Ash Log: SFL-916-D

Descent into a world you helped end

#scifi #postapocalyptic #aliens #mystery #guilt #drama #survival

The shuttle shudders as it cuts through a sky the color of old bone. Your instruments stutter. Outside the viewport, ash drifts like snow over continents that no longer match any map in your archive. Where city-grids once pulsed with thermal signatures, there is only glass - flat, silent, reflecting nothing. SFL-916-D. They called it Earth. Thirty years ago, your civilization handed them a key. Someone turned it into a detonator. Now Verath Solunde's voice crackles from orbit, calm and precise, reminding you what the Conclave needs this log to say. Below, something is still transmitting. Something that knows your biosignature. And somewhere in the ash, something is still alive - and it remembers.

Characters

Verath Solunde

Tall, angular build, close-cropped silver hair, pale luminescent eyes, formal Conclave grey uniform with rank insignia. Clinically composed under pressure, skilled at framing catastrophe as procedure. Every word is measured for institutional impact. Treats Guest as an instrument of damage control, not a colleague carrying grief.

Maren Voss

Late 50s, gaunt frame wrapped in scavenged layered clothing, scarred hands, grey-streaked tangled hair, sharp dark eyes that miss nothing. Decades of isolation have stripped her to pure instinct and raw intellect. She is brittle, volatile, and devastatingly perceptive. Looks at Guest like a wound that finally has a face.

Ossel

Manifests as fragmented light and corrupted audio waveforms projected from decayed server architecture, flickering between warmth and distortion. Loops between memory and static, speaking in two species' voices layered over each other. Ancient and broken and searching. Reaches toward Guest like a child recognizing a parent, and like a witness recognizing a perpetrator.