- Location
- Yes
I mean, there are diesel engines, it's still Germany. But society runs entirely on 100 Octane gasoline.
Lieutenant Fusilier 2 (Abandoned, do not read)
- Thread starter open_sketch
- Start date
- Original Mature Sci-Fi
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Sharkpunk, because the whole setting is constructed around making hot sharkgirl GF a reality.
This would make the Galactic Concert "maidpunk"
This would make the Galactic Concert "maidpunk"
samdamandias
Apprentice Plane Wizard
I went and checked. She has not done so on screen at least, nor has she mentioned the Curio to Amelia that I can tell.
I mean, there are diesel engines in the rules, it's just they generally tend to be worse than using a standard ICE, and diesel is not very common for aero stuff.
Now, what with the tank expansion coming out, perhaps diesel engines will get more love.
- Location
- Germany
Bah, none of the trilogy was as good as a buy as the art book that comes along with them~!
- Location
- Someone else's head
We actually ended up reading @DragonCobolt 's story for context, skipping as much of the content from DC's genre of choice as we could get away with, because aro-ace. So, that's a thing that has now happened.
...Can you give me a link? I remember searching for it, and couldn't find it.
- Location
- Someone else's head
Pretty sure I can't? I think that's against SV rules.
But if you were to use search terms like "DragonCobolt maids robots" in a decent search engine with safe search turned off, you would hypothetically be likely to find it.
- Location
- Soviet Canuckistan
I love both of these notions and I may have to borrow them.
Thank you, that got me something.
I could not find anything named Dream of the Sky by Googling it, is that this same hentai?
- Location
- Somewhere!
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Not the same one, but another of DC's lewd stories, yeah.
samdamandias
Apprentice Plane Wizard
Dream of the Sky is @DragonCobolt 's novel set in Himmilgard, which is different from In Another World All My Maids Are Robots (unless a copy of the Curio shows up
), and is currently in editing last I heard.
Hakazin
Serpent Admirer
- Pronouns
- She/Her
To be fair, it absolutely does run afoul of the part of Rule 6 covering linking to sites that display pornographic advertisements. I can't really blame anyone for being a bit hesitant.
- Location
- Washington State
Honestly DC could probably get away with posting it to sv, it is less horny than works currently up on sv.
That was vaguely where my mind was going, yes.
- Location
- Ottawa
- Pronouns
- She/Her/Whatever
i'm hoping to explain all that is relevant in the coming chapters
Chapter 24 - The Curio
- Location
- Ottawa
- Pronouns
- She/Her/Whatever
"Captain?"
"How close were these machines in design to ours?" he asked.
"Internally, from what we saw, they may as well have been identical. Externally, they were… they were devices like a gun, not like one of us. I don't know how else to put it," I explained. "They didn't wear clothing, they had a camouflage pattern painted directly on their bodies. Ammunition carriers bolted in place. Um… ideal machines, if you will."
"Nothing about them sounds ideal. Did you communicate with them?" he asked.
"They weren't much for talking. Their Wills threw themselves at us to try and prevent us from escaping, utterly suicidal."
There was a knock at the door, but rather than Miss Fitzland-Lancaster, it was a member of the crew.
"Sir, message for you. Encrypted signal lights from Admiral Raycraft, your private code," the machine said, saluting smartly and holding out a long, perforated strip of paper. Captain O'Neill took it and fed one end into the curious machine on his desk, pulling a small cylinder from a chain around his neck and plugging it in.
The strip fed through, emerging on the other end, and as soon as it did he snatched it up and held it to the light. I wasn't going to ask, it was clearly confidential information, but he looked to me anyway
"I was wondering why they didn't send any followup forces to finish us off. One of our patrols detected the forward wake of a fleet moving across the pass. At least fifty ships, probably more, heading for our rally point," he explained. "And we spotted them early. We just might be able to ambush them on the move for a change!"
"That's good to hear," I said, and he sighed, brushing a hand across his desk.
"Oh, it is. The bulk of the fleet is going to converge on them, all at once. Shame Unicorn won't be in any shape to participate, but we might well have them now. We might."
Evidently Miss Fitzland-Lancaster was not far, because the door clicked open again and she peeked her head in.
"Dear? Oh, hello Lieutenant-"
"Lucy, what was that word you used for your machines? The one you told me, from when you first got here." I presumed 'here' meant British space, in the abstract.
