The Commonwealth wasn't just an institution

There was something Dylan failed to think through before he spent the night in Marion's room.

Okay. There was more than one thing he failed to think through, but there's one thing that's important that occurs to him as he 's making his -- admittedly short -- way between Marion's room and his, and that is that, unlike Marion, he has a roommate.

He hasn't had a roommate for a very long time, especially if you discount the home he'd occasionally, when their schedules allowed it, shared with Sara on Tarn-Vedra. Admittedly, on his ship, there'd be Rommie to disapprove, because there's only so much privacy possible on a ship run by an AI, especially when she makes it her duty to know what's going on with you.

There's no shame for him in this, but he's also not keen on the idea of being interrogated by his still none-too-friendly roommate. Especially when he's still wearing last night's workout clothes. (He could, of course, have gotten new clothes from Marion's replicator, but for the short walk to his room, it hadn't seemed worth it.)

He's not sure what the time is, but he has a feeling it's a little too late to expect Lucie to still be asleep. He'd gotten ... distracted for a while before he'd said goodbye to Marion.

That's why Dylan's trying to be as quiet as possible when he slips back into room 748.

Dylan's not in Ten Forward when people's clothes start changing; he's in his room, sprawled across his bed reading one of Julian's books and taking notes on the flexi Trance had given him when he first arrived here. Building up his profile of the Federation, drawing parallels between it and the Commonwealth and, more importantly, drawing contrasts, has been taking up much of his time, when he can find the focus for it.

He does have other things on his mind.

He's set aside the PADD and flexi for a moment and headed into the main living area. He's standing in front of the replicator, because he's just asked for something to eat when ... something happens. Something that sets his senses straight to alert: another flash of light, like when he'd first arrived here. Reality doesn't shift around him, but his hand drops to his holster ...

Which suddenly isn't there. Instead, he's wearing a sheathed sword, and his uniform turtleneck and pants have been replaced by ... what? He turns away from the machine, heading back to his room to look himself over in the tiny mirror in the room to find that he looks like he's stepped out of an old Earth history lesson.

Like Lord Nelson or someone of his ilk.

That's rather a lot of ostentatious gold on the tailcoat he's wearing.

When he heads back into the living area to find the replicator's replaced the salad he'd asked for with something that looks like a bowl of confectionery, he glares at it.

"Lucie?"

Well, this is just great.

Earlier today ...

[ In which it is decided that none of the crew like zombies. Especially Beka and Dylan. TW for character death, violence, suicide themes. ]


The biggest surprise in the aftermath of the zombie attack on his ship comes from the ship herself. Rommie, who stood by him all day, even when he'd asked her to do other things. Rommie, who sometimes looks at him like she's just as confused by him as he is by Trance.

Rommie, who asks if she can speak to him alone and then leads him out onto the observation deck, where the stars are finally moving as they head towards a slippoint.

"When things got bad back there, I didn't think you were going to make it, and I realised something."

He thinks, then, that he knows where this is going. "I may be virtually indestructible, but you, you are..."

"Me, well, I just think I'm indestructible." He smiles, hands on his hips, teasing her like he would anyone else who said it to him.

But she's not anyone else. She's Rommie, and she's still new. Less than two years old in this form. New in this body, in this experience of being both a part of and separate from the ship itself. She blinks, smiles, and he recognizes the look she gets when she thinks something doesn't compute.

Even if it does.

"One day you're going to die, Dylan. And I care about you. Not just as a Captain, but as a person. I don't want to lose you. You're all that I have."

This conversation.

This would have been easier back in the High Guard days, when a captain was posted to a ship for four years and rotated off at the end of them, handing over to the first officer.

But he and Andromeda have been together longer than that.

There's no other captain for her and no other ship for him. But even if there were, he wouldn't want it. Not now. Not after she brought him through three hundred years in a black hole and brought him out again. Not after this time they've spent together drawing a line for civilization against the darkness that's fallen on the Three Galaxies.

Not after everything they've been to each other.

They used to warn captains, back in the day, what happened when their AIs became too attached to them. And vice-versa. But Dylan and Rommie ... they've been through things no captain and ship have ever faced before. And through it all, they've stood together.

"Rommie," he says, softly, shaking his head, "I can't promise I'll never die, but I promise you'll never lose me."

She may survive him, true, but if she does, there'll always be a place where she can hold onto him. She'd told him, once, that she didn't have a heart, that a warship was good for nothing but killing.

And he'd told her the captain was there to be the warship's heart. To temper her with the compassion her programming can't allow. But Rommie ...

She's learning those things herself.

