Stranded
04 Apr 2020Flambard Quinceteth
Well, that didn't go as planned. I got myself out to the Rim mostly without issue. There was a week where my handling kept going insane, mind. I had to strip out the whole front dash and thruster controls of the Maven to figure out what the hell was going on. I thought I'd fixed it once, but consistently and seemingly without prompting, the damn thing would start slowly pitching up. Not good for when you're trying not to crash into a god damn sun. Took me over a week of repairs to get it sorted; turns out it was just a loose connection between stick and thrust control that would fuck everything up. I re-soldered the whole thing, and stiffened up my stick to prevent any future sudden knocks causing issue again, and it was smooth sailing.
Until I got stuck in deep space. See, the Maven's a great ship, but it turns out even she can't get all the way out here. I'd packed her too full of trinkets and modules to make it where I needed, and that meant I had to shuffle my ass all the way back to Ray's: 1,500lys out only to find I'd fitted my ship wrong, and 1,500lys back to go and eat humble pie.
Got another 30m in cartographic data, mind, and made my first new discovery! Unfortunately, I didn't think to record what it was when I turned the data over, but somewhere out there is a planet with my name on it, and that's kind of amazing. If nothing else, it shows the sheer scope of the galaxy; two days into the black, and I've seen something that no other living being has.
Until Farseer helps me out, Maven wasn't going to get me where I needed to be. I switched over to my Diamondback Explorer - the Vagrant Jaunte - and stripped him back to the bones. All told, he does just shy of 40ly per jump, and was more than enough to get me back out into the black. I headed back out to the Rim and spent some time with nothing but my thoughts and these weird crystalline structures.
After a couple weeks alone, I headed back into the Bubble. I spent a bit of time flitting between systems, trying to get a lead on where a man can find himself some meta-alloys, and stumbled across a grizzled bounty hunter who told me he would frequently patrol the Deciat system for pirates hunting fresh pilots bringing in meta-alloys from Maia. With my destination set for Darnielle's Progress, I got back into the Maven and headed out.
I was nervous arriving in Deciat, and my paranoia proved well-founded. Almost as soon as I jumped in, I was interdicted by a couple of pirates. I'd shaken off interdictions before, but this was different. With my flight skills well improved by now, I decided to submit and see if I could reason with them or, if not, haul ass safely out of there. It was a fool's hope, however, and their well-engineered combat ships tore through me like butter. My last thought before my ship collapsed into dirt was the hope that these damn bio-flashes work, and - I'll admit - a twinge of panicked regret at my decision to leave Earth.
Flambard out.