Storyline

please respect the integrity of the ss13 canon for a laugh make sure to check out the Old Storyline complete with flowchart

Note: Parts of this have since been retconned by backstory stuff in adventure zones and what not, because we're a mess.

NanoTrasen Space Station 13, Captain's Log Entry Date: 14-07-2050, SS13 Shift No. 322 Access Level: Black

[LOG MARKED FOR DELETION, REVIEW ACCESS BY SENIOR PERSONNEL ONLY]
[UNAUTHORISED ACCESS TO THIS FILE WILL BE DEALT WITH ACCORDINGLY]

LOG BEGINS

Every single day I spend on this station I become more and more certain that this was some kind of macabre punishment promotion. I don't know what I did to deserve being consigned to this glued together ball of orbital wreckage, but someone has it out for me. On the station I may well be Captain, but the title brings with it all the prestige and responsibility of some kind of fucking manchild kindergarten teacher.

It seems not one day goes by on the cesspit without one of these dipshits i'm supposed to call the crew blowing up or gassing half the station, beating seven shades of shit out of each other or ending up using their innards to paint the corridors a nice shade of viscera; and this isn't taking into account the fact that the fucking universe itself seems hell bent on erasing the foul waste of space that is SS13.

To think NanoTrasen loves to call this hellhole a "State of the Art Orbital Plasma Research Facility". What research? What facilities? State of WHICH art, S and fucking M? I can barely even remember all the droning seminars and presentations they flung at us in NanoTrasen orientation, all I remember is just wanting to go into space.

If I remember correctly though, it was all about the Plasma. It was like the new oil - not long after humanity got out into space and everyone got all big on exploring and discovering, all that boring Star Trek bullshit. So some clever guy discovers some gassy orange shit hiding inside a gas giant somewhere which turns out to burn better than Tox Lab on a good day. It was given some fancy-ass scientific name, but the media erroneously termed it Plasma for some reason, and the name stuck. All the companies and industries wanted to guzzle it up despite the fact we knew jack shit about it and still don't, but that didn't stop them.

Of course since history has proven that putting money before employee and consumer safety is a great idea, corporations keep mining and selling it on, making enough money that they were able to keep the government regulators all hush-hush with nice paychecks. Out here in the frontier of space though you can't regulate shit, so all sorts of inter-corporate warfare broke out. Turns out none other than NanoTrasen was the big dog, able to screw up and quite literally kill off the competition and then cover their tracks quickly and effectively enough to never get caught out on their bullshit.

Twenty NanoTrasen stations were constructed during this time. They used to be mining facilities, but then the Great Crash happened. It turns out, much to everyone's immense surprise, that using an extremely volatile and alien fuel source which you know fuck all about isn't very smart - various small consumer based incidents and conflagrations had been happening for years, but the corporations were always able to pay off the media to either not report them or chalk them up to one-off accidents or product abuse.

Now when a rickety old plasma-powered research base sited on the moon explodes with enough force to blast a huge chunk out of the planet, and said blasted off chunks end up falling to earth as a rather nasty meteor shower, and said nasty meteor shower ends up wiping out two thirds of the population of China and fucking up the weather planetwide for the best part of three decades, you can't really cover it up or pay it off. You have to pay the price - or at least someone does. Unfortunatley, it turns out NanoTrasen is very good at passing the buck.

Sure, they paid an utter fortune in legal expenses, reparations, having to cover investigations and attempts to shut them down, but the money was just too good and the pie was just too sweet for the world governments to keep their fingers out of it, even if millions of lives were lost and several million more ruined or affected. Plasma mining, refining and use was restricted immensley pending research into the volatility and usefulness of Plasma as a fuel source. Research grants came up for grabs to corporations, and guess who got the rights because they had twenty stations in orbit around viable Plasma sources...

Naturally, this pissed a lot of people off. Millions of people die in a world-scale disaster and NanoTrasen still functions more or less unhindered? Old corporations who had their holdings destroyed and employees killed on the sly and no-one does anything because of NanoTrasen's rock solid alabi? Lucractive research grants come up and no other corporations even get a look in? This is without even delving into the dubious hiring and HR policies which continue to this day, as evidenced by the roving pack of thugs i'm expected to keep in line.

So back on Earth, people think back to Lenin and Marx and think it sounds like it could be worth a try if it means millions of people don't end up with a bunch of rocks falling on them from space. Some countries embraced it, others rejected and suppressed it. It turned into some kind of new Cold War, which has been hitting NanoTrasen paticularly hard as evidenced by the "purging" of SS08 of the supposed crew uprising by their hired commando squads. Sure, NanoTrasen think they're smart and have covered it up, but the evidence is there if you know where to look.

Meanwhile after the massive station restructuring from mining to research and then the massive budget cuts, NanoTrasen has to "relax their hiring opportunities to allow for greater diversity in the workplace", which basically translates to hire whichever shady pricks you can to make it look like you're doing somewhile while you drink away the research grant before embezzling the lot and vanishing into the night. As a result, we have the glorious state of affairs wherein toolboxes get used more for stoving in the heads of people who looked at you funny than for actually fixing anything.

So I guess this brings us up to the present day. I'm working for a pack of greedy monsters who don't give a damn their shit has killed off an insane amount of people. The crazy thing it's like the world doesn't even care other than the people who are out to kill me - we've had the Marxists in here preaching all kinds of nutty shit and trying to off me before. It wasn't pretty; i'd like to say I don't work in a job where stoving someone's head in with an extinguisher while he begs for his life is mandatory, but i'd be a dirty liar.

