Lore-some Project

The subject of this article is from the Visions update.
The information from this article is up-to-date as of 13 August, 2019.

This section is Fan Fiction. The information found here is not an actual part of the released game, but a user-invented addition to the wiki.

No Man's Sky Lore-some Project Image — Official Poster created by flying_horker

The Lore-some Project is a No Man's Sky lore based project.

Summary[ | ]

The Lore-some Project is a No Man's Sky lore based project. It is a collective lore project that involves as many travellers/interlopers who wish to be a part of it.

Each traveller will write their own chapter. The next traveller will then write theirs, following on from the previous travellers chapter. By the end of the project, a big No Man's Sky Universe story will have been created by a collective of players.

Table of Contents[ | ]

Story[ | ]

Chapter One[ | ]

The strong winds swirled all around me, forcing the sand and grit into my face. The air was dry and smelled stale. I grabbed my scarf and placed it over my face. It didn't help! My eyes were still exposed; the sand made them feel like a thousand daggers were stabbing them. Throughout my discomfort I kept thinking I must persevere and press forward, I had been through many trials and tribulations by this point and I wasn't going to give up now.

After what felt like an eternity of walking, I reached the outskirts of a forest and spotted an abandoned Euclid fighter ship. It was a sight for, literally, sore eyes. The engineering was fascinating on these ships. The first of their kind to have pulse drives. Primitive in comparison to modern ships, I was in awe of this classic. “This is where I'll seek refuge tonight” I shouted loudly to myself.

I entered the abandoned ship’s cockpit and had a look. The ship had been gutted a long time ago. There was enough space to settle for the night. I took out my blanket, placed it over myself and fell asleep.

I awoke in the morning with a dead arm. I wiggled my fingers until the sensation came back. When the feeling had returned, I opened the hatch and readied myself to get out. During my movement I knocked my knee on the cockpit dashboard. “Stupid damn ship design” I muttered. During the knock, an old style disk popped out from the drive. “How long has this been here?” I asked myself. I placed it into my backpack so I could check it at some point.

When I got to the ground I saw how dense a forest it was. It was truly beautiful. The birds were chirping and the crickets were playing their unique tune. Again, beautiful. I looked at my life support systems. 40% left with nothing to recharge it with, “I could be in trouble” I thought. I continued forward.

Three days later I spotted an outpost in the distance. It must have been three clicks away. My immediate goal was to get there. I began my journey and all was fine. The walk was easy and steady. However the winds came back. The sand and grit were everywhere. My visibility had gone. “Oh no” I thought, “What am I going to do?” I carried on, going in what I thought was a straight line. I began to jog. My nervousness was setting in. All was going well…...then suddenly I felt a THUMP to my right shin, followed by shear agony. I reached down and felt my leg. I lifted my hand and it was covered in blood. I quickly looked down. Two puncture marks to my shin. “I've been bitten” I screamed. “Noooooooooooo”. Everything began to go dark and I collapsed.

A few days later I awoke. I was in a bed. “Where am I and how did I get here?” I asked myself. I got out of bed and headed downstairs. Upon my arrival I was greeted by two Gek. “How are you traveller?” they asked. “Okay I think but what's a traveller?” They both began to laugh. “You don't remember?” they asked. “No” I replied. “I have no idea where i've come from or how I've gotten here” I screamed. “We have a machine for that” stated the Gek. I heard what they said, ran back upstairs and locked the doors. I was scared.

I spent many hours contemplating the Gek offer of their machine. I had no recollection of how I had gotten to this system, this planet or even this place. “What did they mean by traveller?” I thought. My curiosity was calling. I needed to know how I got here.

I went back downstairs and said to the Gek that I wish to use their machine. They laughed. “Okay traveller, but at a cost”. “What cost?” I asked. “Haha, you'll see traveller, you'll see”. They pulled out a machine and attached the cables to my head, arms and legs. “ Are you sure traveller?” they asked. “Yes” I replied.

