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User:Lin/Pain and Chaos

2022-02-17T00:28:45Z

Lin: /* {{separator|f|Chaos}} */ some grammar...

{{author tag|Lin}}
{{XXX}}
{{byline|author=Lin|user=Lin}}

=={{separator|f|Pain}}==
Slowly her consciousness rose from the velvet blackness. Everything about her body felt like a tank had just rolled over her repeatedly, only to balloon her with air a moment later. Every heartbeat was like a hammer strike resonating in her ears. Even the faint light that made its way through her eyelids tormented her, searing into her like white hot lasers. She attempted to move ever so slightly, but even thinking about it did made her muscles scream in agony.

What felt like an eternity later, the pains began to ebb and wane eventually. Not as fast as her tormented brain screamed for, but it was enough that her thoughts could go beyond begging for them to stop.. Who and where was she? And what had happened to her? But before she could finish the thought, she sank away into an unsteady slumber again.

The moments between each episode of consciousness and the next could have been mere minutes, or hours; she couldn’t tell. The pain she remembered from her first episode of half awakening dulled down to an endurable degree. But as she attempted to move, she felt the protest of the tortured muscles in her arms and stopped. Instead, she tried to open her eyes . With quite an expense of willpower she managed to coax the eyelid muscles to follow her commands, forcing them apart with all of her thoughts. At first, everything was dark, but then she noticed a naked gas-discharge tube mounted against a steel ceiling, but the ashy grey color of it told her that it burned out quite some time ago. To her left, she recognized the rough texture of epoxy laminated paper. Inhaling under some pain, she forced her neck muscles to obey, turning the head to her right in what seemed to be a stop motion film . This short movement alone seemed to rob her of all of her power, but she managed, spotting a door ajar that allowed some flickering light to pass through. It was the flickering light from another discharge tube with a defect starter. The last thing she realized from the corner of her eye, was the white foam she lay stretched out on before darkness took her again; the same foam they used to fill mattresses in hospitals.

=={{separator|f|Chaos}}==

Once again, she couldn’t tell how long she had been away, but this time the pain was gone entirely. She opened her eyes, just to squeeze them shut the instant after. More light than her eyes could manage flooded the room and even tormented her through the closed eyelids while the silence was broken by a deep and low hammering. It sounded like a fly’s wings would make, but slowed down to a mere fracture and then increased in volume to make a deep dub. As the bolt of pain ebbed away, she tried again to see something, extremely slowly and carefully this time. The whole room was in the dirty grey and white she had anticipated, and the white foam underneath her was spotted with stains in different shades of yellow and red. Just ahead of her was a window in the wall, and through it streamed a cone of light, the very one that had blinded her only moments ago. It wandered through the room, revealing the items that lay there astray: a small pile of cloths, a bunch of plastic wrappings, and a nightstand with a folder upon it. The room was in chaotic disarray and the harsh light made it look even shabbier. A few moments the cone of light remained on the bare wall of the room while she remained motionless upon her foam bedding. Then, the light was gone.

Slowly she pulled herself together and up from her resting place. Surprisingly, the dim, flickering light that came through the doorway was enough to her to make her notice details that shouldn’t be visible in so little illumination. The texture of the dry cement on the floor seemed to stand out, the mostly polished down welding seams of the roof, even the dark grey stripes in the black curtains. She didn’t remember ever having good night vision, but then again, she didn’t remember too much about her past, or rather she didn’t remember anything but that this was a new sensation. The room felt just wrong, as if she never had been here before, and with a shiver, she realized she couldn’t even remember her name, or what she looked like. Taking a deep breath she lowered her eyes, looking down her frame while lifting her arms. The bare skin of her hands came into view, painted into a silky orange from the light passing through the door. About half a dozen colorful patches dotted her wrists, and she began to peel them off one by one before taking a look at the rest of the body that felt alien but well known at the same time.

Letting her eyes wander upwards along her arms, she noticed that they seemed to be quite slender at first. As she moved the lean fingers to peel off those colorful adhesives, she felt the tendons and dense muscles twist and bunch under the skin that was free of blemish or hair. Making her digits obey also made the stiff joints in them ache slightly. As the first of the plastic plasters came free, she noticed a silvery glistening liquid sticking to it and winced a moment on the chemical, biting smell it had.

With each patch she peeled off, the inflexibility of her articulations lessened and the movements felt more natural and smooth, almost nimble. Finally, the last one came free and she tossed it upon the small pile that had formed on the floor, before she stretched her arms fully. Twisting the hands around to feel each and every one of the sore muscles in her lower arms and then bending the elbows to do the same for the upper ones, she heard a crack as her shoulder joints snapped into place. It was not the painful scrunch from a dislocated bone, but more the relieving sound of cartilages getting the movement they needed after a longer rest.

Taking in a deeper breath, she locked the fingers of her hands into each other and closed her eyes a moment as she lowered her chin and pulled her hands to the back of her head, pulling down while she pressed against the hands with her neck musculature. On her palms she could feel the texture of the matted hair, which was just an inch or two short of brushing against her shoulders, then the muscles of her nape tensed while she moved her skull to the upright position again. As she lifted the lids of her eyes again, she spotted her calves and feet in another of the red-orange flashes from the door, but besides them being well trained and bearing a thick layer of hard skin under them, they didn’t seem too remarkable to her at first. Only as she let her eyes rest upon the toes a moment or two, she realized, that her toenails seemed rather pointed, almost sharp and clawlike. Shuddering she averted her eyes, reasoning with herself that they were just scruffy and would look ordinary once they would undergo pedicure.

As she turned her head to gaze down her back, the black stripes of the tattoo virtually jumped upon her. The first line followed her shoulder blade, its shape tapered towards the arm and the color fading towards the inner of it and a few inches lower a similar waved line stretched towards her ala. The next lines were invisible to her as she could not turn the neck far enough back, but at the lower back, she spotted a pair of forking lines, each and every about a thumb’s width or more in the center of her spine. Turning the head to the other side, it appeared to her, that the pattern etched under her skin was mirrored, spanning her whole back in a symmetrical way.
Eventually, she stood up, the rough skin on her feet touching the uneven cement floor. Two steps brought her over to the gaping door and she risked a peek through it. The room behind had white walls and down from the ceiling hung a pair of lamps, one of them creating the jitters as the starter made the neon in it flash up red in an unsteady cycle, the was only there as the rest of the cable which had held it up. Now, it lay shattered upon the odd metallic table that stood underneath. Roughly humanoid-shaped, it featured leather cuffs where wrists and ankles did belong to. Halfway hidden by the polished surface was a strange aperture with hundreds of cables and tubes that connected it to the bottom of the table. Only then she noticed the keyboard upon the steel surface between debris left by the crashing lamp.

On the other side of the room lay a toppled over creeper over something white, the contents spilled over the off-white ceramic tiles of the floor. Syringes and surgical instruments cluttered the floor between glass shards, and some of the metal objects stuck out of the dirty cloth that the cart was partly covering. As she carefully stepped between them to not harm her feet, her nose caught a sweetish smell and she had a strange feeling in her guts about what she was about to see. A shudder ran down her spine as she realized fully that the white object was the body of a human. The bald head of the man was turned in an unnatural way, his nose facing to his back and a trickle of red fluid ran down from his mouth and dried hours ago. Now that she was closer, a slightly sour and rancid smell mixed into the odor, creating a mixture that she almost instantly recognized as similar the stench of a steak left out of the fridge for a day. The corpse’s lab coat was soaked in dried, reddish-brown blood where it touched the ground and in his left he held the broken hilt of a plastic scalpel while his right forearm was amiss. Nauseated she turned and left the room in a hurry, feeling a sharp pain as she stepped into a glass shard.

Stepping back into the room she had woken up in, she did clamp her hand onto the doorframe as she tried to sort things out in her mind. Who was she? Why she was here and where was here? The harder she thought about it, the less she could find an answer, as if everything that had connected her to the life before she awakened had vanished. Only the tattoo remained, but it could certainly be that it was new too. She couldn’t tell. Eventually, her racing mind decided to follow a mere instinct; to leave this place. Just to grab everything which might be useful and then run.

Letting go of the doorframe, she stepped fully into the room, the red flickers casting the long shadows of her frame over the floor. Each step hurt slightly from the small glass shard in the ball of her foot. Only as she arrived at the pile of clothes she stopped, crouching down to take care of it. Carefully she peeled the piece of the broken lamp out of the wound, and instantly she was rewarded with lessened pain, but also a gush of blood. The metallic stench of it hung in the air and in an attempt to lessen the flow she bent down to try to lick the red fluid away. Slightly to her own surprise, she managed to twist her spine and leg enough to not only lick the blood away, but also to be able to suckle at the cut without discomfort. The salty and metallic taste filled her mouth, but it was almost alluring. Then the hard and sandy grains of silex dislodged from the gash, and in some kind of reflex she did spit them out.

As she pulled her gaze away from her foot, she caught a whiff of its smell. It was a strange sour odor that wafted upwards. Peculiar and mostly suppressed by the metallic smell of the blood from her foot, but she couldn’t say it was a rank aroma. Lowering the leg, her eyes followed the firm muscle of her calf to the shallow cavity on the inside of her knee as her hand followed on the outside at the same limb. Letting her fingers run over the kneecap, she caught the first deliberate look upon her naked thighs. Shapely they formed a gentle curve, hinting about the trained muscles underneath the skin and ending in a small dimple at the side of her hips. Her behind was, as she had seen from the look down her back, by far not perfect, better to be described as somewhat angular in her own opinion.

Resting her sore foot upon the ankle to keep the wound off the dirty ground, her left hand rested upon her knee, while her right hand found a comfortable position at her hip. Maybe they were not wide enough and a tad bony to be called nice and well-shaped, but at least they did flare out some in comparison to her waist. Sighing she lifted her eyes to take a look upon the room once again, but before she had found anything new, they returned to the resting point of her right hand, as if it was magnetic. As she looked upon the fingers with their almost well-manicured nails she felt they were quite a harsh contrast to those claws she had at her feet. Just a fraction of an inch away from their resting spot her eyes found a trimmed down bushel of hair, the color of them only describable as dark in the dim and reddish flashes of light from the other room. It could be anything between red and black, she thought a moment, taking it as a hint to her natural hair color. Auburn maybe, but for some reason, she thought a reddish-black would look good on her.

Staring at her lower body, she realized that she couldn’t have too much of a chest to speak of, as she didn’t see them bouncing into her field of vision from below. Letting her chin lower down against her collarbone to see more, she tried to gauge how much she really had, but found it pretty hard with nothing to compare against. So she did pull both her hands up, cupping around the mounds of her breasts and then squeezing the firm flesh. Hugging around a bit, she eventually found a position for her fingers to rest in a way that didn’t feel too weird, each of them slightly gapped to the next one and the pinky just at the lower brim of them. Still, she couldn’t tell how much that was exactly, but to her, they felt like a small handful, at the apex maybe a finger and a half, maybe two if she measured generous, away from her ribs.

Eventually, she changed her seating position into a kneeling one and started searching through the pile of clothing for something to wear...

User:Lin/Milk Run

2018-05-30T13:55:26Z

Lin:

{{Universe|FreeRIDErs}}
Foreword

Before I start, this is still a WIP, so things are subject to growth, maybe pieces get added, others realigned... -[[User:Lin|Lin]] ([[User talk:Lin|talk]]) 08:53, 30 May 2018 (CDT)

={{separator|f|Milk Run}}=
==={{seperator|f|November 125 AL, Southern Dry Ocean}}===

The blazing heat of the Dry Ocean made the air flimmer over the stretch of perfectly flattened ground. Clearly it was too flat, even for an eroded ocean floor, to not be artificial. Indeed, the edges had the marks of heavy construction equipment to flatten the 2 kilometer track, the start and end of it marked only by a pair of hardlight pillars. At the southern one a small pavilion provided cover for a group of people, their yellow and white Hazmat suits creaking as they moved in the tiny protected area. It wasn’t that they would need it yet, in the shielding of the tent, but the silvery object on the table was a rather delicate piece.

Under the harsh light from the tubes, gloved fingers placed the panels onto the distinctively feline body, the polished chrome hiding the pulsing Qubitite processors and Sarin batteries. The hissing whine of pneumatic screwdrivers sounded as each panel got fastened in place, then the gloves retracted one after another. Distorted through the Intercoms, a male voice resounded over the desert, the prelude of some a twencen rock cover chittering in the background, some runs almost sounding like the screech from pneumatic screwdrivers. “Assembly finished. Starting boot sequence. Clear the track, I repeat, clear the track.”

A single blue light appeared in the darkness of her slumbering mind, growing larger with each passing second. Disturbing her restful sleep, the silver avatar of a cat tilted the head at the pearl, a low curiosity in its features. What was it this time? Just another diagnostic check on her RI? Another function test? Moment by moment the ball of light grew, eventually illuminating the whole sanctum. The pedestal on which she had slumbered, the walls with all their screens, the entryway between the late empire pillars, all cast in the cold blue, before the light source ascended to settle into the ceiling. This was more than just the standard boot tests, she soon realized as piece by piece came online, the screens around the Avatar starting to fill out with status reports, one by one turning green.

With an electric crack, a speaker in the tent yelled a “Report!” at the crew, one of the white clad scientists promptly grabbing for the control to regulate it down a few notches. “Got a green status here on phase nine, commencing through ten, awaiting consciousness in 30.”

Things turned dark around the Avatar suddenly, the world shifted in a way that even for a RI was nauseating. Up and down suddenly realigned as the physical hardware replaced her mental sanctum, the inputs from the optical sensors replacing the status reports, the icy chill of the chrome skin becoming a physical thing, not a detached information. The world she had experienced only in the labs in pieces before became… She couldn’t quite describe it.

“Can you hear us? Are you there?” rang a distinctively female voice from a short yellow suit.

“Status Green, Doctor Munroe. I am here, but I can’t move.” the RIDE replied, the chrome clad face moving only minimally. “Is it time for a full function test?”

“Yes, it is. We will loosen your fetters in a minute. In the meantime, check the instruction file.” The radio from the doc crackled a bit, as the interference from the magnetic storms got worse. “Changing to Lasercom.”

“Doctor Munroe, I just have to run down those 2 Kilometers, switch to skimmer and come back? Is that really everything?” the RIDE replied, only managing to tilt the head from its position on the working rack as the fetters overrode all other movement, declaring them unneeded.

“Exactly. The funding of the project is in question. Command gave us one chance to prove that you are worth the money they give us instead of reworking the Fennec line. Please, don’t disappoint us.” The concern was more clear as the voice came over the laser. “Get on your marks.”

It was a strange feeling to touch the floor the first time for real after countless hours of test runs on the stand, in which the legs at best had touched a lab table, if at all. Wobbly the new RIDE set step by step, the internal gyroscopes demanding tail movements too large to keep the balance for the first couple of steps towards the hardlight shield of the pavilion, but with each step, she got better.

As she reached the shimmering barrier, an alarm resounded over the barren wastelands, then the green shielding flickered and shut down, allowing the chrome cheetah to pass through into the Q-dust. One last look back to the tent, the shield back up again. “Good Luck,” was the last transmission of Doctor Munroe before the coms cut out. She never heard the last words of the doctor, as they never were sent. “Everything depends on you now.”

As she had reached the mark on the ground, little more than a black line of laser burnt earth in planished the white chalk of the ground, once again the speakers over the desert strip came to life, an elderly male voice this time, one the experimental RIDE didn’t knew. “T minus 30 seconds. All hands on deck, repeat, all hands on deck!”

The hardlight pillar flashed up, red orbs turning yellow out one by one, each joined by a fanfare, until they all changed to green with a howl. Deep the alloy claws cut into the white rock as the chrome clad RIDE jerked forward out of a stand, accelerating witch each leap. A cloud of white dust rose behind her, the back bent like a snake. The long tail movements for balancing out the body was taken over by the code adapted from flight stability computers for fighter aircraft, allowing the 300 kilograms of cat to seemingly float over the Dry Ocean without a single antigrav lifter kicking into action, only one of the feet touching the ground at most. Hardlight shielding flickered on around the feline head, but instead of the fur many RIDEs sported, it was a sleek, aerodynamic shielding, reducing the drag as she broke the 100 km/h, allowing to speed up some more.

The dust trail at the start hadn’t even settled when the RIDE broke the sound barrier just 406 meters short of the finish line, one clock in the pavilion stopping at 9.37 seconds while the graphs on several screens showed the top acceleration at the start of the track had been 3.7 g. Not even a full second later, another timer froze at 10.02 seconds, the associated speedometer freezing just shy of 400 m/s. In the distance, the dust cloud grew rapidly upwards as the slender frame of the cheetah turned on the lifters and then tilted the upper body up to get as much reverse as possible.

Pebbles were ripped out of the ground as the legs changed configuration, panels shifted and the whole body violently bucked in the process. The front legs fused into a single, almost fragile front extension while the back ones unfolded into a pair of wire wheels, tilted inside at the top. The vehicle was more resembling a sled, the empty pilot cockpit hanging low to the ground and leaving just a hand's width between the belly of the RIDE and the ground. The engines howled as the fragile race machine went into a U-turn, and she overshot the end of track marker by half a kilometer before the wheels touched ground again. Dust and chalk once again was ripped from the aeon old bed of the long evaporated ocean, the experimental RIDE dashing towards the tent again.

Closing in on the sound barrier again, the hardlight emitters flared up, altering the aerodynamics with stubby aerofoils. First they pressed the skimmer down, but then changed the configuration to provide lift and force the light vehicle to break from the ground. Losing contact, the back wheels rotated upwards, acting as some kind of elevator in what could best be described as a Ground Effect Mode, just a meter or two above the surface.

{{seperator|f| }}

Inside the tent, Doctor Munroe had taken off the helmet of the Hazmat suit ignoring the Q-dust alert howlind, her eyes affixed to the 10.02 seconds. 2 hundredths of a second. Enough to be considered an error in measurement! “Commander, she can do better! Give her a second try!” she yelled into the comms.

In a Nextus command bunker abandoned right after the Sturmhaven war, the elderly commander made a gesture towards his com officer to cut the connection. “Execute termination, change status of project CTH-LSR-000B2 to failed, erase the files and notify Miss Bertrand or she will have your heads for the boss. And bring me a new cup of tea, this one tastes bitter. Pronto!”

