Confrontation

[Machaeus]

Urufu laughs. "That does sound good, but they might want to search there more than they would the frozen wastes. We can go there afterwards or something."
Machaeus nods. "That sounds quite nice. If all goes south, no pun intended, maybe we'll head there when we shake 'em off our trail."

[tachyon]

Bowman Coast, Palmer Land, Antarctic Peninsula,
2 1/2 hours later

It took nearly 45 minutes of circling and flying up fjords and along mountainsides before they found it.
"There it is," said Gordon as Kei banked over the spot on a small ridge he'd indicated, "Novaya Nadezhda."
Gordon had gone over a list of abandoned Antarctic settlements on the flight down. Most had been ignored, as mostly they were former 19th and 20th century whaling stations had been abandoned for too long for any structures to remain. Instead they chose one that, while old, was well built and largely forgotten.
Novaya Nadezhda, the 'New Hope', was built in the 1980s by the Soviets as a listening post to monitor the nearby British assets on the Falkland Islands. It had been abandoned in the early 1990s, but re-commissioned in 2022 by the Russian Federation as a joint EU scientific research post. It enjoyed moderate success until 2045, when it had to be evacuated due to a severe eruption from a nearby volcanic group. It was never reopened.
"Well the MAD says it's there," Kei said, referring to the magnetic anomaly detector function of the multi-scan array, "I don't see anything. It won't do much good if it's under 10 meters of ice."
"Won't matter. As long as the main entrance is isn't buried too deep we can land and use the engines to melt through... Look, you can still see the runway."
A 2km long rectangle of relatively flat ice marked the buried runway, which ran along from a sheer cliff edge to the flat face of a mountain. Kei lined the shuttle up so they were flying slowly down it, towards the mountain face. The twin beams of light from their headlights shone on a massive metal structure embedded in the rock wall. Hanger doors, big enough for a small cargo jet.
"Now that's what I'd look for in a Fortress of Solitude..." said Kei, who saw the others looking at her strange, "What? We get Superman comics where I come from too you know."

[Machaeus]

"I didn't know the quote," Urufu says. "Didn't read a lot of comics."
"I didn't either," Machaeus shrugs. "They don't deliver much of anything to the underworld realms, much less flammable paper comics."

[tachyon]

Kei mutters to herself, "Geez. The one Earth pop culture referance I ever drop and nobody else gets it..."
Kei lands with the back of the shuttle facing the hanger, specifically a place with a small door built in. She gives a few seconds of full thrust to melt the ice before letting the ship idle and opening the rear hatch. Putting on her mittens and picking up her pack, she lead the way out into the Antarctic spring twilight, her hand held spotlight casting a cone of light over the ice. It was bitterly cold, but thankfully there was little wind.
However, despite a large melted depression, the door was still under at least a foot of ice. Kei unhooked an ice axe and chipped away a small chunk. It was flecked with what looked like partices of black dirt.
"Hey, any idea what this stuff in the ice is?" asked Kei, holding out the chunk.

[Machaeus]

Urufu looks closer. "No clue, it's stuck in the ice. If it was out, I might be able to tell by scent, but..."
"Hmm. Could just be dirt - there is some land out here, not just ice...but I'm not certain either. Gordon, any clue?"

[tachyon]

Attached to Kei's belt, swinging as she hacked at the ice-bound door, Gordon scanned the chunck of black-flecked ice.
"It's ash." he said. Kei missed timed a swing at the word and the axe clattered off the surface, but Gordon continued. "Volcanic ash. Makes sense; this place was evacuated after an eruption because the only fesable access was by air. Since they didn't know how long the eruptions would last or which way the wind would carry the ash, they couldn't return untill after they'd stopped or they'd run the risk of being trapped here, or worse, crashing."
Kei had freed the doorway from the ice and was now using the ice axe as a lever to turn the latch. There was an echoing 'chung' from behind as she unlocked the door and kicked it open.
Shinning the spotlight inside, she entered.
"Hey, you guys gotta check this out." Kei called from inside.

[Machaeus]

Urufu looks in, as does Machaeus. The mage has summoned a bit of fire to keep the group warmer.

[tachyon]

The interior is completely dark, save for the twilight entering through the opened door and Kei's handheld spotlight, but by the echoes of their footfalls the space was large.
Kei turned her spotlight over one of the concrete walls, revealing a large, poorly painted mural of two figures dressed in arctic clothing -one holding a hammer, the other a sicle, each holding a Soviet flag- reaching across a crude depiction of the Antarctic continent surrounded by 3 words in Cyrillic. The whole thing looks to have been drawn by a child, though thanks to the shelter of the hanger, the cold conditions, and the paint used (originally intended to help rust-proof ships) it looked as garish as it did in the 1980s.
"Hmm," was all Kei said as she passed the beam over it.
The hanger was large enough for a small cargo jet to park in with enough room to turn around and be unloaded. Kei's spotlight showed the walls to be reinforced concrete slabs attached to the rock walls with massive pins, while metal framework and catwalks hung from the bare rock ceiling. Then she noticed a metal tube running the length of the ceiling. Following it as it traced along the wall, she saw it eventally entered the wall above a door. There was a yellow saftey sign on it, also in Cyrillic.
"Says 'diesel generator room'." Gordon translated.
"Well I don't know what diesel is but generator sounds straightforward enough."
She entered, and soon enough the sounds of chugging and the smell of fumes filled the hanger. A few lights flicked into life, older lightbulbs, revealing the newer unlit LED lightstrips alongside.
"Well, that can't be the main power source," said Kei, wiping the grease off her gloves and onto her pants, "must be for emergencies. It's got about 6 hours of fuel in it, so we've go time to look around."
"Well, there's a pair of lifts over there that just got powered up. Looks like they go up and down." said Gordon.
"Ok, which- Holy frack!" Kei was inturupted as one of the 200 year old lightbulbs exploded, but regained her composure, "which way? Up or down?"

