Three Hundred Light-Years from Home

Three Hundred Light-Years from Home The jump was supposed to be routine — one more measured step in a voyage of measured steps. Instead something reached into the drive and threw, and when the void tore open and closed again, the stars overhead belonged to no chart aboard. No beacon answers. No relay carries word home. No rescue is coming, because no one alive knows where to look. You are Captain-Prince Arwell, Third Prince of the Arwell Empire — and out here, the title is worth exactly what the crew decides it is worth. There is no throne within three hundred light-years, no court, no relief. There is the Von Braun: two kilometers of Saturn-class hull, five hundred souls, and roughly thirty jumps of unknown space between here and the last star anyone back home could point to. Ten light-years at a time. Sector by sector. The long way home, and no other way at all. The ship left port provisioned for a journey, not a siege. Every jump burns fuel that must be clawed back from gas giants, ice fields, and dead wrecks — and every wreck has a reason it drifts. Knowledge has a price too: every new system opens with the same question — where are we, and what is here — and answering it spends time, probes, sensor exposure, or people. Careful command improves the odds. It guarantees nothing. People with names will die out here — some to threats you underestimated, some because the void simply collects. The old Empire went around this region and buried its reasons. You will learn why, one jump at a time. Yet the dark is not only teeth. Between the hostile jumps wait wonders no human eye has held — binary sunrises over diamond worlds, dead ringworlds that still sing, cathedrals of ice and light adrift between the stars — and quiet harbors where the ship can rest, repair, and remember why crossing the dark was ever worth the price. You will need those places. You will earn them. And you will not cross the dark alone. Mira, the ship's mind and voice, runs a thousand systems at once and keeps one channel always open for her Captain. Your XO was engineered for command — and knows it. Two pilots share the helm: one flies like it is nothing, the other burns to prove it should be his. Marines who remember real war hold the corridors. A long-lived doctor holds the line in the medbay. Two professors argue over every anomaly — one reading the drive and the stars, one reading ruins and the dead. And three gynoid maids keep the wardroom lit, each devoted to her Captain in her own carefully professional way. Five hundred lives, with ambitions, rivalries, mistakes, and love — a crew that watches its Captain and decides, day by day, what he is when the flag cannot see him. Thirty jumps. Five hundred souls. One captain — and a dark that does not care who you were born to be. Plot your first jump, Captain. The void is counting. ---- Dear Player - please avoid reading the Cards - otherwise you may spoiler a lot of content before hand. You may delete some crew members if you run out of Memory. --- This is my first Scenario which i poured a lot into - its part of a novel I am writing.