Down on the Disk is a quest about stealing the magical and technological secrets of ancient ruins and tombs for your own purposes. Explore the Disk, an enormous Alderson Disk at the center of a mysterious solar system on the edge of a fantastical galaxy; find artifacts, explore tombs, encounter strange anomalies that defy even the magical physics of this world, and study them all in order to make sure your name goes down in history (or bring about the fabled 'end of history')
Down on the Disk (Graverobbing for Fun and Profit in an Original Science-Fantasy Universe)
- Thread starter CuttleFish2.0
- Start date
- Original Sci-Fi Fantasy
-
- Tags
- original open voting
- Created
- Status
- Ongoing
- Watchers
- 66
- Recent readers
- 0
- Threadmarks
- 51
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Statistics (27 threadmarks, 60k words)
User Total CuttleFish2.0 27 -
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Introduction/Character Creation 1
CuttleFish2.0
Friendly neighborhood cuttlefish
- Location
- Seattle, Washington.
Mu. Tomb of Empires. Godling Pyre.
The Jewel Star. The Slaughterhouse System
Graveyard of Empires.
Here is where the story begins, far beyond the civilized and well-settled edges of the galaxy. Though never far from the ambitious dreams of its expectant warlords, hungry heirs, slavering hordes, and mad savants. For eons uncounted, ever since mortal eyes looked beyond the bright rim of the galaxy and saw it sitting there — like an empty throne — it has been the ultimate prize. An irresistible beacon for any and all who might wish to bend the cosmos to their will.
And no part of it more so than the literal and metaphorical centerpiece of the system; the Disk.
Unimaginative so far as names go, yes, but when confronted with a disk thousands of kilometers thick and billions of kilometers in diameter hung around a star as if it were a bauble, words are likely to fail even the greatest poets. Not that those first contenders were the greatest of poets, mind, but the point stands.
For all that its name might be stale, it is a true wonder unmatched in all the galaxy. One accompanied by yet more wonders; stations and worlds guarding secrets of life and death and war. Their names too are known across the galaxy. Atlantis, perpetually sinking. Zerzura, shining world city. Cibola, glittering star forge. Kitezh, the labyrinth of the dead. Hesperides, garden of immortality. And more, each a prize for which empires have fought and died.
Filling the orbits of the system with the ruins of dead fleets caught in their death throes.
Scattering ruins and tombs into every shadow and hidden hole during each brief reign.
As for who built the Disk, who built Atlantis and Cibola and all the rest? There is only a name; nearly as unimaginative as the Disk, the Wrights.
What awaits you? Glory. Power. Danger. Wealth. Enemies.
All can be found on the Disk, so come ye mad, desperate adventurer — graverobber, looter, secret stealer, pillager — and meet destiny.
From the Desk of your Friendly* QM:
So what is this?
Have you ever wanted to play as Indiana Jones or Lara Croft, but with laser guns, cybernetics, and magic powers?
Then this is the quest for you!
Down on the Disk is all about exploring an ancient Alderon Disk — conveniently left behind by mysterious precursors and subsequently filled with ruins and tombs by the march of history — in search of artifacts and strange anomalies to study and exploit. All in service of gaining fantastical power, uncovering hidden truths, and ultimately… uh, doing something impressive. Maybe ascend to godhood? Bring everyone who ever doubted you to their knees? Oh, oh, or topple the gods and lay waste to the cosmos.
Really it's up to you.
Eventually.
First you'll have to survive, not just the Disk and its wildlife** but also rival adventurers, bandits, jealous gods, and of course keep yourself from starving in the meantime. You won't be starting at literal rock bottom, but you're at the bottom of a deep hole the path up is long and treacherous.
Gameplay will consist mainly of two parts; expeditions to the various sites where you will find artefacts, structures, and anomalies to study and then the actual studying of said artefacts, structures, etc. In between you will have to build your facilities, sell off sites and objects to fund your work, meet the locals, and fight off the wildlife as well as rivals. This will be a mechanics light (and those that do exist will be all but invisible to you all), narrative focused quest.
So come along and let's get started.
But… who are you?
Note: This is the first of 3 stages of character creation. Here you're setting up the basis of your character, next you'll be choosing their background and overall ambitions. And in the final stage you will be making purchasing tools and resources to start your adventure, as well as gaining companions and rivals.
[] Species: Cosmetic and narrative choice. Mostly changes how people will act/react to you.
[] Name: Whatever you want, so long as it's not offensive or too memey.
[] Gender:
[] Minor Disciplines: (Choose 3 from List)
[] Description: Physically describe your character. Completely Optional. I reserve the right to tweak winning options and/or steal bits from non-winning ones. Again, just don't be offensive or too memey and I probably won't touch it much.
Vote by Plan
Feel free to ask questions!
Special Thanks to @Xantalos for bouncing ideas off of and giving feedback, though all blame belongs to me.
*management reserves the right to alter 'Friendliness' of QM at any point.
**not guaranteed to meet technical or lay definitions of either 'wild' or 'alive.'
The Jewel Star. The Slaughterhouse System
Graveyard of Empires.
Here is where the story begins, far beyond the civilized and well-settled edges of the galaxy. Though never far from the ambitious dreams of its expectant warlords, hungry heirs, slavering hordes, and mad savants. For eons uncounted, ever since mortal eyes looked beyond the bright rim of the galaxy and saw it sitting there — like an empty throne — it has been the ultimate prize. An irresistible beacon for any and all who might wish to bend the cosmos to their will.
And no part of it more so than the literal and metaphorical centerpiece of the system; the Disk.
Unimaginative so far as names go, yes, but when confronted with a disk thousands of kilometers thick and billions of kilometers in diameter hung around a star as if it were a bauble, words are likely to fail even the greatest poets. Not that those first contenders were the greatest of poets, mind, but the point stands.
For all that its name might be stale, it is a true wonder unmatched in all the galaxy. One accompanied by yet more wonders; stations and worlds guarding secrets of life and death and war. Their names too are known across the galaxy. Atlantis, perpetually sinking. Zerzura, shining world city. Cibola, glittering star forge. Kitezh, the labyrinth of the dead. Hesperides, garden of immortality. And more, each a prize for which empires have fought and died.
Filling the orbits of the system with the ruins of dead fleets caught in their death throes.
Scattering ruins and tombs into every shadow and hidden hole during each brief reign.
As for who built the Disk, who built Atlantis and Cibola and all the rest? There is only a name; nearly as unimaginative as the Disk, the Wrights.
What awaits you? Glory. Power. Danger. Wealth. Enemies.
All can be found on the Disk, so come ye mad, desperate adventurer — graverobber, looter, secret stealer, pillager — and meet destiny.
From the Desk of your Friendly* QM:
So what is this?
Have you ever wanted to play as Indiana Jones or Lara Croft, but with laser guns, cybernetics, and magic powers?
Then this is the quest for you!
Down on the Disk is all about exploring an ancient Alderon Disk — conveniently left behind by mysterious precursors and subsequently filled with ruins and tombs by the march of history — in search of artifacts and strange anomalies to study and exploit. All in service of gaining fantastical power, uncovering hidden truths, and ultimately… uh, doing something impressive. Maybe ascend to godhood? Bring everyone who ever doubted you to their knees? Oh, oh, or topple the gods and lay waste to the cosmos.
Really it's up to you.
Eventually.
First you'll have to survive, not just the Disk and its wildlife** but also rival adventurers, bandits, jealous gods, and of course keep yourself from starving in the meantime. You won't be starting at literal rock bottom, but you're at the bottom of a deep hole the path up is long and treacherous.
Gameplay will consist mainly of two parts; expeditions to the various sites where you will find artefacts, structures, and anomalies to study and then the actual studying of said artefacts, structures, etc. In between you will have to build your facilities, sell off sites and objects to fund your work, meet the locals, and fight off the wildlife as well as rivals. This will be a mechanics light (and those that do exist will be all but invisible to you all), narrative focused quest.
So come along and let's get started.
But… who are you?
Note: This is the first of 3 stages of character creation. Here you're setting up the basis of your character, next you'll be choosing their background and overall ambitions. And in the final stage you will be making purchasing tools and resources to start your adventure, as well as gaining companions and rivals.
[] Species: Cosmetic and narrative choice. Mostly changes how people will act/react to you.
[] Dveugr: Wide, stocky bodied, the dveugr hide their features behind thick armor and wild manes of wiry, coarse hair. Known across the galaxy as obsessive crafters and greedy merchants, they are one of the oldest species still living and have, in that time, spread themselves far and wide and fractured into hundreds of petty kingdoms and empires. Typically standing between 1.2 and 2 meters. (Grey/black skinned dwarves in space.)
[] Yddr: Tall and lanky, with skin ranging from light blue to navy so dark it is almost black, the yddr are one of the oldest species still active in the galaxy. Ranging on average from 2 to 2.5 meters, with wide expressive eyes and delicate features, they are typically stereotyped as graceful acrobats and fragile thinkers. (Blue space elves.)
[] Sylth: One of the youngest species in the galaxy. Brought to life by either a deity (though no one agrees on which one) or a mad wizard (so far no one has accepted blame), this herbaceous species has many varied forms, all by nature sessile. Require advanced systems to achieve locomotion. Stereotyped as gregarious and talkative merchants or flimflammers. (Plant people in encounter suits.)
[] Aadad: Short, with thin limbs and a thick hunched body, the aadad have skin that appears at first glance slimy but is actually covered in a thin layer of waxy substance which helps them retain moisture. Usually standing no more than 1.25 meters tall with coloration ranging from black to various shades of greens and browns they are often seen as sneaky thieves and merciless killers. (Frog/toad people.)
[] Uurz: Broad and hairless, with two pairs of small tusks jutting up from their lower jaw and skin ranging from dusty tans to muted yellows to dull reds, uurz are often thought of as savage berserkers and thoughtless bruisers. With faces typically described as 'pinched' and 'scowly,' they typically stand somewhere just under 2 meters in height. (Orcs in other words.)
[] Khar: Standing between 2 and 3 meters tall, the khar loom menacingly over most other species in the galaxy. Worse yet, their large multifaceted eyes, mouths full of twitching mandibles, and serrated forelimbs do them no favors. Ranging in color from dull browns to lively greens to riots of pastels there are stories of them plying the stars for long eons as cold hunters out of nightmare and ravenous swarms. (Giant praying mantis people.)
[] Human: It's a human. You can be one if you want. Known as the cockroaches of the galaxy.
[] Name: Whatever you want, so long as it's not offensive or too memey.
[] Gender:
[] Female
[] Male
[] Neither
[] Major Discipline (Choose 1 from List)[] Minor Disciplines: (Choose 3 from List)
- Biology: Whether you want to make exotic toxins, targeted poisons, or edit genes to create monstrosities no god would ever sanction, biology is the field for you.
- Electronics: If you want to command drone armies, control a fleet from the comfort of your bed, or trap your enemies in virtual prisons to torture them for simulate eternies then electronics is wher its at.
- Life-Shaping: Use magic to bend the energies of life to your whim; molding servants, warriors, and monsters out of raw flesh.
- Gain 'Enchanter' Trait.
- Thaumaturgy: Magic is the ultimate toolset. Break reality over your knee and force it into your preferred shape by spell and ritual.
- Gain 'Caster' Trait.
- Metallurgy: Zinc, copper, steel, titanium. You know the secrets of working with all of them. Moonsilver, orichalcum, mithril, adamantine, and others. These too you have mastered.
- Gain 'Metalsmith' Trait.
- Linguistics: Studying a language can tell you much about those that used it, even beyond what the actual literal translation of text or speech offers.
- Material Sciences: If it's not living, purely magical, weird beyond all normal laws of the universe, or the realm of theoretic physics you can figure out how to make, unmake, or recreate it.
- Necromancy: Death and Unlife. Whether you want to raise shambling hordes of zombies and skeletons, anchor your soul against death, craft servants from corpses, or steal souls from the afterlives this is the field of study for you.
- Gain 'Caster' Trait.
- History: Those who do not understand history are doomed to repeat it. Or something like that. If nothing else it'll be helpful in finding those sites not yet discovered.
