Star Trek: Theurgy

[ PWO Rihen Neyah | Vector 01 Hull | "Helmet" Exterior | USS Theurgy ] [Show/Hide] Blinking away the salty egesta from her eyes, Rihen Neyah tried to breathe deeper. Nonetheless, the nausea remained. "I'm... almost done," she said inside the helmet of her EVA suit, chiding herself because she wanted to repair her allotted hull damage and not just quit because she was feeling a bit ill. The skin of her nose was rubescent by the heat, glistening with perspiration, and her eyes were dry like paper no matter how much she blinked. Likely a fever peaking after having felt fine when she began the shift. Her arms, as weak as a newborn's, still moved when she made them, but she felt that her entire body was slick with sweat inside the suit. Of course, she'd heard about Virus 117, but she was in denial. Well, perhaps she wasn't - already suspecting she had contracted it from the Resolve crew. Yet even if she had, she was not about to leave a job half-finished. She was almost done, and even if it seemed like the gloves on the suit were getting stiffer around her fingers, she could still push her thumb down on her plasma torch's trigger, and that was good enough. Just a little more... Suddenly, the hull became brighter, and Rihen raised her heterochromatic gaze to the nebula. The vertigo or the motion almost made her eyes roll. The crepuscular sky above Vector 01 was filled with cloudy maelstroms - moving on winds unlike she'd ever seen in Suraya Bay or Nimbus III. Desultory, her eyes next discerned the umbrageous surface of the hull before her, whereupon spectres of malign fire danced. An explosion? she thought. How could she not hear any susurrous anlage of fire? She had momentarily forgotten that she was in space, and that there was no sound. Then, she saw the origin. Her mismatched eyes widened to the sight; fiery effluvium expanding, a silently roaring ebullition larger than her, and the sinuous motions of the molten flames.  A pocket of sirillium gas had just detonated, expanding towards the surface of the hull she stood on. "Oh, no..." she said, but before she managed to contact anyone, there was a voice heard inside her helmet. [This is Crewman Fok in Work Bee Zero-Nine to all engineers.] The voice sounded brittle, as if on the verge of carefully contained hysteria. Fear barely tethered. [I represent the Devoted, and h-here are our demands. Unless Captain Ives resign, and Sarresh Morali is m-made new Commanding Officer of the Theurgy, I will detonate all the sirillium around the hulls. No more can we fumble blindly, dying because of Ives' ignorance. Let Morai thwart the enemy... and lead the way home.] Screaming, Rihen had dropped her torch from her hand and started to run away from the firery cloud, but her legs weren't working as they should. Perhaps it wasn't her suit that was stiff, but her limbs swollen. "Neyah to Kalmil!" she panted, reporting to the only Chief outside the ship, "I can't get away!" [Inform the Captain that h-he has ten minutes, but that's all. We are listening on this channel.] Rihen cast her brown and blue eyes back once more, realising it was too late, and threw herself down unto the hull. Yet that meant her boots were no longer magnetically sealed to the surface. Still screaming, the shock wave of the conflagration swept her off the hull, leaving the back of her EVA-suit burning - the air trapped inside the suit's layers set alight.

• The Character indicates which crewperson is responding. Many Theurgy writers have multiple characters on the ship and also write disposable NPC characters at times as well.
• Location, Deck, and Vector help place the exact location where the post is. While locations such as the main bridge may be obvious which deck and vector they are, there are many locations aboard, crew quarters for example, that are spread across all decks and vectors. The Deck Layout can be found in the top menu of the forum, under "Database"
• While most posts take place on the Theurgy, at times your character may be sent off ship so Theurgy may be replaced with another vessel, for example the Tactical CONN folks during fighter ops will use their fighter designation (Wolf-03, Wolf-06, etc.) or their callsign (Razor, Ghost, Icarus, etc.)
• And the last part is the Attn: block. Basically, it’s to show other writers who is to respond to your post next. Typically the writer (not the character) is referenced here, and usually by utilising the forum's Mention function (@Member). That specific format is used by the forum software itself to indicate a writer has been tagged in a post. You have to type @, then start writing the name of the member, and then pick the name from a small pop-up menu. If you don't, the name will be white instead of blue, and no Mention notification will be made. Moreover, Mentions doesn't work in "Quick Edit" mode if you want to add one afterwards. To do that, you have to use "Modify Post".
• Most of the time, writers tend to insert a picture of their character under the header with a spoiler using the following code, and a few even go out of their way to make those images links to their character pages in the database.
  

