Challenge #02425-F235: A Study of Abnormalcy
On the Edge there are many prisons. Some of them are just normal, regular prisons, but you can also find a special prisons.
Heavenworlder (name) is trying to learn about human psychology. Probably the best place to learn about “true human madness” is prison for unstable human murderers.
“He talked about murders with some sort of weird passion. But he started to be aggressive when I asked him about his childhood experiences. He struggle against cuffs and tried to reach me. If not for the guards behind me this would be probably my last day.” – Anon Guest
Walls and bars do not make a prison, but they certainly help. That said, there are many ways to restrain those who are abundantly dangerous and Humanity has been through literally all of them. From outright execution through shipping them off to a distant land with optional deadly hazards[1], and finishing with… this.
An entire planet dedicated to keeping the homicidally dangerous peaceful, happy, and contained. The population is incredibly sparse, and the landscapes are stocked with animals for them to predate upon. Those who need company have companions who are trained to handle them without making it look like they were being handled. Those who don’t are well away from any intelligent life they could harm.
There is a city, but it is populated almost exclusively by the people who study the people who only know murder as a valid response to life’s challenges. It is well-fortified. Entrances and exits are tightly controlled. Not that the dangerous residents care very much for city life, but those who choose to live there prefer to feel safe whilst they do so. Many who live there are fellow Humans. Some were Galactics of a tougher breed. One… was not.
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Challenge #02423-F233: The Hubris Initiative
He was the sort of person who stood on mountaintops during thunderstorms in wet copper armour shouting, “All the Gods are Bastards!” ~ Also by Terry Pratchett – Anon Guest
There’s inviting trouble to your door, and then there’s stalking it for apparent fun and alleged profit. Inviting trouble is asking questions with obviously painful and demonstrative answers from the cosmos, like: “What else can go wrong?” or, “So what’s the big deal?” or, “How can we possibly fail?” Stalking trouble… well, to do that, you would have to be Fenris Pole.
Human Fen was one of those people who don’t react to trouble, they go actively seeking it out in order to punch it in the nose. They drew a conclusion from a standing start and leaped straight to it with weapons drawn. Frankly, it was amazing that they survived to adulthood, let alone Human middle age.
When facing a system potentially threatened by an apophis-class asteroid, Human Fen would fly out to the rock in question, analyse it, and devise seven different plans to stop it being so much of a threat, most usually steering it into the closest convenient gas giant or, if one wasn’t available, the sun. On rare occasions, Human Fen would simply bust out the mining equipment and profit off the molecular contents. It all depended on the makeup of the asteroid in question.
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Challenge #02422-F232: Crit Happens
Most gods throw dice, but Fate plays chess, and you don’t find out ‘til too late that he’s been playing with two queens all along. ~Terry Pratchett
Also known as being a DM. (Dungeon Master) – Anon Guest
Imagine a game so complicated that even the experts have to look up the rules. It is not just played with dice, but also cards, charts, tables, books, miniatures, and a hell of a lot of imagination. There is only one person at the game table who knows anything about what’s going on, and that is the holder of the core of the story. They know most of what’s going to happen. Well. What’s most likely to happen.
The one thing they don’t have control of is what the players are going to do. Because everyone who plays this game is a chaos demon in roughly humanoid form. They have a set of rules, too. A set of rules almost as complicated as the entire game, with permutations and corollaries so complicated that nobody could keep track of them all. Player choices leading to potentially infinite customisation not limited to the character’s appearance, but also throughout the game.
The game can last for years. Groups meeting to play on a semi-regular basis. Play interrupted by life events, by colds and other virii, by children and the associated shenanigans, by spouses, by family, by work… but they keep returning to play. A game that can involve pop culture, dirty jokes, incidental weaponised singing - both in-game and out - research, improvisation, and massive amounts of bullshit made up on the fly. No one session is completely predictable. No game is ever played the same way by any group of players. It’s no surprise that something this phenomenally complicated is also something invented and enjoyed by Humans.
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Challenge #02421-F231: Organically Sourced Isotopes
The stasis box arrived in successive layers of protective wrapping, depending on which port it had shipped through, and which species did the transporting on the next leg of its rather long journey. Upon seeing the parcel that was now the rough dimensions of a sleep pod, Human Jef had one thing to say.
“Bloody hell, this is gonna want a lot of unwrapping.” Human Jef started rolling the dolly and the parcel on it towards their special enclosure that protected the rest of the Havenworlder crew from everything Deathworlder that could potentially harm them. “All this fuss and bother for some fruit from home.”
“Fruit?” echoed Thys the Companion. “This is Deathworlder thing, yes? It explodes? It is poison?” The package had warning labels on top of other warning labels. By all rights, it should have been thrown into the heart of a dying sun just to make certain that the Universe would no longer have it in existence.
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Challenge #02416-F226: Pheromone Formula Number Nine
H: “oh SHIT”
I rushed in as soon as I can, noticing a pink liquid spread across the floor as I slipped on it.
H: “you should lock yourself in you sleeping quarter for a few hours”
My body began to heat up, as the human helped me up they look different form they was a moment ago, Breathing heavily.
M: “why should I?”
I was on the floor again, pulling the human down with me.
H: “Its a universal aphrodisiac” – Anon Guest
Realistically, it shouldn’t make sense. So many species had different body chemistry, different pheromones, different fertility cycles, different plumbing… Yet it was happening anyway. I was feeling in the mood for some solidly beneficial haptic feedback. Human Jaz was the same way, I could tell by their dilated pupils and elevated breathing.
“This is wrong,” said Human Jaz. They were fighting their call of the wild and I had to wonder how. Truly, these creatures were as they said - space orcs. To resist something that powerful. They had to be powerful and I had to have them as my bedmate.
“Is it?” I challenged. “This feels just right to me. I can make it feel right by you.” I couldn’t understand how they could resist. The feeling was overtaking my brain. Some part of me still protested that I couldn’t possibly mate with a Human, but that was a dull whisper compared to the part that was screaming about how I could find a way to make it work.
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