WSP 039

The Moon

Vaughan’s head was pounding, feeling like it would explode. But it didn’t. The spinning had stopped, too. There was a pain in his back—that was normal—and one in his leg—that was not. His ears were ringing. Otherwise… he was fine?

He opened his eyes and discovered that looking at things was painful. He quickly shut them.

His face stung… oh, wait, that was just the sunburn. He’d done that to himself despite several warnings… he found that he was capable of weakly chuckling at this. His own foolhardiness was what had gotten them into this mess…

“He looks fine.” The words came to his ears as though through a fog. “No gashes or anything.”

“He’s not really responding, though, try healing him anyway.”

“Okay…”

Vaughan felt the familiar sensation of Green waft over him. All it fixed was his leg, which hadn’t even been broken, just bruised. The rest of his symptoms remained.

“See, told you it did nothing.”

“Vaughan… Vaughan, come on, wake up.”

“I am…” Vaughan grunted.

“Then why didn’t you say anything!?” The voice was clearly Blue’s now, and the worry was quickly leaving, being replaced with indignation.

“Didn’t… feel like it.” Vaughan tried to open his eyes again. It still hurt to look, it was so bright.

“Maybe we should cover up the windows,” one of the twins suggested.

“Well that would require finding the curtains for all of them,” Blue said.

“Just the ones that are letting the brightness in.”

“…Fair.” Vaughan could hear the sound of Blue levitating things around. “Agh… I must have hit my horn or something, that hurts…”

“You were complainin’ about that before we landed,” Keller observed.

“Double injury, then. Ow… there. Vaughan, your eyes okay now?”

Vaughan opened his eyes. The interior of the Moonshot was no longer so bright it hurt to look around, though his eyes still felt weak, somehow. At least now he didn’t have to struggle to keep them open, though the sight he was greeted to was definitely a mess. Blue’s equipment was strewn everywhere. Ink was splashed all over several of the walls and one of the windows that showed stars outside. A few smaller streaks were clearly blood, but given all the voices he’d heard any major injuries had already been taken care of, so he didn’t let that worry him for more than a few seconds. Somewhat surprisingly, all the hatches and drawers had held, nothing that hadn’t already been open or loose had been released, showing that they really had designed the ship properly. A few glass things had been shattered—one of the metal supports for an interior rod was exposed, but the steel itself was unbroken. The drive and the pilot’s seat looked perfectly fine, and even the air pressure sensor was in one piece—and it told them that they hadn’t sprung a leak.

With a sigh and a grunt, he sat up—and was highly surprised to find that he had no difficulty whatsoever doing this and in fact shakily rose to his feet among the pile of junk that had settled around him. “Wh—what?”

“Careful!” Jeh said, jumping up in a lazy arc to one of the bars above him. “Down is different here!”

“Wh… right, it was pulling us in…” Vaughan looked around for his hat and scepter. Finding both, he kneeled down to get them. The activity was a little awkward for him, but so long as he moved slowly, everything took less energy to do. Hat on head and scepter in hand, he took in a big breath. “So. uh… besides the obvious, what happened?”

“We only have the obvious,” Keller said. “We crashed.”

“Everyone good?”

“You were the worst off.”

“I had a broken arm!” one of the Twins called, gesturing at an arm that had apparently been healed quickly.

“If Jeh had been unconscious that woulda been a problem. As it is… you suffered for less than a minute.”

“It was still pain…” She wrapped her arms around herself and shivered. Her sister put a comforting arm around her.

“Still think this trip was a good idea for you two?” Vaughan asked.

“Yes,” said the one with the healed arm.

“Definitely,” said the other.

“Crazy…” Blue muttered.

“We all got into a tin ball and flew to the moon,” Jeh said. “We’re all crazy.”

“Is the ship… okay?” Vaughan asked.

“Well, we’re not obviously leaking,” Blue said. “The drive is still fine. As for everything else…”

“Inspection underway!” the Sourdough twins said in unison, setting to cleaning up and inspecting everything in the ship while the others continued to talk.

“So…” Vaughan tried to walk but found that the energy he put into a step pushed him slightly into the air. “Besides this… new down, do we know anything else about the moon?”

“Covered in dust. Absolutely covered,” Jeh said. “It’s all over out there.”

“It’s also very bright,” Blue said. “I think we landed on one of the lighter sections.”

“Hmm…” Vaughan approached one of the windows, one that was currently directed to the side and slightly downward.

“Your eyes…”

“Have adjusted enough, I think.” Vaughan squinted his eyes and slowly pulled back the curtain. It was still hard to look out there, the ground was comparably bright to freshly-packed snow under a noonday sun, but it was definitely not the same texture. The scenery was almost monochromatic and rocky, with everything either being dusty or just a lump of rock. The few exceptions were specks of Color from Colored crystals, but those only existed near where the Moonshot itself was, at greater distances there was nothing but monochrome mountains, a black sky, and stars.

“Crystals…”

“Oh yeah, crystals,” Jeh said. “Guess that means they are up here.”

“Why are they only near us?”

“They probably only form underground,” Blue said. “Though, evidently, there’s a lot of them since we just struck a random spot and got a lot of them… unless we just got lucky and hit a vein…”

Vaughan put his hand on the glass. “We… we did it.”

“Oh. Well. We crashed but…”

“We did it!”

“YEAH!” Jeh said, putting her fist into the palm of her other mitt. “WE DID IT! We are on the moon and we are alive! A whole new land to explore!”

The twins let out an almost musical series of cheers.

“Heh… we did. We made history,” Blue said. “Assuming we can get back in this hunk of junk…”

“Drive still works, and we have access to crystals we can stock up on,” Vaughan said. “I like our chances.”

“I mean, I do too, just being cautious here.”

Keller drummed his fingers against one of the metal walls. “So, now that we have arrived, I must ask… what now?”

Vaughan cleared his throat. “Primary mission objective was to get a sample. So…” He lifted his scepter and used Orange to lift a medium-sized rock from the ground. Dust poured off of it as he moved it, though it simply fell to the ground rather than drifting in a complex plume. There was no air out there to slow it down, clearly. He levitated it over to the airlock and sealed it shut from the outside.

Jeh opened it from the interior and pulled the rock out. It easily fit in her hand.

It was light gray without the thin covering of dust. Lumpy. Had a few pocks in it spread around randomly.

It was. A rock.

“Well this is a lot less interesting then I was hoping,” Jeh said, placing the rock down. “Honestly that very shiny dust is more unusual…”

“We should sample some of that as well,” Blue said. “Get one of the waste bags, we can put it in there.”

