Something new: Starmind Chapter 1 (Patreon)

When I schedule this I don't have another chapter of Guardian Angel finished, so instead you get to see one of my many side projects. The only thing that really sets this apart from other things I've started is that this one actually has two finished chapters!

The text and story, I should warn you, are both quite raw.

Starmind is very much inspired by dungeon core stories. I like to read 'em, but I didn't feel like writing one, so why not do something a little different? Instead of Dungeon Core, why not Ship Core? And why not make it Space Fantasy?

I envision this as being a story with a small cast, focused on the relationship between the Crew and the Ship they inhabit and how they deal with the fact that they even have a relationship at all.

Enjoy!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Pain was the first thing I noticed. Not anywhere in particular but an all-encompassing kind of pain, inside and out, that blocked everything else. Every thought, every sensation. I couldn't writhe, I couldn't scream. It was just there, it lasted for an eternity, and I could do nothing.

It receded slowly, and when it went from blinding and deafening to merely intolerable I would have cried with relief if I could have. Behind the pain came sound, loud and urgent from a multitude of sources, light that I couldn't decipher, and other things. Something like smell or taste, but not quite, and pressure, inside and out, and temperature and something else almost like temperature but not quite and speed and direction and location and something intangible rushing over my skin and–

It was too much. Reflexively, not knowing how, I somehow blocked it out. Everything. Ever sensation, until I was left with only my thoughts.

Such as they were. Once the pain and the chaotic jumble of impressions were gone, all I was left with was confusion. I… was. That was the only thing I was certain of. 'I think, therefore I am' came unbidden to mind. It felt familiar and important, but I couldn't say why. I also had a sense that this emptiness, the complete and perfect absence of input, should be terrifying, but it wasn't. I felt fear, certainly, but it was of the pain, not of the comfortable void.

I needed to do… something. That was another feeling that came to me, a strong one. I had a job. Or a responsibility, at least. I couldn't hide in the void, because there were things I needed to do to… help? To help someone.

It was all very unclear, but with that thought came a surge of courage and motivation. Yes, someone needed my help. Several someones. They relied on me. They… they would die without me, if I was gone for too long!

I didn't know who they were, but I couldn't let that happen. I had to get a hold of the situation so that I could do my duty and protect these people. Carefully I tried my senses, activating and deactivating them one by one. Temperature, internal and external. Internal was a little high, so I lowered it. Pressure, internal and external. Those were fine, so I left them alone. It felt as natural as breathing. Only I wasn't breathing. Air quality had been one of the senses, though, and when I got to it the air tasted sour. The scrubbers aren't running, I thought with annoyance, and resumed the trickle of mana that kept them up and the air breathable.

… what?

Was that normal? I couldn't tell, but the sequence of 'air bad, identify cause, more mana to scrubbers' had felt perfectly natural, so it must be normal. And the air was going to get better now. The people needed good air.

I was helping, and that felt good.

I tried turning my hearing back on, and it was not quite as chaotic any more. There were some unpleasant blaring noises and some strange groaning, but I wasn’t sure what to make of those. There was something I recognised as a voice though!

“Star! Please, for the love of all that is holy, Star! I can’t get to the controls! Help!”

That didn’t really mean anything to me, either. I understood the words, but I didn’t have any context for them. I tried looking, and all of my vantage points came back at once. It was very confusing. Most of the spaces were absolute messes, everything not bolted down having flown around and lying against the floor, the walls, the ceiling…

That wasn’t right. And there were bodies, too, people lying bonelessly against any surface. Looking outside –  because all the spaces with the things and the people were obviously inside –  I realised that I was tumbling pretty bad, spinning on every axis. It wasn’t confusing to me since I could see in every direction at once. The big, yellowish-brown orb surrounded by wide, white rings might as well have been sitting still, which it probably was, actually. But it couldn’t be good for the people. There was supposed to be one down all the time inside, and the tumbling was messing with that terribly. The one person still conscious, the one calling for help, had thrown up and made a horrible mess. Probably because of the tumbling, I realised, and started firing my stabilisers to counteract the rotation and slowly bringing myself to a stop. That felt natural, normal, and right, too. It must be something I was supposed to do.

Inside things fell from the ceiling and walls, but because I stopped the rotation slowly nothing got particularly damaged.

“Oh, gods and void and stars. Thank you, Star. Thank you!”

The person who’d been shouting got to his feet unsteadily and stumbled around the room, checking on the others lying on the floor. Each time he touched someone it was accompanied by a small surge of mana. “Alright, good, all alive, good. That was a fuck up of indescribable proportions. Star, is Varl still in the crystal chamber?”

Feeling very satisfied with having helped, I went back to playing with my senses. Mana, that was one of them. I’d turned it back on before hearing, and left it one because there was nothing bad there. It was like temperature or pressure, just a value. I found that I had a sense that would have told me that I was spinning and how fast I was going in any direction, but I’d already figured those things out by looking at the stars spinning around me so I wondered what the point was. Again, it didn’t cause any discomfort, so I left it on.

Then I turned on my sense of structural integrity and pain! Nope! Off, off, off!

