Ninja Vampires, Filipina Cowgirls, Space Elf Pirates, oh my...

The hot, humid jungles of Pulau Serasan, an Island just off the coast of Borneo were a world away from the cold northern hemisphere. Landing on the beach was an ordeal on its own, having to spend a couple of days in some backwater fishing village finding a fisherman who was willing to take US dollars for 'violating the island of gods'. The beach was pristine, with not a trace of evena tiny hut. It could have been a great place for vacations, were it not for the local's superstitions that something beyond dwelled there.

It was still unbearably stuffy here, and the giant mosquitoes hungrily preyed on any human who stalked the thick, uneven terrain of the deep jungle. "yuck", Diana would express, as the blood suckers became bloody smears on her palms as she swatted them, the things too bloated with blood to fly away or resist. Sweaty clothes clung to Diana as she hacked her way through the thick growth, the cheap machete a crude and clumsy thing compared to her main weapon. But of course, using the Blood Sword as a mere tool tended to rouse its temperament unfavorably.

So far on her jungle trek she'd seen a quite a number of exotic birds like colorful parrots and macacks, otters, colorful (and very poisonous) frogs and insects the size of dinner plates... but no terrestrial mammals. All around was the sound of rain, rain and water.

Diana in her frustration, cut through a particularly thick vine with a bit too much force and was sent rolling down a steep, muddy cliff face. She tried to hold on but the soil was much too soft in her grip, coming loose between her fingers. She plunged into a natural pool, the refreshing cool water filled with leaches. Diana swam and climbed onto a muddy bank, breathing and wiping the sweat-water from her brow. She frustratingly wiped the mud from her skin and face, having a great desire to be at a hotel with a tub. Looks like it was time for a break.

Fortunately she was a savvy buyer of traveling equipment and her branded backpack was water proof. Between peeling off leeches and changing her clothes, she suddenly heard an unusual sound overhead, the roar of... jets? but what she glimpsed were small things, like flying sail boats with sharp, elongated profiles propelled by some purple rocket plumes travelling at breakneck speeds. Only Diana's immensely sharp senses could make out dark armored figures clinging to the sides...

Once she got herself into a grey tank top, fresh khaki pants and socks, she retrieved and peered at her Blood Amulet, concentrating on the power within it. In Diana's mind it glowed in the same direction the sky boats were sailing. It was also the direction she was intended, looking for... something... that the demon within her blade compelled her to look for. "I had better have some dragonfruit shake after this." She muttered. Diana gathered up her gear to make ready to go... but the rustling sound of nearby bushes made her tense up, her hand going to the hilt of her blade. She was not alone...

Elaine Googled Borneo before hopping a slow moving barge to Borneo. Incidents putting Elaine on the "Do Not Fly" list made travel difficult, so did not realizing the boat would go to Africa before heading to the island nation. Once the itinerary showed the number of stops the ship would stop to remove cargo, Elaine did the only sensible thing and led a mutiny. It was awkward when she left and the crew had to let the captain out of the laundry room, but he knew the crew did the right thing to get Elaine off the ship faster.

Elaine met an orangutan while taking in the sites of Borneo.

He didn't talk. Neither did any of the people in the village. Whatever.

Like most people interested in Elaine's whereabouts, Elaine checked in on Amethyst live Tweeting her most recent adventures. Apparently it was hot. Air conditioning made it cool inside, but Amethyst was a wizard. She might know if it was in fact hot outside.

When people didn't talk to Elaine in her initial outfit, the cowgirl disguised in black shorts and a black tank top with two pistols hanging from her hips started conversations, but not directly to her. Didn't matter, Elaine didn't want to talk to them first.

Trees grew in jungles. Also, most things in jungle could kill you. Another thing, if the sun can't shine through trees, it gets dark. One last thing, when trees fall in jungles and no one is around to hear, they do make noises. Or maybe they don't.

Then Elaine saw a ship fly across the sky with a small dog next to a possibly large or maybe not large orangutan. Elaine isn't a zoologist and spirit corgi doesn't like competition. "Is that why we're here?"

