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Post by dazura on Jul 3, 2004 1:41:51 GMT -5
Asai crawled out of the brambles. He thought he had seen something resembling civilization here, and so there was, so long as a simple agrarian village counted as "civilization". It'd have to do; it looked like it was surrounded by the same swampy brambles he had just extricated himself from, and there was no way he would want to go back into them anytime soon. There was an, um, something there, and it sounded a bit too hungry for Asai's comfort.
As he was circling the planet in his escape pod, and once he determined that he would end up landing near here, he tried to get some sort of idea of what the place was. It was a clearing a couple miles across, and, as far as he could tell, a perfect circle. It looked like it was probably inhabited, with what looked like a building in the middle. It'd have to do; he'd used up the last of his thrusters getting the escape pod to this planet in the first place; at least he wasn't crashing into an ocean.
On the ground, it certainly looked like some of the plants were cultivated. Food, probably, though he couldn't tell what sort. Growing everywhere like weeds were some bent-over plants with fist-sized spiny fruit, most of it still green, but with a few yellow or orange ones scattered about. Looking farther into the clearing, it looked like there were about 12 huts scattered about.
Asai checked his gear and weapons, making sure it was all there, including the emergency rations in his backpack, and started off walking towards the center. He saw someone working in one of the fields; she looked like she was probably human, and if so, about 17 years old. Humans are common enough in this part of the galaxy, but most of them aren't spacefaring anymore, and some of their worlds are downright primitive. Judging by what I was seeing here, these humans fell into the 'primitive' category. Not a good sign.
He decided to keep an eye on her, but not to try to contact her just yet. No sense in needlessly scaring the natives of the planet you're marooned on. As he was making his way through the rows of what he could best describe as a grain plant, he managed to catch a clear glimpse of the human. Fortunately, she didn't see him, being too busy picking a green spiny fruit. In her wake, she left growing some yellow and orange and red fruits.
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Post by NaughtyOtsel on Jul 3, 2004 19:37:21 GMT -5
((sounds like a good start to me; gotta love the primitive folk....))
Not everything in this town was as primitive as it seemed at first. Many of the parts of buildings (Door handles, window frames, the occasional flower planter), appeared to be made of scavenged spaceship parts. The pod out in the swamplands would probably soon join the rest of the various metal objects...perhaps it would make grood scrap for farming implements?
Most of the folk here were tanned from working hard in the sun, wearing what seemed to be homemade clothes, but here and there, one might see a patch for an engineer, or a necklace made out of titanium bolts from a ship. One little girl ran past, her hair held back with rainbow wrapped copper wire, obviously from some sort of electronic device that no longer worked. The people didn't seem to notice the newcomer just yet...all except, for one.
It was a peircing eyed old woman wearing what looked like a Sari type garment. Her hair, though she was old, looked as if it had been spun from liquid crystal, and her eyes and a strange almost inhumanly bright look to them. Unlike the rest of the group, she had been watching him for quite some time now, standing infront of a hut toward the border of the village. The old woman's features were taught and proud, leathered from the sun, and she appeared to have all her teeth as she bent over to talk to someone. What was odd about her was her fingernails, which looked almost like claws carved from quartz crystal. Around her birdlike neck was a silvery ribbon with a quartz hanging from it. From the look of it, she seemed to be the town healer...she was boiling some foul smelling herbal brew and would stop her vigil occasionally to talk to people who would stop by.
A little girl, no more than about five, ran up to the old woman and tugged at the side of her robe.
"Obaba! Obaba! What are you looking at?"
There was a slight pause as Obaba looked down into her pot, tossing in a live lizard. "Nothing Pinki. Just daydreaming that's all...I'm old, I tend to drift off into my own little world sometimes." She said, stirring the pot once. "Now run along and play, Obaba has work to do."
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Post by dazura on Jul 4, 2004 0:57:22 GMT -5
These didn't look like spacers. Though Asai could see that there were some spaceship parts built into the huts, the people, their skin, their clothes, nothing about them said "spacer".
He paused for a moment.
He tried to talk into the mind of the little girl he saw, the one who called the old woman "Obaba" and who, in turn, was called "Pinki". <Hey, what was Obaba looking at there?>, he asked.
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Post by NaughtyOtsel on Jul 4, 2004 23:08:49 GMT -5
The little girl stared, and stared....and then ran like hell for one of the huts. Obaba motioned for him to come over to her hut, stirring rod in one hand.
