The return back to the Cauldron took less time then the walk there since Gwen already knew the way. The smell was the first thing she noticed when arriving through the sub-level 1 access tunnel. "Oh what the hell is that smell Eel?" Gwen yelled before fighting back a gag. "Did something die in the harvester?"

As quickly as she could, Gwen grabbed the repair sleeve, an oil spill cleaning kit, a small shovel, and put them on one of the narrow drone carts that could be programmed to follow her in the tunnels. The less time in the Cauldron with that awful smell the better.

With the cart in tow, she hurried back into the tunnels to escape the smell. The repair wouldn't take to long, the sleeve going over part of the pipe that was damaged, then tightened down so it sealed off the hole. Gwen leaned back so she could examine her work before slowly opening the valve to restore the oil flow to the recycler, watching for leaks around the seals of the patch. It would hold for awhile as long as no more of these burrowing creatures trying chewing their way through the sub-levels.

When she was satisfied that the leak was contained, she opened the spill cleaning kit and spread the oil absorbent over the area. The tedious part was the waiting for the sand/wood pulp blended material to soak up the oil before shoveling it into the plastic totes to be processed later by the machines in sub-level 3.

"Holiday, please mark the oil leak as repaired and clean up in progress" she asked the dome's AI before switching to the open channel. "Kaplan, repair has been made and cleanup of sub-level 1 where the leak was is in progress."

Yev tried to help Gwen, taking out the rubber mat that came packed in the repair sleeve to wrap it around the pipe, then biting off a yelp when the hinged cover pinched the tip of her middle finger as Gwen heaved it over the top of the pipe.

She wiped her finger off, then stuck the tip in her mouth as she watch Gwen flip the bolts into their slots and begin tightening them down. Her training videos showed how to do this with a wooden plug, the rubber mat and wrapping it in place with a ball of coarse string. This was so much easier.

Yev did wince when Gwen reported the leak as "repaired" - it was patched and returned to service. Later, in a couple of months someone would show up with a work order to cut out the damaged part, put up a new section of pipe, sealing it in place and then it would be repaired. Assuming the rats didn't get them. But she kept her mouth shut, shoving plastic bags inside empty five gallon buckets (why was there none of the bigger barrels?) and blousing them over the top edge so the edge stayed clean. Nobody liked being corrected and she didn't need a negative evaluation.

Picking up a shovel, she began shoveling the oily "kitty litter" into the prepared plastic bags.

"We're going to have to go down, aren't we?" She said quietly, trying to keep her voice steady. "To see how far the... crack goes?"

They probably went all the way down to the power core....

It's safe, she thought furiously. If it wasn't safe, Holiday's radiation alarms would be going off.

And how did one fill a crack in the concrete or fused lunar dust or whatever it was made of?

With a long, low moan, Yingxue placed her head firmly on the lab table she was working on. Bitten. The cow was bitten. Why? By what? How? As far she she knew there wasn't anything like a real predator or parasite in LD10, so the only reasonable solution is that--

"--I'll bet Eel bit it," she muttered, doing her best to quiet the creeping unease. Unknown creature. And, important and no less discomfiting, its bite had sickened the cow. It must be ill itself, and she hoped to god it wasn't the patient zero of some mysterious alien illness.

"Holiday, does the dentition pattern match any known species that we have on board? Could be some grand accident," she asked with undisguised if desperate hope in her voice. She was pretty sure anything on board wouldn't start biting to begin with, so whatever was going on it was an anomaly of some kind. She finally lifted her head, rubbing her sore eyes tenderly as her attention started to stray back over towards her beanbag. She violently wrenched it back to shape, refocusing on the work in front of her. The Big Important Stuff had come in; the sterile equivalent of a q-tip the tip of which had rubbed on the bitemark had just arrived. The potential genetic information.

It wasn't certain that what she found would actually be whatever relevant to their mysterious guest, or if enough time has passed for it to decay and leave just the cow's genetics. But, of course, any effect would be better than no attempt. She mounted it quickly and had it underneath the electron microcop like she'd done it a thousand times (which to be fair, she definitely had), before finally looking into the viewfinder at whatever she might appear. A bit of observation later and she suddenly jerked backwardd like she'd been stung, staring at the microscope.

