M Fnord Wrote:

robkelk Wrote:Sounds like a plan.

Okay, we're set up. For any and all Fenspace Alternates material tag the page as "Alternates:$whatever" and it'll go to that specific namespace. I've set up a main page for the namespace and linked it from the sidebar, but haven't played around with content yet.

Quote:The Last Chance Saloon was the first public house established in the fine city of Grand Central on the planet Grand Central. As the colony became the heart of Fenspace’s gatecrasher community, the saloon became the main pump. Most off-call gatecrashers hung out in one of the Last Chance’s expansive drinking rooms, and the back rooms were used for briefing and planning missions. Sometimes a team would be technically off-call, but waiting for a particular job to open up, and they would hang out at the Last Chance until word came back from Gate Control.

And this is where we find the Order of Saint Grimace, occupying one of the saloon’s back rooms while waiting for the call to return to Secundus. The vultures had already done a fair bit of aerial surveillance of the mysterious other-Earth, and C-Sec wanted a team on the ground soonish.

The problem: The gate in question opened up on Secundus’ moon, which meant they needed a way to insert the team from Luna-2 down to Secundus. The first option, using their trusty old runabout Mystery Machine, was quickly and violently nixed by C-Sec authorities. “Too conspicuous,” they said. “Too obviously alien even when stealthed. After the fuckup with the vulture, we want you guys running around in something that won’t arouse as much suspicion if you get spotted.” This left the Order at something of an impasse, until the rookie said she might have an idea and give her a couple days to do some digging. She then left Grand Central on the next gate for Sol.

That was a week and a half ago. Now, the Order waited for the call to action, and for their rookie to return from her mysterious errand. Mal Fnord sprawled on a handy couch, watching the latest pirated movies on his smartglasses while his partner Tina napped, feet in his lap. KJ DuPree and Deidre Griest played a desultory game of pool while Sep Lacroix and Lena Oorebeek workd on draining yet another pitcher of beer.

The scene of terminal boredom exploded, when the rookie finally returned to the Last Chance. “I got us a ride!” Sora Anderson announced triumphantly, bursting into the back room. The assembled Order jerked as one, abandoning their posts and clustering around Sora.

“What’d you get,” KJ asked. “Please don’t tell me you went to Stan’s Used Spaceships.”

“No. Jesus!” Sora glared at KJ. “I’m not that green, come on. No, I had to dig deep for this, but it ought to be good for the Secundus job. C-Sec approved, even!”

Mal raised an eyebrow. “That was quick,” he noted.

Sora preened. “All I had to do was show them the plans,” she said. Pulling a portable holoprojector out of her pocket, she laid it on the pool table and activated it. “Ta-dah!”

“It, um.” Lena paused. “It looks like the Titanic, only it shrank in the wash and somebody glued a couple fuel tanks to its belly.”

Tina gave the displayed ship a once-over, her eyes widening. “Son of a bitch,” she said. "That’s a Columbian sky-schooner! How the hell did you get the plans for one of these?”

Sora shrugged. “Called in some favors. My aunt Meg collects Columbian documents and artifacts, so I asked her if she had any sky-schooner stuff.”

“Wow... talk about your strokes of luck. Did she, you know, have the full blueprints?”

“Don’t be silly.” Sora rolled her eyes. “I’ve spent a fair bit of the trip setting up modcons; we’ll use darksci repulsors for primary lift and propulsion, with dummy props it should be convincing enough. Obviously the windows, hatches and the like have been space-proofed. The lift tanks are vacuum aerostats instead of hydrogen, which gives us a lot more safety and makes it pretty close to neutral-buoyancy at normal flight altitudes. Plenty of room for drones, collapsible trucks, labs, actual bunks...”

“Sounds good, but objection,” Lena said. “This thing is pretty gorram big, are we going to be able to get it through the gate?”

Sora sighed. “Probably not. We could fit it through here, but we might snag the masts on the New Clavius side. New Clavius has fabbers on their side though, and plenty of feedstock; we send through the plans and they’ll fab it for us.”

“Fits the defining paradigm, a bit big but well-apportioned, good for a long-term mission to a strange new world. Well done, Rook,” Mal said. “Let’s get the plans out to New Clavius and tell C-Sec we’re ready to roll as soon as the ship is.”

“One last thing,” KJ said. “She needs a name.”

“Well, it’s Columbian so it ought to be something appropriately high-falutin’. How about ‘Intrepid Spirit?’” Mal offered.

