Misanthropic Optimism and Fricking San Tu!
23 Nov 2020LongDistanceClara
//Wow, awesome timing!
The NMLA/Kepler stuff cropping up right after my last rambly log was perfect! I'd love to claim some clairvoyance there but it's obviously pure dumb luck (which happens to also be Clara's approach to navigation). I usually try and make the logs a bit "stand alone" so no prior explanation is required, but this one was inherently linked to the previous log, sort of a "part deux" type thing, so apologies if it's a bit confusing!Piccies are not very explorey in this one obviously (what with being mostly in the bubble!), but looking forward to going off on a little exploration soon so hopefully less pictures of ships (and idiots in ships
) and more funky stellar bits and bobs!Lastly, hope it goes without saying - the ranting stuff is obviously in character so it's Clara's typically positive but slightly naive outlook on things! Have read a lot of awesome logs on Inara recently of the Kepler thing, and just wanted to stress that Clara's rants are in no way aimed at detracting from them!
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Misanthropic Optimism and Fricking San Tu!
You knooow - I'm beginning to think the Thargoids are right about us!
Before I get a slap in the face for being a spacesquid sympathiser, let me qualify that! I just mean that I'm about as fed up with humans as I imagine those honking stellar starfish are. I can just imagine them scratching their heads (do they have heads?) and thinking "euhm wait - so we blow up your spaceports and cover them in our corrosive goop which gets you really angry with us - and then you do it to each other - and that's different how?". Obviously different scenario, but it's defintely no less dumb!
And then just to put the icing on the idiot cake, people get all righteous and demand vengeance, retribution and all that testosteroney good stuff.
You can justify it six ways from sunday but at the end of the day, the same self-indulgent, retaliatory traits of humanity nicely mixed with a lack of self-control are what caused this thing in the first place! Aaaand the whole wonderfully dumb cycle starts over AND pretty much guarantees that all this will happen again... After over a hundred thousand years, are we as a race STILL so unevolved and single-digit-IQ as to think "an eye for an eye" is how we become better?
WHAAAT am I rambling about? The whole Kepler Orbital thing. I suspect everyone knows about it at this point but long story short: dummies blew up a station for dumb reasons; more inflammatory dumb comments made by dumb people on all sides; dummies want to lynch someone. News at eleven. I fully expect Galnet to knock down my door and beg me to work for them with that kind of journalistic eloquence and insight!
That having been said - am I wrong? Because it sounds pretty accurate to me!I PROMISE that's the last soapboxing I'll do. Well in this log anyway. Maybe.
SO where to begin? Coral and I had been helping those people we'd "disappeared" out of the bubble in our last log up on Marimba. Although honestly, they hadn't really needed our help setting up their camp - which was just fine as that meant we could "keep an eye on the kids" (aka have a great excuse to go swimming in the bay, sunbathe and occasionally check to see no-one was drowning!). It's a brutal life sometimes, being an explorer.
And then during lunch I popped back on board the Clair de Lune, checked the comm - and saw that some extremists had blown up a station and would anyone free mind coming back to help out?Cue overly dramatic eyeroll.
How good was our timing?! Ok, well, the Admiral's I guess, but wow - did we get these people out of the bubble just in time or what!
They were probably heading to a less than pleasant place before we intervened, but with the NMLA blowing up a spaceport and the two-plus-two-equals-five bigots being out in force - I think these guys would have come to a fairly sticky end! We were a good day or so's hike from the bubble, but we figured rescue ops would take a while, so we waved a rushed farewell to the new settlers, got mauled by a thousand hugs, then quickly scuttled back up on to the Anaconda and started zooming back to Shinrarta.Super speedy turnaround; CLANG - conda down in the hangar. Even quicker scooch over to the Cassie, and load up the Cutter with evac cabins; jump on board and CLANG - riccochet off the walls of Jameson because I forgot how monster her engines were, sorry! Followed by a handful of quick jumps over to Atropos, followed the traffic jam to Kepler Orbital and dropped in to a scene of chronic deja vu;
Kepler Orbital
Why is it that on the few occassions we come back to the bubble, we always end up evacuating people from stations for one reason or another?
