#eelenore

[eelenorejane-blog]

Captain Eelenore-Jane's Saga - Component 1 - Valve 4 The Vault and The Wings

Often it happens that when you will for something enough that it just occurs, and at this moment that’s what happened to Eelenore. After spotting a small speck on the horizon, she lifted her telescope up to her eye to get a closer look.

"Building ahoy!" Eelenore laughed out heartily.

R. was taken aback by her cry, "What!? No way!" 

Eelenore could feel herself becoming worked up, "Full steam ahead!" 

R. rolled his eyes. "Did you think we are travelling half speed?"

The sandsteamer was forcefully pushing its way across the desert and the cracks in the ground were getting deeper still and were now a lot wider in girth. The sandsteamer may have been big enough to straddle the smaller cracks but by no means was it up to making some of these bigger gaps. R. was beginning to worry. "Captain we have to stop soon. She can’t take the jumps"

"But we are only about 100 miles away! Keep moving"

"NO! You’ll get us killed!" R. pulled on the breaks, all the engines stopped and there was an eerie silence. The sand cloak fell with a silent sprinkle all around the steamer.

A captain’s word is absolute and a captain’s word should not be disobeyed. Eeleonore burst into the cockpit "What the HELL do you think you're doing" she spat at him with outrage, the frustration almost jumping out of her throat "We are so close! I need to find those bastards they have something VERY important!"

"I, captain, just stopped you from killing us. And destroying this lovely ship of ours"

"Oh god. Getting all sentimental...I’m gona have..."

"Going to punish me? Oh that’s a good idea your only pilot. You think you’ll last long with out me at the helm?"

"Don’t back chat me!" Eelenore being no older than 25 herself and had issues with dealing out discipline. R. was her only crew member and a stubborn one at that. He quite obviously thought he was better than Eelenore which at times made him hard to control. Ultimately they were friends with a common goal - trying to escape the arid planet that they had the misfortune to be born upon. So far their journey had been a fruitless endeavour, seven years had passed and they seemed no closer to lifting the sandsteamer off the ground.

Eelenore got up into R's face "Get me to that building R.” She gritted her teeth “I need to get there!" 

R. lent back in his chair and put his hands behind his head "Why don’t you walk." It was less of a suggestion more a sarcastic jibe.

"What across those canyons?"

"Well if that’s the way you want to go..."

"How do you expect me to do that?" She stood up right again still glaring down at R. - although he didn’t care he had his eyes shut and was laughing internally.

"I don’t know but I’ll tell you what. Why don’t I just stay here. Someone has to look after the ship." He paused and sat up again "Why don’t you look in the hanger for something useful" he swivvled his chair round to the broken monitor lent back and put his boots up on the dashboard with his back to Eelenore. He knew she loved to look in the hanger and was probably off the hook.

"You’re a total..." Eelenore started a sentence but R. kicked a switch on the monitor which caused the picture changed and the speakers suddenly roared "TITAN WARS!" which was followed closely by a theme tune. Eelenore threw the nearest thing she could find at him and left the room.

On a ship the size of Captain Eelenore-Jane's it’s easy to get lost, its also easy to loose things. Often Eelenore and R. would loot ships and abandoned towns and shortly after forget what they found and where they put it. Admittedly it was usually broken parts, very rarely anything valuable but Eelenore being who she was was of the "it could come in useful some day" disposition. Whenever the unlikely pair got in a tight fix they always consulted their junk hordes, now and then they would find a fantastic artefact which would help them out. And now seemed like a good time to do just that. 

Eelenore strolled down one of the more damp corridors possibly drawn there by the smell of fresh rust. It’s a horrible metallic smell which most hide from, but to Eelenore it reminded her of home. As she made her way down the hall of seemingly endless ironclad doors, she noticed the leak that was causing the rust, she made a mental note although knew full well she wouldn’t ever bother fixing it. When she finally reached a door she felt like opening she stopped.