[spoiler][url=http://INSERT.URL.OF.CHARACTER.PAGE][img]INSERT.IMAGE.URL[/img][/url][/spoiler] 

• Posts are written third person past tense. The action is written as if you were the camera watching the scene and reported what had just happened. If I said, “Ryuan Sel tossed Wenn Cinn the phaser”, that is past tense whereas if I said “Ryuan Sel tosses Wenn Cinn the phaser,” that is current/present tense. Note the verb used tossed vs tosses.
• Quotation Marks - Used to indicate character speech that is audible to those immediately around the writer. Can be anything from muttering under their breath to outright yelling, the exact volume is often noted in the descriptive text around the speech. See further down in regard to unspoken thoughts, which doesn't have brackets or quotation marks.
• Brackets - Used to indicate speech heard (but not sent) over the comm system, either via combadge, computer console, or helmet worn by the pilots (amongst others). The reason we do this is to distinguish that the dialogue read does not come from a person present in the physical location of the scene. Brackets can also be used between paragraphs to indicate a shift in location, or in time such as [ 5min later – Bridge ]
• Italics - Italics have multiple uses, but it shouldn't be too confusing. Essentially, italics are used for:
  
  • Illustrating the thoughts of one's character, the worded thoughts not having brackets or quotation marks.
  • Flashbacks from past events in the middle of current scenes. These italicised flashbacks include both dialogue and prose.
  • Denote the dialogue of preceding posts from other writers, this, however, with [brackets] or "quotation marks." In larger threads, this helps the reader understand the overall continuity of the post, ie, where is fits into the overall plot and who it is in response to.
• Alien/Foreign languages -  A common way to denote speech in another language, but written in English for sake of readability, is to use <these kinds of brackets> or ~ even using the tilde grapheme ~ for such speech. If you want to use actual Klingon words, for example, it is recommended that you include a translation in an OOC comment (see below).
• Textual coloring - Some writers employ textual coloring to indicate speech in addition to the use of quotation marks. While not required, some writers do and some don’t, the highlighting of speech text can make reading easier as speech stands out from the rest of the body of the post. At the same time, highlighting speech might make readers gloss over important information in the overall prose.

• Forum Profile Signatures - If you want to add a more permanent comment or links to your characters' pages in the database, you can do so in the Forum Profile section on the forum.
• OOC comment - If you need to leave an Out-of-Character message to the readers in general or the other writers involved in the thread, we usually separate the OOC area with a horizontal line, and we also make the OOC note in italics to not confuse it with the body of the post. Something like this:

[hr]
[i]OOC: Insert comment to readers and co-writers.[/i]

• Memory Alpha - The one stop shop for most Star Trek information. Many of you already know about this site.
• Memory Beta - Expanded universe information. Goes into more detail than Memory Alpha, but in most cases the extra detail is not canon information.
• Warp Speed Calculator - Simple, yet effective. Has multiple ways of figuring out the math(for the warp theorists in the group).
• Stardate Calculator - No stardate calculator is entirely accurate, but this is our official one that we should use. It's new so old stardates we've added in the story had not been updated to this standard yet.
• English to Klingon Translator - Translates to, and from Klingon. As well as a good deal of earth languages. Handy for the Klingons in the group. Qapla'!
• Daystrom Institute Technical Library - Starship information, and not just for the Federation. Pulls information from many sources like the shows, books and tech manuals to create a complete picture of each ship. Includes a size comparison for each ship in relation to others. Also adds logical speculation to fill in the gaps. Good information to know if the Theurgy has to face another ship.
• Cygnus-X1 Blueprints - A great resource for canon ship blueprints. Some of them drawn by the actual ship designers for the show. Also includes other manuals like the Starfleet Medical Reference Manual.
• Official Star Trek Online Wiki - A bit of a stretch here as Theurgy is not Star Trek Online. But in the light that CBS and Paramount have classified the story in STO to be canon, this is a good resource for technology and races that might only exist in STO. Doesn't provide the detail of information that Memory Alpha/Beta does, but can give a reference point.