Crash Landing, Part 1

Ilkarin

Standing before you, letting the wind sift through the locks of hair that fall cascading along the sides of her face is a female fox. She stands at 6' tall and turns to look your way. Ilkarin, starting from the top, has a set of slightly large ears; a gold hoop earring accommodated each ear. Her blonde hair is parted in the front to the sides, and leads down to the back of her neck. The fox's hair is thick and almost like a mane. Next were those golden eyes, staring into them you see softness, and a strength few could match. Her eyes still carry a keen edge to them, shining with intelligence. Ilkarin's features had hardened and become more defined, showing she has matured over the years of her current wandering travels.

The fox's body was moderately muscular. Definition rippled along every muscle and curve of her figure. The fox's coloring is a deep ruby red, while her chest and underside of her tail reflected a white. Her hands and feet have black "gloves" and "socks". Her bosom also remains moderately sized, enough not to be a hindrance in her adventuring. Ilkarin still has four digits for her hands and feet, also still standing plantigrade and having soft soles and toes despite the fur.

Ilkarin is currently wearing what looks to be a green colored mechanic's jumpsuit. Beneath the jumpsuit she has a gray tanktop on, but often the suit is zipped up to the middle of the chest, letting Ilkarin's chest show. Ilkarin has a belt around her waist holding up her pants. The belt also has a couple icons of what looks to be common mechanical tools. She is wearing some fingerless gloves around each hand. The fox's tail pokes out of the back of her pants.

Amy

Put simply, she is a young white-furred lynx, fully-grown at 4 1/2 feet. Her fur is mostly white-tipped silver with black on tufts and white highlights. Over her slim figure she wears khaki pants with a multidude of pockets, a black T-shirt, and a simple unadorned black leather collar.

But it's not that simple... The black-tipped white headfur tufts and ears that suggest lynx heritage aren't quite right, somehow. And her arms and legs seem oddly long, almost simian. She walks digitigrade, scorning shoes. She seems perpetually alert, if not downright fidgety, ears swivelling this way and that as things happen.

Logging Started: 3-19-2012 10:47:23 PM

Meredith - Orbit

Meredith is a beautiful Earthlike planet gone strangely wrong. An orange sun lights a heavy, oblate globe. What looked like ice caps turn out to be permanent cloudcover, not quite stretching to completely cover the ocean-drowned, flattened poles. These oceans are divided at the equator by a craggy crocodile-back of continent, forming a serpentine ring broken by water-filled rifts and one enormous crater. Many smaller lakes are also curiously round...

Halfway obscured behind the world is Meredith's lopsided doggie-bone excuse of a moon. The moon has its own moon, a puny kilometer of basalt in a ball-of-wool orbit. This mote should drift safely into solar orbit in a few dozen years, 3/4 simulations agree.

Nonetheless this odd world is alive. Nearest the equator, everything but the mountaintops and water are tinged a curious violet; nearer the north and south coasts, plants of a more traditional green dominate, producing colored stripes like one striped leaf of a gigantic organism. A few fitful lights glimpsed along the nightside coasts point to life of another sort.

It is dark in the stormcloud, but nothing like black. Fractal arms of lightning spread and join and strike, above and below, leaving the hull rattling with noise and ship's scanners and systems struggling to cope. Good air is hissing *in* the gash in the hull now, which seems more hopeful than how it was leaving. Meridian City's homing beacon is heartbeakingly close -- yet so far away... For a moment one could almost *swear* there's a red tinge to the blackness, before the cloud seems to react to your intrusion with a concussive *SNAP* and blinding flash. Green nonsense pours across the computer displays. The ship suddenly lists to one side, slipping down sideways, tumbling a moment before backup systems lurch into motion and try to right it, braking thrusters screaming, but the queer forest blurring by below is suddenly terrifyingly close... A thump on the bottom of the hull becomes a drumbeat, silence, then a long *SCRUNCH!* as the ship bounces off once, wedges between the trees, and plows itself to a stop with a final sounding *BOOM* as it lands at a 45 degree angle. Silence, except for the thunder, rain, and pinging of cooling metal...

The rainforest smells earthy and wet, with an undertone of something metallic and unpleasant. Creatures like wet snakeheads sometimes snap at your feet toothlessly, while towering, broccoli-topped green-wooded trees vie to outstrip and overshadow each other. What light they let through is sopped up by the vines and strangling creepers and parasitic flowers adorning them. A few insects buzz around heavily, but most of the flying fauna (?) are tiny floating semi-transparent gasbag creatures, drifting everywhere like wind-blown seed heads. Wind. Wind would be a nice relief from the heat...

