Human arrival

  Originally posted to the message boards by Trevor Rage.

This is the "myth" of the arrival of Humans on Haelrahv.

The Story of the Arrival of Humans on Haelrahv
As described to the Grand Council of Abbindolare by Captain Evan Hale

Ever lounged on a warm Tahiti beach, lying back with some kind of fruity drink you don't even recognize in one hand while the other dangles off of the side of your chair to play around in the white sand? Probably not, most around here haven't, but I did once. Let me tell you, it was absolutely gorgeous. No Darjing, mind you, but I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing. Sometimes I wish I could go back there, but I know I never will. No, I'm here now and I'm here for good.

Evan Hale, that's who I am. Sure, you've never heard of me, but that's only because you weren't on that rock when it landed. Broke all kinds of hell loose, I'm sure the locals were in a stir about it. But, that's the way things work out sometimes. At least there's lots of open land out here, it was easy finding a safe spot instead of crashing into a bunch of homes or one of those fancy temples. I bet some real hell would have broken loose if we'd hit one of those.

So me, well I'm just a pilot. Served in the Force for fourteen years, learned my way around a whole lot of ships in that time. That's how I ended up in this gig, as Captain of the Blue Ray, the cruise ship that's currently rusting away in the forest over there. You can be sure this place was never on the itinerary. So how'd it happen? Well, it's quite a story let me tell you, but it seems we have lots of time to tell it.

We loaded up with the usual load of passengers, mostly wealthy or near-wealthy, several hundred of 'em. They all wanted to see the stars, most of them had probably never been in space before. Back on Earth, space travel had become fairly common. We still weren't doing much out there, but we'd gotten real good at getting around anyway. So, you'd have a handful of cruise ships out at any given time, making trips out to the moon, or maybe they'd push off on a long haul to Mars. We had some scientific ships out there too, always doing experiments. I never understood how there could be that much difference between what a frog does on dry land and what he does in zero-G, but whatever.

The Blue Ray, she's modified for service. That means she has a large amount of free space we don't haul passengers in, so she can pick up stuff out of space for the government and occasionally for some private outfit. We get paid well for it too, and we have less of those passengers to deal with, so it works out nice. So we sometimes pick up rogue satellites or lost expedition equipment. Once in a great while, we'll have to haul in an entire ship that's been disabled for whatever reason and bring it back in.

We swung way out of our planned route and picked up this science ship, a real nice one too. I couldn't imagine such a beauty having serious engine problems, it looked brand new. But, things act up, sometimes this stuff isn't made right to begin with and you break down six months later. In fact, once in a while it doesn't even make it out of the atmosphere, but we've gotten pretty good about that and when it happens, it's usually something experimental.

So we have this beauty of a ship in dock, filled with a bunch of scientists going on about how this and that is sensitive, or needs to get back immediately, or can't go out of space so we need to do a cargo drop at one of the orbital stations. Real demanding types, for sure. I told em all to take a leap, we're going to follow the plan. We'd already lost a lot of time getting out here and I wasn't particularly comfortable with the scene to be honest, it was somewhere I'd never been, and something about it just didn't seem right.

I punched in our coordinates, making a few adjustments to get us there a little quicker. I'm sure our passengers weren't thrilled with what was going on, they sure weren't seeing our current location on their maps. I doubt many actually knew how to use a mapper anyway, but the last thing I wanted was heat about being too late. So I put 'er in motion and we were off. For all of a few seconds, anyway.

It seems there was a very good reason for that science ship to be out here, and a very good reason why she was disabled, too. As we started to haul out, we started taking some hits. I thought maybe it was some debris floating around, but it hadn't come up on the grid, nothing sensed it. Then everything went nuts, displays and alarms going off everywhere. Gravity pull. But it wasn't a planet, there wasn't one anywhere close.

You hear talk of worm holes, black holes, all kinds of holes. Apparently space is one big block of Swiss cheese and we're crawling around in it. Well, I don't know what kind of hole this was, but I thought we were dead. We were going through it and there wasn't a thing I could do about it. Funny thing is, all I could think about was how I was gonna explain this one to corporate. I get a kick out of that when I think about it now. If I ever see corporate again, I won't have to explain it, cause they'll be on this rock with me.

Anyway, that's the last time we were anywhere near Earth. We hurtled through the other side of whatever this thing was, some kind of tunnel, and the first thing we saw was some new planet. Two moons, red one and a blue one. Well, I think the passengers thought this was part of the ride, they were going a little crazy in chatter, but no panic. The scientists on the other hand were going nuts. Then the bang.

It seems our buddies in the bay had some kind of device they were planning to close that tunnel with, or so they hoped it would. Not really close it, but block it somehow so stuff couldn't go through it. They jettisoned this thing out right before we went through. Problem is, it didn't do a damn thing. Yet.

After we passed thru the hole, that probe or whatever it was dragged behind us. When it came out the other side, it hit us as I was leaning the Ray starboard to try to avoid getting in the orbit of this planet. Took out a huge chunk of the Blue Ray and whatever was blown off apparently went back through the tunnel, blown out to the Earth side I'd have thought. Well not really. I guess these holes or tunnels or whatever they are only go one-way. The thing collapsed from our side and what debris didn't make it through exploded in the eeriest light you ever saw. It was then that I figured we probably weren't going home.

We ended up in orbit of this planet anyway, deep in it. That first blast that took a chunk out of us really did a number on our flight path too and our engines were out. Comm was completely gone, blown back into space. Somehow that damn science ship survived intact. We lost lots of people though. Lot of the fool passengers were huddled in the rear to see the show behind us.

I suppose it turned out a blessing in disguise that they blew that tunnel, we'd have been in sad shape if we'd tried to reverse course. They had a lot of equipment on the ship which was also good, because we didn't bring a lot of provisions with us. Cruise ships tend to carry the fluff you know, lots of food, but not enough to feed people for weeks. They were growing a lot of their own food on the science ship, even had DNA samples of a whole bunch of stuff, a practical zoo in a lab. We managed to handle thirty nine days in orbit before we took the fall to land.

I'm not sure how many were on that science ship. On the Ray we had a little over six hundred including crew. By the time we were on solid ground, the space explosion, the weeks in orbit and the rough landing took a bunch of us. We were down to a few hundred left, including the researchers.

We aren't going back, we can't. No ship, no tunnel, and if we found a tunnel, we wouldn't even know if it was safe to travel in. Sure, they may find a way back one day, but it'll be long after my time. You all seem like nice folk, though to be honest, you scare the daylights out of most of us cause ya look so different. But this place isn't Earth, that's for sure. And there's a lot of work to do here. Luckily for you, you got us Humans to help.