‘The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.’ – Antonio Gramsci

(This is the Avalon Fleet Yards Mission for the events of April 12th, 2401: Frontier Day. Please see the parent mission for the fleet-wide overview of this Bravo Fleet event. While this BFMS mission is for writing in the Avalon Fleet Yards Command, and thus for members of the sandbox RPG, it contains relevant guidelines for writing on other Commands set at AFY)

Across the Federation, festivities are being held to celebrate Frontier Day. This includes at Avalon Fleet Yards, one of the largest hubs of Starfleet operations in the galaxy. While the biggest celebrations will be held at Sol with the gathering of ships from all fleets, AFY is not to be outdone. Frontier Day will mark the relaunch of the USS Edwin H. Armstrong as the experimental testbed vessel for the facility and the last Ambassador-class starship in Starfleet mainline service. A formal ceremony will be held in the main auditorium of Brahms Station, where senior officers and honoured guests will gather for refreshments, speeches, and front-row seats for the launch. Starships and fighters will fly an honour guard for the Edwin H. Armstrong’s launch. And all over the system, ad hoc celebrations will be held, from work teams taking a break to watch the Sol or Avalon festivities on a screen, to street parties in the heart of Sato City.

Guests will travel from across the sector to enjoy the festivities at AFY. This includes many staffers of the Fourth Fleet, as the campaign against the Lost Fleet in Deneb left many of its starships in need of significant repair or maintenance. As such, many ships of the Fourth Fleet are berthed in AFY dockyards, with their crews contributing to the repair work or enjoying shore leave around the Avalon system. Frontier Day is expected to be a shining light for them after the hard weeks fighting the Dominion.

Halfway through the celebrations, just as the Armstrong has launched, the Jupiter Signal from the Sol System will reach Avalon. Staff and residents of AFY aged 25 and below – or of equivalent physical maturity, depending on their species – will succumb to the activated nanites in their bodies, and become part of this new Borg Collective. They will lose control of themselves, be subsumed by the will of the Borg Queen, and unite in their mission:

Prepare for the Collective’s future. Secure control of Avalon. Detain potential drones. Eliminate all opposition.

 

The Event

The Frontier Day event at Avalon will last three weeks, starting OOC on July 17th. Any posts prior can be placed in the IC days or weeks running up to Frontier Day itself. From the 17th, the event will split into two phases:

– Monday July 17th: The Frontier Day celebrations at Avalon begin
– Monday July 24th: The Jupiter Signal begins. The Borg Collective assumes control of those infected with nanites.

The first week is thus focused on the festivities. Your character could be part of the main event on Brahms Station, in one of the street parties on Sato City, or somewhere else in AFY either working or celebrating. After that first week, the chaos of the Borg begins.

 

The Borg Outbreak

The Borg at Avalon have different instructions to the Borg at Sol, who are ordered to eliminate the unassimilated and ultimately seek to destroy Earth. At Avalon, the Borg are preparing for the Collective’s rebirth. They seek to seize control of AFY’s ships and facilities and will only kill those who stand in their way. Other unassimilated will be ignored, as is occasionally the Borg’s way, or they will be detained if possible. The Collective wishes someday to resume traditional assimilation and will need potential future drones.

This means the drones will be racing to control centres on the ships and facilities of Avalon. The element of surprise means they will enjoy rapid and early success; nobody at AFY is expecting the junior officers to take up arms and violently seize control. They will focus on locations like the operations centres of the disparate stations, weapons control facilities, and major dockyards. These they will seize quickly, and use the resources now at their command to lock down the rest of AFY.

Those who stand in their way will be met with violence. While the drones do not have Borg capabilities like adaptive shielding, they are vast in number and relentless. Organised opposition, such as by security teams, will be quickly overwhelmed. 

Those who do not try to fight will find the Borg do not hurt them – but they may not let them leave. Wherever possible, the drones will lock down Avalon and trap in place the humanoids they can detain for future assimilation. Ships, sections of starbases, and major centres of celebrations are likely to be trapped in such a way. Larger gatherings will be their priority for lockdown.

