Igraine

Pieces of 8: Bones of the North

Hmmm... *thoughtful chintap*

Perhaps an angel might do what an angel would do in the middle of despair? For Veti and Thad, there really may not be much to do or decide there until Team Death does whatever amazing thing it finally does. But there's a distraught young girl with Henry; and there's also an incubus trying to revive a very scorched little vampire with his own demon blood.

Oh, and uh... Dawn is coming.

The Last Kings of Orion

Thank you so much Heroes, for all the pretties! Yes, he is the man with all the beautiful graphics because... Uh... Some of us just... Can't graphic. >.>

I figured we may start some time later this weekend or early next week, if that sounds all right with everyone, just so people have time to get their CS's up and mold them as far as they'd like before we begin. I know people have work and/or school and/or family obligations to meet (personally, I'm taking visiting family to tour Washington DC tomorrow). So does that sound acceptable to everyone, as a decent timeframe to begin ICly?

Pieces of 8: Bones of the North

That was a wonderful post - thank you LP. Love Kata - she really is such a wonderful character :) And I hope real life gives you a bit of a break or, if it must keep you busy? That at least it's a good busy and something fun.

Pieces of 8: Bones of the North

All righty, I hate to be wielding "ye olde poking stick" here, but LP are you going to be posting imminently? Team Death is waiting for your response, and the rest of us are - in the main - waiting for the end game on the other side of life! :)

Loki's Laugh

Looking forward for when you can finally break out your Ragnar and Haakon and Ivarr all over again!

The Last Kings of Orion

From a photograph affixed to the interior of 11-year old Michael A. Davis’ stasis bed. Written in a neat, precise script on the back, ‘Christmas Day in Red Wing, 2029’

Name: 1SG Abigail "Abby" Jane Larson

Occupation/Crew Position: Military Police Supervisor/Security Specialist

Age: 34

Background: The youngest of five children, and the only girl child at that, Abby grew up in Red Wing, Minnesota, alternately protectively spoiled and playfully tormented by her older brothers: Alan, Aiden, Aaron and Alexander. The matriarch of the Larson clan, Anne, was a high school secretary and her father Alistair, a combat veteran of Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm, was a captain on the Red Wing Police Department.

The happiest memories of Abby’s childhood were of the summers and winters spent on the Minnesotan lakes. Swimming, waterskiing, snowmobiling, snowshoeing and even ice fishing, the Larsons spent weeks at a time with aunts, uncles, cousins and grandparents, basking in the warmth of a genuinely loving family. Athletic, outgoing, and eternally full of mischief, Abby raced in her big brothers’ footsteps, bedeviling teachers and frustrating her parents (in the most charming way) all through grade school, and then on into high school.

She saw no reason for that to change when, during the summer of her senior year, the dirty bombs of 7/4 were detonated in San Francisco and Los Angeles. Abby gently, but irrevocably, set aside her parents’ dreams she’d settle down to become a teacher, or maybe a nurse - anything sensible really - when she enlisted in the US Army as a military policeman, the day after Aaron and Alex. Her first tour of duty after basic was in the combat zone of the Korean Peninsula. Abby emerged from the other side of that conflict wiser, and sadder, and knowing her family had expanded to hundreds of brothers, and even a few sisters, for whom she’d gladly give her life.

Aaron and Alex returned to civilian life after the China Seas, but Abby did not. She’d found her place, a calling and a sense of purpose, having a hand in protecting the people and things she held dear. Abby liked being an MP, and she was damn good at it.

That hard-won and early maturity though, didn’t necessarily extend to every corner of her life. Sometimes Abby was tempted to jokingly claim that marrying her squad leader SGT Ned Davis, a year after settling in at her first CONUS duty station, was probably the most spectacularly awful mistake she’d ever made - but that wouldn’t be entirely true. No, not that she’d made bigger mistakes before or since – she hadn’t. But if Abby hadn’t indulged just once in being young and dumb, there would be no Michael Alistair Davis - and even with all the good already in her world, that boy was the very best.

The mistake of marrying a hard-drinking, womanizing asshole was a quick enough fix three years after it started (even without taking up any of her brothers on their enthusiastic offers to come kick his ass). But with a little boy to raise almost entirely on her own, Abby doubled down on her determination, she’d do everything in her power to give Michael a world worth living in.

