Beta left the travel disk and her two companions and swam toward the surface. She became aware of buzzing vibrations in the water and wondered what might be making them. Over the neural net she heard a missive from the security specialist, Alpha: "OBSERVE CAUTION. NON-AQUATIC LIFE FORMS ARE APPROACHING ON THE SURFACE. A RETURN IS ADVISED!" Beta replied, "I'LL BE CAUTIOUS. THIS IS AN OPPORTUNITY TO OBSERVE THE NATIVES. IT'S THE REASON WE ARE HERE, NO?' "I don't like this," Alpha vocalized off the neural net to Prime, the mission commander and diplomatic officer. "I see little we can do to dissuade her. Monitor as best as you are able, Alpha." Prime knew her team's strengths and weakness. A deep streak of stubborn confidence marked Beta, the science officer. A strength or weakness? Molly's art notes: A little retro sci fi for a change! Set up and rendered in Poser 12.0.619 using the Superfly Cycles 2 rendering engine and then tweaked a bit in Photoshop (mainly to add a subtle vignette). The ship is Cybertenko's discplane with a few material tweaks (I didn't like the glass in the dome). The discplane's location is in a Lake by 2nd World. The characters are all DAZ generation 3 dollies: V3 improved by Blackhearted's GND 2 morphs and textures, SP improved by Blackhearted's Irina 2 morphs and textures and Aiko 3 improved with some stuff from DAZ. All of the character textures were optimized for Superfly with Snarlygribbly's EZSkin 3 (there is a new version, " 'beta', use with caution" for Poser 12). The uniforms come from an unknown source and are called male comic overlays. There's a lot in the Poser library from more than 15 years ago that my husband got from I don't know where.