Foundation

[Craines]

At that moment, a large shuttle landed outside of the Hall of the Historian. It was the Hakobune, once a great pioneering ship, and now a renegade science vessel. The Hakobune had on it four people who would help the Historian immensely. They were Richard Walters, an elderly Bretonian man who had served as a butler to the late Fiona deLuna for a year, and had been in such prestigious halls as that of the Queen of Bretonia, the President of Liberty, and the Chancellor of Rheinland. He was also a clandestine assassin, perhaps the most skilled in the universe and the least talked about. Never had a murder been traced back to him.

The second man to walk off the Hakobune was the esteemed Doctor Daishou Hiia, head of the Deius Prime experiment. With a masters degree in metamathematics, and two Ph.Ds in genesis biology and viral biochemistry, he was a master of terraforming, as had been exemplified during his stint at Planetform. He had spent most of his life on the Deius Prime experiment, but that had ended with the sudden and unexplainable death of the captain of the Hakobune.

The third man to descend was a stout looking Rheinlander, short, fat, and with a massive beard that spanned the width of his belt. He wasn't more than four feet high, and he had a large round nose that was sunburn red. He was Professor Gregori Gutenteval vanHoffman, a master of gravitonics and the head of the Rheinland Jump Hole identification effort. Along with the lab coat he wore, a jug of alcohol swung freely from his belt. His undershirt was brown, his pants black, and his skin was tanned from working on stations that orbited stars. The top of his head was exposed, and his thick black hair made a little crown where it was evident. He smiled jovially while he got down.

Finally, a tall, thin woman with shoulder-length, fiery red hair and a look of bemusement walked down the boarding ramp. Her eyes sparkled behind her glasses, and her face was framed in by the wild, uncontrolled mess of hair that she had. Her efforts to straighten her hair had been in vain, and she had accepted her curls for the untamed entity that they were. She was Samantha Cinders, Liberty's metallurgist and chemist extraordinaire. She had been at a meeting before Doctor Hiia had interrupted, and as such, was dressed in a pinstripe business suit. She didn't look the part, but she was the foremost mixer of metals in the Sirius system.

They were four unlikely friends, bound together by a strange invitation that Doctor Hiia had received. It had requested each of the four persons gathered by name. A very strange event, but still, they had seen weirder things in their days.

Professor vanHoffman looked at his ornate pocketwatch, and turned to his companions. "It vould be vise, my friends, if ve enter that building! After all, ve don't vant to be late!"

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