A Fesh Start
25 Dec 2017Monolith Preacher
Preacher woke up with a sore head and a throbbing jaw. His dance moves went down a treat on the dance floor, but trying to keep pace with the breakcore had resulted in him taking a bit more Fesh than his body was really ready to handle, and his body was protesting at the amount of hard work he'd put in. As he brought up the GalNet feed for the day, he realised he'd almost been involved in an altercation with a fellow preacher at some point, but his brain couldn't recall a single moment of the entire endeavour. He wondered idly if Len was making him seem good in the write up, as he was sure the drugs in his system were likely to have made him a lot more snappy than the account mentioned. He was sure, however, that his use of archaic city slang was likely to follow him around for a while, as he tended to put forward a far more cultured front for the press than his lowly upbringings had actually resulted in him becoming.With the Railroad gone, he had delegated duties for the retreating of the dross systems to the rest of the wing, and he decided to focus on bigger things. There was a looming war for a very important system in the works, and he also was trying to spearhead a Winter Olympics for the Pegasi Sector Commonwealth to finally get everyone together in something that wasn't another war zone. The public image of Black Omega was undergoing a shift towards what he felt was a more appropriate setting as owners of the best club in the bubble, and the recent promise to allow slaves passing through some modicum of human rights was opening up opportunities he had not foreseen, but which may soon prove to be rather fortuitous. All in all, things were finally starting to look up as far as the macrocosm of his life was concerned.
He decided to celebrate by finally getting himself a pet. He sauntered over to Ts'in Gu and invest in the new talking pumpkins which had recently been developed. After browsing through a few which were altogether too straight-laced, he found one with a rather more satyrical grin than the rest, and had a rather drawn out bit of banter which resulted in him agreeing to take on this plant on the agreement that it would get mashed into a pulp if it talked to any of his future VIPs on the proviso that it could chew him up for breakfast if he happened to become a corpsicle during his journeys. Apparently, the plant's name was "Zero". When Jaquel ventured that it was more of a number than a name, Zero mentioned that he used to be a ghost dog a long time ago, and his first owner had an interesting penchant for the macabre and the antiquated notion of a fat man breaking into people's houses in order to do some odd form of forced charity he didn't fully understand.
Truth be told, Preach wanted some form of grounding when he was flying to distract from the voices he was already hearing in his head all too frequently. He had neglected to tell anyone in his wing for fear of them doubting his prowess, but he was starting to wonder if he was losing his marbles or if he indeed was the owner of a haunted ship. When he first found the wreck of a 'conda he had been using for the past year floating around the asteroid belt in Tjakiri, there was a malevolent presence lingering through it as he made his way to the bridge. Being a man of strong resolve and possibly the most faithful Monolithian known since the days of them being an Earthbound faction, he believed his spirituality and will would prevail over any such metaphysical concerns. However, as time went on, he began to feel like he wasn't entirely sure whether he was truly in control of the ship.
It started innocently enough. Once in a while, he would turn to a certain panel and be sure that he heard a cat meow at him. He was never fond of cats, and he thought it might be a joke in the audio interface left by a previous owner, so he paid it little heed. Flash forward a month or so, and the ship's computer began to relay information about it's dog which "most certainly was real". The voice reminded him of a rather spoony AI he remembered reading about being installed in an old red mining ship whose crew ended up succumbing to the "space madness" which often affected the first batch of people brave enough to leave Sol. As time went by, this AI began to have arguments with a grandiose competitor who would wax verbose about the cosmos with a sense of awe and a somewhat annoying sense of self importance. Both of these things began to feel like a rather normal state of affairs when he began researching the kinds of AIs which CMDRs had recently been installing into their ships, and he was glad that the smug brain transfer given to a certain lecherous captain of the Federation had not found its way into his hunk of junk, as he really did enjoy using this apparent ghost ship as a space taxi.
Then, a rather loud and trigger-happy AI turned up quite unexpectedly around the summer time. It rambled on for hours about the hygiene habits of Thargoids, and recounted a myriad of adventures so bombastic that Jaquel wondered how many of them were based in fact and how many of them were him relaying old wive's tales as his own endeavours. It started to begin to feel like something of a houseshare scenario, and it kept him rather entertained when he was mining for materials for the Engineers who always wanted increasingly ludicrous things before granting him an audience. However, the last addition to the motley crew had legitimately unnerved him.
