"Is it... really alright for us to just sit back and watch like this?"
Down in the excavation pit, every single laborer had been politely asked to clear out of the meteor's impact zone. Word had come down that a specialized professional was taking over the hands-on operations, meaning their manual labor was temporarily on pause for the day.
Yet, having already been pocketing a full day's wages, the workers found it difficult to swallow such a bizarre stroke of luck. A few whispered among themselves, standard paranoia kicking in as they worried whether the corporate higher-ups were setting some kind of elaborate trap to justify dockings from their paychecks down the line.
Ultimately, the crew decided it was far safer to linger around the perimeter as onlookers. That way, if the young girl down there messily fumbled her task and pulled out, they could seamlessly dive right back into the pit to salvage their shift, couldn't they?
Up on the observation ridge, the Doctor and Theresa were also keeping a close watch. They focused their undivided attention on Jeanne's lone figure below, intensely curious to see exactly how she intended to unearth a planetary treasure buried so deeply beneath the bedrock.
Down in the basin, Jeanne was practically vibrating with pure, unadulterated anticipation. Truth be told, the very instant her boots touched the rocky soil, she could already feel the heavy, thrumming presence of that colossal subterranean mass. Forcing her to sit on her hands and wait through a protracted engineering delay would have been an absolute form of mental torture.
Thus, Jeanne chose to handle the initial excavation herself. It wasn't as though she needed to carve out a massive, structurally sound commercial transit shaft; as long as she could clear a narrow, stable path wide enough for her own body to squeeze through, that would be more than sufficient, wouldn't it?
Driven by that practical logic, Jeanne set her plan into motion. She began wandering across the uneven landscape, testing the density of the earth beneath her boots as she sought out a structurally weak point that would offer the least amount of resistance once the heavy work began.
Of course, attempting to map out the shortest route to a buried meteor without a single scrap of modern scanning equipment would look like absolute, fraudulent guesswork to any ordinary observer—had Jeanne not possessed the literal cheat code known as her Revelations.
Up on the ridge, the laborers watched her aimless pacing with deeply perplexed expressions, though no one dared to raise a vocal objection. This eccentric girl had been personally escorted to the site by the top brass; whatever logistical chaos she caused down there wasn't coming out of their pockets anyway.
Besides, a single day's delay in production meant absolutely nothing to them. Their wages were calculated on a strict daily flat rate; the longer she dragged her feet and prolonged the excavation, the more days of easy money they got to collect!
"Alright, this is the spot. Time to get to work!"
After mapping out a few concentric circles, Jeanne finally locked onto a geological fault line that promised a smooth descent. With a sharp, decisive motion, she drove the butt of her holy banner deep into the dirt, signaling the official start of operations.
In the very next heartbeat, a violent tremor rippled through the valley floor.
Before the onlookers could even process the shaking, several stocky, otherworldly reptilian entities materialized from thin air, surrounding Jeanne in a defensive cluster. Interestingly, the baseline laborers didn't erupt into a massive panic at the sight of prehistoric beasts bursting from the soil.
The workers merely traded startled glances, assuming Jeanne belonged to that rare, legendary caste of battlefield operators who specialized in taming wild beasts to fight by their side. They had heard tall tales of such beast-tamers during their travels, but this marked the absolute first time they had ever witnessed the phenomenon in the flesh.
The Doctor and Theresa, however, viewed the display through an entirely different lens. Having cross-referenced countless anomalous abilities across their lifetimes, they were utterly flabbergasted by the total lack of logical framework behind Jeanne's trick. The reality unfolding before their eyes had thoroughly broadened their intellectual horizons.
They knew with absolute certainty that Jeanne hadn't been accompanied by a hidden menagerie when she walked into the pit, and even the most legendary beast-tamers on the continent couldn't conjure living matter out of thin air. This sequence crossed into an entirely uncharted domain of reality.
Under the collective gaze of the camp, the massive earth-dragons wasted no time, immediately throwing their heavily armored claws into the bedrock to burrow straight down. A split second later, a colossal geyser of dust and gravel erupted into the sky, forcing a deeply disheveled Jeanne to scramble backward out of the impact zone as fast as her legs could carry her.
Jeanne had grown far too accustomed to executing excavations across the frozen expanses of Ursus. The permafrost up north was solid and packed tightly, completely lacking the loose, powdery consistency of the arid Rim Billiton terrain. In her excitement, she had entirely overlooked the blinding dust storm that a localized burrowing operation would kick up!
