[Writing/Worldbuilding Premise/Prompt/Challenge] Science Fiction and Fantasy, Local Military…

(Full title, since it got cut off: '[Writing/Worldbuilding Premise/Prompt/Challenge] Science Fiction and Fantasy, Local Military Encounters Going South, World-Hopping, and Magitech Wank')

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Poster's Note: I'm not likely going to make much headway on doing my own take on this in the near future, so I just thought I'd throw it out there. Anyone's free to riff off of it. This is a bit of an unorganized brain dump (sorry,) but here's the premise:

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PoV 1:

• You are a part-time student assistant or intern at some kind of academic institution participating in one or more partner programs with your local government in a (mildly? mildly hard?) sci-fi future where humanity has mastered FTL space travel and communications and making AIs and spread some arbitrary range beyond Earth; your homeworld is somewhere between halfway to and closer to or on the frontier. One day, out of the blue, a mech pilot you know from the local planetary/system defense force or militia experiences some kind of random equipment malfunction in their ansible and long-range sensor suites during a routine exercise or patrol. All of a sudden, they start picking up what they first mistake as weird 'echoes' of a combination of static and gibberish, fading in and out of focus, coming in on a weird, hard-to-catch/-localize trajectory too far out into the bulk for them to have come from a ship mid-jump.
• You somehow end up being the lucky guy who gets to troubleshoot this but find in your 'post-mortem' (so to speak,) after checking the receiver hardware in question over and running the usual diagnostic tests on it, that the phenomenon turns out to be rather tricky to reproduce, at best. Something prompts you to leave the faulty transceiver on for a little while and log what it hears to pick through at your leisure. Later analysis starts making patterns jump out at you, but you're not quite sure what you're looking at just yet…

Meanwhile…:

PoV 2:

• You are the independently-minded and somewhat strong-willed daughter of a non-trivially wealthy and influential family in your nation's mercantile nobility in a multi-mooned science-fantasy world awash in both familiar technology and alternate-technline magitech and both wide-open scenic vistas and sprawling urban metropolises where bladed weapons are still in just as wide use as guns are. Chafing aganist the expectations people have for you in your place in society, you thumbed your nose at any prospects of an early marriage to some random suitor, instead taking tangential inspiration from one of your recent ancestors and going off to join the scout intelligence division of your country's resident fantastic military during a time of civil unrest fueled by the subtle (but beginning to escalate) advances of a foreign power.
• The past little while has not been fun. Early on in your cadet training, you go missing with several civilians and a local rookie police detective near the base where you're stationed after you stumble across and get caught up in a clandestine enemy prisoner-trafficking scheme meant to help swell the opposing army's ranks with unwittingly force-conscripted soldiers. You eventually manage to escape, only to find yourself stranded in/on hotly-contested occupied territory in the form of a frontier island in the middle of an ocean between your homeland and that of the antagonizing force large enough to have multiple settlements.
• Throwing your hat with the local resistance to survive ends up being the order of an early day of (your) (partial) freedom. Given where you are, it takes more than a bit of a hot minute of on-and-off guerilla warfare before local forces gather enough resources to retreat to a more defensible location, in no small part helped in doing that by your home country's cavalry getting its act together. You gain much experience, including in counter-intelligence and code-breaking, during your unplanned exile.
• On the way back from that madness, your naval convoy first has to run a ragtag blockade, then runs afoul of at least one pursuer. While fleeing from the latter under fire, you catch a glimpse of a signal anomaly at the far fringes of your one or more antennas' range by sheer chance. You can't do anything more than log a recording of the event and move on amidst the chaos of the escape you've joined, but it bothers you, so you make at least a mental note to come back to it later.
• Inspecting the resulting signal trace prompts more questions than answers. Its profile doesn't resemble one given off by any known nonlocality-exploiting transceiver, none of which don't use magic, but looks too clean to have involved any. Even if a mundane transmitter could produce a signal like this, it would use known protocols; this doesn't. You discretely relay what analysis you've already done to the chain of command upon your return to friendly territory alongside your official report.
• Command agrees that you deserve some shore leave to visit your folks after being separated from family for so long, but you insist on being kept in the loop on anything anyone else figures out concerning the discovery that dropped itself into your lap and even pitching in work on it remotely when you can, even as it's all kept under the radar. You join the secret crash team assigned to the project of further analyzing your findings in full once you get back. (At some point, you all catch a smidge of a lucky break: even though you have to decipher the protocols used from scratch, some of the traffic you see later using settings similar to what made you happen across the first irregularity turn out to be unencrypted. It's not much, but you think attempting to reverse-engineer the chatter you're now eavesdropping on might lead somewhere…)

