The Foundry Missions: Introduction

 When it first started, Star Trek Online had mechanisms in place - sort of - for simulating the less shooty aspects of Trek stories.  These included diplomatic missions, and "exploration clusters" where you could go and discover strange new worlds (the plan was for these to be procedurally generated, Rogue-like, but in the even, the game couldn't support the generator, so what we got was several hundred randomly assigned missions created by the generator, not always to good effect.)  Eventually, these things were retired from the game - but not to worry! the devs said, for we still had the Foundry, the system for creating user-generated content, and we could make our own missions, diplomatic and otherwise, in that.

But the Foundry system broke with every major update to the game, and eventually the devs had to pull the plug on that one, too.

While it was running, though, quite a few people designed their own missions in the Foundry... and I was one of them.  The design interface was pretty rough, and I only managed to make two.  With them being gone, now, with the Foundry shuttered, the only way to preserve them is... write them up as fanfic, I guess.

So here's the first of them.  It kept breaking, itself, but the few people who played it seemed to enjoy it (even if they were cross with me over one point, where I used a Ferengi appearance to mask a notoriously over-powered Klingon Dahar Master.)  It's a slightly silly mission, so I thought the best thing to do was run through it with a slightly silly character in the driving seat....

Deep Gate: Introduction

And off I went on another tangent here, with a more-or-less self-contained storyline that doesn't reference much either in-game or in my own continuity.

After Kalevar Thrang and his relatively straightforward villainy, I decided to try something a bit different, with a primary antagonist who genuinely, sincerely, wants the best for everyone.  And has not the slightest compunction about deciding what "the best" means.  As a mulish sort of person myself, speaking personally, I'd rather have Kalevar Thrang.  At least you know where you are with a power-mad dictator.

One recurring character turns up - M'eioi, who I don't use often enough - and two new ones.  By this stage, I'd been through every option in the game's character selection setup bar two; playing as a Joined Trill, and playing as a Federation-aligned Klingon.  So, I followed up those options, and the results were Carayl Quon and Surella.  Also, I decided to abandon the "everyone's an admiral" thing... so, Carayl is an independent privateer captain (taking full and unfair advantage of her position - my view of the Joined Trills as a sort of Freemasonry is mine alone, but I can't see how they could reasonably avoid having a social network like that, over time), while Surella is a Starfleet Captain facing off against the worst enemy that can afflict a Starfleet Captain: Starfleet bureaucracy.

All this and zero-mass black holes, too.  Now read on....

Zero Hour: Introduction

"For a word to be spoken," says one of Ursula Le Guin's characters, "there must be silence, before and after."  Not that any of my rubbish deserves comparison with Ursula Le Guin, except on the very basic level of "Ursula Le Guin writes a lot better."  But there's a point there, which I've sort of taken.  Everything comes to an end.

This applies to recurring villains, even.  The affably evil Kalevar Thrang would just get boring if he never stopped trying to take over the galaxy, wouldn't he?  Useful though he is from a reusing-things point of view, eventually even I have to make the effort and think up a new antagonist.

I decided, for this one, to go back to the team that originally went up against Thrang - Tylha, Pexlini, and Heizis.  It seemed appropriate, since all three had a personal history with him - and he is the kind of person who takes things personally.  It also gave me a chance to wrap up another, unrelated, character arc... and to tidy up a few loose ends in the long-running background as a whole.  A few subsidiary characters, locations and other details get neatly disposed of in this one.

I make no apologies for Pexlini, by the way.  I find it amusing to have this scruffy little distaff Neelix crashing around doing the James Bond stuff.  This story contains what seem to be the Three Obligatory Scenes in any story involving Pex - the bit where she can't work the log recorder, the bit where she gets a minor scalp wound, the bit where she writes off a shuttlecraft.  It is positively as formal as a Jacobean revenge drama, this one, although possibly a bit more messy.

The Last Treason: Intro

Events in the game marched on; the fiftieth anniversary of the original Star Trek was marked by an event which let you create original series era characters, and then bring them, via time-travel shenanigans, into the game's present day.  I wound up with a bunch of these; one of them was a very minor character from "Claws" (Ronnie Grau's counsellor in the twenty-third century).  The focus, here, though, is on another one.  Original era Star Trek just isn't complete without someone faking a Scots accent.

