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Started January 23, 2023 by @EldritchHorror-Davadio health_and_safety emoji_events

tune

Name: Tristan Moon
Age: 24
Gender: Male
Appearance: Tristan stands at 5’11 and is 185lb. Moon has Heterochromia making him have blue in the left eye and hazel in the right. He has curly, dirty blond hair which complements his different colored eyes. Moon always tries to dress in a more formal way but how formal can you get in space? He usually just wears black jeans with a colored shirt.
Desired Role: Medic, Biologist
Personality: Moon doesn’t talk much yet he always loves to hang around his crew. They are like family to Moon after all. He is very jumpy and with his job, isn’t very helpful. Any time he finds any living thing, it always tries to hurt or in general eat him. Other than that, Moon loves to help out the other members of the crew.
Backstory (optional): Moon never really knew his parent’s as a kid. He was told that his father left his mother and his mother died when he was only 1. Moon would travel around the populated earth, searching for something he could occupy himself with. He decided to go to all the different libraries he would come across, hoping to gain knowledge of things that would interest him. At last, He had found it. The vast emptiness everyone had called space wasn’t too empty. At least not for Moon. Thats when he heard of Project Elbowspace.

The news had gone out: Project ElbowRoom was taking volunteers with qualifying skill sets to man their exploration ships. The Magellan-class exploration ships would house 4 crew, with an AI onboard as well. Space Force offered extensive training and pay, with the understanding that this was a potentially life-threatening mission.
Magellan-class ships didn't look like the typical spaceships. Rather than a long shuttle with the cockpit in the front and the thrusters on the back, the Magellan-class ships were spherical. The cockpit sat on top, and the entire hull was covered in micro-thrusters. The main propulsion, however, was the graviteum engine situated smack in the middle of the ship. It could fold space like nobody's business, allowing the ships to move faster than light. It was fueled by a fusion reactor, which sat near the center as well. The ships had gravity plating, allowing the entire interior of the sphere to be usable space. 4 small but private bedrooms, 2 shared bathrooms, and multiple cargo bays with various purposes took up a good section of the ships. A medbay, a lab, and a small kitchen/dining area/meeting room completed the ship.
The 4 man crews trained in their ship for a year on Earth, getting used to the space, the controls, and doing versions of their jobs. By the time the missions left, the crews were already relatively experienced. They had also had to learn to live with each other.

The Olympus was a Magellan-class. Her crew had signed up around the same time, and had trained for 6 months before starting their year long onboard training. The crew had gelled well, and they been launched with pomp and circumstance. They were given a map of several planets the astronomers thought might be potential colony sites.

That had been 6 months ago. Now, in the long dark of space, with training behind them, they were finding that things were… different. Not bad, per se, just… different.

Romulus was talking to Hephaestus-11, the ship's AI, up in the cockpit about exactly that.
"I guess I just wasn't ready for how lonely it is… we were alone on the ship for that year, but… we knew there were people close by, I suppose. It's just… disorienting."
The holographic bearded face nodded at him. "I won't pretend to know what you mean, but I can see it's been hard on you all."
Romulus chuckled. "Well. Very sympathetic of you." He glanced up at the map as his HUD pinged an alert. They would be within distance of their next target planet inside an hour. He'd need to shift from auto-pilot to manual control. Good. This was his favorite part. The crew all knew their roles, and this was his. Alaina made sure the engine didn't overload as they came out of warp space, Tristan ran scans for signs of any kind of life, plant or otherwise, Mica marked their location in the star charts and updated planetary maps, and Hephaestus-11? Well, he made sure they didn't get hit by anything.
Romulus tapped the communicator built into his collar to call down to the engine room. "Alaina, it's Rom. Engine running fine? We're coming into a big gravity well with this star nearby."

Being on an exploration ship was strange, to say the least, but Alaina couldn’t complain. After all, she had wanted this ever since she was a child, and she trained for this mission for months. But, even with her strong desire to see what existed beyond the boundaries of her atmosphere, Alaina couldn’t help but to often think back to her own home planet. There wasn’t that much left for her back there, but she missed it, and she couldn’t understand why.

Alaina was once against reliving memories of her old life as she walked through the ending room, checking if all the machines were working properly. She had to do this quite often during her stay on the ship, even at odd hours of the night. The engine could easily malfunction, after all, and she didn’t want to think of what could happen if it shut down altogether.

As she was checking reading on one of their mechanisms, Rom’s voice came over the intercom, giving her a mini heart attack. Sure, he would call down often to see if everything was going well, but his voice coming out of nowhere would never cease to frighten her.

“It’s running fine,” she replied, once again returning over to the engine. “Some of our readings are a bit off, but I’ll be sure to keep on eye on them.”

Once Rom went quiet, the room went into a dense silence that Alaina was starting to despise. She had been cooped up here all day with no one speak to, and despite what she tried to tell herself, she longed for human interaction. So, after she checked the rest of the machines, she headed to the cockpit and leaned against the door frame.

“Talking to the AI again, Rom?” A small smile crossed her face. “Why am I not surprised?”

Alaina was competent, and that made Romulus's life a lot easier. When she said readings were a bit off, he had just beeped an acknowledgment over the coms and trusted her to handle it. She didn't seem worried, so he wasn't.

