ʜᴏᴡ ꜰᴀʀ ᴡɪʟʟ ʏᴏᴜ ɢᴏ ᴛᴏ ꜱᴇᴇ ᴛᴏᴍᴏʀʀᴏᴡ? | ᴀ ʀɪᴍᴡᴏʀʟᴅ ᴏᴅʏꜱꜱᴇʏ

[Tenzai]

"I pity the hubris of your mistake. Shame that you and your ilk had mistakenly stumbled upon your grave."

ɴᴏᴡ ᴘʟᴀʏɪɴɢ: ᴄᴏᴀʟᴇꜱᴄᴇɴᴄᴇ | ᴄʜʀɪꜱ ᴄʜʀɪꜱᴛᴏᴅᴏᴜʟᴏᴜ
↻ ◁ II ▷ ↺​

"Such a waste of flesh and souls." Surrounded by the dead and dying, a being that defied the will of the gods of creation had aimed its massive blade towards the bleeding captain of the ship as alarms blared and sirens roared. The damage inflicted on the vessel was far too extreme for it to remain in orbit for much longer. Without the power in its thrusters to withstand the gravitational pull of the very world it orbited around, there was nothing that could prevent its descent through the atmosphere onto the alien planet. A crash landing was imminent and those onboard who lacked an escape pod to send themselves through would soon join the names of the slain and the lost.

"My crew are among some of the best... This galaxy will ever know..." Covering his chest to endure his soul's call for escape just a little longer, against the odds, the captain had kept the ship steady as it plummeted, ensuring that those onboard could be given enough time to reach the escape pods. "Don't assume that they would all succumb to your malice... Providence..." The massive saber impaled through the captain, though despite the light in his eyes fading and his breath running shallow, even then did his hand not leave the manual control for the ship. "... They will survive... Your world... They will survive... You..." Gripping the controls with all the strength he had left, his corpse refused to give its murderer the satisfaction of its surrender.

"How typical. Your stubborn kind never knows when to die a proper death." Withdrawing his blade from the body, Providence swiftly removed the arm of the captain before slamming the brunt of his weapons against the controls. Feeling the ship tilt at an odd angle, as the other bodies that lay atop the navigation bay of the ship spilled towards the bow, the eldritch being cut open a rift back to his throne room. "It is not good to lie, captain. Not when your species is known to disappoint."

[ATTENTION, ALL STAFF! WITHDRAW TO THE ESCAPE PODS! THIS IS NOT A DRILL! ALL STAFF! WITHDRAW TO THE ESCAPE PODS!] A loud, looping announcement had blared through the ship's speakers as Fortuna ran towards one of the different sections of the ship that housed the escape pods. Growls of monsters aboard that had seemingly come from nowhere had interrupted the sound of screams and combat. Something happened while she was on guard duty, an intrusion of an unknown origin. The blood that now stained her blade was far from what she expected from this world: Galatina's Edge was tainted with the chill of the eldritch.

The peace she had once known as a guardian of the RSS Charon had come to a swift end. Her future living in an ordinary life after participating in imperial wars had been stripped from her, each body she passed of both her ally and enemy were sobering reminders that this was far from a dream. This was reality. Scratches had coated her body after spending her time fighting against the first wave of the alien intruders that drew themselves from rifts aboard the ship, though despite how many she could cut through, there seemed to be three more laying in wait.

"Tch." Fortuna clicked her tongue as she searched through the vessel while running for signs of her brother only to find bodies of the people she was destined to protect as an imperial guardian. Escape didn't feel appropriate as an option without securing her brother, Ethos, first. However, one look at the vacant escape pods in her section had made her realize there was a chance he might have escaped before she did. Unlike her, he wasn't the type to disobey orders without good reason. With the amount of faith he held in her and his loyalty to the captain that took them both in, it was likely that he would be among the first to escape once commanded, expecting that she too was soon to follow the same. Uttering a short prayer to her god, Gideon, for the safety of herself and her only family, as she entered the confines of the small pod, she heard the sound of growling coming towards her from inside the ship. She was running out of time. Remaining here would be nothing more than a death sentence.

"I'll find you again, Ethos. I promise." Her weapon glowed as though it heard her prayer; With nothing left binding her to the ship, she engaged the commands to fire her pod towards the planet below. If they had to take chances, they would suffer better odds in making landfall and dealing with the planet itself than fighting over the remains of a dying ship. Closing her eyes as the exterior of the pod burned upon friction from contact with the particles in the atmosphere, Fortuna hoped that if her god had fated for this day to be her last, that he would make it end quickly. However, after a few minutes of falling from the sky, the sudden thud of the impact rocking against her body had shook that fear away quickly. Whoever listened to her prayers had yet something more in store for the space paladin.

