Shadows in the Rift - Out of Character Note
13 May 2017Jellicoe
This story was an attempt to tell the tale of the Exploration Community Goal last December where the Children of Raxxla took on the Federation in a race to obtain data from the three regions known as the Formidine Rift, Hawkins Gap and Conflux. I've tried to stay as close as possible to what actually happened but have had to deviate in some ways to try and make it a consistent story. The biggest change to the actual events was the discovery of the ground bases and their coms logs, I understand that these were meant to have been the big discovery of the event but due to (I think) a bug in the code anyone approaching them during the CG suffered a crash to desktop and it was not until the mini patch in January that the bases were accessible and gave up their secrets so this tale has been the story of how things *should* have happened if things had worked as they were supposed to! I make no claims whatsoever to have been the first player to discover either the beacons or the bases, I know full well that many other players were at both before I was (which I try to show by Jellicoe's encounter with CMDR Orson at the first beacon and the presence of apparently fresh tyre tracks at the base) and thanks to social media I knew exactly what was waiting for me in the Rift. That though would make for a very poor story and so I came up with the device of a coms blackout, a little contrived perhaps but necessary to creating (hopefully) some dramatic tension, and such a blackout doesn't seem entirely unrealistic for a shadowy, secretive organisation like the Children of Raxxla especially when taking on a galactic superpower like the Federation!
The encounter with CMDR Orson (that wasn't his real name) did actually happen but was in reality me and a Fed player saying what a cool event this was! The attack by the two Asps was alas, a complete invention. All the quotes from the logs that I included are 100% genuine and can easily be found (as can all the logs from all four regions) online. The excursion to the Earthlike planet was partly based on landing on a planet and discovering an occupied escape pod at a signal source, that though would be boring to write up and read about so changing it to an Earth like planet allowed me to work in other fluff to the story, it also allowed me to include the revelation that came with the discovery of the Zurara megaship that there had been some terraforming activity during the Exodus mission.
The ending I had planned was that the crew of the Warspite began to one by one succumb to the mysterious (and at that time unexplained) 'space madness' mentioned in several of the logs and having a desperate race against time to get home before it took them all but the discovery of the Zurara megaship out in the Formidine Rift destroyed that idea by explaining exactly what the cause was. A great piece of story telling by Frontier but one which blew my yarn apart which is the reason for the rather disjointed end to my tale!
As to who was behind the bases and what their purpose is we still do not know, it is part of an ongoing story line in the game, the latest part of which is the information contained in the listening posts in the Teorge system and I recommend anyone interested to go and have a look at them for themselves.