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Personal Log, Lieutenant-Senior Conrad Matsiyan, TSN Lancer, 4th L.D.
Stardate: 51116-2237Stars around! What a lot of upheaval. Hunter’s disco ball may have been delivered, but it seems it will be safely mothballed for a while longer. The higher-ups have concluded that a destroyer will be more useful to the division than the scout, whose role has a lot of overlap with the interceptor but lacks the punch. Since we may well not have enough staff on a regular basis for a sixth vessel, TSN Excalibur will be commissioned as a command training vessel where an additional couple of junior officers can get some experience in CO and XO roles.
I had submitted an application for the command track some time ago just in case my promotion to Lieutenant-Senior implied the brass thought I wasn’t interested, given that it is a way to reward officers who would otherwise would move up to Lieutenant Commander, but don’t have the desire or opportunity for an XO role. I had pencilled in some time away for the intro developmental classes but was on tenterhooks as to what would happen with the application. Finally the approval came through and I had to pack a duffel quickly to catch the first available slot. I went online to check shuttle schedules and not only did I notice Mundy was attending the same set of command training simulations at Edgefield but also that there had been an update to the Division Assignments document. It is always interesting to see who is posted where, especially if it follows a colleagues promotion. I scanned the list and was rather concerned to see that Lancer had an open slot. That won’t last long I thought to myself rather smugly. Then I realized the missing crew name was mine. In shock I scanned the rest of the document and found a new entry at the bottom; TSN Excalibur, DD-117, Acting XO Leonard Hall, Acting CO, Conrad Matsiyan.
Shock was no longer adequate and I had to resort to astonishment. To cap it all, the appointment was immediate, but I was going to be away for the next two shifts. So Leonard was going to have the opportunity to get to know her. Heck, he might even have flown in her the last time she was deployed.
Command training simulations at Edgefield camp were fantastic. Opportunities to go planetside are rare so the lack of temperature control, the amazing scents of the multicoloured trees and vines, the wine vats, the beer yeasts, the distillery vapours are so appreciated. Great espresso every morning not even made by me. Soaking in the heated outdoor pool after the final evening with dozens of other candidates, with the steam rising among the sub-tropical plants, past the flaring torches into the winter night sky. Eating meals that have never been through a replicator, but straight from a dead animal or a crushed fruit. Yes, computer, I am aware that this list is not punctuated with grammatical correctness.
Most of the simulations had nothing to do with military tactics per se but placed the emphasis on moral dilemmas and thinking out of the box.
The first one required you to work out how you would cope with having to kill noncombatants to survive and deal with immoral superiors, as a vampire in 1971 Los Angeles.
The second asked what lengths you would go to in protecting a terminally ill loved one, and whether illegal actions can be moral as the crew of a small tramp freighter twenty years after a scandal brought down the interstellar government and balkanized humanspace.
The only one I was in with Mundy had us taking the part of bounty hunters, I as a smuggler pilot captain and she as a scary mercenary bodyguard with mob connections. There is a lot of repressed violence under that librarian stare and she is lethal with a blade. The bounty hunt actually led to a first contact situation where an alien nano hive mind was re-animating asphyxiated crew to prevent us from decoding their command matrix. Eventually they overloaded the warp core and we barely escaped with a download of a lot of their language, leaving us with some hope for future encounters. Made me think a lot about biomechs and caltrons.
Another was a very depressing sim where it was known up front that none of the characters would survive in a world where the sun and stars had disappeared. Ten Candles were used to represent the declining state of the world. People will do some desperate things when all hope seems lost, but at least we did not turn on each other.
The fifth had me as an amnesiac captain pilot recovered from a scouting mission beyond known territory who slowly came to realize that he had encountered an inimical intelligence that was reaching out to corrupt his home society. That was an excercise in choosing the good of the many over the needs of the few or the one.
The last one was a continuation of a sim I have been running since academy days using an ancient Japanese cultural metaphor exploring how to operate under difficult rules of engagement, during a time where command is decaying, hostile forces seem limitless and allies are unreliable. The characters continue to support each other while being puzzled and conflicted over their familial and emotional connections versus their duty and their limited alternatives.
As soon as I was clear I fired off a request to Wade and Quinn for a blazon for Excalibur since I could not find one on file for her.
[End log]
//Balkanized? Hahahah! First time I’ve heard the term. Had to Google it up. Ah, we Balkans. 😀
//Nicely written log. Loved the first two paragraphs.
// The first two paragraphs are actually about the TSN. The rest is just an attempt to shoehorn OOC attendance at a gaming convention into the RP narrative to fit my mania for log-writing. Mundy writes it much better. But it is true that some of the games do exercise command skills. And Mundy really is lethal with a blade, and with Very Hard Stares. Make sure you interpret that.
The balkanized bit was a game set in the Firefly universe, twenty years after the movie Serenity. Glad to help with vocabulary 🙂
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