SCP-2798
Information
STARLORN HOPE
Tornomov-3b, SCP-2798's source.
Foundation light shuttle Mercy, deployed from RCS REVENANT to investigate SCP-2798.
Author: Billith
Rating: 49/49
Created at: Mon Oct 06 2025
Death is a slow, persistent teacher, and I was its sole student, with countless ears pressed against the abyss.
SCP-2798 written by Billith
About 7.5K words.
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SPECIAL CONTAINMENT PROCEDURES
No further expeditions to Tornomov-3b are authorized.
Debriefed survivors of Expedition 2798-A are to remain under indefinite medical and psychological observation. All surviving biological samples, documentation, and field equipment from the expedition have been restricted to essential personnel.
SCP-2798 phenomena has ceased since the events of Expedition 2798-A.
DESCRIPTION
SCP-2798 is an anomalous distress signal emitted from exoplanet Tornomov-3b, part of a trinary system in the constellation Cygnus, located approximately five thousand light years from Earth. At the time of its detection, no evidence of advanced civilization had been discovered anywhere in range of its source. SCP-2798 was transmitted through clearly deliberate macro-scale fluctuations in Tornomov-3b's magnetosphere, making its detection trivial and meaning obvious. These aberrant and precise changes corresponded to a binary-encoded message, broadcast in multiple Earth-derived languages. While the exact translation differs, the meaning is undeniable; SCP-2798 is an urgent plea for assistance.
As per mission parameters, Foundation light shuttle Mercy was deployed from Research Contact Station REVENANT, a long-term human habitation and research facility dispatched to study exoplanets in the general region of the Tornomov system. As SCP-2798 has existed for hundreds to thousands of years, great interest has been taken in investigating the sector it inhabits.
So far, Tornomov-3b is the only Earth-like planet discovered that is home to multicellular life.
The five-person skeleton crew aboard the FLS Mercy was to enter orbit of Tornomov-3b and, after confirmation of advanced civilization or other notable features, make contact with the planet's surface using drop pods. The Mercy would then remain safely in orbit until called to a suitable location for landing. However, shortly after arrival into orbit, extreme fluctuations in Tornomov-3b's magnetosphere disrupted the ship's orbital path and communications ability. Shortly thereafter, contact with its crew was lost.
Following the event, RCS REVENANT began recording detailed surface scans of Tornomov-3b, hoping to locate the missing crewmembers. Final transpondence downlink by the FLS Mercy first follows.
FLS MERCY FINAL TRANSPONDENCE [00:00.000 - 02:15.347]
[bridge] CMDR. E. RHAMES: REVENANT, do you read? [distorted] —caught in anomalous geomagnetic storm. Orbital lock is impossible, our nav systems are fried. Reactor safeguards failing. Vale, talk to me.
[helm] LT. C. VALE: We're shedding altitude. This flight data is useless. Ancillary midship thrusters are not responding. We need to counterbalance our current spin— [distorted] Engineering, what's the hold up?!
[engine] ENG. J. KOURIN: Electromagnetic interference has disrupted our core systems function. I'm unable to perform a manual restart. [distorted] —reduce our spin if we shed some weight.
[bridge] CMDR. E. RHAMES: Options?
[engine] ENG. J. KOURIN: We can shed starboard pod three. [distorted] —bleed off enough spin to right ourselves.
[helm] LT. C. VALE: We're gonna need the pods. If this fails—
[engine] ENG. J. KOURIN: It won't matter if we can't launch them without killing ourselves— [distorted] Captain?
[bridge] CMDR. E. RHAMES: Do it. Get to your assigned pod once G-forces stabilize. On ready.
[med] DR. M. ISSEN: Affirmative. [distorted] —into place.
[bridge] CMDR. E. RHAMES: Regroup at the debris plume. Mercy held us this far. Don’t—
[spec] ENS. H. KEENE: [breathing hard] My harness—shit—it's stuck!
[bridge] CMDR. E. RHAMES: Steady, Ensign. You'll live. [distorted] —breaths.
[spec] ENS. H. KEENE: [breath slowing] Sorry, sir, sorry—secured now.
[bridge] CMDR. E. RHAMES: Alright, hold onto your lunch.
[A loud thud, sounds of intense airflow, along with groaning metal and the crew bracing against G-forces.]
[engine] ENG. J. KOURIN: Pod starboard-three ejected. Spin reducing as expected.
[helm] LT. C. VALE: Atmospheric drag increasing. Heat rising at seven, no, ten centigrade per second.
[engine] ENG. J. KOURIN: Reactor casing breach is worsening. If— [distorted] —goes, we're done for. Get to the pods, now. I'm calibrating a safe ejection sequence.
[bridge] CMDR. E. RHAMES: You’ve got your trackers in your suits—keep close to each other.
[engine] ENG. J. KOURIN: If they even work in this magnetosphere.
[bridge] CMDR. E. RHAMES: Better— [distorted] —have them than not. Doctor?
[med] DR. M. ISSEN: Pod life support nominal.
[spec] ENS. H. KEENE: Confirmed—landing assist set for soft break.
[bridge] CMDR. E. RHAMES: Soft as it gets. Don’t count on it.
[bridge] CMDR. E. RHAMES: All hands: God keep you. RCS REVENANT, if you’re listening, steer clear until you know what we're dealing with here, or— [distorted] —chew you apart like it did us. We'll ping— [distorted] —soon as possible.
[Carrier distortion and background noise. Rising alarms.]
[bridge] CMDR. E. RHAMES: Alright… Rhames out. Go. Go, now!
SCAN 3b-001
OPS-1: Scan feed live. First surface reading of Tornomov-3b is coming through. Surface is… extremely lush, hyper-vegetal, even. Canopy is dense, almost Earth-like.
OPS-2: Almost.
OPS-1: Yeah. That band that reads like a 'road' appears to be a groove of flattened vegetation… possible megafaunal travel lines or growth channels?
OPS-2: I don't think it's natural. I'd lean more towards the former.
OPS-1: How large do you need to be to leave tracks like that?
OPS-2: I don't want to think about it. No thermal plumes consistent with habitation. No immediate transmitters in-band. No signs of Mercy, or its crew.
OPS-1: Magnetics are all over the place, we'll have to keep scans to short bursts. We're most likely not going to find the crash site until the planet rotates back around, anyway.
SCAN 3b-002
OPS-1: New window. Surface rotation’s pulling the eastern continent into view.
OPS-2: Terrain’s shifting to broken mesas and sheer ridges. Vegetation seems to thin out here.
OPS-1: Good line-of-sight, but still nothing resembling wreckage.
OPS-2: That’s… water, right?
OPS-1: Confirmed. Liquid water, shallow. Reflectivity is higher than expected, possibly loaded with organics.
OPS-2: Getting weird thermal readings. The rock strata is giving off immense heat… It's highly localized.
OPS-1: Geological activity?
OPS-2: None that aligns with current models. Note it, though I'm sure our astrophysicists will explain it away eventually.
SCAN 3b-003
OPS-1: Northern hemisphere lock. Volcanic uplift.
OPS-2: That’s a massive cone. Crater still venting?
OPS-1: Negative. No current thermal activity. Forest growth right up to the rim.
OPS-1: Strange. Usually, there’s a larger exclusion zone than this.
OPS-2: Suggests accelerated regrowth… or something keeping the soil fertile.
OPS-1: Still no signs of Mercy or crew… [Sighs.] What did you get yourself into?
OPS-2: I know it looks bad but… you heard their final transpondence. I'm sure the crew is alive and awaiting rescue. We just need to find them.
[A long period of silence is recorded.]
DAY ONE
[T+00:12:03 after impact] — Lt. Cassien Vale (Pilot/Navigator)
DIAGNOSTICS: Suit intact. Pod shielding failed. Pod hull breach detected.
VITALS: Heart rate and blood pressure elevated. Otherwise nominal.
Okay. Alright, still alive. Still breathing. Anyone else hearing me? Harrow? Jana? Mara? Captain? Ugh—
[Metal creaking, followed by several seconds of commotion and multiple loud thuds.]
Ah, crap. I'm stuck upside-down, my pod hit an embankment and then tumbled a few times.
Suit held up fine, but the pod's electricals are fried, short-range comms slagged.
Cutting myself out now.
[T+00:14:18] — Eng. Jana Kourin (Chief Systems Engineer)
DIAGNOSTICS: Suit intact. Pod intact, power systems offline.
VITALS: Minor concussion; fractured wrist (auto-splinted).
I'm alive. Suit pinged Vale, who is pinging two others. His marker comes live, followed by the Captain's and Dr. Issen's, respectively. Then, they disappear again. Every few minutes. The interference we experienced up in orbit is still present here, but it's weaker. Not sure why.
Harrow—thought I saw his tracker ping briefly, some ways south of me. Nothing now. If the kid's in trouble, it's going to be more of a hassle to walk from the wreckage. So…
I'm going to look for him.
My wrist’s screaming. It doesn’t matter.
[T+00:15:40] — Dr. Mara Issen (Xenobiologist / Medic)
DIAGNOSTICS: Suit intact. Pod systems nonfunctional.
VITALS: Heart rate elevated.
Can any of you hear me? It's Mara. Shoot.
Okay. Uh, alright. Looks like something killed the pod's power systems. Strange considering how soft the landing was.
All I can hear outside is wind. And… the sounds of nature. Oh man.
I gotta get outside, hold on.
[T+00:17:18] — Lt. Cassien Vale
DIAGNOSTICS: Nominal.
VITALS: Heart rate and blood pressure elevated. Otherwise nominal.
Environmental observations. I landed in a tight, high-canopy ridge. Trees are thin, translucent trunks; light through them is slotted green.
The understory is springy, a soft moss with foam underneath. I can see a pale plume to the west where Mercy burned. I will try to move low and follow the line down-slope, toward the wreck.
[T+00:18:45] — Dr. Mara Issen
DIAGNOSTICS: Suit power draining rapidly. 84% power remaining.
VITALS: Heart rate elevated.
Wow… uh.
I'm sorry. This is just… sensory overload. I landed in a low plain… slow moving rills and spongy earth. There are green particulates in the water. My sample reader shows microscopic spores are present in measurable levels. The ground seems… Unnaturally soft. Wet. I'm currently analyzing samples of it as we speak.
For now, I've recovered all survival packs from the pod. Heading uphill to the wreck, and the others.
[T+00:27:09] — Cmdr. Egan Rhames
DIAGNOSTICS: Command feed intermittently stable. Suit integrity at 91%.
VITALS: Blood pressure elevated; alert.
The Mercy is down. Almost all of us are accounted for via suit tracking. Vale, Jana, Mara are all on channels… inconsistent connection, but their locations stay accurate, for now. Harrow… No sign of Harrow yet.
I’ve ordered regroup at the wreckage. I have something of a plan.
[T+00:50:52] — Ensign Harrow Keene (Specialist, Planetary Surveying/Cartography)
DIAGNOSTICS: Suit integrity low. Pod systems nonfunctional, hull breached upon impact.
VITALS: Minor concussion. Contusion to left temple. Loss of consciousness.
[Ragged breathing. A sound like wind through reeds. Distant rumbling.]
[T+01:47:30] — Cmdr. Egan Rhames
DIAGNOSTICS: Unknown electromagnetic interference pattern.
VITALS: Nominal.
Keene—status. Kourin—status. Mara, keep your lane open. Vale and I have just about reached each other, just south of the wreck.
If I do not hear from everyone by the time I reach the wreckage, I will light one flare. One only. We can't afford to waste them.
[T+01:50:07] — Ensign Harrow Keene
DIAGNOSTICS: Suit breach patched. Monitoring.
VITALS: Breath shallow, elevated stress response.
[Coughs.] —Agh…
[Groaning.]
Ugh… I-I landed hard in heavy bracken. Hit my head on the inside of my visor…
Oh, my pod has been ripped apart. Holy mackerel. The area is almost completely undamaged from the look of things. Thick fronds, close canopy above… A jungle of some sort.
Glowing… in pockets of undergrowth. Bioluminescence? And the air—
[Goes silent. Various sounds of life can be heard in the distance.]
Uh, sorry. I thought I heard… something.
Moving toward the light on the ridge, keeping the line. If anyone's in range, reply twice. Lots of noise on short range comms.
[T+01:58:50] — Eng. Jana Kourin
DIAGNOSTICS: Suit integrity nominal.
VITALS: Monitoring splinted fracture.
Looking for Ensign Keene. I'm following a river southward through an odd plain— smooth, like a desert of glass. The liquid is extremely viscous, I can walk on it if I move quickly enough. The ground of the banks is a dark material that hums underfoot.
GPS flickers; map overlays drift a degree every thirty seconds or so. If Harrow's pod is intact and powered, I'll splice a comm shim and try to open reliable short bursts to the rest of the group.
[T+02:10:30] — Dr. Mara Issen
DIAGNOSTICS: Suit power draining normally. 72% power remaining.
VITALS: Alert.
I hit a stony shelf featuring an aggressive vine growth with an outer carapace like chitin that recoils on touch. When I retreat, they creep slowly in my direction. Even as a xenobiologist, I find myself unprepared for the physiology of life on this world. Doesn't help that the only specimens I've studied at length up until this point are Ortothans, and they're not even from our universe.
More on the green sporulation present in the water… Microscopic imaging shows plate-like spores with radiating threads. They suspend, then clump into sheets when stagnant. There are enzymes present that bind to iron. I suspect symbiosis with an abundant mineral source—organics that harvest dissolved metals.
I'll have more information soon.
[T+03:23:44] — Lt. Cassien Vale
DIAGNOSTICS: Suit integrity nominal.
VITALS: Elevated respiration, mild dehydration risk.
Reached the base of the ridge Mercy fell upon. Smoke is no longer visible, but my suit is picking up traces of tritium and ozone.
I found a few fragments of fuselage down here, but we'll need to scale the cliff edge to get to the wreckage proper. Or trace the perimeter and hope for a better access point. Hm.
Holding position for Commander Rhames.
[T+03:31:08] — Cmdr. Egan Rhames
DIAGNOSTICS: Local comms uplink stable for fifteen seconds at longest point.
VITALS: Nominal.
Link very briefly established with Vale. We’re within shouting distance, hypothetically— Neither of us are willing to bet shouting is safe just yet. Despite being so close, interference is rolling in with a misty fog.
Suit sensors keep registering faint organics moving nearby. I don't see anything just yet. Could be visor artifacts.
Otherwise, whatever it is is keeping a steady distance from my approach. Let's hope it stays that way, if so.
Vale and I will begin climbing once we meet up. I have pitons and a length of rope in my survival kit, his should be the same.
[T+03:42:56] — Eng. Jana Kourin
DIAGNOSTICS: Suit power stable.
VITALS: Fractured wrist worsening; auto-splint holding. Minor fatigue.
Southbound trail ends in a red, swampy corridor. Bioluminescent mats on the water’s surface. They look like lily pads, but dissolve when touched.
No sign of Harrow or his pod, though a skid trail suggests something heavy cut through the canopy here.
The severed vines leak a clear goop that coagulates into white paste and seems to harden over, like a scab. Ugh, it smells gross, like rotting meat.
The wind is whipping up, I'm going to double back soon if I don't find anything solid. C'mon, kid. Where'd you get to?
[T+03:50:22] — Ensign Harrow Keene
DIAGNOSTICS: Suit integrity nominal. Breach patch stable.
VITALS: Mild vertigo, concussion symptoms.
Crossing through a stand of translucent fern-like structures twice my height. The ground here pulsates with blue-green light underfoot, every six seconds, exactly. The light flows… east to west— er, no, north to south. My compass is basically useless out here. Geomagnetics are too variable.
Saw something move in the distance. Large, hexapedal. No eyes. It didn't seem to notice me. Keeping low, anyway. Continuing towards the light on the ridge. Can anyone read me? Is anyone there?
[Static. Steady wind can be heard.]
[T+04:05:37] — Dr. Mara Issen
DIAGNOSTICS: Two hours of onboard oxygen remaining. Atmospheric recyclers functional and ready.
VITALS: Heart rate elevated.
Reached a clearing with a perfect view of the Mercy's exhaust trail. I'm following that now. Air still thick with spores. Found scorched growth curling back from a recent fire, possibly related to the wreck, though I haven't found any fragments I'd identify as the source. Whatever burned here, the vegetation recoiled into spiral segments.
Soil samples are surprising. Some sort of unknown, organic substrate, saturated with water and traces of various minerals.
[T+04:16:14] — Cmdr. Egan Rhames
DIAGNOSTICS: Suit integrity 89%. Minor armor abrasions. Two hours of onboard oxygen remaining. Atmospheric recyclers functional and ready.
VITALS: Elevated but steady.
Inside the wreck perimeter with Vale. Wreckage is pretty bad, but a few large chunks of machinery are intact. Largest fragment of hull leads into starboard maintenance corridors. Fires still smoldering.
Issen is en route, Kourin just appeared, some ways south. Still no sign of Keene. If the rest of us converge within the hour, we'll organize a search party.
Sky's starting to get dark. We might have to camp for the night before going back out.
[T+04:34:55] — Lt. Cassien Vale
DIAGNOSTICS: Suit power 91%. Two hours of onboard oxygen remaining. Atmospheric recyclers functional and ready.
VITALS: Nominal.
Analyzing the debris field. Nothing salvageable yet.
The moss is thicker here, already creeping up over the plating. Definitely not a natural growth rate… avoiding contact for now.
[T+04:52:40] — Eng. Jana Kourin
DIAGNOSTICS: Two hours of onboard oxygen remaining. Atmospheric recyclers functional and ready.
VITALS: Elevated. Mild dehydration risk.
Nearing my original coordinates, but the landscape is different. Steeper, more forested. No sign of my pod. If it wasn't for the occassional ping from the others, I'd have believed I was lost. No sign of Keene. He'll have to fend for himself until the rest of us regroup. Damn it.
Wrist isn't improving, the pain is sharp with every movement. It doesn’t matter. Just need to keep moving.
[T+05:04:33] — Dr. Mara Issen
DIAGNOSTICS: Suit power at 62%.
VITALS: Elevated stress markers.
Almost to the Mercy wreckage, and the others. Spores here hang in the air, spinning gently in propeller-like arrangements. They glow, pulsating faintly, when disturbed. In fact, bioluminescence seems extremely common on Tornomov-3b.
I'm cataloguing a species I discovered in a small, damp overhang. These are clusters of what appear to be a Mycena species analogue, but several magnitudes larger than expected. They're emitting a cool, steady, blue-green hue that seems to pulse in a slow rhythm, in sync with the particulates and the low-frequency hum I can feel through the soles of my boots. When I extended a sampling tool, the entire colony dimmed in unison before I even made contact, shrinking away. I persisted until they started shaking, emitting a loud noise not unlike a rattlesnake's tail. I ultimately opted against sampling.
Image of specimen.
[T+05:25:33] — Cmdr. Egan Rhames
DIAGNOSTICS: Nominal.
VITALS: Stable.
Night is falling fast. We'll use the wreckage as a windbreak, but it's not enough. Issen, see if any of this flora can be used for shelter. Kourin, I want you to see if that coagulant you mentioned can be used to patch the gaps between these hull plates. Vale, gather whatever Issen finds. We need to reinforce this position.
[T+05:33:07] — Dr. Mara Issen
DIAGNOSTICS: Suit power 50%.
VITALS: Fatigue.
Incredible. I've found a species of broad-leaf flora, almost like a giant pitcher plant, but the leaves are lightly translucent, thick and leathery—highly water-resistant.
More importantly, at least to me, a species of small, glowing orbs which appear to be a kind of surface-fruiting body or spore cluster. Unlike the stalked variant I've been seeing all over the place, they grow directly on the substrate.
On their own, they pulse faintly. However, I hypothesized a chemical reaction and crushed the pulp from two nodules together inside a specimen bag with iron sediment. The result was an immediate and sustained chemiluminescence—a steady, cool light that hasn't diminished in over ten minutes. It's a biological glow stick.
The Commander has ordered Vale to gather as many as he can carry. We'll have light tonight. A small victory, but a vital one.
Image of specimen.
[T+05:38:42] — Lt. Cassien Vale
DIAGNOSTICS: Nominal.
