Exploration – Unknown

Shara turned back around after acquiring her goodies from the pod. It seemed that the fires on the pod's externals had extinguished themselves without the oxygen the interior of the pod provided as it leaked, which was both a good and a bad sign. Good, because it meant if she left something here it wouldn't burn up; Bad because Shara had no way to replenish her diminishing supply of oxygen if something were to happen to her if she ended up here longer than the 24 hours of emergency oxygen materials allowed for.

This could be considered a bad place to be.

Valkyr weighed all of the options available before delivering the best and worst options to Shara.

"Well, with my analysis, it seems that the worst option is to die. At least for you. The best option is to live, again, for you. The current situation leaves us with two choices. We can attempt to explore; and die knowing you tried to find a way out or stay here and wait for the reaper. I don't have any other options for you at the moment, Shara. But I think I'd prefer the former rather than the latter. It seems a lot more interesting."

Sometimes, Shara wondered why she allowed Valkyr to exhibit such levels of sarcasm.

Pulling herself out of her momentary inactivity, she began to look around the room in earnest. The floors seemed to be one piece of metal, intricately carved and chiseled to both provide grip and decorate. The metal had a slight tint of iridescence to it, which added to its charm, but Shara couldn't tell if it was just a coating or some inherent quality of the metal itself. The walls were slightly illuminated along the top edges, a dull red light flashing intermittently. Shara could see the stars through the hole the pod had burrowed into the earth to get down to here. Shara would hazard a guess of at least 5 meters of earth had been over the room she was now in.

Walking away from the pod; the lights on her suit of armor gave off enough light to see quite a distance. The room she was in was at least 30 meters long and wide, large enough to fit a small orbital fighter! She didn't see anything related to that though, so she figured this must have been a small warehouse due to its complete emptiness and the size of the doors she could now see in front of her.

That, or it was built for a very large race of extraterrestrials.

Shara's back trembled at the thought. Something that size could crush her armor like an empty tin can.

Walking towards the massive doors in front of her, she paused. She couldn't see a way to open the doors, and nor did she see a way to get into a console or terminal of some sort. She walked closer to the three and a half meter wide doors in front of her, hazarding a touch as she attempted to figure out a way to pry them open. Alas, she was unable to figure out a way to open the doors without using force or hacking them open.

"Valkyr, review my video footage, do you notice any hardware we can use to get through these doors?"

"5 Meters to the left of the door, there's a loose panel on the wall. Perhaps that may give us access to the wider areas beyond."

After taking a very short walk to the aforementioned location, Shara dug the tips of her armored gauntlets underneath the small panel Valkyr had mentioned. Prying was little effort for the servo-assisted armor, with Shara easily managing to remove the panel. Valkyr monitored the situation from the viewpoint of her helmet, eventually stopping her from frying herself when she almost grabbed a very high current wire.

"Shara, you need to sever this wire to get the doors to open, if the data I have collected is right. It appears there is some sort of protocol behind this door being closed, most likely due to the gaping hole left by our ride in."

Shara sighed, and then realized something. If there was an airlock protocol, the atmosphere inside would be different! She might not die of choking to death on her own carbon dioxide! This was momentous news for Shara's still injured body, just walking the distance from the pod to the doors was excruciating for her body to move.

"Shara, you'll have to cut the cable somehow. But you can't touch it to cut it. I would recommend using that rifle of yours."

Shara hefted the railrifle up to her shoulder, the buttstock of the rifle coming into a seating notch in the armor she was confined in. After positioning, aiming, and contemplating the benefits versus the cost of firing this thing, Shara blasted the fist-thickness cable until it was completely severed. At the moment of severance, there was a large arc of electricity that crossed the gap as the doors slowly began creeping up to about head height. There was a large whoosh that came through her armor's external microphones, amplified by them because of the lack of other sounds.

Shara went through the door slowly, slightly limping as the cocktail of painkillers didn't take all the edge off anymore. Grunting, she made her way through the door and into the dim red lighting on the other side of the door, the flashlights on her suit making the shadows jump and making the general atmosphere in this area very menacing.

Once on the other side of the door, she again took a moment to analyze her surroundings. Again, the hallway around her was almost completely unfurnished, with not even a trace of dust. There was a terminal beside the door next to her flashing, but she wasn't able to determine what it said, as it was in an entirely different form of writing than she's ever seen, most likely alien.

"Valkyr, what's this say?"

"Insufficient data to process and translate this message. We'd have to find more of this kind of script, and some sort of Rosetta Stone for it, it's not similar to anything I have in the database. I'd hazard a guess that's about the atmosphere venting. Tap on it and see what it does?"

"I guess that's about our only option to see if it'll close. If it doesn't I guess we have the internal oxygen of the armor."

Shara tapped the monitor of the terminal.

The door seemed to immediately drop down the small amount it had opened, and then the floor and the door seemed to weld to each other.

"Guess we're not going back that way."