"What the hell...?" she breathed.

Gwen looked up at Yev when she started to say something. She thought she had heard Yev say something, but Gwen was not fully listening, distracted by the list of things she needed to work on today and the want of a hot shower to wash the filth of the day off. The worst part was that the day was barely a few hours in so there was not much she could do about it yet.

"Hmm? Sorry, Yev I didn't hear you. Something wrong?" Neilson asked, genuine concern in her voice.

"Nice. Only took, what, two years? Two years to hit backspace and type eight letters."

The voice was muffled slightly by the speaker's face being smushed into their pillow. Rhiannon had been awake for a while, but laying in bed dozing before they actually had to get up was a true pleasure. Technically she did not have to start work at any particular hour and doubted that they'd lose their job if, realistically, they didn't hit the fields until well into the afternoon (at least not for another few years of digital paperwork being pushed through), but she wasn't that kind of person. Most of the time. She lifted her head from the pillow.

"Thanks Holiday."

She rolled over, swung her legs out over the side of mattress, and dug around in a pile of clean clothes until they pulled out their threads for the day. Dark leggings, a slightly oversized sweater in beige, and one of those triangular shawls in neutral color and pattern. Of course after dressing they quickly flopped back onto the bed, snatching their personal communicator -little better than the smartphones from back in the day- to see if they'd missed any direct messages overnight. Then they pulled up the dome map, checking the spot Holiday had marked with a hum.

It could be hard to tell when animals were sick, but Rhiannon had a feeling that this particular cow (which did not have an official name but who Rhiannon had dubbed Moonica) had been growing lethargic. It was literally their job to keep track of stuff like this after all, so she wasn't surprised at the news that Moonica had developed a fever. She'd recently asked Yingxue to rev up whatever the medicinal equivalent of a fryer was, so she also wouldn't be surprised if the doctor was already finished. Or, if the woman had tuned Rhiannon out again, she'd at least probably be working on it after Holiday's announcement.

After the device slipped from Rhiannon's fingers and smacked them in the face it was about time to actually get a move on. She stepped out from the bedroom into a small living space with a slapped together kitchenette on one side, then through the door in that room directly down a short flight of wooden stairs. Then she was outdoors, walking through the green grass in a pair of boots.

Rhiannon had lived in the apartment complex that was built on one side of the Dome for her first few months there, until she found that one of the barns had a pretty spacious second floor and no real need for storage up there at least until the lunar station was more populated. There were three more of these structures at each pole of the grazing ring that circled the dome, but so far there was only one that Rhiannon had made her own space in. It was way bigger than the apartments, and when she couldn't even shoot the shit with her co-workers there it made living in a barn seem a lot more appealing. They liked the kind of rustic feel to it too, and after some decorating over time it became quite the cozy living space.

Eventually they'd get to the other barns too and have different rooms in different styles for when she was feeling a change, or maybe someone else might appreciate having a cool place that smelled like sawdust and grass all the time.

Rhiannon strolled through the area at a leisurely pace, turning their face up towards the light. She made a beeline for the half of the herd that Moonica was part of. It was normally split into two or more groups because the number of animals they needed to sustain all ten lunar domes was pretty high, plus they had to keep some of the bulls separate, keep the pregnant animals in more stable areas, and blah blah blah.

Actually Rhiannon had gradually started to become interested in minutiae like that even if it had started off with her learning on the job, but her internal monologue was defaulting to blah blah blah that morning. Probably because they'd forgotten to make coffee before leaving. Dammit!

"Awww, you not feeling so good, girl?" Rhiannon cooed to Moonica when they'd arrived, petting the animal on the head. It was laying down in the grass, blinking big brown eyes at its caretaker. Though the fever and lethargy were most likely caused by the contaminated grass, they shouldn't actually rule out that Moonica had contracted something that could spread, or that other cows would start getting sick too if they ate from the same patch. So quarantine it was, for now.

"Alright, get up," they said, patting the bovine on the rear until it finally stood. Then she steered it towards one of the many structures on the rim of the grazing ring that were meant for this kind of thing. Stables of various sizes with an equal variety of equipment kept handy. "Gonna have stick a thermometer in your ass, but then you'll be chilling all day, 'kay?"

