we only in creation | Glowfic Constellation

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The obvious constraint on where she can set up shelter is that it needs to be above the high tide line. So, next up: figure out where that is.

She leaves the boxes where they are - she will need to haul them with her, she absolutely needs all of her gear to survive this - but for now she's just exploring.

The silt is rapidly freezing over, and crunches under her feet.

The exposed rocks are covered in some sort of purple biofilm, which seems to be resisting the frost, and incredibly slippery. There are also armored limpet-like organisms, some almost as large as her fist, with radial ridges that look razor-sharp.

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The exoplanet has multicellular animal life!!!!

...That was something Merrin probably had visual evidence of earlier - the weird little holes in the silty part of the tidal flats look like something left by burrowing invertebrates - but she hadn't quite fully and explicitly made the observation and inference, because at the point when she was paying attention, she also hadn't explicitly thought through the "being on another planet" part.

The primary photosynthetic pigments in the local equivalent of...prokaryote algae?...are purple. Dark purple, a lot of it is closer to black with purple undertones, and iridescent blue-green from some angles when it catches the light. She...can probably infer things about the planet's sun, from that, once she has a chance to dredge up her not-strictly-human-medicine-related biology knowledge.

The time for that is probably not right now. ...A lot of dark pigment might hint at high UV levels? Which is useful to know - and makes perfect sense, a lower-oxygen atmosphere would mean somewhat less ozone production and a thinner ozone layer - but if she's wearing the power armor for heating anyway, she's not going to get a sunburn.

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(There's no reason to assume the animal life is edible for her. Or the plant life, for that matter. It might all use completely different amino acids and undigestible sugars. ...Reasoning off fiction tropes rather than physics - which Merrin is making SO many mental faces about doing but this is SUCH a tropey situation to be experiencing - then it depends on the author's taste and the flavor of story they're going for, it might be the case that this biosphere is just mysteriously compatible with dath ilani life. Maybe given time she can figure out how to repurpose her field blood-test lab equipment to figure out the composition? ...Off the top of her head Merrin has no idea how to do that but if she uses her brain and doesn't DIE STUPIDLY then she might have time to figure something out...)

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(Life!!!! Alien life on another planet!!!!!!!! Merrin might not have chosen to be in this situation and might - pointlessly, she's aware of that - resent Reality enormously on multiple levels, but also, ALIEN LIFE ON ANOTHER PLANET is really superheated cool.)

The tidal flats slope gradually upward for a while. Eventually Merrin reaches the edge of the (probably limestone? definitely some kind of sedimentary rock with visible strata) valley walls, and when she looks back, the boxes are definitely at least four or five meters lower than her current elevation, over maybe 300 meters of horizontal distance.

The valley walls aren't cliffs. Fortunately, or it would be a lot harder to climb up. It seems like it was once a V-shaped valley - carved by a river, maybe, at some point in the past when the river was a lot larger, or maybe it is larger in non-winter seasons. The erosion pattern produces a step-like effect. The stone is also crusted with (much smaller) limpet-like molluscs, and more of the purple probably-algae-biofilm. Here, it's been exposed long enough that the surface has dried out to the texture of waxed leather, and is no longer particularly slippery, but when Merrin touches it, there's still a feeling of gelatinous squishiness underneath: there's water present under the waxy surface, and it's still liquid.

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That's really cool. It's probably full of antifreeze proteins or something!

She starts hiking up the slope.

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...The gravity on this planet is not right.

It was less noticeable on the flatter area; the power armor gives her some help, to avoid her exhausting herself just hauling around its weight, and it probably recalibrated automatically, and the default panel readout doesn't list local gravity because, like, why would it, the suit is not rated for space. She was falling down kind of a lot, but it was easy to blame it on the insanely slippery mucilaginous biofilm stuff all over the rocks.

Merrin digs through suit readout menus and determines that the suit sure is estimating an effective gravity of 1.18G.

She eyes the sloping limestone. It's going to be even more annoying than she thought to haul eight entire boxes of gear to the top. She's really not going to want to carry them any further than necessary. And she doesn't know how close the tide was to fully out; if it's already turning, she doesn't have that long to work.

She climbs.