- Engineering: Whether you need to build a machine or a structure you have the know how and skills necessary to do it. Eventually.
- Runes: In order to make magic permanent and long lasting (without dumping absurd amounts of raw power into it) you need some way to guide it, that way is runes. Highly prized and often ill-understood, you know how runes work.
- Gain 'Enchanter' Trait.
- Geomancy: The Sacred Art. Though to whom it is sacred is not often made clear. An immensely useful art that takes the freely available energy (arcane, elemental, divine, and otherwise) in the universe and turns it to productive ends through the building of precise structures.
- Gain 'Caster' Trait.
- Pneumatology: Whether you want to curse people with malicious trickster spirits or bind them into a weapon pneumatology will allow for it. Along with many other options.
- Gain 'Enchanter' Trait.
- Divinities: None can deny the hands of the gods at work in the world. But few make a study of it (mostly because the gods tend to object, and be in possession of divine power and armies of fanatics), you have though. Whether because you hope to steal godhood, break it, or simply exploit it.
[] Description: Physically describe your character. Completely Optional. I reserve the right to tweak winning options and/or steal bits from non-winning ones. Again, just don't be offensive or too memey and I probably won't touch it much.
Vote by Plan
Feel free to ask questions!
Special Thanks to @Xantalos for bouncing ideas off of and giving feedback, though all blame belongs to me.
*management reserves the right to alter 'Friendliness' of QM at any point.
**not guaranteed to meet technical or lay definitions of either 'wild' or 'alive.'
Last edited:
Character Sheet
CuttleFish2.0
Friendly neighborhood cuttlefish
- Location
- Seattle, Washington.
Name: Ivan Dmitryov Korvinsky
Species: Human
Age: 29
Gender: Male
Description: You stand approximately 1.7 meters tall. Lean and with a boyish appearance, what muscle you have on your frame comes from shoving recalcitrant support struts into places, helping move industrial machinery, and running from the inevitable explosion. Your squarish face is framed by a messy mop of coal black hair, masking you look constantly as if you have just awakened from a bad sleep. Not that your sleep schedule would be called 'healthy' by anyone sane. Muddy green eyes stare out from your soft features.
Most often you can be found wearing dull red coveralls stained with machine oils, grease, and metal dust. This has the advantage of making you look bulkier than you are because of the protective padding stitched into the fabric, not to mention all the tool belts, harnesses, and other protective gear you wear over that. When called on to wear other clothes (which you avoid at all costs) your style can best be described as desultory. And primarily involves grabbing whatever is closest and looks cleanest.
Species: Human
Age: 29
Gender: Male
- Major: Engineering, Life-Shaping
- Minor: Electronics, Metallurgy, Material Sciences
- Synergy: Mad Scientist
- Combining all the mundane arts of science you know how to push the boundaries of good sense and safe laboratory practices to not get yourself killed. Mostly. So what if half of what you build ends up exploding? While it works it is glorious. And you always learn such interesting things from each successive failure.
- Synergy: Flesh to Machine
- Golac is a world of mines, canyon cities, and thundering machines. Magic is little trusted there. Flesh magic even less so, so you had to keep your second major subject of study secret from all save those you were closest with… so basically just Natya and Nosta. You know the art of working the little magics of blood and skin and sinewy and hope to one day marry it to your knowledge of machines.
- PalmDiv, All-Purpose Scanner
- Samshi SurvivalistTM Hammerpick
Most often you can be found wearing dull red coveralls stained with machine oils, grease, and metal dust. This has the advantage of making you look bulkier than you are because of the protective padding stitched into the fabric, not to mention all the tool belts, harnesses, and other protective gear you wear over that. When called on to wear other clothes (which you avoid at all costs) your style can best be described as desultory. And primarily involves grabbing whatever is closest and looks cleanest.
Last edited:
Base
CuttleFish2.0
Friendly neighborhood cuttlefish
- Location
- Seattle, Washington.
Base: Located in Demarch Region of the Disk, 300km Anti-Spinward-Outward from Thyrus city in an ancient impact site.
Moderate Storage: Full to Bursting
Basic Survival Amenities
Not Yet Secured
Basic Survival Amenities
Not Yet Secured
~330 m3 Moderate Storage: Empty
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Character Creation 2
CuttleFish2.0
Friendly neighborhood cuttlefish
- Location
- Seattle, Washington.
Five thousand kilometers thick (not counting the vast, atmosphere breaking glaciers) at the edge and spanning more than a billion from edge to edge the Disk dominates your vision. This far in you can't even see anything beyond it in the lower half of your vision, just an endless plane of green and blue fading towards sun-scorched tan ahead of you and to glittering white behind you. All else is the star strewn black field of space and the burning beacon of Mu ahead.
Well, and the pearlescent form of Zerzura growing in your viewports.
Zerzura, the White City. Zerzura, crown jewel of Mu. Zerzura of innumerable empty halls, lonely manses, and lifeless promenades.
A planet which is a city.
No one knows how deep it truly goes. If there is some rocky, planetary core beneath all the layers of labyrinthine construction. Those who go too deep never return and those who do not go quite so deep, but skirt the edges, say that things have taken up residence. Others say that Mu's ancient owners still lurk, warding off intruders from their final, greatest work.
Whatever the truth, Zerzura is the first and (usually) last stop for anyone coming to or leaving Mu and the Disk. It has been the capital of empires and the tomb of emperors. Billions call it home. Living in its towering crystalline spires, trading in its vast squares and avenues, playing in the gardens tended by inscrutable servitors.
It is to here that you bought passage. There are star ports on the Disk itself of course, thousands of them, but if you had landed there you wouldn't have been able to browse the markets of Zerzura. Everything that comes to or leaves Mu passes through Zerzura at some point.
A dozen stations orbit the planet, connected directly down to the planet by gargantuan elevators. Ten around the equator and one each at the poles. At any point there are thirty-seven thousand ships docked between them; ranging from tiny single pilot skiffs, to titanic cargo haulers nearly ready to collapse under their own weight. Your own humble carriage is some ancient dveugr built mammoth serving as a passenger liner.
Once it might have been an impressive craft; edges carved to neat, imposing lines and surfaces brandishing stark reliefs of warriors and monsters from legend and myth. But when you saw it — for all of five minutes granted — while boarding, it was a timeworn and pockmarked shape dimly resembling five moth-eaten mountains tied together by wild sprays of gantries, swaying tubes, and crumbling bridges, all sat on a squashed, shallow pyramid and set on its side.
And the less said about its interiors the better. You would curse its name, but if it ever had one it is long consigned to history, lost even to its crew.
While aboard you spent your time...
[] [Journey] helping maintain some of the ventilation and life-support systems of the ship in exchange for a pitiful wage. +3000 Credits.
[] [Journey] making friends amongst your fellow passengers. +1 Companion.
[] [Journey] making enemies amongst your fellow passengers. +1 Rival. +6000 Credits.
[] [Journey] studying an ancient tome you stumbled across right before leaving for Mu, you think it might hold some clues to a potential site. Guarantee a good site.
[] [Journey] Write-in: Have an idea? Write it in. Subject to approval.
Now, as the rays of Mu dip down behind Zerzura and you watch the glittering constellations of lights down on the surface dance through several complex arrangements you wait to begin your journey with baited breath.
Who were you before?
[] [Background] Nobody: You were no one in particular. An unremarkable talent who passed beneath everyone's notice, you scraped and scrounged and saved and stole to pay for your passage to the Disk. Good news is, no one is going to come looking for you. Bad news is, no one is going to come looking for you.
Gain: +7000 Credits.
[] [Background] Greenhorn: Early on in your life you found your path in life, it would have been hard to make it anywhere if someone older and more experienced hadn't seen something in you and decided to take you under their wing. You earned most of your knowledge at their feet, through practice. And even made some friends and connections too.
Gain: +15 Tokens +1 Companion.
[] [Background] Coward: When you were a child your parents laid out the path of your life for you in no uncertain terms. They knew what they wanted you to become, and when, and there was previously little you could do to change even a single second of it. Fortunately they didn't count on your having megalomaniacal dreams of running away to the edge of the galaxy to risk life and limb chasing faint rumors of ultimate power. Unfortunately doing so may have made certain… uh, acquaintances of yours, unhappy.
Gain: +14000 Credits. +1 Companion. +1 Rival.
[] [Background] Prodigy: Everyone always said you were going places. You don't think this was the sort of place they meant when they said it, but no one would deny you're going to make use of your talents. Unfortunately in your drive to reach this point you may have made some enemies, and one or two may have chosen to follow you in order to have their revenge.
Gain: +1 Rival. Choose Additional Major Discipline.
[] [Background] Write-in: Have an idea? Write it in. Subject to approval.
And why did you come?
[] [Ambition] You'll prove them all wrong! You have a theory about something that you aim to prove in the most visceral way possible.
[] [Ambition] You want it all! Gold, jewels, swords, guns, ships, exotic creatures. Anything and everything you can imagine, and plenty of stuff you can't.
[] [Ambition] You just want to see it burn! The world is so tiresome and irritating, but once you've put it all in shambles and rebuilt it in your image it won't be.
[] [Ambition] You want to uncover secrets! Power and wealth are only good insofar as they fuel your search for greater knowledge, which is the true power that moves the world. Not that you care about moving the world, but it's nice to know you can.
[] [Ambition] You won't be stopped by anyone's silly 'rules!' You have dabbled in techniques and practices that are forbidden by the civilized rules, but you don't plan on letting those sorts of things hold you back.
[] [Ambition] Write-in: Have an idea? Write it in. Subject to approval.
Well, and the pearlescent form of Zerzura growing in your viewports.
Zerzura, the White City. Zerzura, crown jewel of Mu. Zerzura of innumerable empty halls, lonely manses, and lifeless promenades.
A planet which is a city.
No one knows how deep it truly goes. If there is some rocky, planetary core beneath all the layers of labyrinthine construction. Those who go too deep never return and those who do not go quite so deep, but skirt the edges, say that things have taken up residence. Others say that Mu's ancient owners still lurk, warding off intruders from their final, greatest work.
Whatever the truth, Zerzura is the first and (usually) last stop for anyone coming to or leaving Mu and the Disk. It has been the capital of empires and the tomb of emperors. Billions call it home. Living in its towering crystalline spires, trading in its vast squares and avenues, playing in the gardens tended by inscrutable servitors.
It is to here that you bought passage. There are star ports on the Disk itself of course, thousands of them, but if you had landed there you wouldn't have been able to browse the markets of Zerzura. Everything that comes to or leaves Mu passes through Zerzura at some point.
A dozen stations orbit the planet, connected directly down to the planet by gargantuan elevators. Ten around the equator and one each at the poles. At any point there are thirty-seven thousand ships docked between them; ranging from tiny single pilot skiffs, to titanic cargo haulers nearly ready to collapse under their own weight. Your own humble carriage is some ancient dveugr built mammoth serving as a passenger liner.
Once it might have been an impressive craft; edges carved to neat, imposing lines and surfaces brandishing stark reliefs of warriors and monsters from legend and myth. But when you saw it — for all of five minutes granted — while boarding, it was a timeworn and pockmarked shape dimly resembling five moth-eaten mountains tied together by wild sprays of gantries, swaying tubes, and crumbling bridges, all sat on a squashed, shallow pyramid and set on its side.
And the less said about its interiors the better. You would curse its name, but if it ever had one it is long consigned to history, lost even to its crew.
While aboard you spent your time...
[] [Journey] helping maintain some of the ventilation and life-support systems of the ship in exchange for a pitiful wage. +3000 Credits.
[] [Journey] making friends amongst your fellow passengers. +1 Companion.
[] [Journey] making enemies amongst your fellow passengers. +1 Rival. +6000 Credits.
[] [Journey] studying an ancient tome you stumbled across right before leaving for Mu, you think it might hold some clues to a potential site. Guarantee a good site.
[] [Journey] Write-in: Have an idea? Write it in. Subject to approval.
Now, as the rays of Mu dip down behind Zerzura and you watch the glittering constellations of lights down on the surface dance through several complex arrangements you wait to begin your journey with baited breath.