On the plus side, we knew the drill; zoom in, pile angry squabbling terrified people on board, zoom out, ideally before melting. There was one interesting thing though; when we evac'd people from the stations being hit by Thargoids, they were kinda frantic and terrified? These guys seemed more furious than anything - sure, they were scared too, who wouldn't be! But it did kinda make me wonder about how funny humans are. We're totally au fait with humans killing humans, oh yes that's almost boring - wait it's not a human, it's a giant spacesquid? Cue terror!Dead is dead right? All I know is it made our job a ROYAL pain in the butt; it had been hard to evacuate those thargoid-hit stations because people were just petrified and stampeding to get on the ship almost; now they weren't so manic but god they were aggressive! Trying to keep them orderly as they boarded, both Coral and I got crap for our accents; I even heard one guy shouting at anyone who'd listen how it'd be a cold day in hell before he boarded an imperial cutter (apparently the weather in hell changes rather rapidly, since about ten minutes later I saw him sitting quite meekly in one of the cabins as I boarded and closed the rear gangway.
).I have to just say at this point though - the pilots who help with the evacs always get all the "glory" for heroically swooping in and saving people; and don't get me wrong, I'm sure there's a lot of altruism irrespective of the credits we get paid for helping out! But in my eyes at least, the unsung heroes are the station staff, the dock teams, the security, all who stay on board while the station burns around their ears and organises the evacuation effort. If it weren't for them, we would simply get mobbed the moment our skids hit the deck! It's not what they signed up for, but they just get on with it and I for one owe them a lot of thanks - there is precisely zero chance Coral and I would be able to stop a swarm of panicked, angry people from seizing our ship!
As it was, things went fairly smoothly and the Cassie handled the furnace of the spacedock like a champ.
Toastie cutter!
After a while things started to calm down a bit; there were bigger gaps in between the rescue runs and frankly Coral and I were exhausted - we'd been on the go for about 36 hours having zoomed straight back from north of the Core without a break - so we decided to head back to Shinrarta before we fell asleep at the wheel and lodged a cutter in the mailslot! We clanged back down at Jameson and ended up collapsing in the evac cabins; they smelt pretty awful after the huge flood of humanity that had passed through them in the prior several hours but I could've slept in a garbage dump at that point.
Next morning, after a well deserved breakfast of coffee-and-cholesterol, followed by a less than pleasant couple of hours cleaning out the Cassie, I collapsed next to Coral on the floor of the hangar and we talked about our next "job". When we'd been smuggling those fugitives out to the core last week, I'd been chatting with one of them, a very shy giant of a guy called Callum. He had mentioned that his sister wasn't with them at the settlement when they'd had to flee; she apparently used to work at the nearby Coriolis starport, acting as their trader, brokering their sales and purchasing any supplies they needed. Callum was clearly concerned that the authorities might figure out she was linked to the fugitives and take her into custody.
Say no more big guy, we'll go find her and get her out.
So he gave us a picture of her, name, ident, all that fluff and we told him we'd bring her back to Marimba with the additional supplies we'd promised the settlers. Seemed like an easy job - zip over to the station, find her, smuggle her out - how hard can that be!I never cease to amaze myself how easily I get into trouble.
RIGHT - first things first, we need to get over to where Callum said she was last. Which was Common Hub (original huh) in Lei Ku, an agricultural system right on the oustkirts of the Empire bubble. Since we were just sneaking in to grab one person and a few supplies, it seemed to make sense to jump in the Hera, my innocent little krait phantom that was a flying fridge with how cold she ran and quick as a jackrabbit! So a quick change of flightsuit (I'd fallen asleep in my usual one and after all the rescues yesterday it smelled of smoke and burnt plastic!) followed by a quick bit of shopping (some solar cells and medical supplies needed for the settlement up on Marimba) bought and stowed - and off we zipped to Lei Ku!
