Holmishire — Roleplayer Guild

<Snipped quote by mdk>

Great to know, mdk, and thank you for the swift response. 

One more question... What does RPGC stand for? I am guessing that it means 'Role Play Game Challenge', but as I am new to the site, I am not really sure.@Revenant Writer
"Roleplayer Guild Contest". Much like the Twelve Labours, RPGC is a writing contest. There are, however, a few notable differences:RPGC employs a theme instead of a challenge. These themes are typically up to interpretation and non-restrictive.
RPGC winners are selected by popular vote, instead of by a panel of set judges. There are, however, usually bonus challenges that judges distribute prizes for.
RPGC accepts both short stories and poetry. On occasion, even some other things, depending on the theme.
Ultimately, the Labours are a challenge in self-actualization, while in RPGC entrants compete directly against one another. See here for the official info. (Note that I am not a contest mod—just helping to point you in the right direction.)


Now's probably also a good time to respond to the Eighth Labour results.

I thank both judges for their reviews. I'm glad you caught the intertextual consequences, @RomanAria—with the others' focus on the Ghost, I was worried I might have doomed myself.

@Terminal, it seems I have failed to live up to my promise. Not entirely unforeseen on my part, but a disappointment nonetheless. As for the plot holes, I take full responsibility for their presence—some were indeed due to a lack of exposition, but a few popped up in my attempts at streamlining the story. (I wrote a good 600 words on the subject of my errors, but realized such hindsight was likely of no interest to anyone but myself.)

The best I can do, then, is to push myself to do better next time. Ineffable Grace may well be outside my grasp, but I'm not out of the running yet!

Finally, @WiseDragonGirl, I hope this setback doesn't discourage you from continuing to fight till the end. Seven is impressive, but eleven even more so!

It's not, I swear. I mean, the 'cowboy' angle might be a little hard to read. I just *did not* have time to flesh out the setting.... so it's gonna be hyper-confusing hard scifi. My real-life obligations really sabotaged the contextual detail.@mdk

Speaking as one of the few hard-sci-fi experts here on the guild, I will now be sure to include critique on the scientific aspects of your story, if the other judge does not select it.

Good thing you mentioned that, huh?Terminal

You evoked the fiend. Now prepare for the Rhino's Bargain.

First, let us talk about lightspeed for a minute.

The speed of light also demarked as C, or 300,000 kilometers per second, is a universal constant. It is the greatest achievable speed possibly by any form of matter/energy on a local basis (this is not entirely true but is observed as enforced on a macro scale by discrete particles if not necessarily by the propogation of their patterns).

That does not, however, mean that objects cannot move faster than light. The classic, and perhaps overused example of superluminal travel would be an alcubierre drive. The vessel within the alcubierre field moves at nominal velocity with nominal acceleration; on a local scale it is not moving faster than light. It just happens that its speed within the distorted region of spacetime that is the alcubierre field permits it to move faster relative to light outside of the field. More specifically, light outside the field is still moving faster than the ship in question, but covers less distance in the same amount of time because the ship does not need to move as quickly in order to cross the same amount of space.

The more relevant implications reflect upon the perceived duration of travel. Since the ship itself is (presumably) not moving at relativisitic velocities locally, minimal time dilation occurs and the distorted region of spacetime within the alcubierre bubble operates on a geometric degree of relative compression; thereby the perceived time needed to travel between two arbitrary points is nearly the same from internal and external perspectives.

With that established, let us now review your mode of FTL travel.

In a place so black and desolate that the whole of the universe seemed a single point of dim light, three blights flashed white-hot and blue. Smallships in lunar boom decelerating past lightspeed and erupting with the gathered optic flash of timeless energy crashing against the abyss in a brilliant and terrible instant. The smallships slowed and circled and winked at one another in the language of jackals, pointed shapes bristling with impossible power. A voice on omnidirectional transmission cackled.

“The longest ten minutes in history,” it croaked. A man, or something alien but man-like and vicious. . .

