eightofswords
Memento mori
Well, I haven't seen anything on here that quite scratches this particular itch of mine... so, here we go. I may expand this into something multithreaded in the future - galaxies are quite large, or so I'm told - but for the time being, I'd like to ease myself into this. Feel free to read the spoilered text, if you're so inclined.
This is a bit of space opera, in the tradition of Farscape if you're familiar with that and somewhere between Firefly and Babylon 5 if you're not. Our fine ship - which you, the players, have the privilege of naming - is hired to make a delivery that pays a bit to well to be legal into a system tightly controlled by the Systems Commonwealth, one of the major governments of the 'verse, and the oldest. Interstellar travel is based on organic technology bestowed upon humanity by a mysterious organism called the Leviathan some hundred years ago, and has become the cornerstone of the human economy ever since then.
If you're interested in playing an alien, let me know. There are a few in human space, but since none of them received the Leviathan's gift directly, they've only had the means to leave their own systems since humanity contacted them.
Speaking of playing, I have a particular character sheet format in mind:
I expect fairly detailed sheets, but as long as it conforms to the rules of the setting, you'll be accepted. I'm very responsive to PMs if you have any questions, but asking them here is also fine. As for me, I'll fill in a character of my own later, so as to avoid sniping some job that somoene else wants. ;^; I'll also be acting as something of a narrator... After all, a story's hardly a space opera without enemies~
Concordia, Perseus, the Milky Way
Systems Commonwealth
Admiral Hawkwood was in one of those moods. He was there, of course, on the Canonical's bridge; but he may as well not have been, for all the attention he could spare. Don't interrupt me, his expression said. I'm thinking important thoughts.
That could, in fact, be a matter of some debate, if anyone could have seen beyond those cold blue eyes to the mind underneath. His crew, if they paid the captain's mood any mind, would conclude he was thinking about battle plans, or logistics, or maybe politics; in their minds, if they wondered at all, he was thinking, in some way, about how to win the war. But the Commonwealth rarely promoted based on intelligence.
At one-hundred and twenty-four years, the Admiral was just barely old enough to remember the early years of space travel, in the decades after the first Leviathan, when travel between stars was the domain of megafreighters with price tags rivaling the GDPs of small countries and enough biomass to fill asteroids (as many did, to save on hull plating), long before the Commonwealth, before those brilliant minds had divined the secrets of the Leviathan's gift, and how to grow starships from common materials. As a graduate student, he'd been part of the team that designed the first commercial starship. He'd spoken out against the others when they accepted a Navy contract, a detail conveniently absent from any official biography. He still remembered the sense of wonder of his first jump, him and some dozen others on the Nautilus' shakedown cruise. He still remembered the shame he'd felt at backing down.
How far we've come, he used to say, when he'd commanded the Academy at Alpha Centauri. How far we've come, he must have told a hundred thousand cadets, none of them quite able to imagine a world without casual interstellar travel. But then the Cygnus colonies started getting uppity again, and the Commonwealth had called him out of retirement, given him a ship and orders...
A starship had once been a tool of exploration, but there was nowhere left to explore, not that anyone cared about. And so the Admiral was about to kill a hundred thousand people.
Admiral Hawkwood closed his eyes, leaned back in his seat, and for just a moment allowed himself to become a tired old man. How far we've come.
---
"Admiral, sir!"
Captain Summers was the only one the ship who could have guessed the Admiral's thoughts. If so, she didn't make it known. Rumor had it that someone in the Admirality was about to retire - maybe Powell; 4th Fleet should not be on rearguard duty - and she thought she had a shot at replacing them; and if her CO really did have misgivings, she certainly wasn't going to impair her fortune for them. The Admiral's sat up and looked her way. Every centimeter of her was the Executive Officer of Second Fleet's flagship, from the greying hair pulled back in a tight braid to the uniform shoes she spent several minutes polishing on a weekly basis, and there was a certain tension about her, like a tightly-coiled spring ready to leap into action at a moment's notice. The Admiral nodded.
"Astrogation reports full readiness," his Captain said. "They've linked up without incident, all diagnostics green."
