Tjakiri Getaway (pt 1)
17 Apr 2018LongDistanceClara
Quick break from the modelling thing - my pea brain has more or less melted after a week or so of teaching myself the basics of character sculpting/rigging/animation >.< That having been said, have managed at last to get a rough version of my actual E:D avatar/character setup and have started on the fine detail - custom clothes at last, hurrah!
I decided to try and rl-analogize my time spent modelling with some in-game shenanigans, so I've moved my character to a new station where I'll be fitting out the ship ready for her "colonization" voyage - while in rl, I'll be doing the character and ship modelling. Bit of a rubbish attempt at tying the two together but thought it might be fun!
Anyway - log stuff! (pics are a bit iffy, I haven't really had any in-game time of late, sorry!)
---
Have you ever dropped out of Witchspace and instantly had that tickly "uh-oh" feeling down your spine? There's no contacts, no alarms, everything looks fine - and yet part of your brain is fidgeting, chewing its fingernails and saying "not good, not good, are you listening to me, you never listen to me, I said not good!!!"?
That's my life at the moment.
Alright, that may be a bit too drama queen-y! I'm just not exactly comfortable at the moment; I'm not even in the same neighborhood as comfortable - I'm on the ship, locked down tight in a hanger, no-one knows we're here or who we are (theoretically) - and yet I've got fingers walking up and down my spine telling me something bad is coming...
Aaaand I'm waffling again! Start at the beginning. Coral and I spent a pretty nervy night hiding out on that dustball before taking a run at Jameson. The idea had been to get some rest, but we were both a bundle of nerves after our escape from Marconi and I don't think either of us slept a wink. Still, after a few hours of lying rigid in our bunks, it was time to make a move. We zombied up to the cockpit, strapped in and very gingerly left the moon. I popped the course into the navcomp for Jameson, thinking how good it would be to be back, while Coral started checking the sensors; a chirp behind me meant that she'd picked up a message, but that could wait - right now I had a serious need to be back amongst familiar faces!
I started spooling the drive - and about a second before we hit the commit timer, Coral yelled at me to abort! I was about to shout at her for scaring the hell out of me when I read the message she sent to my console:
Well crap. I - JUST - WANT - TO - GO - HOME!
I'll admit I was feeling a bit emotional at this point! None of this was my doing - well I mean it was technically but really, it was self-defence! Ok, pull yourself together and figure out a plan. Nothing's changed; I still need to get the Wildcat ready for our planetary survey mission. The only slight problem is that there are people out there trying to turn me into a payday! So we need station resources to modify and install the kit we grabbed at Marconi, plus a few custom knick-knacks to boot - but we can't just breeze into any old station, we'll get flagged immediately! We need somewhere a bit shady with plenty of resources but where no-one asks too many questions...Here's the problem - that's not me! I'm not that kind of pilot - Little Goody Two-Shoes, right here! All I've ever done was fly diplomats around for the Imps so that I could get my Pilot's License, then basically became a tour-operator-slash-deep-space-explorer. The shadiest place I've ever been (apart from San Tu) was some of the more iffy bars in Shinrarta and that's hardly the badlands! I think I must've been muttering to myself, as it was at this point that Coral piped up.
And this is where she scares me
She looks like a completely naive, happy-go-lucky little innocent - who then promptly tells me she knows of a perfect spot in the Tjakiri system, a Coriolis starport with all the tech we'll need, but a pretty shady joint. We have this kind of unwritten rule - I don't ask her about her past, and she doesn't tell - but sometimes it's a huge honking great elephant in the room that's almost impossible to ignore! Anyway - I had nothing; and we couldn't just float around out here forever so with no better plan, we set off to Tjakiri.
On the way, Coral gave me a run down of what to expect; the starport we were headed to was Clair Dock and was the HQ of a particularly scary bunch, a group called 'Black Omega'. She basically said we'll be fine if we stay off the radar - don't get in trouble, head down, stay out of their way etc... So in retrospect walking straight into one of their favorite clubs was probably not the smartest thing we could have done - but more on that another time
She kept nattering away about "oh, and don't go to this level, soon as you leave the nicer districts it gets really shady and pretty horrible" and "I mean, they have laws and stuff, but y'know...", in that cheerful voice of hers, while I'm slowly becoming a nervous wreck. And before I have time to just give up and "newp!" the ship around - we arrived.
