Intro: Strange, beautiful, deadly

The group along with Captain Santoro hunker down behind a hill, Alex scanning the distance through his binoculars. Through them, he sees a single vehicle, shaped like an elongated spear tip close in. Most of its upper part is covered by some glossy black material and it appears to carry a pair of light lasers on the sides. Judging by the course it follows, it seems to be headed towards the Aurora and will be passing by soon.

The group resumes its travel, cautious of its rear as indeed a while later, the vehicle appears to follow the opposite direction. After once again hiding out of its field of vision, it passes through. Other than that, the rest of the trek is uneventful, except maybe for the mounting stress of your suits running out of air. Judging from their indications, it's been two or three hours you've been on the move already, with some leeway for whatever air you used up around the Aurora's crash site and while hiding.

The settlement itself is, as Alex picked up from a distance, built in extremely symmetrical fashion, with architecture that seemlessly escalates the skyline towards the city's center, where it is clear to see your destination lies: a starport, built atop two towers shaped like arms with the palms joining at the wrists as they hold up the ship-laden surface. Oddly enough, there's no outlying buildings past the city's limits as you would organically expect them to at some point have popped up, everything seems to begin at a very specific point. Fortunately, there seems to be no wall, gate or checkpoint around as you enter, not even a camera or scanner drone. The outlandish harmony of this place apparently comes with an eerie quiet.

Then you hear the blast.

It's a muffled sound at first, drowned out by your suits to the point where it is a bit reminiscent of those EMP warheads, but the shockwave is unmistakable. Seconds later, a score of half a dozen people in what appears to be stained togas and respirator masks run past in the distance, soon followed by three armed men in full combat suits chasing them.

"Pssst! Over here!" a voice shakes you out this. In a nearby alley, you see a girl in her early teens, waving you to come closer. She too has some sort of respirator device over her mouth and nose, but is otherwise dressed in some sort of military uniform not unlike Kildare's, though it's been treated so that the camouflage is suited to the colours of this urban environment.

"Over here, or they'll gun you down where you stand!"

Captain Santoro and the crew of the Aurora head into the alley, where the girl peeks around the corner to the main street before turning her attention back towards them. "Grandmaster Shen II's propaganda is crashing down on him at last, it seems. See, he rose to power telling people we should isolate ourselves into this utopia of Art. That offworlders only bring pain, war, destruction and savagery. But he still needed some sort of police or defence force, right? So at first, it was a bottom-tier job for people who had zero artistic inclination to do anything else. Which worked out at first, but there still weren't enough people to fill in the ranks, so he started recruiting mercenaries from other systems. Rubbed some of us the wrong way, but by that point, you just couldn't go out and call him a hypocrite. His people made sure such voices were... "silenced". Their property got confiscated, then slowly this became his punishment of choice. Then starport traffic began to pick up and it's easy to see it's not just mercs they're bringing in, the numbers just don't add up. Word is he's selling our art for personal gain. We're putting in all the work, he takes it without compensation or even credit, then because he's basically set up a monopoly, probably sells it to offworlders for ridiculous profits. Which leads us to the riots of these last few days." She pauses for a moment as you take in the information, realizing she's been running her mouth for quite a bit. "I'm sorry for my blabbering, I've been dying to get this off my chest and it's not like I had anyone to discuss it with all this time. You don't seem local and you don't look like Shen's people, how'd you end up on Aphrodite Prime?"