This means any response to the Borg will be on a chaotic and ad-hoc basis as pockets of officers, even ranking officers who avoided being trapped at Frontier Day parties, are forced to respond wherever they are.

 

What to Write

You have several clear options of the sorts of stories you can tell about your characters at Frontier Day in Avalon:

– They might be trapped somewhere, such as the main auditorium on Brahms Station, as the drones use computer controls and physical guards to lock down key areas.
– They might try to run or get to a place of perceived safety without being trapped by the Borg or perceived as a threat – perhaps the Borg will ignore people running for a shuttle; perhaps they won’t?
– They might try to fight back. Perhaps they will gather other party-goers and push to retake a location the Borg have seized control of, or perhaps they will try to stage a defence of somewhere they think the Borg will push towards, like another dockyard.

You have the whole of the Avalon system to consider in your writing. Remember to be mindful of the writing of others, especially if you want to depict events somewhere like the main facilities of Brahms Station. But you can have action in the streets of Sato City, write your characters trying to escape the Borg on Tucker Station, or depict the horrors of an underwater research lab on Avalon II who have crewmembers suddenly become drones as the facility loses contact with the rest of AFY. There are dozens of possible scenarios as well as ways of telling the stories.

 

Writing With Others

You can write a full story with your Team/Institute/etc at AFY without involving other members. But you are welcome and encouraged to write joint posts with others. This might be only as their paths briefly cross at the party or in the later chaos, or you might choose to team up IC and OOC to write an entire narrative of Frontier Day together.

If you do this, remember that the event lasts only three weeks, and the Jupiter Signal lasts only two. Do not get over-ambitious in this storyline. While you can write as much as you want with as many posts as you want, if writing with others throughout, make sure you set attainable goals. This might be writing a post a week in a three-act format.

For example, you could write three posts of the following:

– The Frontier Day party, written in the first week
– The chaotic outbreak of the Borg signal and escaping harm or detainment by the drones
– Achieving a small victory: freeing others, recapturing a control station, or getting to a shuttle to escape.

Obviously, there are ways to expand this format, but this is an achievable goal for a small group of dedicated writers. Remember that it’s okay for posts to be short and sweet. You can write solo posts about a character’s emotional reaction in your own time or even save that processing for the aftermath. It’s also okay for two or more of you to go hog-wild with multiple short, punchy posts a week.

Please be honest when agreeing to write with others about your capacity to commit. It’s okay to take the entire three weeks writing just one post about surviving the Borg but make sure everyone else is on the same page.

 

Limitations and the Ending

If something has been mentioned in a post by the AFY staff, you should not try to undo it. For instance, the Borg will seize control of Brahms Station’s Ops, and they are going to hold it until the end. This is because, from there, the Borg have significant control over vast swathes of AFY’s facilities. Their continuing to hold control of Brahms Station is integral to the threat they present as part of this story. Do not write your characters saving the day from a specific threat in a specific location identified by AFY staff without staff permission.

It will be possible to make more impact in lesser facilities, like Tucker Station. Please discuss with staff if you wish to write this so we do not have members writing contradictory stories. In this case, we mean the writing of major events like ‘restoring control of Tucker Station’s ops centre’. Wherever possible, we encourage members to write together, even if this entails planning and discussion for their stories to be compatible or complementary, rather than necessarily joint posts.

Eventually – after Augut 6th – Jean-Luc Picard and the crew of the Enterprise-D will stop the Jupiter Signal. It will come as if from nowhere, and all assimilated will suddenly recover their senses. Hundreds will be dead, Avalon’s facilities will be heavily damaged, but those challenges are for the future. When it happens, the crew of AFY will not have turned the tide or restored control of the major facilities; they will still be fighting a losing battle against the Borg. But they might, perhaps, have stopped the catastrophe from being as massive as it had the potential to be. Their efforts do not save the day. But they make it a little less dark.