Engineer’s Log Day 158

Tadorn, Vrokflen, Pottem, and Grel. Those are the names of the folks who came to challenge me and I’m saying it here to help me remember. Tadorn is the challenger, Vrokflen had the tear racing stripe thing and is grey, Pottem was taller than the rest, and Grel is the brown furred one who seemed kinda bored. I need to go and perform my voodoo ritual of chanting the names in front of a mirror or I am going to forget at least one of those names.

Darana wasn’t able to tell me much about any of these individuals aside from the fact that it's two couples and they’re kind of outcasts. Kinda. There was some distinction there that wasn’t getting translated well but it didn’t sound like that big of a deal so I’m not gonna worry about it. Pottem and Grel are married but Tadorn and Vrokflen are something else. Darana gave a word for them, “imaxi”, which, near as she can explain, is something like a fiancé but with extra steps? I don’t know but I’m hardly an expert on matters of marriage.

I did ask Darana a bit about that though and their courting ritual things are cool. I say courting rituals but I more mean that in the lines of stuff like dating and asking for a hand in marriage. Actually, as it turns out, more often than not species that make it to space tend to do marriages of some sort according to Darana. Something to do with stability and raising a family but I digress. Xythan marriage. Apparently in the past, one of the big things they’d do is prove themselves to their partner and families. Both groups would provide some feat and if they couldn’t they’d just fuckin square up.

I’d say humans don’t do that but we have it literally immortalized in Shakespear in like 7 different variants. I also have far too many friends who spent far too much of their college life trying to impress chicks. Darana apparently knew a few folks like that too while she was getting her education. I suppose college students are a universal constant.

Engineer’s Log Day 159

My training arc is in full swing now. A couple more pushups and a few more miles and I’m liable to start losing my hair and surpassing my limits. I’ve already succeeded on that first point so thankfully it's all up from here. My previous training regime was mostly to keep me in ok shape while preserving my stamina so for my new and improved routine I’ve decided to try a generalist strength workout. I figure my stamina is pretty ok where it’s at and this’ll help me strengthen myself up for those areas I’m just barely weak in.

Some of these contests are gonna just be a complete wash for me and just completely unwinnable so I’m planning a bit of selective training. If I can win at the competitions I’m neutral or just barely disadvantaged at, I should push the scoring in my favor. I don’t need to win them all, just enough to prove my totally real superiority. Totally.

That's just part of my day though. Spent the rest of it scouting around a few different areas to see what places would make for a good defensive encampment. While the human military base has done a valiant job at keeping me safe and makes for an excellent starting point to be able to expand and colonize, it’s kind of a sitting duck defensively. While I do have the shields, all sides of the base are available for infantry and ground vehicles to attack, making it a bit harder to properly plan a good defense. My strategy of just using the cameras only works so well as evidenced by my failure.

Ideally, I’d like somewhere where the terrain isn’t super great for letting large numbers of people in on foot, maybe somewhere with decent ground cover and open skies, and importantly an underground reservoir nearby. The reservoir might be the most important thing on the list since if we are forced to hide behind our shields, we can have as much food as we want but if we can’t get any drinking water it’ll be game over for us. Technically speaking, I can set up some machines to generate water from our supplies but those aren’t efficient and wouldn’t be able to create enough water for the entire xythan population.

The main issue for me right now is that I don’t have the foggiest clue as to how I would even begin charting out water reservoirs so it’s probably time to reach out to Sarlunt. I’ve started charting out a few potential locations so they should have a few good starting places to check around. I should probably start pushing for them to check around since getting a base set up for that many people will no doubt take a good amount of time.

That said, if I do have enough time to set up, I should be able to make it so we can repel anything short of an orbital assault vehicle. We’ll probably end up with something more mild since that level of defense would probably take a few years even if I had some 50 odd clones of me working on it. Optimization is a pain like that.

Hopefully, the locations I have my eye on right now have some sort of water source nearby. The ones I have my eye on should have some natural resources that’ll allow us to expedite any base building and with the crunch we’re presumably working under, it’s vital that the terrain be working with us.

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Engineer’s Log Day 160

So my plan of relaxing in the afternoons via nap is kinda fading since I’m always doing a bit in the afternoon. Sometimes it’s exercising and working on my general coordination for competing and sometimes working on design plans for potential bases. I can’t get too far on that second point since I’m still waiting on the xythan hydrologists to finish their inspection of the sites. Hydrologist sounds entirely made up but I have looked it up and believe it or not that is the name for folks who find water basins among other things.

