The Reaper Chronicles

Pit Stop

    The two looked like night and day. Lee stood taller, but thinner. His suit was a neutral ash grey color, slim fitting, flexible, and lightweight. With several cargo pockets about it, a few jump boosters here and there, and a frosted hardlight face plate that offered great visual clarity and decent protection it fit the needs of the average dock worker or hull repair person perfectly.

    Samon's rig was something else. It was a custom affair painted tactical black with layers of rigid reflector and impact plates, attachment points for gear and weapons, and powerful course correction and evasion jets. The helmet was full, high-grade steel with sleek, hardened cameras pointing in every direction ingrained into the surface that provided a visual feed via a hud display on the inside. It was the pinnacle technology of spaceborn, extravehicular combat, its movement abilities further enhanced by the fact that Samson didn't require a power suit to operate the half-ton machined exo. The outer appearance of the unpowered mech carried an edge of intimidation with the battle scars that littered its surface--and these weren't placed there during manufacture like the tears in fashionable pants--no, Lee had seen a lot of bounties taken down with Samson inside that thing. It had become such an iconic part of the bounty hunter's identity that it had been dubbed "The Samson Classic" by their fellow reapers.

     "What is it?" Lee asked, stepping into the shop and up to his partner. Despite being several inches taller, Lee was still quite the smaller one between the two when you accounted for mass and Samson had to move to the side to let Lee take a good look at the object in the display case. After letting Lee step up to it Samson tore his gaze from the item inside and turned it toward his partner, a silent question posed in his body language. 

     Samson tapped his left ring finger into the palm of his hand twice, the gesture opening a private voice channel between the two reaper's suits. "Well?" he asked, as Lee inspected the display case. What lay inside appeared at first glance to be an ordinary double headed battle axe. An archaic weapon useless before most blasters and modern weaponry. On closer inspection, Lee could identify the markings of faint blue lines tracing along the weapon's blade and hilt, identifying it as an Arurian artifact. A real Arurian artifact in this good of condition would sell for a fortune--several fortunes in fact. The only question was whether or not it was genuine. In Lee's vision he could see the physical form of the weapon clearly out of his left eye.  Then he closed said eye for a full second, like a prolonged wink. The eyepatch that blocked his right eye quickly swapped over to his left, transversing the magnetic tattoo over the bridge of Lee's slim nose. Everything went dark, as if someone had turned the lights out. Instantly, he noticed how noisy and bright the previously clear plasma barrier was. It shown amongst an otherwise dark room as if someone had lit a table's top on fire and tipped it on its side. It took him a few moments but he slowly tuned the display case out and peered another layer deeper.  The previously faint blue trails along the axe's physical form exploded into shifting highways of brilliant overlapping colors atop a darkened, spectral outline of what he saw the weapon as before. Lee long-winked his right eye, and his eyepatch switched spots again, snapping the world back into what most saw as the visible spectrum. "It's real." He said before repeating Samson's hand gesture, dropping the private voice channel.

    The Arurians were the forefathers of the civilized universe. They were the ones responsible for the permanently stable wormhole stations that existed throughout the galaxies. Creating a wormhole in and of itself was possible with current technology but demanded immense resources. Even the federation, the wealthiest organization in recorded time-space, could only keep one stable for mere hours. The Arurians had built wormholes that were not only hundreds of times larger than anything the Federation could manage, but were completely self-sufficient and required no outside energy to maintain. Not to mention that the Arurians had built them billions of years before the galaxy that had eventually spawned the Gracher--the species predominantly in control of the Federation--was even born. There was no sign of Arurian life anywhere to be found in the federated galaxies and beyond, nor had been before the Gracher had even invented space travel. Any artifact related to them was heavily coveted. Or at least that was the general idea.