Menseio Station, orbiting Veria
Jonuth Kidravia’s Ship - Abi
15:21 Ship Time
September 13, 2019

I took a moment to grab a snack from the galley and then headed to my room, eating as I went. By the time I arrived, the only thing remaining was a small piece of quillbeast, which was tossed in the air. There was an almost instantaneous popping sound and the piece of meat disappeared into Vixa’s mouth. It was a lazy day for her, content to just sleep the day away rather than play with the kids and other phenidae onboard.

Looking over to the bed, I couldn’t help but laugh at the mess of blankets and pillows. When I had left in the morning the bed was still a mess, but not to the extent that it was now. The comforter was pulled to the middle of the bed with the pillows haphazardly placed on top in a sort of circle, creating a nice little nest, the perfect size for a small phenidae like her.

“Did you enjoy yourself?” I asked, looking down at her as she licked the fur on one of her front paws. I received a happy little yip, but she didn’t stop what she was doing. “Well, how about some more fun? We’re going somewhere today that is unlike anywhere you have ever been.”

She stopped her cleaning and looked up at me, as if she was bidding me to continue.

“We’re going to another planet. Well a moon, actually. You’ll be able to play with all your friends, as long as you don’t go too far, alright? This time you don't even have to wear the suit that you wore on Yrranth.”

She gave a loud, excited bark before I even stopped and then popped over to the door. Putting her front paws on it, she looked back at me with her tongue hanging out the side of her mouth. It still amazed me just how dog-like she was in many of her actions.

“Hold on!” I chuckled. “I didn’t just come up here to get you, I still need to get ready myself!”

Walking to the closet, I grabbed a pair of long thermal underwear, a thermal shirt, as well as a pair of thick socks and the coat I would be wearing. After depositing all that on the corner of the bed, I stripped down and began putting on the thermal layer, but not before changing to my human form. While we would be hitting up the slopes first and then try to teach the locals some hockey, neither of those were things that I wanted to do in a form I wasn’t completely used to.

---

We already knew exactly where we were going, with Zaszi having already dispatched a team to scout out the area and dig in, and with Kiri going personally to examine all the angles. By now, there were half a dozen sniper pairs set up with extremely powerful gauss sniper rifles, which would allow them to cover the entire area. It was kinda funny, but people don’t really think of gauss rifles as something that can be stealthy.

With a conventional firearm that uses gunpowder to propel a projectile, some of the sound that is heard is caused by the explosion and gases escaping the barrel, while the projectile surpassing supersonic speeds creates a sound--a sonic boom--of its own. Suppressors do a good job of containing the sound of the explosion and the resulting gases, but they do nothing to stop the sonic boom. To be truly silent, or as quiet as you can be, you need to both use a suppressor and fire subsonic projectiles. The issue with that, especially from longer ranges, is that because the projectile is traveling through the air so slowly, it makes it much harder to hit a target. Especially one that is moving.

The beauty of gauss sniper rifles, or gauss guns in general, is the ability to change how much power is channeled through the coils along the length of the barrel. The more power, the faster the round travels. While the power being channeled through the weapon can easily be heard if you’re within a few meters, it’s completely inaudible if you’re more than seven or eight meters away. With the power lowered enough so the projectile is accelerated just below the speed of sound, you can fire off shots without anyone being the wiser.

With the technology available to the Watchdogs, having a shooter-spotter pair wasn't necessary, so both pairs would be shooters. The magnification on their scopes was vastly more powerful than anything on Earth, and since they were entirely digital, they could display all the information a sniper might need. That was things like wind speed and direction and humidity, but also other things like the precise gravity and rotation of a planet, and the exact temperature. Those were all things of extreme importance, because while snipers only have to learn how to work with the rotation once on Earth, every planet is a little bit different and not everyone can recall all that information on the fly.

Though knowing the rotation and gravity of Alade were important aspects for firing at long distance, the temperature was just as important, at least when trying not to draw attention. This is because the speed of sound changes as the temperature does. In most cases that difference would be minimal, but because Alade is an arctic planet that rarely gets above minus 20 degrees Celsius, the difference is significant. For instance, the speed of sound at minus 20 degrees Celsius is a little under 319 meters per second, while it’s a little over 343 meters per second at 20 degrees Celsius.

Even with changing the power setting so that a round would never exceed 319 meters per second, each of the sniper teams had spent the morning on the various mountainsides practicing. They fired round after round getting a feel for how long it took for a round to arrive on target, even going so far as to take shots at the Watchdogs who were posing as tourists. They had plenty of notice so they could put up Mana Shield, of course, so any round that did hit bounced off harmlessly.

