Gremlins & Getting To Know You!
22 Jan 2018LongDistanceClara
(I'm very tentatively getting into this slightly more "rp-ey" way of recording my wanderings, with a little bit of fiction/story mixed in with my in-game explorey bits; and as ham-fisted as they are, I'm really enjoying it! It feels like they make things a bit more immersive while I'm on the bajillionth jump to nowhere! With that in mind, I wanted to try and make the "we/rest of the crew" a bit more defined, so while my phone company tries to fix my sulking internet connection, I scribbled some stuff to add a bit more in the way of specifics to the crew of the Kara (I know precisely nothing about the lore of Elite so apologies if any of it seems "off"!)-------------------
Becalmed!
Or whatever the space-faring equivalent is, but either way - we're stuck! We were pottering along up the arm, squeezing between Colonia and the core and heading north again to go poke around my favorite stomping ground. Everything was going great; lots of pretty along the way, including one of those rare gems - a Wolf-Rayet!
So we were bumping along nice and easy, got to a fairly generic G-class star, I flicked the trigger to start spooling the FSD - BOOM. Or rather, an absence of "boom" - drives offline, HUD goes squirrely for a second before flickering out and scariest of all, life support decides it doesn't want to be left out of the party and shuts down! Of course, when I tell this story to friends when I get home, I'll have reacted in the way a consummate professional explorer does - calmly investigating the problem, re-wiring some stuff with my toes while at the same time nonchalantly running some diagnostics with one hand and rebooting the computer with the other, why yes I'll take that drink thanks...
I won't tell them I nearly peed myself, scrabbled for my suit's helmet and ineptly ricocheted my way down to engineering, yelling at Hal to "make things go!" again >.< So I like breathing, sue me! All joking aside, it's pretty darn scary losing life support when you're in the back end of Nowheresville and the nearest help is a lot further than several minutes of oxygen away!
Adrift!
LONG embarrassing story short - we'd had our first gremlin with the Kara, which by some miracle had escaped the shakedown cruise. Bunch of stuff I didn't understand (I fly ships, but they could run on jello as far as my engineering knowledge goes), but basically we'd had a power surge through some faulty circuit and it had tripped all primary systems offline. A few tense minutes later (and a hastily bodged together power cable dangling across engineering like a high-voltage clothes line!) meant we had life support up and running again, thank god. Getting everything else back was going to take a lot longer though - the problem was buried deep in Kara's belly and just getting to it meant pulling up the deck plates and disassembling a whole bunch of stuff!
SO - as much as I want to help, I find myself evicted from engineering by Hal after basically being a hindrance for half an hour, before being politely told to bugger off out of the way! All grumbling and banter aside though, the crew are pretty much my second family - I love 'em to bits and since I'm sat here in my bunk with nothing to do, I figured they deserve a mention
 | NAME: Hallin Strom DOB: 08.08.3270 AGE: 33 GENDER: M ORIGIN: Shukov Settlement, Marlin Canton//Capitol I've known Hal since we were kids growing up as neighbors in Achenar. As I was an only child, I inevitably ended up getting "adopted" by him and his two brothers. I was also usually the one to try and placate their parents, after our latest diabolical scheme had failed horribly and ended up with us in trouble  We were pretty much inseparable as kids; but after I joined the IDC (flying various bigwigs around) and he got a job working as an engineer for a company running freight out of Cubeo, we kinda lost touch. Hence me being so excited when, after advertising for crew a couple of months back, I got a message from him saying he'd left Empire space, was in the neighborhood and wondered if I needed an engineer! As is fairly clear from our current predicament, the answer to that was a big huge honking "yes!" - and he's been with us ever since. It's a massive cliché, but we've literally just picked up where we left off and although he's all business when things get serious, every now and then, we're just kids again, getting into trouble - we've just swapped the galaxy for our backyards all those years ago on Capitol. He can be a pig-headed, stubborn and massively impatient oaf, so much so that sometimes I just want to smack some sense into him with a wrench!!! He's also ridiculously compassionate, generous to a fault, and will walk through walls for anyone he cares for. I'm not a believer in karma or fate or any of that stuff but it's kinda funny that we ended up back together after all this time and all our travels - the odds of him being local to Jameson at that exact moment I was looking for crew? "Of all the gin joints in all the galaxy..." So happy he's back |
| NAME: Coral Harrell DOB: 04.03.3281 AGE: 22 GENDER: F ORIGIN: Unknown She's been onboard for literally a couple of weeks and already I can't imagine flying without her. She's just a superstar and can go from wide-eyed innocent novice to one-hundred-and-ten-percent focused in a heartbeat. More than that though - you know how some folks you sign on are super professional, reliable and all that good stuff, but you don't really gel as a team? Coral is exactly nothing like that - she's more like a little sister. She doesn't talk about her past that much (it's the only time when I see that irrepressibly bubbly facade crack a bit, but I guess she'll talk about it when she wants to). I found her when I was looking for an slf pilot for the Kara's shakedown and although she was by far the least qualified of all the pilots, she was without a doubt 'the one' - even though she had almost no actual flying time, had never been outside the Bubble (let alone to Beagle!) and for sure wouldn't have the first clue about the ins-and-outs of deep space exploration! I'm mediocre at lots of things and utterly hopeless at even more! But I like to think I'm pretty good at reading people - and something about Coral was just an instant "yep!". She's the kind of cheerful happy innocent that the rough-and-tough macho crowd would laugh at on station - but while they're turning tail and running from an unwinnable fight, she'll be staying put and helping folks who need her without a second thought. I think there's a very, very tough cookie under that innocent exterior! Plus she controls the pain meds for next time I inevitably do something goofy so you know - gotta keep her happy |  |
Ok, the cursing from down the corridor has subsided a bit so I'm going to risk taking a peek and see how Hal's getting on.
Wish me luck!