Devil's Playground (X3AP 3.1/Litcube's Universe DiD)

[Zaitsev]

Yeah, I'm at it again.

I decided to go with TriaxX' suggestion and play the game for a while, building up some assets before I throw myself into the DiD-part. So this time I got a nice business going as we begin our story.

But first, a prologue.

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Prologue – A new player in town

Stars. When I was little I used to look up into the sky and dream about being among them one day. Then the dream came true, and now I stare at them through the thick, transparent metal windows of the Torus. The dream came with a price, though …

"Sad to see you leave, Maya." the voice behind me said.

"I know, Bran" I replied. "But this is not the place for me anymore. I … I need change."

The man the voice belonged to sighed as I turned to face him.

"I see." He sighed again. "It's just … It's been, what, fifteen years now?"

"Twenty." I said

"Damn …" he said, his eyes widening ever so slightly. "Time flies when you're having fun, eh? Feels a little funny, y'know. You were there when I was young and stupid …"

"… and I'll still be here when you tell your grandchildren about me."

"Yeah … Uhm … I guess what I'm trying to say is that I hate to see a good friend leave. Almost as much as I hate seeing skilled employees leave."

"I'll still come and pester you when I need a favor, if that's what you want."

He laughed.

"I'm sure you will," he said. "Just take care out there, all right?"

"I'll do my best."

"Frak that. Stay alive, or I'll personally drag you out of hell itself just so I can kick your ass back down there! Then I'll repeat the process until my foot gets tired."

"All right, all right!" I held up my hands in front of me in mock surrender and grinned at the big man. Then I got serious.

"Time for me to go, teddybear." I said, blinking away a couple of tears.

"I'll miss you, Maya."

"I'll write. And you take care too, all right?"

"Yes, ma'am." He saluted me, then he threw those big arms around me and hugged me so hard I thought he would break my ribs.

[Zaitsev]

Mods, rules and stuff.

Mod:

Litcube's Universe. That's it. As the mod is still evolving I'll patch it and keep it up to date, but since Litcube has included an awesome feature that make sure you don't lose anything when you patch the mod it shouldn't be a problem.

Also, it's an awesome mod. You should try it.

Rules:

Conditional DiD - Excludes bugs and computer f#%kups.

Ships for personal use can only be repaired halfway using the repair laser, i.e. if the hull integrity is below 50% it can be repaired up to 50% and if it's over it can be repaired up to 100%. The other half counts as structural integrity damage, and can only be repaired at a shipyard or at the HQ. Anything that is to be sold can be repaired up to 100% regardless of prior condition. It's going to end up as rivets anyway.

Maya can only fix fighters, TS, TM, TP and M6-class ships with the repair laser. Anything else has to be repaired at a shipyard or at the HQ.

Goals:

The game is over when I either die, or I have defeated both the OCV and Phanon Corp., which are the two main enemies in LU. That's right, folks. No plots here, just one enemy that will hunt you if you let it grow too strong, and another one that will happily take over the entire universe if left unchecked for long enough.

Start:

For those interested I started with the Damyath Trader, which gives you a Caiman Advanced TS, three Kestrel explorers and some credits, and traded, scavenged and shot my way to where I am now.

Assets:

For those who care about such details ...

M7 Mandalay - Knight's Rock

M6 Quasar - [unnamed]

TL Mammoth - Archangel

TL Mammoth - Whitehorse (mobile mining base)

6x Buster Miner

TS Caiman Advanced - Satchel

TS+ Snotra - Reynard

TL Angel - Short Bus II

18 Universal Traders, mostly Baldrics.

2 Caiman Advanced station agents. Basically LUs version of the CAG, assigned to the two Saturn Complex Hubs (LU equivalent of Gazz' Complex Cleaner) in Antigone Memorial.

Antigone Memorial Saturn Complex Hub - 20x PAC forge

Antigone Memorial Saturn Complex Hub - 20x IRE forge

Home of Light Saturn Complex Hub - 20x 1 MJ shield fab

Mines of Fortune Saturn Complex Hub - 100x Bliss Place L

Headquarters - Caduceus Industries HQ

Starting funds: 503,250,402 credits

[Zaitsev]

Look, a chapter

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Chapter 1 - Top of the food chain, ma!

That was … what, five years ago? The universe had changed a lot in the meantime. We had seen brother turn against brother, an attempt to revive the old AGI threat, heinous crimes and even open war. The Torus was gone, ripped from the sky by an Argon agent, and while there was once again peace between Earth and the Commonwealth old grudges still lurked under the surface.

