phoamslinger
Explorer
edit: didn''t realize three judgements coming.
CERAMIC DM March 2012
Rodrigo Istalindir
Explorer
Ceramic DM R1M2: The Hitchhiker
Hanging upside down in the wreckage of his lander, Paz’ilik grudgingly conceded that maybe the rules were in place for a reason.
He’d rushed through the pre-flight check and eased the lander from the hanger bay. Protocol called for him to awaken one of the others from hibernation in case of trouble, but by all indications the primary species on the planet was barely sentient, and certainly pre-technic. Following protocol would have meant someone else got to make first contact. If anything unexpected turned up, he’d comm the ship and have the AI thaw someone.
Everything had been fine until one of the retrorockets flamed out on re-entry, sending him spiraling to the surface.
It was pitch-black; apparently even the backup systems were down. He reached for the release on the safety harness and realized his arms weren’t working. The first stirrings of panic whispered through his brain as he realized that his blindness wasn’t a result of failed emergency lighting. His host body hadn’t survived the impact. No host meant no way to manipulate the comm system.
Calming himself, he unhooked his kith from the brainstem of the unfortunate Greu and began the difficult journey out its auditory canal. With any luck, he thought, one of the locals had come to investigate the crash. He’d snag a new host, activate the distress beacon, and before he knew it he’d be back on the mothership. The captain would be livid, but this far from home, there was little he could do except confine him to the ship.
With a *plop* he exited his former host and began crawling up the wall towards the floor. He could sense the exotic scents of a foreign atmosphere; the impact must have breached the hull.
An hour later, he emerged from the mangled vessel and felt the warmth of a strange sun on his skin. The light felt wrong – too yellow, and too bright by far – but Iliks were remarkably myopic, relying on their auditory, olfactory, and thermal senses at a distance. He closed his eyes and inhaled deeply.
There! Wafting on the breeze was a foreign, musky scent, perpendicular to the sun, far enough that its heat signature just barely registered. No clue as to what it was, but ‘any port in a storm’ and all that. Paz set off through the flattened grass.
He was reaching the end of his endurance when he reached the creature. Up close, he could see it wasn’t one of the sentients, but it was warm-blooded, and although it was seemingly knocked unconscious by its proximity to the crash site, it wasn’t leaking fluids and looked usable. He crawled inside and began the laborious process of attaching to a new host.
He was close to mastering the nervous system when he sensed another creature approaching. He tried to stand, but he was used to two legs, not four, and awkwardly collapsed. (Picture 4). He reset the connection and tried again. He managed to regain his footing just as the newcomer arrived.
Paz swore. Of course one of the sentients would show up just as soon as he’d finished adapting to a new host. He briefly considered ditching the hairy beast for the biped, but he worried that it would move away before he could sink his kith into it. He waited patiently while the primitive poked around the wreckage, then followed it when it left.
*********************
Hafiz barely noticed the llama as he gazed wonderingly at the strange object. His sister’s cousin knew someone in a distant province who’d once found the remnants of a fallen star and crafted a wondrous sword from the small piece of metal that remained. He’d been up before dawn to start the fire in his kiln, and the only one in the village awake to witness the fiery traveler. He’d set out immediately, hoping to find some of the star-metal himself. The massive object at the bottom of the crater was more than he’d dreamed.
He leaped down into the crater and started prying at a loose chunk of metal with his walking staff. It shifted, and he realized that the object was hollow, rather than the solid piece of ore he’d been expecting. He fashioned a makeshift torch from his staff and some cloth torn from his robes and thrust it through the gap.
At first he saw nothing but a tangle of metallic rope, but as his eyes adjusted, he saw something that made his blood run cold. In the flickering torchlight, the fiendish visage of a demon glared at him. With a panicked yelp, he scrambled from the crater and ran for home. Paz loped along after Hafiz at a safe distance, keeping him in sight but not getting close enough to draw attention. Not that he needed to worry, he thought. The creature didn’t look back once.
Hafiz said nothing of his discovery. His conscience told him he should warn the holy men of the demon, but common sense told him they’d probably have him stoned as well, just to be safe.
*********************
Back at the village, Hafiz went about his daily routine as normal. He made a decent living as a potter, crafting new pots when someone could afford it, repairing cracked vessels when they could not. With his carefully hoarded savings, he bought semi-precious gems, silver and rarely, gold, which he used to adorn his best work. Once a year he journeyed downriver to Multan to sell them, earning more from that one trip than he did the rest of the year. One day he dreamed of moving there, but the city was expensive, and he was never able to muster the nerve to leave his simple but safe life in the village.