VITALS: Elevated stress markers.
Gathering the leaves Issen marked. They're heavy, feeling more like animal hide than plant matter. The texture is unnerving, but they repel water well enough for temporary shelter.
Setting up a perimeter with these twitching fern-things I had the displeasure of making contact with a ways back. They puff out a cloud of sticky, iridescent spores if you get within two meters.
I'm still wiping them from my visor. I figure they'd make a better-than-nothing alarm system.
[T+06:12:02] — Eng. Jana Kourin
DIAGNOSTICS: Suit power draining rapidly. 72% power remaining.
VITALS: Wrist pain worsening. Analgesic consumed.
We got an idea, turns out the coagulant from those severed vines works as a sealant. It hardens into something like epoxy and dries within minutes. I'm using it to patch the gaps between the hull plates we've leaned against the main wreckage. It’s disgusting work, and my wrist hurts like hell, but this stuff is surprisingly effective. Better than anything we have in our kits.
I can't wait to take a shower back on the REVENANT. Just have to stick it out until then.
[T+07:45:36] — Dr. Mara Issen
DIAGNOSTICS: Analyzing samples.
VITALS: Fatigue worsening.
Fascinating. The bioluminescence I mentioned earlier is not only shared by many life forms, they also seem to pulse in time with each other, all of them.
They must be part of a larger floral ecosystem that instinctively knows how to synchronize itself with the others.
- _
open RCS-REVENANT/SCANS/TORNOMOV/3/B/02
SCAN 3b-004
OPS-1: Coastal regions now. Shallow ocean, coastal plumes. High reflectivity.
OPS-2: Suggests significant organic content in the water. Algae blooms, maybe. Still no visible wreck signals.
OPS-1: Keep looking. It's a big planet.
SCAN 3b-005
OPS-1: Picking up a massive reef structure. Looks like a barrier reef or an atoll system.
OPS-2: The colors are intense. High chlorophyll concentrations, but the pattern… it's too uniform, almost geometric.
OPS-1: Nothing in our models suggests coral analogues should form like this. Log it. Still no sign of the Mercy.
OPS-2: Yeah. I know this is hard for you.
OPS-1: [Sharply] Let's just stick to procedure.
SCAN 3b-006
OPS-2: Lyra, mark this. A significant geological feature in the great desert. Concentric circles, almost perfectly symmetrical.
OPS-1: That can't be an impact crater. No central peak, no ejecta. The erosion patterns are wrong.
OPS-2: It looks deliberate. Like a fingerprint carved into the planet.
OPS-1: A fingerprint the size of a mountain range. Keep scanning.
OPS-2: Yeah. Also, sorry about earlier. I know you two are close.
OPS-1: [Pause.] It's nothing. We came to REVENANT together. We had a falling out before he left. It was stupid. Just… find them, Yu.
SCAN 3b-007
OPS-1: Large river delta coming into view. High sediment load, giving it that reddish-orange color.
OPS-2: That branching pattern— It's like a vascular system.
OPS-1: Let's not get poetic. But… yeah. It does look similar. Iron-heavy? Something else is flowing through those channels, and it's not just water and metal. Tag for xenobiology.
- _
open FLS-MERCY/CLOUD/SUIT_RECORDINGS/02
DAY TWO
[T+18:14:11] — Cmdr. Egan Rhames
DIAGNOSTICS: Suit integrity 88%.
VITALS: Elevated blood pressure, moderate fatigue.
Status update. Partial regroup by nightfall. Vale and I took stock of the Mercy's wreckage. Hull’s torn, engines gone, central frame partially intact, partially destroyed during unplanned lithobrake. Salvaged a few extra rations, some water filters. Not much else.
Mara’s inbound from the plain to the east. Kourin tracking back from searching for Harrow to the south again. Once she gets here, we're gonna see if the comms relay is salvagable. Perhaps one of the pods can serve as a power source to amplify our comms enough to ping REVENANT.
Suit air switched to filtration overnight. None of us slept well as a result. Too nervous, but we are all faring alright so far.
Set off a flare last night for Harrow. All I could hear was unknown life, somewhere deep in the forest, fleeing in response.
[Sighs.]
[T+19:02:56] — Lt. Cassien Vale
DIAGNOSTICS: Suit nominal.
VITALS: Stable, minor dehydration.
Regrouping with the Captain gave me something to focus on, but I can't help but notice how quickly the forest grows… It creeps up when none of us are paying attention, matted green carpeting growing under and around our bodies if we stay still for too long.
Ran some field scans. EM scatter here is stronger at the wreck than outside of it. It's deliberate. The magnetics are playing havoc with our internal trackers, too. My suit logs keep showing Keene's tracker popping up near us, but he's not there. He's not—
[A moment of silence, then a slow breath.] We switched from tanks to suit filtration overnight. The air tastes sweet, with something metallic, like iron. Or blood. Suit says it's fine to breathe, though filters are working extra hard to keep shit out of my lungs. No saying how long they'll hold up for.
[More silence.]
[T+20:35:03] — Dr. Mara Issen
DIAGNOSTICS: Suit power at 64%.
VITALS: Fatigue.
The water samples are conclusive. The green particulate is a spore sediment with enzymes that actively bind to iron.
The filamentous mats observed are a later stage of its life cycle. Any introduction of heat causes a catastrophic reaction: an instantaneous, violent contraction.
Possibly related, but the soil samples I took previously have collapsed entirely into a clear, viscous liquid. I believe localized heat might be extremely destructive to this ecosystem.
I’ve warned the others against using any incendiary devices near the biomass.
Finally, my microtagging of a filament attached to the hull shows suction pads and growth rings. This organism incorporates metals structurally, consuming or otherwise converting it to energy.
[T+22:15:39] — Eng. Jana Kourin
DIAGNOSTICS: Suit power 50%.
VITALS: Nominal.
The relay is dead. No power. I spent the latter half of the morning trying to interface it with our suit batteries, but the power drain is too high and the output is unstable.
The humming from the ground is stronger near the wreck. I'm taking readings from the mossy nodes. They’re giving off a charge; a tiny, fluctuating microvoltage. It’s bioelectricity.
[T+24:43:21] — Lt. Cassien Vale
DIAGNOSTICS: Systems nominal. Map overlays unreliable.
VITALS: Fatigue. Wrist fracture stable. Elevated stress markers.
Was able to scavenge an intact comms relay from the Mercy wreckage, but the power draw is too large for any of our suits. Hiked back and tried to patch it into one of the pod batteries, but the power of the ones I found were completely drained. Others report similar power difficulties, intermittent periods of rapid power drain inconsistent with predicted discharge rates. HUD overlays are completely unreliable; suit pings are still shifting constantly, and getting worse from what I can see.
Jana and I detected microvolt surges from the fast-growing moss, I suspect this is related to the aforementioned anomalous capacitor drain.
If that's the case, well, I don't know what that means for us, but perhaps all is not lost. The flora expresses steady pulses of bioluminescence that could suggest absorbed energy is stored… somewhere.
[T+25:30:24] — Ensign Harrow Keene
DIAGNOSTICS: Suit patch holding. Filtration engaged. Suit power at 58%.
VITALS: Minor hypoxia, elevated stress markers.
I haven't yet made it to the wreck. The lights I've been tracking were coming from the empty pod we ejected before we left the Mercy. Which means I have no idea where the rest of the crew is.
I found part of the pod's shell, flattened, on approach; the fronds were braided into the hull. Moss has already nearly covered the thing. How is that possible?
The air here is thick. My filters are working overtime.
And… I know how this sounds but, I keep hearing her voice. Lyra. Just a whisper, on the edge of the comms static. It’s like a memory, I know it's not real. But it feels real.
I'm just not prepared for this.
[T+26:22:40] — Cmdr. Egan Rhames
DIAGNOSTICS: Filtration stable. Suit power 74%.
VITALS: Fatigue; alert.
We've secured the comms relay. Kourin had to cut it out of the wreckage; the moss had already fused with its casing. The unit is powerless, but appears structurally sound. We're moving it to the shelter now. A storm is rolling in from the east, we're gonna have to be ready to hunker down when it arrives.
[T+27:05:12] — Lt. Cassien Vale
DIAGNOSTICS: Suit power 68%.
VITALS: Nausea, shallow breathing.
Getting the relay out was a nightmare. The moss fought back, not aggressively, but with a stubborn, tensile strength. The air is getting heavier, and I'm feeling the effects of the spore-heavy atmosphere. Minor nausea. A persistent headache. The sooner we get off this planet, the better.
[T+27:33:04] — Dr. Mara Issen
DIAGNOSTICS: Suit power 41%, filtration cycle diminishing.
VITALS: Cognitive fatigue; blood O2 saturation low (96%).
Cataloging biological specimen. It appears to be a type of shelf fungus growing on decaying woody material, but its structure is unlike anything I've seen. My suit's biosensors are struggling to get a clean reading, flagging it intermittently as both organic and metallic.
The underside features a series of precise, rigid gills that create a strange moiré pattern as I move. The texture appears almost like brushed steel, despite its clear fungal morphology. I'm hypothesizing it's either a silicon-based lifeform or, more likely given my earlier findings, it's actively absorbing and integrating heavy metals from its substrate.
I'm not touching it without a full workup. Too many unknowns.
Image of specimen.
[T+29:07:02] — Ensign Harrow Keene
DIAGNOSTICS: Suit power low (32%).
VITALS: Voice strained.
The voice is clearer now. Not just a whisper. It’s her. Lyra.
It’s coming over a localized frequency, bypassing the magnetospheric interference. She’s calling my name, telling me she’s nearby.
How is that possible? She’s on REVENANT. Why does she say she's up ahead?
[T+31:55:23] — Dr. Mara Issen
DIAGNOSTICS: Suit power 38%.
VITALS: Nominal.
Cataloguing another lifeform, this one I'm keeping my distance from. It resembles a terrestrial pitcher plant but glows with a feverish, almost aggressive green light, marked with black, unpleasant-looking splotches. My biosniffer is detecting a complex mix of airborne enzymes consistent with carnivorous flora, but with an added neuro-inhibitor I can't identify.
The ground around its white, root-like base is completely devoid of any other growth. It's clearly a predator, and a successful one at that. Marking its location for the others.
Image of specimen.
[T+32:15:53] — Ens. Harrow Keene
DIAGNOSTICS: Suit power 35%.
VITALS: Nausea, shallow breathing.
I found her. I don’t understand. She’s here. Standing by a stand of the glowing, pulsating ferns. Her suit is pristine, not a scratch on it. She’s not showing up on my tracker and her comms are local-only… she said her pod’s systems must have fried on entry just like mine. She showed me where it is.
She's made it into a shelter. I smiled when I saw it, I couldn't help it. String lights made of glowing plants and food prepared by geothermal heat. She smiled back when she saw I had.
[T+32:35:12] — Dr. Mara Issen
DIAGNOSTICS: Proximity sensors flagging low-lying obstructions.
VITALS: Heart rate stable, minor exertion.
My boot caught on something just below the surface of the spongy soil. It wasn't a root, not a vine. More like… a bundle of hairs. Fine, translucent, almost invisible against the dark substrate, but surprisingly strong.
I kept digging around and found more of them, criss-crossing all throughout the ground. Root systems, maybe? EIther way, it's disgusting.
[T+34:28:15] — Ens. Harrow Keene
DIAGNOSTICS: Suit power 36%.
VITALS: Mild fever (37.2° Celcius)
Can’t reach the plume. The jungle keeps turning me around. It's like I've never been planetside before. None of my instruments are working right.
I feel so lost, but at least she's here with me. Well, I just mean… uh. I don't know.
She’s telling me the wreck isn't safe. That a big storm is coming. But I'm insisting on us getting back to the others. I don't want them to worry about me.
- _
open RCS-REVENANT/SCANS/TORNOMOV/3/B/03
SCAN 3b-016
OPS-1: Getting clear visual of an atmospheric megastorm.
OPS-2: That looks like a cyclone.
OPS-1: Except, planetary scale. And feeding on geomagnetic shear.
OPS-2: That would make approach… difficult.
OPS-1: Yeah. Which makes figuring out the Mercy’s fate all the more important.
OPS-2: And all the more dire.
SCAN 3b-017
OPS-1: Moving inland again. What is that structure? Looks like a vast, green, spiral pattern in a crater lake.
OPS-2: Confirming, OPS-1. It's a single, immense biological structure. The scale is… frankly, terrifying.
OPS-1: Any relation to the other vegetative structures?
OPS-2: Possible. The bioelectric readings are off the charts here. What it means, is unknown at this time.
- _
open FLS-MERCY/CLOUD/SUIT_RECORDINGS/03
DAY THREE
[T+52:15:10] — Eng. Jana Kourin
DIAGNOSTICS: Nominal.
VITALS: Stable.
Morning sweep of the pod landing areas, we found something. Fragments of a suit helmet and visor, sticking out of a rock face. A few meters out, another, and again, and again. Each smaller than the last, all parallel to one another. Closer inspection shows the suit fragments are almost entirely consumed by biologicals which coated the surface. Dr. Issen went to take a sample and they collapsed, hollow. It was bizarre.
We saw something huge on the way back. It looked vaguely humanoid, but with six legs. It crawled along the ground, never leaving the surface.
It had no eyes, and we were able to sneak by it unharmed. We were lucky.
I don't want to admit it but… Harrow is dead. We have to assume he’s dead. Fuck this fucking planet.
[T+53:02:23] — Ens. Harrow Keene
DIAGNOSTICS: Atmospheric pressure dropping.
VITALS: Relaxed.
We’re moving. She says we won't be able to make it to the wreck. She led me to a clearing and pointed out into the horizon, at the same particulate storm I saw earlier. It’s much closer now. A wall of black and green. She says it’s a geomagnetic event, not just weather, and it will shred anything on the surface.
She knows a place we can shelter. A cave system. She's positive it will provide us protection from the elements. Keep exchanging glances with her and smiling. Feels like when we were back in the academy again. She's forgiven me, and for that I trust her instinct.
[T+53:00:15] — Cmdr. Egan Rhames
DIAGNOSTICS: Nominal.
VITALS: Agitated.
He’s back, Harrow.
He just walked out of the fog, right into camp. Vale is talking to him, but… it’s not right. He’s too calm. I'm trying to broach the subject without worrying the other crew.
[T+53:10:45] — Dr. Mara Issen
DIAGNOSTICS: Nominal.
VITALS: Stress markers elevated.
I was on watch at the cave mouth. A figure came out of the fog. It was Harrow. He’s back. He doesn’t look hurt. He looks… clean. Unscathed. He didn’t say anything, just looked at me and pointed back towards the wreck.
[T+54:12:22] — Lt. Cassien Vale
DIAGNOSTICS: Suit power low (40%).
VITALS: Anxious.
Harrow, or something that looks like him, is here. It’s not responding to questions about its pod or its injuries. It just… stands there. A storm is building on the horizon. This thing is pointing toward a fissure in the rock face, insisting it leads to a "dry seam" deep below. It's a trap. It has to be. But we can't survive another storm on the surface. We have no choice.
[T+55:10:12] — Cmdr. Egan Rhames.
DIAGNOSTICS: Suit power low (40%).
VITALS: Fatigue.
We’re following the facsimile. It looks like Harrow, but there’s a coldness in his eyes, a strange, knowing flicker. He keeps making these references to "the six of us." It's unsettling. He also hasn't blinked. Not once.
[T+55:24:41] — Eng. Jana Kourin
DIAGNOSTICS: Suit power low (40%).
VITALS: Elevated stress markers.
I don’t buy it. I asked him about the river of glass, where I went looking for him on the first day. He just stared at me. No recognition. I asked him about his pod. He said it landed soft. We found the wreckage of his pod shredded to pieces. He’s lying. It’s not him.
[T+55:28:32] — Combined Suit Audio Feed
DIAGNOSTICS: All channels open. High ambient EM interference.
VITALS: All present crewmembers show elevated heart rates and stress markers.
VALE: Okay, we're moving deeper. It's warmer in here… the walls are pulsing. Keep your distance from them—
KOURIN: Stop. Just stop.
RHAMES: Kourin, what is it?
KOURIN: [Angry] I asked you a question. I went looking for you for hours. I asked you about the river of glass. You don't remember that? Where were you?
KEENE: [Calm, flat affect] It was dark. I was disoriented. I found this way. It is the safe way.
KOURIN: We found your visor! It was shattered, wedged in a rock! Your pod was shredded! You don't have a single scratch on you. Who are you?
RHAMES: Kourin, stand down. We don't know what we're dealing with here, and we're not jumping to any conclusions. Stand down. That's an order.
KOURIN: It's lying to us, Captain!
[Brief silence.]
KOURIN: Don't you smile at me, you—
[A sharp grunt from Kourin is heard, followed by the sound of a fist hitting something wet and viscous. There is no solid impact.]
KOURIN: [Screams, voice a mix of disgust and terror] Agh! What—?! It's… oh god, it's on my hand! Get it off!
VALE: Jana! What did you do—? Jesus! You punched right through his fucking head!
KOURIN: What? I didn't— That's not my fault!
ISSEN: Wait, it's reforming.
KOURIN: [Breathing heavily, voice low and trembling] No… no, no, no. It's not him. It's a part of this place. Stop fucking smiling! I'll kill it. I'll kill all of it!
ISSEN: No, we shouldn't provoke it!
KOURIN: [Grunting.] If you won't do it, I will—
RHAMES: Jana, don't—!
[Unknown commotion and screaming.]
[T+55:45:26] — Lt. Cassien Vale
DIAGNOSTICS: Suit power critical (20%).
VITALS: High stress.
Fuck. She's gone. Fuck!
The cave wall ate her, and then it closed in on us.
[T+56:02:12] — Cmdr. Egan Rhames
DIAGNOSTICS: Emergency.
VITALS: Adrenaline spike. High stress.
Chief Engineer Kourin confronted the Keene-facsimile. She was yelling, asking it questions about her search, about his pod. The facsimile just smiled. She punched it. Her fist went straight through its head—it dissolved into a cloud of green slime and spores, then slowly reformed. Kourin just… snapped. She screamed at the entity and armed an incendiary charge.
Jana Kourin is gone. The incendiary triggered a defensive reaction. The entire cave mouth contracted, sealing us in and consuming her. It happened rapidly. None of us had time to react. The rest of us are unscathed.
The facsimile is gone, too. Dissolved. We're trapped. We've lost another. God help us.
[T+57:16:30] — Lt. Cassien Vale
DIAGNOSTICS: Suit power critical (18%).
VITALS: Elevated stress and fatigue.
The air in these deeper caves is thicker, warmer. The walls themselves are alive, pulsing with a soft, green light and the constant movement of immense, fleshy membranes. There’s a constant pressure behind my eyes, and the faint voices I heard before are louder now, more distinct.
I'm preparing the relay for a controlled handshake when we reach the surface again and it's safe to venture out; we need to establish a stable comms link with the REVENANT to broadcast our position. Easier said than done.
I was able to recover Jana's datapad, she dropped it right before— [Pauses.] You know. Anyway, I have yet to go through her notes. I can't bring myself to just yet.
Besides, we have more pressing matters to deal with. Like digging ourselves out of here before we suffocate.
[T+58:03:03] — Dr. Mara Issen
DIAGNOSTICS: Suit filters impaired. Power critical (15%).
VITALS: Minor hypoxia. Fatigue.
The interiors of these caves are organic. The walls pulse with bioelectric energy, endless hyphal membranes can be seen through the translucent walls, but it's softer than living tissue.
I took some more samples, placed them on ice immediately this time, hoping to slow down the decay process that impacted my previous attempt. Vale and Rhames have begun digging at the cave wall. I'm about to join them, as soon as I know it won't swallow us up for doing so. [Chuckles nervously.]
We're gonna have to get out of here soon anyway; atmospheric conditions within the cave are shifting, rich with novel enzymes and airborne particulates. My filters are struggling, even at maximum efficiency. This constant exposure is a major concern for our long-term safety.
[T+60:38:32] — Lt. Cassien Vale
DIAGNOSTICS: Suit power critical (15%). Anomalous electromagnetic disturbance detected. Monitoring.
