- Location
- Nova Scotia
- Pronouns
- She/Her
I don't know if I ever specified the sensor array, but it keeps being compared to a Banner, so probably monocular.
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Petals of Titanium -- My Life as a Mecha Setting Bridge Bunny Quest
- Thread starter Gazetteer
- Start date
- Original Sci-Fi Users' Choice!
Voted best in category in the Users' Choice awards.
Omegahugger
Inattentive Idiot
I am afraid that "What if Amani romanced J6 instead of Lori" isn't neccesarily the same timeline as "What if Owusu died instead of J6".
... Unless Lori dies and Gazetteer gets to write a tragedy that way, then Amani romancing J6 only to lose her later might be too similar for it to be fun to write.
- Location
- Nova Scotia
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Here's a couple more I missed!
- Location
- Nova Scotia
- Pronouns
- She/Her
This continues to be a bit of a landslide, it's been several days, and voting has slowed down, so I'll call this here, voting closed, expect the next update soon.
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I've stopped voting myself.
I feel like some of the earlier votes that I was on the losing side of have wretched the story off in a direction so far from where I wanted it to go that I don't have preferences on the remaining details.
I feel like some of the earlier votes that I was on the losing side of have wretched the story off in a direction so far from where I wanted it to go that I don't have preferences on the remaining details.
Update 045: Blind
- Location
- Nova Scotia
- Pronouns
- She/Her
You didn't immediately explode.
You're strapped in to one niche in a twelve-occupant escape pod: A small, metal cylinder firing away from the Rose like a bullet, travelling along as close to a safe trajectory as the ship could manage in its dying moments, based on your last scan data before leaving the bridge. Unlike a standard United Empire warship, this escape craft makes full use of the three-dimensional nature of space: The main passenger compartment of the craft has niches arranged in ring sections, four to a section, each one allowing a passenger to safely secure themself, with plenty of room for a bulky emergency spacesuit, like the one you're wearing. You all put them on with a long rehearsed swiftness.
Your ears are full of the hum of the escape pod's components, the sound of the others' harried breathing, almost as loud as your own. The confines of the suit heighten any small amount of claustrophobia you might have. At least things aren't too terribly hot or uncomfortable. Yet. But, the upside is, in the event that this pod is destroyed or breached by something that somehow fails to kill you, you have long hours of helplessly drifting to look forward to, in the hope that someone finds your suit's signal in time to save you.
As it is, you're looking "down" at the commander of this escape craft. Or up. Or across — take your pick, they're all equally valid ways to describe the far side of the ring from you. The commander in question, Sub-Lieutenant Rupert Mazlo, catches your gaze briefly through the glass face plate of his helmet, before closing his eyes. Too tired to be hostile or conciliatory or anything but glad to be alive. You, yourself still feel numb, mind not yet ready to process how narrowly you escaped death. The fact that at least two other escape pods launched is some comfort, but the ship that carried you out to Phoebe and back, through skirmishes and battles and long months, is gone. And with it, your commanding officer — a woman who worked herself harder than anyone else. She's earned a rest.
Considerably less stoic than either of you is the woman in the niche to your right, in the next ring section over. You've been listening to her breathing steadily accelerate as the minutes drag on and the escape pod sends you all blindly away from the wreck of the HIMS Titanium Rose. It's becoming obvious she's started hyper-ventilating, for all that she's trying to be discreet. You know who she is: The Rose's new mecha control officer, Anja's replacement, who you picked up at Iapetus. For a moment, you find yourself uncharacteristically unable to put a name to the trembling, pale-faced woman in the grips of a panic attack. It's no surprise, you suppose — you're forced to admit that you made a choice, conscious or otherwise, not to get to know this woman whose very presence was a reminder of your friend's absence. You glance again at Mazlo, but his eyes are still closed, and he's seemingly trying to ignore your fellow junior officer's distress. While you're in the escape pod, the seals on your suits aren't shut yet, but wasting that much oxygen is a bit of a dangerous habit to form, under the circumstances.
"Ensign Satou?" you ask, quietly, the name coming to you at last.
"I... I... I..." she tries to speak, but the breaths are coming too shallow and too rapidly for her to get a word in around them. Her eyes are wide and brown and terrified, reflecting the soft lighting of the escape pod as they meet yours across the short gap between your niches.
"Yes, look at me. Follow my lead," you tell her, gently. "Hold your breath two, three, four. Breathe in two, three, four. Hold, two, three, four. Out, two—" You speak slowly and clearly, and she follows your lead, the worst of her panic seeming to recede, for the time being.
