Inter-real Vessels
The shiny, new technology of Inter-real Travel requires a shiny, new type of vessel. A futuristic hybrid of psionics and tech, each ship in the Fleet behaves and presents differently. But they all run on the same principle--in order to traverse a place of unreality that primarily reminds people of a dream, mind magic is required. Psychoportation is the name of the game in the Fleet.
Under the Hood
A medical professional who walked randomly onto an inter-real vessel and into the engine room would at first think, "Wow, this is a weird med bay. Where are the lounge chairs for the patients?" Their likely confusion would stem from the fact that there are multiple Neurals--a technology used for many medical purposes in Artemisia--arrayed around the walls of the engine room. But upon closer inspection, they would realize that some of the neurals are not configured like standard medical equipment, their input and output cables--usually hooking up beneath thera-chairs--instead heading into another room. Then, upon even closer inspection, they would realize that other pieces of machinery--mainly the units with glowing blue bits, are tech they cannot identify at all.
The engine room in a Fleet vessel does not, in fact, contain anything like any kind of propulsion engine. Instead, it contains all the components necessary to take a prepared telepath with the proper key and turn them into a pilot--tapping into and enhancing parts of their nervous system by way of the neurals and empowering them to psychoport the ship and its inhabitants by way of the key's energy conducted through the psionic machinery. This lucky telepath fabricates the ship, propels it through the dreaming void, and keeps it on track throughout the entire voyage, even when they're not strapped in. And, as Deverick would observe, "That's a whole helluva lot harder than bending a spoon with your brain."
Needless to say, as exciting and important as protecting and transporting dozens of people may be, the role of pilot is not one that crewmembers are lining up to assume.
The Driver Picks the Radio Station
Just as in the regular parts of Artemisia, the pilot does indeed choose the radio station. Unlike in the regular parts of Artemisia, a pilot on the Fleet does not receive this privilege by the good graces of the passengers--it's more that large parts of the vessel are literally created through their brain.
While some aspects of piloting are set-and-forget, meaning that a pilot is not confined to the pilot's seat at all times throughout a journey, the process is always using odd corners of their brain to generate and maintain the vessel. This may be why their mental, emotional, and even physical state influences the environment on the ship. The temperature may change, lights flicker or short out, the look or even layout of the place alter itself. And they do, of course, set the ambient music. Upsetting the pilot can have consequences that prove anything from inconvenient to outright dangerous, depending on what challenge the dreaming void is currently posing them.
These challenges vary because different places in the dreaming void are dominated by different ambient emotional states with huge amounts of variation and nuance, and none of them are holding still. When deep in the phases of travel that involve being strapped into the pilot's seat, setting the ship on course to pass through one of these areas involves the telepath picking up on what the void is throwing out there, and then harmonizing their own emotional state with it, at which point they can use their thinking to drive. The more in-harmony they can get, the faster and more easily they can get the ship through that particular part of the void, like they put superior fuel in the tank. Avoiding a particular danger area, conversely, means not getting sucked into its emotion, which can be like trying not to think of a purple bearded dragon. The pilot sometimes relies on the use of telepathy-dampening Psio-meds-meds to achieve it.
At times, the thoughts and emotions required to maintain course can be reduced through neural enhancement to a sort of background operation in the mind, leaving the pilot free to leave the chair and interact with other people. While a relief for them, and necessary to stave off Pilot's Madness, a different danger does enter the equation at that point. There's a reason that the room with the pilot's chair in it seals others out. If a conversation or encounter triggers a strong enough dissonant emotion in the pilot, or disrupts their thinking, it can steer the ship in a different direction, change its layout, or potentially cause parts of it to cease existing, which is an undesirable outcome in the ship that is protecting one from the void.
While different emotions can derail the pilot depending on where in the void the ship is, some states are just about always bad--unless the void is specifically demanding them. Anger, fear, and pain are all very difficult to think well through, and can cause serious damage to the ship being piloted.* Despair makes piloting impossible. For reasons that nobody entirely understands, the pilot bleeding pretty much at all can quickly unravel the psionics holding the ship together, and the pilot losing consciousness outside of a very specific trance state that the neurals in the pilot's chair induce can cause catastrophic ship failure. This essentially means that sleep is out of the question during the voyage. Regular use of trance and the fact that time is not passing in the typical way out in the void are the only reason that pilots don't succumb to severe sleep deprivation.
*There are exceptions to this rule. Deverick, for example, is one of very few pilots on the Fleet who can successfully pilot a ship using his own anger and pain for fuel. He's just metal that way.
The Keys to the Fleet
As though all of the preceding responsibilities and hardships weren't enough to make piloting deeply unattractive to most people, there's a final factor that takes it into territory where only the masochistically conscientious or the slightly mad will venture: the situation with the Keys to the Fleet.
Tech and the low-level mind magic even of an enhanced telepath will only get a ship so far in the void. The keys bring the magic ingredient that makes it all work. Each is an individual object--usually a colorful variation of a dragon combined with a toothy key--that positively reeks of psionics and is kept quite literally close to the chest, often beneath the pilot's shirt, on a cord around their neck.
