Given
Copyright© 2026 by Daniel Tors
Chapter 1
A gloved hand is placed on a small rectangular camera sitting atop a halfway cluttered metal table, the girl it belongs to taking a second to let in and out a controlled breath before doing anything. Switching the camera on, she places herself formally in front of it.
The small room it viewed was largely devoid of any color other than white; the only things breaking this were the grey flooring, various handles adorning the walls, a monitor along the opposite wall, and the girl herself. Though she had on a decently form-fitting pilot suit, one which was mostly burnt orange with black accents around the joints, it could be clearly discerned from the neck up that she was a Hyena. Her fur was a mix of dark and muted browns, with her short ears, snout, and unkempt mohawk being the darkest while the patch on her neck was closer to beige. Pretty much the only part of this image that wasn’t a dull color was her bright, pale green eyes. The suit making it a little easier to tell, her build was on the thinner side. She didn’t have much of a curve to her nor did she seem particularly fit, but that’s not to say she was without muscle mass. Despite the professional demeanor she now took, the girl appeared to only be in her late twenties.
Eyes pointed directly into the lens, she spoke in a matter-of-fact tone. “Having landed within the last two hours, I’ve attempted to signal any potential life in the unknown spacecraft. Failing that, all scans I have performed turned up negative, leaving me to believe the ship is abandoned. As there is no intelligent presence on the planet itself, I will attempt to enter the ship. Signals have already been sent to my field team and they are sure to be en route by now, though it is unclear exactly when they will arrive. By the time you’re seeing this there is sure to be a report with further details on our findings. In everyone’s best interest further commentary will be kept to a minimum.”
Taking the camera from the table she attached it to a metal ring circling her shoulder, one which took a moment to configure itself so it could automatically stabilize as the girl moved. She also, with only a slight moment of hesitation, grabbed a filled handgun holster and attached it to a slot on her hip. Approaching the airlock entrance, she placed a visored helmet on the thick collar of her suit and twisted it to lock it in place. With nothing more than a verbal command the suit sealed itself, leaving her to breathe nothing but what came from the air tank on her back.
As the airlock’s entrance closed behind her, a rather realistic-sounding feminine voice originating from the ceiling queried, “Is everything in order, Yuna?” Its voice was pleasant and smooth, but it still had mannerisms that made its artificial nature obvious to someone paying attention.
Yuna confirmed that all was well and she was ready to leave, the air draining from the chamber shortly after as warning lights lit up dramatically around her. Yuna’s hands shaking as the exit door slowly slid open, she briefly clenched them before stepping through to the outside. Keeping a consistent pace and her eyes focused forward, she walked down the metal ramp that had formed outside the exit of her ship down to the planet below. The planet she’d landed on, at least at a glance, seemed to be a habitable one. Grass that reached up to her knees came from loose soil and swayed in the heavy winds no doubt related to the blanket of dark clouds covering the sky. The area was a plateau with nothing much to see in any direction, though that’s true only of natural formations.
Her sleek and sharp fighter-jet-looking scout ship was dwarfed in size by the unknown craft she was approaching, one which took the shape of a long trapezoid with rounded edges and comparatively low-height sides. Its size was comparable to two upper-middle-class homes lined up next to each other, with that and the glossy metal sheen covering the entirety of its hull – save for the large windows spanning its side – making it hard to miss at near any distance. Coming to stand right beside it, the only indication of age was the back half of the ship’s evenly spaced landing gear having sunk slightly into the ground, the rest of it showing nothing more than dirt across its exterior. Yuna took a good twenty minutes or so circling it, a search that came up with no markings, writing, or anything that she could try to use. She saw that one end of the trapezoid was indented partially and had a window covering most of its area, but this one was also tinted and impossible to see through from this side. The gap being just large enough to freely walk around, she took to checking its underside. The first thing she saw of note – near immediately after she started – was a port about the size of her head, one with a bar that seemed like it could be grabbed and extended out to open its hatch. Only examining it briefly, she moved on within a few seconds.
Having searched much of its underside already and finding nothing but smooth surfaces, she came across a strip of brightly colored metal near the indented end of the craft. The strip was bright orange and slightly outdented, above it being two characters clearly from a written language and taking a similar form to the strip, as well as two rounded handles below. Yuna squinted her eyes a while at the written characters – both of which contained numerous lines and were comparative to Mandarin in complexity – silently moving her mouth as she did so. After looking at them for a minute or so, she pointed to the right character and moved her hand left as she spoke.
