Exploration Log: NYND, Give 'Em Hope, Cyd
18 Jan 2022Lucy Feonix
//Initialising...
//Welcome to Feonix Enterprises Exploration Division.
//Please enter your query.
//Searching...
//Multiple entries found for 'Give 'Em Hope, Cyd'.
//Displaying in chronological order.Commander's Log, 15th of January, 3308.
Commander Feonix is out cold. Cyd Icarus presiding. At around midnight, an emergency beacon lit up, close to Sidewinder's Song, black hole A. I was fast asleep at the time, and woke up to screeching alarms and flashing red lights - I hadn't seen that in years, I think the last time that I can recall was the attack on the Palin Research Institute in Maia, where I was representing Tiana, as part of my... debt payment at Fortune's Loss. Security crews rushed me and Ariel over to the bridge, where Ray was already present - drunk as a skunk that got into a hoard of rotten apples, but present nonetheless. Commander Sidhara herself was so kind as to brief us on the situation. At 11:53PM standard galactic time, Commander Feonix commandeered one of her own ships, the AD-SWK Sun Wukong from one of the storage hangars, and undocked without prior authorisation. From there, the logs got a little hazy, but as it appears at this moment, she attempted to fly the sidewinder-class straight into the black hole. Close to the event horizon of the supermassive point, she lost consciousness from the sheer G-forces. At this point, it is likely her ship's COVAS took control of the ship and initiated a distress call to the Lunar Hyperlight, which is where we are now. Sidhara also informed us that they have already dispatched a Rescue Ranger patrol to get her, and hopefully the ship, back safe and sound, but they will both require excessive medical and/or mechanical attention. As the Sun Wukong is mostly my engineering work, I've been tasked with heading the maintenance crew on piecing her back together. Seeing as Ray is... well, not in great condition, the ship's lead surgeon, one Doctor Eichhorn, will be taking the lead in that area.
04:00Thanks to the efforts of Commander Borson's Rescue Rangers squadron, the Sun Wukong and its sole passenger were successfully recovered, though both were in critical condition. As some of the systems were exceptionally volatile due to my modifications, special care had to be taken to disarm this 'bomb' first. After this, not much was left - both the main and the auxiliary thrusters, as far as I can tell, are suffering from a severe case of spaghettification, and the shield generator on-board has been warped beyond recognition. The power plant was removed, as its overclocked-yet-damaged state made it too dangerous to be aboard the Lunar Hyperlight without burning it out. The cockpit, by some miracle, wasn't touched extensively, but it has suffered major damage. The COVAS sputtered some words when it came in, something about Thargoids... When I have the time and a whole lot less adrenaline, I should extract its data logs and have someone look at them. The rest of the hull is also warped in places, making it almost look like a comical caricature of a Viper Mk. III, though with the characteristic thrusters of the Sidewinder. I need to get to work on this thing now. Thankfully money isn't a problem, Commander Sidhara informed me - our exploration efforts more than cover the cost of even building the Sun Wukong back up from a stock Sidewinder. Not that that's much comfort to me - a ship of Theseus, no matter how many parts are replaced, remains the same ship - but welding all those parts together does not equal a clone of the old ship.
Commander Feonix herself is hanging on by a thread - while she was thankfully, by a miracle, spared the horror of being spaghettified by a literal black hole, she has beared gravitational pull greater than any human should ever rightfully handle. Aside from this, some parts of the cockpit were crushing her - most of her extremities on her left side are fractured in a major way, mangled as if she were stuck in a collapsing building - which isn't far off, I suppose. Dr. Eichhorn says she'll make it, but she won't be able to walk unassisted for a good few months, at least. They're keeping her in the medical wing currently for extensive testing, but with some luck and an enormous amount of elbow grease, she'll be able to join us for the rest of the expedition, though in a wheelchair, and on the condition that Ray performs extensive medical checkups on the daily. I'm... not sure how we'll be doing the logistics on-board the ships, but I suppose we're lucky that her quarters are on the same deck as the pilot's cabin. I just hope she'll improve quickly. For now, I need to finish maintenance work on the Azure Dragon, and draft up some plans for the Sun Wukong's maintenance so that the crew can restore her at least to working order.
