She once believed, in every story he had to tell
One day she stiffened, took the other side
Empty stares, from each corner of a shared prison cell
One just escapes, one's left inside the well
And he who forgets, will be destined to remember, oh oh oh...
Nothingman... Nothingman...
Pearl Jam - Nothingman
//This JP takes place between the Mission 1 and Mission 2//
START!
LSDF Val'ta, Deck 9, Primary Science
There was a section of the Primary Science area in the Val'ta close to the underbelly of the ship, where its sole occupant seldom left and the entrance was concealed. With it, a stale smell of duq leaf smoke was in the air and an odour of other chemicals. Some in self medication, some for legitimate experiments - some for both too.
A lone Lorath man paced around his hovel, over some of the rubbish he'd left on the rug, looking at a mirror and wondering whether his lot in life now was really worth all the running he'd done from some far reaching consequences beyond his initial wildest thoughts.
He felt as though he had two swords dangling over his head, only kept aloft by the thinnest of hairs each. The first was the Lazarus Consortium's patience with him, the second the Captains of the Val'ta. He knew the Lmanel woman was ambivalent to him and considered him another hand from the Consortium to keep an eye on all the science equipment, like Michael was for all the engineering.
It was the more orthodox Fyunnen who worried him, quick to call him out on what'd gone down on the Akahar - despite not knowing a thing. The gall of it all distanced Mar'zhaz Keib further from himself and his ties to the Matriarchy. The expectation that his job would be cushy was further complicated by the presence of ex-Akahar staff on board. He couldn't show his face, and his voice? Obfuscated heavily. Their curiosity? His potential downfall.
There was a knock on the 'door'. Was it someone bumping into the wall which separated his little nook again, or someone who knew the way in?
The red handle, a rectangular plate on the door slowly shifted to greenish blue as the door itself slid open. The room was dark, the hall lit - giving Keib only a silhouette at best of a willowishly tall woman with long hair. She wasn't in uniform like the others - her features masked like a black cutout as she stepped into the room - the door sliding shut and locking red behind her without a touch.
Shoulders slumped, she took steps toward him. It seemed obvious to say they were taken one at a time, but the sound of them and the slowness of the motions and moment through Keib's head made each an event of its own.
The New Tur'lista was standing there rolling himself a duq cigarillo. He was responsible for plucking leaves off the fruit in the dead of the night when nobody else was around to spot him, drying them and making his own form of tobacco with them, cut up some Nepleslian stuff, sometimes sprinkling a lab chemical or two in to spice things up. He watched Aiesu walk in as he licked one edge of the leaf and rolled it shut in his fingers.
"Oh, it's only you," he said, relaxing and sitting down on a desk chair encrusted with filth on the armrests. "What brings you down here to the skunkworks?" He asked, with a completed cigarillo in his fingers now.
"I can't say I've met you." she said, moving to pour herself some coffee from a much-abused looking machine festooned in duct tape. She then set the cup aside, eyed the coffee pot and took a drink from it. Her expression was blanched in disgust but she went back for seconds. "The other two have but this is my first impression of you. This is terrible coffee, by the way."
"Ah, another," he sighed, placing the cigarillo in his mouth and slumping his shoulders as he counted on his fingers. "I thought this junket was supposed to be free of surprises, you know."
"Ah, you thought it'd be.. That I'd be like the first who was a brat or the second who thought you a booty call?" she nearly coughed on it. "Please. Don't sound so disappointed."
"To be honest," he lit up and took a puff as he watched the door close itself behind Aiesu, "I preferred the brat, she wasn't pretending to be anything else."
"Well, I've got some good news for you in that case." Aiesu said. Keib raised an eyebrow as a trail of smoke begun to rise into the room in ribbon-like trails.
"The crew haven't really sussed it yet but the nature of the volumetric compression deck means that provided the power needs are met during entry and egress, this ship has a theoretically bottomless basement under it in fifth dimensional space."
"Gotta say, this place is decked to the nines," he nodded in admission as he placed the cigarillo in an ashtray and grabbed himself a cup of coffee, "even in this little shithole."