It took a little more care to get the dust into the airlock in sufficient quantities and to get it into the bag. Inside the Moonshot, the air definitely allowed the dust to cloud up, and it was so fine it did so readily. Jeh was forced into a coughing fit. “What… fun…”

“Hmm…” Vaughan took the bag with dust in it and held it in one hand, while he held the rock in the other. “I wonder if this is just the powdered version of that.”

“What would cause it to powder, though?” Blue asked. “There’s no air out there like in a desert. Not even any dunes!”

“I don’t know, something to ponder. Now, what I’m curious about… is the crystals. Jeh, if you mind, can you start digging out there?”

“Aye-aye beard man!” Jeh pulled out her Orange and started digging. It was easy for her to get through the layer of dust, finding that for the most part the ground was the dust, with the occasional rock or crystal suspended in it. The powder was significantly denser further down, but without any air it was easy to throw it aside. The slow arcs the particles made in the “air” were telling of the significantly weaker force holding them to the moon’s surface.

In digging, they found quite a few crystals of all seven Colors. However, all of them were small, none larger than a fingernail, though occasionally they found two of the same Color fused together. When Jeh eventually hit solid rock—which took a while, the hole ended up being several meters deep—the distribution was the same. Crack a large rock open, get a bunch of small crystals.

“Crystals either form differently here or this is a weird place,” Blue said.

“We can fly over to one of the dark spots,” Vaughan suggested.

“Jeh, do you…?”

Jeh grinned. “Now that I know that down can change, it’ll be easy. We weigh less here!” She bounced into the air and grabbed onto one of the supports near the current ceiling. “That means it’ll be easy to move the Moonshot.”

“In that case… Rina! Rona! How’s the inspection going?”

Rina and Rona gave Blue mock salutes. “Almost everything checks out!” one said. “Two things don’t. One, we’re missing one of the exterior knobs, but that’s not a problem.”

The other continued. “The other thing is this drawer here. It won’t open.” To demonstrate, she grabbed the handle and put her feet on the walls, using her whole body to try and pry it open. It was clearly unlatched, but no matter how much she struggled, it didn’t budge.

“…Weird…” Jeh said, narrowing her eyes.

“Maybe we do have a hole,” Blue said. “Jeh, can you levitate a rock out there to see if you can get inside?”

Jeh did as asked. Even though they couldn’t see through the metal wall, Jeh could still move the rock back there and tap the exterior wall, letting a resounding clang resonate through the Moonshot. She kept tapping closer and closer to the mysterious hatch, until suddenly they didn’t hear a noise anymore.

“Yep. Hole.”

“That drawer is sealed, though, so we should be fine…”

Vaughan frowned. “What was in there?”

“It was one of the food chests.” Blue paused. “…How much food do we have left?”

“Enough,” one of the twins said. “Hover clover rations are still fine.”

“And sooo nutritious!” the other added.

“Egh, if we have to dig into those because of this…” Jeh muttered.

“Everyone be quiet for a second,” Blue said. “I want to see if we can hear any air escaping.”

Silence.

Not even the sound of hissing air.

“Okay, we’re good,” Blue said. “Still, someone mark the drawer or something.”

“Might I suggest gluin’ it shut just in case?” Keller asked.

“Good idea,” Vaughan said.

The twins set right on that, pulling out some glue and pressing it all around the edges of the drawer. “Now it’ll never open again!” they said as one.

“Right, so… do a dark area?” Vaughan suggested.

“Might as well,” Blue said.

“Everyone strap in!” Jeh said, jumping into her pilot’s seat. “Let’s actually fly around right this time!”

Everyone did, in fact, strap in. With a creak and a groan, the Moonshot lifted up off the ground and, without much fanfare, set off for a darker area…

~~~

The darker area proved not to be all that different from the previous one. Somehow it was still extremely bright when looked at head-on. The dust was only about half as deep, though, and the rocks they pulled out of it were darker in color. The Colored crystal distribution was exactly the same.

Vaughan and Blue set to cataloging and investigating the various properties and differences between their various samples. This left Jeh not doing much but looking outside at the lunar ground.

“I want to just go out there and run,” Jeh said. “Just… can you imagine, bounding through the airless void?”

Either Rina or Rona nodded. “It does sound fun…”

“But we can’t carry air out there,” the other added.

Jeh frowned. “Next ship needs a bigger airlock. And we need to bring the diving helmet. I want to run out there, not be cooped up in this tiny ball.”

“It’ll probably happen eventually, Jeh,” one of them said.

“You just need to be patient!” the other finished.

Jeh sighed. “Patience… oh, patience… why do things take so long…”

“Long?” Keller gave her one of his unsmiling chuckles. “Kid, your space program’s only been operatin’ for two years. Ya made it to th’ moon. Expeditions t’ the desert can last that long, and it takes months just t’ cross th’ ocean. Ya’ve moved faster than anyone ever.”

“Wow, why is normal life so slow?”

“Ask Dia that one, kid.”

“Will I ever get to?” Jeh tilted her head. “I’m not exactly going to die.”

“I… hmm. I dunno, kid. I dunno. Ask that Mayor of yours.”

Jeh shrugged, turning back to looking outside. “To run…”

“I just realized something,” Vaughan said.

Blue blinked, looking up from the rocks. “Wait, you found something interesting?”

“My back doesn’t hurt anymore!”

“I… Vaughan…”

“I think it’s because I weigh less!” Vaughan jumped into the air and stretched out his arms. “I feel limber once again! Yes!”

“I can see it now,” Keller said, scratching his chin. “Come t’ th’ moon, solve your back problems.”

“Buy now!” the Sourdough twins added.

Blue turned to them with an uncertain glance. “You two are seriously already thinking about space tourism, aren’t you?”

“Maaaaaaybe,” one said.

“If we weren’t before, we are now!” the other added.

“…Walked into that one,” Blue muttered. “Anyway, we’ve accomplished our primary objective—make it to the moon. Secondary objective of samples is also complete. Third objective… map the dark side. Do we still have enough food to wait for a new moon?”

The twins nodded. “We’ll just need to not have any extra meals or snacks.” They both pointed at Jeh. “That means you.”

“Ugh, fiiine…” Jeh grumbled.

“So, what do we do until then?” Vaughan asked.

Jeh shrugged. “Keep flying around, looking for things?”

“It’s not like there’s anything stopping us from going there now,” Blue said. “It’s just not a rush at the moment.”

“I am rather curious as to what it looks like…” Jeh said.

“Might I suggest we set our destination as the dark side and just mosey over there slowly?” Keller said.

“Seems reasonable,” Vaughan said. “Though, first, we should check out the dawn… dusk? Whatever area, since it’s closer.”

Everyone nodded in agreement.

“We should start sleeping in shifts again, too, have to keep the air restorer running and all that.”

With that, they took off into the air, this time maintaining a rather low elevation from the ground as they sailed on, looking for anything interesting at a slower pace.