“Nah... a little too high-falutin’ for the Order.”

“Yeah, point.”

“How about ‘Floating Vagabond?’” Lena offered. The Order paused in thought.

“I like it,” KJ said.

“Works for me,” Sep agreed.

“A proper name for one of our ships,” Deidre said.

“Well, let’s go with it.” Mal finished the discussion. “Floating Vagabond it is. May the solar winds be at our backs.”

Quote:Excerpt from Thompson's Guide to Pre-Wave Weird Science (Univ. of Chicago, 20XX):

"SKY-SCHOONER: A form of lighter-than-air transport used by the inhabitants of the aerial city Columbia (1893 - 1915?). The sky-schooner used some form of greysci or darksci electromagnetic propulsion system, the exact details of which were never made public and have since been lost to posterity. Only three examples of sky-schooners are known to exist from the Columbian period; none are intact hulls as the vehicles were lightly constructed and the engines apparently rigged to self-destruct if handled poorly.

Quote:The phone rang.

Since it was the phone, not the teleconference video, he knew it was somebody who wasn't part of Stella Via Trading who was calling. And since his secretary hadn't announced the call, he knew it was someone who already had his private number. And he knew from following Eimi's Twitter feed that she was chairing a panel on infomorphs at the moment. That narrowed it down to one person.

Noah picked up the old-style handset. "Hi, Meg! It's been a while; what's up?"

"Hi, brother-mine. Nothing much - the restaurant's doing well, Eimi's been asked to give another lecture on Earth, and I talked to Sora last week."

"Sora? Last week? And you didn't tell me? Why?!"

"Because I knew you'd react this way. She's back through the Miranda Gate by now."

"The Oberon Gate."

"Whatever. And if I'd told you before she left, what would you have done?"

"I'd have stopped her."

"No, you'd have tried to stop her, and you would have failed."

"Really? The company's security force knows how to do its job."

"Really. The Convention's police know how to do their job, too. She's a big girl, Noah. She knows what she's doing."

"Does she really, Meg?"

"Yes, she does. Just listen for a minute. I've had a lot more experience raising a child than you've had, and I know that Sora is just as smart and just as determined and just as sane as Eimi is. And we both know Eimi's got her head screwed on straight."

"But -"

"I'm not finished. Sora's a grown woman, and it's time for you to get out of her way and let her live her own life. You've got one daughter who decided to stay with you, and Kohran's a darling, but Sora isn't Kohran. She isn't Eimi, either, and she definitely isn't you or me."

"But -"

"Shut up, Noah. You're driven to make everything you touch work the best way it possibly can. So is Sora. So am I, and so is Eimi. But you and Sora don't agree on what's best. You're going to have to learn to live with that. She already has."

"But ... But she's hooked up with a criminal gang."

"And she knew that ahead of time. Did you ever think that maybe she's trying to change them from within?"

"Did she tell you that?"

"No."

"Don't try to raise my hopes, Meg. If that's really what she's doing, then I want to hear that from her own lips. If it isn't, then I want to hear from her what it is she is doing. She hasn't told me anything."

"And that hurts. I know. Eimi doesn't tell me everything, either."

"Damn it.

"Language."

"Sorry. So, how is she?"

"She's well. The first thing she asked was how you were. The second thing she asked was whether I had plans for any ship thing that wouldn't stand out in a pre-industrial society."

Noah was pretty sure that, whatever Sora had actually said, it wasn't 'pre-industrial.' "What did you give her?"

"You have to ask? The sky-schooner, of course. It was the only set of plans I had that fit the bill and gave her room for a private cabin."

"If she builds it according to plans. Thank you, Meg."

"I don't want to see her hurt, either. So, when are you, Kohran, Jake, and Takami coming for dinner?"

Quote:[Begin Log]

Survey Report 09 - Gate PKX-18901 - Considering the life bearing world discovered by Gatecrasher Group 023 on $Date.

