STAR BRICK
Space is big.
I mean, space is really, really big. The Deep Space Jump Drive provides the illusion that it is small enough to wrap your mind around, what with flinging metal cans full of air through the subspace aether across dozens of lightyears in an instant, but that illusion breaks down in the sectors of the Outer Rim. Here, away from the more civilized Cluster worlds, is where interstellar travel gets interesting, or to put it another way, gets really quite dull; the star systems of the Outer Rim are spread out so much that it requires multiple DSJs to get anywhere, which results in an awful lot of time inching your way through the interstellar medium waiting for your DSJ drive to recharge for another plummet through the aether. Few things highlight the breadth of the galaxy as much as being suspended in the inky void with little to do other than contemplate the inordinate distances between yourself and the nearest tavern which might sell a drink strong enough to drown the shakes that come from staring into an infinite amount of nothing.
The DSJ of the
Star Brick is quite weak, which means the crew spends extra time in that black limbo. Fortunately, the
Star Brick also lacks windows and the viewscreen is usually on the fritz, which makes navigation and salvaging operations tricky but certainly helps cuts down on the existential angst.
Name: Captain Someone
Class: Deafblind Spacebard
Bio: Captain Someone is, as you may surmise, the closest thing dear old Star Brick has for a captain, a person quite singular in shape and talent. A skinny, though tall middle-aged woman with rather long hair, she is clad in a thick, light gray military uniform of unknown origin. Captain Someone is the de facto owner of the vessel merely by having outlived the rest of its previous occupants, and possibly even the occupants before them. She dwells on her bridge, having mutilated several of the more user-driven ship systems so that they can be operated via what look like multilayered organ keyboards, some of the keys marked with distinct notches. She really hates it when people touch her keyboards, it should be noted, and she shows a strange finesse with the operation of some of the things on board in a manner you might not expect.
As for what she has experienced, she can hardly say, and is unwilling to write, but the gestures she makes with her hands on other people's bodies seem indicative of not the most pleasant set of adventures, no doubt made worse by her seemingly tenuous grasp on the world around her. The one thing she appears to do aside from checking and messing around with the ship's systems is playing some variant of a zither, holding it upright with her jaw placed firmly on the upper part while keeping the other on some metal surface - this being the Star Brick, there's plenty of those around, of course.
Captain Someone has even less trouble with the disorientation and loneliness associated with deep space travel than most spacefarers. Some might say that it's because she's a grizzled veteran of hundreds of DSJs, and the travails of such travels have inured her to the experience. Some might say that it's because she has military training of some kind, a stoicism and resolve that keeps her on course where others couldn't persevere. Some say that it's because she's deaf and blind and doesn't really understand, let alone
appreciate the gravity of the business she's about.
However you like to slice it, there's no doubt that she's the most competent member of the ship's crew, which is no mean feat considering she couldn't tell you the color of the hull. Not only has she restocked the provisions of the Star Brick and hired on a new crew member, but she's also plotted the ship's course; the Cantaiian Debris Field, the site of an ancient battle between the Sol Imperium and the now-shattered Morgari Hegemony. Far from the beaten path and full of easy scrap, it's the perfect job for a ship like the
Star Brick.
Someone's fingers dance across the navigation controls. The
Star Brick groans, and rattles, and then abruptly pops off into the intestellar void. No warnings blare, no alarms sound; at least, the controls don't twitch beneath Someone's hands, and the ship doesn't shudder any more unpleasantly than usual. The
Star Brick is cruising along at relativistic speeds far away from anyone and anything important, slowly gathering the energy to hurl itself even further into space. Someone smiles to herself, and pulls out her zither.
Name: Conan Jenkins
Class: Communications and systems trainee, former Librarian.
Bio: Conan is a large and imposing man with a full beard, moustache and long hair tied back into a neat ponytail. Though he is muscled and full of energy, his hair has long gone white as snow.
He has never told his real age to anyone. Hailing from a rather tribal world, he worked as a librarian on a tiny agricultural planet for years after being picked up by a salvage ship in his youth. After some failed harvests the economy on the planet crashed, leading to the farmers using the books for heating their homes. Conan had then took a job on the very forst ship he could find, which was probably the second worst mistake in his life.