~~~

They had found that it was significantly easier on the eyes to look at the moon’s surface with less direct sunlight, so they started following the edge of the moon’s shadow to the dark side, which meant they were taking a “northern” trajectory, though the compass they brought wasn’t working. It would either point nowhere or point in seemingly random directions.

Blue, Vaughan, and one of the twins were currently sleeping, leaving Jeh, Keller, and the other twin operating everything. Keller was currently on the air restorer, while Jeh was flying and the awake twin had her face pressed to the lower window, trying to look for anything interesting to investigate.

“Might see something,” the Sourdough twin called up to Jeh. “Slow down, take us closer to the surface.”

Jeh slowed down and lowered the Moonshot toward the ground.

“Those are lines…”

“Huh? Lines?” Jeh asked.

“There are lines cutting across the lunar surface. Set us down, gently, let’s have a look.”

Jeh set them down. The first few times they’d done this, it had woken everyone up, but Jeh had discovered the weaker pull of the moon made it much easier to do things gently. She unstrapped herself and went to one of the side windows.

There definitely were lines cutting across the lunar surface, two of them in fact.

“…Those look like rigid tracks,” Jeh said.

“Huh?”

“Really?” Keller said, suddenly very interested.

“Yeah, there were areas in the Shinelands where there wasn’t metal, but dirt, and the tracks the wheeled rigids made looked kind of like that.”

“…Let’s follow them,” the twin said.

“Oh you better bet we’re following them.”

“If there are thin’s livin’ here…” Keller said, caution evident in his voice.

“We haven’t seen anything alive the entire time here,” Jeh said. “It’s probably something that just looks like tracks. But don’t worry, I’ll be careful.”

So the Moonshot lifted up once again and followed the tracks. The tracks went on for several kilometers, but they eventually came to a stop… at a thing.

“Hold,” the twin called. “Don’t descend, Jeh. Keller, come look at this.”

“What is it?” Jeh called down.

“It looks… like a rigid,” Keller said. “…But it ain’t movin’.”

“Maybe she’s dead,” the twin suggested.

“Maybe… we should wake th’ others for this.”

“Yeah…”

Jeh hovered the Moonshot in the “air” while everyone was woken up and told about the situation. Soon, everyone but Jeh was cramming their faces at the window.

“Come on,” Jeh grumbled. “I want to see, let me land already!”

“We really can’t just not go down there,” Vaughan said. “Possible life, I… I hadn’t really considered it, but there it is.”

“Jeh, descend slowly,” Blue said. “Very slowly.”

“Can a rigid even survive without air…?” Keller asked.

“Things either breathe air or water,” Blue said. “There are rigids that live in both ecosystems, but the species that can operate in both are very rare. They need it just like the rest of us, though I’m not entirely sure how, as they don’t visibly breathe.”

They eventually reached the ground. The presupposed rigid never moved as they approached. Now that they were close, they could make out features. It was quite unlike any rigid Jeh had ever seen—most were entirely enclosed, while this one had most of its interior organs just exposed. The eight wheels it had were made out of wires attached to black cylinders, entirely hollow, were there air it could have passed right through. Several wires and pipes moved exposed on the exterior of its drum-shaped body. Its top was flat, and two sections protruded from it. One was a bizarre, long object that pointed into the sky, with various knobs along its length. The other was a round dish angled slightly upward.

The entire thing was covered in a thin coating of the moon dust.

“Maybe she’s sleeping?” Blue said, suddenly. “The sun is setting here.”

“I’m not sure that’s even a rigid,” Jeh said, tilting her head. “There’s just… not enough there, and it’s not smooth enough or… complete, if that makes sense? Too exposed?”

“What else could it be?”

“It’s been here a long, long time, whatever it is,” Keller said. “There ain’t no wind here. The dust don’t drift. This thin’ has a coatin’ on it. How long ya think it hat t’ sit in one spot t’ get that?”

Everyone thought this over.

“Definitely dead, then,” one of the twins said.

“Why hasn’t it decomposed?” the other asked.

“What’s there to decompose it, out here?” Vaughan asked. “This isn’t the Shinelands, there are no other rigids around to complete the cycle. This thing… person, creature, or otherwise… was alone. And has been alone for… who knows how long.”

“…Should we poke it?” Jeh asked.

“I don’t think so,” Vaughan said. “There’s no telling if it has some kind of strange attribute that might act up. I think we leave it, give it some respect.”

Jeh nodded slowly.

“Maybe a future mission can have someone on it who knows a bit more about rigids… let’s mark where this is. Jeh, we’ll need a high view so I can mark this location on the map.”

“You got it!”

“And make sure to get some images, this is the most important thing we’ve found so far…” Vaughan looked back out at the… corpse? Somehow it didn’t feel quite like a corpse. It was something… else.

Something truly unexpected and inexplicable. Had someone been here before them? Were there rigids native to the moon? If so, why hadn’t they seen any others, or any sign of them? So many questions… he almost wanted to go back on his decision of taking the safe route, of ignoring the potential of danger or sacrilege and trying to open the thing up, see what was inside.

But that… didn’t feel right to him. This was just an initial exploration, there was no need to potentially violate anything. Not today.