Ilkarin grunts and shakes her head, thankful for wearing her seat-belts and keeping herself strapped in as she stumbled to stand up, checking over her uniform to make sure it wasn't damaged in case the planet she ended up on was a bit harsh on her fur. She tapped a button, opening the door to the outside and looked around to see if there was anything around she could use.

Ilkarin whistles, kinda wishing she had a biologist on her ship and not just was part of the mechanic crew, searching for debris and lost ships as she gazes around on the landing pad, looking for any sign of life but wipes her brow, finding the place very heated and undoes some of her zipper to her suit to at least try to get some air. Patting her sides, she blinked and cursed under her breath. She left her pistol back in the ship and it was better for her to find out what was going on. Sighing she ran her finger along her belt and tapped the wrench icon. A normal sized wrench unfolds itself into her palm. Shape alloy? She had fallen asleep at the lecture behind the science of her work belt, but she sometimes did wonder where it went to when not in use.

A strange smell is noticed first, for starters. As well as vines which almost prevent the door from opening, beyond which you see gouged trunks, fallen trunks, and a great deal of smashed wood, still goopy with green resin. The thunderhead looming above DOES flicker red, with a queer shiver in the air -- and the forest answers with a sudden twinkling of blue points, slipping upward like escaped balloons, thousands of them. As quickly as it started, the storm diminishes into a slight drizzle. One blue point remains, drifting, nearby. A scratching is heard on the other side of the hull...

Ilkarin grips the wrench and sighs, knowing the item would do little if she ran into anything with a hard skin or shell. Or if it would even assist at all, being just a small hand-wrench. She nudges the door open further and looks around, trying to find the source of the scratching among the drizzle of rain and approaching storm.

A kind of large, pulsing millipede with far too many segments is nosing around at the hull breach. It seems to look up at the rustling, though it has no visible eyes, and changes direction towards you with a kind of slow, ghastly deliberation, adhering to the hull. Another rustling noise is heard from the deeper forest, approaching far more rapidly.

Ilkarin ducks back into the ship and looks around for her pistol, knowing that would at least offer a better protection than her current weapon as she knelt down by the door and kept watch, not yet wanting to step outside of the ship without at least knowing the damage. Flicking her ears, she looked up and gasped, seeing a second millipede crawling about on the outer hull. The portion it crawled over was a sort of 'looking' observation area where someone could look outside through the clear glass-like material, but it had strength to resist some of the harshes enviroments of space. Still, the sight of more than one of them unnerved her. "And they said this route would be a slow, uneventful ride only

needing one person..."

It has never encountered anything like glass before, and seems to find it fascinating, curling about it in long loops, watching the activity inside, and knocking experimentally against the glass with its squidlike and serrated beak. *Ponk* *Thunk!* *Scratch!* It can't hurt the glass, but certainly seems interested at finding whatever snack's inside this tin can. This interest loses out, however, in discovering the source of the arrow that's suddenly sprouted from its flank. Still eerily quiet, it writhes, and begins unlooping to strike at the ground below snakelike.

Ilkarin blinks and looks up, soon seeing it skitter off with something in it's back as she grabs her pistol and straps it to her thigh as she flicks her ears again and hears a dripping sound. Gasping, she opened the door and muttered "No no no..." as Ilkarin saw some of the storage containers turned over and broken by...what looked to be some kind of rats, but had six limbs and insect-like eyes, feeding on the chemicals. She halted as she heard the slow drip of acid from their lips and backed away, shutting the door as best she could and quietly as possible. The storage was lost...great.

A small whirl of flame is seen below as a short grey blur fends off the attack of the millipede creature with a torch. It's not deterred for long, soon following the torch instead of avoiding it, but she simply throws the torch one direction and leaps the other, clinging to the outside door you opened up a little while ago. "Open up! Open up!"

Ilkarin pulls the door open as best she can to let the person inside, not yet knowing if they were friendly or not but she began to let the person inside regardless, wondering who this was who was fending off these creatures so well.

Amy tumbles in and SLAMS the door behind her. She looks soaked and half-crazy and unkempt, but so would anything that was out in that rain. Not to mention arguably crazy as well. She looks around, spots you, eyes darting around looking for any other crew members... None spotted. She clawticks in a little further, then leaps to the controls, looking over them rapidly. "Good lord, woman. You got outside lights? Turn them on!"

