Active Plots (Alphabetical) - Updated 8/21/2010

Can't I Have Any Time? - (Eruantion Doriath [?], Amonost Doriath [?])

End of Solitude - (Verda Stelo [?])

No More Grape Soda - (Alex Dean [?], Samuel Jorgenson [?], Leon Mecheeto [?])

Questionable Means - (Tawny Black [?], Ishkan Ma'z)

Author	Comment
QuantumTroll Street Fighter/Space Station 7/21/2009 6:49:38 AM Level: 1 Experience: 0 Total Posts: 181	RE: Space Station FREYA Mr. Piet's reaction came totally unexpected.  Freya noticed that Piet never really answered her counter-question, and realized that she had no idea what the man had done with his life except piracy and making enemies.  Perhaps Piet himself didn't see much else either, at this point.  The android let Piet walk away without a word. "As worthless and despicable as the homeless drunk without the ambition to leave the gutter", says the man with a whiskey bottle in hand as he lays down in the bed I've given him.  I know exactly what I am for, as clearly as I did before I even took to space. Freya had little experience with pity and pitiful creatures, but she couldn't help but sense how deeply troubled Piet was.  She thought it was about time for him to react — he'd been unnaturally stoic since he'd been found, trying to take charge and whatnot.  Perhaps the presence of a human female had kept him together. Now, alone in the bowels of a talking ship, there was no support, no outside help. She decided to let Piet do as he pleased for a little while so he could get his head on straight. As soon as the whiskey was gone and sobriety returned she'd set him to work.  She would give him purpose. Outside, the near-vacuum of interstellar space changed slightly as the ship plowed through the stellar bow shock and entered Blizzard System, roughly 12 light-hours from the star.  Work on the hull progressed at a steady pace, as the ripper bots gained experience and optimized their processes. Plumes of ablated metal formed a slowly expanding trail behind the ship, lit by the large ion drives. The salvage consisted mainly of base materials, suitable for little else except crude mechanical constructions.  Still, Freya sketched out various ideas about what to do with it.  Mr. Piet wanted to continue his career.  With all this stuff and soon a functioning hyperspace engine and perhaps some weaponry, that sort of work could soon be a possibility.
Kapitein Piet (Ethical) Space Pirate 7/28/2009 4:55:15 AM Level: 1 Experience: 0 Total Posts: 60	RE: Space Station FREYA The hours of drunken stupor dragged into days of melancholy and spiraled down an abyss of depression. Freya did what she could - got him to work, producing designs, consulting about the requirements of a star-faring vessel, performing physical labor befitting a human at the tail end of life; applied her limited knowledge of biochemistry to alter his moods with the food she gave him; attempted jokes, music, and entertainment to lighten his spirit; guided long conversations about life, the universe, and everything. All to no avail. Kapitein Piet remained disinterested and uninspired. The work he accomplished was nearly useless - only contributing the obvious, but even then so full of error and discord that Freya had to spend almost as much effort checking and repairing it than if she had done it herself in the first place. Sometimes even more. Freya began to wonder if having Piet around was actually worth it. Piet wasn't wondering much at all - just spent his days in sincere misery - a broken man.
Froderick Engineer - Space & Cybernetics 7/28/2009 5:43:47 AM Level: 1 Experience: 0 Total Posts: 19	RE: Space Station FREYA After about a week of traveling through empty space on the trail of the bizarre space station Jara described, Froderick Hertzmann was getting frustrated. His little carrier pod was cramped and uncomfortable; he was running low on food, water, and oxygen; who knew what might be going on back at the colony; this trip was starting to cost a fortune in fuel; and there was nothing to show for it. Froderick considered turning back for hours, but doggedly pursued the thickening trail of ions. Eventually he'd approach close enough to hail... Look at that! The trail starts to curve towards the ecliptic. If I calculate a non-uniform b-spline... tap-tap-tap on his pda ... and then extrapolate the first derivative... add some smoothing... Looks like it's heading towards that comet over there... He guided the pod out of the trail and plotted an intercept with the predicted location of the station. The cord was of course much shorter than the curve it  spans, and, outside the wash of Freya's ion drives, he'd quickly become detectable by her powerful sensors.
QuantumTroll Street Fighter/Space Station 7/31/2009 5:33:15 AM Level: 1 Experience: 0 Total Posts: 181	RE: Space Station FREYA [errata warning, Froderick: ships never run out of fuel; fuel is never an issue. Unless your ship is totally obsolete... ] Weeks passed as Freya plowed through stellar space.  Integration of the remains of the Calamitous had progressed until it was indistinguishable from the rest of the patchy hull. Using the recovered ion cannons as a model, Freya was able to assemble a number of low-yield ion cannons from parts. A ring of micro-missile launchers was constructed using the old ship's attitude jets.  These missiles wouldn't harm anything larger than a small fighter, but they'd form an excellent anti-missile shield. Piet didn't function well at all.  Freya hypothesized that the man urgently needed human contact.  