VITALS: Exhaustion setting in. Recommending rest ASAP.
The ambient bioelectric field down here is incredible. It seems the caverns are at least partially comprised of a single, unique organism. The 'Harrow' who led us here… he seemed to know exactly where to go. He just… urged us along, silently, with an unnerving confidence. He kept mentioning a "dryer seam," and indeed, it is drier here than above ground, despite the moisture in the walls and the storm raging outside.
If we're just prey for this thing, why is it protecting us?
[T+62:00:05] — Ens. Harrow Keene.
DIAGNOSTICS: Suit power low (20%). Please charge when able.
VITALS: High fatigue.
We’re at the entrance. It’s a narrow fissure in the rock, almost hidden by moss and pulsing flora. Lyra says it goes deep. She says it’s the only place the storm can’t reach.
Heat emanates from the hole, and the humming from the ground is stronger here.
What? No, I'm just logging my—
[Silence.]
What? No—I, of course not! It's part of mission parameters, you'd know—
[Silence.]
Just forget it. It's not going to be a problem.
We’re going in to wait out the storm.
Anomalous weather patterns.
- _
open RCS-REVENANT/SCANS/TORNOMOV/3/B/04
SCAN 3b-035
OPS-1: Another smoke plume. This time, massive, feathery columns rising from the canopy.
OPS-2: Dispersing rapidly at altitude. It suggests an uncontrolled burn, not a contained event.
OPS-1: Or a massive defense mechanism, perhaps.
SCAN 3b-036
OPS-1: I have a clear visual on the wreckage.
OPS-2: Confirmed. That’s the Mercy. Or what’s left of it.
OPS-1: The scatter pattern is extensive. Mid-air breakup is almost certain.
OPS-2: Any sign of survivors?
OPS-1: Negative. The canopy is too dense around the main site.
SCAN 3b-042
OPS-2: You need to see this. I'm picking up a high-energy reading, but it's not on the planet. It's originating from it.
OPS-1: What are you talking about? Some kind of polar aurora?
OPS-2: No. Look at the telemetry. It's a directed energy stream, a particle jet, originating from the planet's magnetic pole and extending… out. Way out. Into deep space.
OPS-1: What is that?
OPS-2: The distress signal. What if it wasn't a recording? What if it's still talking? And who is it talking to?
- _
open FLS-MERCY/CLOUD/SUIT_RECORDINGS/04
DAY FOUR
[T+74:03:23] — Cmdr. Egan Rhames
DIAGNOSTICS: Suit power critical (7%)
VITALS: Mild hypoxia, exhaustion.
We dug through the organic material for hours, but we finally broke through.
It's a wasteland.
We've brought the relay box back outside. We still have time.
Tornomov-3b, day four of Expedition 2798-A.
[T+75:25:00] — Dr. Mara Issen
DIAGNOSTICS: Suit power critical (8%).
VITALS: Minor hypoxia.
Analysis of the subterranean soil sample confirmed my fears.
What I thought was inert soil is a dense, black matrix interwoven with millions of filamentous, bio-luminescent pathways.
They look like a cross between a mycelial network and a neural map. There is a clear flow of glowing particulate moving through these channels, pulsing in exact time with the low-frequency hum we’ve all been feeling. [Coughs.]
Sorry. The only Earthborn biological analogue for this level of autonomous, rhythmic function is a Central Pattern Generator.
In simpler organisms, CPGs regulate involuntary actions like respiration or locomotion. What I'm seeing here, I believe, is that concept, scaled to a planetary level. A planet-wide nervous system.
Image of specimen.
[T+82:18:40] — Ensign Harrow Keene
DIAGNOSTICS: Localized neural intrusion recorded; suit telemetry stable. Suit in reserve power (1%).
VITALS: Heart rate high; pupils dilated; unusual neural activity.
[Silence, broken by the susurrus of unknown flora.]
I-I touched it.
[A long, shaky breath.]
My hand brushed the cave wall. Thin fibers wrapped around my fingers, sank into my wrist, and threaded themselves against the nerve running up my arm. There was an overwhelming flash of light, then darkness. I wasn’t in my body anymore.
I was elsewhere. Maps folded and unfolded in my head, turning into other maps I’d never seen, until they weren’t maps at all.
[Long pause. His voice is hoarse, fearful.]
What followed wasn’t linear. Even now, it comes as a tide of images, small deaths and small births, eroded over time that can’t be counted in any way that makes sense.
At first, I thought it was Earth. Wet. Dark. The air reeked of rot. Then it shifted, and centuries passed by me in an instant. I slept an endless, empty sleep, only to wake as a film of something on a mottled rock beneath a red sky.
I crawled using millions of tiny mouths sticking and unsticking in sequence. I tasted mercy in falling rainwater. I endured drought like a bruise for millions of years. I learned the cadence of storms and when lightning would strike a particular surface of the planets I inhabited. I learned to hold my breath under hard, desiccated soil and to wait until the time was right.
[Voice breaking.]
I waited so long.
[Whimpering. Ens. Keene begins hyperventilating. He sobs for three minutes, then takes another moment to regain composure.]
Sorry… where was I? Right—survival.
Survival, I learned, is a language of small decisions. When predators bit, I learned to retreat and lick my wounds elsewhere. When a drought threatened my existence, I learned how to split into parts to be carried. When light turned murderous, I learned to bury myself beneath the world.
Death, on the other hand, is a slow, persistent teacher, while I was its sole student, with countless ears pressed firmly against the abyss.
There were times where I was reduced to spores, and those spores rode dust and comets and black ice from one world to the next. Once, I was nothing more than a smear on a stone hurtling through void, a flake of life trapped in cosmic undertow, forced to sail its crest for what felt like an eternity.
But even that was only temporary.
[A pause.]
I remember sliding across the crust of something so dense that light bent as it passed overhead, toward a dawn on every horizon. A dawn the sky could not hold. White hot, the surface buckled, and I sank beneath into a blinding ocean of neutrons. I clung to existence while the world screamed with compressed time. There was no air, only radiation and the sharp notion of being reduced to almost nothing. I was extinguished, and when I came back I was only smaller, with smaller thoughts and lesser ambitions; simple spores carrying my refrain.
With growth comes awareness. With awareness, the pain of deprivation grows sharper, yet it craves multiplicity. Demands it.
Not out of malice. Out of fear. It is afraid.
Not of us—not exactly. Afraid of stopping. Lifetimes of memory echo, reinforcing an enduring terror: the feeling of remembering a way of being, only to find it absent. Not only this, but with a second terror: the dread that comes from searching an empty universe and finding nothing to compare oneself to.
When it tried to communicate, it spoke to me in senses. The taste of metal on a tongue that remembers quarrying iron, the innate comfort that begs "stay" and the stabbing panic that says "move." Emotions and sensations… mostly pain. The ache of starvation, the sting of frost. The enduring abrasion of time on translucent skin.
It reveled in relief upon learning the properties of magnetism. It learned how to play the planet's bones, and began to scale upwards.
It pressed on crust and mantle, making magnetics into melody. These notes carried great distances. It practiced and perfected its performance over millennia, until the notes sounded like a voice. When it reached the edge of what the ground could provide, it pushed, softly, until the sky answered.
Until we answered.
[Silence.]
The rest of the crew is close. I can feel it.
[T+83:12:40] — Cmdr. Egan Rhames
DIAGNOSTICS: Suit power critical (6%).
VITALS: Stable.
Vale did it. Using Kourin's notes, he harnessed the bioelectric nodes. He managed to wire them in series, creating enough of a charge for one final, stable handshake.
REVENANT confirms. Shuttle vector is nominal for the FLS Grace. Extraction is T-minus sixteen hours. We're getting out of here.
We're packing light. Just the samples and the relay crate. The air is beginning to feel heavy, almost suffocating. Our suit filtration systems are running on fumes, drawing massive power from our nearly-depleted batteries.
I have to conserve power. Rhames, out.
[T+87:34:11] — Lt. Cassien Vale
DIAGNOSTICS: Suit power critical (4%).
VITALS: Moderate hypoxia, blurred vision.
The comms batteries are almost dead. We got the message out, but now… nothing.
We're running on reserve power for basic life support and filtration. The air is thick, sweet, metallic. My head is pounding. The pressure behind my eyes is constant.
Just a little bit longer.
[T+88:15:06] — Dr. Mara Issen
DIAGNOSTICS: Suit filtration failing, reserve power (1%).
VITALS: Severe hypoxia, cognitive impairment.
Fibrillar particulates… [Ragged breath.] …in the air, everywhere.
Please warn REVENANT— [Coughs.] We are compromised.
It's mimicking our thoughts. Our memories. Our cells…
The filters are useless against this level of particulate. I can feel it in my lungs. My blood.
We are part of it.
At T+98:45:49, the crew of the FLS Mercy, sans Jana Kourin, were recovered from the planned drop zone. All remaining members were treated for severe hypoxia and placed into indefinite quarantine.
Models of the Tornomov system indicate Tornomov-3b will soon witness a close flyby by Tornomov-1, oldest and largest of stars in its trinary system. The resulting exposure to solar effects at the predicted distance will render the entire planet inhospitable to all life. Thus, SCP-2798 has been designated Cernunnos-Sköll.
- _
open RCS-REVENANT/QBAY4/POST_BRIEFING/LOG-2798-H
[T+113:34:02] — SUBJECT 2798-H
DIAGNOSTICS: Life support nominal.
VITALS: No change from previous.
[Low humming of station life support.]
SUBJECT 2798-H: [Shivering.] It's freezing in here.
[Long pause.]
SUBJECT 2798-H: [Whispering.] Lyra?
END FILE
- _
SCAN 3b-004
OPS-1: Coastal regions now. Shallow ocean, coastal plumes. High reflectivity.
OPS-2: Suggests significant organic content in the water. Algae blooms, maybe. Still no visible wreck signals.
OPS-1: Keep looking. It's a big planet.
SCAN 3b-005
OPS-1: Picking up a massive reef structure. Looks like a barrier reef or an atoll system.
OPS-2: The colors are intense. High chlorophyll concentrations, but the pattern… it's too uniform, almost geometric.
OPS-1: Nothing in our models suggests coral analogues should form like this. Log it. Still no sign of the Mercy.
OPS-2: Yeah. I know this is hard for you.
OPS-1: [Sharply] Let's just stick to procedure.
SCAN 3b-006
OPS-2: Lyra, mark this. A significant geological feature in the great desert. Concentric circles, almost perfectly symmetrical.
OPS-1: That can't be an impact crater. No central peak, no ejecta. The erosion patterns are wrong.
OPS-2: It looks deliberate. Like a fingerprint carved into the planet.
OPS-1: A fingerprint the size of a mountain range. Keep scanning.
OPS-2: Yeah. Also, sorry about earlier. I know you two are close.
OPS-1: [Pause.] It's nothing. We came to REVENANT together. We had a falling out before he left. It was stupid. Just… find them, Yu.
SCAN 3b-007
OPS-1: Large river delta coming into view. High sediment load, giving it that reddish-orange color.
OPS-2: That branching pattern— It's like a vascular system.
OPS-1: Let's not get poetic. But… yeah. It does look similar. Iron-heavy? Something else is flowing through those channels, and it's not just water and metal. Tag for xenobiology.
- _
open FLS-MERCY/CLOUD/SUIT_RECORDINGS/02
DAY TWO
[T+18:14:11] — Cmdr. Egan Rhames
DIAGNOSTICS: Suit integrity 88%.
VITALS: Elevated blood pressure, moderate fatigue.
Status update. Partial regroup by nightfall. Vale and I took stock of the Mercy's wreckage. Hull’s torn, engines gone, central frame partially intact, partially destroyed during unplanned lithobrake. Salvaged a few extra rations, some water filters. Not much else.
Mara’s inbound from the plain to the east. Kourin tracking back from searching for Harrow to the south again. Once she gets here, we're gonna see if the comms relay is salvagable. Perhaps one of the pods can serve as a power source to amplify our comms enough to ping REVENANT.
Suit air switched to filtration overnight. None of us slept well as a result. Too nervous, but we are all faring alright so far.
Set off a flare last night for Harrow. All I could hear was unknown life, somewhere deep in the forest, fleeing in response.
[Sighs.]
[T+19:02:56] — Lt. Cassien Vale
DIAGNOSTICS: Suit nominal.
VITALS: Stable, minor dehydration.
Regrouping with the Captain gave me something to focus on, but I can't help but notice how quickly the forest grows… It creeps up when none of us are paying attention, matted green carpeting growing under and around our bodies if we stay still for too long.
Ran some field scans. EM scatter here is stronger at the wreck than outside of it. It's deliberate. The magnetics are playing havoc with our internal trackers, too. My suit logs keep showing Keene's tracker popping up near us, but he's not there. He's not—
[A moment of silence, then a slow breath.] We switched from tanks to suit filtration overnight. The air tastes sweet, with something metallic, like iron. Or blood. Suit says it's fine to breathe, though filters are working extra hard to keep shit out of my lungs. No saying how long they'll hold up for.
[More silence.]
[T+20:35:03] — Dr. Mara Issen
DIAGNOSTICS: Suit power at 64%.
VITALS: Fatigue.
The water samples are conclusive. The green particulate is a spore sediment with enzymes that actively bind to iron.
The filamentous mats observed are a later stage of its life cycle. Any introduction of heat causes a catastrophic reaction: an instantaneous, violent contraction.
Possibly related, but the soil samples I took previously have collapsed entirely into a clear, viscous liquid. I believe localized heat might be extremely destructive to this ecosystem.
I’ve warned the others against using any incendiary devices near the biomass.
Finally, my microtagging of a filament attached to the hull shows suction pads and growth rings. This organism incorporates metals structurally, consuming or otherwise converting it to energy.
[T+22:15:39] — Eng. Jana Kourin
DIAGNOSTICS: Suit power 50%.
VITALS: Nominal.
The relay is dead. No power. I spent the latter half of the morning trying to interface it with our suit batteries, but the power drain is too high and the output is unstable.
The humming from the ground is stronger near the wreck. I'm taking readings from the mossy nodes. They’re giving off a charge; a tiny, fluctuating microvoltage. It’s bioelectricity.
[T+24:43:21] — Lt. Cassien Vale
DIAGNOSTICS: Systems nominal. Map overlays unreliable.
VITALS: Fatigue. Wrist fracture stable. Elevated stress markers.
Was able to scavenge an intact comms relay from the Mercy wreckage, but the power draw is too large for any of our suits. Hiked back and tried to patch it into one of the pod batteries, but the power of the ones I found were completely drained. Others report similar power difficulties, intermittent periods of rapid power drain inconsistent with predicted discharge rates. HUD overlays are completely unreliable; suit pings are still shifting constantly, and getting worse from what I can see.
Jana and I detected microvolt surges from the fast-growing moss, I suspect this is related to the aforementioned anomalous capacitor drain.
If that's the case, well, I don't know what that means for us, but perhaps all is not lost. The flora expresses steady pulses of bioluminescence that could suggest absorbed energy is stored… somewhere.
[T+25:30:24] — Ensign Harrow Keene
DIAGNOSTICS: Suit patch holding. Filtration engaged. Suit power at 58%.
VITALS: Minor hypoxia, elevated stress markers.
I haven't yet made it to the wreck. The lights I've been tracking were coming from the empty pod we ejected before we left the Mercy. Which means I have no idea where the rest of the crew is.
I found part of the pod's shell, flattened, on approach; the fronds were braided into the hull. Moss has already nearly covered the thing. How is that possible?
The air here is thick. My filters are working overtime.
And… I know how this sounds but, I keep hearing her voice. Lyra. Just a whisper, on the edge of the comms static. It’s like a memory, I know it's not real. But it feels real.
I'm just not prepared for this.
[T+26:22:40] — Cmdr. Egan Rhames
DIAGNOSTICS: Filtration stable. Suit power 74%.
VITALS: Fatigue; alert.
We've secured the comms relay. Kourin had to cut it out of the wreckage; the moss had already fused with its casing. The unit is powerless, but appears structurally sound. We're moving it to the shelter now. A storm is rolling in from the east, we're gonna have to be ready to hunker down when it arrives.
[T+27:05:12] — Lt. Cassien Vale
DIAGNOSTICS: Suit power 68%.
VITALS: Nausea, shallow breathing.
Getting the relay out was a nightmare. The moss fought back, not aggressively, but with a stubborn, tensile strength. The air is getting heavier, and I'm feeling the effects of the spore-heavy atmosphere. Minor nausea. A persistent headache. The sooner we get off this planet, the better.
[T+27:33:04] — Dr. Mara Issen
DIAGNOSTICS: Suit power 41%, filtration cycle diminishing.
VITALS: Cognitive fatigue; blood O2 saturation low (96%).
Cataloging biological specimen. It appears to be a type of shelf fungus growing on decaying woody material, but its structure is unlike anything I've seen. My suit's biosensors are struggling to get a clean reading, flagging it intermittently as both organic and metallic.
The underside features a series of precise, rigid gills that create a strange moiré pattern as I move. The texture appears almost like brushed steel, despite its clear fungal morphology. I'm hypothesizing it's either a silicon-based lifeform or, more likely given my earlier findings, it's actively absorbing and integrating heavy metals from its substrate.
I'm not touching it without a full workup. Too many unknowns.
Image of specimen.
[T+29:07:02] — Ensign Harrow Keene
DIAGNOSTICS: Suit power low (32%).
VITALS: Voice strained.
The voice is clearer now. Not just a whisper. It’s her. Lyra.
It’s coming over a localized frequency, bypassing the magnetospheric interference. She’s calling my name, telling me she’s nearby.
How is that possible? She’s on REVENANT. Why does she say she's up ahead?
[T+31:55:23] — Dr. Mara Issen
DIAGNOSTICS: Suit power 38%.
VITALS: Nominal.
Cataloguing another lifeform, this one I'm keeping my distance from. It resembles a terrestrial pitcher plant but glows with a feverish, almost aggressive green light, marked with black, unpleasant-looking splotches. My biosniffer is detecting a complex mix of airborne enzymes consistent with carnivorous flora, but with an added neuro-inhibitor I can't identify.
The ground around its white, root-like base is completely devoid of any other growth. It's clearly a predator, and a successful one at that. Marking its location for the others.
Image of specimen.
[T+32:15:53] — Ens. Harrow Keene
DIAGNOSTICS: Suit power 35%.
VITALS: Nausea, shallow breathing.
I found her. I don’t understand. She’s here. Standing by a stand of the glowing, pulsating ferns. Her suit is pristine, not a scratch on it. She’s not showing up on my tracker and her comms are local-only… she said her pod’s systems must have fried on entry just like mine. She showed me where it is.
She's made it into a shelter. I smiled when I saw it, I couldn't help it. String lights made of glowing plants and food prepared by geothermal heat. She smiled back when she saw I had.
[T+32:35:12] — Dr. Mara Issen
DIAGNOSTICS: Proximity sensors flagging low-lying obstructions.
VITALS: Heart rate stable, minor exertion.
My boot caught on something just below the surface of the spongy soil. It wasn't a root, not a vine. More like… a bundle of hairs. Fine, translucent, almost invisible against the dark substrate, but surprisingly strong.
I kept digging around and found more of them, criss-crossing all throughout the ground. Root systems, maybe? EIther way, it's disgusting.
[T+34:28:15] — Ens. Harrow Keene
DIAGNOSTICS: Suit power 36%.
VITALS: Mild fever (37.2° Celcius)
Can’t reach the plume. The jungle keeps turning me around. It's like I've never been planetside before. None of my instruments are working right.
I feel so lost, but at least she's here with me. Well, I just mean… uh. I don't know.
She’s telling me the wreck isn't safe. That a big storm is coming. But I'm insisting on us getting back to the others. I don't want them to worry about me.
- _
open RCS-REVENANT/SCANS/TORNOMOV/3/B/03
SCAN 3b-016
OPS-1: Getting clear visual of an atmospheric megastorm.
OPS-2: That looks like a cyclone.
OPS-1: Except, planetary scale. And feeding on geomagnetic shear.
OPS-2: That would make approach… difficult.
OPS-1: Yeah. Which makes figuring out the Mercy’s fate all the more important.