The Gek switched the machine on. A shooting pain went through my body. “Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhh” I screamed. Everything went blank.

All of a sudden I began to remember…..

End of chapter one

Chapter Two[ | ]

Deep inside my brain, something cracked.

Like a mirror being thrown to the floor and bursting into a million distorted images of reality.

I felt each shard of those broken memories cut into my soul, my mind, my perception.

I saw myself in a lightspeed timelapse of scenes from strange alien worlds, creatures, buildings, spaceships and adventures I seemed to have experienced, I heard short parts of conversations in foreign alien languages and felt sensations of heat, cold, high and low pressure, radiation and the fear of death, together with the joy of discovering things nobody else had seen before and the excitement of entering the atmosphere of a planet without knowing what awaits you.

Fragments of sounds, sights and emotions swirled around inside my head, a vortex of pieces of my existence and beyond, so confusing and frightening I jumped off the chair the Gek had told me to sit on, only to notice I had no control over my legs.

I fell to the ground, unable even to put forth my arms and absorb the impact of the hard landing.

My face hit the ground, and my cheekbone felt like it would be pushed right through my skull and exit from the back of my head.

I let out a muffled moan, and through the haze of tears the pain squeezed into my eyes, I saw two pairs of Gek boots approach me.

“That one fell fast”, one of them said.

“Maybe it’s not full-grown yet”, the other responded. “Those anomalies all look the same, can’t tell how old they are, if male of female, smart or dumb. Is it breathing?”

I felt a short stubby finger poke my back, and I let out another muffled expression of pain and confusion.

“It’s making sounds”, the Gek said. “And it’s moving. Must be alive then. Let’s take off the device before it breaks it.”

“We better do”, his partner agreed.

I was moved and tossed around on the floor, all cables were taken off of me, and after a few moments I could move my arms and legs again. My head still hurt though, it felt like the memories of an entire lifetime had been hammered into it in the few seconds I had been using the Geks’ machine.

As I was able to sit up, I watched the Gek put their strange device away and act like I wasn’t even there.

“Excuse me…”, I said after a while. “What just happened? I mean, the machine. The device. What did it do to me?”

One of the Gek turned to me, looking kind of confused.

“What do you mean? You said you don’t know where you are and how you got here, and the machine showed you. Brought back your memories. It’s a Memorine. Memory. Machine. Memory-machine… Memorine. Get it?”

He turned away, looked at his partner like he had just been talking to a retard, shook his head and started sorting some papers on a nearby table.

His partner sighed, turned towards me with a pitying look in his eyes and pointed at the other Gek.

“He’s not always like that”, he said. “He just doesn’t like visitors. Most of all when they are anomalies. Or Vy'keen. Or Korvax. To be honest, he just hates everybody.”

The friendly Gek walked up to me and took my hand.

“You should take a rest now, traveler. Read a book, or maybe take a little walk outside, then try to sleep. When the full power of the memories you just restored with the Memorine hits you, it’ll punch you out of your boots.”

“Good to know”, I nodded. “How long had I been knocked out?”

“A few days”, the Gek said. “But we… well, I’ve been looking after you and tried to keep you alive. I don't know much about anomalies or your anatomy, but I thought pouring some water into your mouth every now and then couldn't make it worse. Also, I treated the bite marks on your leg with some herbs.”

“Thank you”, I said and took a slight bow, surprised by the kindness this Gek showed compared to his grumpy partner. “Did I carry any stuff with me? Anything pointing towards my identity, perhaps?”

“Not much”, the Gek replied. “A backpack and the ragged spacesuit you’re wearing. We didn’t dare take it off, because naked anomalies are pretty disgusting.”

“Aha.”

“Well. But we noticed that huge and heavy Yul you have. Pretty big one for an anomaly, would have expected one like that on a Vy'keen usually.”

“A… What?!”

“A Yul. A pretty impressive one, to be honest.”

