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Save Point: The Feathers Of Anuket

Anuket wanders along the tideline, her bare paws crunching in the damp sand, looking for new and unique shells to add to her collection. The tides here are are large but steady, unlike the much more complex epicycles of Sethuramandraki, and it constantly amazes her just how fast and how deep they flow in and out, and the sheer range of driftwood and debris carried with them.

The breeze ruffles the crown of feathers atop her head, the strange sensation of the quills moving under her scalp something that she still can't quite get used to, even after all this time, although they are handy to shield her eyes and scalp from the more yellowed, if less intense sunlight that obtains here. Each feather is an antenna, linking to one of the component members of the drone swarm that drift slowly around an arbitrary perimeter out beyond the shores of the main island, feeding on sunlight with modified solar cells designed to compensate for the changed levels of the sunlight, each as light as a feather itself and able to stay aloft indefinitely.

The base of each feather transmits to dedicated hardware installed inside her skull, allowing her a subconscious perception of all the different incoming feeds that she is abstractly aware of, but a perception which does not trouble her conscious mind at all unless she sees something that might be incongruous, distracting. When this happens, she can pause and mentally shuffle through the feeds, closing her eyes to avoid confusion, until she finds the right one.

Where possible, each of the crew on the Citadel mission has been selected around multiple tasks, so they can work around their specialties to contribute as effectively as possible. She's actually a marine biologist, technically, and so by assigning her to wrangling the drone swarm, they address matters of security whilst also giving her all the visual data she could possibly need to learn as much as possible about this planets oceans from a somewhat limited sample.

Hacking the Azatlani and Rama Empire oceanographic databases has given her a broad-scale idea of what's going on, but it always helps to have eyes-on and so she has redistributed the perimeter slightly to encompass the outer coasts of several surrounding sandy islands, allowing her to walk the shores on foot whilst being an all-seeing eye along the coastline, a sort of goddess of the seas.

She has data, samples, fish from the Khemitic river delta collected by the contact mission, but the wide-mouthed estuary goes outward for miles before it finishes mingling with 'the great green' as the native people call it, and it's the true ocean that interests her. Even if it is some strange shade of green to blue and not the deeply intense purple that she's used to.

Checking the drones again and confirming their viewpoint, watching herself deep in thought as she watches herself from the outside, she locates a comfortable rock above the spray, seats herself down and grooms her plumage, trying to get the layer of the feathers just right. Her lightweight, just scantily-there seaside dress flicks up around her waist in the breeze.

After a while, a small boat becomes visible, making for shore. It's the most peculiar vessel she's ever seen anywhere, sort of like an extended hexagon with a prow and tail extended out from an underlying octagonal frame. It seems to have been assembled from local woods of several types, but isn't caulked or nailed or even held together by some sort of glue, with the edges of the planks fused together somehow to keep it in one piece. There's a relatively simple sail arrangement, two long spars at an angle to one another, that resembles the primitive boats of the Khem delta, yet the sail seems to be a single piece of almost translucently thin cloth, or maybe two joined together to get enough surface area. It looks like the mast can be unshipped and set as an outrigger of sorts instead, or tied down should the weather turn threatening.

Sitting under the lateen arm and expertly directing the vessel in toward the shore is a scrawny, slim and sun-kissed sethuress with, oddly enough, a fold in the skin of her belly like a pouch, and high tits strangely firm despite what has clearly been a distinct shortfall in acceptable nutrition. Anuket can see all this because she is nearly naked and wearing just the shortest remains of some heavily worn item of clothing loose around her waist.

The sethuress runs the vessel up onto the sand, climbs out, and pulls to drag it up onto the shore while wind and wave are still with her. Spotting Anuket, she exclaims, "Well don't just stand there, help me with this!" in a raspy voice that sounds like it hasn't been practiced with lately. "Getting a little low on water," she explains apologetically. "Had to keep the shells from drying out."

Once they're up on the sand, the crazy sethuress steps back up onto the tiny boat, which she can sees now has a minuscule but completely closed cabin built into it, and opens up a sort of hatch, before pulling out of all things an egg, still several days from hatching but clearly getting close to its time. She hands the egg promptly and without a word of warning to Anuket, who takes it with an understandably confused expression, and then pulls out a second slightly smaller one, which she cradles in the crook of her arm before stepping back down onto the sand.

"I hate to ask for a favour," explains the crazy sethuress, "but could you maybe hide me for a few days? Just until I manage to eat a bit, get my strength back, make sure that these ones are healthy? I have to make an entrance, you see. Make sure that everyone sees me arrive and knows that I'm back alive and well, and not likely to, say, expire conveniently at the last second. If you have, like, a boat-house or seaside research-station or something, or even a shack, that would do."

"I'll say that the boat was empty," concludes Anuket, after a considerable pause to think about the implications of this request. "Everyone was curious, but I'll say that there was no-one inside and that the boat must have simply slipped its anchor with the sail still up. The weather's been kind of clear lately, it's vaguely plausible. If they persist, I'll string them along and fan their curiosity until you've had a day or two to rest, then promise to show them a surprise discovery I made aboard. Would that be close enough to what you have in mind?"

"Oh, thank you so much," sighs the sethuress. "Do you have any water, by the way? I'm really very thirsty. And I could shred a nice fillet flank of gazelle. And some dessert."

Bemusedly, Anuket transports the egg back along the sandy shore, all thoughts of shell collecting blown away on the sea breeze. The crazy sethuress follows along after as they head toward her planetary exploration vehicle, which is parked on a rocky outcrop atop the nearest headland.

"Nice feathers, by the way," adds the sethuress as she trails along behind. "I don't think we ever personally met before. My name is Keselt."

It gets lonely, wandering around on the sea shore by yourself. Anuket will be happy to have some pretty female company all to herself, even if that female already has two eggs waiting to hatch and presumably there's a partner somewhere, willing or otherwise, about to become enmeshed in all manner of complications. It's not the noblest of motives, but she likes sethuresses and is full game to admit to it, as her sister-wife would attest.

She finds herself thinking happily about cooking for Keselt and wondering if she'll let her help to scrub her back during the shower that almost certainly awaits. They're not really dirty thoughts, mostly, more like planning to go on a secret date that your friends and family won't know about until after the big reveal. She'll have to smuggle out some food but that shouldn't be too hard, she can call it camping supplies or something for a night out under the stars. It'll be exciting.

"I'm Anuket. Let me get you some water and then you can tell me what happened."