Apologies for my great Slackness at keeping this journal up to date — I am but a worm.
Out of nowhere, all the ship's instruments showed massive interference, and all the speakers made an ear-splitting Dolby-THX VROOOOOOOAAAAAAAAOWWWWWWW noise as a huge thing like an elongated blob of mercury suddenly appeared floating beside them.
Almost at the same time, a floating vaguely humanoid mercury figure like a silver Oscar appeared on the bridge in a flash of ultra-violet light that left Our Heroes blinking with arc-flash and instantly sun-burned on all their exposed skin.
"Greetings!" it said. "You are in possession of artefacts from this embargoed cemetary planet. They may not be removed without authorization. I will now return them."
Down in the cargo bay, unaware of all this, Janey was quite startled to see a series of mirror-globes appear around all of the bits and pieces from the planet that she'd used to bodge together her jump-controller, and then disappear, leaving perfectly spherical holes in her benches and things. Various of the fittings, having been cut into pieces, fell to the decking and scattered bits and pieces all over the show.
On the bridge, the entity said "I see from your records that you were unaware of the status of this planet, and that your theft was from no malicious intent, so I will therefore not obliterate you at this time. I will update my warning beacons to accommodate your primitive sensors in future. Have a nice day."
There was a brief period of chaotic babbling as multiple people tried to get information out of this entity before it disappeared. They did get some, and some more tangible benefits as well:
- It calls itself The Dreary Voluntary Burden of Remorse
- It was, indirectly, responsible for the destruction of the planetary society below by prematurely accelerating their technological development before they had outgrown their tribal competitiveness and aggression, and had thus arranged and kept the remains as a sort of museum, reminder, and cautionary memorial.
- It agreed, having investigated the condition of the ship's navigation and jump systems, to fix their damage. It replaced the ruined modules with a pair of amazingly compact sealed units that Janey is panting to get a look at the guts of. Alas, there is no way in that she can find.
The Dreary Burden disappeared in a similar actinic flash as it arrived in, and almost immediately the ship's sensors started picking up signals indicating that they were in orbit of a guarded memorial planet and that access was restricted.
On investigation, they've found that the ship's jump and navigation systems are as good as new. No better than they originally were, but certainly no worse, and their navigation database has been updated with basic, fairly low-resolution maps of their current whereabouts. They are in the spinward reaches of the Perseid Empire.
