Challenge #01500-D039: Guarded Mundanity
“There is no point at which you can say, ‘Well, I’m successful now. I might as well take a nap'.” - Carrie Fisher -- RecklessPrudence
Success is the closest thing there is to perpetual motion. One begins by striving for it. Once it is obtained once, the struggle becomes to maintain it. After that, success becomes a higher rung. Higher and higher. Almost impossible to attain. With more people admiring and watching, there are higher standards from everyone.
Only those who can take the pressure continue to greater success. It's perpetual effort. Rarely slowing down.
Scavenger Taren was just beginning to learn this. One lucky strike had to be followed by the next lucky strike. Some of which can be directly attributed to learning where the good stuff is. Every rookie makes the mistake of collecting resources that are rare where they come from. It takes more than a few weeks to watch the markets and then get a feel for what resources are needed and where.
Cat-napping while her automated systems sought out potentials and headed for them whilst also avoiding risks. There's always that one abandoned vessel that has more boobytraps than a fictional villain's lair. And then they left it for some luckless schlub to either disarm or detonate. You either get good at the first one, or wind up dead from the second.
Taren devoted herself to studying all kinds of booby traps. Anything that had a trap attached to it had to be worth learning to defuse it. Mostly.
This trip was a short haul. Newbies learned quickly that long hauls full of noob scrattle don't get much in the way of Time. taren learned second-hand, and took the advice to heart. Short hauls until she got the feel for profitable and unprofitable. She was still doing short hauls, but she had enough knowledge to defuse a few of the really interesting booby traps in a long-abandoned vessel. Including using remote waldoes to do all the fiddly stuff.
One door down, untold traps to follow.
Taren breathed a sigh of relief and opened the door. And her well-earned result was revealed as... room upon room of stored science data and personal logs.
Well... maybe the Archivaas would pay for some of it.
[Image (c) Can Stock Photo / AnatolyM]
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This was a well written piece. You managed to pack a lot in such a short sequence. Apart from a few formatting errors, there's nothing negative to be said about this. It's just a nice, tense romp that has a suspenseful hook near the end. Great job! :D