While mood is not dangerously low, everyone is feeling a little stressed lately. Fortunately we have arrived at the one time a year we can hold one of the most notable religious festivals - The Cystia Fiesta. This grand party fills the storeroom with swirling lights, pounding music and cool smoke and vapors. As all the official members of the colony partied in a most hardy fashion, the sound of the party pumping through the walls inspired Mitsuya to educate Milton about the glory of the Cystian faith. He did not convert, but every conversation about it helps.

During the Fiesta everyone is hanging around and having a good human time, like humans do. This is exemplified by the totally normal conversations that Fresh and Anthraxus, both known humans with right thinking, have during the party. We don't know if he is lying but during the party Bezro also confides that it is his birthday! Now slightly older, Bezro can now try to do all kinds of useful things around the base. Perhaps not all that surprisingly given his animal calling ability, Bezro proves to have a remarkable natural talent for dealing with animals.

As part of growing up, Bezro not only developed his own quirk, that being kleptomania, but we also had to pick a new additional trait for him. Between being thin skinned and having an interest in drugs, and given that we will be moving in to drug production soonish, it only makes sense to go with the chemical interest. As the Fiesta starts to draw to a close we intercept more radio transmissions talking about anotther seemingly abandoned genetics research lab. This is shockingly like the abandoned lab quest that we already opted out of, but we have some time to think about it (and to make more food).

As the Fiesta officially comes to a close, everyone's moods are quite high and everyone is feeling good. Everyone returns to work. RK goes back to working on recruiting Mitsuya and converting Milton. Fresh jumps back on researching. Anthraxus works on mining steel and hauling wood and doing some construction work, including our first masterwork creation, a pew to sit in while listening to readings. Bezro draws on the floors alot, but also helps move some big stone chunks around.


As Fresh stands in the pouring rain to study the monolith and everyone else is puttering about there is a sudden surprise! Despite her recent conversion to Cystia and Milton's near conversion, Mitsuya leads a two man jailbreak, leveraging the obvious gap in our security - the still uncompleted vent to allow the the prison room to be cooled. Anthraxus immediately responds by charging in and opening fire with his shotgun. The first hit distracts Mitsuya from fleeing, and he blows her left off with the next shot. Milton is no fool and immediately heads for the hills as Fresh sets off in pursuit.

Having lost her other leg and an ear, and with fresh blood pouring down from just above her right peg leg, Mitsuya nearly bleeds out before Anthraxus is able to get her stabilized. With Fresh just far enough back that she is only able to take potshots with her hand cannon. It is only with a final lucky headshot that she is able to stagger Milton enough to prevent his escape. With some care she stabilizes him in the field and carries him back to the base.

While Anthraxus and Fresh worked on patching up the rebellious prisoners, RK had headed over to the steel mine as a botched construction attempt on the last cooler for the freezer had caused a sizable amount of steel to be wasted. While he was hard at work digging out ore, a lemur went mad with bloodlust and attacked RK. With his hatchet, RK was able to kill the lemur with only superficial wounds. Even so it was a harrowing situation as you never know when an infection may take hold in a wound.

While Bezro seems pretty happy with how the colony is going there is one element that really bothers the little boy. The fact that his bed is in the same room as a literal slavering monster. We will need to focus on making more bedrooms for folks, especially if Milton and Mitsuya give in and join us. As we are considering the best way to go about that, RK finally successfully converts Milton to the Cystian faith. It is only a matter of time until we have the entire Gazette staff together once again.

Flush with his success of yet another conversion, RK declares that now is the time. He gathers everyone together at the ritual circle near the monolith and begins the ritual that has been put together by himself and Fresh in her research. Strange dark energies began to swirl around the ritual circle and the candles flicker and dance in the rain and sudden wind. RK continues to chant softly, focusing on the most depressing and worrisome aspects of life and existance.


