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by Shadowwell » Wed Jul 05, 2017 8:11 pm
Rupudska wrote:Yeah, it's fine. Accepted, though the bio is a bit sparse for my tastes.
Was gonna post yesterday, but I'm exceptionally tired so I'll post tomorrow.
by Cylarn » Thu Jul 06, 2017 1:35 pm
by Shadowwell » Thu Jul 06, 2017 1:43 pm
by Gerdon Laughis » Thu Jul 06, 2017 1:46 pm
Shadowwell wrote:Will try to geyt a post up soon, who is available and what is going on right now?
by Shadowwell » Thu Jul 06, 2017 2:23 pm
by Rupudska » Thu Jul 06, 2017 3:00 pm
Shadowwell wrote:Am typing my post now, tell me if anything needs to be changed, when i is done.
I have added a bit more to the bio and it should be better, it is not done however, i am wantig to focus on my first post for right now.
Waht can you tell me about the Taurians Rup?
by Shadowwell » Thu Jul 06, 2017 3:13 pm
by Rupudska » Thu Jul 06, 2017 5:38 pm
Esternial wrote:Gotta do work this week. Don't know if I'll have time to write a decent post.
by Reverend Norv » Thu Jul 06, 2017 7:39 pm
by Rupudska » Thu Jul 06, 2017 7:56 pm
Reverend Norv wrote:Rup has called and I have answered. I'll be adding an idea of mine from a previous FT RP - the Stowaways, Puritan Communist hillbillies IN SPACE! Just give me a few days to put my various apps in order.
by Reverend Norv » Thu Jul 06, 2017 7:57 pm
Rupudska wrote:Reverend Norv wrote:Rup has called and I have answered. I'll be adding an idea of mine from a previous FT RP - the Stowaways, Puritan Communist hillbillies IN SPACE! Just give me a few days to put my various apps in order.
Marvelous. I imagine the fringes of the Empire (and much of the Void and unaligned nations) are absolutely full of Stowaways.
Freyr might have some, but most of the landmasses aren't large enough for Stowaways to hide in, except for Blaland which is really just Australia with a slightly smaller desert.
by Reverend Norv » Thu Jul 06, 2017 8:22 pm
THE STOWAWAYS
Commonly found in desert, marshy, mountainous, or otherwise inhospitable and remote regions of planets on the fringes of Cyanian control, the Stowaways are generally seen by outsiders as inbred, free-riding, anarchistic fundamentalists with too many guns. The Stowaways, by contrast, view themselves as the only genuinely free people in the galaxy. What everyone agrees is that they are a unique cultural phenomenon of the Great Void.
Stowaway history is mostly oral, told through the elaborate collective memories of settler clans. It begins shortly after the discovery of viable starflight, when disadvantaged populations across Earth seized on space colonization as a chance at a new beginning. The poor and desperate, of course, could not buy shares in the joint-stock companies that financed the first space expeditions; as a result, millions signed on as laborers, without either an economic or a political stake in the colonies that they were hired to build. Isolated and destitute areas like the central Congo, the Appalachians, the Amazon, and Central Asia provided most of the early laborers, who quickly became known as "Indentures" - after the quasi-serfs whose status they closely approached.
Conditions on the first group of settled worlds did not live up to the Indentures' hopes: they found themselves up against elaborate structures of legal and economic exclusion that left them unable to own land and reduced to the same menial jobs that they had done on Earth. As the centuries wore on, and the glorious Rheim Imperium brought order and prosperity to the stars, the situation of the Indentures deteriorated even further. In response, many Indentures came to repudiate the supposed "Golden Age" of Rheim and everything that it stood for. They turned from technology to traditional religion, from orderly hierarchy to egalitarian community government, from excitement over industry to idealization of agriculture. In the shantytowns beneath the skyscrapers, they built an entire alternative society: one in which sprawling clans or tribes provided a social safety net, and communities made decisions collectively, and religion came from the Bible or the Koran or the Torah alone, without the need for clergy or special training. They resisted taxation, practiced small-scale agriculture to supplement their meager wages, and revived the almost-lost craft of gunsmithing in an effort to fashion primitive projectile weapons out of scrap metal, with which to resist planetary police.
When war came to the galaxy, and the collapse of the Imperium left thousands of worlds depopulated and beyond the reach of any government, these rebellious communities of Indentures saw their chance. Hundreds of thousands of them found ways of sneaking onto colony ships bound for what became the Great Void; most spent the journey in the barely-heated hold among the livestock. The Indentures' justification for this plan was simple: land was too precious to be held in the hands of banks or companies or governments. God made the land for man to live on, and so he who farmed it owned it. "God gave the land to the tiller," became the rallying cry of the new Stowaways.
When the paying passengers - and the corporations and governments - found that their money had been inadvertently used to transport thousands of indigent and violent Indentures, they were less than pleased. They dubbed their new neighbors "Stowaways," a name that the former Indentures soon adopted with rebellious pride. Keeping together in the clans and communities that they had formed under the heel of Rheim, the Stowaways began a rapid migration, mostly on foot or using pack animals, to the most remote areas of their new planets. Often, these areas resembled their half-remembered ancestral homes on Old Earth: Arab clans moved to the desert, Central Asians to the desolate steppe, Appalachians to the mountains, Congolese to dense jungle.
Drawing on their experience of "insurgent agriculture," the first generation of Stowaways rapidly adapted to their new environments. They traded minimally, mostly for raw materials like metal ingots and long-lived energy technology like solar panels or windmills. Once purchased, they learned by trial and error how to keep patching and fixing this equipment long after it would otherwise have broken. Stowaway communities turned overwhelmingly either to agriculture or to pastoralism, depending on environmental conditions. They rediscovered traditional techniques, with the result that Stowaway clans now produce the galaxy's only major supply of food not dependent on advanced technology. By trial-and-error, Stowaways devised herbal remedies for illness or injury from available plants and fungi. They made their own clothes from the wool of sheep that they raised themselves. They learned to hunt again, to the point that expert shooting, learned from a young age, became as much a Stowaway trademark as religious fervor. And they elevated the craft of gunsmithing to a fine art: a handmade Stowaway rifle, while distinctly old-fashioned in its operation, is made to fit an individual shooter like a tailored suit. It can compete favorably with far more modern weapons in its accuracy, and it is peerless in its artistic beauty.
