MGIS 5 - Gathering Strength - Chapter 8

Chapter 8

Duty.

Some people see it as a waste of time. They class it with the sort of disdain that the rich have for the struggles of the poor.

Some people hold it up as the shining paragon of everything that is good and right in our world.

But those that know it for what it is—the weight of necessity and the glue that holds society together—those are the ones you have to be wary of, because they are the ones who will go to any extent to fulfill what they believe is necessary

~Faye Un’Killandra, Imperial Agent. Her memoirs.

Passing through the veil of the Rift on foot was a new experience for Desmond and his group.

Every other time they’d been sent to a Rift in the past, they’d flown in on a shuttle and then deployed from there. So they entered the Rift as if they were breaching a hostile pirate ship.

Chloe and Desmond lead the way, because as the adept, Desmond needed to be there to stabilize the Rift and allow his team to enter safely. The other three followed in a row after them only seconds behind.

Just because Desmond had to go in first didn’t mean that Chloe was going to be happy about it or even allow him much of a chance to get hurt. When the two emerged into the Rift, Desmond was tight to Chloe’s right side and it would have only taken a brief scooping motion to literally cram him behind her shield.

Thankfully, it wasn’t necessary. The area around the entrance of the Rift had already been cleared. The smoking bodies of the Rift monsters showed evidence of Windracer’s team having pushed back the initial assault. They were too heavily damaged to get a feel for the creature's size or makeup though.

Off to one side of the Rift were two large lumps covered in ash that he expected were the farming drones. Each looked to be the size of a small car, so he just made a note of them for now, he could help drag them out later on.

“Status report?” Desmond asked into the platoon wide comms as he glanced to either side, taking in the view surrounding him while the girls settled into their normal Rift formation around him.

While the sky had been blue and clean outside, within the rift it was filled with dark clouds and shone a dull, angry red. Distantly, Desmond thought he could see an orange moon peeking over the horizon, but it was hard to really spot as there was so much going on right now.

Underfoot, the ground was easily ankle-deep with black ash that scattered quickly with each step. More ash drifted downwards from above in twirling flakes while a gout of fire and magma erupted on the horizon, spewing molten rock into the air.

The entrance of the Rift had left them in a dead-end ravine with sheer sides, maybe half the size of a football field. Two narrow clefts in the dark stone walls extended from the far end, showing the paths that they could take in the Rift.

Windracer ignored his question, glancing between the two clefts as if trying to decide which one she wished to take. All of her team was fully encapsulated in their armor and looking sleek in the well-cared-for outfits.

She must have given some order to her team, because the gravelly voice of a Hyreh answered him.

“Suppressed an initial assault of fast-moving quadrupedal creatures. They have a projectile attack that is akin to small gobs of napalm as well as sharp foreclaws. No damage taken as we were expecting something, but this place appears to be a swarm-type Rift with a fire mana alignment.”

Desmond ignored the fact that Windracer had ordered one of her guards to answer him. If she wanted to play it that way to be petty, then whatever. He didn’t have a problem with her guards for the most part, the only one who’d really gotten on his nerves was the one that Chloe had rather violently introduced to the decking shortly after.

“Confirmed. What call sign should I address you as?” Desmond sent back, flicking off the safety on his spike rifle and setting it to maximum power. “And do these critters have hard shells or no?”

“Anchor-6,” came the reply from one of the two Hyreh on Windracer’s team. “And no, soft targets. Quick and dangerous is their build.” There was a pause, Desmond guessed she had switched back to the squad comms for a moment before returning and speaking. “Our team will take the left path if that is all right, Helm?”

Desmond quirked an eyebrow in surprise that the other team already knew his call sign but didn’t say anything about. Instead, he gestured to the right-hand path and responded to Anchor-6.

“Affirmative Anchor-6, your team has the left path. Radio if you reach the end or find the Core and I’ll let you know if we have unaccounted for branches along our route. We will do the same. Be safe and get out in one piece.”

There was another long bout of silence that would have felt awkward if it wasn’t for the fact that Desmond was already aware that the other team felt mostly antagonistic to him.

Or maybe that’s just because of Windracer. Her guards could just be following along with her, Desmond thought, but before he could spend too much time on it, Anchor-6 responded.

“Understood. Same to you.”

It was a simple answer, but as Desmond switched back to the squad-only frequency, he couldn’t help but feel encouraged.

