jumped without a jump drive

[rockeye_stonetoe]

Nick, in a full environment suit like any sensible person would wear in untamed wilderness, is overseeing a small swarm of robots harvesting various useful plantlife from the uninhabited parts of a sparsely settled planet, when something suddenly comes tearing through the undergrowth towards him and it's not showing up on scanners-

He raises his hand-phaser, notices it has a mirror for a face and hesitates a little too long. And then he is in a clearing, cut off from his ship and 'bots, with all available sources of data telling him he just went through a jump.

What.

Comments

[rockeye_stonetoe]

Nick does not get involved in this dispute.

And his six month loan term is coming due soon, so he'd better stop spending capital on things. When the metal scouts fail to find any particularly good deposits for two weeks he recalls them and stops expanding his staff and just sells the things he already has.

[alicornucopia]

Polyester is pretty cheap and becomes popular among the poor, and among those so rich that they can accentuate it with obviously expensive things and not risk being mistaken for poor people. People of reasonable means and uncertain status mostly steer clear. Lights become increasingly popular, although a lot of people conservatively just put one light in one room of their house. Radios are distributed (less rapidly than paladins on flying creatures could ferry them around) and used to communicate between towns; this winds up serving partly as a replacement for their ineffectual postal system and partly as early storm warning. The theater person starts playing the first halves of recorded plays and songs over the radio; people who want to hear the rest have to attend a listen.

[rockeye_stonetoe]

Two days before the official repayment date of his loan, he goes to talk to the moneylender. Of the 32 gold and a bit he owes after interest, he has 29 ready. He reports that his businesses are steadily profiting, and asks for a few days' extension on the repayment of the other 3 gold.

[alicornucopia]

She'll give him a few days, although not without squinting at him.

[rockeye_stonetoe]

"I will have your gold." He hands over 29 gold now, at any rate.

He runs his stocks of materials low and gives some of his staff a few days off over their objections to make up the last three gold, and adds a silver to the moneylender's payment for her trouble.

When he's back in money he sends the metal-scouts out again, hoping to find a nice vein of titanium, iron, or at least coal.

[alicornucopia]

Out they go. One of them finds some coal in the mountains after enough tromping around in the cold.

[rockeye_stonetoe]

The cold-trompers get a break and are replaced with two other teams travelling further and further away. Coal is good, but he needs iron as well to really get going on the kind of industry that will eventually lead to spaceships.

[alicornucopia]

He could just buy some iron the next time traders come through - there's a lull between the times when it might snow and when it already has, when it's impractical to use sledges and when it risks getting you caught in a snowdrift if you use carts, but it'll snow soon. He could even radio someone far away about his demand for iron. (This is pointed out by his obnoxious staffperson.)

[rockeye_stonetoe]

He explains that the amount he can buy from traders is not enough for what he has in mind. He needs a proper mine, or at least a long-term deal with someone who has one.

But it's still a good suggestion, so he starts asking around via radio for someone with lots of iron to sell.

[alicornucopia]

Someone promises a cartload when the snow's on the ground, sooner if he wants to pay enough to cover possible lost days due to early snow.

[rockeye_stonetoe]

That's not nearly enough. But he'll take it anyway. The metal-scouts are just going to have to keep scouting for metal, hopefully he'll find some in the ground eventually. He goes about claiming or buying the land where the coal vein is.

Sometime between then and the first snow, one of his electricity customers electrocutes herself after cutting through the wires' insulation. Nick defends himself to law enforcement and arbitrators, talking about his warnings not to mess with the wires.

But that night he has terrible nightmares. Fires caused by electrical faults, explosions in the power plant, one of his employees screaming, his arm mangled under the bloody letters of the printing press...

The next night it's more of the same. Armies using the locomotives he was planning on building, nuclear technology in the hands of some unstable king. After that are dreams of being trapped forever, growing old and decrepit and dying of some sort of preventable cancer at the young age of 70. Dreams of his parents, laughing at how he fled from home but ended up stuck in one place anyway how pathetic.

