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More than three hundred years ago, the Earth was split in two by a pervasive, hostile alien force known as the Gauna. Attempts to contact them have never yielded success, and they appear to be without intellect or culture. An incredibly large mass of Gauna detected five lightyears from Earth one day began approaching the Solar System, and when they arrived, tore it and Earth apart.

Five hundred vessels, manned and unmanned, escaped.

The Excalibur has seen much already, though at this instant her sensor arrays have detected an extremely abnormal object floating through space in accessible vicinity. No known threats exist nearby.

So who are you?

>>34246536
Jake Dole, Janitor 1st class

>>34246536
>>34246664
Sure, this sounds good to me!

>>34246536
>Aleksandra Kalashnikov
>Security Officer

>>34246536
>Centrifugal force providing gravity
this is my fetish

>>34246536
>So who are you?
Is there a list or something?

>>34246697
But this is a rectangular ship. Why are the lakes not falling into the corners?

Also what happens when you, you know, turn on the engines? Because a ship this size should really just be getting its Gs from, you know. Gs. The acceleration from thrust. At 1 G.
It be cool if they figured out gravity generators.

>>34246664
Much as I like the security officer's name, I must see what this mop-pusher is going to do with his life.

>>34246503
"Saladin"
A former Spook. Part-time baby sitter,Part-time Teacher, Full time bad ass.

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>>34246664
Your name is Jake Dole, and you are the Captain's personal janitor, doing for him things around the ship that he may not otherwise wish to. This discovery is of immense significance to the ship, as it represents the only possible evidence of alien life other than the Gauna, which are regarded by scholars aboard the Excalibur to be incapable of thought or reason.

The shuttle craft you are descending down to the one thousand kilometer wide object in is equipped with three Mark Two Excalibur Defense Frames, each housing two Gatling guns on their manipulators with an RPM of one hundred thousand and a magazine of sixty five hundred. Also in this nimble ship are your three closest friends. The brunette woman named Matilda has known you since birth, and also sits in the ship's better graces, being a helmsman for exploratory craft not dissimilar to this one. Ethan is another, and weeks of wandering along in the north and southern forests has bonded you like brothers.

Finally is perhaps the greatest asset on board to the ship, a researcher named Luther who has helped advance the Excalibur's capabilities in mere decades. There is a suspicion that he proposed this mission to the Captain.

Vibrations rattle the old hull as she makes final touchdown, her window of time on this rock beginning to close as the mother ship soars on by a short ways away.

How to proceed is up to you.

>>34246814
Check the bins

>>34246814
Give Matilda a friendly massage.

>>34246802
I'm assuming the inside is smooth while the outside is rectangular. Also, it's plausible for an interstellar ship to use centrifugal force as gravity seeing as how it would need to carry too much reaction mass to be able to accelerate the entire distance.

>>34246814
Get yourself and Ethan in those frames and go take samples and scan every visible object, and every available cubic foot of empty space, and pipe that data back to Luther on the ship. Unless you figure he can science better in a cockpit.

Also, after about thirty seconds, I am ALMOST certain that the distribution of colored dots in the OP image are random and aren't showing any outstanding red or blueshifts.

>>34246900
It eats asteroids, brah. no shortage of spare mass after refining for water, metals, and CHON.

>>34246936
>Implying an asteroid contains enough mass to continuously accelerate a ship that size between stars

Fuck off, retarded namefag.

>>34246962
How often do you think they go through them?
Depending on the rate at which they process, they could be foraying for new rocks every few days. (Unlikely, but still a possibility)
If that happened to be the case, they would have to *dump* mass.

>>34247048
Also sorry for the derailment.

>>34247048
This is interstellar space. How many rogue asteroids do you expect to find on a trip from one star to another?

Not enough to reliably build a ship around using it for continuous acceleration.

>>34246925
>>34246863
You perform your lucky routine of checking your ammunition before going on a framewalk. Gleaming metal slabs snug to their charges wait in unison for the few seconds they'll have to fire. Of course, these cannot kill a Gauna.

Nothing can.

Slapping the heavy canister back together, you start climbing into your frame. Number three. Hollering to Ethan to get his ass out on the ground, you seat up within the cloistered, digital cockpit and boot the machine. Its servos whine to life for yet another period of service in service to Excalibur, and before long Matilda and Ethan have done the same.

Air wheezes out of the room as depressurization takes place, several attending scholars following Luther in his own routines, double-checking their suits bound by umbilical tethers.

At once, the group hustles forth from the craft, which has landed a scarce three hundred meters away from a gaping, dead black hole leading further into the structure.

