[Sabre's POV]

It's been another day, talking with Orange during the rain was actually pretty nice...

I decided to let him have some space after what happened, and he went home a little after we ended our conversation. Heh, he said that diving into the water from the top of the pod was fun.

It rained all through the rest of the day and the night, which I didn't mind. Rain has always calmed me. And hey, this morning when I woke up, there was a rainbow outside for about an hour.

Right now I'm checking all the materials I have so I can prep to build a better base. The lifepod will run out of its emergency power in about a week, so I need to get something up fast. I mostly just have a lot of different metals and other materials, along with some plants I picked up from the ocean floor... it's not anything I can use for a habitat builder, though.

I jump when suddenly I hear knocking on the pod's hatch again. I close the pod's storage unit and walk over to the hatch, seeing Orange smiling and swimming in place outside.

As soon as I open the hatch, Orange jumps inside. He quickly hugs me as he shuts the hatch behind him using his finned tail.

"Hey buddy!" Orange greets me. "How ya doing?"

"I'm doing good." I reply, chuckling a bit.

Orange sets me down. I smile at his as I wipe some of the water off my now damp clothes.

"What's up?" I ask. "You seem excited about something."

"Well- This pod thing just floats around, right?" Orange says.

"Yeah, why?" I say.

"Well, since you need to find a place to start building a home, what if we move the pod next to my home?" Orange says, smiling. "It's really safe, and it's not far from here, still in the Shallows! It just has a few creepvines around."

"Hm..." I say, thinking. "Well, being your neighbor could be pretty cool. And apparently 'creepvines' are what I need to make an important material... Sure, let's do it!"

"Yay!" Orange exclaims, excitedly jumping up and down.

"How will we move the lifepod, though?" I ask. "It's kind of really heavy."

"Lemme try something!" Orange says, kneeling down and opening the hatch. "If this works, you might wanna hold onto something."

"Okay?" I say, and Orange jumps into the water.

I wait inside the pod. Nothing happens for a while, and I start to wonder what Orange is doing. However, the pod leans forward a bit.

"What the-" I mumble, confused for a moment.

Suddenly, the lifepod lurches forward, and it's moving. Fast. I fall over onto the floor, my scanner that was previously on the table landing on my chest. I quickly grab the scanner and climb up the ladder, opening the upper hatch.

When I look outside, I see Orange swimming in a direction, pulling the pod behind him using a vine of some sort.

"ORANGE! DUDE!" I exclaim, amazed. "HOW IN THE HECK ARE YOU THIS STRONG?!"

Orange looks up at me while he swims on the water's surface, smiling.

"PRETTY COOL, HUH?" Orange yells back, then he turns again towards the ocean.

"'COOL'? THIS IS AWESOME!" I say, laughing.

"WELL, GO BACK IN AND HANG ON! WE'LL BE THERE IN A MINUTE!" Orange says.

I climb back down and into the lifepod, still sort of in shock from this newfound ability of my friend. I guess swimming all the time makes him naturally strong or something? It's still awesome!

A few minutes later, the pod suddenly comes to a halt. I don't fall this time, and I was holding onto the ladder. Orange soon knocks on the lower hatch again.

I open the hatch, and Orange pokes his head through.

"Okay, we're here!" Orange smiles. "Get your suit, I wanna show you around!"

"Alright, alright, hang on." I say, returning the smile.

Orange goes back down and closes the hatch behind him, while I grab my wetsuit. I hurriedly get the suit over my normal clothes, excited to see where Orange has taken me.

As soon as I jump in, Orange is swimming circles around me. He's really excited about this. I understand why when I look around.

I see a structure that resembles a house, half-built inside an underwater mountain. An object that looks like a lantern floats while being kept in place by a hook of some sort attached to an outside wall of the house. The mountain is sparsely surrounded by kelp plants that also look like vines, these plant having strange, luminescent buds at the tops of them. Orange swims in front of me just as I look back at him.

"Tada! This is my home!" Orange says, smiling. "And now, it's kinda yours too!"

"Dude, this is awesome!" I exclaim, following Orange as he swims towards the house-like structure. "Thanks again, buddy."

"No problem!" Orange says as he opens the door to the house.

Orange spends a while, just showing me around his home. It's bigger than it looks on the inside, there's like, seven different rooms! Eventually I have to head out so my oxygen tank can refill.

"Isn't that thing kind of annoying?" Orange asks me as he follows me up to the surface.

"Yeah, but not like I can do anything about it. If I don't refill the tank when it tells me to, I'll suffocate." I reply.

We break the ocean's surface, and my tank refills quickly as always. Just as we're about to head back down, Orange points at something.

"Hey, what's that?" He asks, and I look over to see he's pointing at some wreckage left over from the Aurora that's quite a bit of a ways away from his home. Dang, how far out did the scrap go?