The fact that Stowaways universally reject ageslow technology - mostly for religious reasons - means that Stowaway communities have passed many more separate generations on their new homes than other settlers. Virtually no currently living Stowaway can remember the journey to the planets on which they now dwell. As a result, the vast reserves of cultural wisdom developed or rediscovered by the first few generations of Stowaways - agricultural techniques, gunsmithing, herbal remedies, and so on - have been inherited and refined by their descendants, and are now seen as ancient traditions rather than recent adaptations. To a life-prolonged outsider, the Stowaways have an absurd sense that their history - which is only a few hundred years long - is ancient and rich.
Stowaway ideology, however, has changed remarkably little. It is equal parts religious, economic, and political, and its keynote is the rejection of hierarchy and arbitrary authority. Religiously, most Stowaways hold to extremely decentralized, quasi-fundamentalist versions of the three major Abrahamic faiths. Stowaway religious ethics are generally rooted in the equality of all people, the responsibility to contribute toward the community, and the blasphemy of technologies and hierarchies that destroy communities and subordinate some of God's children to others. Family is held to be sacred, but based upon love and companionship rather than strict hierarchy. Nevertheless, children are not to be born out of wedlock - a prohibition sometimes enforced by "shotgun weddings." Clergy may or may not be present, but when they are, their authority is starkly limited: they are counselors and mediators, but the Scriptures themselves are the only legitimate source of truth, and the clergy are no closer to those Scriptures than anyone else. Clergy are generally appointed by the community, and receive no special training. This extreme level of dedication to holy texts has caused Stowaways generally to become voracious readers: literacy is among the most prestigious of all skills. Classic literature of Old Earth, from Homer to Hemingway, is more widely read in Stowaway villages than anywhere else in the galaxy. This generally comes as a surprise to outsiders, who mostly stereotype Stowaways as illiterate hicks.
Economically, Stowaways are dedicated to a kind of agrarian anarchism whose two primary claims are that taxation is theft and that land belongs to whomever is actually living on it and using it. Since Stowaways realize that the outside world - known variously as "flatlanders," "lowlanders," "housedwellers," or "drylanders," depending on environment - is bitterly opposed to these claims, Stowaways strive for the greatest possible level of economic self-sufficiency. This is the source of their deep, almost spiritual connection to agriculture and herding: after centuries as wage-laborers, the ability to provide for oneself is the purest form of freedom. Handicrafts are central to the Stowaway economy: everything from radios to water purifiers is produced by hand. Among non-Muslim Stowaways, home-distilled liquor is of central symbolic importance, and often functions as an informal currency - among themselves, Stowaways generally barter for what they need. However, Stowaways almost always retain some economic connection with the outside world; they trade organic produce, artisanal cheeses, and handmade rifles for raw materials and advanced manufactured goods. But these contacts are always tense: heavily armed Stowaway militia show up in small towns in large numbers, and everyone breathes a lot easier once they are gone.
Politically, Stowaways in practice have two levels of government. Clans - extended family groups that can include hundreds of members - are headed by chiefs or patriarchs or matriarchs, whose status is mostly informal and rooted in age, experience, and force of personality. They generally cannot make major decisions without the support of the clan as a whole, but they have great power to shame and bully their family members into contributing to the general welfare. They are generally highly respected guarantors of local stability, and are likely to serve as clergypeople or militia captains. Four or five clans living in the same area constitute a Stowaway village, which is linked by shared public institutions: the church or mosque, the village militia, the general store, a few gunsmiths, and so on. Village government is entirely communal and consensus-based: Stowaways gather, usually in the church or mosque, and debate until a compromise emerges that is minimally acceptable to everyone. As a result, a willingness to swallow one's objections and take the best deal available is central to Stowaway political ethics. And all Stowaways recognize a need to contribute to the community; they provide labor to help to build each other's barns, and they send their menfolk - and sometimes womenfolk - out to serve in the militia and defend the community from attack. The Stowaway way of war is guerrilla fighting, based on ambushes and booby traps and relying on intimate knowledge of the terrain.
When this process breaks down, it is usually as a result of tensions between local clans. Almost all Stowaways have accepted traditions of feuding. Most feuds begin with insults, and escalate to theft, and then to brawling, and finally to lethal violence. At this point, a feud becomes a blood feud, and it is very difficult to end unless one party is annihilated or driven into exile. As a result, the community usually attempts to intervene and find a solution to the crisis before anyone is killed. Nevertheless, most Stowaways have stories of blood feuds, and take deep pride in the opportunities for martial glory that these feuds provide.
In the borderland chaos of the Great Void, centuries of almost continuous war have had a mixed effect on Stowaway communities. Most have survived the quarrels of the three empires quite well; when their planets are assaulted or blockaded, the Stowaways simply cut ties to the rest of the galaxy, ambush anyone who approaches their remote fastnesses, and carry on farming or herding. Their self-sufficiency has saved them from anything short of an orbital bombardment. Most Stowaways live within a few weeks' travel of both Imperial and Federation space, and their relationships with the many and varied alien species with whom they share the Great Void are deeply fraught. Most Stowaways associate aliens with invading armies, and xenophobia is accordingly widespread. In some ways, this is justified: Stowaway communities on the Federation border have waged a decades-long local insurgency against Cipaqoaltus efforts to integrate their worlds. Ironically, this produced a spectacularly hypocritical Confederation propaganda campaign in which the Stowaways were portrayed as fearless pan-human patriots resisting alien oppression. What they were actually doing, of course, was armed tax evasion. Nevertheless, this romanticized portrayal remains the only attractive portrait of the Stowaways in Imperial space, and it had a substantial impact on the public imagination.