The spare time I spend tinkering has transformed into trying to make a few quick toys for potential upcoming fights. Figure that even if I won’t participating in battle directly, I can at least help provide support from a range. Sort of thinking about it like I’m in an MMO, you got the people doing all the combat and raiding but then you have that one glorious bastard who does all the gathering and crafting for the rest of the guild. The crafter is quite important for endgame stuff and if you don’t have one, you’ll have to hire the services of another.

Bad analogy aside, I’ve been spending the last few days asking what exactly I can make that would help boost the xythan’s combat prowess? My knee-jerk reaction is to start making some explosives for them to play with as you can never have too many but they definitely have more than their fair share of those. I remember them lobbing explosives at me far too liberally in the early months for me to think they suddenly need my help in that department.

A bit of an interesting point actually, they’ve got some similar baseline tech to me we just have differences in where we’ve been focusing. Humans have tended more towards our shields and railguns while it seems they focused more on explosives. This is even reflected in our ships where ours use the shield tech to skip along the surface of reality with the Ender Drive while they simply blow a temporary hole in space and slip through essentially a temporary wormhole. Differences in philosophy leading to differences in tech. Pretty cool stuff.

In so far as helping, I’ve been considering just setting up a few smaller shield generators at a few choice locations. Obviously, they can’t be as powerful as my base’s without a generator but having them around at the very least should help create a variable terran that the enemy can’t predict as well. Our pirate friends were able to catch the colony ship so I can’t write off the fact that they may have hardware that lets them detect anything I build. Probably need to talk to Sarlunt about that... Maybe there are some other areas they struggle with?

Engineer’s Log Day 164.1

Alright the training arc is over and I have to say, one week is not nearly enough for there to be even the slightest of differences in physique or skills and our mini tournament is later today. I went even on the competitions when the whole festival thing happened so I’m proooobably going to be fine. Probably. I really hope. It doesn’t matter to me that much if I win or lose but I do still need To win this little competition or Darana is never going to tease me for the rest of my natural life.

Engineer’s Log Day 164.2

Thankfully, my fears did not come to fruition and I have managed to keep my humiliation to completely acceptable levels. The whole little contest was actually really fun with all the constantly changing competitions. I did run into one small complication during my time playing though as there was one important little twist to the whole thing that these fellas neglected to let me know about ahead of time. All of them participated. Now if it was all of them going at the same time, I think thats fair play but no. They had one person chosen for each event and all took turns with each taking the sport they were best at.

First of all, unfair. Second of all, imagine challenging a human to a stamina game. They may not have known going in humans have yee ole stamina in spades but they certainly left knowing that. That isn’t to say they did their bits of the competition and just passed out after but they definitely got winded faster than I did. I’d say I performed about as well as I could have considering the situation but they definitely pulled one over on me. I almost wonder if this is how the fey in older stories felt getting tricked like this.

They were good sports though and afterwards even invited me in for one last “contest”. It’s something called “calydr” which roughly plays out like dodgeball. The main differences between calydr and dodgeball are that you play in a sort of box arena and you have to bounce the ball off the walls or floor first to eliminate a player. From there it’s basically a free for all with a couple fewer balls than players. I only have one thing to say about that game though.

YOUR HONOR! I’M FUCKING BALLIN’.

I’m what you might call a pro at dodgeball so naturally I had to take them up on it. They put up a good fight despite not being able to throw the ball as accurately as I did, making up for any perceived lack of aim with fast reflexes and great gusto when throwing the ball. There was one exception to this status quo though. Grel is a dodgeball master. She was routinely the last woman standing and over the few games we played we ended up having to team up on her to have any real chances at winning.

One odd thing though was that she absolutely hammered the tar out of my entire left side. Never the right, only the left. I don’t know how she managed it but she did and I’m having a distinct feeling I’m going to be feeling a few bruises there tomorrow.

I suppose I made a good impression on them as I got invited again. They expressed some interest in Darana joining us for the next little adventure which I am more than down for. When I brought it up this evening over dinner, she seemed receptive to the idea but had some doubts about what Bayfur would be doing during the time to which I can only say, fair enough. Definitely for the best that we don’t leave Bayfur unattended since he does have a tendency to wander into trouble if left to his own devices long enough and there is no shortage of problematic things to get into. She did suggest that Glysia might be interested but she wasn’t technically invited so I’ll have to ask next time we meet.