Cycle 84.3Book man returns. The book is indeed pretty sizable, the bold, large-font title (
THE CRYSTAL INCIDENT) being easily read long before they get back into reasonable speaking distance, with a tiny bit of cover space left for an author name you unsurprisingly don't recognize. They look pretty relieved after they drop it on top of you with a heavy thunk. They take a drink out from a bag and start speaking loud enough for you to hear them underneath the book.
IN THE BEGINNING, there was dark. We could not see a thing! It was rather difficult to not die from falling into another cave! But, thank Jacove, this is not the point of this book. Unless you are reading it in the dark like an idiot, in which case turn the light on already, how did you even get to this sentence. What this book is about, is THE CRYSTAL INVADER.*
*Some of the more dramatic authors would affix 'of Doom!' to that, but lets not get carried away here, you survived to read this book after all. Or you're a xeno-xenoarchaologist who somehow deciphered our mysterious language.
Explorer hears numerous pages being skipped before book man continues on.
At first, it was at best an...unexpected arrival, to say the least. A massive asteroid overgrown with crystals to the point where you couldn't even determine what the base material was anymore (they told us it was originally an asteroid however, thus the description). As bright as the sun1 was, but presumably not as sun-like, since the planet survived us meeting them. They sent a vessel the size of a large cargo hauler down to meet with us after we managed to get across we do not get off the ground more than a jump's height without special equipment and were currently using said equipment to communicate instead since it had the longest range. As it turns out, they were incredibly bad at normal-scale things after some untranslated length of time being spaceborne, meaning that when they said 'a small emissary', they meant a vehicle the size of a large cargo hauler essentially being used as a personal transport. Suffice to say, many people were not amused at the space required to meet with the CRYSTAL ACQUAINTANCE as it was nicknamed (sans caps) at the time, since it was fairly valuable land being so close to the transport hub. Eventually a translation was worked out that did not involve hand signals on our end or energy displays on theirs, and we moved on to diplomatic kinds of talks.
1. The sun is/was (depending on if you are alive or the previously-mentioned archaeologist) the giant ball of light in the sky, which is painful to look in the direction of for long periods. Since we've been underground since the end of the incident, if you don't know of the sky go find another book to define it for you, this is not a geology textbook.
Book man goes back to the front of the book, then goes quite a bit further on, presumably skipping all the diplomacy in favor of getting to the point.
In the end, nothing worked out. They did not want to give up any additional secrets without outrageous energy demands (the least of which exceeding the total power generation of the city it had landed in) due to the apparent cost of staying in orbit, only occasionally collecting errant asteroids or comets that came close enough. Offering to use nearby moons to satisfy their interest in continued manufacturing instead of the power costs we said were unacceptable caused immense dislike among several sizable groups that no longer exist today that, at the time, had at least a tiny amount of sway in the discussions and eventually succeeded in convincing them, to our detriment. (the Astronomers Guild for example, has nowhere to gaze underground that the Geology Association does not, and thus disbanded after determining who was left post-incident) Its not like we'd even notice those space objects now, considering the sky is no longer ours to look at...
Anyway, the former CRYSTAL ACQUAINTANCE became the CRYSTAL ANTAGONIST for its ability to quickly determine who was talking and use the least-fitting conterpart personality on their end to quickly end any further talks in angry table-throwing quickly if the meeting was probable to go nowhere, as it was not actually a Crystalline. it was simply a gigantic communicator with some limited mobility. The furniture industry, while amused, eventually joined in on the dislike after it became too expensive to supply quality tables to the city in question in sufficient quantity to make a profit.
One thing we'd learned during out talks with this Crystalline supergroup, the so-called Prime Crystal, was that they did not in anyway we could see accept there were things they didn't understand, assuming they had long enough to study it. They made quite the major effort to understand things as a result, but most other races they'd met were much less advanced and considered them divine at minimum, which had made it difficult to understand things without involving force. The message we received the hour before the invasion started was simply 'As much as it has been appreciated to not be treated as divinity, verbal solving of your requests has failed. So be it.'
For the less-inclined to reading between the lines, the message has generally be interpreted post-incident as 'Thanks for the reasonable treatment, but we don't understand why you repeat asking for more when you cannot give more in return, so we'll kill you and take your stuff afterwards to study instead.' Which is exactly what they did until they were pushed out, because all of the reports of the time are of fear and terror! Destruction and mayhem! Deadly laser beams! Large-scale theft of buildings and their contents!
He goes on for quite some time about how destructive the
Prime Crystal's negotiations-turned-invasive-learning-project was, until the next section finally shows up.
After many years, we'd given up on surviving the lunatics in their moonbase. Yes, it was not a full-sized moon, it was an asteroid; that was beside the point. Yes, they were not the kill for killing's sake sort of lunatics; they just didn't understand the government being greedy. They weren't even organic for Jacove's sake! But we didn't want to deal with them any more. So we managed to get the CRYSTAL COMMUNICATOR to speak up again, and made a deal: We'd leave the surface in exchange for them leaving us the fuck alone. Anything we didn't take with us on the way down was free for them to take with them on their way out of the system, including the communicator. And if they showed back up here without a reason, we were allowed to smash them to little bits if we found them (and made sure of the no-reason part) as reparations for all the damage caused during the alleged 'learning by force'. Thus ends our story of how we came to be cavern dwellers, fellow Aztorn.
What should Explorer do next? Aside from the book sitting on it, theres still one Explorer, one Ka, and one unnamed Aztorn around here and not especially much else of note.
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Topic: Crystalline - Cycle 84 (Read 86139 times)