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Save Point: Stranded But Not Lost

Remote Unnamed Island

Keselt makes a disheveled grunt as she is kicked, well not so much really kicked as foot-planted and given a vigorous shove, out of the still hovering planetary exploration vehicle to land on dry beach sand.

"Have fun, I'm sure you'll like it here!"

"Where the hell is is 'here'?"

"Oh, just a nice little uninhabited island. Plenty of natural resources, more than enough for one of us, just not enough for an actual human community. You aren't going anywhere. Just consider this a sort of enforced holiday, to ensure that no-one goes meddling in our business."

One of them tosses her coms device back to her.

"I'm afraid we may have physically disabled all outgoing calls. Purely as a precautionary measure, you understand. Consider it this way - at least we aren't tracking your every movement. Which would be relatively easy if we hadn't, but I'm afraid our glorious leader has too much faith in your resourcefulness and so he really insisted!"

The planetary exploration vehicle rises back up into the air and begins to drift away.

"Just stay put and you'll be perfectly safe. I'm sure someone will come by and pick you up at some point!"

The whoosh of its departure lifts up sand to swirl around her ears as the rudimentary inertial-suppression kicks back in and the aggressively-styled triangular form shoots off over the waves, leaving a vacuum behind it and doing weird things to her ears.

"Well, damn," she mutters, coughing on fine dust.

~*~

She swipes on to see what she's still got. Some previously unimportant component seems to have been physically pulled from the coms device with tweezers, and attempts to request content fail with various 'could not send' errors. The antenna is presumably still there (it's distributed all throughout the device, so no handy takebacks) and is still picking up various things being actively sent to her via entangled coms as part of the standard operation of the device, such as a news feed assigned for all crew members, and several channels of Azatlani and Ramanae television channels that are worth keeping tabs on. At least she won't get bored.

She knows that entangled coms don't need any sort of directional assistance, and that once you make the link they'll keep working indefinitely, wherever you are, and with more bandwidth than you could ever really need. But to request anything new or place an outgoing call, she'd need to be able to signal out to establish new links, and that is not happening. Some of the services are likely to fail over the next day when they decide that, due to her lack of response, she's not connected and resources should be allocated to other users. Once they stop sending, that's it.

Anything it does receive will get cached, however, and won't get overwritten because requests to refresh are not being sent. She still has everything that was already stored on the device, all the writing and music and previously downloaded cultural databases she could hope for. Local tasks should work just fine, so she can write a journal, make notes and play existing games for as long as the power supply holds out (it can recharge from ambient power sources, but this will take a while with only sunlight, body movement and temperature variations to feed on).

Oddly enough, the global positioning still seems to be working, which makes her suspicious in light of recent comments until she realizes that it works off a different system. Since it receives physical radio signals in the form of time-stamped pings from the Azatlani satellite constellation, in order to measure the delay and triangulate her position, it's not compatible with instantaneous entangled coms. The accuracy sucks, because it never had a return mode anyway, as they can't put out their own signals or interrogate the Azatlani stuff for corrections without someone noticing.

The fact that it's military hardware makes up for it a bit. Naturally they can decrypt the noise that is otherwise introduced for civilian applications, but it's still a bit dicey and unsuited for precision use. It's enough to find your way by, though, which gives her hope as it is something that her not-quite-captors have overlooked, perhaps because it was literally beneath their radar, a technology not sophisticated enough to rate their attentions.

A certain amount of fiddling with the last cached version of a world mapping tool, just the lowest level planetary map that it displays for a second on the zoom-in, confirms that they were telling a reasonable fraction of the truth and that she is genuinely on a small island in the middle of empty ocean, but that it's not as bad, perhaps, as they may have made it seem. She's still in the same part of the world as the Citadel island, not off on some other region or on the other side of the globe.

She can, off-hand, posit a number of possible reasons for this - not wanting to deviate too far off the existing flight-path, improved plausibility of whatever excuse they're going to make, her ready availability if they decide to pick her up again at short notice for some other reason. It might even just be pure laziness on their part, somewhere they stopped off once for milkshakes that they still had saved in the navigation system.

Still, she's staring to get ever so slightly thirsty, so escape plans will have to wait until she's found a source of moderately fresh water. There must be something nearby or they wouldn't have set her down here. At least she hopes they were that forward thinking, since they're clearly obsessed with their own self-perceived cleverness. Someone more sensible would have assigned a guard, but the problem with a bunch of self-proclaimed transgressionists is that they're hard to wrangle and get bored easily. It wouldn't be tempting, being stuck alone with her on an island, unless they were allowed to do the sort of nasty things that would reduce her resale value.

