Author Archive: AndrewBCrisp

#3 – Fleet Navigator Tyla Garvet

Tyla Garvet is the 15th person to ascend to the role of Fleet Navigator.  When the fleet of world-ships left Sol centuries ago, seeking new worlds and new adventures, the role of Ship and Fleet Navigators had been little more than their Earthbound equivalent: charting a course and avoiding dangers.  Since then, it has evolved to the point that Navigators are like monarchs, with near-total authority over the ships and people they guide.  Even the Ship-Captains bow to them.

Tyla’s tenure as Fleet Navigator should have been one of excitement and joy, as the fleet entered a new system, and prepared to seed a new colony for humanity.  But others have entered the system as well – the insectoid Hrenl, whose hive-ships have begun to colonize the asteroids, and they do not wish to share this system with another.

The people of the world-ships look to Tyla to lead them safely.  Now, she must lead them to war.

(Fell behind these past few days, partly due to having to get my eyeglasses replaced and partly due to a family… problem.  We’ll see how well I can catch up in the days ahead.)

#2 – Roland Wong

(Whew!  This is a little late – mostly due to my deciding to work with the colors and inks in Clip Studio, a program I recently purchased.  Nice program – lots of useful tools – but not the wisest choice I’ve made while laboring under a deadline.  Also: Photoshop layer folder don’t work in Photoshop Elements, so I had to bounce between two programs to get the template to work right.)

Roland Wong is Cosmetigene’s best salesperson in the Greater Vancouver Archology.  A man of great charm and charisma, he makes his living selling cosmetic gene enhancements.  Want eyes that changes color via your mood?  Looking for tiger-stripe hair or glow-in-the-dark fingernails?  How about some chlorophyll in the skin to give you that extra bit of pep through the day?  Cosmetigene has it all, and Roland can sell them to just about anyone.

It’s not a bad life… but Roland misses the days when he worked an entirely different job, as a plainsclothes detective in the GVA Police Force.  There his charm had been used to coax testimony out of reluctant witnesses, and to ease criminals into confession.  He’d been good at that job too – perhaps a little too good.  On a corruption case, he found he’d angered the wrong high-ranking official, and soon found himself out of work.

But his past collides with his present when a routine sale becomes a terrible murder.  One of Roland’s gene enhancements for a client was altered: instead of giving his client the robin’s-egg-blue skin she wanted, it turned her skin cells into toxin-producing factories, poisoning her from the inside.  All evidence points to Roland, and his job, reputation, and freedom are on the line… unless he can find the real killer.

#1 – Danielle Kostra

And we’re off!  Since today was rather busy on the day job front, I only have a pencil image today.  In any event, please give a warm welcome to Danielle Kostra.

Danielle is a biologist, specializing in non-terrestrial arthropods.  If it has an exoskeleton and no relations to Earth life, she wants to know everything about it.  And, as one of dozens of biologists aboard the Concordat Grand Survey Ship Tyio-9, she is pretty much in her dream job.  The Grand Survey’s mission is to explore every star in the galaxy, spending about a year in each.   With close to 400 billion stars, that’s a lot of worlds… and a lot of bugs, crustaceans and other exoskeletal creatures that evolution can cook up.

Danielle herself is not Earth-born.  She’s from Sapphire, a beautiful world orbiting the star Epsilon Indi, and colonized by one of Earth’s slow-ships.  When humanity was inducted into the Concordat (a vast collective of over 70 races, some of them extremely advanced), they gained access to the FTL technology that allows other Concordat races to hop across the galaxy with the same ease modern commuters can jet around the world.  Still, Danielle and her fellow humans do face some issues, as many of the younger Concordat members feel threatened by each new arrival.  Prejudice and mistrust have caused more than their fair share of friction between humans and their new allies, and people like Danielle, working on the front line of the Concordat’s push into the galaxy, can sometimes be caught in the middle.