What's Going on With Section 99: In Short, Stuff!

Hey hi, remember that thing that I wrote? I've been writing it more and more behind the scenes, and doing some editing and restructuring.

I'm really happy with the stories I wrote, but I also think the scope of where Van was going and what he was going had blown too big. Which is why I'm going to be taking a bunch of those plot points from earlier stories, and re-condensing them into a new story, one that's less sprawling, focusing on a tighter core cast, and just one place in the bigger Section 99 universe. Instead, the conflict that Van was building toward is going to be condensed and focused into a story that directly effects the colony of Port of St. Joseph, which is where I was eventually building towards being his long term residence, the yard he's a watchdog over. I figure, why not cut to the chase, and rewrite what I got towards that new direction, of a more compact, leaner, meaner storyline.

To keep folks tided over, I've started making something of a tourist guide, since Talen Lee went and showed me this video on doing just that. It's going to be a narrated walking tour of a city carved out of a giant asteroid, a preserved ocean cavern in space that industrious folks turned into a massive port and trade station- Port of St. Joseph, the Hub of the Freelands. You'll learn about the sort of people that live in the city, their history, the architecture, and the sort of things you'll find in the city, from pieces of art, to food, to common every day items. You know, like Van's handgun:

 Yeah I've been keeping up on my technical art for the RPG project as well, I still haven't forgotten about that, either.

The first bit of the guide is almost ready for you all on patreon to see, but as an early preview, here's the introduction:

Aeons ago, a planet blew up, shearing apart its two moons in the cataclysm and spreading their collective mass as a great crescent arc of stone along its orbital path. Nobody knows for sure what did the damage, just that it’s a real shame that it happened at all, going off the promising evidence that survived the worldbreak: place had liquid water on the surface, and enough life in the seas that fossil evidence lies in strata that are eras deep.

We know this because one of the biggest stones in the field is hollow. It’s a vast ocean cavern that held its shape against its world’s ending, a hard knot that resisted planet-scale doom. In it, we found metals, minerals and the aforementioned fossils, so loose in the sediment we could stir the loot loose with rakes, let alone drills and hammers. But in it, we found another opportunity than just a mine and refinery: it was the most fitting foundation for a theoretical Stone Station we’d yet found, one that’d let us build even bigger than the models projected.

We had to try. Given that we’re talking from 40 years later, though? We might just have succeeded.

We called it Port of St. Joseph, a figure that even non-Christians and non-Terrans pray to when things start shaking, burning or exploding on a starship. No, not that St. Joseph, the other one, the one that patrons astronauts. It started out as a collective joke: “please, Joe, don’t let the walls cave in when we pressurize this thing,” “Hail Joe, Full of Grace, Hallowed Be Your Backup Solar Farm,” that sort of thing. But then things started to actually work properly, and an experimental colony became a working station, with a corps of engineers and builders that adapted rapidly to the unique challenges of their new home. These are the people that innovated the interior support shell that not only hardens the outer walls of the rock, but leeches the gravitic force out of is titanic mass and channels it into the floor, giving the cavern a clear and constant sense up and down. These are the people who built the pillar arcologies, that support the roof while giving living space to the masses that call this place home. These are the millions-strong people that have turned a blown-apart piece of dead rock into a vibrant hub of a port city, a place of trade, industry, art, knowledge and entertainment. They made it a where life has unfurled into an engineered ecology of interplanetary peoples, animals and vegetation beneath a sky of artificial sunlight, above canals and an artificial lake of farmed moisture. They made a world unto itself, where the crowd noise has its own music and the shadows are subtly neon, where what corruption and scum scrapes that ashore is met with resistance that just as unique and fierce as the place it defends. They made it a place where people are born, live and even die without ever leaving, because everything they ever wanted is right here. 

This is Port of St. Joseph’s. The City in Space.

More coming next week- I've got my writing momentum again, finally, and I'm really happy to show you how things have evolved in the editing cycle for what I had. Until then!

-G