Now I have to think back to all the crazy shit that's happened while i've been Captain here. I suppose I can't finish this log entry without mentioning the "Syndicate". It's a no-brainer that if you piss off as many people as NanoTrasen has, you'll make some very nasty enemies who are just as bad, if not worse than yourself. The Syndicate's top men are mostly ex-CEOs of businesses which NanoTrasen forcibly put out of business by destroying their holdings and killing their employees, then making it look like they did nothing at all so they get away scot free. The Syndicate's leaders are smart - some are in it to avenge family, others on principle, others to recoup lost profits. The one thing they have in common is that all of them are out for cold, hard revenge and they don't mind sinking to NanoTrasen's level to get it done.

The foot soldiers and mooks who do the work are another story, though. There's all sorts of them - escaped convicts, ex-NanoTrasen employees, anarchists, marxists, crazies, basically more mixed nuts than a squirrel with the shits. We've been attacked by them before several times, all of the stations have - the results tend to vary. Sometimes they send a pack of batshit bonkers madmen who wouldn't look out of place standing next to fucking Genghis Khan, other times when they actually want shit done they send the really evil sneaky bastards. What I want to know is where the fuck do they keep getting nuclear bombs from?! I suspect there's some government involvement somewhere down the line, but i'd rather live than look into that.

Then there's the fucking Space Wizard Federation. I don't know anything about those guys other than they are scary as hell, running around the station blasting people into chunks and hurling balls of fire out of fucking nowhere. I'd heard something about some weird hi-tech cult but these guys are practically luddites, spewing thees and thous and using all sorts of weird archaic references to shit and wearing burlap robes and fake beards. Either someone found a way to inflict their insanity upon reality itself, or these guys have some insane technology we don't know about. Frankly though i'd rather put a very large distance between me and anyone who looks like a decripit methed up hobo and can tear my entire body apart in an instant by poking me in the balls hard enough.

The really scary stuff comes from threats that aren't (at least debatably) human, though. From the small amount of research done on plasma when corporate wasn't embezzling the grant funds to drink themselves into even more of a stupor than usual, we've found that there's shit LIVING in that giant orange space fart we're orbiting. We've found life before, nothing intelligent though. Animals at the most, but usually stuff similar to just microbes and bacteria even if they're still completley alien to us. It turns out that certain types of amoeba floating around in the gas we harvest really, REALLY like earth DNA... so much that if exposed to it, even just dead skin and shit, it ends up mutating into a huge green pile of acidic blamanche that eats more than the Head of Security and makes nearly as much of a mess.

Then there's "The Gibbis". Good fucking god, the Gibbis. Who or whatever created this hideous universe has got to be mocking us for sure - if I wanted my body to spontaneously melt into a pile of diseased chunks i'd drink the fucking beer in the bar. It makes the Devo Virus look tame, the Devolutionary whatever the fuck it was called. We just call it the Devo Virus for short and it doesn't make you grow a silly hat and make strange music. It turns out this virus decides to snip or add a few chromosomes here and there and bam, you devolve back into a chimpanzee. The chimps of course tend to be significantly more productive than the crew I have now and nowhere near as hairy.

If I had to pick out the single greatest threat to the station though, i'd have to say it's the fucking crew, hands down. That includes the crotchety fucking IBM piece of shit we're supposed to call an AI, which essentially amounts to being a glorified doorknob with none of the charm. Of course, if there happens to be an ion storm, or the replacement parts were faulty, or some fuckwit thinks he's so goddamn funny telling it to act like an owl, then it goes on a homicidal rampage and offs half the crew. I wouldn't normally complain about something like that, but the replacements are always worse.

Speaking of which, due to NanoTrasen's lovely equal rights movement, we probably haven't had an intelligent crewmember in months. Sure, we have scientists, engineers, security and all sorts of professionally trained staff, but the problem is they were trained by the same corporation that was so monumentally stupid it destroyed half of fucking Asia! The Plasma Scientists always end up huffing it or burning their lab down, the geneticists probably learned everything they know from the discovery channel and the Chemists just sit making space meth all day. The Engineers couldn't light a fucking fart if they tried, and Security.. oh good grief, Security.

Why this station has a job opening for judges and lawyers I don't know when the closest thing i've seen to a trial was a security guard stomping someone's teeth out while shouting "IT WAS YOU WHAT DID IT". I dread the fact that they entrust these people with batons and flashbangs when you could probably give them a deflated balloon and they'd find a way to beat someone to death with it.

I don't even know why i'm writing this in my fucking logbook. I sure as hell don't need the history lesson for myself. Sure, I could upload it with all the evidence and dirt i've found over the years, but what's the point? Who would give a shit other than corporate making me suddenly disappear? I suppose I could send and upload it to the network and let people make their own judgements, maybe at least try to stir some shit. After all, i'm the one sitting out here in deep space, cruising along leisurely in an empty escape shuttle. Who's going to touch me?

I don't care what they called me back on the station - i'm not a traitor. I'm a man of principles and standards. Principles which don't kill people horribly and which also incidentally get me quite far, as evidenced by my handy electromagnetic card. I'd say i'm the better man here; I may be a thief and a liar, but at least i'm not a murderer.

If you are reading this log, maybe you've started to doubt NanoTrasen. That's good. I urge you to look for the evidence that's out there. They deny, they cover up, they make people disappear but they can't keep it all covered up forever. Start thinking for yourself and using your brain, it's exactly what NanoTrasen doesn't want because then you'll see the cracks and flaws in their big scheme, and once enough people start to ask the hard questions they'll crack and crumble. They'll fall like they deserve to. And then none of us will have to instinctively fear people in grey carrying around large heavy objects again.

Ex-Captain [NAME DELETED] of SS13, signing off.

LOG ENDS

written by I Said No

Dramatic reenactment

made by Aphtonites, narration by Maid