The Moonshot lifted into the air shortly afterward and headed off to the “northern” pole of the moon… and then… to the dark side.

~~~

A few days passed, though since they were now moving along the dark side it was somewhat difficult to tell exactly how many since they couldn’t see Ikyu anymore—Blue literally had to take a measurement of the sun’s position against the background stars to figure out what day it was.

It was approaching the new moon phase, at which point they planned to increase their elevation to get an image of the entire dark side. For now, though, they were still operating close to the ground, trying to notice any small features.

So far, they hadn’t really come across much. There were clearly two types of ground, the light and the dark, but this was just a relative difference as both were highly reflective. They had not found any dark regions on the dark side yet, a fact which amused the Sourdough Twins and Keller. The distribution of crystals seemed to be the same on the dark side as the “light” side.

The other major thing they investigated were the craters, the large round shapes clearly visible on the moon. Since they were close-in, they could see that they came in almost every size, small enough that not even Jeh could fit inside, and so large that up close it was impossible to see the entire thing.

Vaughan’s map of the moon was improving its precision, and he had started to catalog the different types of craters. One of the notable things they were able to discover was that different craters had different depths of the lunar dust on them. The more sharply defined the crater was, the less dust it had.

“I think we can use the amount of dust to get a rough idea of the age of the craters,” Vaughan said. “Sure, there’s a bit of a problem since the light and dark areas have different amounts of dust, and presumably when they form they have some amount of dust placed on them from… whatever makes them, but relative ages can be determined. …For the larger ones, the small ones don’t seem to vary from the dust levels around them…” Vaughan scratched his beard. “I feel as though we should be able to figure out where they come from… these formations don’t exist on Ikyu, and yet this place is more similar to Ikyu than we first thought…”

“Well, let’s list the differences then,” Blue said. “Biggest one is no life. Or almost no life, if there are rigids here their population is small enough that we only saw the one.”

“Second biggest difference is lack of air. None at all, sky is always black.”

“Third… no water.”

“Fourth, smaller.”

The two of them thought in silence for a moment, examining Vaughan’s drawings.

“You know, I just realized something…” Jeh said, jumping over and landing on a support beam just above their heads. “I think I know what makes the small ones. We saw it when I was digging.”

“What?” Vaughan said.

“Here, watch.” Jeh went up to one of the windows and pulled the curtains back. They were currently landed inside one of the larger craters, so mountains surrounded the edge of their view. Jeh used her Orange to pick a rock up off the lunar surface and then proceeded to ram it into the ground as fast as she could, sending a shower of dust into the airless void… and leaving a small circular hole in the ground. “That’s where the small ones come from. We make a few shapes like that when we go digging, I flung a few rocks pretty hard by accident.”

Vaughan scratched his beard. “Rocks falling? But what would kick them up to cause them to fall? Th—wait…” Vaughan crossed his arms. “The moon pulls things in, it doesn’t have to be from here.”

“Space is empty, Vaughan,” Blue said.

“Remember the tiny rocks that hit the Skyseed?”

Blue blinked. “Oh… uh…”

Jeh clapped her hands. “That’s right! Those tiny rocks must be making these tiny holes! They shoot down super fast and SMASH!”

“Then why doesn’t Ikyu have any?” Vaughan asked.

“Atmosphere,” Blue said. “When we try to come in fast, the Skyseed lights on fire. When we came in fast here, we didn’t even notice. Any rocks that fall to Ikyu are either burnt to a crisp or slowed down. And…”

One of the Sourdough Twins poked her head out of her sleeping bag. “You know Darmosil has a sword that was supposedly forged from a rock that fell from the sky, right?”

Blue blinked. “He what!?”

“Oh yeah, that thing…” Vaughan scratched his beard. “I guess some of them are big enough to make it through and…” He suddenly looked outside at the distant mountains that were the edge of the crater they were in. “And some are big enough to… oh my… by the eights…”

“What?” Jeh asked.

“How big of a rock did it have to be to make a crater a city could be built in?”

Jeh blinked a few times. “…Oh.”

Blue shook her head. “Let’s think about this. Things like that have to be rare, we don’t see large things floating out in space that aren’t the planets, and they aren’t regular.”

“Remember the dots around Qi?” Vaughan asked.

“Yes, how could I forget. Okay, never mind, maybe there are things out here just whizzing around of huge size that we can’t see because…” Blue tapped her hoof. “Right, the satellite, we were barely able to see it, and we made it extra shiny. Anything that’s just a rock would be much harder to see… still, there aren’t a lot of big craters here on the moon, you could see them as we came in. That means they aren’t common.”

“And the moon hasn’t visibly changed in all the time we have observed it,” Vaughan noted. “So, at the very least, no craters visible from the ground have happened in the last century or so.”

“And we don’t see craters on Ikyu at all so… hmm, but Ikyu has water and wind that can wash things away, those things don’t exist here.” Blue paused. “…Vaughan, how old are these craters?”

“…They could be older than any mountain on Ikyu.” Vaughan looked down at his maps. “They appear to be the only major feature on the moon aside from the light and dark spots. Virtually every mountain and valley is created by these craters… there is no weather, nothing else to change the landscape. We know Ikyu wears down and builds up mountains over time, though the methods are unknown. If that doesn’t happen here… these mountains we’re looking at…” He put a hand to the bridge of his nose. “I’m trying to get a number but they just get too big…”

“Millions of years,” Blue said. “You’re looking for Millions.”

Jeh gawked. “That’s… that’s absurd!”

Blue pulled out a notebook and started scribbling. “We have a pretty good estimate that sets the Second Cataclysm at four thousand years ago… before that it’s all an estimate but the First Cataclysm was thought to be one to two thousand years before that… and before that we just have religious texts to go off of, but it suggests that Dia made the world… man that’s a number that ranges from one to a hundred thousand years. But still, that’s less than… a million.”

“Did time really mean to the Great Crystalline Ones what it does to us?” Vaughan asked.

“Okay, fair point, probably not, but still the presence of spirited wasn’t until far after the creation so… these mountains are older than any living thing on Ikyu, possibly.”

There was sudden silence in the Moonshot.

“That’s too much time,” Jeh observed. “And that’s coming from me, I’m probably several thousand years old.”

“It does mention that the world was ‘renewed’ in the texts,” Blue said. “It’s… it’s possible there were things before the Creation.”

“But we have no way of knowing what they are,” Vaughan said.

“Maybe we do,” Blue said. “Look. We might be standing on one of those things right now. Or maybe that’s heresy, I don’t know. …Oh no, what if Lila doesn’t like this…”

“Lila has seen more things to make her doubt than a rock supposedly older than creation,” Vaughan said with a chuckle. “And the Keepers of Axiom are generally of similarly open minds. That said… I have met those who are a bit more… strict in their beliefs, I doubt this will be popular with them.”

“That’s why we have Keller, right?” the awake twin asked, pointing at the sleeping form of the Agent. “He’ll tell us what’s to be made public and what isn’t.” She chuckled. “This is also why we snuck on, to hear things like this.”

Vaughan nodded. “That’s a good point. The Crown may decide to keep this information hidden.”

“But… people deserve to know the truth of the world!” Blue retorted.

“Blue, what are people going to do with the information that the universe is older than we thought it was?”

“I… er… well. Huh. Yeah, not much.”

“Plus, it could just be Ikyu the texts refer to. It is arguably a ‘world’ is it not?”

“I…” Blue cocked her head. “I’m going to have to ask Lila about this.”

“She may not know! This will be new to her as well, after all.”

“Oh boy, changing how we understand the world, great stuff…”

Vaughan grinned. “It is, in a sense, what we are out here to do, isn’t it?”

“Yeah!” Jeh cheered. “Everything we know might be wrong, let’s go to space to figure it out!”

“I…” Blue couldn’t help but chuckle. “All right, you two have won me over. This is… a great discovery. That said, I want to make sure my quick calculations aren’t crazy so I’m going to check…” She took the next little while performing a lot of very sloppy and uncertain math to parameterize the age of the craters.

There was a lot she didn’t know. How long it took mountains to erode on Ikyu. But she could get lower and higher bounds on these things just by thinking. From that she could extrapolate how frequent big impacts had to be, since Ikyu currently showed no signs of them at all, and recorded history didn’t have any large enough to make the biggest craters on the moon. Working from that, she counted the number of large craters on the moon’s near side, used the rough estimate of all spirited history as a ruler, and extrapolated back to determine the age of the moon.

This more rigorous calculation produced numbers with multiple millions in them.

“Oh boy, it’s gotten worse.” Blue let out a laugh. “The Moon’s definitely old… or, in the past, there were a lot more impacts. But a lot of impacts in even relatively recent history would have definitely left a mark on Ikyu, even with all the weathering…” She shook her head. “I can’t say for sure and this number has a lot of uncertainty, but it certainly seems like the age of the moon’s surface is on the order of millions of years.”

Jeh clapped her hands. “Go Blue, math master!”

“Jeh my possible answers cover four whole orders of magnitude.”

“Just four?”

“Four is very bad!”

Everyone had a good laugh at this.

