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[RFC] The Westerosi
[RFC] The Westerosi
#1
This started as a Fenspace story, but has since wandered far afield from its roots. Posting the first couple bits here for comment before posting it elsewhere. Enjoy. ~ The Mgt.
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Bran

His mother hated it when he scrambled across the rooftops, but for a boy of seven namedays the roofs of Winterfell were the greatest playground imaginable. From his perch above the castle’s everyday life Bran could see everything, above and below. He carefully clambered up the rubble of the Broken Tower, aiming for the very highest point. Beneath him Winterfell sprawled like a great grey tree with tangled roots, and above the sky shone a brilliant blue.

Around him the North stretched around him like a vast green carpet. Bran peered out, imagining that he could see the whole of the North, if not the whole of Westeros from his vantage point. His eyes strained to look north, searching for the vague blue haze that marked the Wall, or the vague green haze of the Neck. Beyond that, Bran fancied he could see a tiny flash of red-gold an impossible distance away marking the site of King’s Landing.

Bran looked to the east, trying to see far Essos with his eyes and fancy, but instead saw a tiny, bright speck of light high in the sky. At first he thought it might be a star, but it was nearly midday. Furthermore, the speck seemed to grow nearer as he watched it. Whatever it is, it’s coming towards Winterfell.

Bran’s eyes widened as he realized what it must be. A falling star! He’d seen brief glimpses of falling stars before, out his bedroom window deep at night, never before in the day. The minstrels often sang of the Daynes in Dorne, how they found a falling star and made the legendary sword Dawn from the metal in its heart. Maybe we can find this falling star and have some star-metal of our own. A sword fit for Father, or for Robb, or maybe I could take it and do something great out there, in the lands beyond Winterfell…

As he watched, the star blazed overhead, a great fire in the sky trailing smoke, almost close enough to touch. Bran reached out to touch it but could only feel the heat of its passing in his fingers and face. The star continued to fall westward towards the wolfswood. Behind it came the faint rumble of thunder and a thin moaning sound just on the edge of perception.


Melisandre

Candles burning around her, the red priestess gazed deep into the hearthfire. The Lord of Light’s visions taxed her strength to receive, and her wit to interpret. Lord, Melisandre prayed, show me your will so that I may do what is required of me. Must I turn away from your instrument? Was I wrong? I had been so sure…

Visions danced in the flames, looping and whorling across each other. She saw towers of glittering black crystal rising from a red wasteland, and men with steel limbs contending against one another. She saw a pale creature with eyes the color of old ice glaring hatefully from a tower of blue stone and gold. The enemy? Have I seen the Great Other?

In the spaces between the flames, she saw stars spinning endlessly in the night. One star detached from the others and fell to earth trailing smoke and burning feathers. The fallen star touched the ground with a mighty blast. The image blurred and resolved into a woman with stars in her hair and eyes the color of wildfire.

This is not Azor Ahai, she thought. And yet… the enemy, the star and the woman. My Lord would not show this to me if it did not mean something. Melisandre rocked back from the hearth, sweat pouring from her brow. She mopped the sweat away with a stray scrap of cloth; the visions had been harder and harder on her these past few weeks, and it would not do for a priestess of R’hllor to show weakness.

She turned back to the fire and summoned her will for one final effort. Show me my path, Lord.The fire surged, and she saw war, death, suffering, sorrow and darkness reflected in the flames. Behind it all, the tower of blue and gold gleamed with malevolent, pale light from the very summit of the world. She saw the hazy figure of Azor Ahai framed in that baleful light, and the wildfire-eyed woman calling down the stars.

Melisandre tore herself from the vision with a cry and fell to the floor, spent.

The Three-Eyed Crow

Tangled within the weirwood’s roots, the last greenseer watched with mingled concern and curiosity as the flames around the falling star faded, revealing a great metal dromond which tore a swathe through the wolfswood, shattering trees and ploughing a furrow through the forest soil until it came to rest, its prow barely an arm’s span from an ancient and forgotten heart tree.

Well, that’s new.
T H E W E S T E R O S I

Log Entry: Surface Day 1

Goddammit. Just... goddammit!

I’m going to die on an alien planet. Always figured that was going to happen, but I’m actually kind of pissed that it’s happening now. I don’t even know why I’m recording this, or for whom. Maybe some bug-hunter will find it thirty years from now, or Starfleet. Maybe I’m just putting this down so I don’t just stick my head in the reactor core. Who knows.