23:00Maintenance work has mostly been completed, thanks to diligent work by the Lunar Hyperlight's maintenance crew. I got word from Dr. Eichhorn a few hours ago that Commander Feonix has regained consciousness, though isn't very coherent yet. The Lunar Hyperlight has already departed for her next stop, Guardian's Hope. Lucy is still in the medical wing - her injuries were too extensive for her to be joining us for this week's jumps. Dr. Eichhorn has assured us that she was in the best of care. She'll be taking up telepresence contact soon, but for now, it looks like I'm piloting the ship as well as maintaining it. One thing is for sure - I pray to any god that will listen that she never pull a careless stunt like this again. Ray and Ariel are fine, just a little shaken. Ray's apologising profusely for being smashed at the time, but really, I can't blame them. We didn't know this shit was gonna happen. We thought we were gonna go have a nice time on the Lunar Hyperlight until the mass jump, but no - oh, right, mass jump. I suppose I should say something about that, yes...
At 6:00PM galactic standard time, the Alchemy Den personnel that actually arrived to Sidewinder's Song on time conducted a mass jump, where all vessels present jump to a single system. With enough preparation time, this jump proved successful, and an impressive sight to behold to boot. Even Commander Lahn managed to make it, despite her 'brief' sidestep to Beagle Point during this leg of the journey. In under 6 hours, she jumped all the way from there to here, midway between the Bubble and Galactic Core. I've heard feats of Buckyball Racing, but I have to say, I was still mighty impressed.
//Image found. Displaying...
//Photography credits for this image go to TheGilmster.
Commander's Log, 16th of January, 3308.
Commander Feonix still hospitalised. Doctor Ray Zhou presiding. We are currently jumping towards the Froarks Planetary Nebula, one of our previous stops before the incident during the Rekohu-Geminus leg. We're still one crew member down, too. Lucy - Commander Feonix - is doing well, or, well, as well as one can be after almost being sucked into a black hole. I'm worried about her. What happened out there that made her snap like this? Was it that argument with Meridian that sent her over the edge? Or was it something else? I remember hearing something, there, when we were suspended by that black hole. I don't know whether it was the sound of matter being consumed by a former star, or if it was something beyond that rift in space, but I'm sure the others heard it too. Maybe Lucy saw something in that void? I don't know. I don't want to put words in her mouth.
21:00Looks like we've jumped into a wealth of planets - and by wealth, I mean five planets that are each worth over a million Credits. I'm not sure whether that'll go to Lucy or to us, given that she's out of commission and we're scanning this, but I'm sure we can figure that out when we cash this in. There's another earth-like pearl in this system, though as it looks it is too far away from the main star to be truly ideal conditions. The surface temperature is 260 Kelvin, slightly colder than on Earth, at around -16 degrees Celcius. With minimal terraforming effort, it could be transformed into a thriving colony - or its fauna and flora could be studied. Gravity appears to be somewhat higher, at 1.29Gs. That would imply denser muscular and skeletal structure of the indigenous fauna, should they have skeletons at all. Above all, though, the planet should be highly prized for its natural beauty. The view of the Galaxy should be breathtaking, given the density of stars and nebulae around, and the planet's own star should be more than bright enough for similar sunrises and sunsets as we know on Sirius. If we could land there, I could spend days taking pictures... In any case, we have to move on. This isn't the first earth-like world we've encountered, and I doubt it'll be the last.
//Image found. Displaying...
22:30I'm honestly not sure how Lucy does this so consistently. I've gotten some complaints from Icarus and Meridian that my piloting is rather... bumpy, and that it's messed up their personal projects a little. Must be a lot of practice, I guess... In any case, we're about 45 jumps out from the Froarks Nebulae now. Jumps have been dull, relatively speaking - A couple of them are worth a lot, but nothing all too special, I guess. Water worlds, a couple ammonia worlds, more terraformable high metal content worlds than I can easily remember. Icarus has been tinkering with the auxiliary thrusters while we're up in supercruise, something about more easily resisting gravitational pull. Meridian has just been tending to her little garden. I think I saw some cute little sprouts coming up out of the soil when I was checking on her earlier. I haven't heard anything from the Lunar Hyperlight in a while. Must've gotten out of our range, but I can't help but be a little worried about them... Saw some GalNet posts floating around earlier that the carrier had parked itself inside the exclusion zone of a star, which, well, it shouldn't do.
23:00Hey, look at that! There's three stars really close to another. Common types or not, they're pretty as all hell, especially with all of those other stars in the background. It's a shame this system isn't worth much. Icarus just came up to the pilot's cabin with the latest from the Hyperlight - he did something with the hyperwave receiver or something techy like that, managed to pick up a transmission from 'round Guardian's Hope. Said they're fine, but Command made some minor miscalculations, leading to a slightly different jump-out point. Commander Sidhara has already managed to correct this, though, and while still somewhat dangerous, it should at least be out of the exclusion zone now. I should probably stop jumping soon and start sleeping. Got some forty jumps ahead of us tomorrow.