As one would expect, possessing a key is what allows the pilot to get the ship up and running, and usually there's a minimum of two keys with their bearers aboard a ship at any given time, because accidents happen and Artemisia is inclined to harm telepaths these days.
Tales from the Recruiting Office
Outside of exceptional circumstances, a person cannot pilot a ship without a direct link to a key, which is where the whole business gets sticky for most potential recruits. Pretty much anyone, normies included, can tell without even touching a key that it's off-the-charts psionic--like, there's enough mind-magic and personality there to overflow a large urn, so much that it feels wrong coming off of this tiny key, which is starting to look kind of fragile and like it might be outright pulverized by what it's trying to contain. For some recruits, that's enough to get them asking questions like "What the hell am I looking at here?" before any further terms are discussed.
When it's also explained that not only will they be expected to touch this thing and wear it on a daily basis, they will also have to allow it to get very up close and personal with their very being and graft its psionics directly into their soul and magic (their "dragon," in common Artemisian parlance), even very restrained recruits usually have questions.
Healthier people will ask, "Okay, yeah, but what even is it?"
To which the response is, "We don't entirely know. It comes from Sylvia. Charl probably had something to do with it, too."
Follow-up questions have included:
"Is that why it looks all bodged together and like it might fall apart from--whatever it's holding?"--Alexandria, Current Pilot
"What in Artemisia is...carried, no...kept in...occupying this thing?"--Jerarr Moz, Backup Pilot
"Will it give me laser eyes? I mean, I'd put up with that for laser eyes."--"Laser Eyes", Current Pilot
"How much personal risk am I assuming by allowing these unregulated psionics to merge with me?"--Juan, Experimental Normie Candidate
And several riffs on "You're fucking kidding, right?"
One quiet young woman, Rhonda, who did ultimately choose to assume the risk and take on a key and a ship, astutely asked, "What happens if I do this and we get separated?"
That turned out to be an important safety question, as she was told, "We don't know exactly, but if you are almost certain that you will be killed, tortured, or forcibly separated from this key, touch it and tell it that you are in danger. It has a failsafe where it pops you in a pocket dimension inside itself. It won't be able to pull you back out, but we have people who can. Anyway, it then teleports you both as close to the back-up pilot as it can in a couple of seconds and hands the ship off to them."
"That doesn't sound so bad..." Rhonda had opined, looking the recruiter dead in the eye and clearly expecting them to just tell her the "but" statement attached to this. The recruiter added, not a little flustered:
"Worst case scenario, it can't find the back-up and does an emergency separation from you to bond with someone else. We're told that's potentially painful, but if someone gets it away from you it won't be able to hang around and grab you before it teleports away. It prioritizes the ship's safety over yours, you see. At that point it will have to separate from you anyway, to save the ship from the repercussions of what happens to you. Charl says that the damage that would cause you would almost certainly be catastrophic. So avoid it at all costs."
And that was the version of events designed not to scare people into not signing on.
A Tale of Two Skeleton Keys
As spooky as people find the keys--one person said they give them a feellng in their stomach similar to "that memetic photo of the creepy, uncanny-valley bird...woman...thing, you know, that one carving"--having them aboard can be useful. Though the primary purpose of the keys is to allow travel, each key can be leveraged to work at least one other psionic miracle.
Take, for example, the two keys that sustain the Element. The secondary one has considerable healing capabilities, and has patched a few crew members together well enough that they didn't have to seek emergency medical care on the mainland. Incidentally, this particular key usually draws fewer horrified looks, and its latest bearer, Robbie, said that "It's still weird, don't get me wrong. But it gives me that feeling like--well, like when a person's situation has been horrible, but then they've turned around and done something really good--like making music that helps people get by. And you're like, take that, bad guys! You know, that weird happiness, that bad stuff didn't ruin everything?"
The primary key for the Element, meanwhile, is the one that drew the comment about the bird-lady carving. The psionics lurking in it are hollow, angry, and dark. When Deverick first held it, he observed, "Feels like it's going to stab me," and indeed one of the functions of the key is to produce a defensive psionic blade in an emergency. Deverick has never needed it, but Bernard, who runs the Element and (quite unusually) has access to the key via Deverick, has used it, and tells people that it leaves no wounds, just "messes them up" long enough to get away. Then, fixing his interlocutor with eye contact and clearly watching for a reaction. he'll start describing in loving detail how the last one crumpled to the floor, was screaming and completely overwhelmed, and so on. That's usually the point at which Deverick tells him, with a carefully cultivated air of it all being no big deal, "Can we try not convincing the new people you're a violent murder looking for a place to happen? Asking for a friend."
Regardless of Bernard's reputation, even he doesn't know everything that the primary key does, but he has opined that some of the people he used to know in the criminal world would be able to put the key to very, very bad uses if they ever suspected that it existed.
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