Monthly Short Story for December: Wearing Power Armor to a Magic School Side Story 1 The Castle in the Stars (Patreon)

Hello Commissioned Pioneers! As promised, in accordance with last month’s poll, I’m proud to present to you the Bonus Story of the Month! There were a total of 4 categories to choose from, and a majority voted for Wearing Power to a Magic School’s side story! Let’s jump right into it then, as I proudly present to you Wearing Power Armor to a Magic School’s first side story!

The Castle in the Stars

You see a lot of bizarre happenings as a freighter captain. In fact, sometimes you start to even question the nature of your own reality after enough time’s gone by. Call it cabin fever, call it paranoia, or whatever the medical technocrats legislating and regulating the occupational safety and health bureau at home had to say… but sometimes, the stuff you see just can’t be explained away. No amount of dry eyes or stress-induced audio-sensory hallucinations, or even idiopathic transient paroxysmal delusional episodes can explain away the stuff that we sometimes experience out there in deep space.

It’s the clout chasers and young bridge officers who make the rest of us look bad. In local bars, in far off pitstops, and most of all in the commsphere; these brash young kids do nothing but spout off tall tales and stories that have effectively made the genuine stories, completely unpalatable to the public.

Still, those of us out there that actually give a crap about the old traditions of freighting prior to the regulatory changes of the past few centuries understand the freighter pilot’s code: that sometimes, there really is shit out there that can’t be explained away.

From ghost ships to unexplained radio transmissions to all out close encounters of a third kind… there was no shortage of stories to believe. There were a few however, that always caught my attention more than most. A set of stories that I had been infatuated with since I was a young cadet back in the UN’s Merchant Fleet Academy. They all sounded just a bit ridiculous at first, as was the case with rumors and legends passed down the grapevine, but something about them just captured my imagination. 

Primarily because they all seemed to be permutations of the same story, except told with increasing and varying detail with each passing account. 

I’d gone back and forth on whether or not I wanted to give them a name. Heck, I felt like giving them an overarching name would be doing the individual stories a disservice. However, what was a collective set of stories with an overarching theme if not deserving of a collective title? So I decided to call it as I saw it, or at the very least, as most of these stories saw it: The Castle in the Stars.

These stories generally start out in any number of ways, although it always contained similar elements that tied them all together. It usually involved a bridge crew for starters, and it always, always needed a viewport or some opening into the void of space to facilitate the unexplained events that followed. You actually see a massive reduction in these sorts of stories after the advent of the Viewscreen Standardization Act of 2593 since the act effectively made large viewports rare amongst most freighters. Finally, it always involved something that was inexplicably absent from sensors logs and camera footage. 

But most eerie of all, it always seemed to focus on the same titular subject matter: the Castle. 

The earliest story I have on record is from the UNMS Venture Star, a superheavy cargo freighter running regular routes between Earth and Alpha Centauri back before the Second Extrasolar War broke out in the late 25th century. The story was recorded by the Venture Star’s dayshift helmsman, a Lieutenant by the name of Alex Shelby. Now, Shelby wasn’t a man known for his penchant for spouting off tall tales. Nor was he a man known for conversation at all.  In fact, most that knew him personally would often refer to him as serious, distant, and driven. He was a lifer who cared deeply for the reputation of both his own career and the collective reputation of his fellow crewmates aboard the Venture Star. So when his personal logs did finally surface at the tail end of the Second Extrasolar War, many dismissed it as either a forgery or a smear campaign against the crew of one of the most storied United Nations merchant vessels to date.

However, it would only be the first in a long line of accounts that would surface across the centuries.

Indeed, what Alex Shelby wrote sometime during the start of his career in the 25th century, would serve as the genesis of my obsession for the Castle in the Stars.

‘Helmsman’s log, supplemental. Not logging the date and time for this one, still deciding on whether or not I want to make this official. I don’t want to be the weakest link on this ship. And I’ll be fucked if I drag the rest of the guys down because of the contents of my own unsound mind. Honestly, I should’ve asked if anyone else saw what I saw, at least then I’d have some leeway with logging this for posterity. But screw it, this has to be logged, it has to be. At about 14:00 hours, Earth Standard Time, we were cruising through warp as per usual. Nothing out of the ordinary, nothing anomalous throughout our whole journey in fact. We’ve been at Warp for 14 days now. As helmsman, you’re more or less superfluous during warp. The navigator and engineer are mostly responsible for maintaining the course and the warp bubble respectively. So all I was doing was sitting there pretty just in case we were suddenly taken out of warp and needed emergency maneuvers to be performed. It’s a decent job, don't get me wrong, but I’m worried if what I saw was a result of that monotony and lack of stimulation… because what I saw well, let’s just say that if anyone heard me talking about it I’d be sent to the ship’s doctor ASAP. It started small, so small in fact that I barely registered it at the corner of my vision. I saw an image appear on the far side of the bridge’s forward viewport. It looked like a small patch of grass with a single brick sat atop of it. At first I thought it was the reflection of someone’s tablet on the glass, maybe the pause menu of the new version of Blic Block or something. So I ignored it at first. However, the longer I sat looking out through the viewports, the more this… reflection grew. Bit by bit, it felt as if someone was peeling off the inky darkness of space, the same way you’d slowly peel off the screen protector on a new monitor or display. Slowly but surely, my field of view became dominated not by the elongated streaks of stars gliding across our warp bubble like streaks of raindrops, but instead by what felt like a window into another world. I could make out something that resembled a castle, with two massive towers capped off with conical tops and this vertical banner bearing a compass sigil hanging from either one of them. The more I stared, the clearer it became, until finally, it vanished as quickly as it had appeared.