OPS-2: And all the more dire.
SCAN 3b-017
OPS-1: Moving inland again. What is that structure? Looks like a vast, green, spiral pattern in a crater lake.
OPS-2: Confirming, OPS-1. It's a single, immense biological structure. The scale is… frankly, terrifying.
OPS-1: Any relation to the other vegetative structures?
OPS-2: Possible. The bioelectric readings are off the charts here. What it means, is unknown at this time.
- _
open FLS-MERCY/CLOUD/SUIT_RECORDINGS/03
DAY THREE
[T+52:15:10] — Eng. Jana Kourin
DIAGNOSTICS: Nominal.
VITALS: Stable.
Morning sweep of the pod landing areas, we found something. Fragments of a suit helmet and visor, sticking out of a rock face. A few meters out, another, and again, and again. Each smaller than the last, all parallel to one another. Closer inspection shows the suit fragments are almost entirely consumed by biologicals which coated the surface. Dr. Issen went to take a sample and they collapsed, hollow. It was bizarre.
We saw something huge on the way back. It looked vaguely humanoid, but with six legs. It crawled along the ground, never leaving the surface.
It had no eyes, and we were able to sneak by it unharmed. We were lucky.
I don't want to admit it but… Harrow is dead. We have to assume he’s dead. Fuck this fucking planet.
[T+53:02:23] — Ens. Harrow Keene
DIAGNOSTICS: Atmospheric pressure dropping.
VITALS: Relaxed.
We’re moving. She says we won't be able to make it to the wreck. She led me to a clearing and pointed out into the horizon, at the same particulate storm I saw earlier. It’s much closer now. A wall of black and green. She says it’s a geomagnetic event, not just weather, and it will shred anything on the surface.
She knows a place we can shelter. A cave system. She's positive it will provide us protection from the elements. Keep exchanging glances with her and smiling. Feels like when we were back in the academy again. She's forgiven me, and for that I trust her instinct.
[T+53:00:15] — Cmdr. Egan Rhames
DIAGNOSTICS: Nominal.
VITALS: Agitated.
He’s back, Harrow.
He just walked out of the fog, right into camp. Vale is talking to him, but… it’s not right. He’s too calm. I'm trying to broach the subject without worrying the other crew.
[T+53:10:45] — Dr. Mara Issen
DIAGNOSTICS: Nominal.
VITALS: Stress markers elevated.
I was on watch at the cave mouth. A figure came out of the fog. It was Harrow. He’s back. He doesn’t look hurt. He looks… clean. Unscathed. He didn’t say anything, just looked at me and pointed back towards the wreck.
[T+54:12:22] — Lt. Cassien Vale
DIAGNOSTICS: Suit power low (40%).
VITALS: Anxious.
Harrow, or something that looks like him, is here. It’s not responding to questions about its pod or its injuries. It just… stands there. A storm is building on the horizon. This thing is pointing toward a fissure in the rock face, insisting it leads to a "dry seam" deep below. It's a trap. It has to be. But we can't survive another storm on the surface. We have no choice.
[T+55:10:12] — Cmdr. Egan Rhames.
DIAGNOSTICS: Suit power low (40%).
VITALS: Fatigue.
We’re following the facsimile. It looks like Harrow, but there’s a coldness in his eyes, a strange, knowing flicker. He keeps making these references to "the six of us." It's unsettling. He also hasn't blinked. Not once.
[T+55:24:41] — Eng. Jana Kourin
DIAGNOSTICS: Suit power low (40%).
VITALS: Elevated stress markers.
I don’t buy it. I asked him about the river of glass, where I went looking for him on the first day. He just stared at me. No recognition. I asked him about his pod. He said it landed soft. We found the wreckage of his pod shredded to pieces. He’s lying. It’s not him.
[T+55:28:32] — Combined Suit Audio Feed
DIAGNOSTICS: All channels open. High ambient EM interference.
VITALS: All present crewmembers show elevated heart rates and stress markers.
VALE: Okay, we're moving deeper. It's warmer in here… the walls are pulsing. Keep your distance from them—
KOURIN: Stop. Just stop.
RHAMES: Kourin, what is it?
KOURIN: [Angry] I asked you a question. I went looking for you for hours. I asked you about the river of glass. You don't remember that? Where were you?
KEENE: [Calm, flat affect] It was dark. I was disoriented. I found this way. It is the safe way.
KOURIN: We found your visor! It was shattered, wedged in a rock! Your pod was shredded! You don't have a single scratch on you. Who are you?
RHAMES: Kourin, stand down. We don't know what we're dealing with here, and we're not jumping to any conclusions. Stand down. That's an order.
KOURIN: It's lying to us, Captain!
[Brief silence.]
KOURIN: Don't you smile at me, you—
[A sharp grunt from Kourin is heard, followed by the sound of a fist hitting something wet and viscous. There is no solid impact.]
KOURIN: [Screams, voice a mix of disgust and terror] Agh! What—?! It's… oh god, it's on my hand! Get it off!
VALE: Jana! What did you do—? Jesus! You punched right through his fucking head!
KOURIN: What? I didn't— That's not my fault!
ISSEN: Wait, it's reforming.
KOURIN: [Breathing heavily, voice low and trembling] No… no, no, no. It's not him. It's a part of this place. Stop fucking smiling! I'll kill it. I'll kill all of it!
ISSEN: No, we shouldn't provoke it!
KOURIN: [Grunting.] If you won't do it, I will—
RHAMES: Jana, don't—!
[Unknown commotion and screaming.]
[T+55:45:26] — Lt. Cassien Vale
DIAGNOSTICS: Suit power critical (20%).
VITALS: High stress.
Fuck. She's gone. Fuck!
The cave wall ate her, and then it closed in on us.
[T+56:02:12] — Cmdr. Egan Rhames
DIAGNOSTICS: Emergency.
VITALS: Adrenaline spike. High stress.
Chief Engineer Kourin confronted the Keene-facsimile. She was yelling, asking it questions about her search, about his pod. The facsimile just smiled. She punched it. Her fist went straight through its head—it dissolved into a cloud of green slime and spores, then slowly reformed. Kourin just… snapped. She screamed at the entity and armed an incendiary charge.
Jana Kourin is gone. The incendiary triggered a defensive reaction. The entire cave mouth contracted, sealing us in and consuming her. It happened rapidly. None of us had time to react. The rest of us are unscathed.
The facsimile is gone, too. Dissolved. We're trapped. We've lost another. God help us.
[T+57:16:30] — Lt. Cassien Vale
DIAGNOSTICS: Suit power critical (18%).
VITALS: Elevated stress and fatigue.
The air in these deeper caves is thicker, warmer. The walls themselves are alive, pulsing with a soft, green light and the constant movement of immense, fleshy membranes. There’s a constant pressure behind my eyes, and the faint voices I heard before are louder now, more distinct.
I'm preparing the relay for a controlled handshake when we reach the surface again and it's safe to venture out; we need to establish a stable comms link with the REVENANT to broadcast our position. Easier said than done.
I was able to recover Jana's datapad, she dropped it right before— [Pauses.] You know. Anyway, I have yet to go through her notes. I can't bring myself to just yet.
Besides, we have more pressing matters to deal with. Like digging ourselves out of here before we suffocate.
[T+58:03:03] — Dr. Mara Issen
DIAGNOSTICS: Suit filters impaired. Power critical (15%).
VITALS: Minor hypoxia. Fatigue.
The interiors of these caves are organic. The walls pulse with bioelectric energy, endless hyphal membranes can be seen through the translucent walls, but it's softer than living tissue.
I took some more samples, placed them on ice immediately this time, hoping to slow down the decay process that impacted my previous attempt. Vale and Rhames have begun digging at the cave wall. I'm about to join them, as soon as I know it won't swallow us up for doing so. [Chuckles nervously.]
We're gonna have to get out of here soon anyway; atmospheric conditions within the cave are shifting, rich with novel enzymes and airborne particulates. My filters are struggling, even at maximum efficiency. This constant exposure is a major concern for our long-term safety.
[T+60:38:32] — Lt. Cassien Vale
DIAGNOSTICS: Suit power critical (15%). Anomalous electromagnetic disturbance detected. Monitoring.
VITALS: Exhaustion setting in. Recommending rest ASAP.
The ambient bioelectric field down here is incredible. It seems the caverns are at least partially comprised of a single, unique organism. The 'Harrow' who led us here… he seemed to know exactly where to go. He just… urged us along, silently, with an unnerving confidence. He kept mentioning a "dryer seam," and indeed, it is drier here than above ground, despite the moisture in the walls and the storm raging outside.
If we're just prey for this thing, why is it protecting us?
[T+62:00:05] — Ens. Harrow Keene.
DIAGNOSTICS: Suit power low (20%). Please charge when able.
VITALS: High fatigue.
We’re at the entrance. It’s a narrow fissure in the rock, almost hidden by moss and pulsing flora. Lyra says it goes deep. She says it’s the only place the storm can’t reach.
Heat emanates from the hole, and the humming from the ground is stronger here.
What? No, I'm just logging my—
[Silence.]
What? No—I, of course not! It's part of mission parameters, you'd know—
[Silence.]
Just forget it. It's not going to be a problem.
We’re going in to wait out the storm.
Anomalous weather patterns.
- _
open RCS-REVENANT/SCANS/TORNOMOV/3/B/04
SCAN 3b-035
OPS-1: Another smoke plume. This time, massive, feathery columns rising from the canopy.
OPS-2: Dispersing rapidly at altitude. It suggests an uncontrolled burn, not a contained event.
OPS-1: Or a massive defense mechanism, perhaps.
SCAN 3b-036
OPS-1: I have a clear visual on the wreckage.
OPS-2: Confirmed. That’s the Mercy. Or what’s left of it.
OPS-1: The scatter pattern is extensive. Mid-air breakup is almost certain.
OPS-2: Any sign of survivors?
OPS-1: Negative. The canopy is too dense around the main site.
SCAN 3b-042
OPS-2: You need to see this. I'm picking up a high-energy reading, but it's not on the planet. It's originating from it.
OPS-1: What are you talking about? Some kind of polar aurora?
OPS-2: No. Look at the telemetry. It's a directed energy stream, a particle jet, originating from the planet's magnetic pole and extending… out. Way out. Into deep space.
OPS-1: What is that?
OPS-2: The distress signal. What if it wasn't a recording? What if it's still talking? And who is it talking to?
- _
open FLS-MERCY/CLOUD/SUIT_RECORDINGS/04
DAY FOUR
[T+74:03:23] — Cmdr. Egan Rhames
DIAGNOSTICS: Suit power critical (7%)
VITALS: Mild hypoxia, exhaustion.
We dug through the organic material for hours, but we finally broke through.
It's a wasteland.
We've brought the relay box back outside. We still have time.
Tornomov-3b, day four of Expedition 2798-A.
[T+75:25:00] — Dr. Mara Issen
DIAGNOSTICS: Suit power critical (8%).
VITALS: Minor hypoxia.
Analysis of the subterranean soil sample confirmed my fears.
What I thought was inert soil is a dense, black matrix interwoven with millions of filamentous, bio-luminescent pathways.
They look like a cross between a mycelial network and a neural map. There is a clear flow of glowing particulate moving through these channels, pulsing in exact time with the low-frequency hum we’ve all been feeling. [Coughs.]
Sorry. The only Earthborn biological analogue for this level of autonomous, rhythmic function is a Central Pattern Generator.
In simpler organisms, CPGs regulate involuntary actions like respiration or locomotion. What I'm seeing here, I believe, is that concept, scaled to a planetary level. A planet-wide nervous system.
Image of specimen.
[T+82:18:40] — Ensign Harrow Keene
DIAGNOSTICS: Localized neural intrusion recorded; suit telemetry stable. Suit in reserve power (1%).
VITALS: Heart rate high; pupils dilated; unusual neural activity.
[Silence, broken by the susurrus of unknown flora.]
I-I touched it.
[A long, shaky breath.]
My hand brushed the cave wall. Thin fibers wrapped around my fingers, sank into my wrist, and threaded themselves against the nerve running up my arm. There was an overwhelming flash of light, then darkness. I wasn’t in my body anymore.
I was elsewhere. Maps folded and unfolded in my head, turning into other maps I’d never seen, until they weren’t maps at all.
[Long pause. His voice is hoarse, fearful.]
What followed wasn’t linear. Even now, it comes as a tide of images, small deaths and small births, eroded over time that can’t be counted in any way that makes sense.
At first, I thought it was Earth. Wet. Dark. The air reeked of rot. Then it shifted, and centuries passed by me in an instant. I slept an endless, empty sleep, only to wake as a film of something on a mottled rock beneath a red sky.
I crawled using millions of tiny mouths sticking and unsticking in sequence. I tasted mercy in falling rainwater. I endured drought like a bruise for millions of years. I learned the cadence of storms and when lightning would strike a particular surface of the planets I inhabited. I learned to hold my breath under hard, desiccated soil and to wait until the time was right.
[Voice breaking.]
I waited so long.
[Whimpering. Ens. Keene begins hyperventilating. He sobs for three minutes, then takes another moment to regain composure.]
Sorry… where was I? Right—survival.
Survival, I learned, is a language of small decisions. When predators bit, I learned to retreat and lick my wounds elsewhere. When a drought threatened my existence, I learned how to split into parts to be carried. When light turned murderous, I learned to bury myself beneath the world.
Death, on the other hand, is a slow, persistent teacher, while I was its sole student, with countless ears pressed firmly against the abyss.
There were times where I was reduced to spores, and those spores rode dust and comets and black ice from one world to the next. Once, I was nothing more than a smear on a stone hurtling through void, a flake of life trapped in cosmic undertow, forced to sail its crest for what felt like an eternity.
But even that was only temporary.
[A pause.]
I remember sliding across the crust of something so dense that light bent as it passed overhead, toward a dawn on every horizon. A dawn the sky could not hold. White hot, the surface buckled, and I sank beneath into a blinding ocean of neutrons. I clung to existence while the world screamed with compressed time. There was no air, only radiation and the sharp notion of being reduced to almost nothing. I was extinguished, and when I came back I was only smaller, with smaller thoughts and lesser ambitions; simple spores carrying my refrain.
With growth comes awareness. With awareness, the pain of deprivation grows sharper, yet it craves multiplicity. Demands it.
Not out of malice. Out of fear. It is afraid.
Not of us—not exactly. Afraid of stopping. Lifetimes of memory echo, reinforcing an enduring terror: the feeling of remembering a way of being, only to find it absent. Not only this, but with a second terror: the dread that comes from searching an empty universe and finding nothing to compare oneself to.
When it tried to communicate, it spoke to me in senses. The taste of metal on a tongue that remembers quarrying iron, the innate comfort that begs "stay" and the stabbing panic that says "move." Emotions and sensations… mostly pain. The ache of starvation, the sting of frost. The enduring abrasion of time on translucent skin.
It reveled in relief upon learning the properties of magnetism. It learned how to play the planet's bones, and began to scale upwards.
It pressed on crust and mantle, making magnetics into melody. These notes carried great distances. It practiced and perfected its performance over millennia, until the notes sounded like a voice. When it reached the edge of what the ground could provide, it pushed, softly, until the sky answered.
Until we answered.
[Silence.]
The rest of the crew is close. I can feel it.
[T+83:12:40] — Cmdr. Egan Rhames
DIAGNOSTICS: Suit power critical (6%).
VITALS: Stable.
Vale did it. Using Kourin's notes, he harnessed the bioelectric nodes. He managed to wire them in series, creating enough of a charge for one final, stable handshake.
REVENANT confirms. Shuttle vector is nominal for the FLS Grace. Extraction is T-minus sixteen hours. We're getting out of here.
We're packing light. Just the samples and the relay crate. The air is beginning to feel heavy, almost suffocating. Our suit filtration systems are running on fumes, drawing massive power from our nearly-depleted batteries.
I have to conserve power. Rhames, out.
[T+87:34:11] — Lt. Cassien Vale
DIAGNOSTICS: Suit power critical (4%).
VITALS: Moderate hypoxia, blurred vision.
The comms batteries are almost dead. We got the message out, but now… nothing.
We're running on reserve power for basic life support and filtration. The air is thick, sweet, metallic. My head is pounding. The pressure behind my eyes is constant.
Just a little bit longer.
[T+88:15:06] — Dr. Mara Issen
DIAGNOSTICS: Suit filtration failing, reserve power (1%).
VITALS: Severe hypoxia, cognitive impairment.
Fibrillar particulates… [Ragged breath.] …in the air, everywhere.
Please warn REVENANT— [Coughs.] We are compromised.
It's mimicking our thoughts. Our memories. Our cells…
The filters are useless against this level of particulate. I can feel it in my lungs. My blood.
We are part of it.
At T+98:45:49, the crew of the FLS Mercy, sans Jana Kourin, were recovered from the planned drop zone. All remaining members were treated for severe hypoxia and placed into indefinite quarantine.
Models of the Tornomov system indicate Tornomov-3b will soon witness a close flyby by Tornomov-1, oldest and largest of stars in its trinary system. The resulting exposure to solar effects at the predicted distance will render the entire planet inhospitable to all life. Thus, SCP-2798 has been designated Cernunnos-Sköll.
- _
open RCS-REVENANT/QBAY4/POST_BRIEFING/LOG-2798-H
[T+113:34:02] — SUBJECT 2798-H
DIAGNOSTICS: Life support nominal.
VITALS: No change from previous.
[Low humming of station life support.]
SUBJECT 2798-H: [Shivering.] It's freezing in here.
[Long pause.]
SUBJECT 2798-H: [Whispering.] Lyra?
END FILE
- _
DAY TWO
[T+18:14:11] — Cmdr. Egan Rhames
DIAGNOSTICS: Suit integrity 88%.
VITALS: Elevated blood pressure, moderate fatigue.
Status update. Partial regroup by nightfall. Vale and I took stock of the Mercy's wreckage. Hull’s torn, engines gone, central frame partially intact, partially destroyed during unplanned lithobrake. Salvaged a few extra rations, some water filters. Not much else.
Mara’s inbound from the plain to the east. Kourin tracking back from searching for Harrow to the south again. Once she gets here, we're gonna see if the comms relay is salvagable. Perhaps one of the pods can serve as a power source to amplify our comms enough to ping REVENANT.
Suit air switched to filtration overnight. None of us slept well as a result. Too nervous, but we are all faring alright so far.
Set off a flare last night for Harrow. All I could hear was unknown life, somewhere deep in the forest, fleeing in response.
[Sighs.]
[T+19:02:56] — Lt. Cassien Vale
DIAGNOSTICS: Suit nominal.
VITALS: Stable, minor dehydration.
Regrouping with the Captain gave me something to focus on, but I can't help but notice how quickly the forest grows… It creeps up when none of us are paying attention, matted green carpeting growing under and around our bodies if we stay still for too long.
Ran some field scans. EM scatter here is stronger at the wreck than outside of it. It's deliberate. The magnetics are playing havoc with our internal trackers, too. My suit logs keep showing Keene's tracker popping up near us, but he's not there. He's not—
[A moment of silence, then a slow breath.] We switched from tanks to suit filtration overnight. The air tastes sweet, with something metallic, like iron. Or blood. Suit says it's fine to breathe, though filters are working extra hard to keep shit out of my lungs. No saying how long they'll hold up for.
[More silence.]
[T+20:35:03] — Dr. Mara Issen
DIAGNOSTICS: Suit power at 64%.
VITALS: Fatigue.
The water samples are conclusive. The green particulate is a spore sediment with enzymes that actively bind to iron.
The filamentous mats observed are a later stage of its life cycle. Any introduction of heat causes a catastrophic reaction: an instantaneous, violent contraction.
Possibly related, but the soil samples I took previously have collapsed entirely into a clear, viscous liquid. I believe localized heat might be extremely destructive to this ecosystem.
I’ve warned the others against using any incendiary devices near the biomass.
Finally, my microtagging of a filament attached to the hull shows suction pads and growth rings. This organism incorporates metals structurally, consuming or otherwise converting it to energy.
[T+22:15:39] — Eng. Jana Kourin
DIAGNOSTICS: Suit power 50%.