~~~

It was, at long last, a new moon. Which meant it was time to take the Moonshot up to get a full image of the dark side. Which, at the moment, was completely lit up by the sun and not dark at all.

As they lifted up into the sky, everyone was awake, and Blue was the one looking down the lower window. “That ‘dark side’ name really is stupid.”

“Well, we knew that already,” Vaughan said.

“It’s even worse. Look at this. We’re almost all the way up and there’s only one dark spot on the entire ‘dark’ side. This side is brighter than the other one! …And it looks like it might have even more craters…”

“So should I be jealous that I can’t see it right now or what?” Jeh asked from the pilot’s seat, which had her facing directly up with respect to the lunar surface.

“The other side’s more interesting,” Blue said. “Though the crater number here might help us learn more about how impacts work… maybe there’s more back here because things are more likely to come in from beyond the moon, and the moon shields Ikyu? That’d mess up my calculations on the age…”

Vaughan held up one of their imaging devices and recorded the scene through the window. “Well, looks like our mission is almost done… unless we see something interesting back here, I think we head back after this.”

“We’ve learned so much,” Blue said, almost breathless. “The age of the moon, its rocks, the dust, the nature of down, the possibility of rigids… yeah, I’d say the mission was a success.”

“Who knows what other worlds we will explore?” Vaughan said, chuckling. “I bet Qi is an interesting place with all those things around it.”

“Five worlds for the price of one…” Blue grinned. “The construction of the Qishot will be a much bigger undertaking, it’d have to survive a trip of… who knows how long, we don’t know how far away Qi is. Perhaps indefinitely. We’d need to make an ark, something that’s self-sustaining for an unknown trip like that, and… oh the logistics of that.” Blue rubbed her forehead. “How do you grow food in space?”

“Sounds like we have our work cut out for us.”

“No kidding, and… hold on.” Blue pressed her face to the glass, squinting her eyes at the ground. “I think I see something near the South pole.”

Vaughan crowded in. She was right, there was something near the Southern edge of the moon’s dark side. It was the only non-monochromatic thing they could see.

It was Orange.

“A massive Orange Crystalline One…” Blue said, breathlessly.

“…That’s our cue to leave!” Jeh said.

Vaughan snapped an image. “Agreed, get us out of here!” He and Blue strapped themselves down. The others, having not been involved in recording data, had already been strapped in. Blue was now the only one who could look down the lower window easily.

“She’s not Purple, maybe she doesn’t see us,” Blue said. “Or maybe we’re beyond her reach. We have to be, even Benefactor didn’t have a range this large…”

At this point, they saw several bright Orange flashes from the Orange Crystalline One.

“Jeh are we booking it?” Blue asked.

“I’m booking it I’m booking it!” Jeh shouted.

“Blue, what is happening?” Keller asked. “Keep me informed.”

“Several bright flashes from the Orange Crystalline One. Nothing else so far. We’re receding from the moon. And… I see Orange Sparks.” She squinted her eyes. “Aaaand they’re coming right at us…”

Vaughan held up his scepter. “I can create a deflection field with Orange, any projectiles should be pushed away.”

“I really can’t see what they are…” Blue said. “They’re… oh, fuzznuggets, those are huge pieces of Orange Crystal being shot at us.”

“She fragmented herself…” Keller realized. “Rare is the Crystalline One large enough t’ do that without losin’ herself…”

“We could see her from orbit distance, she’s definitely big enough! Ideas?”

“I… if I could shoot my firearm… but that would destroy th’ shell. We can’t have that.”

“Then what do we do?”

“Hope she’s friendly.” Keller flipped a coin into the air. It landed on his other palm. Tails. “…I could really use a smoke right now…”

Blue continued staring out the window. The crystals were moving fast, but the distance between them was still large—but closing rapidly. Now that some time had passed, Blue realized that the leading crystals were being tailed by smaller crystals. Perhaps providing some kind of chain back to the Crystalline One’s main body?

Perhaps she wanted to talk to them…

Blue didn’t have any more time to think. “They’re almost here!” Blue could hear Vaughan muttering prayers under his breath.

Six Orange Crystalline One shards arrived. They stopped moving immediately relative to the Moonshot, and formed a circle around it, moving in perfect tandem with Jeh’s acceleration.

“Okay, they’re following us,” Blue reported, looking out the side windows now. “Jeh, try t—”

The Moonshot was stopped.

The sudden and dramatic change in momentum threw everyone in the Moonshot against their supports, breaking skin, cracking bones, and forcing everyone except Jeh into unconsciousness. She had built up a tolerance to dramatic changes in acceleration and motion, managing to maintain her awareness as her body started stitching itself back together.

Her immediate thoughts were about the safety of everyone else. She could not see everything, so she surrounded the entire interior of the Moonshot save herself in Green, sparing herself so she could keep her mental awareness.

She noticed that the drive was glowing an unusually bright Orange Color, and that its intensity was growing.

Uh-oh.

