So, if you’re confused why Space is suddenly the Place when Realmgard is usually more-or-less 1620s Earth, the context here is that I was loosely inspired by the fact that Regular Warhammer eventually gave rise to Space-Warhammer (and, as it happens, sort of circled back to Space-Warhammer in Not-Space).
[Incidentally, Regular Warhammer has basically been revived as a spin-off game.]
Warhammer Fantasy and Warhammer 40K are different settings, though a lot of the factions have parallels, if not outright equivalents (and the Orcs are just straight-up the same…) between the two games. There’s no real direct influence from 40K on Space-Realmgard — for one thing, 40K is so bleak and depressing that it literally invented a new word. The inspiration is really just “SciFi setting derived from and similar to early Fantasy Setting.”
All that being said, I do want to do a real Space-Realmgard story at some point.
Also, Space-Amara’s name is vaguely Romanian-looking, sort of like how actual Romanian is at least vaguely Latin-looking, reflecting how Regular-Realmgard Elves are suppose to be Roman. It’s also inspired by the fact that a lot of characters in Fantasy anime seem to have long, elaborate, multi-part names.
Ahem.
So, like, Space is the Place, etc.
Copyright
J.B. Norman
“Frang it,” Kathryn Starstone mutters, looking up from the readout on her tablet. She turns to her robotic assistant. “Is anything on the ship still working?”
“Life support systems are not operating at peak efficiency but are functioning within acceptable parameters, Captain,” the robot tells her. “Additionally, the turn signals operate on a separate circuit unaffected by recent overloads of other systems.”
“Thank you, Wembley,” Kathryn says through grit teeth.
“I live to serve, Captain,” the robot says with a bow. The robot was programmed to behave like a butler, so Kathryn and her sister decided to name him after their own childhood butler. Frankly, the resemblance is uncanny.
“Hold this for me,” Kathryn says, shoving the tablet into Wembley’s metal hands as she stalks towards the ship.
“There were plenty of new ships on the lot, Kathryn,” she scolds herself. “But no! You just had to go for the vintage piece of junk!”
She begins hammering her foot into the hull of the old, battered ship, hoping perhaps to beat it into compliance. All she really manages to accomplish is hurting her foot.
“Ow,” she mutters, slumping to the ground.
Kathryn looks up to see her best friend, the Alvaraean princess Amarantha, the daughter of the Duke of the Third House of Vallda and twenty-seventh in line to the throne of the Ljósálf System: important enough to be fabulously wealthy, well-bred, and well-educated, but obscure enough in the grand scheme to Alvaraean politics to be freely able to spend most of her time slumming it up travelling around the galaxy with a star-pilot.
Her full legal name is ‘Amarantha Marcellinou yl tres-Vallda yn Vanr.’ Or something. Kathryn is just glad that she usually just goes by ‘Amy.’
“Is everything alright, Captain?” Amy asks.
“No,” she mutters, “everything is not alright. Everything is borked. The weapons are offline. The sublight drive is overloaded. The FTL drive is clogged.” She glowers at the ship. “Because the whole ship is a rusty piece of junk that deserves to be melted down into scrap!”
“I, uh, I don’t think the ship can hear you, Captain,” Amy notes.
“If that—” She glances back at the ship. “—piece of junk—” She turns back to Amy. “—had a butt, I would kick it from here to the Lohengrin Verge.”
“Well, good for the ship, that it does not, in fact, have a, ahem, butt,” Amy says.
Kathryn and Amy turn towards the door of the docking bay as it hisses open and Kathryn’s little sister and official Unofficial First Mate steps inside.
“I’m back!” Dunstella declares, carrying a bucket nearly as big as she is. “I brought food! It’s called fried chicken! I’ve never had it before, but it’s greasy, so it must be good!”
“What is a chicken?” Amy asks.
Wembley steps forwards.
“A chicken is a domesticated bird popular on many human worlds as a source of meat and eggs,” the robot explains. “They look like this, Princess.”
He projects a holographic image of the creature in question, a small, fat bird with strange fleshy bits on its face.
“Oh,” Amy gasps. “What a horrid creature! Do people really eat these?”
Hungry and entirely unperturbed, Dunstella reaches into the bucket for a hunk of chicken and takes a big bite.
“It’s good!” she exclaims. “It tastes just like Fengarian Hypergator!”
The rest of my writing exercises are here. This scene is from February 2022.
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