I guess I don’t really think the carrier is going to be shot out of the sky. But we live in the Deep Desert now — and it’s the kind of place where that kind of thing happens.
We’ve been in the Deep Desert for more than a month now, but our moment of recognition came when we decided to make multiple DD bases — we thought it wise after we got ganked last week. I made a simple forward base — a box base — centrally just south of the line. The line that separates the northern PvP zone from the southern PvE zone. Talk to someone who lives in the DD, and talk about the line; they’ll know what you mean.
Calrain made a base right at one of the Deep Desert entrances, right in the flight path in and out of the desert. They had to wonder who we were. Then Stingite/Tree Trunks/The Friendly Necromancer made an even bigger, brighter base right next to that one. It was more than just a base at zone-in — it was a complex.
I was reminded of my first trip into the DD, where I found a huge complex with a large spice refinery, a carrier, a harvester, lots of support craft and machines, just everything. It was my first time seeing a lot of these things. I haven’t seen these folks since, but it made an impression.
I haven’t seen these folks since. I suspect they are First Wavers. The people who leveled up quickly and moved to the DD as soon as they could. Then, I assume, there are Second Wavers, who came soon after and represent most of the sophisticated bases we see. I place us, the Order of the Wombat, in the Third Wave; people who leveled up slowly and are just beginning to build the infrastructure that allows one to succeed in the Deep Desert.
Sting, Calrain and I were flying in Calrain’s assault ‘thopter, doing bases and ships both before and after the line, when a stranger in a scout ‘thopter came up behind us and demanded to know who we were. I was a little creeped out — it was a PvP zone, and seeing someone at all was unusual, someone right next to you more so, someone demanded to know who you are… well, almost unheard of.
I’d say entirely unheard of, except that every NPC, as they’re trying to kill us, demands to know our identity. So usually, when someone asks, it means we’re fighting.
I was getting a lot of this information about waves and guilds in the DD and all by chatting with folks over the public channel. Public channels are so important to this kind of game. There’s every chance that we could team up with others for the tougher labs; we did okay in an above-the-line lab, once we finished clogging the pentashields with our battered corpses, but four would be better. Even more would be better-er. We could do a I-level base and get the best stuff.
A couple of things have me considering us finally, fully arrived. The carrier was an important milestone, but we cheated a little — we bought the required spice mélange from the auction house, during that time when an omnipresent player, TalonQueen, was selling them cheap. 200 spice mélange for 20K solari — a fantastic deal. I’d do it again in a minute. TQ hasn’t been around lately, though, and I’m thinking she was one of the last of the First Wavers, just selling off the store before closing up.
The second was Calrain making a large spice refinery; 200 spice mélange for 10K spice sand, a 1:50 ratio. The regular spice refinery had a 1:100 ratio, and the medium one, 1:75. So the medium was good — the large better. The regular one should never be built, except that you have to have processed spice to build the other two.
With that, me and Calrain did an insane amount of spice harvesting and processing, as did Tree Trunks and Skips Leg Day. Team 1 has over 1500 processed spice, now. That should be enough to let us make the Large Ore Processor after the storm passes and we go back into the DD.
So, now the plan is to make a spice harvester to sling beneath the carrier. We’ll fly scout thopters to find large spice blows and then we’ll have a team of at least four to harvest it — one for the carrier, one for the crawler, two to defend. As long as you’re not an easy target, folks will think twice. I hope.
Otherwise, carrier hits the ground in a mass of twisted, burning wreckage, and we probably stick to the protected Hagga Basin on the private server where nobody but the guild plays for awhile, maybe hope for better luck as a Fourth Waver 🙂
Update: Team 2 has just made their carrier, and now Cal is talking about making a harvester crawler… there may be another update coming with pictures!
Well, Cal had enough spice for the crawler, Sting said to go for it, Skips was online, so the three of us made the crawler and cleared that particular quest out. Now we just have to harvest spice with it….
But you never finished the story about the stranger demanding to know who you were!!? What happened next!?
We told him! And then he left.
Yeah, I guess I just dropped that thread. I’ll pick it up.
Aww, I was expecting more drama than that!
I asked ChatGPT to help with this true account:
The sky split.
