Great thanks to Lady Eivel, for encouraging me to continue this, and to Laseri, for giving me a thread on which to pull!


Something had to be wrong.

Gnawing at her bottom lip, Toshiko Sato fiddled with the dials on her scanner again. She had to have made a mistake; after all, it was rather difficult to operate delicate equipment with mittened fingers.

She tried recalibrating the sensor array, hands naked this time. That nearly gave her frostbite, but no different readings.

She tried pacing around the peak, but while the movement helped her toes regain feeling, the scanner remained blank.

Was it broken? It had to be, because if she was shivering on this mountaintop for nothing…

… someone was going to pay.