#going to be there for munich n1 if anyone’s wondering

[farfromstrange]

It’s officially Eras Tour Month for me! I’m fucking wired and ready to become absolutely insufferable.

[enricodandolo]

What I’m currently working on

Mostly academia and ESO, tbqh.

Tagged by @celeritassagittae, I’m continuing the emergent tradition of sharing snippets.

Main project: next chapter of A Light Shining in Darkness

The Grand Duke indicated a brisk pace, and quite quickly they had reached a set of archways flanked by guards in polished steel cuirasses and elaborate masked helmets. Through the thick marble walls, the faint clamouring of a large crowd could be made out. “Ready to face the music, Inquisitor?”

She tried to think of something clever to say. She nodded.

On Gaspard’s arm, Bethany entered the Hall of Homage. At once, she felt blinded by the light of electric candles and sconces, reflected and prismed by hundreds of tiny crystals that hung from the frescoed ceiling in heavy chandeliers, and by the tall mirrors lining the walls on either side of them. It was warm in the hall, no doubt a consequence of the throngs of people gathered in it, yet a gentle breeze seemed to fly through it, bringing necessary refreshment. Once her eyes had somewhat attenuated to the sudden brightness, Bethany realised that the back wall of the hall was composed of five massive floor-to-ceiling windows interrupted by marble columns. The middle window was made of stained glass, although there was no way to determine what it depicted now that the sun had gone down. In the other windows, all wide open and leading out onto a large terrace looking out over the city, swayed large silk banners of the Orlesian flag. Yet Bethany’s eyes were intractably drawn towards the massive throne in front of the middle window. A huge sunburst emerging from the floor as half a wheel formed the backrest, and resting lions the arms. Both shone brightly in the chandeliers’ light, and Bethany would not have been surprised to learn they were shaped from solid gold. Royal blue cushions were embedded into the seat and backrest, the latter embroidered in gold with the imperial coat of arms. It was the sort of overloaded, almost gaudy thing she had expected, and yet she could not but be awed.

Bethany issued a slight gasp at the sight of the hall, at the scale of it. In the silence that slowly descended over the hall as all eyes turned to them. it felt like a scream. She flushed. Then, suddenly, to their right, a young elf in an embroidered silk herald’s tabard slammed a carved rod of wood onto the floor and exclaimed: “His Imperial Highness, Field Marshal the Grand Duke Gaspard of Chalons, Prince of the Blood and Marshal of Orlais! Accompanying His Imperial Highness: the Right Worshipful and Learned Enchanter Bethany Revka Hawke, Lady Amell of Kirkwall, formerly Viscomital Reader in Force Magic at that Circle, and leader of the Inquisition!”

Oh, bugger.

On hold for now: The Brightest Star in the Sky, a Mass Effect / real life crossover

Where Charon had been, there was a bright yellow, oblong and perfectly regular shape, forked in the middle. “What the hell is that?”

“We don’t know,” the flight director down at Goddard replied. The anxiety was plain to hear in her voice. “But we’ve got the White House on the phone.”

She was about to reply when another transmission came through. “Station, this is Munich.[1] The European Extremely Large Telescope in Chile just picked up an unidentified object seemingly appearing out of nowhere inside the orbit of Mars. We’re trying to establish what it is, or what its heading is, but it’s gone on the very next image we have.”

“How is that possible?” An idea hit her, and for a moment she had to weigh whether to ask the question at all. Maybe she had watched too much Star Trek. “Could it be moving at … well, at relativistic speeds?”

“Uh, Station, we’ll get back to you on that. Honestly, we’re as much in the dark as you are right now. Lemme put it this way, we just got on the line with the Berlaymont and President Mogher-”[2]

Whatever else the ESA flight controller had to say, it was lost in transmission as a sudden tremor went through the station, almost as if a shockwave had hit it. Giulia gasped in surprise, and almost at once bright red warnings popped up all over the laptops lining the walls. “Uh, what happened? Er, Sasha, life support?”

Quickly, the Russian floated over to the nearest Russian Laptop responsible for control of the Russian Orbital Segment. “It’s, uh … steady across the board.”

“I’m getting a caution from both P6 SAWs here!” Ana added, her voice raised with tension.

“Station, Moscow. We just got the data, is anyone hurt up there? What happened?”

“I, I don’t know,” Giulia reported, looking for a laptop that was set to telemetry data. “Space debris, maybe? We’re all fine, just a bit rattled. Do you have any alerts for us?”

“Three dozen. It looks like both P6 SAWs may be bent or broken, we will want you to examine those using Canadarm. For now, stay in the ROS in case there are more impacts like that. Keep emergency equipment on hand and stand ready to seal bulkheads throughout the station. We’re bringing SURGEON in, he should be here in a couple of minutes. Your telemetry looks good, be advised we will hand primary mission control over to Houston in eight minutes.”

“Roger, Moscow.” Giulia looked around at the others, whose faces betrayed their concern, if not fear. They didn’t send people up who lost their calm under pressure. “Moscow, do you want us prepare an emergency evac and deorbit? Please advise.”

“Stand by.”

There was no immediate reply, so Giulia turned to the others. “Alright, let’s take stock. For now, no one moves past N1. Sasha, Ana, I want you to keep a close eye on life support and telemetry. If anything happens, even if it’s just a routine alert, I want to know about it immediately. Ilik, if you could have a look at our electrical and radiation systems? Matthew, give me a hand. We need to stow away all this food before it gets on the instruments.”

“Uh, Giulia?”

“What is it, Ana?”

“You might want to have a look outside.”

