ALIEN: Manticore

IRaptus

I like the idea of a Fanfiction....department? Sub-site...whatever it would be, here on scified!!
GOOD idea!! :D

I know this isn't really the place but just for the vibe of HGL:

Really liked this game. Sad it went down the way it did.

Quote from HGL: "Remember the dead and fight for the living!"

Godzilla: King of the Monsters

You're welcome! :)

Tiwaz

Interesting armor in the pics! The shot of the Parliament House in London, yeah, I could see that in a world-war-Alien way.
Good quote, I have to say!

Thanks Godzilla: King of the Monsters I will most definitely read yours chapters and give some feedback!!! If you are interested I can PM you a link to my own Alien fanfiction?

Tiwaz

Looks like a great game, i haven't played it.

Dead Space is another game that has a great atmosphere similar to Alien..

@IRaptus

I know Death Space. Never played it but watched a full Let's Play. I liked it.

It's atmosphere is much like Alien indeed. 

ALIEN: Manticore is now a good ways past 60,000 word-count.

Work is ongoing with both editing and adding material.

I am working on a short-story as well, and will be posting a short excerpt from it presently. :)

ALIEN: The Silent Dark

'The Lander'

EXCERPT BEGINS---------

Katherine looked out the narrow window of the lander’s hatch at the barren, rocky landscape around the ship, her breath fogging the glass slightly as she stared out into the distances and tried to ignore the massive dome-shaped building in her view.
The barely-above-freezing temperature inside the lander was something that didn’t bother her in the slightest, but did have the benefit of somewhat annulling the olfactory effluvia from too many people living in too-close quarters for entirely too long. She raised a hand, a three-inch talon slid out from under her index-finger’s nail and she idly scratched a small ‘smiley face’ into the paint and underlying alloy below the lower rim of the window.
“Happy birthday…” She said very quietly to herself in a lifeless monotone under her breath, officially marking her nineteenth year of life as well as the third week trapped on the planet they’d landed on
There was tension in the air aboard the small vessel, thick and heavy, spiced with sheer desperation that continued to build day upon day. Supplies were dwindling, the thirty-odd year old ship’s electrical system was damaged beyond any hope of repair, and there was no other way off the planet they’d sought as refuge. They were going to die on the nameless world, and there was no way to deny it, and none of the crew were pleased by the inescapable fact.
For her crewmates, death would come from suffocation, as the air scrubbers wore out and could no longer remove the CO2 from the world’s otherwise breathable air. It could also come from starvation, she supposed, but it was more likely be the air scrubbers wearing out that would kill them. The water supplies were dangerously low, and while death by dehydration loomed, she knew that when the scrubbers went, death would come for them in mere minutes.
For herself, she was mainly concerned with food and water. The cold wasn’t a factor for her as much it was for her Human crewmates, nor was the air.
She’d been outside the ship, in the course of the excursions to pick through the wreckage they’d found in the vicinity of the creepy non-Human structure. It was during one such trip that she’d discovered the expired air scrubbers in her respiratory equipment, whereupon she’d been surprised as she realized she could breathe the CO2 laden air without any difficulties whatsoever. She would survive, somehow, on the lifeless world they were stranded on.
She looked into her own eyes in her reflection on the glass of the window, green eyes to phantomesque green eyes. She’d survived the past, she’d survive the present, and she’d survive whatever the future brought. This wasn’t a promise she made to herself, it was simply affirming a fact, she felt.

EXCERPT ENDS---------------

Godzilla: King of the Monsters

Thank-you for the compliments!!

I'm glad to hear that you've been inspired to do ALIEN fan-fiction, possibly in-part by my efforts!! When you feel it's ready, we'll be here to read it. Take your time, and think of writing as what it is...sculpting with words. There's other writers here who have some truly splendid and chilling works here as well, and reading those or re-reading them can help you develop your skills and help you get a grasp on the 'feel' of ALIEN.

The suspense part, is both Hard and Yet 'easy'. The trick is give hints, little 'precursors', then let that get buried in the goings-on until it's time for another.
Setting and Environment is a MAJOR element and your best ally. Description and detail is very important as unlike a movie, you can't 'show', you have to direct the reader's mental theatre and film-making. Just a good environment description can lend a good sense of suspense. ;)

Go for it Godzilla: King of the Monsters!!, It would be fantastic to see your writing style and Godzilla background crossed into an Alien fiction! I reckon it could bring a whole range of new ideas and concept into this verse!!