Who were you before?
[] [Background] Nobody: You were no one in particular. An unremarkable talent who passed beneath everyone's notice, you scraped and scrounged and saved and stole to pay for your passage to the Disk. Good news is, no one is going to come looking for you. Bad news is, no one is going to come looking for you.
Gain: +7000 Credits.
[] [Background] Greenhorn: Early on in your life you found your path in life, it would have been hard to make it anywhere if someone older and more experienced hadn't seen something in you and decided to take you under their wing. You earned most of your knowledge at their feet, through practice. And even made some friends and connections too.
Gain: +15 Tokens +1 Companion.
[] [Background] Coward: When you were a child your parents laid out the path of your life for you in no uncertain terms. They knew what they wanted you to become, and when, and there was previously little you could do to change even a single second of it. Fortunately they didn't count on your having megalomaniacal dreams of running away to the edge of the galaxy to risk life and limb chasing faint rumors of ultimate power. Unfortunately doing so may have made certain… uh, acquaintances of yours, unhappy.
Gain: +14000 Credits. +1 Companion. +1 Rival.
[] [Background] Prodigy: Everyone always said you were going places. You don't think this was the sort of place they meant when they said it, but no one would deny you're going to make use of your talents. Unfortunately in your drive to reach this point you may have made some enemies, and one or two may have chosen to follow you in order to have their revenge.
Gain: +1 Rival. Choose Additional Major Discipline.
[] [Background] Write-in: Have an idea? Write it in. Subject to approval.
And why did you come?
[] [Ambition] You'll prove them all wrong! You have a theory about something that you aim to prove in the most visceral way possible.
[] [Ambition] You want it all! Gold, jewels, swords, guns, ships, exotic creatures. Anything and everything you can imagine, and plenty of stuff you can't.
[] [Ambition] You just want to see it burn! The world is so tiresome and irritating, but once you've put it all in shambles and rebuilt it in your image it won't be.
[] [Ambition] You want to uncover secrets! Power and wealth are only good insofar as they fuel your search for greater knowledge, which is the true power that moves the world. Not that you care about moving the world, but it's nice to know you can.
[] [Ambition] You won't be stopped by anyone's silly 'rules!' You have dabbled in techniques and practices that are forbidden by the civilized rules, but you don't plan on letting those sorts of things hold you back.
[] [Ambition] Write-in: Have an idea? Write it in. Subject to approval.
Not a plan vote.
Last edited:
Vote closed
CuttleFish2.0
Friendly neighborhood cuttlefish
- Location
- Seattle, Washington.
Character Creation 3
CuttleFish2.0
Friendly neighborhood cuttlefish
- Location
- Seattle, Washington.
Dirt Garden is one of the mid-tier markets of the Utallos District in the southern hemisphere of Zerzura. Far from the thick braid of nanocarbon cables linking to the orbiting station in orbit, the one from which you disembarked, and the much more expensive markets ringing it, it is your last stop on your three week journey down towards the Disk proper. Most of those three weeks you have spent browsing every market you could for deals and getting good and striking drunk every night, to celebrate your arrival.
All of which has put you in good company. Half of the people you've met so far have been doing exactly the same. If not for the near omnipresence of the silent and impassive servitors which maintain the world, their flickering, angular eggshell bodies drifting by overhead and squeezing past you in crowded passageways as well as the truly omnipresent form of the Disk drifting lazily by overhead, it would almost be familiar.
Everytime you run across the familiar hypercorp logo — whether it's the interlocking blue rings of Ten Springs, the stylized feather and sword of Samshi, or the black pyramid and eye of SkeleCorp — you are almost viscerally thrown back home.
You really do need to stop thinking of it as home, too, at least by the time you get down onto the Disk. Getting lost in memory and reflection is a good way to end up dead down there.
During your time exploring Zerzura what have you gained?
You have 9 Tokens and 1 FREE Companion Choice (least expensive companion).
Tokens can also be exchanged for Credits to purchase supplies and tools (1 Token = 525 Credits).
[] [Companion] Adra Ortun'essig: every single stereotype and cliche people say about the yddr died a quick and untimely death the second you laid eyes on Adra; who is the thickest, meanest looking example of her species you've ever met. Maybe it's the steel and orichalcum arm, claw tipped and with a disconcerting range of motion. You saw her stab a guy through the hand with her pointer finger and then immediately after light a cigar with her thumb. The red glow from her prosthetic eye doesn't help. Apparently she's decided you're going places. (-5 Tokens)
[] [Companion] Kre'ebik Stargulper: aadad have always creeped you out. Kre'ebik is no exception, not even for being all of fourteen. Surprisingly though it has less to do with his appearance (usually the sticking point for you with aadad) and more to do with how he keeps talking about 'leylines' and 'the spirits of the cosmos' and a 'galactic consciousness, dreaming itself full of stories.' Kids should talk like that. They especially shouldn't follow you around, talking like that. (-3 Tokens)
[] [Companion] Natya Dannika Llitov: your fellow apprentice and your only close friend in the world (or at least the only one you half-way respect) Natya is in many ways your reflection just as obsessed as you with metals and tinkering, but with a bent towards the magical. Why she chose to follow you on your journey you're not entirely sure, but you're glad to have her nonetheless. (-4 Tokens)
[] [Companion] Opal Glittering Skyline, Nine Wings Broken: Opal-Nine is an aged khar, his mottled brown and green carapace scratched from years and years of hard living on the edge of civilization. Long ago he was a soldier in the Republic of Kharmun-thar. You met him drinking himself to death in a rundown little joint on Zerzura and struck up a conversation, apparently he liked you well enough to forego the alcohol induced funeral and hitch his 'fading fortunes to you.' He's seen a lot and done more. (-5 Tokens)
[] [Companion] Nosta: raroh hawks are particularly intelligent and social species of hawks common — and prized — on your homeworld. Their mixed red and white feathering hides them against the quartz-iron rich walls of the canyons where they hunt, too have they learned to hunt in the cities dug into the canyon floors. You discovered Nosta as a chick, one of her wings weak and shrunken and nursed her back to health. In time her wing grew to full size but she never left you. (-3 Tokens)
[] [Companion] Elenari: three meters long, and as thick around as your waist, Elenari is a young moon wyrm (when you can expect to live to ten thousand, eight decades is practically infancy) who you encountered shortly before you left for the Disk. Though capable of shapeshifting in a variety of forms, their 'natural' one is vaguely serpentine and covered in large, ridged iridescent scales of a pearl white color. You have no illusions as to them being a 'pet' or anything like that, but for the time being they choose to follow you and help you. (-8 Tokens)
[] [Companion] Thurgash Namecaller of the Three Ravens: Everything about Thurgash is characteristically uurzish except for his unending thirst for knowledge (it almost matches your own) and seemingly encyclopedic grasp of the fields of divinities, linguistics, and geomancy. Not that you know all that many people with an interest in any of the three, but still for as much as he fits the stereotype visually — down to the elaborate full-body tattoos, wearing skins for clothes, and numerous bone piercings decorating his body — he bucks it intellectually. (-8 Tokens)
You start with 7000 Credits.
[] [Purchase] Samshi SurvivalistTM Weapon: Knives, spears, swords, axes, hammers, any weapon you could imagine, Samshi makes. Their Survivalist line — consisting of rugged, weatherproofed, simple designs — is sold practically everywhere and will serve against most wildlife. Most even have dual function capabilities as utility tools.
Price: 180 - 615 Credits
Gain: One Weapon
[] [Purchase] Sled: Simple wood and metal sled. Provide transport for supplies, artifacts, and/or injured companions. Not self-propelled, range dependent on the user's own strength and stamina.
Price: 205 Credits
Gain: Small Transport (Slow) Capacity
[] [Purchase] Samshi All-Environment Ranger Kit: 'Perfect for Rangers of all shapes and sizes! Feel at home in all environments!' That's what it says on the packaging. Includes a BlendAllTM camouflage cloak, MoonshotTM bow, WaspStingTM throwing knives, DragonhideTM armor, plus more.
Price: 1500 Credits
Gain: Decent Armor, Decent Weapons
[ ] [Purchase] Olorin Class 1 Environmental Suit: Erun Luvar & Daughters Co. stopped producing approximately fifteen centuries ago, and yet their products still show up across the galaxy. Partly a testament to their hardiness and partly a testament to their popularity, this example you stumbled across in an isolated junk-market during your second week. Class 1 is good enough for most environments you'll find within the settled portion of the Disk and brief sojourns into the unsettled ones.
Price: 2125 Credits
Gain: Protection against moderately extreme environments.
[ ] [Purchase] PalmDiv, All-Purpose Scanner: Azrhan-Dam House Works is a small-time producer of custom scanning and divination devices for pest-control, law enforcement, and adventurers of all kinds. One of their first models, the PalmDiv lacks in much of the modern deep penetration capabilities of competitor designs but makes up for it in affordability.
Price: 2750 Credits
Gain: Limited short-range treasure/enemy/resource detection.
[] [Purchase] SeeAll, Deep Penetration Divination Sensor: Made of a flexible, semi-transparent plasti-crystal ("... comes in a variety of tints!" announces the box) with 'comfort designed' adjustable straps to attach a wide array of limbs types, as well as activatable 'Super-StickTM' enchantments to allow for static mounting. Made by the Tein Uulass Ring, and usually running several tens of thousands of credits, this one has a giant crack running down the center and several of its convenience enchantments have failed. Still, it works.
Price: 5000 Credits
Gain: Short-range treasure/enemy/resource detection.
[] [Purchase] Ten Springs Two-Way Uplink Set: Utilizing automated astral projection and catching techniques these pair of fist sized black stones with gold filigree allow for the transmission of both thought and data across upto 100 kilometers without lag and 1000 kilometers before total signal degradation. Has both hands-free and manual mode.
Price: 3725 Credits
Gain: Easy long range communication and data transmission.
[] [Purchase] Report to High Prelate Gharisk on Assets of the Four-Hundredth and Thirty-Second District of the Final Conquest: This ancient half-corrupted report dates back some twelve thousand years, during the short tenure of Akalad, Conqueror of Ten-Million Stars as ruler of Mu and the Disk. Supposedly gifted with divine power by the uurzish god Grol (though Akalad themselves was sylthen) they established a heavily advanced empire relying mostly on having stronger armor and blowing up their enemies harder, plus a dash of apparent divine favor. In other words, almost perfect for you.
Price: 4095 Credits
Gain: Guarantee the majority of sites you start with access to will be Engineering and Metallurgy oriented.
[] [Purchase] Single-Family Pre-Fab Module: Contain adjustable sleeping space for up to 8 individuals, one double occupancy/multi-species restroom, climate controlled storage, combination cooking/dining space, attachment points for full on environmental control suite, and a Quick SealTM airlock for rapid entrance and egress. Exterior facing module pieces are made of high-strength composites rated to withstand Class 0 extreme weather conditions.
Price: 3800 Credits
Gain: Ready made shelter with minimal personal time investment.
[] [Purchase] Skiff: Built by the uurzish conglomerate Iron-Skies, this single occupant skiff is rated for suborbital pressures of up to 3 atmospheres. Shaped like the end of a particularly nasty argument about one's ancestry, it is everything one would expect from an uurzish company on the surface. It won't move much, but it'll get one person from point A to point B safely. So long as you stay in atmosphere.
Price: 9470 Credits
Gain: Small Transport Capacity.
[] [Purchase] Lighter: Cobbled together from the corpses of at least four different ships (that you can recognize) held together by wishes and duck tape; resembling several squashed eggs tuck to the side of a conch shell, fins running down its side, that someone hammered an enormous arrowhead into point out. Out of atmosphere it'll probably last long enough to get you down to the Disk, but after that it will be relegated to ferrying you to and from sites unless you invest a lot in rebuilding it.
Price: 15045 Credits
Gain: Large Transport Capacity.
You must pick at least 1 Rival.