“‘Exception, entrance’.” Her voice was unsure though it wasn’t spoken as a question. Staring at them for just a moment longer, and glancing at an identical, much larger hatch she paid little focus to, she said, “Close enough,” under her breath. Reaching to take hold of the handles, Yuna wedged her hands under their ends and tugged downwards to detach them from the ship. It took a bit of fiddling with them to determine exactly how they were meant to be used, but after a while and a good deal of physical effort, she managed to twist the handles in just the right way that the circular hatch above them clicked open. Just as it did so the air around Yuna rushed inside, leaving her still with the task of pulling the weighty hatch down. Once done it could be seen that there was no illumination coming from within, the opening nothing more than a pitch-black hole from her view. Switching on a chest-mounted light, she did a short hop to grip the opening of the hatch and pulled herself inside.
It taking but a second to adjust to the off-kilter flooring, Yuna scanned the area. The room, though its surfaces were covered in a far duller metal, matched the outside in its minimalism. Aside from its walls now clearly having individual panels that could presumably be removed, it was completely empty – and immaculately clean, to go with it. Being a good sixty feet across – and certainly wider than that – the only things in sight were the hatch with an opening easily three times her size, and two doors on opposite walls. Despite the room only being not-quite thrice her height and really not that large, the emptiness made Yuna appear far smaller than she ought to.
Seeing that the door leading towards the ship’s back end had more orange writing next to it, Yuna approached that one first. This wall had far more writing on it than what she’d previously seen, though much of it wasn’t nearly as complicated either. There were three columns next to the door, all followed by what seemed to be a diagram. From right to left, the first was a vertical row of four characters, the second was a row of unique symbols that were all identical, and the third was mostly made up of simple shapes. From top to bottom, these shapes included a vertical line, two diagonal lines, a long horizontal line with two shorter ones on its upper right and left, and an open circle. The diagram to the far left was composed of the third symbol between the first and second, with the open circle being above both sides. She again took a moment to examine this, eventually starting to talk to a currently nonexistent audience.
“Assuming the glyphs are supposed to correlate with the symbols on the left I can tell that the vertical line means ‘you’, and the two diagonal lines mean ‘we’. The third symbol may mean ‘offer’, but that’s only due to a similar glyph I’ve seen before, and I don’t recognize the fourth one at all. As for how the symbols are combined over here...” Her sentence trailed off, leaving only the sound of wind rushing against the ship as she thought. After staring at it a while she finally came back saying that it was likely an attempt to communicate, though her understanding is too rudimentary to make any conclusions as to what exactly they were saying.
Peeling herself away from it, Yuna turned to look at the door beside it. Much like its twin opposite her, the door nearly reached the ceiling and had two handles of different sizes. Yuna took hold of the smaller handle closer to the bottom and worked it in much the same way as the hatch, leading to another strong gust of air flowing inside. The room that followed seemed to take up most of the ship’s length and looked more akin to a particularly wide hall. Its walls and center lined with metal tables and what were presumably desks of varying complexity, what was particularly notable were the metal boxes with black lining around their seems on each of the tables, all of which just as rounded and dull looking as everything else. It being the only one with a recognizable handle, Yuna hesitantly placed her hand on the box right on the room’s center-front table. Any attempt she made to nudge the box was futile as it stuck firmly to its original position, it being unclear if this was due to weight or something else holding it in position. Yuna’s eyes and hand then came to rest on the foreign handle with the latter tugging lightly at it once or twice. Jerking her hand away from it, she cleared her throat, instead opting to check one of the eight doors sandwiched between the desks.
At the entrance to the first room on her left she found more glyphs over the door which were just as outdented and brightly colored as all the others. Of the multiple characters she saw only one of them was readable to her, saying out loud that it meant, “Test.” Entering it, there was an obvious shift from the mostly barren rooms previous, and this one, which was filled with complex machinery. The ceiling and walls were stuffed to the brim with strange apparatuses, Yuna’s face as she looked over them only further cementing that there was no intuiting what these were used for. Barring the typical color scheme, none of them even had a recognizable through line in how they were designed – not to an outside observer, at least. Not touching any of it, she scoured the room for a good ten minutes before moving on.