Anyway, for the record, everything was fine on my last planned check-in on Flight Day 612, so I didn’t just vanish into subspace. I made it to my destination and that’s when everything went wrong. I’m still not sure what happened, the logs were partially corrupted during the crash and my memory’s... fuzzy... about the whole thing, but instead of doing an orbital survey like usual the Carefree Victory lost control and I ended up falling into the atmosphere like the Queen of All Idiots.

My next check in is in a week. A month past that and I’ll be listed as “overdue.” Six months after that and no sign of me, Starfleet will officially write me off as lost. It will be very sad, there’ll be a nice memorial service, I’ll get my name and maybe a picture on the memorial wall and life will go on. Jade Hasegawa, one of many glorious martyrs of the exploration of space.

And I’ll still be here for however long it takes for this planet or existential despair to kill me.

How to begin?

Starfleet. The mission: seek out new life and new civilizations, boldly going etc. The guys in the big ships with the big crews and the shiny uniforms get all the publicity, but they stick close to home for the most part. They run patrols around Earth, Planet, Yushan, Shamballa and the like, sometimes they’ll survey the systems on the nearer fringe of Federal space. The realinteresting work is done by me and my buddies in the Starfleet Rangers. We’re... a looser group than average, not quite freelancers but not as tightly controlled as the fleet boys and girls. Rangers go where angels say “I’m not getting paid enough to do this,” and sometimes we find some pretty amazing stuff. Sometimes we don’t come back. A lot of the time we don’t come back. Fuck.

Moving on before I get depressed again... I was chasing a lead from the Tanis Map. The Map’s an artifact left behind by a civilization we call the Builders, because they were into making shit and just leaving it all over the place. It’s an annotated catalog of somewhere around a million stars relatively close to Earth. Pretty much the biggest and most awesome treasure map in the galaxy so far. I love it to bits. Every Ranger tries their hand at a Map location once or twice in their career, because the potential payoff is amazing.

My target for this run was catalog designation FSC-29294, a system way the hell out on the far edge of the Map a good seven hundred-plus days flight one-way from Mother Earth, further out than almost anybody else has gone. I picked it because the Builder annotations intrigued me: we’ve finally started to get a decent handle on the Builder language, so we can actually read the notes left behind, great stuff. FSC-29294 was tagged with the glyphs for “sanctuary,” meaning that this was a place the Builders wanted to protect, and “watch” which was something we hadn’t seen on any nearby system. Sanctuary worlds tend to be good places for artifact finds, and an all-new glyph meant there was something there the Builders were interested in, so I decided to check it out.

My ship was... is... the FWSC Carefree Victory, AGS-3172. She’s a Triumph class, a specialized deep-penetration scout vessel based off the old Archer class. Like the Archer, the Triumph has the classic Starfleet flying-saucer-with-outrigger-pontoons design, though she’s so small that she can actually land on a surface with relative ease. Unlike the Archers, which actually had a pretty large crew for a ship so small, my Victory is a singleship, designed and built to be operated by just one person. Well, just one person and a host of non-sapient virtual intelligences. Not the greatest company, but they keep things running. Victory and I have been together for about ten years now, we’ve been all over known space and done multiple deep missions together.

I hope I can fix her. I really do. Even if I can’t get her all the way home, if she’s unrecoverable I don’t know what I’d do.

Victory dropped out of subspace on Day 614 and we started the basic survey of FSC-29294. The star’s not that exciting, just an everyday old G-type. Eight planets, couple dozen minors, nothing too dissimilar from Sol. The third planet in had signs of a decent environment, so we coasted in to take a closer look and... I don’t know. Maybe it was a collision, maybe something else. All I know is that one second we’re fine and then we’re falling.

The last thing I remember seeing is a whole lot of trees suddenly in my glide path.

I awoke to a massive headache and the feeling of a gentle breeze. Which when you’re on a spaceship is never a good sign. My face was covered in blood—I must’ve faceplanted into the controls on landing—the mains were offline, automatic systems killed the power to prevent any surges, the emergency lights were glinting dull amber and I could smell vegetation. The good news is, the planet’s capable of supporting Earth-type life: I know thanks to the fact that I’m still breathing. I pried myself out of my seat and half-stumbled back to the overstocked first-aid station I call a medbay to clean off my face. That, thankfully, turned out not to be too bad, just a few nasty scrapes that bandaged up nicely. The console held up (Starfleet engineering stronk!) so I didn’t have to pick perspex or switches out of my face. Which, you know, is a definite bonus.