Vulture Reporting: Dakota

$Date

As per GateCon orders, I've setup my ROVs feeds so the team going Dirtside can tap into them and even be given limited control. Basic Gate station construction is going well for something that isn't in my paws. Still compiling population movement data, but have a rough outline of local trade routes. Not much activity in internally on the North American landmass. Lots of small blink-and-you-miss-them settlements along the coasts I've started to pick up. I believe they are colony attempts given the overseas ship traffic that has been spotted at some of them.
Ground, Sea, and Air routes.DATA
Major routes.AJPG
Updated World Maps.AJPG
My worries are of some of the temples my recon ROVs have taken images of in the Samarkand region. While normally I'd not bat a eye at a pentagram, to see them on such brooding monstrosities of a temple is worrying. More so that people in chains are dragged into the temples at random intervals.
Temple.AJPG
Temple2.AJPG
Temple3.AJPG
People in chains.AJPG
Samarkand Recon.DATA
I've dictated three ROVs to keeping a camera on the larger temples. My recommendation is that any ground team should avoid that whole region until we know more.
[End Log]

Proginoskes Wrote:I suppose the question is, how sure are scholars that Columbian tech is wave-free? Because in the absence of evidence to the contrary, my assumption would be that the 'wave has been around much longer than previously thought, not that the people of Columbia managed to hack together greysci or darksci in its absence.

Proginoskes Wrote:And Noah Anderson really should count his blessings. As "criminal gangs" go, it's hard to get more harmless than politically-motivated provocateurs with a very strict "no physical harm" rule. Gorilla suits, not Guy Fawkes masks. And she's not so estranged that she's not asking after your health, which will happen if you try to hold her. (Yakety Sax is an earworm of epic proportions, and I'm now imagining it as the soundtrack to Noah's efforts to track down and contain his wayward daughter.)

Quote:"The target is this factory in the Osaka region. It's owned by the Nippon National Heavy Industries Special Group-"

"Isn't that from an anime?"

"... Could be. Anyway, the company is officially producing 'special electronics' at this factory, which makes up a good 30% of their annual earnings. These special electronics are, in fact, several different types of animatronic sex dolls."

"Oh, ew. Otaku culture strikes again. So we go in and play switch-the-bits on the dolls?"

"This one's a bit grimmer I'm afraid. We've received information from the undisclosed location that NNHI-SG has recently started making 'deluxe editions' of their product lines using sapient informorphs. We're not talking basic AI here, this company is generating full-on certifiable sapient life forms and selling them.

"This, brothers and sisters of the Order, is our mission: we go in there, rescue the infomorphs, take the generator software and their sales records, then we blow the factory the fuck up. Any questions?"

Quote:TERRORISTS STRIKE IN JAPAN: ELECTRONICS FACTORY DESTROYED IN MASSIVE EXPLOSION
Terror group Order of Saint Grimace claims responsibility, claims 'victory over capitalist slaveholders'
~NHK WORLD online headline, 10 July 20XX

Quote:SLAVEBOT FACTORY DESTROYED BY MARXIST GUERILLA RAID

Order of Saint Grimace liberates Osaka sex-slaves

Governor Marsden vows to see the culprits brought to justice. Levies charges in World Court against Nippon National Heavy Industries Special Group Executives.

~GREENWOOD TIMES online headline, 11 July 20XX

Quote:When asked for a comment, noted businessman and infomorph developer Noah Anderson said, "I didn't adopt the infomorphs that I created just because it's the right thing to do. I set a legal precedent - infomorphs are people in the legal sense as well as the social sense. I'm tempted to stage an unfriendly takeover of NNHISEG just so I can fire the people responsible. But I'm not happy about the property destruction - I can't believe everybody at that factory knew what was going on, so there might be some innocent people out of work today."
~NBC Business News, 11 July 20xx

Quote:Though the Oberon gates are all very similar in look and function, in truth there are many notable differences between individual structures. First among these is size. Some of the gates are quite large, with the main spherical cage having a radius of over 100 meters. On the other hand, most gates are significantly smaller, with the lower end gates having a radius of approximately 15 meters across. There is some speculation that the gate sizes may be programmable, though no one has succeeded in reshaping one yet, or at least acknowledged such to the research community. It is possible to manipulate the wormhole size so that it is smaller than the gate; this is in fact standard procedure when connecting to unknown locations. In these cases, the wormhole is intentionally kept just wide enough to stick a microsensor through, while preventing anything larger from coming through.

All gates have the same basic form: a rough sphere of interlocking angled arms, like a round patterned cage. These black arms are solid and composed of an unknown form of stable and programmable exotic matter. Despite several years of study, the exact composition continues to spur a raging debate in materials science and physics circles, and there seems to be some evidence that different gates may actually be composed of different substances, or perhaps change composition over time. The arms move and change shape when new destinations are programmed into the gate, though it is interesting to note that set destinations do not always produce the same arm configurations.