//Image found. Displaying...
Commander's log, 17th of January, 3308.
Commander Feonix is still hospitalised. As such, Ariel Meridian will be presiding.
Marcus Aurelius once wrote: "Dwell on the beauty of life. Watch the stars, and see yourself running with them." Every day I am here amongst those stars I once looked up at so wistfully from my backyard on Mars - with every jump we make, the firmament changes ever more, until the view is no longer recognisable as similar to that in Sol. With a different perspective, all things can change.
Today's jumps were quite uneventful, to say the least. I did not see the merit in recording the number of water worlds or terraformable worlds we encountered on our way to the Froarks Nebula - it would simply be a slog to read, through the sheer amount of them. We did, however, realise that, though quite beautiful, this wasn't the nebula that we meant to visit - the Froarks Planetary Nebula was only a dozen or so jumps away from it, thankfully. Mr. Icarus was so kind as to calibrate our cameras in a way that could capture the stellar dust in all its splendour.
//Image found. Displaying...
00:00After a correction of our navigational errors, we made our way to the planetary nebula surrounding Froarks XJ-R E4-1363. As it turns out, the main star in that nebula is not a star at all, but rather a small black hole, roughly three times the mass of Sol. While not large enough to be directly harmful to us or our ship, our hyperspace deceleration once again failed us, and we flew right into its exclusion zone. During our maintenance break on the Lunar Hyperlight, Mr. Icarus prepared our hardware and software for exactly such a scenario. COVAS took over the piloting with precise maneuvering that only a machine could successfully accomplish, and the thrusters needn't work as hard as to emit a bone-chilling, agonising screech like that as when we flew into Sidewinder's Song. The artificial intelligence brought us in a stable orbit around the supermassive point, at around twenty kilometres above the event horizon. I hadn't ever imagined getting so close to such an eldritch, abyssal stellar object, so I took the liberty of taking some close-up photos. Commander Feonix's remarks about the Sidewinder's Song black hole staring 'right into her soul' suddenly made a lot more sense to me. With light bending around the mass, in combination with the many, many stars in the cosmic backdrop, it gave the illusion of the hole being a pupil in a titanic celestial eyeball. I highly doubt it is a sight that will ever leave my mind.
//Image found. Displaying...
Commander's Log, 18th of January, 3308.
Commander Feonix is conscious and well, but seeing as she's not physically here and I am, Cyd Icarus presiding.
We're about to pull in at the Lunar Hyperlight. I've heard word from the hospital wing that Commander Feonix is doing well - very well, in fact - and that she'll be joining us again during our next leg of the journey. There's still questions about her mental acuity, as she's still prone to bouts of rambling about 'what she saw' and the like, but those mental checkups can be done over the phone, so to speak. Means more work for me, finetuning those damn hyperwave transceivers, but I'm just happy to have the Commander back. As fun as it is commanding people around on my shifts, I don't think Ray, Ariel or myself are much command material. We're good at what we do, sure, but command on top of that? Not my favourite. I hope that Feonix has some good stories to tell. I know we don't, this has been a boring trip here. But hey, it made us some money, so I'm happy.
That said, I wonder where this system got its nickname from, or why it's a waypoint. It's exceptionally dangerous to enter - with a hot Jupiter running around a quarternary star cluster at speeds I can't even begin to comprehend, I picked up rumour from some of the other engineers that it wasn't uncommon for ships to be hit by a planet there. We barely made it ourselves, as the planet was making its way to our jump-in point at rapid speeds. I kind of imagine this is what it's like having an eldritch God being pissed at you. At least I don't have to deal with the repercussions of that, I guess.
Commander's log, 18th of January, 3308.
It feels good to be back. I'm still quite sore, and I don't know quite how the docs fixed me up, but hey, I get to travel again, so I'm good to go. I'll only have to deal with weekly psychological evaluations because I've been 'spouting nonsense about stuff I saw', which is bullshit if you ask me, but I guess I'll live with it. I know what I saw, and I know what I heard, but I guess it's best not to tempt fate. Or the doctor. Neither are a good idea. Given the length of the upcoming journey leg, I've made the decision to get started on it ahead of time - with a bit of luck, that'll grant us some extra time to get to Caeruleum Luna, which might mean extra money, or extra waypoints. One way to find out, I suppose.
“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.”, so wrote H. Jackson Brown. Words I intend to live by.
//Image found. Displaying...
//End of log. Returning to root terminal.