The drive exploded.

~~~

Jeh woke up.

She was not in the pilot’s chair of the Moonshot.

She wasn’t even in the Moonshot.

She was sitting on top of a chair made entirely out of Orange crystal, one with unusually rounded edges that made it impossible to cut herself on anything. She herself was, naturally, completely fine, though she sensed a few fragments of the drive’s crystal in her face and chest. Her furs, on the other hand, were completely shredded, revealing her almost ever-present dark undergarments.

Looking around, she found that she was in a large chamber made entirely out of Orange crystal. The first thing she noticed was the Moonshot sitting nearby, with its main doors open. She could see through the door and noted that her seat was still there, but the entire framework with the drive in it was completely busted. Various loose crystal pieces could be seen glinting inside.

There were a few smears of blood on the walls.

Did… did I fail to…?

“Jeh! You’re awake!”

Jeh jumped up a significant distance into the air and looked behind her, finding all of the others… perfectly healthy, save for some cuts and scrapes in their clothes that no doubt came from the exploding drive. The Sourdough Twins were the ones who had spoken. Blue, Vaughan, and Kaller were… shouting at a pedestal of Orange that had more crystal on top of it in the shape of an apple?

“What kind of stupid game of charades is this!?” Blue shouted. “What do you mean ‘apple?’ How does that relate to ‘hand?’ “

“Blue, calm, anger is not going to help us broach the communication gap,” Vaughan said. “Here, how about this, write down and say the word relating to whatever object she puts on the pedestal.”

“Fine…” Blue took out her notebook and, wincing slightly as she levitated a pen up, wrote down the word “apple.” “Apple.”

The shape on the pedestal transformed into the notebook Blue was holding.

“Notebook.”

The shape then became Blue herself.

“Blue. Or, wait, unicorn… uh…” Blue shook her head, pointing at herself. “Blue.” Then she drew a generic stick-figure unicorn. “Unicorn.”

The shape on the pedestal became some kind of weird sea-urchin like object with curved shapes all over its spines.

“…What even is that?” Blue asked.

“Perhaps she’s trynna see how you’ll react to nonsense,” Keller asked.

“I object to being treated as a test subject!”

“It was just a suggestion.”

“Um, hi,” Jeh said, bounding over like a gazelle. She really liked moving like this, but even she could tell now was not the time to run around and giggle madly.

“Hi Jeh,” Blue said. “Welcome to charade prison! Where we get to be imprisoned with a Crystalline One who doesn’t know Karli.”

“Let me try,” Jeh said, switching to Desc. “Hello, Crystalline One!”

Words from the Crystalline One entered her mind immediately. It was not Karli. It was not Desc. It was not any language she could ever remember hearing.

But she understood what it meant perfectly.

“Oh good, you speak multiple languages. I’ll be able to teach you Standard better. So… uh… dangit I don’t know the word for language in your languages, um…”

“I… I understand you!” Jeh stammered, speaking with words she didn’t know she had. “How… how do I understand you!?”

“WHAT!? How. How. It’s been thousands of years, there is no way Standard will still be spoken in the same form it was back then! Languages drift! How!?”

“I… I don’t know! I’m…” Jeh shook her head. “I… I don’t even know how old I am, I regenerate, I… oh my goodness this is so weird I can just think of a word and it appears this is nothing at all like learning one…”

“You… regenerate? Are… …Jenny?”

“H-huh?” Screams. Pain. Agony. “My name’s Jeh.” Heat. Fire. A red hand. “W-who’s Jenny?”

“The name of… well, someone like you? I don’t know, I don’t understand anything, even an immortal’s sense of the language should have drifted with the language I don’t even…”

“Um… care to let us in on what’s being said?” one of the twins asked.

Jeh rubbed the back of her head. “Uh… neither of us understand how it’s possible for me to know her language. She’s speaking something called Standard that’s… apparently thousands of years old and really shouldn’t still be spoken? And I have no idea how I know it, and…”

“…You weren’t relearning languages all this time,” the other twin said.

“Huh?”

“You were learning new ones. You’re just extremely good at it, probably because you’re so ancient.”

“But I don’t remember anything from any of that!”

“You remember Standard, apparently.”

“Oh boy…” Jeh put her hands to her head. “But… it’s just there, I don’t ever remember… anything about…”

“Hey, hey,” Vaughan said, putting his arms around Jeh. “It’s okay. You don’t need to know where it came from. We’re just so lucky that you do know it.”

“I…” Jeh took in a deep breath and let out a sigh. “Okay!” She turned to look at the pedestal and switched to Standard. “My freak out is… reasonably under control, how’s yours?”

“I’ve sectioned it off in another section of myself where it can scream for a while. It’s quite loud and annoying but I can deal with this impossibility for a moment. Anyway, uh, you’re Jeh?”

“Yep, name’s Jeh. You?”

“Wanderlust. I have had no need to use it in so long…”

“…Well, glad to meet you, Wanderlust! Care to explain why you broke our ship?”

“Oh! Uh, I am so sorry about that it was a complete accident I thought you were one of the ancient robots that suddenly activated for some reason, I didn’t realize you were from Ikyu*.”

*The word Wanderlust is using for Ikyu is not “Ikyu,” but to avoid confusion it is translated here as such.

“Robots…” Jeh mulled the word over in her mouth. She knew the word, and she knew how to use it, but its meaning wasn’t fully understood in her mind just yet. “You mean rigids?”

“Oh, no, these are quite different than rigids, they predate magic itself.”

Jeh blinked. “What.”

“I can see there will be a lot of explaining… and to keep you from having to explain it twice, perhaps you should relay what I’m saying to your friends over there?”

“Oh, right. …I know how to do that, didn’t even think of that.” She turned to her friends and smiled awkwardly, speaking in Karli. “Sorry, got involved there. Uh, so I have a feeling this conversation is going to drop a few massive explosions on how we understand things. So… I’m going to translate what Wanderlust here says.”

“Good name,” Keller said.

“He likes your name,” Jeh told Wanderlust.

“I spent a lot of time coming up with it, he sure knows a good name when he hears one.”

“Uh… right. Anyway… um…” Jeh put her hand to her chin. “So I’ll translate for everyone and facilitate the conversation. For the record—she doesn’t want to kill us, th—oops.” She switched to Karli. “For the record, she doesn’t want to kill us, the damage was just an accident. She thought she was one of those ancient… huh, the word doesn’t translate. Ancient not-rigid-things we found that just started moving.”

“I guess that makes sense… what else could we have been?” Vaughan said.

And so the conversation occurred, very slowly, with Jeh relaying everything and many interruptions.

“So, where should we start?” Wanderlust asked.

“A good question…” Blue said. “I’m not… sure, there are so many questions…”

“I have questions for you too! How did you get here? Why did you get here? What is Jeh? And… oh it’s so much, I haven’t even talked to people since I left, it’s… I just had to section off the part of myself that was about to start screaming from excitement and another part that was about to panic from overstimulation.”

“Must be nice t’ be a Crystalline One,” Keller observed.

“Oh yes, it is, but it also isn’t.”

“Oh for the love of the Crown!” the Sourdough twins shouted. “Look, here’s how you talk. Ahem, Jeh, translate. Greetings, Wanderlust! We are Rina and Rona Sourdough, that’s Agent Keller, that’s Gideon Vaughan—please call him Vaughan—that’s Blue, and you already know Jeh. We are members and associates of the Wizard Space Program which operates out of the Kingdom of Kroan on Ikyu. Our mission is to explore the surface of the moon, map it, and return with samples to Ikyu so they may be studied. Our goals are to further our understanding of the universe, prove that space travel is viable and useful, develop space technology further, and survey possible beneficial materials in space for the Kingdom. Pleasure to make your acquaintance.”

As Jeh finished translating that, she added, “Yeah, we probably should have started there.”

“Absolutely fascinating! Well, I shall respond in turn. I am Wanderlust. Several thousand years ago, I decided to leave Ikyu because the world was becoming too crowded and bothersome for me, I could not live in peace, I had become too well known among the Alliance—oh, that most assuredly doesn’t exist anymore. The Alliance was a nearly worldwide association of leaders and governments whose purpose was… I’m gonna be honest, we always said it was to encourage unity but it was mostly just so we could uncover every hidden secret the world had to offer. We were a bunch of dreamers who wanted to see it all… ended up In politics… oh boy that’s a mess of a story. Ahem, I decided to leave it all behind. It occurred to me that I could just leave Ikyu. Most didn’t dare since the arcane field drops off out here, but I decided to brave it and set myself up on this brave new world. My mission since then has been to explore as much of the universe as I can from here, launching rocks and parts of myself into the mundane abyss to see what I find!”

Once this was translated, Vaughan raised a hand. “Hold on, arcane field? What’s that?”