"Well, I'm personally invested in it. I know this will kill you inside a little but I designed it."
He looked up as he made himself a coffee, doing things to the machine to ensure it got a good brew rather than a kludged one. "Don't take all the credit, I'd love to chat shop with the other guy."
Keib clicked his tongue as he poured himself a cup of hot coffee, steaming more than Aiesu's was. "But goddamn, he can't stay still or he'll probably blow his own foot off building a thermite launcher or using Deck 6 as a motorcycle ring or something." With that, he took a sip. He didn't flinch at all.
With another sip, he pressed ahead with a line of inquiry. "Actually, how much hardlight can this ship put out, in real mass and volume terms?" Keib had seen diagnostics of it being used extensively for training, but he wanted to know how far it could be pushed.
♫ Ennio Morricone - Ecstacy of Gold ♫
"I honestly don't know. A good example is our engines. Our engines don't use real electromagnets to drive the plasma that forms the big extended super-magnet assembly that envelops the whole ship so we get our insane FTL efficiencies. If they were real, they're so tuned for raw performance we'd have to rebuild most of the entire assembly every two weeks like a race-car because they're under so much stress."
Keib finished his coffee in a few quick gulps as Aiesu was explaining the ship to him. He raised an eyebrow.
"We just reboot the engines when they fall out of expected behaviour, alignment or output and they're good to go inside fifteen minutes like brand new. Why? Hardlight's programmable. A nice bonus is the entire assembly of plasma and hardlight weighs less than 1% of what the real thing would, so the ship can be really light, giving us room for the compression."
"Didn't think of it that way." Keib gave his scraggly beard a scratch. "So long as we have power and resources, theoretically this ship can keep expanding, and expanding." He pursed his lips and blinked. The possibilities for that seemed a bit ... worrying.
"Right now, she's an empty husk at less than 1% of her maximum carryweight. She has two powerplants, each containing 60 smaller powerplants that all work in sequence, all about the size of one of those big exercise balls you see the Fyunnens wobbling on in 'the church', all arranged in a big sphere like buckyballs. Only about twenty on each of the buckyballs is switched on at the moment."
"Right..." Keib put his cup back down.
"We power them on in sequence so we can fix the ones that have been running while they're sleeping. The plan is that when we hit 60% of the total capacity of all of them, we build another two bucky-ball assemblies, taking us from 120 to 240. We'd need to overhaul the hull, though, hence the strange look of the ship - its made to be expanded upon."
Keib held up a finger to stop her there. "Even though I'm always for having more than you need in case of an emergency, how far is too far, do you think? You need to realise that we have an assimilation machine here. Hell, we dove through a gas giant for more resources, and they're already being put to use by the boys and girls in Foundry and Manufacturing to patch stuff up."
He picked up his cigarillo before continuing, pointing it at Aiesu. "What safeguards are in place, if, say, the ship gets a mind of its own and starts eating planets like apples once its big enough? We have a monster here, potentially."
"It maxes out at six of those bucky-balls and it can't make a whole second ship. She's designed to last about 100 years of hard mission and remain operational for up to a thousand. In my research, I anticipated a scenario where we might encounter time dilation and I wanted to make sure some semblance of us would make it home if we did. There's a reason nobody goes out this far."
Aiesu held her smile. The 'mad scientist' influence was a bit more clear now than it had been with the other two constructs, her predecessors that he'd had the misfortune of meeting. Keib cooly took a drag of his cigarillo, realising she was a little off her rocker.
"Don't you understand, Keib? This is the only ship designed specifically to leave known space altogether."
"OK." Keib said, finishing his cigarillo and brushing the butt against the armrest of his chair.
"If you want to meet the brat, she's somewhere on board. She was meant to be a sort of trump card for if you tried to leave. A psychological motivation to stay. She's in the same state she was on the Akahar - in need of repair, her software in pause - repackaged but not refurbished. If you get lonely-"
Keib made a dismissive wave at Aiesu. "You are a mean bitch at heart, but I'm happy here in relative obscurity, with a cushy job." He admitted. "Porrim, thankfully, doesn't seem to care or mind me being here so long as I have output at the end of each expedition, but the bulldyke worries me."