Rhiannon muttered something like 'getting more action than me' and got the animal situated. As she worked she snapped her fingers at a hovering drone to summon it over.

"Holiday~ make sure your little robo-shepherds avoid the bad spot," they said. Sometimes she liked to act as shepherd herself, but there was little need when the automated system was fully capable of it. They'd be surprised if it wasn't already blocked off though, normally the head honcho was--

Right on cue, the voice of Dr. Kaplan blared out of the drone. Rhiannon slowly tilted her head back as if the volume alone was pushing against them, mostly for their own amusement. "Heh, Isaac is piiiiissed~" she sing-songed to Moonica, though the cow did little besides snort.

Pulling out the phone-like communicator, which really was basically just a phone and will henceforth be referred to as such, Rhiannon sent two messages:

🐮💩👍👍👍👍

yeah im not doing that. will stop by for the meds tho. i guess let me know if u actually want more cow shit 😉

It was a little game to see how long they could go communicating with Dr. Kaplan just using emoji before he got too frustrated and came to complain to Rhiannon in person. Which was pretty much the only time he would make for her, so it was kinda nice. Maybe a little weird, actually, that Rhiannon enjoyed those sessions of being chewed out over no in person interaction at all. And though it had been three years Rhiannon still found it hard to get a real sense of who Yingxue was beneath her work persona, if one could even call it that, but acting overly casual had never steered Rhiannon wrong before. With Yingxue at least. It very much had before, on Earth and beyond.

Rhiannon began to hum again as they cared for Moonica, idly thinking of what they'd have to do next. Visual inspection of the other members of this part of the herd, probably visit the lab for the antibiotics (in which case maybe bringing a cow pie would actually be funny), couldn't forget the twice daily chicken check...

"Hmm?"

Wiping Moonica down had just been something Rhiannon did to ease some of the discomfort of the fever, and to get rid of the soil on her legs - and yeah, there definitely was a leak if the cows had actually been stepping in oil - but they noticed a strange wound on Moonica's hind leg. Rhiannon tipped their head. It probably wasn't caused by a bull's horns. Maybe some of the cows had gotten rowdy and a hoof had scraped her? Although it sort of looked like claw or teeth marks... which was impossible because cows did not have sharp teeth or claws. Rhiannon also found it very unlikely that a chicken had found its way over here and gone berserk enough to attack Moonica with its talons.

Rhiannon scratched the side of her head. Typed out another message.

🦇❓

Then stood up from crouching and turned to look at the other cows out in the pasture. Their brows furrowed slightly. With Moonica attended to and resting in their stable, Rhiannon made her way to the other animals to check on them more closely.

"Hmm? Sorry, Yev I didn't hear you. Something wrong?" Neilson asked, genuine concern in her voice.

Her finger tip was throbbing now with every beat of her heart. Why did it have to be the real one?

"I said," Yev replies, speaking louder as she put another shovelful into a bucket, "We gotta go down further, right? See how far this goes?"

Yes, down to the power core made in a Concern™ factory using the cheapest parts they could get.

She could feel a chill wash over her. Her bioplas coverall could seal up and protect her if the dome got punctured, but it wasn't going to anything if whatever cracked the floor also cracked the power core, spilling its radiation.

"Not that I mind this," Yev said, emptying another shovelful into the bucket

"I said," Yev replies, speaking louder as she put another shovelful into a bucket, "We gotta go down further, right? See how far this goes?

Not that I mind this."

"One of us will yes. At least to evaluate the damage." Gwen replied while scooping up more of the oil absorbent. [color=]"If it goes down far enough I'll probably be spending the next few days checking around the core to make sure whatever this is did not damage the coolant lines, turbines, converters, or any other components."[/color] She dumped the absorbent into one of the buckets that Yev had set up and looked over to the younger woman.

"Something bothering you?"