"Um…" She glanced at me nervously, cringing. "It's kind of an awful thing to say, you know, I've worked very hard to purge it from my vocabulary…"
"It's important," he insisted, and she sighed.
"Robots?" she said, then looked at me. "Sorry."
"Um, it's alright, just… I'm very lost. Is this an American thing?" I asked.
"You could say that," Lucy nodded, "Are we letting the Lieutenant in on the secret?"
Captain O'Neill nodded slowly, and Lucy exhaled and leaned back in her chair. There was a crack from the damaged wood, and she sat back up.
"Oops, okay. Phew. Right, so this is all going to sound completely crazy, but just bear with me, okay? I'm not from around here," she started.
"Right, you're American. I think?" I seemed to recall she held British titles too, but it had all quite fallen out of my head in the last day or so.
"... not your America. Different one, real different," she said. "I'm a bit like you, actually. I went through a portal and ended up here, big old fall through time and space. Thanks to this."
She drew something from her purse, that heirloom of hers, and now I instantly recognized it as the device from the bridge. I was suddenly rather afraid to touch it, so I stayed frozen in place.
"What is it?"
"We call it a curio, cause we have no fucking idea," she said, swearing with a disconcertingly casual ease. "Sorry, um, working on language hard. So, Albert's best guess is that it's some kind of alien device for exploring other realities. It can make a copy of itself in other worlds, then you can see through it. Like little peepholes between universes."
"Oh stars." The concept of other universes was something so far beyond my ability to comprehend already that I was just nodding
"I very much agree," Captain O'Neill whispered.
"So, we have no idea where they came from. This one was given to, um, me, well, former me by Sir Starfellow when he… okay. Can I start over?"
"... yes, please do," I requested.
"So, we don't know how it works exactly yet, but it has limits. You can't really aim it too well in the other universe, so if you want to duplicate it in two places here you need to know where they are. You can see through the portals, and put small things through, like books. But nothing big, and if you try to go through yourself… I mean, if a person tries, I don't know if that only means humans, we haven't tested too much…"
She paused, took a deep breath as if to calm herself, and continued.
"Their brains do a switcheroo."
"... sorry, a what?" I asked, utterly confused.
"Like… it swaps minds between the controller and the person they target. Albert says it might be so you can basically possess people on the other side, use them to look at stuff. Gross, right? But, um, so this body used to belong to one Albert Fancypants-Lancaster?"
"... um, well, you don't hardly look it," I responded numbly. Was that a good thing to say to somebody of received sex? I had no idea. It didn't feel good.
"Aww, thanks. But yes, Albert was futzing around with it and accidentally possessed my old bod, and I ended up in this one. Turns out that was kind of better for both of us? Anyway, yeah. I'm from a different universe. And, well, in that universe, we call machines robots, and instead of hardworking steam-powered cuties they're all big soulless beepboops that make cars and bomb the Middle East."
"I'm not steam-powered…" I protested.
"So yeah. That's everything. Why does that matter?" she asked.
"Because we found the word robot on the enemy ship, alongside a lot of what you'd call robots. Soulless machines," Captain O'Neill said plainly.
"O-oh. Well, shit," she said nervously, and I realized there was a piece of the puzzle missing.
"Not just that, um… I think they may have their own curios," I said, and I held out the one I took from their bridge. They were identical, there was no mistaking it. "They destroyed themselves after I took this. It's the same thing, isn't it?"
She reached out and I let her have it, and she held the two of them in her hands, looking back and forth over them. Then her thumb moved on the other one, and a misty white projection of sorts shot out from it.
"Oh yep. So that's a problem," she said. "That's a real problem. Oh, shit, Sir Starfellow must have been working with these guys, that's where he got this..."
"What, so they come from another universe or something?" I asked, "Are we being attacked by, um, like an evil Galactic Concert?"
"I don't know! I don't think you could fit a ship through, just like books and-" Lucy started, but she was cut off.
"Damn, that explains it!" Captain O'Neill exclaimed, sitting bolt upright and drawing a long ribbon of paper from his desk. "That's how they're communicating without signal lights. They're bouncing their messages through curios. Into one universe and back to ours."
"That's why we can't track them, right? It's a big advantage?" I asked.
