[HICHE] ADKoPD: Episode 23, Parked in Hyperspace

A silly title for a silly episode idea, easily the shortest draft yet and currently the third-shortest overall. For some reason, my mind told me it was some sort of a reference to something I’d heard before, but…yeah, I got nothin’. Welcome, friends, to Episode 23 of “A Different Kind of Pegasus Device”.

[G-Docs Chapter Link – Parked in Hyperspace]

We start with a “Previously on” reminding us that the Spectroans’ flagship vanished mysteriously around the time the city hid itself, clearly for no plot-related reasons. A team of backgrounds are on a mission to a random planet, grounded Stargate, and the only notable thing about them is that three of the four have yellow coats and blue manes. Yes I did fill in the cast list for this episode rather late in the story’s planning, why do you ask? Nothing important happened, aside from Goldengrape finding an ‘interesting’ plant in a cave, so they try dialing back to Atlantis but the Gate fails to connect. Crystal Pony Rubenstein (the only one out of color-code) fidgets with the dialing pedestal’s control crystals until it works. He radios ahead before he, Raindrops, and Lemon Hearts step through. Meanwhile, at Atlantis, no word has come through the Gate.

The Expedition team wakes up in the halls of a spaceship, their wormhole having intercepted a large bubble en route. They hear Vinyl respond, suggesting the Gate be shut down if they’re not coming through, and Rubenstein calls for everyone on both sides to stop. Quick rundown, not sure when or how they’ll find all of this out. This ship is the Spectral Shadow, the lost Spectroan flagship. It’s empty. It’s drifting. And it can’t be piloted. It’s utilizing a unique propulsion drive, using a bubble of hyperspace to shield it (similar to the solution to SG-1’s “Grace”) as it enters and travels through subspace, the medium of communications and wormholes, which matter usually can’t exist in while fully integrated (all completely my original idea). And it’s floated quite by accident into the path of the wormhole between the planet and Atlantis, catching the travelers (similar to intercepting ring transporters in SG-1) and trapping them aboard. The wormhole is ‘propped’ open by the bubble, but will shut off after 38 minutes like all Stargate wormholes, leaving the ship to wander until another wormhole goes through it, easily a-trillion-to-one odds. Oh, and the place is just as radioactive as Spectros was. And at the same time, Goldengrape has a comedic B-plot trying to deal with the vine-like plant he found in the cave that, upon bringing a sample out into the sunlight, starts growing uncontrollably like that plant infesting the SGC in SG-1’s “Zero Hour”. Not much more to say about it here. Did I mention that the bubble around the ship also delays radio signals by ten seconds each way?

Following Spectros itself, the Shadow’s design is lifted from the prior-mentioned Dinosaur King villains’ ship. The Expedition finds its logs, discovering the playback of its fateful mission, the short version being that they leapt into a small Wraith fleet and noscoped all the Hives, but the many Cruisers broke their shields and damaged their engines, so the ship drifted into its hyperspace window on momentum and has just been going like this ever since. The swarm of Darts beamed aboard a small army of Wraith after the shield fell, but after killing the Spectroan crew, they succumbed to the radiation and over time it’s disintegrated their corpses completely. This encounter reveals the Achilles Heel of the Spectroans: they only saw the major Wraith ships as threats. Because they primarily employed precision radiation beams (because that sciences) to deliver massive payloads to singe targets and cripple enemy fleets swiftly, few of their weapons could effectively counter large numbers of small ships at once. Their ego led them to sacrifice the other Crystal cities, confident they could destroy the Wraith alone, but their lone flagship quickly fell to the Wraith’s advantage of quantity over quality, the reason they were winning the war against the Crystal Ponies (and Ancients in SGA) in the first place, leading to their inaction since.

I haven’t been discussing the events of the plot much, see if you can guess why. Raindrops finds a glowing strand passing though a hallway, the motion of the ship making the strand trap her against a wall before she touches it and is sucked back into the wormhole, exiting into Atlantis. They’ve found their way out. The new problem is that the wormhole’s almost past the back of the ship. And as Goldengrape’s plant starts saying, “Feed me, Seymour,” he dives through the Gate and arrives on the ship, too, further complicating things. Rubenstein only gets the others off before the ship drifts out of the wormhole, but after a brain blast he takes an onboard Pod Ship (single-pilot fighters we saw in the battle replay, their version of Puddle Jumpers) and flies it into the wormhole strand as it’s about to both pass out of the bubble entirely and disengage by timing out. All but the tip end of the ship safely makes it out of the Gate at Atlantis before the wormhole shuts down, but that was the main propulsion, so it’s basically just dead weight for now. Still, the bigger hunk of Spectroan technology will help with the Spacegate remote and Crystal Stinger in the future.

More lore than plot again, a clear sign of an unpolished early idea. In a full version, I’d have tried to structure it so the bulk of the word count was working through the unknown situation and uncovering the mystery of the lore dump featured in the draft. Join us next time with the short but ominous-sounding adventure, “Dissension”.