Far above the desert, a shooting star appeared in the desert sky, rapidly growing and changing from a silver-blue, to a blazing red, a blazing trail of ardent fragments following up the descending object.

Howling in frustration, Doctor Munroe slammed her fist onto the computer clock, the heavy acrylic glass neither giving the satisfying sound of breaking glass nor even budging under the impact. Tears in her eyes, she looked over to her colleagues, their faces under the hazard suits showing shock and resignation, even tears. “Nikita… Do it. Let’s give her at least this.” Her voice was broken, as she turned a key in the console, her postgraduate doing the same at the one in front of him. “Let’s hope she’ll do better than us.”

{{seperator|f| }}

The tent in front of her grew, the finish line closing in. The roar of the falling tungsten rod shook the desert as a single communication laser hit her, the package in it just a single line. “Good luck out there, baby.” Strange, she thought, then her navigation suddenly went haywire, the waypoint of the end pillar replaced by some location thousands of kilometers away to the north, through the depth of the Dry Ocean. She couldn’t tell why the target changed, but with shrieking lifters, she changed course, speeding past the pavilion at roughly than Mach 1.4, the left back wheel almost making ground contact as the skimmer turned into a tight curve.

In a thunderclap, the deorbited tungsten penetrator hit the pavilion, the supersonic alloy ripping through the equipment deep into the ground, the heat of its descent scorching everything within half a kilometer within an instant. The earth shook in violent tremors for miles, and the plasma storm of the burning air expanded, rushing towards the RIDE on escape course.

Roaring the shockwave dashed in on the Skimmer, the back wheels losing contact first as the flat trike got thrown around, dark marks appearing on the polished chrome as she was hurled away. The gyroscopes told nothing that could be interpreted in a sane manner, claiming upwards was left and right at the same time, then the ground impacted hard on her right side. Metal protested as the thin shell of the driver’s cocoon was pushed inside, then everything went dark.

The gleam of the outer world vanished as the cheetah was yanked back into her mindspace, status screens on the walls all around flashing with red and orange, some even having turned entirely red with black letters yelling error messages to the feline avatar. The blue light in the ceiling dulled, then one system after another turned off, fetters forcing those still running into emergency hibernation. The last she saw before falling into slumber was the blue orb in the ceiling turning green slowly, and from the corner of her eyes she thought to have seen some kind of maggot.

==={{seperator|f|14 July 146 AL, Aloah}}===

Harsh spotlights hit the chrome body the of derelict RIDE, the feline shape curled up, the right side dented and bent, but someone had spent hours to clean the scorch marks and polish the smaller scratches out of the chrome clad shell. A white label attached to the boxy head’s cheek read the lot number and offered to download the specifications from the sleeping beauty.

“Next we have lot 1912. Salvaged RIDE, Cheetah Design, 300 kilos, unknown manufacturer, no stored ID or previous owner on file, RI core in hibernation. More specific details you find in the catalogue. This item is sold as is with a starting bid of 300 Mu.”

“Cheap. I wonder what’s off with that thing.” Dominique Marie Dumas muttered under his breath, pulling up the file onto his data specs. “Seems to have run for almost no time if the size of the memory files is a good indicator. But the timestamps seem rather corrupted. When was the Cheetah line released again? Too bad I forgot to download the ‘Osprey New Vanguard - RIDEs of the Nextus-Surmhaven War’ earlier.”

More out of curiosity, the young man kept his eyes on the bid field for a second, before setting up his limit to 500 mu, halfway expecting that some rich collector of early RIDEs would try to snatch the machine as a bargain, or even a miner with a very tight budget who just needed any RIDE to continue working. But then again, the specs highlighted the lack of the standard pulse cannons just as much as the hardlight emitters were just rudimentary, but that could just be a sign for a nextus origin. On the other hand the design philosophy of the the makers had somehow valued receiving a message from several klicks with a lot of scatter important, but not replying back, as the actual comm laser only was specified to focus tightly enough only on distances less than a tenth of that.

“300 from the man in the green shirt, do I hear 350? 300 going once, anyone 350? 300 going twice, 350 for the lady in red, 400 from the green shirt again, do I hear 450? 400 going once, anyone 450? 400 going twice and sold. Congratulations to Mister Dumas. Now onto lot 1913. Demilitarized Heavy Assault Armor...”

Dominique barely had registered that the man on the auction block had issued the sale to someone in his monotone voice without much separation between the sentences just because the spotlights changed to a different stand. The steady rumor of the auction hall rose and fell like a wave, as a stagehand in a black gorilla RIDE - probably a KingKong-3 model, judging from the oversized muscles - started to push the hover platform with the cheetah RIDE off stage while a colleague in an old Nuevo San Antonio Heavy Assault Komodo pushed in the lot 1915. Only when his specs showed up a bill over 400 mu, he realized that he had just won the auction.

The slightly perplex look was still on his face when he reached the counter, uploading the proof of payment to the teller, a copper colored fused BBV in a white tux, though it was hard to tell if it was a genuine PSA or the Nextus IMA offshoot. “Uhm, I am a first time buyer, where can I claim my lot?”

“Let me look that up a second.” was the perfectly modulated reply, something about her movements being just a tad too perfect. “Ah, here it is. Dominique Marie Dumas, Lot 1912. Undesignated Cheetah without documentation, sold ‘as is’. I am legally obliged to inform you of the risks of fusing with a RIDE of unknown repair status and gender, including RI breakdown, malicious hidden software and crossriding. Would you please sign here? Your purchase is packaged for transport just this moment.”

With an all too fluent movement to not be precisely trained or designed she held the pad to him, that foxy smile showing just the right amount of teeth to not be threatening but attractive. Something in Dominique shuddered as he took the datapad to skim over the notes, just making a light contact with the hardlight fur of the Fuser’s hand. Someone must have spent countless hours to finetune it to feel perfectly silky.

Fumbling with the pad a moment longer than necessary to sign with a press of his right thumb, Dominique thought about how to ask the girl out, but then just sighed and gave back the pad. It was a dumb idea anyway - and she might get such propositions any day en masse. “Here. And...”

“Your purchase will be delivered right over there, and indeed, I would appreciate you to not ask for a date. It would be all humiliating for both of us.” ‘’:Especially since I don’t swing that way. Sorry, but I run her in passive.:’’

The sudden male voice on the phone in his specs made Dominique shudder, the cheeks flushing. Embarrassed he almost dropped the pad. “Uhm… how did you…”

“It was written all over your face, Mister Dumas. But a ‘’Lady’’ can keep secrets, and I will never mention it unless you ask me to. If you would turn around, you can see your RIDE coming from the storeroom just this moment.”

Dominique couldn’t tell if there was some chuckle put into ‘’her’’ voice as he followed her request, seeing the Gorilla from earlier pushing a flat black plastic box on a hoverpad in. In contrast to the box that followed after him, it looked almost punny, but the white stencils claimed its contents to be the RIDE he had just purchased. “Uhm, one last question… The documentation didn’t really say much about this. Called it undesignated.” Dominique asked, pointing to the line just under the lot number.

The fox morph just lifted her shoulders, but the Gorilla did answer, his huge index finger tapping on the panel. He sounded like a rasp on hardwood. “It is, as the designation is incomplete. That’s as much as we could figure out without breaking into the RI and risking damage. You saw the mention of heavy worm damage? CTH(?)-LSA is all the worms didn’t eat of that bit. Well, actually LS, but the last letter according to Nextus standards is obvious, isn’t it? Anyway, have fun with it. Will be a hell of a project to get the core back out of hiding.”

==={{seperator|f|15 July 146 AL, Aloha}}===

The light in the garage was rather gloomy as Dominique entered, and sending the light command to the mesh of the refitted storage didn’t change that. With a sigh he began to search for the manual switch on the right, only to find it on his left, perfect for not forgetting to switch the light off when you leave the building.

A flickering “thunderstorm” with clicking “thunder” later, the bright xenon tubes at the ceiling cast their sterile light onto the matted steel table and the black box upon it. Stepping closer, Dominique’s fingers trembled and he had problems to open the fast release locks in his eagerness to see his very own RIDE. The heart pumping like a jackhammer, he lifted the top, but after a tiny bit a pneumatic cylinder took over with the telltale hiss, revealing the contents.

Like an expensive collier the silver cheetah lay on the dark red smartfoam, the polished chrome surfaces reflecting Dominiques face back in a distorted manner. He could make out his latest attempt of a proper beard in the shape of muttonchops on his bony cheeks. “Hello there, beauty...”

Perfectly knowing that he wasn’t a professional mechanic, let alone a RIDE one, he took his time to mount the slender RIDE onto the stand, once more wondering what made someone strip a LSA from weaponry or even some standard communications. But once he had the delicate piece of machinery on the stand, he realized it was a piece of cake to remove the paneling, the plates coming off almost by themselves the instant the few screws were removed. That was not exactly what the CTH-LSA-002 manual had described about having to remove the plates with “gentle force” after unscrewing a dozen hexbolts.

An hour later Dominique tossed the manual into the virtual paper bin in a wave of frustration, the wiring schematics looking so unlike what he found under the shell of his RIDE. Whoever made it, didn’t just skip on installing the weapons, he seemed to had stripped any wiring from the tree that was not essential, and wherever they had hidden the RI release, he couldn’t find it. It was hard to admit failure, but this was much above the skills of him. He was a librarian, not a RIDE wizard, and all he could figure out that he didn’t got a LSA-002. With a sigh, he pulled up his address book and called Jo’an.

{{seperator|f| }}

“Ok, let me see your sleeping beauty ‘nick” the short man in bib trousers said as he pushed his wide frame through the warehouse door into the makeshift workplace. “You know, my college bunk years ago had more elaborate tools than this. But at least you ‘’have’’ a cradle.”

“Joan, that’s not the problem. You know, I was lucky to get a free garage this time of the year.” Dominique answered, having put on a t-shirt in addition to his usual beach trunks for the cool temperature of the workshop, at least for Alohan standards.

“And you know you should have brought your little pet project there to my place in the first place. Now you started disassembling your sleeping beauty without me and took all the fun of that from me.” A moment he stopped and twirled the impressive moustache over his lips as he eyed the exposed internals of the cheetah RIDE, then turned to the door again. “Sebastian, bring your fat behind in already! You gotta see this yourself!”

“I’m not fad, I am well rounded, Jo!” came back in a deep bass, just before the walrus RIDE pushed open the door with the head, sporting a very very tusky grin from under a moustache equaling Jo’an’s. “And I know you like ‘em well rounded too. Just a piddy Aloha is overrun with skinny beach babes… Holy Cow, is that whad I think id is?” Jo’an nodded only in silent answer.

“What? Am I the only one who’s left out of this?” Dominique asked rather embarrassed, exchanging looks between his old childhood friend and his ride. “You know I could tell him about that day when your parents forced you to wear the girls school uniform…”

Jo’an just chuckled, joined by a hearty . “You know, RIDEs share memories with their RIDErs. Basti knows all about that day, just like he knows i prefered trunks to bikinis even before I broke the wall.”

“Ok, ok, I can’t embarrass you in front of him, Joan, but could you please tell me what is so special that even Sebastian freaks out about it? It’s not like it’s an antique or something, right?” Dominique’s face was showing even more confusion than the moment before, and a few moments later he frustratedly slammed his hand on the desk, switching the holoprojector in it online.

With a chuffing sound that doubled as as a laugh, Sebastian instantly hijacked the projector, pulling up Newman’s Ride Encyclopedia on it and then a few diagrams “Id’s rather obvious. See thad? These are the motherboards of a GDE-RMR, a LEO-HAA and a BBV-PSA. You see the difference?”

Staring at the floating images, Dominique shook the head, pointing at the edges in guess “I am not sure, but that chunk there is only on the LEO?”

Jo’an chuckled as he nodded “So, you see that there is not too much a difference, aye? Now look at what you got there on the table and tell me, do you got something like in those pictures or something different?”

Looking to his RIDE and then the pictures again, Dominique tried hard to compare them again, then it struck him. “You mean, that is not what you’d expect in layout?”

“Exactly. Someone did a pretty custom on this one. Well, not all custom, ‘cause everything is there as far as I can tell. No, they just didn’t solder up what they should have and instead used adapters and jumpers.” Jo’an sighed as he picked up the casing Dominique had dissembled earlier, carefully eying the screws and seals. “Like somebody had expected to need to get in there a lot to replace parts. You would expect that only for very error prone RIDEs or ones you wanted to tweak a lot. No, not even then you would put every single chipset on its own board.”

“So, what you’re telling me is..." Dominique didn’t finish the sentence, instead looking at the RIDE with utter fascination and confusion.

“Mighd be a prododype, man.” Sebastian responded, nodding with the whole upper body. “And a rather preddy one, even if a bid skinny for my liking.”

“You’re kidding me, right?” Dominique asked, but only got a double headed head shake back.

“No kidding, that is either a homemade, a really fucked up machine or a prototype, and nothing guarantees it works anymore. Where did you get your fingers on that heap of parts again? I would expect such a shoddy thing to pop up in Bartertown, but here?” Jo’an asked, once again twirling the moustache in the same way his former female self used to twirl her hair before going bald and male.

“It was a legit auction. They liquidated a bunch of storage rooms and small businesses over at the south side…”

“And you thoughd id would be smard to buy the firsd besd RIDE catching your eye withoud calling in a professional opinion.”

“Not exactly. I mean, yes, it was the first that caught my eye, but I thought someone eccentric would outbid me for sure!”

“And now you own this shoddy pieced together DE with an RI that, if those files you showed me are correct, is either completely broken or in sleep mode since about two decades. What did you expect from a storage auction? Plug and play?” Jo’an looked a bit angry at Dominique, but seeing his shoulders slump he grabbed the screwdriver with a sigh. “Come on buddy, let’s close it up and haul it to my place, I’ll see what I can do to try to at least get it working somehow. I can’t guarantee that you won’t need to get a new RI or even keep much of those internals, but I will do my best to at least keep it looking like a cat.”

==={{separator|f|19 July 146 AL, Aloha}}===

After a week of dealing with lots of college students that had trouble to find their way through the library or just failed at downloading their books from the servers, Dominique had spent most of the friday with sorting the physical part of the botany collection again. While he loved his job usually, the students that didn’t put the books back to either the right shelves or the dedicated ‘I have no idea where this belongs’ shelf made it tedious.

Stepping out of the dimmed light of the library into the bright afternoon of Aloha, he had to blink a few times until his eyes had caught up to the illumination level. The gentle curved shapes of the university’s buildings were pretty, but they also made him feel small as he passed down the almost barren road towards the bay on foot. While he had a skimmer, finding a parking lot on friday mornings was a hell as every single student who couldn’t afford a RIDE would appear hours before the library opened and lectures even began, just so they could vanish from the place that was supposed to create the elite of tomorrow in a stampede towards the bay. Some days he even suspected them to park on thursday night and then come to the classes on foot, only to manage that feat.

But Dominique Marie didn’t mind the walk really. With just a centimeter or two short of two meters, he wasn’t the slowest walker, and the one girlfriend he had in his past, incidentally also a Marie, Marie Florence du Mont, had always complained about him running when he was merely walking with his usual steps. It didn’t help that she would always introduce them to people he didn’t know as “I am Marie and he is Marie.” He didn’t liked that very much, but for the better part of nine months they had been a thing, till she ended it.

The moment he turned from the spacious boulevard to a narrow side road to cut the way short, the high buildings with their reflecting surfaces vanishing from sight. Barely able to see the sky, Dominique sighed, but that shortcut saved him about half an hour and he wanted to try to get back to his pet project, now that it was stored at the Arc Garage.

{{seperator|f| }}

Woken from slumber, the cheetah stretched the back in her very own world, something about the small cave with its familiar, dim red pulsing screens all around feeling amiss. All the systems were claimed to be down like almost all the time she could remember but for the battery indicator. For some reason it showed up a full charge, and there was this tiny tickle at the base of her spine that felt like a current flowing up along it. But then again, she remembered very well to be covered under a load of rock, so it might be finally the sensors failing. Yawning, the cat repeated the stretch to slowly trot towards the dim cave entrance, looking out to the shrublands that covered the world for as wide as her eyes could see.

Out there were a few trees, offering shade in the burning sun of the sahel, but far to the west was also what she had called the black canyon. The sound how the wind howled there was maddening and she didn’t dare to get to it usually, but she also knew that it hadn’t been always there. Averting her eyes from that hideous scar though her mental landscape, she focussed on the east instead, from where a few lazy clouds over the horizon told about the upcoming rainy season.

Almost tasting prey upon her tongue, she stretched in the sun again, before pushing her head up to gaze into the sky directly. How long was she doing this again? Her time signal was out of date for felt ages. When did they tell her to have good luck? Weeks? Months? Years ago? Time in here didn’t matter really, and she was determined to try to have good luck as long as she could in this world of her own, even knowing that one day it would come to a halt together with her when the battery would run out.

But today wasn’t that day, she said to herself, pushing her nose into the wind to take in the smell of the plains. Slowly, she moved down the small hill that housed her sanctum, moving towards the east on light feet. Some moment the world seemed to slow down, loose color and she felt cold, but a moment later the warmth and color returned. Was her time coming to an end eventually?

{{seperator|f| }}

“Ok, here goes the core to the cradle.” Jo’an said, wiping the sweat of his forehead before looking over to Dominique, who had bitten into his lip to the blood as he saw his friend put the glowing orb from the tight cavity of the feline head to the open bowl. “Tell you what, I wouldn’t have expected a twenty year old RI that hasn’t been used for most of that to be in that great shape. You might be lucky not to need a new one.”

“And… what now? I mean, you are the expert here.” Dominique asked, looking over to the chassis. Once again stripped of the outer shell, it had taken them the better part of the rest of friday to get the skull open.

“The fun pard, pard’. Disassembling, cleaning and replacing.” Sebastian chimed in, dragging his massive body to his partner - and then threw himself at the heavyset man, chest opening for the fuse.

“Gread do have thumbs ‘gain.”

“I still don’t get why you’re so squeamish about touching the cores Sebastian.”

“You wand to handle human brain? Id’s the same for me.”

Dominique chuckled a bit, sucking up the blood from the lip. “Do you have that discussion more than once?”

