looked up the ramp of dust and soil that was quickly eroding under the increasing wind, unable to see where it had attached. Giving it a couple more yanks, testing its hold, she finally decided that it had functioned properly, and didn't have the luxury of doing much more than trusting it to hold her weight.

With a grunt, she took a step up the ramp of earth, nervously pulling herself up with the gun and thread. She didn't see how such a thin strand of material could work as a lifeline, but she didn't have another option. She reached forward, groping about blindly for the impossible-to-see thread, finally getting a grip on it with her free hand, and proceeded to climb up the unstable ramp step by deliberate step, pulling it taut with every bit of progress.

About halfway up the ramp gave way and her feet slipped from beneath her. Her white-knuckle grip on the thread was all that saved her from going face first into the dirt and tumbling back down again. With her breath still caught in her throat, she hoisted herself back up and continued to climb, finally making it to the top. When she stood before the gash in the hull, she caught sight of the actual dust storm itself, a solid wall of blown-up earth rampaging towards them at alarming speed. Her eyes went wide.

Instinctively she realized what the thumb-trigger on the gun was for, and with it pointed at the ground, she depressed it. As she suspected, it cut the thread free, and she shoved the tool back into its holster. She looked down at the gash in the hull, then back at the dust storm, then at Natsumi and Takeyu who were already crawling inside. The dark aperture didn't look particularly inviting, but then again, neither did that storm, and she knew for certain that getting caught inside of it in the high gravity and thick atmosphere would end badly for her.

After a brief hesitation, she crouched down and slithered into the gash, away from the approaching storm.

Natsumi heard the wind change, getting stronger. She peered over the derelict's hull and saw the wall of dust and spores rushing to them. "Guess we're exploring the inside first!" she said and glanced back, seeing Sienna already nearly done ascending the dune.

She slid into the gash in the hull. It was tight and took a bit of maneuvering the added bulk of her power armor through and into the dark interior.

Other than the light from through the gash, the inside of the ship was pitch dark. There was no sign of any residual power from the ships power plant or batteries.

Natsumi deployed her drones and floating flashlight. The drones she immediately sent out to start exploring the local area inside the ship. Mainly she wanted to make sure there was no danger from structural failure or wreckage in the ship, but also if anything had taken up residence inside. She hadn't seen any signs of anything bigger than a spore, but who knew what was on this dust ball. The floating flashlight she kept with her, providing some light to see by as she examined where they had just entered the ship.

Derelict Ship

Since the hatch was shut and partially covered by sand filling the compartment the team was in, the drones were mainly stuck in the confined space. Outside, the dark cloud slammed into the cliff face, blocking out almost all light as its hyper-dense, dust-laden winds blanketed the area. Suddenly, Sienna and Natsumi had to hold on to whatever they could or be sucked out of the ship. Takeyu, still outside, was pushed up into the air and violently pinned against the rocky cliff face and pelted with fungus shards, rocks, and sand so hard it tore of some of the armor's paint off and scratched up the sensors.

Ramiro was busy examining the outside of the ship when he heard Takeyu call out. His adrenaline immediately kicked in as he rushed as quickly as he could over to the hatch. Crouching down, he waited for the two females to finish climbing in before he reached down to climb in himself...too late.

The force of the wave was enough to make him black out. The next thing he knew, he was pinned to the side of a cliff with Takeyu pinned on top of him. Groaning, he tried to move but found that the strength of the sandstorm combined with the power armor on top of him was enough to too severely restrict his movement. Laying back he managed to rotate his head enough to look at Takeyu.

"I think it's about time to get off...uh, sir."

"Would love to..." muttered Takeyu, he was amazed that despite being in power armor the storm was doing a fine job of keeping him pinned. Had he been pinned alone against this cliff-side he wouldn't worry so much about it, but being pinned against a fellow soldier had its problems.

Using a set of coordinates, he powered up his teleportation module. Although, he did have to triple check the coordinates, his suits sensors weren't functioning properly and he wasn't sure it was because of the fine sand in this storm or if the storm itself had somehow damaged his suit - which would be quite embarassing to say the least. "Hang on," he said to Ramiro as he set the module to teleport the two of them to just inside of the ship, at least twenty feet away from where Natsumi would've been.

Inside the wreck


As the sandstorm crashed into the ship Natsumi grabbed onto a structural beam, her MINDY's superior strength making it not too bad for her to hang on. She turned her attention to Sienna to make sure she had a firm hold onto something, then tried to spot the other two.

