So Much Things!
28 Oct 2019Dante Cortez
It feels like it's been a long time since I last wrote a journal entry, but while it hasn't been very long, I've covered a lot of ground - er, space - since the last one. I was just heading into the NGC 7822 Nebula, a region filled with bright blue stars. (Turns out, it's also in the Elysian Shore, so I've crossed another region border.) NGC 7822 is a stellar nursery. Each of those bright blue stars - the ones I jumped to, in any case - was orbited by a handful of other stars or black holes or both. I visited one system that had a pair of black holes orbiting the central type O star, and spinning around each other, with a star orbiting the two black holes... and it had a planet! I spent a little time there. Strange and beautiful.
But as fascinating as the nebula was, it had been visited by a lot of people. I could probably have spent years there, looking at amazing things that other people had found before me, but instead, I chose to move on and look for things nobody has found yet. I struck out further away from the galactic center. I'm currently headed toward yet another nebula, the Soul Nebula, and starting to find unexplored (or at least uncatalogued) systems. So far, the most interesting things I've found have been tagged by those who came before, but I have a feeling I will find some cool things.
Like in one place, I was investigating a water world with a ring, and I got a ping that suggested a point of interest in the ring. Something identified as a "Serendibite Hotspot." But when I got to the location, there wasn't anything there but a bunch of the same floating rocks that made up the rest of the ring, so I don't know what that was about.
Anyway, now I'm about 4,000 LY from Sol. At some point, I guess I'll have to turn back, but I can take a different route entirely. By the time I get back, I should have a nice fat portfolio of info to sell to the Universal Cartographers. But that's a ways off. I'm still moving outward for now, and plan to continue to do so for a while. A Bit Of Gravitas is holding up well - no more lithobraking, as they call it - and all systems are functioning. I'm synthesizing food and water, the life support system is in tip-top shape, and really I could live out here for a long time.
But I imagine at some point, I'll want some human company.