"Let me check Twitter." No trip to the nature would be complete without checking a cell phone. Unfortunately, jungles got bad reception. "Don't know, so I'll go with yes because the orangutan hasn't said 'no'."

"I really haven't paid attention to anything going on, so just listen to what the orangutan doesn't say."

"I think I'm going to find that ship." So, Elaine walked to find that ship.

Her body tensed, a dagger materializing in hand from her blade mail, Diana was prepared to launch a dagger between the eyes of whatever emerged from the bush... except it was just some orangutan.

"Oh...Just a stupid monkey." Diana sighed, letting her armor absorb the dagger in hand and relaxing. She met the hunched primate's gaze for a moment, the creature seeming to study Diana as much as she did it. She tilted her head, and the Orangutan did the same.  

"Sigh." Diana ignored the creature, her posture no threat, as she was not interested in hunting a critically endangered species. That would have been petty. She held her amulet in hand by the chain, and it levitated, pointing down a steep, nearly vertical pit behind the ape. She groaned at the prospect of descending deeper  just as she finished falling down. From the looks of things she was on an earthen ledge, and she couldn't see past the foliage to see what lay in the ravine below, though those small...flying boats... went down there.

She looked around for an alternate path when the Orangutan began making a gesture.

It gestured for Diana to shoo, with both of its big arms. "Wha?" Diana looked at it again, and she wasn't imagining it. it gestured for her to go back where she came. "You want me to leave?" the thing nodded like it understood her. Granted, she could regenerate from being cut in half but this was definitely new. And funky.

"Well sorry mister Orangutan, but I'm here for a reason... Don't worry, I'm not a poacher." Diana reassured the animal, though she didn't know why. it shrugged, like saying 'meh, I don't care, I'm just here to warn you tourists'. It turned around and climbed up into the trees, quickly reaching a high elevation and traversing the canopy through brachiation. Diana wondered how much arm strength swinging from branch to branch took, but didn't bother.

She took out a pair of climbing picks and started the descent. Thankfully she fell in the eastern side of the ravine, and that meant in the afternoon she was climbing down the shadowed side. she wouldn't be seen too easily; at the bottom she could make out the raider ships, the air still thick with the fumes of their rocket engines. All was well until Diana could hear a buzzing sound...

"Ferret Balls." She muttered, preparing herself for a vertical confrontation without her usual weapons.

* * *

Minutes later, the same Orangutan would come across Elaine, if she didn't already fall down the steep face of the ravine, or fall into a pool of leeches, or encounter a large venomous snake, or fall into some quicksand, or suffer any other natural obstacle on her way here. It gestured to her to go away a few times, and regardless of her response mister Orangutan shuffled off back to his monkey business.

Someone with a keen eye would notice that this large pit from this point on was far too perfect a circle to be natural. They'd probably also see half a dozen giant robot bees emerging from the brightly lit side of the pit. The things were sleek, agile and polished white, like Apple products, and were headed towards a lone, distant climber with a pink hiking backpack descending into the pit.

Killer Robot Bees: Int 1 (machines) Str 2 Spd 5 Dur 2 Fs 6 Fly 2 Ability (Poisonous Sting Launcher) 6

Some dumb monkey tried to tell Elaine what to do, but she was having none of it. None at all. Even though her travel companion of the past few days mainly kept quiet, he and Elaine developed some kind of message system to let the other know what they thought. The orangutan would point and hit things, and Elaine would grow annoyed and shot things. Either way the system worked, but this new ape merely let his hands do the talking. Pressing her hand to her lower lip, Elaine devised some meaning from his gesturing of her to go away. It meant something worth looking for would surely await Elaine if she explained herself to the ape.

Mimicking the ape's hand positions, Elaine tried to merely get the orangutan to give up his post and go back to his monkey wife and kids. His wife must be terrible, because this dumb monkey refused to take the hint. Before the dialogue continued, the old orangutan who never opened up about his feelings began to argue with the guardian of the mountain. Elaine watched the exchange and tried to decipher some meaning from the various gestures the apes communicated with.

"It's hard to believe one day man will just become apes."

