Ancient Mysteries
Posted on Sat Oct 8th, 2022 @ 12:35pm by Aliereth t'Leiya & Lieutenant Commander Sofia Nikedoros & Lieutenant Alan Harrison & Lieutenant Jai & Lieutenant Akihito Takeshi & Rocoa Lotor
2,582 words; about a 13 minute read
Mission: Roll With It
The involuntary chase led them deeper into the ruins of civilization, past towering buildings overtaken by nature and time. Eventually, it would be Aki that somehow had the upper hand over the beast in pursuit, flinging himself upon one of the various tendrils and using it to scale the building it was dangling from. He managed halfway up the decaying wall before stopping mid climb, looking behind him to see if the creature was there.
And, of course it was, but on ground level, circling and waiting for this odd-shaped treat to fall down.
Alan nervously watched the beast and Aki, as it seemed to have decided to ignore the rest of them. As Sofia was the most senior officer around, he looked to her for guidance. "Should we try to stun it? At least to distract it?" he asked her.
A fairly large rock flew past the two officers in seeming answer to the question, from where it had been hurled with nearly sports-champion level force and speed from behind a second crumbling wall nearby, where Aliereth stood carefully, mostly hidden from the creature. The rock hit its aim point on another crumbling structure nearby, which, as a bonus, caused a few more pieces of it to fall off too, adding to the cacophony and disruption the Romulan engineer had hoped to create to distract the creature.
Ali's move came just as Sofia was considering a similar distraction since she knew that large reptilians were often unphased by a stun setting. Now she caught her breath, waiting for its reaction and saying a silent prayer for it to run off. But she hefted a scrap bar of metal in one hand, ready send a makeshift javelin as far as she could in hopes a clatter would trigger a prey response from the big predator.
As expected, the creature's head swiveled in the direction of the noise. It sniffed the air, but slowly backed away at the sight of a crumbling wall. Moments later, and it disappeared off behind some brush, with the sounds of it retreating echoing through the ruins.
Aki's eyes were clenched tight, also fooled by the distractive noises. He barely survived this creature. Anything that made it run away? He was doomed.
Once it was clear the creature was no longer an immediate concern, Ali cocked her head ever-so-slightly sideways, perplexed at Aki's closed eyes for a moment before reminding herself it was just 'one more bizarre human thing'; uninterested in looking death in the eye. "You may want to consider coming down from there before something else shows up." She remarked dryly, offering an arm up to him to assist.
Meanwhile, after rotating ears to listen carefully in each direction for any sign of more giant lizards, Rocky climbed down from his perch. "A good idea. I don't hear anything, but I'm all for getting away from here."
"Agreed," Sofia said with a nod, and opened her tricorder. "I'm getting some anomalous energy readings further that way." She pointed in a direction nearly opposite to the way the creature had gone.
"After all that, should we still head further in?" Alan asked nervously, displaying the distaste for danger characteristic of one usually stuck on an engineering deck.
"If our concern is large, wild creatures; we are more likely to find them out there--" Aliereth gestured slightly to the wilderness beyond the ruins, "--than further in there. A potential power signature bears investigating, lest we overlook a potential threat within reach of the colony."
Leaping down from his spot, Aki dusted himself off. No one else seemed concerned about threats, so he put that upon him to assess. He would do so... quietly. "Initial scans of this place didn't suggest anything major, so I don't think we have to worry about threats, but you never know, right?"
"Initial scans also did not reveal large predators; so I think we may assume that not all potential issues can be found in such a manner." Ali didn't bother confirming the 'you never know' inquiry; that went without saying, but humans seemed to always assume it did not, either by in fact saying it as if it were in doubt; or by failing to account for it at all. She waited a moment more for Aki to collect himself, then gave the group a small, sharp nod and started off in the direction Sofia had indicated.
The reply had sounded almost Vulcan - an observation Sofia knew well enough was best kept to herself, so she simply nodded agreement. "Not all creatures register biosigns on standard scans, even large ones. In fact, back in Pike's era it was found that Gorn didn't register. Though our scanners are much better now," she added hastily seeing Lotor's ears prick, whether in alarm or offense or some combination of both. "Either way, there are readings for an energy source and those are worth investigating."
