wanderingwolf

Firefly - Second 'Verse

Welcome to Bugman! Stoked to get you into the story!

Also, I finally got Lyen's CS up, now just to get to work on SAM's.

Firefly - Second 'Verse

Lyen Giu

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Name: Sister Lyen Giu

Age: 36

Appearance:

Lyen stands about 5'2" with a lithe frame, dark brown hair typically restrained in a long braid. She has almond brown eyes and wears a bright orange kasaya robe which denote her vows.

Skills:

Lyen's past sports all sorts of sordid activities, but that was more than ten years ago before she took her oath and handed her life over to service of the Temple on Santo. A year or so after that saw Lyen studying medicine under the tutelage of a somewhat famous Dentist-turned-bushdoctor on a Firefly class ship across the 'Verse. She still knows her way around an infirmary, but her skills have needed to evolve due to lack of resources. Most importantly, her penchant is for matters of the heart and soul.

Personality:

Sister Lyen has been a nun for thirteen years--with all the patience her station affords any woman who chooses the cloth. She is kind and earnest. Life experience has taught Ly that nothing is black and white, and so her grip on the harsh precepts taught to her at the Temple long ago have loosened over time. Underneath her skin, there's still a rebelious woman who has her own demons to face.

History:

Lyen's parents were taken from her while she was a child, but not by plague or war. Her father was a miner, her mother was a taven worker; one left the family out of selfishness, the other lost her life to chemical coping. Self destruction was a common theme for young Lyen Giu.

The rest of her young years saw pain as she fell in with gang life on Santo. After a seminal moment in her life, Lyen took a sharp turn into the cloth and her vows at the Temple of the Order of the Interverse. She spent the next ten years learning about the Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha.

At the end of ten years she was tasked by the mothers to go out into the world and to do good, saving as many people as she could. And so following that charge, Lyen found herself in the company of a captain of a Firefly class ship, traveling between plantes on the rim.

When her time ended aboard the ship, Lyen, still following her calling, stumbled upon a blight upon society in the Blackout Zones of Osiris. Since that time, and for years hence, she has been working to alieviate the suffering of the subjugated and enslaved in the dark underbelly of the most 'just' city planet in the 'Verse.

Firefly - Second 'Verse

Howdy Crew,

I'm dropping a note here as an update on my hiatus.

The update is...

It's over! I'll be easing back into the role of Cal, and as things stand, I wanted to say thank you to all of you for your support and to Sail for keeping the wheels on this bus. I am behind on a couple fronts (I need to get two CS's up, one for Lyen and one for SAM who feels awfully neglected), but bear with me!

I hope you're all well and I look forward to seeing you all on the board.

Kind regards,
Wolf

Firefly - Second 'Verse

Hello you colorful gang of space-flying miscreants.

As you've all probably noticed, my posting fervor has been lacking in the last month or two or three. After discussing this with Sail, he floated the idea of a hiatus for me, and I accepted.

One of our guiding tenants here at FF2V is to Write When It's Fun. This is a game and we ought to be having fun!

That said, I need a little time to get my head screwed back on the right way so that I can enjoy writing Cal and the gang properly.

Sail will be running the whole shebang for now; he has graciously accepted writing for the Captain until I come back. I'll be around, and I'll be unreachable, I just need a little space to pursue some other evolving things in my life. And I'll still be writing in the game, in some capacities.

I'll drop this message in our GChat as well, but I wanted to say thank you all for your patience and collaboration with Sail and me.

May the road rise,
Wolf

Firefly - Second 'Verse

Loose Lips Sink Ships

Osiris, Day 1, Bridge of the China Doll

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Before Sam had the opportunity to reply to Tommy's queries, Yuri spoke up.

"Will do, Mr. Antonov," it almost sounded like there ought to be a wink following the salute, but as she had neither eyes nor arms, the incorporeal feeling would suffice.

It was almost with delight that Sam's circuits accepted Yuri's offering of Tommy's particulars. Now, any existing searches into the identity of Tommy Pearson were augmented to fine tune for typical background biographical information. Soon, the AI had a spread of information unfurled in front of her like a deck of cards with which to build her model of the bonafide Mr. Pearson.

