You leave the mountain with still some curiosity in you, as if you've just scratched the surface of something.
Something mainly metallic, which actually doesn't produce a nice noise, when scratched. Still, you feel the tiny thought of that place insinuating in the branches of your grey urban life; those pink mountains were beautiful.
So you start searching every door, like in the best RPGs, entering every house and talking to each and everyone, whenever, wherever, however. You risk a couple charges for trespassing but hey, those doors were open! You covered almost all the city, there's only that little hipster club at the end of the street: a nice cover business for the Inn. You run towards the building and fall in an open drainage pipe.
What, it happens in cartoons, did you think you'd avoided it?
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This drainage pipe is strangely huge and quite remarkable in its quality, although you still don't know where it's leading you to; thinking about your recent track record, you think of a couple possibilities. As a matter of fact, you finally end your slide in a huge but fashionable post-industrial hangar.
Your eyes can't ignore the elephant...or better, the giant in the room: a skeleton of opaque metal, bronze-colored, towers at the end of the room. You can see its head, enormous and menacing, and the cockpit in its chest. It's still under construction it seems, being so...naked, with a scaffold to sustain those two unsettling centers of gravity.
"Don't worry, we're not gonna use that one" a familiar voice reassures you from behind. Not from too far, almost creepy of her to scare you like that; fortunately Sora gets in front of you and continues. "Yes, it's the same one that you saw last time, some light years ago, you were here; we're perfecting it, Franco is fine-tuning its mechanism, you met him. Sooner or later, the time will come for us to get to it too, but in the meantime..." You can't help but noting how she used light years to indicate the time, but her unapologetical arrogance doesn't quell. "What do you know if I used it as a time measure? Do you know if we're not light years away from here?" ...True dat. "Exactly! You'll wonder if I do know it!" You're fairly sure you know the answer to that... "My point is: as you can see this modest inn is always in movement, if you'd have watched around you before judging you'd have seen that we're not at the observatory anymore! And soon we won't even be here! If you'll follow me..." her voice and posture become more accomodating and gentle as she leads you to another machine, covered by the colossus: a spaceship, or better defined as "piece of junkyard". "Hey!" Sora turns abruptly at you angrily "This junk will bring you to dinner for free, and for your information it sunk all alone a pirate dreadnought at the Yoreldex-908 trade junction!" You make a mental note to be careful with your next interactions with the Locandiera about her personal belongings. Or any of your thoughts about it.
Un'astronave in No Man's Sky
Metamorphosis on a drink
As you board the spaceship you see the Locandiera changing aspect: plaques made of rock join together from various parts of her limbs, forming an armor of sorts. On her chest, now rocky too, forms some kind of energy nexus, as those on sci-fi movies, but pink. The same color is present in the other lights of this...costume? Armor? Skin? Anyway, on her horned helmet, and on her right shoulder. Behind her you can see a winged jetpack.
"eh eh eh, what can I say? It's living stone!" Sora is definitely satisfied while she so defines her new...configuration. While you try to figure out this "paradox" she indicates you a mirror and goes to pilot the ship. What you see reflected makes you forget every possible noise and bump of the ship's takeoff.
You've undergone not a mutation, an overhaul! You're smaller, stout, with a space suit, with a reptilian/birdlike head? Yeah, the head is longer now, you can see scales on your cheeks, and a beak similar to that of a toucan...but shorter! No wait, it changed again!
"If you focus on the metamorphosis process you can stop it to the form you like. And yes, you'll return human when you'll return home!" You try various ears like vyverns or dragons, and even...horns! But they grow from the nose, should they be called like moustaches? What's this all about? The Locandiera, now pilot too, returns to you: "Neat huh? That's what you get when you escape the Earth's gravity!" adds ironically.
The Sky is of nobody
"Since lately Earth's temperature has become a little bit...heated, we're going to a place more comfortable, at least environmentally!"