Promotions came, and schools, her time put in as a drill sergeant in Fort Leonard Wood and, of course, deployments. Abby had just come off her second back-to-back unaccompanied tour, when she got what ought to have been a shit assignment at a pissant post in Wyoming. As First Sergeant for an MP company at a testing range, there wasn’t an awful lot to do but ensure the roadblocks were up during missile launches and the right people were waved onto base; that the roads to “the Mountain” facility an hour away were well-patrolled and clear of unauthorized personnel, and that bored soldiers didn’t get up to too much trouble in their down time.

But for Abby, this assignment was just the breath and space her little family needed most. This was a post where she could be home for Michael when school let out, and help him with his homework. She could take him to baseball practice, and sit in the bleachers most every weekend like every other Mom, cheering her son's team. Abby could even put in for leave over a holiday or two, to visit her family in Red Wing.

She could have never imagined the singular importance of this duty assignment, any more than the rest of their world could have anticipated The Change.

The Last Kings of Orion

For anyone interested who just happens to find us? So sorry but this is a closed RP, and the people who will be participating already know who they are.

And finally, thread up! I'll be updating with all the pretties as they come along, but for all of you who requested a thread to chat and post up the CS's? tah dah! And after this post here, I'll post a CS for my character that can serve as a template for anyone who might still need one. Long or short, it really doesn't matter at all - just something to introduce your character to the rest of us!

The Last Kings of Orion

This is a CLOSED RP

“Everything is theoretically impossible, until it is done. One could write a history of science in reverse by assembling the solemn pronouncements of highest authority about what could not be done and could never happen again.” ~ Robert A. Heinlein, The Rolling Stones

And All We

The year 2028 saw the beginning, and 2031 witnessed the end. “It” started small, of course, and truth be told, no one could ever say for sure when “it” had started, or how. But eventually “The Change” had crept up over the coasts of Chile from the Pacific.

"The Change."

Sure, the press-assigned name was innocuous, rather dull to say the least, but that did not make the initial swath of destruction any less horrific. Fish and sea mammals died off in numbers that left South American coast lands a wasteland of rotting carcasses. And every so often, a thick, poisonous yellow mist would blow inland, choking every living thing unfortunate enough to cross its path.

The eco-zealots worked themselves into a frenzy, screaming their half-assed theories from every makeshift pulpit they could find about secret giant corporate chemical dumps, or biological weapons, or the “natural consequences of anthropogenic global warming,” and so on, ad nauseum.

That is, until the first of the New Kind made their way to shore.

These… things, these creatures of the New Kind – had no precedent anywhere in the hundreds of millions of years of Earth’s evolutionary path, emerging from the oceans and infected shores in just a few stupefying months. Evolutionary and marine and terrestrial biologists, oceanographers and virologists and climatologists alike were helpless to provide any inkling of an explanation for their appearance, much less a solution .

A matter of no consequence to the New Kind. The aquatic creatures came first insect-like creatures came first – at least to the visible eye - and then the reptilian, the avian and eventually some that almost resembled mammalian life forms. There were only two common factors between all The mist didn’t kill them. Rather, the Kind seemed to thrive in the thick poison that killed all other life.

The enviro-cultists remained convinced the Kind were mutations produced by pollutants or contaminants of some type. What other explanation could there possibly be? How else to explain what had happened to the once happy-go-lucky ocean creatures, obviously deformed into hideous monstrosities by the greed of giant corporate interests and the callous disregard of all those vicious SUV drivers with their murderous carbon footprints?

Evolutionary scientists hypothesized this might be the start of a mass extinction event; that perhaps the disappearance of the dinosaurs had nothing to do with a cataclysmic meteor strike, but some hitherto unknown mechanism that initiated a radical change in the entire biosphere.

But the proverbial life’s breath was summarily sucked out of the world for all time with the final, truly terrifying revelation: hex-stranded DNA.

Alien. Whatever the hell was happening, it was not – and never had been – terrestrial in origin.

The aliens had landed – and somehow, no one had even noticed. Space and surveillance agencies across the globe, from NASA to the Russian Federal Space Agency, were all “baffled” according to their copious press releases – not that it mattered for long. As if someone – or something - had flicked a switch, The Change began to spread with a sickening speed, expanding its reach geometrically, grasping fingers of irrevocable death across every oceans and continent.

