Once again, Scarlet woke due to the light filtering through the leaves of the tree she had been sleeping in. During the night, she had been awake for quite some time, looking up, into the starry sky and thinking about life, the universe and everything. Sadly, there had been no light, shining down onto her, enlightening her, thus, her questions remained. For example, the question why the strange rockdog had been able to dominate Cyca and shake off her attacks, whereas it had been quickly taken down by Crysna. Was it just because of the surprise and the fact that his attacks had hit full-on or was there something more?

In the morning, she checked for enemies on the ground before climbing down and deciding to make her way back to the Sparkle before breakfast, maybe she would get some fish in the river, or, even better, she thought to have seen a couple of berry-bushes while following the rockdogs tracks.

Out of curiosity, she tried to find the traces of Cyca from the day before, but was unable to find more than a few, spotty remains, nothing she would have been able to follow, without the game-trail. On her way, she found the bushes and was able to harvest a lot of berries, enough for a couple of meals. The survival-cook-gear showed its use again, allowing her to store the berries without dirtying her backpack but it also meant that she would be a little limited, with only one metal pot remaining berry-free.

Once she got to the Sparkle, she carefully looked for fish in the water and was happy to find that there were some. But getting them out of the water would be problematic, as they were not the lazy carp-like fish she had seen before but another type, one that was quickly traversing the river downstream.

But she had a solution for that, Crysna was adapted to water and had even some power over it, so she gently pushed Cyca back into her crystal and let Crysna out. The snake quickly slithered into the water, his scales almost blending with the sandy streambed and then both, human and monster, started to wait. They didn’t have to wait too long, a few minutes later, a fish wanted to swim by, only to be attacked from below and thrown from the water, onto a nearby rock. There, it flopped around for a moment, until Scarlet managed to grab its wet scales and use her knife to end its suffering. The fish was big enough for breakfast, so she let Crysna act as he wanted, watching as he played around in the water, while she prepared breakfast.

Soon, the mouth-watering smell of grilled fish spread and she sat on a nice sun-rock with Crysna next to her while eating. Sitting there, she had to grin, her life could hardly be more different compared to what it had been a little more than a week before. Before, she had been training to be one of the elite-interrogators, investigators and spy-hunters, guarding the Federation from threats, external and internal. Now, she was sitting on a planet that could only be described as a primitive, prison-hellhole, by any objective standard, but she felt free and happy. As her teeth sank into the fish, enjoying the crunchy texture, she examined her feelings and thought about their reasons. Maybe, it was because here on Verdun, she might gain true freedom. Back in the Federation, she would never be able to leave society, always forced to obey one set of rules or the other. Allways forced to accept social norms and expectations.

On Verdun, if she felt like it, she could simply strip off her clothes and jump into the water next to her, the only law she had to obey was that of the jungle. It was the one law she could live with, either she would manage to claw her way to the top or it wouldn’t matter. After all, the dead had seen the end of war, the end of struggle.

Her hand started to idly stroke Crysna’s scales, enjoying the sun-heated smoothness, before she decided that yes, whimsy was good, and stripped off before jumping into the water. Crysna soon joined her, and together they played in the water for a while, before climbing back out and lying in the sun, to dry off.

Afterwards, she pulled on her pants and shoes but decided that the feeling of the sun, soaking into her skin was preferable to wearing her shirt and jacket, so she started walking, with only her backpack on, and even that she would have preferred to leave off. After a few steps, she started giggling when Crysna came out of the water and wrapped around her upper body, placing his head on her left shoulder, getting some extra sun. His smooth scales tickled her, but the contentment he radiated made up her mind, accepting the closeness.

She continued hiking along the Sparkle for some time, looking for the disturbance-traces left behind by Crystal Monsters moving through the area. In addition, she stopped from time to time, spreading her mind out, causing herself a nosebleed but she felt herself make progress, managing to gleam a tiny bit more understanding, a slightly longer glimpse at the marvel that was life. After some time hiking, she found another crystal-monster trace. Looking at the direction it was headed, she decided that struggling through the brush without a shirt would be a particularly painful and unpleasant idea, she pulled on her shirt again and started after the trace.

Following it took almost no time at all and she saw another of the squirrel-monsters that made her question her sanity. A small, detached, part of her mind wondered just where those nuts were coming from, until it decided that, no, she didn’t want to know where the squirrel pulled them from. Sadly, Crysna had extreme problems to fight with the highly mobile enemy, it jumped from tree to tree, either dodging or ignoring his water-attacks and he was unable to fully dodge the exploding nuts. The detached part, started to wonder if Crysna was going nuts.

In a move, similar to the one she used the day before, she forced Crysna back into his crystal while having him jump towards her, catching his crystal while throwing out Cyca’s. She did it that way, out of fear that she might fail to correctly direct her second monster against the enemy, for them, either crystal monster was a target and their weakened teammate was a juicy one. But, once she had the crystal in hand, the standard behaviour rules that she had psionically drummed into them worked. Crystals that she, or another human, held were off-limits. Period.

Cyca had less problems, the lightning was far faster and harder to dodge and Cyca was just as agile as the squirrel, so after a few exchanges, it ended with Cyca happily glomping down on his energy, absorbing it and proudly carrying the depleted crystal over to Scarlet. She quickly scanned Crysna’s crystal and decided that Cyca would stay out, letting him rest.

For the rest of the day, she managed to track down two more crystal monsters, one a rat-type and the other a bird-monster, both of which were quickly dispatched by Cyca. She even managed to fry the flying bird while mid-air, striking it down with a single, electric bolt, earning her extra scritches in the process. Those two brought her total of collected crystals up to nine.

One of them looked quite impressive, the one that had previously manifested the rockdog, there were flecks of amber enclosed within the clear matter, along with streaks that were a little darker than the rest of the clear crystal. The crystals she had gotten of the two nutty squirrels had colourful imperfections as well, however those were swirls of green and turquoise, making them pretty. Similarly, two of the other crystals, she thought those she had gotten from the birds had turquoise flecks in them and one of the remaining had greenish-brown flecks. The rest of the crystals were completely clear.

She was quite curious why some crystals had those imperfections, or rather, why the monsters that seemed to have special abilities had those imperfections. She made a mental note to keep a closer look on the correlation between crystal-colour and special abilities, maybe she would be able to come up with something. Currently, it seemed as if the types of monsters all had different colours but there were similarities between the crystals she had gotten from the squirrels and the birds, for some reason.

In the late afternoon, Scarlet looked at her scanner once again and decided that she had gone far enough. Her scanner’s indicator-colour had shifted from the light yellow it had held the days before into a slightly darker colour, indicating that the danger-level was getting higher.

She tried looking for landmarks, but, other than the Sparkle next to her, there were only trees. Simply turning around felt like a bad idea, so she started following the sun. Luckily, both Cyca and Crysna were able to quickly climb into the trees, allowing them to get an unobstructed view for orientation-purposes, even when the forest was dense. She knew that bad weather and the unknown condition of the terrain were both potential dangers, but felt that it would be good to challenge herself.