Third Magus
Really Really Experienced
- Joined
- Jan 3, 2003
- Posts
- 324
Stefan Sangrail’s earliest memory must have been from when he was almost five years old. He was in the dining room, the great, dark room lined with oakwood panelling from Old Earth itself, and there was a meal in progress. The family usually ate in the smaller, brighter, warmer kitchen downstairs, but his father’s guests had come to supper that night, and they had to be formally entertained.
Someone had offered him an orange, a particularly large and succulent-looking fruit, but the young Stefan, in a confused notion of how the rules of courtesy and hospitality worked, had steadfastly refused, even though his mouth was watering. The big, blackbearded man sitting at the table at Father’s right had given a great booming laugh, and said: “ No Orne-synth stuff for you, eh? Just like your father”. Everyone had laughed, including Stefan, though he hadn’t understood. Afterwards the visitor had given him half a crown in spending money. It wasn’t until long after that Stefan realised the visitor must have been Black Magnus.
Stefan remembered the details of his father’s arrest, four years later, much less well, even though that story was so well-known it was almost common property. It was true that the starport police burst in during a production of The Tempest and arrested his father. It wasn’t true that his father had shouted defiance and had to be bludgeoned unconscious, or that he’d attempted suicide, or that he’d tried to bribe the police into letting him go. Stefan mostly remembered a crestfallen, slightly crumpled look on his father’s face as they led him away, as though he was like the actors on the stage, confused and awaiting a helpful cue.
As he grew up, Stefan wondered, along with everyone else, why his father, Conrad Sangrail, had done it. Why he’d conspired with the pirate Black Magnus against the Orne Company, his own company, that had given him wealth and fame and power. In his early teens, Stefan had gone through a fiercely Company-loyal phase, and was convinced that his father was a greedy wretch who’d sold out Orne it for a share in Magnus’ spoils. Later, when he became slightly more politically sophisticated, he liked to think it was because Conrad Sangrail had seen a terrible danger in Orne and the other great companies’ rapid growth, seen that a company was ultimately something that simply devoured endlessly, regardless of the wishes of its directors, and he was Don Quixote, fighting a hopeless battle against an enemy nobody else even saw.
Stefan now saw that people were infinitely complex, that his father could have been doing it both for idealistic and mercenary reasons, that he could have been both hero and villain in one, and that, moreover, he betrayed the Company simply because it was in his nature to do such things.
But all the eight-year old Stefan knew was that they had taken his father away.
Company fines had taken away the townhouse in Caern Starport and the little apartment on Caern’s third moon. Orne Company’s lawyers had attached their suckers to the family’s funds, and slowly drained them away. It was a foregone conclusion that Stefan’s sisters would have to give up their dreams of college and financial independence, to make the best marriages they could. And Stefan’s fate was out of his hands too: at the age of thirteen he was sent away to the Orne Naval Academy on Delos.
Despite his family-history, he was a fair success in the Academy. Reame Company, after fifty years in the position of the runt of the company-pack, had suddenly starte dto rise again, making aggressive expansions in the north-west sector of the galaxy. Orne needed all the space-farers they could get, and promotion was fast due to attrition. Stefan rose through the ranks to become, at the age of twenty-four, the master and commander of his own small vessel.
He was summoned back to Delos to have the epaulette pinned on his right shoulder, and then given twenty-four hours’ grace to choose his crew. Stefan knew he would be watched closely by the Naval authorities. Did treachery run in his family’s blood?
And if it did, there’d be hell to pay.
The idea for this RP is the Napoleonic wars in space. It’s three or four centuries on from our own time, and humankind has hit the stars, but there’s also been something of a slide backwards. What on Earth were just corporations have become the Imperial powers of space, and there’s the kind of rhetoric and pomp around them there was around the European powers in the nineteenth century. There’s also a state of semi-open warfare between most of the great companies, mapped by a constantly changing set of alliances, conducted with odd, anachronistic rules and niceties.
