#whereas Eskarra is not great with social cues and defaults to surnames with everybody in an effort to be respectful

[isaacathom]

i had a ridiculously long post in my drafts about my lil firefly knockoff thing ive got buzzing around the brainpan but what if i didnt do that, and made it much shorter

basic setting shit - different systems are daisy chained together by something called the Interstellar Highway, which are fantasy bullshit that basically tunnels through space and loop around the edge of systems for a speed boost. Because of the speeds needed, every system on a highway has a structure called the OnRamp, which basically fucking catapults you onto the highway. theyre great.

it used to be that you would stop at every system on the highway to refuel and to check ship integrity, because engine efficiency wasnt good enough for long journeys. however, in the last 40 or so years, industrial-grade engines have gotten to the stage that they can go 2-3 systems without stopping, and that has naturally meant some systems have started languishing.

the system the story takes place in is one of those, where it primarily acted as a pit stop. the only traffic it really gets now is its own import traffic, which generally goes maybe 1 system over in either direction for essential goods.

because of the lack of Business, the systems sucking shit, and a lot of people in the inner system rely on a gig-economy of delivery ships that travel between them and the onramp.

the ship at the story's core is one of these gig economy ships. it's a like 30yo ship, bought on loan by one Captain Foster Cline, whose hectic routes throughout the system have gotten him within sight of owning the ship outright, but not quite.

the crew can be divided into sub groups, starting with the "captain core":

Foster Cline, a guy in his 50-60s. pretty nice guy overall, jovial and hard-working. owns and manages the ship, and can do most of the jobs alright

Andrea Seward, lady in her 40s. shes very cautious and 'safe', preferring known routes and repeat customers. handles a lot of the paperwork and accounting, though she can apparently pilot.

Ogawa Yuuji, guy in his early 50s. really sweet guy, always trying to help and offer advice even when its unasked for. works as the ships gunner and security guy, as well as being a general strong pair of arms.

These three have known each other for years, Cline and Ogawa in particular going back to before he bought the ship, and Seward being one of their first 'hires' when they went into business.

Then we have the younger gen:

Jalen Romilly, man in his late 20s. He's a guy who likes to follow rules and structures, always wanting things planned out and knowing what's happening. He's also particularly worried about diseases and germs, so he keeps his areas of the shop spotless. He's the ship's slow and steady primary pilot.

Gideon van der Karmozijn, man in his early 30s. He's a creative guy, loves tinkering and trying new shit, and he's always confident it will work. He's the ships primary mechanic, and secondary pilot.

These two are more recent hires, the last 5 years or so, replacing an irregular churn through other pilots and mechanics over the 30yrs of the ships operation.

The basic vibe is this ship always starts its route at the OnRamp, and the captain core + Romilly will sit down and plan out what jobs they're taking for the next little bit, trying to layer as many on top of eachother as they can for maximum profit, with the understanding that they'll revisit the list at every stop to tack more onto the end, continuing a month-long rush of work before they will return to the OnRamp station for a week.

It's gig economy delivery, and it can vary a good deal. You'll get people asking for medicine, businesses asking for raw materials, groups requiring transit from point a to point b, people needing you to transfer shit on their behalf, so on. Most of them it's pretty uneventful, though the need to try and get good profit margins means sometimes tensions can flare. it can be a big mess.

The "show", such that it is structured in my mind, would begin with 2.5 ish episodes of the 'regular shit' for these guys. obviously some of their more exciting or complicated jobs, drama with someone unwilling to pay, so on. at one point they do end up picking up a package from a shady 'merchant' where the implication is that their goods are all stolen. And it's like, well... ? not much we can do. Cline has been a good client of theirs for years, yknow how it is.

then during the third episode, they follow up on a job that needs them to go to a vineyard in high country of one of the planets to pick up a delivery bound for a bar on a different planet. they land a little ways off, and the captain core traipse off to go sort everything out with the owners while the younger gen man the ship.

at which point a group a ruffians descend upon the ship to try and take it.

karmozijn manages to barricade himself and romilly into the bridge and radio for help, and ogawa bounds off. before the others can respond, they get cut off by some members of the group, and shit just fully ensues. cline and seward get into a short firefight in the woods, ending in cline being fatally shot and seward scaring off the hijackers by convincing them that the vineyard owners are coming with firepower (they are, but they were still a few minutes out). on the ship, meanwhile, ogawa ends up fighting the hijackers in the engine room, managing to defeat or scare them off but receiving serious injuries.