Mihail and Doctor Yingxue's various tests, requests, and queries will meander through their mutual specialties and reveal to them a confirming duality of technical readouts and data; the bite marks, saliva, and genetic material associated all point towards a creature that Holiday cannot identify-- and therefor not a creature native to Earth, the Concern's information banks, or her ability to make conjecture on. It is either an alien or an experiment, which she posits the following;

"It's possible that something has gone awry at Lunar Dome Nine. The scans I have made of the tunnels this creature seems to have chewed through our foundations potentially indicates that direction. Furthermore, His Majesty King George V has provided a physical specimen that he has found lodged in the faulty harvester. The silver lining is that our harvester will be fully operable soon."

And, just for the sake of brevity and permitting these characters to move somewhat more freely in their next posts, the two genetic and biological experts would be able to identify from the physical specimen and its DNA the tell-tale marks of man-made tampering and deliberate gene-splicing, with the genetic equivalent of a trademark stamp hidden within this data set that clearly confirm the LD-9 origin.

---

Holiday's voice emanates pleasantly from the hovering drone that has lingered by Prisoner 57104, her tone business-like and direct;

"I'll get right on assessing this now that it has been brought to my attention. Won't be but a jiffy, and I'll tell you how deep it goes."

The drone then drops quite sharply and begins flying downward into the chewed tunnels, a bright light pulsating off of its hull, and disappears from sight. In just a few minutes, Holiday's voice now comes from a nearby wall speaker, somewhat more tinny than the advanced drone's rendition of her Irish tones.

"Seems to me that this hole goes down beyond sublevel five, into the lunar surface itself. The direction trends beyond Lunar Dome 10's confines, and thus I am not capable of verifying exactly how far it goes. It is possible that this is an experiment from Lunar Dome Nine. I will alert Doctor Kaplan of this possibility. For now, I am going to have concrete mix poured into the holes. I can handle the bulk of this task myself."

---

And, indeed, Kaplan concurrently finds himself alerted by Holiday not only of Rhiannon's emoji ridden displays, but also by Holiday's ever-annoying and incessantly self-satisfied voice;

"Doctor Kaplan, current evidence indicates a foreign pest of some kind. Evidence indicates it is from the biological labs at Lunar Dome Nine. Do you want me to attempt to contact Lunar Dome Nine and connect you to them?"

---

Moonica's feverish eyes blink blearily at Rhiannon, before it lethargically and begrudgingly accepts physical diagnosis and treatment. The bite mark on its hind leg, quite high on its body, is absolutely not a subtle injury. Rhiannon certainly has to bandage or potentially stitch the cow's wound closed. Once this veterinary nonsense is settled, however, she moves on to check the other animals of the herds and coops.

Again, in the desire of some brevity, the other animals are all fine, but feel free to embellish the discovery of other branching holes in this section of the Dome. More than the one foreign creature have made their way into 10, and Rhiannon's wanderings will discover the entire set of five branching holes (which Holiday will steadily fill over the coming day). Something about this grazing area has attracted these foreign creatures.

After emerging from the undercarriage Arthur requested Holiday to brief him on what they had found in the tunnels. The news of the tunnel piqued his interested. Maybe he would visit the dome's underbelly today. Notably, he kept his PPE on, not wanting to risk being exposed to whatever foreign pathogens the vermin might carry. His pincers flicked through an assortment of shelves and cabinets busily. He grabbed a backpack and slipped the straps over his shoulders, so it was draped over his front. He placed a pair of the standard respirators into the bag, a box of nitrile gloves, and a bottle of sanitiser gel. After another moment of searching his pincer grasped a crawler drone by the 'leg' and held in Infront of Eel's face. It was a fair bit smaller than the specimen he had found. He popped it in the bag along with the matching controller screen.

Using his neural interface he activated his pincer sockets and detached all but the smallest operating arm. He left them on a counter. They were a bit unwieldy for the tunnels. He zipped the bag shut after placing a small premade tool pouch into it and he made he entered the tunnels directly through the Cauldron's maintenance hatch. He climbed down a steep stairway that was very nearly a ladder. He came close to slipping and tumbling back down, but managed to steady himself at the last moment. He grumbled and groaned. This is why he didn't come down here unless he could help it.

