The morning had come for the students to head to the surface, and the team at the cliff face had actually found something that would explain the writing on the wall, or so they thought. There was a small shard of crystal among the sand near the base of the cliff that they had sorted through, and it appeared to be a transmitter crystal from an Alliance escape pod.
The size and composition both matched, and though this one was fairly weathered, they were working on the theory that this might well have been a crash site from an Alliance exploration ship.
The deepest regions of space were treacherous, and there was no telling what they might have come across during a long journey into deep space. Sending a portal required exact sensor readings, and the Alliance had developed high warp ratio ships long before portals, so they had explored that way, which inevitably led to a few unknown incidents when the exploration vessels encountered new phenomenon.
