Crack in The Wall

[Noth Squadron]

. . .Theodore Syd, Noth Squadron . . .Kaarst Drydock, Hangar #4 -> Dark Matter Storm, Omega-58 -> Omega-41 -> Omega-5 -> Madsack Fragment, Omega-11 Get in, then. We've got a long road ahead of us. I look through my own eyes as the last of few supplies are lazily loaded in the ship. But why are my eyeballs darting around like some crazed junkie itching for the next dose of slog? Oh, yeah... This is how we make sure everything is bolted to the floor, ceiling and walls. Lazarev's engines fire up once more as we finally depart Kaarst's eerie embrace. I've noticed that The Wild flies manually through the Dark Matter Storm -- always. Maps are useless for the ship's basic AI pathfinding to make use of. Yes...the Storm is all around us, but there's also small, highly concentrated patches that occur randomly and pack quite a punch. It doesn't matter if you're in a small, nimble fighter or a giant warship with shield arrays just as big. You can neither tank or dodge the radiation -- let alone the occasional lightning bolt giving your hull a nice tattoo. Conveniently enough, getting out of Omega-58 wasn't the hardest thing. It's almost is if the stars aligned and we missed every storm pocket. The rest of the trip was just as boring. Fortunately the auto-pilot took care of actual travel, while I was sorting supplies in the cargo bay. Curiosity must've gotten the better of me, because I somehow grew the balls to open one of the crates holding some of these artifacts. They were magnificent. Oval rocks with an impossibly smooth finish. And yet... a subtle headache crept up in the back of the prison that is my skull. Mild, pulsating pain that was all too similar to how a battering ram breaks down one of those apartment doors. Bam- ... Bam...- Bam...- until I eventually sealed the trinket away in that crate. The pain went away with it. After returning to the pilot seat, I've noticed that five hours already passed and we were in Omega-11 -- did the console break from the radiation? But that couldn't be right, could it? I saw the red sun right there in front of my eyes. Did I zone out for that long? For a split second the thought of Four and his practical jokes to kill boredom. And yet that didn't seem to be the case. Even so, my mouth went ahead and asked. There was a mix of confusion and annoyance complementing my already sour tone. Did you... [mumbles to themselves] Did you mess with the console's internal clock? Can you not sit in your seat for ten minutes without breaking something? In my defense. I really thought we were gone for that long.