Even if now, she's staring at him like he's an equation that's threatening to break space-time.

She closes her eyes, turns away, starts walking, staring into the gently moving stars through the window.

"How do you do it? Humans, how do humans do it? How do they make friends, have relationships?" She turns around, staring at him, her eyes pleading him for the answers. "Fall in love? How do they connect knowing that nothing is permanent, that even love dies?"

"You see, that's where you're wrong," he says, gently, stepping forward to close the gap between them. "Love doesn't die. It's the only thing that lasts forever. I mean, your body could be destroyed or run out of power." His gaze turns, staring out into the distance in the stars. "But when the universe ends and the last star burns out, the only thing left will be love."

He's spent so much time here, thinking about just that.

Staring out into space and remembering all the people he's lost. The crew who once bustled through the now-empty corridors of this beautiful ship. The ones killed at Hepahistos and the ones who made it but he'd never see again. His family, back on Tarn Vedra, lost to time, just like their planet. Comrades in arms. Even Gaheris.

And most of all, the love that still burns in his heart, the one he knows will still be there when all those stars are gone.

The one that means he knows exactly what Rommie's afraid of. Sara. Forever a part of his being, even after three hundred years.

When he looks back down at her, it's with a fond smile, but she's staring at him again, uncomprehending.

"I don't understand."

"Yes you do." And just like he would if she were human, he bends to press a kiss to her cheek. Her eyes are still full of questions as she looks back up at him, but he just smiles.

"Yes you do."

Your name or online alias: JK Ashavah
Your email: ashavah.jk@gmail.com
Another preferred means of contact: ashavah or ashavah

Character's Full Name: Captain Dylan Hunt
Character's Canon: Andromeda
Character's Journal Name: dreams_dont_die
What would you like your character's tag to be?: dylan hunt

In 300-500 words total, tell us your...
Character's background (their past and present):

Dylan was born on the now-legendary planet of Tarn-Vedra, capital of the Systems Commonwealth, in C.Y. 9745, or 4835 C.E.. He had a happy childhood in the minority human quarter of Vishana Tarn, with his mother, a high gravity shuttle pilot, and father, who worked at the Imperial Gardens. Dylan was entranced from an early age by the history and culture of his homeworld and the Commonwealth it represented, so it's little surprise he was drawn to the service of the Commonwealth.

He became an officer in the High Guard, the elite military of the Systems Commonwealth, and served with distinction as part of the Argosy Special Operations Service, its black operations wing. One of his operations involved rescuing a scientist, Sara Riley, from a Magog attack. On learning she wasn't trapped but was waiting for her experiment to finish, he destroyed the experiment, prompting her to tell him that her aunt, his mentor Admiral Stark, had warned her if she ever met him she'd either kill him or fall in love with him.

She did the latter, and the two began dating. Dylan later proposed to her and they began planning their wedding. Dylan would later say that Sara taught him everything he knew about love.

At the end of his Special Operations career, Dylan undertook a mission to capture a dictator that, to his mind, ended badly when the dictator was killed. To Admiral Stark, however, the ending was satisfactory, and she gave him his promotion to Captain and his new posting as the captain of the Glorious Heritage Class heavy cruiser Andromeda Ascendant.

For three years, Dylan, his first officer Gaheris Rhade, and the Andromeda ran largely humanitarian, peacekeeping, and defensive missions, which suited his natural inclination to prefer peaceful solutions backed up by military force rather than bloodshed in a crisis. Until the day he received a distress call from a system claiming to be under threat from a black hole. Expecting to help evacuate refugees, Dylan answered the call to find an ambush by a massive fleet awaiting him. Outnumbered and too close to the black hole to escape the battle, he ordered the crew to abandon ship and flew towards the black hole hoping to use its gravity to slingshot his way clear.

Rhade betrayed him and sabotaged the ship, the plan backfired, and the Andromeda became trapped. To Dylan, he only seemed to be caught a few seconds, but it was really 303 years. When the Andromeda was pulled from the black hole by a salvage ship hoping to claim her as a prize, Dylan was stunned to learn that a war had started the day he was trapped that destroyed the Commonwealth, and that everyone and everything he'd known was gone, except his ship. After fighting off the salvagers, he came to realize they were skilled and mostly fairly good people, and asked them to become his crew on a self-imposed mission to restore the Commonwealth.

At the point in canon I'm taking him from, it's around C.Y. 10088/5168 C.E., and Dylan is 40 years old (or 343 if you take a strictly linear approach). He's spent over a year trying to gather planets to join his new Commonwealth, with some successes and some failures. But it's more than a dream, now, it's a necessity, because the Andromeda has discovered a massive Magog ship with the power to overrun the Known Worlds if they do not stand together.