The time travel stuff, of course, made me want to do a story involving precisely that... and it's hard to get one's head around, sometimes.  It's awfully hard to structure a plot when characters can, supposedly, go back in time and rewrite bits of it at will.  In the event, though, the main issue was not so much the time-travelling, as the antagonists working at cross purposes.  As poor old Thyvesh points out, even with time travel, you can only work with what you've got....

This one brings back and ties off another loose end - what exactly did happen to make Priyanapari so important to T'Laihhae?  I always like to re-use stuff where I can.  It saves wear and tear on my imagination.

The Death House: Intro

I admit, I do like writing villains.  And this story is... umm... pretty well supplied with them.

The Kobali started out as a weird-alien-of-the-week species on VOY; their gimmick is their "reproduction" system, which involves infecting the dead of other species with a virus that brings them back to life, but as a Kobali.  It's a disturbing enough idea.... When STO brought out its Delta Rising content update, the Kobali became an important background element, and they quickly made themselves very unpopular indeed.  This is because the storyline requires the player to cooperate with and support the Kobali... while also making it clear that the Kobali are, well, basically lying to the player throughout their entire storyline.

Untrustworthy body-snatching ghouls are easy to cast as villains.  So are corrupt and ambitious Klingon High Councillors, and unprincipled Orions and Letheans, and weird militaristic humans.  And so, of course, is the affably evil Kalevar Thrang, last seen in "The Wrong Box", and back again with another devious and overcomplicated plan to take over the universe.

This time, he's starting with the Klingon Empire, which of course puts him up against my KDF characters - Shalo, R'j Bl'k', and Rrueo, none of whom is exactly a paragon of virtue either.

In fact, after "Noonday Sun", with all its Starfleet high-mindedness, this one is quite a change in pace.  It's hard to find a single decent person in it.

I had fun writing it, though.

Noonday Sun: Intro

This one was me going off on sort of a tangent.... The Solanae Dyson Sphere is a setting in the game, and it is sort of briefly important - it figures strongly in one story arc, and then gets left behind as the players go off to the Delta Quadrant to do other things.

I felt that was kind of a shame.  The Dyson Sphere is big, and there is plenty of room in it for stories.  And there is a fair amount of in-game backstory about it, and there's room to develop that, too.  So I set out to do just that.

The characters I chose were a couple of undeveloped ones, too.  My Starfleet science officers, T'Pia and M'eioi - well, they've appeared before, but not as often as some of the others.  Since they're both sort of serious, straight-arrow, Starfleet types, I though it might be interesting to put them in a situation where those ideals came under a bit of pressure - from enemies such as the Voth, and from another source entirely.  (If you've ever wondered how Ronnie Grau gets, or keeps, anyone in her crew at all - well, there are worse choices than Ronnie to work for.)

So, this story's something of a detour, off into under-explored territory.  I had some fun writing it, though.  If nothing else, it is always interesting to write T'Pia, and try and fix things so that her natural Vulcan flat affect comes across as deadpan cool, instead....

The Wrong Box: Introduction

By the time I started this one, the major event of the Iconian War was over and done with; like most of the in-game big events, it just gets a tangential reference or two in the story.

We'd also had the "Delta Operative" thing in the game - effectively, an incentive to create a new character.  So I did, and here she is: Heizis, an excellent example of a perfectly balanced Reman - chips on both shoulders.  Since she wasn't likely to prove a barrel of laughs, I brought back Pexlini to provide a lighter touch, and Tylha to act as  - hopefully - a steadying influence on them both.

By this stage, both the game and the stories had so much internal continuity, it was silly not to use it.  So we get guest spots for the likes of T'Laihhae and Ronnie Grau,  and the return of minor characters like Paul Hengest from "Heresy", Gvochkorr from the stories dealing with Tylha's homeworld,  even a shout out to "Fallout" with a reference to DaiMon Prago and his illicit transwarp gates.  I like internal continuity, it makes the world seem more real.  And it means I don't have to think too hard and make up new things.  It's all good.