[] [Rival] Inquisitor: out here, so far from the temples and sacred grounds, the gods have little presence. But 'little presence' is not 'no presence' and it is most certainly not 'no interest.' Ruins of ancient temples and shrines litter the surface of the Disk; though the attention of their patrons have mostly moved on. For whatever reason you have gained divine ire and now are hunted by the agent of some god. Not that you know that yet.
[] [Rival] Natya Dannika Llitov: your fellow apprentice and your only close friend in the world (or at least the only one you half-way respect) Natya is in many ways your reflection just as obsessed as you with metals and tinkering, but with a bent towards the magical. Why she chose to follow you on your journey you're not entirely sure, and you're not sure if she can be trusted.
[] [Rival] Red Iron Works of Vapim, Asset Protection: Some of your more… energetic projects had unfortunate collateral impacts. Nothing ruinous. And no one lost more than a finger, or two. Still they put you, nominally, in the debt of Red Iron Works of Vapim; a local megacorp of your homeworld Golac, a debt that you had, technically, skipped out on. But with you gone to the Disk they'll probably just write you off as a lost asset and collect a fat insurance check. Right? They wouldn't send someone after you, would they?
[] [Rival] Torin Dyatlav: you never really noticed, but for years Torin has been living in your shadow. Always held up to your example and found wanting. It's the sort of thing that can gen irritating, that can get under someone's skin and drive them just mad… the sort of mad that leads to questionable decisions made on the basis of questionable reasoning. One way or another they mean to demonstrate for now and forever that they are not just a lesser version of you come too late.
[] [EXTRA] Major Discipline: (Choose from same list as previous)
Unspent tokens are lost at the end of character creation.
Note: You may write-in a rival, but you MUST submit it to me first for approval.
Not a plan vote.
Ignore the above, I didn't think things through enough.
Vote by Plan.
All of which has put you in good company. Half of the people you've met so far have been doing exactly the same. If not for the near omnipresence of the silent and impassive servitors which maintain the world, their flickering, angular eggshell bodies drifting by overhead and squeezing past you in crowded passageways as well as the truly omnipresent form of the Disk drifting lazily by overhead, it would almost be familiar.
Everytime you run across the familiar hypercorp logo — whether it's the interlocking blue rings of Ten Springs, the stylized feather and sword of Samshi, or the black pyramid and eye of SkeleCorp — you are almost viscerally thrown back home.
You really do need to stop thinking of it as home, too, at least by the time you get down onto the Disk. Getting lost in memory and reflection is a good way to end up dead down there.
During your time exploring Zerzura what have you gained?
You have 9 Tokens and 1 FREE Companion Choice (least expensive companion).
Tokens can also be exchanged for Credits to purchase supplies and tools (1 Token = 525 Credits).
[] [Companion] Adra Ortun'essig: every single stereotype and cliche people say about the yddr died a quick and untimely death the second you laid eyes on Adra; who is the thickest, meanest looking example of her species you've ever met. Maybe it's the steel and orichalcum arm, claw tipped and with a disconcerting range of motion. You saw her stab a guy through the hand with her pointer finger and then immediately after light a cigar with her thumb. The red glow from her prosthetic eye doesn't help. Apparently she's decided you're going places. (-5 Tokens)
[] [Companion] Kre'ebik Stargulper: aadad have always creeped you out. Kre'ebik is no exception, not even for being all of fourteen. Surprisingly though it has less to do with his appearance (usually the sticking point for you with aadad) and more to do with how he keeps talking about 'leylines' and 'the spirits of the cosmos' and a 'galactic consciousness, dreaming itself full of stories.' Kids should talk like that. They especially shouldn't follow you around, talking like that. (-3 Tokens)
[] [Companion] Natya Dannika Llitov: your fellow apprentice and your only close friend in the world (or at least the only one you half-way respect) Natya is in many ways your reflection just as obsessed as you with metals and tinkering, but with a bent towards the magical. Why she chose to follow you on your journey you're not entirely sure, but you're glad to have her nonetheless. (-4 Tokens)
[] [Companion] Opal Glittering Skyline, Nine Wings Broken: Opal-Nine is an aged khar, his mottled brown and green carapace scratched from years and years of hard living on the edge of civilization. Long ago he was a soldier in the Republic of Kharmun-thar. You met him drinking himself to death in a rundown little joint on Zerzura and struck up a conversation, apparently he liked you well enough to forego the alcohol induced funeral and hitch his 'fading fortunes to you.' He's seen a lot and done more. (-5 Tokens)
[] [Companion] Nosta: raroh hawks are particularly intelligent and social species of hawks common — and prized — on your homeworld. Their mixed red and white feathering hides them against the quartz-iron rich walls of the canyons where they hunt, too have they learned to hunt in the cities dug into the canyon floors. You discovered Nosta as a chick, one of her wings weak and shrunken and nursed her back to health. In time her wing grew to full size but she never left you. (-3 Tokens)
[] [Companion] Elenari: three meters long, and as thick around as your waist, Elenari is a young moon wyrm (when you can expect to live to ten thousand, eight decades is practically infancy) who you encountered shortly before you left for the Disk. Though capable of shapeshifting in a variety of forms, their 'natural' one is vaguely serpentine and covered in large, ridged iridescent scales of a pearl white color. You have no illusions as to them being a 'pet' or anything like that, but for the time being they choose to follow you and help you. (-8 Tokens)
[] [Companion] Thurgash Namecaller of the Three Ravens: Everything about Thurgash is characteristically uurzish except for his unending thirst for knowledge (it almost matches your own) and seemingly encyclopedic grasp of the fields of divinities, linguistics, and geomancy. Not that you know all that many people with an interest in any of the three, but still for as much as he fits the stereotype visually — down to the elaborate full-body tattoos, wearing skins for clothes, and numerous bone piercings decorating his body — he bucks it intellectually. (-8 Tokens)
You start with 7000 Credits.
[] [Purchase] Samshi SurvivalistTM Weapon: Knives, spears, swords, axes, hammers, any weapon you could imagine, Samshi makes. Their Survivalist line — consisting of rugged, weatherproofed, simple designs — is sold practically everywhere and will serve against most wildlife. Most even have dual function capabilities as utility tools.
Price: 180 - 615 Credits
Gain: One Weapon
[] [Purchase] Sled: Simple wood and metal sled. Provide transport for supplies, artifacts, and/or injured companions. Not self-propelled, range dependent on the user's own strength and stamina.
Price: 205 Credits
Gain: Small Transport (Slow) Capacity
[] [Purchase] Samshi All-Environment Ranger Kit: 'Perfect for Rangers of all shapes and sizes! Feel at home in all environments!' That's what it says on the packaging. Includes a BlendAllTM camouflage cloak, MoonshotTM bow, WaspStingTM throwing knives, DragonhideTM armor, plus more.
Price: 1500 Credits
Gain: Decent Armor, Decent Weapons
[ ] [Purchase] Olorin Class 1 Environmental Suit: Erun Luvar & Daughters Co. stopped producing approximately fifteen centuries ago, and yet their products still show up across the galaxy. Partly a testament to their hardiness and partly a testament to their popularity, this example you stumbled across in an isolated junk-market during your second week. Class 1 is good enough for most environments you'll find within the settled portion of the Disk and brief sojourns into the unsettled ones.
Price: 2125 Credits
Gain: Protection against moderately extreme environments.
[ ] [Purchase] PalmDiv, All-Purpose Scanner: Azrhan-Dam House Works is a small-time producer of custom scanning and divination devices for pest-control, law enforcement, and adventurers of all kinds. One of their first models, the PalmDiv lacks in much of the modern deep penetration capabilities of competitor designs but makes up for it in affordability.
Price: 2750 Credits
Gain: Limited short-range treasure/enemy/resource detection.
[] [Purchase] SeeAll, Deep Penetration Divination Sensor: Made of a flexible, semi-transparent plasti-crystal ("... comes in a variety of tints!" announces the box) with 'comfort designed' adjustable straps to attach a wide array of limbs types, as well as activatable 'Super-StickTM' enchantments to allow for static mounting. Made by the Tein Uulass Ring, and usually running several tens of thousands of credits, this one has a giant crack running down the center and several of its convenience enchantments have failed. Still, it works.
Price: 5000 Credits
Gain: Short-range treasure/enemy/resource detection.
[] [Purchase] Ten Springs Two-Way Uplink Set: Utilizing automated astral projection and catching techniques these pair of fist sized black stones with gold filigree allow for the transmission of both thought and data across upto 100 kilometers without lag and 1000 kilometers before total signal degradation. Has both hands-free and manual mode.
Price: 3725 Credits
Gain: Easy long range communication and data transmission.
[] [Purchase] Report to High Prelate Gharisk on Assets of the Four-Hundredth and Thirty-Second District of the Final Conquest: This ancient half-corrupted report dates back some twelve thousand years, during the short tenure of Akalad, Conqueror of Ten-Million Stars as ruler of Mu and the Disk. Supposedly gifted with divine power by the uurzish god Grol (though Akalad themselves was sylthen) they established a heavily advanced empire relying mostly on having stronger armor and blowing up their enemies harder, plus a dash of apparent divine favor. In other words, almost perfect for you.
Price: 4095 Credits
Gain: Guarantee the majority of sites you start with access to will be Engineering and Metallurgy oriented.
[] [Purchase] Single-Family Pre-Fab Module: Contain adjustable sleeping space for up to 8 individuals, one double occupancy/multi-species restroom, climate controlled storage, combination cooking/dining space, attachment points for full on environmental control suite, and a Quick SealTM airlock for rapid entrance and egress. Exterior facing module pieces are made of high-strength composites rated to withstand Class 0 extreme weather conditions.
Price: 3800 Credits
Gain: Ready made shelter with minimal personal time investment.
[] [Purchase] Skiff: Built by the uurzish conglomerate Iron-Skies, this single occupant skiff is rated for suborbital pressures of up to 3 atmospheres. Shaped like the end of a particularly nasty argument about one's ancestry, it is everything one would expect from an uurzish company on the surface. It won't move much, but it'll get one person from point A to point B safely. So long as you stay in atmosphere.
Price: 9470 Credits
Gain: Small Transport Capacity.
[] [Purchase] Lighter: Cobbled together from the corpses of at least four different ships (that you can recognize) held together by wishes and duck tape; resembling several squashed eggs tuck to the side of a conch shell, fins running down its side, that someone hammered an enormous arrowhead into point out. Out of atmosphere it'll probably last long enough to get you down to the Disk, but after that it will be relegated to ferrying you to and from sites unless you invest a lot in rebuilding it.
Price: 15045 Credits
Gain: Large Transport Capacity.
You must pick at least 1 Rival.
[] [Rival] Inquisitor: out here, so far from the temples and sacred grounds, the gods have little presence. But 'little presence' is not 'no presence' and it is most certainly not 'no interest.' Ruins of ancient temples and shrines litter the surface of the Disk; though the attention of their patrons have mostly moved on. For whatever reason you have gained divine ire and now are hunted by the agent of some god. Not that you know that yet.
[] [Rival] Natya Dannika Llitov: your fellow apprentice and your only close friend in the world (or at least the only one you half-way respect) Natya is in many ways your reflection just as obsessed as you with metals and tinkering, but with a bent towards the magical. Why she chose to follow you on your journey you're not entirely sure, and you're not sure if she can be trusted.
[] [Rival] Red Iron Works of Vapim, Asset Protection: Some of your more… energetic projects had unfortunate collateral impacts. Nothing ruinous. And no one lost more than a finger, or two. Still they put you, nominally, in the debt of Red Iron Works of Vapim; a local megacorp of your homeworld Golac, a debt that you had, technically, skipped out on. But with you gone to the Disk they'll probably just write you off as a lost asset and collect a fat insurance check. Right? They wouldn't send someone after you, would they?
[] [Rival] Torin Dyatlav: you never really noticed, but for years Torin has been living in your shadow. Always held up to your example and found wanting. It's the sort of thing that can gen irritating, that can get under someone's skin and drive them just mad… the sort of mad that leads to questionable decisions made on the basis of questionable reasoning. One way or another they mean to demonstrate for now and forever that they are not just a lesser version of you come too late.