@Lurking Krog@Expendable

As he turned into the tunnel his shoulder mounted light activated with a thought and he trundled down the hall, both hands resting on his front pack. Arthur didn't actually know where he was going, so he wandered around sublevel one for sometime. He casually whistled a blind melody as he wandered, not rushing as he went. By the time he found the hole Yev and Gwen were wrapped up the job and were mid-conversation. His shoulder light dazzled them momentarily, interrupting them. It flicked off as soon as he noticed them and he called out merrily through his respirator, "Hello! I've brought you ladies some PPE. I hope you know about the rats by now. I don't want you catching something off the vermin."

He set his pack down on the floor, opening it wide for them to take from. He grabbed his tools and the drone and began to set it up. He clicked the camera lens into the low-light position and flicked the switch on the back. It whirred to life and he set it in the hole angled down. The quadruped's anchor claws gripped the concrete surface and he began fiddling with the controller tablet.

"What in the hell..." Mihail could only say as he gathered the information from Holiday."So it is either from the unknown or from a lab from Dome Nine." Given the two options, Mihail was more willing to believe that this creature was from the labs of Dome Nine. Which means that someone from there made a mistake and now their pet project is loose and causing problems. Though if it is from Done Nine, how did it make its way to here? Mihail wondered, did it literally dig its way here, or come via some other way?

Still, as he came to analyze the data and new data coming from the physical specimen. Mihail's suspicions were true, it was clear as day that the creature was not natural and had the signs of being artificial by human hands.

So, someone at Done Nine did screw up, and now their science experiment is loose on the moon. Or at least at this dome, but who knows if this creature has spread to the other domes?

Either way, Mihail contacted Kaplan about his findings. "Kaplan, this is Mihail. I have some troubling news. It turns out we have a foreign creature from Dome Nine in our Dome, which is the reason behind the bitten cow and the grass. We should contact Done Nine to tell them their experiment is loose, and maybe we can figure out a way to deal with this pest before it causes real problems."

@Wernher

"Kaplan," Yingxue bit out as Holiday took down her dictation to send, "there's something seriously wrong with whatever this thing is."

She peered down into the microscope again for the umpteenth time, still someone hoping that she was wrong about this and...whatever the hell it meant.

"Its genetiic code has been tampered with and spliced to hell and back so many times I can't even identify provenances. It would be easier to think of it as a man-made organism entirely than a modified animal. So..." she paused, rubbing her eyes as she tried to string her tired thoughts and words together, "if it's so incredibly modified, then why? Why would LD9 make something that can sicken animals it bites, chew through concrete and metal..."

She sucked in a long breath through a tight cage of teeth, tilting back on her chair as she let her arm fall over her eyes.

"And how did it end up here, anyway? It'd need to travel across the lunar surface, and if something can survive in that level of hypoxic environment, as soon as it was reintroduced to more oxygen density it'd die."

A long, long sigh as she finally said what was bubbling in the back of her mind, letting her chair legs fall to the floor again as she started at the electron microscope in an oddly detached way. "I hope this is just me being paranoid, and it's not relaly my place to say anyway. But I'm starting to worry that this..." she hesitated a moment more, "...is some kind of sabotage. Let me know if you have any other tasks for me. Xi Yingxue."

With a quick nod at nothing in particular to prompt Holiday to send it, she slumped out of chair, eventually laying flat against the ground as she stared up at the sterile ceiling.

"...I don't like this."

Gwen looked over to the path Eel was approaching from, her eyes drawn to the light bobbing around as he walked through the tunnel. As he got closer to where Yev and her were shoveling, she could barely here his whistling over the consistent droning of the pumps and machines in the tunnels. When he set the bag of PPE onto the floor and mentioned that there were rats for sure, Gwen frowned. Internally she scorned herself for not thinking to grab the gear beforehand, a bad habit she had not overcome from her youth.

She set the shovel down, grabbed a respirator and handed it to Yev before grabbing one for herself. The last thing either of them needed was to get sick from whatever this creature could have brought in from outside the dome.

"We have rats now? Is that what was sticking up the Cauldron? I swear if this is something that some fool didn't stop to ask if they should rather than if they could... she muttered more commentary to herself as she secured the respirator to her face.

"Holiday said it goes down below sub floor 5 and into the moon's surface. Possibly has to do with something from Dome 9. How far do you think you can get the drone to go Eel? It would be nice to know for sure where this damned thing came from."