Vectors: Introduction

By the time The Three-Handed Game had ground to a conclusion, the "Delta Rising" expansion for STO had come out; a whole host of new worlds had opened up, a number of latex-forehead-of-the-week aliens from Voyager had become significant features in the game... basically, there were a lot more options on the table.

One of those options, for mugs like me who bought lifetime subs, was to play a Talaxian character... and so, I rolled my very own Neelix.  I had some ideas from the start as to what Pexlini's backstory might be, and what her personality might be like.

Her persona, as a somewhat disreputable interstellar Del Boy Trotter, needed a straight-arrow, upright, Starfleet sort of contrast.  Since the Delta Quadrant was new territory for the stories, I decided to bring in another new character, my Caitian science officer M'eioi, who'd only appeared in a couple of cameos before.

Part of the in-game background is the ages-old conflict between the Caitians and their genetically-modified counterparts, the Ferasans... since I already had a Ferasan character, I brought back Rrueo for this one.  To quote the late Patrick Campbell, I thought she and M'eioi would get on like a house on fire... or a gas main exploding.

This story also contains one of my most thoroughly hissable villains ever.... The Vaadwaur aren't presented with much subtlety in the game's storyline, and Tuarak, who is driven to be even more Vaadwaur than the Vaadwaur, positively revels in his nastiness.  And so did I, to an unhealthy degree.  I wish I could figure out some way of bringing Tuarak back... but that's the thing about villains, they've got to get their come-uppance in the end.

The Three-Handed Game: Introduction

So this is it.  The climax.  What would be the grand finale, if I'd, y'know, stopped writing at the end of it.

However, it is the conclusion of Ronnie Grau's big character arc, when we finally get a complete explanation of what happened to her in the course of her multiple time-warps... and I drew on a number of other things, like Q saving Tylha way back in my second Literary Challenge entry, so it all looks as though it's been carefully planned in advance and I am dead clever.

Since I was building this up as a narrative climax, it needed to be suitably, well, climactic... so I needed an adversary that started small and built up to galaxy-shaking proportions.  I indulged myself shamelessly in making the Siohonin leaders thoroughly nasty... I have to confess, I enjoy writing villains.  That probably says something about me.

Also, I enjoy making my main characters suffer.  I don't believe the heroes of a story should ever have things too easy; there's no satisfaction in seeing someone win a victory that's a foregone conclusion from the start.  So, I think, in this one, my characters get fairly comprehensively stitched up, beaten down, and knocked sideways, and that's all good in my book.  (One example: ever wondered what actually happens when you get blown up in space combat and have to press the "Respawn" button?  Basically, it's chapter 37....)

So.  What actually happened to Ronnie Grau in the Stygmalian Rift?  How, exactly, was she liberated from the Borg Collective?  And what is the awesome cosmic significance of Tylha Shohl's thing about Holst?  Read on to find out.

Claws: Introduction

This is one where I've deliberately ignored the limitations of the STO game itself.  I've always been a fan of M.R. James eerie otherness, and of Stanislaw Lem incomprehensible aliens; Claws is a venture into that sort of territory, and also deepens the ongoing mystery of just exactly what did happen to Ronnie Grau during her various temporal misadventures.

This one uses two of my KDF characters, Rrueo and R'j Bl'k', as viewpoint characters.  Both of them present some challenges.  Rrueo, being a Ferasan, is also a telepath, and it turned out that her habit of idly scanning people's minds and constructing metaphors for them... was a handy way to illustrate other characters.  As for R'j Bl'k', well, both she and her entire species started out as throwaway jokes, so it was hard work to turn her into anything like a credible character.

(If you ever run into them in-game, it's worth looking up their character bios.  R'j's contains some more information on the terrifying Mlkwbrians, and Rrueo's... is just amusing.  Be warned, though: Rrueo is pretty normal in these stories, but in-game she speaks in lolcat, and that's what her bio is written in, too.)

