#cargo delivery system

[macleod]

UPS has reached an agreement with the Teamsters union to avert a strike. These are the highlights of the tentative 2023-2028 agreement:

Historic wage increases. Existing full- and part-time UPS Teamsters will get $2.75 more per hour in 2023, and $7.50 more per hour over the length of the contract.

Existing part-timers will be raised up to no less than $21 per hour immediately, and part-time seniority workers earning more under a market rate adjustment would still receive all new general wage increases.

General wage increases for part-time workers will be double the amount obtained in the previous UPS Teamsters contract — and existing part-time workers will receive a 48 percent average total wage increase over the next five years.

Wage increases for full-timers will keep UPS Teamsters the highest paid delivery drivers in the nation, improving their average top rate to $49 per hour.

Current UPS Teamsters working part-time would receive longevity wage increases of up to $1.50 per hour on top of new hourly raises, compounding their earnings.

New part-time hires at UPS would start at $21 per hour and advance to $23 per hour.

All UPS Teamster drivers classified as 22.4s would be reclassified immediately to Regular Package Car Drivers and placed into seniority, ending the unfair two-tier wage system at UPS.

Safety and health protections, including vehicle air conditioning and cargo ventilation. UPS will equip in-cab A/C in all larger delivery vehicles, sprinter vans, and package cars purchased after Jan. 1, 2024. All cars get two fans and air induction vents in the cargo compartments.

All UPS Teamsters would receive Martin Luther King Day as a full holiday for the first time.

No more forced overtime on Teamster drivers’ days off. Drivers would keep one of two workweek schedules and could not be forced into overtime on scheduled off-days.

UPS Teamster part-timers will have priority to perform all seasonal support work using their own vehicles with a locked-in eight-hour guarantee. For the first time, seasonal work will be contained to five weeks only from November-December.

The creation of 7,500 new full-time Teamster jobs at UPS and the fulfillment of 22,500 open positions, establishing more opportunities through the life of the agreement for part-timers to transition to full-time work.

More than 60 total changes and improvements to the National Master Agreement — more than any other time in Teamsters history — and zero concessions from the rank-and-file.

Unions work, unionize.

[grison-in-space]

Listening to Artificial Condition again, it strikes me how much Murderbot uses empathy reflexively as a survival skill. Look at this bit.

Upon meeting it, ART allows it on board and then announces that it knows that Murderbot is rogue. Then ART threatens to destroy it if it hacks ART's own systems. Murderbot is immediately terrified and shuts down all inputs, gives serious thought to spending the entire three month journey unconscious, and then considers the potential avenues of damage from ART's drones. ART, not realizing why Murderbot had suddenly gone silent, tells it to quit sulking, which understandably pisses off the still-terrified Murderbot. It dumps a bunch of memories of coercive treatment into ART's feed, and ART goes silent.

Then this happens:

Then it said, I’m sorry I frightened you. Okay, well. If you think I trusted that apology, you don’t know Murderbot. Most likely it was playing a game with me. I said, “I don’t want anything from you. I just want to ride to your next destination.” I’d explained that earlier, before it opened the hatch for me, but it was worth repeating. I felt it withdraw back behind its wall. I waited, and let my circulatory system purge the fear-generated chemicals. More time crawled by, and I started to get bored. Sitting here like this was too much like waiting in a cubicle after I’d been activated, waiting for the new clients to take delivery, for the next boring contract. If it was going to destroy me, at least I could get some media in before that happened. I started the new show again, but I was still too upset to enjoy it, so I stopped it and started rewatching an old episode of Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon. After three episodes, I was calmer and reluctantly beginning to see the transport’s perspective. A SecUnit could cause it a lot of internal damage if it wasn’t careful, and rogue SecUnits were not exactly known for lying low and avoiding trouble. I hadn’t hurt the last transport I had taken a ride on, but it didn’t know that. I didn’t understand why it had let me aboard, if it really didn’t want to hurt me. I wouldn’t have trusted me, if I was a transport. Maybe it was like me, and it had taken an opportunity because it was there, not because it knew what it wanted.

The thing about Murderbot's survival is that it clearly involves quite a bit of negotiating with other constructs and bots. That's how it talks its way onto cargo hauler bots in the first place. It uses empathy--envisioning the emotional and cognitive context of the individuals it encounters--to work out what different kinds of people want, so that it can offer them fair trades. It also uses empathy to consider what humans might be looking for, so it can practice blending in and hide.

Murderbot would never have survived so long if it wasn't capable of assessing the individual desires of the people--human, bot, and construct--around it. It thinks about ART's probable fears and motivations so that it can consider whether ART is inherently an ongoing threat or a potential ally.

When your survival depends on evading detection, you get really good at assessing perceptual biases so that you can shape yourself to fit into them. People talk about murderbot being radically empathetic as a choice it makes, or as a feature of its personality that makes it a good person. But I think murderbot would be the the first person to tell you that this empathy is part of its threat assessment suite, a skill that was developed out of necessity in order to allow you to survive.

It is also a trait that makes murderbot a good person, of course: it chooses very carefully to try to survive by doing as little harm as possible and by offering things, like media, that buy it access to things it needs. But it started as a survival skill. It's part of hypervigilance.

I think one of the strengths of this series is that so many of the things we love about SecUnit are traits developed for survival in an inherently threatening world. The shape of its mind and heart have been changed by the trauma of its origin--but they don't make murderbot less good for being altered, even if that skill was developed in a traumatic context.

I like that.

[marlynnofmany]

Unlikely Tech Problems

I reported to the cargo bay for our next delivery, and found concerned faces. Captain Sunlight waited by the door, scaly browridges angled into a dignified frown, while Mimi gestured wildly with his tentacles. I’d expected Mur to come with us instead. Something was up.

Before I could ask, the captain waved me over. “The other ship’s communications appear to be down,” she said. “Additional problems are possible as well. Keep your nostrils open for trouble.”

“Right,” I said, choosing not to comment on the Heatseeker phrasing. “Do we know if they’re okay?”

“They should be,” she replied with one clawed finger pointed at the closed bay door, which blocked the view of a busy spaceport. “The crew member who exited their ship to wave us over didn’t look distressed. And Wio isn’t picking up any alert signals or other causes for alarm.”

Mimi rumbled, “But we’re cautiously alarmed anyway.” He made quite a contrast to the captain, with his voice so much rougher and his attitude grumpier than usual today. Plus all the tentacles. I wondered what he expected the problem to be. Or maybe he just wasn’t looking forward to being mechanic-for-hire as a favor for regular clients. Though I’m sure the captain would have given him a bonus for that.

“We are simply cautious,” said Captain Sunlight. “We’ll head out as soon as—”

Something hissed behind me.

“I hearrrr of thrrrreatening circumsssstanssses?” asked Trrili, sounding pleased.

I turned to see our largest and scariest crewmate doing her favorite thing: looming. Well, second favorite thing, after jumping out and startling people. It was probably good that she enjoyed being terrifying, because with an appearance that was a mix of praying mantis, black widow spider, and unholy nightmares, she was really good at it.

Captain Sunlight was unfazed. “Potentially threatening,” she corrected. “If you will kindly observe in case of problems, I would appreciate it.”

Trrili crouched lower and flexed her pincher arms. “Yesss.”

(Unnecessary hissing is her third favorite thing to do.)

“Right. They’ll be waiting.” The captain stepped forward and opened the bay door — with the airlock engaged. She really wasn’t taking any chances. I wondered if Wio was watching from the cockpit, ready to call the local authorities if need be.

Yeah, of course she was.

The first three of us cycled through the airlock, then waited on the tarmac while Trrili followed. The spaceport was a big one, with ships in all the nearby parking spots and people hustling to and fro. (They're more properly called berths or bays or something, but whatever; they're parking spots. Everybody there could land vertically, and the areas were sorted by ship size.)  I didn’t know which ship held the package we were meant to be picking up. Hopefully it was close.

By the time Trrili stepped out, the ship directly across from us had opened its own bay door, this one without any sort of airlock precautions. A snow-white Heatseeker trotted out and waved us forward. I was glad that the local weather was slightly overcast, since between those white scales and Captain Sunlight’s yellow, I would have been doing a lot of squinting on a bright day.

“Piercing Sunlight!” exclaimed the client. “Good to smell you.”

“Hello, Toothbone,” said the captain. “Always a pleasure. Is your comm system down?”

Toothbone swished her tail. “A precautionary measure. We had a bit of machinery repaired, and it came back with suspicious programming. We’re making sure it’s not malicious before connecting with any other ships, just to be sure.”

Captain Sunlight nodded while Trrili made a quiet hiss of disappointment. “Very sensible,” the captain said. “I trust this won’t affect the package you want us to deliver?”

“No, not at all. It’s a textile piece that one of our crew made on commission for someone on their home planet, no technology involved. Right this way.”

She led us up the ramp into their cargo bay, which had a lower ceiling than ours. Trrili and I both had to duck a little. The Heatseekers and Mimi didn’t notice.

Toothbone pointed out an awkwardly-shaped box that probably held an art frame as well as the promised cloth, and Captain Sunlight tactfully brought out the payment tablet.

Angry voices echoed down the hallway. Trrili perked up and edged forward; I stepped aside to let her while Mimi squashed down beside the package. Captain Sunlight glanced up but didn’t say anything. Toothbone just looked tired.

Since neither of them told her not to, Trrili opened the door and stuck her head out. Somebody shrieked. The sounds of the argument stopped.

“Isssss therrre a prrroblem?” Trrili purred.

“No — well yes, but not — who are you?” someone asked while other voices muttered in the background.

“Courrrierrr,” Trrili said.

“Thank you for your concern,” said an officious voice. “If you don’t mind—”

“Hey, is that a human?” asked another voice, and I saw brown eyes peeking around Trrili. “They’ll back me up! Hang on a sec. ‘Scuse me.”

Trrili stepped back as a slender human with dark skin and a wild-colored shirt skipped past. He hurried over to me. I braced for whatever conversation was about to happen.

“Hi,” he said earnestly. “Please tell me you’ve heard of the thing where people program old Earth games into unlikely bits of tech.”

“Sure!” I said. “My cousin put Doom in a hoverbike’s display screen once.”

“Yes!” He pointed at me and pumped a fist in the air, then turned back to the scaly faces in the hall. “You see?”

