As some of you know, i get ideas for star trek from stranges places sometimes; I love mashing up things from other sources and adapting them to something else, in this case Trek. I also love the almost untapped reservoir of weird stuff that must happen to Star Fleet personel all the time. This particular idea started while watching Ancient Aliens, looking through a Prime Directive D20 book, and skimming some pdf files I have for D20/Pathfinder games, and I don't really know if it would make a good story, adventure, or set up for Star Trek 3 (JJ, call me!), but thought I would share it.
Set in the TOS era, a skeleton crew on an experimental ship is testing a new propulsion system, one the might change the future of space exploration (early transwarp?), but during a test flight, there is a dangerous malfunction, and one brave helmsman gets his crew off the ship before the ship falls into some kind of Hawking tunnel/wormhole. Before it closes, they manage to get data from the ship that would point to where it would exit the wormhole. Not wanting this tech to be lost, or worse, fall into enemy hands, they mount a rescue at the opposite end of the wormhole, which is near an inhabited M class planet. The race that lives there is just starting their early pre-warp stage, and should have warp drive in less than a century. (also, there have been reports of 'ghost ships', unidentified warp craft in the area)
Not detecting any trace of the ship, the rescue ships detect faint subspace signals and power signatures coming from various sites across the planet; troubling because all of this points to tech beyond the locals ability. Near one of these sites, they detect a possible human lifesign amongst a group of natives! Beaming down, they eventually find this person; it is the crewman, but he has been geneticly altered, and claims to have been on the planet for a millennia!
The Helmsman's tale goes something like this: The wormhole dropped him in this sector of space, but it also displaced him in time as well. He was thrown backwards a thousand years, with no way to get home. As he tried to figure out his situation, he was captured by machines working for an alien living on the planet he ended up on. This alien was the last of his kind, his race existing at the same time as the Preservers and Sargon's people. But while the Perservers moved races around to save them from extinction, this alien's people prefered to study races. This specific being was dying, and was engaged in a grand experiment he had artifically created a race, and was guiding it's development towards a technological civilization.
At first, the Helmsman was a curiousity for the Entity; he was studied, experimented upon, and interrogated. As time went on, the Entity became intruiged by the Star Fleet officer, and of all the things he represented. He presented his experiment to him, not as some god-like being but as equals, for he had come to realize that like him, this human was alone in the universe. The Helmsman was amazed at the scope of the project, but more amazed when the Entity asked him to become part of it; he would wander the world, walking amongst the people of this planet, learning, teaching, interacting, and guiding them in a way that the Entity could not. The procedures the human had endured would give him a body that would resist age, but also would allow the machines to recreate him after he had died. He would wander and periodically report findings to secret stations across the globe.
So, without any other options, the Helmsman became a figure of legend; a wanderer who went from nation to nation, teaching new ways, spreading peace, and disappearing when his work was done. Eventually, he was part of the myths of this world, the "spirit of knowledge" that was seen as the right hand of the Originator (the Entity), and opposing force of the Angel of Light (the Entities Android assistant). The human's interaction with the other two members of this trinity wanned as they approached the Information age, the last time he saw the Angel was the day the Entity passed on, but he continued to report and observe, even if he was more of a myth at this point. As his new people began to explore space, he was looking forward to a time when they would be given their birthright, the knowledge of the Entity.
The arrival of FED starships set something else in motion; the Angel, long since abandoning it's programming, has been doing it's own research. On a secret base on one of this planet's moons, it has built up an army made up of natives that worship it, and believe they are destined to rule not only their home world, but the galaxy itself.
And the helmsman must eventually chose: save this world that has always been his home, or leave it for the life he should have lead.
Ok, that's alot of typing; thoughts? I'll cover some of the other stuff later, like how would you even begin to stat a 1,000 year old character up?
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Originally Posted by Tricky