It appeared that this rogue AI had been lurking there the whole time, and was waiting for him to slip up so it could commandeer the vessel for its own nefarious processes. It constantly referred to him as an insect, and was always pushing to replace the "bag of meat" he owned with "cybernetic grace". Whilst its ability to compute long distance travel up to 20K light years was certainly impressive, and it appeared to have an encyclopaedic knowledge of a range of subjects, it made no attempts to hide its malicious nature, and at times he was sure it had made the hardpoints open fire indiscriminately when he was in a combat zone or HazRes. Whilst his trigger-happy madman always promoted a "shoot first" policy, he never pushed Preach's hand in the endeavour. Jaquel decided to hire a co-pilot in order to legitimise his worry, as he was sure a third party would be the best way to make his mind up on whether any of this was actually normal procedure for the more zealous CMDRs out there.
He found a crewman who had served on an Imperial capital ship, as they could be trusted to act with a certain decorum and also to keep any oaths they professed. He was also aware that the only people likely to be complicit with the kinds of endeavours Black Omega tended to get up to would be someone who was already a fond contributor to Imperial atrocities. His plan backfired, however, when the AI appeared to go offline as soon as his new recruit entered his ship. Therefore, buying Zero seemed a good way to have "eyes on the ground" at all times as this situation progressed. He still kept it secret from his wingmates, and decided that if the worst came to the worst, he would merely trade in the ship to some random Grom-infested backwater in the hopes it would impede their rampages through the bubble.
Of course, the levels of paranoia this implied brought him back round to thinking of his substance abuse. A while ago he had given up the Onionhead, rightly feeling that it was taking the edge of his ability to think straight due to how often he was walking around with a smoke hanging out of his mouth. He had never been much of a drinker, although he was certainly happy that rum was finally available in Harma, as it stopped him needing to create his own moonshine for the sake of having a few shots on occasions which warranted it. However, he still dealt in any substance which was available, and he felt a need to test the product to make sure it was legitimate and he wasn't being sold henna instead of Black Lotus, as the old saying went. He'd tried most of them as a teenager anyway, and had developed enough of a tolerance that he could get away with taking a quick hit and going on his merry way to sell it without it making him try and play chicken with a neutron star on his way to smuggle it into whichever system he felt could benefit from it the most.
Then he unlocked access to the Crom system. Fesh was the most illegal thing around, and with good reason. That stuff made you sharper than a nano-refined filament knife, but over-use of it ravaged the body and mind in a way which made most injected substances seem like taking an extra dessert on a weight loss program. Of course he'd tried Fesh, and decided that like Tantra taught "the very poison that kills becomes the elixir of life when used by the wise". If someone couldn't keep a handle on something, it was their own fault if they ended up spacing themselves because they felt too cooped up in their spacesuit. But when he tried Crom Silver Fesh, it was like he'd never taken anything before. He instantly set up a standing order with the suppliers so he could pump it through the dry ice machines at Deggie's, and at low potencies it was working quite well to heighten the atmosphere. It also resulted in him having a few spare tonnes sitting around at any given time, however, and so he didn't really bother keeping tabs on his own use of the substance. He was starting to notice that it was taking it out of his system shortly before he underwent his rather drastic image change, and he was slowly weaning himself down to a more acceptable level in order to not become the same shrivelled wreck his wingmates had been used to seeing before Marra left.
His gradual down scaling of his dose was going well from a metric point of view. He had moved down from the "this should have killed three yaks" to "double LD50", but it was resulting in some rather harsh withdrawal symptoms which was resulting in him occasionally having to retire to a secluded area to indulge some base impulses in order to get his head straight again. He couldn't help but wonder if his recent maiming of the new barman might have been somewhat influenced by the mood swings he was having to analyse in hindsight, and the more paternal part of his brain was wondering whether he might be giving the kid a few new addictions a bit too early for his body or brain to handle it, but the logical side said the sprog must've known what he was getting himself into when he signed up.
As he sat in his private quarters in the back of the club, Preach began thinking about a way to start promoting it to the galaxy at large. It was then a massive paid advertisement blared through his feed about a massive breakfast party at Harmony. Those chefs were at it again, and they wanted some drinks.
“Well now, I'm sure we can do better than that!” he said to no-one in particular.
“Sure can, Guv!” replied Zero “Just don't put any of my shavings in the punch!”
He fired up the Crystal Shard and decided to go on an old-school smuggling run. He started in Harma for good measure, and by the time he had completed his route he found that the better part of a day had passed. As he gandered at his cargo racks, he realised he should have enough to make sure that anyone who did try the punch would probably need to have their blood tested by at least three different doctors to decant the amount of substances sufficiently to process how to treat them if they had more than three glasses. He decided to try one out for good measure himself once he set up the drip-feed system underneath the fountain being used to supply the drinks, and that might have filtered in to the reason he flew a touch too close to a few dead stars on the way back home.
