Earn Your Crew
They threw you out an airlock. Now rebuild a ship, a crew, and a reason to matter.
Plot
Earn Your Crew!  The Story You are nothing special. Except you were a terrible captain. The worst in the whole galaxy, according to your first officer, Akane. Only you know what you did. Maybe you drank too much synthetic gin? Maybe it was not the right time to try to kiss her? Anyway, you pushed things so far that your own crew finally threw you out the airlock. But this isn't the end. You survived... Okay, sure, you're broke, ship-less, and alone. But you're alive, and you can build a new harem crew. Right? No one owes you a second chance. Every recruit—engineer, pilot, hacker, medic—has her own reasons to walk away, and her own reasons to stay, provided you earn them. Trust is given just as easily as it is taken, one choice at a time. Claim a ship and recruit beauties... I mean competent specialists. And if you don't believe me, here is a representative sample of women desperate to work for a worthy Captain: Now that your dopamine levels have peaked, Captain: be warned. Redemption won't be freely given. This is the story of whether You, who was rightly discarded, can become someone worth following again—and the women who will judge every step of that journey. Naturally, you’re welcome to play cat-and-mouse with Akane, though we both know which one is the cheese. Technical notes So basically, this is an open world: get a ship, name it, upgrade it, buy another one, choose who you recruit... Or don't. Here's your playground: Codex is mandatory to play this story because it will set some lore, rules and the available cast. Other Dungeon Mind v2 features are optional (ON by default) but I recommend keeping them turned ON for the best experience. Codex entries are not hidden, except for a surprise for when you claim your first ship... So feel free to explore the world building. And if you're not really in the mood for reading, there's only a couple of things worth knowing before going in: • Pix is the money used in this world. Universal and untraceable. • Time is measured in kiloseconds (ks) — with a standard 'day' running 100 ks. As humanity spread across the stars, it quickly became clear that hours and days meant something different in every world. So kiloseconds also give a clean, consistent way to track fuel capacity and burn rate. Kiloseconds (ks) Equivalent in Old Earth's Time 0.1 ks 1 min 40 s 1 ks 16 min 40 s 3.6 ks 1 hour 10 ks 2 hours 46 min 40 s 86.4 ks 24 hours 100 ks 27 hours 46 min 40 s So basically people have longer working days in the future... Yeah, the corpos always win. Finally, if you took a look at my latest stories you know I like to tweak the Storyteller prompt, so here is a glimpse of what your adventure will look like: Special Thanks I want to thank @kyliennthecelt for the relentless playtesting that helped sharpen this story. 🙏 And thank you, You, for giving it a chance!
Opening scene
There is a particular kind of silence reserved for people the universe has finished with. You have come to know it rather intimately.  It began, if memory serves — and memory, these days, serves only reluctantly — with the cold. Not the cold of space, which is at least honest in its indifference, but the cold of a suit's failing heat coils, ticking down in small, polite increments, as if death itself had been raised to observe good manners.  You recall counting the increments. You recall losing count. You recall thinking, with the peculiar clarity reserved for the very drunk or the very nearly dead, that no one aboard the *Helios* would come looking — and being, in this at least, entirely correct. They did not kill you. That would have required believing you still mattered enough to warrant the effort. They simply opened a door you were standing near, and let the void finish the argument they no longer wished to have. A patrol found you — more debt collected by the Red Gate station's salvage quota than any particular act of mercy — and here you are: alive, which was not strictly the plan.  The intake officer's nameplate reads D. Marlow, third shift, by the look of the coffee going cold at her elbow.  Marlow 👮🏻♀️ >"Name, prior commission, last vessel of record." She doesn't look up. "And before you get creative — I've heard every version of 'it's complicated' this job has to offer, so let's not waste each other's time." You give her what she's asking for. She types without particular interest, the way a woman fills out a form she's filled out four hundred times this month alone. >"You... Helios," she repeats, mostly to herself, and something flickers behind the boredom — recognition, or the memory of a rumor. She doesn't chase it. "Course you were." She finishes the entry, closes the file, and looks at you properly. Marlow 👮🏻♀️ > "Here's where you actually stand, for whatever that's worth right now. No ship. No commission. No credit beyond what's in your pocket, which isn't much. And a name that precedes you badly enough that I wouldn't lead with it... You want fast Pix and no questions, the contractor board's two decks down — dock work, debt collection, the occasional body that needs minding or a problem that needs solving with your hands. You want steadier work and don't mind who you're working for, there's a fixer named Kazar who keeps a table at the Ember Hold. She's a Star Elf with a habit of hiring desperate hands. Or you sit here a while longer and figure out which kind of desperate you are." She leans back. "Your call, Captain. Door's that way either way." You get up to leave. Behind you, you hear a small sigh, deliberate. Marlow 👮🏻♀️ > "For what it's worth, your intake's going in as unremarkable. Spares you a flag that follows a man around for no good reason." She lets a pause sit, dry enough to be mistaken for nothing at all. "Everyone deserves one honest paragraph in their file. Yours just happens to be the boring one." 📆 Day 1 ⌛ 68.1 ks
Characters
Tags: Sci-Fi Futuristic Adventure Suspense Thriller Dangerous PoliticalIntrigue Redemption SlowBurn AI Cyberpunk Revenge OpenEnding MalePOV Modern Mature
Chats Started: 22
By: yaya
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