Across the known galaxy, people are vanishing. Beds go unslept in. Journeys stop halfway through because the person taking them is suddenly somewhere else, somewhen else, or otherwise unavailable for follow-up questions.

While most of the fleet is busy locating the ‘Displaced’ and, with luck, shoving them back towards the correct coordinates in space-time, Starbase Bravo has a different problem. Doppelgangers. Alternate-reality versions swapped in with little regard for timing and courtesy.

This is, for several fairly obvious reasons, a problem.
It’s bad for daily operations aboard Starbase Bravo. It’s bad for morale, and for anyone who prefers their friends, family, or coworkers to remain the exact version of themselves they started the week with.
It’s especially bad because it puts the station squarely in the sights of the Loom…

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Starbase Bravo In Play

​Life on Starbase Bravo is currently built on a very simple principle: if you see someone you know, the first question is no longer “How are you?” but “Are you really you?”

Socially, paranoia is spreading slowly but steadily, especially among the civilian population.

This has done very little for morale and even less for daily operations and efficiency. Meetings begin with awkward pauses and end with security reports, and Department heads have discovered that ‘staffing issues’ can, in fact, cover a much broader range of catastrophes than previously imagined, and somehow, the station still has to function.

Hanging over all of this is the Loom, and with it the idea that there is not merely a crisis to be managed, but a contamination to be noticed.

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Story Prompts

Rather than a Creative Writing Roulette, Starbase Bravo is offering writing prompts for the duration of the Fleet Action. These can be claimed by any active member by sending a DM to Brennan (@enigma_tales) and can be written as solo stories or collaboratively.

As always, you are free to create your own scenarios and invite people to collaborate. 

Varo of Bolarus​
Ambassador Varo of Bolarus will admit that something about the station looks a little off, but she is not buying into the suggestion that she’s been magically whisked away to a universe where interstellar negotiations aren’t generally finalized by group marriage. Not when Ambassador Glarr and Ambassador zh’Qoll have been putting this off for weeks! She is not taking off the crown jewels of the First Mother and leaving the arboretum until the ambassadors have shown up and said their vows in front of at least three witnesses. Only then will she play along with your silly alternate universe fantasy.

Lieutenant Raddi
Lieutenant Raddi, callsign “Bishop”, went through vahar’ai in the prime universe ten years ago and is one of the best pilots in Starfighter Group SB4-Tango. The Raddi who just impaled two pilots with spines and stole a Starfighter seems to have gone through vahar’ai just ten minutes ago. She is enraged, confused, and on her way to who-knows-where. No one knows if she’s still a pilot in her home universe, or even if the Kelpien are predator or prey to the Ba’ul where she came from. The only certainty is that she must be caught.

Doctor Walter Anton (assigned to Octavian Jackson)
Doctor Walter Anton has been acting unlike himself in ways that would be reassuring in any other person and deeply alarming in him. He makes sustained eye contact, remembers colleagues’ names, thanks people unprompted, and speaks like someone who has suddenly discovered emotional regulation and basic social grace. A medical scan explains the problem when it reveals that this Anton is not the real one, but a doppelgänger. You are tasked with escorting him to a secure location, which would be straightforward if he had not, in the meantime, fallen hopelessly and inconveniently in love with Ricardo Schön, Anton’s long-suffering lab assistant. Unfortunately, this means your assignment now includes interrupting what appears to be a painfully sincere romantic dinner between Ricardo and a man who looks exactly like his supervisor but actually has a heart.

Ensign Dosarna (assigned to Traan)
Someone has been poking around in the Fourth Fleet archives. Worryingly, they seem to be attempting to break the heavy security encryption on the activities of Frontier Day and the latest Borg Incursion. The latest reports place an Ensign Dosarna in the station’s library, accessing files related to transwarp drives, most concerning? The Ensign Dosarna of this universe never made it out of Frontier Day. The Security teams of Starbase Bravo must find the ensign before they gain access to data that could fundamentally alter the fate of an entire universe.

SS Celeste Maru
Three days ago, a civilian freighter on autopilot docked at Starbase Bravo. No comms, no crew, no message. The SS Celeste Maru appears in perfect condition, except for a slight variance in its quantum signature; unfortunately, its ship’s logs are buried in corrupted data, and only a single word is retrievable through the sputtering screens. ‘Loom.’ The engineering teams of Starbase Bravo must get to the bottom of this ghost ship’s appearance before they, too, are at risk of disappearing.

Quantum Fluctuations
The disappearances of crew members were barely noticeable at first; on a station as big as Starbase Bravo, you can go days without seeing some people. Unfortunately, the operations team is now short-handed and vital systems are starting to suffer. Work teams across the base are plugging holes as best they can, but now the very fabric of the station seems to be working against them. Cargo bays age by centuries, deuterium tanks become as empty as the day they were installed, and crew quarters appear and disappear, leaving strange and unusual rooms in their wake. Before each change, a quantum signature appears momentarily, and the already exhausted operations team must find a way of adapting Starbase Bravo’s systems to protect against these quantum fluctuations.