Explore the crash sight.

“Yeah, it’s probably best if we left that alone,” I admit as I slowly back away from the device. “I guess in the meantime, we can try to find the others on foot.”

Emily groaned at the thought of walking. She was always a bit softer than I was. I personally loved the exercise. Before the Tyrusiens came, I used to be co-captain of my swim team back in high school. I imagine that that pool is nothing but steaming vaper by now. I don’t even want to think about what might have happened to my teammates.

We stepped out of the pod and set foot onto the muddy ground. The air was hot and humid. Even worse, the alien bugs were starting to take an interest in the two young sweaty women. They probably thought we were fruit or something. Thankfully they weren’t the biting or stinging type, just the very annoying buzzing and flying up your nose type.

Emily stepped out behind me with the scanner in hand. Thankfully she knew more about these gadgets than I did. Otherwise, we would have really been lost. We decided to try exploring the area around the crash site first to see if there was anything we could use. Behind the pod was the expected crater, where the pod crashed through the trees and slid through the mud. I could see a few exposed roots from the nearby trees and a few smoldering leaves in the crater, mainly close to the pod itself, which was still very warm to the touch. The trees themselves were large and twisted, kind of like what you would see in a horror movie. Nightfall was going to be fun. The leaves were higher up, creating a thick canopy overhead, while trunks were covered in thick green moss. Ground-level, there were a lot of ferns, some of which were taller than I was.

We found something that looked like fruit lying on the ground as we moved a little deeper into the woods. They were large, red, and incredibly heavy. Picking one up, I noticed that it had a tough shell but at the same time smelt very sweet. It was a little too hard for my teeth to cut through, so I grabbed a nearby rock and started pounding.

Emily stopped me once I had cracked the shell and placed some kind of thin rod into the opening, shoving it down into the core. About a minute had passed until the scanner finally told us if the fruit was safe to eat or not. Unfortunately, it was using scientific teams that neither of us could understand.

“Blast it,” Emily cursed, “Of all the pods on the ship we could have taken, it had to have been the one with a scanner that doesn’t speak bloody English.”

“I guess we should try to find a guineapig then,” I told her while looking up into the trees. If we could find an animal eating this fruit, it was…possibly, safe to eat. For all we knew, the life forms on this planet could be eating sulfur to survive. Even my sister seemed a little iffy about trusting the wildlife of an alien world to tell us what we can and can’t eat, but unless we wanted to start taste testing the fruit, I didn’t see many options.