I know what’s going to happen. Now I just have to write it down.
February 26
I’ll be damned. We found log entries! Somebody on the Blobmart kept a log! THIS IS THE GREATEST MOMENT OF MY PROFESSIONAL LIFE.
Ahem.
Sorry, I’ve had a drink. But only one! A big one, but only one. The moment deserved it. Also, regulations insist on administering mild depressants to non-essential personnel when encountering a discovery of this magnitude.
Speaking of regulations: as per Section 1.31 (amended), let me put down the gist of what we know so far. Just in case, you know, everybody goes insane from the revelations, and this is the only record that survives: the logs are weekly summaries from somebody on the Blobmart’s command staff. They’re written in the oxy-nitro version of Amalgamation Standard, which is nice because that’s the one we know, at the kiddie level. Unfortunately, this version is… not. First disappointment: most of the technical jargon is above our heads and there’s entire sections where we don’t know enough to even try to figure it all out by context. Hopefully The Process will be able to help with that, if we get the logs back to Earth.
Second disappointment: the aliens on the Blobmart didn’t know what happened to the Amalgamation, either. All they did know was that something crashed out galactic civilization, starting with the FTL communications network, and that it only didn’t crash out their ship in the process because of sheer, blind luck. External comms were detached from the rest of the ship’s systems for maintenance, so only FTL comms got wrecked.
The log entries flatly refused to say what transmissions got through before the comms went out, but whatever it was, it was enough to make the Blobmart flee to interstellar space on the spot.
This is starting to feel very Call of Cthulhu, in that whole “There is knowledge that drives people, but we kind of need that knowledge, so we’re going to throw a bunch of explorers and researcher into the sanity meatgrinder anyway.” way
Mad, that is. Drives people mad.
Well, it doesn’t ALWAYS drive people mad. And the authorities know where the stress points are. And nobody’s ever really alone, which helps.