“Too good to talk to us, uppity cun—” Raegan grumbled but Desmond cut his fiery-eyed lover off.

“Easy there, we knew she was going to be testy before this. Don’t let her throw you off pace. Let’s focus in on this place and keep an eye up high. This environment is just screaming to have hazards crop up like magma or whatnot. While our armor might shield from some of the heat, I’d rather not have any of you get burned and your armor can conduct heat if you fall into it. Also, engage environmental seals. Toxic gases might make an appearance and I’d rather be safe.”

He got a round of acknowledgements from his girls and he made sure to catch Raegan’s eyes to give her a wink so she didn’t take his interruption too hard. She rolled her eyes but he caught a smirk through her clear faceplate.

They fell into their regular formation, with Lila on point and Sasha just behind to support her. Raegan stood on Desmond’s right with her shotgun ready and Chloe was on his left, her shield held ready to lock down if needed while her new heavy-bore weapon sat ready.

“Shield’s new toy is going to be overkill on these things if what they said was true,” Lila said as they moved into their pathway. The crack was about ten feet wide and rose up almost a hundred feet on either side, effectively cutting them off from the sky and the rain of ash for the most part.

“Naw, it’ll be just right,” Desmond intervened with an amused chuckle. “If it’s anything like the gun I’m thinking of, just hitting near weaker monsters will be enough to kill them.”

“I’m just itching to try it out,” Chloe said with a sigh. “Bell talked the caliber up enough that I would like to see how it works outside the range. I have the hang of it in those sealed conditions, but like this?”

“You got this, Shield,” chirped Sasha as the perky Hyreh-Taari woman skirted around a large stone that poked up from the uneven ground. “Just remember that even misses can hurt. Spalling might catch someone as well. I’d be worried if it wasn’t you using it, since you are always so aware of where each of us is.”

Chloe didn’t respond verbally and Desmond glanced over at his horned lover, catching the edge of a blushing smile on Chloe’s face as she scanned their surroundings warily.

The crevice they were walking along the bottom of twisted lazily back and forth, trending more towards the right than anything else, and appeared to dead-end straight ahead of them. Lila was the first one there, as she was point on their formation, and she was quick to radio back that it was a T-junction.

“Left first,” Desmond ordered and his group pivoted.

He swapped the spike rifle to his left hand and pulled the small canister of paint from his belt. Carefully, Desmond marked the wall with it to indicate which way they were going with an arrow. He’d draw a vertical line through the arrow to mark that direction as cleared when they came back by. It was to easily indicate what spaces were already checked in case they had to radio for back up.

Still strange to be seeing something as simple as spray-paint in this advanced setting. You’d think that they could do some kind of holographic marking or digital one that the HUD’s would recognize, but then again it also makes sense to keep things simple and straightforward. It’s hard to ignore or miss bright yellow paint like this, he thought with a wry smile, tucking the small canister back onto his belt.

His guards waited until he was done before enclosing him once more and heading down the lane. They moved at a slow, shuffling pace, kicking the piled ash out of the way rather than stepping on top of it. They had discovered the material compacted and then had a tendency to slide underfoot.

Their first encounter with live Rift monsters came within moments of starting down the path.

A quiet chirp echoed through the comm lines and Sasha swore under her breath in the guttural Hyreh language.

“Sorry, I thought I had that turned down far enough that it wouldn’t come through the open mic.”

“No worries, Sword. What do you have?” Desmond answered, guessing that it was her new mana sensor that had picked something up since he’d seen her fiddling with the unit mounted to the front of her right thigh every so often.

“It’s got a few sensor hits ahead, but I’m still cleaning up the signal. The frequency for the Rift changed once we left the open starting space and moved into the paths,” Sasha replied, fiddling with a dial for a moment before nodding. “Yeah, there are a good dozen signals ahead.”

“The path opens up, I’m betting it's a clearing or canyon where they are at. Do we want to draw them into the path, Helm?” Lila asked from her spot in the lead and Desmond hummed thoughtfully for a moment before responding.

“Yes. Let’s see if we can drag them into a killing tunnel. Sword and Dagger, you two have this. If you need support, drop prone and that’ll be our signal to open up over your heads.”

