Feng Zho

A second wave Elysian scientist turned reluctant fighter in a new land, Feng tries to understand the mysterious forces controlling reality on Next Island while trying to uncover what happened to his family.

Log Date/Time (Local): 41y_95d_0101m
Log Date/Time (Universal/Calypso Time): 55Yac_45D_1930

Specimen: Scale Pendant

Ostensibly, the appearance of this sample seems to be a scale from the Daudaormur creatures in the bogs and marshlands near the enchanted forest. The shape, color, and texture of the scale-like object appears comparable to that of the Daudaormur. However the size of the scale is several times larger than that which exists on an actual Daudaormur. Additionally, after spectroscopic analysis, the elemental composition and density is unlike any biological material I know about found on Next Island.

I would conjecture that this scale is actually manufactured rather than of biological origin. My understanding of biology of the creatures on Next Island leads me to believe that this can not originate by any natural means. Additionally, I do not understand the energy signatures that are being emitted by this specimen, except to say that it seems to match some of the interference I have been experiencing in my work to perform the teleporter install at the outpost, much to my dismay.

On a whim, I modeled the expected resistance to different damage types using my composition and energy measurements.I am uncertain where the Resa woman acquired this object, but I may know why the Stel were after her. The material seems highly useful for reinforcing against damage from close quarter combat as well as resistance to acid venoms.

At the risk of sounding insane, I have been having extremely vivid dreams. I remember being called towards a cave, of ancient battles, and oversized Daudaormurs. The dreams recur, and it is as if some force is drawing me towards something, but I don’t know what it is. But the dreams seem so real, as if I can almost touch it. I know it is just a dream though. I think.

“So what did you find?” Linara asked, as I completed my study of the scale pendant from the Resa woman.

“I’m not sure,” I replied. “How is she doing?”

“Still asleep. Her wounds are fully regenerated, but it may take some time for her mind to forget the shock of her wounds.”

I looked towards the resting form in the bed at the far corner of the room. “What a strange day,” I muttered.

“I’ll say,” Linara replied with a smile. “So what did you determine from all your gadgets?”

“The pendant is not from Next Island. Or rather, it doesn’t seem to be of any natural origin on Next Island. I’ve never seen anything like it,” I said.

Linara sat quite for a minute. “So, any idea where it is from?”

“No, but I did find the same energy signatures from it that are interfering with my teleporter install. It is like the noise interference preventing me from frequency matching with the network is the same as that emanating from that pendant. I’ve never seen matter produce energy signatures like that. I’m in uncharted territory here. Oh, and modeling suggests the material has military uses for armor reinforcement. It is as advanced if not more than any of the reinforcing materials we have available to us.”

Linara raised an eyebrow, “So how does a Resa come to acquire such an item, one would have to ask.”

“I don’t know. I need to find out,” I replied.

“We should report this to the commander then,” Linara suggested.

“Yeah, but I want to get the full story from the Resa first,” I replied as I looked over to the sleeping form of the Resa woman. “I need to understand what is going on, before it gets hushed up and hidden in some archive somewhere.”

Linara nodded, and the sleeping form on the bed began to stir.

Log Date/Time (Local): 41y_94d_1856m
Log Date/Time (Universal/Calypso Time): 55Yac_45D_1345

I’m not sure who wrote the previous entry 41y_94d_1836m in my research log, but it was not me. Unfortunately it seems these science log devices do not have a delete function, so I’m left with having to write this journal entry disavowing my previous journal entry. Again, if anyone is reading log entry 41y_94d_1836m, the author is not me (Feng Zho). I don’t know who inserted it into my journal.

On a side note, they should really introduce a security protocol that includes identification/authentication into these devices. Encryption would also be useful.


I turned around and quickly ran back up the path, but not before seeing one of the Stel brigands draw a weapon and fire it in my direction. As I dove into the bush, I felt a pain in my right foot, and smelled the scent of burnt flesh.

Don’t look, I told myself.

I looked, and nearly passed out.

