#spacewhaling

[nacricissa]

WIP Re-Intro: The Forever Project

Tried this once here and none of that is strictly wrong, but I just wrote a killer blurb so we’re going again.

How would you fare if you became omnipotent on your fourteenth birthday? I imagine you might be able to figure something out given some time to get a handle on your newfound powers, but Hera Elizabeth Rider’s deicidal brother and waking up to the discovery that she’s transported herself out of her body and into a new world are not giving her that luxury. It takes her a deal with the devil, unwitting service to a vampire hunter, the creation of several gods, and one eccentric genius before she’s able to do anything with her powers on purpose, and by then it’s really not clear what the right thing to do even is.

Relevant tags (searchable on my blog)

Forever project: all tag games, short stories, random thoughts, and if I ever do them character intros for this work are tagged with this tag. It’s the one to block if you are mainly here for Twilight content.

Elise Godslayer: This is the tag for the MC, Hera Elizabeth Rider. She goes by Elise because there’s too many Hera’s in her family (in her world Mary goes by her syncretized Greek name, and so most European historical figures that in our world are named Mary are named Hera there) and Elizabeth is too long for her tastes. The godslayer part is arguably a spoiler, but it happens in chapter three so I’m not too worried. Elise is a fairly normal fourteen-year old, outside of her godlike powers. She likes music (she can play violin and fiddle), was just starting to figure out she might like some girls as more than friends, is wary of responsibility, and has a crushing need to be liked.

Davriel Godslayer: This is Elise’s birth brother, though they were raised separately: Davriel was never human. He started out with their theoretical mythological purpose: killing the Greater Demons, but when the gods separated Elise from his at birth out of fear, he began to expand his horizons; were they really so different from the forces they pretended to oppose? Davriel was given far too much time alone growing to stew in his own mind, and has convinced himself there could be no greater solution than him as god-emperor of everything. This is not to say, unfortunately, that he wouldn’t make a terrifyingly competent and entirely benevolent god-king, it is simply that his understanding of what he’s working with (the world) is a scoche incomplete.

Eric Melior: This is the blurb’s vampire hunter! What the blurb does not mention is that he is also a vampire and was born in 1892. I recently decided he would be a Lithuanian aristocrat, so his name is likely to change, but he is not. He’s a very steadfast type, committed to his ideals and those he was raised with. He was raised by a pro-Tzarist father and a mother who joined a cult upon her husband’s death, however.

Sorceress: Here we have our eccentric genius. The only person (human, centaur or siren) to discover how to use magic on a sentient creature! She used this power to give herself a pair of legs, having been born a siren but being too curious about the world to confine herself to the water. Even though Elise created her world, Sorceress is likely its most consequential figure.

Mlle Nefara: The most recent character to get a tag, Mlle Nefara is just trying to get rich. Unfortunately, honest means are not particularly available to her as a black woman in 1890s Europe, and so she has chosen the slightly easier route of lying to a bunch of rich people, telling them all about the supernatural threats only she can teach them how to defend themselves against. Her charisma and talent are serving her well in this endeavor until 1897, when a plague of monsters begins to creep through the land. They’re similar enough to the ones she’d made up for her sect to become increasingly popular, but she can’t be so lucky that the techniques she made up would actually defeat them.

Siren’s meet nada: Nada is the word for city among the most magically reckless group of humans on Globe, Sorceress’s world. They call the city that has built up around Sorceress’s first home on land Siren’s Meet, not because they really ever meet Sorceress (and very few know she was ever a siren regardless), but because the estuary has collected extremists and eccentrics from human and siren communities. While it was Sorceress’s presence (and her geologic engineering) that drew the first few citizens to the place, it continued to thrive long after she went to Nadalitas. I use this tag mainly for short stories and worldbuilding facts that take place in the city.

Nihil hunters: A nihil is the most dangerous of the monsters that have begun to infect Eric’s and Mlle Nefara’s world. They are at once vampire and wraith, and so lose many of the vulnerabilities of both. The tag is nihil hunters for their whole world, because vampire hunters, what they call themselves, is simply too generic.

Southern dragons: These are mostly a world building project, as their interaction with the magic system and spatial/temporal laws I’ve built for this project is generally quite illustrative. While they originated in the southern continent of Sorceress’s world, hence their name, they have since spread to other worlds, moving through space and reality with a degree of mysterious ease I think is suitable for dragons.

