The metal was cool and cold in Sunny's hand, the shaft of her spear both a comfort and a reminder to her as she stood on the bridge of the Empyrean. No one had argued when Ramirez made the executive decision to take them through the portal, in all honesty she probably would have argued If he hadn't, not that that was ever a concern. She sort of half expected to find them in some sort of dimension of darkness and incomprehensible horrors but was surprised to find themselves floating above a tranquil blue planet with oceans stretching off from horizon to horizon.

Before Ramirez could give the order, Sunny already had their orbital survey team taking a look at the planet running spectrographs, emissions typography scans and atmospheric composition arrays. As it turns out, while life is theoretically possible in different kinds of atmospheres, nitrogen heavy carbon/oxygen mixes were the most prominent to some degree or other. Often it was the degree of oxygen or other trace elements that made a planet unsafe.

The planet below them was not one of these cases.

"Another habitable planet/" Sunny wondered gripping the back of the seat in front of her. It did occur to her, and continued to occur to her every day that she was no longer living in a world familiar to her. She had grown up without the aid of technology on the fertile plains of Anin only to find herself with her feet perpetually off the ground in new territory.

Though that was fine by her.

New planets meant new lifeforms.

Which often lead to more fighting.

She flexed her fingers around the shaft of her spear. She felt odd, unusually nervous and on edge. She chalked it up to the portal taking them somewhere unknown and unexpected. She was likely to have been less worried if they had been thrown somewhere more inhospitable.

"What do we know?" She urged, and the scientist below her continued to flip through the scans being fed to her by a lower deck scientific crew. Sunny could sense the nervous posture of the woman's body tense about the shoulders and torso, to straight, to controlled.

Something was wrong.

"If Adam came out the same place we did-." Her voice was low, unsure.

"What!" Sunny said urging the woman to spit it out.

Ramirez was the one to answer, "He was inside the gravity well..... which means."

"He fell?" Sunny finished

Ramirez nodded from where he floated high above her, "Probably."

"Can' we track him" She demanded, "Didn't Krill put some sort of tracking devise in him that could monitor his vitals."

She was surprised when it was Krill who answered her question standing in the doorway behind them, his antenna buzzing gently, "I did, but his conversion to Anima power fried the electronics during his visit to president Hunt."

Sunny had forgotten about that, though she certainly shouldn't have. After all, she was the one who repaired his mechanical eye and mechanical leg after the whole ordeal, whose electronics had also been fried despite being mostly on the exterior of the body. If only she had thought of the tracking device beforehand.

"Lets hope his jetpack was still working." Ramirez said mildly.

He didn't sound worried, and usually Sunny wouldn't have been either. Adam was known for surviving. He was notoriously difficult to kill, and now that he was part Maker than unkillability was probably tenfold, but for some reason she just couldn't shake off the nervous energy.

"The suit would protect him. "She said, hearing more conviction in her voice than she felt, and her statement was true enough. Adam liked to buy expensive toys, and in the end it was HER job to repair and maintain them. Adam didn't know the first thing about maintenance on the steel eye suit. It was a good thing she found him cute otherwise she might not have put up with his tech illiteracy. But she did feel better knowing about the suit's jetpack, and barring that its lockout systems.

"Scans complete." The scientist in front of her announced, "Water is about sixty two degrees, shallow. The atmosphere is a livable mixture of oxygen nitrogen and CO2. Anything living on the planet's surface is bound to be carbon based, and I do mean anything living as the planet does seem to be inhabited."

There was a soft muttering from around the room.

"Inhabited." Ramirez ventured, "By what?"

"We have detected short wave radio emissions and hold on..... I have images coming in."

Up on the screen in front of her, an image began to appear, it was clear, and detailed down to the inch.

More muttering rose up around the room.

"Does that look like a city to anyone else?" Ramirez said glancing down and around the room.

"No probably just a really weird rock formation." Someone quipped quietly from one of the seats. Ramirez shot them a look, but it was impossible to tell who said what.

"Twenty bucks says I know where Adam ended up. He has a habit of doing this." Of course Sunny couldn't help but agree with his assessment. Adam was attracted to new alien species like other people were attracted to bad relationships or coffee shops . Of course there had to be a reason they ended up married in the first place.

Hr mind went immediately to a rescue attempt, taking ag group of marines down the planet and.

And why did that thought make her feel sick?

She was a bundle of nerves today, and that wasn't normal.

That was Adam's job.

Sunny reached up to rub her head, "I'll lead a team to get him." She turned and motioned to maverick who was still lurking at the back of the room, "Maverick ready alpha team on me."

Maverick seemed only slightly surprised but then nodded and jogged out of the room. Ever since their revelation about Maverick's past, the marine had worked twice as hard to convince everyone that she was worthy of being part of the crew when in all reality, to the rest of them, she had proven herself time and time again. She didn't need to work so hard to impress them, but this wasn't really about impressing the rest of the crew, it was about proving soemthing to herself.

That was something Sunny could understand, more than most people could.

When Sunny first joined Adam's crew it had been under her mother's instruction as a spy planning to backstab Adam, and avenge her father against the drev creed of combat. In the end she hadn't been able to do it, and had switched sides. In essence that is what Maverick was doing, just over a much longer period of time.

Sunny hurried down the hall and into her and Adam's room. Two climate controlled glass cases were tucked into the far corner of the room, one for Adam's SE armor and one for her own saint armor pearly white and glowing with a UV sheen of rainbow colors. She hurriedly donned her armor, reaching up to pull on her helmet when she was hit with a sudden.

