They knew there were the odd chances - those 1 percents that everyone ignored as much as they dismissed the possible humiliation of choking to death at dinner.<br/><br/>They had come from desperate times.<br/><br/>Her pod was a chrysalis of nanowoven metals, which was otherwise opaque except for the singular window that faced her head.  From her perspective this might seem like a window out to the world, but she knew that it was really just a window in.  Stasis pods were apt to fail and what reason was there in open something that contained a putrified body within?<br/><br/>The process was clear to her even if she had never experienced it before.  Few people have in fact been in stasis and their experiences had been reported to be rather bleak to say the least.  After all, the science behind freezing time had more than just a whiff of blasphemy.<br/><br/>There was a head, or at least the shape of one, silhouetted in the harsh light of a focused source.  It was alarmingly large, which might startle anyone who had ample experience with psuedohuman creatures.  A wild medusoid mane encircled the creature's crown like the distended teeth to some deep ocean beast.  The proportions of the head appeared mutable through the glass like heated wax as it oozed to and fro across the view of her window.  Occasionally, she would be afforded senses of color, but those elucidated nothing but a horrible melt of primal reds and bone whites.  Club like features rose up to fall against her window and it might take her some effort to subdue the reflex to shield herself.  Outside of the thick steel she could hear a grunting growl of cursing or the roaring, shouting for her to respond.  The club like things beat down harder and harder till she could finally see from the deformation of them against the glass that they were made of skin and that they were in fact fists.<br/><br/>Then suddenly it was gone.  Gone was the fists and gone was the dark face.  The movement was so sudden that she wouldn't be prepared for the blinding light, which the head had been blocking from her eyes.  It would take her a long while for her eyes to acclimate themselves to the intensity of light.  When the pain and the overwhelming brightness subsided, she would instead find nothing but a small fixture set several feet from her window.  The fixture was blurry through the thick glass and the shape of the light was odd and ameboid as the creature's face before.<br/><br/>Outside her pod, there wasn't even a rattle from the creature.  The figure had disappeared entirely, which might make her think that it had never appeared at all - that she had imagined it perhaps?  The pod began to open in a very normal sequence.  Whatever lay outside of it was not a concern of the machine and nothing at her disposal could delay the machine.  The machine would not understand and did not care that she might wish to remain within its protective steel, shell.<br/><br/>But, there was just black outside of the parting door.  No creature, no threat...<br/><br/>Normally there would be a flock of 'medical professionals' to bring her out of the pod.  However, the pod's beetle-like wings opened to release her into a startlingly alien place of ashen grey and melted shapes of metal.  She could come to recognize this place, this hold, to be part of her old ship, but to do so was a severe stretch of imagination.  It would appear like her ship had been subjected to acid and that the metal had dissolved off the bones of its superstructure.  Like an eaten fish, the titanium beams curved cavernously around her and reached pathetically up at an ultramarine, midnight sky.<br/><br/>Beyond the broken walls of her craft she could barely perceive the landscape.  It was irregular in the moonlight and could not be resolved from her vantage.  It wasn't clear that she was on a hill or on a meadow, but she was also looking out at it through odd fissures and holes of the ship.  However, there was no doubting the abundance of flora, which swayed with a naive innocence to the night time breeze.  Her eyes might trace the creep of the greenery up over the craft itself.  Leaves and jungle epiphytes crawling around the steel like it was no different than the trunk of a tree.<br/><br/>Around her she might consider the other pods, which held her crew.  There were some still bracketed to their walls, but their windows were cobbled by a miasmatic black that warned one away.  Before she might forget that strange visitor at her window, her inspection of the ground would reveal several foot prints disturbing the sandy dirt before her pod.  Yet, if she were to search out in the night and amid the shadows of the broken ship, she would not find any other sign of the creature.  Or… much less a person - any person at all.<br/><br/>----------<br/><br/>Monkey had followed the vague depression in the ground for most of that day.  It was a furrow in the dirt that was often times narrower than a shoulder's width but sometimes spanned far wider than Monkey's arms outstretched.  In fact, it sometimes broadened at least five times the width of his arms outstretched.  He had in fact measured it so with patient scrawls into the damp earth with his big toe while a peering eye gauged the plumb of his outreached forefinger and the ground.<br/><br/>At one point Monkey knew that the depression must have been fierce, for the man saw the way the earth was turned up around the fissure, and he could sense how much that clay settled with time.  Now, however, the depression was shallower than a creek bed and was throughly filled in with grasses and bushes.  Great rooted trees broke the embankments of the fissure and nature otherwise sought to smoothen it back into its fold.<br/><br/>Monkey might have missed it himself if he hadn't decided to relieve himself right over it in the morning.  Why, he'd stared a little puzzled with the way his urine ran a perfectly straight path away from him.  Immediately he knew this was not a natural occurrence and being in the business of making trouble for himself, he decided to trace this phenomenon into the jungle.  The phenomenon was of course the trail of her ship's crash, which would have plowed a great amount of earth all around it before settling where it did.  To Monkey, these oddities did not necessarily have to make sense in so far as they were recognized as 'artifacts'.<br/><br/>He followed that trail through the afternoon till it ended with the very alien shape of her spaceship held within the bosom of the jungle.<br/><br/>He unearthed her from the wreck of metal and the reek of decay and time.  He triggered the machinations to release her without knowing he had done so.  In the fogged glass, which perturbed her visage into a frightening creature, Monkey had beat the pod with his fists as if to prepare himself to send it… her back to the pit she should have remained in.<br/><br/>When the pod began to open, Monkey fled.  He ran back into the jungle and clambered up a tree with his silent blue eyes watching out into the darkness.  Seeking movement in the dead hull of the ship.<br/><br/><br/><br/><br/><br/><br/><br/><br/><br/><br/><br/><br/><br/><br/>