Tune in to Exoplanetary Archeologist Jee'Mekel -- (No Man's Sky fiction)

The below article is my attempt at a fictional story involving my character in the game No Man's Sky, introducing the game through the lens of one of it's players.

Though I got stuck on it for more than a week, cause fiction ain't my strong suite and my brain got shorted out by the amount of freaking mental effort I put into my work lately XS

Hope you guys like it anyway XP

---

Greetings Travelers !

I hope this transmission reaches you before anything too drastic changes.

Before we get started, why don't you say hi to Teller. He's the little guy floating up there:

I'm not too sure how I managed to get him to behave, but apparently there's a defect in their code - possibly left by whoever owned that base computer before me - that allowed me to do a bit of creative reprogramming of his hostility settings.

Now he's content to just buzz around my home... that and try to alert the other sentinels, which is why I named him Teller.

Luckily, my home's shielded, and there's only the occasional Combat drone dropping by when I leave the door opened too long...

Well, enough about my pet, the gek you see above dropped me a hint about a ruin on a nearby planet !

Mekio VIII, in the Natos System, is supposed to have some interesting historical archives !

I can never resist taking a break and admiring a planet from afar before jumping in.
That, and make sure it's not one of those [CLASSIFIED] sentinel-infested planets...

Arrival on Mekio VIII, An old Gek homeworld, reduced to radioactive slag; that the Vy'keen are currently exploiting for it's resources.

The Vy'keen are a blessing for us Travellers. Without them the Sentinel presence on most worlds would be greatly increased.

This world has been thoroughly cleaned, though there are still some drones buzzing about.

But this one is very peaceful.
Peaceful enough I could get some nice zoomed in shots !

Time for some sight-seeing on the way to the ruins !

As we can see, the vegetation is.. well... adapted to it's local highly-radioactive environment.

I swear, the distinction between fauna and flora on some of these worlds can get pretty distorted sometimes.

These ones look alarmingly similar to some of those infections that the Predators seem to live around...

And this weird critter doesn't even have proper eyes to see with.

And the taste is rather bland. I didn't have the courage to add some of that mutant plant to the mix, nor the patience to wait the extra 2 hours it'd take for the decontamination process.

Ah, sorry. I always ramble on these trips.
Off we go again, this should be the right direction...

Ah, yes, there are the Gamma weed patches the local told me about, it should be somewhere right around here...

There's a sentinel over there, might it be scanning the ruins ?

Yes indeed !

Sometimes their obsession with scanning the unusual does come in handy...

I wonder if I could reprogram Teller enough to put him on a lease and have him guide me to monuments...

Given, of course, he doesn't call in a Walker on me the minute I step outside the door !

These ruins require a careful touch...

After some calibrations and material scanning (got to be sure not to vaporize the building, only the ground and flora).

And we can begin digging !

And here we have our first find !

An artifact key !

All us xeno-archeologists are a bit puzzled about why the keys to the historical artifacts are scattered across the ruins that hold them, like some kind of miniature game, but we usually don't complain too much.

It's a good source of income, after all !

With most of the ruin dug out (and only a single case of collapse ! Amazing hos sturdy these ruins are... nearly like they were built in this very form...) we can proceed to find the historical information.

There's usually a larger crate, requiring several keys to open.

Ah, there we are !

Huh...

Well, that was dissapointing.

Turns out it was the equivalent of old First Spawn erotic literature, at least according to the Explorer's guild guy hired to translate.

Didn't even sell for that much...

At least one the way home I dropped by some more interesting worlds !

So, fellow Travelers, I hope it was interesting to see what I do with my day.

Maybe, once the Convergence happens, we can meet up...

Hopefully before Well...

Well, you know...

it reaches ze-

Oh bloody hell, even that's enough to attract your notice ?
Jeez, ATLAS, come on... don't be like tha-

[ANOMALY CONTAINED]

---

Yeah... I suck at fiction, I know XS

I've tried my hand at National Novel Writing Month a total of 4 times, though not in the last 2 years due to how heavy the workload has been with the University, and I've never gotten more than halfway.

Hopefully I didn't kill anyone off with my horrible writing, but the idea of writing an "intro" to No Man's Sky using fiction has been pretty well blocking all my other post ideas, so I really had to get this off my chest.

One thing I'm going to investigate is if there is a puzzle hidden inside the game...

I swear that looks like 1/3 of a QR code...