This chapter contains material that I do not own, they are the property of one of the following: Akira Toriyama, Yoshihiro Togashi, Rumiko Takahashi, Tite Kubo, Masashi Kishimoto, Eiichiro Oda, and Yuji Naka. Please support these excellent artists.
I took in the image of the planet for a moment; oblivious to the young man that had come with me. I swiftly began running my eyes over the control panel. Thankfully the Ark I had lived on for so long had been so complex to operate. As it stood there were still a few devices that looked alien to me. But my eyes landed on the scan controls.
With a little work, the console came to life and began spewing out the numbers I had asked for. However the first number out, the one I was most interested in, was impossible. The diameter of the planet was easily over 100,000 km. This planet was several times larger than even the largest planet. I began to work furiously on the console. The hologram above shimmered and zoomed out. According to the readings, there were no suns orbiting the planet. How was that possible? In fact, how do we have a fairly regular twenty-four hour day?
I plugged away, inputting commands, and getting gibberish. Finally the hologram shifted, and the planet separated into layers. Looking at it, the core was about what I'd expect, but surrounding it was a series of deep tunnels dug underneath what seemed to be an entire layer composed of buildings. Then a thin layer of various minerals, followed by the planet's surface. Finally, floating roughly in the upper atmosphere, was some form of casing, which ran lights around the planet to simulate the sun.
My mind was reeling. The level of work, of craftsmanship. The knowledge and technology required, was far beyond anything I had seen. The planet itself seemed to be supported by small dimensional pockets which could be shifted around. As soon as that thought crossed my mind I glanced over the console again. There had been one panel I hadn't understood; I looked it over now.
With a little fiddling the image changed to a zoomed in view. There was a cursor as well. I tested the controls and managed to select a piece of desert. Continuing to test the panel I tried to move it to replace an area adjacent to the forests. The machine displayed a loading bar, and after about five minutes the two areas swapped places.
After an hour or so, I figured out most of the controls, but this console had some locks applied to it. Only a few terrain types could be moved at all. I changed the view to the large map. There were seven buildings that were not in disrepair. I assumed each of them was a base like this one. Six made a form of ring around the planet, while the seventh, a tall tower with almost a city structure around it, rested at what would be the south pole. I felt it was a safe bet to assume whoever was doing all this would be there.
Gripping the Chaos Emerald in my pouch, I knew I couldn't warp all the way there, but I could at least put some distance between myself and this place.
Comments:
Yeah I'm gonna do comments here from now on. This way I don't have to remember to do them later, and I can actually get my immediate thoughts down.
Lotta techno-babble in this chapter. And Shadow will probably always be like that. Especially since he is one of the few characters I have that can actually get places, and do it somewhat stealthily. Meaning I'm going to use him a lot to uncover the miscellaneous hows and whys that some people might have. For instance, why do I write most of the story in the forest? The answer is definitely not that I just like forests for combat, and they lead to interesting tools that make writing fights more interesting. It's just that the Solarus that have been sorting the planet have put several planet's worth of trees all in one spot. So it's just got a lot of forest condensed into one location, the same location most of my characters are traveling through.
See, I've got logic. To make my life easier.
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