scribblemyname | Andromeda Promptathon

This is, I think, my favorite Andromeda quote.

"I have faith in nothing but this: when the Universe collapses and dies, there will be three survivors. Tyr Anasazi, the cockroaches, and Dylan Hunt - trying to save the cockroaches."

You can write it either way. They're my favorites and I kind of ship them, too.

Sorry

(I guess. Still, I think it would have been interesting if they rebuilt the commonwealth together.)

You can wait on it if you want. I don't really want to watch it happen (again) either.

"Here's everything I know
about war: Somebody wins,
somebody loses, and
nothing is ever the same again."
~ Admiral Constanza Stark, CY 9784

The Heavens burned, the stars cried out
And under the ashes of infinity,
Hope, scarred and bleeding,
breathed its last.

~Ulatempa Poetess, "Elegy for the Commonwealth"

"We say atoms are bound by
Weak Attractors.
Why not admit the Truth:
The Universe is held together by Love."
~Michio Von Kerr, Wayist physicist

"If hope is the engine of the soul,
Then duty is the navigator...
And love is the fuel."
~High Guard Supreme Commander Sani nax Rifati
"Persuasions and Exhortations"

"Between birth and death lies desire,
Desire for life, for love,
for everything good.
And this is the source
of all suffering."
~Outcast Consensus 17

Trance doesn't want to lose Harper in any possible future.

Okay, so maybe a bit too much thought went into this, though I am relieved that I managed to keep it short despite that. Maybe because it's all background and no real plot.

Still, I think Alik would be like this ship (http://andromeda.wikia.com/wiki/Typhoon) because if the ship was going to be a family's home it would be smaller and less of an attack vessel than ones like Balance of Judgement and Achilles, also smaller than Andromeda and her class of ships were all sisters and wouldn't have a male AI and since my thought was that Enadar and Malina ended up on a salvaged Commonwealth ship from before the fall. I tried to follow Commonwealth naming patterns and picked a myth (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gates_of_Alexander) for the name of the ship.

Enadar had not been surprised to learn that his older brother was actually an android.

Not, as some people would think, because he hadn't grown with them and never seemed to age, since while his parents were alive, they'd made sure that Alik kept pace with him and Malina, but because of so many little things that all made sense after learning that Alik was a machine—a ship's avatar.

When Enadar was little, his parents would send him off to find his older brother if he had a question. Go ask Alik, they'd say, and Enadar would. Alik always had the answer. Enadar loved that about his brother. It was nice knowing that he could ask anything of Alik. They discussed everything from mundane questions every stupid kid asked to temporal physics. No matter what the conversation, though, Alik talked like a machine. Always had, probably always would.

He acted like a machine, too, not just in the way he talked, but in his emotional distance and unswerving devotion to logic and practicality. He always thought two steps or three ahead, which was annoying when he was left in charge and could stop Enadar from both fun and trouble before he could even start it. Alik was overprotective and knew everything, things he shouldn't know (but did because he was a ship that heard and monitored everything.) Technically, he spied on them every second of every day.

That didn't make him any less their brother. They still snuggled with him on the couch in the common areas. Alik had always felt real, like an older brother should, not cold or metallic even if he might have been made of synthetic parts. His arms were reassuring, a place where both Enadar and Malina would curl into and be held to feel safe and protected. He told the best stories, watching over them long after they'd fallen asleep to his voice and missed their favorite moments.

Malina always said Alik was home and safety. She hadn't known how right she was, not until after their parents failed to come back from a supply run and Alik's emergency protocols activated, revealing him to be much more than their brother—he was The Gates of Alexander, a glorious heritage class transport from before the fall of the commonwealth.

All and all, it wasn't hard to adjust to having a ship for a brother. Alik's hologram would show up and answer questions if Enadar spoke aloud, and he had stopped jumping after the first few times it happened. As for all the announcements and warnings over the comms being in Alik's voice, well that Enadar liked. He had hated the boring computer voice from before, and he found it easier to use the screens to communicate with the ship when the ship was his brother.

