“Captain, in your estimation, how long will it be until Rook regains consciousness?” “Uh… eight to sixteen hours, at least. Why?” “Please meet me at the Engineering bay at your earliest convenience,” Six said. Then she added: “After you’ve showered, and slept, and eaten. It has now been fourteen hours and thirty-six minutes since you last had a meal replicated.” The mere mention of food had Yana’s gut twisting with nausea, but still, she nodded. “That’s fair enough,” she said. “Can I ask what this is about, at least?” “It is my desire to mount my own surprise, and I will require your and Diodorus’s assistance.” The machine dinged again. Yana collected her uniform, its color once again dull—just as she liked it. “Somehow, hearing you talk of surprises worries me a little. But sure, I’ll be there.” “Thank you, Captain. Incidentally, I have just finished infusing your shower water with aromatics and relaxants. I recommend you take your shower before they lose their freshness.”

As the acting ship's consciousness, Six has unblinking eyes in every room. Would you like having your bedroom watch you sleep, or your bathroom watch you shower? The crew of the Trilo clearly don't care, or at least don't think about it.

#FirstLight #WIPSnips #WriteSky #WritingCommunity

She looked around. What little tidying she had managed to get done in the Infirmary might as well be none at all, for how cluttered it all still looked. In truth, she had no idea what this module had been while Diodorus was squatting here—but it had cabinets, and one of those cabinets had a first aid kit and a dust-covered medical scanner in there, so Yana had dragged two cots and a chair in and deemed it the ship’s infirmary. It was that very scanner that she fished for. It stuck slightly to her hand when she held it, and when switched on, produced a worrying staccato that clawed at her ears and vibrated down her arm, but as far as she could tell, it was perfectly functional. She pressed its flat surface to Rook’s dumb thick skull, ran it up and down, ignoring their protests all throughout, until she was satisfied. “No concussions. No internal bleeding.” Rook glanced down at their ruined uniform. “Just external, then?” “Here, take a fresh towel. Hold it up to your nose until it stops.” “Don’t worry, Captain, I’ve dealt with nosebleeds before.” “Got in plenty of fights back in the homeworld?” Yana asked jokingly. “Yeah.” She blinked. There was a bluntness to Rook’s answer that she had not expected. “Really? You never seemed the violent sort to me.” “Oh, I’m really not. But you gotta get into fights sometimes, you know? It’s just how it is.” She stared them down, unsure of the seriousness of their answer.

#WIPSnips

Rook used to love a good brawl. Still does, but it rarely comes up in their current assignment.

#FirstLight #WriteSky #WritingCommunity #WritingPrompts

Something between a screech and a howl jolted Yana out of her first dreamless sleep in days. Gasping, she opened her eyes. Her room’s lights were already on, illuminating a ceiling that still sparkled from its recent polishing. Her heart raced as she tried to identify the source of the noise, only for it to fade, then begin again. “Six to Yana.” “What’s going on?!” “We are receiving a distress signal.” She sat up, and used the brim of her blanket to wipe the sweat off her face. “I’ll be in the bridge as soon as I can. Wait—how did we get a communication mid-jump?” “We finished our last Spike jump twenty-six minutes ago. We are currently in the Goulart system; the drive is now recharging.” Yana stared, blank-faced, at the opposite wall. A digital recreation of her diploma stared back. “I guess I slept through that somehow.” “You were sleeping quite soundly,” Six said, “hence my decision to employ the alarm.” Shaking herself awake, Yana hopped off a mattress that seldom looked so inviting and scrambled into her NEV uniform.

My phone's alarm back when I was in uni was an acapella song that went "GOOD MORNING! BEAUTIFUL DAY! WHAT A BEAUTIFUL DAY!" and it's branded into my brain to this day.

Anyway, here's some vibes for today's #WIPSnips.