Hitting a stationary target was easy enough, but hitting a moving target, especially when that target was something the size of someone's head, was significantly harder. With the rounds traveling so slowly, it would take well over three seconds for it to actually hit someone a kilometer away. If not enough lead was given or the target moved erratically, then it would be impossible to take that target down. In comparison, a round propelled by a gauss sniper rifle at full power would cross the same distance in less time than it takes to blink, while also being a hell of a lot more powerful.

That's why hitting a target in the head was needed with such a slow-moving, if heavy, round. While a gauss rifle at full power could easily punch through someone's chest, killing them instantly if they weren't wearing heavy armor, a slow-moving round wouldn't do much at all. At least not to a high level person. A hit to the head on the other hand, will knock someone out leaving them with a concussion at the very least, but would also have a good chance at killing even a high level person.

While the sniper squads were practicing, the rest of the Watchdogs were settling in. Some were participating in activities that Alade was known for, while others were dug in, using specialized equipment to make it seem like they weren't even there. Any heat signatures would be easily detectable, so each sniper lay within a small dome that they had set up when they first reached their positions. After excavating some snow and setting it up, they just needed to cover it with snow, use a wind spell to make it seem like the snow hadn't been disturbed, and then climb inside from the back. They wouldn't have a full 360 degree line of sight around them, but they would be able to cover their designated areas.

Aside from the Watchdogs that would be on the ground, there would also be two full squads in Grasshoppers up above, along with Abi herself in geostationary orbit. It was very unlikely that any attack would occur after the last one failed so miserably, but no one was taking any chances.

---

Not wanting to overheat before we even arrived down on Alade, I stowed my coat and snow pants inside the Beacon and then made sure that I had everything. Skates and all of the other hockey equipment had been in Abi's dimensional storage ever since we left Earth, as were a few other things that she had crafted for us since then. For example, we didn't know that humans weren't the only species that skied and snowboarded until we were on our way, even if it was a little different. It turns out that kids of many different species like to slide down big hills covered in snow. Who would've known?

It was interesting that both snowboards and skis were practically identical, even 65000 light years away from Earth. The materials used to make them were different and they came in many different sizes, but they were functionally the same. The main--if only real difference--was the way that they were fastened to one’s feet. Rather than step into a boot binding, one wore boots not dissimilar from those used on a spacewalk. Embedded in the core of each ski or snowboard was a thin layer of metal, allowing one’s feet to be secured via magnetism, rather than strapped or locked down.

Since none of us had brought any of our gear for anything other than hockey, we were happy to hear when Abi said that everything we needed could be purchased when we arrived on Alade. While there were hundreds of lodges all around the moon, what they carried depended on where they were located. The one that we were going to was situated in a valley surrounded by mountains on three sides with a large lake in the middle.

Ice skating wasn’t something that was done, but the lake was a big draw both for those who liked swimming in the frigid waters, and those who preferred fishing in them. While the temperatures rarely got warm enough for the ice covering the surface of the lakes to completely melt, enough heat was produced by the moon’s core to prevent lakes from freezing entirely. It also prevented all of the fish and some of the other animals that call the lakes home from dying, because while they could survive the cold waters, they couldn’t survive if they were trapped in a massive block of ice.

Confident that I had everything, I turned to the door, with Vixa sitting patiently in front of it. As soon as I looked at her, she excitedly got up and moved to the side, allowing me to open it.

“Alright, let’s go. We’ve got one stop to make first,” I said, closing the door behind us and then turning to head to the bridge. It didn’t take long at all to arrive, but I was surprised to see that each and every one of the stations was manned, and that we were already in orbit of Alade. I could see that the engines were still active as we moved into geostationary orbit, but they were cut a moment later. I didn’t even hear the ship power up or feel it lift up off the hangar floor.

“Ah, Jonathan! Good to see you!” Tich said, getting up from the captain’s seat and walking over, before bending down to pet Vixa. “And hello to you as well, Vixa.”

“Hey, Tich. Abi said you wanted to see me?”

He looked up and nodded. “I heard that you and your friends and sisters had a successful day yesterday.”

“Not as successful as the girls team, but not bad,” I chuckled. “I had to mentally block Mason for a little while because he kept going on and on and on about his new necklace, almost like it was a legendary or mythical item and not just an epic. We passed level 100 though, which was really nice. Why? What’s up?”

