Apocalyptic Log / Fan Works

• Something WIcked This Way COmes, a Star Trek: The Original Series fanfic has an Apocalptic Captain's Log by the captain of a ship that went through an Eldritch Location in space - the log begins complaining of widespread space sickness among the crew and goes downhill from there, getting more nad more incoherent as the captain undergoes serious Sanity Slippage. Kirk and the Enterprise crew finds the ship empty of everything but corpses... or so it seems, to begin with.
  "I can sense them" Neill had recorded in one of his later entries. "They are in our dreams, looking in. they are in the corners where the shadow falls on them. They know who we are."
• Among You: A large portion of the and they say murder can't be a bonding activity - whats been released of it so far, anyway - consists of Orange reading White's data log, documenting experiments involving Minis and Impostors, how she got her Mini, and how she came to work on the Reliant.
• A Statement in the Ice, a one-shot Watchmen/Cthulhu Mythos crossover which uses the concept that Adrian called down a real Eldritch Abomination rather than had one customized.
• The Baker Street Record, a Sherlock Holmes/House of Leaves crossover, is one giant Apocalyptic Log.
• Dr. Brainstorm records something similar to one while his lab is ablaze in Calvin & Hobbes: The Series.
• Children of an Elder God: The prologue consists in Gendo and Fuyutsuki listening to the "Transcript of the Last Transmissions of the Long-Smith Expedition", recorded by two scientists while they were exploring a network of caverns. The log abruptly ends up when they are found by an Eldritch Abomination.
• "Daring DONE!": Parodied. Ponies repeatedly send letters through a magical dragon even when they really should have better things to do, or shouldn't be physically capable of sending letters. It starts with the relatively tame example of Twilight Velvet sending letters to her daughter while the princesses are tearing her house apart, and then escalates to the Royal Guard desperately sending letters to her husband Night Light while she's fighting them.
  Night Light: Twilight Velvet is whipping you and you still send me a letter? I don't really understand how that works, but Princess Celestia can be proud of her Royal Guards' dedication.
• In the fanfic-of-a-fanfic, The Dark Past, the boys exploring an ancient alien spaceship discover the final log recording made by the only remaining relatively able-bodied crew member right before he killed himself. The recording gives them enough clues to understand what happened and also provides some plot exposition.
• Fallout: Equestria, like its source material, is full of these. Much of the backstory of before the war is explained through computer logbook entries and memory orbs scattered about.
• The Thomas & Friends Dark Fic Sodor Fallout is told through Sidney’s (Edward’s driver) notes and logs he writes in his journal.
• In Fleet of the Homeward Bound, The International Space Station keeps a constant feed and broadcast trained on the three Ha'Taks in orbit even though she is well aware that her orbit is about to carry her into their presence, at which point they'll probably vaporize her, in the hopes that somebody on Earth can use the information to stop them. This is subverted when Normandy alters her orbit with a Mass Effect field to put her out of immediate danger.
• The Frozen Terror is an A Song of Ice and Fire fic about a young Brandon, Ned, and Lyanna finding a journal hidden in Brandon the Shipwright's tomb detailing his failed journey across the Sunset Sea. It's revealed that they were actually successful in reaching eastern Essos that way, but on return they ran aground on an iceberg, where a mysterious creature began hunting the crew each night. It ultimately turns out to be one of the crew, cursed into a werewolf while in Asshai. By the time this is discovered, most of the crew is dead and Brandon has been infected; he sequesters himself in the iceberg before he can turn and sends the few survivors back to Westeros with his journal as a warning, which is what led his son to burn the North's fleet so no one could ever risk finding him and spreading the curse.
• The Ghost of the North is mostly a story about a mysterious, incredibly powerful figure (the Ghost) that gives certain tips to the nobles of the North, and later all of Westeros, to prevent certain problems and prepare the Seven Kingdoms for the Long Night, the last chapter is about a centenary Jon Targaryen (son of Rhaegar and Lyanna, who married some time after Elia dies in childbirth) reading one such log. Written by canon Jon Snow, it tells of how the Others felled the Wall and marched south while most nobles stupidly continued to play the game of thrones. The Others eventually took over Westeros, which not even Daenerys and her dragons were able to prevent, and the last survivors of the Seven Kingdoms took refuge in Essos. While the Others struck at the slaver Free Cities, Jon crossed back to Westeros and made his way north to find Bran, who told him the war was lost, but that he could yet change things: he would send Jon back in time to change history, but he would have to leave behind his identity... becoming the Ghost of the North.