"To answer your question, Tommy, I'm neither crew nor passenger." There was a clicking static through the bridge com momentarily as if she were considering her reply. "And at the current juncture I have no interface with which to project an image for you to reference. Apologies." Her sterile tone tapered into one of disappointment.

"I see you fought in the war," Sam's tone was even as she gauged Tommy's facial expression. "But you signed on as an engineer." Her matter of fact tone continued, "What makes you qualified as a pilot?"

<Tag Tommy>

Firefly - Second 'Verse

And You Are?

Osiris, Day 1, Bridge of the China Doll

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As Tommy's hands sprung to work on the console, Sam cataloged his prominent facial features, any scarring, or birth marks. Though she had no real basis with which to compare, she accepted the human notion that the symmetry present in Tommy's visage would classify him as handsome. Herself? She was still dolled up in the myriad shells and beads courtesy of the last pilot to hold the post, tucked safely out of sight nestled in the communications bay.

The com behind Tommy crackled to life, "Hello, potential pilot Tommy, my name is Sam," her Bostonian accent lilted as her words emanated from the speaker fixed in the console. There was humor prevalent in her response, "And I don't think this ship is haunted, and I know every inch of her." Her crystalline voice somehow echoed through the com clearer than it should have, like she were sitting beside the pilot, leaning on the console with a smug look on her face--well, if she had one.

"Do you have a surname, Tommy?" The AI asked with an air of curiosity. Such data would vastly accelerate satisfaction of the historical and motivational unknowns present in the man's accumulating dossier. Already her initial analytic picked up on the nuances of his accent, his speech pattern, his timbre and 'yaw,' as it were.

<Tag Tommy>

Firefly - Second 'Verse

Hello My Name Is

Osiris, Day 1, Bridge of the China Doll

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And she certainly was watching. The artificial intelligence module dubbed S.A.M.N.T.H.A. whirred away in her little black box tucked away under the fore storage below the flight deck. From the moment he had set foot on deck and from every receiver, the AI cataloged the prospective pilot's movements, though from the capture scanner's poorly situated location in the console, visual data had been omitted.

She was practically leaning on the edge of her metaphorical seat as the communicator in the bulkhead listened for his response to the first mate's all-clear for him to make himself comfortable at the flight controls. Sam waited for him to check the China Doll's readings; to step squarely into the range of the capture sensor, so that she could get a full picture of this 'Tommy.' Her artificial brain already began erecting models which would become her understanding of the human before her.

Given name: Tommy (67% chance a shortened moniker for 'Thomas' || Thompson in some cases || An elongation of the name 'Tom' || An anachronism from Earth-That-Was denoting a soldier for the British army || A Japanese horror manga series featuring 'Tomi' Kawakami)
Surname: Unknown
Profession: Pilot (97% assumption due to Yuri's presence on the deck and conversation overheard on the coms after entry)
History: Unknown...

In the milliseconds before Tommy placed hands on the controls, SAM began running a search on the Cortex at large, using their location on Osiris, the man's first name, and profession as mile markers for narrowing the results. Until she discovered his surname, the search itself could possibly take an indeterminate amount of time with relative accuracy; and to an artificial intelligence, data was everything.

Rather than wait on her concurrent searches to yield results, the AI decided to engage the subject in a more direct manner.

"Greetings, Tommy, and welcome to the China Doll bridge."

The immutable logic of binary if and then statements riddled with if elses and try catches dictated from her study of the human condition that she ought to exchange pleasantries by way of introduction before moving on to vastly more pertinent information. The AI sighed internally, a secret circuit she'd forged to attempt a hands-on study of sarcasm vis a vis the limitations of thusly dubbed 'civil' conversation which precluded the transfer of data in a timely manner when conversing with humans.

<Tag Tommy>

Firefly - Second 'Verse

Club Banebdjedet

Blackout Zone, Osiris, Day 1

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The road back to the blackout zone was packed with the busy comings and goings of the spaceport. Lyen's orange kasaya robe had become a common sight to see for the inhabitants of the Capital City's working class such that they scarcely reacted to the sight of her as they once did. Over the last two years Lyen had made the atrocities of the blackout zone her chief concern, and as a result, had drawn much attention to the gap in Alliance justice.

