Engineer’s Log Day 154
In the spirit of actually listening to other people, I’ve decided to take the day off work… ehhh kinda. I’m still going to be getting some of the platforms set up but only for a few hours and it's mostly just assembling things I’d already started. It’d be bad to leave some of that stuff from the other day half done. I’ve done some soul searching and decided to actually listen to the doc and am putting the kibosh on doing overtime work. I’ll still be working mind you because I still shouldn’t be slacking overly much as danger could be arriving as soon as two months. Now obviously, that time is subject to some amount of variation and thats a really really grim estimate on their ability to find us. Its not even taking into account competence as the pirates could be stupid and just not know how to follow the jump trails back over here. Maybe they just have gotten beat to shit and just decided it wasn’t worth it trying to touch us. I mean I don’t think either of those are the case since they managed to jump the colony ship and Command had sounded concerned but a guy can hope you know?
Anyways like I said, I’m going back to a much more normal schedule. I farm stuff in the morning, go out to hook up my launchers until early afternoon, and then head on home for the day to perform advanced relaxation. Now, is this any different than your bog standard relaxing? Not particularly but it has a funnier ring to it.
A thought occurred to me while I was workin’ earlier today. While I am familiar with how to make most of the base work and am able to fix most things, my area of expertise is in the ground defenses. Now ground defenses are a pretty wide field but you could say that I’m a pretty wide man. Actually wait no, I’m not wide but I got a wide head. That doesn’t sound right either but rest assured, I have a big brain, I promise.
Jumping back to the point though, my specialties lie in shield tech and defensive positions. Basically, I’m responsible for understanding a bit of tactical know how, planning out basic bases, and then setting up shields. Technically speaking, a lot of this is originally designed for ship side stuff but things still translate well. The point is that while we have all these missile launchers as deterrents against pirates bombing us into submission or landing directly on top of us, they can’t truly protect us. To put it simply, while the xythans and I are kind of populating only one section of the planet and can defend our bit from a good number of ships, any sufficiently intelligent and determined invader can still cause us problems either via volume or just going around.
In practice, the fact we are defending a stationary point on a planet means that we can’t ever truly be safe. Worst case for us would be if they decide they hate us particularly and then bomb the far side of the planet until the atmosphere gives out. I strongly doubt it will be coming to that though for a few reasons but the primary one is that they’d need to have enough armaments of sufficient caliber to do us in before we try and do something desperate. After fighting the colony ship, which was by no means undefended, they should be down a fairly significant portion of their arsenal before they even arrive. After that, if they test our antiballistic array, they don’t have a snowflake’s chance in hell of actually doing shit to us if they have anything short of a battleship.
Now, the big issue I realized today is what happens if they decide to land on the far side planet and just walk in at us. Theoretically, they can just blow our launchers to bits with their ground troops and then land full raiding parties or worse yet just bomb us. This is what folks in the living business call, less than ideal.
I know for a fact that Sarlunt will have a few plans in mind. The real trick will be getting him to actually share some of those ideas with me. Maybe see if I can’t get him to share any secret tech.
Engineer’s Log Day 155
I’m going to blow a gasket. The actual audacity. The nerve! The actual nerve! This means war! Total and complete war! I mean not really but still!
Sarlunt had already considered the idea of a ground assault and had already worked out patrols! This is good except for the fact that I’ve been completely excluded! When I asked why, he simply stated that since I’m an engineer and a diplomat furthermore and as such he is honor bound to “see to my safety” or something the other. I made sure to inform him that I’m plenty competent and I could have actively help with this to which he responded by listing off my failure at defense. Jerk.
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On the practical side of things, I can definitely understand his position of wanting to keep me at a distance here even with the whole honor thing set aside. You hardly want to have your singular human diplomat going out, getting involved, and potentially getting himself caught in a fight and that’s before you take into account my value on the engineering side of things. As I’ve said before, I’m stationary defense expert and have been keeping my force shields working for a pretty long time and that’s exactly who you want to keep close to home. This is especially exacerbated by the fact that I’m the only one who really knows their way around human tech and reproduce it with any real speed.
This isn’t to say Sarlunt doesn’t have plans for me, he’d apparently just wanted to wait on asking until after I’d progressed further on the launchers. From what it sounds like, he wants me to work on making a safe haven for the villagers which does make sense. If we are being raided it would be smart to have the innocents as far away from the danger and chaos as possible.
Hmm… wouldn’t me building a haven like that make me the Supreme Defender of both Man and Aliens? You know, that actually has a rather nice ring to it. Maybe, this isn’t such a bad plan. I’m always down to pick up an extra title.
Engineer’s Log Day 157
A few days back, I’d talked about kicking back in the evening. What I’d meant by that was basically just taking a nap, watching a nice dinner movie with Darana and Bayfur, then maybe tinkering with fun stuff in the workshop. Fantastic pass time by the way 10/10 would recommend. That said, these idyllic days might be changing soon due to some stuff that happened today.
To set the scene, it was early afternoon and I’d finished up work a little bit earlier than usual and laid down for an early nap. About halfway through though, I started receiving a few pings about people approaching the base so with bleary eyed I picked myself up and checked. Naturally, I’m pretty curious when I see a few unknown folks around the edges of the base. At this point, I hadn’t received any word from Sarlunt’s people letting me know that anyone was scheduled to be showing up and there are to many folks for it to be Darana and Co. so by process of elimination I knew it had to be someone new.
Initially, I’d thought it might the folks who’d come to yell and shoot at me back when I was on my own but they’ve stopped their shenanigans for a while now . I’m not certain what caused the decline . Maybe it was some sort of weird honor thing, maybe they got warned off by Sarlunt in attempt to try and get me to cooperate, or something else. I’ll actually have ask Darana about that later.
Either way, that wasn’t what this was about. When I poked my head over the wall to see what was up, I was greeted by a rather ominous sight. Four xythans with that malicious grin Darana makes whenever she is scheming something. Not a good potent of things to come but I decided to hear them out. The leader of their little back of four declared a challenge as a follow up to the festival.
The fools.
THE ABSOLUTE FOOLS! MUAHAHAHAHA.
Their first mistake was challenging me. The second mistake was also challenging me. That’s right ladies and gentlemen, it’s the rare double mistake from these lads. What a blunder! Why is it such a blunder you may ask? Well, Mama didn’t raise no loser and as such I have now added a bit of extra training to my daily routine. They thought I was doing well before, well they ain’t seen nothing like what’s about to happen. This is me before the training arc. I’m about to step into the Hyperbolic Time Chamber and show them how we do it back where I’m from.
Mad power trip rant aside, I just got challenged to a few friendly contests and we were able to hash out a good date and time for the both parties to meet up again. While it took the guise of honor, I’ve seen enough of these sorts of things in college to know that this mostly just for fun which Darana agreed with when I brought it up to her later.
Interestingly, half of the contests are things I won at the festival with the other half being things I either didn’t participate in or did kinda middling in. I think they’re trying to bait me in with a few gimmes so they can have at me with the middling stuff which is very kind of them to give me some leeway but that shall be their undoing.
I’m kinda hoping that my appearance at the festival dispelled some of the magic that surrounds me in their eyes. The thought of having a social life again where I can talk to more than just the same 3 to 4 people has me a little bit excited. I mean I’m probably going to just talk to the same 3 to 4 people anyways but its nice to have the options you know?
I do have a bit of a problem right now where I actually cannot for the life of me remember what their names are. I do remember that one of them was brown and one grey though I’m not sure there’s much I can actually pull from that information. I’m praying Darana will be able to help provide a few names so I don’t end up looking like a total doofus.