Bleak white. For however long the object has been out here, it has sustained apparently little damage, Small scuffs and dents of sizes made by larger chunks of space rock lightly mark the surface. The research crew seems puzzled, kicking their heels at the seemingly strong ground.

The pit looms at the horizon, its very presence almost a contradiction. You begin to stride towards the edge, and soon everyone follows.

>>34247105
Prompts?

>>34247105
Look down the pit.

>>34247105
See if you cant get some of the lesser eggheads to stick around at the surface and get some samples of this material you are standing on; if its artificial, the ship might be able to reproduce it. And do something about the disconcerting inability to deal with spacerocks hitting the hull. All those dents in the ship cant be good.

Onwards.

>>34247092
That seems pretty reasonable.

OP ded

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>>34247232
The trio of mechs stride towards the edge of the massive drop, each pilot peering down into the pitch black ninety straight degree hole. One of the boffins struggles to use the comm.

"Reading of latent Higgs particles is lesser here, for some reason."

Luther freezes up for but a moment. "That's interesting." He says, mechanical eyes peering inside of the structure. Shall we drop inside?

Another scientist appears frustrated hacking into the white matter.

Matilda deploys her maneuvering thrusters and slowly lowers herself into the black maw, power umbilical drifting gracefully in the vacuum. The frame rotates to shine its light on the wall. "It's dark down here. Oddly so." She declares, continuing descent. Ethan jumps in after her.

The chief scientist bounces off of the surface and hangs above the black, peering inside wordlessly.

There is only forward.

>>34247632
Do we have any powerful floodlights? If not, head down.

>>34247691
A leg grumbles as you push off, letting the weak gravity of the object assist your descent, only stalling yourself as you met up with the other two. The floodlights aboard the frames are as good as they're going to come out here, so you gave an order to shine them downwards.

If eyes were to be believed, nothing existed below. Black was the reason Luther seemed startled here. Not even his eyes were picking up much. They darted quickly to a dim crevice at the corner of the light's spread. "Down there. An irregularity." he stated, referring to a small crack of sorts in the rock below. Power lines drifted downwards and hovered a cautious distance away, light barely peeking around the jagged abnormality.

"Everything is still down here. Absolutely numb." Spoke Ethan in a hushed, wary tone.

>>34247805
What scanning equipment do we have? Could we send an unmanned probe to check it out?

>>34247872
"Luther, get us a probe." You call out over the communications. The drifting man swipes a few commands into his wrist computer and a small, saucer-like device propels itself towards the Frames within a few dozen seconds. The little spacecraft boldly stuffs itself into the crevice and runs its scans.

A tendril of mass extends instantly from the crack.

"Communications ceased!" Cries Luther, continuing to survey. Putrid looking growths begin to fester forth from the tear in the structure. growing without source, rhyme, or reason. Disjointed eyes form on the mass, as black as the rest of the hole.

"It's a Gauna." says Matilda. No evidence of the lump in her throat ever manifesting over the microphone.

>>34248004
Retreat. Get back to the shuttle and blast out of there. Comm the captain and suggest he gets the ship read for a hard burn out of here.

>>34248004
Get Luther to dump the rest of the probes, automated, to scan the rest of this rock. Everyone start backing up Now, and if you think it will help, keep the flesh suppressed with your weapons.

>>34248004
Ignore the fermenting mass of flesh, and go straight for the core and attempt to come out through a different tunnel, we don't want whatever the fuck that thing is following us.

>>34248144
>>34248123
>>34248049
Ethan raises his guns on a dime and lets out two thousand rounds from both guns, mashing the Gauna's face into odd-colored gore almost instantly. "Probes, Luther!" You yell, He doesn't have to look at his wrist and numerous saucers in various states of disrepair thrust over the landscape as far and fast as their dated engines would take them, three descending further into the pit. "No further cracks as they go down. Higgs readings are zero. If you draw the Gauna further inside and blast away its placenta, it likely won't regenerate."

The #1 unit again places his arm snug against the quickly expanding crevice and unloads another thousand rounds, doing a blender's work to everything it was near.

"It's our only hope, Jake. We can't let it follow us back to the Excalibur." the girl spoke, maximizing output on her thrusters downwards into the pit. Ethan spewed out five hundred more rounds and joined her. Number three descends.

Two of the probes were hopelessly fucked, dead shells screeching through the black, transmitting as their vectoring died. One veered and smashed into the wall before reaching the core of the perforated orb, and the other zoomed inside, briefly broadcasting images of light to the withdrawing scientists and descending pilots, now scraping at their twenty minute batteries. The Gauna had blistered out of its crevice a few seconds ago, and was nipping at the upward-facing light of #2.

"You're going to reach the center soon."