Blackwinter-witch congrats of cracking the 60,000 mark. Your writing is so polished and eloquent. I like what you've done to keep the sense of dread.  Nothing increases the fear factor and anxiety by dialling up detrimental environmental conditions and an expiry date lol.

"but did have the benefit of somewhat annulling the olfactory effluvia from too many people living in too-close quarters for entirely too long" - love the livid description. I could use it to describe my workplace hahahaha

IRaptus

Would you be kind enough to post some links here to you works so Godzilla: King of the Monsters! can find them?? :)

That invitation extends to everyone else who wishes to post links to their works here in my thread!! :)

Thank-You!! There's still a LOT more to do, adding and editting, but it's coming along, slowly but steadily.
The short story is a work to help me get a better grasp on the character I'll be introducing into ALIEN: Manticore, and that lander isn't there by accident. ;)Also, not much anziety if all's a-ok, right? :D

I'm trying to remember, to teach myself to involved all the reader's senses, and glad you liked the description!! :D
I know a few places that'd match this description also!

Godzilla: King of the Monsters

You're welcome!! Just remember, take your time with it, don't give in to any feelings of 'pressure', those are just 'ghost' sensations, no one's pressuring you.
I thought to mention that as it seems a LOT of writers put enormous pressure on themselves even when there's none from external sources. I'm really bad in doing that to myself, as an example. :)

ALIEN: Manticore

61000+ wordcount, AFTER trimming out the 'gristle', with work ongoing as I'm, starting the additions to the Story-Block section involving everyone's favorite Petting-Zoo planet:

LV-223!!!

Free Fifield Technique Ultra-Deep Pore cleansing and Makeover!!

:D

Short Excerpt; 'Meeting the neighbours'

BEGIN-----------

As the planet’s sun moved towards evening, Selinaehra was on the bridge, watching over her husband and fellow crewmate as they made their way across the landscape towards the lander in one of Manticore’s SDRT transports. She kept overwatch from the combat station on the bridge, in the event things went sideways for her husband and Declan, she’d display to the lander’s crew why they would benefit from better manners.
She had the ship’s utility lasers tied in to the combat systems, the Hydra Mk-8H point-defense-close-engagement weapons were deployed and on ‘hot standby’ along with the lasers.
She’d left the ship’s main armament alone, as the accelerator cannons were simply too powerful to use versus a target as small as the lander and as close in proximity as it was to them. The missiles Manticore had were likewise too overpowered for such a target.
She had selected the weapons specifically as she intended to use the ship’s armaments to protect her crewmates, not obliterate the lander, a good part of the landscape and them in the process.

END--------

I am officially 'Hiding' from ALIEN: Covenant for the time being. There's so much being said about it, good and bad that it's taking a toll on my perspective.
I won't be seeing it for a while, as movie ticket prices are insane, it's at minimum an hour's drive to the nearest theatre, etc, etc..

SO, for the time being, I'm hiding out in my stories that you all know I'm working on.

Splicing-in a whole block of stuff and also working on the tie-in short-story (which ain't gonna be that short)...that's where I am these days, eyeball-deep in Lore and the tones of Lovecraftian mystery.

ALIEN - The Silent Dark 'The Lander' will be done tonight, wih a bit of luck and I will be posting links to it. If not, it will be done in a day or so, worst-case.

It will be available via Google Docs and Scribd, and for Free $0.00 as it is fan-fiction.

It is a stand-alone short story that ties in to the main story of ALIEN: Manticore, introducing two new female characters who will be joining the 'Cast'.

ALIEN: Manticore is on-track to be completed on-time, so far...the real world has it's demands and we are in the process of buying a business, so delays might come about.

ALIEN - The Silent Dark 'The Lander' would not exist without the talents found here.

Alien: Covenant The Unofficial Animated Series!

They deserve a significant share of the credit for my story as without their works, it just simply would not exist.

ALIEN - The Silent Dark 'The Lander'

Here's the Tie-In short-story for ALIEN: Manticore. :)

Available in PDF on Scribd and Google Drive.

ALIEN: Manticore - Excerpt

NOTE:
"point-six byond light speed" is a nod to Star Wars but doesn't use the Star Wars Hyperdrive.
In this instance it refers to the percentage of a Light Year travelled per Sidereal Day.
In Manticore's case, at Top Speed (unladen) she can attain a Superluminal Velocity State of .68 of a Light Year/Sidereal Day, which is approximately 240X the speed of light.