The same self-congratulatory cunning that has led them to dream up a more economical solution may, hopefully, be the flaw that undoes it. First, however, she needs a drink.

~*~

Keselt, going through her gear, finds all sorts of things. There's a solid looking bracelet that was offered free to all members of team who attended one of the safety and survival briefings, which can be rubbed and twisted at until it frays and unbraids into a length of sturdy corded rope.

There's her small torch as well... wait. Didn't this thing have some sort of extra functionality, just like the bracelet? She slides back the adjustable, rotating casing that conceals the power supply and comes across a small embossed, and slightly raised, curved arrow pointing to the stop that prevents the casing being rotated all the way down. She tries to remember the details. The torch has a tiny pinpoint focus in the front, a component that is far more efficient than is really needed, which is why there's the stop at the end, one of several increasingly thick bridges deliberately not cut away along the spiraling path. If you spin it all the way down, the beam becomes so tight that it is recommended not to look directly into it and you can see it all the way to the horizon, or you could, assuming it was possible to hold it that straight.

It turns on and off from a simple touch switch at the end, and is waterproof. That's about it...

"....I pressed down hard on the switch and something broke inside, and suddenly the dark space was flooded with additional light as the creatures of shadow cowered away...."

Something from a weave game she played once, at least she thinks so. But it reminds her exactly what it was she was trying to remember.

She grasps the torch firmly at either end, then twists it with a savage determination as though it was one of those simple glow-sticks that you snap at the center to let the contents mingle. The first and thinnest of the metal stops snaps, then another twice as thick, and finally a really heavy one greater by almost a factor of four designed to make sure that there's no way you could do this by accident. Having twisted it as far as it will literally go (and shes not sure she could get it back to the original position either) she presses down hard on the main power button until something crunches inside.

The torch generates an infinitely thin needle of actinic light, so white as to be almost blue, which leaves a persistent after-image in her vision as it slices through several heavy frond-like leaves, completely severs a slender palm trunk and leaves a small sputtering burning hole melted in the sand before she has the presence of mind to release her grip.

...and it's an emergency weapon-slash-cutting tool, is what she was trying to remember earlier. The small size of the power supply inside it makes it unsuitable for extended use in this mode, but it might be enough to do a few things. The corners of her mouth curl up in a small grin normally reserved for when she figures out how to solve some strategic puzzle in one of her games.

~*~

She checks her pockets to see if there's anything useful, finding only a vial of irradiated milk, and a fun-size resealable foil packet of smoke-dried meat cubes, the leftovers from the party with the sethresses from Kilseth's little group. They'd been holding something back, but she'd assumed it was just their research that they didn't want to share, rather than the fact that they were trying to lull her into a false sense of security prior to this not-quite-technically an abduction.

Seriously, kidnapping the sethuress? It's so steampunk, pure Age of Mechanisms. Your princess is in another castle, and so on and so forth. If there was anything really calculated to get Sethkill to come looking for her, or make him go after his brother on general principles, this is it. If they drop the slightest clue, she's certain he will find her, regardless of the fact she's in the middle of round about nowhere.

Still, best to save herself if she can. A sensible sethuress doesn't rely on her mate to bound up and save her on the back of a riding jackal, or sweep in to the rescue on white wings. If she can escape, maybe it'll save him from whatever's going on, instead of the other way around.

~*~

A giant coconut crab strolls up, in reservedly sideways manner, attracted by her building project. Because it's kind of cute and reminds her of the arthropods from home, she politely refrains from turning it into crab stew and instead pets it gently on the carapace behind the eyestalks, careful to avoid the huge grabbing claws. "Perhaps I should bring you along with me to keep me company. I could call you bitey crab? ...no? ...very well then."

She leaves the crab to whatever it is they do. Climbing palm trees maybe. Eating it seems vaguely dishonorable, like spearing some harmlessly fluffy lowest level creature included only to provide weapons practice for the amateur player. Besides, there are plenty of other edible things about, all of which have shown far less initiative and interest. Maybe it's a merchant, rather than just some random ecosystem spawn existing only for targeting refinement.

Unfortunately, she needs everything in her inventory for this little project.