The two of them clicked their mics twice in agreement and stalked forward. Though Sasha had already retracted her tail into her armor when Desmond ordered them to seal up, he could easily imagine the cat-featured woman’s fuzzy rope of a tail switching back and forth in annoyance.

Where the path opened up into a larger space was easy to spot, as the walls began to spread out rapidly and Desmond could see flashes of movement just past his girls as they got into position.

“Engaging,” said Lila a moment later and then her pistol barked rapidly, joined a moment later by the steady chug-chug-chug of Sasha’s auto-shotgun as the two sprayed fire into the clearing and then began backing up side by side.

Squeals of anger that sounded remarkably like someone doing a burnout on polished glass tried to overwhelm the roar of weapons fire, but failed to do more than highlight the weapons commanding roars.

The shots cut out sharply as Sasha and Lila split in the middle and a gob of something dark red shot through with lines of bright orange flew between them to land on the piles of ash and vanish with a hiss and a flare of light.

“Anchor-6 wasn’t kidding. That looked like magma that one spit at us,” Sasha growled as she returned fire while shifting to take up position with Lila in the middle of the path once more.

That brief moment where they split was enough for Desmond to get a look at the monstrosities scrambling towards them. He was suddenly glad that he never had to sleep alone anymore, because these things would visit his nightmares otherwise, he was sure of it.

Roughly quadrupedal, the Rift monster was about twice the size of a house-cat. However, it did not have any fur and was instead covered in a dull gray-black skin that blended in relatively well with the ash that they ran through, which came up to their mid-thighs but didn’t appear to impede the movement. No tails were present, and rather than a feline head it instead looked like someone had replaced it with a shrunken baby’s head after grafting a flappy mouth over top of the lower half of the face with jowls like a bulldog.

Desmond saw one of them open their mouth and a glow started deep in its throat that was abruptly extinguished when one of Lila’s heavy pistol rounds slammed into the creature’s maw and sent it skidding to a dead stop.

The dozen contacts that Sasha had called out were eliminated in rapid success, with both girls needing to reload once each but not having to rely on the rest of the squad for back up, though they stood ready for it.

“Well, that was anticlimactic,” Sasha muttered, checking her weapon over quickly before going back to fiddling with her sensor, the pickaxe-shaped unit that reminded Desmond so much of the PKE meter from Ghostbusters still giving out the occasional beep or chirp.

“Don’t worry, there will be plenty of time to find more trouble. Those things were creepy,” Chloe responded, stepping past Sasha to cover the smaller woman while she worked on her sensor.

“No need to tempt fate. It likes using me as a squeaky toy enough already,” Desmond grumbled and got a laugh from the girls at that, dismissing some of the growing tension that had been accumulating from the close atmosphere.

“Well it better not, you are my squeaky toy, Helm,” Chloe mock grumbled, getting more snickers from the girls before they got moving again.

The area that lay at the end of the pathway was another open canyon, much like the area that housed the Rift entrance. This one was more triangular in shape, with the path they came in on emerging from one of the points. Other than the portions of the ash where the monsters had raced through it to get to them, it was featureless and bleak to look at.

Desmond felt a pulse of something under the gritty ash off to one side and headed over to investigate. Raegan and Chloe kept close to him, while Lila and Sasha covered the path they had come in on.

Distantly, they could hear the echoing crack and boom of the other team’s weapons fire, but it was coming in steady and regular intervals without haste, so Desmond wasn’t worried.

It’s why we are here after all, to clear out the Rift threats and make it possible for them to harvest this place. I wonder if the planetary colony is going to get salvage rights to the mana when we lock the place down? Desmond thought as he followed his mana senses towards the pulse of energy he’d picked up.

He knew that once they had the Rift Core out of here, specialists would come in with machines that could drain the accumulated mana out of the Rift so that it would dissolve rather than cause a critical reaction like the Rift disaster he’d dealt with in his first year at the academy. Mana was used as fuel and power for just about everything in the Hegemony, and he wondered if it would be a windfall to the locals, or just something that vanished as a cost of living on the frontier.

I mean, the Rift has already ruined one field worth of whatever grain product they are growing here. I doubt that one field will cause a problem for their harvests if they have a large enough operation to need automated drones. But still…

His foot caught on something that was more than just the ash and Desmond squatted down to dig into the mess with his gloved hand. A bit of brushing and tugging produced an oblong hunk of black glass that was half the size of a football and vibrated in his hand.

