Starfield Log 5
At constellation even with the starborn after us we continued to hunt down the artefacts. Maybe they should have been warning enough but after me gaining my powers everyone's enthusiasm grew exponentially. For quite a while we weren't even disturbed we must have collected another five or six artefacts before things started to get weird.
After that, I returned to the lodge to add more artefacts to the sphere, then we were radioed by an unknown source. A few of the team were on the eye, the constellation space station, making repairs for long-distance scanning. These people included Andreja, Sam and Vladamir. The person on the radio threatened us, calling himself the Hunter. We could hear the constellation members on the eye in pain in the background. The rest of us stayed at the lodge since we knew the Hunter, another starborn, would come there next. He teleported into the room, grabbing Walter from behind. I managed to shoot the hunter, causing him to let Walter go. Noel retrieved the artefacts while we held the hunter off. That was all we could do; he was unstoppable and kept duplicating himself. As soon as the artefacts were retrieved, we ran for my ship.
We escaped New Atlantis before the Hunter stopped it. Over the comms, he congratulated us on posing a challenge to him and jumped away. He would come for us later. We flew to the eye with haste to find the other gravely injured. Sam was dead, and the others not far from it. We did what we could, but the loss of Sam had a huge impact on the team. When I left the lodge, I received a message from the Hunter. He wanted me to meet him and the Emissary, the starborn who had tried to stop us from leaving Neon. I agreed after hiding the artefacts at my mining outpost, Corvo Attano.
At the coordinates, I found their incredible ship and docked. It seemed so unique and yet so human. I could dock with it, and the starborn on board were humanoid, but in shiny suits with tinted visors. It seemed the Emissary and the Hunter were in a disagreement about who should have the artefacts. They could be used together to jump to an alternate universe and, in the process, give the user eternal life, but after use were lost. Why the starborn wanted to continuously travel to new universes, I could not tell, but it seemed they were addicted to doing it.
The Emissary revealed himself as Sam Coe from another universe, and the Hunter as Keeper Aquilas, the preacher from New Atlantis, I didn't know how to feel. I knew it wasn't really these people, but they looked and sounded the same. Sam had just died, but now, with the starborn visor clear, he stood in front of me. Each of them wanted me to take their side so they could get all the artefacts in this universe. I told them I would think about it, as I didn't really want to side with either of them. Sam wanted to limit access to artefacts in other universes, and Aquilas would do anything in his power to get as many as possible. This mostly meant murdering his way to all the artefacts he could.
They left me to collect more artefacts and said they would meet me again, but gave me a key to access Nasa on Earth, where another artefact would be. They believed I would learn much there. I went to Earth and found that NASA had created grav jump technology using an artefact. It was them that had created the universe we lived in but also that it had destroyed earth. I didn't find this answered any of my questions really.
Every time I went to find an artefact now I would get attacked by starborn. For eternal beings, they were surprisingly easy to beat in a fight. It wasn't long before I had all the artefacts bar a few that the Hunter and the Emissary had between them. They asked me to take a side. Whichever I took would help me fight the other, and then we would use the artefacts to warp to the next universe together. I took the Hunter's as he seemed the more capable fighter.
Then we travelled to the place where, in every universe, they would fight. We fought through many starborn with many great powers before reaching the Emissary. While fighting, he warped us through many locations before we beat him, and he faded out of the universe. I took his artefacts, and the Hunter gave me his. I gathered the artefacts together in my ship and grav jumped. This took me to a place called the Unity. It was a place between universes, another version of myself showed me what I had done and how it would affect my universe. He then told me I could walk to the glowing centre of the Unity to go to a new universe or walk back out into the Starfield to stay in my own. I decided to stay. I had invested too much in this universe to let it go. There was my outpost I had built, all the factions I had helped and Andreja. I didn't want to give them up, and I could always make the leap later if I felt like it or things started to go wrong in this universe. Turns out I may not be as mercenary as I had thought.