Chapter 472: 22: Grounded

"There!" Sky shouted an instant later.

Jade didn't even have to ask as he saw the slightly ragged stretch of light seem to rise from the horizon. His instincts guided Hisui's hands as the little ship rose in response. The movement of the ridge spoke of how close their viewpoint must be to the surface of the globe beneath them.

The slow descent that the feathered charms had reduced their fall to, suddenly seemed far too fast. The ridge was beneath them within moments, and Jade threw the fans that would only work within an atmosphere wide open. A storm of particles swirled upward in response.

The little ship landed with an ominous thud, and then bounced. 

The small vessel once more smacked into a hard surface that threw an even thicker, brighter, fog of dust into the air again, with a slightly less forceful thud. They bounced again. 

From the outside the ship's landing might have looked like the path of a neatly skipped stone. From the inside, it was a barrage of impacts that nearly shook Hisui's boots loose.

When the ship finally landed, then merely quivered for a moment and didn't bounce again, its occupants lay where they had fallen. They all lay still and silent for more than a moment.

"We're alive," Appella announced almost questioningly.

"Yes," Sky agreed.

"Did we land on anyone?" Jade asked a bit shakily.

Both of them turned their heads toward him, and he pointed at the branches that stuck out into the viewport on one side.

"You said that there were animated shrubbery, or creatures dressed in leaves…" he added.

Appella sat up and drew an odd weapon out of a container space on her belt. Sky didn't object, instead she also gathered up her bow from where it had landed on the final bounce.

The branches didn't move. The leaves didn't quiver. The haze that shrouded the small ship didn't thin noticeably.

"Are you planning to kill them off if landing on them failed?" Jade asked as he began to gather up his own gear.

The leafy branches seemed to fade into the foggy background despite the fact that they seemed to be glowing just like the tree overhead. Everything seemed to be glowing, even the particles in the air.

Appella turned toward Hisui with a rather dazed expression, and then glanced down at what she held. "I'd probably attack someone who landed on a friend of mine… but, I'm not even sure about what I saw. And that isn't moving."

"I'm not really certain of what I saw either," Sky admitted nervously. "A sea of marching rabbits dressed in leaves seems unlikely."

Jade glanced at the pale glowing environment that surrounded them again, and began searching the storage compartments of the little vessel.

He searched until he found the volcanic glass lens he used to protect delicate instruments against the harshest flames in Hisui's forge. Obsidian wouldn't do more than dim light in the real world, but here in the game its legendary properties of absorbing light and energy were quite real. Unfortunately a single lens couldn't protect 3 people.

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Jade smashed the lens and ground it into a fine powder.

"What are you making?" Sky asked curiously.

"Filters," he explained as he took apart one of the helmets he had created before Appella gave him the air stones. 

Jade used one of Hisui's more magical skills to reshape the glass while using that artificial fluidity to meld the powdered obsidian into it. He then slid the first visor over his own eyes and looked outside the ship again, before handing the other two over to his companions. 

The visor subdued the brightness that had obscured everything enough for him to see movement in the cloud that was slowly settling. He could actually see that the cloud was slowly settling with the help of the filter. It seemed to be functioning rather like a polarized lens.

Sky drew in a sharp breath as she pulled her own visor down. "A sea of rabbits!"

Appella squinted in the direction that Sky was looking, and Jade followed suit. There was movement in that direction too, but it was slower than the currents in the cloud they had raised, and at first he couldn't make anything out.

The dust slowly settled, ever so slowly. The three of them watched as though caught in a spell, but a glance at the ship's instruments told Jade that the interior was still free of the thick magical energies that had filled the void. The exterior was also giving a far lower reading here within the Moon's atmosphere. 

Eventually they could all see the sea of rabbits, or at least the long eared furry beings that resembled rabbits, though they moved on their hind legs like people. But as a group they moved like herd animals, or perhaps a vast school of fish, rather than the rabbits Jade was familiar with.

Once in a while one would reach up to grab a leaf from the branches they seemed to be wearing like hats or shawls. The leaf was slowly nibbled, held in paws that were far more like hands than a real rabbit's front feet.

"Why are they all glowing?" Appella asked.

"Maybe because they are eating leaves that glow," Sky suggested.

Jade stared at the sea of ghostly rabbit people. His internal questions were automatically forwarded to his orbital System, and answers began to filter back into his mind. The Moon's server was portraying a very typical mesh of 'popular legend' mixed with what 'everyone knew' about the moon. 

The fine dust that covered the ground and shone whitely was neither realistic, nor completely fantastical. Lunar rabbit people actually had a solid legendary history among more than one culture, and Jade had been more than half expecting to find some on the moon. But not thousands, or hundreds of thousands.

Both Appella and Sky stiffened with alarm when Jade stepped forward and lowered the barrier that had enclosed the little ship against the airless void between the Empire and the Moon. There were no rabbit people walking along the ridge they had landed on. The magical energy within the small vessel only raised a little as the Moon's atmosphere filtered in.

As Hisui stepped down, Jade was relieved to see that the thin branches seen through the portal hadn't been carried by one of the rabbit people. They were sprouting from the ridge. The ridge wasn't a hill of Moon soil, it was a root.

"Do you think we've landed in the Moon's equivalent of the 'Beginner's Vale'?" Sky asked with soft curiosity as she followed Hisui.

Appella's expression lit up and she bounced out of the little ship as energetically as usual. "It is, isn't it?!" she exclaimed.

The rabbit people who were moving along the edge of the root closest to them glanced upward in response to the exclamation, but their slow movement didn't stop.

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