Fortunately, her reflexes were sharp enough to ensure a clean escape from that choking cloud. Now sitting safely on a nearby boulder, her expression was a brilliant blend of embarrassment and mild annoyance as she watched her summoned earth-dragons happily dig deeper into the pit.
"I had no idea you possessed this kind of industrial utility! What's the underlying principle here? How do you manipulate the matter displacement?"
As Jeanne sat there monitoring her workers, the Doctor—whose intellectual curiosity always ran at a fever pitch—sauntered over to her side to initiate a casual chat.
By this point, the crowd of onlookers had already been thinned out. A managerial mastermind like the Doctor was never going to allow a massive labor force to stand around burning company hours for an entire afternoon; once she confirmed that Jeanne's summons had the situation entirely under control, she smoothly reassigned the workers to secondary maintenance duties across the perimeter.
With the area cleared, she seized the opportunity to conduct a firsthand investigation. To be precise, she harbored a deep, academic urge to get a closer look at these reptilian entities that shared such a striking morphological blueprint with ancient draconic species. If she could somehow secure a few blood samples for laboratory analysis, that would be even better.
"You're asking me? How should I know?" Jeanne replied with a perfectly flat, deadpan delivery, explaining her summoning process with the casual simplicity one might use to answer a toddler's question. "I just sort of focus, and then—boom—they appear."
The Doctor chuckled softly, well aware that Jeanne had never been built for high-level academic theory. She casually sank down onto the rock beside the holy maiden, joining her in watching the steady stream of dirt and shattered bedrock erupting from the tunnel mouth, shamelessly seizing the opportunity to slack off on company time.
"Dragons... I must admit, it's rather fascinating that a holy maiden of your caliber commands the authority to summon and control draconic entities. If we go strictly by the classic mythologies of your homeland, shouldn't your historical archetype be wielding the divine power meant to vanquish them instead?"
The Doctor looked at Jeanne, playfully questioning whether the girl sitting beside her might be an elaborate counterfeit. Why on earth did a canonical saint possess a flawless, instinctual mastery over the draconic race? The raw aesthetic of her power felt completely at odds with her divine calling.
Could the historical reality of that legendary Hundred Years' War be entirely different from the textbooks? What if the Holy Maiden Jeanne d'Arc had actually led a massive vanguard of flying wyverns to secure her nation's salvation? Surely the baseline theology wouldn't support that narrative, would it?
After all, across the religious dogmas of her home planet, dragons were invariably framed as the ultimate embodiment of malevolence and sin. How could a holy instrument of God command absolute authority over creatures of darkness? Under any standard inquisitorial framework, an ability like that would instantly classify her as a wicked witch, wouldn't it?
Of course, voicing that specific observation aloud would be incredibly tactless. The Doctor deliberately swallowed the word "witch" before it could slip past her lips, fully aware that utilizing such a loaded, derogatory label would be a massive insult to the girl's core identity.
"Who can say?" Jeanne murmured, offering no further elaboration on the mechanics of her soul. She knew from long experience that trying to untangle the cosmic logic of her summoning grimoire to a secular academic would only result in a messy, cyclical headache for everyone involved.
Instead, Jeanne found her own curiosity piqued by the Doctor's musings. Listening to the casual way the strategist analyzed the creatures, it sounded as though she viewed the concept of a true dragon as a tangible, historical reality rather than a fairytale. Did that imply she had crossed paths with a similar entity in her forgotten past?
But considering that modern Terra was already populated by draconic offshoots like the Vouivre and the Draco, it wasn't surprising that the Previous Civilization record might hold data on prehistoric variations.
Before she could dwell on the thought, the fountain of dust erupting from the pit grew significantly more violent. A heavy shower of displaced gravel and stone began raining down around their boots, a clear indication that the burrowing summons below were reaching an absolute peak of excitement.
The creatures had likely picked up on the raw, unadulterated energy signature of the meteor. Jeanne recalled that her earth-dragons possessed a natural, predatory attraction toward localized clusters of high-density energy; their subterranean senses were guiding them toward the core with flawless, mathematical precision.
"Commanding an apex species of that caliber must require a staggering threshold of raw energy input..." The Doctor mused quietly. The thought triggered a sudden memory of a report Theresa had shared earlier that morning—apparently, the moment Jeanne woke up the previous night, she had calmly consumed five whole clusters of high-grade Originium Prime like they were casual snacks.
