Oh, circles. Big, giant circles going around and around and you could miss all of the shells. How, well, sometimes people get a bit too over-focused. Ignore what’s right under their noses. Hard to miss a giant piece of rock floating in the sky, but still. This is a big world in here. So, yeah, you could miss them. And traveling from shell to shell. How would you do that? With our ships? The gravity beam driven ones? No, you’d need another form of propulsion. And fuel to sustain it. What’d you say? Balloons? Yeah, but those are susceptible to wind. You could end up anywhere, going in circles and out of control. Up into the water, even. No, there’s a reason we keep balloons tethered. Safer that way. Go look up your history. We learned that lesson the hard way.
So, yeah, our ships just travel to close shells. Ones we can see. Ones we can get back from. Don’t want to lose home, right? Home matters. It’s important. You need it to live, in this case. If that shell you’re going to is moving on, yeah, we need to get back. If that shell goes too far away, you’re stuck once it’s beyond your ability to fly back from it. So, that’s why inter-shell travel is unheard of.
So, that’s where the Expeditionary Force came from. If you have a problem like this, what else would the government do than start an entire organization funded just to do one thing. Sounds very government-like right? Waste a ton of money on a very limited thing that will probably just end up costing you a fortune and give you hardly anything in return.
Still, some people wanted to go, wanted to explore other shells. And they knew they might be gone a while. Maybe forever. Planned it that way, even. Facing that, you’d have to be a special kind of someone. Funny, never thought of them that way, but I guess my parents are special. Very much so.
Table of Contents
Chapter 1 - Unexpected
Chapter 2 - Hubris
Chapter 3 - Paths Cross
Chapter 4 - The Nomad Council
Chapter 5 - Truth or Vengeance
Chapter 6 - Complications
Chapter 7 - Cheating
Chapter 8 - Conspiracies
Chapter 9 - Tensions
Chapter 10 - Questions
Chapter 12 - Secrets Never Told
Chapter 13 - Fiery Emotions
Chapter 14 - Nomad Secrets
Chapter 15 – Facing a Questioner
Chapter 16 - Shadows
Chapter 17 - Challenges
Chapter 18 - The Arena
Chapter 19 - Taken
Chapter 20 - Weeping
Transcript of Quentin’s Interview