Zeo Genesis Travelogues
Greetings, star-nomads! You can call me Trev. (You can also call me Trevallion Franklin-Ridgeway III, but I’d rather you didn’t). I’ve left behind my shallow executive existence to explore the Hundred Suns, to re-connect with insignificant voiders just like you. These are my travels. You’re welcome.
“Greetings listeners and, if you’re on Little Aether like me, fellow survivors. Six days local ago, a ship slammed into this space station’s surface. Nobody knows how...why…not here, anyway...station-wide communication is barely, if ever, functional and off-station comms is fantasy. I was ‘lucky’ enough to be trapped in a subterranean farm, but up here, not so much. What spotty reporting there is estimates a third of the population have died in the disaster and another third were wounded. Both those fractions can be expected to increase as off-station aid is unable to make stationfall.”
“At times I’ve waded through knee-high ash to get deeper into Hizz city. Further I go, the more injured, distraught, dying, and dead I see. In parts, it’s like the impact only happened yesterday. Fires still rage, and smoke and ashen snow make the world a choking haze.”
“Across Hizz, hovering holo-projectors have been deployed—from orbit, I think—by the two local major powers, OSSU and Interhelios. Both project respective spokesmen, whose names I don’t care about. Mr. Interhelios claims the disaster is due to an extremist terrorist suicide attack on one of their capital ships. Terrorists harboured by OSSU, making them responsible.”
“Johnny OSSU, however, claims Interhelios’ ship was blockading vital spaceways to deliberately starve OSSU’s people into relocating and the crash was a result of one of the ship’s secretly stored weapons misfiring. They’re driving me mad.”
“However, I’m heartened to see Pact and GuardCorps putting aside differences, working to dig people out of rubble while their figureheads bellow propaganda above. Both sides have clearly spent resources on getting these holos into place that could’ve been spent on direct aid. Neither party, apparently, will let a good tragedy go to waste.”
“…”
“I’m deeper now…and darker, in every way. The holos seem louder…I don’t know if it's echoing off the skeletal buildings or they’ve turned the volume up. I’ve never heard rhetoric this...violent. Feels like something…fundamental...has changed and the fact they’ve deployed propaganda-projectors into a ZED at all confirms it.”
“T’Platton, are they…they’re actually arguing, screaming at each other as these people struggle to stay alive. It’s too loud…can’t take it anymore…they’re practically declaring war on each other…shut up, shut up, SHUT UP, SHUT UP! ARRRGGGGHH—”
“Thank funt for that... Wait, what the funt…? Is that…Moa Nakamoto?”
Little Aether News Regulatory Office – recorded speculation broadcast by Galaxy Broadcasting News deemed as contributing to civil division and unrest directly following the Little Aether Disaster.
- Interhelios vessel was secretly being used to house immigrants. Overcrowding led to breakdown in ship infrastructure, resulting in crash.
- Interhelios vessel was secretly being used to house immigrants. Unhappy with supposedly “generous conditions” (GBN), immigrants mutinied, resulting in crash.
- Interhelios vessel was secretly being used to house immigrants, among them a small, radical, fundamentalist Mushtiiq terrorist cell who deliberately crashed the vessel in a suicide attack.
- Small, radical, fundamentalist Mushtiiq terrorist cell secretly boarded the vessel using small ships before deliberately crashing the vessel in a suicide attack.
- Interhelios ship personnel spontaneously reorganised into communist work structure, inevitably resulting in crash.
These journals were recorded via Tymphony Aural Augmetics… TAA: Listen Up!
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