Challenge #00544 - A169: The Un-Secret

Dunno if you’ll like this one, but I ran across it:

“The thing about evolving on a death world is that you don’t really realize you’re doing so until you get the chance to leave it. Up to that point the presence of carnivorous monsters, venomous micropredators, extreme climatic conditions, geological instability, the most lethal cocktail of microbial and viral life forms in the galaxy and of course the crushing gravity, seemed entirely natural. Until we left Earth we thought ourselves rather weak, frail, defenseless creatures because we only had earth fauna to compare ourselves to. You can imagine our surprise then, upon joining the galactic community to find ourselves in fact to be enormous, robust and insanely dangerous in our own right.” – RecklessPrudence

The humans had literally gone all out to ensure T'reka’s comfort while she recovered from her broken leg.

They’d made her a nest-bed and a special ward where she had a panoramic view of the human town below. And they made sure she had access to their entire database and an ever-evolving translation app. And rechargers for her own technology.

They even invented a patch for her comms system so she could check in with her origin city.

Which was how T'reka found all the archived documentaries.

Su-syn found her staring in awe as David Attenborough narrated his careful and whispery way through explaining life on a coral reef.

“You is good?” she chirped. “You is not needing more calm-shots?”

“No, is good.” T'reka shook herself. Fluffing her feathers and resettling herself. “Am now knowing human secret.”

“Secret? We is no hiding true from you.”

“You is not knowing it is a true,” T'reka soothed. “You is living be on death world, before come here. Whole planet - deadly. Big thing, small thing, big risk, all time. You not noticing. Not knowing other way.”

Su-syn smiled. Uttered a brief laugh. “You is making jokes, yes? Earth no death world. Is where all human living.”

Yes. And that’s the problem. “Earth living four time tough than Hu'lu'a living. Human four time tough than Numidid,” she tried to explain. “All you big tame animal? Still big threat to me folk.”

Su-syn made a face like something smelled bad. “Even sheep? Even chickens?”

“All,” confirmed T'reka. “You folk many much tough than most others star folk.”

Su-syn sat down abruptly. She just folded her legs and landed solidly on the floor. “Is not shock, you folk is think we monster,” she murmured. “We is promise we try no be monster for Numidid.”

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Challenge #00543 - A168: Sufficiently Advanced… Rituals

[In a discussion about technically-proficient people (of any subdivision) and the lies-to-children told to those they have to interact with]

I think we know why wizards just act all cryptic and stuff…

I imagine they had to keep explaining their knowledge of the arcane to the average peasant over and over again until they just got fed up with it.

And that’s how we get wizards, mages and sorcerers who seem to delight in not giving a straight answer. – RecklessPrudence

There were those who saw Isobel as a god. There were those who saw her as an angel sent by their deity to see them safely to their distant and unreachable paradise. Some saw her as some form of divine intervention in mortal form.

One saw her as a friend.

And now… one different one saw her as a pain in their anatomy and a threat to their authority.

His title was Sir. A fact he reminded everyone of at the slightest hint of a slip. He wore ancient passkeys and sigils of authority, strung on a huge chain around his richly-robed body. He had a harem of under-dressed ladies who he apparently employed to keep him warm and distract any participants.

Pity for him her attentions were solely on the door he’d carefully blocked with his throne of office.

“None may pass,” he repeated. “None! Which word do you fail to understand?”

“I do not understand why you don’t wish to reach Eyisum,” said Isobel, feigning the unique ignorance of a foreigner.

“Eyisum is a state of mind. Eyisum is where our spirits fly. Do you wish to kill me, outsider? Do you wish to kill yourself? This chamber is sealed under the curse of Karantin.” Quarantine. “To enter is to die!”

Her scanners were thorough and had detected nothing in there that could harm a rat. And had, in fact, only picked up rats inside there. Large ones, certainly, but not deadly.

“Then it seems in your best interests to let me pass,” she finagled. “If to go through that door means death, then it seems the quickest and easiest way to prove my hubris to all.”

There it was. The telling flicker. He was a smart enough martinet to know that the machine-gods of Arta were not performing as advertised. Therefore he feared that the forbidden zones had similarly lost power. His power relied heavily on that of their gods. If that power was gone, so was his.

“To enter is to die,” he repeated. “I have men with crossbows to ensure that fact.”

“And I have micro-meteor-rated space armour,” she countered. “Your men are welcome to try it.”

“Enough of this nonsense,” he sneered. “Defense grid, fire internal lasers co-ords eighty by five-three-niner by twelve!”