NOTE 2:
NO I don't care what Covenant uses regarding 'Jump' drive, OR 'recharging'. That's an example of the badly-done Canon of the franchise and I won't touch it.

************EXCERPT BEGINS**************

" Sharie had dug deeply into the databases recovered from the main building and the number of ships that had been abandoned. Then, she’d run a correlative analysis of the Engineer’s ship-based navigational databases compared against star charts and navigational information from the building’s database. In a few minutes, she was staring right at it: The home world of the Engineers. She was as sure as she could be that she’d found it in the records and databases, and it was quite far away in terms of travel-time at least by the standards of Human hyperdrive technology.
The information recorded by the lifeboat’s sensors and some detective-work with extrapolation and correlation had shown where Dr. Shaw and the android went off to…and Sharie was looking right at it again on the small holodisplay she was using. Shaw had gone to the home world of the Engineers, which struck Sharie as being laudable, but also potentially suicidal.
One bit that troubled her was the indications that showed the Engineer’s home world to be not that far from a flight path to a potential colony world that a ship named Covenant had been sent to. She brought up the information on Origae-6, the destination of Covenant, and ran a course projection from Earth to Origae that compensated and backtracked the forty-odd years of stellar drift.
Sharie looked up historical information, glad that their Captain didn’t consider such to be a waste of computer archive memory. She was interested in all things pertaining to Covenant now starting with how the distant world of Origae-6 was first found as she placed no belief in ‘convenient’ coincidences with interstellar navigation.
More and more, the ‘Engineers’ and things relating to them kept rising up like spectres from an old grave in kids stories.
Prometheus travels to this moon to find the Engineers, thinking it was their home, and in fact it was some kind of weapons research-development complex, or close enough to qualify. Then, only a few years later, a colonizer is sent out along a path that comes close to the genuine home world of the Engineers.
Sharie chewed the end of a pen she’d been using to scribble notes with, and considered the statistical odds involved, she didn’t like the mental ‘taste’ of the answer she gave herself.
Someone knew something, and knew a lot more than they should be able to know if this moon they were currently parked on had been a genuinely ‘new’ discovery of Dr.’s Shaw and Holloway. The deep-range probes even back in the era of Prometheus would have easily been able to make a pretty quick trip out to this moon, poke around some, and then return to hypercomms range to report their findings. She looked up the specifications of all known deep-range drone probes from that era, and found likely candidates. In that light, she began to suspect the Prometheus mission had in actuality been a follow-up to a drone reconnaissance disguised as a first-run exploration mission. Those same models would have also been able to trek out to the world Covenant travelled close by to with reasonable speed, or much better than such if the outbound drone pushed it’s hyperdrive to the point of it being a one-way trip, and carried a drone for the return trip that was equipped with extremely long-range hypercomms.
Covenant had been lost, and no one had ever gone looking for it considering the distances involved and how slow the first-gen of hyperdrive ships were. But that was over three decades previous, and Manticore was as fast as she was big, capable of better than point-six beyond light speed, which made her one of the top-five fastest ships currently flying.
Sharie did some crude course projections, refined them with software, bundled up her discoveries in point-form and sent it all off to Sin’s phone, then went to deal with the hollow ache in her stomach from ignoring meals for almost twelve hours. "

******END OF EXCERPT*******

ALIEN: Manticore

Been busy and haven't done an excerpt in a while, so I figured this made a good teaser. :)

NOTE: This is still pretty 'raw' and has some clean-up editing and polishing needed, so read with that in mind.

