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beccaelizabethSo. Rhodri and Sean and the teleport circle.
I reckoned physical disads need careful handling, but then I figured, really short people never get to play in science fiction except as funny head aliens. So bring along someone to be human and short. Also maybe extra tall. Both as scientists. Short astrophysicist isn't significantly further from object of study.
Expedition needs dentist and optician and botanist and someone to study the new stars and nearby new planets and someone to study the new planet they're standing on, someone just to make maps even. They're doing surveys of a new world, they bring a surveyor. Geography. Geology. I don't know, looking at new landscapes and making a map and figuring out where not to stand, sort of thing. That's half a dozen already. Some of those skills can be military too, but there isn't as much for military shooting type people to do. Translators are logically more useful. People who talk to people for a job. Someone confident they can buy and sell stuff. Just friendly extrovert people who don't want to spend all their time in a lab.
Also, someone to cook and someone to clean. Logically necessary people the story is never about.
That's another dozen jobs already. Add some names and we has expedition.
Of course there also needs to be someone good at water and someone good at waste disposal. It's kind of funnier if they discover that after they get there. With a bunch of, I don't know, chickens and donkeys and other potentially useful live things. Plus if they've brought a bunch of research people is then funny when they do all their own digging. Science fiction has a tendency to watch decision makers and skip actual work. Unless the work goes boom. Not so much good.
The bankroll person could be interesting. If they're an outsider trying to control the place with money there is story. But if they're an outsider someone is related to, there is double story, because to most of the expedition they're still just a busybody businessperson but to one or two of them they're forty years of christmas arguments or something. So think parents, siblings, even offspring. What if Merfyn is the money guy? From his mother's side. Then he's sent along not so Rhodri can show off but so Merfyn can keep track of where all this money goes. And then Merfyn's mother is the businessperson. But then they'd have to have good ideas and be useful and stuff, because I'm not writing an Evil Ex story. It gets boring when one person is all bad anyway. Figuring out how to make a lot of money from an expedition to another world shouldn't be too hard.
The other world is way ahead on biotech and can grow buildings. They think our tech path is weird. They can make languages in pill form, and they do, because they're a whole world with a bunch of different languages and cultures. So they have Trade language in a pill. Which freaks out everyone, especially the linguist. They have lots of things in a pill that shouldn't be possible by here and now logic. Like, ways to totally rewrite yourself. The ones acquired from mainstream new planet society are pretty much safe. The ones left behind in sealed chambers in the lost city? Not so much.
Selling biotech back home leads to issues of human testing and uncontrolled interactions, as well as probably most people not understanding what they're using. It could make money fast by being sold all sorts of places, but it could make money safely and long term only after a long process. It's not like weapons tech you can just deploy. Though it probably does include better stun and crowd control products, all biochemicals. Little poison darts, only with safer poisons.
Really we need either two bankrolls with different priorities or a bankroll and a get rich quick scheme, so things can go horribly wrong and also be done competently. Is fun.
Also fun: When expedition decides to go public, which is a year after their initial stranding on an alien planet, they know they're never going to be able to just phone people up and say 'hi, we has stone circle that goes to other worlds, want to see?' Or rather they could, but it wouldn't get the best and brightest minds in mainstream science to turn up. Just the usual suspects. But there are people who turn up and meet regularly at events not strictly speaking to do with their professional expertise. People from all walks of life, and from all over the world. People who have been waiting their whole lives to know that humans have walked on another world. So what you need to do, to gather together a whole broad spectrum of expertise and let them get the word out, is to run an event. So to announce their findings to the Earth the proposal is they need to run the first truly out of this world science fiction convention.
... it's perfectly logical! Really!
All they need to do is get the right headline guests and they'll get a hall full of scientist, journalists and even some military, without having to hand the project over to any government!
The news will go worlds wide without any time to keep it classified!
... It's a plan with a lot of exclamation marks, really.
I don't currently know if the person to think of the idea can persuade anyone else to go along with it. Wait, if it's Mary she can be pretty sure of persuading Rhodri and Sean. And then there's three of them thinking up reasons this is perfect. Like, it makes a great cover story for any meetings they specifically want to set up. And, they've got to bring in a ton of supplies anyway, it's not like they can keep that secret, so they make it have a widely advertised reason. And, Claudia Christian.
... any plan is better with the right main guest.
okay, so this entire story is only because I'm bored, it's going to be full of weird.
I should probably think of some actual plots, as well as the silly stuff and characters.
*Edited to swap a name
I reckoned physical disads need careful handling, but then I figured, really short people never get to play in science fiction except as funny head aliens. So bring along someone to be human and short. Also maybe extra tall. Both as scientists. Short astrophysicist isn't significantly further from object of study.