As the ritual completes a pulse of dark psychic energy washes out and away. As RK loses consciousness, he can feel somewhere not all that far away, a soft answering grunt. Before RK regains consciousness, a group of a single animated boar corpse shuffles into the area. This is the fourth anomaly entity we have found of the seven basic types. Fortunately, unless it wanders in close enough to see someone before it returns to death.

As the zombie boar shuffles around the periphary of the map, Bezro begins to exercise his newly wrought ability to mine trying to finish digging out the prison room. While that is going in RK comes in to continue his ongoing conversion attempts with Milton. Surprisingly Milton doesn't seem to understand what birthdays are, but RK sets him straight.


Meanwhile, the ritual has only peaked Fresh's interest in investigating the monolith. The fervent study has lead to a suprising breakthrough in understanding. We now know that the monolith is not only a mostly closed doorway but also a conduit of psychic energy, linking our monolith with some unknown, distance place. Because of this breakthrough, we should be able to research anomalous impacts of the monolith quicker going forward. Only a few hours after this discovery, we were pleasantly surprised with a small trio of traders from the Barga collective that showed up.

RK negotiated with them, trading gold and a couple of weapons for a small pile of pemmican. Mitsuya, now fitted with two wooden peg legs, recovers enough to begin to move about. Showing how ready they both are to join the community, Milton and Mitsuya show off their own comedic stylings.

Anthraxus remains focused on work in the wild around the base. Part of this includes cutting down the ominous Harbringer trees that has sprouted earlier. These fleshy plant masses were now taller than Anthraxus himself, their pink and red fronds in constant movement, even when there is no wind blowing. He cut them both down, leaving behind log-like twisted meat. It smells and looks vile, so for now we are leaving it in the field for the wild animals to devour. As he heads back to the steel mine, he hears a vicious growling from the undergrowth. A cougar has decided to hunt him!


Anthraxus is no fool, and setup a small hunting spot near a tall dogwood tree to try to take out the cougar before it could get a fang or claw on him. This did not work out. While Anthraxus was able to get a couple of decent shots on it, the cougar closed with shocking speed and gave Anthraxus some pretty gnarly wounds before, of all people, Bezro saved the day. From all the way back at the base, Bezro focused his power and let out a tremendous feline roar. The power of his beast call caused the couger to forget it's prey and begin wandering around, looking for someone hostile to it's temporary master. Anthraxus used this as a window to blow the cougar's whole fucking head off. His wounds were widespread and significant, and within a few hours the slash on his left arm was showing signs of infection. As if as a reward for the clever tactics a cargo pod containing a simple wooden shovel landed significantly to the south. There is no way to know why these individual tools keep dropping, but they are at least worth a little bit to other traders.

In addition to free gear, the free gifts were not done. As Anthraxus worked to treat his wounds, a pair of Sivatherium, gigantic prehistoric giraffids, self tamed and came to join us. Perhaps the world is apologizing for the death of Larimar. Fortunately Bezro has enough skill with animals to try to train them, but they don't like any of the food we have available. As we build a pen to contain them, they are left to wander freely. They spend a lot of time wandering around inside the base. RK finally has an opportunity to use one of his unique Mod abilities. Giving Anthraxus an eloquent speech that counters many of the things he whispered during the earlier ritual. This speech is so powerful that it boosts Anthraxus' ability to acquire immunity to illnesses.

After a little less than a day we received our next visitors, a group of Barga collective slavers. They hang out a little with the other Barga traders we are still hosting. While we given them a little time to get closer to the base and settle in, we have cause for celebration! Mitsuya, the peg leg prisoner, finally agrees to join us. Her intellectual skill gives us another great researcher, as well as a skilled tailor to start making some replacements for our various tattered garmets.

Just like Bezro when he joined, the start of Mitsuya's life among her fellow Cystians develops a new trait. Unlike the wholly useless and socially dangerous kleptomania Bezro developed, Mitsuya's disposition as a careful shooter slows down how quickly she will fire ranged weapons, but significantly increases her accuracy. In the prisoner room, RK and Milton continue to talk, adopting conversations I would not be surprised to see in the current Gazette discord.