I connected the dots. “Did your repaired piece of tech come back with a game on it?”

He whirled, wild-eyed. “Yes! One of the repair guys is a buddy of mine, and he must have done it as a joke. I’ve been trying to explain it, but nobody believes me!”

“What tech is it?” I asked.

“Part of the medbay,” he said, running a hand through his hair. “Somebody sprained their tail, and the medic went to scan it for breaks, then they ended up with a screen full of demons and gunfire.”

I tried not to laugh. “Is it actually Doom in your medbay??”

He dragged his hands over his face. “It’s Doom in the medbay.”

“That’s amazing!”

By this point the other Heatseekers had made their way in to join the conversation, and to be formally introduced. Things got a bit chaotic. But I confirmed for the alien crew that yes, this was a thing humans did sometimes, and no, it was not a threat to the ship. Alarming yes, but not any form of viral attack.

Trrili was a bit disappointed, but everyone else was relieved. Captain Sunlight managed to steer the conversation back to courier business.

The other human shook his head next to me. “I can’t believe my friend did that. Well no, I can believe it; this is definitely his sort of thing. But jeez.”

“You might consider sending him another old Earth tradition in return,” I suggested with a grin. “Possibly a max-volume rickroll?”

He grinned back. “I might. I might indeed.”

~~~

Inspired by this thread. Thanks for the idea, @sleepyowlet!

~~~

These are the ongoing backstory adventures of the main character from this book.

Shared early on Patreon! There’s even a free tier to get them on the same day as the rest of the world.

The sequel novel is in progress (and will include characters from these stories. I hadn’t thought all of them up when I wrote the first book, but they’re too much fun to leave out of the second).

[cherryjamandtoast]

UPS TEAMSTERS-UNION WON !!!!!!!!!!!

From the article:

[(WASHINGTON) – Today, the Teamsters reached the most historic tentative agreement for workers in the history of UPS, protecting and rewarding more than 340,000 UPS Teamsters nationwide. The overwhelmingly lucrative contract raises wages for all workers, creates more full-time jobs, and includes dozens of workplace protections and improvements. The UPS Teamsters National Negotiating Committee unanimously endorsed the five-year tentative agreement.

“Rank-and-file UPS Teamsters sacrificed everything to get this country through a pandemic and enabled UPS to reap record-setting profits. Teamster labor moves America. The union went into this fight committed to winning for our members. We demanded the best contract in the history of UPS, and we got it,” said Teamsters General President Sean M. O’Brien. ... This contract sets a new standard in the labor movement and raises the bar for all workers.”

“UPS came dangerously close to putting itself on strike, but we kept firm on our demands. In my more than 40 years in Louisville representing members at Worldport — the largest UPS hub in the country — I have never seen a national contract that levels the playing field for workers so dramatically as this one....” said Teamsters General Secretary-Treasurer Fred Zuckerman. “We stayed focused on our members and fought like hell to get everything that full-time and part-time UPS Teamsters deserve.”

“Rank-and-file members served on the committee for the first time, ... “Our hard work has paid off — from those members and leaders negotiating for more at the table to my sisters and brothers building a credible strike threat around the country. Our union was organized and we were relentless. We’ve hit every goal that UPS Teamster members wanted and asked for with this agreement. It’s a ‘yes’ vote for the most historic contract we’ve ever had.”

Highlights of the tentative 2023-2028 UPS Teamsters National Master Agreement include:

Historic wage increases. Existing full- and part-time UPS Teamsters will get $2.75 more per hour in 2023, and $7.50 more per hour over the length of the contract.

Existing part-timers will be raised up to no less than $21 per hour immediately, and part-time seniority workers earning more under a market rate adjustment would still receive all new general wage increases.

Wage increases for full-timers will keep UPS Teamsters the highest paid delivery drivers in the nation, improving their average top rate to $49 per hour.

New part-time hires at UPS would start at $21 per hour and advance to $23 per hour.

All UPS Teamster drivers classified as 22.4s would be reclassified immediately to Regular Package Car Drivers and placed into seniority, ending the unfair two-tier wage system at UPS.

Safety and health protections, including vehicle air conditioning and cargo ventilation. UPS will equip in-cab A/C in all larger delivery vehicles, sprinter vans, and package cars purchased after Jan. 1, 2024. All cars get two fans and air induction vents in the cargo compartments.

All UPS Teamsters would receive Martin Luther King Day as a full holiday for the first time.

No more forced overtime on Teamster drivers’ days off. Drivers would keep one of two workweek schedules and could not be forced into overtime on scheduled off-days.

UPS Teamster part-timers will have priority to perform all seasonal support work using their own vehicles with a locked-in eight-hour guarantee. For the first time, seasonal work will be contained to five weeks only from November-December.

On July 31, representatives ... will meet to review and recommend the tentative agreement. All UPS rank-and-file members will receive a list of improvements in the contract. ... Member voting begins August 3 and concludes August 22.

The UPS Teamsters National Master Agreement is the single largest private-sector collective bargaining agreement in North America.]

Check the article for the full list; but ho ho holy shit.

This is huge. It shows the collective bargaining WORKS. The Teamsters sent a message to UPS and this win will send a message to Corporate America that unions can WIN for rank-and-file workers!!!

[foone]

I'm surprised there's not more supernatural spaceship media. Like, your average little cargo ship is jumping around the outer rim trying to cut some time off their delivery route and they pick up a distress call, so they have to answer it.

(under a readmore cause this got a little longer than I expected)

They warp in to the approximate coordinates and there's a colony ship orbiting a gas giant, stuck in the shadow of it, basically frozen over. It's centuries old, but these sleeper ships from the pre-ftl era were built to last, so it's still broadcasting the SOS. It's not responding to radio, so they need to board it.

Normally this'd just involve turning off the SOS. The ship is clearly dead and not responding to any hails, the crew must be long gone and the reactor is just keeping the SOS going. But this is a sleeper ship, so it's possible there's just no one awake. Stuck in longsleep for god knows how many decades, waiting for someone to stumble on their signal...

So they board it, activate the computer, and it tells them that everyone is dead. The ship launched, and over the 358 years it's been traveling for, every single cryo chamber has been either opened or never had any lifesigns in it in the first place. The last event logged on the computer is 136 years ago, when the acting captain set the ship to orbit this gas giant, and turn on the distress signal. Since then, nothing.

But there's still power on the bridge. There may be something there. So they climb up the decks, passing the grim sight of endless rows of cryochambers lined up like tombstones, all showing red lights of lifesign failure. As they get closer to the bridge, the time of deaths get later. The ones on the first deck were close to the launch date, and the ones near the bridge are nearer to that 136 year ago deadline.

This wasn't a hardware failure. Something killed all these people, one by one, over 220 years.

They get to the bridge. The computers are all powered down, but the power management system is still active. Two of the decks still have their cryochambers powered, but it's the ones that were supposed to be empty. There's no lifesigns in them, so the little computer in the power diagnostic system has been recommending they be turned off to save on energy. Naturally it's been recommending that for three and a half centuries. One of the crew members almost absent-mindedly agrees to the prompt, and those cryochambers deactivate. They were empty anyway, right? The sound of humming from the bridge mostly fades away, as a few hundred cryopods on the deck below power down.

The boarding crew powers off the SOS beacon. They'll alert the authorities to the ship's location when they get to a port, surely someone wants to investigate what went wrong here, or at least do an archeological study. This place is beyond an antique at this point... Wait. What's that?

The power computer says there's still one active power draw, about 1.2 kilowatts, in the captain's quarters. That's too much for a personal computer, but just about right for a single cryo pod. Maybe the captain or someone is still alive? That pod isn't on the network, so they can't see the lifesigns from here.

They head over, and the bulkhead door is still cracked open, with a thick cable running in through the gap in the door. Whoever wired this up clearly didn't have time to correctly reroute the power systems, they just lugged a cryo pod in here and basically ran an extension cord to a nearby terminal.

They pry open the door, and there's a softly glowing cryo pod in the middle of the surprisingly spacious room. It makes some amount of sense, generally on these ships the captain would be the one who has to wake up and deal with any situations that arise, while the rest of the colonists are content to sleep until they reach their new home.

They look in the pod, and there's a man lying there. He's not the captain, though. They saw his photo on the bridge. This is someone else. Some one quite pale and gaunt. Maybe they were suffering malnutrition before they put themselves in the pod?

The pod is softly beeping. It's reactivating, apparently triggered when they opened the door. The pod shows no lifesigns, so it's not worth worrying about, the panel sliding over to reveal merely a well preserved corpse.

And then he smiles. "I'm so glad to see you! When we ran out of food we we're afraid we'd never see another human again. And even through those environment suits, I can tell you're so deliciously human." he licks his lips, and the boarding crew spots his prominent canines.

There's a noise halfway between a howl and a shriek from the floor below. The man in the cryopod leans up his head. "ahh, I see you've woken up my children as well. Marvelous. I hope you brought plenty of friends for us to snack on."

The head of the boarding party lifts her arm to call their ship, tell them to get out of there or drop a torpedo into the colony ship's reactor. Before she can bring it to her face to call, there's a flash of motion. Before she can even realize what's happening, the man(?) in the cryopod is up and holding her wrist away from her face.

As she cries out at the sudden pain, the other members of the boarding party spot movement down the hall. A lot of movement. A wall of thin pale people are running towards the captain's quarters, climbing over each other and pushing each other aside, like a pack of wild wolves who just smelled prey.

The boarding party steps back into the room and slams the emergency close. At least in here they only have to deal with one of those things.

The door hits the cable and bounces off with a loud alarm. It fully opens again, ready to let the hungry mass in.

So... Have you ever noticed how much a cryopod looks like a coffin?

[mistercrowbar]

I was reading you comics before sleep. Could explain the good boy points from Aldiirn' clan?

The system is lifted from Death Stranding where you are awarded Likes for completing orders, returning lost cargo, helping to build structures, donating equipment, or just because someone liked the silly sign you posted. These Likes increase your Porter Grades, which rate your skill as a porter in different categories, and Connection Levels, which is how many resources a specific facility/delivery recipient is willing to let you use.