After all, his brother had always been a robot.

Love it! Every little backgroundy detail of it!

Wow. This thing is a monster. I'm still sitting here thinking through what I need to do to make it come together and wow. :glances through for a shorter fic first:

:)

It does actually fit them all rather well.

Too well. :/

So, this could be an origin story, maybe. How a new member joined the "crew."

I figure Reventes for Nietzcheans. It was that or something close to Vedrans, but I know more about Nietzcheans and could see enough parallels where it made sense. Plus... I think I like the tribal dynamic. I've used similar concepts before in other unrelated stories.

If a person could be in lust with a ship, then Felise figured she was, just a little, with this one. Standing in the derelict's slipstream core, she stared, mesmerized by its inherent beauty and danger, unable to believe how well-preserved and maintained this place was so long after the fall of the Commonwealth. She could stay here for days and admire just this part of the ship.

That was, if she wasn't being hunted and didn't need the parts desperately to make her own ship work so she could run. Again.

She grimaced, trying to get the console to respond. She'd found door control easy to get, and she'd made quick progress to the core, but while the slipstream drive seemed like it would be fully functional, the power was doing strange things through the ship—she probably should expect it to die soon—and she needed to hurry.

“I'd prefer it if you left that where it is,” a voice said, making her want to jump. “That is my slipstream drive, and if you tamper with it, I'll have to kill you.”

She shook her head, swallowing as she turned to face the man who'd spoken. Tall, dark-haired, the sort of human that could have been trouble if she'd been willing to let her hormones rule her instead of her upbringing, he managed to challenge her lust for the ship for just a moment.

“Nice try, but the high guard has been extinct for years,” she told him. “And I checked—there are no salvage claims on this vessel. It doesn't belong to you. Not to anyone, not anymore, so me borrowing a few parts... Not much you can do about that.”

His eyes went to the force lance in his hand—great, he'd managed to raid more of the ship than she had—and back to her. “If you want to live, you will refrain from touching that drive.”

She shook her head. “No, if I want to live, I need the parts from the drive to get me out of this system. I'd have gone with a slipfighter if I could have, their parts would have been closer to what I need for my ship, but it seems someone else has already salvaged all of them.”

His lips curved just slightly, and she thought he was amused by what she was saying.

“And anyway, it doesn't really matter because at the rate power is dropping through this grid, there won't be anything left to salvage soon. Shame, really, because they don't make ships like this anymore, and it's beautiful, but with this much damage, it's only good for parts.”

“Trust a Nietzchean to say that,” another voice said, this time from behind her, and she was tempted to hurt something, anything, since her scans hadn't shown any lifeforms on this ship and now she had two of them to deal with. “I guess that explains a few things, though I've never seen a Nietzchean on her own doing salvage runs before. Aren't they all supposed to be back at home, making little babies and staying where it's safe?”

“Some Nietzchean prides allow their infertile females to prove their worth in other ways,” the one in the high guard uniform said, and Felise glared at him.

“Who are you calling infertile?”

“You,” the second one said, amused for a moment before dropping his smile. “Guess since you can't create things you figure on destroying them, but it's not going work here, Freckles.”

She would have whirled and hit him, maybe even shot him, if she wasn't sure she'd take a force lance blast the moment she did. Freckles were a genetic impurity. She did not have them, no matter what anyone said.

“Alik.” A third person had joined the party, this one another woman, and Felise looked down at her scanner, tempted to throw it into the core for all the good it had done her. She just needed a quick salvage run. A couple parts and she could have been on her way to someplace safe.

“We've lost control of more of the key systems,” the high guard one said. “I know. Enadar, escort our guest here to her quarters.”

“Alik, if we're losing containment—”

“Then it is my responsibility to fix it and you are not going anywhere near it,” he insisted, reaching over to take Felise's gun. “Don't get any ideas about trying to escape. You hurt him, and you will answer to me—if you survive the ship's internal defenses, which is unlikely, even with your advanced genetics.”

