Colony Commander Sarlunt swerved a bit to avoid stepping through where the glass window shards had been on his way back to his desk. They had been swept up but he still preferred erring on the side of caution just in case anything had slipped through the cracks with the first sweeping. Making a mental note to go and check the other vandalized buildings again, he sat down at his desk and let out a long, suffering sigh when he saw what sat before him. Another report on that damned human.
Taking a bit of time to read through the content, Sarlunt was pleased to see that the disturbances had been relatively minimal though he would have preferred that his troops hadn’t chased after the human directly. He’d need to sit down and discuss that with the company leaders. Just because the human seemed unwilling to fight didn’t mean he wasn’t dangerous. The defenses he’d set up proved that was anything but the case.
Sarlunt thanked the ancestors that the human wasn’t causing serious problems though. The recent streak of what at worst could be called delinquency was a far cry better than the total war he’d initially feared. It did confuse him that the human had denied all attempts at diplomacy through proper channels but with how many times a mob had formed outside his base, Sarlunt couldn’t quite bring himself to hate the man for that. Tossing the paper onto the desk, he sighed again wishing this problem hadn’t fallen into his lap. So many little things seemed to be slipping through the cracks.
Why did he have to be stuck with the weird human?
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Engineer’s Log Day 60
Well, good news I suppose. No visit from the little guy today. I’d been concerned that he’d make a habit of traipsing through my land and inevitably bringing down all of the local firepower directly onto my head but it seems we’ve dodged that bullet this time.
I can tell I’m getting particularly bored if this is the highlight of my week.
Engineer’s Log Day 64
Hey hey, guess who actually found something useful. Well I mean it's not technically useful in the sense it provides utility but I mean… no… I don’t know how to spin finding the assembly guide for the HARP as useful. It does help shove off the boredom but I don’t know if I’m willing to use that as a classification for usefulness. By that logic, falling off the roof could technically be considered useful even though it’s actively making my life worse in every regard except boredom. Actually, this is definitely useful if it gets me something to do other than read that god awful fan fic. I wish I’d had more casual reading stuff.
Aaaaanyways, I did find the assembly guide for the HARP. Steven had been keeping it on a completely separate thumb drive and I lucked out finding it. Fortunately, assembling this thing doesn’t look terribly hard. The most challenging part originally would have been creating each of the pieces which I can neatly bypass for the most part with my printer. Once I have enough of the pieces made, it should just be a matter of welding, fastening, and attaching everything. Kinda like legos but with much greater potential for chaos and destruction!
By the way, I cannot understate how nice this 3D printer is. Most of the time, you have to pay a premium to be able to look at stuff like this and out here I get to make what I want every day with functionally no restrictions other than size. Shame the opportunity came with more downsides than I care to count.
Engineer’s Log Day 65
Welp, kid came back, tried jumping me again and everything. I caught him on the cameras as he was trying to sneak in. Turned off the turrets, locked up the dangerous bits of what I had been working on, and got ready to receive my guest. Initially, I’d planned to send him away like last time but that train of thought was kinda lost in the weeds when I actually saw the guy in action.
I wouldn’t say he’s bad at stealth considering how he did manage to get the jump on me the first time we met but I’m also not gonna say he’s good at it with the whole running across the courtyard directly in my line of sight. After a bit of snuffling around on his part, he managed to find a decent enough ambush spot and settled down to wait for me. The whole time his little tail was going a million miles an hour. Obviously, I walked forward and he jumped out to latch onto my leg. Absolutely adorable. 10/10 would get jumped again.
He seemed to be in a stunning mood after a successful ambush and ran off to go and explore the rest of the base. At the time, I’d kind of chuckled and let him do his thing but he returned a bit later with a length of rope and the rubber ball I’d printed up some time ago. I don’t know how he got his hands on either.
When he saw me though, he dropped the ball, ran up to me with the rope, and gave me one of the ends. I took it from him, a bit confused, before he gave me an expectant look, said something I didn’t understand, wrapped the middle around his waist, and legged it the opposite direction as me. My end of the rope goes flying and he nearly faceplants.
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A few more charades and one sided conversations later and I get the idea he wants to play tug of war. Repeat of the last few steps but this time I actually hold on properly and the game is afoot. For someone barely clocking in at 3 ft, this kid had quite a strong pull.