Aldiirn’s clan, Iaurrhen, more or less weaponises underfolks’ aversion to owing debts for Good with a system of paying favours forward using Merit (ie Likes) to gauge members’ contributions. The clan sees that everyone has their basic needs met, eg couriers can get a bed and warm meal at their depots, but if you get enough Merit you can request fancy extras and even get clients specifically asking for you to handle their orders instead of whoever is available. Merit isn’t spent like gold it’s more like having enough gets you a raise in your pay/allowance/whatever.

Main differences is Death Stranding is a post-apoc setting where the economy is trashed and everyone is either self-sufficient or has everything provided by the cities because everyone is Gale and trade is done on gifting, while Iaurrhen still has to interact with gold economies amongst cutthroat peoples. Merit prolly also serves as a check that members are contributing, or out they go. Iaurrhen’s prolly derided a lot, they’re like this weird bright socialist experiment in the Underdark, but they get shit delivered.

Aldiirn is still relatively junior as a courier/broker but rapidly rising since he’s managed to secure happy repeat clients, usually with rare alchemical fungi or being able to secure surface goods for better prices since he can avoid going through criminal orgs (usually its only types like the zhents that want to trade with the underdark). He’s got a good amount of Merit built up but he only uses it for job things like a handy haversack and 99 Scrolls of Detect Poison. All gone in the nautiloid. :’)

[theivorybilledwoodpecker]

At Egypt’s Rafah border crossing, lines of hundreds of trucks carrying aid wait for weeks to enter Gaza, and a warehouse is full of goods rejected by Israeli inspectors, everything from water testing equipment to medical kits for delivering babies, two U.S. senators said Saturday after a visit to the border. Sens. Chris Van Hollen and Jeff Merkley pointed to a cumbersome process that is slowing relief to the Palestinian population in the besieged territory — largely due to Israeli inspections of aid cargos, with seemingly arbitrary rejections of vital humanitarian equipment. The system to ensure that aid deliveries within Gaza don’t get hit by Israeli forces is “totally broken,” they said. “What struck me yesterday was the miles of backed-up trucks. We couldn’t count, but there were hundreds,” Merkley said in a briefing with Van Hollen to a group of reporters in Cairo.

[samueldays]

Sam Reviews: Factorio Space Exploration

That's Space Exploration the factorio mod (played v0.6), not Space Age the factorio expansion coming soon. I have finally completed SE with the cooperation of two friends across 300+ hours, I don't think I would have bothered to finish on my own, but it was a fine reason to hang out and chat. I had fun, but it was very irregular fun between good bits (spaceships!!) and facepalm bits.

It's A Scale Challenge

Space Exploration is a scale challenge, and I lead with this because I find the documentation misleading. On the Getting Started SE wiki page, which is also linked from the SE mod page, it says:

Space Exploration is mostly a complexity challenge and not a scale challenge. It's completely possible to beat the game with only 20SPM, unless you play with a science multiplier. But it'll still be hard!

Similar descriptions abound. However, Space Exploration has individual technologies mandatory for victory that cost more to research than the entire tech tree of the base game up to and including the Rocket victory research.

It's even worse than that sounds.

"Cost more" can be calculated in a quick and dirty way that vanilla Factorio's Rocket Silo victory tech costs 1000 sets of science packs to research.

Its prerequisite Rocket Control Unit costs 300, and so on back down to basic Automation technology costing merely 10, all of which add up to 5750 in total.

Space Exploration has a mandatory 6400-cost tech, some 5000s, a 4000 and a 3200, several 2000-cost techs used as filler in an already overpriced and bloated tech tree, and a 8000-cost (max spaceship size) that's theoretically optional but avoiding it requires you to play Tetris with your size-constrained spaceship layout.

But the numbers are not directly comparable, and the more detailed count makes Space Exploration look even worse. "5750 sets" vanilla includes several early technologies where the set is a subset, even one single science pack, it costs 50 of [Automation Science] for basic technology and gradually fills out to the Rocket Silo costing 1000 of [Automation, Logistics, Chemical, Utility, Production Science] which is a set of 5.

Space Exploration, meanwhile:

Which is 5000 of a set that's twice as large as the largest in basegame, so more like a 10K victory tech compared to the 1K victory tech in basegame.

But that number still isn't a direct comparison, because the multi-striped science packs in there are high tier packs whose ingredients include lower tier science packs that also need to be produced. Deep Space Science 4 (the black stripes) is made with various input resources + a DSS3 pack, which is made with more input resources + a DSS2 pack, and so on. If you count the fifteen intermediate science packs, it's something like a 25K victory tech compared to the 1K in basegame.

There's numerous techs like this. If you ever play Space Exploration, I advise you to slice a zero off everything. Set the tech cost multiplier to one-tenth. It is severely padded.

Pretty Cool Spaceships

Spaceships are of course the big draw of Space Exploration, though they come pretty late in the game, and before them there's two other methods of moving stuff between planets: Cargo rockets and railguns.

The rockets are very fuel-hungry to launch and also "consume" most of their ingredient parts as stages. The delivery railguns can't move fragile objects or players, and are same-solar-system only. (They double as expensive interplanetary weapons!) Spaceships are reusable as long as you keep them refueled, and much more fuel-efficient, as well as being able to mount laser/gun turrets for defense if landing on a hostile planet. You can even put artillery in a spaceship, which my team used to create a very short-distance-hop spaceship that was more like a suborbital bomber/mobile artillery platform for clearing the hostile fauna off our home planet.

Eventually you get spaceships to transport stuff at custom speed and scale between planets, with the ability to build and design your own. Then, the ability to set spaceship automation with docking clamps and the circuit network, and can give a spaceship instructions amounting to "go to planet X and wait until your onboard storage has 40K Cryonite, go to planet Y and wait until your onboard storage has 0 Cryonite and your fuel tank is refilled". It's the Factorio experience of automating stuff you were manually handling before, but at the much larger scale of interplanetary transport.

Here is my mini-spaceship for personal transport between planets, used to go over and tinker with things, has a few chests but doesn't take bulk cargo:

The side notch is to help me align the refueling underground pipes.

The Mod Maker Is A Control Freak

In the base game you have the opportunity to research Logistics Robots, small flying drones that carry items around for you, making automated transport more convenient so you no longer have to weave together transport belts, underground belts, railroad tracks and other physically connected means of item movement in the infamous "belt spaghetti".

Space Exploration comes with a mandatory dependency on the Robot Attrition mod, which makes logistics robots randomly collide and explode destructively if you're using more than 50 of them. (There's more than 50 item types in SE, so you will want far more than 50 logistics robots.) You can't not include this other mod when playing Space Exploration. There is a game setting which looks like it disables robot attrition, but it actually only disables robot attrition in the starting zone.

"Surely there's another mod which restores robot functionality?" you might ask, since Factorio has a lot of mods. Not that I could find, possibly because Space Exploration is distributed under a "no modding my mod any further" licence, formally the Factorio Mod Limited Distribution Only Licence.

You may make alterations for your own private personal use only. You are not allowed to distribute any content from the mod, or anything altered or derived from this mod with the following exception: You may post partial modified sections of this mod in Earendel's discord https://discord.gg/ymjUVMv for the purpose of providing bug fixes or enhancements.

Binding or not, I think that's an amazingly dick move for your Cool Spaceships mod to degrade some unrelated basegame functionality and tell people they aren't allowed to post a modmod which restores that functionality.

In other control freakery, Space Exploration is flagged as incompatible with infinite resource supply/non-depleting ore patch mods for Factorio, because the SE modder feels it would ruin the intended balance of his mod. It's flagged as incompatible with teleportation mods, to force you to use rocket/spaceship transport. It's flagged as incompatible with waterfill mods to prevent you digging wells where the modder wants to enforce a logistic challenge of delivering water in barrels. It's even flagged as incompatible with some mods that change the stack size of some items, because the modder wants to ensure you are inventory-constrained and pay for logistics.

Bizarrely contrary to the spirit of modding, if you ask me, trying to enforce that the mod is played the specific way one person wants you to play it.

Padding, Filler, and Bloat

It's not just the tech tree that suffers this, it's many aspects of the mod, and I'm going to list enough of them to make this post feel ironically padded.

In regular Factorio, when you put a drill on an iron ore patch, it produces iron ore, which you put in a Furnace to smelt into iron plates.

In Space Exploration, when you put a drill on an iridite ore patch, it produces iridite ore, which you put in a Pulverizer to crush into... a random mix of crushed iridium, stone (waste byproduct), and iridite ore that you have to feed back into the pulverizer and try to crush again.

To me this is something I shouldn't have to interact with in Factorio, it should be pre-automated below my notice. If an input ore is not properly crushed in the crushing machine, the crushing machine should keep crushing it until it's crushed, rather than demanding extra player attention to its one job. Reeeee. I have no interest in my factory's machines having what is effectively a random failure chance at doing their job. There is no upgrade tech or better machine which gets rid of that random failure chance.

It might have been interesting with one processing step whose unique gimmick is a failure chance and a need to filter-loop the output back onto the input, but Space Exploration recycles this recycle gimmick over and over again to pad out different processing steps with "do it again".

-

Speaking of random failure chances...

In regular Factorio, the "science packs" are kinda high-level abstractions. You put together a pair of engines, several electronic circuits, and a handful of sulphur to create "Chemical science", which could be taken to vaguely represent a process of destructively testing or consuming something and measuring it.

In Space Exploration, the advanced sciences are data-driven, which is a cool idea. For example you put together plates of iron, copper, stone, plastic, concrete and iridite with a blank data card to create "Tensile strength data" and recycleable scrap, then you use the data card in another recipe to create "Material science" and also outputs "Junk data card" representing data you've already analyzed and can't learn more from, and then you put the junk data card into a spacecomputer to erase the contents and get back a blank data card again.

It's a neat abstract representation of science involving data collection and material testing, with a reusable computer component and am expended material component, and it's undermined by the fact that erasing junk data has a 30% failure rate. That's the chance that the Super-Engineer Protagonist, with nuclear reactors and supercooled computers, will somehow fail to turn a Junk Data Card into a Blank Data Card and will instead break the card. So the data cards are in practice still expended consumables; you'll need to produce millions of them.

-

In regular Factorio, the various grades and kinds of steel (high carbon, low carbon, stainless, etc) are abstracted into a single "Steel plate" item which has many different uses. Storage chests, trains, power poles, handgrenades, armorplating, automation robots all use the same Steel Plate as ingredient.