“I'm an engineer. If you need help with something—”

“You'll do it out of the goodness of your heart?” the one called Enadar said, snorting as he pushed his gun into her back. “We're not stupid. No one trusts Nietzcheans.”

“Except to do what they have to in order to survive, idiot,” she reminded him. “If I can't get off this ship, the best thing for me to do is help fix it.”

“Yeah, except you're probably working with the ones that sabotaged it in the first place, and there's no way we're trusting you with so much as a holonovel.”

“You know, you have no more right to this ship than I do. It's open salvage. You can stop poking me with that thing because if you don't—” Felise cut off her words as the ship fired at her feet. Enadar smirked at her, and she glared back at him. “If you've lost as much of the key systems as you seem to, then that was just an accident, and I'm not afraid of you and your little gun.”

“You might try being afraid of the ship instead,” Enadar said, shoving her forward into a room. “They didn't build him with a sense of humor.”

Felise snorted. “I came on board because this wreck was floating dead in space with no salvage claims on it.”

“You can't claim an older brother,” Enadar said, shutting the door on her, and Felise shook her head in frustration. She knew this ship was in no state to fight. She wasn't sure how anyone had managed to stay alive on it, but whatever hack job they'd done in getting the ship going again, it clearly wasn't working. She could fix this, and while she might not be the most stereotypical Nietzchean out there, she was enough of one to want to come out of this alive.

She went to the closest wall panel, pulling it off and starting to work.

“If you bypass that system, you cut off life support to this section of the ship.”

Felise looked up, almost smiling when she saw the state of the AI hologram. Gray and indistinct, it had nothing more than a flat computer voice lacking all personality. “I'll risk it.”

“You may be bred for a level of genetic resistance, but even your body cannot withstand the effects for very long.”

“Yeah, well, your little attempt to make me think I'm dealing with a—whoa. Someone gave you a nasty little virus, didn't they? This thing is eating through your code like candy. And here I thought you were just a little feint from the bad salvage crew to make me think that a high guard AI still existed on this ship,” Felise muttered, recognizing the trojan for what it was. “Fortunately for you, I've seen this thing before—the Annapurna pride created something similar to help them battle with larger ships before they were wiped out. Now it's used by cowards and pirates that are too weak to fight fair. Though why they'd need to use it on a derelict...”

The hologram flickered out, and she shrugged, going back to work. She didn't care if the AI had been a trick. She knew she could stop the virus—it wasn't half as adaptable as it pretended, and its main strength lay in overwhelming any ship's systems to where it was hard to prioritize what to fix, not in actual complexity.

It didn't make it any less of a pain in her genetically perfected rear to fix, but she could do it.

“What did you do?”

“I killed the virus and saved all our lives,” Felise said, frowning when she realized that she wasn't talking to the malfunctioning hologram but to the live members of the crew. She had better hearing than that. How had her door opened without her hearing it? She should have been out it and getting the part she needed by now. “You could be a little thankful.”

“Awful convenient you just knowing what virus was running through the ship and could shut it down like that,” Enadar said, shaking his head in anger. “How many times do we have to tell you we're not stupid?”

“You don't want an answer to that,” Felise said, biting back a kludge even though she never used that word.

He snorted. “You think you're so much better than us when you have to resort to this kind of thing to be able to steal from us. Yeah, right.”

“Enadar,” the woman said, and he just rolled his eyes at her.

“Malina over there is such a bleeding heart she thinks we should drop you off at the next drift with supplies and our gratitude,” Enadar said, shaking his head. “I suggested leaving you for your friends to deal with, but Alik says they'll likely kill you for your failure.”

Felise swallowed. Alik was right, though failure wasn't the only reason her family wanted her dead. She didn't want to admit that. “I saved the ship. I think letting me go is not only the least you can do, but in your best interests.”

“It's not happening,” Alik told her. “Out of respect for Malina's wishes, you will not be left behind in a crippled ship as easy prey for those who come, but trusting you would be a mistake, and it is not one I will make. You will be moved to a location without any access panels for the duration of your stay and any further attempts to alter the ship will be dealt with using lethal force. Is that clear?”