There's silence for a few seconds once she finally stops. Maybe longer, it's hard to say. Then, she finally speaks again, voice ragged: "You almost got left behind! You almost died, North!"
"Almost," you admit, the notion seeming oddly distant now.
"Captain Andre is dead!" Satou says, still not quite as steady as you'd hope.
"A lot of people are dead, Ensign," Mazlo growls. He looks half ashamed as soon as he says it, but doesn't try to apologise. Merely falls silent.
"I... I know," Satou says, increasingly brittle. "We could still die! We could all die! Any second! We're all helpless in here! We can't even... I can't even..." she looks wildly from Mazlo, to you, to someone else strapped in nearby. "Did it ever matter? I... I relay messages over comms. That's what I do. Back and forth! And... and Lady Perbeck always sounds annoyed with me, but I... I do my best, and... and did any of it ever matter? Any of it, if this is all that happened?"
You try to make sense of the places that rant went, aware that everyone is listening in now, although no one is chiming in helpfully. "It did," you say, voice still calm, because she needs someone to be calm. And in this moment, you need to be useful somehow to someone. "We all did what we could. That matters. Everyone doing what we can."
"Even if we all die?"
"It still matters to me," you say, truthfully. "Even if we die."
"I don't want to die here," Satou tells you. "I'm terrified of dying like this!"
"Why did you join the Navy, then?" someone mutters, before being hastily sushed by his neighbour.
Satou flinches. "I knew there was a chance that... but I didn't think it would be like this!"
"No one wants to die here," you reassure her. "It's alright to be afraid, but panicking won't help right now."
You're aware, abstractly, that she's likely a year or two older than yourself, even though it certainly doesn't feel like it right now. From the embarrassment that slowly replaces her blind panic, you wonder if Satou is conscious of that as well. Slowly, addressing the question to you as much as to anyone else who might hear, she asks: "Did... Captain Andre have any family?" More than just the Captain died, of course. Comrades from the mecha deck and other less fortunate parts of the ship didn't make it. There's a chance some of the other escape pods may have been damaged or lost after launching as well. The Captain, though, died in front of you all, leaving the bridge last, making sure that you all got out ahead of her.
"My husband's back home, living over Titan," you remember the Captain saying to Grayson on the passage from Iapetus. "Same as half the crew's families. Worst comes to worst, I can think of a lot of places I'd want to die less than on this old girl." Then she'd patted the wall of the shaft they were in, as if the Rose were a faithful animal, and not just a piece of machinery.
"She had a husband," you venture, after a moment.
Mazlo looks faintly surprised at this, coming from you. Perhaps because the Captain was hardly so forthcoming about personal details with junior officers. Or perhaps you knowing such a thing about someone else goes against his uncharitable impression of you. Instead of clarifying, he nods shallowly, motion almost undetectable inside his suit's helmet. "Yes, he lives here. In one of the orbitals." He's quiet for a further moment, before he admits, in a hollow voice, "the same one where my family lives." It's impossible to tell, just yet, whether that habitat fell victim to the fighting. Whether that family you saw in the picture, or Andre's husband, or countless others survived. You can hope the moon itself fared better, for the sake of Anja's family.
"Mine is all back on Anchiale," Satou admits. She seems a little self-conscious, having loved ones safely out of harm's way, who weathered Iapetus's invasion when so many others died, will still die. There's a silence as the weight of that collective knowledge stretches thin between you all. "Right before shipping out, I... I had a stupid fight, with my fiance. I just... I just hope I get the chance to... to..." she trails off, and for an instant, your heart sinks at the prospect of her bursting into tears or panicking again. Then, she finishes: "... to hear him say that he apologises, for being wrong."
There's a half second of further silence, then the group dissolves into general mirth. It's strained, but you all needed it very much. Even if the rest of the pod isn't rushing to continue the conversation, you suspect that they all need it to continue, on some level. To have something to think about other than the battle going on outside, the one you can no longer influence or follow the progress of. So, you silently vow to keep it going as long as is practical:
What do you do to keep the conversation going?
[ ] Encourage Satou to talk about her family
[ ] Tell her about your own family (being circumspect)
[ ] Tell her about the last thing you told your girlfriend (naming no names)
You're strapped in to one niche in a twelve-occupant escape pod: A small, metal cylinder firing away from the Rose like a bullet, travelling along as close to a safe trajectory as the ship could manage in its dying moments, based on your last scan data before leaving the bridge. Unlike a standard United Empire warship, this escape craft makes full use of the three-dimensional nature of space: The main passenger compartment of the craft has niches arranged in ring sections, four to a section, each one allowing a passenger to safely secure themself, with plenty of room for a bulky emergency spacesuit, like the one you're wearing. You all put them on with a long rehearsed swiftness.
