<u>007 Working on the Core</u>


    Lieutenant Commander Dylan Shelton, Captain of the former Scout Corvette Sunhawk, looks up at the knock on his cabin. It has been several hours since the meeting, and he was currently going over the records of what the System said and especially what it not said. “Enter”


    Dr. George Davis, navigator and astrophysicist from the Sunhawk, comes in. “Hi Dylan, please don’t get upset. Cheyenne just exhausted herself and dissolved back to the anchor in her cabin.”


    “WHAT? I specifically asked everyone not to spent their Mana on anything because we don’t know if that dissolving harms them or creates additional problems.”


    “I know, and Cheyenne knew as well – which is why she told me about this only in the last minute when I had no chance of stopping her. The problem was that she didn’t want to spent fuel for creating the first Mana Storage, and that this is what every spirit in every core had to do to get that first structure. So she didn’t expect it to be directly harmful, and that the Mana Storage would then enable us to syphon extra energy without having to do the same again.”


    “So she’ll hopefully be awake again in two hours? Tell her to report to me as soon as possible after that, and I’ll give her a piece of my mind for pulling that stunt. I would have authorized the fuel for that construction if that would have been necessary to prevent this.


    After all there never has been a case like this with several souls squished into a single core, and we have to be careful that nothing harms us further.”If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.


    <->


    “It’s nice to be able to stretch ones leg’s again outside of our cabins, Cap. Too bad that the mess hall equipment dissolved when Cheyenne dismantle the structure”


    “Luckily only the original contents of the mess hall, the additional equipment brought in later survived, Stephen. Oh, there she is.


    Hey Cheyenne, you look as if you have another one of your harebrained ideas. What do you want this time?”


    “Hey Captain, I wouldn’t call it harebrained, but it is a gamble in a way. It’s about the fold storage of structures.”


    “Do you want to use that option for pulling out a random structure? Sorry, but that’s too expensive for a random advantage. We might be able to reserve a space for that, but it was a bad surprise that the cost for placing a structure went up with the core upgrade. It simply takes too long to collect that 750 Mana, especially as we might get only something like another spirit room.” The captain denies that possibility.


    “No,” Cheyenne answers “I am thinking about something different. The fold storage only lists three structures from the 59 remaining as being available for direct, not-random placement. The battery we got out weeks ago was replaced by one of the labs in that listing. Neither the lab nor the cargo hold are what I want to try. But from the very beginning it also listed another part of the fold drive as available for placement. And I hope that with four segments of the fold drive structure, it’ll give me better option on what to do with it. Especially since the entire drive would probably need six sstructures based on the parts we already have.


    I don’t know what additional possibilities that will create, but everything I learned of this System and its world shows that it will increase our options with the fold storage at least a bit, and that might help us with accessing the other structures remaining from the Sunhawk.


    By the way, I made a calculation of what numbers we have – it seems that a bit less than 60% of the Sunhawk was converted and mostly stored, but I have no idea which 40% were lost. That is something I hope to calculate better with the fourth part of the drive placed as well.”