This design holds true across the game: items represent broad classes of a material, also machines are multipurpose and an "Assembler" machine can be set to make gears, wire, pipes, or other stuff by configuration. One Assembler turns iron plates into gears. The next Assembler combines gears and more plates into engines. The next Assembler combines engines and more gears into transport belts.

In Space Exploration, there's several machines which only have one use, and there's even items which have less than one use.

The only thing the Xray Observation Telescope does is produce Xray Observation Frame items, the only use for Xray Observation Frame is processing into Xray Observation Data, and the only use for Xray Observation Data is combining it with Microwave Observation Data, Infrared Observation Data etc. to produce Astrometric Science. That's also the sole use for those other Observation Datas. All the different wavelength telescopes, the different observation data items, and the different observation data frame items collectively serve one purpose when put together, so I count them as having a fractional use each. Someone call an editor, fucking cut these.

-

In regular Factorio, drills on a copper patch produce 1 Copper Ore per production cycle, which smelts into 1 Copper Plate.

In Space Exploration, drills on a beryl patch produce 1 Beryl Ore per production cycle, and 20 Beryl Ore smelts into 1 Beryllium plate.

(both ratios can be improved somewhat with Productivity Modules in your furnaces)

Which brings me back to the extremely overcosted science packs, because that blue-striped Astronomic Science Pack that you need 5000 of for the rocket victory? Its cost in raw materials for a set of 8 looks like this:

displaying 580 beryl plates instead of the 5800 ore needed, 725 per pack, plus some more for the data cards that don't calculate raw material correctly, adding yet another multiplier layer of bloated tech cost. I am infuriated by whoever wrote "not a scale challenge" on the Scale Challenge Mod which asks you to mine millions of ore to research a single technology.

Arcospheres

I have another post on these, so I'll keep it short: There is a type of special item necessary to win the game, which are only available in limited supply, which you can permanently lose by accident or bad luck.

The available supply is several times larger than what's needed to win, so I wasn't actually threatened by this, but I dislike it on principle.

Also, they're spoiler-enforced by the control freak modder who keeps the helpful information off the official discord, wiki, and mod page.

Verdict: Thumbs Down

I was suckered into this partly because I believed the "not a scale challenge" advertisement when my friend group was considering what to play next, and I regret it. Halfway through we felt it starting to drag, but we were having fun and community and spite so we powered through. This is a reason I have emphasised the bloat so much in my review. This mod really, really needs an editor to cut down numbers and cut out items and simplify processes so you can get to the Fun Spaceships part without so many Mine Literally Million Ore part.

[adventure-showdown]

What is your favourite Doctor Who story?

ROUND 3 MASTERPOST

synopses and propaganda under the cut

The Horns of Nimon

Synopsis

When the TARDIS collides with a spaceship en route to the planet Skonnos, the Fourth Doctor, Romana II and K9 soon uncover the horrific truth about its cargo. The ship is carrying young sacrifices for a powerful, horned creature called the Nimon.

But why is the creature so desperate for the delivery, and what other dangers await the time travellers? All will be revealed at the centre of the labyrinthine Power Complex on Skonnos...

Propaganda no propaganda submitted

The Tenth Planet

Synopsis

Many years ago, Earth's twin planet, Mondas, drifted away to the edge of space. Its inhabitants grew weak, so their scientists created spare parts for their bodies. Limbs and organs were slowly replaced by metal and plastic. Emotions were removed. The Cybermen were born.

The Doctor's TARDIS lands at the Snowcap space tracking station in Antarctica in December 1986. A routine space mission starts going wrong. When the base personnel's suspicions are roused, the Doctor informs them that the space capsule is being affected by the gravitational pull of another planet — a tenth planet in the Solar system.

The loss of a routine space mission and the appearance of that planet in the sky herald the arrival of the Cybermen, who are intent on the destruction of the Earth and the conversion of all humans into Cybermen. Ben and Polly fight to save the world, but it is a battle that may be the Doctor's very last.

Propaganda no propaganda submitted

[decarabiandivorce]

Am i the asshole for staying behind on an uncharted planet

I (23M) have been a new hire at this shipping company for around three months and it has been absolutely horrible. The company has us work outrageous hours and there is only one other employee. A month ago that employee (my mentor) went on a vacation and ever since then the president had me switch over from simply organizing packages to making full deliveries. On my first trip, I was attacked by a group of space bunnies and the company was sent into debt because of it. They told me the route was safe and secure, however, it was clearly not the case. The important cargo was destroyed and the remaining debt is now more than a hundred years' worth of salary. The company is going under and the president is even accusing ME of doing something. I have no clue what he is talking about and am very frightened by the experience.

Now then my mentor (38?M idk) comes back and talks about how he was hit by a meteor and crashed. It took him a whole month to recover his parts and just barely made it back. Before he could even see his family the company's appraisal AI scanned a memento he yoinked from the crash site and now the president thinks its a great idea to send two deliverymen to search for treasures to sell. Why do we even have an appraisal AI I don't even know. So now me and this captain i've know for about two months is being sent towards an uncharted planet.

Then we crash. There was a blizzard and I am sent flying into the snow. I am tired, hungry, and lay down on the ground as I contemplate my life. A long story short we reconvened and it turns out this planet is FULL of hostile life! Creatures as tall as me just waiting to eat us. Holy fuck. My mentor is taking this as a normal occurrence???? He spent a month on this planet??? The hell????

So after fighting off creature after creature-some as tall as space pups while others as tall as buildings, we somehow get enough pokos to pay back the COMPANY'S DEBT. We weren't even paid overtime and I think my mentor GOT A PROMOTION? We barely had enough supplies for one person so I started taking back some of the local creatures to eat. (DM me if you want some of my recipes!) . We wake up as soon as dawn breaks and this planet's day and night system are so unlike my own planet. By the time it's 10 PM its Nighttime! Dawn is around 6 AM!

My mentor has been relatively nice. He gets my silence and for that, I am grateful he doesn't have me talk a lot. Cons: He forgets about me really easily. Usually, he has me just follow him while we explore and at some points, I feel as if I could have just stayed at the ship and slept and would accomplish the same amount of work. It is aggravating to be woken up so early and told to just follow him around.

After another long expedition I am about 10 seconds away from passing out our ship's appraisal AI (who has been so snippy with both of us) blares out that we should return home now. The thing is, after so long of being on this planet I realized that I prefer this planet more than slaving away at that delivery service. The same service that would send me straight first toward a hive of space rabbits for my very first mission. So I lagged behind a bit.

In my lagging behind, my mentor starts up the ship and leaves. At first, I am shocked. He actually did that. Holy fuck he left me on this planet. Sure our suits were upgrades to filter out the oxygen just before we left and I could last for months if not years....it was still shocking to me. I could not help but watch the sky as he blasted away. Maybe this was a blessing in disguise!

I walked for a long time, resting in safe areas to conserve my stamina and eating the creatures I knew were edible. There was a lot of experimentation here and there and I missed the spices of back home. I just knew that a certain creature would taste way better if I added in a couple more condiments! (Remember! DM me for my recipes!)

While exploring one of the caves, a giant spiderlike foe kidnapped me and placed me on it's head. It was so cute! Like riding a weird dog.

It was nice being with the big spider. It gathered some ancient technologies that were perfect for my survival. None of the other creatures seemed to bother the two of us and it was nice to know that there was someone else on this planet that understood us. Still, I was tired and after what felt like days, my suit's forced sleep mode kicked in. I have no clue what happened afterward nor how many days I was asleep but the next thing I knew was that my mentor was right in front of me making sure I was okay.

He says that he came back for me with the help of our boss, but I could see the poko in the president's eyes as the ship went over finances with him.

They killed the spider to 'save' me. The spider went on full attack while I was asleep on it and the appraisal AI thinks I was in control of it despite being unconscious. At least the captain think's I didn't do it...

They then told me that there was no third seat on the ship and that I will be sleeping in the cargo hold until they got every single treasure on this planet. I am pretty sure that's a space OSHA violation but at this point, I have been in so many life-threatening dangers that I gave up counting. At least they don't expect me to help out because I am 'recovering'. They are content to let me stay by the ship and I have been using this time to perfect my recipes with the supplies they got from back home.

[zoeykallus]

Mayday

Mayday x Reader Oneshot

Angst/Fluff/Comfort

I already put it in the tags, but just in case: SPOILER ALERT FOR TBB SEASON2!!!!

___________________

AC: After a misunderstanding with someone requesting this on anon. I decided to write this one now and don't put it in my to-do list first. As a little "apology" because I was pretty rude. Wish I could tag you, but unfortunately you contacted me on anon. Hope you still get to read this 😊

___________________

Actually, you don't work for the Empire. You are an independent contractor, a small business mainly for cargo and logistics. When an Imperial officer contacts you, you are reluctant to take on the job. However, you don't want to upset the Empire either. None of your handful of workers is eager to deliver the cargo for the Empire, especially not to Barton-4, the ice-cold lump of a planet. So you take over the delivery yourself. Food, gasoline, energy packs for flashlights and a new generator for environmental sensors are to be delivered. Even the approach to the imperial station is complicated and dangerous. Fierce crosswinds push your cargo shuttle from all sides and make it difficult to land the ship safely. But you make it anyway. With a sigh, you see the clone troopers coming across the landing platform, who should be unloading the goods. You put on your thermal jacket, zip it up to the top and pull the hood of the jacket over your head, then you open the ramp and see the soldiers already coming towards you. Their equipment doesn't look exactly winterized, some of the men are provisionally wrapped in cloth and skins in addition to their armor. The sight makes you frown. One of them addresses you. "Of course, the Empire is sending civilian transport out here". You blink, then say dryly, "I guess the Empire knows they don't have pilots good enough to land in these weather conditions." You hear a rough laugh from under the clone's helmet, shortly after the soldier removes his helmet and you see an unfamiliar image. You clearly have a clone soldier in front of you, but one with long hair and a full beard, something you haven't seen before. He holds out his hand to you. "I'm Commander Mayday, this is Hexx and Veetch." You shake his hand, the others too, and introduce yourself. "Hi, nice to meet you guys" Maydays laughs again, and you can see a cheeky glint in his eyes. "We'll probably get to know each other a little better, whether you like it or not, the weather has been closing in, changes like this happen practically every minute around here. You're not going to get the shuttle out of here anytime soon." You look down the ramp, over which an icy wind blows into the interior of the shuttle. Outside everything is white, it is snowing, a blizzard, you can barely see two meters. "Fantastic," you say with a dry smile, and begin to help the men unload.