The doctor was quiet, following along behind the others but keeping his counsel to himself. The Only wasn't exactly built for tackling giant lizards in any case.
As the group set off, with Aki making sure to send word to the Atala that they had not perished to whatever unseen dangers the scans did not pick up (and a request to do more scans... just in case), the scenery around them changed. The deeper in the group went, the less abundant the plant life became. Soon, they came up to more broken ruins and...
"HOLY MOTHER OF-" Aki stopped himself from screaming louder, lest the monster bats in his nightmares came to find them. But, as the group further investigated, the easily excitable pilot's flashlight shone upon a humanoid form. He could see the top of the form's head, which had a dull green tinge to it, as well as it's claws. He stopped, flashing his light on it more aggressively. "... Oh. Oh, it's dead. Good."
Ali seemingly didn't trust the appearance of demise of the creature, and kept a phaser aim on it while studying the tricorder readouts in her other hand before finally satisfied that the creature was, in fact, dead as a doornail and relaxing slightly, holstering the weapon again. "Strange. The death is not recent; by these readings; but it seems exceedingly well preserved." Once again she toggled the language setting on her scans and flipped the screen for the rest of the team to view.
"Remarkable," Alan remarked with the fascination one would expect from an archaeologist and not an engineer, "Could you get any decay readings to indicate the age?" He'd had a bit of an interest in xenoarchaeology for some years now, so Alan relished the idea that they'd found a previously unknown civilization.
Sofia had stopped short, breath catching at the sight of the creature. "Holy Mother is not an inappropriate prayer here, Lieutenant," she remarked as moved toward it cautiously - less out of fright than an archaeologist's experience with the fragility of remains - and ran a tricorder scan. "These are several thousand years old, though we'll need tissue samples and isotope data from the surrounding complex for a more precise date." She squatted down, studying the head more closely. It was not same size as the creatures she'd seen in the caverns, but there was a definite resemblance... She wished they had tissue from the former to compare. "We should place this in a stasis container to bring back for study."
"Unholy Non-Gendered Guardian?" Aki suggested weakly, before giving his commbadge a tap and relaying the order. "They should be able to beam us down one pretty quick." He inched closer to it, waving his hand in front of it's fossilized face, before squatting down to get a good look at the creature's mouth. "What a set of chompers this thing has. But it's so small compared to the thing that almost ate me... Think it was sentient enough to build all those weird-looking shuttles we saw earlier?"
"The big thing earlier? No. This one?" Ali's eyebrows lifted up, then back down again; the Romulan version of a shrug. "Hard to tell; an expert in xenobiology could probably make some guesses from a more detailed brain and nervous system scan but brain structure and such can vary a lot between species so it can still be difficult to parse, as I understand it."
"You're right on that," Sofia agreed, still examining the alien remains. "The large predator we encountered earlier didn't display behavioral signs of sentience, but that's all I'd go on there. We've seen too many radically disparate species that were sentient to judge by much else. This one... it might have been sentient, but there's a prejudice in favor of assuming sentience in being with bodies more closely resembling our own, so I'd want to be cautious about assuming."
Jai drew a sharp breath as he looked up at the deceased monstrosity, listening to the others talk as he quietly withdrew the medical tricorder that he carried. The others were already talking about tissue samples, so it seemed he could focus on trying to take a few scans of his own and skip the usual preliminaries, such as blood distribution or toxicology. Instead, he tried to get a map of the nervous system. Still, the debate about sentience did bring to mind the relative size of the creature's brain. He'd have to run some simulations once they back aboard the ship.
"I can help with setting up the stasis chamber," Alan offered, "I think we should be able to get a good transporter signal over... there." He pointed to the remains of a plaza between some crumbling buildings.
Ali swept her eyes - and her scanner - over the area Alan indicated; then gave a decisive if perhaps grudging nod. "Alright. Let's go secure a transport site and you can comm for the stasis unit to beam down." One hand reflexively checked the position and presence of the phaser at her hip and the dagger under her tunic, clearly intending to appoint herself as a guard for such an endeavor, then shot a glance at Rocky. "You too. You'll be the best lookout."