"Yes, it is hard to believe things you just made up, but I think we should be going after whatever your ape friend didn't tell you to not look for."

"You pointed to the wrong ape, racist, but you're..." Off in the distance a call for Elaine buzzed in unison. "I'm going to go shoot things. Take notes on what the monkeys say about me."

Elaine traveled a sure footed path towards the gap in the mountain pass where a hiker found herself caught between a rock and a hard place. Hey, one of those actually fits. Reeling off explosive rounds into the swarm of bees gave Elaine the most buck for her buck shot. Shadow jumps and explosive rounds would wear down their numbers to a more manageable number. Probably zero or so would be a good place to start.

Like the flimsy Apple products they resembled, the first target was blasted to smithereens with a direct hit. Meanwhile the explosive force of the rounds clip the wings of the other two alien robot guardians, sending them crashing into the wall. The remaining three's defensive parameters adjusted for Elaine's weapons, dodging the explosions. They changed their priorities and all went after Elaine, while the climber who had yet to prove her danger was left for later pickings.

Traveling through the air at high speed with perfect maneuverability (Spd 6/ Fs 6), they begin firing a flechette storm of tiny poisoned needles in Elaine's general vicinity. If she could avoid becoming a pin cushion for iNeedles it'd take only a single needle's poison to paralyze her. (Abi 6)

Diana unfortunately, was in no position to dodge effectively, and the only way to go was sliding down or be blasted to bits by the crashing robot bees. She dropped down and tried to catch herself, but the deceptively soft earth wall exploded downward and sent Diana falling the last 100 or so feet, landing with a bone shattering force. Diana groaned in proportionate agony, her supernatural conditioning allowing her to survive it but doing nothing to detract from the pain. She lay there for a while, unmoving.

The swarm of still not fully dead bees continued to dart and attack Elaine as her troubled spirit guide noticed something peculiar about these bees. "Why do the bees have numbers around them and why are the gauging their attacks with a numerical value?"

Two more bees burst into spare parts of metallic waste. One bee found a perfect trajectory towards Elaine's lower abdomen when the cowgirl pulled her scarf from her neck and used the cloth of cover her hand enough to keep the stinger from digging into her flesh. "I think you see the universe. Everything revolving and ordered by a number system probably ranging from 1 to 10. All my stats are probably like 15 or 20." Two more rounds went into the buzzing pests.

"You can't just assign perimeters and break them in your next statement. Who are you Roger Gooddell?" Along the back of the mountain, it appeared the backpack traveler struggled to find her footing against the swarm. Spirit Corgi didn't really care. "Haven't we had this conversation?"

Two bees crashed into the side of a tree as Elaine led them on a wild chase. One explosive round fired into the side of a tree. Three bees closed the distance. "Yeah, but it was in a place where no one would hear it, so I'm talking about it again." A push of the trigger brought the tree down on the pests. Their insistent buzzing made it hard to listen to the surroundings and figure out just how many of the creatures there actually were or what their flight path looked like.

"Recycling a conversation is cheap and lazy."

"If you have a conversation with a ghost dog no one else can see, does it ever really happen?"

"I can only hope it doesn't. If those things sting you it will probably paralyze you."

12 rounds flipped from her holster into the cylinder of her two pistols. "If metal bees have toxins someone put them in there, so someone had to make them." A hail of rounds tore each of the bees to pieces.

"Yeah, also, bees aren't made of metal in nature." One bee in particular took the impact hard and pieces of its hull flipped out towards Elaine.

"Well, yeah, but also, what I said makes sense too." Stretching her arm out with her gaze set to Spirit Corgi, the business end of a bee stinger scrapped her arm. Elaine looked down and saw the breakage of the skin. The pressure from her closed hand covered the small cut. "Guess you were wrong."

"Looks like it. How bad is the cut?"

"Don't know. Can't move my hand or arm anymore."

The robot bees weren't endless in number, and over time their hive mind intellect deduced Elaine to be a threat requiring a greater response. They cut their losses, regrouped and withdraw to their hidden lairs in the wilds and the chasm walls, allowing Elaine free access to the chasm and the booty deeper still. It was a two-hundred foot drop to the bottom though.