“You don’t know? You got all the way up here and you don’t know that magic gets weaker the further away from Ikyu you get?”

“It… does?”

Blue looked at her horn. “Blast it! That’s what the headache has been about, not the stress! AGH why are there so many obvious things staring us in the face and we don’t see them!?”

“To be fair, the drive didn’t get any weaker.”

“That’s because the drive operated almost entirely based on internal magic stored in the crystal,” Wanderlust explained. “It doesn’t need a very strong field to activate spells since most of the energy is internal. If you left the field, it would stop working as the various parts would no longer be able to communicate. Your racial attributes, meanwhile, rely almost entirely on the field and thus are much more sensitive to its strength. If you had arrived here when I did, you probably wouldn’t have been able to levitate anything at all right now!”

“The field is getting stronger?” Blue asked.

“Yes, Ikyu continually produces more and more of it. The boundary is now a significant distance past the orbit of the moon. When I arrived, it was barely past it.”

“That’s why the crystals here are so small!” Blue realized. “They’re growing in a weaker field and have been growing for less time!”

“I… huh I guess that would be right, I never thought of that before. The crystals here have always been kind of useless to me…”

“We’d use them,” Keller said. “There ain’t no surface crystals on Ikyu no more, have t’ go in the mines. They can be picked up like candy here, people will want that.”

The Sourdough twins nodded. “Wanderlust, you have the most claim to the moon, what say you?”

“Claim!? Me, claim the moon… I guess I am the only one living here, hmm. Well. The moon is only useful to me as the furthest place from Ikyu that has enough magic for me to be able to use my senses that isn’t just floating awkwardly in space. Having ground is nice. Anyway, you all can do what you want with the moon, I don’t care, I’ll only lay claim to the area around where I currently am. Which is a lot larger than it looks, a lot of me is underground so I can have different viewing angles, but the moon is big you’ll be fine.”

“The Crown’ll like that,” Keller said

“I have a feeling I’d like to be on the right side of the Crown!” Wanderlust said with a shimmering laugh. “I remember thinking that I never wanted to see people again when I came here… oh how wrong I was, it seems.”

“People are nice, aren’t they?” Jeh asked.

“Speaking from experience?”

Jeh nodded. “I… my earliest memories are being in a forest, having forgotten apparently everything about what I once was. I liked the forest. But coming out of the forest and doing things is so much nicer. Maybe it’s time for you to come out of the forest too!”

“Well, I suspect I don’t really have much of a choice, naturally other craft like yours will follow and I can’t exactly move further out, there’s nothing there.”

“Why do you need magic?” Blue asked. “You’re a Crystalline One, you can make your own, right?”

“That only applies to a certain extent. I will be able to maintain my awareness and physical structure, this is true. However, all my senses, as a Crystalline One, rely on magic to be executed. If I were to fly past the arcane field, I would become a mind trapped in a physical body with no way to feel beyond it, or even see. It would be quite nightmarish. Casting spells without being able to see would be quite difficult, and doing so at a distance would be all but impossible. The Seven Colors may seem independent, but in reality they are not, Orange cannot operate fully in complete isolation.“

Blue was scribbling this all down furiously. “What else can you tell us about the fundamental nature of magic?”

“I’m afraid I wasn’t an arcane researcher, even though that was what the Alliance cared the most about. I was and always have been an explorer. I can tell you what occurs—that I can’t leave the arcane field—but not why. Ikyu’s generation of arcane energy was the big mystery everyone was researching when I left.”

“When did ya leave?” Keller asked. “Compared t’ now.”

“Hmm… I didn’t start keeping exact dates until it became important to my explorations, I’d have to guess… four to five thousand years ago?”

“Before the Second Cataclysm, then,” Keller said.

“There was a second one?” Wanderlust paused for a while. “That would explain why no one ever came to find me… and why your understanding of Standard hasn’t changed, Jeh. It must have happened not too long after I left… do you know what caused this Second Cataclysm?”

Keller shook his head. “Nobody does. Somethin’ went wrong, every kingdom collapsed. All or most Crystalline Ones shattered.”

“Good thing I bailed, it seems… Though what a tragedy that everything everyone worked for fell apart like that…”

“Well, we’re still here,” Jeh said, jumping on top of the Orange pedestal and kicking her legs back and forth. “So there’s still hope, right? We’re out exploring, looking for answers…”

“Yes, you are! Oh, I so look forward to what strange things you will find. Unlike me you can go out there. You’re biological in nature for the most part, a lack of magic will not hinder your progress.”

“We kind of have been relying on magic to keep us alive,” Vaughan pointed out. “And without magic, Jeh won’t… regenerate.”

“Oh… right. Well, it seems as if there will be a few hurdles, but I’m sure you can surmount them.”

“How would we even keep breathing without magic?” Blue asked. “We rely entirely on the air restorer to recycle the air… wait hold on how are we breathing!?”

“I filled this room with air from Ikyu.”

“…Where did you get that?”

“I launch rocks and pieces of myself into space regularly, it’s not that hard to scoop up pieces of atmospheres. Over the millenia I’ve amassed quite a collection. It’s only surface air, though, the air inside your craft has a somewhat different feel.”

“…Do you want some?” either Rina or Rona asked.

“I already have what was inside your craft.”

“I mean a lot more. We have some extra pressurized air tanks.”

“Ooooh, a large amount of pressurized air from the surface! Might even be able to distill significant water out of it… absolutely! I’ll be sure to give you some of my samples in exchange, though I can’t get surface samples.”

“While that’s all well and good,” Keller said. “I think we’ve all forgotten that the drive is busted. How are we gonna get back?”

Blue’s eyes widened. “…Uh oh. Oh no we can’t rebuild the drive here and we don’t have enough food to last forever and there’s no food here and…”

“Relax, I can launch you back.”

“You can… launch us back?”

“Blue, I’m an utterly massive Orange Crystalline One who has been launching rocks into space precisely for thousands of years. I can throw you back to Ikyu no problem, all you have to worry about is landing.”

“That’s… going to be a problem without a drive to control our descent…”

“What if we hit the ocean?” Jeh asked. “All we’ll have to do is make sure we’re entering slow enough not to light on fire, and if all we need to do is hit the water we can tumble all we want until splash!”

“I can aim for an ocean.”

“…This is going to be crazy,” Blue said, shaking her head. “Absolutely insane, nuts, asinine… we really are a bunch of lunatics.”

“Operation Lunacy indeed,” Vaughan added with a chuckle.

Jeh found that she couldn’t translate the pun directly into Standard. “Uh… it’s funny, believe me.”

“I’ll have to take your word for it. Anyway, now that we have a plan worked out… Jeh, I have to admit, you interest me the most. I knew someone like you, and I thought she was unique in the world… you look so much like her too, but you don’t act the same. You have more of a heart to you.”

“Um… thanks?”

“You say you remember nothing?”

“Yeah, absolutely nothing from before the forest. I ‘remember’ how to do lots of things, like talk Standard, cook, but like… nothing else.”

“Hmm…” Wanderlust paused. “…Have you ever looked at the base of the back of your neck?”

“…How would I?”

“Have any of the rest of you?”

“I don’t… recall anything?” Vaughan said.

“Humor me, the person I knew had a marking back there.”

Jeh shrugged, pulling off her bear hood and tugging it down. “You guys see anything?”

“There… are four symbols here, but I can’t read them,” Blue said. “They look almost like a birthmark…”

“Ah. Yes, that is the same marking she had. I could never read the letters either, but she assured me they said ‘Gen Zero’. It’s where she got her name, Jenny Zero.”

Pain. So much pain. Pain wasn’t a problem, but why was it now? It was deep, so deep, must be pushed away…

Blue must have noticed something was wrong. “Jeh? Are you… okay?”

“I… I don’t want to hear about her anymore…” Jeh stammered.

“…I see,” Wanderlust said. “I shall respect your wishes. Perhaps this is best… in this short time I have talked with you, I have seen that you are not her. And that is a good thing.”

Jeh nodded, finding it hard to get enough breath to translate back to everyone else. In the midst of this one of the Sourdough twins pulled her into a hug, the other one remaining standing in her “official business” pose, looking up at the facets of Wanderlust.

“So,” the standing twin said. “We’re sure there’s a lot we could learn from you about the past, and a lot you can learn from us about the present. But we came here with a purpose to learn about the world outside. We’ve been listening, you have been launching things into space for millenia.” She smirked. “What have you found?”

“Oh! I thought you’d never ask! Why don’t I just show you?”