"Yes, but now that we know we can do the same!" he said, "Lieutenant, this is going to win us this war!"
"Um, dear, I don't know…" Lucy started.
"Now that we have this, we can use it to… to what? To communicate, obviously, and spy on them, right?" I proposed.
"Easily. We could open a portal onto any of their flagships, once we found them, and watch their every move," he replied excitedly.
"Or, or we could drop a grenade through the portal and put an end to it right there, couldn't we?" I asked, "Or a charge into their engine rooms, the moment we find them!"
"You're thinking too small. We could very well seize the mind of their commanders and order them into traps! We could control their ships!"
"Um, sorry, hey! Can I talk?" Lucy asked, sounding a little impatient. "Look, you thought of all that in one go, what's making you think they haven't thought of it too! They can do that to us!"
"Well then, why haven't they?" I asked.
"Because maybe they want to keep it a surprise! Not blow their, uh, advantage all at once on like, a cargo ship. They've probably been using it for spying and stuff, maybe like, sabotage. Maybe… oh fuck. Oh fuck fuck fuck."
"L-language, Miss, and, sorry, what?" I asked.
"Like maybe before you start your stupid war you try taking over the Concert. Plant it where some enterprising explorer would find it, then start taking control of people in a big chain. You know, maybe get Regent, or a Concert Minister on Luna. Or, say, until you got one who was in position to buy out the Royal Machine Company and push an update on everyone breaking their brains with whatever virus makes their robots robots. Somebody... like..."
She paused.
".... like Sir Starfellow. Like me," she concluded.
The two curios dropped from her nerveless fingers. They landed without a sound on the deck below and neither bounced nor rolled.
"I guess Albert swapped with me first, maybe that interferes. Sir Starfellow's hijacker tries to marry me for the shares, that falls through, he tries to kidnap me, they raided his manor and found… found all the machines he'd tested it on. And whoever was on the other end moved to plan B," she concluded.
Silence lingered in the room for several long seconds.
"... the fleet." Captain O'Neill said suddenly, dashing back to his table and pulling another ribbon. "It's a trap!" He pressed a button on his desk and began scribbling furiously, and the door opened a second later, a machine stepping in.
"Sir?"
"... Sailor, get the signal light up and oriented-"
"Sir, our light is out, remember?"
"Then get the bloody Koreans to do it! Send them this." He ripped the ribbon short, fed it through his code machine, and handed it to the sailor. "Rouse all officers and start running out the sails, tell the transports to do the same. I will set navigation coordinates."
"But sir, repairs are nowhere near finished, I don't-" The machine paused, seeing the look on his face, then shot into another salute. "R-right away, sir."
"Lieutenant Fusilier, I suggest you get to your transport now," he said. I turned to see Miss Fitzland-Lancaster still staring at the curios in shock, and left the room.
"How close were these machines in design to ours?" he asked.
"Internally, from what we saw, they may as well have been identical. Externally, they were… they were devices like a gun, not like one of us. I don't know how else to put it," I explained. "They didn't wear clothing, they had a camouflage pattern painted directly on their bodies. Ammunition carriers bolted in place. Um… ideal machines, if you will."
"Nothing about them sounds ideal. Did you communicate with them?" he asked.
"They weren't much for talking. Their Wills threw themselves at us to try and prevent us from escaping, utterly suicidal."
There was a knock at the door, but rather than Miss Fitzland-Lancaster, it was a member of the crew.
"Sir, message for you. Encrypted signal lights from Admiral Raycraft, your private code," the machine said, saluting smartly and holding out a long, perforated strip of paper. Captain O'Neill took it and fed one end into the curious machine on his desk, pulling a small cylinder from a chain around his neck and plugging it in.
The strip fed through, emerging on the other end, and as soon as it did he snatched it up and held it to the light. I wasn't going to ask, it was clearly confidential information, but he looked to me anyway
"I was wondering why they didn't send any followup forces to finish us off. One of our patrols detected the forward wake of a fleet moving across the pass. At least fifty ships, probably more, heading for our rally point," he explained. "And we spotted them early. We just might be able to ambush them on the move for a change!"
"That's good to hear," I said, and he sighed, brushing a hand across his desk.
"Oh, it is. The bulk of the fleet is going to converge on them, all at once. Shame Unicorn won't be in any shape to participate, but we might well have them now. We might."