"Don't just stand there and gawk like a newborn yackcow! Come here..." The weird thing was that while she said it, a good 100 yards away, he could hear her just as well as if she was standing right next to him.
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Post by dazura on Jul 5, 2004 1:39:06 GMT -5
"Hell, is she a telepath too?" Asai thought to himself about Obaba. "She didn't sound right; she sounded more like her voice was in me than in her. I hope she didn't figure out that I'm telepathic. I shouldn't trust her, but it looks like the only way out here, since she's, well, the village crone."
Having thought about it, Asai began cautiously drawing closer to Obaba, trying to be ready for anything.
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Post by NaughtyOtsel on Jul 5, 2004 13:15:12 GMT -5
The local folk didn't seem to notice him; they were too busy with their own gathering, and talking to eachother. A few glanced his way with a confused look...they'd never seen anybody like that, that they could remember anyway. Two children ran by chasing a fluffy round ball which chittered alarmingly; must be the local wildlife.
Obaba had decided her brew was finished cooking and lifted the kettle by the handle as if it weighed nothing. The flames were still burning brightly under it until she passed one old hand over them and it hushed out instantly; the logs coated with a thin layer of crystaline ice. The old woman then toddled into the hut, slowly as if her joints hurt her.
"Come on then lad...." She said "Come and have some tea..."
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Post by dazura on Jul 5, 2004 15:01:31 GMT -5
Asai kept walking. "Might as well be polite. I don't see much of a reason why she'd poison me, since it doesn't look like anyone else here's been poisoned. Besides, this is a chance to try a new tea," he thought as he drew closer.
When he got to the door of Obaba's hut, he paused for a moment, trying to get a bearing on what he was going into. He soon started to step into the hut.
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Post by NaughtyOtsel on Jul 5, 2004 23:11:56 GMT -5
Obaba's hut was completely different than anyone would expect. Many herbs and flours and the like hung from the ceiling, that was to be expected, but the walls were covered with glittering shards of glass, shiny insides of shells, crystals, pearls, and the bleached white bones of animals like a silver, pearl and white mosaic. The hut was cool inside, as if airconditioned...but that couldn't happen right? She had hand woven curtains that were silvery like her clothing, perhaps from crash parascutes for space ships. The oddest thing was the windows; each one had a pane in it made out of a single rounded crystaline object, however this didn't look like glass...it looked like some sort of very very thin cut stone...and was that growth lines on it?! It almost looked like a giant snake scale. But what snake grew to be that big?
The old woman sat down on her bed which was made up of various grey blankets and two or three large animal pelts...cold weather animals by the look of them. She had taken out a tea set, obviously homemade from the local clay, and set it on a table made out of a large flat rock.
"Welcome to Yusuko, third planet in the Pei system. It's been a long time since we've had visitors...come have a seat. I'll make tea...." She stood slowly and hobbled over to a shelf on the wall where there were many little bags of herbs. A dash from one, a handful from another...all went into a teakettle in one gnarled hand. "You're certainly and interesting looking fellow, never have I seen one of your kind before. What brings you here?"
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Post by dazura on Jul 6, 2004 1:21:47 GMT -5
All the crystal and shiny stuff seems weird, but I suppose she's not too bad. She even talks about this place like she might actually have been a spacer once. I'll talk, Asai thought.
"Well, my ship got hit, and my escape pod came down in the swamp," the Diran explained. "Something out there at the edge of the system; I certainly never saw it. Cloaked ship, maybe; I was cloaked myself and they were probably just as surprised as I was, if they managed to survive the crash." He paused, trying to think up what to say next. "So what is this village? It looks sorta like you people used to be spacers too. What happened?"
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Post by NaughtyOtsel on Jul 6, 2004 12:59:13 GMT -5
Obaba didn't answer at first and simply poured hot water into the teapot.
"The people in this village, and four or five others, were all space fairing folk once." The old woman said. "Sugar? Yak milk?" She brought two small cups and the pot over and set them on her rock table before sinking down to sit on her bed/couch again. The tea smelled faintly like flowers....
"This town was founded on a space pirate ship which crashed here about fifty years ago. Yusuko is my home world so I decided to take care of them and make sure they didn't die out here. This planet isn't the most...hospitable to high techers who don't know how to farm or make things from scratch." She poured the tea, her hand shaking a little. "So I took them under my wing and showed them how to live around here."