Heresy: Introduction

The thing about fanfic is, it comes with built-in limits.  You can't push the setting too far, or readers will complain about breaches of canon and the like.  You can't change the setting too much, because the next fic that comes along - fan or canon - will revert any dramatic changes you make.

The next long story, then, pushes at the boundaries of this limitation.  It sets up a situation which could break apart the Federation... and, since I'm not allowed to break the Federation, it means I have to find some way for my guys to fix things, however desperate the situation looks.  (Actually, fixing it was not my biggest problem, when it came to this storyline.  Shuffling the whole of the rest of Starfleet out of the way, so my guys were the only ones on the spot to save the day, now that was a problem.)

The main characters in this story are Tylha, Ronnie and T'Laihhae; it's the first time T'Laihhae appears as a first-person point-of-view character, and so this is the first look we get at her actual thought processes.  Previously, she's been enigmatic and well-informed - very well-informed.  This story offers some explanation of how she got that way - and also resolves her long-standing personal plotline with her former boss.

A few more of my characters get bit parts in this one.  By now, I'd added a Caitian and a Ferasan to my stable of toons, mostly for the fun of watching them bounce around.  As the crisis develops in the Federation, my KDF characters are around to comment on it and take advantage of it.  And there are brief appearances by my Starfleet science officers, T'Pia and M'eioi.  (There's a mention of a "young black-furred Caitian" in one scene where Tylha and Ronnie are in Club 47:  this is M'eioi, although she doesn't get an actual name-check until further into the story.)

This one was written before the end of the Federation-Klingon war, but not before I'd heard that the Earth Spacedock map was going to get a complete overhaul.  So I had no qualms about, well, the things Tylha does to Earth Spacedock at one point.  I mean, if it was going to get broken anyway....

Oh, and a one-off Literary Challenge story fits into the timeline here, about when Ronnie is off running patrol missions by herself.  It's one of my favourite Ronnie stories, that one.

Fallout: Introduction

This was where I decided to stretch myself (and my readers' patience) a bit. Although I carried on for a while with the Literary Challenges - and some of those stand-alone posts will crop up later, inserted into roughly the right spots in the overall timeline - I'd had enough positive feedback that it went to my head, and I wrote a long story with multiple points of view.

Perhaps more to the point, I now had two contrasting characters - the solid and serious Tylha, and the manic and scatterbrained Ronnie - who could play off one another in (I hope) an entertaining double act. I needed one more character to represent the Klingon point of view, and I picked Shalo, my Orion engineer, who is fun to write for different reasons from Tylha and Ronnie. The thing about Shalo is, she is not a bad person - by her own lights. She just happens to come from a culture which values honour and artistic vengeance, and isn't too fussed about the value of sentient life.

Of course, virtually nobody's a villain in their own mind, anyway - and that's the spirit in which I approached writing from the Klingon perspective. I tried to make sure they weren't pantomime villains, but serious-minded people, with goals that seem reasonable to them, setting out to achieve those goals in a reasonable way.

Which is why the death toll is horrific.

The Short Stories: Introducing Ronnie Grau

(More of me waffling about the background. Ignore it.)

By this point, I'd been through the new version of the Klingon character creation system (creating Shalo, who turns up a little later as a character), and was spending enough time and effort on STO that buying a lifetime subscription seemed - briefly - like a good idea. Unfortunately, the "good idea" thing lasted long enough for me to spend the money.... Tylha's next ship was named after Holst's opera and ballet "The Perfect Fool", this being the sort of person who'd buy a lifetime sub. Never mind.

This gave me access to the Liberated Borg character race, so I rolled myself a Liberated Borg. I also started one of my idle background projects (long-time fleet members may remember my attempts to have a full roster of colonists, all called Charlie Luhrs; this sort of thing amuses me and worries my friends and family), trying to get every possible version of the USS Enterprise on one character. It occurred to me to wonder how any one person might have come to command so many different ships from so many historical periods, and the answer I came up with was "eh, it's Star Trek, there are time warps and things all over the place".

