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Avocet chapter 1
The revised start to Chapter one. And it's STILL too wordy. GRAGH! Well, opinions are always good, so... myeh.
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Ride the Avocet, chapter one (part one)
“Now where did that go…?”
They say that in space, no-one can hear you scream. On Dauntless, the little dark aviform spacecraft, the crew were thinking about testing the theory, but their only screams would be ones of boredom. Time really does drag its heels when there’s nothing to do.
You’d think, in space, that there’d plenty of exciting things to keep a person occupied – new people to meet, new worlds to explore, all kinds of things. Indeed, the little vessel had left Khufa in a blaze of glory, her crew of five quivering excitedly in anticipation of what they’d find, exotic people and places and incredible technologies, and… the journey wasn’t really living up to the hype. After all, the thing about space is that it’s fairly empty. So far, only Ivory was particularly enjoying herself, comet-chasing and finding new things to research, to satiate her gnawing desire for science. Everyone else was bored of the inactivity, of the endless and interminable testing of software and equipment, and contemplating a mutiny. Things might go horribly pear-shaped, Lena had observed, if we’re not allowed to find a habitable planet on which to make landfall and feel grass beneath our feet for a few days.
Right now, things were puttering on like normal. Ivy had promised that if they found a planet she was happy to stop off for a few days, but so far finding one was proving problematic. Onyx, Dauntless’ self-styled “chief engineer” (aka “general dogsbody”), had long since left his shipmates buried in starcharts, and returned to his natural habitat. He was now on hands and synthetic knees in a confusing muddle of tools and engine spares, hunting the little self-tightening bolt that had skipped from his begrimed hands and hidden itself under a morass of filthy engine parts. They were purring away quite nicely, for once, which pleased him greatly, but Ivory was complaining they weren’t at full capacity, and as the ship’s designer she knew best. And now his unofficial captain had suggested it, he himself recognised there was more power in there somewhere. Onyx had resigned himself to more rebuilding, and more reading.
None of this was to say Onyx was a bad engineer, but all his experience so far had been with the petrol-driven noisy smoky monsters of his homeworld – it had been a sign of affluence if you could afford to waste fuel, so naturally the noisier and dirtier the better. Dauntless’ engines, by comparison, were aliens in gleaming chrome efficiency – well, comparatively gleaming, covered as they were right now in grease.
He’d sat and stared at pages of schematics for days, since they’d left Khufa, and still it didn’t make much sense. It was gradually coming together – power coupling goes here, converter goes there, add in fuel and voila! Drive comes out – but it was frustrating him. He sighed, absently wiped engine grease off his hands and onto his trousers, scratched under his chin with the long prehensile tentacles on his sharp face, and quietly contemplated his mess.
Of all the small crew, Onyx was technically the only “pure-bred” on board; he was one hundred percent Skelna, albeit with a little bit of genetic tweaking here and there, to improve his sight, his stamina, alter his skin tone, all inconsequential little things. His species could never really have been described as visually appealing – even the petite Ivy had a strange look that bordered on the unattractive. Their ears were small and round, their eyes bulbous with strange horseshoe-shaped pupils, and five short, prehensile trunklike tentacles spread from their snouts, cuttlefish-style, covering their narrow muzzles and odd, beakish teeth. They were heavy and deep in the chest, and their arms and hands were long and very powerful, but they came from an arboreal environment and lacked hind legs altogether. In their heavily forested native environment they got about easily, relying on a prehensile tail to grab and swing, but out of it they were vulnerable, often reduced to dragging themselves around on their stomachs. Onyx himself wore neurally-controlled cybernetics on his lower half, expensive and sophisticated and personally modified by Ivory.
Onyx’s history was a fairly typical one, for his species, and for a considerable time he had been treated more as a commodity than a person, especially given how he’d been plucked from Prime GeneLabs “Bargain Bucket” to be a live crash-test-dummy. His unexpected ability to survive, and more importantly to control and pilot most things thrown at him, had earned him a better post, better pay, and most importantly some degree of respect from his superiors.
He was eventually assigned to work with Ivory – or “Ivy”, as she preferred to be called, these days. Ivy was another Skelna, which made her unusual in both that she was one of the developers, and that she was female – a rarity in their termite-like society. Quiet and demure, however, Ivy was content to take a back seat, and as a result most people in her own research centre didn’t even know she existed – which was exactly how she liked it. She and Onyx had shared a fleeting romance, and were still extremely close in spite of the fact the passion had gone from their relationship.
