What Miliam wanted to do right now was sleep. She had stayed up all night in order to offset her sleep schedule from the others’. Since the bridge crew (and Tessa) were rotating their watches, she would be sleeping during the first two, awake for the next two, and on watch for the last. That actually came out to a twenty-hour watch rotation that was going to be a pain to adjust to for Miliam, but was standard in the GC.
Though, there was really no good way of determining the schedule, since everyone came from worlds with vastly different definitions of a day, or even an hour. Miliam was, naturally for her, measuring things by Earth hours, but the dokkaebi twins were used to twenty hour days by that standard and Aoibhe had grown up with an even shorter sixteen hour day. On-worlders often went by the local standard, but ships and stations utilized the GC standard as the best compromise- assuming the captain didn’t just implement their own home world’s schedule.
In the end, what it all boiled down to was that time is relative and it was impossible to synchronize all clocks galaxy wide, so someone would always be miserable, and it just so happened that right now that person was Miliam. She would adjust in time, and the first step in that processes was sleeping for the next eight hours. But first Miliam needed to discuss Captain Ardyanto’s warning with Abigail and Tessa.
The missile bay was mere steps from the bridge, so while Aoibhe wandered off to do Aoibhe things, Miliam popped into that room before Tessa could wander off. Fortunately she discovered Abigail to be present as well, having apparently decided to spend the jump keeping Tessa company. That was, strictly speaking, against regulations since Abigail wasn’t part of the crew, but the ship had so few public areas that Miliam wasn’t going to quibble about it.
Because it wasn’t a big deal. Definitely not because she was conflict averse.
“Glad I caught you both before you left,” Miliam told them as she walked in. “I spoke to a local captain and he mentioned something we should probably talk about.”
“Why would I leave? I thought I was supposed to stay here until you dismissed me. Should I just go if there’s nothing happening? I guess it’s not a big ship so it wouldn’t take me very long to get back if there’s an attack or something anyway and I can probably run up here from the lounge in under a minute so that would be pretty great and-” Tessa’s run on sentence cut off abruptly as she literally ran out of breath in the middle of it. Abigail, sensing a chance, slapped a hand over the elf’s mouth before she could continue where she left off.
“Apologies if this advice is unwanted, but you really must learn to provide this one with explicit instructions.”
“Oh, no, you’re right. I should have dismissed everyone from their stations over the comms, not just the bridge crew. What was I talking about?” Miliam stopped for a second, thrown off track by Tessa’s rambling. “Oh, right. I spoke to a Captain Ardyanto and he mentioned something about the mirazar going after a colony called Jethroe’s Landing. Aoibhe said it’s far enough out of our way that it shouldn’t be a problem, but I thought I should see what everyone thinks about it.”
“Mirazar? Worrying, but it merely reinforces my determination. Best we investigate my lead before they get wind of it, particularly if they are currently operating in unclaimed space,” Abigail replied with furrowed brows. “I must agree with Aoibhe’s assessment, however. I know of the colony in question due to a recent discovery made there. I am concerned about the potential destruction of valuable relic, but my understanding is that it was a relatively minor find which has already been thoroughly documented, so little stands to be lost.”
“If Abby’s not concerned, I’m not either,” Tessa began, but this time Miliam was quick to cut in before she really got going.
“Alright, thanks, I’m going to bed, dismissed!” Miliam rattled off before turning and fleeing the scene.
A few hours later Miliam descended from her quarters, bleary eyed but mostly awake. She stopped by the galley on her way to the lounge to grab something to eat. The rather large pantry had a wide selection of options courtesy of Aoibhe, some requiring preparation and some not. Not wanting to spend time on cooking, Miliam grabbed a fay breakfast pocket, a strange preserved food that consisted of dried fruit and meat wrapped in treated animal skin that was leathery to the touch, yet soft enough to bite through and not overly chewy.
Like the last fay cuisine she’d tried, Miliam found that the fruit was savory, but this time the meat was sweet, a strange juxtaposition that she found worked better than it should have. More importantly, she could eat it with one hand, so she took it down to the lounge to snack on while studying on her grimoire.
