Writing Prompts

[novius]

Good start. I already have a rather solid idea where to go from there....

[novius]

New part is up. Turned out to be much longer than anticipated, but I hope it turned out alright.

As for Beryl? Curiosity killed the cat....

[dragoongfa]

Not touching the next part, too much adolescent fantasy for me to get Alex out of it...

[novius]

Nah.... I think I wouldn't dwell overly much on that, too, perhaps going with a time skip to the point when they leave the tea house again, and only hinting at Spiral's state of mind - enough to answer if they did or did not, but not elaborating on it.

Or perhaps, Brightshield had enough time to 'get it out of her system' that she feels ready to turn to more serious topics, without the underlying tension.

[Werra]

"Nights Of Desire"? "Endless Pleasure"? "Feel Me"? "Fifty Shades Of Grey"?, Beryl blinked, confused by the titles. Even more confusing, the little pictures next to the names had quite a common motif - one with a rather curvy human female in quite revealing or see-through garb, together with a solidly built human male, more often than not quite tightly embracing each other.

...Why does Alex have a bunch of erotica for women on his drive? You should watch South Park Season 4, Episode 6.

[dragoongfa]

"Nights Of Desire"? "Endless Pleasure"? "Feel Me"? "Fifty Shades Of Grey"?, Beryl blinked, confused by the titles. Even more confusing, the little pictures next to the names had quite a common motif - one with a rather curvy human female in quite revealing or see-through garb, together with a solidly built human male, more often than not quite tightly embracing each other.

...Why does Alex have a bunch of erotica for women on his drive? You should watch South Park Season 4, Episode 6.

That isn't Alex's data pad, that's Ellen's.

[Werra]

Oh, nevermind then. Now I remember what happened.

[novius]

Any takers for the next part? If not, I'll write up to the part where they exit the tea house, and maybe a little further than that. And no worries - despite where the last part left off, things would stay relatively calm.

SpoilerShow

Intellectually, Alex may realize that human moral values apply to Loroi only to an extent - but still, emotionally, this might be much harder on him. So there's a good reason that Alex would say 'sensory overload', and gently put off Spiral for another time...

[Werra]

Well, I might have a few ideas.

[novius]

Then, by all means...

On an unrelated note, I have an idea how Pure Sand (surprisingly) may offer a contribution to the war effort, in conjunction with Alex, beyond her 'just' being the Farseer and sort of sidelined when the battle is underway. And no, that does not mean that she has to hook up with Alex, despite what she might secretly want.

[Werra]

Things cooled down a bit. So I used the opportunity to set up the larger scene for the next chapters and lay some groundwork on the situation.

I'm not sure where to take Beryls experiments. It's good that Kirkland only read mainstream classics of our century and not for example..

[dragoongfa]

In regards to the entertainment being of this century and not contemporary, I am going to go with the rule I had planned to use with one of my fan fics: For intelligence reasons all of the entertainment on the ship should be heavily outdated in case a hostile nation secures them. Makes sense in the worse case scenario that a scout ship was captured, the less contemporary information a hostile nation has the better.

[dragoongfa]

And... Teenage fantasy Alex must be tired

Oh well, I wanted to give you guys a shot on this so I can't complain. Will get to work on the next part tomorrow.

@ Werra

SpoilerShow

What I had in mind in regards to the in system defenses of Nezel where this:

Two identical custom Citadels dubbed the 'Twins': Roughly twice the firepower of a BS-5 station like the Tizaba citadel of Leido, including a RXS waveloom (The upgraded version that Tempest has). These are closely covered by 4 BS-3 stations, two each. The jump relays are small LS-2 stations.

If you don't mind can you make an edit?

[Werra]

I could have written things in the bath differently, but why would I? Alex was already set on that path. Go big or go home, to paraphrase Moist van Lipwig. In any case, a Loroi beating Alex at something felt fresh.

Personally I'm more happy with some flirting but nothing more in the whole story. But too late..so just roll with it.

@Edit
Sure, what do you want? Three instead of two wavelooms?

