A Big Ball of String :)
13 Nov 2020LongDistanceClara
Been a while! 
RL has been a bit of a beast lately and continues to be so, and not even due to a certain spiky little virus! Writing dumb stuff always brings a bit of catharsis though so am going to dive back into some more daft elite adventures. Apologies in advance for any spelling/grammatical errors - current rl condition makes looking at screens for a prolonged period of time a bit grim so am going to forego any proofing and just hope stuff makes snese
Before I start rambling (too late), I never got around to posting a silly vid I made at the beginning of the year of the (then) last year and a half of LDC's travels, so here it is.
Thanks to the wonderful EDAstro for the above! AAAAAND last but very much not least - all the best to everyone, family and friends - has been a pretty poop year granted but at least we are lucky enough to have internet spaceships as a distraction! Take care all!
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A Big Ball of String...
Stars smell of circuits, planets smell of plastic and space smells of tin.
No I haven't gone bananas. Not completely.
I'll try and explain myself a bit better! Have you ever been slogging through the galaxy, tuning around the signals on the comm - or maybe wandered into some crusty dive bar on a remote outpost somewhere - and a tune has come on over the speakers that instantly yoinks your brain out of your ears and back through the years to a place and time in your past? And it's not just a case of "oh yeah, I remember that tune and associate it with xyz" - it's far more than that, you feel what it was like back then? It's called sense memory (I think!) and while music is a big trigger, for me it's smell that really drags my FTL-addled brain down memory lane.
When I was little, I'd sometimes spend summers with my grandma in what could charitably be called a "rustic" hut but in reality was a haphazard-collection-of-woodwormed-timber piled in a shape vaguely resembling a dwelling, in a high valley up in the mountains back on Capitol in Achenar. There were maybe only three or four other properties in the valley, all decrepit but gorgeous little cabins nestled in amongst the trees lining the lower scree slopes of the snow-capped ridges. And before I bore everyone to tears with a self-indulgent wallow in nostalgia, I'll get to my point.
Capitol, Achenar (library pic)
I have endless wonderful memories from my time there, but the one thing I associate most with that place was the smell. Lying back on a threadbare pallet and looking up at the ancient, cobwebbed rafters, warm rays of sunlight causing the motes of dust in the air to softly glow, I'd close my eyes and breathe in. I'd smell the smokey odour of the cedar from which the shack was made; the sharper, aromatic scent of the pine trees encircling us; the earthy, animal musk of the livestock my grandmother kept in the little rundown barn next door. All so vividly and indelibly etched on my mind; so that now, any time I smell woodsmoke or incense - anything like that, a little bit of me jumps back in time.
Ok so - maybe not quite such a peaceful memory as that but I get pretty much the same thing with space.
I can't help but associate the smell of hot electronics with stars, which should probably tell you a lot about my competence or lack thereof when it comes to zooming around the galaxy! Planets smelling of plastic - I can't take the blame for that one, that's all my SRV's fault. I don't know what the canopy is made of but all I know is when it gets toasty in the unshielded glare of a nearby star, it has a pretty strong, chemical smell exactly like hot plastic that pervades everything. And as for space smelling of tin - ok, no real rationale to this one. But when I'm way waaaaay out on the rim doing my usual little shutdown ritual and the frost starts forming on the canopy, my beloved conda's cockpit gets that sharp, metallic tang in the air that you sometimes get in cold, snowy environments. That one I'll grant you might be more my impressionable brain putting two and two together to make five, but it doesn't make it any less real for me!FINE - but where am I going with this? Well, there's a distinct scent formed from a cocktail of stale beer, machine grease and the body odour of people who've been exploring both the lack of showering facilities on a deep space vessel as well as deep space itself; and THAT particular smell I associate with the Hootenanny, our 'favourite' bar back on Jameson Memorial in Shinrarta. I say 'favourite' because it's a total fleapit - but it's the closest one to the docks and frankly, given our usual catatonic state when we drift back into port, it's about as far as our wobbly legs will take us after landing.