Rupp waited in a bright room once familiar and full of pain, no longer familiar. For the room and the world it occupied she had been gone a lifetime, though it seemed to her less than a day. Besk and GN conferred outside with an aged man who scarce resembled the villain she remembered. His dark-haired scowl was ringed instead with gray and white, and filled now with regret in place of greed.@mdk

There are not many modes of useful FTL travel that necessitate severe time dilation as described in the story. It could just be that I am not familiar with them since all of the Space NRPs I have participated in required competitive designs, and in interstellar warfare the potential schisms that can occur while a fleet is in-transit assuming slow FTL is being used would doubtlessly lead to tragedy once the shoe drops. Getting to the point, the way in which you describe your superluminal transit permits the following speculation:
Your ships are, somehow, impossibly, moving faster than light in a direct fashion without any distortion of spacetime (happens more often than you think).
Your ships are distorting spacetime and are merely accelerating and decellerating across nominal velocity thresholds.

If the former is true, your ships would move backwards through time as they move towards their destination in space, and then would move even further back in time on the return trip - returning before they leave. Contrary to common expectation this does not create any unusual problems concerning causality due to the nonlinear nature of time; the issue lies in the now defunct utility of your chosen FTL drive since its operators would cease to exist in the observable universe (appearing in another freeform instance), thereby precluding further development and usage of your phantom drive in the first place. Following that chain of logic, the FTL drive used in your story either did not exist or else, from the perspective of the viewpoint character only exists up until the last moment she makes use of it - all subsequent usages of the drive by others would, from her perspective, fail and cause the users to vanish (since in her particular stream of consciousness the operable feasability of the drive remained at a constant so long as she herself continued to use it, though this would create large amounts of relative causticity in instance fidelity between jumps). However, we can rule both of these scenarios out as true since an extended amount of time passed between departure and arrival both ways and hence, this particular hypothesis has been definitively debunked.

If the latter is true, almost no time should be passing for either the observers or travelers and so the whole time dilation segue is likely to be wrong. I will permit the possibility of some weirdo drive that locally distorts space without also locally distorting time - I have never attempted to use or else implement such a drive in any of my own efforts and the utility of such a design escapes me. One would think it would be even harder to design than the already conventionally impossible mundane FTL drives seen in literature.

If I had to guess I would say you knew enough to determine that time dilation occured as a traveler approaches C, but the way the equations are set up the time dilation does not increase beyond the constant. The only way so much time could have passed in your story was if the smallships were travelling at just under the speed of light. As a reminder, the speed of light is 300,000 kilometers per second. There are 150,000,000 kilometers in an Astronomical Unit, the Solar System is (by some measures) around 150 AU in diameter, and the average distance between most stars (and thereby planets in star systems) is several lightyears. It would take you nearly a full lightday to travel from the sun to the boundary of the solar system, which makes the 'ten minute' jump to the colony ship even more perplexing, assuming it had passed beyond the heliosphere. The distance and local perceived time measurements remain around the same even when you start going faster than light, meaning it would take nearly the same amount of time from the point of view of the traveller assuming they were moving literally faster than light. The only real way to save on time in this equation is to go so explosively far beyond lightspeed that you could outstrip Spaceball 1. In fact, here is the specific calculation for you.
A single lightyear is approximately 9.5 trillion kilometers. Let us generously assume the generation ship in your story was around 3 lightyears away from Earth (although without FTL that takes generosity to a new level). Most stars would be more than twice as far from each other under normal circmstances, so this is not an unusual interception distance for our purposes.

The stated transit time is ten minutes, which means the smallships had to cover a mere 2.85 trillion kilometers every minute, meaning that they had to be travelling at around 9.5 million times the speed of light (that goes down to a mere 3.166 million times at one lightyear). The equations for calculating the exact degree of reverse time dilation are faintly arcane but, nonetheless, would likely take exception to these shenanigans and spit you out somewhen around the beginning of time. The universe is still an infantile 13.7 billion years old, I will remind you. Thus my confusion with your choice of FTL method.