"Which one?"
To Aiesu, bulldyke could mean any one of the thirty seven Fyunnen on board. Or any woman taller than her, depending on the day.
"Bel'meir." He filled the gap. "The other captain, serves as captain on deck when Porrim and company are planetside." From what he knew, she was a hardcore Orthodoxy sort, very blood and thunder in regards to heretics or the unaccountable - Keib was both.
"On Yamatai, they say you love your Taisa. Porrim loves her crew. More than any other captain in the LSDF. She's loyal to the point of fault."
"I've ... heard. Yeah," he snickered, looking over to a display which had some security feed on it.
"She's a match for always putting the crew's survival first. She'll never turn on us; she's psychologically almost incapable of it. Its why the ship has her in its core registry as captain. And why it only has Bel'meir in software as a commander, captain only in name."
"She made any moves on you?" He asked, raising an eyebrow and pointing a coffee cup to her.
Aiesu took another drink from the pot. The cup was a formality, something to leave Keib when she was done.
"You're seriously suggesting she'd be interested in me?"
"Shit, she's a Lorath, Lmanel, heard she used to do Morale Officer work - and nobody knows what gender she really is. Even I don't know."
"Science doesn't know either. After enough kaserine use, your genome becomes impressionable if you're Lmanel. The same way a drunk becomes impressionable. The same way a drunk forgets. I think her aspectation might actually be kaserine."
Keib put the empty cup of coffee he was using back on his desk and shrugged. "Yeah, let's not waste the resources speculating. We've got things like planets to speculate."
He turned around. "Did you see the preliminary data from this one we're heading to, just a ways of Miyamae, a bit ... South East of it?"
"No, I've been holed up reviewing the crew for possible contaminants, who refused to remain in stasis or quarantine. I've actually just finished a machine to do the job for me because I'm so fucking sick of it."
"Oh, that thing?" Keib tilted his head, raising an eyebrow. He heard about something rumbling in the manufacturing area.
"Its basically a phonebooth we can throw at a planet and airdrop. Crew climbs in. Makes sure they're clean, scrubs them out, produces reviewable material for machines, not by one of the two head engineers. But most of all, it gives the crew their just deserts for ignoring me; I hope you don't ever have to step into one."
He made a impressed whistle. "I've heard its thorough, like," he put two of his fingers in front of Aiesu, then hooked them upwards, "goes all the way up your ass," he then flattened his hand and put it over his shoulder, "right out your mouth, then everything else in between. I have no intention to step in it."
"It empties your guts, bakes your skin and makes you vomit. Its a very very unpleasant affair."
Keib then leaned in, lips taut as he wondered just how unpleasant Aiesu had felt to devise something that ludicrous. "You aren't filming that ... are you?"
"ME!?" Aiesu gagged on her coffee. "If anyone would be, its Porrim. She's ..." the l'manel sighed. "She's taken to using it recreationally, when she gets out of bed. Says it makes her feel squeaky clean."
Keib's eyes widened, looking up at the ceiling, presumably through the walls at the Captain's quarters. Perhaps Bel'meir wasn't the one to be worried about.
"Its the xenon lamp. Its meant to kill anything hiding in the skin but it makes the outer epidermis - the dead layer - shed. so your skin is really soft. It also kills body hair that isn't your eyebrows or scalp. And a free enema before breakfast too. And a dedicated six hour sleep-in. Porrim's disgusting but there's a ... A logic I can appreciate to her."
"Like what?" Keib rolled his eyes. "Thrust forward, both hands on hips, a twist of the arms to the right, then do the Central City Face Hat?"
"More thrust more speed, she'd say."
"More Thrust, more Speed." Keib repeated, in Trade, better accented than Porrim'scented. He nodded to himself. He occasionally heard Nepleslians say it.
"I hear everyone says it all over space but I still have no idea where its from. We should stage a fucking mission just to find out."
Keib nodded without hesitation. "After we do this system, tag it, and get Porrim to 'thrust and speed' anywhere of interest, we're on."