[Ash]

Inside a military van outside the EDF base in Tremorton sits a man in front of a relative large computer screen. The screen shows countless open windows, showing him curves, diagrams an charts. The man however continues to type various commands without paying much attention to those windows.With every command, new windows open. He only stops as he notices that the vans slide door opens. An old man climbs in and smiles at the man at the computer, even though it is obvious that he has to force himself to do so.

"You already began to analyze the data?", the old man asks, peeking at the screen.

"Began?", the other man asks him with a grin on his face, "I am as good as done with it."

"And? Anything important?"

"I wasnt able to rescue most of it, but the little that I could..."

The man sighs and stands up to grant the old man a better view at the screen.

"I´ll play the most important part the main camera recorded. Butdon't't watch at the images. Look at this.", the man says, pointing at a red bar at the right corner. The screen shows something white that could be an arm and something red in front of it. The shaky recording makes it difficult to see anything at all.

"Now. Look."

In the blink of an eye the red bar changes to a dark blue. A few seconds after that the screen went black.

"Hm? What was that?"

The old man clenches his eyes and leans closer to the screen, not sure if he seen right.

"The Dragons battery gauge. It was almost empty. Probably just enough for the armor to move. And shortly before the record ends... Well. It was completely filled again.", the man explained, tapping his forehead.

"And that happened because?"

"I have no idea, to be honest. But look at this here."

The man sits down again, starting to type. Most of the open windows including the recoded data disappear, leaving one single window open. A diagram. At the end, the red line in the diagram moves rapidly upward.

"And what is this now?"

"Energy. Pure energy. So much that our instruments cant even tell us where it ends. That leads me to the assumption that, whatever caused the Dragons battery to be fully charged again, is somehow affiliated to this.", the man explains, tapping the diagram on the screen, before leaning back in the chair with an thoughtful expression.

"So. Do you think that this was Nyder´s work? Do you think that he evolved?"

"Even if he did. Thats to much energy. No evolved human we know... and we don't really dont know that much... can produce this amount of energy."

Silence filled the room. Both men continued to look at the diagram for a while, silent, until the old man nodded to a small steel canister behind thick glass,
labeled with "-Bio hazard-".

"Do you think we can work with the probe?"

"I have no doubt about that. And still..."

"I know. But we cant wait anymore. We are more vulnerable than ever before. Now or never.

"It is against the law."

The old man turns around and walks slowly toward the vans door.

"Yes, I know that too. But if we want to protect this planet we have no other choice."

"And what are you going to do now?"

"I have to meet some people. Revil made us look like a bunch of d**ned terrorists. I have to clear this up."

"He manipulated everyone. So... don't feel responsible for what happened."

"I am responsible for all that has happened. I haven't noticed what he planned. I couldn't stop him. Instead of me, other people fought him... and died. So don't tell me that I shouldn't feel responsible for this."

The man at the computer turned around and looked at the old man with a sad expression.

"If we are really going to use the probe...", the man said quietly, not finishing the sentence.

"...then not even god will forgive us. Yes. Yes.", the old man says slowly, before getting out of the van, closing the door behind him.

The young man remains in the van, quiet, thinking. Not moving a muscle. He just stares at the canister.

[tachyon]

Former Soviet & EU research station Novaya Nadezhda, Palmer Land, Antarctic Penninsula
Level B-3

"Allright! Look what I found!"
Kei pulled up two bottles of a clear liquid and placed them on the bar. She blew the dust off one and held it up to the battery-powered lantern she'd hung from the glass holders overhead.

_{КАЗАЦКИЙ ДУХ
НЕПОДДЕЛЬНАЯ РУССКАЯ ВОДКА}[/sub]

Satisfied, she unscrewed the top and lifted the bottle to her mouth.
"Umm, you sure that's a good idea Kei?" asked Gordon, strap looped around a pocket on her coat, "That's been down 'ere for over century."
"Meh. Alcohol has no expiration date. And I need a drink."
"Of straight vodka?"
She took the bottle and wandered about the recreation room. The bar occupied one of the walls, it's selves empty of most of the bottles it once held. There were two pool tables and an airhockey table in the centre of the room, three dartboards on one wall, a small bookshelf, a pinball machine, and chairs, couches and a beanbag in front of an antique LCD TV. A door on one wall lead to a small theatre setup. Out the main door and through the hall were the kitchen and mess hall, and the elevator.
The base had been well preserved; no ice had managed to form on anything, not to the extent of the hanger at least, but everything was covered in a thick layer of dust. And it was still freezing.
"I wonder how Machy and Rufy are doing?" Kei said to herself.