Engineer’s Log Day 98

It's Show and Tell day today where I showed off the missile platform I made and then the xythalaxns told me I needed to build it differently. Then we got into the classical engineering fist fight where the victor of a bracket style tournament was declared the Greater Engineer. Little did they know I’ve years of intensive arcade punching machine experience under my belt and they didn’t stand a chance.

Fun fact, did you know those machines can sometimes be tricked with a sheet to paper? Some of the punching machines measure the “strength” of a punch by how fast a little light they have is blocked and then unblocked. If you have one of those sorts of machines you can just do the same thing with a sheet of paper and super quickly move it past. Did I scam arcades out of tickets with this? Maybe but it isn’t provable and arcades are a scam most of the time anyways.

Fun little Henry fact for yah, I actually had been considering going into the arcade machine business for a little while after college. It may not be as popular now as certain points in the past but like every 3rd bar either has a pinball machine of some sort, a shooting game, or some derivative of Pacman. I decided I liked money more though and went all in on becoming a fulltime engineer though so here we are. What a different potential life I could have been living ehh?

I’m tired from today so I’m chasing rabbits right now. Jumping back to the missile platform topic, everything went about as well as I could have expected. There were frustrations involving communication slowness and certain terms and phrasing not getting through properly but for the most part things look good. They actually had a few more things to say about my missiles rather than the platform itself. If what they’re saying is true and I do end up yoinking their munitions to fuel my stuff, I’ll probably be able to shrink down the scale of my launchers and both build them faster and more of them.

Engineer’s Log Day 100

Today marks 100 days since I got stranded. I’ve been sitting here listening back to my records.

I’m still sorting through my emotions about everything so I don’t know quite what to say. On the one hand, I’m very glad to be alive and to no longer be ina fight. Then there’s the other part of the situation where everyone I worked with for the last like 2 years might just be dead to what ultimately is just cosmically bad luck.

When everything is all said and done and I no longer need to be worried, I’m a bit unsure about what I’m going to do. Hopefully more humans will show up but what do I do if they do? I don’t know if I wanna stay at this point with everything that's happened but will I even be able to since I’m technically a diplomat? I don’t know anything aside from the fact that things are very uncertain. Whole thing leaves a pit in my stomach to be honest. It’s definitely been a little fast-paced this last month and I’ve just been mentally tired.

Sigh

I guess for now I gotta keep truckin.

Engineer’s Log Day 104

Hello, it’s me again. Only updating now as for the most part, it’s been an uneventful week. I’ve been working on getting the parts together for the pirate’s welcome gift and Ripley’s Believe It or Not, creating stationary turrets is a bit boring and not really worth reporting on. I have had some good news in the HARP department as I have managed to get everything correctly calibrated and now I’m on the final stages of construction. Still a good week’s worth of work getting everything finished but I’m close now.

The bulk of the week has been me struggling with getting my computers to play nice with xythan’s. Actually wait, I don’t think I’ve mentioned that in a log yet. I recently was pleasantly surprised to find out that “xythalaxn” is as much of a pain for them to say over and over as it is for me. Darana said they typically use xythan in informal settings and xythalaxn in formal ones. Kinda like how humans use humans and terrans depending. Armed with this new information, I shall now be endeavoring to make every situation informal enough so I can stop using that long form.

But back to the topic at hand, the computers. Obviously, two species with different normal languages are going to have communication difficulties and that problem extends itself to our computers. On a very, very basic level, both of our machines use ones and zeros but as they start to get more advanced, the computers’ languages branch out into completely different directions. Right now, it’s looking like the human and xythan anti-ballistic and anti-craft launchers will have to stay on separate systems. Honestly, I don’t mind it all that much because while the xythans are technically my allies, I like being able to verify that I am protected at the very least. I’m still gonna see if I can’t whip something up to connect to their controllers at the very least.

Fortunately, I have some time. I’m still in the mass assembly stage and testing all of the stuff. I’m doing most of it on-site so I don’t have to haul my ass halfway across the proverbial continent to figure out if I forgot to plug something in.

This narrative has been purloined without the author's approval. Report any appearances on Amazon.

Onto a not work topic, I’ve had the joy of watching some movies with Darana and Bayfur. Honestly, the movies aren’t anything super out there or unusual but it has been such a nice change of pace. I need you to put yourself into my head for a second. I’ve spent like a third of a year in this base with only the scraps of entertainment being what I have been able to get out of other people’s saved media. Entertainment has been very sparse but now the floodgates are open.