[Jugust 1st, 5500 | Night | Clear | Boreal Forest]​

As the escape pod opened, the outside revealed a meteor shower of artificial origin. Space debris as well as the light of other pods flying through the atmosphere had caught her attention. Never did such a beautiful sight bring such sadness to her heart. The flicker of each streak of light raining down was just another sign that the life that she had fought so hard to obtain had come to an end. Her sacrifice did not matter in the grand scheme of it all. Feeling herself first to do a checkup on her body, she sighed in relief upon finding nothing more than surface level wounds, though she had room to assume that those she might come across might not be so lucky. Escape pods weren't always guaranteed to remain in one piece, especially if it landed in a place much more hostile than her own.

[WIS=12] Climbing out of her pod after grabbing the emergency ration inside, Fortuna inspected the landscape around her, noticing a chill in the air. The trees were much taller here and the plant life had seemed a bit more sporadic than she expected. "Hmm... Must be a forest near the snow." She recalled the similar scene from the prior battles of the different biomes she encountered. Likely, if they were around a place like this, it would've meant that out of the few animals they would encounter, if they were brave enough to approach, they would either be in packs if they didn't have the mass to treat them as prey to begin with.

Clutching her weapon close, Fortuna uttered a short prayer before moving through the forest, letting the light of the shooting stars and moons above guide her way to the other pods. Even if they lacked a surviving body on the inside, at the least, there might be something to scavenge from their remains. Hopefully, her brother would have landed somewhere nearby too. Eventually approaching one that landed nearby, as she walked to its entrance, she heard the sound of the airlock open, causing her to grip her weapon in case one of those monsters had ended up dropping from the sky as well. "Halt! Who goes there?!"

 

[Anarchia]

The heart of her final patient flat-lined. His body spasmed a final time before it fell still against the metallic plate of the operating table​

The medbay was illuminated in crimson lighting, the hunched form of Nyxia, the ship's last medical officer alive was barely visible in the darkness as she tore her bloodied gloves from her hands and tossed them aside to the floor, they landed in a puddle to rejoin the rest of the crewman's blood. There was no real chance to save any of those who had been brought to her medbay in the past manic hour; all of them had grievous wounds, limbs torn from their sockets, massive gashes lashed across their skin… Extreme blood loss, but even still, Nyxia had stayed until the last one slipped away from her grasp.

The medic's thin, frail form stepped out into the corridor, her breath condensing in the air to form a white cloud from the biting cold; at some point, the ship's life support systems must have failed, and now heat was radiating out into the void of space. The emergency lighting intermittently lit her pale face crimson as she glanced to her left in the direction of the escape pods before moving off, shifting the grip of the snub-nosed plasma pistol in one hand while the other lifted the strap of her medical bag and hung it over her shoulder and across her chest. Turn after turn, body after body, she made her way towards the escape pods, only for her path to be blocked by one of the monstrous creatures that had boarded the ship hours earlier… she froze in the corridor before shoving herself into one of the cracks in the bulkhead, a tiny maintenance shaft that was just large enough to obscure much of her form in the darkness.

The creature was crouched over one of its fallen brothers, desperately trying to seal a wound… In the dark, it was hard to tell what species they were, which infuriated Nyxia's scientific curiosity to no end. In the chaos of the boarding action, Nyxia hadn't left her medbay, hadn't seen their attackers until the ship's fusion reactor had finally spluttered out and died before auxiliary power had taken over, quite literally leaving her in the dark… After a few moments stretched to their extremes, she slowly stood, her footsteps silent as she kept her body pressed against the opposite side of the corridor to the creature crouching over his comrade… Her hand raised her pistol to aim its barrel point blank at the back of the creature's centre mass before she squeezed its trigger.

The first blast sent the creature crashing forward with a scream of rage and fury.

The second took that scream and twisted it towards agony.

The third, fourth and fifth were panicked shots from Nyxia, and left the creature a pink mist from the waist up…​

His comrade, the one on the floor, looked up at her and growled out in a spiteful, suffering tone… "You would shoot an enemy in the back…" Nyxia stared at the corpse at his side before she turned the weapon onto its wounded fellow. "Well... its the safest way, isn't it?" she snapped back, her voice a calm whisper in comparison to the blaring alarms before her finger squeezed the trigger a final time, the plasma bolt that followed smeared the contents of the creatures skull against the wall before she tossed the weapon aside moments after it caught fire as it's hydrogen charge overheated.

​

Before long Nyxia found herself in her escape pod, her medical bag tucked under her legs as she watched her pod fall away from the ship; an inferno blazing in the void of space, from a distance it was almost beautiful, and she wondered how she had ever made it off the s hip before the flames of re-entry blocked her vision, followed by the turbulence as the planets atmosphere jostled it's newest arrival… her hands gripped the straps across her chest with white knuckles before her eyes finally fluttered shut, only to reopen when her pod met the approaching ground with a terrible, earth shattering crash.

