((Well, I'll just write it now and edit it if something turns out wrong.))
Turn one
Will
[4] You jump up and down in your pod, hoping to dislodge it from the tree, but to no avail. You sway from side to side, but the stubborn capsule doesn't budge. You curse heartily, making sure to mention the factory that produced it, the engineer who designed it, Flatulus, the god of wind and farts, whose fault the current situation is, and the engineer's elderly mother. The design of the pod is truly retarded in some places - no manual overrides, who'd have thunk it? A single button for disconnecting the chute from the pod, and you wouldn't be stuck here looking like a git. You stomp your foot in frustration.
A branch creaks and snaps. Then another. You catch the drift just in time to grab on to rails near the door. The pod drops down and thumps into the snow. Your only injury appears to be a bitten tongue.
[2]Then, you hear a chittering noise, somewhat like a child's laughter, but with a eerie, chitinous note to it. And another, slightly to the side of the first. It looks like your fall has attracted some attention.
Markus
[3] You ready your pistol - a blue dot appears in your field of view, as well as a small, unobtrusive ammo counter. 14/14. That's reassuring. Apparently, your glasses are fully functional.
You half-walk, half-slide down to the river through the deep snow. Setting your feet firmly down on the ice, you flip the pickup switch in your headphones, and listen. Every noise seems suddenly amplified tenfold. You hear branches cracking, the wind blowing, something scurrying beneath the snow, the whoosh of a hover engine starting - but nothing suspicious. You walk forward, feeling calmer.
[4] After some ten minutes of walking, the forest ends. The river runs out into the plain under an arc of massive trees, their twisting limbs covered in bluish needles. This is a truly astonishing sight - the shade of the forest shifting suddenly to the radiant glow of the open plain. Few people on Earth have ever seen so much sky.
You step through the gate confidently. You're heading home.
In a minute or so, you come upon a hole in the ice of the river, some twenty meters across. In the middle, a pod floats.
Jacques
[3] With a sigh, you begin climbing down the hill. It is not as easy as it first seemed - there are boulders and lichen-covered plates of rock everywhere, and they are treacherously slippery. Nevertheless, you do climb down, clearing the last few meters sliding on your butt, struggling with the urge to whoop like a kid.
[1] You wade through waist-deep snow to get to the river. Due to Boreas' lower gravity, snow takes longer to pack and compress, and is generally fluffier than back on Earth. Wading through it is fun - white clouds of it puff up around you.
Your smile is wiped off your face as you feel a burning pain in your ankle, just above the boot. Cursing, you reach down. Your fingers close around a wriggling, slippery shape. In instinctive revulsion, you yank hard and tear it off your foot, but manage to keep yourself from flinging it away. Instead, you lift it up to examine it.
The creature is about thirty centimeters long, with strong jaws, a scaled worm-like body, and four long fins, like a fish's flippers, but longer and broader. You guess that it uses those to "swim" through deep snow. It squirms and wriggles in your grasp, but is unable to bite you.
Alex
[3] You look around, but most of the landscape is covered in deep snow, so there are no sticks to be found. You think for a second, then begin digging down. Aha! Under the snow, the hard soil is covered in some sort of moss-like plant. You fish around in your pockets, and smile as your fingers close on a small rectangular box. Even though there are no flares in the kits, at least whoever designed them thought to include a box of matches. You believe you could ignite the moss, if you gathered enough of it. It would involve a lot of digging, but the resultant smoke would be easy to spot.
You shake your head. So that's Plan B; time to develop some Plan A.
[4] You start climbing,and after a few initial setbacks, you reach the hilltop. The forest's to the northeast, and the river is southerly. There's a taller hill to the southeast. Something's on the top, but you can't make out what even with your glasses' zoom function. Could be a partially-obscured pod, could be a weird rock formation. Worth a try, maybe?
Dr. McGaw
You finish your conversation with Al-Radi just in time to see one of the Horizon's sides drop down, forming a ramp. A small human shape climbs inside. The deep sound of a hover engine is heard - you once heard a fiction writer compare it to "the breath of a giant", though in your opinion, it sounds like a vacuum cleaner from Hell - and the machine itself emerges. It is a rugged lozenge of grey metal approximately five meters long, with small windows and a short, stubby muzzle. The hover homes in on your location and stops near you, raising a cloud of snow. Inside is a woman with a buzzcut and sharp, angular features, her cheekbone marked by a thin, long white scar. She smiles at you: to your surprise, she has the friendliest smile you've ever seen on a human being.
"Dr. McGaw, I presume? I'm Williams. You'll be wanting the driver's seat, eh?" She slides to the side, letting you take the stick. You accept and take off.
[4] Despite the vehicle's larger size, piloting it is not much harder than the two-seaters you trained for. Sure, it's slightly slower to turn, and the inertia's higher, but it is nothing you can't handle. Piloting a real craft proves to be an exhilarating experience. The simulators tried to model every aspect the vehicles they represented, but there is just something about the smell of motor oil and new electronics, about the overall feeling of power in the hovercraft, that makes your heart beat a little faster. Williams gives you an understanding look.
"Spiffy, isn't it? A new world and a new ride; what else to ask for?"
[5] You take the hover around the hill, surveying the landscape. In a few minutes' time, you spot a tiny grey speck on another mound in the distance, this one to the northeast of the first. You check the map. It doesn't show a marker there, but you're quite sure it's a human there. Looks like you found the missing Alex Shater. You zip across the plain, and sure, it's him. He climbs in, looking relieved at not having to dig for moss. Turning around, you hurry to the rescue of O'Driscoll, feeling quite heroic.
Sean
Not long after you meet the strange kid, you hear the sound of hover engines in the distance. Soon, the machine itself arrives. A figure leaps out and waves at you.
"Yo, soldier! Enjoying the bath?"
You know her; you sparred with her once before your departure. She has fists like half-bricks, but you still emerged victorious, flattening her on the mat with a powerful throw. The event did much to improve her already quite high opinion of you.
[1]((What'cha do to piss off the RNG?)) She pulls a coil of synthetic rope from her pack and throws one end to you. You catch it handily, and then a totally unexpected thing happens.
A long, slender shape bursts through the thin crust of new ice, slamming into the rope with quite a lot of force. From what you see, it's some kind of fish or dolphin. You don't see a lot, however, because at the next moment the rope stretches taut, throwing you into the water.
It is cold. It is ice-cold! It's colder than the hooks of Hell before the Devil started the fires, and the thought that you're sharing it with a possibly-carnivorous fish doesn't make it any more pleasant. Williams hauls on the rope with all her considerable strength, and you yourself leg it like no tomorrow. In a few seconds, you're on the shore. In another few seconds, you're ushered into the hover, stripped to your underwear, and given a self-heating mug of vitaminized caf from somebody's ration. The whole experience leaves you rather shaken.
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Topic: Trailblazers in a World of Winter - Chester crashes the party. (Read 59500 times)