“Excuse me, but what is a Yul, and who in Atlas’ name allowed you to look at mine…?”

“It loomed out of your suit, so we decided to pull it out and examine it. My partner doubted it was real and wanted to bite a piece off, but I told him not to.”

I was getting a bit worried.

“Please tell me”, I said hesitantly while touching the area around my lap to see if everything was where it belonged, “what exactly is a Yul?”

The Gek turned around and took something off a shelf behind him. He turned back to me and held an old style disc in his hand, waving it in front of my face.

“This here”, he said, “this is the Yul you had in your pocket.”

I looked at the object, and all of a sudden felt the breaking mirror sensation inside my brain again; shards of fragmented memories seemed to rain upon me at the speed of light and assembled to a three-second replay of my hand taking the disc out of a drive inside what looked like the cockpit of a wrecked starship. I screamed in pain and pressed my fists against my temples, until, after what felt like eternities, the vision faded to nothing and got replaced by the friendly Gek standing right in front of me with a worried look upon his face.

“Are you alright, traveler?” he asked.

“Sure”, I replied, “or maybe not. I don’t know.”

It took me a while to recover.

I took the disc from his hand and moved it around to analyse it. Its radius was little larger than the palm of my hand, not even half as thick as my piggy finger, surprisingly heavy and decorated with strange, unidentifiable ornaments. I couldn’t tell if it was made of stone, wood or even some kind of metal, it somehow felt… alive. Organic. Sentient. As if it knew I was looking at it.

“What’s that thing for?” I asked the Gek. “What does it do?”

“It’s an ancient telepathic data storage”, he replied. “You don’t find them often today. They were used to preserve the collective cultural, religious and social memories of civilisations that were about to go extinct or were threatened by wars or plagues. Where did you find it?”

“I’m not sure”, I answered, trying to recall the vision from moments ago. “Inside a ship. A wrecked ship, probably. I pulled the… Yul? Yeah, I pulled it from the ship’s data drive. I don’t know exactly where that ship is, or whose ship it is, or if it’s probably mine… but I abandoned it, and I feel it is not very far from here.”

The Gek nodded.

“Maybe we should go looking for that ship”, he said. “Maybe we’ll find some answers there.”

“Will you now leave that traveler alone, Wilk!”, the grumpy Gek yelled from the opposite side of the room. “Let it sleep or something, before it gets hungry and wants to eat from our supplies!”

The friendly Gek sighed and rolled his eyes.

“Yes, master Unya”, he said. “He will go to back to bed now.”

He softly pushed me up from my chair and away from the other Gek, towards the stairs I had come down earlier.

“Go upstairs now”, he said. “We’ll talk later, and I’ll see that I’ll get you something to eat!”

“Fine”, I said, feeling something like a massive black hole inside my stomach, now that they’d been talking about food.”I’m starving. Is your name Wilk?”

“Yes”, the Gek replied. “The other one is my boss Unya. What’s your name, traveler?”

I shrugged my shoulders, as I absolutely couldn’t remember my own name, which scared me a bit.

“I don’t know”, I said. “And I think I will need you to help me find out.”

“I will do my best, traveler”, Wilk nodded, “I will do my best. But for now - go upstairs and try to sleep. I will look after you later.”

“Fine”, I said as I turned around and walked up the stairs. “And thank you, Wilk.”

“Never mind, traveler.”

I laid down on my bed, almost immediately fell asleep, and started dreaming…

End of chapter two

Chapter Three[ | ]

It came to me in pieces then. Like transmissions broken up by radiation, like sparks from a plug in an incompatible socket, erratic jolts of consciousness not native to my mind. Trapped in the physical paralysis and mental delirium of an exhausted sleep, I could offer no resistance as strange thoughts washed over me in foreign waves.