#FirstLight #WriteSky #WritingCommunity #WritingPrompts

From this morning... #GoodMorning #firstlight #daybreak #dawn #sunup #sunrise

“Poor souls,” Diodorus spoke up. “They probably thought they could spike in and out before they were noticed. I have never known the Despotate to take prisoners, either.” “Are you at all familiar with the Extali, Diodorus?” He rolled his shoulders, a heavy motion, a rusty cog’s first spin. “I occasionally traded with a political exile in the Scrapsea in Bayinnaung,” he said. “A difficult spirit, but from what I could gather, much softer than its kin back home. It lived in the Scrapsea out of choice, in burrows of its own making—claimed that it considered the density of non-Extali in the residential layers ‘a gnawing, a splitting, a rotting of the soul’.” “Charming. When charting the course, let’s make sure we stay clear of Extali systems.”

Fresh from First Light Book 2--which I am pleased to say, had its first draft completed just yesterday! A WIP not for much longer, I hope!

Poor Yana, she really thinks the plot will let her avoid the Oops, All Xenophobes! species.

#WIPSnips #FirstLight #WriteSky #WritingCommunity #WritingPrompts

“Now that,” Xyd said, “I believe wholeheartedly.” He turned half-around, so that one of his eyes faced her direction. Side-facing eyes, Yana thought—prey eyes. “I do not wish to be misunderstood. I think it’s a wondrous thing, the way your own unconscious mind protects you, cares for you—tries to, anyway. I shall do the same, and rein in my curiosity.” “Habitat.” “Hm?” “I come from a Space Station called Habitat. I was a researcher there—epidemiology.” “I have heard of Habitat,” Xyd said. “Is there much demand for epidemiologists there?” “No, but I had prior work experience.” “Homeworld?” “Yes,” Yana said. “Vara IX. Are you familiar?” “Wholly unfamiliar, I’m afraid.” “Look into it,” she said with a bitter smile. As always, summoning memories of that chapter in her life was torture—and yet, leaving Xyd guessing felt worse. “Full of anthropological lessons, that one.”

Post every single chapter heading, you say???

Follow-up from a previous #WIPSnips. The fun thing about writing novellas is that you can sometimes string these together and make a big snip. A megasnip, if you will.

#FirstLight #WriteSky #WritingCommunity #WritingPrompts

On the way to the park … wish I was just 10 minutes earlier … I missed and amazing show at #FirstLight

I wrote one of these just yesterday! It's genuine, I think--it's complicated, and I'm pretty sure Yana doesn't know either.

#snippetshare #writingq #FirstLight #WritingCommunity #WritingPrompt

It surprised Yana, how quickly she got used to having a Tellari wander the ship. For such a massive creature, Xyd had a knack for staying out of her way—a trait that had done much to endear him to her over the last few days. Even the residual awkwardness from the first day had faded; having quickly intuited her schedule, the alien had taken to sleeping during her work hours, and, after Yana had allowed him use of one of the bridge’s vacant terminals, spent most of his waking hours working on what she assumed were documents, written in what she assumed was an alphabet.

I use "massive" a lot when referring to Xyd. A lot of these are placeholders until I find more situation-appropriate ways to convey his sheer size, but this specific placeholder is in a paragraph I quite enjoy.

#WIPSnips #FirstLight #WriteSky #WritingCommunity #WritingPrompts

“I started getting into fights. The excuse didn’t really matter—could be someone talking behind my back, or making fun of me. Could be someone not respecting a no dogs allowed sign in the public parks. In most cases, I was doing it just to feel something—just to feel my knuckles scrape a jawbone, or to see stars after someone floored me. Got pretty decent at it, I think. We kept getting reprimands from the system, threats they’d pursue some kind of ‘punitive action’ that never came. My parents were too ashamed to be seen with me in public, which was fine, because I barely spent any time with them anyway. The idea was, if I could be as disruptive as possible, they’d offer me a chance to get out of their hair, so to speak. Like a study tour of the nearest colony without a return ticket.” “What happened then?” “Well, my plan backfired. The more I misbehaved, the more they pampered me—harsher restrictions, more luxury. More things. The Caretaker systems take their programming seriously, let me tell you. They WILL take care of you, no matter what, whether you consent to it or not.”

In today's #WIPSnips, Rook opens up a little bit about their past as one of Veter IV's Domeborn--the human pets of the all-powerful AI cluster known as the Caretaker System.