"Oh, that's a piece from the ship I was on." I say. "We could probably salvage stuff there for materials."

"Okay, let's go!" Orange says, already diving back down.

"Wait, now-?!" I say, quickly following after him.

"Yeah, why not?" Orange says as we swim. "You need the stuff, right? If you get it now, it won't take as long for you to build a home for yourself!"

"I guess you're right..." I say as we approach the wreckage. "I-I'm just... a little bit- uh..."

"There's nothing to be scared of over here, Sabre." Orange says, giggling. "The only thing that's remotely dangerous near my home is Gerald, and he's not a fighter. He doesn't even have teeth!"

"Uh, 'Gerald'? Who's Gerald?" I ask.

"Oh, my pet Stalker. Y'know, the things that live in those creepvine forests you saw?" Orange explains.

"Wh- You have one of those things as a PET?!" I exclaim, now extremely scared. Orange notices.

"Oh, chill out. He won't eat you, like I said he doesn't have teeth." He says. "Besides, even if he did, he's more interested in eating the Hoverfish that hang around here."

Orange then dives deeper towards the wrecked debris.

"Now c'mon, buddy!" He calls out. "It'll be fine!"

"Ah- Orange!" I say, diving down along with him.

When I reach him, Orange is excitedly poking around the loose bits of broken metal. He's lifting up the pieces easily, and seems to be dragging things he finds out from underneath them. I swim closer to him.

"Careful not to cut yourself on those, it'll hurt pretty bad." I say.

"I'll be fine!" Orange says, waving me off. "Hey, look what I found!"

Orange lifts up one of the metal sheets, and underneath is a broken bed, an end table, and some other decor. This must've been a crew quarters. I take out my scanner.

"Oh, nice. I can scan these for blueprints." I say, pointing the scanner at the half-broken furniture. "Can you keep that up?"

"You got it!" Orange smiles.

It only takes a few minutes to scan all of the items. When I'm done, I let Orange know he can drop the metal. Orange then spots something else that looks interesting, and starts to swim towards it. I happily follow him.

Until, he sudden jolts backward while swimming, and he quickly swims back over to where I am since I was lagging behind a bit.

"What's wrong?" I ask.

"I dunno, the water started to sting over there!" Orange says, looking at his skin, checking it.

"The water... stung?" I say, confused.

"Yeah, kinda like a burn but not? I dunno." Orange says. "And that's the way to the Grassy Plateaus, too..."

"Let me see." I say, swimming towards where Orange just said the water stung him.

"Be careful!" Orange calls out after me.

As I approach, it does feel like the water's burning, but I'm more focused on a familiar, terrifying sound I hear when I get close enough;

A Geiger counter.

The one built into my suit.

I quickly swim back and grab Orange, heading back to the direction his home is.

"Woah, what is it?!" Orange exclaims, catching up and swimming next to me.

"My suit has a device that goes off whenever it detects radiation." I explain. "It just went off, that means the water there is irradiated."

"Radiation?!" Orange says.

"Yeah, so we need to get the heck outta here!" I say. "It's not in range of your house, so that should be safe!"

Soon enough, we reach the below-sea mountain that Orange's house is built into, my lifepod right next to it. I quickly swim towards my lifepod, Orange following me.

When we're inside, we finally get to catch our breath.

"Man, I am not built for this..." I say.

"What? Swimming?" Orange asks.

"Kinda, my species isn't meant to be swimming this much." I say. "I mean... we can, it's just really tiring."

"Take a break then, ya bingus." Orange giggles.

"I'll be able to once I get a habitat built. Right now I'm kind of on a time limit because of the lifepod's power." I say.

"Oh." Orange says.

We decide to look at the materials we've gotten, speaking of building. I realize I've almost gotten enough to make the habitat builder tool.

"I just need a little more silver for the wiring kit, then I'm good to go!" I say, smiling. "This is great!"

"Silver? Which one is that?" Orange asks.

I hold up a piece of the shiny metal, before I put it in my pod's storage unit.

"It's really conductive, so it's perfect for wiring kits. That's why so many of them are silver-based." I explain. "Like the one I need for the tool."

"Well, at least you're close!" Orange says. "Maybe we'll get lucky tomorrow and find some."

"Hopefully." I say.

I then look out the lifepod's window, and notice it's already getting dark.

"Did we really spend that long sorting materials...?" I say, surprised.

"Eh, time flies when you're with friends." Orange says, smiling.

We both say our goodbyes to each other for the day, and I close the hatch soon after Orange exits. Maybe I should teach him how to open it himself...

I then finally take off the damp wetsuit, and set it on one of the countertops of the pod. Finding a spot that isn't as cold, I take a while to drift off, just like always.

If tomorrow turns out okay, this'll be the last night I'm sleeping on the floor.