He was so absorbed working on one of his special pieces that night when he never noticed the llama peering in through the window.
*********************
Paz waited until Hamiz fell asleep before gently detaching himself from the beast. He wanted to hurry, but if he wasn’t careful the host might be disoriented and cause a disturbance. He couldn’t risk waking his prey.
Slowly, he crawled along the dirt floor and up the rickety wooden bedpost. He inched his way across the tattered blanket toward the creature’s head. Sensing that his target was still soundly asleep, Paz secured himself inside its ear and extended his kith.
Hamiz whimpered. A disinterested observer would think him in the grip of a fever. He moaned and thrashed, his thin blanket a sweat-soaked mess kicked to the floor. In his delirium, Hamiz battled demons for his immortal soul. The demon reached out with a hundred serpent-like arms, poking and prodding at Hamiz. Voices speaking in strange tongues echoed through his head, yet somehow he knew what they were saying: “Let me in.” Again and again, Hamiz refused.
Paz was stunned. The Ilik had encountered 27 sapient species, and not one had resisted attempts at integration. This was worrisome on several levels. In the short term, without a tool user for a host, he was stuck on this backwater planet. In the long term, these people could present a serious threat to his species. The Ilik had managed to survive despite their physical shortcomings by infiltrating competitor races and using their puppets to maintain the status quo.
He retreated back to the llama, which had started to eat the discarded blanket. He re-established control and wandered away from Hamiz’s house, pondering his alternatives.
*********************
Paz spent several days observing from the innocuous beast. Evolution had given the Ilik a gift for languages, and his taps into the llama’s auditory nerves allowed him to eavesdrop on the villagers and pick up their tongue in short order. He’d also come up with a plan.
That night, he returned to Hamiz, pushing through the curtain that separated the living quarters from the workshop. The potter was intent on a new piece, one of his special works, and he took no notice of the intruder until it bleated loudly.
“Bah! Get out of my house, beast!” he yelled, making a shooing motion.
The llama retreated a step and stopped.
Paz struggled to master the vocal cords of the creature. It was ill-suited to speech, but he’d not found a better alternative, and he’d seen several of his host’s brethren butchered and eaten. He didn’t have time to look for a more suitable host.
“Amiz?” Paz tried again. Better, but the glottal fricatives were going to be troublesome.
Hamiz stopped mid-shoo, eyes wide. He reflexively made a gesture intended to ward off evil.
“Begone, demon. Bother me no more!”
“You are strong, Amiz, strong enough to resist. So I offer you a bargain. Craft for me a masterwork, to my specifications, and I will reward you with fine metals for your art the likes of which have never been seen.
“Imagine the price such works would fetch.”
Hamiz paused, greed fighting with fear.
“Refuse me,” Paz continued, “and I will burrow inside your head and devour you from within!”
Greed started working with fear, and Hamiz nodded slowly.
*********************
The next morning, Paz led Hamiz back to the crash site. At Paz’ instruction, Hamiz stripped materials from the ship. Once he was sure he had enough raw material to extract what he needed, Paz directed Hamiz to open a hatch in what was once the floor. A silvery glow illuminated the human’s face.
“I require but a small amount of this. The rest is yours.”
Hamiz was enthralled. He assumed the material was metal, but the way it pulsed and glowed reminded him of the way the blood that spurted from the throat of a sacrificial goat shimmered as it arced through the air. His fingers twitched at the thought of the things he could craft with such a material.
Hamiz finished loading the material on the back of the demon-llama and began the long trek back to the village.
Paz was anxious. The qarium that he’d had Hamiz remove from the power core was dangerously radioactive, and he needed Hamiz to make what he needed before it killed him or this host. He could always find another beast, but the only other villagers he’d come across lacked the artisan skills he required.
It was past dark by the time they returned. Hamiz was tired from the trek and the manual labor and wanted to sleep, but Paz cajoled and berated him into starting his commission right away.
Hamiz took a ceramic urn he’d been saving until he’d acquired the right materials. It was flawless, one of the best pieces he’d ever crafted, and worthy of the magical materials the demon had given him.
“Cover it in a thin layer of gold,” Paz instructed, “and then let it set. Tomorrow we will use the qarium to engrave it with the proper symbols.”
Hamiz nodded, and set about his work.
