<snip>

Unsqueezing her eyes, Cadet Las briefly became overcome with excitement. Her mouth dropped upon sight of the foreign environment. Wow wow whoa I’m late!” Throwing all the equipment she held into a satchel bag, Cadet Las followed the fresh foot prints headed for what looked like ancient ruins.

-Cadet Las (Engineering)

Stan noted the presence of a variety of small animals on his tricorder scans, and looked carefully around his surroundings. Looking way up to the tree tops, and down to the ground. He couldn’t see any of them. He wondered if they might be avoiding the away team because their species had previously had encounters with the humanoids that used to inhabit the ruins. Or maybe they are just scared of anything that’s bigger than them…

He heard the Captain’s order to continue to the ruins and was happy to return his focus there. A zoology survey on this moon might be interesting, but an archaeological mission was more exciting to Stan, and that also happened to be the assignment they were on. He eagerly continued towards the ruins, being careful to keep his tricorder up so he could see both its screen and the ruins themselves.

Cadet Wisniewski, Scientist

OOC (Out of Character): To add to Dan’s comment about our retcon, this is something that you’ll see pretty frequently here on the Challenger, but not as much on our main fleet ships. Here on the Challenger, we have new members joining and people graduating fairly consistently, so sometimes our away team make-ups have to be… fluid. :)

IC (In Character):

The excitable responses of the cadets was lost on Emmy as she began to head toward the ruins, her tricorder pointed directly in front of her, searching for signs of activity beyond the animal life that was abundant. As she strode there, at a remarkably efficient pace for someone of her size, she instructed, “Cadet Ko, you will provide security if needed, monitor for any life signs that could pose a threat to the away team. Cadet Wisniewski and Cadet Las, when we arrive at the ruins, begin a methodical survey of the area.”

Davis, CO

Hearing her name from the Captain was the last needed element to feel the Star Fleet experience. “Received.”

-Cadet Las

As the away team approached the ruins the first thing that they noticed, or at least anyone who had read the primer on the system and the culture, was that these were not Menk in origin. They were something wholly different. In the rock pyramid rising out of the jungle were the images of some bipedal creature fighting with a large disk in the sky. Any cadet who was making scans would be told of the paint flecks that covered the edifices indicating a brightly colored past compared to the dull grey granite rock.

GM Wombat

“Yes, Captain”, Stan replied to the order to begin a survey of the ruins. He was glad he got that out before they actually reached the ruins. Because once they approached them he was speechless. He hoped his jaw hadn’t dropped open. This isn’t right…, he thought.

“These aren’t Menk ruins…Captain,” adding the last word as he realized he should be making a report to the senior officer and not just thinking out loud. “At least, I’m pretty certain they aren’t. The design, the iconography, this doesn’t match what the Federation Anthropological Database has on file for this system.”

Glancing at his tricorder for the first time, he added, “I also think these ruins might be older than expected. There are some faint traces of paint that appears to have faded away.”

Stan reached into the lab kit slung over his shoulder and pulled out a container so that he could take a sample of the ruins with the paint flecks and try to find out some more about this mystery.

Cadet Wisniewski, Scientist

(OOC: You’ll see I have trimmed the thread by removing some of the older posts and noting that with “<snip>” comment. You should look to do that in your threads - main sim or otherwise - when they it starts to get a bit too long. For threads with multiple people like this, there are different ways of seeing how much to remove. In this case, I trimmed back so that each participant still had at least one post displayed - although as you get more experienced you may be able to trim back more.)

With the team at the ruins, Eric started to deploy the team. “Wisniewski, if these aren’t Menk in origin, see what you can make of them. Maybe we can date these ruins? I’ll also get Challenger to assist.”

Eric then turned to Las. “Cadet, see if you can find a way to enter these ruins - and maybe make sure they won’t collapse on us when we enter.”

Finally, Eric looked over at Ko standing guard. “Let’s do a perimeter sweep of these ruins. Make sure we’re not about to have any surprise visitors. I can join you in a moment.”

Eric looked over at Davis to see if she had any further orders.

-Cmdr. Eric Holmman, XO