New base already inhabited...

The team were pulling out everything we’d flagged as valuable. The next thing was to sweep the base and cave area as there had been some rooms there we hadn’t checked and the Dr had told us about a room with some tanks and things floating in them.
 
One thing that had stopped us was there were a number of doors that required keycards to access the rooms beyond. There was a good chance Crane, who had appeared to be running things on the base would have an all access keycard. A quick search of his body revealed I was right, he had a keycard. Now time to test it’s access. There was a biohazard crate in the hangar Ilyara had wanted to access so I handed her the card and left her to it. It was her that wanted to see what was in there. I didn’t want to be too close to anything labelled biohazard. I might not be flesh and blood but I could still be affected by things.
 
I took another card that I’d found and went off to sweep the base for any unopened doors. On the right was a room we’d not been in. I opened the door and found a woman strapped to a chair. Judging by the state of her she had obviously been beaten. I had no idea who she was, or if she was likely to go after us so I asked who she was and if she’d play nice if we let her go. She nodded and said her name was Cassie. She was a hunter who had been in the area after desert skates. She’d been tied to the chair for 5 days so was stiff and struggling to move.
 
I pinged Ilyara a message and got her to meet us at the medbay then we got her up and started helping her to the medbay. On the way we asked her if she knew why she’d been taken. She raised an eyebrow. ‘I’m female, they were pretty much all male, you do the math’ I nodded. She did tell us she had a lot of knowledge on the area and convoy movements if we needed it. I offered to get her to wherever it was she wanted to go as it seems that her vehicle wasn’t here so she’d be stranded otherwise.
 
Once she was there Max asked us to go and check on the Alien room, make sure nothing else was alive in there. I did debate suggesting a handful of grenades as the quick way of doing the job but there might be something valuable in there so I thought against it. I did, however, ask for Dez to come with me. He was handy in a fight and if there was a thing in there that was going to cause me any issues it would be nice to have someone to hide behind. Sadly one of the downsides to looking human was that the creatures might not realise I’m not the good kind of crunchy and I really am not good with ketchup.
 
Fortunately I didn’t need to hide behind Dez and the room was just goo and hatched eggs. There was a shaft int he middle of the room that looked a little too regular to be natural. I sent a drone down and could make out rock and shards of metal, but it wasn;t anything I could identify. I messaged Tin and asked if she’d mind coming and having a look. Once she got there she had a look down the hole, she didn’t seem too keen on going down but agreed to go down as far as the drone to get a better look. She handed Dez a grappling hook and told him not to let go and threw a rope down the shaft. The video feed went a little wobby but I was still able to keep an eye on her.
 
She shouted up, the rock was just natural rock, nothing special to report. The metal, however, was manufactured. Which was interesting considering it was mixed in with the rock. I asked her to grab some samples and she pulled out a pot from a pocket and managed to get some samples of the rock and metal.
 
We asked her to go a little further down but the drone could only go another 25 feet and it would be out of range of me so we messaged Ilyara and asked her to come with the hub device she carried in case I needed somewhere to go in case my body suffered critical damage. Ilyara turned up and handed me the hub device but also suggested that she turn herself into a bat and fly down. Tin seemed happy to get out of the shaft and left Ilyara to it.
 
I sent the drone down with Ilyara in case she got into any trouble. For a while all we could see was more of the light brown rock and chunks of metal, but then we also saw what we could only assume was some kind of biological material that looked like it had been scraped onto the rock, or something had hit the side and then scraped down the wall.
 
As they went further down the shaft I noticed a pinky-purple light, it was getting brighter and then the source of the light became apparent as there was a tunnel off to the side of the shaft, Ilyara followed the tunnel and so I followed her, the tunnel was only short and finished in a large cavern which was illuminated by think pinky purple light. The scene it illuminated however was slightly disturbing.
 
There was what looked to be a giant rock lying smashed on the ground with runes carved into it. Scattered around the cave were glowing crystals which appeared to be the source of the mysterious light. There were also corpses scattered around the floor, both human and, well, decidedly not human. There was also the remains of a mole drilling unit.
 
I sent the drones in closer to the non-human remains. There were some gorilla like creatures, blacky-brown fur but no flesh on the bones. The fur looked desiccated. One had six eyes in the skull set in a triangular pattern. One had over-extended canines and the bones of the skeleton looked exceptionally thick. There were also poseidonian, but without the natural armour modern poseidonians have.There were some six legged creatures but with a body and torso that rose up with talons and arms with three fingers.
 
The strange thing was, these creatures were obviously not human but were also not Amaranthian, or posiedonian, or at least the majority definitely weren’t. Some had some features but they were also very different, too different. They had also been there for quite some time. I sent the drone around the outside of the cave looking for any other entrances but there wasn’t one.
 
Whenever I got closer to the big rock like thing in the centre, there was some interference and static. It was also skewing the data from any scans we were running. I did make sure to record everything, even if some of it wasn’t 100% clear.
 
I turned the drone around to check on Ilyara just in time to see her bat form fail and her return to human form and fall to the ground. To be fair to her she did land on her feet even if she did wobble slightly. I made a note of it for the Broadcastle bloopers reel. It was only fair that we had something other than Max on it.
 