***BEGIN EXCERPT****

“Okay people, final prep and checks. Selina and I will take lead. Declan, Katherine, you two stay with Smythe no matter what happens. He’s going to be busy with his equipment, that makes him vulnerable.” Sin said over the comms, getting assorted inarticulate sounds of general acknowledgement as his people did the final check over of their weapons and gear.
It took five minutes and he didn’t push, it was better to spend a few minutes at the present than find something that was overlooked later. When they were all ready, they all disembarked at once, eyes and weapons sweeping the area for anything potentially threatening, finding nothing. The barren landscape inside the building’s storm walls offered no hiding places for anything larger than a small mouse. Selina moved quickly to the rectangular entryways, scouting ahead to check for any problems in getting to the iris-like door that led into the building itself. A small detachment of drones waited by the door, evidence of someone on Manticore thinking to keep things covered for them.
“All’s clear, but grab some demo charges for the door.” She said over the comms.
“The drones never did find a way to open the exterior doors did they?” Smythe commented, sounding speculative.
“It’s weird, they must only have controls inside.” Katherine commented.
“Hmm, not so weird. It would be a pragmatic security measure, simple and quite effective.” Smythe opined as Declan opened a storage compartment inside the back of the SDRT van, took out a couple of blocks of yellow-and-black striped explosive along with a couple of stopwatch-sized detonation units and started to where Selina and the drones waited by the door.
“Here’s the keys.” He joked as he handed the explosive charges to Selina, working with prepping the det-units as she peeled the priming strips off the molecular adhesive backings, placed one charge on the wall on either side of the door.
Declan handed her one det-unit and he attached the other to the explosive charge she wasn’t working on, pressing the prongs of the det-unit through the outer wrapper and deep into the plastigel explosive beneath.
The charges and det-units set, they walked away from them with the drones following, up the slope towards the rectangular entryways and back to the SDRT where they waited with the others until the simultaneous blasts occurred, shaking the ground they stood on with an almost stingingly-sharp concussion even through the soles of their boots and the distance involved.
“You two sure you used enough?” Sin commented sarcastically over the comms.
“Well, we wanted the door open, and just in case there was something lurking on the other side, it’s either dead, injured so badly it’s a non-issue, or ran for it’s life.” Declan replied.
“Okay, let’s go see what there is to see. Get the trackers running, the sooner we find these people and get back to the ship, the better.” Sin commented to everyone in general, activated his own multimode tracker fixed to the accessory rail of his rifle, the small screen positioned beside the combat scope-sight.
“Manticore, this is the Captain, over.” Sin said on bother general and command frequencies.
“We hear you, Captain, over.” Elizabeth replied quickly.
“We’re just about to head in towards the access door. Keep our telemetry locked-in and tell us if there’s any interference. We brought relays, but there’s a lot of solid stone and passageways that could mess things up, over.” Sin said to her, leading the way beside his wife, eyes sweeping like scanners, missing nothing, experience kicking in as if it’d only been yesterday when he’d last needed it.
“King and I are keeping eyes on you all, Captain. Affirmative on alerting about signal problems. Sharie’s ready to jump in to address signal problems as much as can be done from our end, over.” Elizabeth assured him.
“That’s all I can ask for. Good to have you there with King and Sharie, over and out.” Sin said, the compliment sincere and he felt a good way to end the convo so he could focus completely on the situation the five of them were walking into.

