Adventures of the Snowdrop

Cat has been working on grad school stuff - slowly but she still has plenty of time. She was delayed by getting sick last weekend. It was a weird little thing - she was really sick for like 36 hours, and then she was fine, just a little tired. Anyway, not much got done over the weekend. Just the absolute necessities. But now her references have everything they need to reference for her, and she has most of a resume and most of a personal statement. Those things are going to get hammered out this week so she can have everything ready to put into applications in one go. She's also studying for the GRE with Sean (big Sean, not Spud - Spud wouldn't help her very much . . . ), and some on her own.

Today was a Traveller day! Almost as much fun as DnD days! Anyway, two weeks ago, the Snowdrop (a modified noble's pleasure yacht owned by Sera Richelle Llewellyn, Baroness of Umkahkuu) was employed to make use of the not-so-famous-but-very-intelligent Professor Van Hawkins's latest experiments - aka chemically enhanced weapons and explosives. The thing they were supposed to make use of this on was a base for insurgents with a free-Earth agenda (not very popular in an Imperialist setting, alas). There were grenades, and a really big fire, and the ship's hired gun was badly injured (no one was surprised) and the engineer was almost killed (everyone was not happy - engineers are important! Not that hired guns aren't . . . ), and Sera Llewellan had to bad mouth the nightside starport manager. But everyone made it out okay in the end and they retreated back to another system - one far enough away to hopefully not raise suspicion.

There they played on the fancy space station. Drake Reed (the hired gun) got in a bar fight over a not happening pool game, Chester Mannix (the pilot) and Chad Ahron (the engineer) went shopping, bought toys, guns, and candy, and saw a news report about they haven't been caught yet for blowing up buildings elsewhere in the sector, and Sera Llewellan lost her artificially intelligent robot when some navy sneaks wanted to see what kind of info he had inside of him. After paying off the port security for Reed's misdeeds, and kicking them into gear to help with Sera Llewellan's problem, Captain Gerrick Ransly and the rest of the crew (minus the delinquent Reed, who was kept on the ship by the Baroness's hand maid and her tranquillizer gun) got together to muster out the robot from possible harm.

After a bit of speculative buying, the Snowdrop is preparing to depart to deal with some pirates several systems away, hopefully for more profit this time. I know everyone will wait anxiously to hear the continuation of the Snowdrop's exploits, to be continued three weeks from now, when people are mostly done taking stupid tests and things. (Cat won't be, but that's okay - the next Traveller game is the week before she takes the GRE - which isn't a big deal since she has plenty of time to prepare for both)

Discussions of the week: New nouns in Japanese since they've learned basic sentence structure, the syntax of African American English, resumes in Theatre Seminar (convenient, eh? It's supposed to be), and measured perspective in scene design.