Dauntless – or Ch’kreth, to give the vessel her proper name – was Ivy’s “baby”. She had been promoted as an exploratory research vessel, but Ivy had grown suspicious when she’d seen the advanced weaponry being added – without her authorisation – onto the vessel’s hull. There was, after all, a sizeable rebellion going on between the Skelna workers and the Yen-toh ruling classes on her homeworld, and she could easily see the little vessel being mass-produced and used to quash the rumblings.
Eventually the pair had tired of the duplicity, destroyed the research, stole the vessel, and made a run for it. They fetched up in Khufa, a pleasant little town sandwiched between a forest and a lake, but it wasn’t long before circumstances pushed them on again, and into this interminable and aimless drifting, lost in the emptiness of the cosmos, on the thin pretence of “research”.
There was a breath of sound from the door on the upper-level, rousing Onyx from his introspection, and he glanced up from his mess to see who was visiting. He watched as a Slate walked in, a pad of scrap paper under one arm, apparently not seeing him below – must blend in with the rest of the junk down here, he mused, wryly.
Slate was a striking visual comparison to his shipmate, even though his own hybrid genetics contained a lot of Skelna DNA. He was tall and willowy in comparison with Onyx’s solid, square build, and his skin was a dark, almost oily blue, where Onyx’s was rich dark charcoal grey. Slate’s features were more pointed, as well, although they shared the same number of “fingers” on their snouts; his head was wedge-shaped rather than round like his friend’s, and his eyes were forward set and probingly deep, whereas Onyx’s were side-set. The ears that sat atop his head were large and pointed, where Onyx’s were small and round, and where Onyx was sleekly bald, Slate had a head of thick, soft raven hair, always immaculately styled. A line of tough, horny grey spines poked through his elegant locks, running down his back to almost the tip of his slim tail.
In spite of all this, the difference most people noticed at first was their difference in height – for obvious reasons. At close to eight feet tall on strong, synthetic legs, Slate towered over Onyx, who barely reached five and a half. Slate’s cybernetics were a heavily experimental version, courtesy of Ivory, to suit his increased height and unusual, spiny back; unlike Onyx’s, which were quickly and easily removable, Slate’s were hardwired into his nervous system. It gave him better control over them, but also meant they didn’t come off.
Currently causing some small degree of worry to his shipmates, they’d found Slate as different in personality as in looks. While he was usually polite and well-mannered, he was also fairly dour, and usually quietly glum. The tall youngster had never looked to be very comfortable round other people, even before they’d left, and happiest keeping himself to himself, and was probably as bored as everyone else with the regular inactivity, but right now he just looked tired and miserable. Perhaps he was homesick, Onyx mused, scrunching up his nose in absent concern – but that didn’t explain why he was avoiding everyone. Have to speak to him about it, sometime…
Slate padded about on the upper level, for a while, claws ticking on the plating, noting down values off the terminal readouts, not noticing Onyx on the deck below.
“Slate?”
Slate visibly jumped at the sound. “What?”
Onyx tried his best to look calm, unconcerned. “Everything okay up there?”
Slate glanced over the mezzanine edge of the upper deck and looked down at him for a second, then nodded mutely, flipped a page over on his pad, scribbled something and managed to get halfway to the door before Onyx called out to him again.
“What?” he asked, leaning over the rail around the upper deck.
“Are you all right?” Onyx probed, gently. “I mean, I haven’t seen you about much since we left Khufa. If you were feeling ill you’d tell us, right?”
“Of course I would,” Slate forced a smile. “And I’m fine. Just… preoccupied. Personal matters.”
“Personal-… Look, I know you don’t like talking, but it might help you get that weight off your shoulders,” Onyx offered, but predictably Slate shook his head.
“No, no, no need for that,” Slate waved the offer away and turned back to the door. “Give me a week and I’ll be fine. Once we get these engines working properly, I mean.” And he was gone, before Onyx could challenge him further.
Lena – short for Aileena, although people rarely called her by that any more – was making her way down to the ‘garden suite’ with a tray of seedlings when Slate emerged from the engineering section and collided bodily with her. She gave an oof! of surprise and caught herself on the wall, managing by some miracle of balance to keep her tray upright, and he just muttered an apology and scuttled away.
“Slate?” she called after him, but as usual he rounded his shoulders, pretended not to hear, and vanished around the corner.
