Lucca Rodenn

### Defending against the Leviathan

With Dawn Stillshield, Lucca sets up a defensive perimeter : while Dawn deploys locking measures, Lucca calls down a barrage from her spaceship, in order to limit the moves of the Leviathan from outside range.

The sensors able to lock on such a large target, Lucca’s ultranought open heavy fire, the beast still able to shrug off and dodge most of it, but stopping it from fleeing. As those volleys start, Lucca jumps in a smaller ship, a combat shuttle, and shows her prowess at piloting, Dawn sitting in position to deploy her own abilities, before engaging in dogfight around the creature’s hide, numerous feys and smaller spawns of the Leviathan attempting to slow down their advance.

But that was exactly what Lucca had in mind, swirling around, opening fire on the lesser creatures, drawing as much attention as possible, before dashing away to another point, threatening to enter the wounds of the entity that the other adventurers are now opening.

Unleashing missiles after missiles, Lucca first engages a small army of feys, her sound based weaponry proving quite disturbing to the screaming flock, showing weakness to draw them close enough for Dawn to incapacitate them, removing the defenses of that part of the Leviathan as they fly away toward a bigger spawn of the Leviathan, starting an air ballet against it.

To fit Dawn's theme better, Lucca switch to scarlet plating on the color scheme of her fighter, as the fight with the spawn turn into a dogfight, the nimble fighter swirling around the more heavily armed entity, dodging between point defense before targeting turret like appendages. As the fight grew denser, smaller feys joined the fight, adding to the close quarter melee on the lesser spawn, forcing Lucca to divert her attention toward the additional flying targets, mostly to free her flight and be able to keep moving.

Still, taking a few hits was unavoidable, and as the lesser spawn fell to the ground, shattered and exsanguinated, Lucca's fighter looked quite bad, one wing barely holding in place, half of the engine output missing, and all but one missile tube disabled. Dashing forward at full speed, still with feys flying after them, Lucca turned on the fusion core, activating the restructuration protocols. Before she could finish her about-turn, the wings and engine were back online, and the tubes quickly followed suit, just in time to open fire, shooting down another squadron of feys.

Activating the autopilot, Lucca and Dawn jumped out of the fighter, letting it fly back up to the launching bay of the ultranought as they join the fray from the surface of the Leviathan, trying to keep the attention of feys and the Leviathan alike, to keep open the way for more damaging attacks.

On Dawn's side : Using their blood sphere abilities they send massive waves of sickles placing myriads of enemies under blood control. keeping them in place for Lucca to target easily. The Larger Fae start to encroach and Dawn switches to their weapon switching between invisible edge and vital strikes hitting with the impact of a much larger creature felling the giants easily. the closer that they get to the larger ones the easier it becomes to flit about.and bind them stringing the attacks and dodging deftly.

### Exploring the Rift

Instead of showing caution when starting her entry of the rift, Lucca favored going all out, launching her drone fighter at full speed, pushing the thrusters to their limit. The rift resists a little, slowing the miniature ship, only to let it enter at full speed, forcing Lucca to dodge the asteroids she arrives close to, in the middle of a star storm.

Asteroids swirling around, with bolts of void lightning connecting each, forming a formidable web of danger, some bolts already randomly hitting the ship, the shields mitigating most of it. Hoping to get a better reading of her surroundings outside the asteroid field, Lucca keeps flying forward, dodging what she can while soaking the rest, the shields progressively weakening. On the way, she makes sure the sensors can pick up the position of notable nodes of interesting matter, before reaching an empty part of the void.

For an instant, she thinks her ship safe, in an empty part of this dimension, but she quickly realizes that the shields are still slowly weakening. She shifts the power investment, slowing down to increase the power output to the shields, the lower speed helping the sensors to pick up relevant information.

What looked like to be outer space was in fact part of the odd atmosphere of a huge planet, the gases now attacking the hull of the ship. Taking samples of the atmosphere, she keeps flying, hoping to spot structures beside the structure made of flying rocks and purple lightning, noting mountains on one side, and spires at the others. She rushes to the spires, expecting some kind of traces of civilisation, instead finding what looks like a forest of stone spires, of various sizes, entangled as if protecting something.

But instead of diving in the "forest", knowing fully well that the drone wouldn't be able to hold long enough for both, she prefers moving at full speed toward the mountain range, struggling to control the now slowly dismantling drone, reaching it to discover a range of cube edges, lined up as in a mountain range, all piking through the floor, as if partly unearthed. Intrigued, she makes the drones takes as many pictures and samples as possible while dismantling, sending the last data back.

### The Lands beyond the Rift (part 3)

After her former exploration of the rift, the forward base Lucca prepared slips through the portal, taking the direction of the overheated gazeous fields, profiting from the heat variation to navigate faster through it, a first module separating close to the rift to land there.

As it lands, it deploys a small relay, with a landing spot and every facility protected against the harsh conditions. It won't last forever, but with cautious maintenance, it should at least last long enough for the first exploration wave, and the teams deployed are trained for that kind of maintenance, as well as data gathering, and to welcome any party requiring help near the rift. Inside the module, there is a fusion core powering the whole assemblage, notably the telepad allowing for easy entrance into the world beyond the rift, or an easy way back to Chronus, or, more accurately, to Lucca's ship orbiting Chronus.

The rest of the forward base flies further, before setting camp close to one big gaz bubble, using it to feed the fusion cores with a small part, the rest being channeled toward the juggernaut in orbit. Using the material found on the surface, and the heat of the gazes, the forward base deploys itself, growing until it is self sustaining, and able to permanently welcome inhabitants, as long as they can stomach the relatively basic food for prolonged periods. The automated extraction process also powers up the sensors of the station, covering a large area, at least allowing Lucca's hunters ships to provide cover to smaller exploration teams, while readying, either by assembling, or by teleporting in parts, small flotillas centered around one small scale scientific cruiser, flanked with a few light interceptors.

Once those start deploying, they travel up or down the stream of gaz bubbles, measuring their expansion and the slow formation of new components in it. The flotillas going down travel through a web of tunnels, dodging stalactites at high speed before reaching deep pockets of gaz trapped in porous stone of an unthinkable scale, while the ones travelling up realize the bubbles slowly condense as they collide, fusing together without their size increasing, the pressure rapidly scaling up as well as the temperature. By following the trail, the ships travel through a series of baby stars at different stages, before seeing tiny stars, going through various states of their lifetime... until, they meet a few dying stars, quickly turning into white dwarves, then black dwarves. The gravitionnal pull became quickly too hard for the ships to follow, forcing the crews to evacuate through the teleportation rings, pulling back with the data gathered.