"Initiate jump," the Admiral said. His voice was calm, reassured, and precise. It was not the voice of a man on his way to kill one hundred thousand people.
Deep in the bowels of the ship, where metal corridors and leather seats gave way to muscle fibers and nerve clusters, the ship's navigator - navigators, rather, the Canonical being considered too important to entrust to one mind - had linked their nervous systems to the ship's, synchronized their brainwaves to her slow, thoughtful rhythm, and visualized a destination. This process, the Admiral had to admit, had actually progressed since he was a child, since it was now reversible. They heard the Admiral's order, relayed through the chain of command, and translated. The Canonical, in that mysterious, casual way the living ships of the Commonwealth had, tore a hole in the world, and fell through into hyperspace. All became white.
---
Quicksilver, the Briar Patch, Andromeda
Independent
A nondescript vessel, one of the many irregular freighters that plied the lawless trade lines of independent space, dropped out of hyperspace near Wayfarer Station. The pilot identified herself as "Alice Hopper", assured Control that she had no intention of plundering, and indicated that she was here to top off on neutron regulators.
It's none of your business why I'm here, but it's not the kind of illegal you need to worry about. Wayfarer Control was intimately familiar with the local spacers' euphemisms. Two minutes later, "Alice Hopper" surrendered control to station autonav. Ten minutes later, her ship had docked, and twenty minutes after that, she'd posted a bulletin to the station's infonet.
Seeking ship + crew for discrete delivery to Perseus. Details TBA. Compensation: 40,000 Defiance credits, payable as raw fissionables. Contact ident 7A3-GO1-F885.
"Alice Hopper" took a seat in the station's lounge. A delivery to the heart of Commonwealth power, paying enough - in untraceable fuel supplies - to keep a ship flying for a year, signed with an anonymous ident number... "Alice" grinned. This was going to be fun.
And within an hour, she had her crew.
Systems Commonwealth
Admiral Hawkwood was in one of those moods. He was there, of course, on the Canonical's bridge; but he may as well not have been, for all the attention he could spare. Don't interrupt me, his expression said. I'm thinking important thoughts.
That could, in fact, be a matter of some debate, if anyone could have seen beyond those cold blue eyes to the mind underneath. His crew, if they paid the captain's mood any mind, would conclude he was thinking about battle plans, or logistics, or maybe politics; in their minds, if they wondered at all, he was thinking, in some way, about how to win the war. But the Commonwealth rarely promoted based on intelligence.
At one-hundred and twenty-four years, the Admiral was just barely old enough to remember the early years of space travel, in the decades after the first Leviathan, when travel between stars was the domain of megafreighters with price tags rivaling the GDPs of small countries and enough biomass to fill asteroids (as many did, to save on hull plating), long before the Commonwealth, before those brilliant minds had divined the secrets of the Leviathan's gift, and how to grow starships from common materials. As a graduate student, he'd been part of the team that designed the first commercial starship. He'd spoken out against the others when they accepted a Navy contract, a detail conveniently absent from any official biography. He still remembered the sense of wonder of his first jump, him and some dozen others on the Nautilus' shakedown cruise. He still remembered the shame he'd felt at backing down.
How far we've come, he used to say, when he'd commanded the Academy at Alpha Centauri. How far we've come, he must have told a hundred thousand cadets, none of them quite able to imagine a world without casual interstellar travel. But then the Cygnus colonies started getting uppity again, and the Commonwealth had called him out of retirement, given him a ship and orders...
A starship had once been a tool of exploration, but there was nowhere left to explore, not that anyone cared about. And so the Admiral was about to kill a hundred thousand people.
Admiral Hawkwood closed his eyes, leaned back in his seat, and for just a moment allowed himself to become a tired old man. How far we've come.
---
"Admiral, sir!"
