Author Topic: NEMO - Prologue: Everything happens for a reason! (including abandonment)  (Read 1063 times)



Prologue:
Everything happens for a reason!



Before anything else, I have some out-of-character (OOC) things to say.
First is that this is sort of another attempt at this... thing. However, that was a mess. I made up pretty much all of it on the fly, and I had absolutely no idea where I wanted to go with it. That's different this time.

Second, some details about the characters and the universe they're in have changed. The player character is mostly the same, except that his last name is Gideon, not Gribean (sry swat). His first name is still Theodore. Also, the planet he's from is now called "Balta," rather than "Incipium." Also the entire situation is completely different.

Lastly, after this section, any time I want to say something OOC, it'll either be in a chunk on its own, all italic, separated by a horizontal rule or two (that's the [hr] tag), OR, it will be inside in-character text, surrounded by parentheses, also all italic. (Like this.)
Unless I specifically state otherwise. For example, if an entire post is OOC, I'd probably just say so at the top of it, and not worry about italics.



You wake up in a bright, white room. You aren't really sure where you are. In fact, you can hardly even remember your name.

Oh wait, no, it's Theodore Gideon, and you know exactly where you are. You're on the Icosa. Your own personal cargo ship. You're not in your quarters, though, it looks like you fell asleep in the kitchen. No wonder you were confused. What time is it? After looking for your phone for a moment, you give up, and decide that the time doesn't really matter out here, anyway.
At the moment, your ship's traveling through Gideon hyperspace (Wikipedia's article on hyperspace). Nope, the name's not a coincidence, your great grandparents discovered it. But you're just a pilot; the science junk was never really your thing, unlike with most of your family.

You're on your way to your home planet, Balta, with a shipment of food from the planet Merit.
Hyperspace makes everything a lot quicker, but it still takes a while. This makes the fourth time you've woken up on this trip, and you've got at least six more sleep cycles ahead of you. Whenever you start to get bored, you just remind yourself what it would've been like without hyperspace.

You're also kinda hungry. But it might be a good idea to make sure one of your two crewmates is awake, too. The ship mostly flies itself, but it's generally considered good practice to have at least two pilots awake at any given time.
What do you wanna do?
« Last Edit: June 29, 2015, 05:25:03 PM by Foxscotch »

Let's meet our crewmates and then eat something.


fap to gay furry research found on swollow's uploadius.

Also, it's probably worth mentioning, for anyone who didn't read any of the old thread, that Baltans are reptillian.

find nemo
Would I ask you to find the Milky Way? Don't be ridiculous.
Let's meet our crewmates and then eat something.
That works.
You stand up from the seat you were in, rubbing your neck. Note to self: don't fall asleep in uncomfortable dining chairs anymore.
The living areas of the ship aren't that big, and you reach the roosterpit soon, but after opening the door you see that nobody's in either of the pilots' chairs. Joel's usually awake when you get up, and he spends pretty much all of his time in here. Maybe he's in the bathroom? He'll probably be finished by the time you get back, so you decide to check on Kate. She should be asleep right now, but you might as well make sure she's where she's supposed to be, anyway. You reach her room, and thankfully, she's there, sound asleep. You make your way back to the roosterpit, finding that Joel's come back. Guess you were just being paranoid.

You sit down in the other chair and relax. After a while. however, you notice that there's a lot less power in the batteries than there should be. Hyperspace engines eat up a lot of energy, but this is weird. There should be at least three quarters left, but there's only one.
"Joel, look," you say, pointing at the battery meter.
"What?"
"The trip's not even halfway over, but we're almost out of electricity."
"Huh. I'll go check. Maybe something's wrong with the gauge?"
He gets up and leaves. The batteries are in the lower levels, next to the engine room.
Joel's kind of the mechanic for the ship, so he'd probably know a lot more than you about it.

But... if it's not a problem with the reading alone, you're still really low on power.
You might as well start planning, while he's gone. So you check the map, and there's a planet nearby that could be a good candidate for landing and recharging. The catch is, we don't know much about it. The fact that it's there is pretty much the only thing we do know. It might be perfect, or worthless. But it doesn't look like there are any other planets nearby, and certainly none that would be a sure bet.

You can wait it out, and just coast along as long as you can. Someone will find you eventually if you set a distress signal. But there's no telling how long "eventually" will be.
Or, after Joel gets back, if necessary, begin the process of landing on that planet. There's a lot more risk, but if it does work, you'll be back home within weeks. If it doesn't, well, you'll figure something out.


Planet
When Joel gets back, he tells you that everything looks fine, other than the low power. Nothing's wrong with the gauges or the batteries themselves. Even the current power drain is normal.
So you let him know what you decided to do. He agrees; even if it doesn't work out as well as you hope, you'll still have explored a new planet, and that usually gets rewarded. You both think it's best to just let Kate sleep. You can explain when she wakes up. It would still be a two-against-one decision, even if she didn't agree with it.

You set a course to land on the planet. The ship does pretty much everything like this on its own. All of the maneuvers that it takes to get around in space are pretty complicated, and while every one- or two-star pilot can do it, it's a lot more convenient to let the computer do the work.
The first thing it does is start slowing down. We're going really fast, and it takes a lot to get us to a safe speed. That's part of the reason it keeps you in hyperspace during the first part of deceleration. In here, there's nothing to run into if something goes wrong.
After several hours, we're moving much slower, and the ship shuts off the hyperspace engine. Leaving hyperspace sounds cool, but it's actually rather unimpressive. In hyperspace, you don't really see anything outside the windows, just blackness. And when you step out of it, a bunch of distant stars suddenly appear. That's all.
The next step is to keep slowing down, as we approach the planet. This is gonna take a few days.

In the meantime, let's find something to do. Joel's already gone back to sleep, and Kate should be waking up shortly. You also just realized that you forgot to eat...
The ship should be fine without a pilot until we get close. It's using a lot less energy now that the hyperdrive's off.

Any entertainment on this ship?

Any entertainment on this ship?
Well, unfortunately there's no access to the galactic internet. You're too far away from any primary planets for that.
When that's not available, most of your time is spent talking to your crewmates, tending to the ship, and sleeping. On some of the bigger ships you've been on, there were recreation areas for the crew where they can exercise or play games, but all we have here is the kitchen, bedrooms, and roosterpit. Plus the cargo and equipment areas, which are pretty useless for entertainment.
There might be some movies or something on your computer, but if there are, you've probably watched them dozens of times.

ok I'm gonna go ahead and leave this one behind, too
but at least this time I'm not abandoning the entire thing, I still intend to write this on my own
I just don't really like this, waiting on other people, and then making other people wait on me. I also don't like depending on other people to make decisions (not that any real decisions have come up yet...)
writing on my own schedule, and writing exactly what I want to write, seems a lot more ideal, to me

it still feels kinda PATHETIC abandoning another one though