*********************
The next night, Hamiz showed Paz his secret technique for applying such precise filigree. He took a long, thin steel tube that curled like a cobra in a basket, head and tail jutting skyward. One end was fashioned almost like a hookah, the other tapered to a needle point. He set it inside a box made of the same thick material as his kiln, then covered the coil with hot coals. He poured qarium fragments into the wide end of the tube, listening carefully to make sure they rattled down until they came to rest at the top of the coil.
“This is the first circuit I require,” Paz said, using his hoof to scratch the diagram in the dirt floor.
When the star metal had melted, Hamiz sat and placed his lips at the hookah end. He held the gilded urn up to the needle. Blowing softly, he forced a thin stream of melted qarium out, precisely etching the first line of Paz’s sketch. (Picture 2).
It took nearly an hour to complete the first image. Paz hovered over his shoulder the entire time, occasionally correcting his work, making him carefully scrape off an errant line and redraw it. Once the demon was satisfied, he drew the second symbol on the floor. By the time that one was completed, Hamiz was exhausted. Paz recognized that forcing him to continue would only mean more mistakes and finally allowed the potter to sleep.
As soon as Hamiz was stretched out on his bed and snoring, Paz detached from the llama. It was risky, but even as good as Hamiz was, there were certain elements of the design that were too small for the primitive tools at hand. The Ilik inched across the urn, finally able to use the extreme near-sightedness of his species to his advantage. Using qarium shavings from lines he’d forced Hamiz to fix, he patched near-microscopic flaws in the circuit, and attached larger pieces at crucial junctures to serve as power sources.
By the time Hamiz awakened, he’d returned to the host.
The next night they resumed, finishing first the third and then the fourth and final element. So intent were they on their work that they never noticed that one of the villagers, beset by insomnia, had wandered by to see what so engaged the potter that he was working through the night.
When the sky began to lighten, Hamiz collapsed into bed. Paz, too, had reached his limit, and didn’t have the reserves to make the final fixes to Hamiz’ work. Instead, he slipped into the state the Ilik called arin, where the host body could operate autonomously while the parasite rested.
*********************
The sound of one of the humans screaming pulled Paz out of arin. He was momentarily disoriented as he re-established control over the llama, and he didn't realize there was a rope around the host’s neck until he tried to turn his head to find the source of the screams.
Ahead, the wizened limbs of a lightning-blasted tree pointed accusingly at the sky (Picture 1). One of the villagers – one of their “holy men”, Paz thought -- threw a length of rope over the thickest branch. The llama was knocked sideways as a struggling Hamiz was dragged towards the tree. Without hesitation, the priest slipped the rope around Hamiz’ neck, and two strong men hoisted him off the ground, cutting off the hapless potter mid-scream.
Paz’ anthropological curiosity gave way to concern when the leader of the mob drew a knife across Hamiz’ belly, spilling his intestines on the ground. He kicked the villager holding the rope that was tied around his neck, and nearly escaped before one of them grabbed it and hauled him back. Unlike Hamiz, they didn’t bother to hang the llama before drawing the knife across its throat.
The Ilik detached from the dying host and made it nearly three feet before the grass fire they’d set below Hamiz’ corpse caught up to him.
*********************
Dr. Dave Wilson examined the latest shipment from the dig near Multan. He was about to write it off as scut work for one of the grad students when one piece caught his eye. He gently removed a small gilded urn, about a foot tall, from the packing material. It was finely etched in a silver, which was not unusual, but the pattern was unlike anything he’d seen from the region.
On a hunch, he picked up the phone and called one of his colleagues in the Electrical Engineering college. Frank was part of the weekly gaming group, and someone he could ask a stupid question without it getting back to the head of the Anthropology department.
An hour later, Dave hovered over Frank’s shoulder as he peered through a microscope. (Picture 3)
“Damn. You’re right, it sure looks like a circuit board,” Frank admitted.
“They must have made a mistake at the dig. It must have been planted as a joke.” Dave replied. “It’d be obvious as soon as we dated it.”
“It looks like it’s got tiny capacitors, too,” Frank continued, oblivious to the anthropologist’s theories. “There are some tiny breaks in the traces, though.”
The engineer picked up a small soldering iron and set to work repairing the circuit.
*********************
The AI running the Ilik ship, patiently waiting in a distant orbit, picked up the signal. It’s programming was clear: any indication of a sentient species that couldn’t serve as a host for the Ilik couldn’t be allowed to leave it’s homeworld. The ship began waking the hibernating crew as well as the missiles they would use to sterilize the planet.
Hanging upside down in the wreckage of his lander, Paz’ilik grudgingly conceded that maybe the rules were in place for a reason.