You have your own little area. But at night, the weather still hasn't cleared, and the cold is even more relentless than during the day. A bit unsure, you make your way out of your little cabin and into the main area, where you find the commander. He is sitting at a heat battery, his helmet lying next to him on a dura steel table. When he hears your footsteps, he looks up. You are still wrapped in your thermal jacket, in this outpost nothing works at all, not even the heating system, which is actually essential for survival. A barely noticeable, gentle smile twitches at the corners of his mouth as your eyes meet. "It's not so easy to fall asleep in this cold, especially when you're not used to it. In fact, it's probably better that way, here in this cold they tend to mistake fatigue for hypothermia. Lost some good men that way". You raise your eyebrows in surprise as well as shock and sit with him, close to the heat battery, across from Mayday. "Wait, that's that serious medical condition in which a person's body temperature falls below the usual level as a result of being in severe cold for a long time? Right?" you ask, frowning. Mayday nods. "Mmm, that's right. The body shuts down, you get very tired, but in reality you die instead of falling asleep." "That's terrible! Why don't you get proper care here? They should have given me more heat batteries and a technician to get your heating system back up to speed. Not even your equipment is intact." Mayday sighs softly and shrugs his broad shoulders, his arms folded in front of his chest, a thick wool blanket draped around his shoulder. "Clone soldiers are expendable, we always have been, but since the Republic was replaced by the Empire, it's worse than ever" Your teeth start to chatter even as you try to suppress it, your whole body keeps shivering as it tries to fight the cold that creeps under your skin despite the thermal jacket. Mayday raises his brows and looks at you. "You're not used to the cold, hmm?" "Not even close," you admit, "I've spent most of my life on Tatooine." Mayday laughed softly, "It's an extreme contrast to Barton-4."

He taps the bench he's sitting on next to him and holds out his blanket invitingly. "If we huddle together, we can keep each other warm. I'm happy to share my blanket with you" For a second you consider if the clone has any ulterior motives, but even if he does, it is so cold you don't care, and he is probably just as cold, probably even too cold for ulterior motives. You walk around the table and sit right next to him, close to the heat battery, and let him put the blanket around your shoulders so that the two of you are finally underneath it. You sit so close to each other that no hand's width fits between you. Your pulse is a little faster and you really feel warmer. However, you are not sure if it is the blanket, the heat battery, or the situation. Slowly, you turn your head to look at him. "Are you okay?" he asks quietly, and you can feel the bass in his voice as you sit so close to each other. "Yeah, it's getting better" He smirks. "Told you so"

You talk for a while. Mayday tells you about his experiences in the war and how he and his men have fared since he was stationed on Barton-4. You sympathize and feel your anger at the Empire flare anew. At a certain point, you are leaning against him, and he has an arm around you. It happened automatically and yet your heart is beating fast. You talk until the sun comes up. As you both look out the window and see that the weather has cleared up considerably, you feel no real relief. You have enjoyed Mayday's company very much, and the fact that this togetherness must inevitably end pleases neither of you. Mayday takes you out to your shuttle on the landing platform. As you say goodbye, you begin to feel a certain longing, which is reflecting in his eyes. On impulse, you kiss his wind-chilled cheek. He blinks in surprise, but he finally smiles at you. "We probably won't see each other again too soon," he says a bit wistfully, with a sad smile. You smile and say, "Maybe we will." As you take off in your shuttle, he watches you for a long time until the shuttle is completely out of his sight, and finally turns back to the outpost with a sigh.

One week later "Commander! An unannounced shuttle is on approach!" Mayday jumps up, puts on his helmet and asks, "Identification?" "It's the cargo shuttle that was here a few days ago, the civilian freighter". Mayday feels his pulse quicken. "Really?" "Yes, sir." Mayday makes his way out onto the landing platform, alone this time. He doesn't want to greet you in the presence of the others, wants a moment to himself. He's as excited as a young Cadet and doesn't really know how to categorize that feeling. All he knows is that he is looking forward to seeing you again. As the ramp to your shuttle opens, he pulls off his helmet and tucks it under his arm. You smile back at him as you walk down the ramp. "Actually, I can't allow you to land here, not without explicit Imperial permission," he says with a wry smile. "And yet you don't seem to want to chase me away," you return, amused. Mayday admits, "I was looking forward to seeing you again." You smile, feeling your face grow warm despite the cold wind. "I take it the Empire still hasn't provided for you properly?" He shakes his head. "We are expendable, still". You cross your arms in front of your chest and say, "Not for me". Behind you comes an astromech and a cargo droid. "I brought you something" Mayday frowns. "This is not an official delivery by the Empire". You shake your head, confirming his statement. "No, a little something from me and my workers. We chipped in and got you a few things. The cargo droid is to help you with transportation and the astromech is an all-rounder, he can fix your heating system. I also brought half a dozen heat batteries, a few more rations, including caf and tea." Mayday strides up the ramp so that you are finally facing each other halfway up. "Thank you." A simple word, but coupled with the soft expression on his face and the warmth in his voice, this word speaks more than a thousand words. You kiss his cheek again, like last time when you parted. "You deserve it, more than that, actually. But I hope this helps you for a while" Suddenly his hands are on your cheeks and his face comes closer. His lips touch yours. It's not urgent, not challenging, it's tender, slow, and intimate as he kisses you. Your heart almost flips over in your chest. As his lips very slowly, languidly break away from yours, you ask softly, "Would you like me to stay maybe a night or two?" Mayday smiles and replies," Please do."

Ko-Fi (If you feel like giving me some coffee)

[zvaigzdelasas]

[Teamster.org is IBT's official website]

Today, Teamsters voted by an overwhelming 86.3 percent to ratify the most historic collective bargaining agreement in the history of UPS. The five-year contract protects and rewards more than 340,000 UPS Teamsters nationwide, raising wages for full- and part-time workers, creating more full-time jobs, and securing important workplace protections, including air conditioning. The agreement passed by the highest vote for a contract in the history of the Teamsters at UPS. All supplemental agreements were ratified as well, except for the Local 769 LAI supplement which covers 174 members in Florida. The national master agreement will go into effect as soon as this supplement is renegotiated and ratified. [...] “Our members just ratified the most lucrative agreement the Teamsters have ever negotiated at UPS. This contract will improve the lives of hundreds of thousands of workers,” said Teamsters General President Sean M. O’Brien. “Teamsters have set a new standard and raised the bar for pay, benefits, and working conditions in the package delivery industry. This is the template for how workers should be paid and protected nationwide, and nonunion companies like Amazon better pay attention.” “This is the richest national contract I’ve seen in my more than 40 years of representing Teamsters at UPS,” said Teamsters General Secretary-Treasurer Fred Zuckerman. “There are more gains in this contract than in any other UPS agreement and with no givebacks to the company. But the hard work doesn’t end here. We will continue to fight like hell to enforce this contract and make sure UPS lives up to every word of it over the next five years.” Highlights of the tentative 2023-2028 UPS Teamsters National Master Agreement include: Historic wage increases. Existing full- and part-time UPS Teamsters will get $2.75 more per hour in 2023. Over the length of the contract, wage increases will total $7.50 per hour.

Existing part-timers will be raised to no less than $21 per hour immediately, and part-time seniority workers earning more under a market rate adjustment will still receive all new general wage increases.

General wage increases for part-time workers will be double the amount obtained in the previous UPS Teamsters contract — and existing part-time workers will receive a 48 percent average total wage increase over the next five years.

Wage increases for full-timers will keep UPS Teamsters the highest paid delivery drivers in the nation, improving their average top rate to $49 per hour.

Current UPS Teamsters working part-time will receive longevity wage increases of up to $1.50 per hour on top of new hourly raises, compounding their earnings.

New part-time hires at UPS will start at $21 per hour and advance to $23 per hour.

All UPS Teamster drivers classified as 22.4s will be reclassified immediately to Regular Package Car Drivers and placed into seniority, ending the unfair two-tier wage system at UPS.

Safety and health protections, including vehicle air conditioning and cargo ventilation. UPS will equip in-cab A/C in all larger delivery vehicles, sprinter vans, and package cars purchased after Jan. 1, 2024. Two fans, heat exhaust shields, and air induction vents in the cargo compartments will be retrofitted into all cars.

All UPS Teamsters will receive Martin Luther King Day as a full holiday for the first time.

No more forced overtime on Teamster drivers’ days off. Drivers will keep one of two workweek schedules and cannot be forced into overtime on scheduled off-days.

UPS Teamster part-timers will have priority to perform all seasonal support work using their own vehicles with a locked-in eight-hour guarantee. For the first time, seasonal work will be contained to five weeks only from November-December.

The creation of 7,500 new full-time Teamster jobs at UPS and the fulfillment of 22,500 open positions, establishing more opportunities through the life of the agreement for part-timers to transition to full-time work.

More than 60 total changes and improvements to the National Master Agreement — more than any other time in Teamsters history — and zero concessions from the rank-and-file.

Last month, the UPS Teamsters National Negotiating Committee, as well as representatives of UPS Teamster locals in the U.S. and Puerto Rico, unanimously endorsed the agreement. UPS Teamsters voted electronically between August 3-22

22 Aug 23

[freetobeeyouandme]

By Way of the Stars

Tags: Rated T, No Archive Warnings Apply; Kevin Day & Neil Josten; Alternate Universe - Space Opera, Sci-Fi AU, Political Intrigue, the foxes are the crew of a space ship and Neil is a stowaway

Length: 9.5k

Summary:

The galaxy is vast, hiding places exist aplenty, and if there's one thing Neil Josten is good at, it's running away. When his mother dies after almost a decade of being on the move, Neil decides to try his luck in the outer reaches of the known part of the universe, hoping backwater planets and uncharted territories will hide him from his father better than the dense population of the inner systems. Stowing away on a small, long haul freighter with a small crew seems like the perfect plan to get there unseen and without much of a hassel. The only problem? He's not the only one hiding away in the small freighter's cargo bay, and he may have run head first into a conflict that may very well determine the future existence of the Federation. - Or, an AU where Neil and Kevin are stowaways on the same spaceship by accident

Read on Ao3; see whole collection

Excerpt:

Neil Josten watched the cargo doors of the small long haul freighter from his place atop the containers stacked in the otherwise empty hangar, waiting patiently for one of the engineers to make her last round of checks before releasing the ship. He’d have a small window to slip inside after that, needing to become a shadow on her heels, but he had dealt with worse odds before. Still, moments like these made him glad to be alone.