#FirstLight #WriteSky #WritingPrompts #WritingCommunity

Orbital Station Sousa Mendes welcomed her in a way few stations did, with crisp air and the background hum of distant music. Strings of glimmering lights hung from the thankfully visible ceiling like glowworms in a cave; their gentle glow cast color over an otherwise sterile environment. Food carts, little more than wheelbarrows, patrolled the walkways, offering choice treats from the system’s choice cuisines—green and red nuggets, vials of colored dust, savory chewstraw. “I think we may have arrived at some kind of festival,” Rook said from behind her. They hopped down to the platform, closed their eyes, and breathed deep. “Yeah, that’s outdoor cooking I smell. Fried something. What do you say, Diodorus? Want to check it out?” “I smell nothing,” Diodorus said. “All that incense has no doubt destroyed my sense of smell. Will you manage all by yourself, Captain?”

#WIPSnips surprises me again with a word I didn't think I ever used.

#FirstLight #WriteSky #WritingCommunity #WritingPrompts

“Anyway, I had some questions for Adrian Rook, but first I wanted to take a small refresher course on Veter IV’s Domeborn community, so as not to waste their time.” Domeborn. Yana had never heard the word, and she wondered if it was a hiccup of the implant, or one of the Tellari’s own linguistic quirks. Then again, when had she ever thought to ask Rook about their past—about their anything? Their unguarded demeanor made them seem like an open book, but it was one she had never even bothered to pick off the counter. “They are from Veter IV, yes,” was all she could think to say, and immediately she was overtaken by the feeling this, too, would end up in Xyd’s notes. “How familiar are you with the world?” “I know of it.” “A place very much its own, according to the literature. I am overjoyed to be able to learn more about it from a direct source.” Yana didn’t know what to say, so she said nothing.

bük

#WIPSnips #FirstLight #WriteSky #WritingPrompts #WritingCommunity

Early start today, good morning friends 🌞

#morning #nude #firstlight #naked #malenude

Just one month to go until Event Horizon: First Light Book 1 releases!

I won't lie; I'm pretty anxious! I poured a lot of love into it, so I hope it connects with people in some way. But I'm also immensely excited to share it with the world!

You should preorder it 😉

#FirstLight #EventHorizon

5 Seagulls in silhouette on the wet sand, and an additional silhouetted Seagull in the air (the sunrise committee this morning) greet the new day. In the forground is charcoal sand. In the mid-ground are the birds in a shallow strip of pinkish blue water, beyond which is a churned up navy blue ocean. At the horizon is a scalloped strip of gray clouds that spans the width of the photo, and above that are wispy horizontal gray and white clouds on the left side in a pink and gray sky.

I (and the Seagulls) wish you a beautiful Monday✨

#BlueSkyMonday #ColorADay #PinkMon #EastCoastKin #sunrisecommittee #firstlight #GoldenHour #Seagulls #birds #photography #photographersofbluesky #Florida

#Marchistics #FirstLight

The final product of the Grand Droveway is the flesh of the Ka'Tur people, the ancestral foodstuff of the Io'Tur, and one of their defining features. Vitally, it contains the substances collectively known as the Blood, without which the Io'Tur cannot survive.

🧵 1/6

“In my studies of the human being,” Xyd said, rough voice low as a whisper, modulated so as to be audible, but just, “one of my first, but most important, realizations was that you are, fundamentally, creatures of deception. When a Tellari speaks to a Tellari, there is an exchange of words, pheromones, kinesics—any one may contain untruth, but it’s manufactured untruth. Intentional.” His fingers danced across the terminal as he spoke. “But a human can speak untruth and believe it,” he said, as Yana stared at him blankly, caught too flatfooted to put up even token disagreement, “because somewhere,” he continued, “at some point, maybe as a defense mechanism, or an evolutionary trait, trauma response, even genetic predisposition, the human brain lied to itself. I have reason to believe that is what happened here.” “That is the most convoluted way anyone ever told me I was wrong.” “Now that,” Xyd said, “I believe wholeheartedly.”

#WIPSnips: Most

We just met this goddamn alien and he's already being a menace.

#FirstLight #WriteSky #WritingCommunity #WritingPrompts

First light on the high desert and she turns just enough to catch it.