with the aid of the vineyard owners, they get cline's body back to the ship and karmozijn is able to very patch-repair the mechanisms in the engine room so the ship will go. because, well... they're in the inner system, aren't they? high country, no less, middle of fucking nowhere. ships damaged, going slow as shit but theyre in a rush. nearest hospital? nearest hospital with SPACE? fucking hell. romilly is eventually able to make contact with an ambulance ship thats willing to make a detour to meet them on its way to somewhere else, and thus they get on a fuking move.

they don't make it to the rendezvous before ogawa dies.

whereas there was nothing they could do for cline, ogawa shouldn't've have died. his injuries were bad, yes, but evidently manageable. with prompt medical treatment, he would've pulled through. and they couldn't get him there.

the ship, two crew down, hobbles back to the OnRamp. each begins a rapid suite of various tasks - Seward is handling job cancellations, paperwork, the police investigation, and also volunteers/demands to be the one to tell Cline's daughter what happened. Romilly is handling talking to Ogawa's family, as well as hiring a new gunner on the double so that they can try to resume work quickly. Karmozijn is handling ship repairs, trying to make it fit into their suddenly stretched budget. and everyones grieving, and everyones handling it pretty poorly.

into this hectic period, covered by a few episodes in my mind, the crew expands not by the expected one, but by three - the new crew:

Petra Cline, Foster's daughter, in her early 20s. she's an adventurous sort who loves to try new things, and in this specific instance shes pissed. She all but demands to be allowed aboard by reasoning with Seward that since the ownership deeds were in Foster's name, as his next of kin she legally owns the ship. Seward decides not to press the issue (it may come up later anyway)

Zayvia Eskarra, nb in their mid 30s. An awkward and poorly social but lovely individual, they're brought on as the ships new gunner largely by dint of being the first person to apply for the position.

Ko Xue, woman in her last 20s. She's confident and brash, working on a vibes-based level on a lot of things. after the first 4/5 crew job goes Okay Ish but not ideal, it's agreed that they need a new pilot to replace Romilly so that he can shift into a managerial position (Sewards idea), and Ko takes that primary pilot role.

A new crew of 5/6 established, they continue on, doing a whole bunch of shit. its largely the same work, very episodic job-of-the-week business. the main underlying thing is the way the crew adapts and grows close, or apart, as the case may be.

there are a few key plots that would occur throughout in the show:

Ko is an extremely qualified ship pilot. like, highway certified. The fact she's working as the primary pilot for a dinky gig ship is bizarre, and it eventually comes to light that this is effectively a side gig for her main job, which is working for a prestigious, slightly dubious inter-system organisation who have their fingers in a lot of pies. she joined because she thought they'd help her make a difference in her dead-end system, but has found that to not be the case, and is locked into an exceptionally long contract. this interferes with her work on the ship on a number of occasions, and some members of the crew are PISSED when her status is revealed because it means shes loaded. its a whole thing.

Romilly has a family (siblings and parents) he supports with his delivery money, who occur throughout depending on how he's doing. there's a lot of drama there about whether he can afford to send the majority of his paycheck their way, especially closer to the vineyard thing, and later too. complicated stuff for him.

Eskarra is, notably, the only member of the crew who is not from the system. They're actually from a place some 4 systems down the highway, having been stranded here when the ship they were working on got 'pulled over' for illegal smuggling, being briefly locked up, and then being unable to pay for passage back home. This causes a sense of disconnect, since they arent anywhere near as familiar with the system as the others, which Eskarra attempts to rectify by like. doing chores. i love them.

Ko and Karmozijn hit it off really well because they both like pushing the ship to the limit, something that upsets both Seward and Romilly, with Romilly taking particular issue with the way Ko handles the ship - he is forced to concede she is the far better pilot, however. As close as the two become, though, Ko expresses little interest in him outside of their shared interests.

Eskarra and Romilly start lowkey dating. its a whole thing

Seward basically alienates everyone aboard the ship as she tries to live up to being the kind of captain that Cline was, which she demonstrably cannot be. she takes a special dislike to Eskarra because they are 'inferior to Ogawa in several ways', many of which have nothing to do with Eskarra's job.

Petra Cline, on the other hand, gets to be on pretty good terms with the majority of the ship, though shes on better terms with the new crew than she is with the others owing to, yknow, The Situation With Her Dad. She's the main person who is still close to Seward, because shes the one person Seward isn't rude to (or the one person who gets an unforced apology from her when she is).

