Quoted By:
“For one solar day, there was a lull in the frantic radio activity washing over the RAIN as we traveled. Dark oceans suddenly teemed with color – as bright and as vibrant as the polar auroras which once shone above my home-world. Across three colonized worlds, fifty billion individuals left the safety of underwater cities and littoral habitats, venturing up into the warm, epipelagic heights where their early ancestors first saw sunlight.
They swam in waves, building illuminated patterns that shifted with effortless grace. The performers changed and the colors shifted, but the meaning never changed: a message spelled out in an unbroken sequence.
The Mizarians sang for their dead. They sang for shattered cities, truncated lineages, and broken kin-groups – to lament the end of memory and repent for the cardinal sin of forgetfulness. They harmonized the pain for futures cut-short with the regret of salvation tragically denied.
It was not an expression of defiance, nor was it a threat. There was no anger or malice to it. There was only sadness – an outpouring of collective grief that I could share even without comprehension.
The two of us watched every moment of it. Near the end, when my eyes became filmy and the bioluminescent colors began to fade back into the ocean waves, a sudden deluge of comm transmissions occupied our buffers.
It was the same message, repeated by those who were still stranded in space – from kin-crews manning corvettes to the refugees packed inside the transparent we had spared weeks earlier. One or two even tumbled in from the outer system – faint, radiation-scorched messages repeated using their final reserves of water and power.”
- [UNSIGNED], EXECUTIVE AUDITOR, TRS NOVEMBER RAIN, AD. 2242, OCTOBER 10th, PERSONAL JOURNAL
[Last update, and no vote this time. I am taking a vacation out of the country with my family on Wednesday til ~mid July, so the next (and probably last) thread will be up sometime then. Thank you again for playing everyone - as always, it is a pleasure to run for you guys, and I wish you the very best.]