In a city planet as wealthy as this, the dark underbelly existed with a blind eye so that the Alliance could comfortably exploit without having to look into the faces of the people who bore their burden. The ingress to the blackout zone closest to the spaceport manifested as a handful of guards stationed at a nondescript back alley between two bars that rode the close edge between dive and derelict. The guards wore rifles slung over their shoulders and there was a bright screen fixed to an archway scanner emitting a visual message of warning and illegal entry.

As Lyen approached, her eyes followed the trajectory of the men's gaze. One guard tapped another at her arrival, who, upon sighting the orange robe, rolled his eyes and placed a palm on the scanning apparatus's controls. "Sister," he intoned with gall, yet the scanner let out a different chirp which signaled to the nun that she could pass. As her robe faded from view, the archway scanner returned to it's previous menacing red digital signage.

"Why do we just let her through?" asked the third guard of the first.

"Order of the Interverse has pull with the powers that be. Spiritual folk can come and go as they please. Waste of time, if you ask me," the guard replied, bringing up another screen and notating on it.

"And that's why we track when we see her?" he followed up.

"Nah, that's something else. Need to know. So turn around and stop asking questions." After clearing his throat, the guard busied himself with his cortex.

The base of Lyen's operations inside the blackout zone served several purposes, from childcare for the indentured inhabitants, to a medical clinic for minor healing and tending to the sick. Today, as she stepped over the threshold, she was greeted by many of the same faces that had assisted her last night at the China Doll's rendezvous point.

"Sister Lyen!" came the cacophonous calls, which the Sister answered with a wide wave. The hall she squatted in had once been a strip club whose neon signage still professed 'les nudes,' 'showboys,' and 'XXX' around the space in various stages of disrepair and dismantling. From the exterior, the edifice read 'Club Banebdjedet' for the Egyptian god of fertility and virility, with the neon outline of a man's body and ram's head horizontally balanced on a pole, legs spread wide.

"Jùjí zài yīqǐ, háizimen!" she called, as she hoisted herself onto the center stage, one hand resting on the pole planted there. "I have a message for you to bring back to your families: Tell them to gather their belongings; I've found a ship to take you to a better place." (trans: gather around, children)

At this pronouncement the throng of children watched with wide eyes in silence until the nun's brow raised quizzically. "Now go!" she laughed, pointing to the door, "And tell them to be ready when I call."

The children began chattering in their native tongue, a dialect spoken only on the rim planet from where their families had been forcibly taken and, eventually, indentured here on Osiris. After a minute of watching them go, Lyen shook her head, a smile spreading to her eyes. The Verse had finally answered her prayers of two years, and it would mean freedom for the oppressed.

Art by Wanderingwolf

Took a couples weeks and made this backrooms animation just for fun. It’s a little goofy but I learned a lot. https://youtu.be/O7zVqLpBn5E

Firefly - Second 'Verse

Meet and Greet, Pt 6

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"Thanks Yuri, why don't I handle this one while you catch your breath," Cal's smile was good-natured as he plucked the clipboard from its perch on Yuri's cast.

Just then, the Captain caught sight of a young man in black slacks and a jacket striking out among the crowd as his gaze followed the arching neck of the China Doll. With a jerk of his head, Strand signaled for Yuri to address the fellow. That was, if his new mate could make heads or tails of his queue this time around.

Closing the distance between himself and Quill, Cal saw to the particulars to seal the deal. With the stylus unclipped, it busily scribbled on the holo board in the Captain's psuedo cursive slant. "Alright, a double it is. Under 'Quill Cassidy.' Say, any relation to Buck Cassidy, perchance?" His brow furrowed for a second before he thought better of his question, "Nah, he's a swindler on Hera, and lookin' at you I'd say you ain't never been off Core." He looked up from the clipboard to add in passing, "No offense."

"Anyway, I don't have a hard ETU, but it's lookin' like near on three days before we thrust up. How'd you like to pay your fare, Cassidy Shao Jeh? We take cred and coin. After, I can show you to your berth."

<Tag Quill, Yuri>