Eventually she's covered another ten meters of elevation, over maybe fifty meters of horizontal distance.

There's less of the algal film - and what there is looks more thoroughly dessicated, it's firm rather than gelatinous - but the rocks are still crusted with limpet-like and barnacle-like molluscs.

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....She's still below the high tide line.

Merrin looks down into the valley. There are her boxes of gear, near the bottom, looking small and sad, especially when she thinks about the fact that that's all she has.

She turns and looks out toward the ocean.

...It's further out. It's a lot further out. And still going out, judging by the smooth outflow rather than turbulence of rising-tide-against-river-current.

Her suit clock thinks it's been about two hours since she put the suit on. It's not trivial to eyeball from here, but when she appeared she was just above the high tide line, sitting in mud that had been covered until recently enough that it hadn't yet frosted. The water could easily have dropped three or even four meters since then.

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Great! She's managed to figure out the next environmental hazard while it's still getting further away from her rather than closer to her!

In dath ilan, most coastal areas have a tidal range of less than five meters. Based on what she knows right now, this planet has a tidal range of at least twenty meters.

And she's in a river valley. Even with just, like, eight meters of tidal range, river valleys can act like a funnel, squeezing the incoming tide into a tidal bore wave of pretty significant height and force.

She doesn't want to be anywhere near the bottom of the valley when the tide comes back in, and she doesn't know how long she has to work.

...How much higher than this does she need to get?

Looking up, she can see a couple of different debris lines; this planet doesn't seem to have trees, there's no driftwood, just shredded bits of what must be some kind of seaweed, dried onto the rock. Probably the most recent high tides line up with the lower debris lines, given how thoroughly dried-out the higher ones are, but she doesn't know that for sure.

the-careful-textbooks

Time to scramble up faster and see what's at the top of the valley walls!

Incidentally, the sun isn't actually all that high in the sky yet, but her suit thinks the ambient temperature is now up to -31º C. Still chilly, but a seven-degree increase. The suit power expenditure on heating is very slightly lower.

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Maybe by afternoon it won't be all that far below freezing!

It takes Merrin another fifteen minutes to reach the top of the cliff. She checks the suit readout again; the temperature is up almost another degree.

There...isn't much...on land, in terms of signs of life. It's basically just patches of lichen and more biofilm-like stuff.

The rocks have very noticeable bleaching patterns on the areas that Merrin can predict would be sun-facing. There's also a lot of cracking, of the kind you might expect from repeated cycles of frigid temperatures - with water freezing and expanding in tiny cracks - followed by heat expansion of the rock itself.

It sure does look like the photosynthetic life goes for purple pigment, and occasionally orange.

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...It does not look like a hospitable place to make camp. Merrin has gear for that, in one of the boxes, she's not stuck making her own shelter out of local materials – which is GOOD because this planet doesn't have WOOD – but she's not sure she has a great setup to anchor a tent into cracked and UV-damaged bare stone. She could improvise carrying slabs of broken rock to weight it down, but - it's so exposed, up here...

She turns around and eyes the terrain upstream.

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There's a cave.

...Which Merrin can't even slightly use for shelter because it's blatantly going to flood at high tide. Probably flood explosively when the tidal bore squeezes its way up the river channel. In fact, she wonders if the cave exists directly as the result of water erosion from the regular gigantic tides blasting their way into an obstacle in the river channel and finding a region of softer stone. This is a silly way to feel, but Merrin is almost mad at the cave, sitting there practically offending her with its tempting yet treacherous offer of protection from the elements.

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Maybe at some later point she'll have time to explore. For now, she'd better get her gear out of the path of the GIANT TIDAL BORE before the tide starts turning.

She starts scrambling back down, which does at least go faster than climbing up.

Still, by the time she's at the bottom, the temperature is all the way up to -26º C.

The sun still hasn't covered all that much of the sky, given that it's now been three hours since dawn.

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.....Merrin is starting to have. A little bit of a suspicion.

She can't easily test it now. The valley floor, soon (hopefully not too soon) to be submerged, is not a good place to set up any kind of observation station. It'll have to wait until she's dragged herself back above the high-tide line again.

She reviews her supply kit.

dath ilan