“Every time we do this. Now let’s have some fun.”

==={{seperator|f|20 July 146 AL, Aloha}}===

They had worked through the night, and the whole workbenches of the Arc Garage were covered in parts, all carefully sorted and some even labeled. In the cradle, the RI core pulsed gently, while Jo’an, Dominique and Sebastian had settled around the coffee fabber.

“Want to hear the good news first or the bad news?” Jo asked, taking a deep sip of the hot beverage.

With a sigh, Dominique peered into his mug, then looked over the the bare skeleton of the cheetah on the rack. “The good one.”

“Well, it’s in pretty damned well shape for being neglected for 20 years and the actuators are even better than some of the new stuff I could get my hands on - whoever made those knew how to coax the maximum out of them. But on the other side? I will need to rewire everything. A lot of the subprocs will need a serious update, and that is not counting the missing parts. Those and the hardlight don’t exactly come cheap.”

“How much we talking here?” Dominique inquired, his eyes showing a bit of worry, before something in the back of the mind nagged at him. “And why do you always use it to refer to... it?”

“Fifteen to sixty, depending on what we need, what you want and not counting the hours. Oh, and you better start to look out for some nanos to fill her up. The stem seems ok, but I couldn’t find the specs of it, so better fill it up with the best stuff you can find to evade nasty surprises.” Jo’an sighed and pointed to the heap of machinery taking up loads of space in its separated shape. “You see anything indicating it’s a girl or a boy? Once we know I will use the right pronoun, but till then it’s a neutr.”

“You don’d wand to call a gal a dick, don’d you?”

{{seperator|f| }}

It had been a good hunt, and while it was entirely a game of her fragile mind playing both sides, but it kept her sane and stated the primal hunger. Somehow she knew it wasn’t the real deal, but then again, she never really had a chance to try to use Nature Range, or for the matter any of those games that needed a partner. Or at least she couldn’t remember to ever have used them. But besides the blanks in her memory from far ago, ones she couldn’t fill in, she had almost perfect recollection of her time alone. At least she thought so, when she climbed the mound she was perfectly sure to house her sanctum and didn’t find the entry.

Confused, she traced back, looking for her usual landmarks and finding them well in place. Even the shallow depression at the top of the hill she could find again, but not the hole under the small bush that lead to where all the status reports of her DE should await her. Had the frame eventually failed fully, and she was running on her last power reserves? Did her... parents... send her off into the wild only to have her be buried by rock and dust for years until she was corroded away by Qubitite dust? Or was there another reasoning for her being unable to find what she considered home?

{{seperator|f| }}

“Surely not! I mean, what you can do now? I mean, to get my RIDE into working order…” Dominique was stopped by his friend lifting the hand.

“Let’s not jump the boat here. The fastest I could do is look for a CTH-RMR from RIDEworks and just plug the core in. Risky, for the specs might be totally off, and not the cheapest. But you might have it running tomorrow. I could start to sort out the mess of a motherboard and work out the other missing parts as we go, that should surely wake our sleeping beauty up once we plug her back in, but it takes time and money. But…” Jo’an looked to his partner, who just lazily was floating on his back in mid air, the stubby fin-arms flapping on his belly.

“You think whad I think you think? Hosting some games for it? Thad’s a cheetah, nod an orca, dolphin or something aquatic. I doubd it would even like my server. You know how cads are with wader.”

“Comeon you PITA, it’s just to check if it’s even worth to start rebuilding it from scratch. Do I have to remind you of our deal Basti? About staying together through thick and thin?”

Dominique snickered as the two bickered like that all the time, to him just a signal that everything was ok. Because the only time he had seen them just agree to one another without exchanging some bubbling as thick as their blubber was when they had to dig through a wreckage they couldn’t salvage at all. “Allright you squabblers. How about Joan and I go to grab some real breakfast and you look after our patient in the meantime instead of banging your heads together?“

“Deal. But whadever I find thad isn’d essendial to fixing, is only the padiends to dell. Professional discretion, kay?”

Dominique looked rather disbelieving to the RIDE, but then sighed as Sebastian put up the best displeased walrus he could muster. “Ok. Come on Joan, they only have bagels till noon.”

{{seperator|f| }}

Connecting up to the cradle and initiating a proper shutdown was something Sebastian had done countless times when the repairs of a project had taken longer than expected. Mainly he would do it because he disliked the idea of being in one awake for more than a few hours, and this one was probably having to wait for days, if not weeks. But then again, the glow of it suggested that it has been in standby since whenever it was left in the Dry and there were no outer signs of deterioration. Shutting it down for inspection could cause more problems than sieving through the data storage provided.

Tampering around with the interface some, Sebastian at least could pull up some of the status records. Skimming through them, most of them showed obvious signs of worm activity, like one would expect for a military RIDE from the Nextus-Sturmhaven war, but the timestamps he could isolate told it was made entirely after that. Looking like a swiss cheese, the maintenance log was a pleasant surprise, only missing very few bits.

‘’:Guys? You god do see these logs. Dominique, you found yourself a genuie ‘’Erlkönig’’ as a ped projecd.:’’

==={{seperator|f|26 July 146 AL, Aloha}}===

After a weekend of trying to fix as much as possible and then a week of having to subject himself to the tedious bureaucratic of the college library again, Dominique had spent most of the friday morning looking at the clock, hoping to accelerate time by that. He even got scolded for this by the head librarian, who was just as always working in her Orang Outan RIDE. Incidentally they claimed, that the only proper name both had was the Librarian, first name the, second name Librarian. But the minute Dominique was off shift, he left the building, dashing down the boulevard in a hurry through the late afternoon heat of Aloha, for a change carrying a courier bag.

When he reached the Arc Garage, he was covered in sweat, the nanofabbed trunks doing their best to not cling to his body too much. Stepping into the shop, he saw Jo’an fist deep in a large cardboard box, Sebastian hovering over him with a size 15 fork spanner protounding between his tusks. “Hey you two. How’re you doing?”

“Hey ‘nick. Catch a breath, grab a towel and then let me show you…” Jo’an started, only to be interrupted by a falling spanner and a chuffing laugh from Sebastian.

“We god everything under control. Id’s not breaking down and we are jusd unpacking the spare pards for your pardner. Lucky for you thad we could get our fingers on some surplus blasders thad fid in.”

“And thanks to standardisation the stuff for the subproc replacement wasn’t that hard to find either. Or that costly.” Jo’an chimed in, rubbing his bald head where the spanner had hit him. “You really need to watch where you drop those Basti. You could have hit brand new hardlight ‘mitters.”

“Mind slowing down a bit? I left you two with ’’my’’ little project last sunday when it was just a skeleton with fresh wires all over and a motherboard and a heap of what you called ‘’sub-par subprocs’’. And now you tell me that you got parts and software for all of that within the last days without even notifying me about some price tags I have to stem?” Dominique’s face became slowly red with anger as he audibly placed a heavy metal cylinder from his carrier bag on the counter. “Because after what we bought last weekend, I doubt I can spend more than thirty without clearing my bank account.”

One moment Jo’an chuckled, then lifted the container, about as large as a soup can. “The Nano refill? I’ll not ask where you got your fingers on these little buggers, but if my mind’s not fully clouded, you shouldn’t have been able to buy this one at all.”

“I didn’t exactly ‘’buy’’ them. But I had to call in a few favours to get a working sample..." Dominique began, only to be stopped by Jo’an’s hand lifting.

“I said I don’t want to know. For all I know, you found them sitting in your attic ‘nick. Basti? Come here my chubby little friend, we got to feed a cat.”

“Hope the cad doesn’d scratch and bide.” The RIDE chimed in as he let himself fall onto the mechanic to fuse.

“I had a question there. How much are those parts?!” Dominique repeated, pointing to the cardboard box. “That’s not exactly what you get from a fabber.”

“Let’s just say, that somebody in RIDEworks was very interested in taking a look at the old subproc setup and forgot to take his luggage when he left. Finder’s keepers.” Jo’an answered with that walrus grin, turning the the steel cylinder in his surprisingly agile hands. “No really, I just got a nice discount for trading in those old subprocs I did replace for they can analyze them for longtime Qubitite wear.”

“So how much i owe you? I mean, really?”

“You mean how much I bill you for?”

“No, I mean how much you paid and hours.” Dominique looked somewhat concerned as Jo’an talked around the bill, hinting he was probably planning to put his own money into his RIDE. “You know, I don’t like early presents to any occasion. And it’s neither my birthday, nor Christmas, nor Naming Day.”

“In pards? God the replacemends and hardlighd for dwendy instead of thirdy, sofdware updades were free, and nod a single hour during opening dimes.” Sebastian chimed in, overriding whatever Jo’an was about to say.

“Thanks Basti. But you still will put those hours on the bill, will you? Because you are working on my RIDE here, not on the war-vet refurbishing charity program.” Dominique replied, the face relaxing as he moved over to the halfway cleaned out skeleton.

“Now that this ugly question is cleared, let’s get back to work ‘nick. This heap has to become a RIDE somehow”

==={{seperator|f|28 July 146 AL, Aloha}}===

After more than 60 hours and a large heap of caffeine pills and just a pair of two-hour-sleeping breaks thanks to some brand new sleeping pills advertised with “8 hours rest in two! Guaranteed!”, Dominique and the fused mechanic stood in front of the reassembled RIDE, the core still resting in its cradle, separate from the DE in its own.

“Sure we got all the wiring right?” Dominique asked, looking over the pile of parts that had been replaced over the course of the last two days. “Because that’s a lot..."

“Don’t doubt in me now ‘nick. We’re down to filling up the tanks, putting the core back in and then the bootup. But we better wait with the bootup for next weekend. I mean, you got to go to work in 12 hours and initializing everything could take a long time as we almost rebuilt the whole RIDE.”

“You really think that is wise? I mean, I could come here after work tomorrow…”

“And possibly miss the eyes of your baby opening? I’m not that cruel.” Jo’an replied with a snicker, twisting the beard once again. “Tell you what, I can set up most of the init over the week and when you come in at the end of the week, I let you flick the switch to wake her up, aye?”

“Oh man… Sounds like a deal though.”

==={{seperator|f|02 September 146 AL, Aloha}}===

Every inch of Dominique’s body hurt as he slowly regained consciousness. With an effort, he opened the eyes, only to see the blue flares of some siren silently illuminating some thin edge of bent steel at his right. Something in the back of his mind something clicked, reminding him of a truck losing control and dashing towards him sideways. He should be dead, he thought, but then registered something warm and heavy pressing down his chest, just out of sight.

Slowly tilting the head enough to get a glimpse at it from the edge of the eye, it revealed to be the sand colored holographic fur of a RIDE. A moment later the weight shifted a bit and glowing blue eyes looked down into his green ones, and in the dim light he noticed the facial features of the cheetah RIDE he had bought a few weeks ago. “They… are blue… like the sky…” he muttered, earning a slightly tilted head from the cheetah, quickly followed by a hardlight tongue washing over his face.

“What is like the sky?” the RIDE asked, the voice somewhere hard to place but that might be his head hammering from the impact. “But more important, you are alive. Rescue is on the way.”

Moments later, the piston of an hydraulic spreader audibly caused the metal of the vehicle frame to shriek as it forced the small gap between it and the concrete to widen, casting in more light and revealing the copper scales of a fused dragon RIDE kneeling down to peer under the wreckage. “You OK under there? We try to get the wreck off you, but you have to stay still and this weight might shift at any moment.” A moment the rumbling bass of the huge helper fell silent, trying to assess the situation inside the space under the wreck. “Is that your RIDE who sent out the ping here is somebody?”

“I... I guess I am alive and...,” a moment Dominique stopped, wincing as he inhaled. “Yes, Ciel is mine. Why you’re asking?”

==={{seperator|f|* * *}}

=={{seperator|f|Thanks}}==
First of all I want to thank [[User:JonBuck|JonBuck]] and [[User:Robotech_Master|Robotech_Master]] for creating the FreeRIDEers universe.

Next in line is [[User:Claude LeChat|Claude Le Chat]], who was my main exchange partner in the beginning and who helped me finding the right stories that showed some of the stuff I looked for.

And then we have [[User:Hawl|Sera Hawl]], who granted me permission to have my evil commander from chapter 1 be an evil henchmen of her Supervillain Aristo and his right hand Ximensas Bertrand.

Last but not least I thank [[User:Jetfire|Jetfire]] for his inspiring Aloha storyline.

User:Lin/Milk Run

2018-05-30T13:53:16Z

Lin: Created page with " =={{separator|f|Foreword}}== {{Universe|FreeRIDErs}} Before I start, this is still a WIP, so things are subject to growth, maybe pieces get added, others realigned... -~~~~..."

=={{separator|f|Foreword}}==
{{Universe|FreeRIDErs}}
Before I start, this is still a WIP, so things are subject to growth, maybe pieces get added, others realigned... -[[User:Lin|Lin]] ([[User talk:Lin|talk]]) 08:53, 30 May 2018 (CDT)

=={{separator|f|Milk Run}}==
==={{seperator|f|November 125 AL, Southern Dry Ocean}}===

The blazing heat of the Dry Ocean made the air flimmer over the stretch of perfectly flattened ground. Clearly it was too flat, even for an eroded ocean floor, to not be artificial. Indeed, the edges had the marks of heavy construction equipment to flatten the 2 kilometer track, the start and end of it marked only by a pair of hardlight pillars. At the southern one a small pavilion provided cover for a group of people, their yellow and white Hazmat suits creaking as they moved in the tiny protected area. It wasn’t that they would need it yet, in the shielding of the tent, but the silvery object on the table was a rather delicate piece.

Under the harsh light from the tubes, gloved fingers placed the panels onto the distinctively feline body, the polished chrome hiding the pulsing Qubitite processors and Sarin batteries. The hissing whine of pneumatic screwdrivers sounded as each panel got fastened in place, then the gloves retracted one after another. Distorted through the Intercoms, a male voice resounded over the desert, the prelude of some a twencen rock cover chittering in the background, some runs almost sounding like the screech from pneumatic screwdrivers. “Assembly finished. Starting boot sequence. Clear the track, I repeat, clear the track.”

A single blue light appeared in the darkness of her slumbering mind, growing larger with each passing second. Disturbing her restful sleep, the silver avatar of a cat tilted the head at the pearl, a low curiosity in its features. What was it this time? Just another diagnostic check on her RI? Another function test? Moment by moment the ball of light grew, eventually illuminating the whole sanctum. The pedestal on which she had slumbered, the walls with all their screens, the entryway between the late empire pillars, all cast in the cold blue, before the light source ascended to settle into the ceiling. This was more than just the standard boot tests, she soon realized as piece by piece came online, the screens around the Avatar starting to fill out with status reports, one by one turning green.

With an electric crack, a speaker in the tent yelled a “Report!” at the crew, one of the white clad scientists promptly grabbing for the control to regulate it down a few notches. “Got a green status here on phase nine, commencing through ten, awaiting consciousness in 30.”

Things turned dark around the Avatar suddenly, the world shifted in a way that even for a RI was nauseating. Up and down suddenly realigned as the physical hardware replaced her mental sanctum, the inputs from the optical sensors replacing the status reports, the icy chill of the chrome skin becoming a physical thing, not a detached information. The world she had experienced only in the labs in pieces before became… She couldn’t quite describe it.

“Can you hear us? Are you there?” rang a distinctively female voice from a short yellow suit.

“Status Green, Doctor Munroe. I am here, but I can’t move.” the RIDE replied, the chrome clad face moving only minimally. “Is it time for a full function test?”

“Yes, it is. We will loosen your fetters in a minute. In the meantime, check the instruction file.” The radio from the doc crackled a bit, as the interference from the magnetic storms got worse. “Changing to Lasercom.”

“Doctor Munroe, I just have to run down those 2 Kilometers, switch to skimmer and come back? Is that really everything?” the RIDE replied, only managing to tilt the head from its position on the working rack as the fetters overrode all other movement, declaring them unneeded.

“Exactly. The funding of the project is in question. Command gave us one chance to prove that you are worth the money they give us instead of reworking the Fennec line. Please, don’t disappoint us.” The concern was more clear as the voice came over the laser. “Get on your marks.”

It was a strange feeling to touch the floor the first time for real after countless hours of test runs on the stand, in which the legs at best had touched a lab table, if at all. Wobbly the new RIDE set step by step, the internal gyroscopes demanding tail movements too large to keep the balance for the first couple of steps towards the hardlight shield of the pavilion, but with each step, she got better.

As she reached the shimmering barrier, an alarm resounded over the barren wastelands, then the green shielding flickered and shut down, allowing the chrome cheetah to pass through into the Q-dust. One last look back to the tent, the shield back up again. “Good Luck,” was the last transmission of Doctor Munroe before the coms cut out. She never heard the last words of the doctor, as they never were sent. “Everything depends on you now.”

As she had reached the mark on the ground, little more than a black line of laser burnt earth in planished the white chalk of the ground, once again the speakers over the desert strip came to life, an elderly male voice this time, one the experimental RIDE didn’t knew. “T minus 30 seconds. All hands on deck, repeat, all hands on deck!”

The hardlight pillar flashed up, red orbs turning yellow out one by one, each joined by a fanfare, until they all changed to green with a howl. Deep the alloy claws cut into the white rock as the chrome clad RIDE jerked forward out of a stand, accelerating witch each leap. A cloud of white dust rose behind her, the back bent like a snake. The long tail movements for balancing out the body was taken over by the code adapted from flight stability computers for fighter aircraft, allowing the 300 kilograms of cat to seemingly float over the Dry Ocean without a single antigrav lifter kicking into action, only one of the feet touching the ground at most. Hardlight shielding flickered on around the feline head, but instead of the fur many RIDEs sported, it was a sleek, aerodynamic shielding, reducing the drag as she broke the 100 km/h, allowing to speed up some more.

The dust trail at the start hadn’t even settled when the RIDE broke the sound barrier just 406 meters short of the finish line, one clock in the pavilion stopping at 9.37 seconds while the graphs on several screens showed the top acceleration at the start of the track had been 3.7 g. Not even a full second later, another timer froze at 10.02 seconds, the associated speedometer freezing just shy of 400 m/s. In the distance, the dust cloud grew rapidly upwards as the slender frame of the cheetah turned on the lifters and then tilted the upper body up to get as much reverse as possible.

