Posted by
Rabenschwinge - Friday, October 8th, 2010
Okay, this age IS cold. I went there yesterday, with a small group of fellow expedition members. We explored the outpost first. It is partly underground, and rather small. There are sleeping rooms for four people, so I guess, it was crewed for more than just short visits. The expedition had found three journals before, which Noelle has translated partly. It seems, the writers were three survivors, who had fled here, when the Fall happened, two men and a woman. The dates given in the journals suggest, that they stayed here for at least two months – because of the limited space and ressources, the tensions between them rose, and it seems, that at least two of them got rather deranged after some weeks. What happened to them? Why did they leave with most of their equipment left behind, not to mention, their personal journals?
I fear, a great tragedy has happened here.
The outpost itself is mostly disfunctional currently. The gauges and scales seem to get no energy, and frost has entered most of the equipment, rendering it unusable.
At least some kind of emergency light is still working – maybe we just have to find the energy source and turn it on again.
We left the outpost through some kind of lock – not an airlock, but something similar, maybe to better keep the cold outside.
All of us weared our maintainer suits, because we were repeatedly warned – the temperatures are really low, beyond -50.0 °C (approx. -58.0 °F).
Even with the maintainer suits, we only stayed out there for 10 minutes – if the D’ni survivors really left the outpost, they wouldn´t have been able to survive there for long.
After that visit, I had to warm myself up, so I was rather happy to be invited to a small party given for one of the explorers because of his birthday, in Risoahl.
The age is very comfortable, as I mentioned before, at least, if you´re not doing any hard manual work there.
We had a campfire, sat around on some felled giant bamboo stems and roasted marshmallows (I had just learned how to do this, I´m not from the US, so this was new to me – I like this particular custom 
).
Of course we told each other ghost stories (especially creepy, when some unknown creatures suddenly shriek inmidst the night, as we found out)
I got to know some of the guys from the expedition a little better, for example, our diving team. They are cave divers from New Zealand, and asked, if I would mind them dive in my new age, Ahnoto. I told them to go ahead, but of course told them of the huge shadow I saw on my last visit. They weren´t scared at all, said, they had dived with sharks, whales and giant squids, and they could handle any creature. Well, it´s their necks they risk – maybe I should let them sign a waiver of liability.
Just kidding … or am I?