He’d rushed through the pre-flight check and eased the lander from the hanger bay. Protocol called for him to awaken one of the others from hibernation in case of trouble, but by all indications the primary species on the planet was barely sentient, and certainly pre-technic. Following protocol would have meant someone else got to make first contact. If anything unexpected turned up, he’d comm the ship and have the AI thaw someone.
Everything had been fine until one of the retrorockets flamed out on re-entry, sending him spiraling to the surface.
It was pitch-black; apparently even the backup systems were down. He reached for the release on the safety harness and realized his arms weren’t working. The first stirrings of panic whispered through his brain as he realized that his blindness wasn’t a result of failed emergency lighting. His host body hadn’t survived the impact. No host meant no way to manipulate the comm system.
Calming himself, he unhooked his kith from the brainstem of the unfortunate Greu and began the difficult journey out its auditory canal. With any luck, he thought, one of the locals had come to investigate the crash. He’d snag a new host, activate the distress beacon, and before he knew it he’d be back on the mothership. The captain would be livid, but this far from home, there was little he could do except confine him to the ship.
With a *plop* he exited his former host and began crawling up the wall towards the floor. He could sense the exotic scents of a foreign atmosphere; the impact must have breached the hull.
An hour later, he emerged from the mangled vessel and felt the warmth of a strange sun on his skin. The light felt wrong – too yellow, and too bright by far – but Iliks were remarkably myopic, relying on their auditory, olfactory, and thermal senses at a distance. He closed his eyes and inhaled deeply.
There! Wafting on the breeze was a foreign, musky scent, perpendicular to the sun, far enough that its heat signature just barely registered. No clue as to what it was, but ‘any port in a storm’ and all that. Paz set off through the flattened grass.
He was reaching the end of his endurance when he reached the creature. Up close, he could see it wasn’t one of the sentients, but it was warm-blooded, and although it was seemingly knocked unconscious by its proximity to the crash site, it wasn’t leaking fluids and looked usable. He crawled inside and began the laborious process of attaching to a new host.
He was close to mastering the nervous system when he sensed another creature approaching. He tried to stand, but he was used to two legs, not four, and awkwardly collapsed. (Picture 4). He reset the connection and tried again. He managed to regain his footing just as the newcomer arrived.
Paz swore. Of course one of the sentients would show up just as soon as he’d finished adapting to a new host. He briefly considered ditching the hairy beast for the biped, but he worried that it would move away before he could sink his kith into it. He waited patiently while the primitive poked around the wreckage, then followed it when it left.
*********************
Hafiz barely noticed the llama as he gazed wonderingly at the strange object. His sister’s cousin knew someone in a distant province who’d once found the remnants of a fallen star and crafted a wondrous sword from the small piece of metal that remained. He’d been up before dawn to start the fire in his kiln, and the only one in the village awake to witness the fiery traveler. He’d set out immediately, hoping to find some of the star-metal himself. The massive object at the bottom of the crater was more than he’d dreamed.
He leaped down into the crater and started prying at a loose chunk of metal with his walking staff. It shifted, and he realized that the object was hollow, rather than the solid piece of ore he’d been expecting. He fashioned a makeshift torch from his staff and some cloth torn from his robes and thrust it through the gap.
At first he saw nothing but a tangle of metallic rope, but as his eyes adjusted, he saw something that made his blood run cold. In the flickering torchlight, the fiendish visage of a demon glared at him. With a panicked yelp, he scrambled from the crater and ran for home. Paz loped along after Hafiz at a safe distance, keeping him in sight but not getting close enough to draw attention. Not that he needed to worry, he thought. The creature didn’t look back once.
Hafiz said nothing of his discovery. His conscience told him he should warn the holy men of the demon, but common sense told him they’d probably have him stoned as well, just to be safe.
*********************
Back at the village, Hafiz went about his daily routine as normal. He made a decent living as a potter, crafting new pots when someone could afford it, repairing cracked vessels when they could not. With his carefully hoarded savings, he bought semi-precious gems, silver and rarely, gold, which he used to adorn his best work. Once a year he journeyed downriver to Multan to sell them, earning more from that one trip than he did the rest of the year. One day he dreamed of moving there, but the city was expensive, and he was never able to muster the nerve to leave his simple but safe life in the village.
He was so absorbed working on one of his special pieces that night when he never noticed the llama peering in through the window.
*********************
Paz waited until Hamiz fell asleep before gently detaching himself from the beast. He wanted to hurry, but if he wasn’t careful the host might be disoriented and cause a disturbance. He couldn’t risk waking his prey.