Ilkarin says, "I-oh...I think I do. The ship crashed so it's a bit damaged. *She said, hurrying over to the command console and looking for the light button as she activated her belt's lighting source and nodded* Here we go. *She tapped the button and heard the ship power up, wondering if the lights were going to turn on or not.*"

It's a bit like flipping on the lights on a kitchen infested with roaches; a sudden blur of motion and lots of skittering scraping noises -- including many against the hull which had arrived without fanfare or notice. Most of them resembling the 'rats' you found earlier. Then.... Silence. Too much silence. Amy shivers. "...Lucky you, hitting a nest of mogwai's on the way down. They're nocturnal..." shakes her head. "...Damn it. I was going to hitchhike with you. Do you think this mess can be fixed?" The hull breaches are just welding, the backup computers work even if the main's still fixing errors in itself, and the scanner's come back online, showing the beacon seven miles away. Most

problematic, though -- nearly no fuel.

Ilkarin says, "I think I can get it working...given the right materials and sources. The ship's fuel is low, so that's something I need. Finding metal to weld back the areas damaged should not be too hard to fix. I could try to salvage what little is left in my storage, but there are these strange rats that drip acid and have insect eyes...never seen the like before. Have you?"

Ilkarin blinks, finding it odd she was just chatting away with this stranger and yet she didn't even know if she could trust her. "By the way, who are you? Where did you come from?"

Amy nods, quieting down and finding a seat. She seems to go between bursts of activity and long periods of calmness. "Those things are Mogwai. I think they were eating the containers for the iron. The beakworm was a Yagghorth. I'm an Amy, also native to these parts. I got wind a ship was coming -- big news, around here. But you riled up everything in a few miles with that hard landing. Why on earth were you trying to fly through a thundercloud?

Ilkarin says, "t-the shipments were important and vital to where I was going. The route was supposed to be calm and smooth according to my superiors. There wasn't any problems until..." She shook her head, focusing on the task at hand. "I saw that this planet had materials that could help me. I also had heard reports of other ships crashing here, so I thought..." She flashed back to the storm, it came up so suddenly, without much a warning. One minute it was calm and normal, the next..."

Amy nods. Unlikely, but not impossible. She stands from her seat and clawticks around the cabin. "I could help you out." a glimmer of dawn beginning to peek over the forest top, a strange orange sun showing stranger, yet green vegetation. "I can get you to the city in one piece, and know whose ears to twist to get you help. But I want to make a deal with you... Will you drop me off on Cheleb Station on the way back? The man I'm hunting isn't here after all, and I've been away way too long.."

Ilkarin says, "I-yes...I will help you. I have not much of a choice. I was unsure if life existed on this planet and now that you are here, I can see that I would be stumbling about a bit blindly. I mean, I do know my way around things, but this is all new to me."

Amy nods. "We'll have to travel during the daytime, and light fires at night. Got a gun? ...good. What about a knife? Canteen? Rations?" Circling around you bewilderingly as she asks these questions. "...flashlight, rope, blanket..." She seems to be fairly used to this kind of travel, and keeps a fairly good list in her head. Gathering the stuff might take a bit.

Ilkarin begins to make a list in her mind of what she has and pulls out a small pocket datapad from her pocket to scribble down the list and check things off instead. "Some of these I do not have."

Amy frowns. "It'll have to do. I'll try and improvise on the way." Snaps her fingers. "...And you. I never caught your name." Much belatedly asking.

Ilkarin says, "I-Ilkarin." She says, huffing a little and drops her hand holding the wrench back to her belt where it slides out of existance once more for the time being. "So what do we do now? Do we try to reach this city or wait the night out in this ship?"

You murmur, "Wait out the night -- what's left of it. In about an hour and a half, it'll be light enough to travel. Meanwhile I'll scavenge what I can get from the lit areas.."

(OOC) Amy's beginning to fade, sorry. Having a wonderful time but my lack of sleep is beginning to show, not to mention, a setting I don't often run is taxing my imagination a little. ^_^; I hope we'll be able to continue soon. (OOC) Ilkarin says, "we can stop here, sure. I don't mind." (OOC) Amy says, "And I really hope you're enjoying it too. Know I've been a bit clumsy with some things." (OOC) Ilkarin says, "I am. Been a while since I had this kinda fun."

Logging Stopped: 3-19-2012 10:49:04 PM