At the bottom of the chasm, Diana couldn't tell how long she was out of it. Fortunately she landed in a shallow puddle and her backpack, and not on one of those large rock outcroppings that would've broken alot of things. She could tell she was mostly intact, though her back was sore. "Ow... ow... ow... ow...! " She groaned, rolling to her side and scrunching up into a fetal position.

She looked up and saw a running battle between robot bees and... someone who looked familiar. Diana recognized, albeit not too sure, the sound of the gunshots. But that was not on her list of concerns right now.

A couple of the guardian bees slowly approached Diana. Get to her feet was an unbelievable agony, and just barely lodged throwing knives in the flimsy creatures' fragile frames. "I should not have rolled." She thought, her knees buckling.

Gasping from the pain, Diana took her time to get up and study her surroundings. The cave she was headed was before her now. She looked at the water, and dreaded holding her breath for who knows how long. She had come so far, only to be foiled.

The chasm was wide, enough to hold three of these alien raiding skimmer ships. They were basically a giant rocket strapped to a couple of grab rails, a mast, a sail and a chair for the pilot but elegant anyway. "This is a cool ride." Diana said, thinking she might use it to climb out of the chasm, but alas, the controls were obviously in an alien language. As for the aliens themselves, these three ships should have held alot more of them, but Diana counted only six bodies in various death positions in the chasm, their bodies riddled with needles. They were probably left to hold off the bees.

These aliens were humanoid in shape, tall and slim, virtually anorexic by human standards were it not for their burgeoning, developed muscles. Their bodies were clad in spiky, form fitting black armor of unknown make, though it somewhat resembled hardened leather. Their masks were wicked things in the shapes of demons and other worse abominations, but Diana mustered the curiosity to remove their helmets to see what they were. Naturally, she picked one of the female pirates.

Carefully she removed it, letting out an audible "Ew" as the mask was dug into her flesh with barbs. She took a peek inside the mask, and saw a bunch of technical machine doohikey. Her heavily occult mind didn't quite appreciate the technology of a fully functional environmental mask, but she kept it as a souvenir.

Beneath the mask she saw a wicked, grinning redheaded creature with  pointed ears, and alabaster skin with a death-like pallor. Diana's senses were bewildered by the beauty of this now dead woman, but looking more closely, she saw them for the repugnant monsters they were, as her face was contorted in joy at the moment of her death. Diana's senses reached out to the creature and felt a cold void. Her soul too, was missing.

A dark elf. Riding a high tech rocket ship. Diana's fascination with the pretty elf would make her less wary of her surroundings.

"If I had known this was going to happen, I would've got a guy to paint my picture." Several minutes went by since the piece of shrapnel landed in Elaine's arm, but at least the buzzing stopped.

"Look on the bright side."  The small dog walked over to the side of Elaine unable to turn. "Oh wait, you can't turn to your right. Gaze into the abyss you crazy cowgirl."

There was in fact a gaping chasm in the ground just before Elaine. "How did you know there was a hole there, you can't see color. I wonder what's down there?"

"Thoughts like that have driven men mad."

"I'm a cowgirl." She was.

"Oh that's right, you're already there." She was.

"No, I'm here. I want to get down there."

"I'm sure you'll be there soon enough. If I had to give you any advice to get down to the bottom of a put of darkness you could never find the light out of, it would be do everything you are already doing and don't twice. Or once really."

"I've got an idea. And my hand works again. I don't think I was paralyzed. I probably just forgot how nervous systems work again." Elaine stepped forth and jumped into the chasm. It opened up into a two hundred foot drop. Elaine only dropped for one hundred and ninety five of the feet before shadow jumping. She reappeared and landed softly on the ground from her leisurely five foot drop.  

"Well, that was a peculiar use of a power." Using more mechanics of spirit that made no sense, Spirit Corgi appeared next to Elaine.

"Yeah, learned it from some nerd who did it in World of Warcraft."

"You had no idea if that would work and based it off something you saw someone do without any knowledge of what in fact it was he did?"