Initial efforts to “quarantine” the affected areas of South America in the heat of nuclear fires were doomed from the start. Whatever the hell these things were, they brought their environment with them - atmosphere and strange plant life, single-celled and multi-celled organisms all consuming and digesting and regurgitating the rich primordial soup of Earth’s living biology to promulgate its own existence. The paper thin layer of organic life that had always lived on Earth was simply being devoured. Eaten and shat out for something no longer even… Recognizable…

And What We Still Have to Hold Close

The last known enclave for Earth’s pre-Change biology was known as “The Mountain.” A top secret joint military and civilian base located in the Rockies of southwest Wyoming, this unprecedented undertaking dwarfed even the Cheyenne Mountain Complex in size and scope, The Mountain did not even have a proper name beyond the rather obvious moniker. And yet near a century of unprecedented, unwavering dedication and international cooperation was the lifeblood of this complex. Nation of origin - Israeli or Chinese, American or Sudanese or Russian or Norwegian or any hundreds others over the decades – were all subsumed to their single-minded dedication to their respective work and fields of study. Financed entirely by vast sums of private capital, organized beneath the protective auspices of the U.S. military, the work the scientists, researchers and engineers developed in The Mountain was entirely cutting edge, highly experimental - pure science for its own sake, unfettered by financial or governmental restraints. Suspended animation, biostasis, asteroid mining, faster-than-light travel, reactionless drives – science fiction was being made real, all with the lofty hope of seeing humanity colonized among the stars.

But with The Change came a new sense of urgency among these brilliant men and women, the first inklings that something was about to go horribly, irrevocably wrong with the whole damned world. The unthinkable somehow became the probable, and then a horrific certainty. Their ambassadorial flagship the Copernicus, mankind’s greatest technological achievement to date, would become humanity’s ark.

Or rather, an interstellar Noah’s ark.

Even as cities, nations, and then entire continents were snuffed out of existence, devoured by the relentless, fatal colonization of the New Kind, those still working in and around the Copernicus fought to the bitter end to recover every last human life left possible in the contaminated environs, though these gains were precious few. Agricultural, space farming and microgravity experimentation – and one desperate run to a nearby wildlife rescue sanctuary – ensured everything from paramecia and wolves, blue algae and red roses, found their place among the denizens of the Copernicus. Only when they were certain there was nothing more salvageable in the poisonous wasteland that had once been Earth, the side of that nameless mountain was blown out and the Copernicus launched to begin its fifteen year sojourn.

Fifteen years. Annual shifts were established for a handful of the six thousand, seven hundred and twenty-two adults aboard, rotated out so that walking, talking people could watch the hydroponic projects, care for the animals they were able to salvage, perform maintenance and resource recovery on the Copernicus, chart the medical progress of the “sleepers,” and pilot the ship.

Fifteen years, until they came to the first planet that might - just might - sustain human life.

And Where All Hopes Lie

Despite the invaluable treasure she ferries across the galaxy, the Copernicus is not herself a lovely ship. Some 400 meters in length, the ship’s exterior is smoothly cylindrical when fully operational, and segmented into five identical, rotating sections that turn about an axis comprised of the ship’s separate engine bays. Within the engine axis is a series of passable holds and locks that can be detached in case of emergency or, as they were originally designed, at planet fall on the less-than-sexily-named M15233-18.

Otherwise known – either tongue-in-cheek or with a desperate hopeful fervor by the crew of the Copernicus – as Canaan, “the Promised Land.”

The sweet Promise Land of Canaan, anticipating the arrival of her new people on the Copernicus.

Each of her five sections is a completely self-sustaining unit, containing both human, animal and plant samples salvaged from Earth. All shipboard assets - from hydroponic laboratories to engineering bays and medical facilities, from the waking crew living quarters and mess to animal pens and reclamation processors - are all spaced equilaterally within each. In addition, four pod-bays are located at a “pole” within every segment, each pod-bay capable of supporting five hundred “sleepers.” At the moment, those still held in stasis are spread more-or-less evenly throughout the Copernicus, though of course all family members – sleepers or the handful of wakened crew – are housed within the same section.