[] [EXTRA] Major Discipline: (Choose from same list as previous)
Unspent tokens are lost at the end of character creation.
Note: You may write-in a rival, but you MUST submit it to me first for approval.
Ignore the above, I didn't think things through enough.
Vote by Plan.
Last edited:
Vote closed
CuttleFish2.0
Friendly neighborhood cuttlefish
- Location
- Seattle, Washington.
Plan Trio and Debt wins! Update will be ready probably sometime around Friday. Character sheet will be updated momentarily...
As an additional tease, someone wanna roll 1d4 for me?
Last edited:
Day 0 - Beginnings
CuttleFish2.0
Friendly neighborhood cuttlefish
- Location
- Seattle, Washington.
Day 0 - Beginnings
You are Ivan Dmitryov Korvinsky, late of Pravj City on Golac, a poor industrial world out in the Ultum arm of the galaxy. But that part of your life is done with.
No longer will you be held back by the prosaic laws and strictures of your homeworld. You're on the Disk now. You can finally really, truly test the limits of your knowledge and create the works you have always wanted to without worry of censure or disapproving noises from your 'elders.'
Soft raindrops beat against the plasti-crystal windows in a rising drumbeat as the storm outside picks up, echoing throughout the shallow dome of the prefab. 400 square meters sounded like a lot until you stuffed it full of furniture, workshop equipment for at least six different disciplines (or at least everything that hadn't been nailed down), clothes, weapons, and rations for three sapients and a bird. Setting up proper facilities will be one of your first priorities. Once the weather lets up.
Nosta, your raroh hawk, makes her own displeasure apparent by tapping gently at your skull with her beak. Well, you know she's trying to be gentle. At her size it still feels like someone dropping a screwdriver on your head.
Reaching up to scratch at her neck, you mutter, "I know, I know. Today is not safe out there, girl."
She clucks, threatening to nip at your ear before huffing and hopping down from her perch to find something of entertainment.
The crew of the lighter you hired down from Leshar station warned you you were coming down ahead of the biggest storm in the sector in a century, but this was something else. Nothing like the storms back on Golac. Sustained wind speeds were already over 150 kilometers an hour and they hadn't even peaked yet according to the weather reports you were catching from Thyrus city — 300 kilometers southeast of you, or, to use the Disk parlance 'sunward-spinward ' — on your scavenged radio receiver. That would happen sometime in the next two days. After which the storm front should quickly move on, leaving you free and clear to get to work.
You were in the Demarch region of the Disk, out in what was considered the 'frontier.' Rumor said that it had once been the seat of the Wrights themselves on the Disk, granted half the places on the Disk likely had similar rumors about them. While rumor and hearsay might be one of the major currencies of your newly chosen trade, but neither was enough to live off of, much less sufficient to uncover the hidden secrets of the cosmos, so you hadn't pinned everything on just a rumor. No. You had pinned everything on a number of rumors.
Carefully collated and cross reference rumors.
Which is to say that you listened to a lot of rumors and decided to go off of the bits and pieces that were most consistent. Then you'd chosen a handful that pointed to the same general area and payed out a pile of credits to get dropped off in something vaguely like the right direction.
That was how you came to be where you were. Waiting for a storm to pass.
You supposed there were worse fates—
A crash from behind you breaks you out of your musings, followed very quickly by a chittery shout of, "Egg-mimic!"
Whipping your head around you see Opal-Nine standing over several open containers of your rations, one of his serrate forelimbs stabbed through at least three-layers of freeze-dried food. It can be hard to tell just by sight, but you think he's upset.
Natya looks up from the corner where she's fiddling with some contraption of brass and silver she bought from one of your fellow passengers. It is now emitting a dim lilac glow. Her sharp features are pulled into even sharper focus as her eyes zero in on the khar standing only a few meters away.
"What is it?" she asks.
Looking up, his antennae and mandibles twitching rapidly, Opal-Nine catches both your eyes and lets out the closest equivalent to a sight that you've ever heard from a khar.
A sort of rattling exhalation that you can feel in your arm hairs.
"These," he lifts up one forelimb to show you the ration packets, (formerly) sealed foil packets as big as your head, leaking a mix of reddish brown liquid down the edges of his forelimb, "Are all useless… spoiled. That flat-eyed dveugr sold us rotten goods."
You and Natya both swear at the same time, "Piss on my back."
It had seemed like a godsend at the time, two months of rations for less than you'd paid for your new sled. Evidently it had been too good a deal.
"How much?"
"Three weeks at least. More maybe. Top layer of each crate is safe," you follow the point of his other forelimb as it motions at the untouched rations, "But everything below that… not fit to feed your bird."
Nosta let out an indignant screech and fixes Opal-Nine with a glare. For his part the khar gave her an apologetic look. At least that's what you thought it was.
Reading the body language and facial expressions of aliens had never been a necessity, Nosta evidently took it in that spirit too because she clucked in satisfaction and turned back to whatever bit of distraction she'd found. An old bit of one of your work gloves it looked like. Opal-Nine continued as if he hadn't been interrupted, pushing the ration packets off his forelimb as he did.
"Must have used an illusion to pass off the bad ones for good."
"Worst case leaves us ten months of rations. Plenty of time to find something," you say.
You've never exactly been accused of a cheerful or optimistic outlook, but you've never been given to pessimism either.
"Vanya," starts Natya, sighing, "That is if we find something. Bar stories and market gossip are not reliable leads."
Rolling your eyes, you get up and stretch, tossing back over your shoulder, "Hold faith Natya, have I ever steered us wrong?"
You will not comment on the look she gives you in response. There's no point trying to explain your process to her again, she'll just have to see for herself the method to your 'madness.'
Overhead the sky has brightened from the roiling sea of grey-black storm clouds to the simple muted grey of an overcast day. You can just make out the dim circle of the sun through the clouds. Two days of being cooped up inside the prefab shelter as the rain pounded relentlessly against the walls of your home like a thousand swarms of angry rock wasps after a dew fruit has given you an appreciation for not being… all that.
The ground is soggy beneath your feet and squelches thickly around your boots with each step you take as you patrol around the perimeter of the shelter. Mud and leaves speckle the off-white dome. Stray branches lay scattered at the foot of the dome along one side, some of them as thick around as three fingers and as long as your forearm.
At least now you have a source for the loud thuds you heard late last night.
Better storm debris than a wild beast roused by the storm.
Most of the local wildlife is supposed to be on the lower end of the threat spectrum for the Disk, that doesn't mean you want it deciding your new home would make a nice roost or lair. You need to get established before you can start playing host to anything more than Nosta or common scavengers. Rounding the bend you spy Natya coming from the opposite direction.
Giving you a quick nod and thenna shake of her head, she says, "No damage."
As expected then. Prefab shelters like yours are usually designed for the conditions of a new colony and advertised as rated for storms at least three categories higher than the one you just experienced.
It is good to see them holding up to those inducements.
For a moment you don't respond, scanning the landscape around you in all its sodden, wind tossed glory. Off to your southeast — spinward and sunward you remind yourself — you spot the cloud cover breaking up just a bit to show clear blue sky around the peaks of the mountains just beyond Thyrus. Their snow capped tips gleaming white in the morning sun.
You think you can just make out a slightly darker smudge on one of them that might be one of your potential sites; a place you've taken to calling the Lonely Tower. Or it might just be a patch of bare rock.
Tearing your eyes away from those distant peaks you take a second look at your more immediate surroundings and look to Natya, one eyebrow raised.
"What do you think?"
Without even missing a beat, she considers, her mouth screwing up as she turns her own gaze on the terrain all around you. It is amazing how well the two of you read each other's thoughts.
A few strands of her dark red hair have escaped their tight bun to whip about her face in the light wind still blowing. Coming in just ahead of the storm didn't leave you much chance to survey things; the captain of the lighter you hired refused to loiter for more than half an hour, leaving you with little choice but to set up where you were and move things into your shelter as fast as you could.
For a choice made off of centuries old satellite imagery and rumor you don't think you did half bad.
"Plenty of material," she gestures to the forests that press up against the lip of the ancient crater you settled in, "If we can source good stone. Room to expand, too."
It was a big impact.
Natya frowned and looked at the ground beneath her foot. Mud squelched up around her boot as she worked it into the ground, forming a vaguely heart shaped depression.
"Need to see how deep the pilings should be for the shelter and future foundations."
You both looked over at the nearest one, indicated by a cylindrical cutout at the bottom edge of the dome. Twenty-three identical cutouts, one every three meters, ran around the circumference of the shelter, capable of drilling to a depth of 15 meters unassisted and filling them with steel foam pilings from internal reservoirs up to a depth of 5 meters. In an emergency the whole process could be complete in a few hours.
While it hadn't been necessary to weather out the storm, the Disk was tectonically active (just one of the many mysteries of the Disk) and so there was a threat of earthquakes. Plus once you actually started serious experimentation and tinkering you would need a stable and level environment to work in.
On that subject, you add, "I may have spotted a couple good spots for labs and workshops. Expose rock on the south lip of the crater… maybe granite."
"Mmm."
A long lull follows before Natya speaks up again.
"Speaking of work, tell me what we have again."
You nod. Even though you've been over it before, several times over the last week in fact, you can understand Natya wanting to hear you go through what you've been able to piece together from rumors and gossip.
"What I'm calling 'Site 1' is an old crashed spaceship about 400 klicks anti-spinward from us, deep into the frontier, belonging to either the Brum'gehad Fleet Senate or the Scar-Faced People— "
"I remember the Fleet from history- they made the hydrogen siphons around Pesht," a gas giant in the same system as your homeworld, "But these others?"
"The Scar-Faced People," you supplied.
She nodded, "Refresh me."
"Uurzish, like the Fleet Senate but around four thousand years older. Most of what we know about them comes from the murals they put on everything, which given their apparent knowledge of construction and materials, could reach truly staggering sizes," you checked to see if that satisfied Natya before moving on, "Both built their ships big, but the Scars mixed in more of the arcane."
"Sounds like good salvage potential. If the gossip is right."
You smile, "Might be something big lurking in the valleys around the crash site, too. Fleet was supposed to dabble in the life sciences."
"Just because you managed to stumble your way into taming one wild animal doesn't mean the next won't bite you in half. Remember this is the Disk, not Golac," she forestalls your objection with a raised hand, "Move on."
Rolling your eyes you let out a sigh, but don't press the issue.
"Site 2 is closer to Thyrus than us, practically on the doorstep."
"That's a city of four-hundred thousand," Natya quirks an eyebrow, "Why hasn't someone plundered it already?"
"Superstition mostly. Old ghost stories. And the reanimated skeletons haunting its' halls; an old necromancer's fortress belonging to some ancient wutn named Wise Nav."
At that your friend's eyebrows shot up, "Big skeletons."
You nod. Last of the wutn died out thousands of years ago but they still pop up in stories all the time, mostly as villains. Literal giants always make for good bad guys.
"Get in, get out with whatever we can. Sell it in Thyrus. Should make us a nice stash of credits."
"Should, should," Natya mutters, then, "You said there was something close to here when we were coming down on the pissing junker."
Laughing you say, "Yeah, supposed to be some tomb in the woods around here. Right after Akalad emptied a quarter of their empire to conquer the Disk they buried some of their elites. No one has ever found it."
Frowning your friend gives you a long look. One you are very familiar with, usually coming after you've finished spilling your latest idea to her late at night and far away from prying ears. You simply shrug.
You're working with what you have. Maybe if you hadn't pissed off the Red Iron Works you could have saved up a little more before heading out from Golac, but if the old goats running your homeworld weren't so titchy about things you probably wouldn't have needed to leave in the first place.
"Weapons, armor, jewels. Close by enough we could make it back to the shelter most days."
"Likely to be trapped," came the raspy voice of Opal-Nine over your shoulder.
You jumped and quietly swore under your breath as you stared at the khar. How exactly had the three meter mass of carapace and weapons — when you'd first met him as a drunken mess, he hadn't had more than a pocket knife (for him anyways) but since then you hadn't seen him with anything less than a pair of blaster pistols and at least a full-hand melee weapon — snuck up on you? It shouldn't have been possible.