But centuries of war have also taken a toll on the Stowaways, leaving them harder and more self-reliant than ever before. While the actual battles usually took place far from Stowaway villages, the constant need to resist occupation by one army or another has left many Stowaways squeezed between opposing forces. When the food supply breaks down, non-Stowaway residents of a planet often begin raiding Stowaway villages in search of crops. At the same time, the universal Stowaway refusal to pay taxes of any kind to any government has made them a priority target for the armies of the thousand tiny tyrannies that dot the Great Void. Many military historians believe that the Stowaways have managed one of the most technically brilliant guerrilla campaigns in human history during the last several decades, using their economic self-sufficiency and knowledge of local terrain to fight both Federation and Imperial forces to a standstill. The human and financial cost of this insurgency has been crucial in discouraging the expansion of the larger powers into the Great Void.
Nevertheless, the sheer scale of interstellar war has often overwhelmed Stowaway resistance. More than a million Stowaways were killed when a punitive expedition by Federation forces against their worlds ended in orbital bombardment. On other war-torn worlds, millions of Stowaways have been conscripted into Imperial penal units; millions more were put behind barbed wire in lowland internment camps, where hundreds of thousands died amid shortages of food and medicine. The camps - the specter of imprisonment - have become a vision of hell for Stowaways across the Great Void.
But Stowaway society remains strong and vibrant; most worlds in the Great Void have at least a few isolated areas of Stowaway settlement. Generally, these villages are beacons of hope in a very dark place: largely self-sufficient, they keep clear of the networks of organized crime that span the rest of the Void. Stowaway militias, hardened by the experience of holding off the might of two empires, are more than a match for all but the most powerful criminal syndicates and local despots. The absence of effective government across most of the Void, of course, bothers Stowaways not at all; it only makes it easier for them to avoid external conflict and get on with their lives. As a result, for the first time in history, non-Stowaways have begun to seek to join these much-maligned rural communities: a simple, safe, hard-working life within a supportive community has started to look very attractive to many residents of the Great Void. Generally speaking, provided that the newcomers adopt the local Stowaway religion and customs, this immigration has been accepted by the Stowaways themselves as proof of the superiority of their way of life. In the last few years, adoption of lowlanders into Stowaway clans and the resulting intermarriage has begun to change the demographics of Stowaway villages - possibly forever.
GLORIOUS LAND
by Rupudska » Thu Jul 06, 2017 8:24 pm
Reverend Norv wrote:Rupudska wrote:
Marvelous. I imagine the fringes of the Empire (and much of the Void and unaligned nations) are absolutely full of Stowaways.
Freyr might have some, but most of the landmasses aren't large enough for Stowaways to hide in, except for Blaland which is really just Australia with a slightly smaller desert.
Great. Do you mind if I bring back Paul Shields, modified to fit the new context? With some tweaking, he'd fit just as well in this context.
by Rupudska » Fri Jul 07, 2017 4:48 pm
by Reverend Norv » Fri Jul 07, 2017 8:30 pm
Name: Paul Shields
Age: 44; Paul has never received life-prolong treatment.
Gender: Male
Species: Human, but entirely unenhanced by prosthetics or genetic medicine - which makes him almost a different species in the fourth millennium.
Nationality/Allegiance: Paul was born on Broadleaf in 3572, at which time the colony was theoretically under the suzerainty of the Cyanian Empire - but Paul's birth was never officially recorded. In 3581, when Paul was nine, he became a de facto resident-alien of the Cipaqoaltus Federation, when a brief border skirmish ended in the planet changing hands. In 3597, after Acadian troops occupied Broadleaf, Paul found himself a "citizen" of that kingdom. And after the Legion and its Cyanian allies withdrew, he is in legal limbo again, just like he was when he was born. Through all of this, Paul's loyalty has been only to his God, his family, his community, and the idea that somewhere in the galaxy there must be a place for a man to raise his kids without an lizard sneering at him or a nobleman lording it over him. His allegiance is to the people he loves, and to their freedom, and to his own.
Physical appearance:
Paul is a rawboned man, weathered by hard living, but with the sturdy, farm-fed wholesomeness of a frontiersman still showing through beneath it all. He is long-shanked and lean-hipped and broad-shouldered, and while his height is only average, he has a way of seeming taller than he is. He has the hard, no-frills, boiled-down musculature of a man who has spent his whole life doing hard physical labor. He is big-boned, with thick wrists and a slightly bullish neck. He has scars, too, both from the vagaries of frontier life and from battle: the most obvious are parallel lines across his nose and forehead, clearly made by a reptilian's claws. Paul moves with little grace, but with the implacable stubbornness of a man who has learned to manage great pain. As a rule, he makes remarkably little noise - though periodically an ugly-sounding hacking cough will make his shoulders shake.
Paul's face is broad and honest, handsome in a blandly wholesome way, with a square jaw and short sandy hair and bright blue-green eyes the color of the sea. It is a curiously ageless face. It bears all the marks of long life: crows' feet around the eyes, deeply graven lines in the forehead, and a general leathery durability that speaks of a lifetime's sunburns. But Paul's features are chiseled like a young man's; his cheeks do not droop, and his gaze is sharp and firm. There is a hunter's wary alertness in those eyes - and, under it, a father's gentle cheer.
Paul wears the durable, old-fashioned clothes of a farmer on the frontier of human space: jeans, work boots, flannel shirts, a battered leather coat lined with stained fleece. He has no body armor, but a heavy handgun is usually strapped to his right thigh in a leather holster. He has a persistent, distinctive smell: lanolin and pipe smoke and good, honest dirt.
Identifying Marks: A plain gold wedding band; three parallel, diagonal scars across the nose and left cheek (old and faded). Other than that, Paul's most obvious distinguishing mark is his clothes: clearly homemade, hard-worn, and carefully repaired in a way that few of the more cosmopolitan inhabitants of the galaxy have ever seen.