• In The Gospel Of Malachel, the captain of a merchant ship sends a distress right before his vessel is destroyed by an Eldritch Abomination.
  The deck shook under his feet and the bow of the ship tilted downwards, throwing him against the console. The ground had a distinctive slope and the ship began to slide forward, picking up speed.
  "Mayday! Mayday! This is the transport vessel Malheureux! We're currently—!" His voice stopped as the ship suddenly cleared the edge of the ground. He could see the sea very far below, glittering in the sunlight. "—airborne," he squeaked as the ship tilted forward and began the long fall towards the water.
• The Halloween Unspectacular anthology series has a few examples:
  • "Dead Gods" is a final message from AJ, recording how he was part of an expedition to study a Reaper found buried under London. It ended up Indoctrinating most of the expedition members, who then killed the rest. AJ states his intent to shoot himself before it happens to him too, but not before warning whoever finds his message to destroy the Reaper, even if means destroying London as well.
  • "Project ReGenesis" is presented as a series of reports and security footage of the titular project, dedicated to creating a Physical God... and how it succeeds, resulting in the deaths of everyone involved.
  • "Cairo to the Cape" is a series of journal entries by AJ, Jimmy, and Jazz, who are all part of a recreational expedition from Cairo to Cape Town which gets hopelessly lost after crossing Lake Victoria. Sanity Slippage is on full display as they begin suffering from low supplies and disease. The final entry is by Mr. Krabs, who reveals that he and Eliza deliberately led the group astray as part of a Human Sacrifice.
  • "Sea Dogs" opens with an entry in the personal log of a sea galleon's captain, recounting how his ship became lost at sea, and overwhelmed by a mysterious illness, which the main story eventually reveals to be werewolves.
• In the first episode of Supergirl fanfic Hellsister Trilogy, Satan Girl assaults a starship. The crew has time to send a message right before being destroyed.
  Within seconds, she was in outer space. Her course was set to intercept that of a massive United Planets patrol ship.
  A message was shortly received at the headquarters of the United Planets. It was the last one they would get from that particular starship.
  The message stated that their craft was being destroyed by an unarmed woman. It was cut off before the end.
• The Hidden Frontier season 1 episode Perihelion, in a manner similar to the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode Night Terrors, features an excellent cameo by Gabriel Köerner, in logs which show him deteriorating under the constant pressure of hallucinations, system failures and mutiny.
  Köerner: I think I may have to kill my Chief Engineer.
• In Jericho (MLP), surprisingly given the setting, but also downplayed. The most exact events of what's going on are told from a little girl's diary, and so it's not explicit at all what's going on. While it's not a normal example of an apocalyptic log, since the end hasn't technically happened in them, they do tell a story of things getting worse, but, at the times Jericho arrives, the dark events aren't over yet.
• The Hetalia: Axis Powers Dark Fic, Log of the End of the World, is exactly what you'd expect it to be. Although there are a few chapters where it goes out of the log format, the majority of the fic is written as journal entries written by the surviving Nations after a nuclear war kills millions around the world, including Nations like Russia, Poland, Hungary, Finland, Ukraine, Belarus, (South) Korea, Taiwan... The list truly does goes on.
• Lost to Dust: On the day she was killed, Ilia Amitola made a recording on her scroll in case she didn't make it. After explaining that someone was killing everyone in her unit, she declared her love for Blake Belladonna and said she was planning to find her so that they could run away together. Then she was killed. Unfortunately, the recording doesn't show the face of her killer.
• The Dragon Age fic Middle Of Nowhere is written as a diary. The narrator occasionally gets into enough trouble that other characters have to step in and complete his entries.
• In "How Things Smurf" from Raven Child's The Smurfette Village series, Brainette finds Tattlerette's last Daily Report in the Smurf Village which recorded that Smurfette's final words about what went on during the time the Synthetic Plague spread through the village.
• The Night Unfurls: Should anyone but the owner pick up Kyril's journal, they would find the contents incomplete and scrambled in no particular order, yet they document a tale about his experience in Yharnam, including: one of his deaths, his initial hopefulness, the deaths of all the people he befriended, and other mind-shattering ordeals and monstrosities.
• The Aviators song "One Last Letter" is set in a Bad Future where the Mane Six failed to stop Discord and centers on Twilight writing a final letter to Celestia before being completely discorded herself.
