Foundation

[Craines]

On board the Hakobune, the four specialists looked at the viewscreens. A small Nomad incursion had broken out, and the whole of the planet, this 'Foundation,' immediately went up in arms. Apparently, for some reason that none of the four could determine, even the smallest Nomad presence would be exterminated with the utmost discretion. Without any action to entertain them, they went to their separate quarters to think about what had occurred.

Richard Walters went to the Captain's Quarters, and hung Johnford up. With his hand in his silky beard, and his mind pondering the destructive abilities of sound, Walters drifted off into a standing daydream.

Professor Gregori vanHoffman went to the bar and indulged in some Rheinland Ale, his eyes misting over. Something was strange about this planet. The gravity was all off - it was too much for the planet. While the mass only warranted the gravity of a large moon, this place was producing the amount of a full-blown Class M planet. It was mind-boggling... only the idea of 'dark matter', disproved so many ages ago, could account for the disproportionate gravitonic readings. His head slowly slumped down, and vanHoffman dozed off, a smile playing at his hidden mouth.

Samantha Cinders went to the Workshop, where she began to play with some metals. Adding in some niobium, a dash of titanium, and some sulfur... no, no, it was all wrong! Hands in her hair, pulling it but failing to remove any of clumps, Cinders stalked the well-equipped workshop. She glared at the mixing pot of bubbling failure. Nothing had gone right in so long... and that meeting she had missed had been about her commission and its revocation. And now, she was in an system-wide mystery... she went over to a cast-iron sculpture of hers that functioned as a chair, jumped onto it, and buried her eyes in her hands.

Doctor Daishou Hiia was in the stark white sterile biology lab. His eyes were fixed on a Nomad sample - a viable Nomad sample, completely living and functioning. It had taken too long to get for Hiia to surrender it to the Foundation fools! They couldn't understand the importance of the Nomads to the Deius Prime experiment! He paced about the room, looking this way and that, but his gaze always returned to the squirming purple mass inside the large test tube. Nothing would take it from him, Hiia decided. Nothing.

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