~~~

SCIENCE SEGMENT:

The moon, according to our current estimates, is 4.53 billion years old.

Blue is woefully, woefully underestimating. A few million? Maybe a hundred million? Hah. Its age is in the billions.

Now, to be fair, the method Blue is using to check the age of things is crater-dating, which dates the surface of an object, not the object as a whole. So how old is the moon’s surface? The highlands, that is, the lighter parts, are estimated at… 4.4 billion years old, so not much younger than the moon itself.

The dark areas, which we call mare (pronounced “mar-ay”) because when we first saw them we associated them with seas, are younger. They’re dated to between 3.1 and 3.9 billion years ago. So, basically, every part of the moon is absurdly, ridiculously, outrageously old considering the timescales of people who put the beginning of the universe at the earliest a hundred thousand years ago. So you can imagine why thinking of things that old shakes up some worldviews.

The reason Blue’s calculations for the ages are so far off are because she has very little knowledge of how cratering and cratering rates actually work. They can—and are!—used to actually measure the ages of planetary surfaces, but that requires knowing the rate of crater impacts at different eras of the solar system and having lots of bodies to compare against to get good readings, and to really cinch it down some baseline dates should be obtained from more accurate methods of dating, such as carbon dating, which as one might expect, Kroan doesn’t have access to.

These days we have good measurements for how often craters are made due to impacts in the modern Solar System, and with some clever inferences we have determined roughly how common they were in the “old days” as well. The rate used to be much higher, so much so that we have an era called the Late Heavy Bombardment theorized, where there were a lot more. This variability makes it rather difficult to get even remotely accurate dates, often with error possibilities in the hundreds of millions of years if we go far enough back, but bodies with more recent, refreshing surfaces can be dated more accurately.

Blue and Vaughan are also incorrect that there are no craters on Ikyu, there are some just as there are on Earth, just not that many big ones and the surface of the Earth readily gets rid of most signs of big impacts somewhat quickly. The largest crater we know about is the Vredefort Impact Structure in South Africa, which, while confirmed, is so eroded away it’s not easy to see that it’s a crater anymore, even from above it just looks like crescent-shape of rock that’s a different color than the nearby stuff. It is absolutely huge, originally in excess of a hundred kilometers, but the glory is past and now it’s just another part of the landscape. (By being clever we have found evidence of larger craters, but those are no longer visible at all.)

So things in space are really, really old, and largely inert objects like the moon, since they rarely change, can serve as a record of things that happened in the past. Even a cursory inspection of craters can lead to great mysteries being unraveled… who knows what can come from a closer inspection?