[b]February 20th, 6521[/b] [hider=Planetside] "You're sure you saw something unnatural up there, Thomas?", a child asked. He appeared to be around ten years old, but carried himself as though he were forty. He wore a military-esque uniform for Moriga's Primary Academy #12, and had a hawkish, sharp-eyed look to him. "That's what I told you, isn't it? I don't make things like this up, Jonathan", answered his companion, a man of twenty years or so, with thick, unfashionable glasses and a blue blazer. "What do you think?" "I think it means we need to take another look. You said those black blobs obstructed your view seconds after you looked through your telescope, right?" "Yeah, that's right - and they still haven't moved." A third voice chimed in. "Perhaps we should take a look from a different spot?" The third person was a woman of around 24, perhaps, wearing business attire, and a brass nametag pinned to the left side pocket, reading "M. Balridge" The three nodded to eachother and looked up at the sky again, from the rooftop, then made their way off of the building to a car below. All three were involved in a group called "The Watchers", which believed that their government wasn't really the highest power on their planet. Cliche name, but at least it caught peoples' interest here and there, and periodically they picked up competent recruits. They were known to the city as a group of conspiracy theorists and madmen, although a harmless one at that. The car sped off towards the city gates, where they temporarily exchanged it for one of the Morigan exploration buggies - it was designed for street usage, not off-roading, and most items in the city could be used as ransom for government equipment rentals of roughly equal total value. An hour later, after leaving Moriga, the three came to a stop and unloaded the man's telescope. The landscape off to their west faded from grassy plains to badlands at the edge of the terraformed radius. The oxygen felt significantly thinner here, so far from the algae vats of Moriga that were responsible for replenishing the atmosphere. As such, they kept speech to a minimum - it was dangerous to stay in the area for too long, lest they grow too weak to drive home safely. Jonathan tested a custom eyepiece with an inbuilt camera function, taking various pictures of the surrounding landscape, while Thomas set up the telescope and aimed it in the general direction of the object that he had seen before. "M. Balridge" stayed in the buggy, periodically scanning the area for any signs of unexpected movement. After a few minutes of fumbling with his notes and adjusting telescope angles to ensure he had a good view of where the object had been seen the previous night, he took the eyepiece from Jonathan and took a look through the telescope. He clicked the snapshot button on the eyepiece several times as he looked for the object, and once again, the dark blobs in the sky flew together in front of it, drawing his attention to it. He stood and nodded to the others, then grabbed the telescope and threw it in the trunk of the buggy. The three made their way back to the city, and Thomas felt a surge of excitement at the possibility of finding something they knew they weren't supposed to see. ================ A mutilated body lay inside a dumpster in the heart of the city, blood slowly filling the bottom. A figure in a hooded jacket skipped down the street cheerfully, humming a childhood tune as they left the scene of the crime. [/hider] [b]March 4th, 6521[/b] [hider=Starside] The post-humans had been quite busy asteroid mining and producing extra mining equipment. Their mining fleet had grown somewhat, since the start of the project to appease the new object, and after some difficulty with harvesting an extremely high density metallic asteroid cluster, they managed to improve their drilling and rock shattering techniques marginally. The great forge-ship, Midoria Processing Facility #1, had been processing hundreds of tons of building materials for spacecraft. One of the Midorian favorites, Custer Armor, consisted of cubic boron nitride granules suspended in a steel-aluminum-manganese alloy, to effectively force penetrating objects to shatter and disintegrate under the heat of friction. The other favorite, a non-armored setup, was the same alloy as the armor, minus the boron nitride, as the alloy was quite strong and lightweight on its own. Their great collective consciousness looked to the stars again, so worried by the existence of new objects in the sky that they completely missed something worrying happening in Moriga, down below. A member of their flock had disappeared unexpectedly, without their knowledge. They then noticed the Gallium asteroid field. [/hider] [hider=Netspace] Midorian network space is more or less a virtual world that exists somewhere between the dreams of human lives that its members have, and sentient code. By virtue of being a biological network, though, it did not follow the standard rules of computing, and was thoroughly alien to all those who did not live in this space themselves. Not even the residents knew how it worked or how to manipulate it. They just knew it was there, and that it was their home. The Midorian post-humans lucky enough to have mechanical bodies existed both in the physical world and in network space simultaneously. Due to the nature of the programming, it was difficult to assign any sort of real time scale to the happenings in netspace, and the laws of causality didn't always apply there. A Midorian chat room popped into existence, and immediately, all relevant personalities joined in, as their interconnected feelings drew them together when they were needed. [color=fff200]Ohoho~! Gallium? We don't have much of that. Let's grab it![/color] [color=ed1c24]What? Why?[/color] [color=fff200]Because we don't have it. We could use it for so much![/color] [color=ed1c24]Like?[/color] [color=fff200]Bigger asteroid harvesters! More rockets! Maybe we could send little Gallium toys down to the people? The possibilities are ENDLESS~ I'll get the mining rig ready for travel :D[/color] [color=0054a6]No.[/color] [color=fff200]Aww, why not? :([/color] [color=0054a6]It hasn't finished its current job yet.[/color] [color=fff200]Oh, fine. I'll just get a few drones together, then. That okay with you?[/color] [color=0054a6]Yeah, whatever. Just don't break any this time.[/color] [color=ed1c24]Yeah, whatever. Just don't break any this time.[/color] [color=00ff00]Yeah, whatever. Just don't break any this time.[/color] [color=00ff00]Oh, by the way, materials manager group here. We're starting construction on a new production facility.[/color] [/hider] [hider=Starside] A group of ten of the mining drones finished dumping their materials in Midoria Processing Facility #1, then clung together hand-to-hand in a circle, and set their course to the new asteroid cluster, disappearing in a dull flash as they simultaneously engaged their Flock drives. A number of small construction drones began pulling Midorian alloy ingots together and melting them down in space with a construction laser array, manipulating the blobs of molten metals with tungsten tipped claws. Midoria Processing Rig #2 was now in progress. The post-human collective noticed the pulsing object and decided to simply observe it for the time being.[/hider]