T'was the Night Before Stupid... (Last Bit :D)
29 Nov 2018LongDistanceClara
Really not sure about this! Not being all drama llama but this is a heck of a long way to go! 
I keep doing stupid comparisons in my head, like "If I take a screenie of each system I jump to, then post that in a vid where I have 1 system per second - the video will be about 10 hours long!" or "it's the equivalent of over 38 trips to Beagle point" or "it's almost 114 trips to Colonia" or "why the hell am I doing this?!"
So yep, little bit freaked out.
But I was the same bag of nerves when I did the viper thing, then settled down a bit, so we'll see. And if the worst comes to the worst, nobody's died so it's all good
I just get really wrapped up in these kinds of gaming challenge, so hopefully fingers-crossed, it all goes ok! REALLY hope ch4 releases asap, can't wait to start playing with the "new" lighting in the pics!And a sneaky "thank you!" to Mr Aune for putting up with a never-ending stream of PMs and letting me borrow him to smack Flynn and Hal around a bit! I always wanted to tie Clara in to some of the other Inara loggers shenanigans and although it's very lightweight, I hope to do some more involved "things" further down the line with other peeps in the community (if anyone wants to, that is!). :D Thanks so much once again guys!
Final Bit!
Little bit scared right now!
Sorry for not catching up on my log from last time, I got sidetracked as usual! So here I am, a few days later. We finished up having our "last meal in civilisation" earlier this evening as a crew, tidied away the galley and headed to our beds for our last night docked here at Jameson before the trip. And after tossing and turning for ages, I've given up and come up to the bridge, where I'm sat huddled up in my chair, looking around me and just thinking about the horrendous amount of hours I'm about to spend in this room...
~
A few days ago, I was helping Lauren oversee the fitting of a ship-launched fighter assembly into the cavernous modular bays of the Clair when I got a spaceboopTM - Coral had sent a message to say she'd managed to convince her doctor friend to come along on the trip and would be back that evening. Awesome news - we were almost there! Just Hal and his science guy and we were ready to go!
Coral and Yan leaving Panacea Medical!
And sure enough, later that evening as we were going over inventory in the common area, Coral and her friend walked in, who looked immediately very familiar! His name was Yan (actually it was a bit longer than that but he took pity and told us to call him Yan!) and as it turns out, he was one of the docs from Panacea Medical who saved my life several months ago! So I was already a huge fan.
We spent the rest of the evening chatting and he's just the nicest guy, so easy to get along with and just really relaxed - I know it's such a cliché but he's got "that" doctor voice, where no matter how bad things are, he makes you feel like everything's going to be ok. Which we could do with - because it had been three days now and still no word from Hal. I was starting to get a bit worried - he'd not told us where he was headed so I had no idea where to look for him if he'd gotten in trouble. Still no sight or sound next morning and come the evening, I was starting to get really quite worried. Then later that night, I got a rather scary anonymous message, saying both Hal and some guy I'd never heard of were being held hostage and if I wanted to see them in one piece ever again, I'd better get my butt to the Kamas system!
Ok, so thoroughly freaked out at this point. Everyone very kindly offered to come along but I didn't want to get anyone else in trouble, so I hopped in a bashed-up little cobra (didn't think turning up in a shiny ship was the best idea!) and headed over to Kamas. I'd been told to meet at Grigson, a rather grim planetary port; so ok, down I scooted, plopped down on a pad and got pulled down into the hangar below. VERY spooked!
So here goes nothing! Disembarked, nervously scuttled across the deck and was literally just stepping out of the hangar when I get stopped in the airlock by a very, very dodgy bunch of guys! The head honcho was abso-fricking-lutely huge and had perfected the whole scare-the-crap out of you thing very nicely - honking evil cybernetic arm, nightmare pet dog-cat-what-the-hell-is-that thing! slavering by his side. His muscles had muscles and just gave the all-round impression of "I'm just barely managing to restrain myself from tearing you into confetti with my bare hands."
I will freely admit in the privacy of my log - may have peed myself a bit.
It's really hard to try and look tough and savvy when a) you're about as 'street' as a kindergarten teacher and b) you're literally about half the size of the guy's leg that you're trying to talk to; but I gave it my best shot. And as it turns out, the boss guy was actually a pretty straight shooter! Apparently Flynn (the science guy Hal had gone to recruit) had had a little bad luck in a card game out here - as in, ten million credits worth of bad luck, against a guy who was a far better cheat than Flynn was smart. Hal had then tried to bust Flynn out before the card sharp and his crew had a chance to slice little bits off him, but had run (literally) face first into Mr Man Mountain, who had proceded in a very not-personal-just-business way to smack them both unconscious, throw them in a hole and send me that charming little ransom message!