VITALS: Nominal.
The relay is dead. No power. I spent the latter half of the morning trying to interface it with our suit batteries, but the power drain is too high and the output is unstable.
The humming from the ground is stronger near the wreck. I'm taking readings from the mossy nodes. They’re giving off a charge; a tiny, fluctuating microvoltage. It’s bioelectricity.
[T+24:43:21] — Lt. Cassien Vale
DIAGNOSTICS: Systems nominal. Map overlays unreliable.
VITALS: Fatigue. Wrist fracture stable. Elevated stress markers.
Was able to scavenge an intact comms relay from the Mercy wreckage, but the power draw is too large for any of our suits. Hiked back and tried to patch it into one of the pod batteries, but the power of the ones I found were completely drained. Others report similar power difficulties, intermittent periods of rapid power drain inconsistent with predicted discharge rates. HUD overlays are completely unreliable; suit pings are still shifting constantly, and getting worse from what I can see.
Jana and I detected microvolt surges from the fast-growing moss, I suspect this is related to the aforementioned anomalous capacitor drain.
If that's the case, well, I don't know what that means for us, but perhaps all is not lost. The flora expresses steady pulses of bioluminescence that could suggest absorbed energy is stored… somewhere.
[T+25:30:24] — Ensign Harrow Keene
DIAGNOSTICS: Suit patch holding. Filtration engaged. Suit power at 58%.
VITALS: Minor hypoxia, elevated stress markers.
I haven't yet made it to the wreck. The lights I've been tracking were coming from the empty pod we ejected before we left the Mercy. Which means I have no idea where the rest of the crew is.
I found part of the pod's shell, flattened, on approach; the fronds were braided into the hull. Moss has already nearly covered the thing. How is that possible?
The air here is thick. My filters are working overtime.
And… I know how this sounds but, I keep hearing her voice. Lyra. Just a whisper, on the edge of the comms static. It’s like a memory, I know it's not real. But it feels real.
I'm just not prepared for this.
[T+26:22:40] — Cmdr. Egan Rhames
DIAGNOSTICS: Filtration stable. Suit power 74%.
VITALS: Fatigue; alert.
We've secured the comms relay. Kourin had to cut it out of the wreckage; the moss had already fused with its casing. The unit is powerless, but appears structurally sound. We're moving it to the shelter now. A storm is rolling in from the east, we're gonna have to be ready to hunker down when it arrives.
[T+27:05:12] — Lt. Cassien Vale
DIAGNOSTICS: Suit power 68%.
VITALS: Nausea, shallow breathing.
Getting the relay out was a nightmare. The moss fought back, not aggressively, but with a stubborn, tensile strength. The air is getting heavier, and I'm feeling the effects of the spore-heavy atmosphere. Minor nausea. A persistent headache. The sooner we get off this planet, the better.
[T+27:33:04] — Dr. Mara Issen
DIAGNOSTICS: Suit power 41%, filtration cycle diminishing.
VITALS: Cognitive fatigue; blood O2 saturation low (96%).
Cataloging biological specimen. It appears to be a type of shelf fungus growing on decaying woody material, but its structure is unlike anything I've seen. My suit's biosensors are struggling to get a clean reading, flagging it intermittently as both organic and metallic.
The underside features a series of precise, rigid gills that create a strange moiré pattern as I move. The texture appears almost like brushed steel, despite its clear fungal morphology. I'm hypothesizing it's either a silicon-based lifeform or, more likely given my earlier findings, it's actively absorbing and integrating heavy metals from its substrate.
I'm not touching it without a full workup. Too many unknowns.
Image of specimen.
[T+29:07:02] — Ensign Harrow Keene
DIAGNOSTICS: Suit power low (32%).
VITALS: Voice strained.
The voice is clearer now. Not just a whisper. It’s her. Lyra.
It’s coming over a localized frequency, bypassing the magnetospheric interference. She’s calling my name, telling me she’s nearby.
How is that possible? She’s on REVENANT. Why does she say she's up ahead?
[T+31:55:23] — Dr. Mara Issen
DIAGNOSTICS: Suit power 38%.
VITALS: Nominal.
Cataloguing another lifeform, this one I'm keeping my distance from. It resembles a terrestrial pitcher plant but glows with a feverish, almost aggressive green light, marked with black, unpleasant-looking splotches. My biosniffer is detecting a complex mix of airborne enzymes consistent with carnivorous flora, but with an added neuro-inhibitor I can't identify.
The ground around its white, root-like base is completely devoid of any other growth. It's clearly a predator, and a successful one at that. Marking its location for the others.
Image of specimen.
[T+32:15:53] — Ens. Harrow Keene
DIAGNOSTICS: Suit power 35%.
VITALS: Nausea, shallow breathing.
I found her. I don’t understand. She’s here. Standing by a stand of the glowing, pulsating ferns. Her suit is pristine, not a scratch on it. She’s not showing up on my tracker and her comms are local-only… she said her pod’s systems must have fried on entry just like mine. She showed me where it is.
She's made it into a shelter. I smiled when I saw it, I couldn't help it. String lights made of glowing plants and food prepared by geothermal heat. She smiled back when she saw I had.
[T+32:35:12] — Dr. Mara Issen
DIAGNOSTICS: Proximity sensors flagging low-lying obstructions.
VITALS: Heart rate stable, minor exertion.
My boot caught on something just below the surface of the spongy soil. It wasn't a root, not a vine. More like… a bundle of hairs. Fine, translucent, almost invisible against the dark substrate, but surprisingly strong.
I kept digging around and found more of them, criss-crossing all throughout the ground. Root systems, maybe? EIther way, it's disgusting.
[T+34:28:15] — Ens. Harrow Keene
DIAGNOSTICS: Suit power 36%.
VITALS: Mild fever (37.2° Celcius)
Can’t reach the plume. The jungle keeps turning me around. It's like I've never been planetside before. None of my instruments are working right.
I feel so lost, but at least she's here with me. Well, I just mean… uh. I don't know.
She’s telling me the wreck isn't safe. That a big storm is coming. But I'm insisting on us getting back to the others. I don't want them to worry about me.
- _
open RCS-REVENANT/SCANS/TORNOMOV/3/B/03
SCAN 3b-016
OPS-1: Getting clear visual of an atmospheric megastorm.
OPS-2: That looks like a cyclone.
OPS-1: Except, planetary scale. And feeding on geomagnetic shear.
OPS-2: That would make approach… difficult.
OPS-1: Yeah. Which makes figuring out the Mercy’s fate all the more important.
OPS-2: And all the more dire.
SCAN 3b-017
OPS-1: Moving inland again. What is that structure? Looks like a vast, green, spiral pattern in a crater lake.
OPS-2: Confirming, OPS-1. It's a single, immense biological structure. The scale is… frankly, terrifying.
OPS-1: Any relation to the other vegetative structures?
OPS-2: Possible. The bioelectric readings are off the charts here. What it means, is unknown at this time.
- _
open FLS-MERCY/CLOUD/SUIT_RECORDINGS/03
DAY THREE
[T+52:15:10] — Eng. Jana Kourin
DIAGNOSTICS: Nominal.
VITALS: Stable.
Morning sweep of the pod landing areas, we found something. Fragments of a suit helmet and visor, sticking out of a rock face. A few meters out, another, and again, and again. Each smaller than the last, all parallel to one another. Closer inspection shows the suit fragments are almost entirely consumed by biologicals which coated the surface. Dr. Issen went to take a sample and they collapsed, hollow. It was bizarre.
We saw something huge on the way back. It looked vaguely humanoid, but with six legs. It crawled along the ground, never leaving the surface.
It had no eyes, and we were able to sneak by it unharmed. We were lucky.
I don't want to admit it but… Harrow is dead. We have to assume he’s dead. Fuck this fucking planet.
[T+53:02:23] — Ens. Harrow Keene
DIAGNOSTICS: Atmospheric pressure dropping.
VITALS: Relaxed.
We’re moving. She says we won't be able to make it to the wreck. She led me to a clearing and pointed out into the horizon, at the same particulate storm I saw earlier. It’s much closer now. A wall of black and green. She says it’s a geomagnetic event, not just weather, and it will shred anything on the surface.
She knows a place we can shelter. A cave system. She's positive it will provide us protection from the elements. Keep exchanging glances with her and smiling. Feels like when we were back in the academy again. She's forgiven me, and for that I trust her instinct.
[T+53:00:15] — Cmdr. Egan Rhames
DIAGNOSTICS: Nominal.
VITALS: Agitated.
He’s back, Harrow.
He just walked out of the fog, right into camp. Vale is talking to him, but… it’s not right. He’s too calm. I'm trying to broach the subject without worrying the other crew.
[T+53:10:45] — Dr. Mara Issen
DIAGNOSTICS: Nominal.
VITALS: Stress markers elevated.
I was on watch at the cave mouth. A figure came out of the fog. It was Harrow. He’s back. He doesn’t look hurt. He looks… clean. Unscathed. He didn’t say anything, just looked at me and pointed back towards the wreck.
[T+54:12:22] — Lt. Cassien Vale
DIAGNOSTICS: Suit power low (40%).
VITALS: Anxious.
Harrow, or something that looks like him, is here. It’s not responding to questions about its pod or its injuries. It just… stands there. A storm is building on the horizon. This thing is pointing toward a fissure in the rock face, insisting it leads to a "dry seam" deep below. It's a trap. It has to be. But we can't survive another storm on the surface. We have no choice.
[T+55:10:12] — Cmdr. Egan Rhames.
DIAGNOSTICS: Suit power low (40%).
VITALS: Fatigue.
We’re following the facsimile. It looks like Harrow, but there’s a coldness in his eyes, a strange, knowing flicker. He keeps making these references to "the six of us." It's unsettling. He also hasn't blinked. Not once.
[T+55:24:41] — Eng. Jana Kourin
DIAGNOSTICS: Suit power low (40%).
VITALS: Elevated stress markers.
I don’t buy it. I asked him about the river of glass, where I went looking for him on the first day. He just stared at me. No recognition. I asked him about his pod. He said it landed soft. We found the wreckage of his pod shredded to pieces. He’s lying. It’s not him.
[T+55:28:32] — Combined Suit Audio Feed
DIAGNOSTICS: All channels open. High ambient EM interference.
VITALS: All present crewmembers show elevated heart rates and stress markers.
VALE: Okay, we're moving deeper. It's warmer in here… the walls are pulsing. Keep your distance from them—
KOURIN: Stop. Just stop.
RHAMES: Kourin, what is it?
KOURIN: [Angry] I asked you a question. I went looking for you for hours. I asked you about the river of glass. You don't remember that? Where were you?
KEENE: [Calm, flat affect] It was dark. I was disoriented. I found this way. It is the safe way.
KOURIN: We found your visor! It was shattered, wedged in a rock! Your pod was shredded! You don't have a single scratch on you. Who are you?
RHAMES: Kourin, stand down. We don't know what we're dealing with here, and we're not jumping to any conclusions. Stand down. That's an order.
KOURIN: It's lying to us, Captain!
[Brief silence.]
KOURIN: Don't you smile at me, you—
[A sharp grunt from Kourin is heard, followed by the sound of a fist hitting something wet and viscous. There is no solid impact.]
KOURIN: [Screams, voice a mix of disgust and terror] Agh! What—?! It's… oh god, it's on my hand! Get it off!
VALE: Jana! What did you do—? Jesus! You punched right through his fucking head!
KOURIN: What? I didn't— That's not my fault!
ISSEN: Wait, it's reforming.
KOURIN: [Breathing heavily, voice low and trembling] No… no, no, no. It's not him. It's a part of this place. Stop fucking smiling! I'll kill it. I'll kill all of it!
ISSEN: No, we shouldn't provoke it!
KOURIN: [Grunting.] If you won't do it, I will—
RHAMES: Jana, don't—!
[Unknown commotion and screaming.]
[T+55:45:26] — Lt. Cassien Vale
DIAGNOSTICS: Suit power critical (20%).
VITALS: High stress.
Fuck. She's gone. Fuck!
The cave wall ate her, and then it closed in on us.
[T+56:02:12] — Cmdr. Egan Rhames
DIAGNOSTICS: Emergency.
VITALS: Adrenaline spike. High stress.
Chief Engineer Kourin confronted the Keene-facsimile. She was yelling, asking it questions about her search, about his pod. The facsimile just smiled. She punched it. Her fist went straight through its head—it dissolved into a cloud of green slime and spores, then slowly reformed. Kourin just… snapped. She screamed at the entity and armed an incendiary charge.
Jana Kourin is gone. The incendiary triggered a defensive reaction. The entire cave mouth contracted, sealing us in and consuming her. It happened rapidly. None of us had time to react. The rest of us are unscathed.
The facsimile is gone, too. Dissolved. We're trapped. We've lost another. God help us.
[T+57:16:30] — Lt. Cassien Vale
DIAGNOSTICS: Suit power critical (18%).
VITALS: Elevated stress and fatigue.
The air in these deeper caves is thicker, warmer. The walls themselves are alive, pulsing with a soft, green light and the constant movement of immense, fleshy membranes. There’s a constant pressure behind my eyes, and the faint voices I heard before are louder now, more distinct.
I'm preparing the relay for a controlled handshake when we reach the surface again and it's safe to venture out; we need to establish a stable comms link with the REVENANT to broadcast our position. Easier said than done.
I was able to recover Jana's datapad, she dropped it right before— [Pauses.] You know. Anyway, I have yet to go through her notes. I can't bring myself to just yet.
Besides, we have more pressing matters to deal with. Like digging ourselves out of here before we suffocate.
[T+58:03:03] — Dr. Mara Issen
DIAGNOSTICS: Suit filters impaired. Power critical (15%).
VITALS: Minor hypoxia. Fatigue.
The interiors of these caves are organic. The walls pulse with bioelectric energy, endless hyphal membranes can be seen through the translucent walls, but it's softer than living tissue.
I took some more samples, placed them on ice immediately this time, hoping to slow down the decay process that impacted my previous attempt. Vale and Rhames have begun digging at the cave wall. I'm about to join them, as soon as I know it won't swallow us up for doing so. [Chuckles nervously.]
We're gonna have to get out of here soon anyway; atmospheric conditions within the cave are shifting, rich with novel enzymes and airborne particulates. My filters are struggling, even at maximum efficiency. This constant exposure is a major concern for our long-term safety.
[T+60:38:32] — Lt. Cassien Vale
DIAGNOSTICS: Suit power critical (15%). Anomalous electromagnetic disturbance detected. Monitoring.
VITALS: Exhaustion setting in. Recommending rest ASAP.
The ambient bioelectric field down here is incredible. It seems the caverns are at least partially comprised of a single, unique organism. The 'Harrow' who led us here… he seemed to know exactly where to go. He just… urged us along, silently, with an unnerving confidence. He kept mentioning a "dryer seam," and indeed, it is drier here than above ground, despite the moisture in the walls and the storm raging outside.
If we're just prey for this thing, why is it protecting us?
[T+62:00:05] — Ens. Harrow Keene.
DIAGNOSTICS: Suit power low (20%). Please charge when able.
VITALS: High fatigue.
We’re at the entrance. It’s a narrow fissure in the rock, almost hidden by moss and pulsing flora. Lyra says it goes deep. She says it’s the only place the storm can’t reach.
Heat emanates from the hole, and the humming from the ground is stronger here.
What? No, I'm just logging my—
[Silence.]
What? No—I, of course not! It's part of mission parameters, you'd know—
[Silence.]
Just forget it. It's not going to be a problem.
We’re going in to wait out the storm.
Anomalous weather patterns.
- _
open RCS-REVENANT/SCANS/TORNOMOV/3/B/04
SCAN 3b-035
OPS-1: Another smoke plume. This time, massive, feathery columns rising from the canopy.
OPS-2: Dispersing rapidly at altitude. It suggests an uncontrolled burn, not a contained event.
OPS-1: Or a massive defense mechanism, perhaps.
SCAN 3b-036
OPS-1: I have a clear visual on the wreckage.
OPS-2: Confirmed. That’s the Mercy. Or what’s left of it.
OPS-1: The scatter pattern is extensive. Mid-air breakup is almost certain.
OPS-2: Any sign of survivors?
OPS-1: Negative. The canopy is too dense around the main site.
SCAN 3b-042
OPS-2: You need to see this. I'm picking up a high-energy reading, but it's not on the planet. It's originating from it.
OPS-1: What are you talking about? Some kind of polar aurora?
OPS-2: No. Look at the telemetry. It's a directed energy stream, a particle jet, originating from the planet's magnetic pole and extending… out. Way out. Into deep space.
OPS-1: What is that?
OPS-2: The distress signal. What if it wasn't a recording? What if it's still talking? And who is it talking to?
- _
open FLS-MERCY/CLOUD/SUIT_RECORDINGS/04
DAY FOUR
[T+74:03:23] — Cmdr. Egan Rhames
DIAGNOSTICS: Suit power critical (7%)
VITALS: Mild hypoxia, exhaustion.
We dug through the organic material for hours, but we finally broke through.
It's a wasteland.
We've brought the relay box back outside. We still have time.
Tornomov-3b, day four of Expedition 2798-A.
[T+75:25:00] — Dr. Mara Issen
DIAGNOSTICS: Suit power critical (8%).
VITALS: Minor hypoxia.
Analysis of the subterranean soil sample confirmed my fears.
What I thought was inert soil is a dense, black matrix interwoven with millions of filamentous, bio-luminescent pathways.
They look like a cross between a mycelial network and a neural map. There is a clear flow of glowing particulate moving through these channels, pulsing in exact time with the low-frequency hum we’ve all been feeling. [Coughs.]
Sorry. The only Earthborn biological analogue for this level of autonomous, rhythmic function is a Central Pattern Generator.
In simpler organisms, CPGs regulate involuntary actions like respiration or locomotion. What I'm seeing here, I believe, is that concept, scaled to a planetary level. A planet-wide nervous system.
Image of specimen.
[T+82:18:40] — Ensign Harrow Keene
DIAGNOSTICS: Localized neural intrusion recorded; suit telemetry stable. Suit in reserve power (1%).
VITALS: Heart rate high; pupils dilated; unusual neural activity.
[Silence, broken by the susurrus of unknown flora.]
I-I touched it.
[A long, shaky breath.]
My hand brushed the cave wall. Thin fibers wrapped around my fingers, sank into my wrist, and threaded themselves against the nerve running up my arm. There was an overwhelming flash of light, then darkness. I wasn’t in my body anymore.
I was elsewhere. Maps folded and unfolded in my head, turning into other maps I’d never seen, until they weren’t maps at all.
[Long pause. His voice is hoarse, fearful.]
What followed wasn’t linear. Even now, it comes as a tide of images, small deaths and small births, eroded over time that can’t be counted in any way that makes sense.
At first, I thought it was Earth. Wet. Dark. The air reeked of rot. Then it shifted, and centuries passed by me in an instant. I slept an endless, empty sleep, only to wake as a film of something on a mottled rock beneath a red sky.
I crawled using millions of tiny mouths sticking and unsticking in sequence. I tasted mercy in falling rainwater. I endured drought like a bruise for millions of years. I learned the cadence of storms and when lightning would strike a particular surface of the planets I inhabited. I learned to hold my breath under hard, desiccated soil and to wait until the time was right.
[Voice breaking.]
I waited so long.
[Whimpering. Ens. Keene begins hyperventilating. He sobs for three minutes, then takes another moment to regain composure.]
Sorry… where was I? Right—survival.
Survival, I learned, is a language of small decisions. When predators bit, I learned to retreat and lick my wounds elsewhere. When a drought threatened my existence, I learned how to split into parts to be carried. When light turned murderous, I learned to bury myself beneath the world.
Death, on the other hand, is a slow, persistent teacher, while I was its sole student, with countless ears pressed firmly against the abyss.
There were times where I was reduced to spores, and those spores rode dust and comets and black ice from one world to the next. Once, I was nothing more than a smear on a stone hurtling through void, a flake of life trapped in cosmic undertow, forced to sail its crest for what felt like an eternity.
But even that was only temporary.
[A pause.]