The iris-door had lost most of it’s blades on the right side due to the explosives employed, allowing easier access for the five crewmembers of Manticore than could be had through the door found by the Prometheus crew where only one blade was missing.
As the first one inside the building, Sin looked up immediately upon clearing the threshold, weapon tracking upward as well. Seeing no possibly lethal surprises of any kind, he scanned the floor-level area with weapon-light, eyes and tracker. Behind him, Selina did likewise, but a more prolonged check as her husband was thoroughly inspecting the floor-level area and keeping the corridor extending deeper into the building from the entry vestibule they were in firmly in his mind, frequently shining his tac-light beam at a narrow setting down it’s length as he continued looking the place over.
Like Sin, she was looking for anything structural that might come down on them, or possible lifeforms that might attack for any of a dozen possible reasons. She found nothing, not even a crack in the massive and solid stonework, then switched her attention to seconding her husband’s inspection of the area.
Next through was Smythe, followed by Katherine and finally Declan. Declan noted approvingly how Katherine stood slightly ahead and beside Smythe on his left side as he was right-handed, covering him yet staying as much out of his way as possible. He didn’t doubt that Katherine would make it a very risky proposition for anything that attempted to attack the older man.
Smythe looked around, no weapon at the ready, instead he busied himself with a device the size of a large fishing-tackle box. It’s weight was managed by the strap from it’s top connected to his equipment harness as it took both hands to operate properly. It was a compact and highly sophisticated sensor-analysis suite in a portable package. It’s size relative to the technology of the era was a testament to the complexity of the device and it’s extremely wide array of functions and capabilities. He scanned the vestibule area with it, the results showing only bio-traces brought along with himself and his crewmates from the ship. As yet, nothing of note had found it’s way to where they presently stood.
Some partial traces were millenia-old, and so faint as to be inconsequential. It did note that the atmosphere was perfectly acceptable fro breathing, and the rate of decay in the small percentage of ozone that was present told him that somewhere in the building there was an operational air-processing system, still functional after millenia. Taking a moment, he rook out a relay module from the small satchel he carried, twisted the casing to deploy the antennae, peeled off the adhesive’s primer strip and attached it to a nearby wall. A flashing blue LED indicated it was functioning and he turned his attention back to the sensor system he carried.
Sin and Selina had moved ahead, to the mouth of the corridor that led deeper into the building, waiting there for the others to join them.
“Y’know, this kinda reminds me of our honeymoon.” Selina commented jokingly over the comms to Sin.
“I apologized for that, but it did pay for the wedding, honeymoon and a seriously indulgent shopping trip if I remember rightly.” Sin replied, a chuckle at the memories sounding in the comms.
Selina abruptly brought her rifle up and aimed down the corridor ahead of them, her weapon-light narrowing down to tight-beam focus as she sighted through the scope at the same time everyone’s trackers emitted an alert tone, showing a small, mobile signature ahead, just beyond the gentle inward curve of the left wall of the corridor.
“Contact. Saw a glimpse of something, not enough to tell what it was. Smaller than human-sized though.” She said tersely over the comms.
Sin sighted through his scope, scanning the area ahead, looked at the tracker’s monitor beside the rifle scope-sight, the signature was still there.
“Let’s have a look. You three stay a couple paces behind us, just in case.” He instructed Smythe Declan and Katherine as he selected a flechette round in his rifle’s grenade launcher magazine as a precaution against anything small, fast and potentially dangerous.
Sin and Selina moved together, staying close along the left side of the corridor, eyes checking the tracker screens as they made their way towards the signature-point. When they were close enough, they exchanged a look, a couple of hand signals, and Sin stepped out to the right side of the corridor simultaneously as Selina rounded the remainder of the left wall’s curve obscuring the signature-point and whatever was responsible for it.
The small humanoid creature was one of the same kind as the drones had discovered previously. It looked up from where it had been hiding to peek around the curve of the wall at them earlier in shocked terror as Selina stepped inhumanly quickly into view, while Sin also stepped into open sight of it, rifles aimed at it’s torso. It backed up a pace, turned and ran away in obvious panic at a semi-quadrapedal gait that reminded her and her husband of how gorillas and other terrestrial primates ran.
“That was anticlimactic.” Selina commented and started looking ahead down the corridor again, using eyes, light and tracker. There was a small cluster of contacts just at the edge of the tracker’s range.
“They’re definitely not very high on the ‘threat’ list. I’ve got a group of contacts up ahead, you have the same?” Sin replied, moving to stand beside her as they compared tracker displays. Smythe, Declan and Katherine joined them, Smythe’s larger and more capable piece of equipment gave them all a precise count of the contacts, and displayed what biosignature information it could detect at that range, consisting of pulse and respiration rates. Within it’s range, there were other signatures, too far away to determine anything beyond their presence.

******END OF EXCERPT********

I love the Lovecraft themes. I also like the ideas this has given me as far as availability strategy goes. Putting things on those sites, even if they're independent non-canon fictions, (not to mention Blomkamp's Oats Studios experiments) could really redefine fan-franchise relations that are so poorly developed.

IndyFront

Agreed!!

It also seems the ALIEN fanbase is determined to keep what we love about this universe alive. And while fan-fiction isn't 'canon', I've encountered a fair number of works here and around the web that show the fanbase's works are often more Canon-worthy than the studio-generated material. ;)

Blomkamp's Oats works, well, saw Rakka and it just blew me away!!

Really loving these excerpts! Love the descriptive imagery here. It all feels very "Alien-verse" and I am really looking forward reading more, finding out more about that distress signal, why the crew might have gone into hypersleep so urgently (if they're alive), and how the Captain is going to respond.

Also, regarding the beginning with the maintenance mice:

When you were a kid, did you ever sneak out of bed and go into the living room or kitchen while the whole household was asleep? Do you remember how spooky it felt? Seeing a version of the house that wasn't meant to be seen by human eyes? The still, empty, night-time version of your house, that only exists while you and your family sleep? You kind of get this chill up your spine that makes you think you should bolt back to bed at top speed and leave the house to its own devices until it's your rightful time to inhabit it again...?

Now imagine that but with flying, faceless maintenance mice, moving coldly and unnaturally about the living space.

Lol, that's the feeling I got while reading this the first bit. So, very well done! Can't wait to read more! :D