END!
One day she stiffened, took the other side
Empty stares, from each corner of a shared prison cell
One just escapes, one's left inside the well
And he who forgets, will be destined to remember, oh oh oh...
Nothingman... Nothingman...
Pearl Jam - Nothingman
//This JP takes place between the Mission 1 and Mission 2//
START!
LSDF Val'ta, Deck 9, Primary Science
There was a section of the Primary Science area in the Val'ta close to the underbelly of the ship, where its sole occupant seldom left and the entrance was concealed. With it, a stale smell of duq leaf smoke was in the air and an odour of other chemicals. Some in self medication, some for legitimate experiments - some for both too.
A lone Lorath man paced around his hovel, over some of the rubbish he'd left on the rug, looking at a mirror and wondering whether his lot in life now was really worth all the running he'd done from some far reaching consequences beyond his initial wildest thoughts.
He felt as though he had two swords dangling over his head, only kept aloft by the thinnest of hairs each. The first was the Lazarus Consortium's patience with him, the second the Captains of the Val'ta. He knew the Lmanel woman was ambivalent to him and considered him another hand from the Consortium to keep an eye on all the science equipment, like Michael was for all the engineering.
It was the more orthodox Fyunnen who worried him, quick to call him out on what'd gone down on the Akahar - despite not knowing a thing. The gall of it all distanced Mar'zhaz Keib further from himself and his ties to the Matriarchy. The expectation that his job would be cushy was further complicated by the presence of ex-Akahar staff on board. He couldn't show his face, and his voice? Obfuscated heavily. Their curiosity? His potential downfall.
There was a knock on the 'door'. Was it someone bumping into the wall which separated his little nook again, or someone who knew the way in?
The red handle, a rectangular plate on the door slowly shifted to greenish blue as the door itself slid open. The room was dark, the hall lit - giving Keib only a silhouette at best of a willowishly tall woman with long hair. She wasn't in uniform like the others - her features masked like a black cutout as she stepped into the room - the door sliding shut and locking red behind her without a touch.
Shoulders slumped, she took steps toward him. It seemed obvious to say they were taken one at a time, but the sound of them and the slowness of the motions and moment through Keib's head made each an event of its own.
The New Tur'lista was standing there rolling himself a duq cigarillo. He was responsible for plucking leaves off the fruit in the dead of the night when nobody else was around to spot him, drying them and making his own form of tobacco with them, cut up some Nepleslian stuff, sometimes sprinkling a lab chemical or two in to spice things up. He watched Aiesu walk in as he licked one edge of the leaf and rolled it shut in his fingers.
"Oh, it's only you," he said, relaxing and sitting down on a desk chair encrusted with filth on the armrests. "What brings you down here to the skunkworks?" He asked, with a completed cigarillo in his fingers now.
"I can't say I've met you." she said, moving to pour herself some coffee from a much-abused looking machine festooned in duct tape. She then set the cup aside, eyed the coffee pot and took a drink from it. Her expression was blanched in disgust but she went back for seconds. "The other two have but this is my first impression of you. This is terrible coffee, by the way."
"Ah, another," he sighed, placing the cigarillo in his mouth and slumping his shoulders as he counted on his fingers. "I thought this junket was supposed to be free of surprises, you know."
"Ah, you thought it'd be.. That I'd be like the first who was a brat or the second who thought you a booty call?" she nearly coughed on it. "Please. Don't sound so disappointed."
"To be honest," he lit up and took a puff as he watched the door close itself behind Aiesu, "I preferred the brat, she wasn't pretending to be anything else."
"Well, I've got some good news for you in that case." Aiesu said. Keib raised an eyebrow as a trail of smoke begun to rise into the room in ribbon-like trails.
"The crew haven't really sussed it yet but the nature of the volumetric compression deck means that provided the power needs are met during entry and egress, this ship has a theoretically bottomless basement under it in fifth dimensional space."
"Gotta say, this place is decked to the nines," he nodded in admission as he placed the cigarillo in an ashtray and grabbed himself a cup of coffee, "even in this little shithole."