Natya quirked a smug eyebrow at you. As if she wouldn't have been just as scared if she hadn't seen him coming.
Opal-Nine meanwhile continued as if you hadn't reacted at all.
"Akalad was a paranoid bastard. Who also happened to believe in 'survival of the fittest' as a sacred test."
"We'll have to be on our toes then…" you let a beat pass, "On the other hand, Site 4 should be a cakewalk. Our main problem will be getting to it; we'll need to climb the highest peak in the region just to get a chance at it."
Natya nods in recognition, "I remember this one. Still no idea what's actually inside?"
You shake your head, which draws a curious clicking from Opal-Nine.
"Unknown danger, for an unknown reward? Sounds like hunting after rainbows."
"Maybe," you shrug, "But whatever is inside it has to be powerful, because whoever built it made it literally impossible to approach except on foot. As if the place doesn't exist otherwise."
Opal-Nine let out a sound sort of like a whistle, but filled with clicking and chattering. You thought he was impressed. Across from you Natya grew thoughtful for a moment.
"Spells, steel, or hot air?"
It was an old question between the two of you, you started using it when Natya first began to study magic years and years ago. Back then you hadn't yet started delving into your own magical journey with life-shaping and so 'steel' had been the mundane subjects of purely physical interactions while 'spells' had been anything to do with the sensible forms of magic.
'Hot air' was anything to do with gods. Because a prayer might as well be so much hot air, rising. It had seemed clever when they were sixteen.
" 'Spells,' I think."
"Bury me in chert," she swears, "How would you even- the feedback from the spell layering involved in something like that must be huge. Just capturing all the data would require- no. I shouldn't speculate."
Natya shook her head vigorously and turned back to you with a furious intensity. Her eyes blazed with a fierce want that you recognized immediately.
"What about the last site?"
You turned to look at Opal-Nine, who was regarding each of you with open curiosity. At least you assumed it was curiosity.
"I was going to say I'd saved the best for last," you say, smiling at Natya, "But I guess that might not be true."
"Get on with it, Vanya," she growls back at you.
"You remember those stories about the Long March— "
The Long March of Ten-Thousand Stars, to give it it's full name, was a mysterious society of aadad warriors and pilots who had supposedly been part of every major war for the last ten thousand years. Masters of blade, ship, and spell they faded in and out of history like ghosts. Turning up wherever they could turn the tide of a battle or pull some prince or champion from the edge of certain death.
" —Micha used to tell us?"
Micha had been one of the apprentices at the shop you both worked in who had been a few years older than you both. Her cheeks color as she nods. Natya had a crush on him for years.
Whenever he started telling one of his many stories, always involving something he'd picked up while getting drunk at the old adventurers bar (The Goat and Tackle you think it was called), though you don't think it had ever seen any actual adventurers, just old soldiers and the odd wildcat miner sun-drunk from years out in the badlands of Golac, she would drop everything to drink up every word. Got her in trouble more than a few times.
"Well I'm pretty sure the last site is an old Long March base. From either the second or third cycle."
Natya's eyes go wide and bright, "Of course; it's not sunken, it's submerged."
"Exactly, and probably at least several hundred years younger than that blind old idiot told us. Those stories of lights and roars from the marshes weren't battles, but the ships coming and going."
People had found Long March bases before, all of them long abandoned. Usually stripped of material. If there was even a chance something was still left it could be the treasure of a lifetime, though not personally useful to you; the Long March tended to mix to get their edge from arcane sources. Though from what you knew they were no slouches in engineering or metallurgy either.
So, what do you put your attention to?
[] Building up your base. Specify:
- [] Storage: rudimentary storage area not literally inside your living space. Slightly more secure, safer, increased storage.
- [] Lab: rudimentary lab for studying anything you find not literally inside your living space. More room to work, better conditions, not in your way.
- [] Workshop: rudimentary workshop to tinker away in not literally inside your living space. More room to work, tools not cluttering up everything, not in your way all the damn time.
- [] Write-in: pending approval.
[] Explore your surroundings. Might discover something unexpected.
[] Go into 'town' Not yet.
[] Go on an expedition to a site. Pick One:
- [] Crashed Spaceship
- [] Broken Fortress
- []Sword Mausoleum Must first Explore your surroundings
- [] Lonely Tower
- [] Abandoned Base
You are Ivan Dmitryov Korvinsky, late of Pravj City on Golac, a poor industrial world out in the Ultum arm of the galaxy. But that part of your life is done with.
No longer will you be held back by the prosaic laws and strictures of your homeworld. You're on the Disk now. You can finally really, truly test the limits of your knowledge and create the works you have always wanted to without worry of censure or disapproving noises from your 'elders.'
Soft raindrops beat against the plasti-crystal windows in a rising drumbeat as the storm outside picks up, echoing throughout the shallow dome of the prefab. 400 square meters sounded like a lot until you stuffed it full of furniture, workshop equipment for at least six different disciplines (or at least everything that hadn't been nailed down), clothes, weapons, and rations for three sapients and a bird. Setting up proper facilities will be one of your first priorities. Once the weather lets up.
Nosta, your raroh hawk, makes her own displeasure apparent by tapping gently at your skull with her beak. Well, you know she's trying to be gentle. At her size it still feels like someone dropping a screwdriver on your head.
Reaching up to scratch at her neck, you mutter, "I know, I know. Today is not safe out there, girl."
She clucks, threatening to nip at your ear before huffing and hopping down from her perch to find something of entertainment.
The crew of the lighter you hired down from Leshar station warned you you were coming down ahead of the biggest storm in the sector in a century, but this was something else. Nothing like the storms back on Golac. Sustained wind speeds were already over 150 kilometers an hour and they hadn't even peaked yet according to the weather reports you were catching from Thyrus city — 300 kilometers southeast of you, or, to use the Disk parlance 'sunward-spinward ' — on your scavenged radio receiver. That would happen sometime in the next two days. After which the storm front should quickly move on, leaving you free and clear to get to work.
You were in the Demarch region of the Disk, out in what was considered the 'frontier.' Rumor said that it had once been the seat of the Wrights themselves on the Disk, granted half the places on the Disk likely had similar rumors about them. While rumor and hearsay might be one of the major currencies of your newly chosen trade, but neither was enough to live off of, much less sufficient to uncover the hidden secrets of the cosmos, so you hadn't pinned everything on just a rumor. No. You had pinned everything on a number of rumors.
Carefully collated and cross reference rumors.
Which is to say that you listened to a lot of rumors and decided to go off of the bits and pieces that were most consistent. Then you'd chosen a handful that pointed to the same general area and payed out a pile of credits to get dropped off in something vaguely like the right direction.
That was how you came to be where you were. Waiting for a storm to pass.
You supposed there were worse fates—
A crash from behind you breaks you out of your musings, followed very quickly by a chittery shout of, "Egg-mimic!"
Whipping your head around you see Opal-Nine standing over several open containers of your rations, one of his serrate forelimbs stabbed through at least three-layers of freeze-dried food. It can be hard to tell just by sight, but you think he's upset.
Natya looks up from the corner where she's fiddling with some contraption of brass and silver she bought from one of your fellow passengers. It is now emitting a dim lilac glow. Her sharp features are pulled into even sharper focus as her eyes zero in on the khar standing only a few meters away.
"What is it?" she asks.
Looking up, his antennae and mandibles twitching rapidly, Opal-Nine catches both your eyes and lets out the closest equivalent to a sight that you've ever heard from a khar.
A sort of rattling exhalation that you can feel in your arm hairs.
"These," he lifts up one forelimb to show you the ration packets, (formerly) sealed foil packets as big as your head, leaking a mix of reddish brown liquid down the edges of his forelimb, "Are all useless… spoiled. That flat-eyed dveugr sold us rotten goods."
You and Natya both swear at the same time, "Piss on my back."
It had seemed like a godsend at the time, two months of rations for less than you'd paid for your new sled. Evidently it had been too good a deal.
"How much?"
"Three weeks at least. More maybe. Top layer of each crate is safe," you follow the point of his other forelimb as it motions at the untouched rations, "But everything below that… not fit to feed your bird."
Nosta let out an indignant screech and fixes Opal-Nine with a glare. For his part the khar gave her an apologetic look. At least that's what you thought it was.
Reading the body language and facial expressions of aliens had never been a necessity, Nosta evidently took it in that spirit too because she clucked in satisfaction and turned back to whatever bit of distraction she'd found. An old bit of one of your work gloves it looked like. Opal-Nine continued as if he hadn't been interrupted, pushing the ration packets off his forelimb as he did.
"Must have used an illusion to pass off the bad ones for good."
"Worst case leaves us ten months of rations. Plenty of time to find something," you say.
You've never exactly been accused of a cheerful or optimistic outlook, but you've never been given to pessimism either.
"Vanya," starts Natya, sighing, "That is if we find something. Bar stories and market gossip are not reliable leads."
Rolling your eyes, you get up and stretch, tossing back over your shoulder, "Hold faith Natya, have I ever steered us wrong?"
You will not comment on the look she gives you in response. There's no point trying to explain your process to her again, she'll just have to see for herself the method to your 'madness.'
Overhead the sky has brightened from the roiling sea of grey-black storm clouds to the simple muted grey of an overcast day. You can just make out the dim circle of the sun through the clouds. Two days of being cooped up inside the prefab shelter as the rain pounded relentlessly against the walls of your home like a thousand swarms of angry rock wasps after a dew fruit has given you an appreciation for not being… all that.
The ground is soggy beneath your feet and squelches thickly around your boots with each step you take as you patrol around the perimeter of the shelter. Mud and leaves speckle the off-white dome. Stray branches lay scattered at the foot of the dome along one side, some of them as thick around as three fingers and as long as your forearm.
At least now you have a source for the loud thuds you heard late last night.
Better storm debris than a wild beast roused by the storm.
Most of the local wildlife is supposed to be on the lower end of the threat spectrum for the Disk, that doesn't mean you want it deciding your new home would make a nice roost or lair. You need to get established before you can start playing host to anything more than Nosta or common scavengers. Rounding the bend you spy Natya coming from the opposite direction.
Giving you a quick nod and thenna shake of her head, she says, "No damage."
As expected then. Prefab shelters like yours are usually designed for the conditions of a new colony and advertised as rated for storms at least three categories higher than the one you just experienced.
It is good to see them holding up to those inducements.
For a moment you don't respond, scanning the landscape around you in all its sodden, wind tossed glory. Off to your southeast — spinward and sunward you remind yourself — you spot the cloud cover breaking up just a bit to show clear blue sky around the peaks of the mountains just beyond Thyrus. Their snow capped tips gleaming white in the morning sun.
You think you can just make out a slightly darker smudge on one of them that might be one of your potential sites; a place you've taken to calling the Lonely Tower. Or it might just be a patch of bare rock.
Tearing your eyes away from those distant peaks you take a second look at your more immediate surroundings and look to Natya, one eyebrow raised.
"What do you think?"
Without even missing a beat, she considers, her mouth screwing up as she turns her own gaze on the terrain all around you. It is amazing how well the two of you read each other's thoughts.
A few strands of her dark red hair have escaped their tight bun to whip about her face in the light wind still blowing. Coming in just ahead of the storm didn't leave you much chance to survey things; the captain of the lighter you hired refused to loiter for more than half an hour, leaving you with little choice but to set up where you were and move things into your shelter as fast as you could.
For a choice made off of centuries old satellite imagery and rumor you don't think you did half bad.
"Plenty of material," she gestures to the forests that press up against the lip of the ancient crater you settled in, "If we can source good stone. Room to expand, too."
It was a big impact.
Natya frowned and looked at the ground beneath her foot. Mud squelched up around her boot as she worked it into the ground, forming a vaguely heart shaped depression.
"Need to see how deep the pilings should be for the shelter and future foundations."
You both looked over at the nearest one, indicated by a cylindrical cutout at the bottom edge of the dome. Twenty-three identical cutouts, one every three meters, ran around the circumference of the shelter, capable of drilling to a depth of 15 meters unassisted and filling them with steel foam pilings from internal reservoirs up to a depth of 5 meters. In an emergency the whole process could be complete in a few hours.
