outer_divide | [Video: Saturday, Week 66] Starships were meant to fly:

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[Video: Saturday, Week 66] Starships were meant to fly:

[The video feed that pops up on Saturday morning features a Kaidan that's shorn of the ~~assholery~~cool rigidity that's been a facet of his behaviour for the course of the latest round of reality shenanigans. Hand rubbing sheepishly at the nape of his neck, he has a question:]

Ah... so this is probably a weird question to be asking, but does anyone know if there are any spaceflight-capable ships on the planet? Or even ones that could be repaired?

I don't need heavy FTL, but something that can handle in-system would be good.

And, ah, I know about the satellite defence grid. I'm also working on plans to see if there's a way around it if anyone has suggestions.

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More or less. I'm no engineering genius like Stark, but I hold my own.

What can I do for you?

[Because that sort of question doesn't seem likely to be offered just as a comment to his quest for space.]

Someone suggested I find certain people. And you were talking about spaceships, not magical horses...

You're not Stark, obviously from what you just said. Are you Alenko or Skywalker?

I'm new, and frankly, I think Poseidon's hospitality could use some work. But that aside, I'm Schwanhelt Bulge.

Alenko. Kaidan Alenko, Earth Systems Alliance Major and Council Spectre, if we're going for full identification... but Kaidan will do.

And, ah, hospitality used to be better before some yahoos decided to set the transient housing on fire. Things are still a bit in flux. But what can a technical person do for you, specifically?

I don't have any idea how much help this would be. I am not an engineer myself, just a platoon captain.

But just before... ending up here, we were fighting a force from the Alfort galaxy, which was in another dimension. They entered our dimension with their ships using what we called white holes to puncture between the dimensions. I don't know how they did it, and only observed the process from the outside, but I understand that someone who's actually seen trans-dimensional technology working is rare here.

That ship, Salvation, she jumps dimensions?

I'm pretty sure the engineers knew a little more from analyzing the device we were given to boost our weapons to attack their ships.

I'm normally a SpecOps commander, so not being an engineer isn't something I'm going to ride people over. Stark actually is, and Kaylee's a ship's mechanic where she's from, so even if I can't parse it, they probably can give it a try... or you can talk to Salvation. She jumps dimensions, yeah. She also jumps through time -- she gave me the equation for that, once, damned near crashed my omni-tool.

You can talk to the ship? [He heard the other names, so is probably going to look for them, too. He's just not used to being able to talk to a ship. There's a computer on Big One that is voice interactive, but you don't chat with it.]

Dimensions, I understand. I've not seen time travel done deliberately. Some regions of space knot things up pretty well, and force time jumps. I can see this is going to a very interesting place to live.

I haven't run into those myself, but where I'm from people usually stay clear of the galactic core or other places where you'd get enough density of black holes to start messing with space-time. This... this is all pretty new. But to Salvation, time's the easy thing to play with, compared to realities. And yeah, you can talk to her.

[Kaidan actually sounds faintly proud of this -- he did serve a key role in bringing the AI back online -- or perhaps of Salvation herself.]

She's an AI, more powerful than any I've seen. Kind of has to be be, given the ship's size and her mission. She's, uh, pretty literal, though, and she doesn't really think like organics do.

I'm not sure of all the causes of them back home, but they seemed to crop up unexpectedly from time to time. We've had to rescue a lot of trains downed from running through them.

I think I'll have to add 'talking to a ship' to my list of new experiences to seek out. I'm as anxious for answers as anyone who's been here longer.

Now that's interesting... Salvation was designed with trying to deal with tears in reality, not just time, but if these time anomalies crop up a lot in your reality I wonder how that fits in with the reality tears.

Maybe what you guys have is an early case of whatever leads to the reality tears -- start with time, end up tearing spacetime, bad things have to happen, right?

I don't know why the knots work the way they do. I thought it had something to do with gravity, but mostly we pay attention to them to avoid them. [Except when they have to go in to rescue another train.]

The leader of the Alfort fleet kept accusing us of doing something to her home dimension, but I have no idea what she meant. As far as I know, they came to us first.

We ended up here because we fell, for lack of a better word, through a damaged section of our reality into the space between the realities. It's, uh, a pretty hostile environment, you might say, which is why Salvation scooped us up and stuck us in the pods to heal. But if that can happen, then why not something that pushes clean through from one reality to another?

If you happen to run across anyone from the Alfort fleet here, it sounds like we'd have a lot to talk about.

Even back home we'd have a lot to talk about. I only ever personally met one of them, and she died. [It does make him thoughtful though.] If there is some damage to space that brought me here, like the rest of you, maybe someone else from home was affected, too. [It would be nice if it was an engineer. He isn't sure how they'd handle any of the Alfort people. Liffel was just a faceless soldier in their army.]

I'll watch for them. Most of them, as far as I could tell, were plant people, specifically women.

Ah... don't be alarmed at Salvation when you talk to her, then. She can manifest an avatar in certain areas on the ship if she feels like it, instead of just communicating through the computer terminals. It's shaped like a plant lady.

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