Greetings, afraid I have another post without an update. I have a little tweaking to do before I’m comfortable putting A&I on CoGDemos. Things are probably working, but there are a couple of pieces of content I want done before I upload A&I again. So sadly at the moment I can’t even tell you to check it out. The plan is definitely to have the first chapter or so available again soon. I should know better than to expect myself to be productive around the New Year, what work I have gotten done lately has been on Ace of Spies.
But no update, doesn’t mean I have nothing to say. Here’s a brief section on the fourth of the Elysian crises. The surprising appearance of intelligent flora:
On Ambulatory Trees
Intelligent trees.
The phrase wasn’t exactly on anyone’s Elysian crises bingo card, partly because in billions of years humanity hadn’t met any intelligent plant life… and partly because well the trees that appeared to be intelligent were descended from terrestrial trees variants of which had been around the Beagle since the ship was launched.
Intelligent alien flora was one thing. But what this appeared to be was intelligent cedar trees and it was just weird.
There was a lot of science left to be done. This was one of those times everyone wished that the Beagle still had access to the old Nomad database. There had been plenty of writing about other ways intelligent life could’ve evolved, but most of that had been theorizing about animal life. Intelligent trees was quite literally a head scratcher. Who knew what the trees would want, if they were intelligent there couldn’t be any real communication with them until they had language, until then the immediate move was just to not bother them and allow them to develop in a relatively normal fashion.
Not exactly exciting, but it would indisputably impact the plans for developing Elysia.
Thanks for reading, hope all of you are well. Be back with an actual update when I have one.
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Greetings, no demo up on CoGDemos yet,
I’ve been slightly distracted by news and general levels of chaos. When reality gets a little chaotic it can be somewhat inconvenient for me to get into the idealistic frame of mind to get thinking about the Beagle and humanity existing for untold eons.
So I’m going to start a brief section on characters that began as name drops but have become steadily more interesting to me…
Meet Zweli Henriquez
Henriquez is a character I created as someone your character could play curling with and potentially have a single romantic episode with. It wasn’t supposed to be a big deal.
He was supposed to be highly motivated and a huge fan of curling and that was sort of supposed to be it.
Then I gave his character a PhD in psychology and suddenly he became very important. The story in a lot of ways is about people struggling with their position in society changing greatly and then with the ramifications of those effects on their souls and personalities. Suddenly someone with a keen understanding of the human mind becomes a very important character. About five different times I’ve found myself expanding Zweli’s role until he’s started getting name dropped along with the other characters that are more famous within the universe. (I make no guarantees Zweli’s observations are psychologically sound, I took a bunch of psych classes in undergrad, but that doesn’t mean I’m close to being qualified to diagnose anything.)
Thanks for reading, be back in June. Hope I have a real update for that one.
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So, have uploaded to COGdemos… so A&I is back online. Hopefully. I suspect I’ve messed things up in the process, but that’s a problem for me to fix.
I should’ve learned by now not to expect to actually get anything done on the A&I front during the French Open, major tennis tournaments have a way of diverting my attention away from A&I and to Ace of Spies.
In the spirit of my last update allow me to introduce another seemingly minor character:
Meet Tondeya Lazzeri
Lazzeri’s role in the story began as your character’s rotation mate aboard the Labrador’s sister ship. In other words she was part of B shift on the Great Dane and in missions where the Labrador has to interact with the Dane she was worth mentioning, but it quickly became apparent to me that she would grow into someone your character could trust and that’s how she wound up on the Unstable Meteorological Subcommittee and playing a significant role in a mid-game crisis.
An accomplished former chief engineer Lazzeri is someone that comes from outside of the Great Families of the Beagle, this gives her a perspective different from that of your character of Mercedes Skorupski, but as with nearly every character what gives Lazzeri a unique perspective isn’t her family heritage, but the era in the Beagle timeline that she comes from.
Lazzeri is from one of humanity’s more exploratory periods which makes her someone with more history aboard space vessels than almost anyone else aboard the Beagle. It means that compared to some of her colleagues she does have a far more optimistic view of the future.
As ever thanks for reading, be back in August hopefully I’ll have cleaned up my code by then.
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