Touchstone 1 - Stray

sort of smile she gives Eeli, which was both nice and a little annoying, since she treats Eeli like an over-eager kid.
    The Ddura didn’t show up immediately, and we had finished clearing the ship’s crew and were working on all the people who were going to be left here for the mission, before my ear-drums were blasted. It was all hhhaaa and hhhhiiiii at the same time, because there were lots of people it recognised as Muinans and lots that it thought were Ionoth, and it came charging up in this huge hurry to kill all the evil non-Muinans threatening its precious people.
    The Ddura is really kind of stupid.
    I had to keep telling it to stop (‘sit!’) over and over until everyone was given clearance. Then I had another shot at telling it not to make the things belonging to the Muinans explode, since all the drones from the last expedition had been exploded. Just picturing the drones and the ship didn’t seem to mean anything to it, even when I could get it to pay any attention to me, so we tried putting a new drone right on the platform and tried giving it ‘security clearance’ and that may perhaps have worked, they’re not really sure. The Ddura stopped treating it as a threat, anyway, so we did that for all the drones and any other largish bits of equipment we could get into the room. Then it was time for me to go visit medical on the ship just before it left, since the best equipment was there, and then back to shore, all drugged up to rest on a cot in the temporary medical tent while they started the business of setting up camp. I waited to watch the ship leave before lying down.
    And now it’s the middle of the night. Fortunately Grif had sent me a summary of the camp arrangements, or I would have had to go stumbling about looking for the portaloo tents. One of the greensuits on guard took pity on me and showed me how to get to the food which had been stored.
    I’m going to try and go back to sleep now that I’ve written this. At least the Ddura shut up eventually. I don’t much like spending all my time in uniform, either.
    Dawn
    When I gave up on sleep this morning there was a mist rising off the lake in the pre-dawn dark. The camp has been set up south of town and it’s really impressive how much they’ve established in such a short time: mess hall, infirmary, sleeping tents, a central command, research and working areas. Lots of canvas, but they’d brought a vat of their nanite building materials along and some ‘real’ buildings were starting to take shape. When the Tarens make camp, they don’t do things by halves.
    There were lights on in the command tent. The person in charge of the expedition is someone called Tsaile Staben, who I may or may not have been introduced to during the extreme-headache phase of yesterday, and one of the research tents was bustling with people who were obviously used to a different shift.
    There’s nearly a hundred people here. I had no idea the mission was that large. Now that everyone has been cleared by the platform, the Setari are support on this mission, not the main focus. The greensuits are taking care of camp security, with the Setari acting as a kind of advanced warning system thanks to Combat Sight. My role’s been reduced to trying to communicate with the Ddura, which is no problem right now since it seems that the Ddura has recovered from its excitement and gone away. Now that everyone has the same reaction to aether, I don’t even have to worry about tomorrow’s moonfall.
    I was feeling oppressed and restless – I’d had way too much sleep – and decided to go down to the lake. There was a greensuit posted on the lakeside edge of the camp, but I got past her just by nodding as I walked by, like no-one would think of objecting to me going anywhere by myself. It’s not as if the lake was very far away: the guard would have been within sight. It was incredibly quiet, just a few birds starting to think about it maybe being dawn, and so long as I kept facing the lake it felt like I was alone.
    Before too long a tiny clatter of rock warned me that wasn’t true and I turned my head to see the leg of a person standing on the rock behind me, and a hand in fingerless Setari gloves. And that was enough to know it was Ruuel. It amazes me that I can recognise him from his hands. Since Ruuel moves like a cat, I guess he must have made the noise deliberately, to prevent me from shrieking and leaping in the lake out of shock. Heh – I can’t help