Still working towards the goal of being able to send a couple people out to check out the supply stash, RK finally goes out and talks with Bear, the leader of the slave caravan. While it would be great to be able to rescue either of the slaves, we simply don't have enough money for that. As it is, we make the hard choice to swap some of our components for a substantial amount of pemmican, as most of what we traded for earlier has already been eaten. This should have been a clue to me that something was wrong, but I just didn't see it. With trading completed, we were ready to settle in and get some major improvements made. This plan was stymied by Bezro and Anthraxus both coming down with signs of Plague.

While Bezro is young enough that the Plague just doesn't hold much threat for him due to his youthful immune system, Anthraxus is not quite so lucky. This is likely made worse by the raging and septic infection that has continued to worsen in his arm. It takes all of RK's healing prayer, lots of bed rest, and Fresh's (our best doctor) tender administrations to allow him to finally get ahead of the infection and develop immunity literally only a few hours before it would have killed outright. Even though he is still working to overcome the symptoms of the Plague, his brush with near death causes him to also develop a new trait. Just like Bezro, Anthraxus has become fascinated with chemicals and drugs. With two people developing this focus we really need to get a drug lab going and plant some smokeleaf and psychite.

Mitsuya is doing what she can to help, having already cranked out a change of clothes for Bezro and making some backpacks to allow everyone to carry more stuff. But if we are going to get all the improvements made that we need, and keep the camp going when people leave for the supply stash, we are going to need Milton on our side as well. This is RK's top priority. Many may doubt the topics he uses to try to bring people into the fold, but it is hard to argue his effectiveness.

We have gotten enough people moving around now that it is difficult to keep an eye on everyone, particularly the playful scamp Bezro. That little guy runs all over. Obviously the rest of the group having been telling him about notable events in the colony's past as at some point he hauled Larimar's body and put it in a nearby empty sarcophagus that we claimed when we first landed. On the lid of the sarcophagus, Bezro carved a representation of Mitsuya's ill-fated raid and Larimar's endin gof it. It's obvious that this reflects Mitsuya's viewpoint on the whole situation. Maybe she slipped that in between discussions of board games and floor drawings.

Well, this has been quite the long update, so I will wrap it up with one final bit of good news before we move on to the votes. After far longer than I would have thought or hoped, RK was finally able to convince Milton that he was home, and our editor finally joins the group.

We are close to finishing our research into skip abduction rituals, and we will also finish our research into the Drug Lab pretty soon. We finished building our freezer (will include a picture in the next update) so can now build up a surplus to actually move on the prior vote to explore the supply drop.
Vote One: Run Down Lab quest
- Option 1: Ignore it. The situation has not changed enough since we declined the abandoned lab to pickup pretty much the exact same quest.
- Option 2: Send a small group of one or two colonists to check it out and flee if there are genetic freaks there.
- Option 3: Risk it all. Send everybody to check it out and deal with any threat. (this will occur after we resolve the Supply site quest)
Vote Two: Dark Research
- Option A: Psychophagy ritual. This allows us to psychically deaden one person to psychically sharpen another for a period of time.
- Option B: Bioferrite Extraction. This base research item is a roadblock to most other dark research options.
Vote Three: Mundane Research
- Option I: Machining. Opens up better weapon construction options and is a gateway to most other advanced research topics, such as turrents, rocket launchers and bioferrite refining (which is required for vehicles).
- Option II: Beer Brewing/Carpets. Beer brewing is already half researched, so including Carpets as an immediate low-level followup. Beer gives us a new recreation option and helps address the chemical fascination for Bezro and Anth.
- Option III: Stew/Soup/More cooking. This increases the options we have for recipes to make which will make more efficient use of our available foodstuffs.
Thank you for reading and participating in the votes. These votes will be closed on 7/31 in the early evening.