Musings
an Online Journal of Sorts

By Alyce Wilson

We played Confed again on Saturday. This was a special session, because we missed playing last weekend. Also, The Paper was feeling better and wanted to have guests, so she tempted us with cheesecake.

In this session, the race began. I'll try to recount it as best as I can, but I may get things slightly out of order or get some details wrong, so my apologies in advance.

This time the characters included mine, Carmella Maylock, a cheval trader (or gypsy); The Gryphon as security and espionage master Steve; The White Rabbit as Alauzhi, a large female cat creature skilled with weaponry; The Martial Artist as Taiwan, the idiot savant ship's engineer; and The Paper as Katy Swenson, a 21-year-old adventurer from a rich family.

Everyone took up positions on the ship. Carmella sat in the captain's chair, although only because she'd been railroaded into it. For most of the adventure, there was no commanding anyone anyway; they did what they felt they needed to at their different stations. I must say, this particular adventure is not terribly well suited for Carmella's skills, unless there's shooting required. Not to mention that some of the more unusual ship's maneuvers made her nervous.

The suspicions that the crew had had about the race, that it was going to be a free-for-all, turned out to be true. We even prepared for a possible invasion of our ship by other contestants, since we knew this had happened in previous years, but we didn't encounter that in the first leg of the race.

Katie, who was the best pilot on the ship, still wasn't infallible. She had to perform a series of piloting stunts before we could do a glimmer jump (hyper jump) to the next stage of the race. I believe the first was a gravity slingshot around a moon. She did a great job with the approach, but as we were coming out of it, a slight error allowed a competitor, the Orleans Du Sol, to come up above us and hit our ship with her exhaust, which rocked the Vandervecken about a bit.

This put the Orleans Du Sol in second, with Komachi, the rich adventurer, leading the pack in his expensive ship. He plays everything cautiously and is not expected to win.

With the Vandervecken in third, engineer Taiwan decided to do something about it. He called Allaujah down to help him, and by the time he was done her fur was standing on end. He basically rigged it to dump some of the ship's water supply into the fusion reactor, increasing the mass and therefore the speed. While the fusion reactor was military grade and designed to handle all sorts of abuses, the Vandervecken, a princess class ship, was not. It went into a yaw, rocking from tail to nose as they flew.

Of course, the people on the bridge, including Carmella (weaponry/ communications), Steve (tactics) and Katie (pilot), wondered what was going on. Katie was not terribly concerned, because Taiwan's jury-rigging gave the Vandervecken enough of a boost to bring her into second place, behind the Orleans Du Sol.

Carmella radioed to the engine room and asked him if he'd just done something. "Yes, but it's fine."

"Is it safe?"

"Sure, it's fine." Then, to himself, "We can travel like this for days before it explodes."

This did not, of course, reassure Carmella terribly much, but she didn't have much time to think about it. Two incoming missiles suddenly started nearing, courtesy of the Orleans Du Sol, that dirty cheating pirate.

Carmella tried to shoot the missiles out of the air, but it's very difficult to do, even for the best gunners, which she is not. However, Steve tried to hack into one of the missiles to throw them off course but failed. Fortunately, only one ended up hitting its target and didn't do any serious damage because it was a kinetic missile, not a nuclear missile.

But then their next stunt came up. They were supposed to pilot through an asteroid field, deliberately flying within a certain number of meters of three of them. As The Cheshire Cat, who is running the game and who was an astronomy major in college, explained the asteroid fields are not like the densely packed ones you see in movies like Star Wars but are more realistic, with asteroids much further apart.

Katie's flying was a little off for the first asteroid. We got a little too close, meaning that our gravity mirror, which is like the ship's shield, clipped the asteroid, both altering its course and causing fragments to fly off. Of course, this wasn't particularly good for the gravity mirror, which had to turned off for periods to allow it to cool down. Fortunately, Allaujah always turned it back on when it seemed like it would be needed.

At this point, Komachi, who had fallen behind, radioed to the Vandervecken. To put this in perspective, two members of the crew, including Allaujah, had had a very nice time talking to him at the ball that had been held for the race contestants, so the crew had been on friendly terms with him.

Carmella took the call from an angry Komachi, who said, "Are you out to get me?" or words to those effect.

