setting.sudrien.net

Ok.

So i’m pretty sure i heard this story every single time i made Rilsin run. At least once each run, always from a different Ril, I guess they wanted to know if i thought it was true.


It was a dwarf planet. Small enough it didn’t have an atmosphere proper, large enough it could act as a heat sink. Half the ball was taken up with a refiner. That size, it would have to be multiple outputs, but not the point.


The management had argured log gravity meant less wear, fewer general inspections. Leading to a massive creaking structure where the recirculating atmosphere wasn’t entirely soot only because the walls were coated in it.

It wasn’t all Goos there, not by a long shot. “Tasser” might have been the only one. Now i’ve never heard of anyone with that name, maybe you have, maybe it’s been run through a few languages. But supposedly she was running a high pressure injection mold someone she frequently was teamed with. What species, nobody ever says, but what little they say doesn’t sound like a Ril.

Somthing broke lose. And by somthing i mean one of the mold restraints snapped, somthing like a cable. Superheated, whipped through them both like a plasma knive.


The other alien had head and an arm cut off. Immediate death, by most species standards.

Tasser was also bisected. In most cases, it should have lead to her two halves screaming at each other psionicly – not just forgetting black speech, forgetting language entirely. The same sort of calls that children scream when forming from their parent.

Except nothing could reattach. The wound was cauterized. A thing that could be worked around if you were in your right mind, but she wasn’t.


Eventually the pool of her coworkers blood widened to reach her. Finding anything other than the cold floor, som suckle, she sucked it up. Followed it to its source. Dove into its source, sucking up the contntes of every vein and capillary, wrapping herself in the lower corpse of her coworker like a security blanket.


When the next shift came to relive them, they found the corpse shambling around the half melted mold, trying to find the charred halves of both bodies.


It doesn’t sound right. But i know several goos who seem to have no memories of the homeworlds. Some anchient strain, so planet so far from the homeworlds the aliens’ species would have no meaning to us? I’m suspicious. But I can’t say it didn’t happen.