Engineer’s Log Day 93

Got a message back today from Sarlunt and it’s caused me to do a bit of sleuthing. Concerning the question about the inciting incident, he’s saying the humans fired on the xythalaxns first. Now if you wanna be real technical, we did fire first since our guns went off before the xythalaxns started blowing things up but that doesn’t tell the whole story. He sent out a team of 4 and only one made it back and they died shortly after returning. The important bit of info here is that that individual had to return in person since their communications were down.

Since this was so close to my experience, I figured something kinda stunk here so I decided to dig a bit on my side. Using the master code, I got my hands on the reports to Command right before everything went to shit. According to what I read, all humans got hit by whatever was going on at the same time. Communications went on the fritz and then after a few hours the shields exploded along the walls. Around this time, the remains of my team arrived back to tell their story.

Figured from here, I’d want to check the diagnostic records for the shield generators. I’d not thought to check them initially since I thought the xythalaxns blew them up a lot more directly but the reports to Command seem to imply that it happened on its own. Now, records showed normal behavior right up until roughly when we started experiencing issues with our communications. From there, the wattage started to creep up in each despite no changes in the generator. This happened evenly with all of them at roughly the same rate. Eventually, the generators had had enough and filed for a divorce with our reality. They took the original generator in the proceedings.

The main takeaways here are that this wasn’t a localized thing and that this required enough power to overload our stuff. I should say that the amount required isn’t by any means a small amount. Overloading multiple shield generators like this would require a small spaceship’s energy. To hit such a massive area with such effectiveness, the xythalaxn’s would basically need an entire battleship for something like or to somehow have revolutionized energy production. This is nonsensical for a number of reasons but primarily is that if they have that level of power available, they can just focus it on the base and fry us without having to go through any level of subterfuge. My shields are good but they aren’t that good.

All this seems to point to the issues being related to something else that isn’t the xythalaxns. I’ll ping Sarlunt asking if he knows about anything that happened that day.

That info blast wasn’t the only thing I got in the email though. I was also able to find out how the xythalaxns managed to get into the base and it honestly makes me really mad. See they figured out that Brayfur was obviously somehow exempt from my criteria of things to blow into tiny pieces. You wanna know how they managed to get past the defenses I worked so hard on?

They crouched down and waddled in.

Sigh

I just don’t have it in me to be mad at that because it makes sense just… I don’t know, it feels bad to be circumvented so easily. I guess I’m a sore loser like that.

Engineer’s Log Day 94.1

Alright, it's official, I hate the planet. The weather can just blow my shit up because why not. It's cool, it's cool, I’m cool.

Sigh

So, I got screwed over by an ionic storm. I’m not a meteorologist so I only have a vague understanding of what exactly it means but the long and short of it is that if I use certain tech during an ionic storm, it’ll misfire or even worse explode on me. My shields are particularly weak to this sort of interference and there isn’t particularly much I can do besides deactivate them in the event one of these storms happens. I can add faraday cages to help my tech avoid catching hands passively but activating anything energy based will be very dangerous.

A bit of testing showed that, yes, this event can just cause the rail guns we have to misfire so now I have to disassemble our weapons to prevent any misfirings in the future and spend the next few days making the aforementioned faraday cages. I’m so mad.

The thing that makes this all worse is that this finally gives me the full story. There were no secret weapons, no malicious plots, just stupid blind, gamble in the casino and win big, levels of luck. A blind firing some 4 hours out from the base and we hit the poor motherfuckers walking through the woods trying to eliminate a threat to everyone. Now things have escalated and I don’t wanna be here!

Oh yeah and that means the message about space pirates is probably true and that means its 50/50 on whether or not they’re on their way here to Yo Ho my ass and take my shit. Jokes on them though I’m going to have an aneurysm before they arrive.

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Engineer’s Log Day 94.2

Currently hiding out in the generator room eating an ice cream with the kid. Originally I hid myself because I wanted to cool down before talking to anyone but I guess I’m not half as sneaky as I’d have liked. Fortunately, I’m not the only ice cream lover around here and he’s been bribed into silence with a bit of my bounty. Don’t worry though, I’m responsible…ish, most of the time, and checked to make sure that he could have some of this. Interestingly enough, xythalaxns can eat a lot more various things than humans but they just can’t handle nearly as much of certain types of things but I digress.