The relief helmsman arrived and snapped me out of it. I looked behind me to see the younger cadet smiling politely, only to turn back to the viewport to see well… just the inky darkness of space.

I later checked the logs, the camera feeds, even the ship’s sensor feeds under the guise of routine maintenance.

I found nothing.

Nothing but my gaze transfixed on a viewport with nothing of interest to look at.

I’m going to need to think long and hard about this.

Shelby never mentioned this phenomenon ever again.

However, this wasn’t the end of the Castle in the Stars.

It was just the beginning.

Following this, I tracked down other accounts from various sources that mentioned similar phenomena. Visions of a castle with two towers, capped with conical roofs, and a strange compass-like emblem flown on either tower. Yet as time went on accounts became increasingly more elaborate. From describing the castle under siege, to the entire structure being reduced to ruins, to even accounts of people being present in these visual hallucinations… The accounts seem to only become more frequent and more vivid over time.

Until of course, it stopped. Right around the time when viewscreens replaced viewports. With glass giving way to screens that projected the view ahead, instead of the traditional transparent metal that allowed for a direct view of the world outside.

Yet the legends still persist, now with reports of the Castle appearing on what little viewports were left on modern ships.

The castle, I feared, would elude me for the rest of my life. That was, until a few months ago however, when I spotted those castle walls and those two towers from the viewport in my cabin.

It was a particularly late shift. A few issues on the bridge had forced me to remain at the helm for far longer than I would’ve preferred. It was nearly midnight before I was able to retire to my quarters, and as I did so, I went through the same routine as I usually did. Taking the time to write, journal, and practice a bit of music composition before I went to bed.

Right before I decided to call it a night however, I spotted it.

Exactly as Shelby had described it.

A patch of grass with a single brick, at the farthest corner of your vision reflected off of a viewport.

I couldn’t move, not when I was afraid of losing sight of this vision before it could fully manifest.

The vision slowly but surely progressed, bit by bit, almost exactly like all the other accounts. It did look like space itself was being peeled away, like it was a window into another world. The castle I saw however wasn’t the one Shelby, or most of the others had described. Instead of the banners bearing the compass, there was instead a banner with a book, a shield, and two wands superimposed upon it. Instead of the largely intact walls, there was a large hole that gave way to what I assumed was the castle’s interior.

What was most striking of all however wasn’t the castle itself, but a figure that walked in front of it, whose form was decidedly bipedal and human but was otherwise entirely alien. Now I know what most would be thinking at this point. The standard gray aliens, or perhaps some other creature of the week from the likes of science fiction. But no. This creature was unlike anything I’d ever seen before. For one, it was decidedly avian, with a bright, striking plumage that popped out amidst the dreary blandness of the castle’s gray and brown color palette. What’s more, the way it moved, the way it shifted its head, the way it carried itself just wasn’t something you could replicate in CGI. This looked genuine, it felt real.

I knew for a fact that it was real because it didn't just exist in a vacuum with me as some unknown third party observer. It actually saw me. Its bird-like eyes widened and narrowed several times as it did several double takes around its surroundings as it seemed as baffled as I was.

At this point the vision was so vivid that it felt like the entire viewport was consumed by this world, like I was inside of it, as the avian creature moved closer and closer still towards the glass.

The closer it got, the greater detail I managed to accrue from its manner of dress. Like the castle behind it, it seemed to be dressed in an attire appropriate to its period. A grey cloak concealing a tunic and gown underneath, with that same compass-like sigil which was missing from the towers behind it, embroidered into its sleeve. 

After what felt like a full ten minutes had passed, its hand had eventually made contact with my viewport, at which point I started to walk over to see this bird creature up close.

However, before I could even take a single step, it all… vanished. It felt like I’d moved just sideways from an optical illusion that only worked if you looked at it from a certain angle.

The inky darkness of space returned in an instant, taking away the lush greenery, the castle walls, and the alien avian along with it.

I don’t know if I could really describe how I felt afterwards. Shock? That was certainly an emotion which resonated throughout the minutes and hours following that whole encounter. Disbelief? Certainly, because how else could you describe the feeling of seeing another world through the viewport of a ship? However, perhaps the single emotion I felt more in line with than anything else after the fact was an unrelenting and insatiable sense of curiosity.

I wanted to know just what I saw.

I wanted to find out if there was anything I could use to maybe, just maybe prove what I’d just experienced in a way that was objective and irrefutable.

However, just like Shelby before me, the logs, camera feeds, and everything else revealed nothing. Nothing but my dumb face staring at an empty viewport for a total of 10 minutes.

For the rest of the journey I assumed what I saw had to be the result of some elaborate, bizarre illusion. Yes, I wanted to believe it. I'd spent a good chunk of my free time studying, researching, and gathering all these stories in an attempt to form a cohesive narrative, but that was just out of a curious desire as an enthusiast for these sorts of things. When presented with this being something more than a string of eerily similar visual hallucinations, I just couldn't suspend my disbelief. There was no conceivable way what I saw was real, and I was certain I had gotten myself involved in some elaborate self-imposed delusion. 

That was, until I reached Midway Station, and I finally got a good look at my viewport from the outside of the ship.

There, in the middle of the large transparent metal which made up my cabin’s viewport, was the faintest hint of a palmprint.