I'm in Spain without the A. I mean the S. Oh God.
10 Feb 2023Ember Lacson
Now I know why they gave me those hardcore pain killers. I was feeling pretty good after I left Niven Dock. The next morning I could barely move. I wasted a whole day in low power mode just trying to get the strength to lift my arm to touch the controls. It wasn't just the pain from my injuries, but fever, chills, agitation.... I wanted those drugs back. I was willing to give my right arm for another hit.Tossing the remaining doses in the incinerator was clearly the right move.
The withdrawals are a lot less now. I wasn't on the juice for more than a couple days, so I think my recovery should be pretty short. But the symptoms seem to come in waves. I was able to get a bunch of scanning done the other day, but I had to take a break for most of yesterday. I'll be able to finish my current system today, and I want to be back on the Morningstar by Tuesday the twelfth. Then I'm going to rest. I might take a break from flight for a second and play admin for Nicole's and my yet to be created vlog channel.
I think one of the things that have been keeping me in this current system is the fact that I'm helping Canonn map it. The only info they had was from body 2, where there's a ton of bacterium omentum. That's a pretty valuable sample. The rest of them have been bacterium acies, which is only worth a million apiece. But given the lack of Canonn data, I have a reasonable suspicion that I might be getting a bonus. That being said, I haven't seen any evidence of myself as the first footfall on any of these planets. (The Pilots Federation will query the database of planets and let you know via a HUD notification.)
If you have first footfall, then you're guaranteed to be the first one to sample the organics present on the surface. If you don't, then there's a chance somebody beat you. It's pretty easy to get first footfall bonuses; I got something like a dozen on the way back from visiting Taranis out beyond Barnard's Loop, back when it was known only as The Anomaly. And for a while, first footfalls were pretty common in the Bubble. But it's been well over a year since the Pilots Federation started tracking that kind of thing, so you have to venture out a few hundred light years into the black to find them in abundance. To be honest, my current dream is to get a sample of stratum tectonicas or some other super high value organism on a terraformable world previously undiscovered and unmapped. That might pay out high eight figures just for that one set of scans.
But for now there are bigger bugs to fry. I need to finish my expedition, or at least hit the really high value scans. Then I need to enjoy the last couple of days with Nicole before she leaves, and after that I need to get back into AX. Like I said last time—at least, I think I said—I'm going to outfit my current Chieftain, Meershaulk, with a quick and dirty shieldless AX build. I think I'm going to head down to the Pleiades to grab a Cyclops the traditional way and finally submit for rank in the AXI, and after that I'm going to play around with some mod shards. AXCZs above surface outposts, installations, etc. are a pretty good way to play with builds, from what I hear, so I might focus on that as well as some refugee transport. Maybe I'll do that first until I'm done with the withdrawals and past the pain. Fingers crossed that I don't need to go to rehab.