Blind and deaf at first, a noxious stench predicated each dream-spasm. A caustic stench, nausea-inducing and blatantly chemical in origin, yet omnipresent as if it were leaking from within me. Even in the strange quasi- consciousness of vivid dreams, relief came each time this smell subsided, and it carried primal terror on every return. At each onset, flight-or-fight desperately urged me to escape my head. Eventually these transmissions cut through the interference and resistance of my senses. Smell became touch, touch predicated hearing, hearing heralded the return of sight. Each sense offered a renewed and deepened desire to return to the safety of inky black interference, to avoid bearing witness to what was being shown to me.

Beasts. Language offers no descriptor adequate for these things I found myself among. Born of unholy amalgamations between organic and electric... life? Technology? Not dissimilar from rare multitools traded in the backs of Vy'keen stations away from Sentinel eyes, they seemed to be weapon, vehicle, and organism all at once. Non-standard in their form but consistent in their abomination, wires, hair, and teeth protruded with equally alarming frequency. A swarm of insignificant fleshy masses skittered forward on spiderlike metal legs, flanked by the ground-shaking impacts of a gargantuan abomination. A clear biological weapon, this fleshy artillery rolled on two metal wheels, dragged steadily forward by four grotesque limbs. I bore witness to this sacrilege against reality - neither biology nor technology is meant to behave in such a way, and certainly never should they be so conjoined.

Another wave. The stench. The armada of abominations processing steadily, mechanically, forward - towards what? As uncoordinated as a new pilot in his first ship, I turned my dream self, slowly and deliberately. A village sprawled before me, impressive in its size but modest in its construction, predominantly wooden. Airborne abominations loomed above the settlement. These reminded me of something from the fledgling days of atmospheric aviation, before Anomalies made it to the stars: gas-based crafts called blimps. These swollen, irregularly-shaped skin blimps hung above as the nightmare clouds of war.

I willed my legs forward. My feet up. No response, left or right, forward or backward. I tried rotating further - no response. Fixed, allowed to witness and condemned to be unable to help. Had I discovered this settlement under normal circumstances, I would assume them to be a primitive culture. Without even a clear sign of electricity, I knew they had no odds of resisting whatever advanced technology or runaway evolution synthesized these living heresies which now converged on the village in growing numbers.

The abominations were largely without noise. They did not bark orders, they didn't utter a war cry, they didn't offer explanation, negotiation, or mercy. The first sign of resistance from the villagers, a pithy volley of stone arrows fell upon a convoy of abominations. These most basic of projectiles bounced and broke off of metal, but the anomalies proved flesh enough, as many arrows found their mark. Tank-like abominations rolled forward, leaking blood and bile but apparently unconcerned. A centaurian abomination had been crippled, one of its four 'legs' severed - upon hitting the ground, the upper mass decoupled from its wounded portion, blades emerging from within to sever the halves. Abandoning over half of its body in this manner, the pseudo-humanoid drug itself forward on its two remaining limbs.

The village was surrounded. The nightmare soldiers encircled the borders, and the terrible blimps floated overhead. The wind offered the only whisper on an otherwise silent horizon. The majority of natives must have fled or sheltered rather than fight, as there was no sign of resistance - and who could blame them? From this far back, and unable to move closer, perspective is limited but I could feel the air change. The anomalies' disgusting tufts of misplaced hair appeared to stand up on end, reaching for the sky. Confused but long since resigned to the terror and my inability to assist, I looked on as the blimps began to swell.

On some unconscious level I knew what this was. I knew I had to scream, to let them know, to get them out. I put all of my will into a scream, into the loudest sound I could summon - a scream drowned out with ease by the deafening bursts of the blimps in rapid succession. Each dropped a sheet of clear liquid on the settlement, liquid which rapidly dissolved the wood below.

Even after such terror, it was only the screams which finally shocked me awake. Standing on the edge of my bed, covered in cold sweat, I grabbed a fresh suit from the closet, taking great care to return the Yul to its high-security hiding spot beneath my spare boots - just in case.

"What the hell did your Memorine do to me?!" I asked Wilk, furious that I might never be able to sleep soundly again.

End of chapter three