“Obsidian?” Desmond muttered, peering at the rock in his hand. He’d seen raw obsidian before, and the lumps were never this polished on the outside normally. It was only after you cracked into one that you’d see the gleam and clear interior. “Whatever, it’s got mana in it so down the hatch.”

Lifting his hand to beside his head, Desmond saw the wink of a telltale light on his HUD that told him his cargo-pod was open and he stuffed the lump of glittering black glass into it past his helmet. The rock fell into his pack with a solid thunk noise and he stood up, dusting off his gloves.

“Short path this one. The little guys are too small to have cores, so let’s head back, ladies,” Desmond gestured back the way they had come and his girls gave a round of nods.

<><><>

The next three groups they encountered were much like the first. Small clusters of the fast-moving monsters nestled inside the open spaces where branches were set up. Usually, each of the open spaces had between one and three offshoots from them that would either dead end with the passage, or a closed, triangular room.

The distant grumble of weapons fire continued to echo over the hills every so often, punctuated by the roar of magma and eruptions every so often that would paint the sky with fresh clouds of ash.

Sasha and Lila had handled the smaller groups without an issue, with Raegan and Desmond adding in every so often, but Chloe seemed hesitant to use her new gun just yet. Something that Desmond had noticed.

“Okay, the next group is all Shield’s. I want to see what this new beast you have been carrying around does besides punch big holes in paper and make you look strong and sexy,” Desmond urged.

Chloe sputtered in surprise at his blunt statement, but the other girls all laughed and the group rearranged to put Chloe up front with Raegan standing guard over Desmond supported by Lila while Sasha backed Chloe up.

“Group up again,” Sasha muttered as she studied the sensor unit strapped to her thigh. She had to assume a pose like a flamingo to observe it, with one leg up and folded as she’d attached it to an armor plate for now, but she’d dialed it in by now to filter out the background radiation of the Rift and Desmond. “Looks like a larger one too, maybe two or three times larger.”

“You good for that, Shield?” Desmond asked.

“Always. I’ll stick left to give Sasha a clear shot and let you know if I need support,” Chloe called back and resettled the large weapon into its notch in her shield.

“They are hiding in the ash up ahead. Pick one of the lumps you can see and just aim for that,” Sasha explained, tossing her head towards the clearing they could see about fifty yards further down their current path.

The smart arm whined quietly as it helped steady the massive weapon, but he knew Chloe didn’t even need the arm to support her weapon, it was more to help improve her aim and allow her to swap guns if needed.

The large weapon was already intimidating as hell, looking like someone had decided to teach an M2 about cyberpunk and get it addicted to growth hormones. The fact that it fired magnetically accelerated rounds larger than the .50 BMG from back home made Desmond really curious to see what sort of havoc it could raise.

Chloe thumbed the selector on the body as she settled in and braced with her shield before feathering the trigger just once.

Given what her weapon looked like, Desmond was expecting a thunderous bang when it fired, even though he knew better from when Chloe had tested it on the range aboard the Fist of Defiance.

The sharp veeee-CRACK that followed was amusing as the magnets engaged and launched the round out of the barrel fast enough that the bullet’s speed was the primary source of the noise.

Up ahead, he saw a cloud of ash erupt and fill the air as shrieks of protest rose up while the monsters scrambled out of hiding, lurching drunkenly from the shockwave of impact.

“Nice…” Chloe muttered and Desmond saw her flip the selector switch with her thumb again before sending a three-round burst down the passage.

Two of the skittering monsters exploded in fountains of gore that reminded Desmond of someone hitting an apple with a sledgehammer. The third missed the monsters entirely, instead slamming into the turf and sending a spray of rock shards into the air and injuring three more of the monsters.

This also had the side-effect of giving the remaining Rift monsters a direction for their fury. With the customary disregard for their own survival, they charged towards Chloe in a writhing mass of wiggling limbs and bobbing heads.

Chloe silently slipped the selector over one more time and depressed the firing stud to send a three-second full-auto burst into the scampering crowd.

The heavy rounds shredded the wave of monsters, leaving gaping holes in their formation as individual monsters vanished in a cloud of gore or had limbs torn off to send them spinning to the ground. Two of the monsters had been mid-spit with their lava attack and instead sprayed the hot fluid over their allies, sending others careening away as they fought to scrape the hot fluid off of themselves.