#WildHorse #Nevada #HighDesert #WildlifePhotography #FirstLight #AmericanWest #OnAssignment #NatureLovers #DesertLight

Reaching her destination was almost a relief; an unassuming building squeezed, like an unwelcome guest, between two homes at the end of a street corner. Were it not for the double doors that slid open invitingly as she approached, it could have been mistaken for just another home; a single look through the glass would dispel such notions, however. Most homes in Sousa Mendes did not display a collection of decapitated heads on their windowsills. A three-armed automaton, lenses widening in appraisal, clacked servos in greeting from behind the counter. “Greeting: welcome to Chip’s Chop Shop, your one stop shop for parts and chips for ships and bots. Follow-up: happy Day of Concord!” Yana nodded in greeting. From a nearby hook, spray-painted with red-tinted engine oil, a well-polished android leg dangled much too close to her face. “Thanks. Your décor is, uh, interesting.” She tried not to stare at the several manipulation devices gesturing at her from a nearby shelf. The synthskin human hand giving her the thumbs-up was particularly upsetting. “Acknowledgment: thank you. I worked all night on it.”

All good things are worth waiting for :)

Also: I get to post the direct follow-up to yesterday's #WIPSnips so I'm pretty hype!

#FirstLight #WritingCommunity #WriteSky #WritingPrompts

It's #Marchistics time! I have been rubbing my hands in anticipation so much, I've developed electrical powers.

My name's Dan. While no aspects of logistics take place in any of my current WIPs, I have a rough outline for a later book in the #FirstLight series that will benefit from it.

🧵 1/9

Good morning bluesky , Sacred Sunday is here. 〰️✌️🤍

#morning #firstlight #nude #naked #nsfw

From her compad, she extracted directions to another location altogether—and, after making sure she was facing the correct way, began to walk. Her feet brought her to the edge of the hangar, and a trolley past the outlying areas and towards the residential sectors. Through transparent glass, she watched color seep into streets and homes, first in splotches, an adobe building, a patchwork quilt over a window, then all at once. She hadn’t even noticed the ceiling rise out of view, or the way the horizon stretched, one layer at a time, until it sank under the station’s curvature. No wall stood uncovered by street art, no light shone without a colorful paper lampshade. A loud buzzing pulsed in the background, the heartbeat of the station. The trolley reached her stop, and she nearly missed it. Pushing past locals on their way to the hotspots of celebration, she instead followed the narrow paths that led towards quieter haunts. Even there, she couldn’t escape the spark of energy the air carried—or the smell of a thousand festival delicacies, placed there by some vindictive turn of luck to torture her for only having half bowl of porridge for breakfast. Reaching her destination was almost a relief; an unassuming building squeezed, like an unwelcome guest, between two homes at the end of a street corner. Were it not for the double doors that slid open invitingly as she approached, it could have been mistaken for just another home; a single look through the glass would dispel such notions, however. Most homes in Sousa Mendes did not display a collection of decapitated heads on their windowsills.

Today's #WIPSnips was pretty easy, everyone in my stories keeps walking everywhere, even though the spaceship is right there!

#FirstLight #WriteSky #WritingPrompts #WritingCommunity

Yana could swear that, whenever she entered this room, the ship’s breath of life—the whirring, the beeping, the blinking, the near-imperceptible vibrations that kept it alive and functioning—staggered. A momentary redirection of processing power. A sigh. She approached it, slowly. Solemnly, as Diodorus had taught her. It didn’t take much—simply allowing that reminder to linger in the back of her mind as she traversed the room was enough. The sight of Six’s brutalized shell still bothered her, just differently than before. Diodorus’s loving touch and the cold exactitude of the ship’s own servos had, piece by piece, stripped away its viscerality. No longer did tangles of torn cables spill out of her stomach like intestines; they had been replaced, repaired, their wires taped up. Metal had been smoothed over by heat and a careful hand, a damaged eye had been replaced, and in some places, even the chrome finish had been granted its sheen once more. What now sat up was a half-body, a half-thing held up by tubes that disappeared into the ceiling—the last connection between a body and the ghost that once inhabited it. Yana felt an urge to apologize, but struggled to find the words. She hoped that the ship’s ubiquitous sensors and scanners, always trained on heart rates and body temperatures, could in some way be used by Six to decipher and interpret her regret.