Frowning, she floated over to the bullseye the air force officer was staring out of, utterly transfixed. She looked outside.

Then, she picked up the nearest radio receiver. “Moscow, Station. We have a problem.”

[1] Mission control for the European laboratory module Columbus is actually based in Oberpfaffenhofen, near Munich. As that is, however, a ridiculous name, EUROCOM is referred to as ‘Munich’ on the radio. Other control centres for the ISS are Houston, Moscow, Huntsville  (Alabama), and Tsukuba.

[2] No politicians were harmed in the making of this fic.

Still intent on continuing this at some point: Lohengrin, a Dragon Age fic set in the late Ancient Age

There was no reply to the call, and Elsa sank to her knees. She folded her arms before her chest, bowed her head, and prayed silently, as she had all those months of silence. Orinia was no longer sure if it really was just for show, or if she really was so deluded as to think her false god would help her now.

She glanced over at Telramund and the king, who were watching the scene with almost equally grim eyes. Surely, she thought, if no fighter could be found, they wouldn’t force the girl to take up arms in her own name for possibly the first time in her life? If she’d had any training, it certainly didn’t show on her frail and slight body. No, surely, the king was—well, at least he wasn’t entirely barbarian, although she shuddered to think of what kind of fate a nobleman of the empire might have to endure to be forced to live out the rest of his life amongst the barbarians in the dark forests of the far south. Not that her life had been all that much better, mind. But he had Tevene blood in him, and was clearly an intelligent and insightful man, much like her Telramund might have been had he had the benefit of a proper education. No doubt he would—

Someone sharply elbowed her in the back without so much as a sorry. Hurt and annoyed, Orinia turned around—though she would never have dared to berate what was doubtless a well-armed barbarian at least three heads taller than herself—and found that she wasn’t the only one to turn away from the praying girl.

All around her, people had turned to face towards the river, craning their necks and standing on tip-toes to see what was going on. Curiously—for what could possibly have distracted so many from such a matter of life and death?—Orinia tried to jump up and down, but found that even that wasn’t nearly enough for her to see across the heads of the barbarians. And as she was quite sure she would be crushed to death if she tried to make her way to the back, she didn’t even try and merely listened to what people were exclaiming or whispering around her. Look, look! What a strange thing! What a miracle! What’s this? A swan? A barge—it’s drawing a barge down the river—is that a swan?—look, look!—there’s someone standing in it—how marvellous!—they’re all in green, from head to toe, look, a swan—what a strange wonder!—look at the swan, mummy, look at the raft, look at the knight!—a miracle!—a miracle has happened!—miracle, such a strange unheard of marvellous holy miracle!

Now Orinia, too was craning her neck, trying to make out anything. A swan, what on earth were they talking about? Proceeding around them had ground almost to a halt, and then the crowd broke up as people ran towards the riverbanks to get a better view. As all around her streamed down to the banks of the Scaldis, Orinia and a few others were left up on the hill the linden tree grew on, so that a cynical observer might have noted that they now had a better view of what was going on. Telramund stepped to her side, and together they watched as an upright figure, dressed head to toe in gleaming green cloth that billowed and sparkled and flowed like water in the breeze, leaning on a spear in his hand, standing tall on a narrow, flat little boat, little more than a raft no larger than a door.

And the whole thing, on a golden chain, was being drawn by a massive swan, its plumage an exceptionally clean, bright white, at least four or five feet long, elegantly gliding down the river.

Also pretty much on hold for now: Poekhali, a Dragon Age fic about Tevinter blood mage elven psychopath Yuri Gagarin

Faleria had never been a planner. There was no plot, however well laid-out, that survived contact with the enemy, and any plan that required more than one other thing to happen was no more than make-believe. The people who wrote plays and pictures and novels in which cunning protagonists set events in motion years ahead, she had always suspected, wouldn’t be writing them if any of their own plans had succeeded. No, the way to get ahead was to know an opportunity when you saw it, and seize it without hesitation.

When she had been eleven, she’d thrown a tantrum about her parents’ inability to provide presents for her twelfth birthday, foolish brat that she had been. Luckily for her, the commander of the labour camp had just the week before announced improved rations for anyone who ratted out fellow prisoners for misdemeanours such as hoarding ration cards. Well, her parents had done so for weeks, and a few quick words to the guards later, found themselves marched to the gallows. Only later did Faleria recognise that α) they had been hoarding precisely to provide her with birthday presents and β) the long-term effects of this act directly increased the peril she was in. The human guards tutted at her betrayal of her parents. The other prisoners glared at her, especially the elves.

Not long after, one of them had tried to murder her in her sleep—whether for revenge or to steal her ration book, she did not know, for that very act caused her magic to awaken in her, violently. By the time she celebrated her first birthday as a mage, she had been removed from the labour camp and sent to one of the new military schools for the magically gifted, intended to bring them up as the new ruling cadres of Areolani’s new empire. Elves, of course, tended to face rather less lofty careers than their human classmates, but she’d always done fairly well regardless, she thought.

What, regret? Killing her parents had been the best damn thing that had ever happened to her.

That had been one opportunity she’d seized, and it had served her well. At the cadre school, she perfected her sense of opportunity, and found she had a gambler’s good luck. When she joined the army air corps as a pilot officer, it hadn’t taken long until she’d found herself gifted with a scramble-all siren, a sharp razor, and only herself and the flying officer placed directly above her alone in the shower room. She’d flown her first combat mission that day, and in truth it had only been astonishingly good luck, a few well-placed lies and the two Qunari fighters she had shot down that had saved her from suspicion. A flying officer’s stripes soon followed.

No tags, but feel free to carry this on!