Physically, gate arms have a polished metal look, and they seem to be impervious to signs of aging or physical damage, having an inherent self-repair function. Nobody has yet been willing to risk damaging a gate—at least that they’ve admitted—and so no one is quite sure just how resilient to damage these structures are. Analysis of the material properties suggests they can easily shrug off concentrated burns from even our heaviest beam weapons and are all but immune to personal weapons fire.

To viewers, the wormhole within the cage appears as a pure black sphere of nothingness, rippling with green static energy. Like the cage, the wormhole itself is effectively invisible on various electromagnetic wavelengths. The wormholes bleed Hawking radiation, however, so they show up very brightly and with a distinct signature on thermal scans.

The unknown fields surrounding each wormhole effectively keep the environments at each end of the throat or tunnel from interacting. This means that gatecrashers do not need to worry about suddenly losing atmosphere or getting sucked through if they open onto a vacuum environment, nor do they need to worry about the remote location’s hostile atmosphere, radiation, or gravity until they pass through. No sensory data passes through the wormhole; it is impossible to see, hear, or otherwise sense what is on the other side without passing something through.

Quote:"The Japanese government today issued arrest warrants for members of the terrorist organization The Order of Saint Grimace in connection with the bomb attack on Osaka Prefecture on 10 July, as well as a series of high-profile thefts of consumer electronics occurring shortly thereafter. The known members of the group as well as 'unidentified accomplices numbers 1-100' have been charged with terrorism, willful destruction of property, felony theft, vandalism and illegal entry into Japan.

"This assault on our soil by foreign interests cannot be overlooked," Public Safety Commissioner Shinozuka Yasujiro said at a press conference regarding the warrants yesterday. "Japan will not be cowed by delusional terrorists who believe that machines are people."

The Japanese stance on infomorph rights has been a major flashpoint in recent years between Japan and certain sections of the industrialized world. Protests by American, European and Iranian infomorph-rights groups have sparked strong reactions after the Order of Saint Grimace's allegations that the bombed factory was used to create sapient infomorphs for use in prostitution."
~ NHK WORLD online edition, 11 July 2039

JAPAN TO FEN MARXISTS: UP YOURS
~ New York Post, 12 July 2039

FEN MARXISTS TO JAPAN: RIGHT BACK AT YOU, BABY!
"Terrorist group the Order of St. Grimace struck back at the Japanese government yesterday after the announcement of arrest warrants aimed at their members. Order members allegedly hijacked the TV Asahi broadcast feed, replacing prime-time evening programming with amateur pornography allegedly starring top cop Yasujiro Shinozuka and a variety of farm animals..."
~ New York Post, 13 July 2039

ECSNorway Wrote:IHNPY, IJLS

Proginoskes Wrote:

ECSNorway Wrote:IHNPY, IJLS

???

ECSNorway Wrote:I'm personally wondering if the combination of the Djinn Effect and other new technology might end up making the RL-current "Arab Spring" less of a Muslim-Brotherhood-Love-Fest.

ECSNorway Wrote:I'm personally wondering if the combination of the Djinn Effect and other new technology might end up making the RL-current "Arab Spring" less of a Muslim-Brotherhood-Love-Fest.

Quote:Chinese squatters on Greenwood mining claim expelled by GSS militia, provided transport to Ganymede

A Rockhounds Inc team arriving on asteroid XF-3L9 (claim filed with the UN Space Resource Assessment Office 12/23/2017) arrived at their claim to find it occupied by a large, heavily-armed team of no documented origin. GSS frigate Arturius responded to the initial report and took the squatters into custody after a brief engagement, resulting in no fatalities.

While there was no direct evidence of the squatters' origin their equipment and weapons were all of Chinese origin and the men appeared to speak only Chinese dialects. Determining that this was a likely indicator of their origin, Arturius' captain (Commander Shiroko Seiba, GSS) delivered the men to the Ganymede colony for repatriation by the Space Patrol. 

~ GREENWOOD TIMES, 12 March 2018

Quote:China protests "armed thuggery" as violation of the disarmament clauses of the Outer Space Treaty of 1967.

The Chinese consulate at Luna City issued a strongly-worded protest this morning at the removal of what it called "independent entrepreneurs" from "their legitimate habitation of an unoccupied body" by Greenwood militia forces. The Consul called on the Space Patrol to disband and disarm the Greenwood Security Services militia forces, accusing them of violating the demilitarization of space required by the 1967 Outer Space Treaty.

~ LUNA HERALD, 13 March 2018