>>34248288
Turn off the lights. Switch to infrared imaging.

>>34248288
Grab whatever we can, maybe a rock sample and book it.

>>34248434
>>34248507
Within short seconds the hole ends, replaced by a wide, brightly lit chamber resembling the structure, though from the inside out. Within this tranquil space no doubt being shook by the higgs boosters of the Excalibur's frames sits an unmoving, separated lattice of bright masses floating still in the chamber. Matilda and Ethan each zoom into the room one after another, screaming over their communicators at you.

The Gauna stares through your hail of shrapnel, things finally becoming clear on the infrared in this strange place.

Seven hundred forty three rounds left in both arms.

Zero.

You make a quick adjustment on the thrusters and one of the floating petals severs through your frame's left arm, spinning wildly towards the oncoming Gauna as you drift past, machine maimed. It collides with the almost stagnant Gauna's core...

And it begins to fizz away. A massless mist washes over the room in but a moment, and begins to dissipate. "Holy shit..." cursed Ethan over the comms. Matilda remained silent and vigilant, holding still with the petals.

The frame comes back under your control with a few deft turns even despite a few missing vectors, and you survey what you see. The Gauna is gone, several dozen of these petals lie suspended in the bright. The individual mass which collided with the creature's True Body drifts about, stained red on the point of contact.

>>34248711
Aren't they supposed to be indestructible? Whatever those things are we need them. Collect them all and book it back to the Excalibur.

>>34248711
Quarantine everything. We need to make sure it's truly gone before going back to the ship.

>>34248760
>>34248773
The drones never found anything else. Every single other cave wall was without imperfection. The shuttle was called back in and descended into the black itself, opening collection hatches to stack as many of the petals, each measuring about five meters tall and one and a half at their widest with blade-like edges surrounding the mass. Even occupying the Frame hangar, each and every one of the fifty four petals was loaded aboard. Scientists took last measurements, surviving drones came back to the shuttle, and the window was soon drawing to a close for your return journey.

The call is made to return home, confident that whatever Gauna may have existed here no longer does.

"What was that?!" Ranted Matilda as she took off her helmet. "A Gauna." replied Ethan, finally taking a seat and staring downwards to the shuttle's grating. "It's gone now." The girl held up for a moment, remembering what she'd just witnessed. "No... That place. Why was it there? How can those objects do such a thing?"

You speak. "I'm not certain of any of this. All readings support the viewpoint that the Gauna has vanished. It's anyone's guess why the petal managed to kill it."

"Luther's going to want to have a look"

"Yeah."

In several hours, the shuttle would dock with Excalibur. Upon hearing the news, the Captain ordered a homecoming festival for the three heroes of the ship. The first known human beings to have ever killed a Gauna.

>>34248951
Yadda Yadda, skip the festivities, I'm sure the Gauna know we swiped their treasure. Can we weaponize it?

How much of those things do we have?

>>34248951

Drink heavily?

>>34248988
Can we... build giant robots?

>>34248951
Grab your mop and start cleaning.

>>34248988
>>34248996
>>34249013
>>34249035
It was made quickly clear to you that those festivities were more of a display for the common folk than anything else when a Captain's aide was sent to retrieve you for audience. Waving goodbye to your overwhelmed companions, you went to meet the officer.

He was standing, waiting in a five by five meter observation nodule somewhere closer to the front of the ship. In full military regalia echoing back to traditions held and passed on for centuries. Noticing you, he sheathes his sword. "Jake..." the old man rasps. "You continue to surprise me. Not one of your team killed and fifty four of these artifacts were recovered. This marks a significant moment in our vessel's history, as I'm certain you're aware." He does not turn to look at you, keeping his gaze fixed upon the slowly drifting stars.

"I find it fortunate that we so much as came across these. How much longer might we have lasted without them?

The Captain chuckles and turns around. His eyes well up with tears as he smiles from ear to ear, almost concealing the cracks and wrinkles of a face contorted with nearly a hundred years of service to the vessel. "Well now you'll never have to find out." he cracked jokingly, using all of his strength to approach you with stern dignity in his steps.

"Kneel."

The blade is drawn once again in a flash, and he lords its flawless metal over you.

And it comes down lightly. One shoulder to another.

"You are the Captain now."

--END 1--

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>>34249218
But can we build giant robots?

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>>34249235
wouldn't be much of a quest if the answer was no

i'll be back

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>>34249253
There better be giant robots when you get back.

>>34249218
>Janitor gets the captaincy

What

>>34249264
More like the King's right hand, or in this case Captains "Janitor."

>>34249264
>Captain being old as fuck.
>New public hero appears, having destroyed the undestroyable

It's a good morale play.