Closing Doors: Firefly's, a Second Life bar for fans of Firefly and Serenity.

  In January of 2007 I had just discovered Second Life.  Spent my time exploring, sometimes randomly, sometimes by searching out key words I was interested in, and mostly marveling at how clever people are.
  One of the things I regularly searched for was "Firefly" and "Serenity".  I'd visit all the places that came up on searches for those words,  hoping to find some hangout or community of fans, maybe a role-play area.
  Unfortunately (or fortunately as it might be) every place I'd visit, day after day, was always empty.  Some were small parcels made as little fan devotions, some were entire towns, like Washtown, but there was never anyone at any of these places, no matter what time of day it was I'd visit.  
  When my wife Jen joined me in SL we'd both look around for Firefly or Serenity places to hang out at.  Never could find anything really.  And the few times we did run into someone at, say, Washtown, we weren't really a part of the "in crowd", we were just newbies and all.
  So with about a month of SL experience, we decided we'd just start up our own Firefly bar!  A place for fans of the show or just anyone who wanted to, to hang out and enjoy music, dance, flirt.  We'd build it ourselves, on a commercial rental sim.  
  We were probably crazy.  I mean, one month old newbies who are going to build and then run a club business when we didn't know anything?  Not even the difference between "mainland" and "private islands"?  

  Well, we built the place and started it up, with a regular schedule so that patrons would know for sure when someone would be there.  Wednesday nights, Friday nights, Saturday nights, and Sunday nights.
  Jen focused on building stuff, I focused a bit more on texturing, decorations, figuring out how to make dance poseballs work (yes, this was way back when).  Jen and I spent so much time building, shopping for stuff, hiring people to script and build what we couldn't figure out how to do ourselves.  It was great fun and a great challenge for both of us.

  From that first effort on the Sterling Heights sim in February of 2007, then to our friend Ariel's sim "This Land", then expanding to a full sim on the "Blackburne" sim, onward to the Sailor sim where we downsized our hours and how much time the place was using up, then to the last days on the "The Verse" sim in 2013 we had a lot of fun, built up a pretty good community of patrons, seen our traffic go up, down, up, down again, worked our way through slow times and enjoyed the busy times.

  Jen and I met so many friends, people who left imprints on our lives, mostly positive, only occasionally negative, and enjoyed owning and running Firefly's for the last six years.
  Now, on the occasion of our sixth anniversary (which is like, forever in SL years), it's time to draw the curtain, take a last bow, and exit the stage.
  Jen and I both want to thank all of the wonderful people we've met over the years through Firefly's.  If I start mentioning names I'll be here all night so I'll just leave it at that.  We appreciate the support we got from so many people, patrons who donated to keep us in business, others who helped run the bar or DJ'd or bartended or danced on stage to entertain the crowd.
  It's not easy, making the decision to call it a day on a place that's been a part of your life for six years.  But everything comes to an end, and it's time for Firefly's to move on.

  In February of 2007 when Jen and I had our first Friday night open, with no one there in the bar but she and I for most of the night, we never would have imagined what the next six years would be like, how great so many people we met would be.

  Thank you all, from the bottom of our hearts. 

  Rick and Jen Aucoin, January, 2013

Goodbye, Cruel World

Well, after three+ years of making a go at rp in SL based around Firefly, it's time for me to throw in the towel.  I've been RPing at Nomos now long enough to know I want to RP in a larger community than I've been able to find or assemble in the Firefly areas.  Almost two weeks and I'm having fun at Nomos, so... it's with some regret I'm packing up Nack and all of the rest of my FFRP and putting them away on a shelf with other fond memories of things gone past.

It's been a distinct pleasure to know you folks, and I'll still be running Firefly's on Friday nights.  Firefly's isn't and never has been about RP. 

Farewell from Nack, Raids, Ravish, Savage, Jayne, Pillage, Tarlek, and many others I don't care to name.