"All mages can do it. You just jump from a cliff and blink when you're within ten feet of the ground and it resets your fall damage." Elaine pulled her backpack around and pulled her pistol rounds out and re-loaded her holsters.

"And you assumed World of Warcraft uses real life physics?"

"No. I assume the real world uses World of Warcraft physics."

"Well? Does it."

"I want ice cream. They have that in the bottom of caves." Elaine drove forward into the depths to claim her prize. And find out what in fact her prize was.

Diana struggled for a moment, looking at the yawning cavern that opened to deep, dark water. Whatever Corvus wanted her to find, was under the surface, at some unknown depth. She wasn't particularly fond of drowning, or what it would be like to regenerate from it. It was only when she sensed someone had shadow jumped nearby, and began speaking in a most familiar voice to an absent companion, Diana turned around to meet her, their background decorated with dead space elf pirates in kinky leather armor.

Her armor responded and placed a small throwing blade in her hand. Her voice was tense, the dialogue simple. "Cowgirl? So... you got away from the crazed Fox Lady, I see." She paused, eyeing up Elaine's movements. "What are you doing here?"

"How do you know her?"

"I don't know. Asian people all look alike and I forget which one I am."

"Good. Now when she explains how she knows you it will sound less stupid."

"Good luck. I know some stupid people." Elaine peered over the murky water. Something in this cave either wanted to be found or hoped to be lost forever. Possibly both with Elaine. "Oh a knife. I brought guns."

"You should place emphasis on whether that was inflection or spoken unironically."

"Yep."

"We're getting nowhere, but making impeccable time. What is it 3 PM and we've already plummeted somewhere we can't get out of and blocked our most promising opportunity with obstacles of the physical and metaphysical kind?"

"Yeah, we're just pretty good at this I guess. Now, back to you..." Elaine peered off towards the geological makeup of the cavern before returning to Diana.

"She says she knows you, so that can't be for any kind of good reasons."

"Everyone knows me. I'm cooler than everyone."

"She knows you and is brandishing a knife."

"Oh, you're going to try to throw that at me. That's not going to work and if you don't know why then you probably don't know much about me."

There she goes again, talking to herself... or to something I can't see. She must have talked Misaki to death, or at least into madness. Likely both. I wonder what the fox lady is up to... pretty upset probably, but taking over the world is boring. Diana thought. Nothing of her own occult powers or senses could pick up anything in the vicinity, as she virtually squinted where Elaine spoke. Was Elaine speaking to some unseen being? or was she a few eggs short of an omelette?

"I'm surprised, you talk like you don't remember me, Cowgirl. So I guess you're not mad about the whole hogtie and taking your hat thing?" Diana asked hesitantly, unsure what the cowgirl's next move would be, given that poker face of hers. She exercises restraint, withholding the dagger, melting it back into the armor.

A cold breeze blew threw the pit as a terse silence hung between them. She was still at least a few steps away. Sword to a gunfight principle, with precious little cover to be had. Diana was at a disadvantage.

She raises her hands very slowly to show her she was not going to fight. If Elaine didn't start a grudge match, Diana wouldn't either. She predicted their fight would be over what lay there in the dark depths... whatever it was.
"Well... since we're both here, then we both want what's down there in the water." She was going to pitch a sale now. Ahem.

"I can't hold my breath forever, though. But, you're a smart lady, cowgirl. Maybe we can help each other. I know the way, and you can probably figure out alien tech. See these dead gimps? I think their masks can help us breath underwater. What do you say? I'll even return your hat." She said, feeling tense. It was like playing poker.

And now this adventure looked more troubling. The warning of an Orangutan never said anything about elves, pirates or evil haunted swords, but he was probably just going through some orangutan stuff and forgot. Elaine could forgive that, but something troubled her mind. "Which one of us is Japanese?"

"You've been there once to do something with a ninja. I think you trained someone and got a Ouija board."

"Did we ever follow up with that?" Not really.

"You spilled coffee on it because Amethyst told you it was too hot to drink, then you drank it anyway. Then you blamed her for witchcraft and shot it. Then an evil spirit emerged and threatened to destroy Earth. I stopped caring after that, but I'm pretty sure the Earth was blown up."

