Video #HAN-083000-17-HI-G23 – Google Docs
Video #HAN-083000-17-HI-G23
This video record will appear in whichever format is most convenient for the campaign, except as something streamable; there are various government restrictions against reproducing Video #HAN-083000-17-HI-G23 (hereafter just called ‘the Video’) in a manner that would make it easy for it to be released on the Internet. It could be done, of course. It’s just that somebody would have to work at it, and then most likely go to federal prison for ten years. It’s happened at least once.
Moving on: the Video is an extremely good human copy of what appears to be an “alien sound-and-vision narrative entertainment” — otherwise known as a ‘movie.’ The main sequence of the Video is 92 minutes, 10 seconds long, and follows the movements of about a dozen coleopteran-like sapients (they wear clothes, communicate with each other in an unknown language, and carry lots of firearms) as they explore what appears to be a dilapidated facility, in an increasingly distressing and violent state of decay. The coleopterans are, starting about forty minutes into the video, intermittently but lethally attacked by shadowy figures with murderous intent and sadistic qualities.
The remainder of the Video features a lot of chittering, explosions, running away, gunfire, increasing numbers of bizarre bipedal monstrosities coming out of nowhere to feed and/or get blasted away — and, five minutes before the end, the actual Main Monsters show up, kill off most of the remaining coleopterans, but are blown up by the ‘head’ coleopteran, with the help of a somewhat larger, yet less visibly-armed coleopteran, and a somewhat erratic smaller coleopteran who spent most of the Video doing stupid things, yet still somehow surviving. The survivors fly off in ornithopters, the camera peels back to show the burning facility — and then one of the Main Monsters leaps into the camera eye and everything goes black. There’s a bunch of what looks like language, and the Video ends.
Nobody involved with analyzing the Video wants to admit that it’s an alien action movie, of course. That just sounds bizarre — although not as bizarre as how it managed to get recorded in a human-compatible digital medium. There’s also the extremely problematic detail that the Main Monster looks exactly like what you’d get if you took a human skeleton and gave it muscles and skin in the same way that humans have traditionally fleshed out dinosaurs. The little monsters are clearly housecat and chicken skeletons, and one particular sinuous monstrosity is apparently a tricked-out swan. Weirdest — or worst — of all; the terrain and vegetation looks remarkably Earthlike. Not quite a match to current conditions, but close. The temporal implications of that have likewise percolated through the Video’s research team’s collective unconsciousness, and stayed there quietly. Nobody likes being reminded that the human race has an expiration date, after all.
On the other hand, it’s a good movie — if you like action flicks, of course. The exact mechanism of how it came to official attention is a little murky (it had been misfiled for almost twenty years in a Hawaiian US Navy records annex), but clearly somebody knows something about where the Video came from, how it ended up on a human-compatible format — and whether there’s any more in the series, of course. After all, it’s a really good action flick.