Brethren Among the Stars [N.E.A.R./FT/CLOSED]

[Kelvaros Prime]

N.E.A.R. members only. The Nuclear Fist is the only invited member.

Language 2: Swearing is generally permitted. However, the language cannot be used to severely abuse.
Sexual Content 1: Mild sexual innuendo and references permitted. No explicit representations or references to genitalia or sex acts.
Violence 3: Extreme violence is permitted.

Mining Chief Janek Veya
Broman Starport, Naria III
Off Duty duties

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Janek downed a fourth shot of ale, the burn lingering in his throat for a few moments as he grimaced at the other miners. It was nighttime, the rush hour period when off-duty miners and their pals flooded the taverns with loud music, banter, drinking, and fighting. So far Wizzy D's bouncers were actually earning their pay tonight by dispatching any tipsy workers who had a little too much to drink. Only one had been thrown out, but it caused a great deal of commotion and only served to teach the other drunken workers a lesson. They took heed and proceeded to drink until they dropped or went home to wake up and repeat the cycle.

Today was an ordinary day like any other on Naria III, it was an outer system mining world, not much attention was paid to it except for the natural resources that were exploited from it. Many merchants and corporate bigshots had customs offices here to keep their workers and products in order, as well as a garrison of ASSC Marines to keep law & order enforced. Life here was pretty boring if you weren't part of the upper-crust nobility who ran things here. Luckily for Janek Veya, he was rising in power despite he had only been here for 2 years. He began his career dreaming to become wealthy so that he may return to Kelvaros Prime and care for his family, so he started at the bottom of the totem pole, a miner. Working tediously, he quickly became a mining chief, a leader within the miners ranks. Whatever he said down in the shafts, was law. He was also well respected despite only being 23 years old, a youngster in the veteran workers' eyes.

Even though he was working his way up the ladder, it would take time to get to the top, and breaks were certainly needed. He was doing so at the moment. Sipping ale and socializing kept his mind off of the soreness emitting from his arms and legs. Mining was hard labor, 10 hours a day. The paycheck compensated for that though, they made pretty decent money. More than enough to live off of. Janek placed the glass on the bar and looked down at his callused hands. Thick and muscular, scarred and callused. The sight reminded him of his father, one of the best damn Marines he ever knew. His father, a Lieutenant Colonel in the ASSC Marine Corps. was well renowned throughout Aligned Systems space. He fought in the Interplanetary Wars with great distinction in the Battle of Alxe when terrorists struck the System's capital. The awards ceremony was the last time he saw him. A few months after the System's victory at war, he was deployed to the outer reaches of ASA space on an expeditionary campaign and was never heard from.

He blinked and a single tear splashed against his right index finger. His father has been gone for 13 years, he had to step up and take care of his mother and 3 sisters at the age of 10. They were the only reason he was here on Hurria, they were the most important people in his life. He wiped his eyes and dried them with the edge of his dirt-crusted shirt. He laid a few credits on the bar and departed, never looking back.

The late night breeze was refreshing, even more so near the sweat stains on his shirt where it was still damp, making it even cooler. He staggered to the outskirts of the city, resting against a wall overlooking the distant mountains. Janek Veya was going to make a difference, he was sure of it. He closed his eyes.

"I'm going to be important and make my family proud."

He opened his eyes. A twinkle shown above the mountains, growing brighter by the second. He smiled to himself, maybe his dream would come true. He took another glance at the gorgeous mountainside, but was diverted back to the twinkle. It was much larger than a few seconds ago, much brighter also. He peered closer, leaning over the wall a little. That was no star, it was a ship! His eyes widened and he threw himself from the wall, landing on his rear in the dirt. Everything went black as the ship rocketed into the earth.

[The Nuclear Fist]

"What are you doing?" Yelled Aelgar, his voice barely audible over the howling alarms of the ship. He, like so many others, fled deeper into the armoured bowels of the ship, hoping to take refuge from the oncoming catastrophe. Aelgar was the captain of the ship they now stood on, a small cruiser meant to patrol along shipping routes to defend against pirates and assorted other raiders. Unfortunately for Aelgar and his crew, they had been caught in a bad spot of stellar 'weather', if such a word could be used to describe the turmultuous and bizarre nature of things in the vacuum of space, and separated from the route itself. The ship itself had been damaged, having been picked up and flung very near the eye of the terrible thing. Most of its weapons had been disabled, and indeed its very warp drives were left unusable. The ship had drifted for weeks, broadcasting increasingly desperate messages for assistance. None were answered.