A "rural" odour! Common Hub, Lei Ku
This place smelled awful. I know, shock, it's a trade hub for agricultural produce and livestock but good grief - my sinuses took one whiff, had a collective "newp!" moment and shut down. So it was a fairly hurried and less-than-discreet scuffle around the docks as we tried to find our lost lamb. Who as it turned out - after really subtly showing her picture to about twenty people around the docks! - we were informed was no longer on the station as she'd left a few days ago, presumably running before the authorities tried to nab her for her association with the fugitive settlement.
Well of course! It'd be far too easy for us to just swoop-and-boop! Oh wait, it gets so much better. The trader who told us she'd gone (and who incidentally smelled strongly of eau de goat avec cauliflower, mmmm) was kind enough to tell us that last he'd heard, she'd jumped on a shuttle heading to San Tu.
Of course she had.
I hate San Tu. As in really hate it. As in it's probably the last place in the galaxy I'd want to go to. Honestly, if someone gave me the choice between San Tu and Kepler Orbital, I'd tell them it's a no brainer and slip into some fire retardant underwear. That pesky system and I have a bit of history and I was less than ecstatic about having to show my face there again! Still - what choice did we have! So fine - off we go to San Tu. On the plus side, this time I have Coral riding shotgun and I have precisely ZERO inclination to accept drinks from strangers, so fingers crossed - we should be good!
A bunch of jumps later and we're dropping into San Tu; a few minutes more of supercruise and we're popping out of FTL and heading for a dock. And all the garish neon and stupid adverts on the comm bring it all flooding back and I can almost feel my fingers twitch at just how much I want to be out of this sleaze-hole as soon as possible!
Welcome to San Tu!
The only good thing about San Tu is they don't really give a crap about who you are or where you're from. I'd say at least half the population of the station were criminals in some jurisdiction or other and that's a pretty soft number! So after we landed I didn't really have any qualms about going to the port authority and making enquiries trying to find Callum's sister. We found out where she was lodging and headed off the dock and into the arcades leading to the address.
For all my bad memories, I have to say - San Tu isn't boring. The main arcades on the station are a fairly sensory-overload type deal; gaudy neon signs blazing at you from every direction, smells both pleasant and hideous and an atmosphere so thick you could probably serve it in a bowl with a ladle. Not to mention the sheer crush of an XXL crowd of people trying to squish into a XXS space! Coral and I managed to use our small size to our advantage for once and squirmed our way through the crowds to a less-than-salubrious alley, barely wide enough for two to stand abreast.
We stepped over a comatose guy blocking up half the door, and made our way up to the room number we'd been given for Callum's sister. No reply on knocking at the door, so in we go and good god, the smell was awful. Total garbage dump of a room, I didn't even think mould could grow on metal walls! Callum had described his sister as a really cheerful, hard working, sometimes-pain-in-the-butt but generally pretty decent person. Hence it being a bit of a shock to find one sister, lying on a bunk, eyes open but clearly drugged out of her earballs.
I may have mentioned this already; but I really HATE San Tu!
Coral and I each grabbed an arm, picked her up and hustled her down the stairs. Dragged her over the human doorstop at the entrance but the guy was clearly far too far gone to even make a noise. Pinballed our way back through the press of humanity in the 'streets' back to the docks - and got her settled in to a bunk on the Krait. I fired up the engines and started heading for the exit ports when Coral casually informed me someone was shooting at us.
San Tu '05, woo! A year older and nothing changes.
THIS time however I was here in a super nippy Krait with nice chunky prismatics, not a tin-can-of-a-viper! I don't know who was chasing us (I'd hazard a guess at whoever had been 'looking after' our new ward!) and frankly I couldn't care less. See you guys, we're out!
