Chapter 11: ch11 – Resupply

We hit the magnetosphere of the system where we hope to resupply, and get into orbit around the green planet just before our dinner.

While eating, an interesting topic comes up: "Should we have names?"

Most of us had honestly not considered it, but it would probably help with diplomacy and third-person identification.

We decide to schedule a research session later to pick any needed, especially for our ship's natural language callsign.

We also discuss our relationships, and simultaneously realize half of us have different kinds of crushes on each other. Our medic and pilot now date our archivist and engineer, who are lightly dating each other, while our chemist has fulfilled her semiplatonic crushes on both our tactician and our diplomat, and our bureaucrat and bodyguard are even more intimate than they were. We feel this rather simplifies things, and resolve to go on group dates.

We de-orbit a few hours later, with a plan to simply take a wide sample of everything. Hopefully we can clone the meats from this ecology much more easily than those we already have stored.

Our cat and her two direct girlfriends are to hunt animal life, while our inorganics sample the plants and fungi.

... We do that. It takes almost the rest of the day. We have plenty of fun, too.

When we get back to the ship, we finally have the ability to unlock it from the outside, with a multipart analogue system that requires unique properties of at least three of us to unlock. Its designer is proud, and most everyone else is impressed. She gets a kiss for it, and immediately the other relevant pair shyly copy them in the background.

While the bioreactors prime, the archives receive the samples, and dinner approaches, we decide to have a picnic.

We take several copies of the Archive, five meals, and a heavy cloth. We also leave our suits in the ship, since it's supposed to feel more natural (though we did bring a speaker for our favorite gaseous organism).

We talk about light stuff, take a brief detour to the topic of literally never having properly interacted with people not currently having this picnic, and return to further things of no consequence. At one point the chemist blows up a nearby rock using only the food we bought, and the eldrich horror laughs and compliments her, which increased the wind speed noticably for a minute or two.

While packing up, we distribute copies of the Archive in random directions (possibly forever altering the future path of intelligent life on this planet) before heading back.

On the way to the ship, we discuss a few names for both it and ourselves, but never settle on any.

We unlock the ship, stow the cloth, prep the engines, take a moment to enjoy the sunrise, and launch. Enough improvments have been made to the engine that (though it requires all seven of the pilot at full concentration) we manage to pull off an incredible maneuver that misses every obstacle while taking us to the leading edge of the system's magnetosphere in under an hour. We immediately publish this feat to anyone that happens to listen, and save it with the engine specs and blueprints in the Archive.

After some direction control and initiation of interstellar flight, we're due to arrive at a recent distress beacon rather quickly.