//The Hootenanny at Jameson (Font pack attrib. Chris Spooner)
And it's where my conspirator-in-stupid-trips Coral and I found ourselves one evening after another boring transport gig in the Bubble. Which has slowly been going nuts with the usual political squabbles - no more so than usual I guess! For all our achievements, it can be hideously depressing that mankind still cannot get it through its collective thick skulls that so much of co-existence is a matter of perspective; and that despite our huge advancements and the fact that humankind has spread and colonised amongst the stars even out to Colonia, inside our heads we're still as provincial as we were a thousand years ago, when we defined ourselves not by our accomplishments but by the percieved faults of our neighbours.
I'm generally quite a positive person, but the bubble always brings out the misanthropist in me!
Hal and Kei were still off out god-knows-where, having been recalled to active duty; Yan had had to return to Panacea Medical; Flynn absolutely unbelievably had been given an R&D position with some tech firm and even more unbelievably had taken it! Meanwhile Lauren had become really close with one of the maintenance team in Shinrarta during the summer, had decided that she'd had enough wandering the galaxy and was going to take a stab at setting down some roots. Both Coral and I will miss them all hugely but wouldn't trade our adventures together for anything.
Love you guys & thanks for the memories! My old crew.
Nevertheless, it was a fairly gloomy pair we made, plopped down at a grubby table in the bar. I really felt that we were just 'going through the motions' - we hadn't really had anything to "do" since coming back from our last expedition and had ended up just running freight for some bizarre reason. I'd normally have suggested another trip off out into the wilderness but I don't know. This is going to sound incredibly stupid considering humankind has barely scratched the surface of exploring our galaxy! - but I didn't get the same buzz out of exploring that I used to. A huge part of it had been about going into the unknown, with a little big of danger and excitement along the way - and maybe it's just experience or the recent meteoric advancements in tech over the last several years but I somehow just don't get that excitement anymore.
BASICALLY I was just being a buzzkill!
And Coral, absolute superstar that she is, could sense that. So during our last hauling job, she'd ducked away at one of the stations, dug around in the little arcades and markets clustered around the docks at Gorbachev station in Sol and got me a lovely antique to cheer me up - she knows what a huge nerd I am for old Earth memorabilia!. It was a reproduction of an illustrated story from a millenia ago, just the kind of thing that I loved. That little gesture from her more than anything else lifted me a little but couldn't drag me out of my slump; still, out of politeness as we sat in the bar, I started flicking through the images and text on my pad, barely reading the foreword and preamble until I got to one image and stopped dead.
Attribution: https://www.daniellieske.com
OK dont laugh - this will sound really silly and make me seem tremendously impressionable (whaddya mean "seem"!
) - but this image from so far in the past kinda reached out of my pad and poked me squarely in the forehead. The cobwebs draped from the rafters in the attic brought to mind lying on my back as a child in that mountain cabin; even the cat watching on reminded me of the enormous tabby my grandma had kept around the house for catching mice (but was far too spoiled and indolent to actually ever get off his gigantic fluffy butt and hunt anything!). But - and I'm probably projecting here - what really stopped me dead were two things; the look of excitement and apprehension in that face - and the ball of string he carried, tethered to the beams.And suddenly I remembered how much I had wanted to explore when I was a wide-eyed kid, to go out into the galaxy, and experience that wonderful buzz of just pinballing around with no plan or agenda other than just to find the shiny; to let the Universe and Fate play a game of chance to see where they'd make you float today. I know I can be horribly cheesy and have my head in the clouds and that has got me in trouble on more than one occasion! But you know what - sometimes that's not a bad thing.
I put the pad down on the grimy, sticky table, shuffled over on the bench a bit and gave Coral a HUGE hug; for the first time in what felt like forever, I felt excited again. Tomorrow we'll jump in a ship and just "go". And while we'll always have Jameson as the tether for our "big ball of string", I can't wait to step out into the picture frame once more without knowing where we're going next.
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I know I've said it above but yes, I am a soppy impressionable idiot irl and I don't care!
I just really liked the feeling captured in that pic above; as stated in the attribution link, it's by a guy called Daniel Lieske, a CG artist and graphic novelist. The picture itself is from his free-to-read Wormworld Saga, which you can read here. As far as Elite goes, I'd like to start trying to use in-game missions and events around the bubble as a change from just exploring to ramble about buuuuut will see how rl things go to permit that!