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    1. Esayo 10 yrs ago

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Jackdaw watched Ryder begin to tear the scrap heap apart, leaning back against the dirt mound for a few scarce moments of rest. She wasn't used to being so drained, and so fast; her skin felt like it was covered by a layer of wet salt, she could feel the dirt sticking to the back of her neck, and tumbling down the false-skin. By the time Rennac had made his way down the hill, she'd caught her breath, and took a vulture like position around the heap, scouring with her eyes for any sign of the captain.

When Rennac made his remark, her only response was a furrowing of the brows before her helmet reformed around her head and clicked itself shut. Heat be damned, she wasn't going to take up any more time.
She pushed and shoved but to no avail, whatever was trapped beneath the seat and the scrap was going to require more than just her to be freed. When she heard Ryder plodding along above, she turned, yelling up at him.

"Get down here! I think I found him!"
A few more minutes, and Jackdaw might have ordered them to move on. And then what? There was no more scrap, and the land, though duned by the crash, was all visible from the high point they were atop. All of it except for the very bottom the massive pile. But that changed rather quickly.

When she turned, the weight she'd put on the cusp of the dirt hill proved too much, and it caved beneath her. She was used to the sensation of falling, it was what she was designed for after all, but the surprise that accompanied the movement of her stomach into her chest was not appreciated, and what followed her sudden plummet was a fierce, angry shout. The hill was not flat-faced, so she was airborne only for a few moments before her back hit the dirt and she rolled head over heels, managing to turn herself over on the way down. The rest of the trip was a slide down towards a hard steel ground of scrap, and her leading foot hit with enough speed and force for the gripping claws on the bottom of her boot to jam through a piece of steel. The claws weren't long, but they dug in well, well enough that she couldn't kick the metal off. With an aggravated sigh, she laid back to get a good hold, angled her leg up and away. Normally she couldn't use the jets implanted into her heels outside of drops, it was loud, uncomfortable, and when she wasn't hooked up to a power source, temporarily drained a considerable amount of her armor's power supply. But they were in a rut as it was, and she figured they could spare a few minutes for her to recover.

A single committing thought was all it took to start the sequence. There was a light hum of build up, followed immediately by sharp, loud crack of air shattering around her foot as the jet on her heel burst to life. The sheet of steel rocketed away, smacking into the ground in the distance with a molten hole at its center, and rips from the claws. It felt for a moment like she couldn't breathe, and when the air came rushing back it wasn't enough. Her armor felt like it was crushing her all of the sudden and the heat was suffocating. Her helmet collapsed, folding away piece by piece until it was settled back into the node on the back of her neck, and she gasped a few times to fill her lungs.

After a few moments, she looked down, mainly to check her foot, but then something caught her eye. It was a piece of scrap, curved by force like an egg. But she could see something else, something not metal, or scrap. It looked like a seat, or the edges of one. Her brow furrowed, but her chest welled up in surprise.

"Hey!" she called, in case somehow the others had not heard the earlier commotion. She slide down the rest of the way, landing beside the peculiar mass, leveraging herself against the base of the dirt hill and pushing it over to see what was beneath. "Hey!"
Ah, sorry. prior to the edit the post read "the equivalent of the Alliance's wetwork agent" rather than "one of the Alliance's wetwork agents". I'll fix my post accordingly.
Jackdaw couldn't definitively say she cared about the history Rennac was laying out. But all the same it held significance, and she would do well to remember it if for nothing else but knowledge's sake. She'd listened to plenty of people preen their resumes, and it was part of the reason she never asked; to her Rennac seemed like the type to do so, but she wasn't sure, and she listened anyway. At the very least she could assume he was alright with a gun, and push that worry from her mind until further notice.

She might have gone on, but the familiar wail of the giant man sounded out behind them. She scowled beneath her helmet and turned to face him as he approached, running like some wild animalm and she wondered for a moment how he was recruited onto the Dawn. He was strong, he could break things, but he had the mind of a small animal, and the loyalty of a dog. Normally, that would be good, but Varus wasn't here, worse, he might be injured, and as far as Jackdaw saw, it was making Ryder a complication.

Wordlessly, she went back to searching. Nothing would come from yelling at Ryder that wouldn't come from yelling at a child, or a pet. If he was so dead set on making sure Varus was okay, they'd find him -or what was left of him- faster for it.
Well, they won't have to have talked, but we did agree that the information would be buried, so yeah like, I'm alright with that. War averted cap'n.
She clambered up one of the more highly stacked mounds of dirt, looking around from there. She had half a mind to yell out for Varus, but her throat closed up. It seemed to desperate, as strange as it sounded, and she wouldn't have defended the preference if called out on it. But still, she didn't shout, she just observed.

For a few moments, she had half a mind to talk to the man. Partly to cover up the not-shouting thing, as minor as that was, and partly because as every second passed, the possibility of her having to take charge grew. At least in her mind it did. And if she had to be in charge, she'd have to form some sort of connection with the others. Out of the people currently with them, she knew two well; Ryder -and that was a stretch-, and Varus. Six was as good a stranger as Rennac, even though he'd been there longer. Taerys was a different ball game, but that didn't matter either. Right now she had an opportunity to start setting a foundation, and if she didn't take it, she'd be making a mistake. Didn't mean she had to like it exactly, but still.

"Tell me why you joined the Dawn," she said more than asked, as if it were an attempt at inquiring about him. "If you get preachy, I'm shooting you."
Jackdaw listened, though she continued walking, turning over another piece, and another to delay her original course. When Rennac had finished, she gave a swift kick to a piece of scrap and sent it skittering away, before turning to him.

"You talk like a manual," she said flatly. Never thought she'd be suggesting someone else loosen up on a mission, but she wasn't sure if the guy was just stiff, or nervous. "But fine, let's go. If you're right, better off for all of us."

She turned about and then began for the other side of the long crater.
She did much like Rennac was doing; checking wreckage, looking for any mounds that may contain a buried man. It was a cold realization that swept over her that Varus may in fact be dead. It wasn't pity, why would she pity him? She was his captain, yes, and he leveled with her on many things, but it wasn't like she would have lost a close friend. She didn't have those, so what would that make Varus? Not simply a teammate; Taerys was a teammate, and aside from the ridiculous pangs of sympathy she'd felt before, she was not very fond of the Varyx. It would take contemplation, which she wasn't too excited for, but that would wait.

Rennac came up beside her, and she broke concentration for a moment to listen. "I'm designed mainly for low-orbit emergency drops, my sensors are standard. But I've been looking regardless," she said.

Jackdaw placed a foot on one particularly long piece of scrap, and the claws at the bottom of her boot dug into it, and she dragged it back towards her onto the ground with a hollow crash. Nothing behind it. Disappointing. She looked around again, trying to spot anything else in the immediate vicinity, be it a whole captain or mere pieces.

"I don't see anything here, let's keep going."
Jackdaw didn't know what to think for a few moments. Taerys had responded positively, which was...unexpected. The lack of conflict brought her back to the present, where she was simply standing still, staring after the Varyx as she ran off, like a statue.

With a slight huff that was suffocated beneath her helmet, she turned and started off in the opposite direction. The ship had made something of a skid in the earth, and there was, as Ryder had seen, wreckage scattered about. It was as good a place to start as any, and if Varus was alive, they needed to find him and get on with the mission. She let out a whistle again, and motioned for Rennac to follow, though she didn't turn to check.
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