Derin Edala

015: FRIEND

Picking someone to revive shouldn’t be too difficult a task, really. There are three main requirements – they need a decent chance of surviving revival with little help (because I’m no doctor), they need to be better than me at doing this (not hard), and they need to be someone I won’t hate enough to want to murder within a week (and vice versa). I’d been woken by the computer because I was a decent all-rounder who was likely to survive and recover revival easily, but we didn’t ne...

Ask Me Anything 1 -- The Spellthing

Do you have a name?

Do I have a name? In my experience, my deer, names are most often held by humans, who breed and cultivate them and then tag them onto everything they see until the skies and the seas and the mountains are positively drowning in mundane labels. I’ve never been one to wield them myself. Some spells do – Destiny cannot seem to resist bludgeoning everything it prophesies about into the shape of a name – but the only name I have with any regularity ...

4.38: Like Twilight

I let Kylie and Max deal with explaining our future absence to most people. I’d already talked down one exhaustively proactive legacy mage today and had no desire to repeat the experience with the Americans. And the coven would have to be told about the geas; there was simply no way it wasn’t ever going to come up. I couldn’t deal with Talbot’s righteous indignation or Hua’s calculated fury right then.

But there were, unfortunately, people for whom it was my responsibility, an...

014: COURSE

I can’t get back up to block the pipes until I’m in better physical shape, but I can change all the air filters again so I’m not breathing mould and coolant while I wait to heal. I trudge (as well as one can trudge while favouring a sprained ankle) to Storage Ring 3 to retrieve some new filters.

They’re not there.

Hmm.

The contents of this ship were very well inventoried before launch, and the AI knows exactly where everything was stored. Sure, the crews have used so...

You're the Voice, try and understand it

You’re the Voice, try and understand it

“You don’t have to do this, you know,” Malas said gently. “We can bring in one of the others.”

Alania fidgeted, but she shook her head. “No. It’s my duty. I’m the newest member of the Council, so…” she gave a hollow laugh. “It feels so weird to say that, after I’ve been on this damned Council for so many years. What does that say?”

“That the Voice doesn’t get replaced very often, and one...

4.37: The Path

We went straight to Duniyasar. Max wanted to talk to Fionnrath’s Destiny, and seemed determined not to waste any time. My presence wasn’t strictly required, but after certain events involving certain now-dead prophecy mentors, I was reluctant to leave Kylie channelling magic there. Duniyasar was essentially how I remembered it, although notably cleaner in some areas. It wasn’t hard to see which parts of the building had garnered Max’s academic interest and which hadn’t; you just had...

013: FALL

If I do need to go to the front of the ship, I can’t do it yet. Turning off the gravity while the thermal cycler is running shouldn’t affect anything (all the liquids in there are sealed), but I’d rather not risk it. The AI seems to think that identifying the mould will help with sterilisation procedures anyway, and I’ll need to steriliseall the ventilation shafts in front of the ship as well as back hereor things growing in the shaftswill just recontaminate –

Wait. There’s ...

4.36: Disposeable

Max’s facial journey during Kylie’s explanation was pretty interesting. He almost immediately put on his sociable, unruffled mask, which I’d expected; I’d seen him put that on under stress many times. But I’d never seen his face slowly get redder and redder through an explanation before, until he looked like he’d just run a marathon. By the time Kylie got to the part where I’d threatened to tell everyone about the nature of curses, he’d dropped the composed facade entirely, an...

012: INFESTATION

I stare at the screen for several minutes.

I’m not actually going to do it, of course. I dismiss that possibility immediately. For one thing, the AI made the decision to wake a single person instead of a whole crew, and I trust its assessment of what the ship is currently capable of handling a lot more than I trust my own. Any attempt to get it to explain the decision has so far just resulted in gibberish about statistics, but the fact that I don’t understand the decision is even mo...

4.35: The Device

Fiore watched me, patient, smiling, waiting for an answer. I quickly assessed my options.

One: I could tell him. I could just explain as much of our adventure under the school as the geas would let me, and let him figure out the rest. This was a promising idea; the whole reason I’d picked him as a surveyanto was to have someone else to fight in our corner if we needed it, and boy did we need it now. This was absolutely the time to pull out all stops and make myself look as valuable to...

Patreon bonus -- Aspen's javelin ID card

ID chips were implanted into colonists shortly before stasis for recognition aboard the ship and new colony, but during the training, accommodation and boarding process, it was more convenient to use these paper ID cards.