The ragtag bunch of misfits on this ship obviously had no need of a librarian, Conan wasn't even sure if most of these people could read. He thus managed to procure some textbooks, such as "spaceship systems 101: an idiots guide to not accidentally shutting of the oxygen supply", and became proficient enough at using the consoles to use the basic systems without killing everyone on board. In his free time Conan enjoys working out and reading. He is currently reading "grammar for dummies" for about the hundreth time. Even though he was rescued from his tribal homeworld, the rules of grammar are still a bit of a problem up until this day.
Conan stands in front of a glowing green floor pad nestled in the corner of a cargo hold, regarding it suspiciously. After the orientation tour delivered by Skirri, he has half a mind to regard everything on the
Star Brick suspiciously. Quite frankly, he'd go give Captain Someone a piece of his mind about how unprofessional hazing the new guy is, if he could be sure that it
was hazing.
According to Skirri, this pad is a teleporter, and it is the only practical way to move around the ship. As she explained it, the
Star Brick was originally constructed by the Tensarians. Since a Tensarian resembles nothing so much as a two foot tall bipedal snake, the halls and hatches they used to navigate the ship were made far too small for the larger races of the galaxy to use, a fact which suited the Tensarians just fine. It also suited the Xorithi engineers who subsequently acquired the
Star Brick and stripped it down for the first of many retrofits; Xorithi teleporter technology is famed throughout the galaxy, and they value the control and security this gives them over the interior of their vessels. The Tensarian halls were patched over, and every room of the ship was linked with teleporter pads.
Of course, both the patches and the teleporter have since fallen into a state of disrepair, much like everything else on the
Star Brick. The modifications to the teleport system that make it non-fatal to non-Xorithians also make it difficult to control. The pad functions using psionic resonance crystals; merely think of your destination, and the pad processes that request and sends you away. Given the inconsistent power levels on the ship, the disorienting layout of the rooms, and the fact that some pads on the ship no longer seem to function at all, and you find yourself wondering whether it's not worth crawling through the old Tensarian hallways anyway.
Telling himself that the story of the Tomb Room full of former crewmen who couldn't teleport back out if it was just a myth told to scare him, Conan takes a deep breath and steps onto the pad. Immediately, he finds himself standing in his cabin, or to be more precise, the abandoned comm node which now features a grav-hammock and Conan's worldly possessions. Relieved to still be in one piece, he sets about making himself at home.
Name: Skirri
Class: Meddling Scavenger
Bio: Standing all of 5'2", Skirri was never exactly the cream of the Cphetei IV Marine Corp's crop. Attempts to turn her into a medic and/or scout had mixed success, her boundless enthusiasm matched only by her tendency towards distraction and unorthodoxy. She insisted on studying everything, routinely had bouts of "inspiration" regarding thoroughly unsound medical and technical practices, and universally attempted to salvage anything not bolted down on the premise that it might at some point become useful or interesting. Her patent refusal to stop attempting to take C-3u2 larval specimens alive was the final straw in seeing her relegated to the role of noncombat mechanic, where her creative adjustment of a Cybat hoverbike with a busted echo coupling into a flamethrower turret on wheels was the final straw in seeing her placed on "special assignments"- first officially and then by way of shipping container.
A dejected Skirri immediately signed onto a visiting Xorithi merchant's vessel hoping to prove and hone her talent. The lampreylike merchant appreciated her reckless and unique integration of alien artifacts as a form of art, but sadly this did not prevent him from losing her in a card game. Her new captain, a sluglike Morgari, was evidently not quite so cultured, and after several failed attempts to get her to stop breaking his things simply handed her a junky old podship to be rid of her.
Purely by coincidence, it did not take this vessel very long to break down, leaving her stranded in a debris field. Fortunately the Star Brick was nearby and none too picky, thereby starting the next chapter in Skirri's illustrious career.
