Character Portrait - Benevici

Do you get those days when everything works out just that little bit more right that you hoped? Where coincidence and the kindness of strangers combine to get you where you need to be just in time, or provide that bit of information you couldn’t have gone on without?

Without knowing it, you may have been helped by the bodiless and multi-formed Benevici. Moving silently from mind to mind like a breeze, peering out from the eyes of animals, children and old men, this quiet angel helps make the world a better place one unseen miracle at a time.

Character Portrait - Lorca

Tall and wide in the sense that layers of fat and muscle were competing for prominence; Lorca presents a cocky and dangerously belligerent stance. Unlike many who do so, she is capable of following through on the implicit threat she shouts to the world, being deceptively fast and nimble. Her dress tends towards that of the outlaw – the biker woman with tattoos, patches and sharp filed teeth. She displays strength proportionate to her appearance, but far more dangerous is the fire that burns within her.

As a demon of destructive flame, Lorca’s passion can be channelled to heat and sear materials that come into contact with her. A favoured tactic is to heat a crowbar or similarly robust piece of ferrous or conductive metal and lay about her with wild abandon.

Her physical form however is not the most durable, being essentially a container for the fiery essence within her. Large traumas will gouge or tear holes in her apparently fleshy exterior to reveal a baked and flame-licked interior of charcoal-like material.

This means that she can be driven off or defeated through the destruction of her physical presence, but it is usually only a temporary retrieve. Like the hidden embers within a fire-gutted house, her flames tend to rise again if treated incautiously.

Horror fragment

Hobbnet's body and limbs seemed to waver and flow with a boneless surge that put Faith in mind of an octopus, surging and elongating. He or it pulled forward up the staircase, like water flowing uphill, tattered clothing binding or shredding loose, or just dropping off as limbs and torso ballooned, shrank, tapered or twisted. And all through this the vacant eyed head lolled on vestigial shoulders.

Mind's Eye Imagery

I was once asked to describe how the fractured facets of myself presented themselves to my mind's eye - the image of a great iron-wheeled palanquin sprang to mind. The child peering out from a shuttered window, the remorseless defender in heavy slabbed armour standing before it, and tied to a leash to the defender a ravening wolf-human hybrid beast with claws and teeth dripping with blood. Its a crude image, but it works.

Anger

This is how it feels to be angry - white hot and ice cold and sick to the stomach all at the same time. Words stumble and mix as they stumble from a thickened tongue and clumsy jaw, and I swear I feel my IQ plummetting as the adrenaline kicks in, making my heart beat faster and my limbs tremble. The heat prickles my brow, sweat burning at my hairline. The ice lies in my bones, caging the second thoughts that would moderate what I would say. The silent scream feels like it will burst my ribs unless I give it voice, leaving me open and vulnerable and guilty for daring to speak up.

A Little Light Horror

The warm darkness shivered and he was alone in the night again. The unseen object was heavy in his hand, its edges digging into his flesh where icy fingers curled around it. The natural noises of the evening began to reassert themselves in querulous birdsong and the distant barking of dogs.

He realised he was drenched in sweat and started looking round for a park bench. He settled for a grass tussock instead, ignoring the dew dampness in the seat of his trousers. Painfully, slowly, he forced his fingers to open to reveal his prize.

A lozenge of glassy metal – impossible to tell the colour in the moonlight – lay in his palm. Something about it drew the eye so that it felt like the centre of the landscape. He shook his head to clear his thoughts and thrust the object into his coat pocket, then he lay back and closed his eyes briefly, exhausted.

A Fragment

The voice from the shadows paused, and a laboured breath wheezed, suggesting dry tombs. The figure tugged its makeshift cloak more close. "Let me ask you a question," it said after a moment, "do you believe in the unseen world?"I tried to work out if this was a joke or trap of some sort.

I opted for caution. "What do you mean by that? The unseen world?"There was a sigh with more than a hint of exasperation.

"Spirits, ghosts, gods, fairies, the supernatural - take your pick. Do you accept that there are things outside what you would call 'normal' existence?"