Taking off from Eavesdown

As the cargo bay door sealed with a racket of clunks that reverberated through the small ship, Nack made sure the luggage for his passenger was strapped down against any sudden acceleration. Once the bay door was sealed Nack jogged up the ramp to the small bridge of the Osprey, shouting over his shoulder at Josie. “You’ll want to strap in up here in the second seat. We’re lifting in two minutes!”

Nack settled into the comfortable pilot’s seat and looked over the boards to make sure the auto-preflight check had gone as it should. Green lights across the board, everything was a-okay. Good thing, since if it wasn’t green he’d be stuck here longer, hiring a mechanic to figure out what the problem was.

The sound of the girl trying to manage the five point harness of the second seat got Nack’s attention. “Gorramit girl, we’re 90 seconds out, get buckled.”

“I’m trying! What is all this, who straps in like this on a ship anyway?” Her voice had gone up a full octave from the husky purr she’d used to sucker him into taking her as a passenger off these docks.

Nack spun in his chair and lunged at the second seat, startling the girl badly judging from the way her eyes went round and her head jerked back. Nack’s hands pulled straps and buckles from around her slender waist and jammed the rig into place tight around her, ignoring her protests as her breasts got more than a bit smushed and manhandled. Throwing himself back into the pilot’s seat just in time for its automatic strap system to wrap him up safely Nack heard the engines of the Osprey boom to life astern and the small ship started vibrating intensely.

Hands tapping out commands onto the boards, eyes focused on the readouts above, Nack muttered, “You’ll want to hold onto something and I sure hope you haven’t eaten anything in the last few hours”

“What? What did you saaayyyyyiEEIIIIIIIIIEEEEEE!!!!”

The courier ship leapt up off the landing pad; right on its launch window, not one second late or early. Blasting upwards and rotating to face nose to space, the Osprey was not a comfortable ride. G-forces pushed you down into your seat hard, rotated you around, dropped you a few hundred feet then drove you upwards hard again.

Nack was used to it; if he wanted a smooth ride he’d hire a real pilot. His passenger didn’t sound like she’d ever been on a ship quite like this though, judging from her screams of terror.

Barely audible over the roar of stupidly-overpowered engines and a young woman screaming in mortal fright right behind him, Nack heard the piping voice of his Blackburnian Leet, as always right on his shoulder.

“d00d, u suxxor!”

“Shaddup, Leetie…”

Passengers are always a bad idea.

Waiting for a launch window on the docks of Persephone.

How many hours wasted sitting on a couple of empty crates, waiting for his turn to get off this world and on his way back to Hale’s with cargo?  Too gorram many over the years.

This trip was a loss anyway, only a few crates of decent booze and one container of cigarettes.  Not even enough to pay for the fuel on this run, curse the luck.  Every smuggler, fence, and thief he knew at Eavesdown was out of luck this week.  Two in jail, one dead from a deal gone bad, the rest with nothing much to trade.

Sometimes you eat the bear, sometimes the bear eats you.

Whateverthefuck a bear was.

Adding insult to injury; a three hour wait for a launch permission.  

So… people watching from his seat on a busted old crate in front of the Osprey’s open bay while enjoying a nice buzz from a sample of synthetic opioids one of his friends on the docks set him up with.

There’s worse ways to spend a few hours.

“You.  There.  Ship Captain… Reynolds?”

The feminine voice didn’t really register to Nack’s ears, till it repeated the call, from much closer.  Turning his head his eyes alighted onto a lovely young redheaded woman, dressed in expensive core-world made “Rim World” style.  She was holding a printout of ships at dock in one hand and looking at Nack down her slender nose.

“Eh?  Wut?”

“You are Captain Reynolds of the… Osprey?  It said so on the registry for this berth.”  Nack’s preoccupation with the snug fit of her black pants delayed his response for several seconds. 

The girl raised one elegant eyebrow, tilting her head slightly.  She held out the printout of the dock register.  “It says you are going to Beaumonde.”

