A Sirius Confession
11 Apr 2024Vizz Curio
::CMDR Vizz Curio on Jupiter Jazz, at Jacques Station, Colonia::::personal log::
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As I recently flew back to Colonia, I'm chillin' and pondering my life 20,000ly away while I'm so far away from it, figured I might document an ancient, serious confession from my former life.
A long, long time ago (I was in cryosleep so long from my accident that I missed the original Thargoid war to give you an idea how long ago) I lived in what was called at the time the Sirius Sector. Everyone knows where the Sirius system is these days. That was back when people stayed within a vicinity of a major system & a few surrounding -- travel wasn't as fast nor convenient as it is with today's FSDs. I grew up an unremarkable orphan. When I was a teenager I started working as a "hired hand" on board freighters that worked out of the spaceport in the city where I had a little rat's nest of a hideaway on the edge. I preferred spending my time in space on a mediocre cargo ship with the basics accounted for than living day-to-day scrounging; plus I learned some skills and saved up some money.
In my early 20s I discovered a long-lost/unknown cousin and we hit it off immediately. We teamed up to start our own teeny, tiny cargo hauling "business" (well, we took whatever jobs we could find!) with a little ship each. We made decent money for honest living, plus a little on the side where we could.
Some time later we had met some unlawful types, part of a local pirate faction known as the Liberty Rogues. They had a homebase made in an asteroid among an asteroid cluster; it was safe because the rocks were all large so navigating through them to get to the base required excellent manual piloting skill and the rocks were so dense & surrounded by dust that very little light from the local star was cast -- it was dark. The base access was invite-only.
My cousin & I started doing odd jobs for the one guy we had met, under the promise of eventually being introduced to the faction and being invited to become members. We were never trustful that this guy wasn't just leading us on to get his own work done for him, but we played along for a while and reaped the monetary rewards happily.
After a while we were annoyed enough that we wanted to ditch that fake carrot-on-a-stick routine, and wanted to make names of ourselves to attract legit attention from the pirates to come to us. We knew we had to do something big and ostentatious enough to garner the attention of the faction and become known as anti-law fiends. That is how the at-the-time-infamous Christmas Eve Massacre started.
The Christmas Eve Massacre in short: my cousin & I moved up from simply extorting-for-credits cargo haulers for "safe passage" to flat out destroying cargo ships & anyone who tried to intervene, and scooping up any spaced valuables & selling them for big profits. A lot of people died and some businesses ruined by our hands and it worked: we became some of the Most Wanted criminals in the region and got our big celebrations with the pirate faction.
We were bad, and we reveled in it at the time.
Eventually, karma came back to kick my ass. As an ace space-fighter pilot, dogfights with the local police were never a major problem. Usually. The last one found me in a scuffle with more like a navy... they finally got me good then: as I was holding tight to my ship falling apart from all the blaster fire, a shot got through that must've finally detonated my wrecked power plant and my ship exploded with all the catastrophic pizazz you'd expect. It seems I was auto-ejected, but not before much of my body was burned and ruined.
I was recovered by those cops who fortunately got me to a medical facility that put me into cyrosleep after processing some healing regimen with all the credits to my name. (Many credits! I was rich from my illicit activities.) I was released in 3300 and given Synthflesh(tm), cybernetic eyes, and some other cybernetic body replacements (both my arms for example) with almost all of the rest of the credits in my ancient account (nothing was ever invested so I never had any awesome interest gains; none at all).
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