TravelingDreamer

  Side Story 8: Exploration

  Mahya had a good seven years. After deg to stop traveling through the Gates, she gave up all the Skills and Spells she could afford and bought engineering Skills relevant to her current world. She jured all the needed dotation and spent 500 mana to be added to the world’s database as an engineer.

  This world had zero mana, so she had to visit the closest Gate tee discreetly.

  She cast her wide, applying to every opportunity reted to space exploration that she could find. Then, after a nerve-wrag seven months, the moment she had been waiting for arrived—an offer to join an exploration mission as a maintenangineer on an FTL ship. The thrill alpable, and she accepted the offer without a moment's hesitation.

  Despite being teologically advanced, her current world faced several serious problems. The pollution levels were very high, nd degradation was affeg food prices, and overpopution had been a signifit issue for turies. Additionally, they had too much garbage. Heheir mission was two-fold:

  Explore neighb gaxies to find uninhabited ps for resource exploitatiarbage dumping.Find a p with optimal ditions for ization.They set out on their mission and spent five years in space. Mahya loved every moment of the journey, even more than traveling to new worlds. She spent every spare moment in front of a hatch, gazing at the mesmeriziy of space.

  After two and a half years, they pleted their first mission objective a an uncrewed spacecraft back with the information.

  A year and a half ago, they found a suitable p for their sed objective.

  For the first year after finding the phe biological and medical teams visited it many times to collect samples and worked around the clock to create vaations against viruses and bacteria.

  Finally, the day arrived for them to go down to the surfad start the sed stage.

  Whe foot on the world for the first time, she opened her Map and saw that the world was pletely unexplored. The entire Map appeared greyed out. Sihat day, Mahya has been stationed in a pound with the mission of assembling the power pnt they brought with them, which acked in crates. She liked this part much less since she preferred space over empty worlds.

  One m, Mahya woke up a something familiar. She froze.

  Mahya stood there, trying to vince herself it was her imagination, but she was unsuccessful. She could feel it—like she could feel the cold in the air and the grouh her feet.

  After her shift, she told her supervisor she was going for a walk to get out of the pound for a while and headed in that dire.

  She arrived at arao a ravine guarded by two cliffs. Those cliffs were the anchors. She touched one cliff.

  Travelers Gate #1463517667Destination: NamiStatus: IedMana level: 95Threat level: Lethal