The one wherein I cart around an extra couple kilos of sand in my boots

I'd like to be able to say that within hours of setting boots on the ground on Al Raquis, I'd found AuroraBlue and safely spirited her away from that unending desert. I'd also like to say I'd brought peace to the warring factions on Devenporte and found a generic cure for both cancer and the common cold. Unfortunately, I couldn't say any of those things. All I could say, safely, was that the world had a certain arid beauty to it and that if I never saw another sand dune, sans beach, it would be too soon.

This sort of work wasn't my specialty. While I had all the required skills, I typically didn't string them together in a search and recovery Op like this. Normally, I at least knew where to find my target so the Op was more a matter of figuring out how to approach than the actual mechanics of finding them in the first place.

For the moment, I was avoiding pulling any of my 'official' resources into this. While Alliance Intel had resources on world, drawing on them would raise questions I didn't feel like answering. Fortunately, I had other resources I could tap here. While part of me actually felt a little bad asking Jai and her Zenobian friends for help, it wasn't really much of a stretch. Jai knew Lily and AuroraBlue and me. She knew it was personal, not professional. It was a favor from a friend and one I would repay when I was able.

Still, before I could make contact with them I would do some ground work on my own: checking out some of the local facilities and settlements to get a feel for the place and any hints I might find before setting off into the pervasive desert to try and find up close what I hadn't been able to find with Wave Equation's sensor array.

Unfortunately, it looked like the only thing I was turning up so far was a whole lot of sand.