Expedition needs dentist and optician and botanist and someone to study the new stars and nearby new planets and someone to study the new planet they're standing on, someone just to make maps even. They're doing surveys of a new world, they bring a surveyor. Geography. Geology. I don't know, looking at new landscapes and making a map and figuring out where not to stand, sort of thing. That's half a dozen already. Some of those skills can be military too, but there isn't as much for military shooting type people to do. Translators are logically more useful. People who talk to people for a job. Someone confident they can buy and sell stuff. Just friendly extrovert people who don't want to spend all their time in a lab.
Also, someone to cook and someone to clean. Logically necessary people the story is never about.
That's another dozen jobs already. Add some names and we has expedition.
Of course there also needs to be someone good at water and someone good at waste disposal. It's kind of funnier if they discover that after they get there. With a bunch of, I don't know, chickens and donkeys and other potentially useful live things. Plus if they've brought a bunch of research people is then funny when they do all their own digging. Science fiction has a tendency to watch decision makers and skip actual work. Unless the work goes boom. Not so much good.
The bankroll person could be interesting. If they're an outsider trying to control the place with money there is story. But if they're an outsider someone is related to, there is double story, because to most of the expedition they're still just a busybody businessperson but to one or two of them they're forty years of christmas arguments or something. So think parents, siblings, even offspring. What if Merfyn is the money guy? From his mother's side. Then he's sent along not so Rhodri can show off but so Merfyn can keep track of where all this money goes. And then Merfyn's mother is the businessperson. But then they'd have to have good ideas and be useful and stuff, because I'm not writing an Evil Ex story. It gets boring when one person is all bad anyway. Figuring out how to make a lot of money from an expedition to another world shouldn't be too hard.
The other world is way ahead on biotech and can grow buildings. They think our tech path is weird. They can make languages in pill form, and they do, because they're a whole world with a bunch of different languages and cultures. So they have Trade language in a pill. Which freaks out everyone, especially the linguist. They have lots of things in a pill that shouldn't be possible by here and now logic. Like, ways to totally rewrite yourself. The ones acquired from mainstream new planet society are pretty much safe. The ones left behind in sealed chambers in the lost city? Not so much.
Selling biotech back home leads to issues of human testing and uncontrolled interactions, as well as probably most people not understanding what they're using. It could make money fast by being sold all sorts of places, but it could make money safely and long term only after a long process. It's not like weapons tech you can just deploy. Though it probably does include better stun and crowd control products, all biochemicals. Little poison darts, only with safer poisons.
Really we need either two bankrolls with different priorities or a bankroll and a get rich quick scheme, so things can go horribly wrong and also be done competently. Is fun.
Also fun: When expedition decides to go public, which is a year after their initial stranding on an alien planet, they know they're never going to be able to just phone people up and say 'hi, we has stone circle that goes to other worlds, want to see?' Or rather they could, but it wouldn't get the best and brightest minds in mainstream science to turn up. Just the usual suspects. But there are people who turn up and meet regularly at events not strictly speaking to do with their professional expertise. People from all walks of life, and from all over the world. People who have been waiting their whole lives to know that humans have walked on another world. So what you need to do, to gather together a whole broad spectrum of expertise and let them get the word out, is to run an event. So to announce their findings to the Earth the proposal is they need to run the first truly out of this world science fiction convention.
... it's perfectly logical! Really!
All they need to do is get the right headline guests and they'll get a hall full of scientist, journalists and even some military, without having to hand the project over to any government!
The news will go worlds wide without any time to keep it classified!
... It's a plan with a lot of exclamation marks, really.
I don't currently know if the person to think of the idea can persuade anyone else to go along with it. Wait, if it's Mary she can be pretty sure of persuading Rhodri and Sean. And then there's three of them thinking up reasons this is perfect. Like, it makes a great cover story for any meetings they specifically want to set up. And, they've got to bring in a ton of supplies anyway, it's not like they can keep that secret, so they make it have a widely advertised reason. And, Claudia Christian.
... any plan is better with the right main guest.
okay, so this entire story is only because I'm bored, it's going to be full of weird.
I should probably think of some actual plots, as well as the silly stuff and characters.
*Edited to swap a name
no subject
Date: 2011-12-11 03:02 am (UTC)But! The stargate they go through isn't the only one. They can't dial up more places, it castles the contents, it just swaps A and B. And, okay, that's a rubbish way to design a transport network, but technobabble can explain why it's the *only* way. Possibly it involves the word quantum. But! Then! There are *other circles*. On Earth too there are many others. The ones on the Earth have been out in the open being hacked up for building stone. Rhodri's circle must have been buried and on family land or something. That gets complicated. Stick with buried. It only works now it's unburied and he discovered the safety features about not letting living things cross the circle. But the circles in the lost city have been protected, under all the shielding they put in to endure the long ice. So some of them go to the new city, or to places there were going to be cities, but some of them go to *other planets*.
That puts the small guy as the first Earth human foot on planets in a whole new solar system.
Rock.
And speaking of rocks, the tall guy can do geology. Just because.