And so Veronika "Ronnie" Grau came to be, a displaced person from the 22nd century who'd been through the clutches of the Borg on her way to the 25th. It seemed to me that anyone who'd actually gone through all that would be, not to put too fine a point on it, a psychological basket case... and that there were two ways of dealing with that, in my writing. I could have her confront and deal with her problems, with a maximum of fine prose and brooding angst - or I could have her deal with things by ignoring her problems as hard as she could, seeking out adventure and excitement and really wild things to distract her from the fundamental awfulness of her life.

You can guess which one I chose. I don't really do fine prose, anyway. You've noticed this by now.

The idea, too, of there being something of a mystery about Ronnie also sprang to my mind... eventually, this idea worked itself out, over the course of four long, long stories. I think it all made sense in the end.

However. The next entry is the very first appearance of Ronnie Grau on the forums. She's been enormous amounts of fun to write, and I hope she's just as much fun to read.

The Short Stories: Legacy of Romulus

(You can skip this bit too.)

By the time the "Legacy of Romulus" expansion was introduced, I'd got myself another two characters already - one of them, the Vulcan scientist T'Pia, appeared in the previous entry; the other, the egregious R'j Bl'k' (her species doesn't really do vowels) was my first KDF character, and makes an appearance in these stories, some way down the line.

"Legacy of Romulus", besides introducing Romulan characters, revamped character creation for the Klingon side, and expanded the game world significantly - meaning those of us writing in it had more options and more background to draw on. It was a pretty big event for the game, and, naturally, it became the focus of a Literary Challenge or two. So, for the first time in this lot, the storyline shifts away from Tylha, and onto someone else.

The next story, then, introduces my first Romulan character, and it's a story that I'm still pretty pleased with. It's sneaky, like Romulans. And it set the character up with a continuing background adversary - a storyline which found a resolution, but quite a way down the road from here.

The Short Stories: Introduction

(You can skip this bit if you like.)

This all started with the semi-official "Literary Challenge" threads in the Ten Forward section of the STO forums. I think they started out under the redoubtable Branflakes, then carried on for a while under the aegis of CaptainSmirk, and later became an unofficial thing in the new ARC version of the forums.

Every so often, Branflakes threw out a prompt, and people wrote stories inspired by it. Simple as that, really. I joined in some time after I'd started playing the game, and the number of Challenges was already well into the twenties. So there's a lot fewer of my stories than there are Literary Challenge threads, which might come as a relief to some.

I decided, for the purposes of these exercises, to model my character(s) in the stories as closely as possible on the ones I have in-game - this provided a sort of ready-made consistency with the game's background, and it stops me from too much power-tripping (my characters in-game don't have game-breaking superpowers, so they can't have them in the stories either.) Initially, this meant I was telling stories about Tylha Shohl, my only character at the time - who got portrayed as a slightly moody, introspective workaholic and something of an Andorian racist on the quiet. As the game developed - you can probably spot where season releases happened, as the stories go on (the actual start point is sometime towards the end of Season 5) - and I got myself more characters, things started to diversify a bit.

I'm starting off with the bulk of the one-off Literary Challenge stories, here. After I'd gone on for a while, I progressed into writing longer, multi-part stories, and - because these things develop a sort of internal continuity after a while - some of the one-offs fit in, chronologically, inside or in between the longer pieces. (This sort of internal consistency serves two purposes. It makes the storyline as a whole seem more solid, realistic and believable. And it means I can refer back to an earlier story inside a current one, pick up on some detail that didn't look important at the time, and pretend I planned it all way in advance, so I look dead clever.)

So here we go. At the start of all this, Tylha was my only character, and she was flying a Mirror Assault Cruiser called the USS Sita. (I'd already decided I needed some sort of naming scheme for my characters' starships, and - being me - I decided to name Tylha's after obscure musical works by the composer Gustav Holst. And then I made Tylha herself a Holst fan, and much later it wound up being a significant plot point, believe it or not.)

Some of these Literary Challenge things wound up being, well, squibs - mood or character pieces with no significant plot to them. On the other hand, some of them turned into pieces of writing I'm actually quite pleased with. For all the Literary Challenge stories, I'm including, at the start, the prompt for that particular challenge. You can decide for yourselves how close I've stuck to it.