Pebbles were ripped out of the ground as the legs changed configuration, panels shifted and the whole body violently bucked in the process. The front legs fused into a single, almost fragile front extension while the back ones unfolded into a pair of wire wheels, tilted inside at the top. The vehicle was more resembling a sled, the empty pilot cockpit hanging low to the ground and leaving just a hand's width between the belly of the RIDE and the ground. The engines howled as the fragile race machine went into a U-turn, and she overshot the end of track marker by half a kilometer before the wheels touched ground again. Dust and chalk once again was ripped from the aeon old bed of the long evaporated ocean, the experimental RIDE dashing towards the tent again.

Closing in on the sound barrier again, the hardlight emitters flared up, altering the aerodynamics with stubby aerofoils. First they pressed the skimmer down, but then changed the configuration to provide lift and force the light vehicle to break from the ground. Losing contact, the back wheels rotated upwards, acting as some kind of elevator in what could best be described as a Ground Effect Mode, just a meter or two above the surface.

{{seperator|f| }}

Inside the tent, Doctor Munroe had taken off the helmet of the Hazmat suit ignoring the Q-dust alert howlind, her eyes affixed to the 10.02 seconds. 2 hundredths of a second. Enough to be considered an error in measurement! “Commander, she can do better! Give her a second try!” she yelled into the comms.

In a Nextus command bunker abandoned right after the Sturmhaven war, the elderly commander made a gesture towards his com officer to cut the connection. “Execute termination, change status of project CTH-LSR-000B2 to failed, erase the files and notify Miss Bertrand or she will have your heads for the boss. And bring me a new cup of tea, this one tastes bitter. Pronto!”

Far above the desert, a shooting star appeared in the desert sky, rapidly growing and changing from a silver-blue, to a blazing red, a blazing trail of ardent fragments following up the descending object.

Howling in frustration, Doctor Munroe slammed her fist onto the computer clock, the heavy acrylic glass neither giving the satisfying sound of breaking glass nor even budging under the impact. Tears in her eyes, she looked over to her colleagues, their faces under the hazard suits showing shock and resignation, even tears. “Nikita… Do it. Let’s give her at least this.” Her voice was broken, as she turned a key in the console, her postgraduate doing the same at the one in front of him. “Let’s hope she’ll do better than us.”

{{seperator|f| }}

The tent in front of her grew, the finish line closing in. The roar of the falling tungsten rod shook the desert as a single communication laser hit her, the package in it just a single line. “Good luck out there, baby.” Strange, she thought, then her navigation suddenly went haywire, the waypoint of the end pillar replaced by some location thousands of kilometers away to the north, through the depth of the Dry Ocean. She couldn’t tell why the target changed, but with shrieking lifters, she changed course, speeding past the pavilion at roughly than Mach 1.4, the left back wheel almost making ground contact as the skimmer turned into a tight curve.

In a thunderclap, the deorbited tungsten penetrator hit the pavilion, the supersonic alloy ripping through the equipment deep into the ground, the heat of its descent scorching everything within half a kilometer within an instant. The earth shook in violent tremors for miles, and the plasma storm of the burning air expanded, rushing towards the RIDE on escape course.

Roaring the shockwave dashed in on the Skimmer, the back wheels losing contact first as the flat trike got thrown around, dark marks appearing on the polished chrome as she was hurled away. The gyroscopes told nothing that could be interpreted in a sane manner, claiming upwards was left and right at the same time, then the ground impacted hard on her right side. Metal protested as the thin shell of the driver’s cocoon was pushed inside, then everything went dark.

The gleam of the outer world vanished as the cheetah was yanked back into her mindspace, status screens on the walls all around flashing with red and orange, some even having turned entirely red with black letters yelling error messages to the feline avatar. The blue light in the ceiling dulled, then one system after another turned off, fetters forcing those still running into emergency hibernation. The last she saw before falling into slumber was the blue orb in the ceiling turning green slowly, and from the corner of her eyes she thought to have seen some kind of maggot.

==={{seperator|f|14 July 146 AL, Aloah}}===

Harsh spotlights hit the chrome body the of derelict RIDE, the feline shape curled up, the right side dented and bent, but someone had spent hours to clean the scorch marks and polish the smaller scratches out of the chrome clad shell. A white label attached to the boxy head’s cheek read the lot number and offered to download the specifications from the sleeping beauty.

“Next we have lot 1912. Salvaged RIDE, Cheetah Design, 300 kilos, unknown manufacturer, no stored ID or previous owner on file, RI core in hibernation. More specific details you find in the catalogue. This item is sold as is with a starting bid of 300 Mu.”

“Cheap. I wonder what’s off with that thing.” Dominique Marie Dumas muttered under his breath, pulling up the file onto his data specs. “Seems to have run for almost no time if the size of the memory files is a good indicator. But the timestamps seem rather corrupted. When was the Cheetah line released again? Too bad I forgot to download the ‘Osprey New Vanguard - RIDEs of the Nextus-Surmhaven War’ earlier.”

More out of curiosity, the young man kept his eyes on the bid field for a second, before setting up his limit to 500 mu, halfway expecting that some rich collector of early RIDEs would try to snatch the machine as a bargain, or even a miner with a very tight budget who just needed any RIDE to continue working. But then again, the specs highlighted the lack of the standard pulse cannons just as much as the hardlight emitters were just rudimentary, but that could just be a sign for a nextus origin. On the other hand the design philosophy of the the makers had somehow valued receiving a message from several klicks with a lot of scatter important, but not replying back, as the actual comm laser only was specified to focus tightly enough only on distances less than a tenth of that.

“300 from the man in the green shirt, do I hear 350? 300 going once, anyone 350? 300 going twice, 350 for the lady in red, 400 from the green shirt again, do I hear 450? 400 going once, anyone 450? 400 going twice and sold. Congratulations to Mister Dumas. Now onto lot 1913. Demilitarized Heavy Assault Armor...”

Dominique barely had registered that the man on the auction block had issued the sale to someone in his monotone voice without much separation between the sentences just because the spotlights changed to a different stand. The steady rumor of the auction hall rose and fell like a wave, as a stagehand in a black gorilla RIDE - probably a KingKong-3 model, judging from the oversized muscles - started to push the hover platform with the cheetah RIDE off stage while a colleague in an old Nuevo San Antonio Heavy Assault Komodo pushed in the lot 1915. Only when his specs showed up a bill over 400 mu, he realized that he had just won the auction.

The slightly perplex look was still on his face when he reached the counter, uploading the proof of payment to the teller, a copper colored fused BBV in a white tux, though it was hard to tell if it was a genuine PSA or the Nextus IMA offshoot. “Uhm, I am a first time buyer, where can I claim my lot?”

“Let me look that up a second.” was the perfectly modulated reply, something about her movements being just a tad too perfect. “Ah, here it is. Dominique Marie Dumas, Lot 1912. Undesignated Cheetah without documentation, sold ‘as is’. I am legally obliged to inform you of the risks of fusing with a RIDE of unknown repair status and gender, including RI breakdown, malicious hidden software and crossriding. Would you please sign here? Your purchase is packaged for transport just this moment.”

With an all too fluent movement to not be precisely trained or designed she held the pad to him, that foxy smile showing just the right amount of teeth to not be threatening but attractive. Something in Dominique shuddered as he took the datapad to skim over the notes, just making a light contact with the hardlight fur of the Fuser’s hand. Someone must have spent countless hours to finetune it to feel perfectly silky.

Fumbling with the pad a moment longer than necessary to sign with a press of his right thumb, Dominique thought about how to ask the girl out, but then just sighed and gave back the pad. It was a dumb idea anyway - and she might get such propositions any day en masse. “Here. And...”

“Your purchase will be delivered right over there, and indeed, I would appreciate you to not ask for a date. It would be all humiliating for both of us.” ‘’:Especially since I don’t swing that way. Sorry, but I run her in passive.:’’

The sudden male voice on the phone in his specs made Dominique shudder, the cheeks flushing. Embarrassed he almost dropped the pad. “Uhm… how did you…”

“It was written all over your face, Mister Dumas. But a ‘’Lady’’ can keep secrets, and I will never mention it unless you ask me to. If you would turn around, you can see your RIDE coming from the storeroom just this moment.”

Dominique couldn’t tell if there was some chuckle put into ‘’her’’ voice as he followed her request, seeing the Gorilla from earlier pushing a flat black plastic box on a hoverpad in. In contrast to the box that followed after him, it looked almost punny, but the white stencils claimed its contents to be the RIDE he had just purchased. “Uhm, one last question… The documentation didn’t really say much about this. Called it undesignated.” Dominique asked, pointing to the line just under the lot number.

The fox morph just lifted her shoulders, but the Gorilla did answer, his huge index finger tapping on the panel. He sounded like a rasp on hardwood. “It is, as the designation is incomplete. That’s as much as we could figure out without breaking into the RI and risking damage. You saw the mention of heavy worm damage? CTH(?)-LSA is all the worms didn’t eat of that bit. Well, actually LS, but the last letter according to Nextus standards is obvious, isn’t it? Anyway, have fun with it. Will be a hell of a project to get the core back out of hiding.”

==={{seperator|f|15 July 146 AL, Aloha}}===

The light in the garage was rather gloomy as Dominique entered, and sending the light command to the mesh of the refitted storage didn’t change that. With a sigh he began to search for the manual switch on the right, only to find it on his left, perfect for not forgetting to switch the light off when you leave the building.

A flickering “thunderstorm” with clicking “thunder” later, the bright xenon tubes at the ceiling cast their sterile light onto the matted steel table and the black box upon it. Stepping closer, Dominique’s fingers trembled and he had problems to open the fast release locks in his eagerness to see his very own RIDE. The heart pumping like a jackhammer, he lifted the top, but after a tiny bit a pneumatic cylinder took over with the telltale hiss, revealing the contents.

Like an expensive collier the silver cheetah lay on the dark red smartfoam, the polished chrome surfaces reflecting Dominiques face back in a distorted manner. He could make out his latest attempt of a proper beard in the shape of muttonchops on his bony cheeks. “Hello there, beauty...”

Perfectly knowing that he wasn’t a professional mechanic, let alone a RIDE one, he took his time to mount the slender RIDE onto the stand, once more wondering what made someone strip a LSA from weaponry or even some standard communications. But once he had the delicate piece of machinery on the stand, he realized it was a piece of cake to remove the paneling, the plates coming off almost by themselves the instant the few screws were removed. That was not exactly what the CTH-LSA-002 manual had described about having to remove the plates with “gentle force” after unscrewing a dozen hexbolts.

An hour later Dominique tossed the manual into the virtual paper bin in a wave of frustration, the wiring schematics looking so unlike what he found under the shell of his RIDE. Whoever made it, didn’t just skip on installing the weapons, he seemed to had stripped any wiring from the tree that was not essential, and wherever they had hidden the RI release, he couldn’t find it. It was hard to admit failure, but this was much above the skills of him. He was a librarian, not a RIDE wizard, and all he could figure out that he didn’t got a LSA-002. With a sigh, he pulled up his address book and called Jo’an.

{{seperator|f| }}

“Ok, let me see your sleeping beauty ‘nick” the short man in bib trousers said as he pushed his wide frame through the warehouse door into the makeshift workplace. “You know, my college bunk years ago had more elaborate tools than this. But at least you ‘’have’’ a cradle.”

“Joan, that’s not the problem. You know, I was lucky to get a free garage this time of the year.” Dominique answered, having put on a t-shirt in addition to his usual beach trunks for the cool temperature of the workshop, at least for Alohan standards.

“And you know you should have brought your little pet project there to my place in the first place. Now you started disassembling your sleeping beauty without me and took all the fun of that from me.” A moment he stopped and twirled the impressive moustache over his lips as he eyed the exposed internals of the cheetah RIDE, then turned to the door again. “Sebastian, bring your fat behind in already! You gotta see this yourself!”

“I’m not fad, I am well rounded, Jo!” came back in a deep bass, just before the walrus RIDE pushed open the door with the head, sporting a very very tusky grin from under a moustache equaling Jo’an’s. “And I know you like ‘em well rounded too. Just a piddy Aloha is overrun with skinny beach babes… Holy Cow, is that whad I think id is?” Jo’an nodded only in silent answer.

“What? Am I the only one who’s left out of this?” Dominique asked rather embarrassed, exchanging looks between his old childhood friend and his ride. “You know I could tell him about that day when your parents forced you to wear the girls school uniform…”

Jo’an just chuckled, joined by a hearty . “You know, RIDEs share memories with their RIDErs. Basti knows all about that day, just like he knows i prefered trunks to bikinis even before I broke the wall.”

“Ok, ok, I can’t embarrass you in front of him, Joan, but could you please tell me what is so special that even Sebastian freaks out about it? It’s not like it’s an antique or something, right?” Dominique’s face was showing even more confusion than the moment before, and a few moments later he frustratedly slammed his hand on the desk, switching the holoprojector in it online.

With a chuffing sound that doubled as as a laugh, Sebastian instantly hijacked the projector, pulling up Newman’s Ride Encyclopedia on it and then a few diagrams “Id’s rather obvious. See thad? These are the motherboards of a GDE-RMR, a LEO-HAA and a BBV-PSA. You see the difference?”

Staring at the floating images, Dominique shook the head, pointing at the edges in guess “I am not sure, but that chunk there is only on the LEO?”

Jo’an chuckled as he nodded “So, you see that there is not too much a difference, aye? Now look at what you got there on the table and tell me, do you got something like in those pictures or something different?”

Looking to his RIDE and then the pictures again, Dominique tried hard to compare them again, then it struck him. “You mean, that is not what you’d expect in layout?”

“Exactly. Someone did a pretty custom on this one. Well, not all custom, ‘cause everything is there as far as I can tell. No, they just didn’t solder up what they should have and instead used adapters and jumpers.” Jo’an sighed as he picked up the casing Dominique had dissembled earlier, carefully eying the screws and seals. “Like somebody had expected to need to get in there a lot to replace parts. You would expect that only for very error prone RIDEs or ones you wanted to tweak a lot. No, not even then you would put every single chipset on its own board.”

“So, what you’re telling me is..." Dominique didn’t finish the sentence, instead looking at the RIDE with utter fascination and confusion.

“Mighd be a prododype, man.” Sebastian responded, nodding with the whole upper body. “And a rather preddy one, even if a bid skinny for my liking.”

“You’re kidding me, right?” Dominique asked, but only got a double headed head shake back.

“No kidding, that is either a homemade, a really fucked up machine or a prototype, and nothing guarantees it works anymore. Where did you get your fingers on that heap of parts again? I would expect such a shoddy thing to pop up in Bartertown, but here?” Jo’an asked, once again twirling the moustache in the same way his former female self used to twirl her hair before going bald and male.

“It was a legit auction. They liquidated a bunch of storage rooms and small businesses over at the south side…”

“And you thoughd id would be smard to buy the firsd besd RIDE catching your eye withoud calling in a professional opinion.”

“Not exactly. I mean, yes, it was the first that caught my eye, but I thought someone eccentric would outbid me for sure!”

“And now you own this shoddy pieced together DE with an RI that, if those files you showed me are correct, is either completely broken or in sleep mode since about two decades. What did you expect from a storage auction? Plug and play?” Jo’an looked a bit angry at Dominique, but seeing his shoulders slump he grabbed the screwdriver with a sigh. “Come on buddy, let’s close it up and haul it to my place, I’ll see what I can do to try to at least get it working somehow. I can’t guarantee that you won’t need to get a new RI or even keep much of those internals, but I will do my best to at least keep it looking like a cat.”

==={{separator|f|19 July 146 AL, Aloha}}===

After a week of dealing with lots of college students that had trouble to find their way through the library or just failed at downloading their books from the servers, Dominique had spent most of the friday with sorting the physical part of the botany collection again. While he loved his job usually, the students that didn’t put the books back to either the right shelves or the dedicated ‘I have no idea where this belongs’ shelf made it tedious.

Stepping out of the dimmed light of the library into the bright afternoon of Aloha, he had to blink a few times until his eyes had caught up to the illumination level. The gentle curved shapes of the university’s buildings were pretty, but they also made him feel small as he passed down the almost barren road towards the bay on foot. While he had a skimmer, finding a parking lot on friday mornings was a hell as every single student who couldn’t afford a RIDE would appear hours before the library opened and lectures even began, just so they could vanish from the place that was supposed to create the elite of tomorrow in a stampede towards the bay. Some days he even suspected them to park on thursday night and then come to the classes on foot, only to manage that feat.

But Dominique Marie didn’t mind the walk really. With just a centimeter or two short of two meters, he wasn’t the slowest walker, and the one girlfriend he had in his past, incidentally also a Marie, Marie Florence du Mont, had always complained about him running when he was merely walking with his usual steps. It didn’t help that she would always introduce them to people he didn’t know as “I am Marie and he is Marie.” He didn’t liked that very much, but for the better part of nine months they had been a thing, till she ended it.

The moment he turned from the spacious boulevard to a narrow side road to cut the way short, the high buildings with their reflecting surfaces vanishing from sight. Barely able to see the sky, Dominique sighed, but that shortcut saved him about half an hour and he wanted to try to get back to his pet project, now that it was stored at the Arc Garage.

{{seperator|f| }}

Woken from slumber, the cheetah stretched the back in her very own world, something about the small cave with its familiar, dim red pulsing screens all around feeling amiss. All the systems were claimed to be down like almost all the time she could remember but for the battery indicator. For some reason it showed up a full charge, and there was this tiny tickle at the base of her spine that felt like a current flowing up along it. But then again, she remembered very well to be covered under a load of rock, so it might be finally the sensors failing. Yawning, the cat repeated the stretch to slowly trot towards the dim cave entrance, looking out to the shrublands that covered the world for as wide as her eyes could see.

Out there were a few trees, offering shade in the burning sun of the sahel, but far to the west was also what she had called the black canyon. The sound how the wind howled there was maddening and she didn’t dare to get to it usually, but she also knew that it hadn’t been always there. Averting her eyes from that hideous scar though her mental landscape, she focussed on the east instead, from where a few lazy clouds over the horizon told about the upcoming rainy season.

