== Day 1: Falling Stars == In the middle of the night (according to top-side clocks, at least), a shower of meteorites slammed into the bottom of SpinDizzy, far faster and harder than the field should permit such things. Though it only resulted in small vibrations on the surface, it shook Feedback City, scattered alumina glass windows across its streets like sprinkles of crystal sugar, fractured the spines of organic tenements, shattered the carapace of a stately dome here or there, and inflicted concussive drive-head collisions on a number of its innocent, synthetic-personality citizens, etc. Maynard and Kandra set off to investigate, commandeering one of Azure's mechafoxes along the way. On the underside of SpinDizzy, they witnessed the streaks of more objects 'falling' from the sky, seemingly unimpeded by the field that all diagnostics showed as operating normally, striking from the sternwise direction. In short order they recovered a few: Not common meteorites of silicates or iron but something else. Guiding the appropriated fox to slurp a few of them up, they found objects shaped with an undeniable but ambiguous intention, somehow awkward to move without being heavy. Just as the bombardment seemed to be tapering off and the pair were leaving with their catch, they received an extra slug for free, sent with express delivery to the hip of the Fox Bot and sending it spinning violently. Although Maynard and Kandra were shielded by the vehicle's safety measures, the spare slugs bouncing around its skull did considerable damage. With the aid of Maynard's colleagues at Priestly's, they managed to drag the crippled fox, and the retrieved, strange meteorites, back to Priestly's. Current SpinDizzy trajectory: moving away from source of bombardment, to swing around an interesting pulsar. == Days 2 and 3: Look Before You Leap == Maynard sends out a call for further help from those so inclined: {{{ Hey people, A while ago Kandra and I found out the hard way that some kind of railgun slugs or other shots were being fired at the planetoid's underside. I figure either somebody's shooting at us, or somebody's shooting at somebody else and we've got the dumb luck to be stuck in the middle. In either case it'd be nice to trace where these shots are coming from and ask them nicely to please stop, or if that fails, ask them not so nicely. What's more, the shots have weird, inconsistent- seeming physical properties. They're hard to put into words, but I figure they're worth looking into and seeing if there's a chance they can be put to some more useful and less destructive end, right? If you're interested, meet me at Priestly's on Saturday. -Maynard }}} At the appointed time, the others arrive at Priestly's; for curiosity, self-preservation, or just something to do. The slugs they retrieved are waitiung there. Four of them. Rough cylinders of silver metal with just a faint tint of blue where the sheen catches the light, wide enough that your average SpinDizzy humanoid could just wrap their arms around them. They've been deformed by their impact, scratched along their length by the rough sand and crags of the Underside, but some of their original shape and nature still is visible: One end looked like it was tapered before the impact, the other looked flat, heavy. There were a tremendous number of very old micro-craters under the more recent, larger dents of impact. More on the tapering side than the flat one. On some of the better preserved slugs, flattened rectangular pieces sticks out a few centimeters on one side or both. [To be Filled out] == Day 4 == Setting off to examine the point where Ember's probes detected a gravity anomaly and lost contact, the team meets on Spengo to board The Leaper and Ember's small shuttle. It's just a hop, skip, and a leap from Spengo to this point: The Leaper and Ember's shuttle scouted out ahead of SpinDizzy to examine the point where the android's probes went AWOL while investigating a gravitational anomaly. Coming out of FTL above a barren super earth, it wasn't hard to find the source: A large trojan in the L4 point, dinner-roll shaped and about 1.5 km across, it looks like all the others, just another rock, and for the most part it shows up on your sensors that way as well. Except for the slight trembles of gravity you detect from it for a moment before they go dead. And a large rent that travels obliquely across it, the flash of silver underneath along with faint detection of active if weak power sources. Dust hovers around it in an unnaturally thick cloud, briefly disturbed by a puff and an eddy before resettling during the gravitational hiccups. And nearby some few, silvery debris of what were once Ember's automated probes. What follows is a series of cautious experiments involving automated probes from the Leaper: * A normal probe sent out to scan the asteroid was greeted by a handshake protocol in three different frequencies and slightly variant encodings but structurally similar. An attempt to respond with an ID of the probe's resulted in a power surge inside the asteroid for a moment as the probe was scanned -- shortly before the ends of two smaller, nearby asteroids, cracked off, revealed crude but powerful SpinDizzy drive analogues that propelled the larger part of the rocks towards the probe, smashing it into red, orichalcum droplets. * There are probable angles that would be safer to approach than others, but it's hard to tell *which* of the smaller asteroids may be loaded with such drives. Their trajectory is fast and somewhat self-correcting. * A series of probes scanning passively and moving quickly past the asteroid were ignored entirely by the asteroid. It acted just like a potato-shaped asteroid would act and might have even passed for one, if it weren't for that rent and the intermittant distinctly un-rocklike things you can detect through it. * A probe sent out with a more elaborate response to the handshake was treated similarly to the first. * Kandra used the instruments as well as she could from a safe distance to get a closer look at the rent for a key-hole glimpse of things. It's hollow like a Geode. Below a thin layer of rock, there's a layer of passive deadening materials. Below that is a layer of active anti-detection materials. Below those is the hollow interior. A spider-web-like scaffolding of black and silver metal exists beyond that. You can't make out all of it, but you definitely see a number of different, rectangular modules, connected by the cylinders of large corridors, in some kind of lattice work. A hidden station. * Sending out one of the not-Tungsten slugs (which by the way are very, very heavy inside the Leaper's artifical gravity) to pass closely to the asteroid, resulted in a similar reaction to Azure's experiment of taking a small piece to the main drive chamber of SpinDizzy, albeit on a more violent and dramatic scale, as the field inside fluctated, resulting in a section of the rent collapsing further (though this time inwards) and the dust swirling before settling. Probably not a good idea to take those inside.