So Long & Thanks for all the Fish! :D
06 Sep 2018LongDistanceClara
Alright - contentious one! Lot of silliness has been said over the recent Gnosis thing; I'm not here to add my two cents because there's absolutely no point and it's just not what Clara would do!
All I'll say is, I've decided to skip out of Elite for - I don't know! Never say never 
I adore this game and there's nothing to say I won't come back at some point. But for right now, this is kind of a rather sad "goodbye" from me! There's absolutely no drama involved at all and no, it's not OMGNOSIS It's just something I've decided for various reasons I couldn't go however without saying an absolutely MASSIVE thank you to all of the people on Inara. YOU guys have been the absolute stars of my time in Elite and I have loved every second of it so much more thanks to the amazingly fun logs and pictures of so many pilots, the messages back and forth and friends made - it's honestly made the game a million percent better than it had ever been for me
Not to get too emo about it but I'm genuinely a bit choked up about how much I'm going to miss it all! /facepalmOddly enough, it's been almost a year to the day since I came back from a hiatus and discovered Inara, in terms of logs and whatnot. I think I've done more in that year, in spite of rl interventions, than I did in all the years since kickstart to that point! So really and truly, thank you all so much for making this game a thousand times better than it ever was by itself for me
Loadsa love and all the very best to everyone here
Take care out there!
Well - there it is.
A few hours ago, I'd just finished tying down the sheets over the Calypso, my nice shiny clipper. She was slowly rolled back into the storage hangar now and I was more than a little tearful to see her go - I really had fun in her, both last year and in the recent days of futzing with various bits and bobs to get her ready for "that little jaunt". Was really looking forward to it but c'est la vie!
It's been an almost surreal few days. After sleeping for almost a whole day after that bonkers trip in my viper Amelia, Coral and I had a LOT of work to do! I'd decided that as much fun as the party bus would have been, a properly fitted clipper would be far more sensible to take for a month-long trip in the isolated Cone sector - I know, so unlike me!
So we set about dashing around the bubble, sweet talking the engineers into tuning the pants off her and forking over outrageous amounts of resources to those sneaky material traders.But when she was done, she was glorious! A tough little cookie and quick as can be; she could clatter around a high gravity planet with a klutz like me at the wheel, scratch the eyes out of smaller prey and run like a hellcat if something bigger wanted to put her on the lunch menu! I decided (rather uncharacteristically for me!) to buy her some new clothes, and although I'm horribly biased, I think she looked absolutely gorgeous!
Since we were going to be stuck out in the back of beyond for a month, I wanted to drop by my hometown on Capitol, so we nipped over to Achenar to say hi. Was great seeing the old digs but as we left, I started to feel a little nervy - this was happening! We were really going out there and from the sound of things, we might need Calypso's claws after all!
I'm sure everyone feels this way when they come home? But breaking orbit from Capitol is always a breathtaking scene for me. As you cross over from the darkside to daylight, all those glowing veins of light twinkle up at you from the cusp of the planetary shadow; the light scattering down through the atmosphere creates this beautiful blue-and-gold halo around the horizon and I'm entranced by it every time!
Ok so enough waxing lyrical, onwards! And soon the nerves faded, we had the music blaring and were doing daft barrel rolls around the stars as we trotted down to Outotz and the awaiting Gnosis. So we weren't in a particularly serious or sensible mood and as such were maybe just a tiny bit late in putting down the landing gear - but good grief that Gnosis flight comms guy has a stick up his bum, he really needs to relax and have some fun
So we locked down for the night; we'd got in kinda late, so the Gnosis was fairly quiet at the time, not much going on. However next morning, we had a day to kill so we nipped off out to the local area and poked around a bit, more as an excuse to go screaming around in the Calypso
But we ended up running into a fun little planet with a bunch of geysers popping off in a canyon below us, which was pretty fun - made more so by a friend joining us out there!