There was a 2 centimeter hole above my right ankle. The laser blast cauterized my blood vessels, so there was no bleeding, but I could see bone where the blast and burned a hole in my lower leg. I attempted to steel myself as the wave of pain kicked in. I hope you may never know the sensation of having a 2 centimeter diameter hole burnt out of your leg.

Nice job buddy, I told myself sardonically. No restoration chip and no armor and a lone walk all by your lonesome. Will have to rethink some life choices. I heard the two Stel walk up the path towards me. I reached for my pistol. My holster was still empty. I had forgotten to pick up my laser pistol before starting to run back to the outpost to get help. There I was, totally defenseless on the floor with a hole in my leg, going into shock. Not a good look.

The two Stel came into view, with their weapons drawn. The tall Stel man had a thick beard and black hair, and a scar on his right forehead. He spoke first. “So, where’s the Resa?” he said in a tone that suggested he really didn’t care if I lived or died…

“I don’t know what you are talking about,” I replied.

The other Stel snickered. “Let’s just kill this one and go find the Resa. I’m sure she couldn’t have gotten far with her wounds,” the female Stel said, as she raised her rifle to my chest.

The male Stel pushed the laser rifle barrel down towards the ground. “Yes, we will, but I’d like to know a bit more about the Elysium’s plans in this area. I see there’s a teleporter being installed here. Want to tell me a bit more about your supply delivery schedule? A little help and I can reduce unnecessary pain in your demise,” the male Stel said, chortling in amusement at himself, and pointing his laser pistol at my left leg.

I said nothing, and closed my eyes as I braced myself to get shot again. I heard a laser blast followed by the smell of burnt flesh. But this time, I felt no pain. The female Stel started screaming.

I opened my eyes. In front of me was the lifeless body of the male Stel lying face down in the dirt with a hole in his chest that was still smoking. I swallowed back the urge to throw up, as I could see the Stel’s innards. His body was already vanishing as whichever Stel revival was rebuilding his physical body. I could see Linara and Julian standing before me with their guns drawn. I felt tears of relief well up in my eyes.

The female Stel, still screaming, had run off into the brush. Without a word, Julian ran off to chase after her. I looked at Linara. “So happy to see you guys,” I said weakly.

“Yeah, we had to send the search party after you didn’t come back right away like you said you would,” she replied. “Nice hole in the leg you got there.”

“Haha, so funny.”

Linara grinned and started applying her restoration chip on my wounds. The hole in my leg got smaller and smaller as my tissues and bones regenerated, until my wound was fully healed. The miracles of modern science! I rubbed my leg where the wound had been. “I’ll never get used to that,” I mulled. In the distance, there was a laser blast. Two minutes later, we saw Julian come back out of the brush towards us.

“She won’t be bothering us here for a while,” Julian said. Julian was older, probably in his late forties, with a large build but moved in battle like a dancer that one might find disconcerting if you have never seen him fight. In contrast to Linara’s lighthearted personality, Julian was serious, and terse in his conversations.

“Let’s get you back to the outpost,” Linara said, as I picked myself up, testing my newly healed right leg.

“Not yet,” I replied, “I need to pick up my laser pistol, and we need to help a wounded Resa.” I started walking towards the spot where I had left the wounded Resa woman, and ignored the very confused looks on Linara and Julian’s faces.


Journal Entry 3:

Log Date/Time (Local): 41y_94d_1836m
Log Date/Time (Universal/Calypso Time): 55Yac_45D_1325

Some personal ramblings.

I find it more difficult to understand the EA’s stance towards the native Stel and Resa tribes. While they have caused and continue to cause some chaos during the establishment of the second wave colonies, they were part of the Elysium during the first wave colonization of Next Island. The majority see the Stel/Resa tribes as a nuisance, but they are our brothers and sisters from the past. The official line is that the Stel and Resa tribes consist of first wave colonists corrupted by Demra. That raises many questions. Were they corrupted prior to arrival to Next Island, or did the corruption occur here. As far as I have seen, there has been no proof to substantiate the tribes’ corruption. Is their current scavenging and raiding behavior a product of their biology, or simply of their circumstance? I take the stance that we should extend a hand to our lost brothers and sisters. However, my opinion is extremely unpopular within the alliance, and I keep these thoughts to myself, lest I find myself in the uncomfortable position of having to answer questions regarding my loyalties.

