Lieutenant Ari Tayrey (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
astrogator) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
come_sailaway2023-10-29 01:46 pm
astrogator) wrote in come_sailaway2023-10-29 01:46 pm
I'll send an SOS to the world
Who: Everyone who wants to!
What: Messages for the outside, NOVEMBER PLOT
When: Mid-October onwards
Where: By Phil's signpost, the lounge, Ari's cabin
Warnings: None yet, will update as needed
Notes: Credit to Batya for the first prompt!
1. Hundred billion bottles washed up on the shore
A day or two after the signpost goes up, a small table shows up next to it, with a large blank notebook from Sundries. It has been labeled on the front, in careful printing: MAIL CALL.
A nearby note, in the same printing, reads:
2. Only hope can keep me together
In the second half of October, Ari will be in the lounge and other communal areas with her laptop. Anyone who passes by, whether she knows them well or not, will be asked to help her with a project. She doesn't want anyone to be forgotten, she says. She wants a record, because existence is so uncertain. Her injury made her value the people here on the ship more, she'll say, - and the bandage still around her head might speak to that. She encourages people to let her make a recording of them, talking about themselves.
'We can do it however you like,' she'll say. 'Flatvid, looking direct into the camera, or I can activate the holorecorders, give you your own holovid. If you don't know what to say, I'll ask questions. Please?' Are you really going to turn down the earnest young Tradeliner?
3. Sendin' out an SOS
Late in October, Ari calls a meeting of her co-conspirators. She gives them each a different time to arrive at her cabin, so the first arrivals will get to spend time helping with video editing or rocket construction while they await the others. There's time for private chat - but when everyone who decided to come along should be there, discussion begins in earnest.
[ooc: prompts divided up below for organisational purposes; contact me or Batya if you'd like to do something different!]
What: Messages for the outside, NOVEMBER PLOT
When: Mid-October onwards
Where: By Phil's signpost, the lounge, Ari's cabin
Warnings: None yet, will update as needed
Notes: Credit to Batya for the first prompt!
1. Hundred billion bottles washed up on the shore
A day or two after the signpost goes up, a small table shows up next to it, with a large blank notebook from Sundries. It has been labeled on the front, in careful printing: MAIL CALL.
A nearby note, in the same printing, reads:
If you could send a message back home, or onward to the next place you want to go, what would it say? Write it here for posterity.Pens and markers are available, in a tall cup scavenged from the buffet table.
2. Only hope can keep me together
In the second half of October, Ari will be in the lounge and other communal areas with her laptop. Anyone who passes by, whether she knows them well or not, will be asked to help her with a project. She doesn't want anyone to be forgotten, she says. She wants a record, because existence is so uncertain. Her injury made her value the people here on the ship more, she'll say, - and the bandage still around her head might speak to that. She encourages people to let her make a recording of them, talking about themselves.
'We can do it however you like,' she'll say. 'Flatvid, looking direct into the camera, or I can activate the holorecorders, give you your own holovid. If you don't know what to say, I'll ask questions. Please?' Are you really going to turn down the earnest young Tradeliner?
3. Sendin' out an SOS
Late in October, Ari calls a meeting of her co-conspirators. She gives them each a different time to arrive at her cabin, so the first arrivals will get to spend time helping with video editing or rocket construction while they await the others. There's time for private chat - but when everyone who decided to come along should be there, discussion begins in earnest.
[ooc: prompts divided up below for organisational purposes; contact me or Batya if you'd like to do something different!]
no subject
Peace and prosperity to you.
I am Lieutenant Arilanna Tayrey of the Tradeline Starship Prosperity, astrogator flying the Keturah line, once Arilanna Kittredge of Cardalek, 284 of the Tower. My papers are appended.
This is an urgent all-channel call for assistance. The gravity of this situation cannot be overestimated. If you hear this, then whoever you are, I urge you to come to our rescue. Follow the trajectory.
I have been held captive for perhaps a standard year. There is no war. There is no conflict, no ransom demand, no path to negotiating my own freedom. All that my captor wants is my suffering, and that of my fellow prisoners. We are not people to him. We are fuel to sustain his bubble universe, and once we cease to be useful to him we suffer a fate so cruel that I can't speak of it.
[Very deliberate, because anyone understanding Ari's Company Standard is vanishingly unlikely to understand any talk of souls and ghosts and the like. Leave the horrors to the imagination.]
The being holding us here is powerful and has done this to thousands of others before us. We number maybe seventy now. Most are civilians. All are from different sectors, vast distances apart. You'll see some of these people on the other holovids. [See that some of them really are alien!] Come to us, help us escape - but approach with caution. We don't want anyone else to be trapped here.
I don't know how long I have left. None of us do. If I'm... if I'm gone before you reach us, speak to Cassandra de Rolo
or John Crichton,and if you can, tell the Tradelines of my fate.I was never a passenger.
Let probability smile on us both, let this message reach you, may you- [a pause, a quick breath, suppressed emotion] -may you fly through safe skies.
[Ari speaks four languages. Ari records this message four times, plus a shorter holovid in which she conveys similar sentiment purely through spacer hand signals.
EDIT: And Ari re-records these, just the same but with the omission of Crichton's name, because no matter how improbable she thinks it is that his enemies will be the ones to find the probe, she understands why he wants to minimise risk.]