“I was a member of a team when I was young, you know. From the time we were kids, my friends and I playacted like we were mighty adventurers, long before we were actually able to do so for real. When we were finally able to, it was everything we imagined and more, and we spent the next thirty-two years delving into dungeons whenever we had the chance.”

“Unfortunately, as happens with most childhood friends, we slowly drifted apart as our interests diverged and other things became more important. Two of my friends ended up getting their spouses pregnant, so that took priority over the team. Another friend had wanted to explore dungeons professionally, but with two of us not having the time to dedicate to that sort of thing, he ended up leaving the team and forming another. That left me and my friend Irxa as the last two, but we knew immediately that it was the end of the team. A man had caught her eye, and, well, the navy caught mine.”

“The rest is history, you could say, but before my friends got on with their lives, they gave these to me, as the leader of the team,” he said as a rectangular box appeared in his hands. “It’s funny. We knew of a Dvergr blacksmith who specialized in magical weapons and jewelry, but it took us over twenty years to finally gather everything we needed. It took him a month to finally have time to make them, but less than three years later, we didn’t really have a use for them anymore.”

“They’re called Rings of Equalization,” he said as he opened up the box to reveal five rings lined up parallel to each other. Each of them was identical except they were all different colors; red, green, blue, gray-ish silver and finally brown.

They looked like signet rings, and as I leaned in to look at the image that was on the face of each ring, I saw that it was an exact copy of our team’s logo; a profile of a wolf howling with a full moon behind it.

“I sent them off to the man who created them the moment we arrived here,” he said when I looked back up at him in surprise. “I don’t know how he did it, but they’re exactly the same minus the logo on the face. He assured me that they are no less effective than they were way back when they were first created and I want you and your team to have them.”

“What do they do?”

“Pick one up. I believe the silver one would best suit you.”

“The five rings are linked to one another, and the color of each ring corresponds to the attribute that it primarily boosts; red for Strength, green for Agility, blue for Intellect, silver for Constitution, and brown for Endurance. It only takes one of you to activate the effect, and doing so will put the rings on cooldown for all of you. I’m sure you can already think of some ways to use them.”

I nodded, thinking about how much easier it would have made some of the fights we had the day before. Though the disparity in strength quickly shrank after we first fought the dreogar, there were still some close calls, particularly on the boss fights. Rings like these would have helped a lot because while I would weaken, each of my friends would become stronger and faster. When my friends got their own sets of Skill Gems, then it would basically allow any of us to perform any role equally for 5 minutes. For example; Ben still hasn’t put a single attribute point into Strength, so activating the rings would allow him to fight very well in melee. Against a boss that was highly resistant to magical damage, that could be invaluable. It would be the same thing the other way around, with Ben’s Intellect and my own being split evenly between the five of us, allowing Mason and the twins to do much more damage with their spells.

“You’re sure you want to give us these?” I asked.

“Absolutely. I don’t have any children or other family to give them to, and I don’t think that is going to change anytime soon. They’ve just been sitting in that box for over a millennia, and the five of you can use them. You’ll also notice that they don’t soulbind to the wearers, so if I change my mind later on, I can always ask for them back,” he answered with a smile.

“We’ll take good care of them, I promise,” I said, putting the ring back in its little slot. Closing the case, I put them in my storage and then bent down to pick up Vixa.

“I know you will,” he replied. “Alright, now get off my bridge, you took your sweet time getting here and now you’re holding everyone else up.”

“Sir, yes sir!” I said, sloppily saluting him and then turning on my heel to leave the bridge.

I heard him chuckling, but I stepped inside the teleporter just outside the bridge and hit the button for the cargo bay. The doors closed and with a flash of light, they opened again. Stepping outside, I walked through the hatch into the cargo bay and proceeded over to where four of the Grasshoppers were landed. The other two were already hiding with Alade’s atmosphere, but the other four would remain in plain sight, parked with all of the other ships.

“You know, it seems like we’re always waiting on you nowadays,” I heard from behind me.

“Well, better get used to it now, cause I doubt that is going to change anytime soon. If anything, it’ll only get worse,” I replied without looking back. “Right now I don’t have much responsibility and only need to attend a meeting here or there, but sooner or later, those meetings and briefings are going to be happening a lot more.”

“Oh, give it a rest, Mason,” Anja said. “You’ve been acting like a little kid about this whole thing. First you get a really nice necklace and then you rub the win in our faces. Then you refuse to stop even when we told you you were being annoying, and now you’re sulking because you were ignored.”

“I’m not sulking!”

“Yes you are,” Sonja chuckled.