Captain Summers was the only one the ship who could have guessed the Admiral's thoughts. If so, she didn't make it known. Rumor had it that someone in the Admirality was about to retire - maybe Powell; 4th Fleet should not be on rearguard duty - and she thought she had a shot at replacing them; and if her CO really did have misgivings, she certainly wasn't going to impair her fortune for them. The Admiral's sat up and looked her way. Every centimeter of her was the Executive Officer of Second Fleet's flagship, from the greying hair pulled back in a tight braid to the uniform shoes she spent several minutes polishing on a weekly basis, and there was a certain tension about her, like a tightly-coiled spring ready to leap into action at a moment's notice. The Admiral nodded.
"Astrogation reports full readiness," his Captain said. "They've linked up without incident, all diagnostics green."
"Initiate jump," the Admiral said. His voice was calm, reassured, and precise. It was not the voice of a man on his way to kill one hundred thousand people.
Deep in the bowels of the ship, where metal corridors and leather seats gave way to muscle fibers and nerve clusters, the ship's navigator - navigators, rather, the Canonical being considered too important to entrust to one mind - had linked their nervous systems to the ship's, synchronized their brainwaves to her slow, thoughtful rhythm, and visualized a destination. This process, the Admiral had to admit, had actually progressed since he was a child, since it was now reversible. They heard the Admiral's order, relayed through the chain of command, and translated. The Canonical, in that mysterious, casual way the living ships of the Commonwealth had, tore a hole in the world, and fell through into hyperspace. All became white.
---
Quicksilver, the Briar Patch, Andromeda
Independent
A nondescript vessel, one of the many irregular freighters that plied the lawless trade lines of independent space, dropped out of hyperspace near Wayfarer Station. The pilot identified herself as "Alice Hopper", assured Control that she had no intention of plundering, and indicated that she was here to top off on neutron regulators.
It's none of your business why I'm here, but it's not the kind of illegal you need to worry about. Wayfarer Control was intimately familiar with the local spacers' euphemisms. Two minutes later, "Alice Hopper" surrendered control to station autonav. Ten minutes later, her ship had docked, and twenty minutes after that, she'd posted a bulletin to the station's infonet.
Seeking ship + crew for discrete delivery to Perseus. Details TBA. Compensation: 40,000 Defiance credits, payable as raw fissionables. Contact ident 7A3-GO1-F885.
"Alice Hopper" took a seat in the station's lounge. A delivery to the heart of Commonwealth power, paying enough - in untraceable fuel supplies - to keep a ship flying for a year, signed with an anonymous ident number... "Alice" grinned. This was going to be fun.
And within an hour, she had her crew.
This is a bit of space opera, in the tradition of Farscape if you're familiar with that and somewhere between Firefly and Babylon 5 if you're not. Our fine ship - which you, the players, have the privilege of naming - is hired to make a delivery that pays a bit to well to be legal into a system tightly controlled by the Systems Commonwealth, one of the major governments of the 'verse, and the oldest. Interstellar travel is based on organic technology bestowed upon humanity by a mysterious organism called the Leviathan some hundred years ago, and has become the cornerstone of the human economy ever since then.
If you're interested in playing an alien, let me know. There are a few in human space, but since none of them received the Leviathan's gift directly, they've only had the means to leave their own systems since humanity contacted them.
Speaking of playing, I have a particular character sheet format in mind:
- Name:
- Gender:
- Age:
- Ethnicity (if human)/species (otherwise):
- Job: We're going to need a captain and a navigator, at the very least; other than that, anything that makes sense on a starship is available. I'll fill in for some empty position later.
- Appearance:
- Three significant memories:
- Personality summary:
- Someone they care about:
- Relationships within the crew: (Obviously, this isn't something you can fill in immediately. That's fine. You'll need to collaborate on this.)
- Species name:
- Years since contact with humanity:
- Physiology:
- Culture:
- Government:
- Tech. level:
- Relations with humanity: (And other species, if desired.)
I expect fairly detailed sheets, but as long as it conforms to the rules of the setting, you'll be accepted. I'm very responsive to PMs if you have any questions, but asking them here is also fine. As for me, I'll fill in a character of my own later, so as to avoid sniping some job that somoene else wants. ;^; I'll also be acting as something of a narrator... After all, a story's hardly a space opera without enemies~