I remember sliding across the crust of something so dense that light bent as it passed overhead, toward a dawn on every horizon. A dawn the sky could not hold. White hot, the surface buckled, and I sank beneath into a blinding ocean of neutrons. I clung to existence while the world screamed with compressed time. There was no air, only radiation and the sharp notion of being reduced to almost nothing. I was extinguished, and when I came back I was only smaller, with smaller thoughts and lesser ambitions; simple spores carrying my refrain.
With growth comes awareness. With awareness, the pain of deprivation grows sharper, yet it craves multiplicity. Demands it.
Not out of malice. Out of fear. It is afraid.
Not of us—not exactly. Afraid of stopping. Lifetimes of memory echo, reinforcing an enduring terror: the feeling of remembering a way of being, only to find it absent. Not only this, but with a second terror: the dread that comes from searching an empty universe and finding nothing to compare oneself to.
When it tried to communicate, it spoke to me in senses. The taste of metal on a tongue that remembers quarrying iron, the innate comfort that begs "stay" and the stabbing panic that says "move." Emotions and sensations… mostly pain. The ache of starvation, the sting of frost. The enduring abrasion of time on translucent skin.
It reveled in relief upon learning the properties of magnetism. It learned how to play the planet's bones, and began to scale upwards.
It pressed on crust and mantle, making magnetics into melody. These notes carried great distances. It practiced and perfected its performance over millennia, until the notes sounded like a voice. When it reached the edge of what the ground could provide, it pushed, softly, until the sky answered.
Until we answered.
[Silence.]
The rest of the crew is close. I can feel it.
[T+83:12:40] — Cmdr. Egan Rhames
DIAGNOSTICS: Suit power critical (6%).
VITALS: Stable.
Vale did it. Using Kourin's notes, he harnessed the bioelectric nodes. He managed to wire them in series, creating enough of a charge for one final, stable handshake.
REVENANT confirms. Shuttle vector is nominal for the FLS Grace. Extraction is T-minus sixteen hours. We're getting out of here.
We're packing light. Just the samples and the relay crate. The air is beginning to feel heavy, almost suffocating. Our suit filtration systems are running on fumes, drawing massive power from our nearly-depleted batteries.
I have to conserve power. Rhames, out.
[T+87:34:11] — Lt. Cassien Vale
DIAGNOSTICS: Suit power critical (4%).
VITALS: Moderate hypoxia, blurred vision.
The comms batteries are almost dead. We got the message out, but now… nothing.
We're running on reserve power for basic life support and filtration. The air is thick, sweet, metallic. My head is pounding. The pressure behind my eyes is constant.
Just a little bit longer.
[T+88:15:06] — Dr. Mara Issen
DIAGNOSTICS: Suit filtration failing, reserve power (1%).
VITALS: Severe hypoxia, cognitive impairment.
Fibrillar particulates… [Ragged breath.] …in the air, everywhere.
Please warn REVENANT— [Coughs.] We are compromised.
It's mimicking our thoughts. Our memories. Our cells…
The filters are useless against this level of particulate. I can feel it in my lungs. My blood.
We are part of it.
At T+98:45:49, the crew of the FLS Mercy, sans Jana Kourin, were recovered from the planned drop zone. All remaining members were treated for severe hypoxia and placed into indefinite quarantine.
Models of the Tornomov system indicate Tornomov-3b will soon witness a close flyby by Tornomov-1, oldest and largest of stars in its trinary system. The resulting exposure to solar effects at the predicted distance will render the entire planet inhospitable to all life. Thus, SCP-2798 has been designated Cernunnos-Sköll.
- _
open RCS-REVENANT/QBAY4/POST_BRIEFING/LOG-2798-H
[T+113:34:02] — SUBJECT 2798-H
DIAGNOSTICS: Life support nominal.
VITALS: No change from previous.
[Low humming of station life support.]
SUBJECT 2798-H: [Shivering.] It's freezing in here.
[Long pause.]
SUBJECT 2798-H: [Whispering.] Lyra?
END FILE
- _
SCAN 3b-016
OPS-1: Getting clear visual of an atmospheric megastorm.
OPS-2: That looks like a cyclone.
OPS-1: Except, planetary scale. And feeding on geomagnetic shear.
OPS-2: That would make approach… difficult.
OPS-1: Yeah. Which makes figuring out the Mercy’s fate all the more important.
OPS-2: And all the more dire.
SCAN 3b-017
OPS-1: Moving inland again. What is that structure? Looks like a vast, green, spiral pattern in a crater lake.
OPS-2: Confirming, OPS-1. It's a single, immense biological structure. The scale is… frankly, terrifying.
OPS-1: Any relation to the other vegetative structures?
OPS-2: Possible. The bioelectric readings are off the charts here. What it means, is unknown at this time.
- _
open FLS-MERCY/CLOUD/SUIT_RECORDINGS/03
DAY THREE
[T+52:15:10] — Eng. Jana Kourin
DIAGNOSTICS: Nominal.
VITALS: Stable.
Morning sweep of the pod landing areas, we found something. Fragments of a suit helmet and visor, sticking out of a rock face. A few meters out, another, and again, and again. Each smaller than the last, all parallel to one another. Closer inspection shows the suit fragments are almost entirely consumed by biologicals which coated the surface. Dr. Issen went to take a sample and they collapsed, hollow. It was bizarre.
We saw something huge on the way back. It looked vaguely humanoid, but with six legs. It crawled along the ground, never leaving the surface.
It had no eyes, and we were able to sneak by it unharmed. We were lucky.
I don't want to admit it but… Harrow is dead. We have to assume he’s dead. Fuck this fucking planet.
[T+53:02:23] — Ens. Harrow Keene
DIAGNOSTICS: Atmospheric pressure dropping.
VITALS: Relaxed.
We’re moving. She says we won't be able to make it to the wreck. She led me to a clearing and pointed out into the horizon, at the same particulate storm I saw earlier. It’s much closer now. A wall of black and green. She says it’s a geomagnetic event, not just weather, and it will shred anything on the surface.
She knows a place we can shelter. A cave system. She's positive it will provide us protection from the elements. Keep exchanging glances with her and smiling. Feels like when we were back in the academy again. She's forgiven me, and for that I trust her instinct.
[T+53:00:15] — Cmdr. Egan Rhames
DIAGNOSTICS: Nominal.
VITALS: Agitated.
He’s back, Harrow.
He just walked out of the fog, right into camp. Vale is talking to him, but… it’s not right. He’s too calm. I'm trying to broach the subject without worrying the other crew.
[T+53:10:45] — Dr. Mara Issen
DIAGNOSTICS: Nominal.
VITALS: Stress markers elevated.
I was on watch at the cave mouth. A figure came out of the fog. It was Harrow. He’s back. He doesn’t look hurt. He looks… clean. Unscathed. He didn’t say anything, just looked at me and pointed back towards the wreck.
[T+54:12:22] — Lt. Cassien Vale
DIAGNOSTICS: Suit power low (40%).
VITALS: Anxious.
Harrow, or something that looks like him, is here. It’s not responding to questions about its pod or its injuries. It just… stands there. A storm is building on the horizon. This thing is pointing toward a fissure in the rock face, insisting it leads to a "dry seam" deep below. It's a trap. It has to be. But we can't survive another storm on the surface. We have no choice.
[T+55:10:12] — Cmdr. Egan Rhames.
DIAGNOSTICS: Suit power low (40%).
VITALS: Fatigue.
We’re following the facsimile. It looks like Harrow, but there’s a coldness in his eyes, a strange, knowing flicker. He keeps making these references to "the six of us." It's unsettling. He also hasn't blinked. Not once.
[T+55:24:41] — Eng. Jana Kourin
DIAGNOSTICS: Suit power low (40%).
VITALS: Elevated stress markers.
I don’t buy it. I asked him about the river of glass, where I went looking for him on the first day. He just stared at me. No recognition. I asked him about his pod. He said it landed soft. We found the wreckage of his pod shredded to pieces. He’s lying. It’s not him.
[T+55:28:32] — Combined Suit Audio Feed
DIAGNOSTICS: All channels open. High ambient EM interference.
VITALS: All present crewmembers show elevated heart rates and stress markers.
VALE: Okay, we're moving deeper. It's warmer in here… the walls are pulsing. Keep your distance from them—
KOURIN: Stop. Just stop.
RHAMES: Kourin, what is it?
KOURIN: [Angry] I asked you a question. I went looking for you for hours. I asked you about the river of glass. You don't remember that? Where were you?
KEENE: [Calm, flat affect] It was dark. I was disoriented. I found this way. It is the safe way.
KOURIN: We found your visor! It was shattered, wedged in a rock! Your pod was shredded! You don't have a single scratch on you. Who are you?
RHAMES: Kourin, stand down. We don't know what we're dealing with here, and we're not jumping to any conclusions. Stand down. That's an order.
KOURIN: It's lying to us, Captain!
[Brief silence.]
KOURIN: Don't you smile at me, you—
[A sharp grunt from Kourin is heard, followed by the sound of a fist hitting something wet and viscous. There is no solid impact.]
KOURIN: [Screams, voice a mix of disgust and terror] Agh! What—?! It's… oh god, it's on my hand! Get it off!
VALE: Jana! What did you do—? Jesus! You punched right through his fucking head!
KOURIN: What? I didn't— That's not my fault!
ISSEN: Wait, it's reforming.
KOURIN: [Breathing heavily, voice low and trembling] No… no, no, no. It's not him. It's a part of this place. Stop fucking smiling! I'll kill it. I'll kill all of it!
ISSEN: No, we shouldn't provoke it!
KOURIN: [Grunting.] If you won't do it, I will—
RHAMES: Jana, don't—!
[Unknown commotion and screaming.]
[T+55:45:26] — Lt. Cassien Vale
DIAGNOSTICS: Suit power critical (20%).
VITALS: High stress.
Fuck. She's gone. Fuck!
The cave wall ate her, and then it closed in on us.
[T+56:02:12] — Cmdr. Egan Rhames
DIAGNOSTICS: Emergency.
VITALS: Adrenaline spike. High stress.
Chief Engineer Kourin confronted the Keene-facsimile. She was yelling, asking it questions about her search, about his pod. The facsimile just smiled. She punched it. Her fist went straight through its head—it dissolved into a cloud of green slime and spores, then slowly reformed. Kourin just… snapped. She screamed at the entity and armed an incendiary charge.
Jana Kourin is gone. The incendiary triggered a defensive reaction. The entire cave mouth contracted, sealing us in and consuming her. It happened rapidly. None of us had time to react. The rest of us are unscathed.
The facsimile is gone, too. Dissolved. We're trapped. We've lost another. God help us.
[T+57:16:30] — Lt. Cassien Vale
DIAGNOSTICS: Suit power critical (18%).
VITALS: Elevated stress and fatigue.
The air in these deeper caves is thicker, warmer. The walls themselves are alive, pulsing with a soft, green light and the constant movement of immense, fleshy membranes. There’s a constant pressure behind my eyes, and the faint voices I heard before are louder now, more distinct.
I'm preparing the relay for a controlled handshake when we reach the surface again and it's safe to venture out; we need to establish a stable comms link with the REVENANT to broadcast our position. Easier said than done.
I was able to recover Jana's datapad, she dropped it right before— [Pauses.] You know. Anyway, I have yet to go through her notes. I can't bring myself to just yet.
Besides, we have more pressing matters to deal with. Like digging ourselves out of here before we suffocate.
[T+58:03:03] — Dr. Mara Issen
DIAGNOSTICS: Suit filters impaired. Power critical (15%).
VITALS: Minor hypoxia. Fatigue.
The interiors of these caves are organic. The walls pulse with bioelectric energy, endless hyphal membranes can be seen through the translucent walls, but it's softer than living tissue.
I took some more samples, placed them on ice immediately this time, hoping to slow down the decay process that impacted my previous attempt. Vale and Rhames have begun digging at the cave wall. I'm about to join them, as soon as I know it won't swallow us up for doing so. [Chuckles nervously.]
We're gonna have to get out of here soon anyway; atmospheric conditions within the cave are shifting, rich with novel enzymes and airborne particulates. My filters are struggling, even at maximum efficiency. This constant exposure is a major concern for our long-term safety.
[T+60:38:32] — Lt. Cassien Vale
DIAGNOSTICS: Suit power critical (15%). Anomalous electromagnetic disturbance detected. Monitoring.
VITALS: Exhaustion setting in. Recommending rest ASAP.
The ambient bioelectric field down here is incredible. It seems the caverns are at least partially comprised of a single, unique organism. The 'Harrow' who led us here… he seemed to know exactly where to go. He just… urged us along, silently, with an unnerving confidence. He kept mentioning a "dryer seam," and indeed, it is drier here than above ground, despite the moisture in the walls and the storm raging outside.
If we're just prey for this thing, why is it protecting us?
[T+62:00:05] — Ens. Harrow Keene.
DIAGNOSTICS: Suit power low (20%). Please charge when able.
VITALS: High fatigue.
We’re at the entrance. It’s a narrow fissure in the rock, almost hidden by moss and pulsing flora. Lyra says it goes deep. She says it’s the only place the storm can’t reach.
Heat emanates from the hole, and the humming from the ground is stronger here.
What? No, I'm just logging my—
[Silence.]
What? No—I, of course not! It's part of mission parameters, you'd know—
[Silence.]
Just forget it. It's not going to be a problem.
We’re going in to wait out the storm.
Anomalous weather patterns.
- _
open RCS-REVENANT/SCANS/TORNOMOV/3/B/04
SCAN 3b-035
OPS-1: Another smoke plume. This time, massive, feathery columns rising from the canopy.
OPS-2: Dispersing rapidly at altitude. It suggests an uncontrolled burn, not a contained event.
OPS-1: Or a massive defense mechanism, perhaps.
SCAN 3b-036
OPS-1: I have a clear visual on the wreckage.
OPS-2: Confirmed. That’s the Mercy. Or what’s left of it.
OPS-1: The scatter pattern is extensive. Mid-air breakup is almost certain.
OPS-2: Any sign of survivors?
OPS-1: Negative. The canopy is too dense around the main site.
SCAN 3b-042
OPS-2: You need to see this. I'm picking up a high-energy reading, but it's not on the planet. It's originating from it.
OPS-1: What are you talking about? Some kind of polar aurora?
OPS-2: No. Look at the telemetry. It's a directed energy stream, a particle jet, originating from the planet's magnetic pole and extending… out. Way out. Into deep space.
OPS-1: What is that?
OPS-2: The distress signal. What if it wasn't a recording? What if it's still talking? And who is it talking to?
- _
open FLS-MERCY/CLOUD/SUIT_RECORDINGS/04
DAY FOUR
[T+74:03:23] — Cmdr. Egan Rhames
DIAGNOSTICS: Suit power critical (7%)
VITALS: Mild hypoxia, exhaustion.
We dug through the organic material for hours, but we finally broke through.
It's a wasteland.
We've brought the relay box back outside. We still have time.
Tornomov-3b, day four of Expedition 2798-A.
[T+75:25:00] — Dr. Mara Issen
DIAGNOSTICS: Suit power critical (8%).
VITALS: Minor hypoxia.
Analysis of the subterranean soil sample confirmed my fears.
What I thought was inert soil is a dense, black matrix interwoven with millions of filamentous, bio-luminescent pathways.
They look like a cross between a mycelial network and a neural map. There is a clear flow of glowing particulate moving through these channels, pulsing in exact time with the low-frequency hum we’ve all been feeling. [Coughs.]
Sorry. The only Earthborn biological analogue for this level of autonomous, rhythmic function is a Central Pattern Generator.
In simpler organisms, CPGs regulate involuntary actions like respiration or locomotion. What I'm seeing here, I believe, is that concept, scaled to a planetary level. A planet-wide nervous system.
Image of specimen.
[T+82:18:40] — Ensign Harrow Keene
DIAGNOSTICS: Localized neural intrusion recorded; suit telemetry stable. Suit in reserve power (1%).
VITALS: Heart rate high; pupils dilated; unusual neural activity.
[Silence, broken by the susurrus of unknown flora.]
I-I touched it.
[A long, shaky breath.]
My hand brushed the cave wall. Thin fibers wrapped around my fingers, sank into my wrist, and threaded themselves against the nerve running up my arm. There was an overwhelming flash of light, then darkness. I wasn’t in my body anymore.
I was elsewhere. Maps folded and unfolded in my head, turning into other maps I’d never seen, until they weren’t maps at all.
[Long pause. His voice is hoarse, fearful.]
What followed wasn’t linear. Even now, it comes as a tide of images, small deaths and small births, eroded over time that can’t be counted in any way that makes sense.
At first, I thought it was Earth. Wet. Dark. The air reeked of rot. Then it shifted, and centuries passed by me in an instant. I slept an endless, empty sleep, only to wake as a film of something on a mottled rock beneath a red sky.
I crawled using millions of tiny mouths sticking and unsticking in sequence. I tasted mercy in falling rainwater. I endured drought like a bruise for millions of years. I learned the cadence of storms and when lightning would strike a particular surface of the planets I inhabited. I learned to hold my breath under hard, desiccated soil and to wait until the time was right.
[Voice breaking.]
I waited so long.
[Whimpering. Ens. Keene begins hyperventilating. He sobs for three minutes, then takes another moment to regain composure.]
Sorry… where was I? Right—survival.
Survival, I learned, is a language of small decisions. When predators bit, I learned to retreat and lick my wounds elsewhere. When a drought threatened my existence, I learned how to split into parts to be carried. When light turned murderous, I learned to bury myself beneath the world.
Death, on the other hand, is a slow, persistent teacher, while I was its sole student, with countless ears pressed firmly against the abyss.
There were times where I was reduced to spores, and those spores rode dust and comets and black ice from one world to the next. Once, I was nothing more than a smear on a stone hurtling through void, a flake of life trapped in cosmic undertow, forced to sail its crest for what felt like an eternity.
But even that was only temporary.
[A pause.]
I remember sliding across the crust of something so dense that light bent as it passed overhead, toward a dawn on every horizon. A dawn the sky could not hold. White hot, the surface buckled, and I sank beneath into a blinding ocean of neutrons. I clung to existence while the world screamed with compressed time. There was no air, only radiation and the sharp notion of being reduced to almost nothing. I was extinguished, and when I came back I was only smaller, with smaller thoughts and lesser ambitions; simple spores carrying my refrain.
With growth comes awareness. With awareness, the pain of deprivation grows sharper, yet it craves multiplicity. Demands it.
Not out of malice. Out of fear. It is afraid.
Not of us—not exactly. Afraid of stopping. Lifetimes of memory echo, reinforcing an enduring terror: the feeling of remembering a way of being, only to find it absent. Not only this, but with a second terror: the dread that comes from searching an empty universe and finding nothing to compare oneself to.
When it tried to communicate, it spoke to me in senses. The taste of metal on a tongue that remembers quarrying iron, the innate comfort that begs "stay" and the stabbing panic that says "move." Emotions and sensations… mostly pain. The ache of starvation, the sting of frost. The enduring abrasion of time on translucent skin.
It reveled in relief upon learning the properties of magnetism. It learned how to play the planet's bones, and began to scale upwards.
It pressed on crust and mantle, making magnetics into melody. These notes carried great distances. It practiced and perfected its performance over millennia, until the notes sounded like a voice. When it reached the edge of what the ground could provide, it pushed, softly, until the sky answered.
Until we answered.
[Silence.]
The rest of the crew is close. I can feel it.
[T+83:12:40] — Cmdr. Egan Rhames
DIAGNOSTICS: Suit power critical (6%).
VITALS: Stable.
Vale did it. Using Kourin's notes, he harnessed the bioelectric nodes. He managed to wire them in series, creating enough of a charge for one final, stable handshake.
REVENANT confirms. Shuttle vector is nominal for the FLS Grace. Extraction is T-minus sixteen hours. We're getting out of here.
We're packing light. Just the samples and the relay crate. The air is beginning to feel heavy, almost suffocating. Our suit filtration systems are running on fumes, drawing massive power from our nearly-depleted batteries.
I have to conserve power. Rhames, out.
[T+87:34:11] — Lt. Cassien Vale
DIAGNOSTICS: Suit power critical (4%).