He turned with a wry smile on his face when she came up behind him. "Hey, listen, Heph is a person too. You should talk to him more." The AI had access to everywhere on the ship, and Romulus was in the habit of talking to him often, but the others still liked to tease him about it. Not his fault Hephaestus-11 was a good conversationalist.
The AI piped up from his spot on the console. "I'm happy to talk to all of you, Alaina, it's just that Romulus asks often."
The HUD (heads-up-display) in Romulus's visor pinged another alert, and Heph looked distracted. "Switching control to you, Captain." The formal address was to remind Romulus he had a ship to fly just now. He downed the throttle, sliding them smoothly out of warp space. The graviteum engine didn't blow, so that was good.
Now it was just a matter of flying them into the solar system and to the particular planet. Usually he flew the Olympus with just the helmet HUD, but a glance at Alaina helped him decide.
"Onscreen."
The viewscreen at the front of the cockpit blinked to life, showing the view around them. A massive star, tinted blue, coming up in front of them, ringed by three planets. One was a huge brown and green gas giant that made Jupiter look like a basketball. One was a smaller pink and blue planet, that Heph said was made up of a surface covering of ice over gasses and liquids, but not water.

And one was their target. The smallest planet had huge sections of red across it's surface, but it was far enough away from the star that it was the right temperature. Almost.
The constellations out here were different, and Rom found his breath taken away just a little.
"Beautiful, isn't it?" he said quietly.

Alaina stole a glance over at Rom, wondering what was on his mind. There was so much going on on the ship and barely anytime to rest and relax anymore. That, along with the intense loneliness that came and left, was beginning to weigh on the shoulders of everyone on the ship. Alaina figured it especially was this way with the young captain. He was barely a few years older than her, but he had loads of more responsibility.

“Mm, he asks often? Go figure.” Alaina smirked faintly at Rom. “You know, if you’re ever lonely, you can come talk to me. I’m probably just as good of a listener as Heph is.”

Alaina walked over to Rom’s side and sat down, her eyes focused on the expanse stretched out before them. It was strange to her how fast her desires could change. For hours, she had been thinking only about home and how much she missed her father and her siblings. But, as soon as she saw the beautiful sight of the universe again, she wanted to stay on this ship for as long as possible.

“It’s all just so… massive.” She laughed softly and rested her cheek against her knuckles. “Makes you feel kinda small, huh?”

Romulus chuckled. "I do ask a lot, because Hephaestus can't get tired of me." The AI gave a low beep just then, similar to a rude gesture, and Romulus smirked.
He glanced over at Alaina. "I do appreciate it though. And you're human, which makes you immediately a better listener."
When they'd all first met, Romulus had intimidated everyone with relative ease. He was taller, stronger, more muscular, louder, and he'd walked into their first meeting in full armor with his voice modulator on. It hadn't occurred to him to tone it down.
They had all warmed up to him eventually, but he was keenly aware of how much space he took up, physically and mentally. He was extremely friendly, and in the interest of not driving the rest of the crew crazy with his pestering, he often went to the AI.
Alaina sat down, and Rom glanced at her again. The look of wonder on her face highlighted how pretty she was, and he had to remind himself to focus.
He chuckled again at her question. "Yes, it does make me feel small, and not much does that."
They cleared the minor asteroid belt at the edge of every solar system, and Rom keyed the ship-wide communications. "Mica, Tristan, you guys getting this? We good? No hostile aliens or hidden black holes?"

Tristan was used to his new life on the ship. Day in and day out, make sure there wasn't any life on the planets they passed by. Or maybe It was needed for there to be life. What ever it was, Tristan was doing it. He had been on the ship for six months on the ship and luckily everything was decently well on the ship. The constant beep of the radar was an annoying sound to say the least, but he never seemed to notice it much. He was always occupied with running tests and such.
When the com's went off, Tristan pressed the button to answer but his mind instantly blanked out. All that could be heard from the side of Rom was the beeping and nothing else. Tristan shook his head, not knowing why he spaced out. "Everything looking alright on my side Rom. Nothing to interesting a always. Though I will be on the look out if the radar'll catch anything. Hopefully we'll have something soon." He yawned.
Tristan rarely came out of his laboratory due to the fact that if there was ever a sign of life, the crew would need do hear about it as soon as possible.

Mica Katz sat hunched in their bed in their private room, surrounded by tools and scraping parts of the rock they were holding into a petri dish that sat beside them. The particular investigation they were conducting at the moment was really in no way part of their job, but, until they got bored of it, it was Mica's personal mission to find the first macroscopic alien fossils, and they had picked up a particularly fascinating batch of samples recently.
Their room was dead silent, other than the hum of the ship, the regular beeping of their monitors, and Mica's quiet scraping, and they startled violently as they heard their name coming over the comms, nearly upsetting the entire lab they had set up on their mattress. After righting a few tools they had tipped, they quickly hopped on their chair and slid back over to their desk to pull up a display, checking the area around them and adjusting magnetic and gravitational inputs, just in case. This part of their job was fairly boring, as sneaky black holes were an extremely rare occurrence. As soon as Mica was satisfied that they were safe to move on, they pressed a button on the device around their wrist, connecting to Romulus.
"Coast is clear, Rom. Looks like smooth sailing, long as you don't forget how to pilot." They popped some leftover lunch in their mouth, and adjusted their display so they could watch a stream on one side and keep on eye on the ship's surroundings on the other. God, Mica loved their job.

Romulus chuckled to himself as the reports came in. Mica and Tristan both tended to bury themselves in their work, and they were both very good at their jobs.
They also tended to hide till it was time to actually get on-planet. Not an issue, they weren't anti-social or anything, but it was part of the reason Rom talked to Heph so often.
"If I've forgotten, we've got bigger problems than rough sailing." he joked back at Mica.
In system, they couldn't move at light speed safely. Too much danger of overshooting and either warping through a planet, or accidentally throwing themselves into the star. Which meant that it would be another 8 hours, moving at about half the speed of light, before they were in orbit over the planet and were able to land and check it out. These 8 hours were critical, because if at any point they caught signs that something was wrong, Romulus would need to be the one to make the call, turn them around, and get them out of there.
"8 hours, guys. We'll be in orbit over the target planet in 8 hours. Sleep in shifts and forward your diagnostics to me when you rest."