Jump 160: Homeworld: Deserts of Kharak

Jump 160: Homeworld: Deserts of Kharak

Location: Kharak
Age: 22
Identity: S'jet
Drawbacks: [+600] Ginger, Traitors In The Midst, The Homeworld Era

[200/1600]  Like An Old Glove
[Free]      Scientific Aptitude
[300/1600]  Logistician
[500/1600]  Fortune Favors The Bold
[800/1600]  Inspired Advancement
[900/1600]  Desert Nomad
[1100/1600] Magpie
[1200/1600] Reaver
[1600/1600] Salvage Upgrades
[Free]      Baserunner

It came to pass, one overly warm day (but weren't they all?), that Kiith S'jet had a member that had been unaccounted for in the past. A young man of two and twenty summers, who claimed extraordinary things. Things that ought not be possible. Knowledge that he could not possibly have. And all of these talents he put toward the future of the Kiith and of Kharak itself.

An expedition had been sent out once prior to the deep desert, seeking out artifacts among the distant dunes, but it met with disaster. And so a second went along, headed by one of the Kiith's rising stars. He, as wel, was invited along to aid them. This, too, was fraught with peril from within and without. Attacks. Sabotage. And yet even for all of this, the Guidestone would still have been retrieved without the young man.

But without him they would not have had anyone capable of recreating the blueprints from the crashed ships that were encountered in the sands, no one who would be able to - at least on a small scale - replicate their underlying systems and get them spaceborne.

In the decades to come, he was a key figure in the Scaffold project, the superstructure built in orbit in order to build something even bigger - the Mothership. Oh, surely it still could have been done, of this there is little doubt. But again, his presence accelerated the project's timeline, made refinements possible beyond what otherwise would have been.

There were a number of designs that were theoretically possible, of course. Some were produced alongside the Mothership project once the Scaffold had been completed. Resource collectors, scouts, fighters. Longer range ships to explore the Kharak system and prepare for the eventual use of the mothership's hyperdrive. Of course, more designs were planned, simply not replicated at this stage - seeking out Hiigara, the eventual end goal, wasn't exactly expected to be a military operation. Though better to be prepared, in any case. Much the same reason that he was certain to be one of the loudest voices when it came to augmenting the planet's defenses.

As the launch date for the mothership neared, though, the no longer young man disappeared. Oh, it was expected - he'd had a small frigate built, aiming to test a hyperdrive variant. But the expected check-in did not happen, and so the launch of the Mothership was expected to also result in his recovery in the outer Kharak system - a ship had travelled to the outer system to aid in calibration and any necessary resupply when the hyperdrives were tested.

If only anyone knew how wrong things would end up going.