So, surrounded by some really shady looking characters, I tried to haggle in that cramped little airlock with this behemoth guy - which doesn't really work when he knows full well that you can't exactly walk away from the deal, since that means your friend and his buddy get turned into that nightmare-dog-thing's lunch! Also didn't help that despite giving the appearance of an all-brawn-and-no-brains beast, this guy was a bit too shrewd for my liking. So much so that, after we'd shaken hands on a deal (as in, I shook his hand and he mangled mine) and I hurriedly helped a very bruised and battered Hal back to the ship with Flynn limping along behind us, my credit balance was a rather stinging twenty-five million lighter! Still - he didn't have to do that deal and in retrospect, I think we got off pretty lightly. I mean, we left in one piece so I'd count that a win!
Poor Hal looking a little the worse for wear leaving Grigson!
Back at Jameson, safe and more-or-less sound. Poor Yan had barely been onboard for a few hours and was already having to patch up two crew members! And not the smoothest of entries into the crew - Flynn was trying to bluster away how he'd had everything in hand and hadn't needed rescuing, Lauren wasn't buying it and the bickering started more or less immediately! Poor Hal meanwhile had a lovely black eye coming up and a couple of very sore ribs, but was otherwise ok. I hope all of this was worth the effort - this Flynn guy better be a bona fide genius for the price we paid!
Anyway - over the next day or so, everyone settled in and got to know each other. It was a bit unnerving, seeing all these new faces walking around the Clair! I'd gotten so used to it just being the three of us that suddenly the ship felt rather crowded! I mean, we've taken boatloads of passengers out to the Core before, but they weren't crew and they mostly kept to their cabins? So this was all a very new experience for us. Hal is a pretty gregarious guy by nature and just immediately got on with everyone, but Coral was clearly a little awkward with so many new faces on board.
And thank god - Flynn turned out to be worth the trouble after all. He talks a big game and is quite the showman, but when you get him alone, one to one, he's actually a pretty reasonable guy, if a little smug. Although he has a lot to be smug about - even Lauren, who clearly isn't his biggest fan, had to grudgingly admit he knows his stuff. They had to work together to get the new scanner tech installed on the ship and it's amazing they didn't kill each other, judging by the yelling coming up from down below! But they got it done; Flynn did say however that we won't be able to "go live" with the tech until he's had a chance to properly calibrate it so, rather worryingly, we're going to be going without our stellar scanners for a week or so!
Making the Clair Ready!
Ok then! Two and a half million light years in eighty days doesn't sound that crazy - until you start picking it apart! For starters, realistically - you're not jumping every day. That's a lot of miles to put under the hull and you'll have to have a rest day or two to check things over, make sure the ship's not falling apart (and neither is the crew!). Plus you've always got to budget for the unexpected out there, so although we've got an eighty day window - we'll actually only be travelling for maybe seventy of that.
So two point five mill in seventy days is about thirty five/six k a day, give or take. And if you're flooring it, each jump cycle is about forty-five seconds. But (and it's a BIG but!) with the new scanner tech, you can't just do your sniff-and-go buckyballing anymore. You gotta scan each and every twinkly little thing out there to make sure you're not missing anything really funky! So each jump takes a LOT longer.
And finally - thirty five k in one day is no drama, sure. Not even for two days, or even a week. But seventy near-consecutive days of it is going to be absolutely exhausting - I mean proper kill-me-now coffee-can-only-do-so-much exhausting! And once the initial excitement and novelty wears off after a week or two, I have no delusions - it's going to be just grim as can possibly be sometimes!
But when all's said and done - I think it'll be fun.
I may have gotten us all into this thing by being a boozy, dopey idiot, but I don't think any of us would be going through with it if we didn't honestly enjoy it? Bet aside, I'm not doing this to prove myself to some silly little ego in a bar somewhere, or for some pointless bragging rights - I'm doing this because why not, sounds like a giggle. Holy crap, I've just seen the time, I've been sat up here by myself all night! There's no way I'm getting to sleep now, "dawn" is only a couple of hours away and then it's D-Day. I'm just going to stay up and watch the night crews drift in and out of Jameson for a while - it's the last company we're going to see for a bit!
Half-excited, half-terrified Clara, signing off.
Footnote: so just to translate some of the "in-character" stuff there, I'm obviously not gonna be sat in front of a pc on Xmas/New year's! And I've got a couple of work do's plus the obligatory xmas parties to go attend/embarrass myself at
So although I'm going to honour the 80 day window and finish by 1500 GMT 19th February, I'm actually working on the assumption I'll only have 70 "jump days" or less! 
I'll be heading off this Saturday and originally meant to post this log on Friday, but rl got in the way and I'm stupid busy tomorrow, so it's a day early irl-versus-in-game, I'll be heading off from Jameson on Saturday afternoon - sorry! And I know that's not a conda cockpit above, I just got the cobra back from Grigson and liked the camera angle, kinda fit with the whole "last look" thing! So hope you'll forgive that
