Y'all have no idea how tempted I am to do more "Enterprise" era writing as #microfiction fanfic here.

I prefer being able to write in my own "sandbox," but damn, it's tempting to play in the world of Enterprise like I used to.

I LOVED writing and roleplaying stuff set in that timeline, and writing stuff that did the whole space navy thing a bit more justice. Even just correcting for Star Trek's longstanding "Only Ship in the Sector Syndrome" made for a fuller experience.

Naturally, I wrote a trans lesbian protag, the skipper of an Earth Starfleet vessel on the frontlines of the war with the Romulan Empire. This was the seeds of what became #MainersInSpace as she was from Brunswick.

It's canon in Trek that the remnants of the Earth militaries still exist in the 2140s-2150s, so she was trained by Starfleet's officer training program in Annapolis, and served in test piloting and other operations-division roles through 2156, when she received her first command.

And yeah, I explored a lot, there! Issues of longing and homesickness, queer issues, life at war, staying true to the good things in dark times. Having it in the ultimately hopeful world of Trek meant a lot.

@obrittuary @ShinRhino and some others on here remember them old days.

I don't write fanfic anymore because I want to be able to own my fiction, and you can't do that if you write fanfic-- it's not your IP. (though obviously, fanfic is legit and has its place-- I'm not knocking it!)

But damn, I'm tempted to make a new character and see that world through her eyes again.

I dunno if she'd command an NX class cruiser. I've written that before.

I feel like I'd be more interested to see someone younger, someone who's a reluctant warrior. (Naturally, she'd also be queer, because that's my jam.)

She'd be a linguist or an engineer or something else on the support end of things, whose career path and the exigencies of war led to her commanding an Intrepid-class escort ship, making do with limited resources and weapons while facing the Romulans in the howling dark.

So not only would she need to learn how to be an effective wartime skipper, but we'd also see her learning to navigate operating and fighting in a larger group, both in her Starfleet squadron and in the broader Coalition forces in the area.

There'd be long stretches of boredom and tedium. Brief bouts of hard fighting and sheer terror. Unbelievably incongruous moments of absurd humor.

And against that backdrop, the humanity of leading a small crew against long odds & trying to remember the cause they're fighting for

She'd have a girl she left behind her, but not Earthside-- on another ship, somewhere else, beyond the range of realtime comms, so they'd have to get creative in how they kept up with each other.

There'd be loneliness, deep and piercing and seemingly without end. She's trying to hold herself together in the name of holding her crew together-- and this is wartime. Relief isn't coming regularly or quickly.

I don't know if she'd be at Cheron, the war's (canonical) final battle, but she'd be fighting all the way to the end.

And after four years of this, peace would take a lot of getting used to.

I don't know if she'd stay on active duty after the signing of the Treaty of Algeron. But something tells me that even if she didn't, after awhile, she'd feel the call of space again, and once more leave the homeworld and head into the infinite dark.

So anyway.

Something like that.

*If* I were to write Enterprise fanfic.

*Vulcan eyebrow arch*

/thread