Then, one day before, the pirates came. A small fleet of lightly armed ships swept down upon the light cruiser. Their weapons gouged ragged scars in the ship's ancient hull, several going so far as to breech it. The horrid aliens boarded the ship in an attempt to loot all it contained, be it treasure to line their pockets or slaves to sell. It had seemed the bastards had mistaken the ship for a freighter. They were met with sword's edge and bolter shell, a bloody skirmish eventually driving the leeches from the ship's wounded hide. What few weapons batteries remained active gave the fleeing pirates a devastating broadside bombardment, ensuring they wouldn't be bothering them any longer. But the damage was done. Critically wounded, she was forced to hobble at a crippled pace. Desperate for a moment of rest and without adequate supplies, the crew of Aelgar's ship took vote and issued him a simple decree, either land at the nearest planet with sufficiently advanced life or face a mutinee. Now Aelgar was a hardnosed and conservative Yeidshe male, but he was no fool. Quickly he put the orders out to search, and eventually their eyes rested upon the nearby world of Naria III.

There was, however, a problem. As the cruiser attempted to land, its systems began to fail. Its structure was too weakened and its power level too low to safely guide it to planet fall. As they were ensnared by the planet's gravity, the crew of Aelgar's ship found themselves rapidly plumeting, with no hope of correcting themselves. It was at that point that he gave the order to flee to the ship's protective core. The surviving crew fled through the ship's winding corridors, where he now found himself in front of a kneeling crewmember, deep in prayer.

"We are surely cursed, m'lord. I am praying for our salvation!" The man said, himself yelling over the screech of the ship's sirens. Aelgar no longer cared, he did not bother attempting to sway the man to come to safety with him. He did not want to waste the time.

"Pray to god that we do not die!" Ordered the captain, quickly abandoning the crewman to his fate and running down the corridor. He was a particularly large Yeidshe male, and never had he been so thankful for his size and strength than as he bullied his way through the crowd at a feverish pace. Soon enough he found himself in the 'protection chambers', a series of reinforced vaults built into the ship for just such reasons. He strode towards the end, taking note of each vault door having either shut or being in the process of doing so. Whether they were filled to capacity was another story. Soon enough Aelgar threw open the door to his own personal vault. The captain turned around and found himself gazing into the wild eyes of a dozen fellow crewmen, those who had been too late to find refuge in the other chambers. By all regulations, he was fully within his rights to shut the vault door and consign them all to his fate. This was, after all, the captain's chamber. But Aelgar was not a cruel man. He did not want what very well might be his last act upon the mortal plane to be one of selfish cruelty, and so quickly ushered them in, sealing the door just as the last one crossed its threshold.

Out of all things, it was surely the waiting that proved the heaviest upon the nerves. Aelgar and his twelve crew in the chamber huddled in silence, a mass of Yeidshe and Oldek beings held together solely through their mutual fear of death. The ship would not be plunging at full force into the surface of the planet, there were specialized failsafe thrusters upon the ship's front that would pulse to life as it neared, working to cushion the fall. Still, it would truly be a moment of great peril. Slowly, though, Aelgar's blood to ice in his veins. He began to hear a distinctive sound, somewhere in between a whistle and a hum. The power went out moments later, enshrouding them in perfect darkness. Every inch of surface began to rattle, sometimes in contradiction of itself. The sound grew louder, until it was shrieking wail that could render even the greatest of men deaf. The rattling only grew worse. Aelgar's snout began to bleed, his head began to pound. As he remembered from his teachings as a young cadet, these were all the tell tale signs of the ship breaking apart in the atmosphere.

Suddenly the chamber began to rattle uncontrollably, seemingly breaking free of whatever held it. It span as it hurtled downwards, tossing the crew against seemingly everything at once. In a moment they were suspended in zero gravity, the result of the chamber's movements. Even without a force to hold them, they tumbled around, smacking into every solid surface. Aelgar bellowed out in pain as he was slammed into the corner of a wall. He felt a horrid pain in his head and a warm ooze. Moments later, he blacked out.

The impact of the vault chamber striking the surface jarred him to life once more. The sounds of painful wails and screams of terror blended with the howling screech of the chamber's speed and the metallic bellows of its hull being compromised. Like a pressurized shell, the great crack sucked two screaming men out instantly, a third being pulled halfway before Aelgar stopped his demise, grabbing the man by his upper arms, hooking his own around the crewman's shoulders. With all his desperate, fading strength, Aelgar slowly began to pull the man back into the chamber's safety, inch by inch. The vault itself seemed to be skipping across the planet's surface like a stone across a pond, now sailing through the air. Just as he pulled the screaming crewman in up to his waist, the vault struck the surface once more, sending Aelgar and half of the crewman spinning. A sickening series of pops and wet tears, followed by horrid, ragged screaming signified that the sudden twisting had rotated the man's lower spine in a full circle. It hanged on only by a few bits of flesh and sinew. Before Aelgar could do much, however, the vault struck the surface once more, this time on the side of the crack. The impact severed the crewman just below the groin, pulling him sans his legs into the vault once more.

