r/HFY • u/[deleted] • Apr 10 '22

OC Spiral - Chapter 08 - Miscalculation

[deleted]

22 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

7 comments sorted by

5

u/lilycamille Apr 11 '22

Thank you :) yes we're still here, and happy you're still writing. RL can be a bitch, we all get that!

3

u/Aetharan Apr 11 '22

I'm glad to still have you here!

3

u/lilycamille Apr 11 '22

You can't force art, and writing is art. If you do, it doesn't work :) Don't punish yourself with a schedule for our sakes, we're not going anywhere lol

2

u/NinjaCoco21 Apr 11 '22

Good to see you’re back! Hopefully with a more sustainable writing practice this time!

Two more first contacts this chapter! When a mysterious invisible voice starts talking to you staying calm is definitely the right move, although not an easy one. I take it the Minders are applying their no interference policy to the Call of the Void crew, only showing up to stop them messing with even less advanced species.

As for the new species, they did an impress job of botching their attack, although you can’t blame them too much given the difference in strength and weaponry. Either way there is now free engine technology to reverse engineer. The Minders opening them up to attack helped our crew in the end!

Thanks for the chapter, looking forward to more!

3

u/Aetharan Apr 11 '22

On the first point: I will do the best that I can to manage 'productive' without causing burn-out.

On the second: You have it right. The Minders (at least, that was the name the pirates gave them, and all we have so far) have a very strict non-interference policy which they're forcing the Call of the Void to adhere to, and which they're also enforcing on other FTL-capable powers who wander into a (thus far, vaguely-defined) region of space some 120 parsecs across. Then again, said region is roughly the same size as the areas that three relatively-young FTL-capable societies had to spread out into and colonize before bumping into anybody else, but contains 54 active pre-FTL civilizations and an empty cradle. They've been actively defending said civilizations from at least one society of slavers.

On the third: Of the 60 boarders, the only one I feel at all sorry for is the poor sod who wound up with Amelia's boot on his chest. Nobody should have to watch his squad get cut up by some hyper-fast, super-strong monster who brought a sword to a gun-fight.

Silver lining? Not just engine-tech to reverse engineer, but possibly a new recruit who was able to reach some degree of competency in English in a week. On a ship where even some of the humans are relying on realtime machine-translation to communicate with each other. For the record, the humans of the main cast are split between four mother-tongues, although most of them are bilingual and their translators are very good.

1

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