011: POPULATION

The greenhouse doesn’t take that long to get in order. In a couple of weeks, the ground is prepared, the seeds are planted, the honey is harvested, and there are still no critical ship problems to solve. There’s nothing to do but wait.

I decide to find out a little something about the people I’m working for.

My primary job here, after all, isn’t to survive. My primary job is to get these thousands of colonists safely to our new home, to build our new society. And since I h...

Introducing... character AMAs!

As a new monthly bonus, patrons at the Apprentice level (that's $10 and up) have the option of asking questions of Curse Words and Time to Orbit characters. Each character will answer up to twenty total questions, and if we have too many submissions, I'll do my best to ensure that each person gets the same number of questions answered. Answers will be publically available. Please note that questions will not be answered, or they will be answered very vaguely, if they would otherwise spoil som...

4.34: The Voice

He was about my age, maybe a bit younger. His red hair clashed horribly with his pink robes, and even more horribly with the bright blue stripe of Malas’ healing magic across his neck. It looked like somebody had cut his throat recently.

He looked very small compared to the two guards that flanked him. His eyes were on his tablet, reading. After a minute, he looked up and flashed a series of hand signs to the Grand Master. I don’t know any sign language, so I had no idea what he sai...

010: ALONE

Okay, so in terms of making this place livable for the next half decade, one task takes obvious priority. Captain Kinoshita died alone. Meaning there was no one to dispose of her body. It is, presumably, still in Storage Ring 6.

Technically, I can ignore this. SR6 is right down the back of the ship, in front of Pod Ring 3 and the aft engine, an engine I won’t have any use for for five years. I have access to three other storage rings as well as the ample materials throughout the rest ...

Behind the Keyboard -- Kayden

Welcome to our new Patreon reward series, Behind the Keyboard! From now on, $5 and up patrons will have access to these monthly "director's commentary" releases, talking in detail about the development of specific characters, events or settings in Curse Words and Time to Orbit. We are starting, of course, with Kayden.

In general we'll be releasing these on the 22nd of each month, just for a more even distribution of content, but I'm so jazzed to get started that we're doing the first ep...

4.33: The Council

The room was just large enough to be intimidating without being impractical. The walls were perfectly smooth despite being the natural stone of the cavern, and apart from the door we’d entered through, the only other exits were several doors along the back wall, all guarded. The floor was tiled in an elaborate mosaic of swirling black and white patterns that looked kind of like runes, but not quite. The room was mostly empty, barring a long table almost cutting off the back quarter of the r...

Bonus snippet -- children

Kylie

“What did you do?!”

“Ow! Auntie, I was just reading, I – ”

“Look at him! Look at Nick! He’s broken his arm!”

“I wasn’t even outside!”

“You hurt him with that thing in your face, didn’t you? You spoke this into the world.”

“I didn’t prophesy anything!”

“So you decided not to even warn anyone?”

“First I spoke it into existence, now I didn’t warn anyone? Do you want me to have prophes...

009: ASCEND

The journey down is very, very slow, and gives me plenty of time to get flat and spread my weight out as much as possible. I hit the wall on my hands and feet and immediately spread flat; it buckles dangerously under my weight, but doesn’t collapse. I lay still and breathe for a minute.

To my immediate right is the former floor, a vertical plastic surface painted with faded flowers. Some distance away to my left is a vertical surface littered with lights and vents; the former ceiling....

4.32: The Cursebinder

I don’t know where they went, but Max and Kylie weren’t in our room when I got back. I really should wait for them, rather than go off on my own, but… but I was all jazzed up now, and I wanted to make some progress, so I wrote a note explaining where I was going and that if I wasn’t visible on the school map within two hours I might need rescue, then went looking for my rock climbing equipment.

I’d bought the equipment after my old rock climbing equipment had ended up at the b...

008: OVERRIDE

I poke around the system for a full day and a half before I finally find the airlock controls buried in an atmospheric control submenu. The interface isn’t at all intuitive (this is what the AI is for), but I eventually identify the airlocks around Chronostasis Ring 1, bring up their status, and find that, yes, all eight of them are locked. I pick one at random and tell the computer to unlock it.

- Function locked by Captain’s Override. Please enter override password. - 2022-06-21 14:30:58 +0000 UTC View Post