If I were to go by the aside note at the bottom of the story, one might be able to interpret the colony ship as moving near lightspeed, which would then explain the time dilation if one also assumed a more convention FTL method was being used by the smallships. However, you do not actually clarify that matter in the story itself, and the way in which you have written the scene almost makes it seem as if the time dilation was due to the passage by the smallships rather than by interaction with the colony ship. I know you were trying to be unclear, but you surely succeeded far too well. There is an uncharacteristic lack of detail in this story of yours, so much so that it evokes your submission in the first labour. This is the skeleton of a story. 

Aside from simply being dominated by ambiguity, the details of the scenes and characters are extremely vague. Beyond the initial introductory scene and the description of the colony ship, there is almost nothing. I have no idea what these characters even look like. I have no idea what our more alien characters are like. I have no idea what sort of place Rupp has her meeting with Leon and Taina. You also, to your own detriment, omit critical details at multiple points - the paralytic brace on Lupp's wrist, for example, changes the tone of the entire scene but comes across as unintentional and probably should have been mentioned immediately.

As a minor aside, there is a faint internal error with the plot. Leon specifically states to Lupp that she can have her daughter back in approximately forty years, with serious surgical/tech assistance - although he is already aware of Lupp's actions and has undoubtedly already made his decision to kill Lupp and send Taina into assisted living. One could assume that was just a natural instance of a Human being awkward mid-conversation, as they are wont to be, but given the topic of conversation and his actual plans it seems curious that he would have not have been more careful in what he said, let alone put forth an illusion that served no purpose.

I also spotted one or two misspelled words and minor typos. It would appear whatever eldritch being you bargained with to grant you magic fingers has left you by the wayside. Perhaps next time.

Finally, this story does not really come across as a Space Western, though I get that impression in part from what I said earlier. This is a skeleton of another, greater, better story. Presumably one where Taina grows up and then decides to settle affairs through gratuitous applications of violence and space dogfights.

The actual reason Abyss failed the Labour, apart from its overall barren semblance, is that it simply did not meet the challenge criteria. The challenge clarifications specifically stated that you need more than one relative on the line, and that you needed both the old and young amongst their number - you gave us one vegetable.
@Terminal

I think I got the gist of at least 50% of that, but goodness. This is why I write almost exclusively fantasy as opposed to sci-fi.

So, um, anyone who decides it takes too long to read my entry is entirely pardoned for that, haha. I do believe it is fairly readable, but there can be any number of reasons. Mostly time-related reasons. It's only 3073 words short of half the first Harry Potter book in word-count, after all. Haha.@PlatinumSkink

I've not yet had the chance, and I don't know when I'll get it. But I will definitely read your entry before the next RPGC voting goes up.

The sheer number of characters was slightly confusing; thank you for color-coding the dialogue. [...] I’m really eager to see what happens to Antsi. If you ever write a sequel/followup, do let me know.@RomanAria

Certainly I went over-the-top with the Naksa tribe—before writing the story, I went ahead and created their whole family tree. Part of that is due to me using a different world for each Labour, and this one just so happened to be the one in which I've done the most worldbuilding. I am tempted to use it again in further Labours, but... we'll see.

Antsi il-Naksa in particular I came up with when I was twelve, but back then she was named Andeela Anteex. This whole worldbuilding venture has essentially been my attempt to take the dumb ideas I had as a kid and turn them into something useful.

Not quite up to par with your usual entries, in terms of final polish / proofreading, [...] There are just a few little typos that kept me from awarding this one with an Accolade.@RomanAria

I'm not sure when I've ever been good at proofreading.  I don't really think I'd have deserved the Accolade even without the typoes, though. Still, thank you!

Labour #8, now. What with all the demoralization I've been getting from @Terminal, if there's one Labour to get an Accolade, it's gotta be that one.

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