"I never liked Earth. Except Netflix. I love Netflix."

"We all love Netflix, but I don't remember her remembering you from Japan."

"Oh yeah, I went there another time. You didn't come though, so it probably went really well. I went to a spa, got kidnapped, ate sushi, and then went home. Hey, now I remember you.  Elaine turned her attention to Diana. "I've got a ghost dog who can go down and scout it out."

"Really? Have I met him."

"He's doing some soul searching. I guess one of us will just have to go down there. Since I won the fight before Fox Lady got involved, I volunteer you to do it. I didn't even have guns that time. Yeah, definitely you going down. Tell me all about it when you get back. I'll go beat up some of these elf people." Elaine pulled out her pistols and began to investigate the masks along the walls. She wanted to know what caused this elf to die, or even if it died at all. Given the physiology of a unique species unknown to her needed more than just assumptions. "Why does Alien Autopsy sound familiar?"

"It's the band name from Ghost World."

"I think that solves everything." Elaine prepared for the second portion of her plan by examining the cave structure. Now she thought back to the bees and wondered about where they ran off to after such a thorough beating. Kind of like the beating Elaine delivered to Diana without guns and wearing a bikini. Maybe she should focus on the incidents at hand. "Yeah, I'm pretty good at this, but I think I need to talk to one of these elf ladies. What a weird mask." Elaine removed the mask and looked upon the face of the woman, checking for signs of death upon her. Elves had good features, so this mask would probably fit. "I wonder if I'm elvish or something. How do you know if you're elvish?"

Yup, the pretty redhead space Elves were pretty dead.

The cause of death was probably due to the numerous amount, thirty or more, of foot long Bee needles stuck in her body as well as an overdose of the paralytic venom, causing bone crushing muscle spasms. Her muscles were visibly twisted into painful knots. Her companions suffered the same fate, sprawled on the rocky ground and died standing up leaning against a rock. Whatever weapons they used were disintegrated into weapon fragments on the ground, useless.

The masks meanwhile, were truly strange things. They seemed completely opaque, and hard like marble when held in hand. As it got close to the wearer's face it soften and turned semi gelatinous, and actually reached out to embrace the whole head.

Elaine all the while was talking to herself, and briefly acknowledged Diana. Since she was just bossing her around to check it out and not blowing her head off, Diana assumed they were cooperating. "Heh. Sure." She said.

Diana fiddled around with the mask some more, and eventually got it to work. Her whole head was encased. She panicked for a moment, before realizing she could still breath. She shoved her day clothes into her water-proof bag and got into some light pink swim wear. Now she was just showing off the gunshots and scars. She went down into the water, and it went very deep... and quite cold. "Should have brought a diving suit." She thought. Thankfully she was breathing alright, and the mask offered her some visibility in the otherwise pitch black water.

Soft azure light outlined a massive alien craft resting at the bottom of this cavern complex. All over its surface there were lights moving about, likely the space elves. Diana swam back up, taking a couple of minutes.

"There's an alien ship down there, that must be what we're looking for. Well, finders keepers on any booty. Good luck Cowgirl." She went back into the water to swim towards the wrecked alien pirate ship on her own.

The moment Diana plunged into the water, the bottom of the chasm quickly got overshadowed. 200 feet up, the bees had returned with lots of reinforcements, and from what it looked like they were going to make it rain foot long needles, making up for their inaccuracy with sheer volume of shots. They open fire with that distinct 'fwip' sound, the many hundreds of organic needle spine things blotting out the sun. The bottom of the chasm was going to be the worst place to be in the next few seconds, and the only place to go was into the water cave.

Diana swam quickly and quietly, sticking close to the bottom of the cave to avoid being spotted, using a cheap machete to cut away sea weed. (The Blood Sword utterly refuses to be a tool.) Most of the elf pirates had entered the craft through an airlock on the side, leaving only a few sentries out. Diana decided not to bother with them, and sneak onto the ship itself...

"So we're sure it's dead?" A gentle buzzing hummed off the walls of the cave.

