Then yes, Weaver will agree that this works for her! Thank you for your help, folks, she's looking forward to her home being taken care of again.

In the meantime the group can also grab what's left of the pre-darkness research that was saved. This as well as the above mentioned research will certainly take plenty of time to sort through, read, and make sense of, so that will surely fill quite a bit of their downtime. The pre-darkness notes, in summary:

• The earliest-dated files give a general sense of the original history of the Helix Station, which was placed under Lake Red Jacket to provide cooling to the facility, to provide general security from Soviet satellite photography, and to help contain and quarantine any of the items that were retrieved, including potential plans for biological samples (both dead and alive) from other worlds. The portal here is a scaled-up, improved version from Dr. Solis' initial project and was funded by a variety of sources including the Department of Defense but was always run as a science outpost.



• Many of the initial research notes themselves give details on a few other worlds. It seems that they used the portal not only to pull objects through, but specifically they were able to observe other worlds using the portal as a window, or more accurately a door - as the machine was stable enough to let someone pass through, observe, retrieve an object, and return within a brief window of time. Spacetime coordinates for three stable worlds with intelligent life and safe atmospheres are provided here. Extreme caution was taken to ensure that the inhabitants did not see the scientists, and that no more than a few minutes at a time were ever spent due to the risk of portal instability stranding someone on the wrong side.



• Authorship of the notes changes in the early 1970s and it comes with a radical shift in tone as the navy takes over operations of the station. Research is no longer exploratory but targeted. Attempts to capture "dark ephemeral bodies" are made but the initial subjects dissipate shortly after containment. As the dates progress, these creatures last longer, and several are contained, observed, and sampled but the researchers at the base struggle to make sense of their apparent abiotic makeup. Research is heavily focused on trying to understand their structure with focus on what harms them. For a time, strong light seems to work but eventually that too fails to "kill" them; meanwhile, more and more are brought in for study, and the names of researchers involved in the projects begins to dwindle.



• The final documents center around the recent appearance of an unknown giant creature which appears to absorb sunlight. Military orders are issued to close or postpone all existing projects and focus solely on importing radioactive materials from a variety of planets to supplement existing federal stockpiles, to record and process audio samples of the creature's vocalizations. The wing containing captured DEBs (which one of the researchers nicknames "forest spirits" due to their fantasy woodland creature appearance) is destroyed in an accident involving one of these recordings.
  
  As the base is somewhat sheltered from the creature due to its underwater location, most weapons creation and testing moves to the station and it fully becomes a military outpost, with the remaining science team conscripted to work on a variety of new projects. Chemical and biological weapons are launched at the creature and all fail to even make it flinch, and peppering it with ammunition yields no obvious effects either. Weaponry focus quickly shifts only to nuclear warheads as they have no more time to test less-conventional methods.



• A final set of notes are written to accompany an audio cassette. The station was to be evacuated, but one member of the team stayed behind at the Helix Station against those orders and set up a recording unit at the lake's surface on a buoy with the capacity to store up to 24 hours of audio on a band of frequencies far exceeding human hearing. Notes from various Night Market teams added to this text file indicate that the buoy has been searched for but has not yet been retrieved.