Isobel heard them warming up and neatly stepped off the entirely suspicious and freshly-repainted X on the floor. Even then, they could barely have managed a first-degree burn on an unprotected citizen.

He’d lost. He’d very clearly lost.

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Challenge #00541 - A166: Ancient Curses

Fragmen of stupri mauris. Quare non opus est? — RecklessPrudence

[AN: I ran this through a translator and got: “Piece of fucking shit. Why not work?” :D LOL ]

There’s working on repairs with trained technicians… and then there’s working with someone who’s learned certain things by rote as part of a holy ritual. Someone who - though she had the brains to work out that the rituals were supposed to be useful, and had successfully applied some of them in other circumstances - still applied those rituals because they were the only way she knew.

Isobel could tell when her friend and ally Jem was reciting an incantation. Mostly because they were far more eloquent.

“Cock-sucking son of a bitch! Work you firkin dick biscuit!”

Sometime, possibly when they were on a break, Isobel would educate Jem on exactly what she was saying. And what some of those ritual gestures meant at the time they became part of the ritual.

As it was, she took it as a general sign that Jem was having trouble. Which left the problem of communicating what the trouble was with an ancient dialect that neither of them could use with accuracy.

Yep. Toasted circuit board. She’d have to fabricate a new one. “This one?” She disconnected it and showed it to her. “Bad-bad beans. Meringue umbrella. Jello roof.” And, in final clarification, turned her thumb downwards and blew a raspberry.

Jem blew a raspberry in agreement. “Fuk dup the ass.”

Okay… Isobel could work with that one. This whole first contact situation was going to give the Archivaas conniptions.

There were no replacements on their vessel, now called some variant of Home. Arta. They called their ship Arta.

Isobel would have to make a new one. Good thing they had plenty of raw material.

Jem kept treating the tech printer as an amazing holy relic. Isobel’s attempts to show her it was just a machine had negligible influence, but Jem would happily watch something come from component elements in avid and reverent fascination.

And holy song.

Such a pity that the ancient engineers of her ancestry had had a very crude taste in music.

Isobel would never have believed, before her arrival in Arta, that Charlotte the Harlot could have ever been sung reverentially.

With the new circuit in, the air generator whirred sluggishly into life. Isobel helped Jem restock it’s necessary supplies and tweak it into full functionality.

"Effing eh?” prompted Jem.

“Effing eh,” Isobel agreed. “Nek minit? That dick biscuit,” she selected the machine that looked ready to collapse.

Jem’s face said it all. “Jussinbeebur…” she muttered.

Isobel felt inclined to agree.

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Challenge #00540 - A165: Opus Apparatus Spurius

Series of posts, each blank line denotes a new poster:

[Comparing real-life understanding of tech by the people maintaining it to a fictional universe] Of course, this is minus the stupid witch doctor rituals.

“Have you tried turning it off and on again?” comes to mind. And a lot of other rituals.

Doesn’t that actually help with a significant portion of callers?

[Fictional universe organisation] rituals work too, except when they don’t. Doesn’t make it any less of a ritual that is performed without understanding why it might help.

Clearly. The next step is ritualizing it. Add some latin chanting as well.

I think the orthodox chant is “Fucking piece of shit. Why isn’t it working!” repeated in a low mumble. Just translate it into a language the people around you don’t speak and you’re done. – RecklessPrudence

Isobel was suddenly very grateful for her camouflage field. She kept to the walls as she followed the chanting people in what was once a functioning generation-ship and was now a floating hulk. A floating hulk bare inches away from disaster. A floating hulk on the precipice of the catastrophe curve and inhabited by… tribes.

She had no doubt that their names translated to ‘the people’, but they had very obviously devolved into primitive tech-worship. Isobel had seen them maintaining machines that had very obviously failed. Performing repair tasks on artefacts well beyond repair.

Using dead remotes as religious totems.

There were some patches of leftover cogniscents who were almost completely sealed off from the rest. They used air vents as a mode of travel. Air vents! If they were working properly, then the denizens would have been chopped to pieces by the fans or eradicated by the blockage destruction systems.

It was like watching someone trying to cross a canyon by stretching dental floss across the gap and then traversing it like a tightrope.

This time, the ritual worked. This time, the machine that made the air whirred into life again. This time, there was great rejoicing.

She stood, contemplating the one machine that kept the entire… mess… alive. There were others, but they had fallen into disrepair and disuse, though they were still altars for these poor, lost people who believed their distant and unreachable destination was heaven.