Slowly, he crawled along the dirt floor and up the rickety wooden bedpost. He inched his way across the tattered blanket toward the creature’s head. Sensing that his target was still soundly asleep, Paz secured himself inside its ear and extended his kith.
Hamiz whimpered. A disinterested observer would think him in the grip of a fever. He moaned and thrashed, his thin blanket a sweat-soaked mess kicked to the floor. In his delirium, Hamiz battled demons for his immortal soul. The demon reached out with a hundred serpent-like arms, poking and prodding at Hamiz. Voices speaking in strange tongues echoed through his head, yet somehow he knew what they were saying: “Let me in.” Again and again, Hamiz refused.
Paz was stunned. The Ilik had encountered 27 sapient species, and not one had resisted attempts at integration. This was worrisome on several levels. In the short term, without a tool user for a host, he was stuck on this backwater planet. In the long term, these people could present a serious threat to his species. The Ilik had managed to survive despite their physical shortcomings by infiltrating competitor races and using their puppets to maintain the status quo.
He retreated back to the llama, which had started to eat the discarded blanket. He re-established control and wandered away from Hamiz’s house, pondering his alternatives.
*********************
Paz spent several days observing from the innocuous beast. Evolution had given the Ilik a gift for languages, and his taps into the llama’s auditory nerves allowed him to eavesdrop on the villagers and pick up their tongue in short order. He’d also come up with a plan.
That night, he returned to Hamiz, pushing through the curtain that separated the living quarters from the workshop. The potter was intent on a new piece, one of his special works, and he took no notice of the intruder until it bleated loudly.
“Bah! Get out of my house, beast!” he yelled, making a shooing motion.
The llama retreated a step and stopped.
Paz struggled to master the vocal cords of the creature. It was ill-suited to speech, but he’d not found a better alternative, and he’d seen several of his host’s brethren butchered and eaten. He didn’t have time to look for a more suitable host.
“Amiz?” Paz tried again. Better, but the glottal fricatives were going to be troublesome.
Hamiz stopped mid-shoo, eyes wide. He reflexively made a gesture intended to ward off evil.
“Begone, demon. Bother me no more!”
“You are strong, Amiz, strong enough to resist. So I offer you a bargain. Craft for me a masterwork, to my specifications, and I will reward you with fine metals for your art the likes of which have never been seen.
“Imagine the price such works would fetch.”
Hamiz paused, greed fighting with fear.
“Refuse me,” Paz continued, “and I will burrow inside your head and devour you from within!”
Greed started working with fear, and Hamiz nodded slowly.
*********************
The next morning, Paz led Hamiz back to the crash site. At Paz’ instruction, Hamiz stripped materials from the ship. Once he was sure he had enough raw material to extract what he needed, Paz directed Hamiz to open a hatch in what was once the floor. A silvery glow illuminated the human’s face.
“I require but a small amount of this. The rest is yours.”
Hamiz was enthralled. He assumed the material was metal, but the way it pulsed and glowed reminded him of the way the blood that spurted from the throat of a sacrificial goat shimmered as it arced through the air. His fingers twitched at the thought of the things he could craft with such a material.
Hamiz finished loading the material on the back of the demon-llama and began the long trek back to the village.
Paz was anxious. The qarium that he’d had Hamiz remove from the power core was dangerously radioactive, and he needed Hamiz to make what he needed before it killed him or this host. He could always find another beast, but the only other villagers he’d come across lacked the artisan skills he required.
It was past dark by the time they returned. Hamiz was tired from the trek and the manual labor and wanted to sleep, but Paz cajoled and berated him into starting his commission right away.
Hamiz took a ceramic urn he’d been saving until he’d acquired the right materials. It was flawless, one of the best pieces he’d ever crafted, and worthy of the magical materials the demon had given him.
“Cover it in a thin layer of gold,” Paz instructed, “and then let it set. Tomorrow we will use the qarium to engrave it with the proper symbols.”
Hamiz nodded, and set about his work.
*********************
The next night, Hamiz showed Paz his secret technique for applying such precise filigree. He took a long, thin steel tube that curled like a cobra in a basket, head and tail jutting skyward. One end was fashioned almost like a hookah, the other tapered to a needle point. He set it inside a box made of the same thick material as his kiln, then covered the coil with hot coals. He poured qarium fragments into the wide end of the tube, listening carefully to make sure they rattled down until they came to rest at the top of the coil.
“This is the first circuit I require,” Paz said, using his hoof to scratch the diagram in the dirt floor.
