Homework, week 1.

So, I decided to ignore all of your advice and went with a sligthly modified version of paragraph #1. Screw you people.

Here's what I finally submitted.

“Hold course. Steady as she goes,” the captain barked. He looked intently through the view port of his fluyt. To avoid attention from the authorities, they were staying away from the main shipping lanes, but that meant during this leg of their journey they'd be traveling particularly close to a region of the asteroid belt notorious for pirate activity. This was going to be his least favorite part of the cargo run.

It was generally well received by the class, even though no one knew what a "fluyt" was. I had to explain that it was 16th century Dutch cargo vessel, and I was trying to evoke the feeling of the age of sail in space, so I used ship classifications from the 16th through 18th centuries. The instructor said that it was fine if I used obscure terms from time to time, and that I should keep it to add flavor.

In addition to that, we had to list the name, age, two positive and two negative traits, and three or four quirks of our focal character. The instructor explained that "traits" are those behaviors that we can't see, but quirks are what we can. Here's what I submitted:

Jack Flint, age 30

Traits:

-Chivalrous
-Perseverance
-Pessimist/Realist
-Contradictory sense of morality

Quirks:

-Strokes his goatee when thinking
-Says “me” instead of “my”, “be” instead of “is”, and other pirate-isms
-Insists he's a privateer, not a pirate

Lastly, we had to bring a picture of our focal character. The instructor indicated that we should look through magazines and such, but I brought a picture I had made about a year ago using UGO's Hero Machine. The instructor thought it was terrific.

Maybe later I'll post the picture I made of Regina.

Since everyone seemed to like the fourth option so much (the first paragraph of Episode II), I'll go ahead and post the rest of that section, from the first chapter. I think Dave will get a kick out of it. (Keep in mind, this is rough-draft and has not yet been edited.)

The Marine on duty lazily flipped the coin and watched as it bounced off the ceiling of the guard shack and gently floated back down, pulled by the weak Rhean gravity. He caught it in one hand and slapped it onto the sleeve of his extra-vehicular suit. He looked down at the engraved image of President Ronald Reagan staring back up at him. That was the tenth heads in a row, and brought the total to three hundred fourteen heads and two hundred seventy-one tails. It was a slow day. 

He briefly looked up. Saturn loomed large in the pre-dawn sky. It hung there in the same spot, day in and day out. Currently, it was about half-full, being last quarter, and would be "new"—a thin, bright crescent—sometime late the next night. Well, night universal time. It would be just after noon, local time, in Rhea's four-and-a-half day rotation. 

Thinking about it made the Marine's head spin. It was one more thing he hated about this God-forsaken moon. Rhea was about as boring as a ball of ice and rock could be. Most of the interesting places in the Saturnian system were either farther out, such as on Titan—home to some of the largest cities off of Earth, and where the vast majority of the solar system's hydrocarbon mining took place—or farther in, on Mimas or Enceladus, which housed the hydrogen refineries where the skimmer ships would take their gaseous cargo after skimming it off the upper-most layers of Saturn's atmosphere. Rhea, by comparison, was the middle of nowhere, which was exactly why he was there. There wasn't much point to building a super top-secret and high-security special weapons laboratory on one of the busiest moons in the solar system. And as long as the US government needed super top-secret and high-security weapons labs, they needed Marines to guard them. 

"Heads up," the Marine heard through his two-way. He looked up at his partner, standing just outside the guard shack. He was pointing towards a small, open-top vehicle approaching from the direction of the spaceport. The Marine stepped out of the guard shack and held up his hand, signaling the vehicle to stop. The vehicle slowly decelerated and came to a halt just in front of the gate. There were three people in it. The driver looked to be about thirty years old and had black hair and a devilish looking goatee. Seated to his right in the front passenger's seat was a very tall dark-skinned man with a thin face. Behind the two of them, in the back seat, was a very young looking man with messy, sandy blond hair. 

"Name and purpose of visit," the Marine demanded into his two-way on a commonly-used communications frequency. 

The Marine could tell by looking through the visors of the EV suits of the vehicle's passengers that the driver was the one responding. "I'm escorting Doctor Gordon Frohman, here on business to see Doctor Kleiner."

 

"Can I see a government-issued photo ID, Doctor Freeman?" the Marine asked. 

"Frohman," the young man in the back seat corrected as he produced an ID card, which he handed to the Marine. The Marine took it and inspected it. He returned to the guard shack and checked the schedules. There was an entry that a Doctor G. Freeman would be coming to see Doctor Kleiner, but no mention of a Doctor Frohman. It was probably just a typo on the schedule, but the Marine still felt it necessary to call it in. 

He touched a control on his suit that set his two-way to use the base's secure frequency. "This is Corporal Calhoun, at the main gate. I need to speak with Doctor Kleiner." 

"One moment," came the reply from the base communications officer. 

The Marine waited for about fifteen more seconds before another voice came over his two-way. "Doctor Kleiner here." 

"Hello, Doctor Kleiner, this is Corporal Calhoun at the main gate. I have a Doctor Gordon Frohman here to see you. Are you expecting someone by that name?" 

"Yes, absolutely. He should be on the schedule. I made sure to let base security know he was coming." 

"Thank you, Doctor. The schedule lists a Doctor Freeman. I figured it was an error but wanted to confirm with you first." 

"That's not right," said the voice at the other end, sounding very annoyed. "I don't know any Doctor Freeman. Why would I have said a Doctor Freeman was coming when I don't know one?"

 

"Sorry to disturb you, Doctor. I'll send him right in." 

"Thank you, Corporal. It will be exciting to see Doctor Frohman again. It's been twenty years since I last saw him, at graduate school." 

The Marine had already been moving to press the end transmission switch, and his mind was further slowed by the sheer boredom of the day and the fact that so many of his brain cells had already been lost to counting coin flips, so that he had already ended the call to the doctor before he had fully comprehended his last sentence. Twenty years? He looked down at the ID card, still in his hands. It listed a birth date of March 14th, 2157. Twenty years, indeed. He didn't think too many universities were in the business of conferring doctorates on toddlers. He began to reach for his assault rifle when he felt a sharp prick in his arm, followed by a sudden and overwhelming feeling of drowsiness. He tried to fight it, at least long enough to lie down on the floor, but gave way very quickly to the desire to take a nap right then and there.