“Yes,” Felise said, anger welling up inside her. “But if you think—”

“Three Nietzchean ships have just exited slipstream,” the ship's hologram reported, only this time it looked and sounded like Alik. “They will be in firing range in less than five minutes.”

“Your friends?” Enadar asked derisively, shaking his head as he did.

“It doesn't matter,” Alik said. “Enadar, move her where she can't do any more damage. Malina, command deck. Now.”

The other woman nodded, starting to run, and Alik followed after her. Felise felt Enadar grab her arm, and she glared at him.

“You know I don't have to go with you. I can disarm you and be off the ship in minutes.”

He pulled her along, keeping his gun pointed at her. “If you really believed that, you'd already have done it. You'd have killed all us kludges and left the ship.”

“Except one of you isn't a kludge, is he?”

“No.” Enadar said with a grim smile. “Big brother is the avatar of a warship. And your friends just pissed him off.”

So awesome. Though he's about to push Felise's temper waaay too far if he keeps assuming everyone's her friends. I do love how they already annoy each other and she does. not. have freckles. :giggles:

I adore this quote.

Well, universe building fics kind of are. I barely skimmed the surface of the stuff I thought of for Alik being the AI.

And then I wrote a second piece in the same universe that wanted to be longer than it was, too.

If you think it's better not to do it, that's okay. I didn't want things to be pressure or out of control, just fun.

It is such a great quote. And so true. I'm actually with Tyr in being able to picture Dylan rescuing the cockroaches.

The Heavens burned, the stars cried out...

"They say that as if we depended on the Commonwealth for survival," Trance Gemini murmured to herself. She was hanging upside down by her purple tail in a little garden alcove on Scholar's Drift, home to a ridiculously eclectic library of odds and ends and ancient books and missives.

Ulatempa's "Elegy for the Commonwealth" was excellent poetry, but it was woefully lacking in certain particulars of reality despite the rave reviews one of her fellow stars had given it.

The heavens burned before the Nietzscheans revolted. The stars didn't cry out; they lit the novas in the cosmos to consume the initial wave of the Spirit of the Abyss. He sent out planet-eaters and devourers of flesh, and the suns reacted with fire and shifting realities, avatars moved into place to find the one that would defeat him utterly.

And under the ashes of infinity,
Hope, scarred and bleeding,
breathed its last.

"So now the Commonwealth is hope, is it?" Trance closed the book and dropped from the tree branch she'd hung from. She had stolen a treasure with this book, worth a great deal, and that a candidate to hold the very Engine of Creation had an eye on.

She glanced into the twisting futures ahead of her.

"I'll sell you the book."

"Adventure? Let me come with you."

"I suppose we could use a good thief."

"And welcome aboard, your purpleness."

"Harper." The candidate will smack the backside of her future friend's head.

The Engine is a backup plan, but a good one. It was always their failsafe. And somehow, this Beka Valentine holds the key to reaching the one—a Nietzschean, a human; it's too far ahead and still uncertain. Trance spins around on her heel until she's pointed in the right direction, the Beka direction, and moves forward with a smile.

I think it'll happen, just wanted a quick ficlet before considering embarking upon a bigger journey.

As he's pointing out the need to use all their resources for their own survival. :)

Yeah.

Though if the ship gets boarded and they try and kill Felise, he'll finally understand. Though I get the feeling Alik's hologram would be kept very busy trying to keep them from fighting.

The freckles are so much a part of her she had to have them. I couldn't resist. :)

Okay.

Though be careful of the larger journey. I thought I'd managed to stay short, but noooooo...

Andromeda Promptathon

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

Dorky name: My Brother the Ship 1/1

Re: Dorky name: My Brother the Ship 1/1

no subject

Re: Dorky name: My Brother the Ship 1/1

The Right and Wrong Salvage

Re: The Right and Wrong Salvage

no subject

no subject

no subject

Andromeda Fill: What is Hope?

no subject

no subject

Re: The Right and Wrong Salvage

no subject