If she cannibalised the defunct machines to repair one other…

To what end?

These people were doomed.

One of the priestesses also lingered at the temple that was once the air recycling system. Staring, apparently, right at Isobel.

There’s no way she could see through…

“Ghost! I command you be gone!” She said. An old form of Terran English that fascinated Isobel. “Canhazchizburger!” And she threw a handful of salt and poppy seeds at Isobel.

Salt and poppy seeds that caught in the seams and folds of her suit. That effectively rendered her camouflage moot. Isobel turned it off and raised her faceplate shielding. “I am no ghost,” she said carefully. “I come in peace for all mankind.”

“You am come to save us?”

Well, crap. That counted as a distress call. “Yes,” she said simply. She was going to have to call for backup… but since her own love of history just landed her in this pickle, she could very well use it to unpickle this whole gen-ship. “I am name Isobel. You am name is–?”

“Jem. Me am name Jem.”

“How is you see me? I are hidden.”

“Eyes be seeing less,” answered Jem. “Some colour they go bad. You have many more bad colour than everything. Is look like Solja in gilly suit.”

Wait. She was colourblind? This was going to be some extreme variant of fun…

“We begin, make more new air?” Isobel offered.

Jem nodded vigorously. “Can has new air kay th'x bye.”

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Challenge #00539 - A164: Come to Australia (You Might Accidentally Get Killed)

“On most airplanes, in an emergency oxygen masks will be deployed from above your seat. This is an Australian airplane however; in an emergency, we will deploy drop bears from above your seat.”

Either way, the lack of oxygen problem is quickly solved. – RecklessPrudence

“What? Why would you do something that barbaric?” Esterhazy boggled.

“Well, the oxygen systems are tied to the landing gear, see,” Shirl expanded without missing a beat. “If there’s no oxygen, then the landing gear’s got to be buggered and, all things considered, the drop bears are a more merciful death.”

“I… thought… the drop bears were endangered?”

“Endangered? Yeah sure. But they’re also tough as guts, mate.”

“There you are,” said Darleen. “Have you finished bullshitting the noob yet?”

“Yeah, nah; I was up to the screaming spiders when ‘e bloody derailed me.”

“Bullsh– Do you mean to tell me you’ve been having me on?” The look on Esterhazy’s face was more than priceless.

Both mad Australians grinned. “Aw, it’s all right. We’re just havin’ a lend.”

“Yeah,” added Shirl. “Wanted to sneak up on ya and scare th’ crap outta ya.”

“Here’s an actual fact sheet of the local things that can kill you.”

“Madam,” said Esterhazy, “This is a fact novella.”

“Yeah, it’s a bit thick,” shrugged Shirl.

“Just a bit,” agreed Darleen.

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Challenge #00538 - A163: Graveworld

The universe is probably littered with the one-planet graves of cultures which made the sensible economic decision that there’s no good reason to go into space—each discovered, studied, and remembered by the ones who made the irrational decision. – RecklessPrudence

Nobody knew what the natives called it. There were no natives to ask. Whatever had happened on this world had destroyed all but the simplest and toughest of organic life, but left the buildings and infrastructure to be slowly buried by the forces of nature.

If there was anything more frightening than a dead city up close, Quilla couldn’t remember what it was. The knowledge that this was a whole world of dead cities was strictly intellectual. Roaming the actual empty streets and staring into the cavernous depths of echoing and dark buildings was far more visceral.

The whole place set her teeth on edge.

No bodies. Not any more. Scavengers had taken care of that. Statues told her and the other explorers what these people had once looked like.

Quilla stopped at one such monument that had evidently been broken in half by a fallen tree.

“You okay?” asked Enat. They’d been working together on trips like this for years. But this was the first grave-world that they’d encountered.

Quilla gestured at the statue. “I got chills. Look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair.”

The two of them trudged onwards, looking for some hint of what had occurred. Silent.

Out of respect for the dead.

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Challenge #00537 - A162: Panelbeating

“Wow, how’d you get it to work?”
“I ran a Physical Impulse Mechanical Stress Routine”
“Huh?”
“I kicked it.”
“Ahh.” – RecklessPrudence

It really only took ten minutes to fix, in the end. A little heat. And a lot of whacking with the right kind of maintenance.

She charged them an Hour for her work, part of which was a ‘luck tax’. As in, they were lucky they reached her to fix the problem.

In the maintenance log, Desiree wrote, Repaired problem caused by too much percussive maintenance.

Which was a nice way of saying, Got rid of a dent that was jamming the works.