The large bank vault like door was identical to all the others and behind it was an identical room, but every door led to a completely different trove of treasures. With an almighty heave Eelenore pulled open the door using her whole body weight to pull it. She took a look inside, the sight she was greeted with was how you would expect a pile of every item that you lost in your entire life to look. There were broken monitors, a large pile of girders, some wood and hanging from the ceiling seemed to be a set of mismatched chairs. She scanned the room; fire extinguishers, an old mattress, hundreds of old newspapers, a small engine which by the looks of it was leaking, everything was pointless, everything was old. Eelenore sighed and walked into the room, she kicked one of the girders it shook and echoed a loud boom all the way through the hull of the sandsteamer. A thin layer of dust covered everything in the room, and one of the monitors which was cracked along the screen had something inside it. Eelenore noticed this and kicked the rest of the monitor’s glass in until she could get at what was inside. It seemed like a piece of cloth but on further inspection she noticed that it had bones in it - made from bamboo. She unfolded it and it stretched 12 foot across at its widest point and 5 foot lengthways. It resembled a pair of wings perhaps even an early aircraft or a para-glider. The only exception is that the bottom of the wings were reminiscent of an umbrella going out to a point then arcing inward before heading out to another point. The cloth was entirely intact not a hole or even a stitch out of place. “This is a sign” she decided, she needed to get across a vast expanse and she had been given wings. The gods were on her side and it was time for her to fly.

[eelenorejane-blog]

Captain Eeelenore-Janes Saga - Component 1 - Valve 3 - The Bazaar at Pisces

Now I’ve never been approached by a group of men of seedy business men and neither had Eelenore. She thought them most probably respectable workmen types. The tallest and most slimy looking man put his arm around her and offered her a cigar. Eelenore, never the one to look a gift horse in the mouth, graciously accepted. Another of the men, this one more portly than the last lit it for her and proceeded to ask:

"What’s a girl like you doing in a place like this? Looking for something specific no doubt. I bet ya anything we will have what ya need."

A third man, the one the exact mix of the prior two men came over and told Eelenore "Our tent over here has every ware you could possibly imagine."

The portly man snorted, sniffed and then said "Yeah cummon in."

Eelenore being the savvy young woman knew better than to follow them. But something compelled her to head into the tent. Perhaps she caught a glimpse of something shiny or maybe it was the hospitality and the cigar she was smoking, but never the less she headed in. Once she entered the tent she felt how muggy it was the stagnant air felt as if it was clinging to her imploring her to leave. The slimy man followed close behind her into the tent with the other two men in tow.

"So...what is it you are looking for?" The slimy man asked.

Eelenore was quick off the bat and replied; "Hydrogen gas tanks. You gots?"

"Nope...but we have something far more explosive." the slimy man replied and the other two laughed heartily.

It was at that point Eelenore noticed that the cigar in her mouth had almost burnt to a stub despite her not toking it very much at all.

"You’re Eelenore Jane, yes?"

"What’s it to you?"

She went to take the cigar out of her mouth as it started to hiss and throw sparks. The two other men grabbed her arms and held them behind her back.

"Heh. Just needed to make sure"

Eelenore had never smoked before and it turned out to be a very bad time for her to start because at that very moment her cigar exploded into a small cloud of smoke. She dropped to her knees unable to stand her mechanical arm became unresponsive and just as she started to close her eyes the slimy man bent down to her face, lifted her head up to look at him and swiped her hat. After placing it upon his head mockingly he let go of her face and she fell completely to the ground and hit her head hard against the rock floor.

The next moment she woke up she was in a speeding sandskimmer. Racing deep into the desert.

Eelenore knew if she just kept on going she would find them. She didn’t care where they were. She would have justice.

(Next Valve - The Vault and the Wings)

[eelenorejane-blog]

Captain Eeelenore-Janes Saga - Component 1 - Valve 2 - The Sandsteamer Lives

Outside, as the steamer started moving and juddering into life, a large vacuum began sucking up dirt from the ground around it’s base. The structure lurched sluggishly forward and started spraying the vacuum collected dust and grit out of huge trumpet like funnels on it’s side creating a thick veil of sand and rushing air not to dissimilar from a sandstorm. The perfect defense and the perfect disguise.