Evidently Miss Fitzland-Lancaster was not far, because the door clicked open again and she peeked her head in.
"Dear? Oh, hello Lieutenant-"
"Lucy, what was that word you used for your machines? The one you told me, from when you first got here." I presumed 'here' meant British space, in the abstract.
"Um…" She glanced at me nervously, cringing. "It's kind of an awful thing to say, you know, I've worked very hard to purge it from my vocabulary…"
"It's important," he insisted, and she sighed.
"Robots?" she said, then looked at me. "Sorry."
"Um, it's alright, just… I'm very lost. Is this an American thing?" I asked.
"You could say that," Lucy nodded, "Are we letting the Lieutenant in on the secret?"
Captain O'Neill nodded slowly, and Lucy exhaled and leaned back in her chair. There was a crack from the damaged wood, and she sat back up.
"Oops, okay. Phew. Right, so this is all going to sound completely crazy, but just bear with me, okay? I'm not from around here," she started.
"Right, you're American. I think?" I seemed to recall she held British titles too, but it had all quite fallen out of my head in the last day or so.
"... not your America. Different one, real different," she said. "I'm a bit like you, actually. I went through a portal and ended up here, big old fall through time and space. Thanks to this."
She drew something from her purse, that heirloom of hers, and now I instantly recognized it as the device from the bridge. I was suddenly rather afraid to touch it, so I stayed frozen in place.
"What is it?"
"We call it a curio, cause we have no fucking idea," she said, swearing with a disconcertingly casual ease. "Sorry, um, working on language hard. So, Albert's best guess is that it's some kind of alien device for exploring other realities. It can make a copy of itself in other worlds, then you can see through it. Like little peepholes between universes."
"Oh stars." The concept of other universes was something so far beyond my ability to comprehend already that I was just nodding
"I very much agree," Captain O'Neill whispered.
"So, we have no idea where they came from. This one was given to, um, me, well, former me by Sir Starfellow when he… okay. Can I start over?"
"... yes, please do," I requested.
"So, we don't know how it works exactly yet, but it has limits. You can't really aim it too well in the other universe, so if you want to duplicate it in two places here you need to know where they are. You can see through the portals, and put small things through, like books. But nothing big, and if you try to go through yourself… I mean, if a person tries, I don't know if that only means humans, we haven't tested too much…"
She paused, took a deep breath as if to calm herself, and continued.
"Their brains do a switcheroo."
"... sorry, a what?" I asked, utterly confused.
"Like… it swaps minds between the controller and the person they target. Albert says it might be so you can basically possess people on the other side, use them to look at stuff. Gross, right? But, um, so this body used to belong to one Albert Fancypants-Lancaster?"
"... um, well, you don't hardly look it," I responded numbly. Was that a good thing to say to somebody of received sex? I had no idea. It didn't feel good.
"Aww, thanks. But yes, Albert was futzing around with it and accidentally possessed my old bod, and I ended up in this one. Turns out that was kind of better for both of us? Anyway, yeah. I'm from a different universe. And, well, in that universe, we call machines robots, and instead of hardworking steam-powered cuties they're all big soulless beepboops that make cars and bomb the Middle East."
"I'm not steam-powered…" I protested.
"So yeah. That's everything. Why does that matter?" she asked.
"Because we found the word robot on the enemy ship, alongside a lot of what you'd call robots. Soulless machines," Captain O'Neill said plainly.
"O-oh. Well, shit," she said nervously, and I realized there was a piece of the puzzle missing.
"Not just that, um… I think they may have their own curios," I said, and I held out the one I took from their bridge. They were identical, there was no mistaking it. "They destroyed themselves after I took this. It's the same thing, isn't it?"
She reached out and I let her have it, and she held the two of them in her hands, looking back and forth over them. Then her thumb moved on the other one, and a misty white projection of sorts shot out from it.
"Oh yep. So that's a problem," she said. "That's a real problem. Oh, shit, Sir Starfellow must have been working with these guys, that's where he got this..."
"What, so they come from another universe or something?" I asked, "Are we being attacked by, um, like an evil Galactic Concert?"
"I don't know! I don't think you could fit a ship through, just like books and-" Lucy started, but she was cut off.