Picking my words carefully I replied with "Well, I'll admit that there are things that happen that I cannot explain - whether that makes them the works of ghosts or anything like that though is a bit of a stretch." I let a nervous smile flicker across my face.

A Cheery Note

"You are never too old to storm a bouncy castle" reads the aspirational message on logging on to the ship's network. Not for the first time I find myself grimacing at the attempt to lighten the mood and turn my attention to the message queue to try and work out what's gone sufficiently wrong in my absence to warrant someone trying to cheer me up. I suppose I could have got up and yelled at someone, but I was halfway through the connection process, with cables inserted and shock-gel sloshing into the pod at chest height and rising. Damned if I was going to get out of the pod now.

Trusting that a slightly less opaque message would have been left if there was a performance problem with the ship I closed my eyes and let my senses expand into my surrogate body. It was a feeling I would never tire of, losing the sense of constraint within the fleshy organics and slipping on a powerful body capable of conquering the void. If I had to describe it in terms of my flesh, it was like getting onto a powerful motorcycle, lying forward on it and melding with it in that position.

My engines, even on standby, were thrumming with a restrained power. The dull throb resonated through the bulkheads and underpinned every conversation by the crew. The massive hydrogen ram-scoops at the front of my arms(hull) tingled with the usual batch of expectant ozone in the hangar bay. In full flight I would feel the intakes grabbing and forcing elemental particles through the length of me and out as exhaust in a torrent. Quiescent like this, it felt like a covering of static electricity enveloping and running through me. It wasn't painful in any sense, but rather I found it lent an air of expectancy and potential. It was like the tensing of muscles before the sprint

Unfamiliar modules had replaced all but one of the usual artillery pieces and I took a moment to examine them - an energy disruption device designed to play havoc with opponents' stored battery power had been fitted. It felt like a small black hole in my belly, while and a dual set of energy drains to pull that energy into my own reserves felt like ravenous mouths.
The feeling behind the aspirational message suddenly made sense.

With the dual warp scramblers and enhanced afterburner systems this ship is designed - I am designed - to capture and confound the enemy. We will pull at their energy and leech their engines, moving faster than they can track their turrets round, while allies pound them at range. It will certainly be a bumpy ride.

Pulsing messages flicker behind my eyelids, most routine, some banter. Its a crew of volunteers for this mission and their spirits are high. I sound the general launch alarm, wait a moment and hear the comms officers begin the pre-flight chatter with traffic control while my support gantries withdraw. Drones clear the way of potential debris and light my path, acting as traffic tugs within the station's gravitational field.

We launched moments later into the clear void, the warmth of solar particles caressing my hull. A series of light thuds along my flanks confirm the micro-drones' return home and the launch of the camera drones. Almost lazily, feeling like I'm stretching after being cooped up for too long, I pirouette away from the hangar entrance to join the other ships. They are hanging in loose formation a few tens of kilometres away.

Even from a distance, I have to admire the collected lethality of looming battleships and cruisers that dwarf me. There are a few of us volunteering for this duty who flit between them like mosquitos. Our frigates are fast, nimble by comparison with these behemoths. Some have settled into the general formation, a couple orbit the group at speed, testing and boasting their speed and maneuverability. Barrelling into proximity from a nearby moon come a pair of battered destroyers, fitted as salvage tugs, and a sleek logistics cruiser bristling with antennae.

A web of communications traffic binds us, the pilots - fellow capsuleers all - to each other, the crews within and between ships. If I switch to the custom filters in my camera drones I see it as a hazy flickering cloud - a sea of information in which we swim. I pull back to a more mundane view to focus on the moment in hand, letting the glory reflect in my memory for now.
The operation begins on a word to the commander from covert ships - a terse message flashes up onscreen, matched by an audio command to align to the designated system gate, and moments later as acknowledgements scroll down my vision, the web of comms tightens to link our warp systems, pulling all the ships within moments of each other on the same directed course. We are seconds from contact.

First Post

Random fragments of story, observation and the like will be appearing here in a deliberate attempt to separate out my public comments, my interior monologues and the general oddness of my thought processes. I hope you enjoy them