Chương 211: LOG-202.

Things were fine. The Pearls were far more comfortable with each other now that they'd gotten just a bit of time to get accustomed with one another. Shell was still being kept compliant by Patina, though all things considered the former heart of the Reef didn't seem all that inclined to truly resist in any way either. With Atoll's…

shards, stabilized somewhat with Pink essence, the signal she had been broadcasting had been reinforced, keeping the entities lurking outside of her walls at bay, at least for the moment. I still had my own theories as to just how she had been and still was maintaining some semblance of self, considering her shattered state, mostly to do with the fact that she'd seemingly uploaded her mind into the facility she controlled, but that wasn't important right now.

No, what mattered the most at present was that the situation had… escalated, following my experience in what I could only presume had been Atoll's memories. We were still stranded of course, trapped on some lost White Court colony the empire had been all too willing to forget, but the briefest sense of safety I had felt at being far away from everything was gone. Because I was on a time limit, again.

Whatever monstrosity Moissanite Beta and Epsilon had made was both actively hostile and working to bypass the restrictions keeping it from flooding into Atoll's lower levels, and with how the Gem turned building had felt about the situation, it was only a matter of time until it succeeded and stormed in to burn us all to death. Perhaps at another stage of my life, I would have cried about it.

Let myself break out into tears over the fact that I was once more being forced to find a solution to a problem before it hurt me and mine. But at this point I'd grown used to the constant repetition of life seemingly throwing obstacles in my path to freedom and safety. Nothing new, really. The Cluster. The empire. The Diamonds. This latest enemy. They were all the same thing. All hurdles I just needed to get past in order to achieve my goals, which meant it was time to get proactive about things once more.

The walk down to the lowest level of the facility had taken me a bit, and I'd briefly paused at the sight of some alien equivalent to butterflies fluttering about in the cave Violet had spoken to me about, but in the end I found myself standing within the depths of a lonely corridor that felt different than the others. The walls were less decorated, the feel of the door I was standing in front of more clinical, with a distinct lack of murals or other pro-Diamond iconography.

Set just above it was a surveillance visor, and I found myself folding my arms behind my back, the familiar pose giving me some comfort as I looked up at the device and gestured towards the entrance with my nose. This story has been unlawfully obtained without the author's consent. Report any appearances on Amazon.

"I need access, please." The feeling of being observed and perhaps even judged intensified for a long moment…before the door slid open with a near imperceptible chime, exposing the darkened chamber it had been hiding.

"Thank you, Atoll." Nodding to emphasize the motion, I encouraged my gemstone to generate a bit of light, before stepping into the darkness. — The 'supply depot' that had been built only a little prior to the colony being overrun by flaming holographic Pearls was a glorified garage, more than anything else. But it was hard to really focus on the details when the majority of my attention was taken up by the husk of metal and crystal alloy standing semi-limp within a gantry set in the center of the chamber.

After all, it wasn't very often one got to look at what seemed to be, for all intents and purposes, an actual fucking mech suit. My eyes must have seemed very wide, even in the unlit confines of the depot as I slowly circled around the vaguely gemoid construct, my initial hopes falling slightly as I noticed just how… dismantled, it looked. Armoured plates missing. Interior cabling hanging halfway out of the interior sections it was meant to run through.

An open cockpit that surely was supposed to have some kind of control interface within it, but currently lacked so much as a lever or dashboard. Some kind of experimental pet project, perhaps. Given what I had heard about Flight's vaunted exoframes back during my time as a Coordinator working with Fawn, the increasing suspicion that their White Glint was in actuality the very same Epsilon from Atoll's memories had me more than a little bemused. …

Even if some old part of me remained incredibly disappointed that I wouldn't be playing around with the angular looking construct before me. Not without performing extreme levels of maintenance that I simply didn't know how to do, at least.

"Alright, enough distractions." The words served to ground me back in reality, and with one last longing look, I stepped away from the roughly Onyx (ignoring the twinge that the memory of the fusion brought) sized machine and turned my gaze elsewhere, eyes roving across tables and containers no doubt littered with tools and materials. And rather exotic ones, at that.

While Atoll hadn't exactly snooped on her superiors, she'd paid enough attention to know that the Moissanites had been storing items of potential use within the depths of her interior. Things like weapons. Things like destabilizers and Warp whistles, though those weren't all that helpful without a functional Warp pad. And apparently, things like the skeletal frame of the ancient ancestor of Flight's signature big stompy robots.

But in addition to all of that, and what I was very much hoping to find at least some semblance of… There, a glint in the dark, the projected pale green light of my gemstone reflected back at me from a pile of geometric shapes set in a glorified bucket of all things. Darting over towards the collection, I reached over and picked one of the specimens up, observing the way faint lines of multicoloured light travelled across its inert form.

"A prism…" Not a light one, obviously. Those were rare enough that even a galactic polity like the empire were stingy about handing them out, but some kind of prism nonetheless. Hefting the shiny rock, I resisted the urge to shiver at the sensation of power that seemed to emanate from its surface, a tingly feeling running along my lightform, originating from the hand holding it. This… was something.

I wasn't quite sure what, just yet, and whether it would even be useful in trying to find a way to either escape the planet or put down the monster Beta and Epsilon had created, but it was certainly a start. … Now I just needed to figure out what to do with the bloody thing. Awesome.