Engineer’s Log Day 20.1

I took a bit of time today to get the missile platform all set up. I had a touch and go moment where I was trying to shift it and my right leg, which I cut, gave out for a split second but I very fortunately managed to avoid getting my toes absolutely mashed so we’re all good.

Now technically speaking, all my defenses are set up and I’m good to go. Practically speaking, I wanna test my launcher on something to make sure it actually works… ahh who am I kidding I wanna blow something up. Just using it on the trees seems like a bit of a waste though. Maybe I set up a little testing range? That sounds pretty fun.

Maybe I can make a dummy or something along those lines. I’m 100% sure that with a 3D print collection that big I have some manner of a cardboard cutout.

Engineer’s Log Day 20.2

Well bad news and good news. Bad news is there weren't any cutouts in the database or if there were I don’t know the tags I need to find them. The good news was I wasn’t using my full brain and we did had some ballistic dummies. They were hiding away in the back of the storehouse where we keep our weapons, weary of my dangerous experiments. Alas, I have found them and it is far too late for them to run now.

They ended up only being the upper half which is a bit disappointing but beggars can’t really be choosers. I’m looking for a can of spray paint in the storage shed as I speak so I can paint an angry face over the model. The current semi transparent ballistic gel is depressing to look at. I’ve found a nice white which gave me the idea to spray paint a clown face onto the front but I need a red for that. You’d think red would be the most common spray paint for marking dangerous stuff but there’s precious little to be found. I might have to do the clowns a disservice and do purple on white.

Engineer’s Log Day 20.3

Today’s test was a little wild and by a little I mean a lot wild. It took me a bit longer but I did end up finding the red spray paint. Gave the ballistic dummy a very nice set of “makeup” and rolled it out front of the base. Scuttled back in as quickly as my leg would let me and then hopped up on top of the wall so I could view the launch in all its glory. Hopped onto my datapad and then began the manual targeting.

It was around this point that I started getting pings about movement in the treelines. Nothing in particular stood out to me as out of the ordinary but I’d adjusted my sensors to not trigger on every third leaf so that meant this was probably something real and I was missing it. Took a bit to sit down and actually pick through the pictures to see if I couldn’t figure out what or who my mystery visitor was. I had a shiver go down my spine when I realized it was my old “friend” Mr. Bug Panther prowling around the outside and he’d been stalking me. I’d gotten dangerously close to death via mauling.

I might have let bygones be bygones if he’d been willing to leave me be but then he jumped the testing dummy I left out. The one right in the middle of my turrets which were still on. Not the brightest move by Mr. Bug Panther I’ll admit as he refused to leave even after getting several warnings in the xythalaxn language but it’s his life to live. What followed is better left to the imagination but suffice to say he was not walking that one off.

You might think this was the end of if but no things continued to escalate. I left the wall thoroughly baffled by the animal’s life choices thinking that’d be the end of everything but it wasn’t.

I guess while me doing set up on top of the wall was missed, the sounds of two separate turrets going off certainly wasn’t. An armed xythalaxn greeting party came by to throw me a housewarming party some time after the incident and by housewarming I mean they took potshots at the base with explosive rounds. They’d run in, shoot a shot or two, and then quickly run back out when my warnings started which is an ok strategy though playing around like that kinda feels like tempting fate.

In the end, I decided to participate in their impromptu stress test on my shielding by suiting up in a set of combat gear and then doing mocking dances on top of the walls until they left. I don’t think they understood the exact cultural context of my magnificent dances but I’d like to think the general gist got through to them because they started yelling a lot more. After a good 30 or so minutes of remorseless taunting, I got bored and headed back inside, keeping an eye on things through the motion detectors.

In the end, it took them over an hour to finally give up. If they really wanted to get me they should have brought better guns. The volume of fire wasn’t anywhere near enough to get at me. The biggest shame of today is I never got to test that missile launcher. Oh well.

Engineer’s Log Day 21

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I’ve started getting fanmail! How utterly delightful it is to be this popular. Why if I were a slightly less humble man, all these letters expressing their support for me in what basically amounts to google translate Common would go straight to my head with such kind phrases telling me to surrender and to kill myself. I really appreciate the effort my new found fan club went through to make their thoughts known to me since I still don’t know how they managed to send messages to my account.

After reading through a few messages and getting the general gist, I’ve decided it’d be kind to respond. I quickly drafted up a professional response thanking them for their efforts and letting them know I would soon move out before professionally attaching a ZIP bomb and hitting send. As a follow up, I made sure to disable any incoming information to prevent any revenge plots.

