Hi, there. A brief interlude, by way of moving things forward. Hugs, and warmest thanks. :) Edited!
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Awakening, once more-
As ever, upon regaining consciousness, there was a brief instant of startled dislocation. Of shock. As a being of pure, focused energy, the Survivor was accustomed to constant flux and wild motion, and to storing information in the amplitude and frequency of his own waves.
When dormant, he converted himself to a pattern of lines and dots on the skin of his organic host. Not just out on the surface, although 'Rigby' wasn't aware of it. The Survivor-code had stamped itself down at the DNA-level, too; altering Rigby forever.
At any rate, springing back to awareness felt to him as though someone had shut a book… or paused a game… and then much later resumed reading or playing it. Time had passed. External conditions had altered, but he was the same.
Examining his environs, Survivor found Rigby in a primitive non-living aircraft, with the young, carbon-base female he desired as mate. Sampling his host's brain chemistry, he learned that Rigby felt concern for 'Kayo', who was evincing distress with her noises and facial distortions.
This was fortuitous, as Rigby's mind was more easily accessed when his conscious thoughts were occupied. Having made sure of his host, Survivor turned to their conveyance. They were quite high up in the atmosphere, he discovered. All systems focused on scanning for 'Scott', who had ceased to radiate, spreading ripples of unease throughout his carbon-base Spectrum.
There was concern, as well, for those ported test subjects, who remained missing. These, he could quite easily locate, having caught and propagated their fading signals, when the transport disk had first malfunctioned. Well enough. Needing to reverse a life-course of unspeakable violence, Survivor chose to act.
Without disturbing Rigby (who seemed to be progressing well with his chosen female) the Survivor simply left him behind. In a flash, he transferred his essence from erstwhile host, to machine. Then, moving at the speed of light, he traversed a scanning wave out of the hovering aircraft and thence to the slow-tilting planet below.
Like a bolt of emerald lightning, he crossed through the layers of Third-World's rare atmosphere, then plunged down into its ocean. There, his speed slowed, and his danger increased tremendously, for the sea's upper regions were filled with microscopic, energy-slashing plants. Fortunately, green was not their preferred wavelength. In other words, he "tasted bad".
Those first hundred haads were still a frantic clutch and scramble, as he zipped through immense clouds of vampiric plankton. Took occasional breaks by printing himself as code on fresh, algae-free rocks, but these were few and far between on this carbon-mucked planet. In fits and starts, then, Survivor reached the safety of dark, colder water.
Flashing past blind things that drifted, and currents that oozed, he soon reached that gaping-wide portal. By-passed it entirely, as much too dangerous, for a being composed of living energy. One had tried to make use of it, though. The Survivor detected faint traces of 'Eos', one of the artificial sentients created to serve the Tracy Island Organics. Young and foolish, she had risked passage through a doorway that was terribly hazardous even for beings with genuine physical structure. Well, she'd paid for her careless haste, and the Survivor would waste no time seeking a mere construct. He had other business, further down.
Within minutes, the speeding energy being had crossed to the relative safety of the crust; penetrating that dense, chilly rock as a rapid vibration. From thin, brittle crust, with its trenches, seamounts and magnetic scars, he passed to the hot, slow-churning mantle.
'Saw' the crust from below, with its star-like pattern of embedded and flickering diamonds. Then, on down through the mantle, riding the same currents that stirred the continents above. Here, Survivor strengthened himself, gaining power from the sheer, ferocious energies of the place. Third World-below was much more impressive, and safer, than World-above, he thought.
Survivor might have lingered a moment longer than necessary, simply basking like a beachside Organic. Three minutes of travel brought him to the planet's counter-rotating metallic core, which thrummed an eternal deep chord as it spun. Encased in many layers of flowing magma, the core was imprinted with its own small versions of the continents.
These shot across the face of that iron globe like the shadows of clouds, creating wild magnetic storms in the molten rock. The survivor took it all in, sipping at the auroras surrounding negative Europe and Asia. Very sustaining. There were living beings there, wisps and sprites composed of heat and magnetic flux, but he hadn't time to socialize.
Instead, skirting the rumbling core itself, he passed on through mantle and crust to the world's other side. Specifically, to a small, toxic island at the edge of a giant landmass. There, Survivor found terrible chaos and urgent need.