R. slumped back in his chair checking all the gauges were correct, now and then fiddling with leavers and the dials. The room essentially was made of buttons and rusted aged girders; the ship was obviously hundreds of years old but never the less it was in working order. Back when the ship had been new it had used an autopilot to drive whilst the sand cloak was in action, as the thick sand veil obscures the windscreen. Unfortunately the autopilot had long ago stopped working and was probably somewhere amongst the heaps of computer paraphernalia cluttering up the majority of the cockpit floor. Therefore to drive the sandsteamer safely there needed to be a person above the sandscreen to see where they were going. And for that reason Eelenore and R. had devised a look-out system; Eelenore would climb to the very top of the sandsteamer above the cloud of sand and use her mahogany and gold plated telescope to watch where they were going, relaying everything to R using earpieces they had picked up at a junk yard.

Recently though they had rigged a periscope to the roof. It was an old video camera which linked into a monitor in the cockpit, the reception was awful, there was a couple of seconds delay and the display had dead pixels and static across 30% of the screen...but it worked its purpose. Despite this Eelenore still insisted on running up to the roof every time the steamer rolled forward. She once told R. it was because she needed to be there in case the periscope stopped working. Her actual words were; "It’s likely to fuck up because we built it outa crap crap and shit". But between you and me the smile that creeps across her face when she rides the steamer’s roof cries out of someone enjoying themselves, not someone who’s there for business.

R. picked up a dirty cloth that was hanging off a soft toy he had been given as a child. It was of 'Lenny', the side kick of a superhero from the show "Titan Wars". He used the rag to clean the visor which he wore - it gave him a heads up display of the ships important intelligence and at the moment everything was fine. He tossed the rag aside and glanced at the monitor feeding from the periscope. It showed the same vacant orange sea of dirt it had been relaying for over an hour now. He stared at it long enough that it started to blur and started to morph into his reflection. He'd been trying to keep himself presentable but his shirt was ripped and coupled with an ugly tie. He sighed in annoyance at his appearance he wanted a shower but they were low on water, and he had even taken to covering up his dirty brown hair with an old deer stalker he had found in their supplies, it didn't properly accommodate his visor and ear piece properly and for that reason it looked a little silly. Placing his hand to his left ear he said "Anything out there capin’?"

There was a short pause and a crackled "Nope...nuttin’" came back.

Now, you may not know this but travelling at 100 miles per hour through an arid wasteland for hours on end be quite boring and certainly for Eelenore and R. as it was very uneventful, yes at first it is exciting to feel the rush of the air and the machine beneath you pulsing like an animal, but soon the monotony leads to bordem. As night began to fall Eelenore had fallen asleep upon the roof in the crows nest. She was awoken by R. shouting in her ear about half an hour into her nap. "Captin! CAPTIN?" She shot up with a start with a wicker basket imprint upon her wind-lashed cheek. The sun had set and the sky was now deep blue and thousands of stars had come to watch them pursue their treasure.

"Yes (ahem) yes R. what?"

"Look ahead and see".

The cracks one sees in the desert planes, usually nothing more than creases in the ground, had been getting increasingly larger and at by this point they were gaping crevasses. Luckily at the moment the steamer was still able to ford them but it was still a strange occurrence, plus, they were still growing in size. Finding herself in a situation she wasn’t expecting Eelenore made a snap decision and ordered R. "Full steam ahead. We'll never find them unless we keep going". She spoke with an element of doubt in her voice which R. didn’t react to kindly to.

"Captin there is nothing out here. This place is gona turn out to be a canyon at worlds end! If we don’t stop well crash."

Eelenore wanted revenge for being left out in the middle of nowhere. It was a despicable act of cowardice not to mention un-chivalrous. She wanted to find the bastards who had mugged her and left her for dead. She had met them whilst in a bazaar in the city of Pisces where the black market thrives; for once she was looking for a legitimate deal to buy some hydrogen tanks to help reconstruct her ship to its former glory. She hadn't long been browsing when a small group of suited men who looked ridiculous due to the dust and mud trailing up their pinstriped trousers approached her.

(Next Valve -   The Bazaar at Pisces)