From there I headed to the engine spaces, to get main power back online so the VI could do a diagnostic and tell me how fucked the ship was. The reactor was still intact, so that was just a question of resetting the breakers. The computer went through boot-up and I sneaked a look at the FTL drive.

The FTL was slagged. The main unit was half-melted and the rest of it was turned into blackened junk. Right then I realized that I was fucked. Once the VI was back online it confirmed everything for me: even if I could repair the main unit inside the hull (I probably could, I’ve got enough spare parts to maybe put one together inside a month or two.) the warp coils in the nacelles were fused. That’s shipyard work. Worse, the VI told me that whatever slagged the FTL took out the primary and secondary ansible communications arrays. The ansibles are wonderful things, giving me reasonably fast communications with Starfleet and civilized space no matter how far out I stray. If the comms were still working I could call for help and then just sit tight as one of my fellow Rangers came out to get me. Without them... for all intents and purposes I just vanish into the black.

So, yeah. That’s the situation: ship’s down, I’m alone on a planet hundreds of light years away from anything, no comms, and unless I can fix things that are by definition unfixable I’m totally screwed.

Fuck this, I’m going to go howl at the moon for a little bit. At least this rock has a moon to howl at.

Log Entry: Surface Day 1.1

Howled at the moon, feel much better now.

Taking stock of the situation, I don’t think I’m quite as deeply fucked as I thought. Victory no doubt took a lot of damage on impact, but the frame’s still solid. Rangers are tough to kill, and so’re our ships. If the VI is right—have to do a visual inspection to check—the hull took the worst of it. There’s a whole lot of panels out of alignment, popped seals and whatnot. Resetting panels is easy enough, and I can fix damaged seals with what I’ve got on hand. If there’s actual damage like torn plates that’s a different story, but depending on where the damage is I can rig up some cheap replacements. Space is off the menu for now but by sealing the right compartments I might make it work eventually.

Supplywise I’m doing alright for the moment. None of the food rations were compromised and the medbay’s still stocked. I’ve got three years of tube rats to sustain me physically, which I am simply overjoyed about as you can clearly see. The ship’s autofac is functional and the feedstock tanks are intact, so I can make more tube rats, essential tools and the like. I’ll have to keep an eye on the tanks; the more I make the more I’ll have to scrounge to refill them, and some of the rare-earth elements are going to be an utter bitch to restock.

(At least one person reading this log is going to ask “if the autofactory is operational, why don’t you use that to fix the FTL or the ansible?” Well, first of all Victory’s autofac is too small to build an FTL core worth anything. Second, I’d have to disassemble the engines to get at the wrecked coils for raw materials, which would mean ripping even more of the ship apart and I really don’t want to do that if I don’t have to. Third and most importantly, drive and ansible cores require some pretty involved calibrations in order to not implode into slag when powered, much less work properly, and that requires equipment I a) don’t have, b) don’t have the autofac blueprints for. It’s a nice thought, but yeah.)

The stuff in my cabin didn’t take the crash all that well, which sucks but it’s not the end of the world. I had the pleasant surprise of finding my guitar still intact despite the shambles. (Holy shit that case was a godsend! I should send in a testimonial: “Guitar survived violent crash on an alien world, A++ would buy again.”) Most of the gear in the cargo bay was secured properly, and the rest of it’s pretty light so everything survived with a few dents and not much else. Of course I can’t roll out the ATVs, the drones and the flight pack and give them a proper checkout yet, but I’ll get there. The weapons locker’s okay, too, so just in case I need to chase off velociraptors or whatthefuckever I can do that.

The good news is the main reactor, the impulse engine and the repulsors all still work properly. The crash knocked them all offline but getting them back in order should be a day’s work, maybe two depending on any external damage. Reactor’s already back up at 10% power (don’t really need more for the VI and basic environmental controls) and the next step is the repulsors. If I can get Victory out of this spirits-fucking ditch and level her it’ll make repairs a hell of a lot easier.