There was a knock on the crystaline door of the hut.
"Come in" A tall woman peeked in, judging by her clothing and hairstyle, she was probably a recent spacer. When she saw Asai she gasped and ran back out muttering something about "Wind Spirits"
Obaba took a sip of her tea. "Sadly, most of the settlers have forgotten where they came from...must be the stress of living here. At least they don't try to leave and stay depressing knowing they're stuck here. The only way off this world is by Planeshift. More tea?"
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Post by dazura on Jul 6, 2004 21:37:49 GMT -5
"Please," he said, looking back at his now-empty cup. "It's some of the best tea I've had in a long time.
"It's rather a shame that they've given up on going back to space, especially if it was the life that they'd chosen for themselves. It's not something I'd imagine you'd forget easily. I knew someone once who decided to try to retire to a farming colony, one with just a little pad only big enough for a runabout to connect it up to space, and just three years later he was back captaining a freighter. And we've always looked out for each other, even the pirates, since a good deed can always be repaid. I wonder why nobody's come to look for them.
"But these other villages, are we in contact with them here? And what is planeshift, anyway?"
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Post by NaughtyOtsel on Jul 14, 2004 14:54:11 GMT -5
The old woman smiled and refilled his cup.
"Well....no ships seem to want to stop by here. Our gravity well is quite intense...it's impossible to take a ship off from here. " She got up to get some cookies. "There's something about the rings around this world that jam signals and all that....for some reason nobody really wants to go back into space. I can't really blame them."
Obaba took a drink, one might have noticed that she was looking to the left for the whole conversation.
"As for planeshifting, many magical creatures can do it naturally, theres spells...and a few alien space drives. The Shikkari, you may have heard of those planet destroying alien bastards...., they can planeshift automattically."
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Post by NaughtyOtsel on Jul 14, 2004 15:05:11 GMT -5
The old woman smiled and refilled his cup.
"Well....no ships seem to want to stop by here. Our gravity well is quite intense...it's impossible to take a ship off from here. " She got up to get some cookies. "There's something about the rings around this world that jam signals and all that....for some reason nobody really wants to go back into space. I can't really blame them."
Obaba took a drink, one might have noticed that she was looking to the left for the whole conversation.
"As for planeshifting, many magical creatures can do it naturally, theres spells...and a few alien space drives. The Shikkari, you may have heard of those planet destroying alien bastards...., they can planeshift aut
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Post by dazura on Jul 14, 2004 21:35:26 GMT -5
"Thank you." As he took a sip of his newly-refilled tea, he looked over to see what it was Obaba was looking at.
"So has anybody here tried flying back into space? I mean, I can see not minding staying here if I were stuck; it seems a nice enough place, but you can always make more powerful drives that can escape a gravity well, so long as you're not trying to fly out of a black hole.
"But magic? The only magic I've ever seen involves pulling rabbits out of hats, and scarves out of sleeves, and that kind of thing. Fun for the little ones who can't see through the tricks, but I can't imagine what it would take to actually pull a ship out of a gravity well. That's no trick.
"Never heard of them, but they sound nasty, if they destroy planets. Only planet I've heard of that's been destroyed, it took the entire Terran navy to do it, and it wasn't so much destroyed as had its surface turned into a thick coat of radioactive glass. What're they like? Not anywhere near here, I hope."
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Post by NaughtyOtsel on Jul 14, 2004 22:59:33 GMT -5
Obaba swished her tea around in the cup for a moment.
"The Shikkari rebelled against their masters and split up...going their sepparet ways about 200 years ago. The last one I saw was working a route as a space pirate. Her ship didn't have weapons systems...." She took a long sip from the tea. "She was one. The Shikkari ships look weak, but when boarded...nobody gets off alive. When you came here, did you notice the big asteroid belt orbitting our sun? That used to be two planets; they wouldn't surrender their natural resources to the Mengala Corp so the Shikkari blasted them. Took three of those monsters I do believe." she put her cup down and rested her gnarled hands on her knees. "Three to destroy two planets."
"As for magics...what do you think keeps my hut so cool?" Obaba smirked slightly, her odd crystal blue eyes sparkling. "There's more to this world than meets the eye. "
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