Sol-III on Sensors [New Year's Extravaganza]

I'm delighted you liked it! And that nothing broke, lol. I'm super rusty, and a lot of stuff here, like the different permutations of your potential artwork, was stuff I'd never learned how to do in the first place, so I had to learn it from scratch anyway. I really enjoyed brushing up on my Twine skills (such as they are), though, and it's good to know the results went down well too!



I imagined there's probably like one clefairy that wears horn-rimmed glasses and a tie who handles all their interactions in the wider world. Basically, I imagined the clefairy as playing by Bugs Bunny logic in a sci-fi world; they pull out costumes from nowhere and the world just sorta warps around them to accommodate them. That's why they all suddenly dress like art critics as soon as there's art around to critique. But they're also like, a weird cross between cats and toddlers, which is why their art is based on glitter and craft paper and 90% of their time is spent playing with whatever they can find.



It's definitely not a coincidence that the ship's cat is the sole survivor of the starship's original crew – or that cats themselves are being smuggled off Earth because aliens find them so cute they just have to have them as pets. To the extent that cats are referred to as 'Sol-III-alpha' and humans as 'Sol-III-beta', because when most of the galaxy thinks of Earth, they think of cats first and those odd self-destructive bipeds second. :V



It's almost literally Audrey II's plan from Little Shop of Horrors, but with less murder: arrive on Earth, become irresistible to every human that sees you, worm your way into every household on the planet. That's … kinda where the plans diverge, since the clefairy don't want to eat people, they just want to have their every need catered to by a horde of witless lesser beings, but still, it was this combination of insidious and 'this isn't even a problem really, is it?' that I really enjoyed writing.



That's their master plan! Nobody escapes the cuteness. But that doesn't have to be a bad thing; the ship isn't immune to their charm, in part at least because there's a human playing them (you can completely not interact with the clefairy at all, but it's designed to be hard to resist), but it works out okay for them, I think. Like it's good for them to interact with other people every once in a while.



I did mean for the ship to be a big part of this too, so you're not wrong to highlight it – the AI collective governing the ship and its mechs was envisioned as like an autopilot mingled with all the programmes that run individual systems (hence their use of 'we'), that accidentally formed a gestalt consciousness, expelled the ship's crew (violently or otherwise), and has since been taking transport/smuggling jobs (most of which are jokes, ngl) to cover the cost of fuel and supplies and to give them some sense of purpose. Their regrets are sorta tied to the act of expulsion in the logs and the very earliest job in the list, and I wrote the rest of the game from the viewpoint of a ship that was really penitent and regretful about what happened, whatever that might have been.

The clefairy might have conned the AI into caring for them, as they do everyone, but like I said, it feels like it did them good. I'd like to think that in future the ship will be a bit more hopeful in their future dealings with organics, now they know they can make friends – like, there's a marked difference between how they interact with the clefairy and with the beheeyem in that diary entry, for instance.

Anyway, I've talked about this poor traumatised spaceship for way too long now. I'm so glad you liked this! I kept thinking of new things to add, like tracking the kind of art you made and the dance you tried on the systems diagnostics screen, or charting declining oxygen levels on the same screen if you passed checkpoints while still having life support off, and it was a really fun, interesting experience trying to implement all that. I'm delighted it all paid off!