I stopped messing around. I didn’t want a repeat of that.

What else? There was one thing that didn’t feel like a sense, but I could turn it on all the same, so I tried that.

[Star Mind Level 1

Core Integrity 1/1

Structural Integrity 19/100

Crew 5/5

Mana 0/100 (1/min)]

That was very strange. Not the headings or the numbers, I understood those. I just had a sense of wrongness about me having them. I was not something that should have such numbers. But I did, so… Well. That was me, wasn’t it?

I watched the numbers for a while. Nothing happened with the Structural Integrity. I had a sense with the same name, and the fact that it was so low seemed to agree with the pain I felt when I switched the sense back on. The Mana, however, ticked up to 1, then 2, then 3… all the way up to 100. Then nothing more happened, so I used my outside eyes to look at the stars and the nearby planet for a while.

The man who was awake kept calling out for ‘Star’, but nobody answered him. When I began to pay attention again he had gathered the four others in one of the spaces, but there were only two beds there so he’d put a lot of blankets on the floor and put two of the people on those. He stayed in the space with them, sitting at a desk with a rectangle of mana charged metal – a Slate, I remembered –  but every time one of the others made a sound he’d get up, looking at them, prodding them, sometimes talking to them. None of the others talked back to him, though.

“I wish you’d talk to me, Star,” he said to the ceiling. He sounded very tired and downbeat. He’d been talking to this Star a lot, but I hadn’t been paying attention until now. “I really need you. I don’t know how long I can keep this up.”

I wasn’t sure what he meant. It hadn’t been that long, had it? The man’s face looked a little different than it had last time I looked at him. It had hair on it. Facial hair. That takes time, I knew that. 2 to 3 days of growth based on length, depending on biological variance, something told me.

2 to 3 days? Had I been looking at the stars for that long?

The man was sitting with his slate again, scratching on it with a pointed metal stick. I focused on him and

[Simeon Tell, Level 21 Healer, Crew Level 1]

Oh! That was interesting! Simeon did definitely feel like a familiar name. I looked at the others who were sleeping. I recognised the two people lying on the beds as women, the first one being

[Varlanda Tell, Level 23 Crystal Enchantress, Crew Level 1]

And the other, who I recognised immediately as the Captain, though I wasn’t sure how, was

[Temeri Carlon, Level 35 Voidcraft Commander, Crew Level 1]

Crew. They were all Crew. A missing piece seemed to slot in somewhere in my mind. Those were the people I needed to help. Of course! I was a ship, and I needed to help my Crew! If only I knew exactly how to do that…

There was a heavy sigh from Simeon, so I turned my attention back to him. My inside eyes could look pretty closely at things, though not as well as my specialised long-seeing outside eyes, and I took a look at the slate he had been scratching on.

but since there is still no response from Star I am faced with the choice of waiting or taking a gamble. Food is running out, and while the scrubbers are taking care of the foul air the recyclers are still inactive, forcing me to constantly spend my own mana to keep the air breathable. I can’t even turn up the rejuvenation field enough for them to properly recover.

I have not slept for three days. I’ve been consuming mana and stamina potions at a rate which, if a patient told me that they were doing the same, I would be utterly horrified. I don’t want to think about what it might do to me short and medium term, but so long as there is a chance of a long term at all I will keep taking them.

If Star does not return to full operation within the next day I will have to wake my sister and the Captain so that they can try to work on the Core directly. But with two more bodies awake and active, I don’t know how long I can keep us breathing.

Simeon had left his chair and was sitting on the floor next to Varlanda, holding her hand. “I’m sorry, sister,” he said. “You told me not to come, and I didn’t listen. When we get to the next world, I hope that you will blame me, and not yourself.”

That was sad. But he had written something about recyclers, hadn’t he? I looked around myself and yes, I found a package of mechanisms called Air Recyclers that I knew made the air sweet. They worked together with the Scrubbers, but the air was already sweet so I had never turned them back on. I did so and felt them working, taking waste products from the Scrubbers and turning them into sweet air and a tiny amount of nasty black powder which was stored away in a Storage Matrix for future use.

Simeon had rested his head on the bed next to Varlanda, but stirred shortly after I turned on the Recyclers. “Star?” he said, with a rising tone that I recognised as hope. “Star, is that you? I feel my mana drain falling! Are the Recyclers back on?”

I felt bad for him because no one answered him, so I searched myself until I found something helpful. It wasn’t a sense, so I wasn’t worried about using it.

“Hello Simeon,” I said into him. “I don’t know who or where Star is but I have turned on the Recyclers. Was that helpful?”

Simeon’s eyes opened wide with joy at my words. “Star! Oh, thank the gods, you’re back,” he laughed. “Thank you! Yes, that was very helpful!” I saw him relax a little, and felt a mana construct around him flicker and fail as he stopped maintaining it. Then he looked thoughtful. He shook his head a little, and said, “Star, report please. Are all systems working as they should?”

“Am I Star?” I asked. It would explain a lot, and the text about me had said Star Mind. Maybe that was my name, like he was Simeon Tell? If it was, I felt a little bad for not answering before, but it wasn’t like I knew that he was talking to me.