"Come on, Kit, Kit, Kit." Skirri wriggles one arm a bit further into the metal grating beneath the ancillary energy conduit. She'd had a great idea, the latest in a string of great ideas. Like most of her great ideas, this one called for some rather sophisticated raw materials as well as a nontrivial amount of energy.
Fortunately, the
Star Brick houses a truly eclectic collection of alien technologies which have been repurposed in various ways to keep assorted vital functions running. It didn't take Skirri very long to take the magnetic field converter out of the stock Ca-Tech energy diffuser wedged in a comm subsystem (it's really only there to complete the circuit, after all.) The converter went into a graviton capacitor where it replaced a... well, Sirri isn't sure what it is, but seems to function like a standard laser signal repeater. She's pretty confident that's what it does, since it didn't blow up when she put it in the engine room's O
2 control panel in order to get the small black circuit regulator she needed for her project.
Unfortunately, she then promptly dropped the regulator down a service vent.
Cold, hard plastic brushes against her hand, then slips away. "Almost..." Skirri mutters, reaching a little further. A discontented mewling floats up from the floor, and suddenly she feels the regulator slip into her hand. Carefully extricating her hand from the vent, she holds the prized tech up high. "Got it! You're a lifesaver, Kit!"
A small, fuzzy, black and white kitten crawls up out of the vent. Its reproachful mew goes unnoticed as Skirri scrambles off to complete her project. All she needs now is a polysteel chassis, and she thinks she knows exactly where to get one...
Name: Kit
Class: Button presser and lever puller.
Bio: A litter of 8 kittens with a linked hivemind, Kit has near-human intelligence and the ability to be getting in trouble in eight places at once! Master of the fine art of pressing buttons, the main reason to keep Kit around is she's able to substitute for the entire rest of the crew in a pinch, being eight tiny sets of untrained paws. Just don't expect anything like optimal operations while she does it. Kit "talks" using collars that can display up to 13 characters at once.
to quote Kit:
so button do?
The kitten takes a moment to clean the grime from its paws before scampering into the Tensarian hallways. Kit has trouble with the teleporter, but fortunately they are the only crewmember which can easily use the old halls. Kit has explored those old hallways more thoroughly than anyone else, and has the best idea of the true expanse of the
Star Brick. No one else suspects just how many rooms lie empty and powerless, some of them untouched since the days of the Tensarians.
Unfortunately, the vast bulk of the ship makes it difficult for the small kittens that make up Kit to quickly get from room to room. What is just a brief teleport for the larger crewmembers is hundreds of feet of running down twisty, dusty halls and crawlspaces for Kit. Lately, Kit has taken to spreading themself throughout the ship, trying to be everywhere at once. They've met mixed success with this tactic; true, now they're aware and present in every important room on the ship, but there isn't very much a lone kitten can do with controls designed and sized for humanoid users. Worse, being spread out like this keeps Kit from forming meaningful sentences; a few kittens together can combine their communication collars to get their point across, but individually they have trouble stringing even a couple of words together.
Kit has tried to communicate the need for more readily accessible controls to Captain Someone, but Captain Someone is both blind and deaf, and Kit's collars lack any sort of vibrate function. Skirri has been induced to help a few times, but she often cannibalizes the conveniences she builds as soon as she comes up with another pet project. Perhaps the new crewman will prove more helpful, Kit muses. Across the ship, in hidden halls and behind warm consoles, eight preternaturally intelligent kittens settle down for a catnap.
The
Star Brick sails on.
Credits: 100
Fuel: Full
Provisions: Full
Shields: 48%
Rooms of Interest:
Life Support
Engine Room
DSJ Reactor
Weapon Control
Shield Control
Medbay
Bridge
Sensor Control
Cargo Bay
Conan's Quarters
Skirri's Quarters
Captain Someone's Quarters
For this first "turn 0," you are currently in transit to your destination and nothing interesting is happening yet. Go ahead and describe what your character would be doing on a typical day, and we'll go from there.
Thanks to everyone who submitted a sheet, you all made it REALLY HARD to pick only four. I think four's as much as I can do and still have reasonably frequent updates, though, so oh well. Most updates won't be quite so long as this one.