Oh, yeah, shit.  Reynolds.   Nack hadn’t used that fake ident in a long while and his slightly foggy synapses were trying to catch up, desperately.

“Yeah, Captain Reynolds, that’s me.”

Exasperation showed on the pretty face of the girl, her blue eyes narrowing.  “Yes, but are you going to Beaumonde?  The registry shows that as your next port of call.”

Nack rubbed his face with his hands and stood up.  “Sorry, yeah, Beaumonde.  Got a small bit of courier work heading that way… in about 20 minutes, I guess.”  Nack looked around for a timer to confirm his vague guess at how long until he was going to have liftoff approval.

“It is a pleasure to meet you, Captain Reynolds.  My name is Josie Gaidin and I would like to purchase passage to Kalidasa system on your ship.”

Nack blinked again, looking back at the woman. 

“Wut?”

“Captain, I am in a hurry.  It is critical that I get off this dock within the half hour and yours is the only ship going my way in that time frame.  How much do you want for passage?”

Way to open negotiations, darlin’.  Tell them you are desperate, you need to go now, and that you are the only ride available.  Let’s see… one billion credits…

Looking more closely at the girl’s face Nack could readily see stress writ clearly for anyone with eyes to see.  So, she was on the run.  Cops or family or boyfriend or husband… easier to deal with if it was cops… but the look of her… gonna guess boyfriend is two steps behind her.

“I’m not takin’ passengers, Miss.  Sorry.”  Nack sat back down on his crate, pulled out a cigarillo and thumbed his lighter active.  The girl, Josie, stomped a booted foot in frustration but quickly got herself under control and sat next to him on the crate, facing him and with her thigh touching his knee. 

She leaned in, an earnest look on her pretty-as-a-picture face.  “Please, sir, I can pay, and I truly need to be on your fine vessel when it lifts from this dock.”  Josie took Nack’s hand in hers, pleadingly.  “I have nowhere else to turn, I implore you sir, help me.”

Looking into her helpless beautiful face, Nack tossed a mental coin to decide between valiantly aiding this poor girl or shooting himself in the head right there for a damnfool.

The welling of tears in her big blue eyes sealed the deal.

“Erm… okay, darling, sure...hey, it’s alright…um, I’ve got a little space available that isn’t being used by valuable cargo, not much, mind you, but a little, and could use the company along the way.”

Truth was his courier’s cargo hold was ninety percent empty so there was a good 300 cubic meters of space without even trying hard.  And the girl could ride in the second cockpit seat.  Nack wondered if she was a chatterer.  Well… even if she is, she’s pretty enough to be distracting for the long flight.

Nack quoted her a price per cubic three times what a commercial flight would cost just to see what her reaction would be.  She agreed immediately and called over a porter flat which had been hovering just out of sight.  A truly heroic pile of fancy antique style luggage tottered its way to the loading ramp of the Osprey as Nack looked on in dismay. 

His card beeped as the money was acknowledged transferred before he had taken stock of the luggage and the woman hurrying herself up the ramp into the small ship, suddenly all business and composed. 

“Oh, Miss... might not be heading straight to Beaumonde....”

 

Watching for trouble.

The warbot, the one they are calling Ravish, is here for that damned 'bot we brought from Blackburne.  Nothing but trouble has come out of keeping that thing with us, we should have pushed it out an airlock on an intercept with one of the local suns.  But, that's water under the bridge where Jesus flung it now.

Several families have been killed by it.  Sometimes when it's spotted in the town there ain't no one about to challenge it, chase it off.  Someone innocent always dies when that's the case.  So I figure I'd best at least take my turn at watching for it.  There's a lot of wide open space that thing has to run across to get to the town, across the landing pads.  I'll take my chances with my shooting versus its dodging if it comes to that.

OOC: Naked Firefly RP In Second Life

Arising from discusions I've had with several of my fellow Firefly fans and roleplayers in Second Life, as well as a lot of thinking I've done on the nature of RP in SL, a new project has been started by myself and Imrhien Fargis.