“Mace… you really were being a dick about the whole thing, they’re not lying about that,” Ben said, entering the conversation. “It’s a very good necklace and I would be lying if I said that we aren’t envious of you for having won it. I know neither Anja or Sonja could make use of it right away, but they would have been able to, soon. Who wouldn’t want something that allows you to use a defensive skill to temporarily increase your damage massively for a few seconds?”

“I’m just bummed that it dropped off the last boss we killed before we called it for the night. I really want to try it out,” he said.

“So you’ve said, multiple times. We might--and I stress might--be able to spend one more day in dungeons before we leave, but my mom and dad will probably want to leave as soon as possible. Everyone is going to be very busy once we get back home. By the way, I’ve got something for each of you,” I replied, turning around and handing Vixa to Anja. When my hands were free, I retrieved the box of rings given to me by Tich and opened it up. “These are a gift from Tich. They’re called Rings of Equalization, and they should be pretty useful for all of us going forward.”

“Equalization? What does that mean?” Mason asked.

“See for yourself,” I answered, picking up the red ring and handing it to him. “The Ring of Equalization: Strength.”

“The Ring of Equalization: Agility,” I continued, handing the green ring to Sonja.

Next up was Ben, who received the blue Ring of Equalization: Intellect, and Anja, who received the brown Ring of Equalization: Endurance.

“Very interesting,” Ben said. “Very useful as well. Where did he get them?”

“They were crafted.”

“Really? I knew that there were crafted items out there, but they’re very rare and it takes a long time to gather the materials needed. I’ve never heard of crafted items that were linked to one another though.”

I nodded, relaying what Tich had told me only a short while earlier.

"Why am I the one stuck with the endurance ring?" Anja asked.

"You're not. Notice that they don't bind to the wearer like a lot of items do. If you and Sonja want to switch, then you're free to do just that. I just figured that the added endurance would help you more."

"So what now? Are we just supposed to stack the attribute of the ring each of us is wearing?" Mason asked.

"You could, but it's not really necessary, and it would probably do more harm than good in the long run. Think about it, we can only use these rings for a short time, once an hour. For that time, each of us will be well rounded, but the moment it ends, we'll be back to normal. If you stack nothing but strength then you'll essentially be a glass cannon," Ben answered.

"We can theorycraft some more later, but how about we get this show on the road. Everyone is waiting for us now," Sonja interrupted as Mason opened his mouth.

---

The four Grasshoppers lifted off the moment we climbed aboard. So quickly, in fact, that the ramp didn't even have time to close completely by the time the landing gear cleared the deck.

While both my Grasshopper and the one belonging to my sisters had their usual 30 man Watchdog contingent onboard, they were instead filled to the brim with everyone that was accompanying us down to the moon. Though not all the dragons that had continued on with us to Veria were present, the majority of them were. Vixa immediately wriggled herself out of Anja's arms when we arrived on the second deck, running over to join her friends.

It seemed like every phenidae was present, and there actually seemed to be a few more young ones present, including the one that Selalea's son Ilnod was holding. He was the one that Vixa ran over to, putting her front paws on his legs so she could sniff the strange new pup. Soon the young phenidae freed itself from Ilnod's arms and began chasing Vixa around. The other phenidae wasted no time joining in, and I was glad that the teleportation blockers were active. If they weren’t, I was positive that we would have all gone deaf from them teleporting in a relatively small and enclosed space.

“So you saw the new addition?” Selalea asked as she stood up from one of the chairs.

“Additions, you mean? I saw at least four young phenidae. Where did they all come from?”

“Tala. Well, her ship, actually. She said that a lot of the crew have phenidae, and there are litters born pretty often. So often that they've had to start giving them away, otherwise they would explode in numbers. You'll probably see a bunch more of them on the return journey to Earth. One of Tala's crew brought six over, but there are another two litters that are almost old enough to not need their mothers anymore.”

Looking around, I couldn’t help but notice that the new phenidae were all either in the hands, or running around their feet, of young dragons and dragonkin in their human forms. I wondered if they were the new owners of the phenidae pups, and I vocalised that to Selalea.

“Mhmm. Many of our whelps fell in love with the phenidae while we journeyed to Draconic space, and they’ve played with them practically every day since we left Earth. There have been more than a few bouts of crying when playtime was over, so we got together and decided to look into acquiring a couple. We just didn’t expect to find so many, or that we would be able to get them for free that we’ll probably struggle to find homes for them all. At least not initially.”

“Dibs!” the twins called out from behind me, drawing a chuckle from the rest of us.

“Well, that’s two down, unless they would rather share one,” I said.