Didn’t mention that, did I? Right, when Victory finally skidded to a stop in the middle of this forest she came to rest bow-down at about a nine degree angle. I’m guessing that the forward scan array caught the dirt like a gigantic plow and just dug in as we slowed down until the momentum was just enough to push the nose in deeper. So everything’s off-kilter which makes doing basic stuff like walking aft or taking a shit kind of an interesting adventure.

The best news right now is that between what’s left of the ansibles, the FTL drive and what I can crank out with the autofac I should be able to fix up a way to contact Earth. Subspace radio is old tech, the sort of thing that used to come standard but has since depreciated in value. I’ve only got one because Victoryis an older-block ship and my aunt Kali impressed on me a need for all the backups at a young age. The transmitter came loose in the crash and is broke to shit, but the antennas are still good and the transmitter is probably fixable. It’ll take me somewhere around the high side of forever, but I should be able to send a message to the nearest Fleet repeater eventually.

So, order of business: Get the ship righted and out of this hole, and fix the damn radio.

Time to get to work. This place wants to kill me it’s gonna have to work at it.

Log Entry: Surface Day 2

There is a face in a tree right outside the ship. What in the absolute fuck?

I only just noticed this when I went outside to check up on the ventral hull plating. The damage wasn’t quite as bad as I feared, paint’s shot to shit but the popped plates aren’t so badly deformed they won’t pop back into place. Still enough torn plates that I don’t want to risk high-altitude flight for a while yet.

I also wanted to check out the path Victory dug through the forest on landing, as I was too unconscious to appreciate the mayhem as it happened. It’s pretty impressive, really. We must’ve started at the edge of the woods and then just tore a hole a good six, seven kilometers long. Nothing but stumps of trees and turned dirt closer to the final stop. I walked around to the bow to see how badly we were stuck in when I saw it. The face-tree (what the hell else do I call it?) was maybe a meter away from the bow. It’s big and white, a surprising lack of color compared to the other trees around the crash site. It’s got red leaves—which must be an adaptation of some kind, because none of the other trees have turned yet—and red sap streaking the trunk.

Oh yeah, and it’s got a face carved into it. The face is pretty humanoid, though how much of that’s exaggeration I can’t say. Whoever or whatever carved it made sure that the sap welled up in the right spots, because the thing looks like it’s crying blood, which is an artistically freaky touch. Hammer Films gives it three thumbs up.

And there’s something else in there.

Asynchronous quantum field effects is what they call it in the science journals. Everybody else calls it psionics—or fucking magic—because that’s what it is for anybody who doesn’t have advanced degrees in subspace theory. Some microscopically tiny percentage of the population has the ability to manipulate psi fields with their minds, one of which I happen to be related to. Unfortunately I’m kind of useless at manipulating them, even when being able to smite something with my brain would be really handy. I can sense the fields if they’re there though. My inability to use the fields dashed Mama’s hopes but the sensory boost helps a lot in my chosen profession: a lot of Builder artifacts use psionics, and a lot more just sort of emit them almost like background radiation.

The tree is emitting like a goddamned champ. I can feel the thing almost like it’s a heat lamp glowing in the background. I think it’s a node for something, feels like the control system at Tannhauser Gate, connected to something big and really powerful. And, I think, asleep. I hope so anyway; pretty sure I don’t want to wake this thing up and find out it’s cranky.

Right, okay. Weirdo magic trees come later, need to finish the damage survey first. Get sorted, then we can start unravelling the mystery of the face-tree.

Worry about it later.
Mr. Fnord interdimensional man of mystery

FenWiki - Your One-Stop Shop for Fenspace Information

"I. Drink. Your. NERDRAGE!"
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#2
Interesting.
D for Drakensis

You're only young once, but immaturity is forever.
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#3
Well now... Smile
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#4
Okay, a little bit more. Depending on feedback the first bits might actually go up elsewhere sometime this evening, who knows. ~ The Mgt.
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Log Entry: Surface Day 2.1

After noticing the face-tree, I took a closer look at my surroundings. This forest isn’t that different from Earth-normal. In fact, it’s a hell of a lot closer than other forests I’ve been in. And the whole place is thick with psionic power. The air’s almost greasywith it.

The Builders had this place marked down as a sanctuary.

I wonder if I’m not alone here?

Log Entry: Surface Day 3

The face-tree might’ve been pareidolia or Builders fucking around, but now I have photographic proof. People live here!