This is the Earth year 2034 AD, and the start of the third “shift change” aboard the Copernicus. The oncoming crew is being woken from stasis, receiving their respective status briefings and preparing to begin their annual duties – this time, to include the essential harvest of ice from asteroids located at their aphelion orbit of the red dwarf G217. The first of four scheduled materiel collections operations in “normal space,” this will be a true test of nerve, skill and design for the awakening crew.

The Copernicus

The Copernicus is approximately 400 meters in length, the exterior built with utility in mind. The entire ship resembles nothing so much as an enormous cylinder comprised of five equilateral sections surrounding an axis through its center. Each of these sections, specifically designed to separate at planet fall, is self-sustaining, outfitted identically in terms of personnel and supplies, and capable of independent space and terrestrial travel. For so long as the Copernicus' sections remain intact however, the command module of the forward (first) section remains the main location for the vast majority of piloting and navigation.







Because many of the awake crew will have to perform multiple shifts, every wakened crew member has his or her own personal room, to be decorated - or not - as desired. These rooms consist of a bed, multiple built-in storage areas, a "portal" portraying any view desired and communications access and, while not spacious, do provide a modicum of privacy and "normalcy" in the most extraordinary of circumstances.







Recreational and mess areas were deliberately constructed to provide for comfort and ease, and are deliberately neither military Spartan nor austere. Though bathrooms are by necessity communal, considerations for privacy, dignity and a very human touch were intentionally designed in their layout.



The vast majority of those on the Copernicus are, of course, in cryostasis. Within each of the five sections are located four different stasis bays, each bay capable of maintaining 500 beds at a time. It is the vital work of the medical technicians to ensure all these beds are maintained and monitored each day of the Copernicus' sojourn.



The asteroid mining ships and the crews that operate them ensure the lifeblood of the Copernicus continues to flow.



Specially designed space exosuits have been developed to cater to the specific job-related needs of each crew member who must enter the vacuum of space, to include maintenance personnel, engineers and the asteroid mining crews.

AmongHeroes: Dr. Gavin Brock

Derren Krenshaw: Antoine Eadoré

Dotcom: Deli Beltran

idlehands: Owen Reece

Igraine: 1SG Abigail Larson

Justric: Robert S. Bach

KuroTenshi: Connor Douglass

Lillian Thorne: Stella Albright, DVM

RoadRash: William "Big Bill" Cothran

SECONDARY CHARACTERS

Derren Krenshaw: Mowzer

Dotcom: Maya E. Coleman, Ha-neul Bae Park

idlehands: Ester Baum, Naomi Ben Zeev, Henry Graham

Igraine: MG Benjamin S. Lahan, Pauline Bethany Weber

Justric: Jack Pumphrey

Lillian Thorne: Penelope Raffin

RoadRash: Sgt Michael Davis

Tides of Dusk: A Piratical Tale of Fantasy

The look Mademoiselle Beauchamp gave him very nearly set the boy back over the edge of the ship's rail he had perched upon. Luc had not the least idea what he may have done to earn her so obvious scowl of disapproval - even disgust. Because he surely had not spoken with her. Ever since the admonishment this morning from Captain Lightfoot, he had said precious little to anyone at all beyond the absolutely necessary, as to Monsieur Morneau as they cooked and scrubbed. What thrill of joy the captain's small salute had given him was scorched away beneath the First Mate's withering glare.

Yes, he had watched her - but so too had any number of the crew, and surely he was not so obvious as all that? Still, if he had the power Luc would have sunk into the ship's deck and disappeared utterly - maybe to slink away to the galley, or to his hammock - or better yet to the bottom of the ocean if he had truly done something to earn such a contemptuous gaze.

It was the near tangible power of that look from someone so beautiful, so obviously angelic, that made the boy take a step backward beneath its weight, in a single terrible moment losing all sense of his natural grace and falling helplessly into thin air, to the churning waves below -

"Ah! Luc! Where do you think you are headed now?" A strong arm snatched the boy back, wrapping quickly about his waist and pulling him to rights aboard the railing. Antonia's heart hammered in her chest, and she fought every instinct in her body not to hold the boy close, to just embrace him and thank a kindly God and all the loa that he had not gone overboard.

In the end, she did offer up that small, silent prayer of gratitude, but she did not hug him tightly to her as she so desperately wished. The crew would think him a ridiculous, spoilt child - and Luc would not thank her for the humiliation. Instead, she simply joined him on the deck rail, sitting now, her legs swinging lazily as if nothing could have possibly gone awry in the past few moments.