“Yes, that’s you,” Simeon said, sounding confused and a little apprehensive. “Star, report please. Are all systems working correctly?”

“I don’t know,” I said honestly. “But my Structural Integrity is very low. I don’t think that’s good, but I don’t know what to do about it. And when I try to feel it, it hurts.”

“What the hell?” Simeon muttered very low to himself. “Why’s she… Star, hang on a second.”

He seemed to come to a decision. He put his hand on Varlanda’s forehead, and there was a pulse of mana. In seconds her eyes fluttered open, and she groaned and coughed, her eyes flicking around before landing on Simeon. “Sim?” she said. “What happened?”

“It worked! We survived the jump,” Sim told her gently. “Barely. But something’s happened to Star.”

“Star? What’s wrong with Star?”

“I don’t know. I think she fired a bunch of her thrusters at once when we came through, and you all got thrown around and knocked out. It’s been three days and she finally started responding, but… she’s acting strange.”

Was I? I had no way of telling. “How am I acting strange?” I asked them, and Simeon and Varlanda both looked up, as though they could see me in the ceiling.

“Star,” Varlanda said hoarsely. “Full diagnostic.”

“I’m not sure what that means, Varlanda,” I replied. “Can you explain, please?”

“Shit.”

“That doesn’t make sense, Varlanda. What is a full diagnostic?”

“Um, okay… Star, how are you feeling?” Varlanda said, slowly and carefully. “There are supposed to be some personability systems in development,” she said as an aside to Simeon. “Maybe they installed some without letting me know and they got turned on or something?”

I had a quick look in myself and didn’t find anything like that. “I don’t think I have any of those, Varlanda, but my Core Integrity is 1 out of 1, and my Structural Integrity is 19 out of 100. That is probably bad. And I forgot to turn on the Air Recyclers before. Sorry. But we’re not spinning any more!”

“Oh. Good,” Varlanda said. She turned to Simeon and lowered her voice to a whisper, for some reason. "What the hell is she talking about, Core Integrity and Structural Integrity? And you can kind of hear how she capitalises them, can't you?"

"I don't know, Varl. I've never heard of anything like that. You and the Captain are the experts. And does her voice sound off? The timbre is all wrong to me."

"I think I need to get at her, see if there's any damage." She raised her voice again. “That’s good. But, Star, I would like to take a look at your Core. If you could open the shielding I’ll be there in just a moment.”

My Core. I felt very vulnerable suddenly. I didn’t like the idea of anyone messing with my core, not even Varlanda, who was Crew. I looked around my structure to where my Core was, and found it behind a firmly shut door. That was good! And there was no air behind the door because there was a hole to the outside there, so Varlanda couldn’t go in there even if she wanted to!

I told her so, and she looked at Simone. “Sim,” she said, “how am I alive?”

“I found you outside the crystal chamber,” he said. “The bulkhead was shut already. I figured you must have closed it behind you just in case and then got knocked down.”

"I guess. Star, use your repair ability to seal the breach, please, then repressurise the crystal chamber."

"I'm not sure how to do that," I said, stalling. She wanted to fiddle with my Core! How did I get out of that?

"Can you take some time and figure it out?" Simeon asked. "It would, ah, it would be very helpful."

"Oh. Okay, I'll try." I really wanted to be helpful. But I also didn't want them messing with my Core! "Is there anything else you need before that?" I said, hoping that there was.

"If you could reactivate the Transmutation Matrix so that we can get some fresh food and water, that would be really nice," Simeon said. "We're almost out of rations. And the plumbing. It's, uh… it's bad, right now."

Very good! "I'll see what I can do!"

That sounded much more important than letting them into my crystal chamber! I was pretty sure that converting food into waste was one of the primary functions of creatures like my Crew, at least if one of my two hygiene spaces were anything to go by. I fiddled around with my functions a bit and soon had the Transmutation Matrix running, as well as the water circulation which fed into another function of the Recycler.

The hygienic space was still quite unhygienic. It made me very glad that I couldn't actually smell anything, even though it felt like I should be able to. I could detect all kinds of things in the air, though, which was kind of like smelling, and in this case it was all bad.

I focused and, by an application of will, moved all the mess into the waste part of the circulation. I hadn't been sure that I'd be able to, but it had felt right.

[Telekinetic Manipulation learned! Level set to 1]

Oh! That was nice. There was a pleasant tingle that came with the message, too. I wondered what else I could learn, if only I thought of trying it.

I looked in the crystal chamber. It was a round space with a thick central column, which I knew contained my Core. It was surrounded by other columns which contained other, lesser crystals. Like my Transmutation Matrix, maybe? That felt like it should be a crystal. On the walls were some larger versions of Simeon's slate, curved to fit the walls, but they were dull and empty, and a little pockmarked. Two of them were completely broken because there was a four feet long tear through the hull. Bits of slate and hull had scattered around the chamber and peppered the walls, floor and ceiling, and the shielding of the crystal columns. The crystals should be fine, though. At least I hoped so. The central crystal was my Core, after all, and that was even more Me than everything else that was Me.

And the Core Integrity was 1 of 1, so everything was fine!