Lotor nodded curtly to the Romulan. Her sister might treat him like a nuisance rather than asset, but maybe this one was capable of learning. "Of course I will be - I have a nose as well as ears as good as yours." With that he moved ahead, though at a half step behind her - he wasn't stupid; between the two of them she made a much more prominent target which would give him the extra seconds to find cover if something did evade their senses and surprise them.
"We should stay together," Sofia advised, motioning for the others stay close rather than spread too far exploring. She herself moved toward the ruined plaza and as it came more clearly into view she spotted a huge tree so similar to the one she had seen in the tunnels on Haumea that she gasped. The tree was alive, branches heavy with leaves, but the vibrant glow she remembered from the other was only a faint impression around its roots. "Ali, come look at this. Did your daughters describe a tree like this?"
"There is a similar likeness in the sketches in Ieliene's notebooks and notes from the school assignment." Ali cocked her head sideways slightly, considering. "Unless the scale was misrecorded, however, this one is larger."
"This is much larger," Sofia replied, opening her tricorder to take readings. "But that one was luminous - it lit the whole cavern - while this one has only a soft glow around the base and roots." Checking her scans, she adjusted the tricorder and then began walking around it, sweeping the tree and the area around it. "It seems as though there's some kind of connection to the surrounding complex."
"Scans show there's an uncommon type of energy moving through the ground, possibly from the tree. It's slight, but it's there," Alan said, interpreting the readings from his tricorder.
"Maybe this one is just..." Ali muttered under her breath in Romulan for a few seconds, searching in her head for the Federation words for what she wanted to say before finally coming to them. "...burning out. Running low on power; from supporting...whatever all is here, for so long."
For his part, Jai was taking Counselor Nikedoros' advice and staying close to his fellow blue-shirt. The only difference was that the doctor was approaching his scans of the tree and surrounding environs through an entirely different lens; checking the air for pollen or irritants.
"It'd match up with what little we've been able to do here," Aki commented, pulling along a stasis container that had been propped up on one of the medical hover gurneys. He gestured back toward the clearing Alan pointed out, where a small team was setting up to assist in the obtaining of samples. "It's not something we thought to scan for, but now that we know it's here I can get the science teams above to see if it matches up - Think we should get a sample of this too?"
"Yes, definitely." Rocky's fingers drummed together in keen contemplation of reverse bioengineering an organic power source that could supply a complex of this size. "Check the tree for seeds, or pollen." He drew a knife from his tool belt. "I'll take some root clippings."
Alan found a suitable container for the clipping in his bag and handed it to Rocky. "There's not much pollen showing on my tricorder. The tree probably doesn't have enough energy to produce much anymore."
Aki took a step back to coordinate the Atala's makeshift science crew (a small group of equally excited scientists regardless of on-colony positions), promising they would have their time to poke and prod at all the samples the moment they got them back to the ship. The last thing Aki wanted was to come face-to-face with that weird predator again, especially while they were root-deep in some discoveries.
"Whaddya all say," suggested the pilot jovially, "We snag all our samples and scans and get our butts back up to the ship, with all the fun science equipment and doodads the Merian's got?"
"An excellent suggestion, Lieutenant," Sofia said, noting that the team was beginning to wander. "Everyone, finish collecting your samples, we leave for the ship in 5. We'll take an aerial survey on the way out so we can plan better for a return expedition. One that will include portable force shields to protect from large predators," she added least anyone protest not staying longer.
Ali gave the statement a measured, sharp nod of sorts, and looked briskly around them as she secured the last of her own gear. It had always somewhat frustrated her that the Federation - technological knowledge or not aside - had always seemed to have an aversion to the more efficient and expansive power-generation technique of a controlled singularity core; sticking with the more limited matter/antimatter reactor concept simply for the fact that it could be shut down in an emergency. This...power generating?...tree, however: Depending on how it bore out, perhaps it might prove to be a more acceptable alternative with exceptional potential. The side of her gaze briefly crossed over to Rocky; suspecting that the ringtailed little contractor was already imagining the possibilities himself as well.
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