Further into the jungle

You and Haruka continue your exploration of the jungle. The weather outside is remarkably humid, the moisture in the air sticking to your skin. You have pulled your inner suit down to your waist, leaving your chest slick with moisture.

"At least we landed on the dayside of the planet" you joke, trudging though the jungle with Haruka.

She still wears her inner suit, though you can tell it is bothering her; following behind you. You look up again and think; During your escape from The Andromeda, you must have landed about in the perfect location, with the sun hanging at about 30 degrees in the sky, a pink hue in the sky, a land of perpetual twilight.

"Strange, how it's always hanging there like it's setting" Haruka remarks.

"It's going to get weird trying to figure out when to sleep," you say in agreement.

"So why did you join the Arc program," you ask Haruka.

"Well... well I've always been interested in plants," she says "I grew up in Osaka, and my mother had this garden I loved it, we would work and plant the seeds together and watch them grow" she smiles remembering.

"And when I reached college I wanted to study plant life, It was there my professor got me interested in exobiology particularly in plant life" she continues to smile "When I heard about the Arc program I knew I had to sign up. My parents were there to send me off, my mother gave me a flower seed from her garden, and my father told me he loved me." she seems to get sad, you decide maybe to leave her be for the moment.

She seems to be clutching something to her side.

Your mind wanders from the conversation back to life on this planet. You watch as a brown crablike creature burrows out of the ground, then with long chitinous legs skitters across the field nearby grabbing something you did not notice, then burrowing back into the ground. You stare at where the strange creature entered the earth waiting for it to come back up.

During your watch, you notice that you hear something, distinctly the sound of rushing water.

"Haruka, can you hear that?" you say, pulling her away from another plant.

After a minute she says "Yes!" you both wander towards the sound.

You wander out of the forest and stumble into what at first you think is a lake, as the trees on the other side of small and barely visible above the horizon. And on one side of the broad river, you see a strange sight as the river just falls off, into seeming nothingness; it is from there the sound is coming from.

The river on the other side goes deeper-into the seemingly never-ending jungle.

"Aaron" Haruka shouts, she must have found something. You run over to her and find what exactly what she was looking at.