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- Not-So-Empty Space -
Terraforming ship Ataegina.
This is a little scenario I came up with that I was looking to see if anyone might like to try out. It's more or less hard sci-fi, but it should be far from dull.
- Plot -
It is many hundreds of thousands of years in the future. In the distant past, humanity spread out from its tiny world to conquer the stars, settling on worlds too numerous to count in a great era of expansion, out into the luminous drifts of our galaxy.It was slow at first, small bands striking out in primitive spacecraft, in generational experiments or placed in the care of unreliable suspended animation technology, hoping to find a better life on a planet far, far away. These first trail-blazers to the stars spent decades - sometimes centuries - out in the void. This was a time before space-folds, when space travel was only as fast as the primitive chemical ignitions and atomic annihilators which propelled the pioneers' rickety vessels. And, for every ship that reached its destination, plenty did not...
But, for all the risk, the expansion continued. Humans and their derivatives settled on thousands of different worlds, laying the foundations for the great interstellar empires, republics and confederacies that would follow.
For many millennia, in any case, slower-than-light star travel was the only method of travel available. Correspondence between star systems took years, and those spacers brave enough to fly the missions were regarded as simultaneously heroic and crazy.
That all changed with the discovery of space-folds. By warping together two corresponding points in space, a starship, equipped with the appropriate technology, could make a trip that would once have taken 100 years through the endless night in a slower-than-light barge in scant milliseconds.
With the space-fold, STL travel through the interstellar medium became a thing of the past. At last, fast and reliable communication and commerce between planets could be achieved. This allowed the first true pan-galactic civilizations to emerge, and brought a new golden age to humans and humanoids scattered throughout the cosmos.
But, there was a loose end.
Even as this miraculous technology spread across the galaxy almost overnight, many slower-than-light ships, still in transit, remained unaccounted for. As many as possible were recalled, but many continued their journeys...
Every so often, one or two turn up. Some arrive at their scheduled ports of call, ghosts from the distant past bearing passengers and cargo out of time. Others are found by exploratory fold-ships, either still in transit or, occasionally, off course.
This is the story of one such vessel in particular, a massive freighter known as the Ataegina.
The Ataegina was launched near the very dawn of the expansion age. Massive, she measured over 5 kilometers in length, and was meant as a terraforming ship, dispatched to remote, inhospitable planets with equipment to prepare them for future colonists.
Over 300,000 years ago, she launched for a distant and long-forgotten world, and was never seen again.
Until now.
Survey ship Curiosity.
She has been found by a survey fold-ship, sent to chart a small nebula. The ship, Curiosity, discovered the Ataegina near the heart of a strange debris field, encompassing the wrecks of numerous pre-fold starships and a large number of metallic asteroids.
Besides being among the largest objects in the field, Ataegina also seems to be transmitting a weak signal, though its content is impossible to determine due to interference from the nebula.
Cut off from communications with headquarters, the Curiosity's small crew decides to investigate the signal, and boards Ataegina. They hope to find the signal's source, as well as any evidence as to what drew the ship, and so many others like it, to this nebula.
What will they discover?
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So, basically, I need about three people to play members of the Curiosity's crew, sent over to explore Ataegina. They would start out by finding my character, a transhuman who is the only survivor of the Ataegina's crew, and who has been in stasis since the ship left port many thousands of years ago (and only "woke up" when the survey team was detected coming aboard). Unfortunately, he's only the ship's geologist, and was obviously "asleep" for whatever presumably set the ship off course.
So, our little team has to explore the ship, and figure out just what's going on...
As for characters, there's no formal profile or anything. Just PM me a picture or description of your proposed character's appearance, and a brief description of their personality and/or history. Once I've gotten three people, I'll make the IC thread and we can begin!
Anyone interested?
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