Where did I get photographic proof, you ask? I got it from the survey array. The ansible’s dead and my subspace radio isn’t working yet, but the old-school radio transmitter still works. Always have a backup, even if that backup is useless beyond three light-years. The survey array is a cluster of microsats Victory uses to do a comprehensive mapping of any inhabitable planets we come across. Drop them off at the beginning of the survey, let them orbit for a couple weeks then pick ‘em up just before departure. Nice and simple. I’d just managed to drop them off before everything went weird.

Earlier today the array finally came back into radio range, and it wanted to talk. Bereft of any better conversation (tree-face outside is sympathetic but a better listener than a talker) I initiated the download and started looking at my new home. I was expectingto see forests, plains, deserts, marshlands… you know, the sort of thing you normally find on a garden planet. Maybe some Builder ruins, those can be hard to spot but I’ve got plenty of experience looking.

I sure as hell wasn’t expecting farms, villages and even I-shit-you-not castles all over the damn place! It looks like the continent I landed on and the one directly to the east are pretty heavily settled. Nothing obviously industrial (dammit, would’ve solved a lot of problems) but pretty well-refined High Postclassical by the looks of things. The resolution isn't good enough to pick out individuals, so I still have no idea what the locals look like. But they’re there. And odds are good somebody noticed me.

Going to have to think about this a little.

Log Entry: Surface Day 3.1

Thinking about it still. So, there’s inhabitants. Awesome. Now I at least have some company during my exile. Assuming I ever get close to them, that is.

It’s the old Prime Directive dilemma, that thorny philosophical issue every Starfleet cadet be they Ranger or Fleet scrub gets to chew on in the academy. Standard policy is we don’t contact aliens who haven’t at least spotted us and figured out a way to contact us. The idea, so far as my instructors explained it, was that the level of knowledge necessary had to be enough that the aliens wouldn’t lose their shit entirely at the prospect of not being alone in the universe and all that good shit. And sure, that makes sense. Stay away from the guys armed with sticks, no problem.

(Used to be there was a purist faction that said we shouldn’t do anything to “disrupt the natural evolution of a species,” even if that meant sitting back and watching them all croak from a rogue asteroid. Thankfully smarter heads prevailed over that sort of ludicrous decision-making process. Some people, man, I swear. Anyway.)

Now, the thing here is I don’t have the luxury of sitting in high orbit watching the preindustrial mortals scurry about their daily lives. I have to assume that somebody saw my descent, or they saw the epic track Victorycut through the forest, and they’re going to follow it right to me. So I have choices to make. The repulsors are working well enough that I can raise ship and I’ve got one-twelfth impulse power, not very fast but fast enough to outpace searchers. I was going to move the ship anyway, get out of this fucking ditch at least and put her on the landing legs, but do I move away from the crash site or do I stay nearby?

Do I want to be found?

Victory’s still mostly intact, the subspace radio’s a work in progress. I move off, I leave behind an inexplicable hole in the ground. I stay and I have to tell the truth or I work out a story. Maybe some balance between the two, try to recontextualize my experience with what a bunch of low-tech people would know. I wish Mama or Vivi were here, this sort of mythologizing is right up their alley.

You know what, fuck it. I want to be found. I may well be stuck here for the rest of my natural life, and I flat out fucking refuse to be a hermit if I don’t have to be.

First, though, some howling. I need to howl.

Log Entry: Surface Day 4

All the repairs I can make to the repulsors are done. So, time to see if she’ll lift out of the hole. I’ve scouted a clearing not too far from the edge of the forest to put her down in, right alongside the giant skidmark we made on the way in. Might as well make it easy.

More once I know one way or the other if she’s going to move.

Log Entry: Surface Day 4.1

Well, good news is the repulsors worked like a charm. Fired them up and Victorylifted out of the trench and floated up over the trees. Bad news is the impulse engines are in worse shape than I thought. Must’ve been feedback from the FTL that damaged the focusing coils. I’ve got maybe 2% impulse power tops before I risk burning out the engines completely. Call it a top speed of… five, six hundred kilometers an hour. Getting anywhere distant is going to be a chore, and orbit is right out without repairing the coils.

Always something. Going to go howl for a bit, then crack a tube rat and celebrate not sleeping at a weird angle for the first time this week. Rangers know how to party.