San Tu was a pretty crazy place, don't get me wrong. All sorts of dodgy folks there (as I found out!) and a fairly elastic view of law and morality! But what with everything Coral had been saying (and my sleep-deprived imagination conjuring up worst-case scenarios), the monolith that was Clair Dock looming large over the canopy had me very spooked. San Tu had been a sanitized walk on the wild side - a theme-park replica of "being bad"...
Clair Dock was the real deal - there was no fakery or imitation here. And this might sound a bit florid, but I had a sudden and rather unsettling flashback of being a kid at the beach near our home on Capitol, splashing around in the warm tidal rock pools where we would play and learn to swim - before wading out for the first time into the cold, pounding surf and the unending dark sea beyond. This felt rather worryingly just like that and I'll be honest, I was so close to turning around; but before I could, we were within the docking envelope - no turning back now...
As we entered the dock, I relaxed a little. Ok, there aren't limbless bodies flying around and screams over the comms - it's just a normal starport - quite a nice one, in fact! Looking around I could see the station had some very swanky stuff - real state-of-the-art tech - and no-one had even tried to murder us yet! Maybe things weren't as bad as I'd initially thought; there was the usual strobing light-show of all the big names, hawking their wares, the docking lights flitting back and forth across the cavernous interior - yep, this is all looking fairly familiar. I settled down a bit as we cruised down the lanes to our landing pad.
Skids on the deck, the hiss of hydraulics and the jerk of the elevator taking us down to the hangar and boom - welcome to Clair Dock! We'd be living off the ship to keep a low profile (and enable a quick getaway just in case!). Since we'd be working in her whenever we were awake anyway, it just made sense. It'd cost us an arm and a leg to reserve the hangar for that long, but it'd be worth it for the privacy.
As soon as we were down, Coral jumped up and started fiddling with a console - when I asked what she was up to, all I got back was "oh - stuff". Great, thanks Coral, I'm feeling kinda out-of-it enough already! I think she noticed because she stopped and explained; she was manually disabling the no-fire safeties on one of the class 1 turrets so that (and I quote) "if anyone breaks into the hangar and, sort of, tries to do anything, we'll be able to stop them".
Elephant is looking particularly huge and honking right about now.
So - we're here. No-one should know who we are - Coral had futzed with our ship ID, so as far as any station logs are concerned, we're now the Selaya and have never heard of any cats, wild or otherwise. Unfortunately, people's eyeballs don't respond quite as well to Coral's technical witchcraft, so a change of appearance was in order! I had a beat up old flight suit as my back-up, so we'll start with that. Next up - well I can't change my face, so (with some helpful suggestions from Coral muttered through the spanner between her teeth!) a few makeup alterations later and I'm starting to look a bit different.
My hair was a bit of a giveaway; pilots generally cut it short as it gets in the way of the helmet but I've always had long hair and it'll be a cold day in hell before I cut it! So we decided it'd be best to dye it; Coral kindly nipped out to the station to get the 'necessaries' while I continued with her work unhooking the turret from the ship's systems. Pretty soon she was back, along with a pair of bright blue cosmetic lenses for my eyes et voilà! New Clara!
Before and After!
It feels so weird
So there we are! There was the whole mess of "later that evening" and blundering into somewhere we really shouldn't have - but I'll save that for another time. We're going to settle in for a bit, but tomorrow we'll need to head back out into the station, grab some provisions and start getting a shopping list together for all the stuff we couldn't get at Marconi. And I really hope I can get some sleep tonight, but even though we're firmly locked down in this hangar, I feel completely adrift right now...
Anyway, time to turn in. This is the "Selaya", signing off
---
Just wanted to say a few quick thank yous! My logs have always been solo things, largely because I used to explore solo and I will also freely admit I know absolutely nothing (apart from the basics) about the E:D universe, lore-wise! So I tried to keep everything fairly stand-alone and light weight
Since my unintelligible scribbling has become slightly more rp-ey though, and to make the galaxy feel more "real", I thought I might take a stab at trying to reference some other players in my logs.Absolutely wouldn't want to tread on any toes or clash with someone else's narrative stuff, so I've kept it ridiculously lightweight and only VERY slightly referential. Very much didn't want to barge in to someone else's world without checking I had the basics right, so I just wanted to say thanks to Stryker and Matt for putting up with me bending their ears about the station that's part of the Inara-Pegasi universe! Looking forward to making time for the second "bit" which should be much more involved - will do my homework and try my best to make sure it's consistent with everyone's stuff! (Apologies in advance to the whole Pegasi gang for anything I get horribly wrong!)
And just for giggles - a sneak peak at the early SUPER ROUGH cut of the all-new "Remlok Casual" - guaranteed not to work in space
