<a class="postlink" href="https://creativefreedomrpg.com/viewtopic.php?f=20&amp;t=42496#p211433">(Link to the OOC)</a><br/><br/><span style="color: #FF8000"><span style="font-weight: bold"><span style="font-size: 200%; line-height: 116%;">The Good, the Bad, and the Feronia</span></span></span><br/><br/>“Wake up, sweetie,” the walls hummed, coaxing Captain Callum Dereeve out of his deep sleep. “Time to get your crew and fly.” Callum’s heavy eyes peered around the room, trying to get his bearings. “Five more minutes,” Callum muttered as he fell asleep again.<br/><br/>“Up up up!” the walls demanded. “You take forever to get ready and I don’t want you to make a bad first impression! The crew follows the captain by example!” Callum groaned. He was a hard worker, always putting in late hours and studying his ship’s mechanics as bedside reading, but he hated mornings with a fiery hatred. He forced himself up, “Fine fine! Quit your moaning, or I’ll delete your personality matrix!”<br/><br/>“Oh hurry up Mr. grumpy, they’ll be here in an hour. I’m brewing some coffee as we speak.”<br/><br/>“No chance you made breakfast?”<br/><br/>“I can turn on switches, honey, I can’t do much else. I’m just a ship.” She wasn’t just any ship though. She was the Feronia, an old rust bucket from the Martian Military at the height of the Great System War. She used to be a Martian U-Kalanda Class 1 gunner-cargo ship, with thick armor plating and weapons that would make any grown man cry. “If I had arms though, I would do more than just make you coffee,” she teased. An AI was installed when she was repurposed and stripped of weapons for civilian use. This made things like ship maintenance and operations easier, which normally took a crew of a few dozen to operate properly. Unfortunately, Callum made the mistake of installing a personality matrix.<br/><br/>“Maybe I should hold off on your holographic upgrade,” he played.<br/><br/>“Oh you’re no fun!” she whimpered. “I’ll behave.”<br/><br/>Callum climbed the ladder two decks up to the mess hall, which doubled as an observation deck with massive windows exposing an all-encompassing view of the outside. Light poured in from a spotlight, and on one end was the vastness of The Black speckled by dots of light, while on the other side was a rocky asteroid surface covered in snow and bio-domes, miles away from an elevator dock the Feronia was attached to. This was Ceres, an asteroid so massive it had been classified as a dwarf planet, and even held its own Terraformed atmosphere. This was where he was to meet his future crew.<br/><br/>The space elevator shot him down to the surface, compelling him to almost lose the eggs and gruel in his stomach. Once there, he paced nervously amongst the crowds of people, looking around for his handpicked crew. Outside a blizzard was growing, making Callum wonder if this was a sign from the space gods that he made a bad decision. Despite the pit in his stomach, he was ready to finally have a crew, after months of working on the Feronia alone. They weren’t the perfect bunch, however they were willing to take a small but equal pay for a place on his ship, and that was good enough for him.<br/><br/>And so he waited…