AUGH.

[agilebrit]

Okay, I've broken 2100 words on what shall be henceforth known as The BearFic.

And now I'm stuck.

The intrepid crew of the Inquisitive Tamandua has an escaped Cave Bear on their hands. They have no idea how it escaped...and neither do I. I also have no idea where it's hiding, or how they're going to find it and get it back in the cage.

What they don't know is that this bear has been genetically engineered to have human intelligence. It knows very well what awaits it at the end of its journey (it'll be worshipped as a god for five years and then be sacrificed)--and it has no desire for that.

So, my bear and my crew are working at cross purposes. They need to deliver him safely and get paid; he wishes assiduously NOT to be delivered. And I don't even know who I'm rooting for here, or how I can solve the problem to everyone's satisfaction.

I'm also wondering where the bear came from in the first place, and if perhaps a stowaway released him. Maybe he was stolen from a lab, and one of the kids that cleans the cages followed them, but can't do anything because he's just a kid. Can't go to the cops with the info because maybe that lab isn't quite on the up-and-up itself, maybe he's been altered in some way, he doesn't want anything to happen to the bear.

OR...maybe he stole the bear himself because they were going to dissect it (or something), and then someone stole it from him for the monastery...

ETA: Thanks to bigsciencybrain, I have the "next thing." YAY.

Comments

[lady-moriel.livejournal.com]

Or if he's got human intelligence, maybe he escaped by himself without even needing to be released. If the crew doesn't know he's more than an ordinary bear, he might've ended up in a cage that would be fine for an ordinary bear but not good enough to hold an extremely smart bear. Still might be difficult for him to get out, but... *shrug*

[lady-moriel.livejournal.com]

Although, for what it's worth, I rather like the idea of the stowaway, especially if it's a kid--maybe, I don't know, the lab is fairly illegal and they did some genetic alteration on the kid too, like...I don't know...when he was much younger to cure an illness that otherwise would've killed him? But his parents couldn't pay enough so he has to work in the lab for a certain amount of time, and...I don't know...he can't go to the cops at all because not only is the lab itself illegal, the genetic tampering on both the bear and the kid is very illegal, for whatever reason (maybe they did something more than just fix whatever was wrong with him), and he and the bear both would probably end up locked away in an institution the rest of their lives, or...something. So maybe the bear was stolen from the lab and the kid went after because keeping the lab out of trouble is one of the few ways he can stay more or less out of even bigger trouble himself, for some reason, and getting the bear back is one way to do that, and also because he's kind of friends with the bear and is halfway hoping that if he can't actually get the bear back, he and the bear can get away from the ship on some random planet (that assumes it's not a one-shot trip from wherever they picked up the bear to wherever they're delivering him) and, I don't know, start new lives there.

...Or, you know, whatever. How all that would be resolved I have no idea, so I imagine that still doesn't help a lot. (This is also probably a good indication of why my stories are so long, rambly, and full of boring exposition. I make everything WAY TOO COMPLICATED.)

[agilebrit.livejournal.com]

Acutally, that's pretty much exactly what I had in mind...until I bounced it off bigsciencybrain and she came up with something even better. *evil laughter*

This is the beauty of science fiction. You can use things that they just can't in "conventional" fic.

What is it they say about great minds?

[baron-waste.livejournal.com]

The kid wasn't 'engineered,' he's just a mutie. Maybe his parents were members of a cult that worshipped nuclear waste. (Thank you, Arsan Darnay.) He bonded with the bearoid because they're both sports.

[baron-waste.livejournal.com]

Interesting ship name, at least.

Oh, to capture a wild animal on board a spaceship, decompress the ship. Bring it down to around 50 kilopascals, equivalent to 18,000 feet altitude, and he go nighty-night chop-chop. (Keep it at that pressure for any length of time, and you won't have to worry about his intelligence; massive irreversible brain damage tends to depress test scores.)

[agilebrit.livejournal.com]

Well, they have to find him first, because they don't get paid if they don't deliver the bear, alive and undamaged.

I was going to call it the Curious Wombat, after curious_wombat, but that was too derivative, so I used a species of my favorite critter instead.