Doxepine doesn't help. He's in a very, very bad mood by the end of the week.

[alicornucopia]

His staff find some iron! Isn't that nice? It's a long way away and a bit tricky to get at but it's plenty.

[rockeye_stonetoe]

Horray. Now he can start drafting plans for a steel mill. He'll need another loan.

Why won't these damn nightmares stop?! He's done nothing wrong, he's been careful, he's improving these people's lives by all accounts. Ugh.

He stops supervising his staff so closely and no longer comes out with new products. He runs out of doxepine. The nightmares stop, but the depressed, paranoid, angry voices in his head don't. He snaps at people who try to talk to him. He grumbles and delays when someone reports a problem with their devices or lights.

[alicornucopia]

The staff pick up the slack as best they can.

(It's only a matter of time before a little kid wants to see what's inside the wires -)

Obnoxious employee starts compiling radio news and printing it up for people who don't have their own radios.

(He's never going home, he's stuck with these ignorant primitives until his untimely death -)

The cartload of iron he ordered shows up.

(He might not even last to seventy, he could catch something from these filthy uneducated people at any moment and die, alone, while he slaughters a few million of the locals by electrical proxy -)

[rockeye_stonetoe]

He locks himself in his room for most of a week and watches movies from his cranial computer it'll break eventually, there aren't any proper surgeons here you'll never fix it, sliding coins under the door when his employees complain they haven't been paid. When he does come out, he kicks the business back into more or less the proper shape and makes slow, slow progress on coal-to-oil conversion and combustion engines the greedy primitives will just use them as war machines.

It's only when he happens to hear of a zombie attack on a neighboring village when he remembers that dark things exist. And one of the dark things that exist are woke shadows.

He scans himself with every still-operational sensor he owns.

[alicornucopia]

Nothing out of the ordinary.

He's just cracking up, that's all, his own mind is turning against him and if the medicine here is ridiculous the standard of psychiatric care is worse, he's just going to go steadily more insane until he hurts someone directly enough that they lock him away, and then every harmless thing he's tried to do will be dismissed as a madman's toys but that won't stop people from keeping things they can use to kill each other, no, practicality is always the ultimate concern there -

[rockeye_stonetoe]

He tries to shove the Winter Light talisman in his ear. This fails to work. Proof. That's what he needs. Objective proof from the people who deal with this kind of shit for a living.

He forces himself to be angry at whoever did this to him, not himself, not the rest of the world. He storms up to the paladins' compound and asks the gate guard how they check someone for woke shadows.

[alicornucopia]

"...Do you think you have woke shadows?" asks the guard. "Or someone else?"

[rockeye_stonetoe]

"Me. I can barely sleep. I keep thinking people are going to kill each other with my inventions. I feel like I'm going to catch some horrible disease and go blind and lose my hands and die. I tried to find them myself, but no, nothing, nothing. Your job is dealing with this. So, check somehow!"

[alicornucopia]

The paladin's response to this is to tackle Nick and start tying him up.

[rockeye_stonetoe]

They're trying to kill you! He struggles. Nick's strong, but not stronger than a paladin. He pulls his phaser- it's self-defense!- And throws it away as hard as he can force himself to do so.

[alicornucopia]

Once the paladin has him securely tied up he starts systematically patting Nick down with Winter Light sigils, not the pendant version but long slightly flexible wooden ones, one in each hand.

And when he pokes one into Nick's left ear there is a hissing scream, intolerably loud -

- and silence.

[rockeye_stonetoe]

He starts crying. "Oh, thank god, I'm not insane."

[alicornucopia]

The paladin does not untie him right away; he checks the other ear. "There might be some in your home. I'll find a novice to sit with you while I go check."

He finds a novice, who is a twelve-year-old girl who pats Nick's shoulder comfortingly and also doesn't untie him.

[rockeye_stonetoe]

He looks at his phaser. "Could you fetch that thing for me, put it back on my belt?"