"Damn, that explains it!" Captain O'Neill exclaimed, sitting bolt upright and drawing a long ribbon of paper from his desk. "That's how they're communicating without signal lights. They're bouncing their messages through curios. Into one universe and back to ours."
"That's why we can't track them, right? It's a big advantage?" I asked.
"Yes, but now that we know we can do the same!" he said, "Lieutenant, this is going to win us this war!"
"Um, dear, I don't know…" Lucy started.
"Now that we have this, we can use it to… to what? To communicate, obviously, and spy on them, right?" I proposed.
"Easily. We could open a portal onto any of their flagships, once we found them, and watch their every move," he replied excitedly.
"Or, or we could drop a grenade through the portal and put an end to it right there, couldn't we?" I asked, "Or a charge into their engine rooms, the moment we find them!"
"You're thinking too small. We could very well seize the mind of their commanders and order them into traps! We could control their ships!"
"Um, sorry, hey! Can I talk?" Lucy asked, sounding a little impatient. "Look, you thought of all that in one go, what's making you think they haven't thought of it too! They can do that to us!"
"Well then, why haven't they?" I asked.
"Because maybe they want to keep it a surprise! Not blow their, uh, advantage all at once on like, a cargo ship. They've probably been using it for spying and stuff, maybe like, sabotage. Maybe… oh fuck. Oh fuck fuck fuck."
"L-language, Miss, and, sorry, what?" I asked.
"Like maybe before you start your stupid war you try taking over the Concert. Plant it where some enterprising explorer would find it, then start taking control of people in a big chain. You know, maybe get Regent, or a Concert Minister on Luna. Or, say, until you got one who was in position to buy out the Royal Machine Company and push an update on everyone breaking their brains with whatever virus makes their robots robots. Somebody... like..."
She paused.
".... like Sir Starfellow. Like me," she concluded.
The two curios dropped from her nerveless fingers. They landed without a sound on the deck below and neither bounced nor rolled.
"I guess Albert swapped with me first, maybe that interferes. Sir Starfellow's hijacker tries to marry me for the shares, that falls through, he tries to kidnap me, they raided his manor and found… found all the machines he'd tested it on. And whoever was on the other end moved to plan B," she concluded.
Silence lingered in the room for several long seconds.
"... the fleet." Captain O'Neill said suddenly, dashing back to his table and pulling another ribbon. "It's a trap!" He pressed a button on his desk and began scribbling furiously, and the door opened a second later, a machine stepping in.
"Sir?"
"... Sailor, get the signal light up and oriented-"
"Sir, our light is out, remember?"
"Then get the bloody Koreans to do it! Send them this." He ripped the ribbon short, fed it through his code machine, and handed it to the sailor. "Rouse all officers and start running out the sails, tell the transports to do the same. I will set navigation coordinates."
"But sir, repairs are nowhere near finished, I don't-" The machine paused, seeing the look on his face, then shot into another salute. "R-right away, sir."
"Lieutenant Fusilier, I suggest you get to your transport now," he said. I turned to see Miss Fitzland-Lancaster still staring at the curios in shock, and left the room.
Last edited:
- Pronouns
- He/Him
DUN DUN DUNN N NNNNNN!!!
Also it is amusing to imagine that Lucy spent a good amount of mental effort to not use "yeet" instead of "purge"
Also it is amusing to imagine that Lucy spent a good amount of mental effort to not use "yeet" instead of "purge"
Spectrum
Tell me a secret~
- Location
- Behind you~
*blink* Well, I guess that explains this.
That's...interesting. I'm not sure what to make of this.
(Well also okay there are some other oblique comments that, apparently like poor Fusie, I don't quite know how to interpret.)
- Location
- Ottawa
- Pronouns
- She/Her/Whatever
I'll note that, as with any of my plot heavy things, im gonna have to go and clean up + foreshadow more in editing because like... I very much find the story through the telling and all the fine detail of plots and stuff have to get narrowed in afterward. The joys of first drafts!
- Pronouns
- He/Him
samdamandias
Apprentice Plane Wizard
Code cylinders! Love those things.
Oh dear.
"Soulless beepboops" might spread as slang. What other things is Lucy going to accidentally yeet into the Concert's vocabulary?
10ebbor10
DON'T PANIC
- Location
- Present
Maybe they look identical because they are all mindswapped robots, brainjacked and kidnapped to estabilish the fleet one by one.