[novius]

Why do I get the feeling that Moonglow had a much better grasp of spoken words than she originally claimed? Alex walked right into that one again....

And, the Tenoin and Brightshield just had to get it out of their systems, and they did - I presume that the brass may show more restraint and thus things might calm down on that front, though yes, Moonglow has a special brand of humor and may enjoy needling Alex a bit...

@dragoongfa
Makes sense about information and entertainment media available to the public would be sort of outdated, but perhaps in order to have something to trade with, up-to-date information about the state of humanity's colonies and industrial power - those things the Loroi requested from him as per their "alliance charter" - may reside in heavily encrypted, selfdestruct-on-tamper databases. Something Alex might come back to when he remembers to fulfil his obligations to Duskcrown.

[dragoongfa]

Yeah, three Wavelooms. The rest I can handle when the time comes.

@Novius

If encrypted and highly compartmentalized then an Ensign second class (the lost possible cadre of a commissioned officer) wouldn't be cleared for it. Maybe Captain Hamilton's footlocker holds a PDA with some important stuff but I doubt it.

What he can offer is general all round information, like location of worlds, population sizes, general fleet size, general industrial capacity and all that. The Loroi would not expect a mid rank Soroin to know anything more critical and they should be content with the basic stuff until they manage to send an expedition to the Prahbu.

[Werra]

Edit done.

And don't worry guys. Moon and Ash are in no position to molest Alex, nor have they the desire for that. They're quite literally having a beer before they'll spent the next year on separate ships again.

@Alex and Duskcrown

SpoilerShow

Since at least one Farseer can now sense him, the urgency is completely gone. There is no longer a necessity for the Loroi to get from Alex whatever they can learn about his Lotai ASAP with Khalkha divisions bearing down on them. That means he's pretty safe from probing now. It also reduced his potential value by a lot. A tradeoff.
I don't think Duskcrown especially cares about some backwater that's easily dealt with after the Shells are gone. He's now either completely irrelevant to her or something of value by his actual abilities/an interesting alien. But that's just how I would play it.

[dragoongfa]

Regarding the Farseer:

SpoilerShow

Being able to 'sense' Alex by detecting the minor displacement of nearby life signs is one thing, being able to detect something in the interstellar ranges is an other, there are plenty of Loroi around Alex but there are scant few life signs around the Umiak fleets nor there is a wall of life behind them, maybe if the Umiak were in a heavily populated star system.

The way I planned for Alex helping with the detection was him being like a 'filter' of sorts at first. By covering the Farseer in his Lotai he shows her a very 'low frequency' telepathic 'noise' that the Umiak Lotai lets out. Something like picking the noise of active jamming beyond the jamming range. After some time with Alex the Farseer will be able to consciously detect this noise and will even be able to instruct other Farseers on how to focus to do the same. Still won't be able to detect the fleets beneath the Lotai.

[Werra]

@dragoongfa

Tempo shared [how to detect Enzin] with Pure Sand, who devoured it all eagerly.

"I see." was the undertone ladden answer Pure Sand sent back.

"What about the Shells?" asked Tempo.

"I see!" the Farseer roared in triumph a moment later.

She already farsensed the Shells.

detecting the minor displacement of nearby life signs

The disturbance is in whatever magic space medium the minds are in. Usually those disturbances are covered by the mind causing them, but perfect Lotai means these traces are now visible. The Loroi just need to train their mind to perceive them when faced with Lotai and it needed a hyper sensitive farseer and an amplified specialist to discover that from the example of an individual with perfect Lotai. It's now possible to sense Alex location. I haven't written anything that makes it possible to attack or read him with telepathy at all.
Really, Alex being senseable in some form was coming the moment he managed to make telepathic contact with a Loroi. The quicker we get over the how and why space magic works, the better.

[dragoongfa]

I took that as Pure Sand getting an idea she wanted to try not as a definite proof of detection, I still expected her to need a few more sessions to fully acclimate her perception but if that's the way the issue is resolved so be it.