Something killed us...
Nice dramatic opener there, Cas, care to elaborate? okay fine.
A lot has changed since my last update. We discovered that we're not the only things scurrying about on Wulf 3. That's right, there's genuine alien life down here!
In the films you'd have had all sorts of probe droids, or bald men in tight uniforms ordering scans for lifeforms and whatnot but reality didn't work out like that. The Forge tech means we are the probes. It works out much faster and cheaper to send a team of freshly printed humans in first, check everything out. why send a robot with a camera when you can send a person with actual eyeballs to have a look? If those eyeballs end up on fire or eaten by a big hairy space goose? You're insured! You pop out of the forge, fresh as a daisy with nothing but a new aversion to waterfowl.
Anyway, it wasn't the alien life that killed us. These guys are more like mayflies, in terms of size and lifespan. We discovered them at sunrise on our first trip out of the base. Clouds of tiny energetic specks dancing through the air, crashing together, dropping to the ground and vanishing as quickly as they had appeared. This process repeated every day. The "flies" paid us no attention, spending no time avoiding us or attacking our suits, just continuing their routine and then vanishing into the soil.
After four days, I finally convinced the others to venture outside without our suits. We knew from four whole days of atmospheric tests that the air was safe, fresh and ready to breathe, so that's what we did and it was incredible, like breathing earth's air before humans gunked it up.
The spent the rest of the day exploring unrestricted, returning to base utterly exhausted. We shared a meal, toasting to the success of our first trip outside without lids, and sank into our beds ready to dream weird dreams about geese...
...and awoke aboard the Orbital.