“Good to know that their spit is also dangerous to each other,” Lila muttered as Chloe gave them another small burst of shots, cutting down the numbers in the group to only three that were still moving but wobbled drunkenly from both concussions and injuries.

Glancing to one side, he could see the light shining in Raegan’s eyes as she watched the havoc that Chloe was causing with her new weapon. It surprised him sometimes how bloodthirsty his dear Raegan was in spite of her affectionate lap-dog attitude most of the time. But he knew what was coming.

““I want one”” Desmond chorused in time with Raegan, making the Uth’ra twitch in surprise and look down at him, her eyes wide while the other three burst into giggles.

“You are a bit predictable, my Hammer,” Desmond said gently and reached back to pat her right thigh with his left hand, getting a pout from Raegan in return.

“No I’m not!”

“Yes you are,” chorused the girls, Chloe not even having to look back to do it as she let the smart-arm take her new toy and drew her sidearm to put down the remaining three, clearly not wanting to waste her ammunition.

“What even is that thing called?” Desmond asked when he saw how furiously Raegan was blushing, not wanting to press his granite-skinned lover beyond a gentle tease anyway.

“Lancer MAHAG-7,” Lila answered for him before anyone else could. “I looked it up while Chloe was shopping. The MAHAG is for ‘magnetic-accelerated heavy assault gun’ with it being the 7th generation model from the Lancer corporation. They handle heavy weapons for a good part of the Hegemony military, so have a strong reputation.”

“Makes sense, didn’t the security-chief say that the ship had several on hand for point-defense?” Sasha asked, using Elle’s title rather than name since she didn’t have a call sign.

“Those are MAHAG-5’s, they haven’t changed out the round type though, so might as well be the same,” Lila said with a shrug and Sasha shot her an offended look.

“Two whole generations of difference is not the same gun, Dagger,” Sasha said in affront and Desmond could just imagine her pointed ears pinned back and tail lashing in annoyance. “Especially if they use it in the naming convention!”

Lila just smiled and shrugged with her hands spread, as if to say ‘not to me.’

Before Sasha could snap back at her, Raegan spoke up.

“Let’s keep going. We are outside for once, so I want a turn next to be able to blow up something without Helm worrying I’m going to bring the ceiling down on us.”

Sasha snorted in amusement at that statement and rolled her eyes, making Lila giggle in response as the two abruptly dropped their little argument.

“Fair, let's get Hammer a chance to show off then.”

<><><>

They had to deal with two separate ‘hordes’ of the little Rift monsters. Both times, the group simply backed down one of the canyon halls and used it as a choke point to deal with the swarms of little monsters. He’d kept Einherjar on his girls the entire time, the enhancement running a slow boil that he could turn up at a moment’s notice if needed. It made his already dangerous team deadly.

Raegan put Sledge to good use, between using fragmentation grenades to hit a target high on the wall and make them fall on the others, to burning—quite literally—through her napalm rounds while they were effective.

Chloe was judicious in her use of the new weapon, as the MAHAG-7 would chew through ammunition without a care if she let it. The only other time she used full-auto was during those two horde situations, and it was with devastating effect as the massive shells tore through multiple ranks of the enemy.

Desmond continued to collect the odd glassy stones and a few crystals as he went, loading up his cargo pod with anything that had a mana signature for now, since he could dump some if he needed to make space for the Rift Core if it was along this route.

In all, he was content. His group was working like a well-oiled machine and not once did the Rift monsters close to the point where they could actually take a swipe at one of his girls. They had to dodge a few bursts of the burning spittle, but nothing beyond that.

I know the captain was asking about expanding the team, but I’m not really in a rush, Desmond thought with a sigh as they kicked through the thick ash into another clearing. My girls are more than capable out here. Quality over quantity, right?

Looking ahead, Desmond spotted the first variance he’d seen thus far in the Rift. The mixed canyons and ravines had been pretty uniform in color and layout, with the terminating ones always being roughly triangular shaped and the non-terminating ones being oval. This open ravine was one of the triangular ones, but a trench filled with glowing magma cut through the middle, sectioning off the back half of the area with a foot wide strip of burning rock.

“Well damn,” Desmond said with a sigh as he glanced around, sweeping his mana sense over the space to see if it was worth going deeper. Sasha was nearby, doing the same with her mana sensor.