Your ears are full of the hum of the escape pod's components, the sound of the others' harried breathing, almost as loud as your own. The confines of the suit heighten any small amount of claustrophobia you might have. At least things aren't too terribly hot or uncomfortable. Yet. But, the upside is, in the event that this pod is destroyed or breached by something that somehow fails to kill you, you have long hours of helplessly drifting to look forward to, in the hope that someone finds your suit's signal in time to save you.
As it is, you're looking "down" at the commander of this escape craft. Or up. Or across — take your pick, they're all equally valid ways to describe the far side of the ring from you. The commander in question, Sub-Lieutenant Rupert Mazlo, catches your gaze briefly through the glass face plate of his helmet, before closing his eyes. Too tired to be hostile or conciliatory or anything but glad to be alive. You, yourself still feel numb, mind not yet ready to process how narrowly you escaped death. The fact that at least two other escape pods launched is some comfort, but the ship that carried you out to Phoebe and back, through skirmishes and battles and long months, is gone. And with it, your commanding officer — a woman who worked herself harder than anyone else. She's earned a rest.
Considerably less stoic than either of you is the woman in the niche to your right, in the next ring section over. You've been listening to her breathing steadily accelerate as the minutes drag on and the escape pod sends you all blindly away from the wreck of the HIMS Titanium Rose. It's becoming obvious she's started hyper-ventilating, for all that she's trying to be discreet. You know who she is: The Rose's new mecha control officer, Anja's replacement, who you picked up at Iapetus. For a moment, you find yourself uncharacteristically unable to put a name to the trembling, pale-faced woman in the grips of a panic attack. It's no surprise, you suppose — you're forced to admit that you made a choice, conscious or otherwise, not to get to know this woman whose very presence was a reminder of your friend's absence. You glance again at Mazlo, but his eyes are still closed, and he's seemingly trying to ignore your fellow junior officer's distress. While you're in the escape pod, the seals on your suits aren't shut yet, but wasting that much oxygen is a bit of a dangerous habit to form, under the circumstances.
"Ensign Satou?" you ask, quietly, the name coming to you at last.
"I... I... I..." she tries to speak, but the breaths are coming too shallow and too rapidly for her to get a word in around them. Her eyes are wide and brown and terrified, reflecting the soft lighting of the escape pod as they meet yours across the short gap between your niches.
"Yes, look at me. Follow my lead," you tell her, gently. "Hold your breath two, three, four. Breathe in two, three, four. Hold, two, three, four. Out, two—" You speak slowly and clearly, and she follows your lead, the worst of her panic seeming to recede, for the time being.
There's silence for a few seconds once she finally stops. Maybe longer, it's hard to say. Then, she finally speaks again, voice ragged: "You almost got left behind! You almost died, North!"
"Almost," you admit, the notion seeming oddly distant now.
"Captain Andre is dead!" Satou says, still not quite as steady as you'd hope.
"A lot of people are dead, Ensign," Mazlo growls. He looks half ashamed as soon as he says it, but doesn't try to apologise. Merely falls silent.
"I... I know," Satou says, increasingly brittle. "We could still die! We could all die! Any second! We're all helpless in here! We can't even... I can't even..." she looks wildly from Mazlo, to you, to someone else strapped in nearby. "Did it ever matter? I... I relay messages over comms. That's what I do. Back and forth! And... and Lady Perbeck always sounds annoyed with me, but I... I do my best, and... and did any of it ever matter? Any of it, if this is all that happened?"
You try to make sense of the places that rant went, aware that everyone is listening in now, although no one is chiming in helpfully. "It did," you say, voice still calm, because she needs someone to be calm. And in this moment, you need to be useful somehow to someone. "We all did what we could. That matters. Everyone doing what we can."
"Even if we all die?"
"It still matters to me," you say, truthfully. "Even if we die."
"I don't want to die here," Satou tells you. "I'm terrified of dying like this!"
"Why did you join the Navy, then?" someone mutters, before being hastily sushed by his neighbour.
Satou flinches. "I knew there was a chance that... but I didn't think it would be like this!"
"No one wants to die here," you reassure her. "It's alright to be afraid, but panicking won't help right now."