A short while passed as she polished off the…actually, now that she thought about it, Miliam didn’t know what word to use for it. It was sort of pastry like, but wrapped in skin, not bread, so what did that make it, exactly? She’d have to ask Aoibhe later. At any rate, she spent that time on studying, which took up most of her free time lately. She was making rapid progress on her self-taught remedial magic course. Each basic spell she learned made learning the next one in line faster.
It was all a matter of vocabulary, for the most part, so knowing more ideograms reduced the number that were new in each successive spell. Physics and chemistry hadn’t changed much in hundreds of years, so her high school and college courses, basic as they were, still applied here. Eventually she would need to learn more advanced concepts and delve into the physics of mana itself, but at that point it was debatable if she’d need to if her goal was simply functioning in modern society.
The door to the lounge slid open to admit Eun-ji and Min-ji. Miliam gave them a small wave, but rather than a giving simple greeting, they threw a salute and jumped to attention.
““Captain!”” they shouted in unison. Miliam startled at the suddenness and realized she’d never really discussed decorum with them- or spoken with them alone, now that she thought about it.
“A-at ease,” Miliam stuttered. “You don’t have to worry about that sort of thing when we’re off duty.”
“Oh…sorry, captain,” Eun-ji answered for them both as they dropped their saluting hands.
“Miliam is fine. This is a small ship and we’re going to get to know each other plenty well, so we may as well keep things casual.” She smiled at the dokkaebi twins and waved at the nearby couch, silently telling them to relax and take a seat. Min-ji grabbed a box off of the entertainment center first, then they both plopped down on the couch to start going through it.
The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.
“What’s in there?” Miliam asked curiously. Eun-ji looked up, but her sister was too busy scrutinizing the contents of the box.
“Games,” she said, waving a square, crystalline chip with a metal rim. It was about the size of a Gameboy Color cartridge, so it was actually pretty large, although it was maybe half as thin. Miliam could see text on one side, but it was too far away to read.
“Wow. Those are a lot bigger than I would’ve expected after all this time,” Miliam remarked. Eun-ji gave her a confused look.
“All this time?”
“Oh, I guess I never told you. I’ll tell you later…I want to get Engineer and Tessa together for that conversation. How much does that store, anyway?”
“Uh…” Eun-ji scrutinized the chip, which must have had the information on it somewhere. “5.6 petabytes.”
Miliam was momentarily struck speechless at the ridiculousness of that number. She’d once had an 8 terabyte hard drive, and that was for all of her data, not a singular game. How much storage were the computers these days capable of? Exabytes? Zettabytes?
“What in the world is on that thing that could require so much space? An entire generation’s worth of games?” she asked incredulously.
“Um…well, a game,” Eun-ji replied, not sure how to answer. “I never really thought about it much.”
“Eun-ji, look! We can play Dyson’s Legacy!” Min-ji announced in excitement, shaking her sister’s arm to get her attention.
“Oh, I heard that’s a good one! Let’s go with that.” While Min-ji slotted the game in to one of the consoles on the entertainment center, Eun-ji grabbed the controllers. They were wireless, unsurprisingly, but what did surprise Miliam was that they seemed to be partially moldable, responding readily to Eun-ji’s manipulation and changing their shapes to fit her hands.
A large screen came to life with vivid imagery- it seemed to somehow be projecting a three-dimensional image without the use of glasses or goggles, and in spite of being no thicker than a flat screen from Miliam’s age. She watched as the twins started a new game, fascinated by the advancements in graphics.
“What kind of start do you want to do?” Min-ji asked.
“You know the answer to that.”
““Explorer!”” they said in unison. The screen split top and bottom to accommodate them playing at the same time, each half at least a meter tall and twice that in width. Miliam decided to take a break to watch them play for a bit.
“Eun-ji, you died again…?” Disappointment was evident in Min-ji’s voice as she side eyed her flustered sister some time later.
“I’ve almost got the controls down!” the other twin protested while Min-ji mopped up the remaining enemies and moved to revive her sister.
“You said that last time…”
Miliam tried not to laugh at their dynamic. She was starting to get a sense of who was who, at least when they were playing games. The two seemed equally quick on their bridge stations, but Eun-ji was noticeably worse than Min-ji at video games. She wondered if that dynamic would extend to the game table or if it would be reversed with physical games.