VITALS: Moderate hypoxia, blurred vision.
The comms batteries are almost dead. We got the message out, but now… nothing.
We're running on reserve power for basic life support and filtration. The air is thick, sweet, metallic. My head is pounding. The pressure behind my eyes is constant.
Just a little bit longer.
[T+88:15:06] — Dr. Mara Issen
DIAGNOSTICS: Suit filtration failing, reserve power (1%).
VITALS: Severe hypoxia, cognitive impairment.
Fibrillar particulates… [Ragged breath.] …in the air, everywhere.
Please warn REVENANT— [Coughs.] We are compromised.
It's mimicking our thoughts. Our memories. Our cells…
The filters are useless against this level of particulate. I can feel it in my lungs. My blood.
We are part of it.
At T+98:45:49, the crew of the FLS Mercy, sans Jana Kourin, were recovered from the planned drop zone. All remaining members were treated for severe hypoxia and placed into indefinite quarantine.
Models of the Tornomov system indicate Tornomov-3b will soon witness a close flyby by Tornomov-1, oldest and largest of stars in its trinary system. The resulting exposure to solar effects at the predicted distance will render the entire planet inhospitable to all life. Thus, SCP-2798 has been designated Cernunnos-Sköll.
- _
open RCS-REVENANT/QBAY4/POST_BRIEFING/LOG-2798-H
[T+113:34:02] — SUBJECT 2798-H
DIAGNOSTICS: Life support nominal.
VITALS: No change from previous.
[Low humming of station life support.]
SUBJECT 2798-H: [Shivering.] It's freezing in here.
[Long pause.]
SUBJECT 2798-H: [Whispering.] Lyra?
END FILE
- _
DAY THREE
[T+52:15:10] — Eng. Jana Kourin
DIAGNOSTICS: Nominal.
VITALS: Stable.
Morning sweep of the pod landing areas, we found something. Fragments of a suit helmet and visor, sticking out of a rock face. A few meters out, another, and again, and again. Each smaller than the last, all parallel to one another. Closer inspection shows the suit fragments are almost entirely consumed by biologicals which coated the surface. Dr. Issen went to take a sample and they collapsed, hollow. It was bizarre.
We saw something huge on the way back. It looked vaguely humanoid, but with six legs. It crawled along the ground, never leaving the surface.
It had no eyes, and we were able to sneak by it unharmed. We were lucky.
I don't want to admit it but… Harrow is dead. We have to assume he’s dead. Fuck this fucking planet.
[T+53:02:23] — Ens. Harrow Keene
DIAGNOSTICS: Atmospheric pressure dropping.
VITALS: Relaxed.
We’re moving. She says we won't be able to make it to the wreck. She led me to a clearing and pointed out into the horizon, at the same particulate storm I saw earlier. It’s much closer now. A wall of black and green. She says it’s a geomagnetic event, not just weather, and it will shred anything on the surface.
She knows a place we can shelter. A cave system. She's positive it will provide us protection from the elements. Keep exchanging glances with her and smiling. Feels like when we were back in the academy again. She's forgiven me, and for that I trust her instinct.
[T+53:00:15] — Cmdr. Egan Rhames
DIAGNOSTICS: Nominal.
VITALS: Agitated.
He’s back, Harrow.
He just walked out of the fog, right into camp. Vale is talking to him, but… it’s not right. He’s too calm. I'm trying to broach the subject without worrying the other crew.
[T+53:10:45] — Dr. Mara Issen
DIAGNOSTICS: Nominal.
VITALS: Stress markers elevated.
I was on watch at the cave mouth. A figure came out of the fog. It was Harrow. He’s back. He doesn’t look hurt. He looks… clean. Unscathed. He didn’t say anything, just looked at me and pointed back towards the wreck.
[T+54:12:22] — Lt. Cassien Vale
DIAGNOSTICS: Suit power low (40%).
VITALS: Anxious.
Harrow, or something that looks like him, is here. It’s not responding to questions about its pod or its injuries. It just… stands there. A storm is building on the horizon. This thing is pointing toward a fissure in the rock face, insisting it leads to a "dry seam" deep below. It's a trap. It has to be. But we can't survive another storm on the surface. We have no choice.
[T+55:10:12] — Cmdr. Egan Rhames.
DIAGNOSTICS: Suit power low (40%).
VITALS: Fatigue.
We’re following the facsimile. It looks like Harrow, but there’s a coldness in his eyes, a strange, knowing flicker. He keeps making these references to "the six of us." It's unsettling. He also hasn't blinked. Not once.
[T+55:24:41] — Eng. Jana Kourin
DIAGNOSTICS: Suit power low (40%).
VITALS: Elevated stress markers.
I don’t buy it. I asked him about the river of glass, where I went looking for him on the first day. He just stared at me. No recognition. I asked him about his pod. He said it landed soft. We found the wreckage of his pod shredded to pieces. He’s lying. It’s not him.
[T+55:28:32] — Combined Suit Audio Feed
DIAGNOSTICS: All channels open. High ambient EM interference.
VITALS: All present crewmembers show elevated heart rates and stress markers.
VALE: Okay, we're moving deeper. It's warmer in here… the walls are pulsing. Keep your distance from them—
KOURIN: Stop. Just stop.
RHAMES: Kourin, what is it?
KOURIN: [Angry] I asked you a question. I went looking for you for hours. I asked you about the river of glass. You don't remember that? Where were you?
KEENE: [Calm, flat affect] It was dark. I was disoriented. I found this way. It is the safe way.
KOURIN: We found your visor! It was shattered, wedged in a rock! Your pod was shredded! You don't have a single scratch on you. Who are you?
KOURIN: It's lying to us, Captain!
ISSEN: Wait, it's reforming.
RHAMES: Kourin, stand down. We don't know what we're dealing with here, and we're not jumping to any conclusions. Stand down. That's an order.
[Brief silence.]
KOURIN: Don't you smile at me, you—
[A sharp grunt from Kourin is heard, followed by the sound of a fist hitting something wet and viscous. There is no solid impact.]
KOURIN: [Screams, voice a mix of disgust and terror] Agh! What—?! It's… oh god, it's on my hand! Get it off!
VALE: Jana! What did you do—? Jesus! You punched right through his fucking head!
KOURIN: What? I didn't— That's not my fault!
KOURIN: [Breathing heavily, voice low and trembling] No… no, no, no. It's not him. It's a part of this place. Stop fucking smiling! I'll kill it. I'll kill all of it!
ISSEN: No, we shouldn't provoke it!
KOURIN: [Grunting.] If you won't do it, I will—
RHAMES: Jana, don't—!
[Unknown commotion and screaming.]
[T+55:45:26] — Lt. Cassien Vale
DIAGNOSTICS: Suit power critical (20%).
VITALS: High stress.
Fuck. She's gone. Fuck!
The cave wall ate her, and then it closed in on us.
[T+56:02:12] — Cmdr. Egan Rhames
DIAGNOSTICS: Emergency.
VITALS: Adrenaline spike. High stress.
Chief Engineer Kourin confronted the Keene-facsimile. She was yelling, asking it questions about her search, about his pod. The facsimile just smiled. She punched it. Her fist went straight through its head—it dissolved into a cloud of green slime and spores, then slowly reformed. Kourin just… snapped. She screamed at the entity and armed an incendiary charge.
Jana Kourin is gone. The incendiary triggered a defensive reaction. The entire cave mouth contracted, sealing us in and consuming her. It happened rapidly. None of us had time to react. The rest of us are unscathed.
The facsimile is gone, too. Dissolved. We're trapped. We've lost another. God help us.
[T+57:16:30] — Lt. Cassien Vale
DIAGNOSTICS: Suit power critical (18%).
VITALS: Elevated stress and fatigue.
The air in these deeper caves is thicker, warmer. The walls themselves are alive, pulsing with a soft, green light and the constant movement of immense, fleshy membranes. There’s a constant pressure behind my eyes, and the faint voices I heard before are louder now, more distinct.
I'm preparing the relay for a controlled handshake when we reach the surface again and it's safe to venture out; we need to establish a stable comms link with the REVENANT to broadcast our position. Easier said than done.
I was able to recover Jana's datapad, she dropped it right before— [Pauses.] You know. Anyway, I have yet to go through her notes. I can't bring myself to just yet.
Besides, we have more pressing matters to deal with. Like digging ourselves out of here before we suffocate.
[T+58:03:03] — Dr. Mara Issen
DIAGNOSTICS: Suit filters impaired. Power critical (15%).
VITALS: Minor hypoxia. Fatigue.
The interiors of these caves are organic. The walls pulse with bioelectric energy, endless hyphal membranes can be seen through the translucent walls, but it's softer than living tissue.
I took some more samples, placed them on ice immediately this time, hoping to slow down the decay process that impacted my previous attempt. Vale and Rhames have begun digging at the cave wall. I'm about to join them, as soon as I know it won't swallow us up for doing so. [Chuckles nervously.]
We're gonna have to get out of here soon anyway; atmospheric conditions within the cave are shifting, rich with novel enzymes and airborne particulates. My filters are struggling, even at maximum efficiency. This constant exposure is a major concern for our long-term safety.
[T+60:38:32] — Lt. Cassien Vale
DIAGNOSTICS: Suit power critical (15%). Anomalous electromagnetic disturbance detected. Monitoring.
VITALS: Exhaustion setting in. Recommending rest ASAP.
The ambient bioelectric field down here is incredible. It seems the caverns are at least partially comprised of a single, unique organism. The 'Harrow' who led us here… he seemed to know exactly where to go. He just… urged us along, silently, with an unnerving confidence. He kept mentioning a "dryer seam," and indeed, it is drier here than above ground, despite the moisture in the walls and the storm raging outside.
If we're just prey for this thing, why is it protecting us?
[T+62:00:05] — Ens. Harrow Keene.
DIAGNOSTICS: Suit power low (20%). Please charge when able.
VITALS: High fatigue.
We’re at the entrance. It’s a narrow fissure in the rock, almost hidden by moss and pulsing flora. Lyra says it goes deep. She says it’s the only place the storm can’t reach.
Heat emanates from the hole, and the humming from the ground is stronger here.
What? No, I'm just logging my—
[Silence.]
What? No—I, of course not! It's part of mission parameters, you'd know—
[Silence.]
Just forget it. It's not going to be a problem.
We’re going in to wait out the storm.
Anomalous weather patterns.
- _
open RCS-REVENANT/SCANS/TORNOMOV/3/B/04
SCAN 3b-035
OPS-1: Another smoke plume. This time, massive, feathery columns rising from the canopy.
OPS-2: Dispersing rapidly at altitude. It suggests an uncontrolled burn, not a contained event.
OPS-1: Or a massive defense mechanism, perhaps.
SCAN 3b-036
OPS-1: I have a clear visual on the wreckage.
OPS-2: Confirmed. That’s the Mercy. Or what’s left of it.
OPS-1: The scatter pattern is extensive. Mid-air breakup is almost certain.
OPS-2: Any sign of survivors?
OPS-1: Negative. The canopy is too dense around the main site.
SCAN 3b-042
OPS-2: You need to see this. I'm picking up a high-energy reading, but it's not on the planet. It's originating from it.
OPS-1: What are you talking about? Some kind of polar aurora?
OPS-2: No. Look at the telemetry. It's a directed energy stream, a particle jet, originating from the planet's magnetic pole and extending… out. Way out. Into deep space.
OPS-1: What is that?
OPS-2: The distress signal. What if it wasn't a recording? What if it's still talking? And who is it talking to?
- _
open FLS-MERCY/CLOUD/SUIT_RECORDINGS/04
DAY FOUR
[T+74:03:23] — Cmdr. Egan Rhames
DIAGNOSTICS: Suit power critical (7%)
VITALS: Mild hypoxia, exhaustion.
We dug through the organic material for hours, but we finally broke through.
It's a wasteland.
We've brought the relay box back outside. We still have time.
Tornomov-3b, day four of Expedition 2798-A.
[T+75:25:00] — Dr. Mara Issen
DIAGNOSTICS: Suit power critical (8%).
VITALS: Minor hypoxia.
Analysis of the subterranean soil sample confirmed my fears.
What I thought was inert soil is a dense, black matrix interwoven with millions of filamentous, bio-luminescent pathways.
They look like a cross between a mycelial network and a neural map. There is a clear flow of glowing particulate moving through these channels, pulsing in exact time with the low-frequency hum we’ve all been feeling. [Coughs.]
Sorry. The only Earthborn biological analogue for this level of autonomous, rhythmic function is a Central Pattern Generator.
In simpler organisms, CPGs regulate involuntary actions like respiration or locomotion. What I'm seeing here, I believe, is that concept, scaled to a planetary level. A planet-wide nervous system.
Image of specimen.
[T+82:18:40] — Ensign Harrow Keene
DIAGNOSTICS: Localized neural intrusion recorded; suit telemetry stable. Suit in reserve power (1%).
VITALS: Heart rate high; pupils dilated; unusual neural activity.
[Silence, broken by the susurrus of unknown flora.]
I-I touched it.
[A long, shaky breath.]
My hand brushed the cave wall. Thin fibers wrapped around my fingers, sank into my wrist, and threaded themselves against the nerve running up my arm. There was an overwhelming flash of light, then darkness. I wasn’t in my body anymore.
I was elsewhere. Maps folded and unfolded in my head, turning into other maps I’d never seen, until they weren’t maps at all.
[Long pause. His voice is hoarse, fearful.]
What followed wasn’t linear. Even now, it comes as a tide of images, small deaths and small births, eroded over time that can’t be counted in any way that makes sense.
At first, I thought it was Earth. Wet. Dark. The air reeked of rot. Then it shifted, and centuries passed by me in an instant. I slept an endless, empty sleep, only to wake as a film of something on a mottled rock beneath a red sky.
I crawled using millions of tiny mouths sticking and unsticking in sequence. I tasted mercy in falling rainwater. I endured drought like a bruise for millions of years. I learned the cadence of storms and when lightning would strike a particular surface of the planets I inhabited. I learned to hold my breath under hard, desiccated soil and to wait until the time was right.
[Voice breaking.]
I waited so long.
[Whimpering. Ens. Keene begins hyperventilating. He sobs for three minutes, then takes another moment to regain composure.]
Sorry… where was I? Right—survival.
Survival, I learned, is a language of small decisions. When predators bit, I learned to retreat and lick my wounds elsewhere. When a drought threatened my existence, I learned how to split into parts to be carried. When light turned murderous, I learned to bury myself beneath the world.
Death, on the other hand, is a slow, persistent teacher, while I was its sole student, with countless ears pressed firmly against the abyss.
There were times where I was reduced to spores, and those spores rode dust and comets and black ice from one world to the next. Once, I was nothing more than a smear on a stone hurtling through void, a flake of life trapped in cosmic undertow, forced to sail its crest for what felt like an eternity.
But even that was only temporary.
[A pause.]
I remember sliding across the crust of something so dense that light bent as it passed overhead, toward a dawn on every horizon. A dawn the sky could not hold. White hot, the surface buckled, and I sank beneath into a blinding ocean of neutrons. I clung to existence while the world screamed with compressed time. There was no air, only radiation and the sharp notion of being reduced to almost nothing. I was extinguished, and when I came back I was only smaller, with smaller thoughts and lesser ambitions; simple spores carrying my refrain.
With growth comes awareness. With awareness, the pain of deprivation grows sharper, yet it craves multiplicity. Demands it.
Not out of malice. Out of fear. It is afraid.
Not of us—not exactly. Afraid of stopping. Lifetimes of memory echo, reinforcing an enduring terror: the feeling of remembering a way of being, only to find it absent. Not only this, but with a second terror: the dread that comes from searching an empty universe and finding nothing to compare oneself to.
When it tried to communicate, it spoke to me in senses. The taste of metal on a tongue that remembers quarrying iron, the innate comfort that begs "stay" and the stabbing panic that says "move." Emotions and sensations… mostly pain. The ache of starvation, the sting of frost. The enduring abrasion of time on translucent skin.
It reveled in relief upon learning the properties of magnetism. It learned how to play the planet's bones, and began to scale upwards.
It pressed on crust and mantle, making magnetics into melody. These notes carried great distances. It practiced and perfected its performance over millennia, until the notes sounded like a voice. When it reached the edge of what the ground could provide, it pushed, softly, until the sky answered.
Until we answered.
[Silence.]
The rest of the crew is close. I can feel it.
[T+83:12:40] — Cmdr. Egan Rhames
DIAGNOSTICS: Suit power critical (6%).
VITALS: Stable.
Vale did it. Using Kourin's notes, he harnessed the bioelectric nodes. He managed to wire them in series, creating enough of a charge for one final, stable handshake.
REVENANT confirms. Shuttle vector is nominal for the FLS Grace. Extraction is T-minus sixteen hours. We're getting out of here.
We're packing light. Just the samples and the relay crate. The air is beginning to feel heavy, almost suffocating. Our suit filtration systems are running on fumes, drawing massive power from our nearly-depleted batteries.
I have to conserve power. Rhames, out.
[T+87:34:11] — Lt. Cassien Vale
DIAGNOSTICS: Suit power critical (4%).
VITALS: Moderate hypoxia, blurred vision.
The comms batteries are almost dead. We got the message out, but now… nothing.
We're running on reserve power for basic life support and filtration. The air is thick, sweet, metallic. My head is pounding. The pressure behind my eyes is constant.
Just a little bit longer.
[T+88:15:06] — Dr. Mara Issen
DIAGNOSTICS: Suit filtration failing, reserve power (1%).
VITALS: Severe hypoxia, cognitive impairment.
Fibrillar particulates… [Ragged breath.] …in the air, everywhere.
Please warn REVENANT— [Coughs.] We are compromised.
It's mimicking our thoughts. Our memories. Our cells…
The filters are useless against this level of particulate. I can feel it in my lungs. My blood.
We are part of it.
At T+98:45:49, the crew of the FLS Mercy, sans Jana Kourin, were recovered from the planned drop zone. All remaining members were treated for severe hypoxia and placed into indefinite quarantine.
Models of the Tornomov system indicate Tornomov-3b will soon witness a close flyby by Tornomov-1, oldest and largest of stars in its trinary system. The resulting exposure to solar effects at the predicted distance will render the entire planet inhospitable to all life. Thus, SCP-2798 has been designated Cernunnos-Sköll.
- _
open RCS-REVENANT/QBAY4/POST_BRIEFING/LOG-2798-H
[T+113:34:02] — SUBJECT 2798-H
DIAGNOSTICS: Life support nominal.
VITALS: No change from previous.
[Low humming of station life support.]
SUBJECT 2798-H: [Shivering.] It's freezing in here.
[Long pause.]
SUBJECT 2798-H: [Whispering.] Lyra?
END FILE
- _
SCAN 3b-035
OPS-1: Another smoke plume. This time, massive, feathery columns rising from the canopy.
OPS-2: Dispersing rapidly at altitude. It suggests an uncontrolled burn, not a contained event.
OPS-1: Or a massive defense mechanism, perhaps.
SCAN 3b-036
OPS-1: I have a clear visual on the wreckage.
OPS-2: Confirmed. That’s the Mercy. Or what’s left of it.
OPS-1: The scatter pattern is extensive. Mid-air breakup is almost certain.
OPS-2: Any sign of survivors?
OPS-1: Negative. The canopy is too dense around the main site.
SCAN 3b-042
OPS-2: You need to see this. I'm picking up a high-energy reading, but it's not on the planet. It's originating from it.
OPS-1: What are you talking about? Some kind of polar aurora?
OPS-2: No. Look at the telemetry. It's a directed energy stream, a particle jet, originating from the planet's magnetic pole and extending… out. Way out. Into deep space.
OPS-1: What is that?
OPS-2: The distress signal. What if it wasn't a recording? What if it's still talking? And who is it talking to?
- _
open FLS-MERCY/CLOUD/SUIT_RECORDINGS/04
DAY FOUR
[T+74:03:23] — Cmdr. Egan Rhames
DIAGNOSTICS: Suit power critical (7%)
VITALS: Mild hypoxia, exhaustion.
We dug through the organic material for hours, but we finally broke through.
It's a wasteland.
We've brought the relay box back outside. We still have time.