But our problems with Stel and Resa belies a larger question about Demra, and I believe a moral quandary. The Elysium was at the forefront of identifying the Demra corruption, and the negative impacts that it has had on our organized, peaceful society. But in identifying an antagonist, we have allowed ourselves to group human beings into two groups, and shun all those we deem to be corrupted. We have neither understood how and if Demra is spread. We have not identified a cure. We have even used Demra as an excuse to ostracize those whose behavior we deem unacceptable.

The effect of Demra on humanity’s genetics and their behavior likely results in a range of different outcomes depending on how the gene is expressed. All of this is conjecture, but can we simply turn our backs on those we deem to be “corrupted”? While we may see the Stel and Resa as a nuisance, their resourcefulness has helped them manage to survive in a forsaken landscape for decades. What really is Demra?

I’ll leave these thoughts for today, there is much work to be done.


I checked the Resa’s wrist for a pulse. She was still alive. A lump had formed where the woman’s skull hit a large stone on the floor where she fell. I winced, thinking about the headache she would have when she woke up, if she survived. I hope her skull was not cracked. I checked my back pocket for my comms unit, and groaned in my head. I had left it back at the outpost, which Linara had told me some number of times to never do. So I’ll never be hearing the end of that I am sure.

While I did not want to leave her lying on the floor in the brush if those looking for her were nearby, I also did not want to risk injuring the woman further if her neck was broken. I decided I would have to take the chance and leave her on the brush floor and come back with help. I could run the half mile back to the outpost, then grab a strider and come back here with reinforcements.

I used my shirt to bandage the woman’s still bleeding leg as well as I could. Then I saw it again. The woman’s green, iridescent pendant was lying next to her head on the floor. The chain from which it hung must have broken around her neck in the fall. I could now see the pendant was in the shape of a reptilian scale. The pendant almost seemed to glow on its own, and it was unexpectedly large for something one might wear around one’s neck. Not wanting to leave it there on the floor of the brush to get lost, I picked up the scale pendant and broken chain. The pendant was heavy and had some heft. It almost felt like a real scale, but I did not know of any creature with a scale of this size, and with its unnatural seeming properties. I slipped it into my back pocket and started running out of the brush and down the path back to the outpost, when I saw the figures of two Elysian outpost guards crouched on the path in the distance.

“Help!” I yelled at the figures. “I have a hurt Resa woman back here.”

The figures broke into a run towards me. Thank goodness Linara and Julian came to look for me, I thought. Then I froze. As the figures approached, I realized they were not Linara and Julian after all. Based on their dress, I had just yelled out to a pair of Stel brigands.

Journal Entry 2:

Log Date/Time (Local): 41y_92d_1545m
Log Date/Time (Universal/Calypso Time): 55Yac_42D_1234

Need to ensure the revival terminal at outpost x1357y902 is functional. It is currently installed and powered, however, there has not been an opportunity to do a live test (NOTE: irony). There is no standard protocol for testing revival terminals on humans. Killing someone and then seeing if they revive would probably be a breach of ethics… The best that the revival techs here have come up with is sending some poor screecher or sand boar through the terminal. Some standard protocol should be instituted by the EDL, but that is way beyond my paygrade.

While the revival regulations turn a blind eye to revival of animals, there are strict rules regarding using the revival for humans that are still alive, with very large penalties if you were found to violate them. Some less ethical people had been found to bypass the death condition on activation of revival, and as a result, the regulators on CDF were forced to deal with some small bands of cloned troublemakers on Calypso, though generally these folks had a self-destructive streak and didn’t get along well with themselves. Generally, the repeat offenders ended up losing access to the revival network. Which makes the penalty of abusing the revival system worse than death. I suspect we may see the sporadic case also here on Next Island.

