World Seed

Author’s Corner: Official Chapter 100! Woohoo! *disco ball descends*After dying, and then… undying? I’ll think of the proper term later. Anyways, after I left the medbay, Yo went back to my room to play games, while I headed to the bridge with Sharon. I just recovered after being out of comission for two days, and before that we lost several crew members. It just feels like I should say a few words, you know?On the way, Celeste filled me in on what had been going on. In order to play it safe, she had chosen to remain in this system until the upgrade to the engines had been completed. We didn’t want to risk something happening in subspace if the engines upgrading caused a problem. In the meantime, she had us move towards a large cluster of asteroids and sent out her construction drones. Although mining was not their specialty, they were capable of breaking down the asteroids and transporting the ores back until she made a small mining vessel.After that, they used the mining vessel, several crew members getting experience with short distance flights outside of the ship. That lasted until about noon yesterday, when the crew had a space burial for the dead elves. I was glad that Celeste handled that part, even though they weren’t sure when I’d wake up.Celeste must have let them know that I was awake now, and that I was feeling better, because there were several people in the bridge that did not actually have a post in there, and were just standing to watch the entrance. Others that were at their consoles had also turned around and were facing the door. Walking in on this… I’ll admit that I deactivated my limiter and took several very long seconds to calm down. Focus… focus… Pretend they’re all in their underwear.That may have been a bad thing to think, because Celeste provided me with a mental image of them all being in their underwear. I was kidding! Thankfully, Celeste cancelled the image and I was able to take another long period to think and plan, while my body remained frozen midstep. After that step finally ended, I reactivated the limiter and cleared my throat, something I was unable to do while essentially frozen in time. “Thank you all for being here today.” Not like you have anywhere else to go besides this ship. “I know that recent events have been hard, despite the journey having just begun. I cannot tell you things will get better from here, because I cannot guarantee that they will be. For all we know, we could encounter an abstract attack every time we jump out of subspace.”I could see their expressions turning a bit grim at that, so I took another de-limited moment to collect my thoughts. “Celeste has assured me that these monsters are rare, but this is a new frontier for all of us. As such, these events will happen, no matter how carefully we plan. This time, we got off with as few casualties as possible thanks to the foreknowledge provided to us. However, we naturally can’t have this same advantage when it comes to everything. There will be times when we are caught off guard, when we lose people because we don’t know what we’re up against.”You know, this had started off so well… I suck at speeches. “When that happens, I’ll be counting on each and every one of you to do your best. To make sure that, even if lives are lost, they are not lost for nothing. Our mission is to help whatever races we can, so that they can better deal with this new world. And, I’ll do my best to help, but I am still new to this whole captain thing…”I had played space games before, and they were fairly realistic, however I never had the aptitude to be a captain. I would always end up as either a navigations officer or a mechanic. So basically either read a screen and tell people when the dots move around, or play a mini-game to fix technology that hasn’t been invented yet.There was a long silence after I was done talking, and surprisingly it was Officer Ackbar that spoke up first. “Salute!” Suddenly, everyone present, Sharon and Celeste included, performed the elven salute that we had witnessed before. I could see smiles on several of the faces, and it seemed that they had approved of my failed attempt at a speech.For the next two days, I stayed on the bridge whenever possible. Even if I was cultivating or training my psychic power, I would do so in the captain’s chair. At the same time, I had Celeste ‘tutoring’ me on the basics of being a captain. I still had trouble accepting this, and I probably would for a while, but this chair isn’t going anywhere… And it is technically my chair. The most comfortable chair I have ever sat in. It’s a good chair… What was I thinking about again?Anyways, I made some interesting discoveries with my power testing for these couple of days. Although my physical body can only move at its normal speed, even when the limiter is removed, my magic and psychic abilities are controlled by my mind. My magic still has a limit to how fast it can move, which is roughly double what I had been using it for, but my psychic abilities seem to work at the speed of thought.I also made what could be counted as the single most important discovery of my Toybox power, and likely the reason that it had its name.