Almost tasting prey upon her tongue, she stretched in the sun again, before pushing her head up to gaze into the sky directly. How long was she doing this again? Her time signal was out of date for felt ages. When did they tell her to have good luck? Weeks? Months? Years ago? Time in here didn’t matter really, and she was determined to try to have good luck as long as she could in this world of her own, even knowing that one day it would come to a halt together with her when the battery would run out.

But today wasn’t that day, she said to herself, pushing her nose into the wind to take in the smell of the plains. Slowly, she moved down the small hill that housed her sanctum, moving towards the east on light feet. Some moment the world seemed to slow down, loose color and she felt cold, but a moment later the warmth and color returned. Was her time coming to an end eventually?

{{seperator|f| }}

“Ok, here goes the core to the cradle.” Jo’an said, wiping the sweat of his forehead before looking over to Dominique, who had bitten into his lip to the blood as he saw his friend put the glowing orb from the tight cavity of the feline head to the open bowl. “Tell you what, I wouldn’t have expected a twenty year old RI that hasn’t been used for most of that to be in that great shape. You might be lucky not to need a new one.”

“And… what now? I mean, you are the expert here.” Dominique asked, looking over to the chassis. Once again stripped of the outer shell, it had taken them the better part of the rest of friday to get the skull open.

“The fun pard, pard’. Disassembling, cleaning and replacing.” Sebastian chimed in, dragging his massive body to his partner - and then threw himself at the heavyset man, chest opening for the fuse.

“Gread do have thumbs ‘gain.”

“I still don’t get why you’re so squeamish about touching the cores Sebastian.”

“You wand to handle human brain? Id’s the same for me.”

Dominique chuckled a bit, sucking up the blood from the lip. “Do you have that discussion more than once?”

“Every time we do this. Now let’s have some fun.”

==={{seperator|f|20 July 146 AL, Aloha}}===

They had worked through the night, and the whole workbenches of the Arc Garage were covered in parts, all carefully sorted and some even labeled. In the cradle, the RI core pulsed gently, while Jo’an, Dominique and Sebastian had settled around the coffee fabber.

“Want to hear the good news first or the bad news?” Jo asked, taking a deep sip of the hot beverage.

With a sigh, Dominique peered into his mug, then looked over the the bare skeleton of the cheetah on the rack. “The good one.”

“Well, it’s in pretty damned well shape for being neglected for 20 years and the actuators are even better than some of the new stuff I could get my hands on - whoever made those knew how to coax the maximum out of them. But on the other side? I will need to rewire everything. A lot of the subprocs will need a serious update, and that is not counting the missing parts. Those and the hardlight don’t exactly come cheap.”

“How much we talking here?” Dominique inquired, his eyes showing a bit of worry, before something in the back of the mind nagged at him. “And why do you always use it to refer to... it?”

“Fifteen to sixty, depending on what we need, what you want and not counting the hours. Oh, and you better start to look out for some nanos to fill her up. The stem seems ok, but I couldn’t find the specs of it, so better fill it up with the best stuff you can find to evade nasty surprises.” Jo’an sighed and pointed to the heap of machinery taking up loads of space in its separated shape. “You see anything indicating it’s a girl or a boy? Once we know I will use the right pronoun, but till then it’s a neutr.”

“You don’d wand to call a gal a dick, don’d you?”

{{seperator|f| }}

It had been a good hunt, and while it was entirely a game of her fragile mind playing both sides, but it kept her sane and stated the primal hunger. Somehow she knew it wasn’t the real deal, but then again, she never really had a chance to try to use Nature Range, or for the matter any of those games that needed a partner. Or at least she couldn’t remember to ever have used them. But besides the blanks in her memory from far ago, ones she couldn’t fill in, she had almost perfect recollection of her time alone. At least she thought so, when she climbed the mound she was perfectly sure to house her sanctum and didn’t find the entry.

Confused, she traced back, looking for her usual landmarks and finding them well in place. Even the shallow depression at the top of the hill she could find again, but not the hole under the small bush that lead to where all the status reports of her DE should await her. Had the frame eventually failed fully, and she was running on her last power reserves? Did her... parents... send her off into the wild only to have her be buried by rock and dust for years until she was corroded away by Qubitite dust? Or was there another reasoning for her being unable to find what she considered home?

{{seperator|f| }}

“Surely not! I mean, what you can do now? I mean, to get my RIDE into working order…” Dominique was stopped by his friend lifting the hand.

“Let’s not jump the boat here. The fastest I could do is look for a CTH-RMR from RIDEworks and just plug the core in. Risky, for the specs might be totally off, and not the cheapest. But you might have it running tomorrow. I could start to sort out the mess of a motherboard and work out the other missing parts as we go, that should surely wake our sleeping beauty up once we plug her back in, but it takes time and money. But…” Jo’an looked to his partner, who just lazily was floating on his back in mid air, the stubby fin-arms flapping on his belly.

“You think whad I think you think? Hosting some games for it? Thad’s a cheetah, nod an orca, dolphin or something aquatic. I doubd it would even like my server. You know how cads are with wader.”

“Comeon you PITA, it’s just to check if it’s even worth to start rebuilding it from scratch. Do I have to remind you of our deal Basti? About staying together through thick and thin?”

Dominique snickered as the two bickered like that all the time, to him just a signal that everything was ok. Because the only time he had seen them just agree to one another without exchanging some bubbling as thick as their blubber was when they had to dig through a wreckage they couldn’t salvage at all. “Allright you squabblers. How about Joan and I go to grab some real breakfast and you look after our patient in the meantime instead of banging your heads together?“

“Deal. But whadever I find thad isn’d essendial to fixing, is only the padiends to dell. Professional discretion, kay?”

Dominique looked rather disbelieving to the RIDE, but then sighed as Sebastian put up the best displeased walrus he could muster. “Ok. Come on Joan, they only have bagels till noon.”

{{seperator|f| }}

Connecting up to the cradle and initiating a proper shutdown was something Sebastian had done countless times when the repairs of a project had taken longer than expected. Mainly he would do it because he disliked the idea of being in one awake for more than a few hours, and this one was probably having to wait for days, if not weeks. But then again, the glow of it suggested that it has been in standby since whenever it was left in the Dry and there were no outer signs of deterioration. Shutting it down for inspection could cause more problems than sieving through the data storage provided.

Tampering around with the interface some, Sebastian at least could pull up some of the status records. Skimming through them, most of them showed obvious signs of worm activity, like one would expect for a military RIDE from the Nextus-Sturmhaven war, but the timestamps he could isolate told it was made entirely after that. Looking like a swiss cheese, the maintenance log was a pleasant surprise, only missing very few bits.

‘’:Guys? You god do see these logs. Dominique, you found yourself a genuie ‘’Erlkönig’’ as a ped projecd.:’’

==={{seperator|f|26 July 146 AL, Aloha}}===

After a weekend of trying to fix as much as possible and then a week of having to subject himself to the tedious bureaucratic of the college library again, Dominique had spent most of the friday morning looking at the clock, hoping to accelerate time by that. He even got scolded for this by the head librarian, who was just as always working in her Orang Outan RIDE. Incidentally they claimed, that the only proper name both had was the Librarian, first name the, second name Librarian. But the minute Dominique was off shift, he left the building, dashing down the boulevard in a hurry through the late afternoon heat of Aloha, for a change carrying a courier bag.

When he reached the Arc Garage, he was covered in sweat, the nanofabbed trunks doing their best to not cling to his body too much. Stepping into the shop, he saw Jo’an fist deep in a large cardboard box, Sebastian hovering over him with a size 15 fork spanner protounding between his tusks. “Hey you two. How’re you doing?”

“Hey ‘nick. Catch a breath, grab a towel and then let me show you…” Jo’an started, only to be interrupted by a falling spanner and a chuffing laugh from Sebastian.

“We god everything under control. Id’s not breaking down and we are jusd unpacking the spare pards for your pardner. Lucky for you thad we could get our fingers on some surplus blasders thad fid in.”

“And thanks to standardisation the stuff for the subproc replacement wasn’t that hard to find either. Or that costly.” Jo’an chimed in, rubbing his bald head where the spanner had hit him. “You really need to watch where you drop those Basti. You could have hit brand new hardlight ‘mitters.”

“Mind slowing down a bit? I left you two with ’’my’’ little project last sunday when it was just a skeleton with fresh wires all over and a motherboard and a heap of what you called ‘’sub-par subprocs’’. And now you tell me that you got parts and software for all of that within the last days without even notifying me about some price tags I have to stem?” Dominique’s face became slowly red with anger as he audibly placed a heavy metal cylinder from his carrier bag on the counter. “Because after what we bought last weekend, I doubt I can spend more than thirty without clearing my bank account.”

One moment Jo’an chuckled, then lifted the container, about as large as a soup can. “The Nano refill? I’ll not ask where you got your fingers on these little buggers, but if my mind’s not fully clouded, you shouldn’t have been able to buy this one at all.”

“I didn’t exactly ‘’buy’’ them. But I had to call in a few favours to get a working sample..." Dominique began, only to be stopped by Jo’an’s hand lifting.

“I said I don’t want to know. For all I know, you found them sitting in your attic ‘nick. Basti? Come here my chubby little friend, we got to feed a cat.”

“Hope the cad doesn’d scratch and bide.” The RIDE chimed in as he let himself fall onto the mechanic to fuse.

“I had a question there. How much are those parts?!” Dominique repeated, pointing to the cardboard box. “That’s not exactly what you get from a fabber.”

“Let’s just say, that somebody in RIDEworks was very interested in taking a look at the old subproc setup and forgot to take his luggage when he left. Finder’s keepers.” Jo’an answered with that walrus grin, turning the the steel cylinder in his surprisingly agile hands. “No really, I just got a nice discount for trading in those old subprocs I did replace for they can analyze them for longtime Qubitite wear.”

“So how much i owe you? I mean, really?”

“You mean how much I bill you for?”

“No, I mean how much you paid and hours.” Dominique looked somewhat concerned as Jo’an talked around the bill, hinting he was probably planning to put his own money into his RIDE. “You know, I don’t like early presents to any occasion. And it’s neither my birthday, nor Christmas, nor Naming Day.”

“In pards? God the replacemends and hardlighd for dwendy instead of thirdy, sofdware updades were free, and nod a single hour during opening dimes.” Sebastian chimed in, overriding whatever Jo’an was about to say.

“Thanks Basti. But you still will put those hours on the bill, will you? Because you are working on my RIDE here, not on the war-vet refurbishing charity program.” Dominique replied, the face relaxing as he moved over to the halfway cleaned out skeleton.

“Now that this ugly question is cleared, let’s get back to work ‘nick. This heap has to become a RIDE somehow”

==={{seperator|f|28 July 146 AL, Aloha}}===

After more than 60 hours and a large heap of caffeine pills and just a pair of two-hour-sleeping breaks thanks to some brand new sleeping pills advertised with “8 hours rest in two! Guaranteed!”, Dominique and the fused mechanic stood in front of the reassembled RIDE, the core still resting in its cradle, separate from the DE in its own.

“Sure we got all the wiring right?” Dominique asked, looking over the pile of parts that had been replaced over the course of the last two days. “Because that’s a lot..."

“Don’t doubt in me now ‘nick. We’re down to filling up the tanks, putting the core back in and then the bootup. But we better wait with the bootup for next weekend. I mean, you got to go to work in 12 hours and initializing everything could take a long time as we almost rebuilt the whole RIDE.”

“You really think that is wise? I mean, I could come here after work tomorrow…”

“And possibly miss the eyes of your baby opening? I’m not that cruel.” Jo’an replied with a snicker, twisting the beard once again. “Tell you what, I can set up most of the init over the week and when you come in at the end of the week, I let you flick the switch to wake her up, aye?”

“Oh man… Sounds like a deal though.”

==={{seperator|f|02 September 146 AL, Aloha}}===

Every inch of Dominique’s body hurt as he slowly regained consciousness. With an effort, he opened the eyes, only to see the blue flares of some siren silently illuminating some thin edge of bent steel at his right. Something in the back of his mind something clicked, reminding him of a truck losing control and dashing towards him sideways. He should be dead, he thought, but then registered something warm and heavy pressing down his chest, just out of sight.

Slowly tilting the head enough to get a glimpse at it from the edge of the eye, it revealed to be the sand colored holographic fur of a RIDE. A moment later the weight shifted a bit and glowing blue eyes looked down into his green ones, and in the dim light he noticed the facial features of the cheetah RIDE he had bought a few weeks ago. “They… are blue… like the sky…” he muttered, earning a slightly tilted head from the cheetah, quickly followed by a hardlight tongue washing over his face.

“What is like the sky?” the RIDE asked, the voice somewhere hard to place but that might be his head hammering from the impact. “But more important, you are alive. Rescue is on the way.”

Moments later, the piston of an hydraulic spreader audibly caused the metal of the vehicle frame to shriek as it forced the small gap between it and the concrete to widen, casting in more light and revealing the copper scales of a fused dragon RIDE kneeling down to peer under the wreckage. “You OK under there? We try to get the wreck off you, but you have to stay still and this weight might shift at any moment.” A moment the rumbling bass of the huge helper fell silent, trying to assess the situation inside the space under the wreck. “Is that your RIDE who sent out the ping here is somebody?”

“I... I guess I am alive and...,” a moment Dominique stopped, wincing as he inhaled. “Yes, Ciel is mine. Why you’re asking?”

==={{seperator|f|* * *}}

=={{seperator|f|Thanks}}==
First of all I want to thank [[User:JonBuck|JonBuck]] and [[User:Robotech_Master|Robotech_Master]] for creating the FreeRIDEers universe.

Next in line is [[User:Claude LeChat|Claude Le Chat]], who was my main exchange partner in the beginning and who helped me finding the right stories that showed some of the stuff I looked for.

And then we have [[User:Hawl|Sera Hawl]], who granted me permission to have my evil commander from chapter 1 be an evil henchmen of her Supervillain Aristo and his right hand Ximensas Bertrand.

Last but not least I thank [[User:Jetfire|Jetfire]] for his inspiring Aloha storyline.

User:Lin

2018-05-30T13:34:46Z

Lin: /* {{separator|f|Works in Progress}} */

{{my stories
|name=Lin
|category=Lin
}}
==About Myself==

Made in Germany and student of physics and history, I have been involved with writing since about 2007. To this genre though I only came about 2013 or 2014. About 2015 I wrote my first into the that was somewhat close to the genre, carring more innuendo than story on furafinity under the label Selinea, and finally in 2017 I came here.

<div class="floatright">
{| class="toc"
|-
!Legend
|-
|
*[[Image:Star.png|20px]] - Favorite of mine
*[[Image:Triple_X.png|20px]] - Adult content
*[[Image:Book with bookmark.png|20px]] - Long story (>150kB)
*[[Image:Magnifying glass.png|20px]] - Short story
*[[Image:Clock warning.png|20px]] - On Hiatus
|}
</div>
__TOC__

=={{separator|f|Works in Progress}}==
{{Universe|FreeRIDErs}}
*[[User:Lin/Milk Run|Milk Run 0.5]]

=={{separator|f|Works}}==

*[[User:Lin/Pain and Chaos|Pain & Chaos]]
:Written in 2015 as a 333 hours - 1000+ words challenge. Cyberpunk and more innuendo of changes that might or might not have happened.

{{author page|Lin}}

{{DEFAULTSORT:Lin}}

User:Lin

2018-05-30T13:34:15Z

Lin: /* {{separator|f|Works in Progress}} */

{{my stories
|name=Lin
|category=Lin
}}
==About Myself==

Made in Germany and student of physics and history, I have been involved with writing since about 2007. To this genre though I only came about 2013 or 2014. About 2015 I wrote my first into the that was somewhat close to the genre, carring more innuendo than story on furafinity under the label Selinea, and finally in 2017 I came here.

<div class="floatright">
{| class="toc"
|-
!Legend
|-
|
*[[Image:Star.png|20px]] - Favorite of mine
*[[Image:Triple_X.png|20px]] - Adult content
*[[Image:Book with bookmark.png|20px]] - Long story (>150kB)
*[[Image:Magnifying glass.png|20px]] - Short story
*[[Image:Clock warning.png|20px]] - On Hiatus
|}
</div>
__TOC__

=={{separator|f|Works in Progress}}==
{{Universe|FreeRIDErs}}
*[[User:Lin Milk Run|Milk Run 0.5]]

=={{separator|f|Works}}==

*[[User:Lin/Pain and Chaos|Pain & Chaos]]
:Written in 2015 as a 333 hours - 1000+ words challenge. Cyberpunk and more innuendo of changes that might or might not have happened.

{{author page|Lin}}

{{DEFAULTSORT:Lin}}

User:Lin

2018-05-30T13:33:21Z

Lin: /* {{separator|f|Works}} */

{{my stories
|name=Lin
|category=Lin
}}
==About Myself==

Made in Germany and student of physics and history, I have been involved with writing since about 2007. To this genre though I only came about 2013 or 2014. About 2015 I wrote my first into the that was somewhat close to the genre, carring more innuendo than story on furafinity under the label Selinea, and finally in 2017 I came here.

<div class="floatright">
{| class="toc"
|-
!Legend
|-
|
*[[Image:Star.png|20px]] - Favorite of mine
*[[Image:Triple_X.png|20px]] - Adult content
*[[Image:Book with bookmark.png|20px]] - Long story (>150kB)
*[[Image:Magnifying glass.png|20px]] - Short story
*[[Image:Clock warning.png|20px]] - On Hiatus
|}
</div>
__TOC__

=={{separator|f|Works in Progress}}==

*Something is out there...

=={{separator|f|Works}}==

*[[User:Lin/Pain and Chaos|Pain & Chaos]]
:Written in 2015 as a 333 hours - 1000+ words challenge. Cyberpunk and more innuendo of changes that might or might not have happened.

