I just... I no longer have any idea what to do on M26. Should I just shock everyone unconcious again, and hope for the best? Return all probes to their home universe, and hope that stops this? Nuke it from orbit? Say "Fuck This" and just leave? All of the above?
And, afterward, how can we possibly improve safety protocols? "Nobody sapient can observe test rooms. We use an echolocation device to assess the topology of each probe when it comes in, and have an automated computer system check if it has any major deviations from standard probe shape. It is immediately returned to a null universe after the sound scan is done, and then returned to home if the scan shows serious anomalies/the computer starts melting or screaming. If no anomalies are shown, a mad hatter'd version of the feed is shown to a sod on a warship 80 AU away from anything, and if it fails to die, the feed is shown un-mad hatter'd. Then shown to a human if things continue to not explode. Then, maybe, if the human reports anything positive, we might bring the probe back."
At which point we learn that it only becomes anomalous after ten seconds in our universe. *sigh*
@Irony
Braincased people can have enhanced capacity mods. Saint has one for aux, actually.
It's a little late for the "shock everyone unconscious" bit. That waws SOP for the sods left in charge of our mine pigeons who were watching the testing rooms. The sods were to guard the humans, and at the first sign of fuckery, were to shock them unconscious. Goddammit, second universe in two weeks where we are mind raped without even entering the universe personally.
If you want to do human testing, buy the mewling fleshmass. Sods are for Worf Effect only under ARM rule.
On the subject of Heph... what was wrong with the Cavernsverse? It's by far the least hostile, and seems to be capable of supporting our little escape pod. Maybe instead of casting ever more fishing lines into the shark tank, you should reel in the guppy.
We were building an outpost there and transferring the necessities. PW lost track of our colonization efforts like, every round since we started doing them. BUt, when we first explored the cavernverse, two things stood out to me. 1) there was not a single microbe of life in them. This is surprisingly uncommon in our travels so far, excluding nullverses. 2) the gravity gets exponentially stronger very quickly toward the "walls, floors, and ceiling" of the caverns. By all rights, no standard matter should survive in there, as it should all be crushed into infinite density at the center of the gravity fields that make up the cavern structure.
But since normal matter does exist, and there are no observable eldritch nightmares or toxins, it is a reasonable place to at least attempt to set up. But we don't know if it is long term viable, and mission parameters were "the more habitable universi, the better." Turns out, we are hitting eldritch nightmares at about ten times the rate of potentially nonhostile universes. and this is not including standard hostile universes like spiderverse or the pink slime verse or Fractalverse. Nope, ten "eat your brain through a straw" universe per one "maybe we aren't doomed immediately if we live there" verse.
We're trying, really. Guh.
...
If Sanity's Requiem has taught me anything, we need one more eldritch horror to invade the universe, such that three of them fight and each destroys another, all while our resident eldricth horror slowly dies in it's chains.