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pinkgothic:
For someone who had grown up back on Earth, it was always a strange feeling to be outside on Martian terrain, wearing a clunky space suit inside a cramped rover, the sky of pale ash suddenly so much more lifeless now that it was more obviously hermetically sealed away from one's lungs.
Somehow all of this was supposed to turn into a living planet, but for the time being all they were doing was sitting in a rover that cut through a landscape of inhospitable desert that, had they been exposed to it, would have poisoned them in record time.
Nyarai was driving. There weren't really roads - no one had bothered to make them - but there were, shall we say, beaten paths that were better to drive along than at random. The jostling, shaking and vibrating of their tin can was nonetheless a unpleasant, constant companion, and it took about an hour for them to reach their chosen outpost.
They were all aching by the time they got there, beset upon by mild bruises from the trip.
No time to rest, though. Nyarai rolled the rover into the garage air lock and triggered the cycle. There was always a chance it wouldn't work, but that was why they were all in their suits - it would have been an inconvenience, not a deal-breaker, to get out and use human-sized airlocks, leaving the rover exposed. If they couldn't fix an issue like that, it meant heading home without the assurance of two layers of insulation, which was risky, but probably hardly worth noting to her sorcerer companions given their professions.
Nothing went wrong, though, and as the inner door of the garage unlocked, allowing human access to the outpost itself, Nyarai took off her helmet and started to strip off the suit, revealing her slightly sweaty slacks underneath.
The joys of space life.
Nymphetamine:
Leila, for all her time so far on Mars, hadn't really been outside the main facility since she arrived. So there was a bit of quiet agoraphobia going on when they were out on the surface of the planet itself, no longer protected by a dome. Only these bulky space suits, and the rover that they had squeezed themselves into. No one had asked much why Leila was going, maybe she was just playing tourist. As inconspicuous as she could be, she had tagged along. It was a terrible ride, the whole way there. No fault of the driver, just the nature of the beast, as it were. Once they were inside the airlock, she could breathe a sigh of relief, comforted by the fact that there was now additional protection between her and the inhospitable atmosphere that lurked outside. Following Leila's example, she unlocked her helmet, pulling it free from her head with a grunt of relief and a deep breath of the recycled air. “Point me at the hot tub,” she murmured in jest, knowing full well that there was no such thing for the poor people that inhabitated Mars. As she began to shed her space suit, it was like each part of her legs and rear end were nothing more than pulverized hamburger after that ride. Bruised and battered, just the same as her fellows, she would not complain over this fact. Nyarai was already irritated enough with her for Leila to want to play it politely.
pinkgothic:
“Me first,” Mateo chuckled, peeling out of his suit a little more slowly than Nyarai, as though concerned he might break something in the process. Nyarai, meanwhile, waltzed to the back of the rover to check its cargo. They're brought a few blocks of materials, not to mention spell-casting implements, and she began to cart them through both open doors of the secondary airlock they could have taken in case of fault with the first, into the facility.
From the inside, the outpost was little more than a glorified bunker with an alien view. The thick glass - quite possibly more impenetrable even than the fortified walls - was facing into a direction from which the sun never shone, as part of its strategy of maintaining a steady interior temperature. It was so thick it was visibly tinging the whole view with a haze of colour. At the bottom, Martian sand had painted a dull gradient.
There was some heavy drilling material here, meant to be used outside on the regolith to retrieve samples, some tables, and a pitiful tank of no doubt recycled water. Any computer systems someone wanted here would largely have to be brought in - the electronics of this place were far from 'smart', laid out for sturdy longevity rather than convenience.
Of course, they were here for the sake of reducing the blast radius in case of catastrophic failure - not for the gear.
They had brought a laptop, though, and eventually, Mateo had stripped himself down and was setting the piece of precious technology down on a table, while Nyarai rearranged the furniture to place one of the smaller tables more centrally in the room.
No one had asked anything of Leila yet, but it was clear what she was here for - if either of them threatened to bleed out due to a miscast, it would be primarily up to her to do something about it. And if the spell went wrong and the entire bunker turned to pudding, well… once she'd cooled off and the sorcerers had decided they were ready, she ought to be at least partly suited up again, and have emergency breathing masks at the ready to give to her friend and his assistant, as fast as possible.