Xandrian Stone Book 1: Beginning of a Legend by Christian Alex Breitenstein
Book: Xandrian Stone Book 1: Beginning of a Legend by Christian Alex Breitenstein
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Authors: Christian Alex Breitenstein
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Chapter 1: AND SO IT BEGINS
Classification Day. THE annual event, every youth aged 18 and above went to the closest barracks to be tested for entry into the Swiss Federated Space Navy.
There had been peace for almost 500 years, so the navy was not a place for adventurers or people thriving in dangerous environments but patient people who did not mind waiting half a life for their promotion into officer ranks. The fleet was small, there were only 500 ships that the public knew of and less than 100 covert, experimental and classified ships - so, there were a total of 600 ships at most. With magical means even Eden 7, basically a big rock in space with no atmosphere at all, had been made well habitable. So there was no need for an extended fleet to ferry goods around in the Eden system as all the planets were self sufficient.
Okay, I lied. Eden 1 was a volcanic double-planetoid, way too violent to live on. There were rumors about some sort of a secret base there, but nobody knows - now it is an asteroid belt that's slowly disappearing into the Eden Star, so nobody will ever know.
The only real reason for the navy to exist at all was to keep human face-to-face contact between the planets, to avoid a situation like the one that led to the God Wars which ended 500 years ago with the founding of the Unified Monotheistic Religion UMR.
Fighting about what name to call the Supreme Divine was deemed "not smart" immediately after that, and since then the Supreme Divine has become known by hundreds of confirmed names. There were even contests to see how many of those names the contenders had memorized and the record was 311 confirmed names. To be confirmed the name had to have been published in any way that was traceable. If untraceable names were counted the Supreme Divine would have tens of thousands of names. Mostly, it was referred to as the "Supreme Divine" for the sake of simplicity and to avoid any mix-ups.
But I digress.
Classification Day was the moment of truth for just about everyone - as everyone who was in their right mind wanted to join the SFSN, getting a job with little actual work which you could not loose (unless you did something monumentally stupid like attacking a superior officer, especially with sloppy magic) and with pretty much unofficially guaranteed absolute safety.
That unfortunately meant that if you were not magic-born in any way there was no way you could get in - unlike nowadays with the newly founded Swiss Federated War Navy and Swiss Federated Trade Navy which both need every able body they can get. I digress again. Get used to it.
Anyway, I arrived early (like everyone else) and got in line. My magic had partly manifested early in my life, it did not fully unlock itself - it hung in sort of a limbo between here and there, giving me a little bit of magic. I had been able to tell where everyone was in our house as a small child. Also, I routinely healed all kinds of small injuries all around my parent’s farm. We made sinners, Standard Naval Nutrition Rations SNNR, and variation 31-14-1 was and to this day is my favorite: Meat loaf with cooked and cut root vegetables and brown sauce. Yum.
Usually, SNNR were, as they still are, created by nutrition magic based on a bit of randomization and weighting. Coming from a farm that made real-life approximations of sinners I just HAVE to include a bit of SNNR-lore here:
SNNR are organized in a three-number code. Each number itself is a two-digit code:
First number:
The first digit describes five different kinds of main course: 1 is natural meat, 2 is in-vitro meat, 3 is ground and mixed meat, 4 is vegetable (mixed vegetables, whatever was at hand when the ration was made) and 5 is corn bread.
The second digit describes the size of that course: 1 is one large piece, 2 is a couple of medium pieces, 3 is several small pieces and 4 is a lot of very small pieces.
So, if the number 1 is 12, it's something like goulash meat, 11 a steak, 31 meat loaf, 33 meat
Classification Day. THE annual event, every youth aged 18 and above went to the closest barracks to be tested for entry into the Swiss Federated Space Navy.
There had been peace for almost 500 years, so the navy was not a place for adventurers or people thriving in dangerous environments but patient people who did not mind waiting half a life for their promotion into officer ranks. The fleet was small, there were only 500 ships that the public knew of and less than 100 covert, experimental and classified ships - so, there were a total of 600 ships at most. With magical means even Eden 7, basically a big rock in space with no atmosphere at all, had been made well habitable. So there was no need for an extended fleet to ferry goods around in the Eden system as all the planets were self sufficient.
Okay, I lied. Eden 1 was a volcanic double-planetoid, way too violent to live on. There were rumors about some sort of a secret base there, but nobody knows - now it is an asteroid belt that's slowly disappearing into the Eden Star, so nobody will ever know.
The only real reason for the navy to exist at all was to keep human face-to-face contact between the planets, to avoid a situation like the one that led to the God Wars which ended 500 years ago with the founding of the Unified Monotheistic Religion UMR.
Fighting about what name to call the Supreme Divine was deemed "not smart" immediately after that, and since then the Supreme Divine has become known by hundreds of confirmed names. There were even contests to see how many of those names the contenders had memorized and the record was 311 confirmed names. To be confirmed the name had to have been published in any way that was traceable. If untraceable names were counted the Supreme Divine would have tens of thousands of names. Mostly, it was referred to as the "Supreme Divine" for the sake of simplicity and to avoid any mix-ups.
But I digress.
Classification Day was the moment of truth for just about everyone - as everyone who was in their right mind wanted to join the SFSN, getting a job with little actual work which you could not loose (unless you did something monumentally stupid like attacking a superior officer, especially with sloppy magic) and with pretty much unofficially guaranteed absolute safety.
That unfortunately meant that if you were not magic-born in any way there was no way you could get in - unlike nowadays with the newly founded Swiss Federated War Navy and Swiss Federated Trade Navy which both need every able body they can get. I digress again. Get used to it.
Anyway, I arrived early (like everyone else) and got in line. My magic had partly manifested early in my life, it did not fully unlock itself - it hung in sort of a limbo between here and there, giving me a little bit of magic. I had been able to tell where everyone was in our house as a small child. Also, I routinely healed all kinds of small injuries all around my parent’s farm. We made sinners, Standard Naval Nutrition Rations SNNR, and variation 31-14-1 was and to this day is my favorite: Meat loaf with cooked and cut root vegetables and brown sauce. Yum.
Usually, SNNR were, as they still are, created by nutrition magic based on a bit of randomization and weighting. Coming from a farm that made real-life approximations of sinners I just HAVE to include a bit of SNNR-lore here:
SNNR are organized in a three-number code. Each number itself is a two-digit code:
First number:
The first digit describes five different kinds of main course: 1 is natural meat, 2 is in-vitro meat, 3 is ground and mixed meat, 4 is vegetable (mixed vegetables, whatever was at hand when the ration was made) and 5 is corn bread.
The second digit describes the size of that course: 1 is one large piece, 2 is a couple of medium pieces, 3 is several small pieces and 4 is a lot of very small pieces.
So, if the number 1 is 12, it's something like goulash meat, 11 a steak, 31 meat loaf, 33 meat
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