Skills:
- Like all Stowaways, Paul is far more self-reliant and far less dependent on technology than any spacefarer. He can track, stalk, hunt, skin, clean, and butcher any animal from a rabbit to a moose. With a stick and some wire, he can build snares for fowl and varmints, or fish for trout and catfish, or catch crawfish. He can gather wild herbs and mushrooms, both toxic and delicious, and he has an almost preternatural talent for reading land so as to locate sources of fresh water. He has been known to sense a coming rainstorm by the smell of the air alone while it is still hours away. And given a plot of land and a few months, he'll have a vegetable garden and a field of corn flourishing with little more than his own two hands and a lifetime of experience.
- In addition to the skills listed above, Paul has also inherited the Stowaway knack for improvised mechanics. While he cannot tell an integrated circuit from a carrot, he can usually MacGyver an ingeniously simple solution to keep a machine working despite the failure of some essential part. In addition to this, he has a working knowledge of the almost lost craft of gunsmithing: in an era of nanomachines and lasers, he can maintain and repair and enhance any chemical-propellant slug-thrower you care to place before him. He is also, like most Christian Stowaways, an experienced home distiller, and can turn any kind of cereal grain into tolerably palatable (and safely drinkable) moonshine. Finally, he is by necessity a basically competent architect and construction worker, capable of designing and building structures ranging from an entire log cabin to a simple improvised lean-to.
- While he has the deep Stowaway suspicion of modern pills, injections, and cybernetics, Paul is well-versed in the traditional herbal medicine of his culture. He can splint a broken limb quickly and confidently, and he can locate and harvest hundreds of types of herbs, mushrooms, roots, and tree bark - most of them originally found on Earth and then scattered across the galaxy by human traders and explorers - that have medicinal properties. He can then turn those ingredients into tinctures, teas, poultices, and ointments that can control a fever, soothe an achy back, numb pain, induce slumber, strengthen immune response, and much more. Paul can also turn this herbal knowledge to more dangerous purposes, turning everyday plants into poisons that can cause sleep, nausea, or even death.
- Stowaway education places a strong emphasis on careful, analytical thought. Paul has a great deal of practice in consciously, carefully thinking about things. In an era of information networks and rapid calculations, he takes his time, turns problems over in his mind, examines them from all possible angles and a variety of perspectives, and then comes to a conclusion in which he can justly feel great confidence. He is the sort of man who can happily take fifteen minutes considering his next move in a chess game. While Paul is hardly a genius, this background gives him an unusual capacity for problem-solving - provided that he is given the time to think the problem through.
- Stowaway education also, famously, places a strong emphasis on ancient literature and on memorization. The consequence of this is that Paul knows Shakespeare, Milton, and the Bible like the back of his hand, and has committed to memory hundreds of pages of Macbeth, Paradise Lost, and the Gospels. He has a quotation ready for any conceivable situation, and he often returns to his precious leather-bound manuscripts for solace or inspiration.
- Paul is a naturally mild-mannered man, not prone to picking fights or criticizing others. For the most part, he is the living embodiment of the injunction that if you don't have anything nice to say, you shouldn't say anything at all. Accordingly, he tends to get along well with all but the most difficult of people, and most strangers find him pleasant company. He is also, like many Stowaways, a fantastic storyteller: a culture without electronic entertainment prizes tale-telling as a skill, and Paul boasts a deep voice with a rhythmic cadence and a wide array of personal anecdotes, clan legends, and Broadleaf Stowaway folktales.
- Paul has the unexpected, immense brute physical strength of a man whose entire life has been spent doing hard physical labor. Though he is no more than average in height and build, and he would rarely win a footrace or an acrobatics competition, Paul can drag a fallen tree several times his weight for miles across the forest floor. In practice, this translates to an iron grip, a capacity to shatter many locks with one good kick, and the ability to pick up a grown man and toss him halfway across the room.
- Finally, while Paul was never a soldier in the professional sense, he has spent most of his life at war. His is the Stowaway way of battle, derived ultimately from hunting: Paul can move silently, blend into the terrain, use natural camouflage like water and mud to baffle advanced technology, and then shoot a target the size of a crabapple from a hundred yards away - with iron sights. He is one of the finest natural marksmen you will ever meet, and he has a great deal of practice in organizing traps and ambushes: punji pits, land-mines improvised from mining explosives, rockslides timed to bury tanks, and so on. At closer range, Paul makes up in experience what he lacks in formal training. He is a brutal and disciplined brawler, who uses his great strength to best advantage by simply grabbing an enemy and then punching them to a pulp. And with a knife or a stick, he is well-versed in traditional Stowaway fighting styles: techniques that have been honed over generations of clan blood feuds.
Personality:The galaxy is a big place. Vast beyond imagining. I'm very small. Not particularly important. A little man from a little village. All I ever asked was the chance to live a little life: till the earth, raise a family, teach them the Savior's ways just as my Ma and Pa taught me. And be left alone. But in all the vastness of the galaxy, seems like even that was too much to ask for.
Mind ye, I don't want to be left alone on account of being antisocial, or misanthropic. I don't mind being on my own for a short time: nearest thing to heaven is going hunting by myself right 'round dawn, when the mist lies heavy in the hollers and there's just me and my thoughts and my gun and the Lord. But the reason why I love that is that afterwards, I can turn my steps to home, and come back to folk that love me, and a warm hearth, and a community that needs the meat I carry. I need people. I need them to need me. The Book says: "It is not good that Man should be alone." And so I find friends wherever I go, and I never betray them.
I want to be left alone because I am a free man. D'ye know how rare that really is now? Look around. There's just bigger gangs and smaller gangs, pilgrim. The biggest gang sits on Mars, and trains folk to care more about lining the pockets of dukes and lords than they do about their own kith and kin and them as love 'em. Another big 'un sits somewhere out there among the stars, and it talks all the time 'bout liberty and equality while it burns villages and turns decent folk out of house and home. There's gangs as smuggle bullets and gangs as smuggle slaves and gangs as burn your house down if ye won't pay them protection money, and it makes no damn difference to me whether they call that money "taxes" or not.
