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Sherry might have made a point of sticking close to Stormy, maybe. Probably. Most certainly. The trainee seemed a bit nervous, and Sherry understood that feeling. The Lifer knew they should be ready for anything, but she still hoped the mission would be as easy as Caelius had made it sound. A nice relaxing mission would be a good thing after recent events.

She was also making a point of not thinking about how seriously uncomfortable she was about going on this mission with Jake. She had been the one to say it, after all. Missions came first or something along those lines. Damn her heart. It was time to ignore it, and trust in what Chester had said. So she did. (Her weapon would have argued that she was doing a terrible job of this.)

She double checked her pockets at the lighthouse, always a good idea to make sure she had her bandages. The flask was a given. Usual equipment, usual last minute checks...and then the special fear scanner was pointed out. Bethany, huh? Sherry....really didn't' know what to think of their charge for mission. Large and old? Cumbersome. Heavy, judging by Jake's example. A team job just to move the thing. No wonder they needed so many bodies. Marcus was right, it was a team thing.

Sherry flashed Stormy and Gale a 'shall we?' smile and then stepped up to help out. She placed her hands on the behemoth of a scanner, making sure her grip was solid.

It seemed like one of those extremely rare moments where the trainees were actually pulling more than the load of their so-called superiors - which actually happened more commonly than anything else on this Island - as Bethany tipped a little, looked like it was going to collapse entirely -

- And practically pushed everyone through the portal. The only saving grace was that it landed loudly on it's side in the sand with a loud whumph. There wasn't even time to think as it pretty much began sliding down the sand dune, sinking a little so that it was half-buried into the ground. Thank god at least, it had began to beep, a steady blue signal. Either this was bad news, and they had messed up the scanner, or it was doing it's job. It was hard to tell.

The area itself was clear, just simple blue skies and limitless desert dunes. Unlike the Sahara however, it wasn't overly sandly, more a pleasant sort of almost lukewarm warmth. There was nothing else in sight, just sand, blue skies, and the steady beeping and signal of the half-buried one tonne Fear Scanner.

Jake only gave Marcus a look when he chided him on his posture, but inwardly, he was glad, because while he didn't openly admit it, it was putting a strain on him and the thing freaking weighed a ton.

However, he wasn't sure if Gale was paying attention or just doing this to spite him, but when he tugged, the weight of the machine came crashing down, and...
s**t s**t s**t s**t-
-Toppled backwards into the portal, falling flat on his back as there was a muffled "whumph!" sound when the scanner hit the ground... sand.
... s**t.

Getting up, he stared at the scanner.
Was it... supposed to beep like that? He really hoped he didn't need to pick it up again, though when he heard Marcus spoke, he froze, staring at the hunter wide-eyed.
... wait. Wait wait wait HE WAS LEADING THIS MISSION?!
He quickly shot Gale a look that seemed to say "HELP."

Sherry had been a little bit impressed with how quickly they got the monster of a machine through the portal, but she was far, far less impressed with well, everything that happened after the portal. Dropping Bethany into the sand was terrible, but the fact that they dropped the scanner into sand was the worst part. Another desert. Sherry was still finding sand in her boots and coat from the last time they'd been to one. (Sure, it wasn't all that long ago.) She could take some small comfort in the fact that she didn't recognize it, though. Wherever they were, it was slightly more bearable than the Sahara had ever been. Rather nice in comparison.

Sherry's attention was dragged away from the memories of other deserts and back to their rather large charge as the gentlemen began to more or less discuss the next stage of the mission.

Right. Set up the scanner and baby-sit it. "Um," she looked back to their surroundings and tried to ignore the noise coming from the scanner. Sand and sand dunes was all she saw.

"Um," she repeated, "Do you think we could set it up at the base of the dune?" She pointed down the hill. "I don't know how far we can carry it."

The scanner seemed rather content where it was, beeping and flashing away, which brought up the second question perhaps of how exactly they were going to carry this back. As there was no portal in sight, there only left for the team a whole bunch of questions and not many options. This continued on for a few more minutes as the Hunters debated their options before everything was interrupted by a very loud series of beeps.

Fear anomaly detected. Fear anomaly detected.

There was a pretty accessible interface on Bethany, half buried in the sand on one side. On it read an even simpler series of options.

Read scanner results?

[ Yes ] [ No ]

Touching the results could mess up the data, considering it had barely been five minutes in, though at the same time, the scanner wasn't exactly specific as to what the anomaly was. The scanner beeped five times very loudly again, easily giving away their location, before the text on its screen changed.

Read scanner results?
Recommended: Threat level high

[ Yes ] [ No ]

"Ididn'tdoit," Stormy mumbled most helpfully, staring at the machine warily like it was going to explode. There were now two nervous trainees on that nope boat.

BEEP BEEP BEEP-

- Click-

- Whirr -

- And then the machine stopped. To better explain things, it simply stopped moving. It didn't hum, or whistle, or even flash strangely threatening words on its interface screen and simply lay there stock still. It was almost anti-climatic.

This entirely unexpected and extremely boring situation continued like this for a good five minutes, as Bethany did not respond to any further prompting and just looked entirely like an extremely inadequate hulk of a machine half-buried in the sand.

Click.

But this new sound wasn't coming from the machine. No, when the Hunters turned around, they would see just one guy, a solitary guy in a hoodie, entirely human, holding an iPhone, taking a photo of them. He was carrying a backpack that said EAST HIGH COLLEGE emblazoned on the back of it. "Weird." The guy seemed entirely unphased by the lot of them. "Is this an engineering thing? Dude, those outfits are hilarious, you guys look like those characters from that movie."