Not that he wanted to think that.

He was sure his mother would forgive him for it, but even six months later the loss still stung. Neil knew, rationally, that she was gone. He’d tried to move on and most importantly move away, towards the outer systems where his father was less likely to find him, but sometimes he still slipped up. Sometimes he included her in his calculations, other times he found himself looking behind himself for a woman that no longer existed. In many ways her death had made it easier for him to disappear, slipping into the shadows whenever he needed to without having to worry about someone else, but Neil found he didn’t like it. Without his mother at his side he felt dangerously off-kilter. There was a distance between himself and everyone else that hadn’t been there before as he passed unnoticed among them, giving himself a new name with every stranger he talked to and never talking to one person twice if he could help it. And picking up the pace with which he orbited the inner systems made it far too easy to help it.

Without his mother there, no one would be left to remember him, much less mourn him, if his father ever caught up with him, and Neil wasn’t sure the trade off was worth it. Having no one meant survival, but what good did his life do him if he was already a ghost?

The loud hiss of the cargo doors depressurizing shook him out of his thoughts. He’d known the ship was old when he’d picked it, but for the past day he had been almost a little bit in awe as he watched her sit in the hangar: Boxy and painted a bright orange, she was an old school Federation standard Subclass Zero, some of the first spaceships the Federation had commissioned as such over forty years ago now. This one was given the designation X, stenciled outside of its hull in slightly scrapped white paint, and Neil thought despite its age the small freighter didn’t look half bad. Zeroes were small and cheaply built, a quick solution to the fighting that had broken out in the Federation parliament over partisan delivery routes and unequal distribution of authority over spaceflight. Most of them had not survived more than a couple of decades, so the F0-X was a rarity.

Neil fell in love with it a little bit over the course of the day. He’d grown up flying Gulls and Ravens, smaller ships than even this, meant for the transport of small groups and war, but this old lady had a lot of charm. Part of that was just him missing being in the pilot’s chair, he knew, his hands itching to flip the long haul freighter’s levers and turn her steering wheel just for the sake of it. The fact that she was so old meant she was well loved, and so he knew she would glide through space smoothly, heeding his every command.

It was almost too bad that she was a Federation registered vessel and he on the run.

[marlynnofmany]

Other Uses for Packaging

I waved goodbye to the customers — other humans this time — then sat back and waited for the trash pickup. I didn’t blame them for not wanting to take all the packing material out into the spaceport. They hadn’t brought a hovercart or forklift, and had been unprepared for the huge crate full of bubble wrap and foam.

Other times, our little courier ship had done deliveries where time was short or regulations were tight, and all we would have been able to do was advise them on where to rent a hovercart or buy a crowbar. Luckily for these customers’ convenience and my conscience, today we could stick around and help them unpack the custom end table or whatever that was.

They’d left happy, with something much easier to carry, and Captain Sunlight had headed for the cockpit to call in the station’s trash crew. (Apparently this was a regular feature at this space dock, which was a nice change from the last few where we’d had to move the ship’s garbage over to the trash area under our own power.)

Zhee looked over the crate that he’d just taken great joy in disassembling. “Wood may be valuable here,” he said with a thoughtful click of a pincher arm. “If not to the station at large, then surely to another ship. I wonder if the captain thought of that.”

I glanced back at the open cargo bay. “Probably?”

“Probably,” Zhee agreed.

We were both silent for a moment while the spaceport bustled around us.

“I’m going to check,” he said, tapping his way up the ramp on his many bug feet. “Make sure none of that blows away.”

“Sure thing.” I looked at the piles. The only breeze in here was the faint wafting of ventilation systems and the occasional gentle landing of other ships at a safe distance, but I understood the impulse to be careful. That one package awhile ago, full of styrofoam beads, had been memorable. And terrible. The darn stuff was almost as bad as glitter, what with the way it stuck to things with static electricity. Nobody wanted a repeat of that.

This set of packaging was much better. The boards made a tidy stack, the foam was in rubbery sheets that didn’t leak bits everywhere, and even the bubble wrap was in long rows instead of individual panels. This was no top-of-the-line cryo suspension or force field generator, but it was respectable.

I organized the mess a bit while I waited. The rest of the crew either had stuff to do on the ship or out in the station, so despite all the ambient noise, things were quiet.

I started rolling up the bubble wrap, thinking someone might want to use it again, but found that many of the bubbles had gotten popped in the disassembly, leaving it only good for one thing.

The first bubble popped with a satisfying snap. By the third I’d pinpointed which direction the sounds were echoing from most, and I enjoyed the different noises I could get by tilting my head. None of the pedestrians were close enough to pay much attention, so I happily worked my way down the roll. I’d seen multiple other types of bubble wrap, some made by different cultures and different materials, and most of them didn’t actually pop. What a simple joy to find the regular old Earth kind again.

Mur’s voice from the cargo bay asked, “What’s making that sound?”

I sighed and turned. “Don’t tell me, this is another swear word in your language.”

Mur waved a tentacle. “No, of course not. I just wanted to know what’s breaking out here. It sounded like a problem.”

Before I could answer, Paint appeared behind him in a rush. “Is there a problem??”

“No,” I hurried to say. “Everything’s fine. It’s just bubble wrap. See?” I held up the section I’d been working on and popped another bubble.

Paint winced. “Is there something wrong with it?”

“No, it’s just garbage.” I rolled up the part I’d already flattened, then twisted it to pop the next row all at once.

“Okay, that almost sounded like a swear word,” Mur admitted.

I had to laugh at that. “Of course it did.”

Blip and Blop hurried out to join the growing crowd in the cargo bay. “What keeps breaking?” Blip asked, frills waving anxiously.

“It’s just bubble wrap!” I exclaimed. “See?” I held it up and popped another one.

Instead of nodding and going back to whatever they’d been doing, my alien coworkers remained perplexed. “Why does it keep popping?” Blop asked. “Are you doing that?”

“Yes!” I exclaimed.

“Why?” asked both Frillians at once. Paint and Mur also looked curious.

“Because it’s fun?” I replied, scrambling for an answer. I hadn’t thought this needed explaining. But apparently it did.

Paint asked, “How is that noise fun?”

“Well, it echoes—”

“You don’t need to worry about condensing materials for the trash pickup, if that’s the concern,” Mur said.

“Yes, I know—”

“Are there food items on your planet that you have to open like this?” Blip asked. “Large fish eggs, maybe?”

“No, ew! It’s just—”

A shadow loomed taller than the Frillian twins. “It is violensssss,” Trrili hissed, making them twitch. (I don’t know how she found a shadow in the cargo bay. Sometimes I think she brings them with her.) “Small-scale, sanctioned violence. These can be destroyed without repurcussionssssss.” She was choosing which words to hiss on, for effect.

“Sure,” I said, spreading my arms and lifting the bubble wrap. “Let’s go with that.”

Trrili wasn’t done. “Each tiny section can be crusssshed individually, with precision, or multiples at once for maximum volume.” She glided forward on quieter feet than Zhee’s, and the others made room for her.

I held out the bubble wrap. “You want a turn?” Her pincher arms didn’t seem suited to it, but I was curious to see where she’d go with this.

“Plasssssse it on the floor.”

“Sure.” I flapped the row out in front of her like a red carpet, and she moved like the predator she was to crush one after the other. With precision. And shiny black bug feet.

It gave me an idea. “Hey, wanna see who’s faster?” I grabbed another section and laid it out to one side. “You’ve got more feet, but my shoes are bigger.”

Trrili spread her mandibles in her favorite creepy smile. “Challenge acssssssepted.” She crouched like a spider and waited for me to be ready.

I glanced back at the others. “Anybody else wanna race?”

Mur spun on his tentacles and scooted back into the ship. “No thanks! I’m going back where it’s quieter.”

“Me too,” Paint said. “But thank you!” She scampered off.

Blip and Blop looked at each other in silence for a moment, fins waving. Then they turned to me. “We’ll judge,” Blip announced.

“All right!” I said. I wrangled my own section of bubble wrap, roughly the same length as Trrili’s, and struck my own ready pose. “Say when!”

The twins chorused, “Start!” and we were off. Pops filled the air along with Trrili’s delighted hisses and my laughter. There were probably people staring, but that didn’t matter.