And I cannot abide a bully, for neither could my father before me, nor shall my children after me. We are stiff-necked and ornery, but we are free folk: we solve our arguments first with words and then with guns, we set our course as equals in the old church hall, and we kneel to no one but the Lord and recognize no law but God's. And so we live simple, clean, honest lives: true to ourselves and each other, even now, even in spite of everything. A man has nothing more precious than his self-respect. I think I still have mine.
A time may come when war consumes the whole of the Great Void. But look up there, pilgrim. There are millions of stars up there, millions of worlds where no foot has trod. I think that when the time comes, I shall gather my kin, and we shall go a-rambling together. God willing, the universe will be big enough for us after all.
Weaknesses:
- By far Paul's greatest weakness is his complete unfamiliarity with advanced technology. He cannot perform the thirty-seventh century equivalent of a Google search, much less maintain a fusion reactor or interface with nanomachines or repair cybernetics or decode any signal more sophisticated than an unencrypted radio broadcast. He is completely incapable of flying a fighter, a corvette, or indeed a biplane. For the first three decades of his life, he never even set foot in a spaceship. In the wilderness, Paul is a perfectly-tuned machine to hunt, gather, fight, and survive. In a city or a spacecraft, he is practically a babe in the woods.
- Like most Stowaways, Paul has a bone-deep, irreconcilable revulsion at hierarchy or arbitrary authority. Not merely nobility, but social class, the military chain of command, and the idea of government itself make his blood boil. He has fought his entire life to avoid calling anyone "boss;" he thinks of himself as a sovereign individual, subject to no one. Obviously, this can make it difficult for him to swallow working as part of a team in which key decisions are made without his knowledge or consent.
- Though his mild-mannered disposition goes some way to temper them, Paul shares the instinctive prejudices of most Stowaways: he feels that followers of other religions (or of no religion) are heathens whose morals cannot ultimately be trusted, he considers aliens to be invaders and oppressors prone to genocidal cleansing (at least until proven otherwise), and he believes that the place of a woman (especially a married woman) is in the home - though this last is complicated. Stowaway women can serve as village leaders and are not expected to obey their husbands, but they are not supposed to travel or to fight. All of those attitudes have deeply shaped Paul's worldview, and they can leave him blinkered and blind to the unexpected.
Fears:I have a lot of fears. Is that uncommon for folk here? I account it a blessing. The man who has naught to fear has naught to lose, and that's a sad way to live a life.
Mostly I fear for them as I love. I lost my family once before. By God's own grace, I found them again. Now I have to leave 'em. That terrifies me. I don't know if they'll be there when I get back. I don't know if I will get back. I'm not afraid to die, mind. My pa had a good death, and so did most of the men I fought with back in the hollers. But they died on their land, and we buried them deep, where their bones could feed the corn and their children could visit them when the sun was a-setting. What will I do if I die far out in the void, and my body floats in space like an icicle: never turning softly back to dust, no one to visit me, no one to know where I rest? To die so far, so far from home; to die without tucking in my kids one last time, without seeing Delia walk through the church in a white dress, without sitting next to Sam one last time in the early morning as we wait for a deer...
I couldn't abide it. My spirit would not rest easy. I know it. If God gives me a halfway fair chance, I'll make it home - because nothing in this galaxy, no agony or travail or terror, scares me half so much as the idea of never seeing that little cabin again.
Bio:I'm a Stowaway.
I know that most folk would shy from admitting that, but I bear the name with pride. My great-great-granddaddy was a poor farm worker on Escalon IV, a day laborer on the lettuce plantations amid the great glass towers. He kept to the old ways, and read his Bible every day, and turned his back on the promises of immortality and power that came out of the laboratory loudspeakers and the mouths of heathens. He had nothing but himself, and his family, and his community, and his self-respect, and his God. And that was enough.
So when Rheim fell and folks with money began fleeing to seek a new life on Greenleaf - a beautiful mountainous world right where Acadia and the Federation come together at the edge of the Great Void - well, Granddaddy had no cash to buy a ticket. But the galaxy is not for sale to the highest bidder. God made the land for the hands of the tiller, not for the tax-collectors and usurers. So Granddady took himself and his family and hid out in the hold of the colony ship, with the hogs and the sows, like our Lord in the manger.
And when the ship landed, he lit out for the deep mountains, as far from the rest of the settlers as his feet could take him, with his kith and kin and a few hundred others in tow. He stopped when he reached the most treacherous stretch of mountains - what the other settlers call the Hrethic Range, but what we call the Gibeon Heights. And there, by a fresh stream full of strange fish and in the shade of strange trees, Granddaddy halted, and built a home, and called it Heart's Desire. There he died, and there I was born, and today Heart's Desire is one Stowaway village among many.
I was born in 3572, by which time the Cyanians claimed to rule Greenleaf through their proxy, a local duke. Truth is, that didn't make no never mind for us. We had always been self-sufficient: hunting and farming and fishing our food, smithing our tools, getting our electricity from windmills. We traded for little, and the duke left us alone, because when his men came up-country with criminal warrants and tax ledgers, we sent them home in pieces. When I was three, the Acadians and the lizards started fighting over their border planets - including Greenleaf - but we barely heard about it. We tilled the earth and went on with our lives. As a small child, I caught crawdads in the mud by the river-bank, and went to school in the church hall - and I know that folk think Stowaways are barely literate, but I had enough education to read Paradise Lost from cover to cover when I was ten years old, and I can quote Shakespeare from memory as easily as the Scriptures. How many ageslowed spacefarers can say the same? They move too fast for that kind of education; they have no time, no time.