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Chalenge #00536 - A161: Mercy Maintenance

I’ve made jokes about “Reboot… with steel toes” and “troubleshooting with a 12-Gauge - PULL!” plenty of times! – RecklessPrudence

A certain sign of doom amongst engineers is whistling backwards. It means something expensive is about to happen. When they hiss through their teeth whilst breathing in… there’s very little to be done.

“It’s bad, isn’t it?” asked Rael, off-the-books-apprentice.

“Eh,” the engineer currently in charge shrugged. “Pass me the hammer.”

Rael obediently did so. “I’d have thought it couldn’t be saved by percussive–”

SMASH!

Rael stared, terrified, at the mess of parts and shattered pieces. He was certain he’d gone silver from stress, but daren’t move to check.

His tutor put the hammer down. “Now we write in the report, attempts at maintenance accidentally destroyed the part and it had to be replaced.” He nodded in satisfaction. “Honestly, if we had repaired it, it would have been a last-gasp situation. Which, considering that this is a freighter, means lives are at stake. Sometimes, a quick and clean kill is the only medicine available.”

Rael cleared his throat and quoted the famous stop-and-go mechanic, “Just shoot this shit, it’s only fair?”

“Nailed it,” said his tutor with a grin and a snap of his fingers.

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Challenge #00535 - A160: Rève-rie

“Yes, I am a dreamer. For a dreamer is one who can find his way by moonlight, and see the dawn before the rest of the world.” - Oscar Wilde c/- RecklessPrudence

Everyone who met her knew that there was something wrong with Sai’dut. She would talk to herself, or stop her appointed tasks to stare at something irrelevant, she would grow forgetful or latch on to some asinine entertainment and learn everything that nobody wanted to know about that thing.

Her fellow Cheletes tried to help her. gave her constant lessons on being one with her fellows. Or at the very least how to pretend to blend in with the greater hive.

Little ever took hold.

Sai’dut couldn’t help being the way she was, and drifted to the corners to do those things that she found satisfying.

Which was how she found the humans.

Only it wasn’t that direct.

It began with a cautioned file. Warnings abounded on a traded relic of a broadcast from a distant planet she had never heard of. It had lingered in the data equivalent of a back drawer for some time. Not important enough to remove and not vital enough to be accessed.

Sui’dut opened it to see why there were so many warnings on it.

Someone had taken the time to translate the human words into GalStand subtitles. But the important part was the puppet frog who told her that though being what she was was not easy, it was its own kind of beautiful. And then the same puppet sang about the wonders of rainbows.

She devoured all related information with a voracious hunger that she hadn’t known until she’d accomplished that little taste. In passing, she learned of Jimhenson and Muppets and Sesamestreet… and all the wonderful things that the humans did.

She learned of Harryhausen and Generoddenberry, and hundreds and thousands of other dreamers.

People who made pretend worlds. And shared them. And made things interesting. And made art.

Other Cheletes scoffed at her efforts. They called her mad. They said she was wrong.

But in the end, when the collision happened between the ship she was a passenger on and the malfunctioning Terran vessel from a planet called Britania, it was Sai’dut who made contact and succeeded in communicating with a human named Harry.

It was broken Sai’dut and a tea lady who wound up saving the day and improvising a way to keep everyone alive until help arrived. Because dreamers also live in nightmares, and ponder daily how to conquer them.

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Challenge #00534 - A159: Exceptions to the Rule

An Outside Context Problem is the sort of thing most civilisations encounter just once, and which they tend to encounter rather in the same way a sentence encounters a full stop.
-“Excession,” definition of an OCP c/- RecklessPrudence

Thus it is that the Cogniscent Rights Committee has passed numerous laws to prevent them. Shipping through inhabited systems with recognised intelligent life native to them is generally forbidden until such time as that native population has regular and reliable space flight.

Similarly, leaving an inhabited planet to face disaster without aid is criminal.

Thusly, interstellar groups are extremely careful when they encounter an inhabited system. First contact situations are usually kept to a minimum and, if possible, orchestrated.

There are two exceptions: the humans, which is self-explanatory, and a species known only as the Greys.

Little is factually known about them, save that they are a plague to pre-interstellar systems, and vanish without a trace once those civilisations stretch beyond their own star.

The Cogniscent Rights Committee has an outstanding reward for anyone who finds the Grey’s base of operations and brings the species to justice. There are nigh-infinite counts of purposely engineering Outside Context Problems for civilisations unprepared to encounter them.

The humans want to talk to them about numerous human-made landmarks. But that’s humans for you.

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