"Get done quickly. The atmosphere isn't toxic, but if you inhale too much sugar air you will definitely die." Ira called down the ramp at Kagima and Tamahoshi as they scurried about outside the ship. The two mechanics were trying to locate the source of a problem they found with the ramp. It wouldn't close, and that meant they couldn't leave the planet. Ira didn't like that.

Outside, Kagima called Tamahoshi over to something he'd found. "Yeah, this is probably it. This piston is all gummed up. Some slimy shit. Gonna need something pretty strong to remove this."

Tamahoshi reached in and stuck his gloved fingers into the strange substance covering the piston. "This is too small, don't you think? If it were some mechanical issue it would have gotten all over some other stuff. Environmental hazard would be even more widespread. This is..." The slime stuck to his glove as he pulled away, stretching and clinging to the metal. He decided not to smell it.

Kagima ran around to the front of the ramp and called up. "Ira! We're gonna need some good cleaner to get this shit off. It's just a minor problem, but it's really sticky." He waited for several seconds with no reply before calling up again. "Hey! We're gonna be trapped on this cake hole if we don't clean this up! Get Rory down here!"

Captain Douglas looked out the hole in the side of the crashed enigma. It was a ship. That much he was certain of. Ancient and massive, but its purpose eluded him. The presence of Human remains confused him even more. The whole thing spooked him, so he preferred to get out of dodge as quickly as he could. He turned and looked back into the dark ship. "Osakawa! You takin' a whiz or something?"

There was no response.

"Yo! What are you doing? I want to head back to the ship now! You can't just stay here!" Nothing. "Osakawa?"

He heard a sound, something small moving low along the ground. It wasn't Osakawa.

Mami looked down at herself, only half pleased with having clothes. The shirt was too tight for her. Akamiya had found a pair of blankets that Kyoko and Sayaka were using to keep covered. They had loaded into the back of the rover, a tight fit, and were headed back to a ship that Hitomi had brought with her. It seemed to Mami to be a little too convenient, but convenience was something she had learned to accept. The rover was quiet. Hitomi was driving, with three others walking along outside. Madoka sat crammed in beside Hitomi, staring endlessly at the locket she'd been given. Sayaka and Kyoko were both just waiting for someone else to speak.

Hitomi finally broke the silence, reaching forward and tapping a panel on the control console. "Captain, are you trying to contact me?" She frowned when no response came. "Fucking useless machine. I swear, it has intelligence and it just does it for shits and giggles."

Madoka let out a long breath, then looked up at the others. She then looked up to Hitomi. "This isn't mine."

Hitomi blinked, confused. "What? What, the locket?"

Madoka nodded. "My locket couldn't have possibly survived this well for this long. It looks old, aged, but not old enough."

Hitomi smiled. "Ah, don't worry. I got it figured out. Your ship probably crash-landed softly, and oxymoron, I know, but it was soft enough that the cryo-sleep systems kept working. You've been asleep since you left, which by this point is almost fifty years. You wouldn't have taken that into the pod with you, so-"

Sayaka cut her off. "That's not how we got here."

Hitomi glanced back at her. "I'm sorry? What do you mean?"

Madoka held the locket up for Hitomi to see. "This belonged to the Madoka you remember. But I couldn't be her just as much as you couldn't be the Hitomi I remember. You said we got here in a ship, and that it probably crashed. If that's the case, then whatever you used to determine there was only one other source of metal on the planet's surface should have picked it up. But what you picked up wasn't any ship we came in."

Hitomi took a deep breath, thinking it over. The only other metal on the planet was not their ship. It was some ancient crash billions of years old. "Then... then how did the locket get here?"

Mami jumped up. "A mystery!"

Sayaka grabbed her arm and pulled her down. "Out of your league."

Madoka laughed. "No, let her try."

Looking around, Hitomi got the feeling that there was something she was missing. "What's going on."

Mami cleared her throat, standing again. She wobbled a bit, but braced herself against the sides of the rover. "I know how to solve mysteries. I'm a private eye!"

Hitomi shook her head. "The hell you are."

"I'm serious." Mami straightened up as much as she could in the cramped rover. "Okay, let me do this. The first thing we need to do is take a step back. Most mysteries that seem hard to solve are only so because the view you get of them is too narrow. Taking a step back allows you to see a few things. So... the question is how this locket got here. First, there are some things Hitomi needs to understand. We are not the people you remember, nor are we truly anyone you ever knew. We left Earth, if my math is correct, over one hundred and sixteen billion years ago. We were in a form of stasis, I guess you could say, until only a matter of minutes ago."