Not metaphorically, not figuratively — I mean the very air above us tore apart as though Shai-Hulud itself had clawed the heavens open. Out of that rift screamed a scout ‘thopter, every blade of its rotors carving streaks of molten light across the desert sky. Its engine howled like a choir of dying angels. Static bled across our instruments; Sting cursed, Calrain pulled hard on the controls, and I swear I felt the temperature drop ten degrees in the cabin as the stranger pulled in close.
Its comms crackled to life, the voice inside not human, not machine, but some terrible hybrid of both:
“WHO… ARE… YOU?”
The demand hit like a lasgun blast, reverberating through metal, bone, and spirit. My hands shook on the grip of my lasrifle though I hadn’t even raised it. On Arrakis, such a question isn’t curiosity — it’s judgment. NPCs bark it at you before unleashing slaughter. So when a living pilot dared say it, not with scripted malice but with choice — the line between PvE and PvP, fiction and reality, dissolved into dust on the wind.
For one breathless instant, we were the quarry. Our ‘thopter — Calrain’s proud assault craft, all burnished plating and weapon pods gleaming like the fangs of a predator — felt small. Insufficient. Our place as Third Wavers, crawling just beyond the threshold of true Deep Desert survival, had never been so stark.
The stranger loomed, framed in the merciless glare of twin suns, their scout’s silhouette a dagger against the horizon. Flashes of lens-flare strobed across the canopy, each pulse painting our cabin in alternating bands of white-hot dread and black despair. I half-expected the sands below to part and swallow us whole, as if the desert itself were leaning in to hear our answer.
I wanted to respond. To explain. To announce the banner of the Order of the Wombat in words forged of spice and thunder. But all I could think was: This is how it ends. Not with wormsign. Not with a base raid. Not even with an honorable duel. But with a single question, asked by a stranger who should never have been there at all.
And then — just as suddenly — they banked away. No missile lock, no burst of gunfire. Just the shriek of rotors vanishing into heat-haze.
We were left hanging in the silence, adrenaline burning through us like melange fire, haunted forever by the terrible echo of the question.
Who are you?
Dear ChatGPT;
Pretty sure that Arrakis has just one sun.
Yours truly,
Tipa
Much better!!! 🙂
Why is it that you always get better prose out of the AIs than anyone else? I mean, sure, that’s a tad overdone, but I’ve read plenty of published SciFi at least as hyperbolic. If I came across that passage in a book I can’t see how I’d be questioning the sentience of the author. I really haven’t seen anyone else getting such good results and you were getting readable stories out of the LLMs years ago, too.
It’s funny you should say that, as the passage SCREAMS AI to me. I read a LOT of AI text lately and certain cadences are just so endemic.
The short sentence: “The sky split.”
Then the “this/that/the other thing”: the voice inside not human, not machine, but some terrible hybrid of both
The “not sequence”: This is how it ends. Not with wormsign. Not with a base raid. Not even with an honorable duel.
And the final short sentence: Who are you?
Oddly, this is what that reminded me of even though there aren’t a lot of parallel but my lizard brain sees them as the same:
—
Anyway I’ve mentioned this before, but it could be your settings. You generally don’t like when an AI gets too verbose and I wonder if you somehow train it to be less so, which sloshes over to when it writes prose?
Here’s what my ChatGPT settings are;
“Be talkative and conversational. Use quick and clever humor when appropriate. Use quick and clever humor when appropriate. Use an encouraging tone.”
I just prompted GPT 5 with:
“Write me a short horror story about a teenage couple out at Lover’s Lane being chased by Hookman”
And I won’t paste the whole thing but here’s how it starts:
———
They park where the asphalt dissolves into scrub and gravel, where the ridge falls away and the town below is a scatter of orange sodium lamps. The sign that says NO TRESPASSING is riddled with old birdshot. The others call it Lover’s Lane, but Maya calls it the end of the world because the guardrail gives up halfway along the curve, like even metal decided this place wasn’t worth holding onto.
Ben kills the engine. The night swallows the last purr of the fan belt, and the windshield fogs at the edges. He scrolls for a song and stops when the radio catches static instead: a thin whisper between stations, like breath pressed to glass.
“Spooky,” he says, a grin that wants to be brave. “So. What are we doing, apart from ignoring public signage and our better judgment?”