Maybe I could talk Trrili into a dance-off afterward. On whatever was left when one of us was declared the champion of small-scale, sanctioned violence.

~~~

These are the ongoing backstory adventures of the main character from this book.

Shared early on Patreon! There’s even a free tier to get them on the same day as the rest of the world.

The sequel novel is in progress (and will include characters from these stories. I hadn’t thought all of them up when I wrote the first book, but they’re too much fun to leave out of the second).

[roanofarcc]

PROJECT SUNSHINE CHAPTER FORTY NINE → EYES CLOSED, HEAD FIRST, CAN’T LOSE

summary: steve harrington x oc

when another product of Hawkins National Laboratory escaped a long-survived nightmare alongside her sister, she crashed into one unsuspecting teenage boy and dragged him deeper into the dark mysteries that made up their hometown.

word count. || masterlist || ocs moodboard

warnings: cannon typical violence, child abuse, horror, gore, and depictions of mental illness. parts of this story were written pre-season 4 release. cannon divergence.

a/n: words cannot express my love for erica sinclair...

previous chapter ← → next chapter

They had absolutely no idea where they were going. The only thing Sunshine knew was that they certainly were heading straight into trouble with no other way out. Her neck hurt from how she slept slumped against Steve’s shoulder for only a couple of hours, and everyone else seemed to have just as uncomfortable slumber as herself. They had little to nothing on them. Dustin’s backpack had a couple of snacks, a few dollars, his walkie-talkie, and his tape recorder. Sunshine had no idea what Erica had in her backpack, but she doubted the younger girl had packed any survival items or weapons, considering she was ten and only planned to haggle ice cream out of Steve and Robin before going to her friends for a sleepover. None of them were prepared for whatever awaited them at the end of the hallway, if there even was an end. 

“You have to admit, as a feat of engineering alone this is impressive,” Dustin said, breaking the silence that had befallen the group a couple of minutes into their journey. 

“What are you talking about? It’s a total fire hazard,” Steve said. “There’s no stairs, no exit, just an elevator that drops you halfway to hell.” 

Erica shot them an unamused look over her shoulder. “They’re commies. If you don’t pay people, they’ll cut concerns.” 

“To be fair to our Russian comrades, I don’t think this tunnel was designed for walking.” Robin jumped into the conversation, picking at her nails as she kept her gaze forward at the expanse of the hall. Sunshine knew a nervous habit when she saw one. Robin hadn’t stopped picking at her nails since last night. They were red and looked on the urge of bleeding. Of course she was nervous, Sunshine thought, none of them signed up for this part of their ‘mission.’ And Robin, up until that moment, had lived a fairly normal life, free of life or death situations. Now she was stuck with three people who had encountered enough life-or-death situations for all five of them twice over. 

“Think about it,” Robin continued, rambling quickly. “They developed the perfect system for transporting that cargo. It all comes into the mall like any old delivery, they load it up onto those trucks, and nobody’s the wiser.” It was smart. The mall was the last place anyone would suspect any suspicious activity due to the constant crowd it drew in.

“You think they built this whole mall so that they could transport that green poison?” asked Steve. 

“I don’t think it’s poison,” Sunshine replied. She didn’t know what the green goo was, but it had to be something more important than poison. Whatever it was, was bad if it warranted such secretive transportation and heavy guard. 

Dustin nodded in agreement with Sunshine. “Yeah, I seriously doubt it's something that boring.” Steve scoffed but kept his lips pressed into a thin line. “It’s gotta be more valuable, like promethium or something.” The only person who knew what Dustin was talking about was Robin, who hummed in response. 

“Promethium?” Steve quirked a brow, waiting for an explanation. 

“It's what Victor Stone’s dad used to build Cyborg’s bionic and cybernetic components,” explained Robin, clearing absolutely nothing up. 

“You’re all so nerdy it's making me physically ill.” Erica placed a hand over her stomach and doubled over, pretending like she was going to be sick on her shoes. It made Sunshine smile, even in their disastrous situation. 

Sunshine hadn’t been around Erica much, not enough to get to know the girl, but she had heard Lucas complain about his little sister a million times over. She was spunky and amusing, and a little different than her brother but they looked too alike to mistake them as anything other than siblings. There was a signature Sinclair-determined glint that Sunshine saw in Erica’s eyes after she successfully crawled through the vent that she had seen mirrored in Lucas’s eyes a couple of times. They also resemble spitting images of their parents, sharing the same nose and shape eyes. Sunshine only wished she had the chance to get to know Erica under any kind of different circumstances. 

“No, no, no,” Steve protested. “Do not lump me in with them. I am not a nerd.”

“Why so sensitive Harrington?” asked Robin, teasingly. “Afraid of losing cool points to a child?” 

“No,” he scoffed. “I’m just saying that I don’t know jackshit about Prometheus.” 

“Promethium,” Dustin quickly corrected. “Prometheus is a Greek mythological figure, but whatever. All I’m saying is, whatever that stuff is, it’s probably being used to make something or power something.” 

“Like a nuclear weapon,” Robin wondered aloud. Sunshine bit down hard on the inside of her cheek, holding back worry that crawled up her throat. She did not want to believe they were heading towards any kind of weapon. The naive side of her brain wanted to believe that they’d stumble upon a door or a lost keycard and walk right out of the place as if they had never even been there in the first place. But the realistic half of her brain knew they would encounter some kind of trouble one way or another, and she needed to be ready for a fight.

“Great, so we may be walking toward a nuclear weapon.” Steve huffed. 

Robin stopped picking her nails and furrowed her brows, falling into what looked like deep thought. “I don’t get it, though. If they are building something, why here? Why Hawkins? At the very best we’re a toilet stop on your way to Disneyland.”

Sunshine, Steve, and Dustin faltered at Robin’s words, lingering just behind Robin and Erica as they continued wondering why anyone would do anything in Hawkins. They had no idea what had already happened in the town; the place was a nightmare hiding in plain sight; a little boring town that was home to slayed monsters and runaway experiments. There were only two reasons why anyone would be interested in Hawkins, and they went hand-in-hand. They’d only be interested if they knew what lurked beside them in another world not too unlike their own, and the place that opened the bridge between the two worlds. 

“Maybe you were right,” Dustin said, looking guiltily at Sunshine. 

“You think they might know about…” Steve trailed off because he didn’t need to finish his sentence for Sunshine and Dustin to know exactly what he was getting at. 

Sunshine felt her gut twist tighter into a knot. “They could.” She couldn’t imagine what would happen if anyone at all discovered the truth about the Upside Down, Russian or not. She didn’t know what they meant for them once they reached the end of the hall, or the world half a mile up. 

“So, it’s connected?” 

“Maybe,” she said. “The Lab, the Upside Down. One always leads back to the other and they both started here.” And it was supposed to be over. The Lab was shut down completely and El closed the Gate. It was supposed to be behind them. They seemed to be the only people who knew the ramifications of toying with something unstable as human experiments and other dimensions, and they had been the only ones to face the repercussions of the aftermaths. 

“I’m sorry,” Robin’s voice rang out as she and Erica turned around to look at the three of them. “Is there something you guys would like to share with the class?” None of them said anything, and luckily, they didn’t have to because Dustin’s walkie muttered from inside his backpack. 

Robin held the walkie close to her ear and repeated the words in English. “A trip to China sounds nice if you tread lightly.” Dustin’s eyes widened and brightened. “Wherever that broadcast is coming from, it’s close. And if there’s one thing we know about that signal…” 

“It can reach the surface!” Dustin gasped. With their small sliver of hope, they hurried down the hall as quickly as their feet could carry them. Sunshine wasn’t sure how long they ran, but eventually, they saw the end of the hall as it emptied out into a larger space. As it grew closer, voices grew louder. Sunshine managed to get to the front of the group, leading them without any idea of what they were heading into. 

A pair of people came into view with their backs to the group. They beelined behind a cluster of crates stacked high that shielded them from their view. Sunshine carefully peeked around the edge of the crate and waited until the pair disappeared around the corner. Once they were out of their sight for a minute or so, they quickly followed them, ducking and weaving to stay as hidden as they could until they came upon a sight she wasn’t sure any of them were expecting. 

The place was swarmed with Russians in military uniforms, speaking in their native tongue with guns slung over their shoulders. Others were dressed in familiar lab coats and held clipboards to their chests. A hand grabbed her arm as she gawked at the buzzing scene, pulling her down with the rest of the group behind another stack of crates. 

Being trapped inside the elevator was one thing, but the underground Russian base was a whole other predicament that exceeded whatever Sunshine had expected. They were five kids now trapped with dozens of foreign military officers and what looked like doctors and or scientists.

“I saw it,” Erica suddenly whispered, squished between Steve and Robin. “The comms room, I saw it.” 

“Are you sure?” Dustin asked. 

“Positive. The door was open for just a second, but I saw a bunch of lights and machines and shit in there.” 

Dustin looked unsure. “That could be a hundred different things.” 

“I’ll take those odds,” Robin said, looking between Sunshine and Steve like she was waiting for their input. 

“Me too,” agreed Sunshine. They couldn’t stay in their current spot without a certain risk of being caught. If they made it to the comms room, there was a chance they could reach someone on the surface who could help them or get help. 

Steve looked back and forth across the distance between them and the room, probably weighing their options before he came to a similar conclusion to Sunshine. “All right,” he agreed too. “We’re going to move fast and stay low.” 

Following Steve’s lead, they managed, by some miracle, to make it across the base and up a couple of steps to what Erica thought was the comms room. The door was on the verge of closing, as two people exited it and turned the opposite way of the group, and Steve grabbed a hold of it before it shut, holding it open so everyone could pile inside. The second Sunshine entered, she was greeted with an alarming sight; the room was still preoccupied. 

At the sound of their labored breathing and footsteps, the man seated at a desk turned around, staring at the group with as much confusion as they held looking at him. His arm moved downwards; his fingers inched toward his belt where a gun was holstered. She instantly shoved Erica and Dustin behind her and moved to do the same to Robin, but the girl bravely stepped forward. She started to recite broken Russian to the man, repeating the code, but he either didn’t understand or didn’t care. He spoke words that none of them knew and made a more obvious attempt to grab his gun. 

Before Sunshine had a chance to ignite the light in her palms, Steve let out a yell and charged straight for the soldier without the slightest hesitation. The man stumbled, taken by surprise just before Steve crashed into him, knocking both of them against the desk. The soldier shoved Steve off with a grunt and swung his fist, but Steve dodged it just before he delivered his own punch into the man’s gut. The soldier roared in anger and pain. He grabbed Steve by the collar of his work uniform and shoved him back into the desk. Steve’s back met it with what sounded like a painful thud. Sunshine readied to intervene, but Steve grabbed a hold of the phone that sat on the desk and swung it hard, bringing it down against the man’s face. The hit was enough to send the soldier down, smacking his head against the corner of the desk and knocking him out cold.

They stood in stunned silence, flickering their stares between the passed-out soldier and a breathless Steve.

Dustin pushed out from behind Sunshine’s outstretched hands and smiled in disbelief. “Dude, you did it! You won a fight!” 