Kid ran in on me and was all over the dish asking if I could have some. Now, I grew up with two younger siblings so I really should have known better than to try and get some sweets without being found out. The one issue now is that I can’t eat as much as I’d like since I need to set a good example. You know at some point, I need to set up a proper translator so that I can talk to him properly. Probably be nice to make one for Darana too, thinking about it.

I’ve been giving some thought to the pirates. They want my stuff and will most certainly kill me for it. If they can take the base, it seems likely that they’ll just turn their guns on the xythalaxns soon afterwards so I should probably defend it to some degree. Yet, if I defend my base too well they might decide it's not worth the effort and just go after the xythalaxn’s stuff instead. I don’t either situation really counts as a win. Ironically, the one silver lining to this whole scenario is that these people want my stuff which means that they can’t just drop rocks from orbit if they want to recover anything. In theory I could just surrender my stuff to them but I doubt that any agreements would even hold as I imagine their line of work breeds a good bit of ruthlessness and bad people.

I’ll need to talk to Sarlunt about it but it’d likely be worth while to set up some anti-aircraft and anti-ballistic launchers. No planetary defense is absolute but if we make ourselves enough of an obnoxious target they might not even want to deal with us and will just leave. I mean if they come here, we’ll probably have issues one way or another but you have to set yourself up as much as you can you know?

Engineer’s Log Day 95

Today was a busy day. Spent the first half in the workshop working on trying to get the HARP into usable shape. I figure that if I’m going to try and help with moving any of the planetary defense stuff, it’d be handy to have an actual vehicle that’d let me work solo. Better yet though, the HARP will allow me to bring a nice source of power and since I’m still in the building stage I can augment it to dodge problems with ion storms. With the new master code, I was able to find some better software for the HARP. It isn’t completely set up but between what I already have and the bit I got, I’ll have that set up in the next few days rather than weeks like I’d feared.

I also took a bit of time to head into town with Darana to speak with Sarlunt. She’d planned her first rendezvous to give updates so I decided to tag along to talk in person about how we’d set things up. Entering town I got no small amounts of funny looks but that kinda makes sense considering how our relationship had been up until like a week ago. When we arrived at Sarlunt’s office, the red building I’d spotted apparently, we ended up getting delayed for like 10 minutes. I may not understand the language itself but the message that I wasn’t welcome was plenty clear. Sucks for them though because I do not care in the slightest but Darana seemed to be willing to tear into them plenty.

When I finally did get inside, I was brought to Sarlunt’s office which was a little depressing to look at for a man that holds the title of Colony Commander. The place seemed to be devoid of happiness, only sporting a desk piled high with papers, a small computer, and the man of the hour himself. Darana turned over her report before assuring me that she’d stick around to help as needed. After he quickly read through it, Sarlunt pulled out the translator device from our last meeting and we got down to brass tacks.

It was definitely a bit surreal planning with the guy since he lead off the conversation on cooperation by pulling out a paper map to help us plan. I feel the need to emphasize this here because my mans whipped out a whole ass rolled up, slightly fringed, treasure planet lookin’ paper map. He said he liked the feel of it over the holomaps when I asked. Fair play I guess but still weird.

In the end, he’d been thinking along the same lines as me and had a few locations in mind. I offered to take a handful of local areas which got a bit of a surprised look but he seemed ok with it. I figure once I have the HARP ready in a week or two I’ll be able to move supplies quite well. In the end, it was decided that we’d need to compare my tech with the xythalaxn’s tech but I don’t foresee any problems so long as we can get our systems talking.

Engineer’s Log Day 96

Spent today getting a translator set up. I can’t talk to anyone on my own so I figure it’ll be worthwhile to get something thrown together. Fortunately, I literally didn’t need to do anything aside from some light calibration since we have a few from the early days when we arrived in the system. The whole thing is fairly easy to wear with an earpiece that translates their language to mine and a small speaker/microphone that does the opposite. Bayfur seemed to think it was pretty cool to be able to talk to me and had apparently been ready to tell me all sorts of things to me all at the same time.

Not everything translated properly which I suspect might be a mispronunciation problem given Bayfur’s age. One work in particular, “farlish” came up commonly as his nickname for me. After bringing that excitable conversation to an end, I hunted down the resident human whisperer to see if I couldn’t figure out what the words I was missing. Darana told me that farlish apparently is a mispronunciation of uncle in their language.

My weak heart is melting.