Unrelated to all that, I’ve decided to start cultivating my green thumb. Now that I’m all bunkered up and don’t need to worry about basic necessities like not getting shot, I figure I’m going to have a lot of spare time to spend on thriving. If nothing else, I’m hoping gardening will be a good way to kill time. I have a whole greenhouse and baby orchid sitting at the edge of the base that I’ve been leaving to rot away over the last few weeks but not more.

I have access to the botanist team’s notes through the hacked account so I have some level of confidence in being able to keep the plants alive. I hope anyways. I think I can keep the saplings alive at the very least. They’re already making good progress from what I’m reading here and trees are pretty hardy. Tomorrow I’ll properly pillage the greenhouse to see if I can’t find some basic instructions. A Botany for Dummies would be really handy.

The main reason I’ve turned my interest towards the plants is because I’ve been kind of missing fruit. One can only eat so many of the freeze dried variants before one starts missing the actual articles. I figure that the worst case scenario is that I kill everything and feel very sad that I have no fruit. Ideally, the best case is that in a few months I’ll be able to have something sweet to supplement my diet.

Engineer’s Log Day 22

Alright, so I know plants need a lot of work but I’m kind of unsure about these instructions. They’re saying that I need to talk to the plants but I feel like if I start doing that, things are going to quickly devolve into a Wilbur sort of situation and I don’t know if I’m mentally prepared to look at myself in the mirror if I hit that point. I’d much prefer to just talk to my computer like a normal person. I also feel like I’ve heard that the whole talking to plants thing was a myth but that they also liked music?

Sigh

I’m gonna start talking to these plants aren’t I? Actually why am I even worrying about this? I know I’m going to start talking to them and giving them imaginary voices to talk back to me because I was already doing it for half the stuff in the workshop back when people were still here. Why would me being alone change that?

Silly rant over, serious plant talk time. I spent a goodly amount of time in the greenhouse today making sure that everything is working properly. Fortunately, in the single month of disuse, nothing seems to have broken on its own. The sprinkler system appears to be working perfectly fine though they seem to be distributing water a bit unevenly. I’ll need to read up and see if there is actually a reason for this and that's why the plants are placed where they are or if it’s a construction oversight that the botanists just kinda got used to. Everything else looks good for the most part but I wouldn’t trust anything electronic in the room to keep working for more than a few months without any checking up. Spent a fair bit of time today weeding around the saplings and exterior portions of the garden but by no means got everything. That’ll be a job for the next few days.

On a less clinical level, I gotta say it was kinda magical walking into the greenhouse for the first time. The whole place smells both earthy and sweet which is really nice after having spent so long working at my oily workspace and delving into dusty warehouses. Plants line the walls and hang from the ceiling making a proper mural of colors from the various flowers that are blooming. The whole thing left me with a sense of inspiration and a strong desire to properly try and keep this nice thing going. I don’t know if improving it is in the cards for me but we’ll see.

Engineer’s Log Day 23

Did some more weeding today and played a few more games of 3D Printer Roulette. I now have a rubber duck, a set of dumbbells, and what I’m 90% sure is a yoga mat.

Engineer’s Log Day 24

The microwave broke while I was trying to heat up my meatball sandwich. I feel utterly betrayed. This shall be fixed post haste

Engineer’s Log Day 25

Ok, a few things. The microwave was not in fact fixed post haste partially because I am a lazy man but only partially. The other part involves some shenanigans with the printer files.

As anyone listening knows by now, the tag system has a few gaps in it but one of the bigger ones is that the name of the item itself is rarely given in the tags. This means I have to guess a few different things before I’ll find the item I’m looking for. Very commonly, I’ll start with the name of the item, move onto common nicknames, and then branch out to descriptors if neither of those work. I followed this logic like I normally do, started by checking the tags for microwave, not getting anything, and moving onto nicknames. Naturally, when I put “nuke” into the search bar and got back one result, I thought I had my microwave.

Now, to be fair, it is on me for not actually checking the blueprints myself but I don’t think I was wrong to assume something with the fucking food tag was designed for the kitchen. I can only assume that this was somebody’s idea of a prank and I have to say that, while yeah admittedly funny, it wasn’t at the moment. Watching the autoprinter spit one warhead after another out and trying to desperately catch them before they roll off onto the floor will age any man several times over.

Fortunately for me, they ended up just being empty shells but man I’m not built to handle that level of stress. What do I even do with these things?