"Well, I'm personally invested in it. I know this will kill you inside a little but I designed it."
He looked up as he made himself a coffee, doing things to the machine to ensure it got a good brew rather than a kludged one. "Don't take all the credit, I'd love to chat shop with the other guy."
Keib clicked his tongue as he poured himself a cup of hot coffee, steaming more than Aiesu's was. "But goddamn, he can't stay still or he'll probably blow his own foot off building a thermite launcher or using Deck 6 as a motorcycle ring or something." With that, he took a sip. He didn't flinch at all.
With another sip, he pressed ahead with a line of inquiry. "Actually, how much hardlight can this ship put out, in real mass and volume terms?" Keib had seen diagnostics of it being used extensively for training, but he wanted to know how far it could be pushed.
♫ Ennio Morricone - Ecstacy of Gold ♫
"I honestly don't know. A good example is our engines. Our engines don't use real electromagnets to drive the plasma that forms the big extended super-magnet assembly that envelops the whole ship so we get our insane FTL efficiencies. If they were real, they're so tuned for raw performance we'd have to rebuild most of the entire assembly every two weeks like a race-car because they're under so much stress."
Keib finished his coffee in a few quick gulps as Aiesu was explaining the ship to him. He raised an eyebrow.
"We just reboot the engines when they fall out of expected behaviour, alignment or output and they're good to go inside fifteen minutes like brand new. Why? Hardlight's programmable. A nice bonus is the entire assembly of plasma and hardlight weighs less than 1% of what the real thing would, so the ship can be really light, giving us room for the compression."
"Didn't think of it that way." Keib gave his scraggly beard a scratch. "So long as we have power and resources, theoretically this ship can keep expanding, and expanding." He pursed his lips and blinked. The possibilities for that seemed a bit ... worrying.
"Right now, she's an empty husk at less than 1% of her maximum carryweight. She has two powerplants, each containing 60 smaller powerplants that all work in sequence, all about the size of one of those big exercise balls you see the Fyunnens wobbling on in 'the church', all arranged in a big sphere like buckyballs. Only about twenty on each of the buckyballs is switched on at the moment."
"Right..." Keib put his cup back down.
"We power them on in sequence so we can fix the ones that have been running while they're sleeping. The plan is that when we hit 60% of the total capacity of all of them, we build another two bucky-ball assemblies, taking us from 120 to 240. We'd need to overhaul the hull, though, hence the strange look of the ship - its made to be expanded upon."
Keib held up a finger to stop her there. "Even though I'm always for having more than you need in case of an emergency, how far is too far, do you think? You need to realise that we have an assimilation machine here. Hell, we dove through a gas giant for more resources, and they're already being put to use by the boys and girls in Foundry and Manufacturing to patch stuff up."
He picked up his cigarillo before continuing, pointing it at Aiesu. "What safeguards are in place, if, say, the ship gets a mind of its own and starts eating planets like apples once its big enough? We have a monster here, potentially."
"It maxes out at six of those bucky-balls and it can't make a whole second ship. She's designed to last about 100 years of hard mission and remain operational for up to a thousand. In my research, I anticipated a scenario where we might encounter time dilation and I wanted to make sure some semblance of us would make it home if we did. There's a reason nobody goes out this far."
Aiesu held her smile. The 'mad scientist' influence was a bit more clear now than it had been with the other two constructs, her predecessors that he'd had the misfortune of meeting. Keib cooly took a drag of his cigarillo, realising she was a little off her rocker.
"Don't you understand, Keib? This is the only ship designed specifically to leave known space altogether."
"OK." Keib said, finishing his cigarillo and brushing the butt against the armrest of his chair.
"If you want to meet the brat, she's somewhere on board. She was meant to be a sort of trump card for if you tried to leave. A psychological motivation to stay. She's in the same state she was on the Akahar - in need of repair, her software in pause - repackaged but not refurbished. If you get lonely-"
Keib made a dismissive wave at Aiesu. "You are a mean bitch at heart, but I'm happy here in relative obscurity, with a cushy job." He admitted. "Porrim, thankfully, doesn't seem to care or mind me being here so long as I have output at the end of each expedition, but the bulldyke worries me."