She wants to stay down now she’s back in person-form and have a bit more of a poke around. Scarlett decides to go and keep her company on the off-chance anything happens. While they’re down there we send a couple of empty crates down and get Dez to help us pull a couple of the bodies back up. Scarlett also levitated a couple up for further investigation.
 
Ilyara starts looking around the rock in the centre of the room, it appears that it’s actually a ship of some kind. She couldn’t get all the way around it, but from what we could see, it operates in a way totally different to anything I’ve ever seen. There are a few display screens that are operational but there’s nothing I can do as I can’t connect to them and, even if I could, the language on them is alien.
 
Max wants to get some archaeologists involved to look into this further for us. I do look for anyone in the area who might be interested. However I do offer a word of caution, that we need to be careful who we get involved, as we don’t know exactly what this is. We don’t know what technology the ship has, or weapons for that matter.
 
They had been down there for some time when we noticed that the crystals were changing colour to blues and greens. According to Scarlett they were also humming in reaction to her. She said it likely meant that some of the creatures may have been psychic. Then all of a sudden the crystals seem to increase in intensity and bright light spills out. I looked at Scarlett who looked unsure, saying she can feel the edge of memories of some kind, but this is not her expertise. She suggests we need to get someone with psychometry to come down here and have a look around.
 
She also noticed that something was moving in the bowels of the ship that wasn't dead yet. Something in the ship was moving, which could possibly mean that there was something in there that was still alive. She suggests they should get out, with there only being the two of them down there it would be difficult if it came to a fight. Ilyara had changed into her wolf form to have a sniff around so she just levitated her up and out into the shaft.
 
I started recording as Ilyara was trying to move around by paddling at the air and it was hilarious. I felt a bit bad but I did ping the stream to the others comms for the fun of it. It didn’t last long as she quickly changed back into her regular form. She was good enough to grab the drone on the way up as the casing was starting to crack from the acid damage. Once they got back to the top we got the both of them to sit down and take a break, they had been pushing it and we didn’t want them going too far.
 
 
Once they’d recovered we headed towards the entrance to the caves. Max was making arrangements for the doors to be sealed to stop anything coming out of the caves. It was unlikely it would happen but we didn’t want to take any chances. Ilyara wanted to go and have a look at the room with the tanks the Dr had told us about, she wanted to see if there was a way we could seal the doors to stop them being opened. It took a bit of messing about as they were old doors but I was able to disable the opening system so it would take a lot of effort to get the doors open. It was a tricky one, we may want to be able to get in there at a later date, but we wanted to make it difficult enough that people would think twice about getting in. Not to mention if there was anything in there stopping it being able to get out accidentally.
 
While we were there I remembered about the weird job I’d done with Ilyara and suggested that we could contact Professor Archibald Ferdinand, the collector. He was into word stuff like this and may know someone we could trust to investigate the wreck and the bodies
 
Once we were back in the hangar Max came to speak to us. We’d been debating about looking for a new base for ages as the current base was getting rather cramped. Between the people we’d recruited into Broadcastle and the amount of kit we’d acquired it was bursting at the seams. It was actually a pretty good idea. It was already set up for the larger aircraft and we’d have plenty of space for everything else. I was sure Leon and the team would likely grumble, they’d just spent hours stripping things out and now it could all stay.
 
The other issue with the old base was it was in Raylans name. We now knew that he was secretary working for the ERF. It was only a matter of time until they came to claim it back. Max spoke to everyone to let them know we would be moving everything over and gave instructions that the old base was to be stripped, lock stock and barrel. We would leave nothing for them.
 
The Dr came to find me a little later on. She had decided she wanted to stay, she would work primarily with Ilyara but would also work with Broadcastle where she was needed. I pinged a message over to Rui to ask her to help me create a new identity for the Dr. Half an hour later and Nadine Courtier was Nadia Constance who had been working in the R&D wing of Ilyara’s hospital. We’d had to bribe Hideo Kojima but he seemed happy to be getting another highly qualified member of staff. I connected to the com buoy in Leon’s ship and got everything pinged out.
 
One of the things we’d found in the base was two military grade robots. Although these were under the ownership of Broadcastle, I was likely to be the primary one using them and so they were under my control. I played it cool but inside I was dancing. I now had three military grade robot bodies to play with. What’s not to love.
 
Ilyara suggested we contact Umbrella about what we had found in the caves. They had the know-how to deal with it, as well as the funding and resources. I put together a series of videos and images and we sent it over to Prof Ashford so he could get a better idea of what they would be dealing with. Ilyara sent everything over to him they discussed the logistics and what would happen next. He finished by sying ‘My Daughter says to send her regards to Eliza’ he didn’t sound like he was happy calling her his daughter but he did, and it was progress on where he had been before.
 
Max arranged for some of the supplies we had found at the base to be transported to Redditch. He had been working with them on freeing some slaves and they had a pretty good system in place but needed some supplies which we’d just found quite a bit of. There was more than what we needed and I know Max was keen to support them as much as possible.