Log Entry: Surface Day 5

Finished the hull inspection now that I can see the whole thing. Plating’s pretty badly chewed up along the bow, just like I expected. Some of it’s patchable, but there’s a few hull panels that took damage I don’t have the autofac volume necessary to repair. I figure I can cut up what’s left of those panels and feed them to the disassembler, then use the extra hullmetal to shore up the patches. It’s not perfect, but it’ll do.

Spent some time going over the survey pictures, looking for something approximating a steel mill. All I need is a dozen square meters of rolled steel sheet to cover the damage until I can get Victory back to a drydock. I’d accept the same in plate steel, pig iron or even bronze if it was available—it’s not great, but at least it’d provide some protection to the inner hull. Unfortunately it doesn’t look like the locals have that kind of industry set up yet.

On that not-entirely-encouraging note, I’m putting off hull repairs for the moment. I’m a Starfleet Ranger, a professional space explorer. I ought to be out there in the big wide world exploring things! Seeing the sights, taking a recce, noting important landmarks and all that stuff. More importantly, I think it’s time I had something other than a tube rat for dinner for the first time in a year and a half.

Hunting time!

Log Entry: Surface Day 5.1

So yeah, that happened. Let me tell you about my hunting trip…

I grabbed a couple guns and ATV 1 and headed off into the woods to bag me a bandersnatch. Mmm, roast bandersnatch. I drove out five or six kilometers from the ship before ditching the ATV and heading further in on foot. Dirt buggies are handy for driving around but they’re noisy and even assuming the local wildlife’s never seen anything like them they’d still be wary of the big noisy thing running around the forest.

The forest was pretty nice, actually. Old-growth, lots of really old trees. This wasn’t a place that had been logged or otherwise touched by the inhabitants in a long time, if ever. If I closed my eyes I could almost be back near my grandparents’ place.

A couple hours of tracking later and I saw what this planet had to offer in terms of animals. They were deer. I don’t even know what the hell is up with that, but okay. Deer aren’t the sort of thing I expect to find hundreds of light years away from Earth, but there’s one thing I know about deer: they’re damned tasty.

Deer being deer, they hadn’t noticed my creeping up on them, which worked out quite nicely. Then things got interesting, because while I was focused on my dream of barbequed venison somebody else was creeping up from the other side. I’d aimed at one of the smaller does when all of a sudden the biggest goddamned wolf I’ve ever seen in my life burst out of the undergrowth and pounced. The deer scattered, I said something along the lines of “motherfucker!” and went for a kill shot on the nearest one. I got lucky and managed to drop it, while my competition hadn’t managed to down her dance partner, this impressive buck that managed to run off with a few claw marks on his flanks.

Guns 1, tooth & claw 0.

When I got to my prize the wolf had padded over and was sniffing the carcass. She probably didn’t know what to make of the lack of arrows, or the smell of the cordite. I grabbed the deer and signaled the ATV to come get me. The wolf gave me this weird look, and I noticed that not only was the wolf huge, like horse-sized, she was pregnant. Which explained why she’d taken the jump and her lack of success, I guess. She just kept looking at me until I sort of lost patience.

“Look, lady,” I said. “This is my kill. If you want you can come back to the ship with me and you can have some, but don’t try taking it off me. Clear?” I felt like a huge idiot talking to a giant canid like that, especially one that could cause some serious chassis damage without thinking about it. But—and this is definitely something I’m going to have to research further—she just looked at me and sat down like she’d been domesticated. She sat like that until the ATV arrived, was a little wary of the engine noise but plodded along after me all the way back to the ship.

And that’s how I made a new friend. She’s snacking on some organs while I wait for the steak to finish cooking. I think I’ll call her Moro. Moro the giant fucking wolf who lives in a forest with face-trees and deer that could’ve come from Earth.

This place is just fucking weird.
Mr. Fnord interdimensional man of mystery

FenWiki - Your One-Stop Shop for Fenspace Information

"I. Drink. Your. NERDRAGE!"
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#5
Mm. Yeah, can see the Fenspace in its DNA... and given that I never got into ASOIAF or GOT, it's got me surprisingly interested. Let us know where you end up posting it.
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.
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#6
Yep, I'm interested. You're a good writer, Mr. Fnord, and I'll take more of this almost as eagerly as more Candle in the Dark.
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#7
Heh-heh. Nice reference to Princess Mononoke - even if it is lampshaded. I'm gonna laugh if she starts calling herself San to the locals. Big Grin
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#8
Jumping ahead a little. Also, watch this space for further developments...
Quote:
Log Entry: Surface Day 14

I am not a Connecticut Yankee. I have to remember that.

