Warriors of Krome

Visitors from the stars.

1. The fall and the rebirth.

The flickering lights, the loud beeps and all the shaking and bumping meant one thing.

The ship was out of control.

After being irradiated by a misterious uncharted energy cloud, the spaceship Destiny crossed an asteroid shower that physically broke the navigation systems that had not been fried already. Next, it was caught by the gravitational field of a three-star system that did not appear in any star map, and had just locked in the orbit of the eight planet around the three-star cluster.

As all instruments indicated, planetfall was not only imminent but unavoidable.

The ship entered the atmosphere at an odd angle that it was not designed for, causing several aerodinamic components to break or melt away. Even if they tried to regain control of the vessel in the lower atmosphere there was nothing left to do it with.

-ALL HANDS, BRACE FOR IMPACT!- shouted Captain Stewart Hammer to the crew members that managed to make it to the reinforced cockpit of the ship before it sealed itself. Engineer Connor S. Trucker and biologist Anita Martinez strapped themselves the best way they could as the spinning ship shot past a mighty purple mountain range. At 100 feet from the ground, the total loss protocol kicked in and the armored cockpit was jettisoned away from any potentially flammable parts of the ship. Problem was that it did while the ship was sideways, so instead of landing on its belly and sliding away to a halt as it was intended to do, the ejected cockpit hit the ground on its side and started bouncing and spinning out if control like a spinning top that had been thrown the wrong way by an inexperienced kid.

The main body of the ship hit the ground sending a wave of rocks, earth and debris into the air that further showered the cockpit, which looked more like a crumpled ball of tinfoil when it finally rolled to a halt.

The dust settled and a few minutes passed without any noise coming out of any part of the wrecked ship. Then, suddenly, something started to pound on the cockpit's hatch from the inside. Too dented and deformed to be opened the way it was supposed to, it was kicked out of the way with a loud grunt after several unsuccessful attempts.

Captain Hammer, bruised and battered but most definitely alive, dragged the limp bodies of his two crewmates out of the ship and manually checked their vitals.

They were still with him, but would not be for long.

Under normal circumstances, moving the injured from a crash site without a stretcher is ill-advised, as it can actually cause further injury, but the captain did not want to leave them to their own devices, easy pickings for whatever local fauna there was while he searched the area for help.

He knew there would be. The ship's scanners had suveyed the planet right before the sensors were fried out in the atmospheric entry, so he already knew that it had a breathable atmosphere. They had also showed him several areas of concentrated heat that might indicate settlements. But he had no idea where he had landed relative to them.

High ground would be his best chance to assess where they were and to take refuge from any potential predators. And so, slinging Miss Martinez over his shoulder and Engineer Trucker under his arm, he started the long climb up the slope of the mountain they had landed at the feet of.

Several hours later, the panting, bruised, bloodied and broken body of the Captain started to falter. His legs no longer responded like they used to, and he was forced to bend the knee every few steps before regaining his feet and painfully resuming his walk.

His vision became cloudy and blurry from the shock and the blood loss. So, at first, he thought what he was seeing was just his brain misinterpreting the poor quality images that his eyes were providing. He thought he could see a tall, slender spire, clearly not made by nature, with a bright light at the top. A tower. Apparently a lighthouse, for whatever good that would do atop a mountain instead of by the sea. But it had a bright light at the top. It was meant to be seen.