Wave of nausea accompanied by that same sense of unease.

The feeling was so profound that she staggered back forced to sit on the edge of the bed with her head in her hands before the strange feeling clear up. She grabbed her spear and hurried out of the room to meet Maverick in the waiting docking bay.

"They're running a scan for his suit's signature now. If he is anywhere on this planet, we are going to find him." Maverick said pulling on the helmet to her own SE suit, modeled on a spartan Corinthian helmet.

Sunny was sure maverick was right, but there was one thought that kept intruding on her mind, "Why do you think he void wanted Adam here in the first place."

Maverick lifted her head. Behind her visor, Sunny couldn't see her eyes, but she could sense the nervous pause, "What do you mean ?"

"I mean Everett wanted him here, he tossed him through the portal, and the Darkborn didn't try to stop it. Its almost like they wanted it to happen, so that makes me wonder. Why did they have a portal coming here....."

One of Maverick's hands tightened into a hard fist as her voice lowered, 'I am not sure that is a question we want answered.

Sunny had a feeling she was right, and she swallowed hard as the twisting knot in her stomach returned.

*** Mizen observed the human closely. He seemed friendly enough, but they did not survive this long because they weren't cautious, and he did not intend to let the strange new creature out of his sight, much to the human's chagrin. Culturally speaking this human valued privacy very much especially when it related to the wearing of clothing items, which is something Mitzen could respect even if he didn't understand it.

But still this is how it had to be done.

The human agreed to remove the heretical material which he wore in favor of one of the Silver robes provided by the overseer. He argued to be left alone, but Mitzen could not permit it, and in those first few moments he figured out why the human had been so adamant.

The body of the human was nothing special, not really anything mitzen hadn't seen before. Aside from the hair on his head he was almost completely hairless like the stovagi with an even pigementation of skin throughout his body. He had little subcutaneous energy storage, and his internal structures were partially visible through the skin, especially at the joints around the chest and on the face. It was clearly not a creature originally intended for cold climates.

And all of that would have been fascinating were it not for the other things he saw.

It was the leg he noticed first, a mass of black metal and an unknown blue material. It clearly was not his natural leg as it did not follow the natural flow of his own body. In a way it looked like it should have belonged to another creature, and as the human moved mitzen could hear the artificial hiss of mechanical components inside the leg as he moved

Flat black metal: flat lack metal following the contours of the body starting at the base of his neck and running the length of his spinal column (a structure that was actually quite common across species and seemed to tend to evolve independently across planets) . These black metal plates ran down the length of his spine and branched out intermittently down his arms, and remaining leg. Small rivets held the metal in place flat against his skin, and as the man moved the metal hissed and clicked like some sort of angry predator.

The sight made mitzen sick to both his first and second stomach.

It was all only visible for a second before the human pulled on the robe, metal vanishing behind a layer of silver thread.

He turned to look at mitzen a knowing expression on his face.

Mitzen wasn't sure how to continue but offered, "You don't have to live like that, we can help you. We have the technology to regrow all of the parts you may be missing." He tried to offer it politely. He did just want to help, and who wouldn't want their real limbs back. The leg and the eye had clearly been lost in some accident so logically mitzen assumed that the exoskeleton was related to a lack of structural integrity in the body. Perhaps his species had been the product of some severe sort of illness or nuclear fallout that caused both war and physiological deformities that required the use of technology to survive.

The shook his head at mitzen, "I lost the eye to an accident, and the leg to battle. I do thank you for our generosity, Auditor Mitzen, but I fight a war that cannot be won with the strength of flesh alone. I could have my eye regrown, or my leg we have the technology, but I chose not to."

The declaration was so preposterous and confusing to Mitzen that he didn't know how to respond .

"I chose to undergo the procedure to put on the exo skeleton. It integrates better with my armor, it makes me stronger, and faster better able to protect my family. I would replace every inch of my own flesh with metal and wire if it meant protecting the people I love."

It was, it was heresy against all the tenants of shanshara that he had grown to know and love.

In a way it disgusted him, but he had to keep those thoughts down, force them into the back of his mind. This human did not yet understand the blessings of shanshara, or the help they could offer without artificial augmentation. There was still time for conversion, there was till-"

"Auditor mitzen, the alien ship is approaching!"

Oh great

***

The alien ship did not hesitate in its descent. The waiting guard circled the landing pad with their energy weapons pointed and ready. The ship came in low and slow its outside shining white and gold like the auditor's ship but with an inner golden light that could not be so easily explained. The guards shook where they stood knowing that their energy weapons were simply for minor use, for crowd control. They didn't need much more than that.

But this was an alien ship, likely with unknown alien weapons.

The ship turned in a slow arc and hovered ow over the landing pad.

They shrunk away.

And hen it landed with a slow roar that eventually died away. A ramp thundered open, and in a matter of moments strange alien creatures were spilling out onto the pad. The guards gasped in shock raising their weapons and backing into each other as the alien lifeforms spilled outward in heretic colors abhorrent to the great light of Shanshara, and at their head, a massive creature with an extra set of arms and shining white armor.

Its very body electric blue like the sea under a rising sun.

It pointed its spear at them which crackled with golden energy, "Gda Nee!" it demanded brandishing its weapon. They shrunk back too many preparing to discharge their weapons out of fear when another alien call came, and the group turned to find one of the creatures striding up the walkway accompanied by the auditor Mitzen. Silver robes billowed around its body as It came sprinting past them, and straight into the arms of the warlike creature.

"Its alright." The auditor said, "lower your weapons."

They certainly didn't want to, but what else could be done.