Artemis mewled out in surprise when she awoke on the floor. Her mind was flooded with overwhelming amounts of information. Ship vitals, sensor readings, statuses of repair and combat drones, so much more she could barely keep track of. Her world spun as she tried to listen to all the noise, track all the updates, but everything just kept coming and coming. Her head hurt, it felt like it was burning from the inside as the data continued to pour in and drown her own thoughts out under the streams of information. 

She didn’t know when she started screaming, but when it all suddenly stopped it felt her screaming for a few more moments in the silence. The quiet buzz of the ship’s generators below the floor she lay on was the only company for several seconds, and Artemis slowly opened her eyes. Data was still there, waiting for her as it hovered in her hud. But it hung there waiting for her, instead of forcing itself into her brain. 

Panting heavily, she slowly pushed herself to her feet. She was standing in an open space, a wide starscape in front of her on a very high-definition viewscreen. Looking around, there was a chair in the center of the circular room, raised ever so slightly. 

It was her command chair, she knew. Where she would command the ship that was her home and housed the computer systems that made up her brain. How she knew all that, she had no idea, but it was there. Just a plain fact that came to mind when she looked around. This was her combat information hub of her ship, her body. Her humanoid form was just an avatar that made communicating with other players and NPCs easier. 

Artemis wondered for a second if the game AI had done something to her appearance as those realisations occurred, and if by request the viewscreen suddenly turned into a massive mirror. Standing where she stood was what she designed as her character, if minorly different. Artemis had gone with a modified human, a thin but tall pale skinned woman with only slight curves. On top of her head was a pair of rounded orange-red cheetah ears, and sprouting from her spine was a matching long cheetah tail. What she hadn’t been expecting was the fact that both were robotic instead of organic. Her eyes glowed a faint red, highlighting the black ‘teardrop’ markings down her cheeks from either side of the bridge of her eyes. Her body was clad in a tight black jumpsuit, with red markings similar to that of her ear and tail. 

She stood there, taking in the information that hung around her in clouds and her appearance as she tried to process what was happening. She’d joined Stellara Nova since her friends at uni kept pestering her about it, and recalled picking a random ‘quirk’ option during character creation. 

An evil grin began to crawl across her face as the implications sunk in. Artemis was a starship AI, or at least as close as the game could let her be given the limitations. As she began to look over the data waiting for her, it became even more clear. She had very little to start with right now. A ship barely more than a large shuttle with no interstellar drive, a small creation engine in the back storage space that could make anything she needed, and a dozen small repair and combat drones that would obey her every command. 

She’d just intended to join up with her friends and have some silly fun for a little bit. But as Artemis took stock of herself, an idea started to form. An idea that only someone who had been the dungeon master for too many tabletop games could manifest on the fly. She pulled up her system menu and found her phone connection. She pulled up the contact for one of her friends, and her evil grin only got wider.

<Hey Avalyn, I’m not gonna be able to join you guys…>

MaeveWerepuppy

This interlude was really fun to write. Artemis is based heavily off a character I played in a space ttrpg at one point, and there's lot of fun misadventures I'd love to explore with her at some point. 

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-Mae