While it hadn't been necessary to weather out the storm, the Disk was tectonically active (just one of the many mysteries of the Disk) and so there was a threat of earthquakes. Plus once you actually started serious experimentation and tinkering you would need a stable and level environment to work in.
On that subject, you add, "I may have spotted a couple good spots for labs and workshops. Expose rock on the south lip of the crater… maybe granite."
"Mmm."
A long lull follows before Natya speaks up again.
"Speaking of work, tell me what we have again."
You nod. Even though you've been over it before, several times over the last week in fact, you can understand Natya wanting to hear you go through what you've been able to piece together from rumors and gossip.
"What I'm calling 'Site 1' is an old crashed spaceship about 400 klicks anti-spinward from us, deep into the frontier, belonging to either the Brum'gehad Fleet Senate or the Scar-Faced People— "
"I remember the Fleet from history- they made the hydrogen siphons around Pesht," a gas giant in the same system as your homeworld, "But these others?"
"The Scar-Faced People," you supplied.
She nodded, "Refresh me."
"Uurzish, like the Fleet Senate but around four thousand years older. Most of what we know about them comes from the murals they put on everything, which given their apparent knowledge of construction and materials, could reach truly staggering sizes," you checked to see if that satisfied Natya before moving on, "Both built their ships big, but the Scars mixed in more of the arcane."
"Sounds like good salvage potential. If the gossip is right."
You smile, "Might be something big lurking in the valleys around the crash site, too. Fleet was supposed to dabble in the life sciences."
"Just because you managed to stumble your way into taming one wild animal doesn't mean the next won't bite you in half. Remember this is the Disk, not Golac," she forestalls your objection with a raised hand, "Move on."
Rolling your eyes you let out a sigh, but don't press the issue.
"Site 2 is closer to Thyrus than us, practically on the doorstep."
"That's a city of four-hundred thousand," Natya quirks an eyebrow, "Why hasn't someone plundered it already?"
"Superstition mostly. Old ghost stories. And the reanimated skeletons haunting its' halls; an old necromancer's fortress belonging to some ancient wutn named Wise Nav."
At that your friend's eyebrows shot up, "Big skeletons."
You nod. Last of the wutn died out thousands of years ago but they still pop up in stories all the time, mostly as villains. Literal giants always make for good bad guys.
"Get in, get out with whatever we can. Sell it in Thyrus. Should make us a nice stash of credits."
"Should, should," Natya mutters, then, "You said there was something close to here when we were coming down on the pissing junker."
Laughing you say, "Yeah, supposed to be some tomb in the woods around here. Right after Akalad emptied a quarter of their empire to conquer the Disk they buried some of their elites. No one has ever found it."
Frowning your friend gives you a long look. One you are very familiar with, usually coming after you've finished spilling your latest idea to her late at night and far away from prying ears. You simply shrug.
You're working with what you have. Maybe if you hadn't pissed off the Red Iron Works you could have saved up a little more before heading out from Golac, but if the old goats running your homeworld weren't so titchy about things you probably wouldn't have needed to leave in the first place.
"Weapons, armor, jewels. Close by enough we could make it back to the shelter most days."
"Likely to be trapped," came the raspy voice of Opal-Nine over your shoulder.
You jumped and quietly swore under your breath as you stared at the khar. How exactly had the three meter mass of carapace and weapons — when you'd first met him as a drunken mess, he hadn't had more than a pocket knife (for him anyways) but since then you hadn't seen him with anything less than a pair of blaster pistols and at least a full-hand melee weapon — snuck up on you? It shouldn't have been possible.
Natya quirked a smug eyebrow at you. As if she wouldn't have been just as scared if she hadn't seen him coming.
Opal-Nine meanwhile continued as if you hadn't reacted at all.
"Akalad was a paranoid bastard. Who also happened to believe in 'survival of the fittest' as a sacred test."
"We'll have to be on our toes then…" you let a beat pass, "On the other hand, Site 4 should be a cakewalk. Our main problem will be getting to it; we'll need to climb the highest peak in the region just to get a chance at it."
Natya nods in recognition, "I remember this one. Still no idea what's actually inside?"
You shake your head, which draws a curious clicking from Opal-Nine.
"Unknown danger, for an unknown reward? Sounds like hunting after rainbows."
"Maybe," you shrug, "But whatever is inside it has to be powerful, because whoever built it made it literally impossible to approach except on foot. As if the place doesn't exist otherwise."
Opal-Nine let out a sound sort of like a whistle, but filled with clicking and chattering. You thought he was impressed. Across from you Natya grew thoughtful for a moment.
"Spells, steel, or hot air?"
It was an old question between the two of you, you started using it when Natya first began to study magic years and years ago. Back then you hadn't yet started delving into your own magical journey with life-shaping and so 'steel' had been the mundane subjects of purely physical interactions while 'spells' had been anything to do with the sensible forms of magic.
'Hot air' was anything to do with gods. Because a prayer might as well be so much hot air, rising. It had seemed clever when they were sixteen.
" 'Spells,' I think."
"Bury me in chert," she swears, "How would you even- the feedback from the spell layering involved in something like that must be huge. Just capturing all the data would require- no. I shouldn't speculate."
Natya shook her head vigorously and turned back to you with a furious intensity. Her eyes blazed with a fierce want that you recognized immediately.
"What about the last site?"
You turned to look at Opal-Nine, who was regarding each of you with open curiosity. At least you assumed it was curiosity.
"I was going to say I'd saved the best for last," you say, smiling at Natya, "But I guess that might not be true."
"Get on with it, Vanya," she growls back at you.
"You remember those stories about the Long March— "
The Long March of Ten-Thousand Stars, to give it it's full name, was a mysterious society of aadad warriors and pilots who had supposedly been part of every major war for the last ten thousand years. Masters of blade, ship, and spell they faded in and out of history like ghosts. Turning up wherever they could turn the tide of a battle or pull some prince or champion from the edge of certain death.
" —Micha used to tell us?"
Micha had been one of the apprentices at the shop you both worked in who had been a few years older than you both. Her cheeks color as she nods. Natya had a crush on him for years.
Whenever he started telling one of his many stories, always involving something he'd picked up while getting drunk at the old adventurers bar (The Goat and Tackle you think it was called), though you don't think it had ever seen any actual adventurers, just old soldiers and the odd wildcat miner sun-drunk from years out in the badlands of Golac, she would drop everything to drink up every word. Got her in trouble more than a few times.
"Well I'm pretty sure the last site is an old Long March base. From either the second or third cycle."
Natya's eyes go wide and bright, "Of course; it's not sunken, it's submerged."
"Exactly, and probably at least several hundred years younger than that blind old idiot told us. Those stories of lights and roars from the marshes weren't battles, but the ships coming and going."
People had found Long March bases before, all of them long abandoned. Usually stripped of material. If there was even a chance something was still left it could be the treasure of a lifetime, though not personally useful to you; the Long March tended to mix to get their edge from arcane sources. Though from what you knew they were no slouches in engineering or metallurgy either.
So, what do you put your attention to?
[] Building up your base. Specify:
- [] Storage: rudimentary storage area not literally inside your living space. Slightly more secure, safer, increased storage.
- [] Lab: rudimentary lab for studying anything you find not literally inside your living space. More room to work, better conditions, not in your way.
- [] Workshop: rudimentary workshop to tinker away in not literally inside your living space. More room to work, tools not cluttering up everything, not in your way all the damn time.
- [] Write-in: pending approval.
[] Explore your surroundings. Might discover something unexpected.
[] Go on an expedition to a site. Pick One:
- [] Crashed Spaceship
- [] Broken Fortress
- []
- [] Lonely Tower
- [] Abandoned Base
Last edited:
Day 4 - Settling in
CuttleFish2.0
Friendly neighborhood cuttlefish
- Location
- Seattle, Washington.
Tied Result: Storage/Exploration
Day 4 - Settling in
Your first priority, you decide after some discussion, should be building some basic storage.
Once you've found some artifacts it'll be necessary. Plus it will let you move your more durable goods out of your shelter, you'll need to move it back in if another storm like the last one moves into the area but you should have plenty of warning for that.
At the moment you don't have all that much in terms of materials and your tools are barely adequate for all but the most basic forms of construction, but handily enough you are right next to a pretty heavy forest. Wood and some lightly worked stone should be good enough to build a basic storage shed out of. Anything really valuable will still be kept in the prefab so all it really needs to do is keep things dry and with most of your supplies still in sealed containers that's a job half done already.
But that's getting a bit ahead of yourself. The first thing you need to do is pick where the storage shed is going to go.
Which means you need to go ahead with Natya's planned investigation of the geography beneath your feet, not that you weren't going to but… well, it's such a boringly responsible option. Especially since you picked up that PalmDiv. You won't even need to do any digging, explosive or otherwise.
So you promptly hand that job off to Natya herself, it was her idea in the first place, and head out into the woods on your own. Not far. Just far enough to find a few choice tree specimens. The sort that had to be imported from the southern hemisphere back in Pravj. Then, with an axe borrowed from Opal-Nine you start hacking away.
Knocking down one tree on your own shouldn't be difficult. You understand the material properties of wood, even live wood, pretty well and the rest is pretty straightforward physics.
Starting on the anti-spinward side of the tree (you have to make a conscious effort not to think of it as just 'north') you start creating a notch in the wood. At first it seems very easy, the axe hardly seems to weigh anything in your hands and the repetitive motion of swinging is even sort of relaxing once you find the right rhythm, something that does take a bit, but after just a bit longer you start to notice the strain in your arms. It takes maybe half an hour before you start wishing for powered equipment.
You keep going, working at the trunk for about two hours, until you have a notch that goes maybe half-way through the tree. At which point you are very much feeling the strain in your arms. Tomorrow you're going to be feeling it, but you've already come this far so you decide to finish the job. After a bit of a rest.
While you rest your arms, wipe the sweat from your brow, and drink deeply from the water you brought along you admire your work so far.
Not exactly pretty. You're certain someone with more experience could have managed better and quicker. But you think you've done well for a first time.
Once your arms have recovered to a point you get back to it. This time getting to work creating a second notch on the opposite side of the trunk from the first. With a little bit of practice now you much more quickly get into the appropriate rhythm.
In an hour you can see your second cut closing in on the first.
You speed up, enjoying the feeling of your pumping blood surging through your body as you work. Sweat drips down your back. Every swing is accompanied with the soft rush of your own breath coming loud in your ears.
Thunk!
Splinters fly.
Thunk! Thunk!
More splinters.
Thunk! Th— CRACK!
Heartbeat thundering in your ears you throw yourself out of the way, letting go of the handle of the axe and ducking your head behind your arms as you do. As you hit the still damp ground, jamming your nose painfully into the dirt and filling your nostrils with an uncomfortable amount of mud, you feel a showered of wood batter your arms and back. Just a handful of seconds later you feel and hear the trunk crash into the ground.
After a moment you peek out from beneath your arms to what strikes you as eerily similar to the aftermaths of some of your tamer workshop experiments back in Pravj. Dust fills the air. There's a faint smell of something almost like burning in the air.
Rather than anything like the nice clean(-ish) cut you were hoping for, the stump has turned into a nightmare tangle of sharp splinters sprouting in all directions with one huge spar of the upper part of the trunk still attached, having torn away from the rest as it fell. You stand there staring at your work for awhile, taking into the positioning of the now fallen trunk and your erstwhile axe flung more than a meter away. Surveying the situation you slowly calm your furious heartbeat and survey the situation. Perhaps the physics of tree felling is not so straightforward as you imagined.
"Ah, well. Still a success," you say to yourself.
You return to the crater a lot dirtier and with a little less spring to your step. Still, you'll need the wood soon enough you think as you spot Opal-Nine and Natya surveying a patch of newly bare dirt.
Both look up as you approach, axe down at your side, but it is the khar who notes your appearance and gives a look that you interpret as a smirk. Something about the way his antennae twitch. You can almost hear him laugh. Almost.