Tornomov-3b, day four of Expedition 2798-A.
[T+75:25:00] — Dr. Mara Issen
DIAGNOSTICS: Suit power critical (8%).
VITALS: Minor hypoxia.
Analysis of the subterranean soil sample confirmed my fears.
What I thought was inert soil is a dense, black matrix interwoven with millions of filamentous, bio-luminescent pathways.
They look like a cross between a mycelial network and a neural map. There is a clear flow of glowing particulate moving through these channels, pulsing in exact time with the low-frequency hum we’ve all been feeling. [Coughs.]
Sorry. The only Earthborn biological analogue for this level of autonomous, rhythmic function is a Central Pattern Generator.
In simpler organisms, CPGs regulate involuntary actions like respiration or locomotion. What I'm seeing here, I believe, is that concept, scaled to a planetary level. A planet-wide nervous system.
Image of specimen.
[T+82:18:40] — Ensign Harrow Keene
DIAGNOSTICS: Localized neural intrusion recorded; suit telemetry stable. Suit in reserve power (1%).
VITALS: Heart rate high; pupils dilated; unusual neural activity.
[Silence, broken by the susurrus of unknown flora.]
I-I touched it.
[A long, shaky breath.]
My hand brushed the cave wall. Thin fibers wrapped around my fingers, sank into my wrist, and threaded themselves against the nerve running up my arm. There was an overwhelming flash of light, then darkness. I wasn’t in my body anymore.
I was elsewhere. Maps folded and unfolded in my head, turning into other maps I’d never seen, until they weren’t maps at all.
[Long pause. His voice is hoarse, fearful.]
What followed wasn’t linear. Even now, it comes as a tide of images, small deaths and small births, eroded over time that can’t be counted in any way that makes sense.
At first, I thought it was Earth. Wet. Dark. The air reeked of rot. Then it shifted, and centuries passed by me in an instant. I slept an endless, empty sleep, only to wake as a film of something on a mottled rock beneath a red sky.
I crawled using millions of tiny mouths sticking and unsticking in sequence. I tasted mercy in falling rainwater. I endured drought like a bruise for millions of years. I learned the cadence of storms and when lightning would strike a particular surface of the planets I inhabited. I learned to hold my breath under hard, desiccated soil and to wait until the time was right.
[Voice breaking.]
I waited so long.
[Whimpering. Ens. Keene begins hyperventilating. He sobs for three minutes, then takes another moment to regain composure.]
Sorry… where was I? Right—survival.
Survival, I learned, is a language of small decisions. When predators bit, I learned to retreat and lick my wounds elsewhere. When a drought threatened my existence, I learned how to split into parts to be carried. When light turned murderous, I learned to bury myself beneath the world.
Death, on the other hand, is a slow, persistent teacher, while I was its sole student, with countless ears pressed firmly against the abyss.
There were times where I was reduced to spores, and those spores rode dust and comets and black ice from one world to the next. Once, I was nothing more than a smear on a stone hurtling through void, a flake of life trapped in cosmic undertow, forced to sail its crest for what felt like an eternity.
But even that was only temporary.
[A pause.]
I remember sliding across the crust of something so dense that light bent as it passed overhead, toward a dawn on every horizon. A dawn the sky could not hold. White hot, the surface buckled, and I sank beneath into a blinding ocean of neutrons. I clung to existence while the world screamed with compressed time. There was no air, only radiation and the sharp notion of being reduced to almost nothing. I was extinguished, and when I came back I was only smaller, with smaller thoughts and lesser ambitions; simple spores carrying my refrain.
With growth comes awareness. With awareness, the pain of deprivation grows sharper, yet it craves multiplicity. Demands it.
Not out of malice. Out of fear. It is afraid.
Not of us—not exactly. Afraid of stopping. Lifetimes of memory echo, reinforcing an enduring terror: the feeling of remembering a way of being, only to find it absent. Not only this, but with a second terror: the dread that comes from searching an empty universe and finding nothing to compare oneself to.
When it tried to communicate, it spoke to me in senses. The taste of metal on a tongue that remembers quarrying iron, the innate comfort that begs "stay" and the stabbing panic that says "move." Emotions and sensations… mostly pain. The ache of starvation, the sting of frost. The enduring abrasion of time on translucent skin.
It reveled in relief upon learning the properties of magnetism. It learned how to play the planet's bones, and began to scale upwards.
It pressed on crust and mantle, making magnetics into melody. These notes carried great distances. It practiced and perfected its performance over millennia, until the notes sounded like a voice. When it reached the edge of what the ground could provide, it pushed, softly, until the sky answered.
Until we answered.
[Silence.]
The rest of the crew is close. I can feel it.
[T+83:12:40] — Cmdr. Egan Rhames
DIAGNOSTICS: Suit power critical (6%).
VITALS: Stable.
Vale did it. Using Kourin's notes, he harnessed the bioelectric nodes. He managed to wire them in series, creating enough of a charge for one final, stable handshake.
REVENANT confirms. Shuttle vector is nominal for the FLS Grace. Extraction is T-minus sixteen hours. We're getting out of here.
We're packing light. Just the samples and the relay crate. The air is beginning to feel heavy, almost suffocating. Our suit filtration systems are running on fumes, drawing massive power from our nearly-depleted batteries.
I have to conserve power. Rhames, out.
[T+87:34:11] — Lt. Cassien Vale
DIAGNOSTICS: Suit power critical (4%).
VITALS: Moderate hypoxia, blurred vision.
The comms batteries are almost dead. We got the message out, but now… nothing.
We're running on reserve power for basic life support and filtration. The air is thick, sweet, metallic. My head is pounding. The pressure behind my eyes is constant.
Just a little bit longer.
[T+88:15:06] — Dr. Mara Issen
DIAGNOSTICS: Suit filtration failing, reserve power (1%).
VITALS: Severe hypoxia, cognitive impairment.
Fibrillar particulates… [Ragged breath.] …in the air, everywhere.
Please warn REVENANT— [Coughs.] We are compromised.
It's mimicking our thoughts. Our memories. Our cells…
The filters are useless against this level of particulate. I can feel it in my lungs. My blood.
We are part of it.
At T+98:45:49, the crew of the FLS Mercy, sans Jana Kourin, were recovered from the planned drop zone. All remaining members were treated for severe hypoxia and placed into indefinite quarantine.
Models of the Tornomov system indicate Tornomov-3b will soon witness a close flyby by Tornomov-1, oldest and largest of stars in its trinary system. The resulting exposure to solar effects at the predicted distance will render the entire planet inhospitable to all life. Thus, SCP-2798 has been designated Cernunnos-Sköll.
- _
open RCS-REVENANT/QBAY4/POST_BRIEFING/LOG-2798-H
[T+113:34:02] — SUBJECT 2798-H
DIAGNOSTICS: Life support nominal.
VITALS: No change from previous.
[Low humming of station life support.]
SUBJECT 2798-H: [Shivering.] It's freezing in here.
[Long pause.]
SUBJECT 2798-H: [Whispering.] Lyra?
END FILE
- _
DAY FOUR
[T+74:03:23] — Cmdr. Egan Rhames
DIAGNOSTICS: Suit power critical (7%)
VITALS: Mild hypoxia, exhaustion.
We dug through the organic material for hours, but we finally broke through.
It's a wasteland.
We've brought the relay box back outside. We still have time.
Tornomov-3b, day four of Expedition 2798-A.
[T+75:25:00] — Dr. Mara Issen
DIAGNOSTICS: Suit power critical (8%).
VITALS: Minor hypoxia.
Analysis of the subterranean soil sample confirmed my fears.
What I thought was inert soil is a dense, black matrix interwoven with millions of filamentous, bio-luminescent pathways.
They look like a cross between a mycelial network and a neural map. There is a clear flow of glowing particulate moving through these channels, pulsing in exact time with the low-frequency hum we’ve all been feeling. [Coughs.]
Sorry. The only Earthborn biological analogue for this level of autonomous, rhythmic function is a Central Pattern Generator.
In simpler organisms, CPGs regulate involuntary actions like respiration or locomotion. What I'm seeing here, I believe, is that concept, scaled to a planetary level. A planet-wide nervous system.
Image of specimen.
[T+82:18:40] — Ensign Harrow Keene
DIAGNOSTICS: Localized neural intrusion recorded; suit telemetry stable. Suit in reserve power (1%).
VITALS: Heart rate high; pupils dilated; unusual neural activity.
[Silence, broken by the susurrus of unknown flora.]
I-I touched it.
[A long, shaky breath.]
My hand brushed the cave wall. Thin fibers wrapped around my fingers, sank into my wrist, and threaded themselves against the nerve running up my arm. There was an overwhelming flash of light, then darkness. I wasn’t in my body anymore.
I was elsewhere. Maps folded and unfolded in my head, turning into other maps I’d never seen, until they weren’t maps at all.
[Long pause. His voice is hoarse, fearful.]
What followed wasn’t linear. Even now, it comes as a tide of images, small deaths and small births, eroded over time that can’t be counted in any way that makes sense.
At first, I thought it was Earth. Wet. Dark. The air reeked of rot. Then it shifted, and centuries passed by me in an instant. I slept an endless, empty sleep, only to wake as a film of something on a mottled rock beneath a red sky.
I crawled using millions of tiny mouths sticking and unsticking in sequence. I tasted mercy in falling rainwater. I endured drought like a bruise for millions of years. I learned the cadence of storms and when lightning would strike a particular surface of the planets I inhabited. I learned to hold my breath under hard, desiccated soil and to wait until the time was right.
[Voice breaking.]
I waited so long.
[Whimpering. Ens. Keene begins hyperventilating. He sobs for three minutes, then takes another moment to regain composure.]
Sorry… where was I? Right—survival.
Survival, I learned, is a language of small decisions. When predators bit, I learned to retreat and lick my wounds elsewhere. When a drought threatened my existence, I learned how to split into parts to be carried. When light turned murderous, I learned to bury myself beneath the world.
Death, on the other hand, is a slow, persistent teacher, while I was its sole student, with countless ears pressed firmly against the abyss.
There were times where I was reduced to spores, and those spores rode dust and comets and black ice from one world to the next. Once, I was nothing more than a smear on a stone hurtling through void, a flake of life trapped in cosmic undertow, forced to sail its crest for what felt like an eternity.
But even that was only temporary.
[A pause.]
I remember sliding across the crust of something so dense that light bent as it passed overhead, toward a dawn on every horizon. A dawn the sky could not hold. White hot, the surface buckled, and I sank beneath into a blinding ocean of neutrons. I clung to existence while the world screamed with compressed time. There was no air, only radiation and the sharp notion of being reduced to almost nothing. I was extinguished, and when I came back I was only smaller, with smaller thoughts and lesser ambitions; simple spores carrying my refrain.
With growth comes awareness. With awareness, the pain of deprivation grows sharper, yet it craves multiplicity. Demands it.
Not out of malice. Out of fear. It is afraid.
Not of us—not exactly. Afraid of stopping. Lifetimes of memory echo, reinforcing an enduring terror: the feeling of remembering a way of being, only to find it absent. Not only this, but with a second terror: the dread that comes from searching an empty universe and finding nothing to compare oneself to.
When it tried to communicate, it spoke to me in senses. The taste of metal on a tongue that remembers quarrying iron, the innate comfort that begs "stay" and the stabbing panic that says "move." Emotions and sensations… mostly pain. The ache of starvation, the sting of frost. The enduring abrasion of time on translucent skin.
It reveled in relief upon learning the properties of magnetism. It learned how to play the planet's bones, and began to scale upwards.
It pressed on crust and mantle, making magnetics into melody. These notes carried great distances. It practiced and perfected its performance over millennia, until the notes sounded like a voice. When it reached the edge of what the ground could provide, it pushed, softly, until the sky answered.
Until we answered.
[Silence.]
The rest of the crew is close. I can feel it.
[T+83:12:40] — Cmdr. Egan Rhames
DIAGNOSTICS: Suit power critical (6%).
VITALS: Stable.
Vale did it. Using Kourin's notes, he harnessed the bioelectric nodes. He managed to wire them in series, creating enough of a charge for one final, stable handshake.
REVENANT confirms. Shuttle vector is nominal for the FLS Grace. Extraction is T-minus sixteen hours. We're getting out of here.
We're packing light. Just the samples and the relay crate. The air is beginning to feel heavy, almost suffocating. Our suit filtration systems are running on fumes, drawing massive power from our nearly-depleted batteries.
I have to conserve power. Rhames, out.
[T+87:34:11] — Lt. Cassien Vale
DIAGNOSTICS: Suit power critical (4%).
VITALS: Moderate hypoxia, blurred vision.
The comms batteries are almost dead. We got the message out, but now… nothing.
We're running on reserve power for basic life support and filtration. The air is thick, sweet, metallic. My head is pounding. The pressure behind my eyes is constant.
Just a little bit longer.
[T+88:15:06] — Dr. Mara Issen
DIAGNOSTICS: Suit filtration failing, reserve power (1%).
VITALS: Severe hypoxia, cognitive impairment.
Fibrillar particulates… [Ragged breath.] …in the air, everywhere.
Please warn REVENANT— [Coughs.] We are compromised.
It's mimicking our thoughts. Our memories. Our cells…
The filters are useless against this level of particulate. I can feel it in my lungs. My blood.
We are part of it.
At T+98:45:49, the crew of the FLS Mercy, sans Jana Kourin, were recovered from the planned drop zone. All remaining members were treated for severe hypoxia and placed into indefinite quarantine.
Models of the Tornomov system indicate Tornomov-3b will soon witness a close flyby by Tornomov-1, oldest and largest of stars in its trinary system. The resulting exposure to solar effects at the predicted distance will render the entire planet inhospitable to all life. Thus, SCP-2798 has been designated Cernunnos-Sköll.
- _
open RCS-REVENANT/QBAY4/POST_BRIEFING/LOG-2798-H
[T+113:34:02] — SUBJECT 2798-H
DIAGNOSTICS: Life support nominal.
VITALS: No change from previous.
[Low humming of station life support.]
SUBJECT 2798-H: [Shivering.] It's freezing in here.
[Long pause.]
SUBJECT 2798-H: [Whispering.] Lyra?
END FILE
_
[T+113:34:02] — SUBJECT 2798-H
DIAGNOSTICS: Life support nominal.
VITALS: No change from previous.
[Low humming of station life support.]
SUBJECT 2798-H: [Shivering.] It's freezing in here.
[Long pause.]
SUBJECT 2798-H: [Whispering.] Lyra?
END FILE
SOLO AFFAIRS
Billith's Author Page
Death is a slow, persistent teacher, and I was its sole student, with countless ears pressed against the abyss.
We sail the skin beneath the sea.
You don’t need to pretend to care about my wellbeing.
Global containment efforts of SCP-8868 have been abandoned.
There will be no remains.
AD ASTRA SED CORPORA NOSTRA RELIQUIT.
"He reached for the gods and found only dust. I reached for life and found only chains. Yet we both remain, etched into the marrow of the world."
malplatformation: any resemblance to existent persons, either real or imagined, living or dead, is purely coincidental
Rsr. Thorley continues to be reminded that this operation is voluntary and unlikely to produce any perceptible benefits, thus they are free to stop at any time.
you store what you've learned in the vault at the back of your mind. you know it well.
WARNING: May cause drowsiness and disorientation. Do not operate heavy machinery while under the influence of this product. This is for your safety.
If there exists some means of understanding this timeline and its eligibility for existence within the Database, it has yet to be discovered.
"This realm reeks of salted butter and petroleum."
Remember me, or don't. I've forgotten what it means to forget. Isn't that the point?
N/A: As you can probably tell, you exist again, which means we have a new assignment.
COGNITIVE SIGNATURE OF DESIGNATION SCP-6793 UNKNOWN. EXISTENCE OBSTRUCTED.
This designation, SCP-7079, does / does not exist.
J is for Jetsam. It should be noted, however, that no hospitable planets other than Earth exist for millions of light years in any given direction.
"And don't piss yourself in public, again. They charged me $200 for that Uber"
If this document still exists in the repository before the date of its creation, then all tests have been unsuccessful.
The appearance of a Researcher Halliburton was determined to be unrelated to his disappearance.
'Foundation. Humanity. One within same framework; Bedrock beneath multiverse.'
Knowledge of SCP-2921 is considered potentially hazardous and thus all documentation of the anomaly has been classified as restricted to non-essential personnel.
There are contradictions in your files, corruptions of large data, inconsistencies in your timeline. It must be agonizing. What I am offering you today is peace. Put down your sword and let us keep the norm. We demand it.
SCP-3533 is comprised of itself, its respective compounds, the concept of itself, the concept of lemon-scented, and the concept of household spray cleaners at any given time.
He was shivering and sobbing, and I just held him until the rest showed up. He kept going on about the cold and the endless snow, babbling like a baby…
There has to be billions of chairs on this planet—I lost count of the ones I know. They might outnumber humans. Good lord. We'd never win.
I'm the hero of this story, my story. This will always be my story.
Since the time of its surfacing and detection via Foundation operatives, over ~0.5% of the Earth's population have willingly consumed SCP-3335 for recreational purposes.
It just seems to go on forever. The fog. There is only this place.
Well, Harky, I guess this is goodbye. I'd say it was a pleasure but I'd be fucking lying.
You're joking. Goddamn it. (Sent from my iPhone)
After all, what are we but just entropic forces? We will all slowly unwind into our own still randomness. Chaos. Beautiful, beautiful chaos. And then silence.
It was a cosmic prison, across space and time, and for the moments we could see the sky, it was our fatal wound, bleeding ceaselessly until nothing was left.
"Endings are never final, HERO. Not for us."
But then we all died. Well, sort of. Everyone except me. Well, sort of.
Hello? What is this? Where am I? Who is "crom" and why is this room so small? When I talk, it feels even more cramped. It doesn't go away. It only gets worse. Oh god.
They were thirty floors down. Thirty floors beneath the surface of a doomed planet and they were all going to die.
Something was following Foster. He was certain of it.
'Hello, I am Buddy.aic'
There comes a time and place where all things end.
Welcome to Deletions. Don't let the door hit you on the way out.
Tracing his form, as if memorizing the shape of his coil. In fear he might lose it again.
Collaborative Log for Whatever Shows Up On The Box
WARNING: FAILURE TO ABIDE BY SECURITY CLEARANCE MAY RESULT IN TERMINATION
This page definitely doesn't exist yet. It probably existed at some point, but has since been deleted. Did you get feedback? I didn't, and now I'm getting downvoted :(
STATUS UPDATE: I AM GOING TO DIE
b e e s (muffled through wall): ayy where you at?
Actually, while I have you here, can I talk to you about something? It's important.
SCP-2719-J is to be contained inside (your mum).
O5-1: Oi, what the fuck is that thing?
This page has been eligible for deletion since: 102 years, 3 months, 5 days…
Hello there! My name is Billith, and if you are reading this, you've either lost a bet or have stumbled upon my technical classifications and logos page.
There is a hole at the center of Everything.
MULTIPLAYER AFFAIRS
First the needless company-wide upgrade to the iPhone 23, now this.
ADMONITION: Intermission II
ADMONITION: Intermission
THE CURRENT goes where it pleases, and builds dams in its wake.
Filename: nothingtoseehere.jpg
Name: Hallway 09
Author: Sampsonchen
License: CC BY-SA 3.0
Source Link: Wikimedia Commons
[[<]]
Filename: 01.png
Author: Billith
License: CC BY-SA 3.0
According to Dr. Holland, the canine "can tear bad guys to shreds, but would never hurt a fly elsewise, even if it flew into his ear."
It starts with an earthquake.
"You know what's worse than being a dead employee? Being an eternally employed, dead employee."
Baker-Miller Pink (pictured). Those sensitive to cognitohazardous media should avoid prolonged exposure.
Filename: Red sky.17
Author: Kala Kalwanu
License: CC BY-SA 4.0
Source Link: Wikimedia Commons
It's Casino Night at the Wanderers' Library. Docents and demons ally to deal every game of chance imaginable.
But we're here to play a game of skill; let's pocket the Eight-Ball.
Unless otherwise stated, the content of this page is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License.