• Pokémon Reset Bloodlines has a sidestory titled "Shadows of the Jungle". It's written in the form of journal entries from a Pokémon Researcher named Gideon Knowles, following him and his colleagues in an expedition to Guyana in search of a Legendary Pokémon. The team loses members one after another as they go deeper into the jungle, attacked by vicious swarms of Bug-type Pokémon, until the final entry has Knowles writing how he was taken to an underground lair, and the one controlling turned out to be not a Legendary Pokémon, but a human girl, a bloodliner who acts as their Hive Queen. Knowles ends up placed in a pit to be devoured alive, and somehow his journal ends up in a completely different place, where search parties sent by Giovanni (who funded the expedition) retrieve it.
• The Pony POV Series has two examples, both of which somehow ended up in the possession of the Interviewers, who eventually saw them end up in Twilight's possession.
  • The first is Razzaroo's book, containing every last detail of the G3 world and the ponies living there as the Alicorns and Draconequi erased it all from existence.
  • G2 Bon Bon's diary, containing accounts from herself and the other G2 Mane Cast on the collapse of G2 society and their G3 incarnations' reactions to the above mentioned erasure.
• The second chapter of Power Rangers Clockwork focuses on the heroes finding a series of journals belonging to Asgaut Velothi, chronicling his family's life in Urverk Castle, going from the construction to experiencing tragic events such as a worker dying and then revived in a suit of armor temporarily until a fire mage killed him again. The final journal documents on Aricin's illness from his poisoning, and then Asgaut suffering the same effects and being suited into armor, only it took years for him to finally die, and it was all done for the family to reach immortality, instrumented by Brynja.
• Realistic Pokémon: What Lies in the Cerulean Caves is presented as the POV of a doomed trainer's camera.
• The short (one chapter) fic Shadow Realm: Blasphemy is an Apocalpyptic Log written by Kozaky (well, a Kozaky, there's lots of them) who is commissioned to translate a tablet. The journal starts off like a typical research log, but the writer starts showing signs of exhaustion, then obsession, then questionable sanity. Eventually, the log makes it clear that the tablet itself is cursed, and details a dark ritual that, if performed correctly, will restore Ruin, Queen of Oblivion and Demise, King of Armageddon, and the still-sapient vestiges of both are trying to control him in order to compel him to do so. Eventually, he has a brief moment of lucidity, convinces a courier to bring the tablet to the ocean and bury it on the seafloor, and after writing the final entry on the fireproof journal as a warning to anyone who goes looking for it, activates a bomb that kills him and destroys the translations.
• Starlight Over Detrot had the diary of High Spirits, a teacher whose efforts to fix his school's leaky boiler worked a little too well:
  As I made to get up, I bumped the book. It fell open, passed the section we'd been reading, and the diagrams, to the last several pages.
  In jagged, slashing strokes of the pen, there was a single word written again and again across every inch of the paper and on both sides. It packed the corners and was circled dozens of times.
  Late! Late! LATE!''
  I hesitated before easing the book shut again with one toe.
  "In fact, If nopony has any objections... I'd like to leave this place right now."
• In Subject 014, a Naruto fanfiction, Anko is in an abandoned base and is reading one of these and the last entry sudden trails off the clipboard. Anko then checks the date. the last entry was written seventeen minutes ago.
  Anko: Fuck!
• In Sweetie's Mansion, Sweetie Belle finds torn pages of a shared journal by Madame Fleur and Spector that explains about how they lived before they were turned into ghosts and clues about the mystery of the mansion itself.
• The Marvel Universe fan film #TRUTHINJOURNALISM is basically Man Bites Dog with the twist that the camera crew realizes that they're becoming accomplices to a scumbag and try to back out. Venom doesn't take it well...
• In an homage to the Serenity example, the Star Trek Online fic A Voice in the Wilderness has an away team from USS Bajor investigate a partially assimilated Preserver installation and discover a recording of a Preserver admitting to having accidentally created the Borg and imprisoning its Artificial Intelligence after they had taken over the planet, then being assimilated himself.
• There Was Once an Avenger From Krypton: The first entry in Sapient Species Codex, rather than being auto-written by the Altean species-monitoring system, was written by Alteans who survived the Galra purge and were determined to leave behind a record of their species, which they were convinced was too devastated to survive.
• In the Alien fanfilm The Message, the Final Girl is woken from cyrosleep to find the crew dead and a message for Weyland Yutani left by the captain who was ordered by the Company to land on LV426 and investigate rumors of the alien spaceship. The recording is interrupted by the xenomorph killing him and the Master Computer wants permission to transmit it to Weyland Yutani, but she orders it deleted and sends her own. "To the people who sent us here: FUCK YOU!" Unfortunately, it's not enough to deter the Company from sending another spaceship.

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