home of Terra Fabula
At this moment I have nothing new to share. Instead, I give you a photo of one of my kitty cats, Cocoa. In her litter, it was her, a cream-colored, two gray tabbies, and one that could nearly pass as a purebred siamese.
When I think of Casiandra, this is what I’m envisioning. With blue eyes.
The title says it all: Part 2 is available.
So, after my last post about ST:O, I figured I’d give a quick rundown on what the galaxy looks like in 2409.
Spock: MIA. The JJ Abrams movie has been integrated into the lore insofar as the moment the alternate reality appears. That is to say:
Romulus is gone, Spock saved the rest of the quadrant and is generally believed to have died in the red matter singularity.
Picard: Ambassador to Vulcan.
Data: as mentioned before, recovered from the data dump left in the B4 android (by none other than Geordi). Captain of Enterprise E.
Worf: resigned commission. Living on Qo’noS with his wife Grillka (the Klingon woman quark briefly married). Has a son by her.
Ro Laren: went to prision, is now DS9 security chief.
Odo: doing ambassador things for the Great Link.
War: Klingons took some territory from romulan space in the hobus disaster aftermath. They also went after the Gorn and absorbed them into the empire. (see #9) The Borg are active again and attacked Vega colony but they were acting strangely unborglike. Rumor has it the dominion is rebuilding.
Species 8472, proper name the Undine, apparently have metamorphic abilities that I don’t recall hearing about during the voyager episodes. They have appeared in the Alpha and Beta quadrants and are infiltrating everybody like the Founders did. Klingons attacked the gorn because it was suspected they had been taken over by an undine. Federation said “shame on you” and klingons dissolved the kittomer accords again. Fed and Klingons are at war again.
I’d never really looked at a galaxy map before but apparently Sol sits right on the border between the alpha and beta quadrants. DS9, cardassia, beijor are all on the alpha side. Vulcan, andoria, Romulus, Qo’noS are all on the beta side.
That’s all I can remember off the top of my head. Oh, Naomi Wyldman is running the show on good old K7. Miral Paris shows up on a mission regarding peace talks with the Klingons. Uh… Yeah. Now I’m really blank.
Well… I’m reasonably happy with where TF: Two Thousand is standing. I know I’ve dropped hints about this eventuality coming to pass, both blatantly and otherwise. Makes me wonder if anyone still didn’t see it coming.
I had an opportunity to poke at the Star Trek Online beta for a couple of days before they closed down the beta server on Tuesday. While it’s not nearly as polished as Warcraft (which isn’t surprising, since it’s 5 years of development time behind) it does seem like it could be a fun distraction once in a while. I don’t know how much replay value or lasting power it’ll have.
I like the way they’ve built space combat. You have to pay attention to not only your ship’s integrity (health) but also its shields - which are divided into four sections: fore, aft, left, and right. The goal is to keep changing which shield side of your own is facing the enemy, while at the same time trying to stay focused on dropping a single face of the enemy’s shields so you can rip through their unprotected hull with a timely placed torpedo.
Mmm. Quantum torpedoes. Delicious. They’ve advanced further into the prime universe (not the alternate reality created by the last movie), approximately 20 years after Picard and the Enterprise-D. Spoilers! Spock’s missing (because he’s now in the alternate universe), Romulus is gone, the Klingons and the Federation are at war again, the Borg are back, and someone, somewhere, is having a good time on Risa without you. QQ. Also, Data’s alive and in command of the Enterprise-E. (Blame the android ‘B-4.’)
Ground combat (away missions) also makes partial use of the shield mechanic. I’m told this mode is almost a direct copy of Conan Online, but I never actually played that so I don’t know. When you’re not running missions with other players, your bridge officer NPCs can beam down with you to flush out the party slots. Unfortunately, they really like to stand there and pet their tribbles all day long.
Among other things, one of my general goals is to have an installment be in the 3000-5000 word range. A few are less, a couple have been significantly more. PS: New Year’s Eve was originally over 11,000 before it got split in half a year ago. That’s just a little much for one sitting.
After a lot of back and forth I’ve gone with my original idea. The alternative route wasn’t really panning out as I got further into it, but it did help me to find a better flow for this particular path.
In other news, I’m still not happy with where the next bit of TF is sitting, and I haven’t even looked at New Year’s Eve Part 2. It’s going to be a busy week next week, and I doubt I’ll have much time to work on anything again. The next deadline I’m setting for myself is February 5th, two weeks from today.