It took Nyxia a moment to bring her breathing under control and to compose herself enough to let her eyes flutter open before the door to the escape pod sprung open. At some point, her escape pod had been caught off balance and buried itself into the dirt on its side so that she was lying underneath the night sky. For now, she stayed seated, staring up at the night sky as the shower of debris burned up in the planet's atmosphere, taking in deep breaths before exhaling them in white clouds… The first breaths of air in months that hadn't been recycled a thousand times... After a moment of stargazing, she slowly rose, awkwardly clambering to her feet, standing on the back rest of the escape pod before she scrambled up the side of the crater it had formed in the soft clay of Tartarus XIII

As soon as she reached the craters edge she heard a voice, a commanding, booming voice. "Halt! Who goes there?!" Nyxia froze there in the dirt, her head turning upwards to face the source of the command. "I… Nyxia… Dufaux? Medical officer… I-I" she paused and looked down to the dirt as she slowly scrambled up to her knees and rose her hands up beside her head… She couldn't quite see in the dark who was standing a few feet away, her eyes squinted before she continued… "I was on the Charon… Medical... Science team. I-I'm with the science team." She slowly rose to her feet and let her hands fall to her sides. At this point, if someone was going to stab her, it would probably be preferable to whatever future Tartarus held for her…

She brushed some loose hair behind her ears before she straightened her dress out and took a step towards the stranger in the darkness, although as soon as she managed to catch the glimpse of the spear within Fortuna's hand and the armour of the zealot, she instantly seemed to shrink in on herself.. "I… You can have whatever you want but… I-I just brought medical supplies…" her voice had shrunk to a soft, timid whisper, assuming she was been robbed by one of the natives as she edged herself backwards to retreat from the figure before she backed up to the edge of the crater she had just crawled out of.

 

[Tenzai]

Preparing for the worst that the ship they left behind had to offer, the soldier drew her weapon upon hearing the sound of Nyx's body hit the floor on the opposite end of the pod. However, upon turning past the frame of the escape pod, instead of meeting eyes with one of the monsters on board the ship, she found someone a bit more familiar instead: A human dressed in blue, covered from neck to toe. "I… Nyxia… Dufaux? Medical officer… I-I" Aiming her Galatina's edge skyward instead of towards the fellow crew member, Fortuna's glare had eased as she gave off a sigh of relief. "I was on the Charon… Medical... Science team. I'm with the science team. I… You can have whatever you want but… I-I just brought medical supplies…"

Fortuna shook her head, allowing the stranger to approach her without raising her guard. "There's no need, Nyx. Its good to see that I'm not the only survivor." Wincing for a moment, she held her arm, aware of the wounds she sustained onboard. She was far from the best in terms of fighting condition, though she'd wager that she wouldn't go down without a fight. "Ach..." Using her spear to keep her balance, the zealot brushed her gloves against her shoulder only to find blood staining her gauntlets.

"Medical huh? I suppose there is something you could do for me. Can you treat my wound? I'd appreciate it." Sitting on the ground beside the medic's escape pod, she undid the shoulder plate of her light armor to reveal a gash underneath. While it wasn't dangerously deep, it was more than enough to leave her dominant arm throbbing. "Name's Fortuna... Fortuna Arturia, but you could call me Fortune. I used to work security back on the Charon. Got hurt on the way to the pods."



Looking up at the skies above, Fortuna watched as the meteor shower had come to a swift end, only to have her attention be drawn to the remains of their falling ship immediately after. The light that had erupted from their ship burning through the clouds had eclipsed even that of the luminosity of the world's moons. "To think, that massive ship would meet its end so quickly. To fall from enemy boarding in a single day. The gods must've been angry at us." Muttering a short prayer for grace to those who fell from the heavens, the blonde woman turned her head back towards Nyx.

Noticing how close she was, to avoid disturbing her work, Fortuna tilted her head to the side to expose more of her shoulder. While she was used to pain, the feeling of placing pressure on an open wound had never stopped feeling uncomfortable. "Say Nyx, has anyone else you've known made it out too?" Hoping that her brother would potentially be among the list of others should she have managed to escape with many more, she kept her faith strong. A doctor wouldn't have made it out of that attack without someone's help, right? "Maybe we could find others around here who survived the attack."

Choices

Nyx:
- If you want to tend to Fortuna without using medicine, it would be a medicine check. Given her skill at medicine [+7], all you need to do is get a 3 or higher on from rolling a d20.
- If you want to tend to Fortuna with medicine, you don't have to roll. It will auto-succeed and use a single charge of your doctor bag. [3/3 uses left today]
- You can also leave her wounded if you so choose.