When the fleet finally shows up, I’m going to spend a good year or so in inquiries about my conduct while on a planet with a preindustrial civilization. Just being here and interacting with the natives is going to cause all sorts of changes, and once the admiralty is done patting me on the back for surviving they’re going to roast me over the coals in order to find out what damage I did to these people in the process. There might even be Senate hearings about my activities when all is said and done. Dad will be so proud.

So I have to try and keep my interference with the good people of Westeros to a minimum. I already made the decision to not just hide out in the woods like a hermit. And living large...ish in a culture not too different from Postclassical Europe has given me a new appreciation for all the little things that make life back home bearable. I thought Ranger training had beaten the fastidiousness out of me but then I tried living in Winter Town for two days before I decamped for Victory again. Some things you just take for granted.

The temptation is there, to remake Winterfell and everything around it in the Federal image, not so much for power but for comfort. I could do it; I have the knowledge. The tools are a little lacking, but any Ranger worth her salt knows there are ways around that. I could jailbreak the autofacs, dismantle the ship to build myself a wizard’s tower, spread that to Winterfell properly. Build some things to spread around Stark’s demense: plumbing, lights, black powder weapons, give him a leg up and me a reason to keep meddling…

Depending on human factors, it wouldn’t take very long. A couple hours for the jailbreak, a couple weeks for the teardown and then a few more weeks to rebuild. Then another six months to get the castle up to Federal standards of living. Probably a year or three to get a minor industrial revolution rolling across the North, then Westeros and then… well, sky’s the limit. Barring accident I’ve got at least a good 250 or so years left before I have to go in for backup or rejuvenation, plenty of time to bootstrap up a society capable of building a ship to get me back to Federal space.

But doing that is tantamount to giving up on going home. I can’t tear down Victory, even if I was inclined to do it, because that would mean stopping work on the radio. And in the event the fleet found me anyway, they’d throw me in the deepest, darkest prison in space for unauthorized enlightenment and de facto planetary conquest.
I’m not a Yankee. If I ever want to go home, I can’t be a Yankee. Until I know help’s not coming for me, I can’t give in to the impulse.

Quote:
Log Entry: Surface Day 233.1

A call came in from the commlink I left up at Castle Black while I was brooding over my failure. Things on the Wall are getting tense. The northern barbarians are on the move, and according to Maester Aemon they’re acting like something is driving them. The watch commander is no longer quite as skeptical about my hypothesis as he was the last time I was up there.

If the ice monsters are on the move, that’s not good. I’ll take this to Stark but the whole civil war thing is likely to take precedence.

But now I have a pretext. Based on my own observations, as of right now I’m invoking the existential threat clauses in Starfleet first contact protocol and moving to figure out a way to contain whatever the hell it is hiding in the far north of Planetos. This won’t forgive my previous sins but it’ll cover what happens next.

I can’t save Westeros from its own stupidity. I can’t stop the civil war. Not yet.

I might not be able to save Westeros from extinction.

But I’m going to fucking try.
Mr. Fnord interdimensional man of mystery

FenWiki - Your One-Stop Shop for Fenspace Information

"I. Drink. Your. NERDRAGE!"
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#9
Quote:M Fnord wrote:
Quote:
Log Entry: Surface Day 233.1

But I’m going to fucking try.
Good man.
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#10
M Fnord Wrote:Jumping ahead a little. Also, watch this space for further developments...
Quote:
Log Entry: Surface Day 14

I am not a Connecticut Yankee. I have to remember that.
If this was still Fenspace, I'd say "But your grandfather is"...
--
Rob Kelk
"Governments have no right to question the loyalty of those who oppose
them. Adversaries remain citizens of the same state, common subjects of
the same sovereign, servants of the same law."

- Michael Ignatieff, addressing Stanford University in 2012
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#11
The first bits of The Westerosi are now available for reading at Usual Suspect 1 and Usual Suspect 2. That is all.
Mr. Fnord interdimensional man of mystery

FenWiki - Your One-Stop Shop for Fenspace Information

"I. Drink. Your. NERDRAGE!"
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