Captain's Log, Stardate 23471, USS Courageous, Captain Zara ka'Athnon
(Excelsior-A, EC)
Hello again Captain's log! It's so nice to be back in deep space!
Courageous has just entered the orbit of YIL-7000, or as it's known to the natives of the largest continent "Yalla", which I understand translates to "Dirt".
We'll be conducting a thorough xenopological survey of Yalla before we move on with our surveys. Spying on history books from orbit with our really big telescopes, recording the layouts of streets, all that good stuff.
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Counselor's Log, Stardate 23475.6, USS Courageous, Counselor Lwema Noir
(Excelsior-A, EC)
The societies on Yalla are wrong.
I have been assisting Commander Beekeru and Courageous's Xenology section.
It is hard to see. But there are patterns in recent Yallan history. Patterns in their social organization. An artificiality.
Zara must be informed.
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Captain's Log, Stardate 23477, USS Courageous, Captain Zara ka'Athnon
(Excelsior-A, EC)
Counselor Noir and Commander Beekeru believe that an outside force is interfering in Yallan society.
The evidence is subtle, but it's there. New languages, sudden wars, riots, inventions, breakthroughs, strange plagues and anachronistic cures, a warlord with impossible knowledge, all improbable but still happening.
There's also the electromagnetic signals that we're picking up from underneath the largest Yallan city. Usually we wouldn't be able to pick up these signals, expect my crew are really really really good at what they do! They're the best there is!
We picked up signals reflecting off of the mirrored semaphore system used by the city's upper classes. See the mirrors they use contain trace elements of Wozolinium which briefly store electromagnetic [COS NOTE: clipped for brevity]
So anyway, we're taking a trip to visit some primitive sewer systems! Exciting!
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Captain's Log, Stardate 23478, USS Courageous, Captain Zara ka'Athnon
(Excelsior-A, EC)
Okay, I'm looking at this equipment, and it's whew. There's a lot of it. A spike of electronics digging nearly five hundred meters down into the earth below the bottom of this well.
It's all built from materials sourced from Yalla itself, nothing we've scanned or found has been sourced from offworld. But we can't find the manufacturing equipment, but, there are no signs of say, replication or nanofabrication.
The computers appear to be programmed in the primary Yallan language. Or rather the constructed language that is now spoken by most Yallans. Right, yeah, I forgot, just got word from Courageous that Chitik is almost certainly a constructed language introduced four generations ago.
And, like, the designs don't match anything we're familiar with either.
It's certainly not a design from any Federation member. It could possibly be a left over mentat experiment, because the mentats didn't ever stick to standardized designs.
Anyway, we're going to spend more time down here to figure out what exactly this thing does.
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Counselor's Log, Stardate 23480, USS Courageous, Captain Zara ka'Athnon
(Excelsior-A, EC)
So, our well spike is some sort of central processing unit for a distributed series of broadcast systems and drones located around the planet. If I wanted to I could talk to the King of Tappika, the Presider of Gammin, and the Bishop of Ranna all at once. They probably think god is talking to them or something.
Other than that we know nothing, as the system doesn't appear to have a memory. The well spike doesn't appear to maintain itself, but we've found no signs of any group on or off Yalla actively maintaining it, no warp traces, no repair facilities, nothing.
We don't know who built this, if it was Licori Mentats, Romulan Tal Shiar, Horizon Singers, or Breen…. Whatevers. And we don't know why either.
I've decided to transport the well spike and the other electronics into Courageous's hull for disassembly and further study. Afterwards we'll leave stealthed probes behind to monitor Yalla.
This is honestly such a mystery, and I don't know if we'll ever solve it, but the least we can do is stop the manipulation of the Yallans.
[+20pp, +10sr from reprocessed components]
