Blast off!!!

DRIVING THIS THING IS THE MOST INTENSE RIDE EVER!!!!!

Some must think that getting onto the highway and booking it at over 100 must be the thrill ride of their life. I just topped that. The speed that the Cthulu reached was so fast, all the little speeders we left behind were moving so slow in comparison they would have looked like a scale model of a city with teeny toy cars glued to the streets.

We had slept right on the ship as there wasn't any point of us taking up space on the station when we were launching off today. We all woke up early -if any of us had slept- and went straight to getting things done. A cameraman and reporter also climbed onto the ship while we were working and started a live feed down to the surface where the whole teeny tiny world would be watching with its teeny tiny people. Go us!

When we were done, we all got onto the 'bridge' as we jokingly called it. It really looked that way though. Like I said before, the front of the ship was domed superglass, and my pilot's seat sat right in the middle of it, giving me the most awesome view of space. Ever. There were two more panels and chairs behind me. One was where Hyosuke would sit and watch over the ship's diagnostics, and the other was where Janet would sit and pay attention to the rest of space and navigate and things. Basically she was my co-pilot.

And then we took off. Hyosuke dug up a real oldie from his music files and we began our flight listening to "Low Rider" from some group long ago. It was good though, nice and groovy, and helped us keep our nerves in check as we drifted. Then the engines began kicking in, and we went faster. And faster.

And then I hit the hyperdrive button.

Never in my life have I felt something so exhilarating. We went from typical launch speed to unmatched raw power as we didn't just fly out of the solar system, we freaking ROARED. Oh yeah, it was that intense.

About half an hour later and some minor tweaks to our heading, I brought us all the way down to a drift. We are now the first humans to leave our little system. Ahead of us in the distance was another, with a nice brightly burning star in the middle of it. I was thankful the dome also had some pretty fancy sunblocker tech in it so I could actually see the sun and not go absolutely blind from it.

Now we had to decide which of the planets we would check out first. After a few hours of debating between Janet, Andrei, John, and Elizabeth, we decided to start with the closest planet, which was just off to our right. I flew us into geosynchronous orbit (which is freaking hard) while Hyosuke and Elizabeth began screwing with their instruments.

They just finally dropped the rover pod onto the blue-gray surface, and while they're doing that I'm going to catch some shut-eye. I'll put down what they've found tomorrow. This is Jack Babylon, signing off.