writing fiction of the fan and non fan kind. See here for SasuHina, Reylo, Kacchako and others.
Me: Come on brain, write.
Brain: I know what’s going to happen next!
Me: That’s fantastic, but for the sake of pacing can we work up to that point?
Brain: Yeah. We could. Or, hear me out, I can tell you every single detail of the next part and we won’t be able to focus on the current point of the story and we’ll get really frustrated because we know where we want to go but don’t know how to get to it.
Cassini is the first spacecraft that was destroyed not from malfunction, or as a necessary end result of its mission… but out of love.
The probe was running out of propulsion fuel, but there’s no reason it couldn’t have been pushed into a stable orbit from where it could collect data and send back pictures for a long while yet.
Except it had detected that one of Saturn’s moons held liquid water and organic compounds: a world that might support life. A world that is, at the least, dreaming of life.
There is no orbit stable enough to be certain that the probe, carrying
radioactive batteries
and Earth’s bacteria, would never have come into contact with Enceladus. A delicate island of alien life could have been snuffed out or overrun. The sheep could have eaten the rose.
So instead – for the love of this fragile possibility, this potential that might yet never be realized – Cassini was brought into a final, intimate tango with Saturn.
But of course, all space probes are built for the sake of awe, which is nearly love. Science is rational, but scientists are driven to understand the universe just as the religious strive to know the face of God.
The Cassini probe was a 4 billion dollar machine for understanding Saturn. And yesterday, two decades after it launched from our planet, it was destroyed while sending us information about Saturn it never could have gathered from a distant, stable orbit: advancing its purpose, even knowing that it would be consumed.
When King Conrad III defeated the Duke of Welf (in the year 1140) and placed Weinsberg under siege, the wives of the besieged castle negotiated a surrender which granted them the right to leave with whatever they could carry on their shoulders. The king allowed them that much. Leaving everything else aside, each woman took her own husband on her shoulders and carried him out. When the king’s people saw what was happening, many of them said that that was not what had been meant and wanted to put a stop to it. But the king laughed and accepted the women’s clever trick. “A king” he said, “should always stand by his word.”
Medieval women were BAMFs.
This movie scene is where I learned the true survival value of being a smart-ass.
concept: an austen-inspired tabletop rpg where there are five classes
single man in possession of a large fortune who is in want of a wife
young woman with low connections who must marry so that she can secure her future
cad whose main goal is to convince someone to elope with him
wealthy, scheming woman whose goal is to ruin the happiness of the aforementioned young woman
tiresome & vulgar elderly busybody (can be either a man or a woman)
I’m gonna split this out a little farther, because I feel like we’re blurring the lines between classes and stats. First you should pick your Austen class:
Bachelor/Bachelorette
Cad / Floozy
Husband/Wife
Matriarch/Patriarch
Busybody
Then you roll for your stats across the 6 basic Abilities:
Ink Child Writing 