The magical world makes their string of breakthroughs in deciphering the other side's emissions first, then (cautiously) moves to initiate first contact after doing some initial anonymized network reconnaissance (and learning some English and about PoV 1's home's culture in the process.) The latter and others on his side nearly got 'caught with their pants down,' as the saying goes, on this, but talks begin and discourse proceeds apace…until one such session gets interrupted violently and cut off when PoV 1's home settlement gets attacked by local insurrectionists or bandits or some kind of larger antagonizing force; in any case:

• Damages run high.
• The locals scatter to regroup elsewhere.
• PoV 2's first contact (PoV 1) takes a chance for whatever reason and makes a hasty, partly blind jump, retreating across the bulk to the other world without properly getting the chance to send notice of this in advance of his arrival (despite having just been in touch with PoV 2's world.)
• Adventures ensue, but PoV 1's home does recover, and he gets to return there in the end.

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Some final remarks:

• For the magical world, I might take a bit of inspiration, including aesthetic cues, from the follwoing series/franchises, perhaps among others:
  • Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha
  • Xenoblade Chronicles
  • fault
• Also, as I've envisioned things, at least as of now and to start with, my rendition of PoV 2 might share some traits of themselves with:
  • Sword Art Online's Asuna Yuuki.
  • 86: EIGHTY SIX's Vladilena 'Lena' Milize.
  • Other characters like them.
• I'd like comments on (at least:)
  • How one might be able to go about reverse-engineering signals from a civilization which originated on Earth, even if future communications protocols have to get speculated about. (In particular, have fun figuring out how one would even begin to see anything as anything other than raw numbers, or even just bits/qubits, without knowing the first thing about any kind of text encoding, let alone Unicode, when you don't use the same language/script and don't have the fonts for those.) (Note: I know a not-uncommon way I've seen to begin bootstrapping communications during first contact in at least a couple places is to have one side start beaming the other the elements of some simple mathematical sequence, like the Fibonacci numbers, in the form of a sequence of pulses for each of them encodied in unary, to start with, but neither side wants to alert the other to their presence until they're sure what they're seeing here.)
• Some additional authroial administrivia:
  • My version of this:
    • Has quite a bit of fleshing out to go through to become more than the sketch it is now.
    • Will get its own thread when I'm ready to start one. I'll post a link to it here when I've done that.
    • Involves PoV 1 and some other characters (though not PoV 2) getting gender-/sex-swapped, male-to-female, given what I've had brewing in my head up to this point.
  • (That aside, somehow I can't help but picture one of said characters endure the 'shopping trip of doom,' hah-heh.)
  • Again, though, I don't mind at all if somebody else uses the bare bones of this post as the basis for something else of their own.

 

I made the other thread for my version of this:

[Early/Nascent Pre-Alpha][WIP][Staging][Worldbuilding] Swords and Sourcery (Title Tentative) | Questionable Questing

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Note to self: The way things are now, there might be some details here I should really move over to the other thread even if this one stays alive. (In particular, minimizing references to what's more germane to my other thread to the point where I can just omit them when cross-posting would allow me to mirror this first thread to SpaceBattles where I meant to start it in the first place.)