Versus thread (rp)
is a Play-by-Post Game held on the Star Trek Online forum started by grandnaguszek1 on August 27, 2014 because he was bored.
The scenario: Your ship crashes on a strange planet and is destroyed. You manage to survive and gather 4 pieces of equipment. You then find out that there is a spaceport with a ship landed that is 300 kilometers away. The problem is that you are not the only one trying to get to it. You have to compete with other players as well and only two of you can fit on the ship. Players either need to work together or kill one another to get to it. Every day you survive, you travel 20 kilometers towards home.
The players:
- worffan101, playing the legendary Dahar Master Kang (Star Trek: The Original Series: "Day of the Dove", Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: "Blood Oath"). Equipment: A bat'leth, 10 days' food, a medkit, and stolen Hirogen stealth armor.
- artan42, playing Romulan Spy Agent 007. Equipment: One disrupter Rifle, one Plasma Pistol, 1 stealth unit, and 1 medical and provisions pack.
- ryan218, playing his game character Klingon General Torpal. Equipment: 1 Disruptor Pistol, 1 Mek'leth, 1 dk'tagh, 1 set of emergency rations and a dermal regenerator.
- StarSword-C, playing his Original Character Captain Kanril Eleya. Equipment: MACO battle rifle and armor, tricorder, and a standard emergency survival kit from the ship.
- locutusofcactus, playing a Medium-Aware Undine captain. Equipment: Enough isomorphic injections to change appearance four times, emergency rations, a personal shroud generator, and a pillow.
This work provides examples of the following tropes:
- Alien Non-Interference Clause: Eleya grumbles a bit about the Prime Directive after Kang stun-snipes a priestess to stop her from performing a Human Sacrifice (she was trying to avoid interfering too much, but they were low on water and needed to trade). But then she considers that they may have deterred them from performing more sacrifices in the future, which is probably a net positive.
- Battle Couple: Defied after Eleya and Kang travel their first hundred klicks.grandnaguszek1: The next day the two of you continue your journey through the rainforest. You then stop for a break when Kang realizes that Kanril is looking at him with a wild look in her eyes....just kidding, just kidding. Please don't repeat the story of Kahless and lady Lukara.
- Cut His Heart Out with a Spoon: After the Ferengi Yek drinks all of Kang and Eleya's water, Eleya has Kang cut one of Yek's fingers off and then says that next time it's his hands and feet, and that they can probably get a good five liters of water by draining his blood into their water purifier. Yek is much more cooperative after that.
- Cutting the Knot:
- Some natives are about to sacrifice a captive to appease Eleya or something. Kang's response is to stun the priestess with Eleya's rifle (he'd borrowed it).
- How do you get around Borg adaptation? Do you do some kind of crazy technobabble? Not if you're Eleya. She jams her rifle through the shields and then fires. (Note that the drone in question was distracted by trying to assimilate Kang at the time.)
- Enemy Mine:
- Averted with Eleya and Kang, the first two characters to meet. The two of them are pretty genuinely working together because they like each other.
- Played straight with the other two. Torpal initially tries to kill 007. 007 shoots him nonfatally in both legs and gives him the option to join up or face a Coup de Grâce. Torpal grudgingly agrees. Breaks down almost immediately when they run into Jem'Hadar and try to use the other as bait. 007 comes out on top and Torpal dies.
- Fresh Clue: Played for laughs.locutusofcactus: The Undine captain looks down at the tracks in the sand. "Hmm... it appears that my competition is a good ten pages ahead of me."
- From Dress to Dressing: Eleya tears a strip off of Kang's Honor Guard cape for a field-expedient sling after he gets stabbed in the shoulder by a Hirogen.
- Genre Savvy: Before investigating a ruin in the jungle Eleya thoroughly scans it with her tricorder first.starswordc: No sense ending up like so many Indiana Jones sidekicks by walking into some booby trap that miraculously still works perfectly after eleventy-thousand years.
- Gratuitous Foreign Language: Kang calling Eleya "bajorngan" instead of "Bajoran". Also Eleya originally greeted him in Klingonese:"QaHlI’ta’ jItlho’, Kang, K'naiah puqloD. Daqvam wImej."trans.
- Indy Ploy: At one point StarSword referred to Eleya going into "Crazy Improvising Bajoran B***h" mode. The end result of that particular improvisation was her singlehandedly destroying a Borg probe and a tactical cube and rendering the entire system impregnable to the Borg. The DM gave up and Dropped a Bridge on the Borg Queen offscreen.
- Medium Awareness: locutusofcactus' Undine. In separate incidents:locutusofcactus: The Undine captain looks down at the tracks in the sand. "Hmm... it appears that my competition is a good ten pages ahead of me."locutusofcactus: The Undine captain looks for an ant colony to step on. Figuring that he can build a shelter from the storm with all the lock boxes that will spawn from the ant corpses.
- Misplaced Wildlife: Lampshaded.grandnaguszek1: You begin your journey by going through a large swamp. When you have walked for a mile or so deeper into the swamp, you find that it is crawling with large Aehallh worms. What do you do?
starswordc: First I try to figure out what the hell an aehallh worm is doing outside of its native habitat, that being a desert. :D - Mucking in the Mud: Eleya and Kang materialize in a swamp, and join forces after she gets stuck in the mud and he runs across her and rescues her.
- Shout-Out: Eleya has a habit of this:
- Her first thought when Yek gets gunned down by a Hirogen is to go through his pockets and look for loose change. Turned into a Brick Joke a bit later after they fight off the Hirogen and she's searching the bodies:starswordc: Little bastard didn't even have any loose change.
- Just to be clear, Eleya is, of course, wearing full body armor. She is not a moron.
- Eleya quotes Ganner Rhysode in Star Wars: The New Jedi Order — Traitor verbatim in a Badass Boast to the Borg queen."I am Eleya. This threshold is mine. I claim it as my own. Bring on your thousands, one at a time or all in a rush. I don't give a damn. None shall pass."
- Her first thought when Yek gets gunned down by a Hirogen is to go through his pockets and look for loose change. Turned into a Brick Joke a bit later after they fight off the Hirogen and she's searching the bodies:
- Sliding Scale of Cooperation vs. Competition: Falls under "dynamic alliances". Player characters who encounter one another are free to work together or try to kill one another, but according to the scenario only two characters can actually get off the planet. How this shakes out varies: Kang and Kanril Eleya are a solid team, minus some occasional bickering, while Torpal and Romulan Spy Agent 007 did an Enemy Mine and briefly engaged in Teeth-Clenched Teamwork before each tried to use the other as bait for some Jem'Hadar and Torpal ended up getting vaporized.
- Translator Microbes: Eleya has the idea to have her and Kang reprogram their universal translators not to automatically translate Klingonese (since they both speak it), enabling them to use it to confer privately.
- Villain Protagonist: 007. Upon encountering the same village with the priestess Kanril and Kang dealt with earlier, he vaporizes three of the villagers and then tells them to help him.
- We Will Not Use Stage Makeup In The Future: Averted via Eleya improvising. At one point she smudges some dirt over her face to disguise her nose ridges and borrows Kang's cape to hide her more advanced tech from some Bronze Age native humanoids.