He was a funny one, she mused, heading down the corridor in the opposite direction. He’d very nearly got on his knees and begged a place aboard, as thought it were imperative he were allowed to join the crew, as though he’d die if he didn’t, then spent most of his time actively avoiding people. The rumour mill had said he’d wanted his place among this crew of near-strangers in a desperate attempt to get out from under his notorious father’s shadow, but now he was out he didn’t seem any happier. And he wasn’t one for talking, either, it seemed – she’d offered her ear more than once, but he’d always waved her concerns away, and ultimately she decided to leave him to his own devices.
In the crew of five, the unofficial ship’s botanist, chef and counsellor was one of two females aboard, the other being Ivy. Compared to her diminutive shipmate, who had a tendency to be more than a little androgynous in behaviour, Lena was very feminine; she was gentle, and motherly, and fairly ample when it came to physique, generous of bust and broad of hips – her shipmates called her “solid”, to spare her feelings, but Lena herself was more pragmatic, and called herself overweight.
She was a genetic hybrid, like most of her shipmates. Her genes came from a random selection of creatures – the snub-nosed intelligent aviform Corvian, a selection of deep-sea creatures, an amphibian or two and some bits and pieces of various mammals – but any passing human would have said “newt”. And she did bear a striking resemblance to a giant, humanoid salamander, albeit with soft, dry humanlike skin, strikingly marked in thunderhead blue and pale jasmine, with limpid golden eyes and three fin crests on her wedge-shaped head. Unlike her shipmates, she was tailless, and also plantigrade, where everyone else walked on their toes, and ultimately everything combined to give her the emphatic foursquare gait of some sort of organic bulldozer.
-----
There. :P
Edit: I have also found Ivy's song: "So Much Love To Give". HURRAH. ;)
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Ride the Avocet, chapter one (part one)
“Now where did that go…?”
They say that in space, no-one can hear you scream. On Dauntless, the little dark aviform spacecraft, the crew were thinking about testing the theory, but their only screams would be ones of boredom. Time really does drag its heels when there’s nothing to do.
You’d think, in space, that there’d plenty of exciting things to keep a person occupied – new people to meet, new worlds to explore, all kinds of things. Indeed, the little vessel had left Khufa in a blaze of glory, her crew of five quivering excitedly in anticipation of what they’d find, exotic people and places and incredible technologies, and… the journey wasn’t really living up to the hype. After all, the thing about space is that it’s fairly empty. So far, only Ivory was particularly enjoying herself, comet-chasing and finding new things to research, to satiate her gnawing desire for science. Everyone else was bored of the inactivity, of the endless and interminable testing of software and equipment, and contemplating a mutiny. Things might go horribly pear-shaped, Lena had observed, if we’re not allowed to find a habitable planet on which to make landfall and feel grass beneath our feet for a few days.
Right now, things were puttering on like normal. Ivy had promised that if they found a planet she was happy to stop off for a few days, but so far finding one was proving problematic. Onyx, Dauntless’ self-styled “chief engineer” (aka “general dogsbody”), had long since left his shipmates buried in starcharts, and returned to his natural habitat. He was now on hands and synthetic knees in a confusing muddle of tools and engine spares, hunting the little self-tightening bolt that had skipped from his begrimed hands and hidden itself under a morass of filthy engine parts. They were purring away quite nicely, for once, which pleased him greatly, but Ivory was complaining they weren’t at full capacity, and as the ship’s designer she knew best. And now his unofficial captain had suggested it, he himself recognised there was more power in there somewhere. Onyx had resigned himself to more rebuilding, and more reading.
None of this was to say Onyx was a bad engineer, but all his experience so far had been with the petrol-driven noisy smoky monsters of his homeworld – it had been a sign of affluence if you could afford to waste fuel, so naturally the noisier and dirtier the better. Dauntless’ engines, by comparison, were aliens in gleaming chrome efficiency – well, comparatively gleaming, covered as they were right now in grease.
He’d sat and stared at pages of schematics for days, since they’d left Khufa, and still it didn’t make much sense. It was gradually coming together – power coupling goes here, converter goes there, add in fuel and voila! Drive comes out – but it was frustrating him. He sighed, absently wiped engine grease off his hands and onto his trousers, scratched under his chin with the long prehensile tentacles on his sharp face, and quietly contemplated his mess.