Man, this last week has been oh so very nice. Like, I’ve got my normal work but since I’ve got Darana pushing around, my workload has gotten a little bit lighter and I’ve actually had a healthy amount of freetime. In addition, between working on planetary launchers and movies, downtime isn’t even boring anymore!

Engineer’s Log Day 107

Alright, Darana and Bayfur are out of the base so I can talk about this now. The kid doesn’t seem to have picked up what has been going on and I don’t intend to drag him into this but I think I said something wrong to Darana? Well, maybe “think” is the wrong way of putting it. I’m almost certain I said something that made her upset, I just don’t know what it was that I said. Everything was fine yesterday but this morning I could barely get her to talk to me. It might have been something I said during the movie, but for the life of me, I cannot pinpoint what I said. I vaguely remember making a few corny puns but that’s about it.

Like running through it, I made a few bowls of popcorn, sat myself down on the opposite side of the couch from Darana, and watched the movie. I fell asleep at the end and woke up a few hours later with Bayfur on top of me. Pulled myself off the couch and brought Bayfur to his bed. Darana caught me leaving their sleeping area. Told her I put Bayfur in bed and promptly bid her a good night before retiring to my own room.

Wait...

Yeah I still don’t have a clue where I messed up.

Fuck.

Engineer’s Log Day 108.1

Update on the situation but I haven’t managed to get past Darana’s avoidant behavior since yesterday so now I have a new plan. I’m going to pull the oldest trick in the book by baiting her with food and then talking to her. I know you don't need to say it, I’m a social mastermind.

The plan is as follows. Step One. Figure out what she likes to eat. This step has already been done for me as I know that she has a tendency to go for steak rations. Step Two, set the bait. I took today off and spent it setting up high necessary gear like frisbees, a bean bag toss, and most importantly a grill. Fortunately, the higher-ups of the base had eventually planned on having a barbeque so I was able to get my hands on some meat set aside for grilling. Step Three is where my genius really kicks in. I’ll set the nearish to the base’s air system to pump the smokey goodness around the base in safe quantities until she has no choice but to emerge. Step Four, I give her food and apologize for whatever I did. It’s a flawless plan and I see no way it could go wrong.

Engineer’s Log Day 108.2

To be fair, it was a flawless plan but it was being executed by a flawed man. I set up my barbecue nearish to an air intake vent and got everything setup. This part went perfectly fine; it was the actual cooking part where things went lopsided.

You might think that the cooking would be the easy part and and unfortunately would be correct because it isn’t terribly hard when the food has your full attention. The steaks did not have my full attention though. I put a few of them onto the grill and was started things up slowly when Bayfur showed up and asked me to play a few games with him. Figured I had a bit of time while things heated up so I put the lid of the grill and left to play some cornhole. Time does its thing and before long I realized that I should probably check on them. I walked over and casually lifted the lid only to be greeted by an aromatic pillar of smoke directly to my face.

To my misfortune, Darana arrived just in time to see my little act of simultaneously choking, coughing, and crying at the smoke. I tried playing it off and spat out something akin to “Steaks may be a little while off.” Apparently, my face in combination with those words absolutely broke her because she ended up rolling with laughter on the ground, crying due to how funny it was.

I don’t think it was that funny but hey it worked to clear the air so I’m not complaining. After she pulled herself together, I tried to apologize for whatever I’d done and she waved me off. She had a bit of a sad look in her eyes for a moment before thanking me and then apologizing for herself. She told me one of my comments during the movie reminded her of her late husband and seeing me bring Bayfur to bed had really driven it home. I’m going to be honest. I should have said something at that point but I was a little speechless.

After a few awkward moments, I asked if there was anything she wanted me to do but there wasn’t and we went back to the mini barbeque, mood a little dampened down. I did what I could to switch the focus onto a game of cornhole. Winner got to choose the next movie and loser had to cook the next meal. With my superior human skills of throwing random things, I won! Barely! It was luck.

Real talk though, I still don’t know how to respond to the idea that I remind her of her late husband. It’s a tricky situation. I just...It’s hard… you know? It puts a whole new crazy spin on the relationship between us that I’m struggling to nail down. At the very least, I think it is safe to say we are at the very least back to better than neutral and maybe friends? She’s been the closest thing I have to a friend for a while now and I do have to say my life would have been much less colorful without her.

There is the whole situation with Bayfur. I love the kid but now I have the fear in the back of my head that I may be sort of replacing his dad? I don’t know if that’s the proper way to put it but it leaves me with a quiet discomfort that I don’t like. I never knew my dad and would have loved it if someone could have stepped up but I don’t think I’m the right man for this job. I’ll….I guess I’ll give this some more thought and keep on doing my thing? It feels like there are a lot of wrong answers to this one.