Spacewhaling: It may not be correct to include this tag with this project; in fact, it started as an independent concept. If it does intersect with Elise’s story, it would only be in the third or maybe even fourth book.

[nacricissa]

I, by definition, had never been to Earth. But it felt in many ways like I had. Everything about the ships is meant to reduce the mental stress of the Earthlings on the missions as much as possible, without being too expensive of course. The little tree decals that would appear on the observation deck when we're over the Sea of Clouds. Immersive VR experiences of walks through the woods, the city. Even most of the exercise programs on the treadmill are modelled off of real places on Earth, complete with audiovisuals, and when we have the gasses for it, full sensory. Not to mention the conversation. Any given mission is going to have a fairly even mix of Spaceborne and Earthlings making up the crew, though there is nothing resembling evenness in the chain of command. Even so, the ships are not that big, and Earthlings are not shy about reminiscing about the wonders of Earth within earshot of the rest of the crew.

So I thought I knew a lot about Earth, despite my lack of firsthand experience. In truth, I did. Much of my knowledge has come in useful since. But the moment I landed I felt woefully underprepared.

It was a water landing, the old way, of course. In order to pass as a failed satellite we couldn't perform a controlled upright landing like most of the companies use. So I had to scramble immediately out of my carefully-designed-not-to-resemble-a-living space, pulling with me a dry-sack containing all signs of life and my watercraft, which was not much more than a boogie board with a motor.

Then I was in the Ocean. I had seen open spaces in VR. I had been in the most open space there is, space. I had visited the reaching expanses of the Sea of Clouds regularly. None of this prepared me for the animosity of the ocean. People compare us to whalers. It's apt; what we do is very similar. But the way space wants to kill you is free of emotion. It's hard to anthropomorphize a vacuum. But the ocean moves in a chaotic, uncaring way that feels much more threatening to me. The sheer volume of it was striking too. I had never taken a bath; cleanliness is most efficient with moist towelettes and quick sojourns in the sauna chamber. I had never seen more than a few dozens of liters of water in one place for any reason. And the gravity. We had gravity, in the ships, or something close to it. I had been subjected to enough elastic straps and whirling contraptions to have the bone density to survive here. But both of those things make gravity differently. The force changes perceptibly if you move too far away. Floating on a globe I had just yesterday been orbiting, I could have been convinced it was flat, so different was the gravity.

Break Anew

[asteroids-and-tractorbeams]

I can’t believe I almost forgot that Thrawn missed the Battle of Scarif by *that* much

[doctorwenqing]

y’all remember how thrawn used the ocean and beach to his advantage to take out the canons and things at scrim island? i’m just saying, if he hadn’t gotten spacewhaled mere days/weeks before, he would have beaten the rebels at scarif (no death star blast necessary)

[nacricissa]

I don't like the little tree decals. The illusion that the Sea of Clouds covers a vast expanse of land, that we just happen to occupy the highest point for a few miles makes the Observation Bay less comforting, not more. At least when we're in free space, the captain takes them down.

I only Observe the Sea of Clouds once each time we come to readjust the gaseous balance of the ship's atmosphere. We never know how much of the Dragon we're going to get on board, which parts, how exactly they're going to react to our designer air. So we come to the Sea of Clouds and the algal mats pull in whatever they're missing until we reach an equilibrium that's close enough to Earth. The process takes longer than you're allowed to go without focusing your eyes on a point farther away than the longest room in our cramped vessel. Nearsighted Hunters are close to useless.

by shainblumphotography

[nacricissa]

The main problem in space is that you should like to have air in you, and space hates air being unevenly distributed like that. The other space problems only come up after much more prolonged exposure. A few minutes for direct solar radiation, hours before infrared radiation can strip off as much heat as a brisk wind, weeks before the cosmic background gives you cancer. So the cheapest way to hunt a dragon does not actually require a full space suit. Just enough to keep your lungs from exploding as you shelter from the sun on the shady side of the ship.

My pseudosphere is just a pressurized turtleneck vest and a mask. It makes it look like I have boobs, from the front, as the high-tensile fabric buoys out from my chest to form as close to a sphere as I can afford without increasing the size of myself as a target. The mask is modeled after a ram's skull; some of the other Spaceborne think it's foolish to have opaque objects that close to my eyes. I find it helps, when going into the vacuum of space, to dress as death. There should be nothing living in such a place, and it is a law I, unlike my crewmates, do not violate.

-Withstand- 

This is the last of my Defy mask series, finally complete after 3 years. You can see the other 5 in my earlier post!