Hello, you Claret and Cobalt world. Is there anything new out there? Anything? I don’t suppose so. I’d try a little wind-up piece about the Rapids, but I’m not so good at the preconceived winding up of others (or... am I?) Instead, I thought I might ramble on a bit about something or other, and you’ll just have to deal with that. Or, I suppose, not read it. That’s always a possibility.
If you remember, I once discussed which of our players would make excellent pirates, and that was all a bit of fun, wasn’t it? At least — I had fun, and I suppose with a blog that’s the most important part. Well, in that vein, I thought I might address another absolutely pressing topic that can’t go without attention: Real Salt Lake... in... SPACE! (If you are adamantly against science fiction, I suggest you turn away right now. Serious. Or if you like good literature. Or any literature. This definitely isn’t that...)
Imagine, if you will, that our boys are on a deep-space exploration adventure aboard the great ship Claret and Cobalt, a member ship of the Galactic Federation. We’ve been out for four years under the jurisdiction of one Capt. Jason Kreis, and through a series of mishaps, we’ve ended up adrift in the dark regions of space. If you remember, our adventurers have been before, having narrowly made it to important competitions — the Great Galactic Cup, the Interquadrant Champions League — as, you see, they’re part of a group of ships out seeking adventure before going to one grand (if recreational) battle every year. How they measure years in space, I’m not entirely sure.
The ship adrift, Capt. Kreis can be assured of one thing by his chief engineer, one Commander Garth Lagerwey: The great ship, adrift as it may be, will be at the Great Galactic Cup — and whether it’s there on quarter-power or full-power, it’s going to make it. But among the crew, trouble brews...
Crew chief Mr. Beckerman, a man who defected from the enemy’s stronghold not long after the Claret and Cobalt launched, has been confined to the brig until the tournament starts. Normally a very calm man, a rush of blood saw him violate several confederation laws before he shuttled off to an intergalactic battle — very odd stuff, indeed. His normally reliable crewmates have been afflicted by a number of space viruses, and some of them are doubting their own abilities.
The strong, defiant security officers Borchers and Olave — working together in the Borlave Unit on lower decks — have found themselves often without the assistance of the rest of the crew, and some high-profile mistakes have seen them taking some criticism across the Galactic Federation, some of which has been justified. The reliable pair a bit shaken like a fine martini (or is that stirred?), the great ship Claret and Cobalt has lost its way.
But to send it adrift? That took something altogether different: A bout of incompetence from the engineering crew, a flurry of bad decisions from the astrometrics lab — well, it’s clearly all gone a bit upside-down for the crew, though perhaps that’s the wrong metaphor, as upside-down in space is an awfully strange way of speaking about orientation along the three axes.
Kreis, worried to no end, is basically ready for the year’s journey to end, hoping, perhaps, that the crew will get their act together for the Great Galactic Cup and put an end to the worries that have plagued the year. The legendary words the captain spoke on his Day of Recognition, he hopes, will ring through the crew’s ears: “Onward and upward, RSL!”
And that, friends, is why I don’t write science fiction about football clubs.
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