She also bounces between different sectors of the ship as she learns various parts of the trade - piloting from Ko, mechanics from Karmozijn, and very limited combat stuff from Eskarra (predominantly knife-based and gun safety, with very limited opportunity to actually fire the gun bc Eskarra refuses to discharge the gun on the actual ship on principle). She does not interact with Romilly much at all, lmao.

and then we hit Da Big Thing, da big plot that i have in my noggin - a few episodes long arc in the acute sense, and certainly a longer thing overall. The Party Split.

now i have no fucking idea how we get here. my vague vibe is that there's possibly a ship that crashes off the highway into something, and theres a general sense of oh. we should uh. we should do something about that. after maybe arriving to help ferry some of the passengers to the OnRamp, maybe one of them goes 'hey. my mcguffin. can you go back and get it. ill pay you to get it' and the crew goes... yeah. sure. sure we can fetch your mcguffin. just sign this thing right here to show that we're not scavengers in case anyone asks and we'll go for it. its good pay.

and basically they're hunting for this thing, and since the ships fucked its basically picking through debris, and they aren't the only ones. guess who shows up? the shady merchants from earlier! where better to steal from than a downed ship? and they heard about a valuable mcguffin 👀

conflict ensues t'fuck. seward, romilly, and eskarra basically head out on the hunt, leaving ko, karmozijn and cline (lol) on their ship. everyones under fire. this is a mess. at some point, karmozijn tells cline that the communications are being jammed and she needs to go tell the captain (seward) that, and also that the shields are busted. she agrees, books it out. she doesnt find seward, instead finding eskarra, who is maybe Understandably Unhappy that she entered what is at this point an active fire fight, gives her a knife JUST IN CASE and tells her to fuck off back to the ship, they'll deliver the message. off they go.

on the ship, karmozijn has abandoned his station and headed to the bridge, has a conversation with Ko that quickly devolves into 'we should just get out of here, this isnt worth it' which Ko seems very lukewarm on.

on the ground, Karmozijn finds Seward to relay the message, which confuses her because Ko has been communicating with her consistently throughout the whole thing, including during her conversation with Karmozijn. And the shields seem fine? Somethings up.

Karmozijn abandons his attempt to be coy and flat out asks Ko to elope with him, which she rejects. He knocks her out, seizes the controls, and ITS. GO. TIME.

Karmozijn, Ko in tow, leaves the crash site.

Seward and Eskarra, stuck out far from the ship, end up being cut off from connecting with the rest of the crew by members of the shady group, being captured.

Cline and Romilly end up meeting up at the site where their ship used to be, and witness the departure of Seward and Eskarra with the other group.

the next bit is basically an episode for each team:

Karmozijn keeps Ko under lock and key, telling her that she could just travel with him (the under appreciated mechanic), but that if she won't he plans to just drop her off on the outskirts of some town somewhere with all her things. She manages to finagle him into letting her start packing said things in preparation, then slips away from him and leaves in the emergency shuttle. he does not pursue. she puts up a report about the ship theft, particularly paging her wealthy primary employer about the matter, and heads back to the crash site.

Cline and Romilly are forced to survive together, which is somewhat difficult because they aren't close, the ship is in so many pieces that its not a super viable shelter, and they aren't in a very hospitable area. Romilly focuses on finding things for their survival (food, shelter, so on) and Cline tries to apply the things she's learned from Karmozijn to create a distress beacon. The two end up genuinely coming to some understandings about the other, as their respective skillsets compliment fairly well. its a good camping time. it is pretty dicey though.

Seward and Eskarra are taken back to the shady merchant's base of operations and interrogated about whether they found the mcguffin or know anything about it. Despite her general demeanour, Seward holds up really well under the pressure, whereas Eskarra cracks pretty early - (un?)luckily for them, they don't know anything anyway. Seward makes a few escape attempts, without Eskarra, and for which Eskarra is punished - this does nothing to change Seward's actions. It doesn't help Eskarra that it is revealed (to Seward, anyway) that Eskarra was a former contractor of the shady merchants.

Finally, Ko returns to the crash with the shuttle and picks up Romilly and Cline, gets them fed and warmed up, and then they all mutually agree that they need to at least make an attempt to rescue Seward and Eskarra. They are actually successful, despite Seward trying to convince them to not go back in for Eskarra (Romilly, their pseudo-boyfriend, insists. thank god for homosexuality). its drama

the mcguffin almost certainly ends up being in Cline's possession, or possibly Romilly's, as the two people who remain at the crash site. so they can get back to the station (possibly with a detour for a refuel) and they can get that good good money.

obviously there are still like. consequences from this. which take some time to resolve. for instance, Karmozijn still has the fucking ship. Seward has made her dislike of Eskarra pretty fucking explicit. theres shit going on. they gotta fucking figure that out. they're also down a mechanic, a role cline probably fills at least in the interim.

its a whole thing. this is all meaningless.