Of all the small crew, Onyx was technically the only “pure-bred” on board; he was one hundred percent Skelna, albeit with a little bit of genetic tweaking here and there, to improve his sight, his stamina, alter his skin tone, all inconsequential little things. His species could never really have been described as visually appealing – even the petite Ivy had a strange look that bordered on the unattractive. Their ears were small and round, their eyes bulbous with strange horseshoe-shaped pupils, and five short, prehensile trunklike tentacles spread from their snouts, cuttlefish-style, covering their narrow muzzles and odd, beakish teeth. They were heavy and deep in the chest, and their arms and hands were long and very powerful, but they came from an arboreal environment and lacked hind legs altogether. In their heavily forested native environment they got about easily, relying on a prehensile tail to grab and swing, but out of it they were vulnerable, often reduced to dragging themselves around on their stomachs. Onyx himself wore neurally-controlled cybernetics on his lower half, expensive and sophisticated and personally modified by Ivory.
Onyx’s history was a fairly typical one, for his species, and for a considerable time he had been treated more as a commodity than a person, especially given how he’d been plucked from Prime GeneLabs “Bargain Bucket” to be a live crash-test-dummy. His unexpected ability to survive, and more importantly to control and pilot most things thrown at him, had earned him a better post, better pay, and most importantly some degree of respect from his superiors.
He was eventually assigned to work with Ivory – or “Ivy”, as she preferred to be called, these days. Ivy was another Skelna, which made her unusual in both that she was one of the developers, and that she was female – a rarity in their termite-like society. Quiet and demure, however, Ivy was content to take a back seat, and as a result most people in her own research centre didn’t even know she existed – which was exactly how she liked it. She and Onyx had shared a fleeting romance, and were still extremely close in spite of the fact the passion had gone from their relationship.
Dauntless – or Ch’kreth, to give the vessel her proper name – was Ivy’s “baby”. She had been promoted as an exploratory research vessel, but Ivy had grown suspicious when she’d seen the advanced weaponry being added – without her authorisation – onto the vessel’s hull. There was, after all, a sizeable rebellion going on between the Skelna workers and the Yen-toh ruling classes on her homeworld, and she could easily see the little vessel being mass-produced and used to quash the rumblings.
Eventually the pair had tired of the duplicity, destroyed the research, stole the vessel, and made a run for it. They fetched up in Khufa, a pleasant little town sandwiched between a forest and a lake, but it wasn’t long before circumstances pushed them on again, and into this interminable and aimless drifting, lost in the emptiness of the cosmos, on the thin pretence of “research”.
There was a breath of sound from the door on the upper-level, rousing Onyx from his introspection, and he glanced up from his mess to see who was visiting. He watched as a Slate walked in, a pad of scrap paper under one arm, apparently not seeing him below – must blend in with the rest of the junk down here, he mused, wryly.
Slate was a striking visual comparison to his shipmate, even though his own hybrid genetics contained a lot of Skelna DNA. He was tall and willowy in comparison with Onyx’s solid, square build, and his skin was a dark, almost oily blue, where Onyx’s was rich dark charcoal grey. Slate’s features were more pointed, as well, although they shared the same number of “fingers” on their snouts; his head was wedge-shaped rather than round like his friend’s, and his eyes were forward set and probingly deep, whereas Onyx’s were side-set. The ears that sat atop his head were large and pointed, where Onyx’s were small and round, and where Onyx was sleekly bald, Slate had a head of thick, soft raven hair, always immaculately styled. A line of tough, horny grey spines poked through his elegant locks, running down his back to almost the tip of his slim tail.
In spite of all this, the difference most people noticed at first was their difference in height – for obvious reasons. At close to eight feet tall on strong, synthetic legs, Slate towered over Onyx, who barely reached five and a half. Slate’s cybernetics were a heavily experimental version, courtesy of Ivory, to suit his increased height and unusual, spiny back; unlike Onyx’s, which were quickly and easily removable, Slate’s were hardwired into his nervous system. It gave him better control over them, but also meant they didn’t come off.
Currently causing some small degree of worry to his shipmates, they’d found Slate as different in personality as in looks. While he was usually polite and well-mannered, he was also fairly dour, and usually quietly glum. The tall youngster had never looked to be very comfortable round other people, even before they’d left, and happiest keeping himself to himself, and was probably as bored as everyone else with the regular inactivity, but right now he just looked tired and miserable. Perhaps he was homesick, Onyx mused, scrunching up his nose in absent concern – but that didn’t explain why he was avoiding everyone. Have to speak to him about it, sometime…
Slate padded about on the upper level, for a while, claws ticking on the plating, noting down values off the terminal readouts, not noticing Onyx on the deck below.
“Slate?”