This was one of the things I'd REALLY been looking forward to. Explorers by nature tend to spend most of their time being antisocial little hermits, off in the wilderness for ages at a time
I've swapped stories with fellow travellers, sure, but we never really meet? So for all of us to be coming together on this little trip - explorers, privateers, heck even the pirates - it was going to be a real melting pot and for someone who spends most of their time off in the dark alone, it was going to be amazing!And next morning, all hell breaks loose.
Substantial servings of "HOOOOONK" with a side of "BZZZZZZT!" had both Coral and I scrambling out of our bunks and rushing to the cockpit. The hangar was in full disco mode, lights going off all over the place, and as the elevator dragged the ship and its two still sleepy pilots to the surface, we were treated to another ear-shattering honk.
Two big ugly thargoid beasties were busy beating the bejeezus out of the Gnosis' butt - before they inexplicably swung around, drifted away and "boop" - gone. The megaship was clearly in a bad way, but there was nothing we could really do to help - we'd just have gotten in the way of all those manic damage control teams racing around inside. So we figured "ok, let's go do some recon and see what's going on!".
The rest of the day was - nuts. Charging around from signal source to signal source, poking our noses in to see if there were any survivors;
...or popping off a few shots at space starfish then burning out of dodge leaving a trail of goop behind us! All in all, it was a pretty manic time; and (as weird as this might sound) - kinda exciting? Don't get me wrong, it was all rather grim and serious stuff! But by the same token, we were both running on pure adrenalin and were pretty shaky come midday. Nevertheless, the Gnosis was still there, taking the beatings like a champ and giving some back, along with all the other pilots "doing their bit".
And then there's a rumour. That becomes more and more solid as time passes, until it becomes unbelievable fact. The Gnosis had been given clearance to jump to that area of space; but the powers-that-be had never planned to allow her to go through with it. Everyone, everyone has their views on this and I'm not about to rehash it - the only thing I find rather disappointing is that as with so many things in life, there's two camps - one in defence of an issue, others opposed to it.
That in itself isn't the issue - I'm disappointed because neither side realises they're BOTH right? The guys who put all that effort in and in the end felt misled have every right to feel the way they do; the guys who are just fine with the way things turned out equally have every right to feel the way they do, too! The need for BOTH sides to throw insults at each other and whip out the verbal jousting - it's this ugly side of mankind that makes me think we've not evolved one little bit.
We waited until things had settled down a bit and the Gnosis was - not exactly out of harm's way, but everything that we could have done in our little Clipper, we'd done. After which, we had a talk, Coral and I, and decided we'd only end up being a drain on the megaship's resources, at a time when it needed every last scrap to support the pilots capable of defending her. So to that end, and with a pretty heavy heart, I dumped everything we could spare with the Gnosis repair crews and headed back to Shinrarta.
All the way there, the "airwaves" were just being melted by petty bickering from both sides, fatuous pompous gasbags in both camps, and we were pretty glum when we got back to Jameson that evening. One wonderful ray of light though that instantly brightened my day was that we were greeted dockside by Hal! He'd been released from his call-up service, something about assets being relocated for the big thargoid offensive, but it was immediately clear he'd been in some pretty bad scrapes and had that haunted look of someone who'd been in the wars for too long.
We talked very long into the night; about the state of affairs in the bubble; the thargoid presence, the pretentious ass-hattery, all of it. And I don't know when it happened or how, but at some point, we all just looked at each other and immediately knew - it was time to get out. Of the bubble, of the rat race, just go and get away.
It was stupidly late - but it didn't matter. We all just got up without a word, walked down to the shipyard and found the hanger of the Clair de Lune, my dear old Anaconda. We had been through thick and thin together and it felt right that she be the one to take us on the drift. No-one spoke as we quietly went about making her flight-ready and very soon, almost too soon, we were gently floating off the deck and heading out for the last time from the starport that had been a home to me for so long.
We'll head off to Marimba, our island paradise, and decide where to go from there. Some folk'll say we're abandoning ship; some might even try and use us as a reason to claim right for their side - I don't care. The truth is that I'm just tired of it all. And with Coral and Hal sat either side of me and the Clair de Lune gently humming away beneath us, that's all I could ever need. That and the stars.
This is Clara, signing off for the last time.