There are several different types of players and participants in the RP scene on SL, none are superior or inferior to the others.  Each has its adherents, and one assumes that the members of each 'faction' of players enjoys what they do (otherwise they wouldn't do it, eh?).  Of late there have been quite a few discussions among the members of one of those factions about where to play, where to "be" their character.

With the closing of sims such as Eavesdown Docks and Beaumonde there are no obvious gathering places for this faction of players, which is the primary reason these discussions have taken place, but there are more factors at play than just not having a place to RP in their chosen style.  There's the fact that they play in a somewhat different style than the RP communities established around specific sims currently operating.

Somewhat in jest I came up with the labels "Naked" and "Not Naked" for the two primary divisions in the Firefly Roleplay community in SL. 

What I mean by these labels is a bit tongue in cheek but simply put, if you own 5 or more sex beds you may be a Naked faction member.  If you have spent as much money as the Gross National Product of South Africa on skins, clothes, hair, shoes, you may be a Naked faction member. 

If you spend fortunes on top quality buildings, spend hundreds of hours in photoshop making custom textures for the hull of your custom Firefly spacecraft, if you haven't owned a freebie item since your first week in SL... you may be a Naked faction member.

Talking to other players who felt like I do that we didn't really have a place, certain characteristics came out that we have in common.  A deeply held appreciation of aesthetics, an attention to detail, a willingness to spend either money or time (or both) to make our avatars our expressions of art.  Personal flickr pages to showcase our photography in SL, character blogs featuring stories not only about conflicts our characters may be involved in, but also the small, mundane, yet beautiful aspects of our fictional lives.

We may appreciate a good shoot 'em up fight, or not.  We may engage in promiscuous and lascivous personal behavior, or may refer to such "off screen".  But we all portray our characters as healthy, adult, members of a world based at least loosely on the Firefly tv show.

Do you get naked in SL? 

Do you not get naked in SL?

It's an admittedly juvenile designation and way of thinking of the different players and groups of players in SL, but... it works. 

And the Naked Firefly Roleplayers of Second Life don't really have a place to BE right now. 

So, lacking a specific sim or location in SL to point at and say "That is ours" we are trying a bit of an experiment.

A central location on the web for members of our faction to "be", which will collect blog posts, stories, and other communications and expressions of creativity from our members, to start with.  http://grou.ps/nakedfirefly

A Second Life Group to facilitate in-game communication.  Naked Firefly RP In Second Life.

A Flickr Group for sharing our visual creations effectively with each other. 

The hub of this community will be the grou.ps site.  More about this project will be posted there as time goes on, with Nack's blog being his generally In Character stories and such.

Let me know if you think you are a Naked Firefly RPer.  I'd be glad to invite you to join us. 

Eavesdown Docks: Jewelry and Dustpans

The old warehouse was getting cluttered fast with the tools and supplies that had been laid in over the last few days. Looking around the place from his seat on one of the couches he’d just finished upholstering Nack could only shake his head in mild wonderment. The availability of materials here for crafting was really incredible. Used to the scarcity of... well... everything from his years on Blackburne Nack was pleasantly surprised at the ease with which he was able to find materials to produce furnishings here on Persephone.

Stacks of rusty steel girders lined the back of the workshop, all still good metal under some rust, and acquired for the cost of nothing more than hauling it away from a fallen down building? Nack had risked life and limb on scavenging missions into the wrecked cities of Blackburne Moon more than once for far less material than he had sitting around his workshop at the Eavesdown Docks, and this all acquired for nothing more than a few credits here and there, a favor to a construction foreman, or hauling off the trash himself.

There were thousands of shards of glass carefully organized atop the workbench he moved to; a bonding tool resting to the side while Nack carefully finished buffing our the last rust spots on the steel girder he had heated and bent and turned until it was a full circle.