“Can you let us know when they’re being brought over so we can each pick one?” Anja asked.

Selalea nodded. “Sure. Like I said, they probably won’t be brought over until either the day we leave or the day before but I’ll call you when we’ve got them.”

“Awesome, thanks!”

---

Zaszi and her team were the only Watchdogs to precede us as we left the ship, as the rest were already dispersed throughout the area. Even camouflaged, they would be easily detectable as they walked through the snow, and teleportation was out as well. The pop from air rushing in to fill in the space left by someone disappearing was just too easy to recognize and portals were too visible.

We were met at the bottom of the ramp by Kiri, who declared that the area was clear and we could do as we wish. Wanting to see Vixa’s reaction to seeing snow for the first time, I had extricated her from the attention of the other phenidae, both old and new. First though, we stepped off to the side and looked at the view.

It was absolutely breathtaking.

Though I had heard it described, words didn’t do it justice. It was like a winter wonderland. Everything was covered in a deep blanket of snow. So deep, in fact, that the snow at the edge of the lake easily dropped five or six meters to reveal the frozen surface, and it was clear that the snow wasn't piled that high. That's just how much snow had accumulated over who knows how long.

Aside from the snow that had been removed to form walkways and the landing pads, the only things not completely covered in snow were trees. Very large trees, so large that they would put even the largest trees on Earth to shame, both in height and girth. The smallest of the trees themselves were still hundreds of meters tall, with the largest coming close to a kilometer in height, if not exceeding it.

Probably the most interesting thing of all was the architecture. Before it was a holiday destination, the Earuu Mountains had been mined for the vast resources they once held. This was at a time shortly after the Pygmaeans had become a space faring species, and were just beginning to build their first fleet. Though Alade wasn't as rich in resources as some of the other planets, moons and asteroid fields in the system, it was very close and had an atmosphere. Even if it was subarctic, which was something that the Pygmaeans had little experience with on Veria.

After the resources of the Earuu Mountains were nearly spent, the mountains themselves looked more like Swiss cheese than a huge chunk of solid rock. The mining operation had gone on so long and was so thorough that one could scarcely go more than twenty or thirty meters before they would be standing in front of a tunnel. It took the new owners of the land decades and billions upon billions of credits, but eventually they turned the area into what it was today.

Though many of the tunnels had been filled in and sealed, many more of them were actually used to create living spaces for visitors and full-time residents. The only part of those living spaces that could be seen was the outward face, but inside they had all the amenities of home. Though they could be a little pricey, especially in comparison to the smaller cabins down in the valley, they also had a rather novel feature; you could quite literally open your door and begin skiing immediately.

Though we would primarily be skiing and snowboarding, those weren't the only activities that were available, as we saw almost immediately after departing the Grasshoppers. While we were enjoying the view, four people shot by on vehicles that looked like they belonged in Star Wars. In no time at all, they were barreling up the side of the mountain, snow flying in their wake.

"Forget snowboarding, what the hell are those?!" Mason asked, excitedly.

"Hoverbikes!" my dad answered from behind us. "Think of them as futuristic motorcycles, but a hell of a lot faster, more versatile, and just as dangerous."

"Not anymore, at least not that last part," Thomas replied. "They've come a long way in the past fourteen hundred years, and even the base models come with force fields now. They can also be upgraded with inertial dampeners as well."

"Really?"

Thomas nodded. "They were, and still are immensely popular, but the amount of high-speed accidents was increasing at an alarming rate. It got so bad that many governments around the galaxy were debating banning them outright, and some actually did. It was one of the smaller companies that was producing them that came up with a solution that prevented a permanent ban from happening."

"What they did was install sensors all around their hoverbikes that work similarly to sonar," he continued. "Those sensors would send out pulses hundreds of times every second, which would then bounce back and be read by a computer. The computer used the information it received to determine if a collision was imminent, and then took control to avoid it. If it couldn't be avoided entirely, then the computer would try to limit the severity instead."

"Huh, interesting," my dad replied. "I think I'll check them out while we're here."

I could see Mason's desire to check them out, and while they certainly looked pretty cool, that's not what we were there for. Thomas had been to this particular resort before and was leading my dad and a few other people to where the hoverbikes could be rented. Before Mason could follow them, the twins each grabbed one of his arms and began leading him towards the main lodge.

"C'mon, Mace," Sonja said. "You can check them out tomorrow. Tonight we're checking out the slopes!"

Before following my friends, I kneeled and placed Vixa down on the snow-covered walkway and proceeded to scratch her neck. “So what do you think?”