You hear the announcement from the intercom and go to the ship's windows to understand where this interstellar captivity is gonna bring you. The celestial objects, from almost unnoticable due to the speed, gradually recover their typically dotted form, and you can tell the farthest ones from planets and huge moons...no wait, that's no moon, it's a really trafficked space station! You see a trade fleet docked between the station and a strange orange planet. Is it desertic? You can't see any trace of "civilian" settlements from the ship, although its trafficked orbit would suggest at least some sentient presence...you don't quite know how to define it, since you just transformed in something inhuman you wouldn't want to sound offensive in your first trip abroad. "Don't worry about that, you don't have translators and you don't know any language spoken here, so they won't understand...and you won't understand them." the slight giggle that follows doesn't make you feel better, but then again, who didn't do it once?
In the meantime the ship has begun the landing procedures, allowing you to better observe the planet. It's marvelous how nothing that you see corresponds to what you know! Maybe the shape of the rocks...or at least so you hope! The ground, already orange-grey, is covered by huge carpets of red grass: only the mountains, of the same color of the ground, add some variety to the landscape. You can't see many trees in the area, especially at high altitudes, but as you look up you see something more spectacular: floating rocks? Flying islands!? Were they attracted by a stronger gravity center, or was the planet's one too weak for them? One thing is certain: there's tens of em! They decorate a perfect pink sky, not because of the clouds, but from the very configuration of the light, which comes from not one but two suns! The heat is not unbearable though, au contraire, probably the combined energy of those two suns barely equals your system's one...
"Or more likely" Sora intervenes while heading for a slim building with a disc on its head, probably some habitable spaces, "this planet's atmosphere is not covered in holes like ours." It makes sense; unbelievable, we're in outer space...and the Locandiera says something smart!?
Foto di un pianeta su No Man's Sky
Impossible Categories
While you wait for Sora to return, you wander through the planet searching for some wildlife. As for plants, there's no scarcity of new and fantastic forms, with a prevalence of quadrupeds. You were just making this observation when from the ground jumps out a sort of...mole? With a....drill on its nose? And it's flying!? After the ascending phase of that "jump" it points towards the ground with a precise ballistic trajectory, and finally it disappears into the ground in a so smooth manner you could swear it opened up before the contact with the mole's drill.
You automatically activate your analytical visors to know more about the fauna. Yes, you have visors, you stopped asking questions a while ago. It's a neat visor! It has a lot of entries, and among the items you can spot the gender. They've got it too! You start analyzing the fauna with hope of reading some known word but you read:
"What, we traversed the stars to another solar system and you wanted to find the same categories of Earth's? They're obsolete and wrong, gods forbid we have them here too!" Today you dangerously agree with Sora, but it's not the time for doing philosophy: you hear in the distance a noise, similar to a swarm of bugs, but also metallic?
Suddenly the Locandiera is in a hurry: she calls you repeatedly and signals you to return to the ship. While you run to the ship she summons a totem-staff with a horned animal skull tied to the staff with a bony hand. Creepy. "We need to run away, the glass bees are coming and you need to return home. Moreover, they're searching for me, and I don't want you to lose the only taxi on the planet!" While you run towards the ship cursing the rain that brought you in that Locanda you see Sora pointing the staff towards those mini-robots and fires from the opening mouth energy projectiles which seem to slow the swarm's speed. She keeps on firing while running backwards, risking the fall twice. At the third time you manage to save her from tumbling and she convinces it's wiser to just run to the ship: those glass bees have just deployed some energy shields to avoid and return the fire. On the entrance Sora tries to face them again but you manage to strongly push her inside.
"Ok ok children let's go before you start to cry!" says in an exageratedly offended tone "but I want it to be recorded, I could've defeated them! Now fasten the seat belts!"
You fasten them as fast as you can, as Sora is quite fast at the helm: while still under the atmosphere she skillfully maneuvers the ship and in little time the stars have become lines once again.
"The audacious Locandiera Sora managed to jump into lightspeed, but new dangers await for the brave heroes: will they escape the swarm of Glass Bees? Or will they need to confront the now-announced Hive Fleet? Stay tuned...ouch!" Oh noes, you stumbled right against he Locandiera and turned off the intercom how unlucky!"
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