I learned other things too, of course. My Pa taught me to hunt: few are the non-Stowaways who can stalk a hind through the woods in silence, and who in the Empire - or even Acadia - is given his own rifle at the age of twelve? I can shoot a crabapple off the branch from a hundred yards. Old Lady Beecham taught me to splint a broken limb, and how to treat a fever with the herbs and mushrooms of Old Earth that ye can find on all the worlds that ever knew the touch of a human foot, and a few that never did. My Ma taught me to cook, to turn whatever we had on hand to gold with a little cream and a few herbs. Pastor Reinhold taught me chess, and he taught me to think, to reason through a problem, to weigh the options, to think two moves ahead and play to my strengths. And I learned, too, how to smell the rain coming down the valley, and how to repair a solar panel and a windmill and a rifle, and how to tell a fine story by the fireside in winter.
Trouble started on account of the war when I was five or six. The lowlanders weren't self-sufficient, and when the supply ships from off-world stopped coming, they began to starve. They panicked, and fled their cities, and started killing each other and stealing. That's what happens when folk rely on others for food and law, and not upon themselves. Pretty soon, they reached the Gibeon, and my Pa was gone most days ambushing starving lowlanders, keeping them away from Heart's Desire and the other villages, protecting our homes and our foodstores. I'd see Pa come home at the end of the day, and draw water from the well to wash the blood from his tomahawk, and I'd never seen anyone look quite so tired.
And then the lizards showed up. We heard 'em on the radio, declaring how they came in peace and brought freedom in their train. They promised aid, and some in the lowlands wept for joy, but we Stowaways - we didn't need 'em, and we certainly didn't want 'em. Heart's Desire met in the church hall and talked all night, and in the end we reckoned as we would just have to wait and see. I was nine years old when I watched the Cipaqoaltus ships descend from heaven to the plain below the heights, like Lucifer and all his angels, and start rounding up the lowlanders. It was the first time I ever saw a starship. It chilled me down to the bone.
For the first five or six years, the lizards left us alone. Then they started sending their pet humans up-country to tell us about the kindness of the aliens, and the wisdom of their rule, and - of course - for the damned taxes that we now were supposed to pay the new planetary governor and his "transitional administration." We stuck to tradition and gave 'em one warning shot before we opened up. I was fifteen, but that was old enough, so I was out with the militia that day. I shot one woman right through the chest. It was easy. I felt sick afterwards. Pa dipped his thumb in the blood and marked my forehead with it. Then he hugged me hard, and I felt a little better. When it was over, I went fishing and read All Quiet on the Western Front.
The lizards themselves came up-country after that. Things stalemated. They had power armor and they walked through our bullets like they were raindrops, but we were on our home ground, and we were too quiet and too fast and too well-hidden for the lizards to draw a good bead on us. They killed a few of our own, but we used some mining explosives to trigger a landslide and buried an entire squad of them under twenty tons of rock. After that, the village elders and a Cipaqoaltus commander met, and worked out a deal: we'd stay in our mountains and promise not to use any fancy technology, and they'd leave us alone. Pa and my family opposed the deal on principle, but we let it go in the name of consensus. The Kerrys supported the deal, and actually tried to learn the aliens' language and religion. My brother Joe told Tim Kerry that he was an apostate and a blasphemer, so Tim broke Joe's nose, so I took a rifle butt to Tim's knees. The Shieldses were at feud with the Kerrys for the next six years, and eventually Joe and I burned the Kerry house down, so they left Heart's Desire and moved to live with their relations up the valley in Hebron.
The next war came when I was twenty-one. We heard about it over the radio again: a real-grim sounding lizard calling out lowlanders' conscription numbers, to fight the Acadians who had come to take the world back. Most of the Stowaways felt like I did: we had no dog in this fight. Like Kipling wrote: "Holy State or Holy King, Or Holy People’s Will— Have no truck with the senseless thing. Order the guns and kill!" A pox on both their houses. Human gangsters are no better than alien gangsters.
The lightshow started a few weeks later: lasers glittering up among the stars, exploding defense stations turning to second suns at midday. We tended our crops in the light of apocalypse. The Legion landed mostly in the lowlands, where the lizards and their human conscripts were concentrated. More lightshow, closer this time. After almost a year, the Legion headed up-country too, and told us that we had to join some kind of irregular battalion to help fight the lizards. We held our tongues and played it smart, waited until most of the powered infantry had left the planet. Then we showed the rear-echelon troops exactly what a bunch of "civilians" can do with a few old rifles and a lifetime's knowledge of the terrain.
The Legion's mechs came back after a few months to deal with the revolt in the mountains. We dug deep trenches, and covered them with branches. Then we engaged the metal men, and retreated across the booby traps. The branches held our weight. The weight of walking tanks? Not so much. Once the mechs were stuck at the bottom of the holes - hard to climb out in that much armor - we dropped wheelbarrow-loads of dynamite in around them and blew them to scrap iron for the blacksmiths to reuse. Swords into plowshares, as the Book says. After that, the Acadians seem to have decided that they had better uses for their precious Powered Infantry.
Instead, the lizards made their counterattack. They sent in the Hellhounds - dromoraptor furia, off-worlders call 'em. Our name is more appropriate. They moved like lightning, and hunted in packs. They could smell us. We adapted. We patrolled along streambeds, so the water would mask our scent trail. We got good at sniping from very long range, beyond where they could smell us. We used raw meat to distract 'em, and rigged booby traps along the deer trails that both they and we followed. But they got the drop on us almost as often as we got the drop on them. And they were savage. They'd rip your guts out in their teeth. Pretty soon, they stopped distinguishing between civilians and militia. We all wore the same clothes. We all looked the same. They killed us all alike, man and woman and child.
We always managed to keep the hounds out of Heart's Desire. But Nashua wasn't so lucky. Their militia followed a false trail, and the Hellhounds came in behind them and torched the whole village. Killed everyone who couldn't flee in time. Then they ambushed the militia and killed most of them too. Pa was dead by this time, killed in a Hellhound ambush in the second year of the war. I was twenty-five, and in command of the village militia. We covered thirty miles over the mountains in a day, and set up just outside Nashua. The rain that night covered our scent. We cut the hounds to pieces, and brought the survivors of the Nashua massacre back to Heart's Desire.