Finally it impacted the ground and did not leave it, skidding across the surface and creating a smoldering scar in the soil. After many minutes, the skidding began to slow until it finally haulted. The vault door itself was dented inwards, making escape through it quite impossible. The surviving crew's only hope was through the crack, which had spread so wide as to be more of a gaping hole in the wall than any sort of minor crack. Aelgar was the first to shamble through it, though several more crewmen did so after him, some carrying the wounded. The captain was forced to shield his eyes, the bright light of hell breaking outwards being too much for his own to bare. He yelled in pain as he tried to stagger forward, looking down at his legs. One of them was at an unnatural angle, his trousers torn and tattered revealing gouges and assorted wounds. A sliver of bone caught his eye in his left leg, and indeed this was the one posing his trouble. Careful to not put much weight on it, he hobbled forwards. He tried to reach a hand down to balance himself, only to find his arm useless. Looking at it, he understood why. The thing was broken at the joint, bone sticking obscenely outwards. Ragged tears in charred flesh signified some sort of burn, causing him to steal a glance backwards towards the vault. Indeed, its wreckage was aflame. How he had missed such a detail he did not know.

The image of the sky, however, shocked him. His ship had indeed broken up during its descendant. Pieces of it, large and small, streaked across a burning night sky or reds and oranges and blacks like so many falling stars. They crashed to earth, leaving smoldering craters and great pillars of smoke. Everywhere was death and carnage, the remains of far less lucky crewmen strewn about in various stages of mangled and burnt. Aelgar was lucky to even survive, though he had not escaped unscathed. He came to realize this as he broke free from his delirium. Besides his ruined arm and leg, the wincing pains of breathing told him that at least several of his ribs were now broken. Jagged pieces of metal stuck out of his hide, the horrid pain in his chest suggesting one had found its way to ever so slightly puncture one of his hearts. His body was covered in smaller cuts and burns and scrapes, and indeed his right eye was forced closed by the torrent of blood falling from his lacerated brow.

"By god!" He shouted, a terrible agony piercing him like lightning through his leg. He fell to one knee, blood dripping into the dirt as he turned around, sitting down and using his good arm to prop himself up. What grasped him was a hand, stripped of most of its skin until little more than dirt covered and burnt muscle remained. The crewman, if the word 'man' could even be used to describe a being in such a state, was little more than a husk. One leg seemed to have been torn off, his three other limbs and indeed the majority of his body seemed to be burnt to blackened char. What kept flesh had no skin, save perhaps a small amount on one half of the face. The two burnt limbs seemed to simply taper off, no distinguishable hands or feet to be seen. Its one remaining hand lacked two of its fingers, yet held Aelgar's leg in a vice. The face, however, was the most disturbing. Half was little more than skull with the barest amounts of charred remains upon it, unmoving. It was only after some time of staring into its one eye, and looking over what remained of its face, did Aelgar recognize it for the praying crewman.

His lips quivered, trying and failing to say something. Gingerly, Aelgar peeled away his fingers and came closer, until his torso hovered over the crewman. It was Aelgar's duty to deliver the man's last rites.

"God, our Lord in the golden halls above, hallowed be thy name. I offer the soul of this pious and humble man to you, so that you make take him into your warm embrace and he may stand ever vigilant by your side. Though he shall walk in the shadow of death's great chasm, I ask that you shine upon him your guiding light, so that evil may not lead him astray. In life, he served you ceaselessly. I ask only now that you allow him to serve you in afterlife as well, as we all strive to. Blessed be thou, my Lord." Aelgar said in a hoarse, shaky whisper. He gently closed the crewman's remaining eye, allowing him to die in peace. Having finished, he fought himself up onto his feet with all his strength and limped forward once more.

Luckily finally found its way into Aelgar's presence as he came upon a local in the dirt. With the mosterous strength typical of his species, he grabbed the man by his scruff and hoisted him onto his feet, shaking him.

"I am Aelgar Gwychardus, of the Chivalric Order! Please, we direly need help!" He yelled in the native Yeidshe language. He did not have a universal translator with him, not having had the chance to take one in his emergency. He hoped that this local either had a universal translator with him or that he was smart enough to figure out the gist of what he was saying by himself. Either way, Aelgar hoped and prayed to god for the slightest bit of luck, even just a sliver more.