"Which one?"
To Aiesu, bulldyke could mean any one of the thirty seven Fyunnen on board. Or any woman taller than her, depending on the day.
"Bel'meir." He filled the gap. "The other captain, serves as captain on deck when Porrim and company are planetside." From what he knew, she was a hardcore Orthodoxy sort, very blood and thunder in regards to heretics or the unaccountable - Keib was both.
"On Yamatai, they say you love your Taisa. Porrim loves her crew. More than any other captain in the LSDF. She's loyal to the point of fault."
"I've ... heard. Yeah," he snickered, looking over to a display which had some security feed on it.
"She's a match for always putting the crew's survival first. She'll never turn on us; she's psychologically almost incapable of it. Its why the ship has her in its core registry as captain. And why it only has Bel'meir in software as a commander, captain only in name."
"She made any moves on you?" He asked, raising an eyebrow and pointing a coffee cup to her.
Aiesu took another drink from the pot. The cup was a formality, something to leave Keib when she was done.
"You're seriously suggesting she'd be interested in me?"
"Shit, she's a Lorath, Lmanel, heard she used to do Morale Officer work - and nobody knows what gender she really is. Even I don't know."
"Science doesn't know either. After enough kaserine use, your genome becomes impressionable if you're Lmanel. The same way a drunk becomes impressionable. The same way a drunk forgets. I think her aspectation might actually be kaserine."
Keib put the empty cup of coffee he was using back on his desk and shrugged. "Yeah, let's not waste the resources speculating. We've got things like planets to speculate."
He turned around. "Did you see the preliminary data from this one we're heading to, just a ways of Miyamae, a bit ... South East of it?"
"No, I've been holed up reviewing the crew for possible contaminants, who refused to remain in stasis or quarantine. I've actually just finished a machine to do the job for me because I'm so fucking sick of it."
"Oh, that thing?" Keib tilted his head, raising an eyebrow. He heard about something rumbling in the manufacturing area.
"Its basically a phonebooth we can throw at a planet and airdrop. Crew climbs in. Makes sure they're clean, scrubs them out, produces reviewable material for machines, not by one of the two head engineers. But most of all, it gives the crew their just deserts for ignoring me; I hope you don't ever have to step into one."
He made a impressed whistle. "I've heard its thorough, like," he put two of his fingers in front of Aiesu, then hooked them upwards, "goes all the way up your ass," he then flattened his hand and put it over his shoulder, "right out your mouth, then everything else in between. I have no intention to step in it."
"It empties your guts, bakes your skin and makes you vomit. Its a very very unpleasant affair."
Keib then leaned in, lips taut as he wondered just how unpleasant Aiesu had felt to devise something that ludicrous. "You aren't filming that ... are you?"
"ME!?" Aiesu gagged on her coffee. "If anyone would be, its Porrim. She's ..." the l'manel sighed. "She's taken to using it recreationally, when she gets out of bed. Says it makes her feel squeaky clean."
Keib's eyes widened, looking up at the ceiling, presumably through the walls at the Captain's quarters. Perhaps Bel'meir wasn't the one to be worried about.
"Its the xenon lamp. Its meant to kill anything hiding in the skin but it makes the outer epidermis - the dead layer - shed. so your skin is really soft. It also kills body hair that isn't your eyebrows or scalp. And a free enema before breakfast too. And a dedicated six hour sleep-in. Porrim's disgusting but there's a ... A logic I can appreciate to her."
"Like what?" Keib rolled his eyes. "Thrust forward, both hands on hips, a twist of the arms to the right, then do the Central City Face Hat?"
"More thrust more speed, she'd say."
"More Thrust, more Speed." Keib repeated, in Trade, better accented than Porrim'scented. He nodded to himself. He occasionally heard Nepleslians say it.
"I hear everyone says it all over space but I still have no idea where its from. We should stage a fucking mission just to find out."
Keib nodded without hesitation. "After we do this system, tag it, and get Porrim to 'thrust and speed' anywhere of interest, we're on."
END!
