Distant Lands

Mysteries

You finish chewing your current bite of food, walking quickly over to Spinel.

"What? What's in there?" You say as you get over to her side, leaning near her to peer at the screen properly. The screen is filled with rows of unreadable text. "What does the text say? I can't read it."

"I'm still reading this one.. hold on." You watch her read the text for several moments before she rips her eyes from the screen, looking at you with a confused expression.

"What?" You ask her. "You're making me anxious."

"Er.." She lifts her hand up, and points at a line of text near the top of the window. "This is kinda weird here. They noticed several bismuth's and a lapis went missing after only being here a few weeks. A lot of this is just daily logs so I'm having to wade through a lot of garbage info."

"Did they say why they went missing? Did they ever find those gems?"

"No, actually." She scrunches her face, perplexed. "The logs continue with some geological and temperature readings. They did mention in here that they came to this planet to take it's resources because it's got limited time left. Something about the dying sun this planet revolves."

"Yeah, have you seen that giant red thing up there? It's kind of atrocious. What else have you got?" You lean a bit further near Spinel, practically hovering over her lap at this point, but you're having a hard time seeing the screen. You think your eyesight has somehow gotten worse on this planet.

"It seems like they also observed that the animal life on the surface is mainly nocturnal, with quite a few notes on a couple particular subspecies of canine." She replies, and pulls up a few pictures that are attached to this file. She flips through a couple, having never seen any of these creatures that you are looking at on the console right now. After a few, she gets to one you almost recognise immediately.

"Oh!" You exclaim and point at the image, and she looks at you almost startled. "I've seen this one. It was small, but it looked just like that picture."

"You saw this?" She asks, eyebrows raising up her forehead almost comically. "When!? I haven't seen anything aside from that thing by the lake!"

"Remember that night you found me on that hill?"

"You mean the night you tried running away?" She attempts to correct you.

"That wasn't what I was doing. Anyway, I ran into one of those little guys that night. Scared the shit out of me. I managed to run away from it before any more showed up, though."

"Well, it explains why we haven't seen like, any of them at all." She continues to click through the images, and you don't recognise anything else. All the creatures that inhabit this planet look super weird compared to anything else you've seen.

She gets into another file and starts reading, and you patiently wait for her to let you know what it says. After a few seconds, she moves to a different file. She gets through three before you interrupt her.

"Are you gonna read any of this out loud, or am I going to have to guess?"

"Sorry, there's not much in some of these. I'm skimming to get through all of the boring supply checklists and kindergarten charts." She glances at you and how close you are to her, and quickly looks back to the screen.

"Okay." You sigh, and lean back a little.

"Hm," She says, narrowing her eyes at the screen. "This entire file is still corrupted aside from the pictures. Think they'll load?"

"Won't know until you try." You say, eyes glued to the console. She loads into the file, and the image is just black. She clicks to the next one, and that's also just a black image.