The Institute
The year is 2388, and humanity has been exploring the stars for more than a century. They are part of - and, indeed, one of the founding members of - the Commonwealth, a federation of worlds spanning thousands of light years and dozens of inhabited systems. Commonwealth starships are a regular sight no matter where you might be, always pressing outward into the unknown with their crews of scientists and scholars. System by system, they go, boldly, in the name of knowledge, of first contact, of finding the stories that nobody has heard for a thousand years.
This is not a story of those ships, or those crews. Well, not really.
You see, space is huge, and beautiful, and terrifying, and ancient. Those ships and crews, their lives are anything but simple. Adventure awaits out in the void, and it might not always be what you expect. Sometimes the crew just has to remodulate the shields or rotate the spectrum of a confinement beam, but sometimes there's more to it than that. Plucky engineers create wholly new technologies, or an ancient space probe might turn out to be slowly turning the ship that discovered it into a copy of a stone temple from its homeworld. Maybe there's a device out there that lets you transport yourself one universe over - and the only way they found out about it was after someone from that universe came here.
All of that is fascinating, and of couse it needs to be studied, analyzed, and sometimes just plain kept out of the wrong hands. Or any hands. But that's not really all that important to the mission of exploration, so the plucky and intrepid crews of those starships send that information back home...where it winds up at the Ashwari Institute. Where it joins the tens of thousands of other artifacts, accidental sentient holograms, personal time-travel devices, and the brass-plated urn from Hekanis IV that turns anything dropped inside into half a kilo of lentils.
There are, of course, scholars at the Institute - but though a combination of fickle academic attitudes and the sheer volume of material forwarded by starship captains, almost all of it is intimately known to only a very small number of people - the custodians of the Institute's archives. They are the overworked, nearly totally unappreciated people that allow the Institute to function at all, they are the people whose job it is to determine what these things actually do, and to create and above all maintain the vast catalogue of cosmic detritus that, for almost everyone else in the Commonwealth, stops existing once the shuttle comes to pick it up.
This is a story of those people.
Because something's gone missing.
----------
Hi!
So, this is an idea that's been rolling around in my head for a couple of years, and I thought I might try to do something that wasn't uban fantasy for once. :3 Really, the elevator pitch here is sort of "Star Trek meets The X-Files," but with a dash of John Scalzi's "Redshirts" and "Galaxy Quest" thrown in.
Your characters will be people working for the Ashwari Institute, an enormous research facility on a far-flung Commonwealth planet - one part academia, one part Silicon Valley. You are a team whose job it is to sort though the world-changing wonders and marvels that show up on a frighteningly regular basis, figure out what it is they do (via, of course, the always-incomplete notes of some ensign or seemingly barely-literate captain), and add them to a catalogue. Occasionally some holier-than-thou professor or harried junior clerk will show up at the storage facility and be variously gracious in asking for one oddment or other, but for the most part your time is spent just barely keeping ahead of endless shipments from further and further away.
You are overworked and underappreciated, but you aren't paid - like Star Trek, this is basically a post-scarcity society, so you're doing this for a reason that isn't directly related to rent money. Maybe you believe in the Institute's goals, maybe it's better than boredom, or maybe your sister was barbecued by something that should have been sent to the Institute but wasn't.
I have a loose plot in mind, but it should be something fairly flexible and open. I don't expect you to 'bring your own story,' but I do love seeing people press on the world and incorporate what they do into the larger arc. The tone of the story is one that will generally bend more towards 'fun space opera' than 'dour examination of cosmic horrors'; I don't have any plans for people to be grabbed by the brain stem and left gibbering on the deckplate. More The Warrior's Apprentice, less Event Horizon.
But before I get too ahead of myself - this is an interest check, after all - who out there might like to join something like this? :3
The only thing I'll say is that this would probably not be first-come first-served, and I tend to have some pretty high standards. But this is the Advanced section, that shouldn't exactly be a problem.