You're aware, abstractly, that she's likely a year or two older than yourself, even though it certainly doesn't feel like it right now. From the embarrassment that slowly replaces her blind panic, you wonder if Satou is conscious of that as well. Slowly, addressing the question to you as much as to anyone else who might hear, she asks: "Did... Captain Andre have any family?" More than just the Captain died, of course. Comrades from the mecha deck and other less fortunate parts of the ship didn't make it. There's a chance some of the other escape pods may have been damaged or lost after launching as well. The Captain, though, died in front of you all, leaving the bridge last, making sure that you all got out ahead of her.
"My husband's back home, living over Titan," you remember the Captain saying to Grayson on the passage from Iapetus. "Same as half the crew's families. Worst comes to worst, I can think of a lot of places I'd want to die less than on this old girl." Then she'd patted the wall of the shaft they were in, as if the Rose were a faithful animal, and not just a piece of machinery.
"She had a husband," you venture, after a moment.
Mazlo looks faintly surprised at this, coming from you. Perhaps because the Captain was hardly so forthcoming about personal details with junior officers. Or perhaps you knowing such a thing about someone else goes against his uncharitable impression of you. Instead of clarifying, he nods shallowly, motion almost undetectable inside his suit's helmet. "Yes, he lives here. In one of the orbitals." He's quiet for a further moment, before he admits, in a hollow voice, "the same one where my family lives." It's impossible to tell, just yet, whether that habitat fell victim to the fighting. Whether that family you saw in the picture, or Andre's husband, or countless others survived. You can hope the moon itself fared better, for the sake of Anja's family.
"Mine is all back on Anchiale," Satou admits. She seems a little self-conscious, having loved ones safely out of harm's way, who weathered Iapetus's invasion when so many others died, will still die. There's a silence as the weight of that collective knowledge stretches thin between you all. "Right before shipping out, I... I had a stupid fight, with my fiance. I just... I just hope I get the chance to... to..." she trails off, and for an instant, your heart sinks at the prospect of her bursting into tears or panicking again. Then, she finishes: "... to hear him say that he apologises, for being wrong."
There's a half second of further silence, then the group dissolves into general mirth. It's strained, but you all needed it very much. Even if the rest of the pod isn't rushing to continue the conversation, you suspect that they all need it to continue, on some level. To have something to think about other than the battle going on outside, the one you can no longer influence or follow the progress of. So, you silently vow to keep it going as long as is practical:
--
What do you do to keep the conversation going?
[ ] Encourage Satou to talk about her family
[ ] Tell her about your own family (being circumspect)
[ ] Tell her about the last thing you told your girlfriend (naming no names)
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- Location
- Nova Scotia
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Don't worry, if a railgun round hits this escape vehicle, functionally everyone will be hit.
[jk] Start a verbal fictional quest, you are a Dryad at your graduation....
10ebbor10
DON'T PANIC
- Location
- Present
Bleh. It's not fun when people remember spalling exists.
- Location
- New York
- Pronouns
- He/Him
[X] Tell her about the last thing you told your girlfriend (naming no names)
- Location
- Derna
[] Teach Satou semaphore so she can do something with all these death flags.
Sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry. Good update, Gazetteer.
I'm leaning towards last thing we told our girlfriend, which would be this conversation I believe? (in the middle, with the pharmacy machine) It might be hard to pull something out of that that isn't very obviously 'dating a superior officer or at least another officer in this Navy,' but it was a great conversation that might do Satou some good right now.
cB557
voOOP
Formatting error.
EternalObserver
eYe Gaze baCk
- Location
- The Void
[X] Tell her about your own family (being circumspect)
- Location
- Nova Scotia
- Pronouns
- She/Her
I've already got something in mind for that, but it is kind of funny to imagine Amani not being as discreet as she means to be, just for the open-mouthed stares as people realise who she's talking about.
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Omegahugger
Inattentive Idiot
[X] Tell her about the last thing you told your girlfriend (naming no names)
We don't get to talk about our girlfriend like this often, we have to take the shot!
We don't get to talk about our girlfriend like this often, we have to take the shot!
Look, if we're getting in trouble for fraternising with superior officers, it means that we've avoided most of the worst case scenarios.
- Location
- America
[X] Tell her about your own family (being circumspect)
- Location
- Florida
[X] Tell her about the last thing you told your girlfriend (naming no names)
- Location
- Internet
[X] Tell her about your own family (being circumspect)
Mechanical
Initiate Action: Buzz
- Location
- Somewhere Strange
[X] Encourage Satou to talk about her family