Begin Log 31-2400

After today's events I should probably start entering these logs a bit more regularly. Maybe I can put them all together in an e-book or something one day so my offspring will read about who built their world. Oh who am I kidding, I'm going to forget it anyway thanks to that ridiculous auto-logger. The ship's AI does that deliberately just to mess with my head, I'm sure of it. Anyway, let's start with a fancy introduction.

It is said that history does not make mistakes. Historians, however, do. Their most recent one was failing to properly save the records of the past, so all we know is what our ancestors told us. And this is their tale:

There was war.

And not one of those petty planetary wars, either. This was the kind of war that renders entire stretches of space uninhabitable for near eternity due to extensive use of entropy-disrupting weaponry and blue-space cracking. The very fabric of timespace was shattered in some places, unleashing even the wrath of incomprehensible horrorterrors from Beyond on unsuspecting mortals. Trillions of people died, billions more were rendered homeless.

Well at least, that's what my granny used to tell me. But she has a tendency to exaggerate her stories for dramatic effect. She's a great storyteller but not much of a historian, and I'm pretty sure she made the horrorterrors up. I've seen an ancient copy of H.P. Lovecraft's collected works on her bookshelf.

Anyway, 12 years ago my home planet Nippon V was hit by a planet buster, cracking the planet's crust wide open and killing the majority of its inhabitant. Only several thousand people could escape, out of a planetary population of millions. For a decade now our star fleet has been travelling through the Milky Way, trying to find a new planet to call home. Our resources are spreading thin and we're getting increasingly desperate. Today we've entered high orbit around Xeron III, a small planet within the Goldilocks zone of twin stars Xeron A and B. These people were lucky. Their planet did not require any terraforming at all, could easily be called a paradise if they didn't rely on unsafe nuclear power so much. But who am I to tell people how they should run their colonies?

Their astro-topographers had some interesting information for us, though. Apparently there's another star only 1,200 light-year away which has at least one planet similar to Xeron III, completely uncolonised. I have ordered the deep space scanner array aboard the Toyohiro Ichi to be directed at that star and analyse the system. If what the Xeronians told me is true, we will set sail for the system as soon as we are done restocking. Supposedly there even exists an ancient jumpgate connection between Xeron and this unnamed star, although nobody knows how to operate it and if it even still works. But who needs jumpgates. We have blue-space drives.

Here's an infograph I drew using my PDA to make it easier to visualise the situation. You are welcome.

I should've become an artist instead of a fleet admiral. Kaiba out.

Log Entry recorded by Kaiba Yakota, admiral of the Nippon V Evacuation Fleet

End Log

Author comments:

Hi everyone! This is my first city journal ever so please be gentle with me. I've decided to go for a more dramatic (or comedic) style of narration from the point of view of the most influential person of the city. The concept is as follows: a solar system gets colonized by a fleet of refugees, and their leader documents the developments through a collection of logs and transmissions. I hope this style works for a journal (and a city).