User blog:Atarumaster88/CatastroFE

''Captain Bryndar Knrr slowly eased around the corner, peering through the infrared sights on the top of his S-2FG rifle at the pair of Peace Brigade guards on the ship he and his Cresh Squad commandos were boarding. They were both Human, both heavily armed, and both completely unaware of the danger posed to them. Excellent. Bryndar ducked back out of sight, waiting for his teammates to check in.

''"Got two live ones," he murmured into his comlink.

''He waited for the other seven armored commandos, safely ensconced in the newest model of Battlesuit52 power suits to report in on their status. Upon hearing that everyone was in position to begin breaching the engine room, he leaned around the corner and put two blaster bolts into each man, dropping them to the ground with the lethal blasts of energy.

''"Got two dead ones," he murmured.

''Several similar acknowledgments followed as Cresh Squad quietly dealt with most of the engine room personnel. Unfortunately, though, one foolhardy Peace Brigader managed to pull an alarm before being permanently silenced by the squad's sniper. Bryndar heard the hissing sound of an opening door directly behind him.

"Tahk!''" he barked in the Echani battle-language that his suit used to distinguish his commands from his normal speech.

''The word, which meant "jump" or "evade," would immediately boost the microrepulsors in his suit and allow him to leap at least ten meters. The suit reacted instantly and as Bryndar sprung away from the opening door and the bloodthirsty mercenaries behind it, his natural motion was boosted to send him rolling away down a hallway to the safety of cover.

''And that's when it happened. The worst thing that could happen to a Yanibar Guard infantryman in the middle of combat.

''All of his suit's displays and systems--the advanced targeting optics, the shield generator, the microrepulsors that made it easy to move around in a fifty kilo suit, the wrist computer, the tactical artificial intelligence--they all went dead. Some kind of mechanical glitch or power overload or whatever technical bug caused this sort of thing was responsible, but to the infantry and commandos who had to deal with it, it was simply armor lock. Bryndar had heard rumors that the new suits were prone to this failure but had thought that had been ironed out.

''Obviously not, and the pounding sound of combat boots and angry yells told him that the mercenaries weren't about to very nicely offer to service his malfunctioning equipment for him. He gritted his teeth, slotted a fresh power pack into his rifle, and then hauled himself to one knee to brace for impact.''

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And that's all of it. No, seriously, the whole point of that little tale was to illustrate a RL dilemma I'm facing. It happened in the fiction, but that's not why a wrote it. Here's the real story. I have a USB drive that I often take places where I'm likely to have time to do some writing. That's where I keep all the segments and stories that are in progress, backing them up every so often.

As of this past weekend, where I did a bunch of writing while traveling, that USB drive is missing. There's a decent chance I might be able to recover it (details deliberately omitted), but for now, I'm kind of like Bryndar in that I've lost something rather important to my mission. While his mission was to board and seize that ship, mine of course is to keep working on new and exciting content and my ability to do that is rather hampered right now. There's a whole new FE V segment out there somewhere, all ready to be sent for editing, that's in electronic limbo, along with significant progress on other stories that hasn't yet made it to the back-up. I was going to do that when I realized the USB drive was missing.

So, hopefully, I'll be able to track this missing USB drive down and find it. If not, though, this could be a. . . major setback. Will I find my USB drive? Will Bryndar and Cresh Squad survive and be able to finish their mission? Stick around and hopefully you'll find out! Atarumaster88  ( Talk page ) 04:09, October 5, 2010 (UTC)