{{author page|Lin}}

{{DEFAULTSORT:Lin}}

Talk:FreeRIDErs (background material)

2017-03-29T12:30:46Z

Lin: /* Lifter Vehicle Designations and Licensing Separator */ new section

I'd like to know more about ASA armors. Do they act as their own Forward Observes? What kind of standard equipment do they have? What their sizes range. Anything and everything basically. --Oddoneout

:Well, we haven't really ''needed'' to work out details like this because they haven't come up in any story. I'm sure the avian RIDES (Light Scouts, Light Mobility) would act as spotters and use comm lasers. Feel free to bring your own ideas to the table. Also, make sure you hit the Signature button when you post. :) --[[User:JonBuck|Buck]] ([[User talk:JonBuck|talk]]) 02:11, 28 December 2013 (CST)

::Alright, I was thinking it would be good if they have a long range sensor suite so they can be deployed without the need for an FO except when targeting at extreme ranges. My brother is in the military and he confirmed for me that this is, to an extent, how artillery can currently operate. If the target is within a certain distance they can target and fire on their own. But most of the time they have an FO or at least someone to call in coordinates for them because they're going for extreme ranges.--[[User:Oddoneout|Oddoneout]] ([[User talk:Oddoneout|talk]]) 08:22, 28 December 2013 (CST)

:Where did we even mention ASA armors, and what are they? I'm confused. --[[User:Robotech Master|Robotech Master]] ([[User talk:Robotech Master|talk]]) 02:09, 15 March 2017 (CDT)

==Nextus Military RIDE Designations (122-160 AL)==
I was wondering if there is a specific designation for not yet designated models, like in development models that are not yet in a stage where one would decide if it was to be a LSA or a LMA or a RMR. EXP for "experimental" springs to mind, but I havn't yet found any established RIDE that would be that far back in the development stage. -[[User:Lin|Lin]] ([[User talk:Lin|talk]]) 14:03, 11 March 2017 (CST)
:Our thinking is that the 000-series is the prototype-prototype, the real experimental stage. The 001-series are the "production prototypes" that get field experience, then on up as each major revision is made. [[User:JonBuck|Buck]] ([[User talk:JonBuck|talk]]) 23:33, 11 March 2017 (CST)
::I meant... the desination is XXX(g)-YYY-NNNZ, XXX the phenotype (CTH for Cheetah), g for gender, YYY for the type, NNN for where it is in this development (000 for the first prototypes) and possibly a Z for variant designations. If a RIDE would follow that designation scheme but were made explicitly as an experimental testbed for what is possible (military demonstrator so to say) instead of a real battlefield role, would that get the closest match of an existing type or would it get something different like EXP or MDM (militrary demonstration model)?
::I ask, because some big point of the plot I have in mind is, that the RIDE was designed with just matching very few goals to prove it was possible, skipping on any non essential other part. In this case, it is for a cheetah modeled high speed one with the goal to break the 2000 meters in 10 seconds. That would meet the LSA, LMA and RMR brackets, but at the same time the explicit skipping on anythign that would be exra weight (including what was needed to fulfill all the other parts of that role) does make it hard to place it in either of those, so I thought EXP or something to evade something even more civillian sounding, like RCE and FRI (Race or Formula RIDE). --[[User:Lin|Lin]] ([[User talk:Lin|talk]]) 15:30, 13 March 2017 (CDT)
:::This is more-or-less answered in-story: Fritz was the ''prototypes<nowiki>'</nowiki>'' prototype's prototype, the first RIDE after Rattigan, and the very first to be a transforming mecha. His model designation was LNX(m) LMA-000. If the record-attempt RIDE was a military project, it would probably be designated a Scout or Mobility Armour (if I recall correctly, RMR stands for "Rapid Medical Response", which would necessitate medical equipment). There is a chance that it would be given a unique code, though. LSR for "Land Speed Record" sounds both apt and military.
:::--[[User:Proginoskes|Proginoskes]] ([[User talk:Proginoskes|talk]]) 20:27, 13 March 2017 (CDT)
:::I think LSR would work in this context, myself. -[[User:JonBuck|Buck]] ([[User talk:JonBuck|talk]]) 02:54, 14 March 2017 (CDT)
::It's worth remembering that this designation is a specific designation designed by and for the use of the Nextus Military. Given how remarkably fiddly it is, with sections to denote just about everything but favorite color and preferred hairstyle, it definitely fits in with the general Nextus bureaucratic outlook. But there's no reason at all anyone except Nextus government branches needs to abide by it. If the RIDE in question was designed by some private company for uses having nothing to do with Nextus government service, there's no reason at all it needs to use an XXX(g)-YYY-NNNZ designator. It would be like a private aircraft manufacturer deciding to call its plane "F- something." They could if they wanted, but it doesn't mean anything. --[[User:Robotech Master|Robotech Master]] ([[User talk:Robotech Master|talk]]) 02:14, 15 March 2017 (CDT)

== Lifter Vehicle Designations and Licensing Separator ==

This article is specified to be "PAAS TX-502-V (Adopted 4 Oct, 152 AL)", so it is the law in 152. But what was the speed limit of skimmers and flyers before? Was it unregulated mostly? What kind of bureaucratic stuff one would have to face in 146 AL? My problem is: how do GEV/Ekranoplans licensed? GEVs on earth are classified as ships: quite some designs are unable to go over 150 meters and achieve true flight and they operate over water most of the time (as it is reasonable flat to provide groundeffect and has little to no structures in the way, but they are capable of operation over land. On the other hand, large GEVs operate in the speed band of slow bombers and propellercraft (caspian sea monster: 650 km/h top). The speed I had in mind though is about Mach 1.4 (476 m/s = 1715 km/h), without true flight but with a ceiling of about 15 meters for this speed.

Now, how would such a GEV-skimmer mode RIDE be classified by Alohan, Nextus and Nuevo San Antonio jurisdition in 146 and 152 respectively? Skimmer (by virtue of being a RIDE and ignoring the speed limits)? Airplane (due to speed and ignoring the service ceiling being practically on the ground)? Ship (analogous to earth)? not registerable at all (as breaking any specification)? Or is it a special vehicle with a lot of bureaucracy to dodge? --[[User:Lin|Lin]] ([[User talk:Lin|talk]]) 07:30, 29 March 2017 (CDT)

FreeRIDErs (Setting Timeline)

2017-03-19T19:23:06Z

Lin: added the links to the stories just given with titles

{| border="1" cellpadding="2" cellspacing="0" class="wikitable sortable"
|+Sortable table
! Year A.D. !! Before/After Landing <nowiki>[</nowiki>[[#TableNote1|1]]<nowiki>]</nowiki>!! class="unsortable" | Zharus !! class="unsortable" | Terra/Other !! class="unsortable" | Technology
|-
|<nowiki>-</nowiki>999997650||-1000000000||Gondwana Forms||||
|-
|2048||-302||||Post-Oil "Dark Age" begins <nowiki>[</nowiki>[[#TableNote2|2]]<nowiki>]</nowiki>||
|-
|2152||-198||||Post-Oil "Dark Age" ends||First Wave of survey probes .3 c
|-
|2200||-150||||||Third Wave of survey probes. .5c
|-
|2225||-125||||First slower-than-light generation ships dispatched to nearby stars (Proxima, Centauri, etc.) First year of the Diaspora calendar some Colonies use.||Quantum computers reach maturity.
|-
|2270||-80||||||Technology improvements make cold sleep feasible. STL speeds increase sharply.
|-
|2278||-72||Zharus discovered.||||Total Body Simulation replaces using live rats for experiments.
|-
|2294||-56||Probe transmission reaches Proxima. Followup probes sent at .8c.||||
|-
|2298||-52||||Survey probe transmission reaches Earth.||
|-
|2305||-45||Zharus Diaspora and Steader Colonization purchase rights. Colonization Fleet construction begins.||||
|-
|2315||-35||STL Fleet leaves Sol System with a full ten million colonists in coldsleep—the largest such fleet at that time. Several more even larger fleets follow at 5-year intervals based on more complete information from followup probe.||||
|-
|2350||0||Landing||||
|-
|2365||15||Last group of original Colonists finally awakened. But there are more arriving every five years as Earth is desperate to get the population to sustainable levels.||||Antigravity lifter technology mature enough for commercial use perfected on Centauri. Lifters use a native mineral quickly called "cavorite". However, unlike its qubitite counterpart on Zharus, this mineral is easily created artificially on a commercial scale.
|-
|2392||42||First space elevator becomes operational on Zharus about 50 years ahead of schedule.||||
|-
|2400||50||Antigravity lifter technology mature enough for commercial use reaches Zharus. This makes the Space Elevator only useful for shipping bulk materials like space-mined ores.||||First FTL demonstration flights.
|-
|2420||70||Last formal "Wave" of colonists to Zharus. Planet population is just over one billion. Dr. Roberto Martinez begins study of the Dry Ocean--from a distance.||||First practical barely-FTL colony ships launched. Speeds at 1.2c.
|-
|2422||72||First expansion out of Laurasia of independent city-states on Gondwana's Coastal Ring. Nextus founded.||||
|-
|2430||80||Several exploratory expeditions into the Dry Ocean fail, sometimes tragically, due to equipment failure caused by qubitite contamination. Most polities declare Dry Ocean exploration off limits.||||FTL speeds jump to 5.3c
|-
|2430||80||||Wednesday Landing Tragedy sparks invention of hardlight. Since Zharus is closest, they send a distress torpedo at an amazing 14c.||
|-
|2431||81||Zharus sends assistance to Wednesday in wake of Wednesday Landing Tragedy.||||Technology exchange between Wednesday and Zharus. FTL ekes to 5.7c.
|-
|2435||85||Zharusian IDE factories retool for other products and external IDE importation ceases.||Terrans continue using IDEs in brushfire wars on Earth and nearer colonies.||
|-
|2437||87||Dr. Roberto Martinez establishes research outpost that forms the kernel of Uplift.||||
|-
|2450||100||Nanites are able to live outside of isolation tanks. Uplift adds its second dome emitter in what will be Bifrost Park.||Earth has first true "cyborgs".||FTL at 10.5 c. Message probes dispatched to ships in flight showing how to upgrade their engines.
|-
|2458||108||<b>[[User:Jetfire/Aloha|Aloha]]</b>||||
|-
|2459||109||Aloha founded on Gondwana. (Officially named in 110)||||
|-
|2460||110||||||
|-
|2462||112||Sarium batteries appear on market.||||
|-
|2462||112||Qubitite Rush begins||||
|-
|2462||112||Clint Brubeck stakes claim to huge qubitite deposit, founds Brubeck Mining.||||
|-
|2465||115||Downgraded surplus military drop shuttles sold as first "Suborbital" vehicles.||Cybernetics (a la Ghost in the Shell: SAC) become common on Earth.||
|-
|2465||115||Sturmhaven labs field-test first AIDE units. Nextus labs create smaller IDEs using sarium battery technology.||||
|-
|2468||118||Nextus-Sturmhaven War begins||Rufus born in Deseret.||
|-
|2469||119||||Ryan Stonegate born in New Boston, Earth.||
|-
|2470||120||||Conditions on Earth vary from "Glass Half Full" to "Crapsack" to "Crapsaccharine".||
|-
|2471||121||Nextus, Sturmhaven, and Nuevo San Antonio military RIDE programs commence||||First RI created in Nextus lab
|-
|2471||121||<b>[[User:Robotech Master/Kaylee Anny|Part 13: Kaylee & Anny]]</b>||||First known Integration takes place.
|-
|2472||122||Combination of sarium batteries and technological refinements make hardlight fully practical for use in portable vehicles such as RIDEs.||Final World War (Unification War)||FTL at 19c
|-
|2473||123||Nextus-Sturmhaven War ends||||
|-
|2474||124||RIDEs for civilian applications enter mass production.||||
|-
|2479||129||<b>[[User:Jetfire/Splashdown|Splashdown]]</b>||||
|-
|2480||130||Integration first becomes public knowledge||||
|-
|2480||130||First Integrated enclave founded||||
|-
|2481||131||<b>[[User:Jetfire/Astra-naught|Astra-naught]]</b>||||
|-
|2481||131||Alohan Space Elevator touches down. (Opens for use in 132)||||
|-
|2482||132||Prospector tourism starts, first in Uplift and then in other Polities. Prospectors with useless claims rent RIDEs to tourists to give them a feel of prospecting in the Dry Ocean. More expensive services offer guides and ships to do "real" prospecting.||||
|-
|2482||132||AlphaWolf escapes (or is released by) Nextus military, begins organizing home for emancipated RIDEs out in the desert.||||
|-
|2483||133||Gondwanan Federated Marshal Service founded||||
|-
|2484||134||<b>[[User:Jetfire/The_Lady_of_the_Tiger|The Lady of the Tiger]]</b>||||
|-
|2484||134||<b>[[User:Jetfire/Cave_of_Wonders|Cave of Wonders]]</b>||||
|-
|2490||140||Brubeck Mining builds first permanent qubitite mining platform to make extensive use of hardlight shielding to protect against qubitite contamination, effectively changing the entire system of qubitite mining in the Dry Ocean. <nowiki>[</nowiki>[[#TableNote3|3]]<nowiki>]</nowiki>||||
|-
|2490||140||<b>[[User:Jetfire/Sum_of_Their_Parts|Sum of Their Parts]]</b>||||
|-
|2495||145||||Earth develops compact tokamak technology to enable reduced-size IDE units.||
|-
|2498||148||||UE Senate debates applying terraforming to Earth itself. Vast cities lay empty, but are being recycled to fill the needs of the still-shrinking population.||
|-
|2499||149||Ryan and Rufus arrive aboard the starliner Spruce Goose||||FTL at 25c
|-
|2500||150||||Study paper on crossriding presented at Terran psychology conference.||
|-
|2501||151||Rufus purchases Yvonne and enthuasticially becomes Rufia. Ryan purchases, fixes Kaylee.||||
|-
|2506||156||<b>[[User:Robotech_Master/Deserted|Deserted]]</b>||||
|-
|2506||156||<b>[[User:Robotech_Master/Merging_Traffic|Merging Traffic]]</b><br /><b>[[User:Robotech Master/Rochelle Rufia|Rochelle & Rufia: R&R]]</b>||||
|-
|2506||156||<b>[[User:JonBuck/FreeRIDErs|FreeRIDErs]]</b>||||
|-
|2506||156||<b>[[User:Robotech_Master/Slightly Foxed|Barely Fused, Slightly Foxed]]</b><br /><b>[[User:Robotech_Master/More_Foxed|Longer Fused, More Foxed]]</b>||||Antimatter-based energy production perfected on Earth but restricted to military applications. The reactors are huge and only usable on very large ships or planetside. Power is beamed to ships/mecha that need it.
|-
|2506||156||<b>[[Turnover]]</b>||||
|-
|2506||156||<b>[[Inspecteur Hollins and The Cat's Paw]]</b><br /><b>[[Inspecteur Hollins and The Viral Thief]]</b>||||
|-
|2510||160||||Earth population has dropped to 4 billion. End of the Diaspora as the planet clamps down, realizing their pop is now too low. Planet is on the way to becoming like East Germany, trying to keep people in. Total population of the Colonies is now greater than the origin world's. <nowiki>[</nowiki>[[#TableNote4|4]]<nowiki>]</nowiki>||
|-
|2525||175||||<i>In the year 2525, if man is still alive<br />If woman can survive, they may find </i><nowiki>[</nowiki>[[#TableNote5|5]]<nowiki>]</nowiki>||
|}

<div id="TableNote1">[1] In actuality, the Zharusian year is 249 hours longer than the Terran year, meaning that the correspondence should slip by one year about every thirty or so. We're assuming magic orbit fairies to keep the timelines matching at this point.</div>
<div id="TableNote2">[2] Just like our own "dark ages" it wasn't, really.</div>
<div id="TableNote3">[3] Prior to this, most mining done by RIDEs using disposable equipment for larger-scale work.</div>
<div id="TableNote4">[4] If Zharus had 2 billion on Laurasia alone (implying probably 3-4 billion system wide given its reliance on space industry), the other colonies combined would have long surpassed 4 billion.</div>
<div id="TableNote5">[5] I couldn't resist. :) </div>
[[Category:FreeRIDErs]] [[Category:Science fiction]]

User talk:Jetfire/Walkabout

2017-03-17T19:27:27Z

Lin: Created page with "Heya! It is a very good story... save for a rather nasty typo: :"He grew a couple of decametres, while his fur became thicker in places, his stance more feline than humanoid."..."

Heya! It is a very good story... save for a rather nasty typo:
:"He grew a couple of decametres, while his fur became thicker in places, his stance more feline than humanoid."<br>
That would mean, he grew by multiples of 10 meters (decameter), while multiples of 10 centimeters or 0.1 meters are decimeters. --[[User:Lin|Lin]] ([[User talk:Lin|talk]]) 14:27, 17 March 2017 (CDT)

User:Lin

2017-03-13T20:59:14Z

Lin:

{{my stories
|name=Lin
|category=Lin
}}
==About Myself==

Made in Germany and student of physics and history, I have been involved with writing since about 2007. To this genre though I only came about 2013 or 2014. About 2015 I wrote my first into the that was somewhat close to the genre, carring more innuendo than story on furafinity under the label Selinea, and finally in 2017 I came here.

<div class="floatright">
{| class="toc"
|-
!Legend
|-
|
*[[Image:Star.png|20px]] - Favorite of mine
*[[Image:Triple_X.png|20px]] - Adult content
*[[Image:Book with bookmark.png|20px]] - Long story (>150kB)
*[[Image:Magnifying glass.png|20px]] - Short story
*[[Image:Clock warning.png|20px]] - On Hiatus
|}
</div>
__TOC__

=={{separator|f|Works in Progress}}==

*Something is out there...

=={{separator|f|Works}}==

*[[User:Lin/Pain and Chaos|Pain & Chaos]][[Image:Triple_X.png|20px]]
:Written in 2015 as a 333 hours - 1000+ words challenge. Cyberpunk and more innuendo of changes that might or might not have happened.

{{author page|Lin}}

{{DEFAULTSORT:Lin}}

User:Lin/Pain and Chaos

2017-03-13T20:58:20Z

Lin:

{{author tag|Lin}}
{{XXX}}
{{byline|author=Lin|user=Lin}}

=={{separator|f|Pain}}==
Slowly her consciousness rose from the velvet blackness. Everything about her body felt like a tank had just rolled over her repeatedly, only to balloon her with air a moment later. Every heartbeat was like a hammer strike resonating in her ears. Even the faint light that made its way through her eyelids tormented her, searing into her like white hot lasers. She attempted to move ever so slightly, but even thinking about it did made her muscles scream in agony.