San Tu Rapid Exit. Every time!
While Coral went aft to check up on and try to revive the poor rescuee, I popped open the navcomp and made our first plot out towards Marimba. A good thirty k of a journey, it didn't take particularly long this time round since we weren't exactly travelling heavy - the Hera was pretty much setup for exploration anyway, with just a few tons of supplies for the settlers, so her long legs made quick work of the trip up past the Core. Thankfully over those several hours, Callum's sister came to; her name was Ailsa and she didn't remember an awful lot past fleeing Lei Ku and arriving at the station in San Tu. I suspect it'll come back to her but there'd be no better place to happen for that than surrounded by family and friends; so I was kinda relieved to feel the Krait's skids squish into the compacted turf of the jungle floor on Marimba.
We helped Ailsa out of the ship and she'd barely set foot on terra firma before Callum had run up and engulfed her in a super-protective bear hug.
The guy is absolutely huge but is the very definition of a gentle giant and I know that he'll be just the one to look after his sister as they adjust to their life here. Coral and I set to work unloading the supplies we'd brought over - with these, the settlers should be good for a while - then made our excuses for heading straight off, exchanged hugs with everyone and re-boarded the Krait.The best part about flying with someone for as long as Coral and I have is that you don't really need to discuss things too much. I think we were both a bit burnt out on humanity after the events of the last few days! And nothing re-centers our brains like a good long stretch amongst the stars.
We broke orbit and, for lack of anywhere specific in mind, decided to pay a visit to an old shiny friend, the big-and-honking black hole/b-class combo we'd found ages ago. A hop, skip and 10k later and we arrived - and honestly this thing never disappoints, it's just gorgeous!
One big eyeball 
It's funny - I get as fed up with the monotony of space travel as anyone. Let's be honest, sometimes it can really start to drag, there's no harm in admitting that! The point is - we keep coming back to it! And I know at some point over the next trip I'll start to get a bit bored; but I equally know that the galaxy will take pity on me at just the right moment and throw a gem in my path, just like this beautiful waltz of stars in front of us now. And sometimes I'll get my wake-up from a scare, like a toasty drop out of witchspace into a super tight binary, or drift off on planetary approach and not realise the gravity slowly crushing me into my seat till the last second! I've certainly had more than my fair share of near misses, all self-inflicted.
Here's the thing though; the galaxy isn't vengeful. It's not conciously trying to kill me (I do that all myself!). Nature isn't vindictive, or malevolent, or kind or caring - it just IS. I remember seeing an avalanche as a kid back on Capitol; everything was so peaceful and calm right up to the point I heard the CRACK and watched as the cornice fell, heard the distant rumbling grow as the snow tumbled faster and faster down the slopes, gathering pace and fury as it went. It swept down the face on the other side of the valley and turned a lovely little cabin into matchsticks in the blink of an eye. Hundreds of thousands of tons of snow just blasting down the slope like a ghostly tsunami - and then silence. Beautiful blue skies, soft gusts of wind - everything as it was before.
What am I rambling about? Honestly I've lost myself a bit but I think the general gist is - there is no natural order of vengeance or "an eye for an eye", that's not how the universe is built - rather that's a human thing born out of emotion. So humanity please, stop with the vengeance. Justice is not the same as retribution. And while the desire for revenge is perfectly understandable, it's also easy to just shrug and say "it's human nature". Well - don't you want to try and be better? It's easy to just give in to the fleeting catharsis of rage and revenge, but that's just self-indulgent and all it does is ensure this will all happen again.
We can be better. It won't happen today, or tomorrow, or a hundred years from now - but if we don't try, I can promise it'll never happen.
I talk SO much rubbish when I'm out here in deep space!
As good a place as any to shut down for the night before our next little spoonful-of-space-wandering. Fly fun and remember to leave the rage behind - life gets an awful lot better when you do! 
Goodnight from two sleepy explorers!