Me, I had used my talents to build a quite successful business. I started out as a salvager, picking up the leftovers after the constant battles between Commonwealth forces, pirates and Xenon. As I could afford better ships and equipment I moved up the food chain, and now I had my fingers in mining operations, military contracts and the Teladi weed market, as well as taking on private security missions once in a while. I also had a TL for building missions, along with a frigate and a corvette to keep nosy pirates off my back.

Right now I had taken a well deserved coffee break as I looked at the fruits of our labor, namely our new headquarters. It made sense, as salvaging was still very much a part of our business, and giving the wrecks we found the once-over with the repair laser was starting to get real old. An HQ, which was more or less a shipyard on stims, could fix those ships in no time, which meant quicker turnaround and more money for us. It had cost me a fortune, but hopefully it would be worth it. Now for the fun part, which was to set up the infrastructure needed to feed that thing.

"Hey, skip!" the intercom roared. "Incoming message. System wide transmission, text only."

I sighed.

"You don't really need to use the intercom, Noriko." I replied. "You can just open the hatch and yell, and the entire ship will hear you. But yeah, put it through."

"Aye aye, skip." I could hear the childish glee in her voice as she relayed the message to my screen.

"Hm …"

Dear Maya Delova.

On behalf of the TandiTech Corporation, a subsidiary of the Phanon Corporation, I, Kyrdall Kormal, Chairman, would like to take this opportunity to personally extend to you my warmest greetings and well wishes. Certain sponsors have put forth a venture capital of 447 255 625 Cr to initiate our organization. As free-market trade law mandates, it is our duty to inform you that our company has established itself with an operation headquarters in sector Sanctuary of Darkness, and will be expanding from there as our board of directors deem fit and as warranted by our financial accrual. We would also like to offer you a friendly reminder to please keep clear of our property, including trade ships, warships, and stations, as the free market can be a difficult, demanding, and often dangerous place. Here at TandiTech, your safety is important to us.

Warmest regards,
Kyrdall Kormal

I took a sip from my coffee cup and read it again. It was just as pompous and over-the-top friendly as one would expect from men who had money coming out of every orifice, courtesy of a rich uncle. I got at least a dozen of these each week, and while I normally couldn't be arsed to look at them twice this one caught my attention.

"Phanon, eh." I mumbled to myself. It was a name that had popped up a few times over the years, and it usually involved shady dealings. They had gone to great lengths to keep them selves off the radar, but now it looked like they were out in the open. That kind of worried me.

Anyway, the day wasn't over and I still had a ton of work to do, so I put Mr. Kormal on the back burner and concentrated on making some money instead. Cause feeding that HQ ain't gonna be cheap.

[Zaitsev]

Yep, another one.

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Chapter 2 – Sometimes you're the wind shield, and sometimes you're the (space)fly ...

"Hull breach on decks one and three, skip! I suggest moving our collective asses out of the line of fire!"

Noriko's voice cut through the wailing of the ship's klaxons as another volley hit us.

"I'm working on it!" I shouted back. "Jumping in three! Two! One! Go!"

The wormhole opened and sucked us in, and moments later we came through the south gate of the sector we had just left. Patrol missions were usually fairly easy money, but this time we had gotten two Xenon Cs in our lap and they decided to gang up on us. It didn't go too well, and we were down to eighty three percent hull integrity before the jump drive kicked in. It looked like it was gonna be one of those days.

"Those Cs are still coming for us at full steam, skip." Noriko said as the noise died down.

"Yeah, I'm counting on it." I said. "We'll probably find out what those orbital weapons platforms are made of in about a minute or so." The first C was heading straight for the OWP guarding the south gate, and I intended to use whatever distraction it could provide to my full advantage.

"Ouch … That must have hurt." Noriko said. I checked the gravidar, and the second C had just taken a major hit. A Heavy Hydra was buzzing around it like an angry wasp, and I assumed it had managed to land a missile on the bastard. With our shields back in the twenties I decided to lend a helping hand. And gun.

"Olaf, jump to the sector center."

"Jump to sector center, aye."

The deck vibrated slightly as the jump drive spooled up, and a quick jump later we were in the middle of the sector.

"All right, you bastard." I muttered under my breath as we closed in. "Let's see if you can bleed."

