Scraprats

Self-Published

Community Rating

Description

The name's Eileen, I'm a scraprat, that means my job is to track down all those rotten hulks people leave all over the cosmos. Maybe even sometimes the crew with them.

As for the ship? She's the Reliance, one-time Dreadnought class warship, now, floating scrapyard. Apparently, somebody decided after all these years she's worth something, so let's try to keep her from being used to repay my debts so I can keep repaying, no ship, no job, no little luxuries like air, or water.

No mean feat when your fees are due to go to Tyr, he makes most loan sharks seem like goldfish, and will take payment by the installment plan. (I like all my installments, especially ones like kidneys, and tech replacements are pricey.) So let's make a to do list 1. fix ship 2. pay off the "loans". 3. Try not to get hunted down for the technology my ship planted in me without telling me............. Well that's new.

Information

Status: Hiatus
Year: 2022
Author: Brights

Royal Road Stats

Rating: 4.6/ 5.0
Followers: 91
Views: 32,517

Reviews

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Community Reviews(1)

IllthylianRoyal Road
★★★★ 4.0
This is an incredibly fun and amusing way to start a story. The main characters are unlucky, scatterbrained, down-on-their-fortunes but competent and intelligent. They are starting at what is essentially the lowest point on the totem pole for their area, but due to chance, stumble into possession of a hyper-advanced relic of a bygone age. Which, being sentient itself, is just as confused about it's reality as our characters are confused about it. The setup is wonderful, there are a million directions in which the story can go, and already a conflict born of accidents and confusion is pushing our crew in directions they never wanted to travel.
Stylistically, there is a lot of back and forth, unmarked conversation that sometimess struggles with proper grammar and punctuation, but you can tell fairly easily what the author is trying to express. There's a very phonetic vibe to the writing, conversational almost, that won't be for everyone but is useful in communicating the humor and cheek the story is going for. The chapters as well are bite-sized and perhaps smaller than they ought to be, and as of chapter 14 where I paused there is only enough content to fill perhaps 3 or 4 chapters of a standard novel. However, this is less of a mark against the writer and more of an appreciation of how quickly, word count wise, things get off the ground and into the central drama.
As for characters, this is definitely what I like to see in a fiction. While all are skilled at their respective jobs, all are equally young, naive, varying levels of inexperienced and generally way out of their depth. We get to see them start at their lowest and least effective, which just makes every victory they experience and every win they get more and more meaningful as they try to work with the hands they've been dealt. The humor can be a bit hit or miss, but the 'plucky' atmosphere and trying to maintain good spirits in a dystopian reality where everything is going wrong is appreciated an