Part I — Bernardt’s Standstill
Stillness, like the final breath of night before dawn. Amidst the crumbled remains of an ancient site along the upper Tapajós River, a man stood—his clothes marked with dust and rain. No team. No heavy equipment. Just a single field tent and a satellite laptop that had lost connection two days ago.
Bernardt—Lucas Bernardt—knew this was a dead end. Every wave anomaly in this place had been charted, but there was no continuity. No pattern. He had excavated, measured, waited—even attempted reanalysis based on fluctuating frequency models. Nothing.
He lacked time, manpower, and equipment to reach further inland. The raw data he gathered was too massive to process alone. The next location was deeper than he could reach without external support.
The comm device’s light blinked patiently. In silence, he touched the panel.
“It’s me. Requesting support. I’ve located a stable anomaly point. I... need air transport and processing assistance.”
“Authorization code?”
“Bernardt. Sector-Three clearance. Initial contact.”
“Logged. Extraction in six hours. Make sure the item is secured.”
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“It’s with me.”
---
Six hours later, through the rising mist of morning, a rotor's hum pierced the canopy. Lucas stood still, a reinforced container in his grip. Inside it—the pure energy source, as VELA analysts called it: a unique, undiluted core.
No one—not even himself—truly knew this was only the beginning.
---
Part II — Goom and Kaori: The Jungle's Whisper
A long flight from GIERA’s headquarters brought Goom and Kaori to the quiet town of Santarém. From there, the expedition along the Amazon began—methodical, scientific, yet full of unanswered questions.
GIERA had recorded a series of unstable wave interferences across several months. Curiously, the anomalies formed a near-circular trajectory, subtly guiding the researchers toward a central locus.
“This feels like... a trail,” Kaori muttered, staring at the shifting signal paths on her tablet.
Goom said nothing. In his eyes, these sites were more than coordinates. He perceived an unseen pattern—as if each location was part of a puzzle, revealing itself piece by piece.
They visited Caverna do Maroaga, where high-frequency disturbances came and went in haunting rhythm. The cave walls bore no carvings, no relics—just damp stone and pulses in the air.
Then to Pedra do Ingá, a carved stone slab whose etchings echoed harmonic intervals with their previous site. Coincidence? Not to Goom.
Next, the Vale do Javari—a vast and largely uncharted region riddled with anomalies even advanced instruments struggled to parse. Each location they visited fed data back into their model, pointing them to the next site as if guided.
To Kaori, this was fieldwork: map, analyze, report. But to Goom, something else stirred. Something deeper than numbers and graphs.
“Do you think this is all just coincidence?” Kaori asked as they camped near the jungle's edge one humid night.
Goom gazed into the thickening trees.
“No. But I don’t know... what’s really calling us.”
He didn’t say a name. Didn’t even realize that in the quietest corners of his thoughts, a name long forgotten occasionally flickered.
Night settled deeper. Birds cried out in rhythm. Fog crept downward.
Elsewhere, behind sealed doors in a VELA facility, Bernardt’s data was being decoded. The world inched closer to a revelation—though no one yet knew what they had truly found.