Luc - a happy, healthy child and, even now, just beginning to show the inkling of the man he would become - got over that harrowing moment rather quickly, smiling and content to see his beloved aunt for the first time since the morn. He missed entirely, the nod and the softening features the First Mate sent his way.

"Tante 'Tonia! I've missed you, and there's so much to tell! I was not sure you would ever come down from your perch up there!"

Antonia laughed, shaking her head. "I cannot spend the entire voyage aloft in the crow's nest, Luc." She pointed upward into the darkness, toward the height of the mast where the dark outline of another figure could be seen. Barlow had come to give her a respite, though he hadn't looked very happy with the prospect. She had managed a touch of a smile out of the kid, with the promise she would lay a wager for him on the Captain. Antonia was just superstitious enough, that she would do nothing of the sort on her own behalf - but she most certainly would not have laid a wager down for the helmsman, even if he'd asked it.

"Even I must come down on occasion - and besides, there is a contest afoot! The captain and the helmsman it seems, to climb the rigging... Though I must ask Luc, what in heaven's name were you thinking, that you would decide to take a walk off the deck rail?"

At the mention of the helmsman and the captain, Luc's face brightened like the sun - though his visage darkened once more when his aunt asked about his near tragic mishap, falling with the dejection of that remembered moment.

"Mademoiselle Beauchamp hates me Tante 'Tonia, and I do not know what I have done. I have not spoken out of turn, as Captain Lightfoot told me this morning. I have not been staring... Well, I mean of course I looked at her, but not so rudely I thought... " Antonia's heart broke as the boy's voice trailed off, the sadness on a face that should only ever know smiles and laughter making her want to hug Luc to her all over again, though she fought that sudden impulse once more.

"No, no sweet boy, she does not hate you! She simply does not know you. Not yet!" She glanced to the First Mate, and decided... No. Quite simply no, this woman could not possibly despise Luc, who was no more nor less than a good boy, her boy. Surely there had been some mistake, perhaps he was simply overtired and overwrought from his first long day at sea?

Yes, surely that must be it! Because who could possibly not love such a good, sincere child?

Luc peered up hopefully to his aunt, listening to her words with a wistful little half-smile. But it was not until he heard Monsieur Jax's call that Luc's jubilant smile broke like daybreak after a storm. Obviously the helmsman, in his equally obvious moment of distress, did not note the shadowy rogue beside the boy - but that was fine with Antonia. It would not be the first time after all, and she was only grateful to the man for restoring the boy's spirits in a single moment.

"Go on then," Antonia whispered, giving Luc an encouraging pat on his back as he jumped to the deck from the rail and swiftly wound his way through the growing crowd of sailors to Jax.

He did not dare look toward Nicolette but, without a single word, the boy pulled up in front of the helmsman, smiling so proudly. He reached beneath his shirt as those dark, amber-lit eyes gazed up to Jax, picking up the twine between thumb and forefinger about his neck and holding it out to the helmsman. The shark's tooth gleamed, slightly luminous in the moonlight, from its perch in the makeshift. Luc's grin somehow grew brighter still as he showed Monsieur Jax irrefutable proof, that the members of the Secret Cabin Boy Club did not simply abandon its own to the whims of fate!

Though honestly, if Captain Lightfoot too was a member of their secret club? Would he be giving Jax far too much of the essential good fortune needed to win? Was that really fair, or was it...

Luc shook his head swiftly, as if to clear it, before taking a deep breath and continuing to smile up at Jax expectantly. Some matters were simply too weighty for the ponderings of a young boy's mind.

Silently and unnoticed by Luc, the rogue approached the small but growing knot of people right behind the little boy, relieved to see his small, sweet spirit was not dampened at all with Jax - even in the presence of the lovely Nicolette who so unnerved him. She lay Barlow's wager of a piece of ivory scrimshaw on the captain, and then stayed back a ways, her arms folded over her chest easily, listening far more to the conversations about her than she ever spoke, as was her wont.

Loki's Laugh

HA! XD Thank you Kuro - Eyja's always fun to play; and yes, Sigrid is pretty damned magnificent, isn't she?

And no, there's nothing there I'd change at all Idle - it looks just perfect to me!