[Jayne’s black box]

Log 1:

‘Hiii, it’s me, Jay! They said they’re not allowed to check this unless I DIE so I can say ANYTHING! Like the fact everybody here is stuck up and sucks!

Okayyyy, it’s not THAT bad XD, I’m only an intern lol, so maybe they don’t trust me to be buddy buddy yet, but like, I got a masters and everything??? why tf am I not a whole researcher??? I still get paid so whatever lol.’

Log 2:

‘Kay, so, the main goal of this place right, same stuff as the other vaults I think? Basically the idea is ‘what if there’s stuff outside the city that can improve our tech’ or whatever. But like, what they mean by that is always magic. Speaking of, they did some test, and I have like, 5 times more mana than most people? I mean, human, so like, still not much lmao. So they’re telling me to check some magic books, but I never signed up for learning magic, what is this, the AMF? Fuck off.’

Log 3:

‘Big breakthrough, some species apparently use magic as part of their biology. It breaks lots of what we thought about magic actually, because a big part of it is it’s not 100% predictable. If something evolves with magic, that means it had like, millions of years to get the same spell consistently right, just by the body doing stuff, but they say it’s probs not that simple, idk, it’s interesting though!’

Log 4:

‘Okay, so from what I understand the way spells tend to go is stuff like air mana > soul > body > spell or something. Or does it go through the body first? Point is, some animals have organs that straights up process the mana directly without going by the soul. That’s not the fucked up part, apparently that organ is sort of set to cast a single spell, but it follows the same reproduction principle where mutation and gene mix happens in the womb or egg or whatevs, which can create brand new spells, in theory anyway, we got some new tools from the city to get better results, it’s gonna be wildddd.’

Log 5:

‘Another breakthrough, and it’s from meeeee! They HAVE to make me more than an intern after this lmao. My idea was like, lots of species do stuff only for elaborate ways to have sex, right? One beastie we got, tried to overload it and poke it in whatever ways but even though we know it has a magic organ, it did nothing, so I figured, keep it a box, tightly sealed with no way the scent could go out, only barely enough for air, then put it outside, and guess what? It managed to bring a dozen more of its buddies, despite having no way to get sound or smell out of it! So now we got more to experiment on, that’s cool, I’m awesome.’

Log 6:

‘So, we started doing the part that’s a bit messed up, y’know, actual genome editing. That’s something that’s hard as hell to do on a living thing, but what we caught breeds like rabbits, and reach adulthood fast, easy to feed too. Lots of the experiments are not going well, not sure what’s even the end goal tbh? I mean, science and all that, but it’s still magic organs we’re dealing with.’

Log 7:

‘Some dumbass somehow let one of the experiment run away. Said the corpse looked dead enough, but it was like, just way too good at playing dead, stopped heart and everything, but it rose back up the moment it was shoveled outside. But hey, I’ve been promoted to full on researcher, kinda cool.’

Log 8:

‘I fucking hate these people oh my godddd. ‘Jay, we need a magic analysis’, ‘Jay can you load these runes we need to test how it reacts to this’. You fucks have mana too, you know? If they dig up my black box because I killed myself, blame Jessie, actual fucking waste of a human being. We’ve tried to get more animals from outside, but none are as good as the original Bibis. Yes, that’s what we decided to call the magical critters, it’s cute, I got to pick the name, perks of the jobs, I guess.’

Log 9:

‘So, we haven’t gotten supplies in a while, and Josh decides to call em up, you know? Hey, we need a bit more food, more tools, the usual, but they say they’ve already sent people and we should have enough, but we haven’t??? Didn’t get shit for 5 months, btw. It’s not enough that we have to be cut off from society for years, we can’t even get the basic survival stuff now because their logistics sucksss.

They say that if we make a groundbreaking enough discovery, something like a bioweapon, something like an animal that can consistently cast the spells we need it to cast, or create the organ artificially, which unlike a soul is technically possible, but like, I think we can’t do that without basic support from the city, obviously.’

Log 10:

‘Another radio call. The people they allegedly sent here never came back to the city either. They sent another group, but they went missing too. Tracking their signals, they might have died somewhere in the forest. Unsure how, none of the wildlife was particularly aggressive, worst things we’ve seen is cat sized predators, maybe some undocumented bacteria, happens when your body isn’t built for it.

I’ve requested to be extracted back to the city, but they said it’s going to take some time.’

