Jeon Jungkook leaned into the curved handles of his steering wheel, squinting at the glass of his fighter jet. The boxy windshield flickered with a pixelated green filter. It was blocking out the intense UV rays that were blazing down from a nearby star onto the tiny planet he was flying across the surface of.

As a result, he wasn't blind just yet.

Jungkook could see the pixelated hues of green on his screen crunching into forms now, the closer he got to the tiny planet of Ether's surface.

His eyes scanned the lines of text slowly scrolling down the left side of his cockpit glass. He muttered out loud to himself as he read.

Jungkook snapped his fingers and the screen's scrolling text froze into place. "Amplify data point C." The surrounding text shrank away as Data Point C grew four times its size on the screen. "I thought I'd just misread it. But no...."

He reached around his pilot's seat for his helmet. Up until that point he hadn't seen a reason to wear it—overconfident as ever. He slipped the hard black shell over his head. A visor remained open and hovering over the top, so that his focused almond eyes were still exposed.

"Landing protocols, engaged."

In response, the ship began to autopilot itself forwards and downwards while Jungkook adjusted the sleeves of his orange and black pilot's jumpsuit, making sure that the seals between the arm ends and his massive black gloves were safely connected. He adjusted the same sealant material around his collar, pulling it around his throat like a sticky black turtleneck.

"Star Xenos' current location?"

His computer buzzed coordinates back to him.

"So, I have fifteen minutes," he muttered to himself, "before direct starlight exposure, aaaand my body roasts and pops like a peanut. Plenty of time." He smirked and flicked his visor down over his face.

There was a shift and a grumble as the fighter jet landed, making Jungkook tumble sideways in his chair and grip the armrests to steady himself. When it was clear they weren't going to catapault off of any ledges (no need for emergency flight maneuvers) Jungkook's eyes did a scan of his visor's readings of the current air temperature, air pressure, atmospheric toxins, and so forth, before tapping a pattern into a square fleshy pad amongst his controls. It responded by opening a door just behind his pilot's chair.

He walked into the exit chamber and tapped the same pattern onto another response pad mounted into the wall. The door to the cockpit shut and sealed in response. Then the back hatch of his tiny jet dropped down.

Jungkook walked down the exit ramp and out into the inferno of light that blazed outside. His suit was secure, but he still had the sensation of walking outside into a hot summer's day. His visor screen had formed into the same green-and-black pixelated display that had shown on his craft's monitor, like night vision goggles working in reverse.

Ether was a small planet indeed, comprised of a series of salt rock spires and cliff formations, as well as channels of underground hot springs and geysers.

It was small, but the gravitation relatively stable. His feet plodded along quite normally--no large leaps and bounds, no floating a bit before taking another step.

A good sign, he thought.

He crouched down and plucked a small black stake out of his utility belt and pushed it into the rock under his feet. It pierced fairly deep into the loose, gravely soil and a reading appeared on the left side of his visor screen. One detail in particular caught his eye.

"15% Mysterium? Chim, you genius...!"

He hurried further down the salt rock slope and came to a steep drop off too tall to jump directly down but not tall enough to worry over. He ran, leapt, and began a delicate dance of back and forth leaps between the twin drop-offs until he'd reached the ground below with a heavy CRUNCH--in which his knees gave, and he fell into a slight crouch before righting himself again.

He walked towards one of the largest geyser openings he saw, which gaped like a smooth wet cave. The lack of rising steam and the readings on his visor told him that no guysers were on the way too soon—so he walked inside it.

His footsteps echoed like a piano with the reverb turned on high, creating a symphony of percussion sounds. It made Jungkook realize that the hardness of the rock formations was increasing the deeper into the shaft he went, compared to the softer and more gravely landing area where he'd left his tiny spacecraft.

The tunnel eventually curved downwards, like a slide, and he slipped through it and came out onto a lower level. The further along he walked it, the narrower this part of the tunnel shaft grew.

He looked at the time. He had ten minutes left. His feet shifted along even faster in his low crouch.

