They were still breathing, and the station hadn’t been destroyed, but it was in no shape to travel. Ramses and Leona spent the rest of the day affecting repairs, or rather, programming the automators to start working on them instead. Séarlas was the engineering twin, and could no longer fulfill this role...
They were abandoned and stranded in the middle of interplanetary space in the Gatewood Collective. Their communication systems were advanced, but a signal could only be so powerful in such a small form factor. Ramses hadn’t given them quantum messengers to store in their pocket dimensions...
Ramses and Leona were going to have to spend all of their time in the new lab. Since the former lost his forge core, he wasn’t able to build everything they needed in only a year. He kept a data chip on his person too, which at least stored all of the equipment specifications, but it couldn’t build anything, so the process was slow...
Leona walked back into the lab. Ramses wasn’t there, at least not in the main area. He did have that room in the back that he asked others to stay out of. Surely that didn’t apply to her, though. They were partners. She contributed a lot to rebuilding his lab, and the slingdrive array, which were their most important assets...
The team came out of the technicolor sling web, and found themselves near another ship. It wasn’t looming over them this time but underneath their feet. Had they failed? This far out in the galaxy, no one should have reached by now. Sure, Extremus was traveling this far, but the chances of happening upon them were literally...
When the away team appeared on the Extremus scout ship, Mateo revealed that he had a new plan, but that he didn’t want to put Ramses out. It would require him to do extra work. The thing was, the people of Extremus knew where they had gone. They had a record of it. This system looked just as good as any...
The team reunited on Extremus Prime, but they weren’t ready to go for another day. Ramses needed to work on something first. Once it was time, they bid their adieu to Actilitca, and activated all seven of their tandem slingdrives. They ended up on a planet called Varkas Reflex. It orbited a host star called Wolf 359...
Angela inspired Ramses to alter his plans for their new pocket dimension habitat. He was still using a belt as a form factor, but instead of only having one central location where they would all live, they would have seven total. This helped a little with power management, which was important...
Ramses’ new Brane Establishment Map—name subject to change—was fully ready to go, but there was a catch. It required the equivalent of five tandem slingdrives to run, and once it was running, it counted as one sling. The coherence gauge went down when it was used, went down faster when it was used to map a larger region...
During the team’s interim year, the pocket dimension generator belts they left behind explored the galaxy on their own. They did so while holographically invisible, in case the next encounter was with someone less kind than Renata and Quidel. The belt stack was able to visit nearly one new spot a day, for a total of 360 slings...
When the team first came out of the woods on Thālith al Naʽāmāt Bida, they found a lone homestead. There were several bags of produce sitting on the grass several meters away from the entrance. A young woman was begrudgingly starting to carry them inside...
Nothing interesting happened by the end of the day in 2543, except for some unusual environmental readings that Ramses was getting, so they made plans to leave. To give Romana time to finally come to a decision for where they were going to go next, and to maximize the time they had to actually do that...
While Team Matic was living semipermanently on Castlebourne, Hrockas set up an annual meeting on their days in the timestream. He typically wanted them to be caught up on certain things, and maybe ask for their advice or help. Even though the team had since left, this meeting was still going on and going strong...
Mirage and Ramses worked closely together. They had to design something that had never existed before; an onboard bulk energy weapon. A quintessence gun. The obvious choice was to reroute all that raw power from the slingdrive to the heat shunt...
Ramses was unable to track the location of the missing slingbelts, and there was no recourse for this. He designed the bulk map so that, while most of the dots were showing non-specific points, the belts were distinct, and stood out. If they were anywhere out there, he would be able to spot them...
Echo Cloudbearer explained his mysterious origins to the team, giving a brief overview of his life. When Olimpia screamed to create the Sixth Key parallel reality, she also created him as a conscious component. The theory was that the DNA in the saliva that came out during her scream somehow rearranged itself...
On a scale from robot butter-passer to ecumenopolis, the infrastructure that Ramses’ forge core was able to construct during their interim year sat at about a 5.6. This logarithmic scale was designed by a team of futurologists back in the very late 21st century; not just something that he made up himself...
Things were a little awkward at first. Leona was a lot less powerful than Senona originally believed. They didn’t think to ask Echo or Clavia about it at some point, or the truth might have been clarified earlier. Senona lived in another universe, and their access to information about other universes had its limitations...
While he was spending time with his son, Echo—when they weren’t going on missions with Leona—Ramses was also working on Operation Starframe. Echo offered to conquer the whole galaxy in the main sequence with a wave of his hand, but Senona said that they would not allow it...
Before calling anyone else about the creep, the twins walked back around the portal building, which they had named The Gatehouse. Angela wanted to call it The Iris, but Marie said that they weren’t allowed to. They stress-tested the structure, and found themselves unable to get in...
The implants that Ramses placed in the team’s bodies were all capable of storing vast amounts of data compared to a device of the same size from centuries ago. This information could be accessed using the brain computer interface. He didn’t specifically install any virtual reality programs in them...
Today was the day of the launch. Ramses’ automators had constructed 121 million Outriders, and he was ready to let them go. Team Keshida had built billion of modules for Project Stargate, but that was designed to spread to every star system in the galaxy. That wasn’t necessary here...
Ramses had something else to show them, which he had evidently been working on at the same time as Operation Starframe. That was on the moon. This was down on the planet, in their main, branch-themed, dome. It felt like he invented something new every day, so while he wanted to show them, it wasn’t done with any fanfare...
They found themselves an ice cave to hole up in to get out of the wind. They were not going to die anytime soon, but it still wasn’t comfortable. Ramses and Leona got to work, trying to figure out what was wrong with their suits, but really, there was nothing they could do. None of their technology was working...
While Marie and Angela were exploring the area, they came across what looked like an even more intricate ice cave system. It just so happened to be roughly in the direction where they were headed now. They didn’t want to walk a thousand kilometers, and didn’t have time to do so anyway...
After a couple of hours, close enough to midnight central for the sling to factor in their timeskipping, Team Matic left Tartarus, and returned to Ramosus. They found themselves just standing there, blinking at each other, but not talking. While it took longer than expected, their experience on the colony was mundane...
When no one else stepped up, Marie decided to choose their next destination. She consulted the bulk map, and cross-referenced it with an updated copy of the central archives, landing on a colony once more thanks to its funny name. The database listed it as the Patsy Richelieu Best First Quarter Star...
The team decided to leave before midnight central so they wouldn’t have to explain their end-of-the-day disappearance. They were determined to hunker down and really figure out who in this galaxy might actually need their help. The larger colonies could have huge problems, but the infrastructure and procedures to deal with them...
The team spent less than a minute on Ramosus in 2561 before agreeing to jump right to the coordinates of their newest mission. They were on a space station orbiting a star that was 299 light years from the Core Colonies. It would have to be a relatively fresh settlement, being this far out...
They were kind of surprised to come back to the timestream in 2562 to find that there were no more hits on Ramses’ warning system. Well, there were few in the meantime, but they closed out by the time they returned. He specifically designed it to maintain some privacy...
Monster might not have been the right word to use for them. They were amorphous blobs that shifted their shapes as they moved in unpredictable ways. They were mostly a navy blue, though hints of other colors randomly appear like twinkling stars. They had no faces and no limbs, but they were heading right for the trio...
Coming soon...
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