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Her highness Tawi Kiburi-Ko isn't particularly interested in prey, but she's open to new experiences. Can this "wild" gazelle coax something unexpected out of the lioness?
Length: 6K words
The demon mother...
Some side notes in case you should want them:
The artificial savanna that this takes place on is located on the inner ring of a space station. It was originally planned to be an asteroid mining and processing hub, but by the time it was completed, it was already obsolete by new technologies and processes. The solar system project began as a purely industrial one, but then turned into experimental research on things related to living in space and terra-forming. To take advantage of that, the station pivoted to the only space-bound resort in the cosmos. It's a source of relief and comfort for those that live on the underground facilities on the partially-inhabitable fourth planet, but it also draws people from the homeworld, Eanli, as well.
Tawi Kiburi-Ko chairs a research group that does space exploration in Eanli's home galaxy. That sounds amazing, but it's a bit out-of-vogue compared to inter-dimensional exploration. She's thrilled with the resulting challenge. The space station here, and the entire colonized system, are largely the result of the Kiburi-Ko family's interest. The plurality of engineers, operations specialists, technicians, assorted adventurous folks and their families are from the lioness's home continent, and a full half of them from her home region. The station's theme makes sense: homesick nostalgia combined with cutting edge tech and research. It also makes perfect sense that they would want people to see Tawi going here and bringing back an important souvenir. That's legitimacy, babe.
The station itself is shaped like a big, spinning loop. The inside has a complex set of instruments, but the most blindingly visible one is the giant mirror-like device that collects and re-directs the light of the system's sun. As the station rotates, the inner portion of the ring is illuminated just like daylight. Presumably, people were going to live there comfortable, but they made something like wilderness there when that didn't appear to be necessary. Now it's a hunting ground inhabited by gazelles that were created from fifty thousand year-old genetic samples found in preserved remains from a prehistoric volcanic landslide. It's like Jurassic Park but with only one thing, and the guests are catching and eating the dinosaurs and taking them home after a machine prints the dinosaur a new body to go in... that's nothing like Jurassic Park, is it? Hopefully you get the idea. The rest of the station is like the biggest possible casino resort, but with less casino and way more resort.
Final note: this does take place in the Eanli Cosmos setting, same as Hunting Paradise and the connected works I've done thus far. The difference is that this one takes place in SPACE! Finally. It took us a while, but we finally went to space. I honed this one down to the barest possible elements, cutting out any elements that didn't suite the atmosphere or direct narrative, so it isn't as obvious.
Posted by Entirely_Logical 4 years ago Report
It's a curious point that you bring up, how what we consider to be the final frontier seems a lot less novel when the concept of the multiverse is introduced; if travel between Eanli and
EarthGardenia is possible, why not other, stranger worlds that technically occupy the same space? On the other hand, that means there are that many more possibilities to explore in both dimensions - as well as any more they might learn to traverse.[ Reply ]
Posted by ObsidianSnake 4 years ago Report
The technology was applied to interplanetary travel first, and then they found a new way to apply it as they learned more. Even space travel can become near mundane under the right social conditions, apparently.
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Posted by TestAccountPleaseIgnore 3 years ago Report
You know, it's really a great example of the sheer - obscene, almost - power differential between the predators and prey that live in post-scarcity times that the inner section of an entire fucking orbital habitat got dedicated to being a hunting preserve.
Also, you say there's a "semi-habitable fourth planet". Is that the Eanli version of Mars? Because I've been mentally matching a few regions on Eanli with their respective ones on Earth - Verria is similar to Canada or parts of the United States, Dascadia is similar to Madagascar, etc. - and it seems like Eanli is essentially a mirror-universe Earth where evolution took a very, very different path.
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Posted by ObsidianSnake 3 years ago Report
The star system here is not the Eanli one. To be fair, it makes sense that you would be tempted to try and match setting elements like that, as such things work in the other stories. This is one of the stories that introduce and entirely dwell within their own contexts, self-contained, still connected -- just like a space station.
The in-setting understanding is that Earth is a shadow of Eanli. The materialistic explanation is long and dull, so a poetic shorthand like that is the general preference. The dimensional layers of the cosmos aren't perfectly equivalent in other ways, too. Those details will come up in prose when relevant.
Verria is confusingly both the continent and the short-hand name for the nation that dominates most of it. I suppose that's poor writing on my part, as everything should be clear and unambiguous, in precisely the way the that the ever-stubborn real world never is. Oh, well! Ambiguous or not, the political body of Verria includes both Canada, U.S., and Mexico. Likewise, it isn't culturally homogeneous.
Un is actually similar. Her Higheness Tawi would see a great difference between her home nation and the others of Un, even if they're enmeshed in terms of world representation. Un is much larger than Verria! Characters have come from there often, but I realize that the opposite has not yet occurred; the stories have managed thus far to not venture there. I'm currently finishing a larger project right now, one that I've been working on for an excessively long time, so the last thing on my mind is flinging myself into another project. That said, there's some ideas I've had that are set in Un. I could see those as the active project at some point.
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Posted by TestAccountPleaseIgnore 3 years ago Report
Verria is confusingly both the continent and the short-hand name for the nation that dominates most of it. I suppose that's poor writing on my part, as everything should be clear and unambiguous, in precisely the way the that the ever-stubborn real world never is. Oh, well! Ambiguous or not, the political body of Verria includes both Canada, U.S., and Mexico. Likewise, it isn't culturally homogeneous.
Well, in real life, the USA tends to just get called "America", so you're actually perfectly-spot on there. It doesn't detract from the enjoyment of the story.
Also, Entirely_Logical brought up the possibility of other worlds occupying the same dimensional space as Eanli/Earth. Is that something you're going to explore further? Because you could do pretty much anything you want to with that - hell, if you make another setting besides the Eanli Cosmos, you could link the two together, if you so desired, by stating that they invented the Portcullis technology as well. Aside from the more obvious facets, interdimensional travel is one hell of a useful, story-advancing plot device.
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Posted by ObsidianSnake 3 years ago Report
I don't enjoy negation like this, but: The scope of these stories is limited by the frame centered on predator and prey as archetypes of people, so there are some genres and plot directions I'm not able (or readily willing) to go in. For instance, I wasn't intending to do cross-overs with other works, or swashbuckling space battle things. If/when I have stories in other settings on this site, I'm wanting it to be about something fundamentally different than these stories. As a topic, I'm not sure what the Eanli Cosmos can do for other settings, either.
In other words, I could do that, but I like what I was doing more. It's sort of like how not all fantasy work stories have high-detail magic systems, or even magic at all, or at least not more than the real world does. That can appear as an error, but non-conventional doesn't mean incorrect. I'd like to imagine that I'm doing some genre-tunneling with these stories, and I hope that I'm leaving enough open room for invite others in, maybe even tempt them to grab a pick-axe of their own!
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