Without the support of its friend the fight was in our favor, and the C seemed to shake and writhe as our ion shard railguns raked the hull, vaporizing armor and blowing off panels in the process. As it tried to recover from the havoc our guns had caused I used our port thrusters to maneuver into position behind it. With only high energy plasma throwers in its rear batteries our shields held, and we hit it with everything we had. Before long the hull buckled, the reactor went nova and we had added a hair over one hundred and sixty grand to our reward. It was gonna take a lot more than that to fix the dents in our hull, though …

By the time we were finished with 'our' C the Boron military had gotten their fins in gear and taken down the other one, so we collected our reward and limped back home to our HQ. Time to get that infrastructure rolling, I think.

[Triaxx2]

Now part of the DiD List.

[Zaitsev]

Aaaand another one.

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Chapter 3 - We built this house with our hands, and our time, and our blood.

"Clear the deck!"

The alarms wailed as we prepared to deploy the Saturn Complex Hub, or SCH for short, that would soon be the home of our power core. Apparently the result of a substance discovered in the rings of Saturn and some Terran quantum physics magic, it could store an entire complex internally, in a package about the size of a TL. Bran had been nice enough to let me get access to them, and I already had four of them up and running, including a gigantic space weed complex in Mines of Fortune. In hindsight a hundred large bliss places might have been a bit much, but since it had been raking in about twenty million an hour since the word got out I couldn't complain.

"Deck is cleared, skip. Everything's green and ready to go."

"All right, fire the boomer in five, four, three, two, one … Go!"

For those of you unfamiliar with the inner workings of a TL, the 'boomer', or 'large material transport array' as is its proper name, was a specialized transporter device designed to deploy stations. It got its nickname from the thunderclap-like sound it produced as up to nine hundred thousand cubic feet of station suddenly disappeared and the air rushed in to fill the empty space. You could of course suck out all the air, but since these transporters were capable of deploying up to twenty stations per hour it was deemed more economic to reinforce the cargo hold and set up internal shielding everywhere to keep the shock wave from breaking stuff. You could still hear and feel it throughout the entire ship when a station was dropped, though.

Regarding the infrastructure we were still burning through money at a rather alarming rate, so moneymakers took priority over personal stations for the time being. An SCH containing fifty microchip plants in Mines of Fortune might help rectify that a bit, and I also had plans to expand my military business to Teladi space. Following the standard recipe of a 20x PAC SCH, a 20x IRE SCH and a 20x 1 MJ shield SCH I should have another twelve or so million an hour rolling in by the end of the day.

No rest for the wicked, it seems ...

[Sabrina Bergin]

Nice to see you back in the saddle Zaitsev, will be lurking to read more.

[Zaitsev]

Nice to see you back in the saddle Zaitsev, will be lurking to read more.

Thanks. It's always nice to know I have readers

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Chapter 4 - Heart of a lion

"Hey, skip! Wake up!" The intercom roared again. I had spent at least half of last night setting up my complexes in Seizewell, and I had spent the rest of it trying to keep my new tug pilot from doing heinously stupid things, so I wasn't really in the mood for rude wake up calls.

"What the hell do you want, Noriko?"

"I think you wanna take a look at this, skip …"

The always chipper tone of her voice was gone, and I instantly knew something was wrong.

"Hold on," I said. "I'm on my way."

Five minutes later I was on the bridge, where everyone was staring at the main screen. It was a news broadcast of some kind, and judging from the look on people's faces they didn't bring good news.

"… and here we have the latest reports from the Omicron Channel," the reporter said. The Omicron Channel was a string of twelve sectors east of Bluish Snout that was discovered about a year ago, and after some initial friction the Commonwealth races decided to share it. The sectors were colonized shortly after, and things were looking good. Up until now …

"As you can see, it appears we are no longer alone here," the reporter continued on. "Scout ships are reporting an odd mix of Xenon and what appears to be ancient terraformer ships assembling near a station of unknown origin. Officials sources have stated that they have no information on this new entity, or its origin, but we have learned that travel to Tokyo Kappa has been restricted as a result of this. Back to you, Jo."

The screen returned to normal as someone cut the link, and my bridge crew all stared at each other.

"Noriko!" I said, snapping everyone out of the trance. "Didn't we put a bird in Omega?"

"Uhm … Yeah."

"Is it still alive?"

"Yeah."

"Let's have a look, then."

What I saw was basically a nightmare. Several ships of unknown origin was orbiting an 'OCV' station, and if our readings were right the biggest of them would be more than a match even for a Valhalla.

"Look at this," Noriko said. "Thirty two gigajoule of shielding, and three times the armor of even our strongest ships. If they decide to expand …"

We all thought the same. It would take a coordinated strike from every Commonwealth race to have a chance to stop them, and even then we would probably get slaughtered.

