2. Dark Spaces

Since Turana was behind Lyle and Emmet , she did not get to see all the interactions but she was alarmed to see that Lyle got discovered , inside her mind she talked to herself "Oh hell! maybe Jaz was right, i wonder if he found a way to close the portal if things go really bad, we should had made a plan to make contact or talk to them .. anyway too late now...ooor maaybeee not.." She took a cypher out of her bag, it was a crystal orb, she did not want to activate it yet, it was called a "Harmony Lamp" and it could help the interactions ahead, but she was not sure

After remembering its utility she decided to get closer to the group and by using hand gestures, let the craadians know that she was about to activate a cypher but there was nothing to fear

The soothing lamp light washes over everyone and the tension drains from the aliens and from you as well. A zest for understanding, for meeting in the middle takes center focus. If only you had a way of communicating words rather than just intentions.

You struggle to make your ways known to them, but you only accomplish a feeling of peaceable intentions, if not anything concrete.

Eventually the Craadians lead you around and show you their setup. They're digging for rare metals in the asteroid, and you get the size that the rock is quite large, maybe tens of kilometers in diameter. You see a map on a mine wall, and that there are hundreds of Craadians possibly living in the sprawling town built into the rock. A large hangar serves as the only obvious entrance to the complex, somehow shuttered from the vacuum of space.

Your new Craadian friends want to take you to the town, show you around.

"Nice setup you have here!" Lyle says. Unless he sees any obvious objections from his companions he'll follow the Craadians. "These guys aren't so bad after all!"

As you explore, you eventually find a translator. The Craadian sets you down to eat and provides the liquid digestible nutritional mix you've had before. It isn't anything that you would crave, more bland than anything else, but it is filling.

"I am known as Police Designate Four Squared. You have been the talk of the colony, as we don't know how you got here. Does it have anything to do with the artifact that we found buried in the rock? Do you know how it came to be there?"

" Thank you for this feast- we are grateful for your hospitality. We do not know much about that type of artifact- although we were sent by our people to investigate something similar. Can you show us this thing you've found?" Lyle asks, speaking through the translator.

Looking glumly at his delicious meal of....slop, Emmett remarks, "I'd bet my now nonexistent paycheck that he means to say the artifact is the big door we just came through."

He sets his bag of gloop on the table, careful to keep the mouth-nozzle off the surface. No telling what passes for clean 'round here, after all. "We're on the trail of some tripod types. They like to rip the skin off folks and....well, I don't rightly know why they do it. The skin thing was enough to get us to stop 'em. Y'all seen anything like that?"

The translator Police Designate Four Squared confirms through description that the portal in the tunnels is the artifact.

As to the quintpods, they are unfamiliar with those, but after some talk among themselves in their alien language, Four Squared adds more.

"There have been sightings of them, mainly in one place in the asteroid belt, Sector 27. They have been expanding, and every where they go, there are deaths to follow." He thinks about it and adds, "Sector 27 would be about one quarter of the way around the sun clockwise, against the orbit."

At first Turana had remained silent for fear of saying something that could be misinterpreted so she just limited herself to nodding and hearing everything they had to show her, it took a while until she felt confident that the harmony lamp had a real effect, after all , in her traumatized past there were several moments in which she felt safe under the guidance of the Convergence magisters only to discover that it only lead to greater abuse, she also wondered about the dilema of closing the portal when this Craadian community seemed benign and promising,specially on the long term if they could completely eliminate the Quintpod treat, she hoped the lamp would improve their chances of getting a productive interaction with them, so she decided to start talking before any effect faded off "We want to totally eliminate that danger, do you have means to reach that sector? if we join our efforts we can all be safer and free to explore options for our communities"

Police Designate Four Squared passes that on, and replies, "We do not. Our numbers are small and we do not have sufficient means to launch forays into space. Indeed, with each generation, we become closer to being entirely isolated from each colony. Several have gone dark over the past twenty Earth years. The time of the Craadians is nearly at an end, although my friends here would be aghast that I told this to you. We see it as a primary weakness, leaving us open to attack."

He tries to look calm, but you really see only his bland, slug-like passivity. "We do not have the weapons or ships to attack the creatures, other than to defend our rocks if they get too close."

I'm going to shut this down. We lost critical momentum, and there are many other games we could be playing.

Thanks for joining me in exploring this uncommon aspect of The Ninth World.