They were still outside. "Nayacesen-San, Ramiro-San!" She called out over the comm. "Are you alright? Where are you?" she tried to look out the gash in the ships hull, but the sand and spoors were so thick that she could barely see anything inside the wrecked ship, let alone anything outside of it.

She had no idea where they were, but knew they were not going to be able to hang on forever with the suction from the winds outside.

"Sienna! Use your grappling line and secure yourself to the ship. I'm going to try to block the entrance or get us deeper inside!" Natsumi said and frowned. She didn't want to block off the entrance in case Takeyu and Ramiro made it to them and needed to get in.

She looked around, getting the hatch that lead deeper into ship was going to be next to impossible with all the wind and sand and darkness. She had to seal things off, at least for a few minutes, she could always open the gash again.

Then there was a teleport.

Inside the wreck

Between the powerful winds roaring outside and the weathered, battered hull of the crashed starship creaking and groaning all around them, Sienna felt as if she was about to be swallowed whole by some enormous, unseen monster. One of the deployed drones knocked against the side of her helmet a few times as the whipping eddy currents of thick air within the little pocket of hull in which she and Natsumi stood buffeted it about, its servos and thrusters whirring and pulsing in a frenzy as it desperately tried to keep itself steady.

She herself found it difficult to stay in place as she stood there near the hatch in the floor, hunched over in the small, confined space. Glacing behind her to look for the others, she frowned when she still only saw Natsumi. She could have sworn they had all gone in before her, but in the soupy mess outside it was impossible to tell for sure. And now that the storm had finally set upon them, she couldn't see anything more than an inch outside of the gash in the hull. Judging from Natsumi's harried messages, it was pretty clear something had gone wrong.

When she was instructed to tether herself to the hull, her first instinct was to merely crouch further down and grab hold of the outer locking valve on the hatch below them. After the drone slammed into her helmet again, she thought better of it; if something were to knock her out, she needed to be sure she wasn't going to end up sucked back out into that hellish storm. Complying, she unholstered the tether gun again, pointed it at the deck, brushed the windblown dust and spores away with her foot, and pulled the trigger. Another strand of nearly invisible thread burped forth, sticking firmly to the metal plating and effectively tying her in place. She tested the lanyard anchoring the gun to her belt with a few sharp tugs, then crouched down to try and get the hatch open. She wasn't wild about blindly charging into what could be a teetering death trap just waiting to collapse the moment it's disturbed, but given the alternative, she didn't see that there were many other options.

An extremely low-frequency hum and the sensation of static electricity making the small hairs on the back of her neck stand on end made her stop and look behind her again. Was that a teleport?

In the sand-filled cargo area, Takeyu and Ramiro somehow had teleported into ship without dying, creating a loud boom that was heard even over the thunderous and whistling winds. With the cargo area filled with sand, they had nearly teleported into the sand and merged their bodies with it. Luckily, everyone was alright.

Sienna was eventually able to open the hatch, revealing a pitch black interior. Broken light fixtures stretched down the bottom of the corridor ahead. The once-white bulksheads of the ship were now peeling paint to reveal gray bare metal. Old ration packaging was piled on the floor along with the paint chips and debris. Here inside the ship, there was no howling sandstorm, only a dull roar from its fury outside.

Sienna felt the impact from the reverberating boom as if it were someone's open hand slapping hard against her chest. Looking up after her initial flinch, she saw the two power-armored men now suddenly on top of one another in a heap in the sand blown into the compartment. After exchanging a couple of puzzled-relieved looks with Natsumi, Sienna turned her attention back to the portal in the back wall.

With a few sharp yanks, she was able to break the rust and caked-in spores in the locking valve, allowing it to spin freely. It loudly creaked and groaned in protest as she pulled it open, apparently not having been operated in some time. Peering inside, the permeating darkness within didn't allow her to see more than a few feet, but what she saw was eerie.

It was one thing to see a wreck from the outside. She'd seen plenty of salvage operations in her lifetime so far. But to be the first to look inside of one after it crashed? She was realizing that this was an entirely different perspective. This was someone's home away from home once, and it showed. The dead fixtures that once served as running lights almost seemed to echo the footsteps that had once walked this corridor. It gave her an unsettling, haunting feeling, and the howling wind wasn't helping the scenery either.