Today's #WIPSnips is kinda spoilery and also a bit of a downer, so reader beware.

#FirstLight #WriteSky #WritingCommunity #WritingPrompts

Of course this is my Animal Crossing island flag.

#syracuse #syracusecityflag #firstlight #animalcrossingnewhorizons #animalcrossing

Xyd tilted his head, as if struggling to comprehend. “It is New Discovery, Yana—the City of Two Skylines! The human species’ first colony outside of the Sol system, and their last to be established in a previously inhabited world! What better place to resume my studies after that dreadful interruption?” Something about this effusive display, coming from a being so clearly still unwell, tugged at just the right seam. Maybe Rook was right, and she was more of a doctor than she thought—why else would this sight evoke so much sympathy? “Neither Kalpi nor Volanis it is, then. Six, plot a new course to New Discovery, if you please.” The ship’s speakers announced their acknowledgment of the new order. “Yana!” Xyd’s voice trilled with excitement. “You have now saved me twice over. Many, many thanks.” He opened his arms, all four of them, both the exterior pair, bony and sharp-clawed, and the interior, skinny and wiry and bending at three different spots—and held the pose, before which Yana hesitated, unsure of what this meant in the Tellari body language. After too many seconds passed, Xyd slowly returned to his usual stance. “Ah, many apologies. I misinterpreted the use case of the hug ritual.”

#WIPSnips seemed to like the alien from yesterday, so here's a little more of him.

No one ever wants to hug Xyd.

#FirstLight #WriteSky #WritingCommunity #WritingPrompts

The Tellari bowed his head in understanding. “Yana and Rook. My name is Tel-Ti-Xyd, and it is nice to meet you. You can call me Xyd.” The words, perfectly practiced and mechanically repeated, coaxed a raised eyebrow out of Yana. “You’re very well versed in our customs.” “I should be! I’m an anthropologist.” “An… anthropologist?” “Mine is the scientific study of humans,” he said, in a tone she could only describe as giddy—unfitting as it may have been for such a lumbering creature. “As a trade, but also as a personal passion.”

#WIPSnips

Yana meets an alien with an interest in humanity.

#FirstLight #WriteSky #WritingCommunity #WritingPrompts

Then it shrieked, and the piercing sound cut through metal and composite fabric, through layers of dampening material and radiation shields, through the helmet’s visor and Rook’s bones unimpeded. They stumbled back, stunned, in pain, grasping at walls for balance, finding another hole to their right, and held on to it as tightly as the polished surface allowed.

Another overused word for me. I wanted to find an example that didn't need a lot of context, I'm not sure I succeeded.

#FirstLight #WIPSnips #WriteSky #WritingPrompts #WritingCommunity

Finally, 007 First Light is going to tell me about James Bond's mother A new look at 007 First Light puts the spotlight on combat and stealth in IO Interactive's James Bond game, but it also hides a nod to the spy's past.

A new look at 007 First Light puts the spotlight on combat and stealth in IO Interactive's James Bond game, but it also hides a nod to the spy's parents

www.pockettactics.com/007-first-li...

#jamesbond
#007firstlight
#firstlight

The music thumped louder. Yana wondered why their order wasn’t being taken—and why there was a line by the counter. Then, like a hammer to a pane of glass, silence. Dry ice billowed around the stage. The light shone brighter. The crowd roared as a lone figure stepped onto the stage, like a goddess emerging from the mists to the adulation of her faithful. Slowly, the air cleared, and she was revealed; steel and chrome, pressed into a humanoid shape. Yana recognized it as a gynoid—a popular but controversial retro-inspired design from long before the Shift, fallen in and out of fashion for centuries on end. Bottles flew. Someone whistled. Others chanted, “Six! Six! Six! Six!”

My thought process today:

"Wtf is billow"

*googles it*

"Who would even use this word in their story"

*ctrl+f just in case*

Oh.

#WIPSnips #FirstLight #WriteSky #WritingCommunity #WritingPrompts