(Slept in today. Need some reiteration here.
This is an excerpt from “Gathering Clouds,” the starter piece, found elsewhere on this site, that got this thing going. I’m not sure if I’ve explained the backstory.
Even so, just for GP, a quick sketch . . . Let me take you back to the halcyon days when dial-up Internet was the latest new thing and AOL membership was bloating like Tetsuo at the end of Akira. Some members of an AOL chat group dedicated to Babylon 5, a then current and fairly popular Sci-Fi television program, decided to co-author a “tag” story together.
One of us would write something and send it to someone else in the group, like ‘tag, you’re it!’ We had high hopes. Where would it take us? I can’t tell you whose idea it was, except that it wasn’t mine. But I liked the supposition and wrote “Gathering Clouds” as part of the ongoing story. I believe there were a couple of entries made other than mine but the idea didn’t get enough momentum to take off.
I wasn’t for lack of trying on my part. When I wrote “Gathering Clouds” I was trying to salt it with as much ambiguous material as I could, leaving loose ends lying all over the place, like a literary super Lego block with lots of connector artifacts. I was trying to make it easy for another writer to find a handle to continue the story. Unfortunately the story was stillborn for lack of participation. We all had real lives, time at a premium, so no one’s to blame. Just how it turned out.
That was then. I recently found “Gathering Clouds” in my archive and after reading it posted it to the old group for kicks and giggles. Yep, some of us are still in touch. @@@ Hail LOOUUUUUUU!!!!! @@@
So now I have this story with plenty of places to go, so, why not? Besides, heh, one of the old group, after reading my post, commented that it might be an interesting read. 😉
Once under weigh I thought about the old group. Man, we’d had some times. I wondered what they’d been up to these last couple of years. Did Yorgie get sober? He was always the toughest in a scrap, not many slinky hoopas could say they fought him and won. ‘Cause I don’t think any who did fight him actually lived to tell about it.
Is Moon still as enigmatic? There wasn’t any piece of tech he couldn’t figure out. And did Dobie ever get that ship he was always talking about? He always dreamed of a ship that could traverse the galactic circumference in two weeks.
Where’s the Ghost now? He’s the only one who really scared me. And don’t forget the babe—oh yeah, the babe! Thinking about her made my leather pants a little tighter. They always underestimated her, such a sweet, cute little doll. She was extremely fast, saved the team more than once because, in spite of her tiny form, she could be more vicious than the rest of us put together when she put her mind to it.
They called us mercenaries but we had a real sense of justice and never took jobs that didn’t seem ‘right.’ There were bounties on all of our heads in more than one backwoods pirate hole. Proxima was such a place but if Starc was there it must be worth the risk.
