The [i]Plousios [/i]has run aground.

There's no mistaking it. The vast starship, this star-spanning city, has ploughed its way across nearly fifty kilometers of dirt, hill and mountain before grinding to a stop. Dirt is heaped up in a huge bulldozed mountain at its front prow, and there is a kilometer wide swathe of destruction through the landscape behind it. The torn earth stinks. The centre of the wreckage is molten, fused carbon and glass from the wash of the Engine. When the rains come, the rain washing into this new valley will create a river.

The [i]Plousios [/i]is broken. The engine channels are broken and leaking plasma in coruscating waterfalls of rainbow fire. A catastrophic event. Probably. It was probably catastrophic... whatever happened here. Mostly, though, it's just beautiful.

The sun is warm, though, and the road is long. The road calls. It winds its way away, across brown hills, through odd forests of eucalypts and their bone-white debris. There are fences that imply farms and signs that count the miles. There's no time to try and fix the ship, reconstruct the past, no time to [i]look back[/i]. Your feet are itchy, you're ready to start your journey!

It stands to reason to use the Plovers first, the mechanized vehicles will eat up the miles and there's enough to go around. Which machine do you pick, what is its name, what are its colours? It's designed to do heavy-duty space engineering, but what kind? Does it carry a rivet gun the size of a truck, a thermal lance designed to clean impact sites, a D-Scythe to scorch the barnacles of the Tides from the exterior? Does it run or jump or fly? How does it feel to run and jump and fly?

*

[b]Dyssia![/b]

"Dyssia, this is very important," says Brightberry the crystal dragonette in the voice of the Great Sage Ohlemi. "You need to stop what you're doing and listen to me. Dyssia. Your spiritual development depends upon this. Dyssia. Our planet is dying."

Through the window twinkles the glitter of a flickering rainbow laser beam. It strikes one of Brightberry's resplendent crystal scales and refracts through the hatchling's transparent body like glass through a thousand prisms. It spreads out into the hardlight wing membranes, projected by the glittering gemstones at each wing joint, where it transmutes into a complex flow of advanced information that the dragonette reads out for you aloud. Doing the voice is not, strictly speaking, necessary; Brightberry just enjoys doing impressions. 

Above and out the window, the clouds in the sky are broken. A Distortion Slice runs straight through the middle of the sky over Irassia, twisting and tangling the clouds where they touch it on one end and spitting them out in new combinations on the other. Communications are done through direct optical laser links between crystal dragons, after all, and that's too important to leave at the risk of the weather. And so the Azura destroyed the reality of the sky above the city so they could more easily angle communication lasers through it without risk of cloud cover. It's a beautiful sight, the sky full of pulsing rainbow lasers and enormous gravity-free mirrors floating aloft.

Brightberry stops narrating and looks over at you, speaking in her normal voice. It was the transformation from an ancient mountaintop sage who gargled a liter of gravel every day to a particularly bossy squeaky toy. "I don't understand why he [i]always [/i]says the planet is dying," she complained. "The Ceronians aren't [i]that [/i]bad, surely? Or is the planet sick?"