![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Lethal Company AU/Crossover Info
Jun. 17th, 2024 02:07 amLethal Company takes place in the Thistle Nebula, part of the Fading Nebulae, which has been populated by spacefaring humans from 'the Boat' for a minimum of several hundred years. Likely more. Either it incorporates alternate-history elements, or they reset the calendar year a long time ago, because it uses the same month and weekday names as the Gregorian calendar but had routine space travel and asteroid mining in 1951. The game is set in at least the late 2380s... by its own numbering. (And probably at least a decade later than that, but the most recent event given a date took place in 2387.) It seems to have changed less culturally or technologically in four hundred years than some places do in fifty, although there have been interplanetary wars in that time, most notably one in the 2100s that left a lot of giant robots lying around.
There's a thriving civilization spread across many habitable planets and moons, none of which the player gets to see in-game because your job is to salvage whatever valuable items are small enough to carry from industrial installations or derelict mansions on abandoned habitable to semi-habitable moons, such as those orbiting the gas giants No Service and Big Grin. Judging by how similar the biospheres of the moons you do visit are (i.e. you find the same types of monsters everywhere), they got that way by terraforming rather than evolving naturally. Most of the creatures you find on these moons are distant relatives of Earth animals that mutated at an extreme rate during the terraforming process, like the giant spiders or the four-winged corvids; some are probably of alien origin and clumsily shoehorned into Earth taxonomy; some could be a fusion of the two; some aren't biological at all, being paranormal or robotic in nature.
The supernatural has a middling amount of presence in this canon. Some of the monsters don't really make sense as living creatures nor robots unless they were deliberately designed by engineers with bizarre and impractical tastes, and one is obviously a homicidal human ghost. The Company is strongly implied to be keeping an eldritch horror in its main building, with one long-gone employee having complained in his personal logs of hearing voices from inside the building wall and being unable to remember anything between interviewing for the job and signing a work contract on the shuttle over.
The setting is apparently dystopian enough that the Company can routinely get its seasonal contract workers killed – often on purpose – without recourse from any regulatory bodies, losing their supply of new hires, or much of anything past a reputation for being a dangerous job. It may not be this bleak everywhere in the Thistle Nebula, but there are enough places where signing on with these guys looks like the best option.
FTL travel is accomplished through slipping in and out of hyperspace, an extradimensional space with exotic properties. Inside hyperspace, moving between the points corresponding to anywhere in the Thistle Nebula takes nearly no time at all, but transitioning between normal space and hyperspace delicately enough not to harm the crew of a manned spacecraft takes hours. (It's several times faster for unmanned craft but still not fast enough to work well for evasive maneuvers.) The spaceships the Company scavengers ride around in are fully autopiloted and can only visit a difficult-to-alter programmed set of destinations. They're hardwired to return to the closest spaceport with or without the crew at midnight, or if all life signs from the crew are lost before then, but apart from that the crew can choose which places on the menu they want to go in what order; the ship is programmed to tell them to turn in their quota of scrap every fourth day but can't force them to show up, although it can automatically detect that they haven't done that within the time limit and space them for it afterwards. Artificial gravity is standard on spacecraft and extremely reliable even during the realspace/hyperspace transition, so crews tend to get complacent about leaving piles of junk on the floor.
How did an Among Us impostor end up here? They bought a long-distance transport ticket, that's how. I wasn't ultimately planning to dwell on it much; Purple's far from home and most locals have never heard of their species, but they're not stranded. Being a shapeshifter, they can just as easily fit in with humanoids as with the Among-Us-canon silly little bean people. I do default to writing their Among Us experiences as having taken place among humans, especially for the crossover continuity, but beans aren't out of the question.
There's a thriving civilization spread across many habitable planets and moons, none of which the player gets to see in-game because your job is to salvage whatever valuable items are small enough to carry from industrial installations or derelict mansions on abandoned habitable to semi-habitable moons, such as those orbiting the gas giants No Service and Big Grin. Judging by how similar the biospheres of the moons you do visit are (i.e. you find the same types of monsters everywhere), they got that way by terraforming rather than evolving naturally. Most of the creatures you find on these moons are distant relatives of Earth animals that mutated at an extreme rate during the terraforming process, like the giant spiders or the four-winged corvids; some are probably of alien origin and clumsily shoehorned into Earth taxonomy; some could be a fusion of the two; some aren't biological at all, being paranormal or robotic in nature.
The supernatural has a middling amount of presence in this canon. Some of the monsters don't really make sense as living creatures nor robots unless they were deliberately designed by engineers with bizarre and impractical tastes, and one is obviously a homicidal human ghost. The Company is strongly implied to be keeping an eldritch horror in its main building, with one long-gone employee having complained in his personal logs of hearing voices from inside the building wall and being unable to remember anything between interviewing for the job and signing a work contract on the shuttle over.
The setting is apparently dystopian enough that the Company can routinely get its seasonal contract workers killed – often on purpose – without recourse from any regulatory bodies, losing their supply of new hires, or much of anything past a reputation for being a dangerous job. It may not be this bleak everywhere in the Thistle Nebula, but there are enough places where signing on with these guys looks like the best option.
FTL travel is accomplished through slipping in and out of hyperspace, an extradimensional space with exotic properties. Inside hyperspace, moving between the points corresponding to anywhere in the Thistle Nebula takes nearly no time at all, but transitioning between normal space and hyperspace delicately enough not to harm the crew of a manned spacecraft takes hours. (It's several times faster for unmanned craft but still not fast enough to work well for evasive maneuvers.) The spaceships the Company scavengers ride around in are fully autopiloted and can only visit a difficult-to-alter programmed set of destinations. They're hardwired to return to the closest spaceport with or without the crew at midnight, or if all life signs from the crew are lost before then, but apart from that the crew can choose which places on the menu they want to go in what order; the ship is programmed to tell them to turn in their quota of scrap every fourth day but can't force them to show up, although it can automatically detect that they haven't done that within the time limit and space them for it afterwards. Artificial gravity is standard on spacecraft and extremely reliable even during the realspace/hyperspace transition, so crews tend to get complacent about leaving piles of junk on the floor.
How did an Among Us impostor end up here? They bought a long-distance transport ticket, that's how. I wasn't ultimately planning to dwell on it much; Purple's far from home and most locals have never heard of their species, but they're not stranded. Being a shapeshifter, they can just as easily fit in with humanoids as with the Among-Us-canon silly little bean people. I do default to writing their Among Us experiences as having taken place among humans, especially for the crossover continuity, but beans aren't out of the question.