CANCELLED - Starbound · 10:53pm Jul 26th, 2021
As the title suggests, I have bad news for you all. Get it, and a plot summary, after the page break.
Welp, no use putting it off. Starbound is officially cancelled. I'm honestly disappointed that it's come to this, but I figure it would be better than letting it go on permanent hiatus, with those of you who cared just waiting with bated breath for what would come next, when nothing ever would.
As I always do, I'll lay out where things were going to go from here before I had to ax it.
So, from where things left off, I was actually a decent bit into the next chapter. Basically what was going to happen next would happen in three parts.
First, the pre-battle. Twilight would be deposited aboard the Valkyrie, plans would be made, the city would begin setting up defenses, and everyone and their mother would know and be aware that the USCM were about to betray Terra Stella and fire upon it. Timaeus would free Jack, a la Lando Calrissian, and would commission an infiltration group to steal aboard the Valkyrie and split into three teams. One would shut down the superlaser, one would cause as much damage as possible as a distraction, and the third group would escort Jack to rescue Twilight. Part of this third group would be Jack's friend Rory.
Second, the land battle itself. The USCM would begin landing soldiers and tanks and shit, and Terra Stella would start fighting them off with its peacekeepers, and also Fatal Circuit bots (a nice call-back to an earlier chapter). All of this so the black ops group could steal uniforms in the confusion and find a way to infiltrate the station. During this time, the station would fire its first blast on the city, but the city's shielding would hold, albeit at heavy cost.
Third, the rescue operation. The groups would split up and start doing their stuff. The rescue group wouldn't have to go far before they found out that Twilight had escaped on her own and was loose aboard the station. Jack would instinctively know where to find her because of some major implications of a bond between them. They would find each other toward the end of things and confront Drogun as well. Drogun would wound Jack in some way, I hadn't gotten that far and didn't have it set in stone, and then the pair would flee the scene, jumping to a random world in Jack's trackable ship. The station would fire a second time before the superlaser was (temporarily) disabled, and the third group would successfully cause some damage that the Valkyrie would need to flee from, especially when along came a coalition of several other groups to protect Terra Stella, led by Jensen and his crew.
After fleeing, Jack and Twilight would end up on an ice world, where they'd be forced to hunker down and share body heat while Twilight tried to fix Jack up, only to find that regular bandages and stimpacks wouldn't work. The USCM would track them down, Jack would knock Twilight out and send her warping off back to Equus to keep her safe, as well as forcing the ship to essentially factory reset itself so that all data was lost, and to lock itself down. He'd be captured and taken to the Rock.
At the Rock, he'd be tortured for information by the USCM, who want him to show them where Equus was. Part of this would involve him being injected with black stimpack, which would create an identical copy of his DNA. Then they would brutally murder him, and revive him using an unstable clone that lives in constant pain. The cycle would continue of him being tortured, killed, and brought back, and his clone bodies would grow more and more unstable. Eventually, Jensen and his men would infiltrate and set him free, because the Valkyrie had been fully repaired and they had been fed information that the group knew where Equus was, and someone they trusted needed to warn them. Jack would escape to Equus, only for the USCM to track him down and start to follow.
Jack would arrive on Equus, romantically reunite with Twilight, and then discover his clone body was about to die again. He'd be transformed into a permanent pegasus pony, taking the name Star Crosser in the process, to save his life. then the USCM would arrive. There would be a ground battle and a battle in space, where USCM troops would land and begin killing indiscriminately, while Jack would pilot the Ulysses with the intent to fire his warp into the Valkyrie's warp, creating a singularity that would utterly consume the battlestation. In the process, however, his ship would be shot down, he'd make an emergency landing in the hanger, and then use his matter manipulator to drag his ship's warp drive to the Valkyrie's reactor core, which he would then enact the same plan. Along the way, he'd fight Drogun a couple more times, before eventually sending him into the reactor himself. Anyway, Jack's too close and gets sucked in too.
As the battle on the surface ends, Twilight loses contact with him, and in a moment of despair, she rewinds and freezes time at the moment before he is taken away, teleports to him, and drags him back to the "present" moment in the future, saving his life. The USCM are beaten, gg ez no re.
In the epilogue, Equus would rescue Earth before its destruction, successfully rehousing everyone on a nearby planet, creating a peaceful bond between the peoples. At earlier points, I had toyed with a couple of sequels, one being a Metroid Prime sequel (which, if you know where to look, you can see me teasing that the USCM had found Phazon), and one that tied into the game as it is now, which would have seen Jack/Star Crosser and Twilight play the part of the player-character in a co-op game.
So that's what it was supposed to be.
With time and distance, I started to recognize plot holes that were in it, as well as bad concepts that I had never bothered to change. For instance, originally Drogun was going to be this massive anvilicious anti-racism religious strawman, and as time grew on, I started changing his backstory to more match Asra Nox's from the original game, only to find that it was too baked into his whole character and his actions by this point. Not to mention, my attempts at "hardening" the softer sci-fi of this story had backfired, and there wasn't much I could do to salvage it. With all of that in mind, coupled with my general lack of interest in continuing it as time went on, it was just best to let it be done. It was a relic from my time as a worse writer, and unfortunately, it will not be getting the rewrite treatment.
My apologies to those who followed the story for this long.