The revival system is as close to witchcraft as a technological device will get in my opinion. The initial attempts at its development failed as scientists attempted to clone the physical form, then replicate the chemical reactions that occurred inside the revival subjects body. This only resulted in a shell of a being in a vegetative state, which is pretty creepy if you think about it. The breakthrough in teleporter technology coincided with advances in mindforce. The ability to travel between dimensions unlocked signatures of our being and consciousness that could not be seen before by science and turned out to be the missing puzzle piece for replicating a person that had a ‘soul’. The mind signatures were analog, so they were analyzed in the frequency domain and stored for a sufficient bandwidth so that imprinting these stored signatures on the physical and energy forms of the clones resulted in an indistinguishable being from the original, at least to our perception. But what might be lost in the analog to digital conversion of our souls, might keep one awake at night.

My mind tried to work, but having a laser pistol pointed at your melon puts a damper on brain function. The woman in Resa garb, keeping the pistol near my head, motioned for me to move off the path leading back to the outpost. I slowly moved as she told me to, trying to slow down my breathing, adrenaline now rushing in my body. Think damn it, I thought to myself.

It was strange that a Resa would decide to go for the direct confrontation route. It was even stranger that they would do so out in broad daylight so close to a Elysium outpost. I glanced at the woman briefly. Her hands shook, though she was doing her best to steady it. There was blood on her leggings and on the elbows of her leather shirt. I caught a bruise and scratches on her cheek that was hidden, barely visible on her face in her headwrap. And she walked with a slight limp. It looked like she had been in a bad fight.

“What do you want?” I spoke softly, trying to steady my voice so it did not betray my fear as we moved out of sight of the outpost into the brush near the path. She did not answer me, gripping my pistol tightly in her hands and pressed into my back. Her eyes, darting towards the outpost and me, revealed fright rather than malice. My eyes caught a quick glimpse of an iridescent green pendant she wore around her neck on a leather strap before she quickly hid it again beneath her shirt.

Once we were about two hundred feet away from the path, the woman with my pistol turned me around. “Where’s your med kit?” she asked, her voice quivering with fear or pain, or maybe both.

“Look, are you hurt? I’m sorry, but I left my restoration chip back at the camp, but if you are hurt, maybe we can go back to the camp together and we can try to help you, if you aren’t trying to kill me,” I replied, trying to defuse the situation, but speaking a bit to quickly. Now that we were a bit closer to one another, I could see a gash in the woman’s right leg. The blood on her leather leggings looked fresh.

The woman cursed quietly. “I need that restoration chip,” she whispered to no one in particular.

I took a deep breath to try to calm myself. “Why don’t we go to the outpost, and we can look at your wounds. I promise nothing will happen to you, and we can forget about the gun and all that,” I said, trying to be reassuring.

“No, we can’t do that. There are people tracking me, and I can’t risk them finding me here,” she replied. “And I know the Elysium Alliance doesn’t really give a damn about the Resa. You all just think we are nothing but scavengers anyways and don’t really care what happens to us. So no, I’ll take my chances.”

“You don’t really have much choice,” I said. “It looks like you are losing quite a bit of blood. You need help.” Why did she think she was being followed, and who were they? Who was this Resa woman? I thought.

“Look, I’m going to need you to get me into that outpost so we can get that restoration chip. Then we are going to both leave the camp, so they can’t use you to track me down,” she said in a weak but determined tone.

Then her eyes rolled back, and she collapsed onto the floor.

Journal Entry 1:

Log Date/Time (Local): 41y_92d_1054m
Log Date/Time (Universal/Calypso Time): 55Yac_42D_0423