But the storm outside was getting worse, and that was far more of a real and immediate threat at the time. She fumbled around on the side of her helmet, knowing that there had to be a headlamp switch somewhere. Finally, her middle finger found a protrusion in the helmet near her right temple and set back behind the faceplate, and she pressed it. With a boring "click," a bright beam of light lanced out from atop her head and pierced the darkness within the ship. Hesitation and curiosity clashed in her mind again, and after a moment's pause she turned back toward the team.

"I move one of y'all with that fancy robot armor and a gun go in first!" Sienna shouted over the din to Natsumi, trying to maintain her footing in the errant blasts of wind that came in through the gash.

The teleport effect had much less on Natsumi as she was clad in power armor, But she still felt it a little. She was glad to see Ramiro and Takeyu were alright though. The sandstorm had come up on them fast and unexpectedly.

"Welcome to the party!" Natsumi said and trudged over to help Sienna extract them from the sand. "Actually, I'm going to send my drones in first" she added to Sienna.

She sent her drones through the open hatch deeper into the ship. She was glad neither of them or her floating flashlight had been sucked out into the storm. They could explore in a bit and give them an idea what was coming while she and Sienna dug the other two out.

Takeyu staring blankly up at the cargo-hold ceiling; his systems going off and warning him about a cascade sensor failure. He shut the alarm off, then turned the sensors off for a moment to allow the system to settle down before switching it over to diagnostic mode. He flipped through the system to find which sensors were still fully functional and those not.

A heads up display of his suit appeared, pinging a few of the sensor nodes on the front of his suit that had been damaged due to the very fine sand. They just don't make armor like they used to, he thought to himself and shut those nodes down for now while keeping the others active, he had a drone leave it's hanger which he would use to make up for his damaged sensors.

Of course, he was surprised to find that despite pulling a reckless move to get into the ship - one that could've gone horribly wrong actually, it had worked.

He got up off of Ramiro and extended his hand to help the soldier up. "You ok?" he asked and looked over at Natsumi and Sienna and beckoned them over.

Sienna nodded to Natsumi, shuffling over to the half-buried Takeyu and Ramiro, clicking off her headlamp for the moment to keep from blinding either of them. Sending the drones in made more sense, if for no reason more than the fact that the one floating around in the cramped space already would stop getting tossed about, clanking against the walls and repeatedly bumping into her.

She moved over to Takeyu and Ramiro as she was asked, grabbing a firm hold of a bar protruding from the wall nearest to her to steady herself against the occasional gust of thick wind that blasted through the gash in the hull. Glancing back down the now-open dark corridor as Natsumi sent the drones in, she asked them, "What's the plan, then?"

Ramiro had appeared face down, several feet above the ground. Landing with a heavy thud, he let out a loud groan into the comm and the rolled over onto his back.

"Never do that again," he responded to Takeyu's inquiry. Using his thrusters to hoist himself back onto his feet, he took a moment to gain his bearings and take a peek around the room. Once he had his glance around, he ran a systems check and was happy to discover that most of his armor was mostly working.

Takeyu smiled weakly. "I won't be, I'd rather 'not' try and do that kind of a teleport again if it can be helped." He looked up and over at Natsumi and Sienna.

"We're going to explore this ship a bit, find anything of interest. Supposedly it's derelict and deserted, but you never know; someone may have taken up residence recently." The Taii stood up straighter and looked toward the cargoholds exit. The place looked like a complete mess, but then again, that wasn't all to surprising really.

"Deploy a drone each to have them search areas that we can't get to, but monitor them all the same and report on anything suspicious... err.. other than the obvious."

"Natsumi, stick with Sienna please. While I doubt we'll run into any hostiles, it never hurts to be safe."

He made a motion toward the bays exit and began to walk toward it, his rifle in a standby position.

Ramiro continued to peer a round the room as he reached to scratch his back, a futile effort in Power Armor.

"Well boss, if there is anything living in here, they sure as hell already know about us."

Noticing Takeyu motion towards a certain direction, he shouldered his rifle and slowly moved behind him.

"On your six, and no drones, only shield modules."

The corridor was fairly cramped, with rough non-skid coated surfaces above their heads and a long row of shattered lights under their feet that crunched as the team moved. The air was breathable according to the AIES systems. On either side of the corridor there were scattered hatches labeled in stenciled, flipped text that was in Trade. They were apparently passing by the laundry room and an environmental systems room. A slimy teal mold growth covered some of the walls near it. Takeyu found a ladder ahead that led to another level below where they were now.