That's how I met Annie. Her kin had all been killed, and she had a tragic beauty to her, like an angel trapped on Earth. And underneath it, she was so strong, so full of unquenchable life. I took her home to Ma, and Ma took care of her, and we all knew that I loved her, but nobody said anything, because the Hellhounds were scouring the woods, and I figured there wasn't time for love. So I came home to her, and ate with her, and talked with her for hours, and held her image in my heart when a Hellhound clawed half my face off and I was tossing and turning in my bed for days, feverish from the infection, and she prayed for my life the while. After that, I knew that I was mortal, and that I didn't want to die without having lived. So I asked for her hand, and she said yes, for she had no kin left to gainsay her. We married the next month, in Pastor Reinhold's little white church.
It's strange how ye get used to the unbearable. The war went on, and on, and on. We kept the crops rising in the fields, and set up a rota so that one man in every three was always on patrol. We started nailing Hellhound skins to the trees, and it scared lizards new to the Gibeon pretty badly. I killed Hellhounds and tended the pigs, killed lizard infantry and tended the corn, killed Acadian legionnaires and loved my wife, killed bandits and saw my children born. We were losing people, but not too many, and there were always fifteen-year-olds like I had once been to take their place.
And then it all changed. The Acadians started running out of troops on Mycenae I, and they suddenly needed all the warm bodies they could find, so they set to conscripting Stowaway resistors. Out of nowhere, an entire platoon of Legion mechs fell from the sky right down into the stream where my great-great-granddaddy settled all those years ago. At the same time, their light troops surrounded the village. There was nowhere to go. In fifteen minutes, it was all over. Heart's Desire was in flames, and we were all prisoners. Annie and the kids were moved to a "refugee" camp in the lowlands. The militia and I were told that we could redeem our crimes against the Empire and Acadia, and earn our way back to being "citizens," by service in the war. A month later, I had a cheap mass-produced rifle in my hands and the flag of gangsters on my sleeve, and I landed on Mycenae I with an Acadian penal battalion.
I was on that world for three weeks. I cannot explain what I saw there. I saw death on a scale you can't imagine. I saw artillery barrages that flattened mountains. I saw nuclear fire consume cities and level forests. I saw strange lasers with colors that ring in your ears like church bells, and sonic weapons that make time stutter like an idiot child. I don't remember sleeping the entire time I was on that planet. The penal battalion was thrown into the worst of the fighting, where the Legion didn't want to waste its precious manpower. We were just Stowaways, after all. Just primitives.
There was no order at all, by the end: when the Legion withdrew in good order from the outskirts of Vidal, their Cyanian pals just left us behind. I found the others from Heart's Desire - those who had survived, anyway. We sat in an abandoned cellar and waited for whatever came next: death, capture, madness, maybe the Rapture. There were no more commands, just a mad rush to get out to a more stable defensive line beyond the city's suburbs. And then a Cipaqoaltus dropship touched down nearby, and they told us that they could get us out. Never ones to pass up new slaves, the lizards. So we went, and we woke from the long nightmare at last. After we left, the fighting turned the whole city into glass, and we were among the last few hundred souls to escape.
I spent the next nine months in a lizard prison camp, one one of their client worlds in the Great Void. I never saw the planet; I know only that it was cold. We spent our time in crowded barracks buildings or pacing the snowy yard under the gaze of the alien guards. They let the group of us from Heart's Desire stay together. We talked about home, about wives and children, the sun on the corn and the mist on the mountains. We broke each other's hearts with remembering, and we kept each other sane. I prayed for Annie and the kids every night, and I knew that they were in some other prison camp far away.
In the end, they let us go. They were having trouble with the locals, I guess, and they didn't want to risk keeping tens of thousands of angry POWs on an already unsettled planet. I hitched a ride with the others on a tramp steamer back to Greenleaf. I looked for Annie everywhere. I combed the lists of the millions of people who had been interned as insurgents by the Empire, and then abandoned in the camps when the Acadians withdrew to defend Mike I. I couldn't find Annie anywhere, not in all the endless mobs of the aimless and the dispossessed. The planet was full of people desperately seeking the lost, and slowly realizing that they would never see them again. The roads were crowded with refugees, and the trains had all stopped running. In the end, I walked six hundred miles, from Hengist to the Gibeon Heights. I didn't know what else to do, so I went home.
And there I found four small log cabins amid the ashes of my village, and Annie waiting for me in the doorway of the last one with her yellow hair tied at the nape of her neck. And I cried for a long, long time.
She had been told that I was dead, it turned out: that I had been left on Mike I. So she had gone home with the other women and children from Heart's Desire, and tried to pick up the threads of their lives amidst the ashes. The other men who had survived New Haven with me came home too, one by one, over the next few months. So did the survivors of other villages that had been destroyed, and a few lowlanders, and even an offworld family of big hamsters that had converted to Christianity and just wanted the rest of the world to leave them alone. We rebuilt our homes, resowed our fields. We corralled our pigs from where they had gone feral in the hills, and scavenged scrap iron from the abandoned war machines to rebuild our windmills.
I had nightmares of Mike I, and Annie held me until they passed. Annie had nightmares of the camps, and I held her until they passed. Haltingly, we told each other our stories, in the darkness of our bedroom or as we sat and fished on the sandy streambank where the Legion had landed and destroyed our old lives. We watched as our kids grew up, and tried not to fear for them too much when they began to fall in love. We lived our lives, and were content to grow old in our time, together.
But the world would not leave us be. We knew that crime lords had more or less taken over in the lowlands, but when they started moving into the Gibeon, we pushed back. I had no stomach for the fight, but I had not gazed into the mouth of Hell just to accept the yoke of another bunch of gangsters. At first, it was the gun-runners: they tried to hide their product in safe-houses up in the hills. We blew up the caches and brought down landslides on the cartel's search parties, just like we had done when I was fifteen. They left us alone eventually.