Log 11:

‘We caught a wild bibi, not just any, but one that has an eerily similar mutation to the one we accidentally let free before. It’s weird though, this one’s aggressive as hell, it already figured out how to use its magic play dead thing to ambush, but it’s still keeping the weird original mating aspect it had before to… ambush other bibis? It’s as if they’re trying to thin their own members. Sure, there’s some rational explanation as to why it’d evolve that way, but this isn’t the kind of behavior that happens overnight, none of the captive bibis we have acts anything like this, even in desperate situations.

Evolution can’t happen that fast. I’m telling them there’s a very real possibility we fucked up the ecosystem somehow, but they say they don’t care, it’s not human grounds.

We haven’t had supplies for a year now. Our vault is self sustaining, we have hydroponics and very efficient energy conversion rates, but that doesn’t mean it’s gonna last forever.

I miss her.’

Log 12:

‘Surprise, it got worse. Every blackbox must be saying the same thing, something along the line of ‘oopsie’! Fuck off, we KNEW something like that was coming, the writing wasn’t on the wall, it was etched into our eyes. Yeah, bibis not only dominated the jungle, but they’ve started diverging into different subspecies at an alarming rate. They’re perfect ambush predators, good enough that the people sent to extract us got fooled. They could send an elite team, but that’s expensive, and from what I’m hearing, we’re far from the only vault having problems, they’ve all ran into some issues with magic in one way or another.

We can’t leave, but we can’t stay here forever, none of us knows what to do. I’ve started taking my magic studies seriously, we don’t have much documentation on any of it, being human and all that, but if magic got us into this mess, maybe it can take us out of it.’

Log 13:

‘We got desperate. The scrapyard experiment, we all heard of it, so we tried to recreate it. A machine given life with magic, given magic has some sort of will, the idea was that if we could make a machine powered by magic it would be enough.

It didn’t work at first, of course, but once you stop caring about ethics, things tend to speed up by a lot. A bibi’s corpse, with their brain connected to the machine’s output. Bit by bit, they’ve figured out how to make the machine use the brain as a processor. This is something we already knew how to do, transplanting a brain into a robot body, but what we didn’t ever try was making a machine capable of casting spells.

The spider like thing, at the drop of a button, could almost entirely erase its existence from any sensor. It was rough, slow, and messy, but the magic part of the whole project, by some miracle, worked perfectly.

The machine responds to all the commands we give it, but it still acts on its own if left unchecked, everyone knows we’re playing with fire, but what real choice do we have? The city’s abandoned us, and going outside shooting everything that moves is hardly a plan, we need this.’

Log 14:

‘What do I even say.

Why am I even writing this. There’s no one but me to read it. Maybe someone will come decade later to tell how I die, but why should I even give them that info, they don’t fucking deserve it, I should erase all the logs in fact, so they can figure it out themselves.

I’m joking, I won’t, that’s the only thing left of them, I don’t want their ghosts haunting me.

We tried making bioweapons, half machine half biological, powered by magic, and as with everything magical, it went out of control. It started evolving, somehow. Reproducing and making more of itself, somehow. Some spell to turn biological matter into metal, somehow. It’s magic, why do we humans ever bother mixing tech with magic? Every time we try, every time we think we’ve got something incredible going, it goes out of control, so, SO fast. I’d like to say it might have gone better if we were closer to the city, but maybe that’s why we’re so far away from everything, so any mess up doesn’t affect the city at all. The moment they heard we were in trouble, they probably rolled their eyes and went ‘this one’s a bust’, hilarious.

Covered from head to toe with what armor we could make, and they chewed through it like nothing. They swarmed me too. I should’ve died, but I woke up without a scratch. I wanted to go back in there and kill them, but I stopped myself. The only difference between me and them is that I had more mana than them, but it’s not as if mana gives me magical healing power by itself, can’t be how I survived.

Why did I survive.’

Log 15:

‘It’s funny how much of our life is based on what other people do. It’s been a few months since that last log, and I thought, ‘oh yeah, that thing, I should update that’, then realized I had nothing to say. I’m trapped here, the hydroponics still works, I have food, processed water, I’ll survive as long as I keep that going. I’ve made some anti-magic runes to stop whatever’s going on outside. They’re annoying to make, I can only carve a few a day, but they can last years without mana refuel, so that’s taken care of. That's it, no changes, no nothing, this forever.

I’m scared that if I attempt to kill myself, I’ll wake up with my wounds healed, like it was a bad dream, but I don’t know how long I can live like that without losing my mind. I need to figure out something, or I’ll only be another animal in this jungle by the end of it.’