However, there was little we could do with only a corvette and a frigate, so until we built some more military muscle it was business as usual. Speaking of which, we still had to fix the Knight's Rock, so I checked the satellite network for ships we could snag and chop to get some spare parts. I already had a few I had claimed last night and left floating, but we needed a few more to be able to fix the armor plating.

Lo and behold, an Lin Black Hole Sun. That should do the trick. Now I just had to get over there and claim it, and we should be good to go.

Action followed words, and a few minutes later I was hanging outside my Quasar in my EVA suit hacking the firewall. I felt slightly uncomfortable doing it just ten clicks off the north gate, but since it would bring the Knight's Rock back to fighting condition I sort of had to do it.

"There," I said as I closed the panel. "Noriko, call in the Tug and let us head home."

"Tug's on the way, skip. We're good to go as soon as you get back."

A quick change of outfit later I was back on the bridge, just in time to see my Akurei TM come through the gate.

"Shit!" Noriko exclaimed. "Skip, we're detecting energy spikes in the gate. Something's coming through!"

"Tell the tug to get the hell out! We'll cover it until it can make the jump!"

"There are too many of them! Looks like an entire squadron!"

"Just do as I say! I've almost lost this dingus once today, and I'm not about to do it again!"

Noriko got on the horn, just as our CIGs slayed the first Xenon. We cut them down like grass before a scythe, but there were just too many of them pouring through the gate.

"Shields are buckling, skip! We have to leave now!"

"How's the tug doing?"

"It just jumped out, and I strongly suggest we do the same!"

"All right, jumping in ten, nine, eight, seven –"

*beep*

"Bansh –"

[Zaitsev]

And that, as they say, was the end of that. I'm both sad and happy that it ended so soon. Sad because I liked Maya and had big plans for her, and happy because, although the "telegram-style" chapters didn't quite suit me, it opened my eyes to the fact that I can omit a fair amount of details and still write something I'm satisfied with.

And for all my faithful readers who thought it ended too soon - Don't worry, I'm already working on another story.

[Triaxx2]

I must admit, you seem to spend an inordinate amount of time going BOOM>SPLAT. Which is hilarious from the outside, but not so good from a storytelling stand point.

[Zaitsev]

I must admit, you seem to spend an inordinate amount of time going BOOM>SPLAT. Which is hilarious from the outside, but not so good from a storytelling stand point.

I know, it's my second greatest talent.

But seriously, it's usually the result of me biting over more than I can chew and paying the price for it, as my first impulse is to dive head first into the fray and hope that I can hurt the enemy more than they can hurt me. In this particular case it was also a bit of stupidity from my side, cause if I had set my TM to do an emergency jump I could just have gotten the hell out of Dodge without having to worry about losing it. Guess it's just another piece of hard earned wisdom I have to keep in mind for my next story

[Song Of Obsidian]

The real tragedy is how much time you spent building up the game before you got to writing it and killing yourself. I don't remember the last time I saw the last part not happening within a week. Bad Zaitsev!

[Zaitsev]

The real tragedy is how much time you spent building up the game before you got to writing it and killing yourself. I don't remember the last time I saw the last part not happening within a week. Bad Zaitsev!

I know! Six ingame days down the drain.

*put on the dunce cap and slinks away to stand in the corner*

[Triaxx2]

Seriously though, stay away from the Xenon until you've got something capital sized.

[Song Of Obsidian]

Or stop doing everything DiD. Do want more story!

[Zaitsev]

Seriously though, stay away from the Xenon until you've got something capital sized.

With my luck I'll probably end up getting doubleteamed by a couple of Is and die anyway

Or stop doing everything DiD. Do want more story!

I've actually thought about it, but I haven't found a satisfying way to incorporate any untimely demises into my stories yet. If I find one such way that doesn't rustle my creative jimmies I'll most likely do it.

[Triaxx2]

Weasel: You wantssss ssssome cloning tech? I can ssssell it cheap?

[Zaitsev]

Weasel: You wantssss ssssome cloning tech? I can ssssell it cheap?

Hm, tempting ... Now I just have to work out a way to either explain how a ship that got blown to bits is suddenly whole again, or find a way to get rid of it without it affecting my character in any way, and we might have something here.

[kaistern]

I like deaths being dream sequences.... it's an intresting way to see how much was lost between the save and the death

Or drunken stuper like I recall someone doing...

[Triaxx2]

Sounds familiar.

That's the fun of cloning. You don't get the ship. You have to send it out into space and self-destruct it.

Of course, that means if you don't have replacement resources, you've gotta hoof it until you find a new ride. And if you're doing that, NPC bailing really helpful.