A small smirk formed on Steve’s lips. He wiped a couple of beads of sweat from his face and leaned back against the desk. Sunshine stepped forward, looking Steve over for any injuries. “Are you okay?” 

“Yeah,” he breathed out, looking rather happy with himself. 

Dustin ripped the keycard from the Russian’s belt and held it between his fingers triumphantly. “Now we’ve got a way out of here.” Erica and Dustin quickly began to bicker over their next best course of action, while Steve tried to mediate. Sunshine had noticed Robin slipping away, entranced by a staircase just to the side of the room they were in. An odd glow painted the staircase and Robin approached it with curiosity. Sunshine followed her, in case any more trouble waited at the top, but they were only met with another closed door that held a small window that allowed bright blue light to pour through and spill onto the stairs. 

The glow was more than unnatural. It caused goosebumps to rise on Sunshine’s arms and the hair on the back of her neck to stand on end. She and Robin exchanged a look before she called down to the others. “Guys! There’s something up here!” 

☀☀☀

Steve should have kept a list of every perceptive-shattering thing he had witnessed in his short lifetime so far. Monsters with endless rows of jagged teeth, his childhood best friend returning to him in the very woods she was lost in ten years prior, possession, superpowers, and the list went on and on. And Steve knew about the Gate, the portal-like thing that was a doorway into another freaking dimension- an evil one at that. But seeing it in person, the gigantic rip in the fabric of their universe, was something he couldn’t process, let alone the fact that he was seeing it inside an underground Russian military base that had set up operation underneath the mall he had been working at all summer. It was unreal, impossible even. 

But through two glass panels, they all saw it just past a large control room. A bright beam of blue light was shot through the gaping wound of their world, and the Gate pulsed to life. Steve’s mind couldn’t think of anything other than the fact that it was bad; really, really, really bad. 

“This cannot be happening again,” Sunshine mumbled, stumbling back from the glass with her head in her hands. She wore a similar expression to Steve and Dustin, something filled with a mix of panic and worry as they processed the implications of what the Russians had done, what they could have potentially released. 

“I don’t understand,” Robin said. “You’ve seen this before?” To her and Erica, Hawkins was as normal as any old town in America, but it was anything but that.

“Not exactly,” Steve replied. 

“Then what, exactly?” 

Dustin took off down the stairs and everyone followed suit. “All you need to know is that this is bad. I’m talking end of the human race as we know it kind of bad.”

“And if the Gate has already been opened, it’s safe to assume that something’s already come out it,” Sunshine added. 

Great, Steve thought, more monsters. He was getting really sick and tired of monsters. 

“Yeah, and we know who they’ll go after.” Dustin looked over his shoulder at Sunshine as fear for all of his friends up on the surface flashed across his boyish face. They needed to get the hell out of there, and fast, to warn the others if they didn’t already know. 

When they reached the comms room again, Erica stopped dead in her tracks, eyes wide. “Um, Steve? Where’s your friend?” She pointed to the spot on the floor where the soldier had just been lying, but the man was nowhere to be seen. And as if on cue, an alarm began to blare throughout the base, alerting an entire army that something was wrong; they were what was wrong, and they all stuck out like five sore thumbs. 

Cursing under his breath, Steve cracked the door they entered through and peered outside. A series of soldiers stood not far and in the middle of the group was the man Steve had knocked out. His eyes darted to the cracked door, pointing and yelling in Russian as Steve slammed the door shut. 

“We’ve gotta go!” he yelled as heavy footsteps approached the door, and without wasting another second, they took off and headed back up the stairs. Bathed in blue light, Dustin shoved the door to the control room open, despite it being full of people. They looked a little less threatening in that they weren’t soldiers but rather some kind of Russian scientists or doctors that decided to fuck up Hawkins even more than it already was. But the soldiers were close behind them, and Steve knew they needed to hurry. He spotted another door on the opposite side of the room and ushered the group towards it. 

The door led out onto a platform that sat smack dab in front of the Gate. The drill-like contraption that was being used to keep the Gate open was so loud that it rattled Steve’s bones. It spun quickly, shooting the beam of blue light into the fleshy rip on the wall. 

They were in the worst possible place in the entire lab, standing beside a high-powered weapon that opened something that they had no business messing with. Steve gripped the railing tightly and scanned the area for another quick escape route. Soldiers flooded out of the same door they had left from and rushed toward them just as Steve spotted a ladder a couple of feet away. He led the way, climbing down first to make sure no one was waiting for them at the bottom before he started to help the others down. 

One by one they scrambled down the ladder, ending with Sunshine, who Erica reattached herself to once her feet hit the ground. Steve was even more horrifying aware that they dragged a ten-year-old into the base. If they made it out of there, Mrs. Sinclair was going to have his head, that was for sure. 

They sprinted away from the Gate but were met with another group of soldiers that ran towards them from down a hall. Steve braced himself before he slammed up against a stack of empty barrels that were lined up against the wall, sending them crashing down and obstructing the soldiers' path just slightly, buying the group just enough time to put some distance between them and the men. 

Robin shoved open the first door they came to, which they were lucky enough to find empty. There was nothing inside besides a ventilation system and a couple of mundane-looking control panels. Once they all piled inside, Steve slammed the door shut and pressed his back against it just as fists pounded on the other side. They were grossly outnumbered. Both Sunshine and Robin joined him at the door, trying to prevent the soldiers from entering while Dustin and Erica removed the grate to the vent in the floor that was wide enough for a body to squeeze through. 

Dustin looked expectantly over at the teens as he said, “Come on, let's go!” But none of them moved, they couldn’t. The second any one of them took their weight off the door, the soldiers would enter. There was no way in hell was going to let Dustin and Erica be caught; that was completely out of the question. 

“Just get out of here!” Steve said through gritted teeth, trying to keep his hold on the door as more bodies on the other side beat against it. 

Dustin shook his head. “Come on, you guys! Now! We have to go!” 

Sunshine managed to meet Dustin’s panicked gaze with a soft one like she wasn’t talking to some smart-ass but rather a terrified kid who found himself in yet another terrifying situation. “Dustin, you need to leave. Take Erica and go get us help, okay?” She tried to hold her voice steady, but Steve heard worry slip through its cracks. 

“N-No! Guys-” 

“Dustin, please go!” she pleaded. “I will keep them safe; I promise, I’ll keep them safe. But you have to go and warn the others. Tell Hopper we need help. He’ll know what to do. We will be okay.” 

Dustin hesitated, but by the look on his face, he put his faith in Sunshine. He and Erica climbed down into the vent and disappeared from their view. It was just the three of them left, holding the door as it started to slip from their grasp and crack open. It didn’t take much longer for the people on the other side to overpower the three of them. The force of the soldiers entering knocked Steve and Robin off of their feet, but Sunshine managed to keep herself upright. 

There was a look in her narrowed eyes that Steve recognized almost immediately, knowing what she was about to do. His mouth went dry and any words he wanted to yell left him in a panic. He didn’t even have time to call out her name before more soldiers flooded into the room with their weapons raised. And like a strike of a match, light bloomed to light in Sunshine’s hands, freaking out the soldiers and distracting them just enough for her to attack first. She outstretched her arms as quick flashes of light filled the room, stinging Steve’s eyes. He looked away for only a second, listening to the sound of screams and guns clattering against the concrete floor. Some of the men fell alongside their guns, clutching their hands to their eyes as their faces contorted in pain. 

But there were far too many of them. Steve and Robin were utterly useless, watching from the ground. At the sound of their comrades' screams, more men filed into the room and drastically outnumbered Sunshine in the confined place. Too many bodies moved in a sea of uniforms and Sunshine’s fighting became frantic and uncoordinated as she tried to aim away from Steve and Robin. He knew she didn’t want to hurt them, but she couldn’t do that and fight the soldiers.

Before he knew what was happening, the butt of a gun was slammed down hard against the back of Sunshine’s head. Even in the commotion, he heard the sick ‘crack’ of her skull, met with a scream that tore through Robin’s lips. 

Sunshine hit the ground at his feet, but just out of his reach. 

Steve’s heart leaped into his throat along with a strangled gasp. He couldn’t breathe. He didn’t have his bat or a single thing to fight with. 

Two soldiers reached down and roughly grabbed Sunshine by the arms, hauling her limp figure upwards. Steve found his voice as a gut-wrenching fear drenched him from head to toe. “Let go of her!” he screamed, trying to reach her through the mess of soldiers who all pointed their weapons at him. He didn’t care; all of his focus was on Sunshine as she was dragged away. “Don’t touch her!” Before he could scramble back to his feet, another soldier raised his weapon and brought it down against his head. Black dots swarmed his vision as Robin screamed again. He mumbled Sunshine’s name before the world around him grew dark, and then vanished. 

Tagged (lmk if you'd like to be added :) ) @sattlersquarry , @leptitlu , @drunkengodsofslaughter

[thefirsthogokage]

From the article:

Highlights of the tentative 2023-2028 UPS Teamsters National Master Agreement include:

Historic wage increases. Existing full- and part-time UPS Teamsters will get $2.75 more per hour in 2023, and $7.50 more per hour over the length of the contract.

Existing part-timers will be raised up to no less than $21 per hour immediately, and part-time seniority workers earning more under a market rate adjustment would still receive all new general wage increases.

General wage increases for part-time workers will be double the amount obtained in the previous UPS Teamsters contract — and existing part-time workers will receive a 48 percent average total wage increase over the next five years.

Wage increases for full-timers will keep UPS Teamsters the highest paid delivery drivers in the nation, improving their average top rate to $49 per hour.

Current UPS Teamsters working part-time would receive longevity wage increases of up to $1.50 per hour on top of new hourly raises, compounding their earnings.

New part-time hires at UPS would start at $21 per hour and advance to $23 per hour.

All UPS Teamster drivers classified as 22.4s would be reclassified immediately to Regular Package Car Drivers and placed into seniority, ending the unfair two-tier wage system at UPS.

Safety and health protections, including vehicle air conditioning and cargo ventilation. UPS will equip in-cab A/C in all larger delivery vehicles, sprinter vans, and package cars purchased after Jan. 1, 2024. All cars get two fans and air induction vents in the cargo compartments.

All UPS Teamsters would receive Martin Luther King Day as a full holiday for the first time.

No more forced overtime on Teamster drivers’ days off. Drivers would keep one of two workweek schedules and could not be forced into overtime on scheduled off-days.

UPS Teamster part-timers will have priority to perform all seasonal support work using their own vehicles with a locked-in eight-hour guarantee. For the first time, seasonal work will be contained to five weeks only from November-December.

The creation of 7,500 new full-time Teamster jobs at UPS and the fulfillment of 22,500 open positions, establishing more opportunities through the life of the agreement for part-timers to transition to full-time work.

More than 60 total changes and improvements to the National Master Agreement — more than any other time in Teamsters history — and zero concessions from the rank-and-file.

Nice work Teamsters! Congratulations UPS drivers! And big thank you to the 3,300 pilots who said they wouldn't fly if the drivers went on strike!