Ensign Ivalyan Keros - H-H-Help
Ivalyan Keros
Leda: Makes you feel alive, doesn't it?
Willow: It certainly keeps me awake alright.
Ivalyan: ::pulling her collar up against the wind, blue eyes reflecting the lightning fracturing across the ridge:: That's one word for it.
She meant it. The cold was sharp enough to be clarifying. She filed that away and kept moving.
Sylvax: These aren't territorial markings. Something's hunting out here.
Leda: See what I mean? My people have been living in space for generations now, but our ancestors were terrestrial. We've passed down stories of every kind of beast on the land and the sea, but the Grevad are… they're different. Cruel. I've never known an animal to be cruel…
Willow: Perhaps these creatures have some level of intelligence, wanting to show some level of "criminal" intent towards others. That, or it's merely a fancy way of saying they are extremely territorial.
Ivalyan: ::quietly, crouching briefly to look at the marks without touching them:: Cruelty implies intent. If they're right about that, we're not dealing with instinct. We're dealing with strategy.
She straightened. That thought sat uncomfortably in her chest the rest of the walk to camp.
Willow: It's a wolf trying to break into the hen house at night. It wants to do it without getting shot dead by the farmer.
Ivalyan: ::flatly:: Let's m-m-make sure we're not the hens.
((Camp Hemera - Drakos Prime))
Leda: Welcome to Camp Hemera! This has been our base of operations since we landed our ship in orbit. Please, make yourselves at home.
Willow: Thank you for allowing us to visit.
Ivalyan took in the camp with a slow sweep. The improvised structures. The weapons being cleaned. The readouts being studied. The specific kind of busy that people got when they were trying not to think about how scared they were.
Ivalyan: You've kept this running a long time.
Not flattery. Acknowledgment. She moved toward the map with the others.
Leda: Too much Temurian blood, sweat, and tears have gone into making it, but this is our map of the cave system so far. You can see where we've marked various encounters with the Grevad, cave-ins, passages we've seen in person, versus what we've mapped with drones and LiDAR, versus what we haven't been able to access yet. Any information we have is yours.
Willow: I appreciate you being willing to share this display of your dedication. Any small exploration of the cave system allows us to use more caution upon our venture.
Sylvax: That's a significant amount of unexplored territory still active.
Ivalyan: ::eyes on the cluster of encounter markers in the deeper sections:: And the encounters aren't random, are they? They're c-c-concentrated? Like it's defending something specific rather than just the whole system... I think...
Sylvax: And most of your encounters seem concentrated along these lower access points.
Leda: Must have been the thunder. There are a lot of storms passing close today. The Orions have supposedly been working on a way in from this direction, but somehow they never seem to make any progress. It's starting to feel deliberate.
Sylvax: Whatever's down there isn't just defending space. It's holding it.
Ivalyan's eyes moved to Leda. The tightening. The arms crossed a fraction higher than before.
Ivalyan: ::carefully:: Is there something in the section the Orions have been focused on that the rest of the system doesn't have?
She left it there. Let Leda decide whether to answer it.
Leda: We had no friends in this sector, knew no one. When they turned up with an offer —
The rumble hit before she finished.
Deeper than thunder. Closer. The walls groaned. Lights stuttered. Dust sifted down from the overhead supports and the proximity alarm split the air open with a scream that bounced off every surface in the camp.
Willow: What is the protocol?
Sylvax: Everyone arm yourselves — now!
Ivalyan's hand went to her side and found nothing. She wasn't armed. She wasn't- she needed to- but she could-.
The screaming started from somewhere in the tunnels. Then the Grevad came through.
She had read the reports. She had looked at the maps. She had counseled herself into believing that knowing a thing was preparation for a thing.
It was not.
The creature was wrong in a way that bypassed language entirely. Too fast. Too large. The bioluminescent veins flaring bright with something that looked disturbingly like fury. The grinding rasp of its jaws hit somewhere below thought and above instinct and Ivalyan did not move.
She stood exactly where she was and did not move.
Sylvax: Take cover!
She heard it. She understood it. Her feet did not receive the message.
The Grevad hit the barricade and the sound of it — the weight of it — traveled up through the floor and into her boots and her knees and her back teeth. Metal shrieked. Someone was screaming, maybe multiple someones, and the alarm was still going and the bioluminescent veins on the thing were flaring brighter and brighter in short savage pulses and some distant professional part of her brain noted that the pulses were accelerating and that probably meant something important.
The rest of her brain was white. This was not the holodeck. This was real. This was danger.
Willow: Anything! We must get to a safe zone.
Move. Move. She knew how to do this. She had trained for this. There was a sequence — assess, prioritize, act — she had read it in a dozen tactical briefings and she could not locate a single word of it.
The Grevad's sensory pits swung toward a cluster of Temurian personnel scrambling left and it moved and the speed of it was obscene, wrong, a thing that size had no business covering that distance in that time —
Sylvax: Move! Now!
Her mouth was open. She wasn't sure when that had happened. She wasn't sure if she was breathing.
oO Move. Ivalyan. Move. Your legs work. You have legs. Use them. Oo
She did not move. She couldn't move.
The camp was chaos in every direction and she was the still point in the middle of it, which meant she was also the most visible point, which some calm and apparently suicidal corner of her mind registered and immediately failed to act on.
Sylvax: It's tracking vibration — keep your steps light!
Willow/Leda: ?
Light steps. Right. She could do light steps. She just needed to take a step first.
And then the veins dimmed.
Not went out, but dimmed. The frantic strobing slowed to something almost rhythmic as the Grevad stopped moving and its sensory pits swept the room in a long, unhurried arc. The screaming personnel. The fleeing Temurians. The chaos.
It was waiting. Letting the room exhaust itself. Letting the noise and the movement settle so it could find the thing worth going after.
Ivalyan: ::too loud, aimed at no one and everyone:: It's not just reacting... the veins.. when it stops moving they slow down...it's thinking... it's picking a target....
She took a step forward.
The wrong direction. Toward it, not away, some catastrophic misfiring of a brain that had spent too long studying things by moving closer to them and not long enough learning that some things you studied from behind cover —
The Grevad's sensory pits swung toward her.
The veins flared white.
Willow/Sylvax/Leda: ?
It had found its target.
oO Oh. Oh no. Oo
Willow/Sylvax/Leda: ?
Ivalyan: P-p-p-p....::she swallowed::
Willow/Sylvax/Leda: ?