What felt like an eternity later, the pains began to ebb and wane eventually. Not as fast as her tormented brain screamed for, but it was enough that her thoughts could go beyond begging for them to stop.. Who and where was she? And what had happened to her? But before she could finish the thought, she sank away into an unsteady slumber again.

The moments between each episode of consciousness and the next could have been mere minutes, or hours; she couldn’t tell. The pain she remembered from her first episode of half awakening dulled down to an endurable degree. But as she attempted to move, she felt the protest of the tortured muscles in her arms and stopped. Instead, she tried to open her eyes . With quite an expense of willpower she managed to coax the eyelid muscles to follow her commands, forcing them apart with all of her thoughts. At first, everything was dark, but then she noticed a naked gas-discharge tube mounted against a steel ceiling, but the ashy grey color of it told her that it burned out quite some time ago. To her left, she recognized the rough texture of epoxy laminated paper. Inhaling under some pain, she forced her neck muscles to obey, turning the head to her right in what seemed to be a stop motion film . This short movement alone seemed to rob her of all of her power, but she managed, spotting a door ajar that allowed some flickering light to pass through. It was the flickering light from another discharge tube with a defect starter. The last thing she realized from the corner of her eye, was the white foam she lay stretched out on before darkness took her again; the same foam they used to fill mattresses in hospitals.

=={{separator|f|Chaos}}==

Once again, she couldn’t tell how long she had been away, but this time the pain was gone entirely. She opened her eyes, just to squeeze them shut the instant after. More light than her eyes could manage flooded the room and even tormented her through the closed eyelids while the silence was broken by a deep and low hammering. It sounded like a fly’s wings would make, but slowed down to a mere fracture and then increased in volume to make a deep dub. As the bolt of pain ebbed away, she tried again to see something, extremely slowly and carefully this time. The whole room was in the dirty grey and white she had anticipated, and the white foam underneath her was spotted with stains in different shades of yellow and red. Just ahead of her was a window in the wall, and through it streamed a cone of light, the very one that had blinded her only moments ago. It wandered through the room, revealing the items that lay there astray: a small pile of cloths, a bunch of plastic wrappings and a nightstand with a folder upon it. The room was in chaotic disarray and the harsh light made it look even shabbier. A few moments the cone of light remained on the bare wall of the room while she remained motionless upon her foam bedding. Then, the light was gone.

Slowly she pulled herself together and up from her resting place. Surprisingly, the dim, flickering light that came through the doorway was enough to her to make her notice details that shouldn’t be visible in so little illumination. The texture of the dry cement on the floor seemed to stand out, the mostly polished down welding seams of the roof, even the dark grey stripes in the black curtains. She didn’t remember ever having good night vision, but then again, she didn’t remember too much about her past, or rather she didn’t remember anything but that this was a new sensation. The room felt just wrong, as if she never had been here before, and with a shiver she realized she couldn’t even remember her name, or how she looked like. Taking a deep breath she lowered her eyes, looking down her frame while lifting her arms. The bare skin of her hands came into view, painted into a silky orange from the light passing through the door. About half a dozen colorful patches dotted her wrists, and she began to peel them off one by one before taking a look at the rest of the body that felt alien but well known at the same time.

Letting her eyes wander upwards along her arms, she noticed that they seemed to be quite slender at first. As she moved the lean fingers to peel off those colorful adhesives, she felt the tendons and dense muscles twist and bunch under the skin that was free of blemish or hair. Making her digits obey also made the stiff joints in them ache slightly. As the first of the plastic plasters came free, she noticed a silvery glistening liquid sticking to it and winced a moment on the chemical, biting smell it had.

With each patch she peeled off, the inflexibility of her articulations lessened and the movements felt more natural and smooth, almost nimble. Finally the last one came free and she tossed it upon the small pile that had formed on the floor, before she stretched her arms fully. Twisting the hands around to feel each and every of the sore muscles in her lower arms and then bending the elbows to do the same for the upper ones, she heard a crack as her shoulder joints snapped into place. It was not the painful scrunch from a dislocated bone, but more the relieving sound of cartilages getting the movement they needed after a longer rest.

Taking in a deeper breath, she locked the fingers of her hands into each other and closed her eyes a moment as she lowered her chin and pulled her hands to the back of her head, pulling down while she pressed against the hands with her neck musculature. On her palms she could feel the texture of the matted hair, which was just an inch or two short of brushing against her shoulders, then the muscles of her nape tensed while she moved her skull to the upright position again. As she lifted the lids of her eyes again, she spotted her calves and feet in another of the red-orange flashes from the door, but besides them being well trained and bearing a thick layer of hard skin under them, they didn’t seemed too remarkable to her at first. Only as she let her eyes rest upon the toes a moment or two, she realized, that her toenails seemed rather pointed, almost sharp and clawlike. Shuddering she averted her eyes, reasoning with herself that they were just scruffy and would look ordinary once they would undergo pedicure.

As she turned her head to gaze down her back, the black stripes of the tattoo virtually jumped upon her. The first line followed her shoulder blade, its shape tapered towards the arm and the color fading towards the inner of it and a few inches lower a similar waved line stretched towards her ala. The next lines were invisible to her as she could not turn the neck far enough back, but at the lower back she spotted a pair of forking lines, each and every about a thumb’s width or more in the center of her spine. Turning the head to the other side, it appeared to her, that the pattern etched under her skin was mirrored, spanning her whole back in a symmetrical way.
Eventually she stood up, the rough skin on her feet touching the uneven cement floor. Two steps brought her over to the gaping door and she risked a peek through it. The room behind had white

walls and down from the ceiling hung a pair of lamps, one of them creating the jitters as the starter made the neon in it flash up red in an unsteady cycle, the was only there as the rest of the cable which had held it up. Now, it lay shattered upon the odd metallic table that stood underneath. Roughly humanoid shaped, it featured leather cuffs where wrists and ankles did belong to. Halfway hidden by the polished surface was a strange aperture with hundreds of cables and tubes that connected it to the bottom of the table. Only then she noticed the keyboard upon the steel surface between debris left by the crashing lamp.

On the other side of the room lay a toppled over creeper over something white, the contents spilled over the off-white ceramic tiles of the floor. Syringes and surgical instruments cluttered the floor between glass shards, and some of the metal objects stuck out of the dirty cloth that the cart was partly covering. As she carefully stepped between them to not harm her feet, her nose caught a sweetish smell and she had a strange feeling in her guts about what she was about to see. A shudder ran down her spine as she realized fully that the white object was the body of a human. The bald head of the man was turned in an unnatural way, his nose facing to his back and a trickle of red fluid ran down from his mouth and dried hours ago. Now that she was closer, a slightly sour and rancid smell mixed into the odor, creating a mixture that she almost instantly recognized as similar the stench of a steak left out of the fridge for a day. The corpse’s lab coat was soaked in dried, reddish brown blood where it touched the ground and in his left he held the broken hilt of a plastic scalpel while his right forearm was amiss. Nauseated she turned and left the room in a hurry, feeling a sharp pain as she stepped into a glass shard.

Stepping back into the room she had woken up in, she did clamp her hand onto the doorframe as she tried to sort things out in her mind. Who was she? Why she was here and where was here? The harder she thought about it, the less she could find an answer, as if everything that had connected her to the life before she awakened had vanished. Only the tattoo remained, but it could certainly be that it was new too. She couldn’t tell. Eventually her racing mind decided to follow a mere instinct; to leave this place. Just to grab everything which might be useful and then run.

Letting go of the doorframe, she stepped fully into the room, the red flickers casting the long shadows of her frame over the floor. Each step hurt slightly from the small glass shard in the ball of her foot. Only as she arrived at the pile of clothes she stopped, crouching down to take care of it. Carefully she peeled the piece of broken lamp out of the wound, and instantly she was rewarded with lessened pain, but also a gush of blood. The metallic stench of it hung in the air and in an attempt to lessen the flow she bent down to try to lick the red fluid away. Slightly to her own surprise she managed to twist her spine and leg enough to not only lick the blood away, but also to be able to suckle at the cut without discomfort. The salty and metallic taste filled her mouth, but it was almost alluring. Then the hard and sandy grains of silex dislodged from the gash, and in some kind of reflex she did spit them out.

As she pulled her gaze away from her foot, she caught a whiff of its smell. It was a strange sour odor that wafted upwards. Peculiar and mostly suppressed by the metallic smell of the blood from her foot, but she couldn’t say it was a rank aroma. Lowering the leg, her eyes followed the firm muscle of her calf to the shallow cavity on the inside of her knee as her hand followed on the outside at the same limb. Letting her fingers run over the kneecap, she caught the first deliberate look upon her naked thighs. Shapely they formed a gentle curve, hinting about the trained muscles underneath the skin and ending in a small dimple at the side of her hips. Her behind was, as she had seen from the look down her back, by far not perfect, better to be described as somewhat angular in her own opinion.

Resting her sore foot upon the ankle to keep the wound off the dirty ground, her left hand rested upon her knee, while her right hand found a comfortable position at her hip. Maybe they were not wide enough and a tad bony to be called nice and well-shaped, but at least they did flare out some in comparison to her waist. Sighing she lifted her eyes to take a look upon the room once again, but before she had found anything new, they returned to the resting point of her her right hand, as if it was magnetic. As she looked upon the fingers with their almost well manicured nails she felt they were quite a harsh contrast to those claws she had at her feet. Just a fraction of an inch away from them her eyes found a trimmed down bushel of hair, the color of them only describable as dark in the dim and reddish flashes of light from the other room. It could be anything between red and black, she thought a moment, taking it as a hint to her natural hair color. Auburn maybe, but for some reason she thought a reddish black would look good on her.

Staring at her lower body, she realized that she couldn’t have too much of a chest to speak of, as she didn’t see them bouncing into her field of vision from below. Letting her chin lower down against her collarbone to see more, she tried to gauge how much she really had, but found it pretty hard with nothing to compare against. So she did pull both her hands up, cupping around the mounds of her breasts and then squeezing the firm flesh. Hugging around a bit, she eventually found a position for her fingers to rest in a way that didn’t felt too weird, each of them slightly gapped to the next one and the pinky just at the lower brim of them. Still she couldn’t tell how much that was exactly, but to her they felt like a small handful, at the apex maybe a finger and a half, maybe two if you measured generous, away from her ribs.

Eventually she changed her seating position into a kneeling one and started searching through the pile of clothing for something to wear...

User:Lin/Pain and Chaos

2017-03-13T20:55:11Z

Lin:

{{author tag|Lin}}

=={{separator|f|Pain}}==
Slowly her consciousness rose from the velvet blackness. Everything about her body felt like a tank had just rolled over her repeatedly, only to balloon her with air a moment later. Every heartbeat was like a hammer strike resonating in her ears. Even the faint light that made its way through her eyelids tormented her, searing into her like white hot lasers. She attempted to move ever so slightly, but even thinking about it did made her muscles scream in agony.

What felt like an eternity later, the pains began to ebb and wane eventually. Not as fast as her tormented brain screamed for, but it was enough that her thoughts could go beyond begging for them to stop.. Who and where was she? And what had happened to her? But before she could finish the thought, she sank away into an unsteady slumber again.

The moments between each episode of consciousness and the next could have been mere minutes, or hours; she couldn’t tell. The pain she remembered from her first episode of half awakening dulled down to an endurable degree. But as she attempted to move, she felt the protest of the tortured muscles in her arms and stopped. Instead, she tried to open her eyes . With quite an expense of willpower she managed to coax the eyelid muscles to follow her commands, forcing them apart with all of her thoughts. At first, everything was dark, but then she noticed a naked gas-discharge tube mounted against a steel ceiling, but the ashy grey color of it told her that it burned out quite some time ago. To her left, she recognized the rough texture of epoxy laminated paper. Inhaling under some pain, she forced her neck muscles to obey, turning the head to her right in what seemed to be a stop motion film . This short movement alone seemed to rob her of all of her power, but she managed, spotting a door ajar that allowed some flickering light to pass through. It was the flickering light from another discharge tube with a defect starter. The last thing she realized from the corner of her eye, was the white foam she lay stretched out on before darkness took her again; the same foam they used to fill mattresses in hospitals.

=={{separator|f|Chaos}}==

Once again, she couldn’t tell how long she had been away, but this time the pain was gone entirely. She opened her eyes, just to squeeze them shut the instant after. More light than her eyes could manage flooded the room and even tormented her through the closed eyelids while the silence was broken by a deep and low hammering. It sounded like a fly’s wings would make, but slowed down to a mere fracture and then increased in volume to make a deep dub. As the bolt of pain ebbed away, she tried again to see something, extremely slowly and carefully this time. The whole room was in the dirty grey and white she had anticipated, and the white foam underneath her was spotted with stains in different shades of yellow and red. Just ahead of her was a window in the wall, and through it streamed a cone of light, the very one that had blinded her only moments ago. It wandered through the room, revealing the items that lay there astray: a small pile of cloths, a bunch of plastic wrappings and a nightstand with a folder upon it. The room was in chaotic disarray and the harsh light made it look even shabbier. A few moments the cone of light remained on the bare wall of the room while she remained motionless upon her foam bedding. Then, the light was gone.

Slowly she pulled herself together and up from her resting place. Surprisingly, the dim, flickering light that came through the doorway was enough to her to make her notice details that shouldn’t be visible in so little illumination. The texture of the dry cement on the floor seemed to stand out, the mostly polished down welding seams of the roof, even the dark grey stripes in the black curtains. She didn’t remember ever having good night vision, but then again, she didn’t remember too much about her past, or rather she didn’t remember anything but that this was a new sensation. The room felt just wrong, as if she never had been here before, and with a shiver she realized she couldn’t even remember her name, or how she looked like. Taking a deep breath she lowered her eyes, looking down her frame while lifting her arms. The bare skin of her hands came into view, painted into a silky orange from the light passing through the door. About half a dozen colorful patches dotted her wrists, and she began to peel them off one by one before taking a look at the rest of the body that felt alien but well known at the same time.

Letting her eyes wander upwards along her arms, she noticed that they seemed to be quite slender at first. As she moved the lean fingers to peel off those colorful adhesives, she felt the tendons and dense muscles twist and bunch under the skin that was free of blemish or hair. Making her digits obey also made the stiff joints in them ache slightly. As the first of the plastic plasters came free, she noticed a silvery glistening liquid sticking to it and winced a moment on the chemical, biting smell it had.

With each patch she peeled off, the inflexibility of her articulations lessened and the movements felt more natural and smooth, almost nimble. Finally the last one came free and she tossed it upon the small pile that had formed on the floor, before she stretched her arms fully. Twisting the hands around to feel each and every of the sore muscles in her lower arms and then bending the elbows to do the same for the upper ones, she heard a crack as her shoulder joints snapped into place. It was not the painful scrunch from a dislocated bone, but more the relieving sound of cartilages getting the movement they needed after a longer rest.

Taking in a deeper breath, she locked the fingers of her hands into each other and closed her eyes a moment as she lowered her chin and pulled her hands to the back of her head, pulling down while she pressed against the hands with her neck musculature. On her palms she could feel the texture of the matted hair, which was just an inch or two short of brushing against her shoulders, then the muscles of her nape tensed while she moved her skull to the upright position again. As she lifted the lids of her eyes again, she spotted her calves and feet in another of the red-orange flashes from the door, but besides them being well trained and bearing a thick layer of hard skin under them, they didn’t seemed too remarkable to her at first. Only as she let her eyes rest upon the toes a moment or two, she realized, that her toenails seemed rather pointed, almost sharp and clawlike. Shuddering she averted her eyes, reasoning with herself that they were just scruffy and would look ordinary once they would undergo pedicure.

As she turned her head to gaze down her back, the black stripes of the tattoo virtually jumped upon her. The first line followed her shoulder blade, its shape tapered towards the arm and the color fading towards the inner of it and a few inches lower a similar waved line stretched towards her ala. The next lines were invisible to her as she could not turn the neck far enough back, but at the lower back she spotted a pair of forking lines, each and every about a thumb’s width or more in the center of her spine. Turning the head to the other side, it appeared to her, that the pattern etched under her skin was mirrored, spanning her whole back in a symmetrical way.
Eventually she stood up, the rough skin on her feet touching the uneven cement floor. Two steps brought her over to the gaping door and she risked a peek through it. The room behind had white

walls and down from the ceiling hung a pair of lamps, one of them creating the jitters as the starter made the neon in it flash up red in an unsteady cycle, the was only there as the rest of the cable which had held it up. Now, it lay shattered upon the odd metallic table that stood underneath. Roughly humanoid shaped, it featured leather cuffs where wrists and ankles did belong to. Halfway hidden by the polished surface was a strange aperture with hundreds of cables and tubes that connected it to the bottom of the table. Only then she noticed the keyboard upon the steel surface between debris left by the crashing lamp.

On the other side of the room lay a toppled over creeper over something white, the contents spilled over the off-white ceramic tiles of the floor. Syringes and surgical instruments cluttered the floor between glass shards, and some of the metal objects stuck out of the dirty cloth that the cart was partly covering. As she carefully stepped between them to not harm her feet, her nose caught a sweetish smell and she had a strange feeling in her guts about what she was about to see. A shudder ran down her spine as she realized fully that the white object was the body of a human. The bald head of the man was turned in an unnatural way, his nose facing to his back and a trickle of red fluid ran down from his mouth and dried hours ago. Now that she was closer, a slightly sour and rancid smell mixed into the odor, creating a mixture that she almost instantly recognized as similar the stench of a steak left out of the fridge for a day. The corpse’s lab coat was soaked in dried, reddish brown blood where it touched the ground and in his left he held the broken hilt of a plastic scalpel while his right forearm was amiss. Nauseated she turned and left the room in a hurry, feeling a sharp pain as she stepped into a glass shard.

Stepping back into the room she had woken up in, she did clamp her hand onto the doorframe as she tried to sort things out in her mind. Who was she? Why she was here and where was here? The harder she thought about it, the less she could find an answer, as if everything that had connected her to the life before she awakened had vanished. Only the tattoo remained, but it could certainly be that it was new too. She couldn’t tell. Eventually her racing mind decided to follow a mere instinct; to leave this place. Just to grab everything which might be useful and then run.