"We have numerous sources confirming it is in fact dead." Numerous in sound, the overwhelming swarm edged through the outlying tunnels leading to the central chambers.

"They have needle marks and bees paralyze people. Therefore it is completely within..."

"That girl is taking all of your phat loot." The dog gazed into the depths of the pool and could only see the loot gazing back.

"Not the loot!"

A startling question rose from the depths before Elaine. Could a cowgirl shadowjump under water? A normal person, no. But, a cowgirl. A cowgirl could possibly do it. Elaine plunged into the frigid depths of the muddy waters. Her initial dive landed her far too close to the jagged rocks, cutting her backpack and keeping it within the rigged hands on stone. A quick twist of her torso and Elaine freed herself from the rocks along the bottom of the pool. She swam forward several meters before seeing the visage of an underwater craft. Now, came the test.

"Well, that was easy." Yeah, cowgirls are just better than everyone. Of course getting in and infiltrating were not the same thing, but right now Elaine just wanted to infiltrate some dry clothes. "No one told me this was going to be a bikini adventure. Who comes up with this stuff?"

Diana finds a diving airlock, its doors ripped off recently by the pirates. Just above she could see one of the figures standing guard at the pool... this proved a difficulty to coming onto the ship undetected.

However, in that instant, Diana felt a disturbance on the shadow realm right above her, and the sentry turned to see Elaine materializing inside the entry hall. The gimp space pirate turned his, or her, whatever, hard to tell with those suits... turned its sinister red gaze on the cowgirl. The pirate was about to open fire on Elaine with his sleek ray gun, or perhaps a needle gun, but the quick thinking Blood Sword broke through the surface and threw, materializing a knife at the base of the pirate's skull.

He stood there a moment, then crumpled to the floor, getting blood all over the greenish interior. The ship was alien indeed,  the floor and walls rough and green, non metallic but organic and hard. Root like lines grew through the walls and floors in organic, branching patterns, some ending in strange red orbs while others vanish into the ship.

Diana slowly helped herself onto the ship, water dripping off her as she deposited her bag on the corner.  She wiped the seawater off her face and skin, the ship interior's warmth a welcome change from the cold sea water. She also wondered the merit of changing into clothes if she might end up wet again later, deciding to stay in her swimwear.

"What the? How'd you get here so fast? I went first!" Diana looked at Elaine who'd managed to get aboard ahead of her. "Bah, no point in asking..." She knelt to rummage through her things, then tossed Elaine her slightly crumpled but still alright hat.

"Here, take it. It takes up too much space in my bag. I'm not much of a hat person. Nice Hello Kitty swimwear by the way." Diana said, with nothing in her voice to tell she was lying, then finishing with a hint of amusement.

"Okay... let's look around. Finders keepers though!" Once that was out of the way, Diana left her bag on a shelf near the airlock, planning somewhat to leave the way she came in. The initial area they were in was fairly nondescript, the red spheres in the wall having no reaction. For now, there was only one way into the ship, forward, through some kind of chamber with large, dark angular machines that were out of place in the more organic ship.

Diana dared to take a closer look at the large machines, like some kind of pods with wires and tubes connected into them. "Alien tanning beds?" She couldn't tell what they were for yet at a glance, so Diana inspected the large central machine. She gave up rather easily, not smart enough to figure them out.

Suddenly one of the pods' glass slid open. She approached the far pod, emitting a mist that clouded its contents. Approaching cautiously, Diana would not expect the skinless, faceless, screaming creature that emerged from it screaming mad, a bare arm and inhuman grip suddenly grasping Diana by the neck.
Diana came face to face with the skinless creature, beholding as its skin regenerated before her eyes; pink, healthy epidermis quickly covered the disturbing face, and Diana would suddenly realize she was face to face with one the Pirates who was killed back in the chasm! Diana tried to break free, but found her focus lost.

The other pods began to open as well, other raw-red leering fiends awakening in a mad, shivering, screaming frenzy, creatures with their skins growing back at an accelerated rate. The shock of their awakening sent a surge of inhuman strength and speed through their limbs, while their howls and visages caught Diana's senses off guard.