Our story begins with the splitting on August 15, the first day our adventuring bard had their own unique consciousness.
The many alarms in the ship are slowly shutting off, and the panel readouts are stabilizing as I slow the ship to a stop. My head is pounding and my hands are shaking. I sanitize the readouts that were covered in vomit. My training forces me to quickly scan the panel readouts and do a visual inspection as well, to establish there is no immediate danger.
My training… what training? I can't remember where I received training or what the training was for, but I can recall what the readouts are for each panel on the ship, exactly how to fly it, and even how to fix the engine. Strange… but it's not that important at the moment. Determining my current situation and next steps are my main priority.
I find out I'm at least not in any immediate danger, and decide to inspect my ship logs for any information on what is happening. Unfortunately, my logs are an incomprehensible mashup of different messages from many different voices and languages at the same time. Whatever happened to me might have scrambled my logs. I check the different compartments of the ship and find a sealed container marked Mission Brief. I find the seal and crack it open.
Inside I find a hardcover manual and a laminated piece of paper. The manual seems to be for the ship and the laminated piece of paper has a simple mission on it.
“Warp Squad 16,
Your mission is to discover the source of the wormhole and to neutralize it or convince the controlling entity to disable it. The primary mission must be completed at all costs. However, if you can discover a way to return our missing planets through the wormhole before disabling it that doesn't jeopardize your mission, you may attempt to do so.
- Alliance Command"
The wormhole must be the cause of all the anomalies within my ship logs and my nausea. Warp Squad 16 must be the group that I'm apart of and maybe where I received my training.
My next step should be to find a habitable planet nearby to investigate this new galaxy, or maybe even universe, and figure out a fuel source. I initialize my ships long range scanners and lean back to wait for the scanners to return some data. Depending on the range of the nearest planet, this could take a few minutes to a couple hours. I decide to nap in hopes of waking up to a habitable planet and no more headache. I drift off to sleep staring into a void of brand new stars and planets to explore, and though my mission is dire, I am excited for the adventure.
Our bard's adventure in this new universe will continue in the next entry of “The Tales of the Wandering Bard."