Megaera approached Gaia. She was still wearing her exoskeleton and had a cable attached to her suit to recharge its power supply. She had saved the location of their base camp on her computer before leaving. It was at the nighttime side of the planet now. She landed near the old camp after deactivation her cloaking device and shut the systems down. After walking a few minutes she saw Mi had uncovered her wrecked bayonet and Mi had greatly depleted food supplies.
Megaera saw the Takatea sleeping outside the ship. She walked to it and cuddled it, surprising herself at how much she missed the creature. She didn't see Mi and decided to look for her in the morning. The takatea looked up at Meg in curiosity, before laying back down. Megaera snuggled against the warm animal and fell asleep herself.
Megaera came back to the sichel. Earlier she took the takatea and another 4 cannisters to the tea spot still marked on her map. The takatea protested when Megaera hung the cannisters on the takatea's back like it did earlier, but eventually gave up and simply followed Megaera. That was some time ago. The cannisters were now filled with the red/yellow tea plants and stacked next to the sichel.
Megaera observed the takatea closely and found out it also liked a purplish root that grew in the shadow of the trees. It did not seem to need light to survive and did not have any part of it growing above ground. It would have stayed unknown if the takatea did not dig it out of the ground at one time. Still it seemed to prefer its Gaian tea plants. Even so Megaera took a small part of the root and planted it in a cannister filled with soil. After only a 3 days the cannister was full of the purple roots.
The ruined bayonet stood abandonned in the sand. Megaera walked towards it and inspected the cloaking device. It had been hit by debris and there was a hole in the side. Megaera went back to her ship and can back wearing her Order manufactured engineering exo skeleton. It took a few tries to remove it from the deformed metal but eventually she could unmount it from the ship to take a closer look. She soon decided that it was unfixable on the uninhabited planet. The takatea looked at this all with disinterest and eventually laid down to fall asleep.
The next day Megaera carried the cloaking device to the sichel and dragged it into the cargo hold, where the dino shimp gazed at her movements. On her way out she threw a piece of her sandwich into the cage. The shrimp ate the meat from it and ignored the rest. Megaera had been feeding it regularly by now and it seemed to become more docile. It became more agressive when other dino shrimps were nearby and the hypothesised hive mind of the others began to influence it.
Another day passed and Megaera sat under a tree with a box next to her, while she was scribling something on a piece a paper. When she was finished, she walked back to Mi's ship with the box in her arms. She carefully put the box on the floor inside the ship and attached the note on it.
Hello Mi,
If you find this, you are still alive.
I could not find you so instead of waiting I left you this box.
Within it is a communications device that you can use to send a distress call and have someone pick you up. If you want, I can send the Gaians a message and have them pick you up. I will tell them you were my hostage and crashlanded there.
P.S. You might notice your cloaking device is gone. I tried to fix it, but I do not have enough equipment at my disposal, besides having no knowledge on how this this works. So I took it with me to get it fixed. You can pick it up later. Also, I took the takatea with me and will bring it somewhere in Baffin. I do not think the TAZ will mind.
~ Megaera
After puting 2 tea plant cannisters next to the box, like they agreed earlier, as Meg knew Mi wanted some tea plants to take back to the Chrysanthemums aswell, she looked at the box for a few minutes before turning around to leave.
She walked back to her ship while looking around untill she found the takatea standing at the place where she wrote her note. It was drinking from her tea cup. Megaera, having grown fond of the animal, led it to the cargo hold. There the takatea protested when it saw the dino shrimp in the back of the cargo hold. Megaera could not make it move so she let go of it. She went into the cargo hold and stacked boxes and cannisters around the dino shrimp until it was out of view. This time the takatea could still smell it, but Megaera could persuade it to get into the cargo hold by boiling tea leaves to hide the predatory scent. Later she realised it was just scared of tight spaces, since the dino shrimp attack at the tea fields had not fazed it.
She entered the coordinates of the jump hole and fired up the engines.