“Nothing here, you?” Sasha said a moment later and looked up from her sensor with a slow blink to Desmond.

“Same, let’s double back. This place is far more branching than I’m used to for a grade-3 Rift,” Desmond grumbled. “Ammunition check.”

“Forty percent remaining,” Sasha replied almost immediately.

“Forty-three percent for my shotty, all my armor crackers and half my frags are left for Sledge. No incendiary, burned through those first,” Raegan said, grinning at her joke towards the end.

“Haha,” Desmond snorted at her before turning his attention to Chloe.

“Sixty-seven percent remaining. Sounds like a lot, but I could probably blow through it in about thirty seconds if I went wild,” Chloe said with a sigh. “I am still getting used to this. It’s built like my old repeater but the bitch eats ammunition like Hammer goes through steak.”

“Hey!” Raegan protested, turning to elbow Chloe and just hitting her shield instead with a solid thunk.

While Raegan did the ‘hitting your funny bone isn’t funny’ dance while Chloe and Sasha giggled at her, Desmond turned his attention to Lila. But his star-speckled Aelfa wasn’t listening. She was staring intently at the space on the far side of the river of magma that oozed past lazily.

“Dagger?” Desmond prodded and Lila flinched, turning to look at him with wide, cyan eyes. “Everything okay?”

“Yeah, Helm. Just… I thought I saw something odd over there. I’ve got about half my ammunition left right now,” Lila said distractedly and Desmond saw her biting her bottom lip in concern.

“Do you wanna go check it out?” he offered and Lila’s frown brightened up into a smile.

“Do you mind? It’s probably nothing, but I would rather be sure.”

Rather than respond immediately, Desmond turned and closed his eyes, reaching out with his mana senses to sweep them over the area once more. He felt a twinge from the pile of goods inside his pack, just the smallest fragment sneaking out of the pod’s shielding, but nothing else.

“Go for it. Sword, cover Dagger while she checks something out. Hammer, you too.” Desmond turned and his girls reacted immediately, shifting to cover Lila as the nimble Va’Aelfa saluted and made a quick running leap to clear the river of lava and land with a puff of ash on the far side.

Chloe shifted to take up her normal spot on his left and set her shield down into the ashes with a puff of black flakes.

“Everything okay?” the horned woman asked.

“Yeah, she’s just checking on something she saw,” Desmond responded. He was going to elaborate when there came a click over the platoon-wide comms and Windracer’s familiar voice came through.

“Rift Core secured and extracting. No reason to send a male to do a woman’s job after all, at least the captain knew that much when she sent us with you.” The acid dripping from the woman’s tone was thick and Desmond just rolled his eyes, though he noted that all four of his girls tensed at the insult in the other adept’s tone.

“Confirmed, will begin pulling back to the entrance. Congratulations to you and the Anchor’s on the Core bounty. Radio if you need assistance.” Desmond did his best to keep his tone professional before flipping back to the squad level frequency.

“Such a bitch,” Raegan grumbled and Desmond couldn’t bring himself to disagree.

“At least she kept the sniping to a minimum. For now at least,” Chloe sighed.

“Odds that she is going to brag about beating us to the Core?” Sasha asked, her own voice thick with annoyance.

“No odds on a guarantee,” Desmond interjected. “If all she does is toss words at me, I’ll take it. If she keeps acting like a fool to you all, then there will be another challenge in the pipe.”

“If it wasn’t for the fact the bitch doesn’t deserve it, I’d say ram it up her pipe,” Raegan growled and Desmond snorted in amusement.

Lila didn’t respond to the back and forth, just kicking through the piled ashes on the far side for a moment and pausing, then moving to another section and pausing again.

Desmond watched as his guard bent down and dug into the ash for a moment before standing upright holding something.

Shit, he thought as Lila immediately turned to scan the cliff walls for a moment before jogging back towards them.

She cleared the magma river with another nimble hop and immediately headed over to Desmond with a serious look on her delicate features. She had something small in her hand, a hunk of what looked like a piece of broken window glass.

“Found this over there. Along with a few other things,” Lila murmured quietly and handed the piece of glass to Desmond.

He recognized it almost immediately, a chunk of a broken data tablet. When Lila gestured for him to flip it over, he saw carved into the bottom corner of the plastic a rough carving. A carving of a set of feminine lips, pierced through with a pair of spears.