Using the bonding tool to attach the first sliver of glass into the framework of the girderwheel, Nack heard a tap at the window of his workshop and looked up to see a pretty young girl standing outside, waving at him. She rushed around through the doors of the old warehouse and walked into the Firefly Furniture Factory shop beaming with a smile.

"Hey, Ms. Freyja. Glad you found your way here." Nack smiled at the girl, and set down the piece of glass he was working with.

"Hi Nack!" the bouncy girl answered, her short red dress swirling about her knees as she approached Nack’s workbench. "I’m here to help you sweep up, like you wanted."

A blank look crossed Nack’s face for a moment then he remembered offering the girl a job a few hours a week cleaning up the workshop. "Yeah,sorry about the mess, I’ve been busy making... stuff."

Freyja looked around the cluttered space and refrained from commenting, "Do you have a broom here? If not I can run back to the Church and get one."

Shaking his head and turning back to the workbench, Nack waved his hand in the general direction of the back of the shop, "Back there, broom. I think." Picking up the bonder and the glass Nack considered the wheel shapped girder. Freyja stopped behind Nack as she made her way over the jumbled pile of steel and glass plates to find the broom.

"That looks very complicated. You must be very good at your job," she opined as she studied the glass shards and the partially complete project.

Nack chuckled softly as he finished bonding the glass to the steel, setting down the tools and picking up a filthy rag to wipe his fingers free of sweat, welding burns dotting the back of his hands and up his forearms from his work earlier with the girders themselves. "I don't know about all that... but I got the idea to see if I could fabricate some furniture from this scrap steel girder I was able to get for nothing but hauling it away from the old building site."

A frown on the pretty face of the girl was followed by her offering a clean handkerchief to Nack, her eyes on his cut and burned hands, "Are you okay? Here, use this instead; it’s clean, I promise."

After Nack hesitatingly took the clean linen Freyja went through the obstacle course of materials in the workshop to find the broom. "Hey, Miss, I don’t want to get this all dirty"

"You can call me Freyja, and if you don't use the handkerchief then it loses its purpose."

Nack wiped his battered hands with the white cloth, "Well, as you say, Ms. Freyja. Welding is a bit tough on the flesh, but I heal fast."

The sound of sweeping came to Nack as he turned to face the back of the shop where the girl was industriously pushing dirt and glass shards towards the center of the room. Without looking up from her work the girl said, "Just Freyja, okay? Or I’ll have to start calling you Sir again." Smiling, the girl looked up to see Nack watching her from the work bench, "Why not wear gloves? Or would it make much difference?"

Nack blinked then considered that for a moment. "Well... gloves make it sort of hard to feel what you are workin' with. Metal and wood and stone, glass and crystal, you... sort of have to feel it, touch it, to make it... well.. to make it bend to your will, I guess. And... I heal fast, burns and cuts aren't anything."

The girl nodded then, not looking convinced but unwilling to argue the point. Sidestepping a piece of sheet metal Freyja then laughed and in a singsong recited, "Nick-Nack pattywack give a dog a bone, this old man came rolling home...See, I know a poem with your name too."

Nack laughed as well, shaking his head as he did so and turning back to the ring of steel and shards of glass. "You know, I think I may have heard that one." And killed men for singing it, he thought but kept to himself. "That does remind me though, I did promise to tell you the tale of the Brisingamen and lovely Freyja.

Freyja stopped sweeping and stepped closer to the workbench, her eyes going wide. "Will you? I’ve been dying of curiosity since you mentioned it."

She stepped closer to where Nack was working, the bonding tool being used to carefully join another piece of glass to steel and to more glass, painstakingly assembling what would be a coffee table.

Nack’s eyes were intent on the glass in his fingers as he worked, his voice was a bit of a murmur as he spoke, "Of course... well... here is how it was..."

((And if you don’t know the tale, here is a short, reasonably good version of it: http://library.thinkquest.org/C0118142/norsepan/freyjane.php))