Let’s get this wooly ball rolling then! Prompt Yan-
Pick a scene in your novel. Write it from the point of view of a generic, unnamed background character.
My current novel is Astronautica and in my current draft I’m about to jettison launch them off into space. So let’s go over that scene.
The Launch
Flashes-Rise-in-Brilliance watched as the crowd swelled and surged below her perch. The last few days had left the station truly discombobulated as everything in normal life turned to be centered around this, the maiden voyage of the Argo with her crew of heroes… and led by this nobody human captain? No one had even heard of him before he arrived and now he was in command of this ship?
She had, of course, come to watch everyone off. Flashes-Rise never missed a launch if she could help it. She had her camera ready, taking shots of the whole crew from every angle she could get. She’d paint them later on canvases nearly twice her size, to join the gallery she already had of crews on voyages. A private gallery, of course, and to be fair it’s hard to call it a gallery when most of the paintings were stashed in cupboards or leaning against the wall… but her best, or the ones of the most dramatic crews, were on the walls of the hive she shared with her mates.
This one would be a difficult composition, to be sure. They were neither the largest nor the most diverse crew she’d painted, but every time there was a difference in height like there was between His Arms Move Rivers and… well, everyone except maybe the tall fydontic, Unbending Tower, but especially the other tisitari crew members; well, positioning and giving equal weight became difficult. And to be perfectly honest, she was hoping Three-Seconds-of-Bright would see her snapping photos and give her a shot of his good side. The side where he wasn’t in the mech. And maybe he could fly by her hive sometime and…
Oh, they were stopping. The Stationmaster was saying something. Flashes-Rise had turned off her people translator; the crowd was too tumultuous and she could read anything of importance that was said later on. Sure she could have learned the language as so many of her hivemates did, but that felt like too much work. It looked like the speech turned into a conversation then an argument between the stationmaster and her son. A shame. They were both effective and efficient managers in their own way, even if they had trouble working together sometimes. She took a picture of Nikolas’s face. That slight glower was going to make for a painting the human women in the station would love.
Eventually, enough shots of the Argo crew stashed for later perusal, she turned to the crowd. There was an odd mix of faces here. Usually people were excited at a ship send-off. Of course, there were plenty of those too, but there were also quite a few troubled faces. Even some angry. She knew the arguments; she’d heard them buzzing around her before she’d turned her translator off and from the babbling noise below her, they continued. People muttering low that the stationmaster should know better; this mission was likely to end in catastrophe. Others assuring that with His Arms Move Rivers along, not to mention the skills of the rest of the crew, barring that human captain, they could overcome anything thrown their way. Some angry at the stationmaster; there was a rumor she was doing this on purpose. Very few credited that. What would she gain by throwing this crew and this ship away? Many argued that the potential glory and security was worth the risk. The Sun Humans were getting too bold and too confident. Best to teach them now that they were not the invincible, untouchable force they seemed to think.
For herself, Flashes-Rise didn’t see why this trip in particular got so much fuss. Didn’t they know every trip in space was full of danger? Even living up here on this station was a risk. But sometimes the risk was worth taking, wasn’t it? She certainly hoped they would come back safely- what a loss to the tisitari community if Three-Seconds-of-Bright and his brother didn’t make it!- but what was the alternative? Stagnation planetside? Without risk the tisitari and fydontics would never have found each other. She’d never have learned to paint. The skies would be bleak and empty. Let them fly!
She didn’t stay for the actual launch. She had what she needed, so she hopped down from her perch on a station beam and flew home, already composing the best arrangement for a crew portrait in her head.
