Justin had let Ashley and Amie go off, almost forgetting them in his curiosity about the ship.  He had seen his fair share of odd things during his time on Faiza, but he knew it was a much bigger universe out there, and this ship didn't look like anything he had personally encountered.  The crashed vessel certainly wasn't big enough to be meant for more than one passenger at a time, and certainly not a human passenger, by the look of some of the controls...

Of course, he noticed the mercurial liquid leaking into the interior of the ship, but he also noticed something else.  What appeared to be a battered laptop, bearing keys marked with letters he recognized, sat half-submerged in the pool of quicksilver.  "Oh, that cannot be good for it," he said with a wince before he reached down, balancing himself carefully against the rim of the cockpit, and grabbed the laptop by one available edge until he had the whole thing out on the grass, with the wires that connected it to the ship still dangling from where it had come loose, most likely during the crash.  He was very careful not to touch the silvery liquid that dripped out of the laptop, gloves or no gloves, but he experimentally tapped a few keys, and was treated to what appeared to be a diagnostic of the ship...shortly before the screen gave out with a shorting spark that snapped at him like a mousetrap.

He glanced around furtively - he had one way to scan the ship, the laptop and the liquid all in one go, but he couldn't use it if he had witnesses around.  It looked like the others were gone for the moment...nevertheless, they could turn back up at any time, and he didn't want to take the chance.  He settled instead on taking off one of his gloves - among some of the best in the industry - and carefully picked up the laptop again to drip some of the liquid metal inside of it.  After checking to make sure that it wasn't eating through the reinforced flexible waterproof material, he tied off the glove and put it into his pocket, then set the laptop down in such a way that it would continue to drain and dry out.

[i]I'm not sure why, but for some reason, I'm worried about this stuff...why would mercury be leaking out of a spaceship?  It doesn't make sense...I'll give this to Nora, I think I remember reading about her work before, and she should know if this stuff is dangerous.[/i]

He brought himself back upright, and was about to go after the girls when he noticed something about the damaged console of the ship.  Justin swore that it seemed less scarred up than it had before.  Was it-

Before he could do anything else, he heard the focus-shattering sound of a tree splintering to bits, and he bounded to his feet and over to where the girls stood, just in time to catch part of the apology and the introduction from Jaiden.  It said something about Justin's life that even with all of the crazy things he had seen on Faiza, something so mundane like finding a guy naked in the forest could still surprise him.  That said, Lady Jane's threat certainly seemed to be a little over the top...though the missing tree [i]was[/i] a little foreboding, and the way Jaiden's face darkened after such a blatant threat...

Justin's shirt was off very quickly, revealing a white tank top underneath that showed off his lean arms and shoulders.  "Name's Justin," he introduced himself into the awkward silence following Amie's threat as he tossed the heather-gray T-shirt to Jaiden.  "That should help cover you until we can get to the lodge's clothing materializer.  Since you mentioned the lodge, I'm pretty reasonably sure you weren't the pilot of that ship back there, and you're not here to hurt anyone."  His last sentence was pointed a little in Amie's direction as well.  "That also means you helped pull the pilot out of the ship, and she seems intact from what I can see, so it's good to see you helping out.  Well done."

He turned his gaze to the other person there, a young woman dressed in black civilian clothes who, up until his focus went to her, had been quietly trying to move around the group and back toward the ship.  She stopped, her slouching posture conveniently keeping her face away from him for the most part, though their eyes met in a brief instant, and Justin saw suspicion, a hunted look, and a question in her eyes.  His best guess of the question was, [i]Are you going to get in my way?[/i]

"As for you, I dug your laptop out from the wreck and put it on the grass to drain out.  Seems like it got partly submerged into some liquid that looks like mercury, and it looks like it shorted out, but it's salvageable.  At least, I assume it's yours, since it's the only thing on that ship that looked designed for [i]human[/i] fingers."  He gave her a friendly lopsided smile.  "We have more tools back at the lodge, as well as a workbench you could borrow, a kitchen full of food, a place to wash up..."

He could tell from the hungry gleam in the girl's eye at "tools" and "workbench" that this was what interested her more than anything else he could have mentioned, though there was still suspicion and a temptation to bolt in her body language.  "Unless you wanna stay out here in the untamed wilderness, where you'd get interrupted by wild animals and bad weather.  And we're supposed to get some rain tonight, nice sunny skies notwithstanding.  Just some friendly advice and an open invitation."

He hadn't introduced Ashley (because he didn't want to have to deal with awkward questions about how he knew her name without being introduced) and Amie, leaving that up to them - he had made his deductions and his offers of help.  Now he could only wait and see how this would play out...[hr]
Nora flailed her hands in front of her in a negative and panicked fashion at Sam's suggestion of burning down the door - a course of action she well knew from reading his file that he could carry out.  "N-no, breaking down the door won't be necessary!  We'll just get in through one of the other doors, instead!"

But, alas, Nora found that the door that led from the garage into the lodge was also locked!  And, after going around to the back cement patio, they tried the door there as well, and though they could look into the small window and see the kitchen counters along the edges of the room inside along with a table and chairs set up, this door was locked as well.

Nora let out a sigh of exasperated futility.  She hadn't known what to expect from this day, but she certainly didn't think for a moment that she would be defeated so quickly by a manual locking system.  "At least if it was electronic, I could try to override it!" she blurted out as she held out her arms and hands directly at the door, palms splayed out, as if somehow she was dumping all of the blame onto the door.

Boxcar nudged her leg, got her attention, then tipped his head in Sam's direction.  "Looks like the firestarter's plan B is our best bet now, perfesser.  We might need everyone to find where the others went."

Nora nodded, then took Sam and Boxcar back around to the front where Winters and Jorvin waited - Winters with all of the luggage piled neatly beside the front door, ready to be carried in, and Jorvin with his inexplicable lack of luggage, standing where he had been the entire time, a silent sentinel that waited for the right moment to act.  "A-All right, everybody," she announced, "so we're locked out of all the doors, and the only one who has a key is likely to be Justin, since he was here inspecting the place and fixing up things for us.  So, the new plan is to go out there, find him, get the keys, get inside!"

She turned to lead the way into the woods, though Boxcar quickly ran a little ahead to use his nose to track down the errant Justin.  Nora was a little nervous about this - what if Justin returned while her group was still trying to find him?  What if he left without leaving the key?  What if he was already dead due to alien invaders that had poured out of the crashed ship?  But at least she had a course of reasonable action to follow now!