Skunk
Pilot Date | 1996.06.06 |
Missions | 605 |
Total Light Years | 11,308.18 |
Current Experience | 16,538.20 |
Greetings, I am Skunk - Founder and Fleet Admiral of SCUL. I started the gang in 1996 and have been flying ever since. As of Alphamission 2023 I have flown with SCUL more than half my life. As you can imagine a lot has changed about SCUL in a quarter century, and as I have grown - so has the gang. In that sense SCUL helps me define who I wish to become. It re-invents me, and encourages me to grow, and I will forever be grateful for the people who work and play with me, past and present. I have seen some truly amazing things, none of which I'd ever experience without SCUL.
While I'm certain there are some who read these words that have experienced a fleet fly-by, I have only seen SCUL from a bystander's viewpoint on three occasions. I hadn't given it much thought until I experienced it for myself. The space surrounding SCUL transforms into a thirty-second party that seemed to have leaked into the street, leaving a wake of smiles, laughter, dancing, and boisterous conversation. As the cheering and music and wild bell-ringing gradually subside, space-time resumes her course and life retuens to normal - as if nothing ever happened.
When flying with SCUL the atmosphere of the city is different. We encounter transport traffic, pulsars, black holes, meteorites, radiation, nebulae and even space weevil - and for the first 20 solar orbits or so, there's chaffing. We maneuver through the tightest turns and spaces that our largest ships will fit through, even if landing and spacewalking is needed. We sometimes fly hundred light year missions that can take fourteen hours to complete. There are hundreds of pleasant social micro-interactions I have. A lot can happen in a few seconds, if you are bustin' tha funk!
What amazes me most of all is the way this completely volunteer organization works so hard and so well together. While SCUL's job structure is completely first-come-first serve, many veteran pilots have become excellent specialists. When a job needs doing, it gets done well. Our forts and our ships attest to it.
There's a moment during almost every SCUL mission I've been on where I find myself in a situation I couldn't have possibly predicted. In other words, SCUL space travel is intense. We are the flame for all the funky, freaky moths out there just itching for the invite to bust the funk with us.
What's a life without the weird?
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