"I assure you, that was unintentional on the part of our pilot," Carmella said.

He ranted a little more, with words to the effect of "Stop that or I'll say stop again."

"Copy that," Carmella said and hung up the line.

The next trip was another close pass on an asteroid, with which Katie had much better success. But the final asteroid, on a course that had been charted by Steve for what was supposed to be maximum efficiency, turned out to be a double asteroid. Apparently, when he'd sighted it from a distance, it had appeared to be single.

Because of the course trajectory, Katie had to fly between the two asteroids as they were spinning. Fortunately, her flying was a lot better this time, although the gravity mirror managed to strike both asteroids, sending them spinning opposite directions and creating more debris.

Steve radioed Komachi the coordinates of the altered asteroid, and the Vandervecken received another irate communications from Komachi: "You really hate me, don't you?"

At this point, the Orleans du Sol began firing at the Vandervecken again. Carmella attempted to hit the incoming missiles and managed to take out two, which Allaujah fired at them, too, hitting one. Then Carmella, using the rail gun mounted on top of the ship, fired at the Soleil Du Sol, hitting them right in their engine, effectively putting the ship out of commission for the race until their engineers could repair it.

During a long span of time while they traveled to the next stunt, Taiwan took care of some ship's repairs and Carmella, wanting something to do, scouted around the ship for any loose items that might need to be secured, therefore causing less destruction should something else happen. Carmella also spotted Katie on the piloting during this stretch.

Allaujah busied herself, as astrogator, doing the calculations required for the glimmer jump which would take place after the Vandervecken completed the final stunt, which involved flying by a brown dwarf and losing half of their speed by the time they had passed it, before jumping.

Steve, who was continually scanning the surrounding space, discovered that Komachi's ship was showing signs of using a particularly fancy sort of booster that would manage to skirt the rules but give him an advantage. Taiwan, who knows something about it, realized that extra metal in its way would screw it up, so he dumped iron filings out of the cargo hatch, screwing up Komachi's skip twice before he gave up.

The two ships were neck and neck as they approached the brown dwarf, and since they were both going at top speed, The Cheshire Cat informed us that whoever passed through the atmosphere first would ignite it! The crew certainly didn't want to be second, so Taiwan found another way to fiddle with the fusion drive, something involving lithium. Whatever it was gave the Vandervecken enough of a boost to pull past Komachi, setting the atmosphere of the brown dwarf on fire before making it through to the other side, air braking and losing half the ship's speed, as required.

As the Vandervecken was jumping, Komachi was cursing behind us, and as the ship entered glimmerspace, he fell to a day and a half behind. Of course, the Vandervecken was the worse for wear, since the gravity mirror faltered temporarily during the run past the brown dwarf, allowing it to shave off all but one of the ship's external mounted guns and shave off the (fortunately unoccupied) observation deck before the grav mirror was restored.

This was where we ended the evening's session, which was a logical place to stop. It was also nearing 11 p.m. by that time.

I'm indebted to The Paper's description of the night's session in her Live Journal, which helped get my memory straight on a couple things. I especially appreciate the kind things she said about my character, because I really felt like she wasn't particularly useful. Although I was honestly trying to play the character true to her personality. I figured that the most daring thing she'd done in the past was hop in her little ship and hightail it out of town after a botched con job. Rocketing through space at insane speeds as the ship shakes, a feeling Carmella compared to a 1973 Chevy doing 80 on the highway, well, that just wasn't something she felt comfortable with.

At one point, she asked, "What's the purse for the winners? Because I'm weighing big pile of money versus death right now, and the big pile of money is not looking so good."

I did manage to get a few lines out that made people laugh. I think my favorite was when we had absorbed the blow from the Orleans Du Sol's missiles, after they'd fired two at us, and had fired one shot at her which had been a near miss.

"Should we fire again?" Carmella asked aloud. "Well, we owe them at least two."

At this point, The Cheshire Cat laughed aloud, looking at The Gryphon and said, "She's a keeper."

Further adventures from Confed:

Confed adventures index

Copyright 2005 by Alyce Wilson

Musings Index

What do you think? Share your thoughts
at Alyce's message board (left button):