This will be fairly low sci-fi; no psychics, no aliens, no lasers, no robots, no FTL travel, no AI. I need a handful of writers; anyone who’s interested should play one of the crewmembers for the new vessel; stuff like the ship’s navigator, doctor, master, engineer, all that kind of thing.
Someone had offered him an orange, a particularly large and succulent-looking fruit, but the young Stefan, in a confused notion of how the rules of courtesy and hospitality worked, had steadfastly refused, even though his mouth was watering. The big, blackbearded man sitting at the table at Father’s right had given a great booming laugh, and said: “ No Orne-synth stuff for you, eh? Just like your father”. Everyone had laughed, including Stefan, though he hadn’t understood. Afterwards the visitor had given him half a crown in spending money. It wasn’t until long after that Stefan realised the visitor must have been Black Magnus.
Stefan remembered the details of his father’s arrest, four years later, much less well, even though that story was so well-known it was almost common property. It was true that the starport police burst in during a production of The Tempest and arrested his father. It wasn’t true that his father had shouted defiance and had to be bludgeoned unconscious, or that he’d attempted suicide, or that he’d tried to bribe the police into letting him go. Stefan mostly remembered a crestfallen, slightly crumpled look on his father’s face as they led him away, as though he was like the actors on the stage, confused and awaiting a helpful cue.
As he grew up, Stefan wondered, along with everyone else, why his father, Conrad Sangrail, had done it. Why he’d conspired with the pirate Black Magnus against the Orne Company, his own company, that had given him wealth and fame and power. In his early teens, Stefan had gone through a fiercely Company-loyal phase, and was convinced that his father was a greedy wretch who’d sold out Orne it for a share in Magnus’ spoils. Later, when he became slightly more politically sophisticated, he liked to think it was because Conrad Sangrail had seen a terrible danger in Orne and the other great companies’ rapid growth, seen that a company was ultimately something that simply devoured endlessly, regardless of the wishes of its directors, and he was Don Quixote, fighting a hopeless battle against an enemy nobody else even saw.
Stefan now saw that people were infinitely complex, that his father could have been doing it both for idealistic and mercenary reasons, that he could have been both hero and villain in one, and that, moreover, he betrayed the Company simply because it was in his nature to do such things.
But all the eight-year old Stefan knew was that they had taken his father away.
Company fines had taken away the townhouse in Caern Starport and the little apartment on Caern’s third moon. Orne Company’s lawyers had attached their suckers to the family’s funds, and slowly drained them away. It was a foregone conclusion that Stefan’s sisters would have to give up their dreams of college and financial independence, to make the best marriages they could. And Stefan’s fate was out of his hands too: at the age of thirteen he was sent away to the Orne Naval Academy on Delos.
Despite his family-history, he was a fair success in the Academy. Reame Company, after fifty years in the position of the runt of the company-pack, had suddenly starte dto rise again, making aggressive expansions in the north-west sector of the galaxy. Orne needed all the space-farers they could get, and promotion was fast due to attrition. Stefan rose through the ranks to become, at the age of twenty-four, the master and commander of his own small vessel.
He was summoned back to Delos to have the epaulette pinned on his right shoulder, and then given twenty-four hours’ grace to choose his crew. Stefan knew he would be watched closely by the Naval authorities. Did treachery run in his family’s blood?
And if it did, there’d be hell to pay.
The idea for this RP is the Napoleonic wars in space. It’s three or four centuries on from our own time, and humankind has hit the stars, but there’s also been something of a slide backwards. What on Earth were just corporations have become the Imperial powers of space, and there’s the kind of rhetoric and pomp around them there was around the European powers in the nineteenth century. There’s also a state of semi-open warfare between most of the great companies, mapped by a constantly changing set of alliances, conducted with odd, anachronistic rules and niceties.
This will be fairly low sci-fi; no psychics, no aliens, no lasers, no robots, no FTL travel, no AI. I need a handful of writers; anyone who’s interested should play one of the crewmembers for the new vessel; stuff like the ship’s navigator, doctor, master, engineer, all that kind of thing.