The narrowing shaft broke abruptly. Like he was being born, the pilot's form popped and rolled forward out of the tunnel space and landed gracefully onto a foot and a knee, with his hands bracing against the ground. He looked around.

"No way."

He had landed near a hot spring of sapphire blue waters. It was steaming slightly.

All around the cavern, tiny shaft holes were marked into the rocks, speckles of potential gyseris under the right conditions. Scattered around the edges of the sapphire pool, and within it, was a metallic rock formation that's surface skipped and flickered like water itself. It was a swirl of perfect indigo in color, but Jungkook couldn't see the details of the vibrant design through his visor.

He could, however, see his visor screen flashing a mustard color everywhere throughout the chamber—which indicated that something being sought during a search had in fact been found.

He pulled out his tiny black stake and drove it into the ground next to him. This time, the point struggled to dig past the surface. It was solid.

"85% Mysterium? Shit! No shit! No freaking way, this can't be real!"

He went mad as he chipped and scraped away soil samples into tubes and pouches, and even plucked a few loose rocks to shove into his jumpsuit pockets.

A warning sign flickered on his helmet. It was time to head back to the ship.

His pockets bulging now, it was difficult for him to make it back into the narrow geyser-tunnel he'd crawled down in.

"C'mon."

He took a few specimins from his pockets and held them instead in his gloved hands instead, trying again to squirm through the narrow opening.

Success!

He crawled then crouched forward, shoving rock samples into his pockets again, then quickly climbed his way back up into the first level of the salt rock shaft by his elbows.

"Five-minute warning," a robotic voice spoke in his ear.

"Crap."

He started to run. Once outside, he bolted straight for the rock cliff's he had parcored his way down earlier, and began the climb hand-and-foot. He had to be safe, but he had to be fast. Going up would take longer than getting down.

A distant roaring sound started somewhere behind him when he was three quarters of the way up the cliffside.

The gysers.

The nearness of the planet's sun-star coming over the horizon, the pull of gravity shifting and the rapid increase of intense heat....

If he wasn't careful, he'd be dead in the next two minutes or less.

He gripped an outcropping with his left hand—but the higher up the cliff went, the softer the rock became.

His left hand slipped.

"GHA!"

He recovered his grip, his body still securely tucked into cliff.

You got this.

Jungkook braced his feet firmly into their footholds. Then he steadied himself into place with his hands and balanced all his weight onto his left foot, while his right knee scrunched and then his right foot dug into an outcropping near his hip. He braced into it and pushed up, hard.

Success.

The top of the cliff was now in reach. He grasped it.

"Kookie, what the hell do you think you're doing? Your readings are going nuts!" It was the voice of Chimin in his ears.

Jungkook didn't worry about answering. He was elbowing his way up and onto the ledge. With a heave and a groan he shrugged, pulled, and rolled himself up fully onto solid rock. His breathing was labored but he was smiling underneath his visor where he lay.

"Kookie are you there?"

"Yeah, Chim," he answered between pants as he rolled to his feet, "I'm here."

The rumbling within the tunnels was becoming a roar. Jungkook turned and saw through his visor bouts of steam welling up from the geyser shafts. They were getting ready to burst.

He ran for it.

Jungkook couldn't help but laugh to himself as he ran, as he felt the vibrancy of his own limbs churning, and of the opportunity before him.

He'd just discovered ummapped, unclaimed, ridiculously high amounts of one of the most powerful and valuable minerals in the galaxy. They could power their weapons systems forever with this! Increase the number of recipients of intensive medical procedures. Develop more advanced security systems than ever before. The possibilities were endless! They would be able to--.

Whatever it was that Jungkook was thinking they'd be able to do differently, it was suddenly dashed against the high salt rocks in a vicious burst of sapphire blue water, along with the body of Jeon Jungkook. Just as the blazing, deadly sun peeled its torchlight over Ether's horizon, Jungkook's unconscious body was being pulled by a swirl of blue deep, down into the depths of those Mysterium caverns once again.