Letting go of the doorframe, she stepped fully into the room, the red flickers casting the long shadows of her frame over the floor. Each step hurt slightly from the small glass shard in the ball of her foot. Only as she arrived at the pile of clothes she stopped, crouching down to take care of it. Carefully she peeled the piece of broken lamp out of the wound, and instantly she was rewarded with lessened pain, but also a gush of blood. The metallic stench of it hung in the air and in an attempt to lessen the flow she bent down to try to lick the red fluid away. Slightly to her own surprise she managed to twist her spine and leg enough to not only lick the blood away, but also to be able to suckle at the cut without discomfort. The salty and metallic taste filled her mouth, but it was almost alluring. Then the hard and sandy grains of silex dislodged from the gash, and in some kind of reflex she did spit them out.

As she pulled her gaze away from her foot, she caught a whiff of its smell. It was a strange sour odor that wafted upwards. Peculiar and mostly suppressed by the metallic smell of the blood from her foot, but she couldn’t say it was a rank aroma. Lowering the leg, her eyes followed the firm muscle of her calf to the shallow cavity on the inside of her knee as her hand followed on the outside at the same limb. Letting her fingers run over the kneecap, she caught the first deliberate look upon her naked thighs. Shapely they formed a gentle curve, hinting about the trained muscles underneath the skin and ending in a small dimple at the side of her hips. Her behind was, as she had seen from the look down her back, by far not perfect, better to be described as somewhat angular in her own opinion.

Resting her sore foot upon the ankle to keep the wound off the dirty ground, her left hand rested upon her knee, while her right hand found a comfortable position at her hip. Maybe they were not wide enough and a tad bony to be called nice and well-shaped, but at least they did flare out some in comparison to her waist. Sighing she lifted her eyes to take a look upon the room once again, but before she had found anything new, they returned to the resting point of her her right hand, as if it was magnetic. As she looked upon the fingers with their almost well manicured nails she felt they were quite a harsh contrast to those claws she had at her feet. Just a fraction of an inch away from them her eyes found a trimmed down bushel of hair, the color of them only describable as dark in the dim and reddish flashes of light from the other room. It could be anything between red and black, she thought a moment, taking it as a hint to her natural hair color. Auburn maybe, but for some reason she thought a reddish black would look good on her.

Staring at her lower body, she realized that she couldn’t have too much of a chest to speak of, as she didn’t see them bouncing into her field of vision from below. Letting her chin lower down against her collarbone to see more, she tried to gauge how much she really had, but found it pretty hard with nothing to compare against. So she did pull both her hands up, cupping around the mounds of her breasts and then squeezing the firm flesh. Hugging around a bit, she eventually found a position for her fingers to rest in a way that didn’t felt too weird, each of them slightly gapped to the next one and the pinky just at the lower brim of them. Still she couldn’t tell how much that was exactly, but to her they felt like a small handful, at the apex maybe a finger and a half, maybe two if you measured generous, away from her ribs.

Eventually she changed her seating position into a kneeling one and started searching through the pile of clothing for something to wear...

User:Lin/Pain and Chaos

2017-03-13T20:53:14Z

Lin: Created page with "=={{separator|f|Pain}}== Slowly her consciousness rose from the velvet blackness. Everything about her body felt like a tank had just rolled over her repeatedly, only to ballo..."

=={{separator|f|Pain}}==
Slowly her consciousness rose from the velvet blackness. Everything about her body felt like a tank had just rolled over her repeatedly, only to balloon her with air a moment later. Every heartbeat was like a hammer strike resonating in her ears. Even the faint light that made its way through her eyelids tormented her, searing into her like white hot lasers. She attempted to move ever so slightly, but even thinking about it did made her muscles scream in agony.

What felt like an eternity later, the pains began to ebb and wane eventually. Not as fast as her tormented brain screamed for, but it was enough that her thoughts could go beyond begging for them to stop.. Who and where was she? And what had happened to her? But before she could finish the thought, she sank away into an unsteady slumber again.

The moments between each episode of consciousness and the next could have been mere minutes, or hours; she couldn’t tell. The pain she remembered from her first episode of half awakening dulled down to an endurable degree. But as she attempted to move, she felt the protest of the tortured muscles in her arms and stopped. Instead, she tried to open her eyes . With quite an expense of willpower she managed to coax the eyelid muscles to follow her commands, forcing them apart with all of her thoughts. At first, everything was dark, but then she noticed a naked gas-discharge tube mounted against a steel ceiling, but the ashy grey color of it told her that it burned out quite some time ago. To her left, she recognized the rough texture of epoxy laminated paper. Inhaling under some pain, she forced her neck muscles to obey, turning the head to her right in what seemed to be a stop motion film . This short movement alone seemed to rob her of all of her power, but she managed, spotting a door ajar that allowed some flickering light to pass through. It was the flickering light from another discharge tube with a defect starter. The last thing she realized from the corner of her eye, was the white foam she lay stretched out on before darkness took her again; the same foam they used to fill mattresses in hospitals.

=={{separator|f|Chaos}}==

Once again, she couldn’t tell how long she had been away, but this time the pain was gone entirely. She opened her eyes, just to squeeze them shut the instant after. More light than her eyes could manage flooded the room and even tormented her through the closed eyelids while the silence was broken by a deep and low hammering. It sounded like a fly’s wings would make, but slowed down to a mere fracture and then increased in volume to make a deep dub. As the bolt of pain ebbed away, she tried again to see something, extremely slowly and carefully this time. The whole room was in the dirty grey and white she had anticipated, and the white foam underneath her was spotted with stains in different shades of yellow and red. Just ahead of her was a window in the wall, and through it streamed a cone of light, the very one that had blinded her only moments ago. It wandered through the room, revealing the items that lay there astray: a small pile of cloths, a bunch of plastic wrappings and a nightstand with a folder upon it. The room was in chaotic disarray and the harsh light made it look even shabbier. A few moments the cone of light remained on the bare wall of the room while she remained motionless upon her foam bedding. Then, the light was gone.

Slowly she pulled herself together and up from her resting place. Surprisingly, the dim, flickering light that came through the doorway was enough to her to make her notice details that shouldn’t be visible in so little illumination. The texture of the dry cement on the floor seemed to stand out, the mostly polished down welding seams of the roof, even the dark grey stripes in the black curtains. She didn’t remember ever having good night vision, but then again, she didn’t remember too much about her past, or rather she didn’t remember anything but that this was a new sensation. The room felt just wrong, as if she never had been here before, and with a shiver she realized she couldn’t even remember her name, or how she looked like. Taking a deep breath she lowered her eyes, looking down her frame while lifting her arms. The bare skin of her hands came into view, painted into a silky orange from the light passing through the door. About half a dozen colorful patches dotted her wrists, and she began to peel them off one by one before taking a look at the rest of the body that felt alien but well known at the same time.

Letting her eyes wander upwards along her arms, she noticed that they seemed to be quite slender at first. As she moved the lean fingers to peel off those colorful adhesives, she felt the tendons and dense muscles twist and bunch under the skin that was free of blemish or hair. Making her digits obey also made the stiff joints in them ache slightly. As the first of the plastic plasters came free, she noticed a silvery glistening liquid sticking to it and winced a moment on the chemical, biting smell it had.

With each patch she peeled off, the inflexibility of her articulations lessened and the movements felt more natural and smooth, almost nimble. Finally the last one came free and she tossed it upon the small pile that had formed on the floor, before she stretched her arms fully. Twisting the hands around to feel each and every of the sore muscles in her lower arms and then bending the elbows to do the same for the upper ones, she heard a crack as her shoulder joints snapped into place. It was not the painful scrunch from a dislocated bone, but more the relieving sound of cartilages getting the movement they needed after a longer rest.

Taking in a deeper breath, she locked the fingers of her hands into each other and closed her eyes a moment as she lowered her chin and pulled her hands to the back of her head, pulling down while she pressed against the hands with her neck musculature. On her palms she could feel the texture of the matted hair, which was just an inch or two short of brushing against her shoulders, then the muscles of her nape tensed while she moved her skull to the upright position again. As she lifted the lids of her eyes again, she spotted her calves and feet in another of the red-orange flashes from the door, but besides them being well trained and bearing a thick layer of hard skin under them, they didn’t seemed too remarkable to her at first. Only as she let her eyes rest upon the toes a moment or two, she realized, that her toenails seemed rather pointed, almost sharp and clawlike. Shuddering she averted her eyes, reasoning with herself that they were just scruffy and would look ordinary once they would undergo pedicure.

As she turned her head to gaze down her back, the black stripes of the tattoo virtually jumped upon her. The first line followed her shoulder blade, its shape tapered towards the arm and the color fading towards the inner of it and a few inches lower a similar waved line stretched towards her ala. The next lines were invisible to her as she could not turn the neck far enough back, but at the lower back she spotted a pair of forking lines, each and every about a thumb’s width or more in the center of her spine. Turning the head to the other side, it appeared to her, that the pattern etched under her skin was mirrored, spanning her whole back in a symmetrical way.
Eventually she stood up, the rough skin on her feet touching the uneven cement floor. Two steps brought her over to the gaping door and she risked a peek through it. The room behind had white

walls and down from the ceiling hung a pair of lamps, one of them creating the jitters as the starter made the neon in it flash up red in an unsteady cycle, the was only there as the rest of the cable which had held it up. Now, it lay shattered upon the odd metallic table that stood underneath. Roughly humanoid shaped, it featured leather cuffs where wrists and ankles did belong to. Halfway hidden by the polished surface was a strange aperture with hundreds of cables and tubes that connected it to the bottom of the table. Only then she noticed the keyboard upon the steel surface between debris left by the crashing lamp.

On the other side of the room lay a toppled over creeper over something white, the contents spilled over the off-white ceramic tiles of the floor. Syringes and surgical instruments cluttered the floor between glass shards, and some of the metal objects stuck out of the dirty cloth that the cart was partly covering. As she carefully stepped between them to not harm her feet, her nose caught a sweetish smell and she had a strange feeling in her guts about what she was about to see. A shudder ran down her spine as she realized fully that the white object was the body of a human. The bald head of the man was turned in an unnatural way, his nose facing to his back and a trickle of red fluid ran down from his mouth and dried hours ago. Now that she was closer, a slightly sour and rancid smell mixed into the odor, creating a mixture that she almost instantly recognized as similar the stench of a steak left out of the fridge for a day. The corpse’s lab coat was soaked in dried, reddish brown blood where it touched the ground and in his left he held the broken hilt of a plastic scalpel while his right forearm was amiss. Nauseated she turned and left the room in a hurry, feeling a sharp pain as she stepped into a glass shard.

Stepping back into the room she had woken up in, she did clamp her hand onto the doorframe as she tried to sort things out in her mind. Who was she? Why she was here and where was here? The harder she thought about it, the less she could find an answer, as if everything that had connected her to the life before she awakened had vanished. Only the tattoo remained, but it could certainly be that it was new too. She couldn’t tell. Eventually her racing mind decided to follow a mere instinct; to leave this place. Just to grab everything which might be useful and then run.

Letting go of the doorframe, she stepped fully into the room, the red flickers casting the long shadows of her frame over the floor. Each step hurt slightly from the small glass shard in the ball of her foot. Only as she arrived at the pile of clothes she stopped, crouching down to take care of it. Carefully she peeled the piece of broken lamp out of the wound, and instantly she was rewarded with lessened pain, but also a gush of blood. The metallic stench of it hung in the air and in an attempt to lessen the flow she bent down to try to lick the red fluid away. Slightly to her own surprise she managed to twist her spine and leg enough to not only lick the blood away, but also to be able to suckle at the cut without discomfort. The salty and metallic taste filled her mouth, but it was almost alluring. Then the hard and sandy grains of silex dislodged from the gash, and in some kind of reflex she did spit them out.

As she pulled her gaze away from her foot, she caught a whiff of its smell. It was a strange sour odor that wafted upwards. Peculiar and mostly suppressed by the metallic smell of the blood from her foot, but she couldn’t say it was a rank aroma. Lowering the leg, her eyes followed the firm muscle of her calf to the shallow cavity on the inside of her knee as her hand followed on the outside at the same limb. Letting her fingers run over the kneecap, she caught the first deliberate look upon her naked thighs. Shapely they formed a gentle curve, hinting about the trained muscles underneath the skin and ending in a small dimple at the side of her hips. Her behind was, as she had seen from the look down her back, by far not perfect, better to be described as somewhat angular in her own opinion.

Resting her sore foot upon the ankle to keep the wound off the dirty ground, her left hand rested upon her knee, while her right hand found a comfortable position at her hip. Maybe they were not wide enough and a tad bony to be called nice and well-shaped, but at least they did flare out some in comparison to her waist. Sighing she lifted her eyes to take a look upon the room once again, but before she had found anything new, they returned to the resting point of her her right hand, as if it was magnetic. As she looked upon the fingers with their almost well manicured nails she felt they were quite a harsh contrast to those claws she had at her feet. Just a fraction of an inch away from them her eyes found a trimmed down bushel of hair, the color of them only describable as dark in the dim and reddish flashes of light from the other room. It could be anything between red and black, she thought a moment, taking it as a hint to her natural hair color. Auburn maybe, but for some reason she thought a reddish black would look good on her.

Staring at her lower body, she realized that she couldn’t have too much of a chest to speak of, as she didn’t see them bouncing into her field of vision from below. Letting her chin lower down against her collarbone to see more, she tried to gauge how much she really had, but found it pretty hard with nothing to compare against. So she did pull both her hands up, cupping around the mounds of her breasts and then squeezing the firm flesh. Hugging around a bit, she eventually found a position for her fingers to rest in a way that didn’t felt too weird, each of them slightly gapped to the next one and the pinky just at the lower brim of them. Still she couldn’t tell how much that was exactly, but to her they felt like a small handful, at the apex maybe a finger and a half, maybe two if you measured generous, away from her ribs.

Eventually she changed her seating position into a kneeling one and started searching through the pile of clothing for something to wear...

User:Lin

2017-03-13T20:51:12Z

Lin: /* {{separator|f|Works}} */

{{my stories
|name=Lin
|category=Lin
}}
==About Myself==

Made in Germany and student of physics and history, I have been involved with writing since about 2007. To this genre though I only came about 2013 or 2014. About 2015 I wrote my first into the that was somewhat close to the genre, carring more innuendo than story on furafinity under the label Selinea, and finally in 2017 I came here.

<div class="floatright">
{| class="toc"
|-
!Legend
|-
|
*[[Image:Star.png|20px]] - Favorite of mine
*[[Image:Triple_X.png|20px]] - Adult content
*[[Image:Book with bookmark.png|20px]] - Long story (>150kB)
*[[Image:Magnifying glass.png|20px]] - Short story
*[[Image:Clock warning.png|20px]] - On Hiatus
|}
</div>
__TOC__

=={{separator|f|Works in Progress}}==

*Something is out there...

=={{separator|f|Works}}==

*[[User:Lin/Pain and Chaos|Pain & Chaos]]
:Written in 2015 as a 333 hours - 1000+ words challenge. Cyberpunk and more innuendo of changes that might or might not have happened.

{{author page|Lin}}

{{DEFAULTSORT:Lin}}

User:Lin

2017-03-13T20:45:45Z

Lin:

{{my stories
|name=Lin
|category=Lin
}}
==About Myself==

Made in Germany and student of physics and history, I have been involved with writing since about 2007. To this genre though I only came about 2013 or 2014. About 2015 I wrote my first into the that was somewhat close to the genre, carring more innuendo than story on furafinity under the label Selinea, and finally in 2017 I came here.

<div class="floatright">
{| class="toc"
|-
!Legend
|-
|
*[[Image:Star.png|20px]] - Favorite of mine
*[[Image:Triple_X.png|20px]] - Adult content
*[[Image:Book with bookmark.png|20px]] - Long story (>150kB)
*[[Image:Magnifying glass.png|20px]] - Short story
*[[Image:Clock warning.png|20px]] - On Hiatus
|}
</div>
__TOC__

=={{separator|f|Works in Progress}}==

*Something is out there...

=={{separator|f|Works}}==

*[[User:Lin\Pain and Chaos|Pain & Chaos]]
:Written in 2015 as a 333 hours - 1000+ words challenge. Cyberpunk and more innuendo of changes that might or might not have happened.

{{author page|Lin}}

{{DEFAULTSORT:Lin}}

User:Lin

2017-03-13T20:42:23Z

Lin:

{{my stories
|name=Lin
|category=Lin
}}
==About Myself==

Made in Germany and student of physics and history, I have been involved with writing since about 2007. To this genre though I only came about 2013 or 2014. About 2015 I wrote my first into the that was somewhat close to the genre, carring more innuendo than story, and finally in 2017 I came here.

<div class="floatright">
{| class="toc"
|-
!Legend
|-
|
*[[Image:Star.png|20px]] - Favorite of mine
*[[Image:Triple_X.png|20px]] - Adult content
*[[Image:Book with bookmark.png|20px]] - Long story (>150kB)
*[[Image:Magnifying glass.png|20px]] - Short story
*[[Image:Clock warning.png|20px]] - On Hiatus
|}
</div>
__TOC__

=={{separator|f|Works in Progress}}==

*Something is out there...

=={{separator|f|Works since 2017}}==

{{author page|Lin}}

{{DEFAULTSORT:Lin}}

User:Lin

2017-03-13T20:37:09Z

Lin: Created page with "{{my stories |name=Lin |category=Lin }} ==About Myself== <div class="floatright"> {| class="toc" |- !Legend |- | *20px - Favorite of mine *Image:Triple_..."

{{my stories
|name=Lin
|category=Lin
}}
==About Myself==

<div class="floatright">
{| class="toc"
|-
!Legend
|-
|
*[[Image:Star.png|20px]] - Favorite of mine
*[[Image:Triple_X.png|20px]] - Adult content
*[[Image:Book with bookmark.png|20px]] - Long story (>150kB)
*[[Image:Magnifying glass.png|20px]] - Short story
*[[Image:Clock warning.png|20px]] - On Hiatus
|}
</div>
__TOC__

=={{separator|f|Works in Progress}}==

*Something is out there...

=={{separator|f|Works since 2017}}==

{{author page|Lin}}

{{DEFAULTSORT:Lin}}

Talk:FreeRIDErs (background material)

2017-03-13T20:31:02Z

Lin:

Talk:FreeRIDErs (background material)

2017-03-11T20:03:58Z

Lin: