Hollow Spark
Here is the bullet point version, for convenience and quick reference: Hollow Spark – Bullet Summary
Cockpit / Flight Deck
The cockpit of the Hollow Spark sits at the ship’s forward end, nestled in a curved module partially protected by armored overhangs. Originally built to support a recon team of three to five, it now offers enough room for four crew members—so long as no one throws elbows during turbulence. A narrow corridor leads into the bulkhead and opens into the flight deck proper. The ceiling arches to just under 2.3 metres at its peak, tapering off toward the sides due to structural bracing.
Four primary stations define the space, each seated on shock-mounted rails with swivel functions and manual hardlocks for locking in during high-G burns. No two chairs match. All bear the scars of time.
The pilot seat, forward-left, connects directly to analogue flight controls—sticks, trim wheels, and a cluster of half-functioning dials. Burn marks and epoxy patches around the console hint at past damage, while a capped port beneath the seat suggests a long-forgotten upgrade. A faded kick-switch on the left side reads: "INERTIA OVERRIDE (DON’T)."
To the right, the co-pilot’s console handles navigation, long-range scanners, and manual comms. It's flanked by a sensor override board—an archaic panel of heat-shielded toggles. One screen labelled "Damp Nav. Array" emits a faint hum. No one knows what it means. Yet.
Behind the pilot sits the tactical station, currently dormant. Wiring protrudes from open slots meant for weapons controls, targeting overlays, and payload delivery. It's a promise of functionality waiting for purpose.
Opposite that, the engineering node monitors power routing, emergency coolant loops, and backup life-support. Its reactor levers are prominently exposed and scream: "don’t touch unless you mean it."
The cockpit smells like cold metal and worn vacuum lubricant, with the ghost of citrus cleaner lingering in the air. Harsh white strips illuminate the room, flickering where the wiring rebels. Materials are a mix of retrofitted impact plates and anti-flash shielding, bracketed to the ship’s original alloy skeleton. The deck plating bears the usual wear: boot scuffs, scratched corners, and a suspicious dent in the left armrest with a story no one tells.
Above, a wraparound display dome—deactivated by default—can project a 360° sensor feed, turning the ceiling into a panoramic viewport. Manual ventilation flaps remain in use under the console, with one scratched note reading: "jammed on descent, 7.12.24." A maintenance hatch, sealed and unlabelled, sits flush between the front seats. No one has dared pry it open.
This is not a luxury command centre. It’s the opposite—functional, gritty, and ready to fly on attitude and aftermarket parts. It belongs to someone like Mia: a pilot who doesn’t ask for permission but expects the ship to follow her lead anyway.
Living Quarters
Originally designed to house a team of twenty, the Hollow Spark’s living quarters were once a grid of bunk stacks, foldout lockers, and communal hygiene pods mounted to reinforced bulkheads. Standard layout for a recon cutter built to ferry special operations squads, salvage crews, or nav-tech detachments. At full capacity, it would’ve felt like trying to sleep in a crawling air duct. Thankfully, the current crew is fewer in number—and far better off for it.
The compartment has since been gutted and retrofitted to accommodate four long-haul personnel. It’s still spartan, still built for endurance over comfort, but it's survivable now. Even—almost—welcoming.
Along both sides of the chamber, four individual personal alcoves have been carved out of the old framework. Each alcove offers a wall-mounted bed with shock padding and a retractable privacy shroud, a reading light, one power outlet, and a narrow inset shelf. Storage is vertical: upcycled cryo-tubes or EVA gear bays now re-sealed and re-tasked into personal lockers. The soundproofing is decent—you won’t hear muttered secrets, but raised voices echo sharp and fast.
Between the alcoves runs a central walkspace, just wide enough for two to pass comfortably. Two fold-down utility benches are mounted into the walls—currently unused. With time, they might become a makeshift gym, a tinkering station, or a corner for quiet reflection. Overhead, a ceiling fan spins on borrowed time. It makes a noise that suggests personality. The crew is probably going to name it.
To the rear left sits the hygiene niche: a single-head sonic shower—functional, if a bit temperamental—and a fold-out toilet stall that tucks back into the wall when not in use. The seat is real. In deep space, that qualifies as luxury. A small mirror, chipped at the corner, hangs above a wall-mounted fluid dispenser labelled: "HydroClean v.4.12 (DO NOT DRINK)."
Opposite that, on the rear right, is the life support interface. A wall panel displays basic environmental stats: carbon saturation, pressure variance, and the age of the air filters. One prominent feature draws frequent side glances: a manual override crank labeled "Cabin Purge." No one has tested it. Yet.
Lighting defaults to a warm, low tone, but buzzes into a fluorescent hum under stress load. The atmosphere has the acoustics of a hospital welded to a freight tunnel. Clean, but distant. The air smells of metal, filtered ozone, and that one sock no one can find. The floor is lined with hard composite plating, with soft padding near each bunk. The footlockers make a satisfying clang when dropped.
No one's claimed a bunk. Not officially. There are no names, no decorations, no stashes—yet. But that’ll change. The space is waiting to be lived in. To get scratched, scuffed, cluttered, and personalised. It feels quiet. A bit cold. But deeply ready to become someone’s home.
Common Area & Galley
Located just aft of the living quarters, the Hollow Spark’s common area serves as the ship’s social core — the place where meals are shared, plans are debated, wounds are patched, and the occasional story is told (and believed, at least temporarily). Nestled above one of the main thermal routing ducts, the space stays comfortably warm, though the ductwork below occasionally groans in a tone that no one trusts but everyone tolerates.
At the heart of the room sits a hexagonal table, bolted to the deck and showing its age through scuffed edges and a melt scar left by someone who got a little too casual with a plasma cutter. A non-functional holojack rests at its centre, labelled simply: “Chimes? Maybe someday.” Two bench seats are fixed in place, while two free-floating stools can be latched into floor brackets when the ship accelerates. Underneath the table, a floor hatch waits for someone to decide what qualifies as an "emergency stash." For now, it’s empty.
The galley wall, to the left, carries the ship’s limited culinary ambitions. A nutrient recycler dominates the centre — theoretically capable of turning standard protein packs into something resembling food, though the results vary in texture, taste, and basic plausibility. Beside it is an old gas burner salvaged from a planetary lander’s kitchen, which absolutely should not work anymore, but somehow still does. A fold-out shelf provides prep space, joined by a magnetic knife strip (empty) and a spice rack containing three mystery vials: one red, one green, and one that dares no label.
Above, the lockers are filled with mismatched bowls, mugs, and a single unopened bottle of what someone optimistically labelled "crew morale enhancer." A coffeemaker, no longer functional but bolted in place like a shrine, completes the setup.
A wall console near the galley holds a flickering data screen and jackpoint, meant for mission logs and status updates. At present, it cycles diagnostic bloatware and a perpetually idle chess app. Beside it, a portable comms unit rack now doubles as a crew whiteboard—its latest message reads: "Don't eat the green vial. Again."
The room’s atmosphere is utilitarian but honest. Indirect lighting in warm tones gives it a softer feel, though one strip flickers whenever the engines fire up. The flooring is composite with foam padding beneath the seating, one panel scorched at the corner in a story no one's told yet. The air carries a mix of spice dust, cleanser, and the faint trail of someone’s forgotten laundry—probably from two rooms away.
Unwritten traditions are already forming: Whoever cooks, doesn’t clean. Whoever eats the last ration bar adds it to the “We Need” list. Whoever tells a story at the table gets believed — for now.
For the moment, the common area is quiet. But its walls expect noise. They’re ready for laughter, arguing, dice clattering across metal, and someone leaning back too far in a chair that definitely wasn’t made for leaning. One day soon, this space will hold confessions, jokes, and the weight of someone’s final words. But today, it’s just clean, a little worn, and wide open.
Hangar Bay
The Hollow Spark’s hangar is the beating, clanking heart of its utility — a space originally conceived for tactical deployment. Dropcraft, gunships, mobile labs, or strike team ferries: the bay was built for rapid deployment and retrieval. Over the years, however, the hangar has evolved — or devolved — depending on who you ask. Its intended function remains, but now it serves with modular flexibility and a distinct sense of improvisation.
At roughly twenty percent of the ship’s total volume, the hangar feels cavernous. There's vertical room to spare, a lattice of scaffolding above, and an atmosphere that suggests the space was never fully finished — or has been “un-finished” multiple times in a cycle of hasty repairs and field retrofits.
The deck plating is reinforced and patterned in a universal grid, with foldaway tie-downs embedded flush. At centre lies a drop cradle, currently empty, sized for a mid-weight craft — anything from a drone shuttle to a rapid-insertion gunship. Magnetic lock pads are scattered along the deck and bulkheads for vertical cargo stabilisation. These require six seconds of sparking and a confident slap to reactivate, preferably in that order.
Access comes via two pressure-sealed side hatches, sized for EVA suits. One bears the scorched remnants of a mercenary logo — too melted to read. The rear bay doors, once atmospheric-rated, now seal well enough for vacuum. They open with a mechanical rasp like an old throat clearing its discontent. Above, a catwalk connects through the crew ladderway, leading to a safety observation platform, two empty tool cages, and an ammo locker that looks like it lost an argument.
Along the ceiling and sidewalls, modular mounting rails allow the hangar to shift purpose. Cargo nets and stretchers are standard, though weapon racks and hammocks have also made appearances. Auto-loader arms, retracted into housing on both flanks, hiss like steam dragons when powered — their age obvious, their strength unimpeachable. One docking port remains standard. The other has been clearly modified, likely for cargo no one was supposed to ask about.
A maintenance console hangs on the portside wall. It’s held together by stubborn wiring, faith, and a generous amount of electrical tape. An empty stim-patch wrapper clings to the frame. The readout scrolls in a language familiar only to those who’ve worked blacksite salvage contracts.
The hangar is lit by harsh industrial bars — two of which flicker unpredictably, one of which strobe-cycles with no discernible trigger. Floorline amber lights provide guidance in zero-G. The scent profile is telling: lubricants, scorched coolant, ozone, aged rubber, and something that might be dried blood or merely melted polymer. No one’s sure, and no one’s eager to check.
This space holds the ship’s hidden potential — its battlefield, its bargaining chip, its smuggler's grin. One day, it could cradle a gunship. The next, it could disguise contraband behind a false wall or serve as a makeshift trauma ward. It listens. It waits. And like the Spark itself, it adapts to whatever its crew dares make of it.
Engineering Bay
Tucked deep into the ship’s aft lower quarter, the Hollow Spark’s engineering bay lies hidden beneath the living quarters and sealed behind a reinforced central bulkhead. Entry is possible only through two narrow access corridors or a vertical shaft ladder, beside which someone once scrawled “NOT WHILE SPINNING” in faded paint — advice still occasionally repeated, only half-jokingly.
This is no showcase deck. It wasn’t built for beauty, comfort, or calm. The air here is arid, the lights strobe like anxious heartbeats, and the ambient temperature shifts with every reactor cycle. It’s the part of the ship that hums with barely contained power, quietly reminding everyone how thin the line between function and failure can be.
At the centre is the main core chamber, a hexagonal space rising two full decks high. Its walls are heat-baffled and stained with years of quiet tension. The floor is a raised metal grate — beneath it, water reclaimers hiss and heat sinks hum softly. The ship’s fusion array lives here, cradled in a rotating magnetic cage at the chamber’s centre. When active, the core glows a faint and ominous blue, the air charged with the low roar of something vast and storm-like. Plasma conduits run overhead in exposed lines, feeding propulsion shafts deeper in the aft.
Along one side, the capacitor bank stands like a silver spine, stacked vertically and pulsing with a slow, steady ping as it balances charge across the system. A maintenance panel nearby reads: "DO NOT ADJUST FIELD TUNING DURING BURN." The dent in that panel suggests someone once did. Once.
The engineering console, bolted into the starboard wall, offers oversight on everything that keeps the Spark in motion — coolant flow, reactor status, magnetic nozzle calibration, grav-thrust harmonics. The overlays flicker not from malfunction, but age. Near the base is a manual override for the gravity dampers, locked in place and clearly labelled. You could override it. But should you?
Beneath the grate, the life support tap draws off power from a stabiliser circuit — which is why sneezing during cooldown cycles is strongly discouraged. Behind two blast-shielded compartments sits the backup fission cell, locked away for emergencies only and requiring a signed waiver to access. The fact that the waiver still hangs nearby suggests no one’s been desperate enough. Yet.
The bay carries a strange, uneasy music: the deep resonance of reactor hum, the high-pitch tremble of field stabilisers, the faint ticking of a capacitor reaching full charge. The air smells of metal, ozone, and industrial dust, with just a faint undercurrent of something sweetly unexplainable — cinnamon, maybe. Nobody has traced the source.
Lighting here shifts with the ship’s state. In startup or power cycles, everything is bathed in dim red; under stable load, the light cools to a sterile white. During dips, emergency yellow strips flicker on, as if the walls themselves start to worry.
The tone of this space is never relaxed. It’s a place where someone might be forced to crawl inside a magnetic manifold with only a wrench and a prayer. It’s the place where mistakes are loud. And it’s where, one day, the reactor might pulse in a rhythm even Chimes doesn’t recognise.
Reactor Subsection: Takeheshi-Smith Subspace Core
Deep in the rear belly of the Hollow Spark, past a tight access corridor and two bulkhead doors that never quite close right, lies the ship’s beating core: the Takeheshi-Smith Subspace Reactor. At first glance, it’s underwhelming — a squat, ringed structure half-buried behind a weather-scarred fusion chamber, wrapped in cable bundles and reeking faintly of scorched metal and stale ozone. But once it wakes, no one mistakes it for anything ordinary.
Startup always follows the same ritual. The fusion igniter hums low — slow at first, then faster, rising into a high-pitched rattling like magnetic teeth grinding in sync. The noise builds, flutters, pulses. The air grows dense and charged. Behind the shielding coils, a flicker begins: blue-white, erratic, like lightning trapped in a jar. Just as it feels ready to tear loose from its mounts — it locks. The pulse ceases, and a new presence settles in the room: stillness, thick and absolute. The subspace tap has engaged.
This isn't rare tech in the wider universe. Most modern ships use some version of it — drawing power from a fold just outside conventional spacetime. It’s routine. It’s reliable. It’s safer than the alternatives, at least in theory. But aboard a ship like this — scarred, patched, and held together by instinct and persistence — it still feels like rolling dice with the void. You don’t command this reactor. You request. And you hope it answers.
The fusion array doesn’t stay lit for long. It’s too small to carry the ship alone — its sole job is to crack open the interdimensional fold and trigger the siphon. Once the subspace stream stabilises, the real power hums through: slow at first, then steady — flowing into the drives, the lights, the heat sinks, the grav-thrust systems. It powers the push, the warmth, the spark.
No one knows exactly where the energy comes from. The documentation calls it a "mathematically bound extraphysical reservoir," which is corporate for don’t ask. But the draw is clean. As long as it’s respected — coolant flow steady, pressure tuned, no erratic field cycling — it provides.
It runs. And it remembers.
The engineers who designed it — Takeheshi and Smith — didn’t build for beauty. And yet there’s something uncanny in the symmetry. The way the light pulses within. The way, if you stare too long at the central manifold during startup, it almost seems like something is watching from inside. Not directly. Just… pressure.
On a ship like this, it’s not quiet. It’s not graceful. But it works. Every time the Hollow Spark surges forward at a perfect 1G pull, you feel it — like a note plucked on a string that stretches just beyond the known.
That’s the reactor. And it doesn’t just power the ship.
It binds it.
Crawlways & Systems Guts
Where most ships conceal their maintenance paths behind polished panels and pressurised latches, the Hollow Spark wears hers like bones under bruised skin. Subtlety was abandoned cycles ago. When systems falter — and they do — no one calls for a technician. You grab a wrench, find the nearest opening, and crawl in.
The ship’s crawlways form a tangled spiderweb: a network of passage tubes, cable trenches, and auxiliary vents winding through every deck. Some are just wide enough to shuffle through on elbows and knees. Others demand a back crawl with your head twisted sideways to dodge low-hanging conduits. The walls are raw alloy and old black insulation, pocked by rivets and gouged by decades of field repairs. Tags stencilled in fading paint guide the way — most helpful, some overwritten in grease pencil with sarcastic commentary. A few just say "Don’t. Just don’t."
Cables snake through in thick bunches, wrapped in heat shielding, old rope, magnetic ties, and — in one infamous spot — a repurposed scarf. You can trace the primary power trunk from the engineering bay all the way forward to the flight deck, provided you're willing to slide under a hydraulic bypass that hums ominously when exhaled upon. Coolant lines, fluid conduits, emergency bypasses, and atmo tubes weave in and out of reach, layered like organs behind old ribs.
Somewhere midship, an unlabeled breaker panel features a scratched-on warning: "Don’t touch. Seriously. (Looking at you, Siz).” Nearby, a pressure fracture has been patched with a playing card and epoxy. No one’s sure who did it, but it’s held longer than it should.
Lighting comes sporadically from utility strips — some functional, some only flickering when no one’s watching. In low-G, or during alignment shifts, the crawlways creak and whisper. Regulars learn to interpret the sounds: three clicks and a hum? Normal capacitor cycle. Four clicks followed by a static pulse? Time to reroute power, fast. If the lights go pink, it’s already too late.
There is no official map. You learn the layout by bruises, burn marks, and memory. Everyone develops a preferred route. Everyone avoids at least one.
And then, there are the doors. Not real doors, but hatches — sealed, handleless, half-covered in dust or etched with sigils no one recognises. Ask Chimes about them and he’ll answer politely, maybe even offer a historical anecdote. But not about the doors. Never about the doors.