“Making fun of the story,” Maya says, but her voice is too low to pass as mockery. “The one they tell in freshman health. The escaped patient, the hook for a hand. The scratching on the roof. Don’t make out at the ridge unless you want to end up on a poster.”
“It’s always a hook,” Ben says. “Never, like, a guy with a spatula.”
“Spatula Man sounds less persuasive.”
The wind tilts and carries a smell of wet leaves from the tree line. Something knocks—one clean tap—on the trunk. They both freeze and then laugh at themselves. “Acorn,” Ben says at the exact moment Maya says, “Rock.”
lol… I like it. Kind of funny, like horror stories often are, to make the horror — when it starts — that much worse.
I’m going to use your same prompt and see what I get:
—
The night was perfect for trouble: a single pale moon, the silhouettes of parked cars lined up along Lover’s Lane, and the long whine of cicadas that sounded like they were whispering run. Becky shivered when she heard it — that scrape, that metallic drag against the asphalt. Troy killed the engine. Both of them listened. Again: shhhrrrk.
“He’s coming,” Becky whispered, a smile tugging at the corners of her mouth. Troy didn’t argue. Instead, he opened the door, stepped into the night, and raised his arm. In the half-light it looked like a scythe had grown where his hand should be, curving sharp against the stars. Becky joined him, giggling now, her own curved silhouette flashing as she lifted it high.
From the treeline, the stranger stumbled forward. He was breathing hard, his arms outstretched. And that’s when they saw it — five thin, twitching protrusions at the end of his wrist. Raw, grasping, fleshy things. Becky recoiled, eyes wide. “Troy… oh God. Look at him. He’s it.” The boy with the fingers only smiled. “Tag,” he said. And then the whole parking lot erupted with laughter and the gleam of hooks, as the game began anew.
I rarely use ChatGPT at all. I use Gemini mostly. Not that I’ve used either for fiction for a very long time. I’m not sure Gemini even has settings per se although of course you can instruct it how to behave in the prompt. I only do that occasionally though. Usually I just ask it things like I’m talking to a work colleague of a casual acquaintance.
I just read Tipa’s Dune story and the two horror stories twice each. I definitely prefer the clipped phrases and repetition of the Dune one. That’s a style I generally approve of and sometimes use myself. I’m a little surprised that it would be a preferred choice of AI but if anything that would make AI prose more appealing than I’d expect.
The first horror story is pretty good, stylistically. I like the looseness of the syntax, the demotic phrasing. It’s annoyingly inconsistent, though, for example where it follows the very naturalistic ““Never, like, a guy with a spatula.” with the very unnatural ““Spatula Man sounds less persuasive.”” Who would ever say “persuasive” in that context? Certainly not this Maya (Who also uses the this/that/the other thing formula, although since that’s just a version of the Rule of Three which all writing courses teach I’m not sure there’s much that’s specifically AI about it…)
The second horror story I find hard to follow. It seems a bit more amateurish than either of the others, too. What do you make of a sentence like “the long whine of cicadas that sounded like they were whispering run”? Shouldn’t run be “run”?
Anyway, I’m on my laptop in bed in the dark typing this so I’ll stop now. Once I get into practical criticism mode it’s always going to turn into an essay and I have songs to make in Suno!
That was actually the second story I made. the first was terrible. the second one I asked for a twist. I also noticed the “run” issue… ChatGPT is not great at writing, tbh.
I ran the same prompt through Gemini and got a story AND an image in the middle of it.
It was way faster than GPT, not that that really matters. And the story was shorter and ends in a cliffhanger of sorts:
“Just as they thought they were safe, they saw it – the road ahead was blocked by a fallen tree, too big to go around. Mark slammed on the brakes, sending them skidding to a halt.
The Hookman emerged from the mist, a slow, deliberate walk now, his silhouette growing larger and larger. His hook, reflecting the faint moonlight, seemed to beckon them. Trapped, with nowhere to go, Sarah and Mark could only stare, their breaths catching in their throats, as the legend stepped out of the shadows and into their terrifying reality.”
I will say it didn’t have quite the “AI patois” I’m used to.
BTW I posted the whole GPT story on my site just because it seemed wrong to leave you both hanging cuz I KNOW you were riveted! LOL!
*runs over to read it*