After only a little bit of back and forth, I had to call it quits on account of my leg which he seemed to take more or less in stride. Tossing the rope to the side, he grabbed the ball and then gave me a very solemn look as he mimed throwing it and catching it while chattering on. I got the idea pretty fast but I am a little sad his impression of me is that dense.
In the end, we played catch for a while. I’d throw the ball a pretty decent distance and he’d run off to get it before running back and handing it to me. We rinsed and repeated until several hours had passed by and he decided to call it quits. I gave him some food before sending him off with the same instructions as last time to not come back. Once again, he dashed off scaling my walls with uncomfortable ease.
I’m a little concerned about why he came back to my base. I’d thought xythalaxns tended to be pretty group oriented but here he is on his own, a young kid who really should have some level of supervision. He also eats like it's his final meal every time he shows up but I don’t really know if that sort of thing is normal or not for his age.
Might just be that the kid is odd. After all, he ran up to someone of a different species and just started talking. Maybe I’m missing some sort of cultural thing? Maybe playing ball has some sort of meaning I don’t get?. Maybe it's some sort of predator game? Humans have plenty of their own “predator” style games?
…
You know I’m almost certainly overthinking this. I’m pretty sure the dog alien had to teach me how to play fetch. Maybe he didn’t underestimate me.
Engineer’s Log Day 67.1
Boredom has struck and I’ve decided it's time to reintroduce the invasive species known as the drone back into the xythalaxn’s natural habitat. This time we’re doing it in the air because I’m not keen at the idea of being shot at while dropping off another RC car.
The design I’m using for the flying drone I’d made back when I was first being a pest so things were able to pretty quickly. Originally I’d been considering doing a helicopter style drone but that had ended up being significantly more complicated than just going with a quadcopter. Printing, assembly, and testing all went off without a hitch within the span of an hour and badda bing badda boom I’m ready. The steering leaves much to be desired but to be fair I didn’t put any real work on it.
Now it’s time to see my pretty fly!
Engineer’s Log Day 67.2
They shot my pretty out of the air. I should have seen this coming but somehow didn’t.
Engineer’s Log Day 68
What if I solved the drone getting shot problem by candidly ignoring it? Lemme explain my thoughts.
Currently, the weakness of the flying drone strategy is that my drone can be shot out of the air before I get anywhere close to the town. I could try solving it but increasing the drone’s durability but in order to weather the ordinance they like to throw around I’d need to scale it up pretty significantly and that kind of defeats them being easy to make. Instead, I’m going to try and use multiple drones. I figure if I can space them out enough, they can only stop so many at once and, by sheer dint of numbers, I should have at least one slip through their hands.
Since I can only really control one drone at a time, I can swap between them but that won’t really do the trick if I have more than two drones deployed at a time. I’ll need to set up an automated flight path for the ones I’m not actively controlling and my current thought is that I just have them maintain altitude and fly in a straight line whenever I’m not actively controlling them. It's a bit simplistic and won’t scale up indefinitely but that’s fine for now. Scaling it up would mean actually adding some effort to making these things which would be a bit of a shame.
Engineer’s Log Day 69.1
The test run with 3 drones today was a great success. I was able to get them more or less circling around the top of my base without any big issues. I’m ready for the big time.
Engineer’s Log Day 69.2
Man, they just shot all of them down! Unfair!
Engineer’s Log Day 70
I’ve decided to stop being annoying for a little while. Not for any benevolent reason but it's been getting windy and that makes it really hard to fly a drone. The weather has been getting rougher in general recently which has also had the side effects of giving the belated realization that I could finish up the job that had originally taken me out of the base. It’ll take me a while to make a new weather spike but if there’s one thing I have it’s time.
I’m a little concerned about trying to make the trip again but my splint should be coming off in a few days anyways so it should be fine so long as I take precautions. And by precautions, I mean I intend to go armed to the gills for this little trip. We are not having a repeat of last time.
On a much happier note, the kid showed up again today. Played some games with him for a little while before he ran off.
Engineer’s Log Day 74
All done building the weather spike. I definitely remember this taking longer last time but I suppose prior experience was helping to carry me through it.
Engineer’s Log Day 75
It is officially a pattern now. The kid shows up every 5 days. I can’t help but wonder at the reasoning for it since it feels just a little too consistent to be some arbitrary decision.
Showed off the RC car I made but didn’t end up getting used to him today. He seemed absolutely infatuated with the thing and had an absolute blast slamming it into my shins when I let him pilot it. I can hear my mom laughing at me in my head when that happened because I definitely did that to her too. Funny how things work out like that.