"Well… not dead. Might survive the Disk."
Natya's eyes go to the axe in your hand and the dirt presumably still on your face. She shakes her head before turning back to the dirt with only a quiet mutter under her breath.
The only word you can make out is 'idiot.'
For the next six days things are considerably less eventful. No less busy.
Building the storage shed is straightforward, if involving plenty of intensive labor, with the spot picked out by Natya all three of you spent the next day and a half digging out the perimeter of the building's footprint down to a meter. Creating a shallow sort of moat. At the corners and at five meter increments along the length and width you dig out an additional quarter of a meter.
The next day you take the sled out into the forest and load it up with some larger stones along with the log you felled. While you and Natya begin to partially fill the moat with the collected stones (added to the larger pile collected from around the crater) Opal-Nine sets about making the structural members. He does this using only the axe, switching from splitting to shaping with nary a pause. Your work from the day before amounts to just under half of the total amount you need, four in all.
Opal-Nine then demonstrates how to properly fell a tree.Though he works with trees significantly smaller in diameter and you can only observe at a distance between laying in stones and packing dirt around each post.
By the end of the third day you have the bare skeleton of a 15 by 7.5 meter structure rising 3 meters high. Future floor sprinkled with a thin layer of wood shavings from Opal-Nine's work.
Your hands ache from using your Samshi hammerpick to split rocks into more manageable chunks and even after washing several times you can't help but feel as if you're still coated in a layer of rock dust. It's almost as bad as the time that a work crew spilled open a dozen bags of concrete powder right outside of the open shop door. That had put the shop out of commission for more than a week.
This time it's merely under your fingernails and in your nostrils like stubborn oxide.
Over the next three days the work isn't quite so arduous. Opal-Nine continues making structural members; though the remaining ones are significantly smaller, meant to help support the planks for the walls, aside from a handful of support beams for the eventual roof that get sunk into the floor. It serves as an excuse to break out what little heavy equipment you managed to haul halfways across the galaxy. Meant for metal and stone it tends to be a tad overpowered, which necessitates some fiddling with the settings.
Soon enough you have a system set up to quickly produce planks with only a little manual preparation from Opal-Nine with his axe. Of course that means you need a lot more wood. And so you get a quick demonstration in proper logging techniques as well as one in what sorts of trees to select.
You probably would have been able to figure it out just from watching the khar earlier but the work of building the storage shed has put you off woodworking. In fact you've started thinking that once you have things set up a little better you might look into using Life-Shaping to grow the damn trees into the proper shape rather than all this fiddling about. Would certainly be much more convenient.
And sensible. Granted also less likely to involve explosive bouts of mechanical failure, but you can't have everything you want.
So, armed with the advice for aged experience you head off again in search of more wood. At first you stick to the perimeter of the crater, chopping down trees and dragging them back to the shelter for Natya to process into planks. Pretty soon there's actually a bit of pileup. Figuring you might as well kill two birds with one stone you decide to venture out a little farther and do some exploring at the same time.
It turns out to be less exciting than you might have hoped but then again you couldn't exactly go very far, what with splitting your time between construction and exploration. Still you feel like you have a decent idea of the layout of your immediate surroundings by the time you've finished building the storage shed. And you might even have spotted the faintest signs of ruins sunward from the crater.
Or it might just be old hunting trails from some hermit. You'll have to follow up with more focused exploring efforts to figure out.
What next?
[] Building up your base. Specify:
- [] Lab: rudimentary lab for studying anything you find not literally inside your living space. More room to work, better conditions, not in your way.
- [] Workshop: rudimentary workshop to tinker away in not literally inside your living space. More room to work, tools not cluttering up everything, not in your way all the damn time.
- [] Write-in: pending approval.
[] Explore your surroundings. Might discover something unexpected.
[] Go into 'town' Not yet.
[] Go on an expedition to a site. Pick One:
- [] Crashed Spaceship
- [] Broken Fortress
-[] Sword Mausoleum Must first Explore your surroundings
- [] Lonely Tower
- [] Abandoned Base
Day 4 - Settling in
Your first priority, you decide after some discussion, should be building some basic storage.
Once you've found some artifacts it'll be necessary. Plus it will let you move your more durable goods out of your shelter, you'll need to move it back in if another storm like the last one moves into the area but you should have plenty of warning for that.
At the moment you don't have all that much in terms of materials and your tools are barely adequate for all but the most basic forms of construction, but handily enough you are right next to a pretty heavy forest. Wood and some lightly worked stone should be good enough to build a basic storage shed out of. Anything really valuable will still be kept in the prefab so all it really needs to do is keep things dry and with most of your supplies still in sealed containers that's a job half done already.
But that's getting a bit ahead of yourself. The first thing you need to do is pick where the storage shed is going to go.
Which means you need to go ahead with Natya's planned investigation of the geography beneath your feet, not that you weren't going to but… well, it's such a boringly responsible option. Especially since you picked up that PalmDiv. You won't even need to do any digging, explosive or otherwise.
So you promptly hand that job off to Natya herself, it was her idea in the first place, and head out into the woods on your own. Not far. Just far enough to find a few choice tree specimens. The sort that had to be imported from the southern hemisphere back in Pravj. Then, with an axe borrowed from Opal-Nine you start hacking away.
Knocking down one tree on your own shouldn't be difficult. You understand the material properties of wood, even live wood, pretty well and the rest is pretty straightforward physics.
Starting on the anti-spinward side of the tree (you have to make a conscious effort not to think of it as just 'north') you start creating a notch in the wood. At first it seems very easy, the axe hardly seems to weigh anything in your hands and the repetitive motion of swinging is even sort of relaxing once you find the right rhythm, something that does take a bit, but after just a bit longer you start to notice the strain in your arms. It takes maybe half an hour before you start wishing for powered equipment.
You keep going, working at the trunk for about two hours, until you have a notch that goes maybe half-way through the tree. At which point you are very much feeling the strain in your arms. Tomorrow you're going to be feeling it, but you've already come this far so you decide to finish the job. After a bit of a rest.
While you rest your arms, wipe the sweat from your brow, and drink deeply from the water you brought along you admire your work so far.
Not exactly pretty. You're certain someone with more experience could have managed better and quicker. But you think you've done well for a first time.
Once your arms have recovered to a point you get back to it. This time getting to work creating a second notch on the opposite side of the trunk from the first. With a little bit of practice now you much more quickly get into the appropriate rhythm.
In an hour you can see your second cut closing in on the first.
You speed up, enjoying the feeling of your pumping blood surging through your body as you work. Sweat drips down your back. Every swing is accompanied with the soft rush of your own breath coming loud in your ears.
Thunk!
Splinters fly.
Thunk! Thunk!
More splinters.
Thunk! Th— CRACK!
Heartbeat thundering in your ears you throw yourself out of the way, letting go of the handle of the axe and ducking your head behind your arms as you do. As you hit the still damp ground, jamming your nose painfully into the dirt and filling your nostrils with an uncomfortable amount of mud, you feel a showered of wood batter your arms and back. Just a handful of seconds later you feel and hear the trunk crash into the ground.
After a moment you peek out from beneath your arms to what strikes you as eerily similar to the aftermaths of some of your tamer workshop experiments back in Pravj. Dust fills the air. There's a faint smell of something almost like burning in the air.
Rather than anything like the nice clean(-ish) cut you were hoping for, the stump has turned into a nightmare tangle of sharp splinters sprouting in all directions with one huge spar of the upper part of the trunk still attached, having torn away from the rest as it fell. You stand there staring at your work for awhile, taking into the positioning of the now fallen trunk and your erstwhile axe flung more than a meter away. Surveying the situation you slowly calm your furious heartbeat and survey the situation. Perhaps the physics of tree felling is not so straightforward as you imagined.
"Ah, well. Still a success," you say to yourself.
You return to the crater a lot dirtier and with a little less spring to your step. Still, you'll need the wood soon enough you think as you spot Opal-Nine and Natya surveying a patch of newly bare dirt.
Both look up as you approach, axe down at your side, but it is the khar who notes your appearance and gives a look that you interpret as a smirk. Something about the way his antennae twitch. You can almost hear him laugh. Almost.
"Well… not dead. Might survive the Disk."
Natya's eyes go to the axe in your hand and the dirt presumably still on your face. She shakes her head before turning back to the dirt with only a quiet mutter under her breath.
The only word you can make out is 'idiot.'
For the next six days things are considerably less eventful. No less busy.
Building the storage shed is straightforward, if involving plenty of intensive labor, with the spot picked out by Natya all three of you spent the next day and a half digging out the perimeter of the building's footprint down to a meter. Creating a shallow sort of moat. At the corners and at five meter increments along the length and width you dig out an additional quarter of a meter.
The next day you take the sled out into the forest and load it up with some larger stones along with the log you felled. While you and Natya begin to partially fill the moat with the collected stones (added to the larger pile collected from around the crater) Opal-Nine sets about making the structural members. He does this using only the axe, switching from splitting to shaping with nary a pause. Your work from the day before amounts to just under half of the total amount you need, four in all.
Opal-Nine then demonstrates how to properly fell a tree.Though he works with trees significantly smaller in diameter and you can only observe at a distance between laying in stones and packing dirt around each post.
By the end of the third day you have the bare skeleton of a 15 by 7.5 meter structure rising 3 meters high. Future floor sprinkled with a thin layer of wood shavings from Opal-Nine's work.
Your hands ache from using your Samshi hammerpick to split rocks into more manageable chunks and even after washing several times you can't help but feel as if you're still coated in a layer of rock dust. It's almost as bad as the time that a work crew spilled open a dozen bags of concrete powder right outside of the open shop door. That had put the shop out of commission for more than a week.
This time it's merely under your fingernails and in your nostrils like stubborn oxide.
Over the next three days the work isn't quite so arduous. Opal-Nine continues making structural members; though the remaining ones are significantly smaller, meant to help support the planks for the walls, aside from a handful of support beams for the eventual roof that get sunk into the floor. It serves as an excuse to break out what little heavy equipment you managed to haul halfways across the galaxy. Meant for metal and stone it tends to be a tad overpowered, which necessitates some fiddling with the settings.
Soon enough you have a system set up to quickly produce planks with only a little manual preparation from Opal-Nine with his axe. Of course that means you need a lot more wood. And so you get a quick demonstration in proper logging techniques as well as one in what sorts of trees to select.
You probably would have been able to figure it out just from watching the khar earlier but the work of building the storage shed has put you off woodworking. In fact you've started thinking that once you have things set up a little better you might look into using Life-Shaping to grow the damn trees into the proper shape rather than all this fiddling about. Would certainly be much more convenient.
And sensible. Granted also less likely to involve explosive bouts of mechanical failure, but you can't have everything you want.
So, armed with the advice for aged experience you head off again in search of more wood. At first you stick to the perimeter of the crater, chopping down trees and dragging them back to the shelter for Natya to process into planks. Pretty soon there's actually a bit of pileup. Figuring you might as well kill two birds with one stone you decide to venture out a little farther and do some exploring at the same time.
It turns out to be less exciting than you might have hoped but then again you couldn't exactly go very far, what with splitting your time between construction and exploration. Still you feel like you have a decent idea of the layout of your immediate surroundings by the time you've finished building the storage shed. And you might even have spotted the faintest signs of ruins sunward from the crater.
Or it might just be old hunting trails from some hermit. You'll have to follow up with more focused exploring efforts to figure out.
What next?
[] Building up your base. Specify:
- [] Lab: rudimentary lab for studying anything you find not literally inside your living space. More room to work, better conditions, not in your way.
- [] Workshop: rudimentary workshop to tinker away in not literally inside your living space. More room to work, tools not cluttering up everything, not in your way all the damn time.
- [] Write-in: pending approval.
[] Explore your surroundings. Might discover something unexpected.
[] Go on an expedition to a site. Pick One:
- [] Crashed Spaceship
- [] Broken Fortress
-
- [] Lonely Tower
- [] Abandoned Base
Vote closed
CuttleFish2.0
Friendly neighborhood cuttlefish
- Location
- Seattle, Washington.
Workshop wins!