Attempts at merging the new teleporter install at new outpost x1357y902 with the Next Island teleportation network has so far been a dismal failure. I have performed the standard frequency matching procedure five times now over three days, and each time, the same result, which is to say the new teleporter installation remains unmerged with the network. From experience, I knew frequency tuning procedure was a finicky process, but the issue is starting to appear to be more than a problem of difficulty.
My instruments have detected a significant amount of anomalous noise, which my directional detectors suggest is coming from the south. The noise is likely interfering with our ability to establish a resonant link between us and the network. Elysium scouts have also reported significant amounts of Haruspex activity in that area. The relationship between the Elysium settlers and Haruspex is good, so there is not much desire to ‘rock the boat’ and confront the Haruspex regarding the energy signatures emanating from that region. However, if we wish to establish a teleporter link to this outpost location to extend and protect the Elysium’s settled territories, some confrontation may be unavoidable. Within the Elysium, there are some who question the motivation of the Haruspex and how they can be convinced to follow the Elysium’s philosophical teachings. There are rumors too that the Haruspex have the capability for interdimensional travel, without the materials and technology that the Elysium Alliance has spent dearly to develop. But those are rumors, and I find them somewhat laughable. But I digress. My likely solutions will be some apparatus to reduce the incoming noise, or, god forbid, having to determine the source of the noise. I shall try the standard protocol one more time, and make my report and suggestions to the Elysium Defense Laboratory.

Having ended my log entry, my mind returned to the problem at hand. My inability to achieve success with teleporter network merge was immensely frustrating. If only I could find an error I had made in my parameter calculations that could fix the problem. I slowly lowered my head until my forehead bumped the edge of my laboratory table. Thump. Thump. Thump. Perhaps I was being a bit melodramatic, but thumping my head against a desk seemed an appropriate and therapeutic response to the frustration I was feeling.


Thump. Thump. Thump.
I heard a chuckle behind me, and quickly raised my head from the table, grinning sheepishly at the figure in the doorway. “Having trouble?” Linara asked, sounding a bit amused.
“That’s embarrassing,” I replied sheepishly. “And yeah. The last attempt ended up with the exact same results as the previous four. You know that saying about the definition of insanity and all that…”
“What’s that?” Linara asked.
“Something about doing the same thing and expecting different results or something like that. It would be easy if there was an error I made that I could find. But I’m almost 100% certain I’m correctly calibrating the teleportal frequencies. There is just so much noise here.”
“You’ll figure it out,” Linara assured me. “The future of the Elysium Alliance is in your hands, Feng!”
“Yeah, no pressure,” I grumbled, before realizing Linara was teasing me.
“I’m just kidding! It’ll work out. You should take a break and let those thoughts ruminate a bit in your subconscious,” Linara suggested. I was about to say how much other work I had to get done before the end of my assignment, but stopped myself. “Yes, perhaps that’s a good idea to take a break,” I replied.
Linara was one of the guards stationed at this outpost, which stood at the northern edge of Elysium Alliance territory. She was tall, with curly dark hair. Probably a few years younger than me, though I never asked. Her friendly, bubbly demeanor belied her expertise for taking down enemies with speed and precision, which I had the chance to see when the outpost was ambushed by drakes the first night I arrived. She single handedly managed to bring down two vulcan drakes. From the other guards in the outpost, the word is that Linara spent time fighting alongside the New Elysian Order in the north.
I stood up from my laboratory table. The stiffness in my legs corroborated the fact that I had indeed been sitting for too long. “I’m going to go for a walk,” I said, to no one in particular.
“Want me to come along?” Linara offered.
“No, I’m okay. Thanks,” I replied, as I grabbed my laser pistol from the wall and holstered it. “I can use some alone time to think. I won’t go far”
“Alright, but be careful out there. I don’t want to write a casualty report for you.”
“I’ll be fine. Just a few steps around the shelter, and I’ll be right back.”
I left the tent, and walked north towards the river that ran north of our outpost base. I came to the place where the river from the north forked and became two, one flowing east, and one west. The recent storms had made the rivers choppy and turbulent. I loved watching the river. When my mind was consumed by a problem, I found the rushing river could wash my worries away, and bring me back to a calm center. I stood hypnotized, watching the river current drive water to crash against the rocks in the river.
I heard a crack from a branch breaking behind me. I spun around. In front of me, about 20 feet away, was a woman that I did not recognize. Her face was partially wrapped in a cloth, and she wore a leather and cloth shirt. Her clothing suggested she was a Resa nomad, but why was she here, and alone? My hand went to the holster of my gun. It was empty. I groaned internally. You damn idiot, I thought. You are in for it now…
The woman raised her hands and pointed something at me, and I froze. In the woman’s hand was my pistol, now pointed at my head.

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