[Log File 010: Agon Wastes, Aether] I left the Agon Temple, thinking about what the recording had told me. I remembered that the air of Dark Aether was hazardous, and I was not looking forward to going back there.
Returning to the area where I had killed the Space Pirates earlier, I climbed a few ledges and found an unstable rock formation. I blasted it with a missile, causing it to fall and create a small bridge across the gap it was next to. I pressed on, eventually finding the portal chamber I-Sha had spoken of earlier. There was just one thing out of place, though - there were Space Pirates there.
There were only a couple present, so I decided to stick to a stealth approach. I opened fire on the two unfortunate grunts standing near the portal machine, dropping them before they knew I was even there. Moving further into the room, two more troopers warped in. I prepared my missile launcher, but didn't have time to fire before the Ing cloud appeared again.
The Ing cloud split in two and moved towards the two Space Pirates. At that point, the Pirate Troopers opened fire on the clouds. This made me feel better, knowing that the Space Pirates and the Ing were not allies. This feeling was short-lived as the Ing clouds started to take over the Pirates. From my experience with the Ing cloud thus far, this could mean only one thing - the Troopers were about to get much more deadly.
The Ing clouds finished the parasitic process of merging with the Space Pirates, and the result was not pretty. Scanning the new Dark Pirate Troopers confirmed my prediction about their new danger level, but provided some interesting intel. Apparently, when the Ing possessed a lifeform, the new Dark creature was weak to light-based attacks. While this information was handy, I had no light-based weaponry to take advantage of this. I filed the intel away for later, and proceeded to handle the Ing/Space Pirate threat the way I handled the other Pirates earlier - with extreme prejudice.
The fight ended with a total of four Space Pirate corpses in the room, but my Varia Suit's energy reserves were at critical levels. Lucky for me, there were some storage crates nearby. Blasting them open revealed energy units, which I picked up immediately. After replenishing my energy, I took my first good luck at the portal generator.
The unit was offline. Scanning the machine, it appeared to be connected to a nearby dynamo. The dynamo received power from solar energy, which could be focused onto the device with three solar lenses that looked out of alignment. It took a few minutes to realign the lenses, but my actions had the desired result. The light from Aether's sun was focused onto the dynamo, which started to supply power to the portal generator.
I scanned the control panel on the generator. After a few seconds, a dimensional flux began to occur. In almost no time at all there was a full-blown portal in front of me. I approached it, hesitant to enter after my last experience with this type of portal. Remembering the mission given to me by U-Mos, I walked into the portal, towards the world of Dark Aether...
[End Log File]_