When the star metal had melted, Hamiz sat and placed his lips at the hookah end. He held the gilded urn up to the needle. Blowing softly, he forced a thin stream of melted qarium out, precisely etching the first line of Paz’s sketch. (Picture 2).
It took nearly an hour to complete the first image. Paz hovered over his shoulder the entire time, occasionally correcting his work, making him carefully scrape off an errant line and redraw it. Once the demon was satisfied, he drew the second symbol on the floor. By the time that one was completed, Hamiz was exhausted. Paz recognized that forcing him to continue would only mean more mistakes and finally allowed the potter to sleep.
As soon as Hamiz was stretched out on his bed and snoring, Paz detached from the llama. It was risky, but even as good as Hamiz was, there were certain elements of the design that were too small for the primitive tools at hand. The Ilik inched across the urn, finally able to use the extreme near-sightedness of his species to his advantage. Using qarium shavings from lines he’d forced Hamiz to fix, he patched near-microscopic flaws in the circuit, and attached larger pieces at crucial junctures to serve as power sources.
By the time Hamiz awakened, he’d returned to the host.
The next night they resumed, finishing first the third and then the fourth and final element. So intent were they on their work that they never noticed that one of the villagers, beset by insomnia, had wandered by to see what so engaged the potter that he was working through the night.
When the sky began to lighten, Hamiz collapsed into bed. Paz, too, had reached his limit, and didn’t have the reserves to make the final fixes to Hamiz’ work. Instead, he slipped into the state the Ilik called arin, where the host body could operate autonomously while the parasite rested.
*********************
The sound of one of the humans screaming pulled Paz out of arin. He was momentarily disoriented as he re-established control over the llama, and he didn't realize there was a rope around the host’s neck until he tried to turn his head to find the source of the screams.
Ahead, the wizened limbs of a lightning-blasted tree pointed accusingly at the sky (Picture 1). One of the villagers – one of their “holy men”, Paz thought -- threw a length of rope over the thickest branch. The llama was knocked sideways as a struggling Hamiz was dragged towards the tree. Without hesitation, the priest slipped the rope around Hamiz’ neck, and two strong men hoisted him off the ground, cutting off the hapless potter mid-scream.
Paz’ anthropological curiosity gave way to concern when the leader of the mob drew a knife across Hamiz’ belly, spilling his intestines on the ground. He kicked the villager holding the rope that was tied around his neck, and nearly escaped before one of them grabbed it and hauled him back. Unlike Hamiz, they didn’t bother to hang the llama before drawing the knife across its throat.
The Ilik detached from the dying host and made it nearly three feet before the grass fire they’d set below Hamiz’ corpse caught up to him.
*********************
Dr. Dave Wilson examined the latest shipment from the dig near Multan. He was about to write it off as scut work for one of the grad students when one piece caught his eye. He gently removed a small gilded urn, about a foot tall, from the packing material. It was finely etched in a silver, which was not unusual, but the pattern was unlike anything he’d seen from the region.
On a hunch, he picked up the phone and called one of his colleagues in the Electrical Engineering college. Frank was part of the weekly gaming group, and someone he could ask a stupid question without it getting back to the head of the Anthropology department.
An hour later, Dave hovered over Frank’s shoulder as he peered through a microscope. (Picture 3)
“Damn. You’re right, it sure looks like a circuit board,” Frank admitted.
“They must have made a mistake at the dig. It must have been planted as a joke.” Dave replied. “It’d be obvious as soon as we dated it.”
“It looks like it’s got tiny capacitors, too,” Frank continued, oblivious to the anthropologist’s theories. “There are some tiny breaks in the traces, though.”
The engineer picked up a small soldering iron and set to work repairing the circuit.
*********************
The AI running the Ilik ship, patiently waiting in a distant orbit, picked up the signal. It’s programming was clear: any indication of a sentient species that couldn’t serve as a host for the Ilik couldn’t be allowed to leave it’s homeworld. The ship began waking the hibernating crew as well as the missiles they would use to sterilize the planet.
Rodrigo Istalindir
Explorer
As fondly as I look upon the 'good old days' of Ceramic DM, I certainly don't miss waiting upwards of a half hour for ENWorld to process a 2500 word post, only to crash out with 10 minutes left before the deadline.
Rodrigo Istalindir
Explorer
How are you going to manage without any dead baby pictures?
...er...thank you sir, may I have another...
Mirth
Explorer
Rodrigo Istalindir
Explorer
Oh, man, those are *easy*.