A wild, profoundly absurd hypothesis crystallized in the Doctor's mind, so staggeringly detached from modern science that it left her momentarily stunned. She could only stare blankly at Jeanne's profile, her mind racing as she tried to reconcile the pieces.
Jeanne, however, paid absolutely no attention to the Doctor's internal crisis. Her gaze remained fiercely locked onto the edge of the excavation pit, her intuition screaming that the total operational timeline was going to be significantly shorter than their initial estimates.
That instinct was validated a few moments later by a heavy, muffled structural collapse echoing from the depths. Following several hours of relentless, uninterrupted burrowing, the earth-dragons had successfully punched a clean breach through the deep bedrock.
To be fair, the rapid progress wasn't entirely due to the creatures' raw digging speed. Their path had happened to intersect with a perfectly positioned, pre-existing subterranean fault line; had that natural fissure not been there to absorb the displacement, the timeline would have stretched out significantly longer.
Without a single moment's hesitation, Jeanne vanished down the shaft like a streak of lightning. It wasn't that she was worried about structural stability; she was terrified that her ravenous earth-dragons were going to treat that priceless meteor as an all-you-can-eat buffet!
Her explosive acceleration was so sudden that the Doctor, who had been lazily lounging beside her, didn't even register her departure. By the time the strategist snapped out of her daze and scrambled into a sprint to pursue her, Jeanne's shadow had long since vanished into the subterranean darkness.
Sprinting through the newly carved tunnel, Jeanne managed to slide into the central chamber just in time, throwing herself between her excited summons and the massive meteor right as the first creature opened its jaws for a bite. With a series of sharp commands, she successfully redirected the earth-dragons toward the smaller, scattered fragments littering the cavern floor, leaving the primary prize completely untouched.
With the crisis averted, Jeanne turned her eyes to survey the colossal celestial core. The meteor was absolutely breathtaking, its jagged contours pulsing with a vibrant, liquid amber radiance that made the entire mass look like a living, breathing embryo waiting to hatch.
Jeanne carefully extended her hand, resting her palm against the sleek, warm crystalline surface. The sheer volume of raw, unadulterated energy thrumming against her skin was staggering; the magical density locked within this single node was more than enough to anchor Fafnir's manifestation to this reality!
"Wait... wait up for me! I'm a baseline desk worker, I don't possess your terrifying physical stamina..." The Doctor's breathless voice echoed down the tunnel as she finally staggered into the chamber, her fragile constitution pushed to its absolute limit by the sudden sprint.
Yet, the moment her eyes adjusted to the ambient glow, the words died in her throat. The Doctor stood completely transfixed by the majestic, luminous mass dominating the cavern floor. Out of the thousands of geological anomalies she had examined throughout her lifetimes, this was undeniably the most flawless, mathematically perfect specimen of Originium she had ever laid eyes on—it was a literal work of art.
"It's absolutely magnificent... and to think it survived a high-velocity orbital impact without a single structural fracture across the hull? Even if one completely ignores its energy output, this mass could comfortably sit in a royal museum as a priceless artifact..."
The Doctor muttered her observations to the empty air, her analytical mind completely captivated by the crystal's aesthetics. She was so thoroughly absorbed in the visual data that she failed to notice Jeanne closing her eyes, her consciousness deep in communion with the crystal as she prepared to initiate the ritual.
For a long stretch of time, a profound, heavy silence filled the cavern. Neither woman spoke a word, each entirely consumed by their own internal worlds while the quiet, rhythmic scraping of the earth-dragons gnawing on the peripheral shards provided a steady background melody.
"By the way... what exactly are you planning to do right now?" The Doctor suddenly blinked, finally picking up on the heavy, atmospheric shift rippling outward from Jeanne's frame. An instinct honed across millennia whispered that the holy maiden was on the verge of triggering an epoch-making event.
"Doctor, I need you to contact the surface team immediately and tell them to brace themselves," Jeanne requested, a radiant, ecstatic smile breaking across her features. Her eyes shone with the unadulterated joy of a child who was seconds away from claiming a long-promised treasure. "Tell anyone within a mile radius to seek immediate cover and stay as far away from the perimeter as possible!"
An oppressive, ancient weight began to saturate the very air around them, causing the hairs on the Doctor's arms to stand on end. Something monumental was coming. Recognizing the absolute gravity in Jeanne's warning, the Doctor wasted no time; she instantly whipped out her tactical communicator, patching through to Theresa and Kal'tsit with a sharp command to order an immediate, full-scale evacuation of the entire surface grid!