““Hey, watch out!”” they warned each other in unison. Miliam broke out in silent giggles as they tried to simultaneously push each other out of the way of a grenade, succeeding only in getting them both blown up. Funny as it was to see, she thought it was cute how their first instinct was to save each other even in a game.
“Why didn’t you dodge!?”
“I was trying to save you!”
The two descended into bickering, having completely forgotten Miliam was in the room, a fact of which she was in no hurry to remind them. Their earlier nervousness in her presence was forgotten, which she hoped wasn’t only because they were too busy arguing to pay her any mind.
It was going to be a long way to Delta Boötis. Maybe, Miliam thought, she could organize a game night for the crew before they left Gaian Collective space to help break the ice. It was probably something she should have thought of before leaving West Gate Station, but Abigail’s job had been on her mind at the time, and she still wasn’t used to being anyone’s boss.
Tessa was either going to be amazing or terrible at poker, and Miliam was going to find out even if it meant teaching everyone the rules herself. They needed to pass through the system Northeast Gate Station occupied on the way out, anyway, so maybe she’d go as far as to pick up a deck of cards if they were lacking one.
She’d have to ask Aoibhe where that sort of stuff was, Miliam decided as plans formed in her mind.
----------------------------------------
Codex Entry: Fay
Once a subject of fantasy, fay are actually close cousins to humans, having only diverged when a significant number of homo sapiens were abducted from Earth around 50,000 BC. Fay descend from a portion of these abductees that were left on a world- dubbed Tir Tairngire- with about half the gravity of Earth, with an atmosphere artificially maintained by Observer technology. Although they are referred to as fay by most humans, fay do have their own names for their people in the various fay languages. However, it is also true that the words 'elf' and 'fay' descend from fay words in long-dead dialects, believed to have been learned and warped over time by fellow abductees on Observer science ships.
Fay are similar to humans in appearance, but taller and thinner. The low gravity of Tir Tairngire has caused fay to be taller than humans, with lower muscle and bone density. An average elf is seven to eight feet in height, but with a weight akin to a five foot tall human. Fay have facial features just short of gaunt by human standards, as well as characteristic long ears. Unlike in fiction, fay do not live significantly longer than humans.
Their long years of adaptation to low gravity environments made adapting to interstellar society difficult for the fay, as most races developed on planets within ten percent above or below Earth's gravity, meaning that most ships, planets, and space stations utilize this range as the standard. When living in mixed-crew settings or on heavier worlds, fay must undergo regimens to increase bone density as well as intensive training to increase muscle mass, although the latter can be substituted for mechanized support braces. Fay living in higher gravity also have a higher risk for cardiopulmonary conditions if they do not regularly take medication to counteract gravity's effects on their cardiovascular and pulmonary systems.
Unlike most races, the fay were quick to both discover and embrace magic. What humans accomplished with technology prior to the industrial revolution, fay accomplished entirely through magic. Fay carved homes into trees, crafted weapons, sowed fields, and grew ships through magical technology alone, only delving into scientific pursuits when they reached their equivalent to the industrial revolution, at which point they began to see the need for automated technologies that did not require an fay operator to function, as well as electrical power generation that could be converted to mana or used to power machinery.
Fay were the first among all human subspecies to reach space as a result of their early forays into magic, and by the time they left the atmosphere of their world, they already possessed all the tools necessary to surpass the speed of light. A small minority of fay believe this makes them superior to their cousins, but the evidence of their manipulation by the Observers in their early years has forced most fay to take a more humble attitude.
Despite the amount of time they have spent exploring space, however, fay have colonized relatively few worlds. Since Tir Tairngire only supports life thanks to outside intervention, it is impossible to find a naturally occurring world with the same conditions. What worlds the fay have colonized are dotted with artificial habitats that maintain a livable environment. A mere handful of their colonies are livable, with the inhabitants having largely readapted for high gravity, coming to be known as ‘elves’.
As a result of these complications, however, fay have become exceptional at building space stations. Fay space stations are like tiny worlds unto themselves, centered around enormous domes containing vast forests that serve as oxygen converters, homes, and food production all at once. From the center of these cities, one could easily be led to believe they are standing on an actual planet. This is not, of course, the extent of the stations - additional modules branch out around or below the domes in which other, more utilitarian facilities exist such as reactors, factories, and offices.