Character's personality:

It's been said that the main failing of High Guard officers was that they were too competent, too caring, and too brave. Dylan exemplifies this. The driving force in his character is idealism, to the extent that his crew tend to tease him for it, and comment when he tempers it with much pragmatism. Dylan dreams of restoring the role of the Commonwealth to "hold the line against the night", more important than ever now that he's seen the world without the Commonwealth.

Dylan's also extremely good at what he does. He never gets himself into a tactical situation without at least one plan to get out (usually two). His plans tend towards what most people might call a little crazy, but they usually work (flying into the black hole excluded). He's also very smart and intuitive about situations and problem-solving. He credits his way of thinking partly to his training and partly to the influence of Sara.

Dylan is sometimes suicidally brave, occasionally reckless, following the motto of Argosy Special Operations that the one hope of the doomed is not to hope for safety. Even though he's a soldier, he still prefers to avoid killing if possible, though some facets of his idealism have been tempered by the harshness of the world after the Fall of the Commonwealth. Sometimes, he has no choice but to kill or to fight. But whenever that's the case, it weighs on his conscience; he's better suited to humanitarian work than fighting a war.

In general, Dylan is friendly and comparatively informal; he prefers "Dylan" over "Captain Hunt", which is a good thing because most of his crew refuse to call him "Captain". He smiles easily, and is an officer and a gentleman, polite to new acquaintances. Threaten his ship or his crew, and then he's dangerously angry. He can also hold a hell of a grudge, like his longstanding anger against the Nietzschean race for the war that cost him everything he loved. Sometimes, he gets annoyed at the lack of military discipline and professionalism in his crew, but that mood usually passes.

He's also very charismatic, even charming, and often seems unaware of the fact, constantly protesting that he's a soldier, not a diplomat. He's particularly good with women and occasionally winds up in one-night stands, though his heart still belongs to Sara.

He usually doesn't show how much he misses what he's lost, but it still effects him deeply.

Character's skills/abilities/powers: Dylan's mother was a Heavy Worlder, which means she was genetically modified to handle high gravity. He's got very dense bones and muscles and is abnormally strong. The combination of his physiology and his Argosy training makes him a very good physical fighter, so good that some opponents refuse to believe he's human. He's also very fast, with quick reflexes.

I am pulling him from a point in canon well before he learns that his father was actually a Paradine, a member of a highly advanced race that has powers of time travel, teleportation, changing their appearance, psychic powers, and the ability to manipulate matter and energy. As he is unaware of his origin, he can't use these powers.

Should anything come up in gameplay to change this fact (since some of the other characters might recognise that he's a creature that can manipulate time), I am happy for him to be unable to use the majority of his Paradine powers thanks to Q and his utter lack of training in them.

Any special equipment your character is bringing along? This includes weaponry, magic items, etc.: His force lance (and some spare ammunition/effectors for it), which is the primary sidearm and melee weapon carried by the High Guard. Its primary uses are as a plasma blaster, to shoot smart bullets or drones, and, when extended, as a quarterstaff. It has several other abilities as well, including remote use, use as a stunner or taser, or to be set to an auto fire or counter-artillery mode, used as a torch, and used as a grappling hook. It's encoded to his DNA so if anyone he hasn't authorized to use it tries to, they'll get an electric shock big enough to knock them out.

He'll also have his High Guard uniform bracers with him. They look like simple bracers colour-coordinated to his uniform, with a screen on the left-hand inside wrist, but they're much more. They also include a built-in sensor/scanner, video communicator, computer stacked with High Guard intelligence, plans, and schematics, and a personal electronic countermeasure generator to defend against smart bullets.

He's also got a communications implant behind his right ear.

Are you bringing your character to ten_fwd from another game? If you are, which game?: Nope
If you answered yes above, briefly summarize how they were changed by and what challenges they faced in the climate of their previous game(s):
Why do you want to play this character in Ten Forward, and what do you plan to do with them? Dylan has invaded my brain and demanded to be played. He also has some great canonmates I'd love to play him with. The setting for Ten Forward is particularly well suited to Dylan because of the similarity of the Federation to his lost Commonwealth, which he will see as an exciting opportunity to further his mission. Also, it'll be nice for him to see a fully manned, mostly smoothly-running spaceship after the chaos that's life with his unruly crew on board the Andromeda Ascendant.

Writing Sample #1: Test thread with Trance Gemini.
Writing Sample #2 (optional): Test threads with Julian Bashir and Telemachus Rhade.