Dooms

Doomsless - Chapter 3: Retrieval

Omega turns the lantern off after Hunter leaves. She should probably do something, but she's too exhausted and worn to move. She doesn't want to move – anything she could think of doing feels like it's just too much.

Echo's gone, and they'll have to keep moving without him, and she doesn't want to. Everything was supposed to be fine now that she's off Kamino.

A dim blue glow catches her attention at the end of the cavern. Omega perks up a little, standing.

Glow. Ipsium glows. Omega remembers that from earlier. Cid or somebody told her. She hadn't really been paying attention – she'd been far too focused on how Echo was gone. They lost the little ipsium they got from Cid's mine, but there's more here, and – they should be able to blow their way out with it, right?

Omega pulls the drill off her belt and pushes the blader into the rocky wall. She might not know exactly how to mine ipsium, but she knows how to use the machine. She likes playing with new machines, but... this time, there was far less heart to it.

It falls away from the vibrations, shattering.

It's not just a little bit. It's – wow.

Omega jumps down onto the small platform-like ledge overlooking a massive cave-like interior. It's eerie in a way that's genuinely beautiful.

There's enough in reach that she could mine easily.

"Omega?" Tech's voice echoes distantly from behind her, and she sighs. Hunter, she gets and understands, even if she didn't want to talk about it right then, but she definitely doesn't want to talk to Tech.

She's not a baby. She can handle being on her own for a few minutes.

"Omega," Tech repeats.

"I'm here," she calls back with a sigh.

Tech's helmet appears at the edge of the darkened doorway.

"Thought we could use this to blow our way through the cave-in," Omega says shortly. She moves to the nearby wall, though after the explosion earlier, she hesitates to drill.

"I came to a similar conclusion myself," Tech replies.

"So," Omega asks finally, awkwardly, though she doesn't know how to go about this. Everything with Tech feels so awkward right now, and she's so angry at him. He might've had a right to be angry, but he was being so – nasty to Wrecker and Crosshair. "How do I do this?"

"Drill into the fossilized quartz until you reach the active ipsium inside. But you must be precise. If the mineral becomes compromised during the retrieval –"

"Chain reaction, explosion," Omega sighs. The memory of the brilliant flash as the entrance exploded flashes through her mind. "Got it." She turns the drill back on, pressing it into the rock.

"This vein appears to be much more pure than what we found in Cid's mine," Tech muses as Omega pulls the vial out of the machine and approaches him, The drop is high, and she does not want to have to climb up and down every time she fills a vial. "Perhaps you should extract as much ipsium as you can."

Omega sighs again. "Sure." Tech's staring at her outstretched hand like it's a foreign object. "Little help?" she asks, shoving the vial in his direction again, and he finally takes it.

"Grab the empty vials from my satchel," Omega requests. Might as well get this going and over with.

There's a lot of vials, though a good number were filled on the last mining excursion. Predictably, everything is fine until that moment where... it isn't.