Slate visibly jumped at the sound. “What?”
Onyx tried his best to look calm, unconcerned. “Everything okay up there?”
Slate glanced over the mezzanine edge of the upper deck and looked down at him for a second, then nodded mutely, flipped a page over on his pad, scribbled something and managed to get halfway to the door before Onyx called out to him again.
“What?” he asked, leaning over the rail around the upper deck.
“Are you all right?” Onyx probed, gently. “I mean, I haven’t seen you about much since we left Khufa. If you were feeling ill you’d tell us, right?”
“Of course I would,” Slate forced a smile. “And I’m fine. Just… preoccupied. Personal matters.”
“Personal-… Look, I know you don’t like talking, but it might help you get that weight off your shoulders,” Onyx offered, but predictably Slate shook his head.
“No, no, no need for that,” Slate waved the offer away and turned back to the door. “Give me a week and I’ll be fine. Once we get these engines working properly, I mean.” And he was gone, before Onyx could challenge him further.
Lena – short for Aileena, although people rarely called her by that any more – was making her way down to the ‘garden suite’ with a tray of seedlings when Slate emerged from the engineering section and collided bodily with her. She gave an oof! of surprise and caught herself on the wall, managing by some miracle of balance to keep her tray upright, and he just muttered an apology and scuttled away.
“Slate?” she called after him, but as usual he rounded his shoulders, pretended not to hear, and vanished around the corner.
He was a funny one, she mused, heading down the corridor in the opposite direction. He’d very nearly got on his knees and begged a place aboard, as thought it were imperative he were allowed to join the crew, as though he’d die if he didn’t, then spent most of his time actively avoiding people. The rumour mill had said he’d wanted his place among this crew of near-strangers in a desperate attempt to get out from under his notorious father’s shadow, but now he was out he didn’t seem any happier. And he wasn’t one for talking, either, it seemed – she’d offered her ear more than once, but he’d always waved her concerns away, and ultimately she decided to leave him to his own devices.
In the crew of five, the unofficial ship’s botanist, chef and counsellor was one of two females aboard, the other being Ivy. Compared to her diminutive shipmate, who had a tendency to be more than a little androgynous in behaviour, Lena was very feminine; she was gentle, and motherly, and fairly ample when it came to physique, generous of bust and broad of hips – her shipmates called her “solid”, to spare her feelings, but Lena herself was more pragmatic, and called herself overweight.
She was a genetic hybrid, like most of her shipmates. Her genes came from a random selection of creatures – the snub-nosed intelligent aviform Corvian, a selection of deep-sea creatures, an amphibian or two and some bits and pieces of various mammals – but any passing human would have said “newt”. And she did bear a striking resemblance to a giant, humanoid salamander, albeit with soft, dry humanlike skin, strikingly marked in thunderhead blue and pale jasmine, with limpid golden eyes and three fin crests on her wedge-shaped head. Unlike her shipmates, she was tailless, and also plantigrade, where everyone else walked on their toes, and ultimately everything combined to give her the emphatic foursquare gait of some sort of organic bulldozer.
-----
There. :P
Edit: I have also found Ivy's song: "So Much Love To Give". HURRAH. ;)
no subject
(PS feel free to elbow me if I look like I'm getting too wordy.)
no subject
I think.... Emphasize the word "think" here - that you're being a little overly detailed for an intro. I'd say either set a character(s), a location, or a plot device, but not all three at once. At least, not at the start. Or the first paragraph - You have the ship, the situation, and a few crew members all introduced at once. And then you spend the next few paragraphs explaining all of these, in sections of a sort. You mention crew members before we have any clear idea of who they are (assuming we haven't been following your notes), and leave them floating while you finish explaining.
And you lead with a quote, and wait almost two paragraphs before explaining the speaker, or introducing him. Assuming it was Onyx. And have about eight more before anything else is said (by characters, anyway).
I believe this is also the first I've read of the actual official Dauntless Universe. At least, as a chapter. I'd say, overall, it has the assumption that we already know the world we exist in. Which is the case with us, but it still doesn't help it as an introduction. Half of it reads like a story. The rest of it feels like notes, or a script.
Aside from the flow of this, it seems well. Still amazed at your penchant for details.
"Organic Bulldozer"..? I prefer "forklift", but that's probably just me...
no subject
Heh, s'funny, the last person I said complained about the exact OPPOSITE - the whole "But I don't even know what they LOOK like *bitch, whine*" thing. Oh well, never any happy mediums. :P