But then, last month, a team of off-worlders grabbed Keith Reynolds' daughter while she was out gathering mushrooms. Beth Reynolds is sixteen and beautiful, and the slavers who grabbed her had military gear and a suit of power armor, and we knew what her fate would be. I called up the militia and we chased the slavers down through the mountains, picking them off one at a time with sniping and booby traps, until the survivors left Beth behind and fled to save their hides.
We got word the next week from the lowland merchant who sells us steel ingots and solar panels: those slavers had been nobles. Turns out, some Imperial muckity-mucks like going on safari in the Great Void, picking up pretty girls and boys as they go. The dead nobles' families knew who I was, though they didn't know exactly where Heart's Desire was located. But they would find out.
We talked it over in the old white church where Pastor Reinhold is buried. We decided that there was only one choice. I had to get a pardon - for myself, for the village. It was the only way to keep Heart's Desire safe. Hopefully, somehow, I could find a way to clear our name, and prevent the Imperial punitive expedition that we all knew was coming. Someday, I would be able to come home.
I packed a bag. I kissed Annie goodbye. I told the kids to be good. I walked through the corn, and sat by the stream that my grandaddy had found, and gently bade my home farewell, and prayed God that I would see her again.
Then I hopped a train to the lowlands, and hopped a rust-bucket cargo ship to Thrawn B7, and I found a letter - a real paper letter - waiting for me there, promising a full pardon in return for protecting a freighter on its journey to Earth. If I could do that, and survive, then I could go home and grow old with Annie. But until then, unless I did the Empire's bidding, the Empire would never let me be.
And that's my story, pilgrim: the story of how there's still not enough space in the galaxy for the Stowaways.
Reason for Being on Thrawn B7: Paul is wanted by the Imperial authorities for killing a noble in defense of a girl from his village. The pardon offers him and his family the chance to escape the vengeance of the Cyanian Empire.
CAPTAIN TO ENTERPRISE (DO NOT REMOVE)
by Rupudska » Fri Jul 07, 2017 8:38 pm
by Reverend Norv » Fri Jul 07, 2017 8:42 pm
by Reverend Norv » Fri Jul 07, 2017 9:05 pm
Species Name: Tocatli; known to many Stowaways as "Hellhounds"
Scientific Name: Dromoraptor Furia
Homeworld: Ixixctl, Cipaqoaltus Federation
Natural lifespan: 25-30 solar years
Physical description: A nightmarish hybrid of insect and lizard, four feet high at the shoulder and seven from tailtip to clawtip, the tocatli evolved as apex pack predators of Ixictl, a planet at the fringe of the Federation. Originally, they had roughly the intelligence of a border collie; Cipaqoaltus intervention has raised this to the level of a chimpanzee or so. They are naturally social creatures, and communicate both with a variety of barks, chirps, and snarls; and through the release of pheromones - which usually have a sharp, metallic smell that Stowaways call "brimstone." Tocatli have extremely potent senses, particularly hearing and smell, which is as acute as the nose of a bloodhound. Tocatli have a kind of horny exoskeleton that can absorb even low-caliber gunfire, and their four forelimbs end in two-foot, razor-sharp, scythe-like blades evolved to penetrate the much stronger exo-skeletons of prey animals on Ixictl. Their jaws evolved for the same purpose: they are extremely powerful, but are equipped with only four very sturdy fangs, used for crunching and cracking; these fangs have been known to puncture sheet metal. Because they cannot really chew, tocatli use extremely powerful stomach acid to digest their prey; they can also spit this acid as a last-ditch defense. They reproduce oviparously, like reptiles, but their eggs are soft-shelled and require warmth; tocatli originally laid them in hydrothermal vents.
Culture and History: The Cipaqoaltus Federation first encountered the tocatli about four centuries ago, and immediately recognized their potential as shock troops. Gene therapy, selective breeding, and epigenetic stimulus were brought to bear to increase the tocatli's intelligence, sociability, and warlikeness. While they are still far from the intelligence of a human, modern tocatli can reasonably be called sentient. Their culture, such that it is, has been warped by this rapid uplift: tocatli seem to see themselves essentially as predators in the service of a higher power, not as soldiers. They kill and eat not only because it is their nature, but because the Cipaqoaltus - whom they love with religious passion - bid them do so. Their packs are led by the greatest warriors; the capacity to plan and eliminate rivals is crucial to a warrior's rise. Most tocatli die in battle, and they do not care for or bury disabled or elderly species members who die of disease. Because of the species' limited intellect, the Federation uses tocatli mostly as assault troops, sent to lead a suicidal charge into enemy territory - or as agents of terror deployed to keep mammalian populations cowed. In this latter capacity, tocatli have been central to most conflicts between the Federation and the Stowaways of the Great Void and the border territories of the Galactic Bar. The Stowaways have dubbed the tocatli "hellhounds," and are generally acknowledged as the galaxy's foremost experts on fighting them.
CONSIDERED A DELICACY (DO NOT REMOVE)
by Cylarn » Fri Jul 07, 2017 9:38 pm
by Reverend Norv » Fri Jul 07, 2017 9:50 pm
Cylarn wrote:I like Shields and I like his background, so I will add Greenleaf to the list of "Acadian" planets that is currently embroiled in conflict. That being said, I would imagine that rather than immediately imposing the king/duke's will upon the Stowaways, the Legion would attempt to form them into an irregular military force to fight the Federation. Either the two factions would split due to operational disagreements, or they would remain on Greenleaf after promising to leave.
In terms of Cyanian-Acadian relations pertaining to the Federation, the Cyanians have merely condemned the Federation and dispatched advisers to assist in a non-combatant capacity. They do not want to risk another all-out war with the Federation, leading the Cyanian-Acadian relationship to become somewhat tarnished by feelings of abandonment.
That's just my two cents.
by Cylarn » Fri Jul 07, 2017 10:31 pm
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