Unlike her, he had spent his entire life surrounded by people who were more or less like him and the web of connections formed an integral part of his conscious.  Without them, he lacked will and drive.   She had tried to teach him the ways of lonely existence, to find within oneself the necessary insight and motivating force.  Piet didn't care.  She had tried to fill his need for other people by speaking with different voices and different perspectives, by changing the android's appearance, by engaging him to talk about his former crew. Nothing seemed to make any difference.  The simple fact was that Piet was a lousy one-man crew. She missed Jara. Fortunately, a solution was on the horizon. A murmur had started surfacing in the rear-facing radiosensor, consistent with a small-ish vessel following her ion trail.  On the day the murmur moved out of the trail itself and into the clear, Freya swung her bulk around, aimed her sensor apparatus at it, and let fly with a blast of focused EM energy.  A small fraction of it came back and resolved as... a small metal box, moving to intercept in two days.  Since small boxes didn't usually have very good receivers, Freya decided to say hello in a day. [This has gone on long enough for me to ask: Is it good or bad to be this explicit about Freya's insights into Piet's thoughts? The conceit/device is that a computer-based mind would probably have greater explicit metacognitive powers and I've been trying to give the reader that, but on the other hand it really undermines the narrative.  Or does it? I think it's made a lot of posts seem sophomoric and, well, downright shoddy, and I regret that it turned out that way.  Comments/thoughts? What do I do at this point?]
Froderick Engineer - Space & Cybernetics 8/3/2009 2:42:28 PM Level: 1 Experience: 0 Total Posts: 19	RE: Space Station FREYA [I kinda like it - when properly contrasted with Piet and Jara (and Froderick), who are not nearly as self-aware or as conscious of other people's behavior, it's a nifty way of showing Freya's inhumanity. And it somehow also makes her... superhuman or transhuman... not sure how to phrase it. Transcendental, for sure, but far from godlike.] *PING* Well, I sure didn't overestimate the station's sensors. Those babies sure pack a whallop! The clunky transport craft's sensors were temporarily washed out in white noise, but eventually returned to normal. Froderick pondered, I should reach it in a couple of days. Can't wait!
Kapitein Piet (Ethical) Space Pirate 8/3/2009 3:07:55 PM Level: 1 Experience: 0 Total Posts: 60	RE: Space Station FREYA Kapitein Piet's stay on - what he thought of as - this living sarcophagus was dragging on. The day-to-day work of getting the station to something resembling a space-worthy voyaging vessel was not boeiend in the least. Luckily Freya announced there'd be a visitor in a couple of days. Two more days of waiting... how had he gotten so attached to his human compatriots? When had it reached the point that he couldn't deal with their absence even for a few weeks? He banished the thoughts with some rubbing alcohol that he sneaked in a storage locker...
QuantumTroll Street Fighter/Space Station 8/3/2009 4:13:33 PM Level: 1 Experience: 0 Total Posts: 181	RE: Space Station FREYA [alrighty, I guess my intention does come through then. At least to my twin brother; I hope that other readers also get it Thanks!  Other people can of course PM me with their thoughts! ] When the time came to contact the visiting vessel, Freya invited Piet to the newly opened "main bridge" room.  He didn't quite have the mental presence to do so, but if he turned the room upside-down he would have recognized his old ship's kitchen.  What had been sinks and food-processor slots now held multi-function screens and interfaces that could come down from the ceiling to yield custom-configured information to a human crew.   This new space and the promise of a larger crew really seemed to cheer Piet up.  He thought that calling the displays down and commanding information sobered him up, but Freya had secretly been dosing him with ethylase enzymes to burn the alcohol off. Freya's android stood by the entrance and watched, arms crossed over her chest.  She said, "Alright, Mr. Piet, we're in hailing range.  You're the comm officer, you know what to do." [Note, I'm assuming that Piet knows what Freya knows about the visiting ship and (like Freya) thinks it's probably a friend of Jara's.]
Kapitein Piet (Ethical) Space Pirate 8/6/2009 10:11:39 AM Level: 1 Experience: 0 Total Posts: 60	RE: Space Station FREYA Kapitein Piet cleared his throat and opened the comm channel. "This is officer Piet on behalf of science vessel FREYA. Please identify yourself. Over."
Froderick Engineer - Space & Cybernetics 8/6/2009 6:33:45 PM Level: 1 Experience: 0 Total Posts: 19	RE: Space Station FREYA "Hi there Kapitein Piet. This is Froderick Herzmann, engineer. You may remember me - I mounted some reinforcing struts and strengthening profiles, with related brackets, on your vessel a while back. Am I cleared to approach?"
Kapitein Piet (Ethical) Space Pirate 8/7/2009 6:04:42 AM Level: 1 Experience: 0 Total Posts: 60	RE: Space Station FREYA No way! Hertzmann? Of course I remember him. Beyond those minor structural improvements he mentioned, he also reinforced the subspace drive foundations and optimized the core cooling manifolds, if I remember correctly. "The approach is secured. Welcome to the neighborhood, mate!" If these are the beginnings of my new crew, perhaps Freya and I can carve out a living, after all...

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