Madoka looked over to Hitomi, explaining with a bit more detail. "We were in, uh... well, we didn't have a ship. We were in a biologically crafted mobile stasis field, travelling at light speed for around a hundred billion years. We landed here and remained in stasis for another sixteen billion."

Mami continued. "You should be familiar with the theory that the universe is infinite, therefore considering the amount of matter in the universe it is unlikely that there isn't an exact copy of each of us somewhere out there. Adding in the endless expanse of time, it becomes a certainty that there are multiples of you that have existed and will someday exist. Now with that in mind, it is still an extreme coincidence that an exact replica of someone we know, who also knew exact replicas of us, is the person to greet us when we wake up. Regardless, it happened. So the answer is that if Madoka did bring her locket with us, it would have long broken down and disintegrated. That cannot be her locket."

Sayaka prodded Mami's leg. "Alright, so how is it here with a picture of Madoka, Hitomi, and me."

Mami smacked Sayaka's finger away from her leg. "That... with a little evidence, can be answered. Hitomi, the Madoka you knew. What happened to her?"

After a long sigh, Hitomi answered. "Madoka... with Sayaka, Kyoko, Mami, and a crew of five others, left twenty years ahead of my ship. They were to arrive ahead of us and start work before we got there. We were supposed to be collecting Helium in the Arbidium galaxy. They'd have been working for twenty years when I arrived, and would have caught up to the twenty years I aged before following them. Unfortunately, their ship went off course. It never got within a million lightyears of the seventy-ninth beacon, and never corrected its course after that. Seventeen years into their journey, they were declared missing."

"Then their ship is here. We just have to find it." They all looked at Mami. She shrugged. "No other way this locket could have gotten here." She smiled knowingly. I propose a theory. Sometime after, I presume, the seventy-eighth beacon, they went far off course. I can only guess what exactly these beacons are, but judging by how you referred to them I think my guess is pretty close. Regardless, they ended up here. Landing briefly, they went to investigate something..."

Hitomi looked like a light went on over her head. "The ship. There's an ancient ship crashed on the surface of this planet. Nine billion years old. It was sealed when we scanned it, but the Captain found it open. ...There were Human remains inside, between twenty and thirty years old. I'm guessing closer to twenty. They'd been eaten by something. Standard science expedition uniforms, like Madoka's team would have been wearing. Two bodies, with emergency survival gear."

Mami nodded. "Because that's when your friends would have been here. The remains may not be your friends. I think they got into that ship, something attacked them. It had probably been in stasis or something similar. It killed two, which we have to assume were two of the other crew members, and sent the rest fleeing back to their ship. In the rush to escape, Madoka dropped her locket. They took off in their ship and fled the planet."

"Or not." Hitomi flicked a switch on the console in front of her. "Nakashima, are you there?"

"Read you loud and clear. What can I do for you?"

Hitomi glanced back at Mami, then down to Madoka. "I have a bad feeling about this." She returned to the radio. "Nakashima, can you run a sensor sweep directed towards the planet's high orbit? I'm looking for a ship. Large. Helium miner. The type with a minimal crew. Particularly anything that's just floating there."

After a few moments of silence, Nakashima came back. "That's odd. It was on the other side of the planet. Just floating there like you said. How'd you know it'd be there?"

"Fuck!" Hitomi growled as she switched frequencies, calling to the three walking alongside the rover. "Akamiya, Akihara, Fukawa, grab on! We're flooring it!" She waited barely five seconds before changing gear and pushing the rover to its full speed. The bumps and hills were more pronounced at this frantic speed, but Hitomi managed to keep her hands steady as they flew across the console, switching frequencies again. "Captain! Get out of that ship! We're getting off this planet as soon as everyone's aboard!"

Captain Douglas' voice came back instantly. "I'm with you on that one. I'm on my way back. Osakawa's... well, he's in bad shape."

Nakashima called in next, having caught on to the desperation of the situation. "Kagima and Tamahoshi are cleaning a foreign gelatinous substance from some of the ramp's components. We can't take off until they're done, but that should be fixed up before you get back."

Hitomi grimaced. "Captain, we're gonna swing by and pick you up."

"Don't bother. I can already see the ship."

"Well then I intend to beat you inside."

The ship drifted alone in orbit, cold and silent as a grave. Gravity had shut off. The lights had died. Only its own momentum kept it up. A corpse, old and decayed, floated in the cargo bay, its position totally static. A few meters from it, a stasis pod lay open. Eight other pods lined the walls of the bay, three on the back and on each side. Apart from the one left open, five were empty. The three at the back were occupied, two rotted corpses on the left and right.

The middle pod contained a young woman, her chest slowly rising and falling with each breath. Her face obscured by the creature clinging to it, spindly legs wrapped around her head and long tentacle-like tail wrapped around her throat.