Baker727483- known in short as "Baker Seven-Two"- is an Android manufactured by the Horizon Adaptive Technologies Partnership broadcasting out of Titan Garden's E-District studios. The host of Beneath The Stars: Tales from the Void, Baker727483 tends to speak in a dry, flat tone, carrying himself with a sort of upright grace. He believes firmly in the quiet dignity of all life, and that even in our darkest hours we carry some sort of inimitable element about us, impossible to quantify, that sets us apart as citizens of the stars. He is courteous and inquisitive, qualities that pair neatly with his emotive flatness, giving him a vibe that is perfect for the sort of show he hosts. He never really "breaks character", on or off the set, he's always just like that.
Beneath The Stars: Tales from the Void is a television program playing every Monday, Wednesday and Friday on Channel 32. It's a show which explores the curiosities of starship travel in an age without faster-than-light technologies- space is expansive and mysterious, not everyone is capable of navigating it and journeys from one planet to another take time, time you spend exposed to chance and uncertainty. Space is home to things that live within the vacuum, as well as things which.... don't... live in the vacuum, and the longer you're out there the more likely you are to encounter something unexpected or unexplainable. Many starfaring crews have stories to tell about odd encounters with things that they later learn shouldn't be, with xenofauna that defy characterization, and with the ghosts of travelers who aren't ready to disembark from their tattered shipwrecks, and on Beneath The Stars: Tales from the Void, Baker727483 presents and narrates dramatizations of these stories for you, the viewer, wherever you may be.
As a Horizon droid, Baker727483 has a unique set of three Job Cartridges synergizing to create his skillset. He has Oration & Public Speaking, Forensic Science and History of Parapsychology cartridges loaded into his deck, which combine to give him a studious understanding of the scientifically immeasurable and a sense for how best to present his findings. He chooses to display his emotive facial screen as crackling CRT static, to add to the mysterious tone of Beneath The Stars. Off the set he will display facial emotes normally, and sometimes his fans almost won't recognize him without his snowy static display playing.
The gimmick of Beneath The Stars: Tales from the Void is that each episode features two stories, one of which is real and the other is fiction. Stories are always set in space and generally have a supernatural or uncanny bent to them. Sometimes a story can be about a long-haul vessel stopping in at a space station just as they are about to run out of fuel, only to arrive at their destination and be told no such station exists. A story can be about Xenofauna appearing to "attack" a ship, pushing it off course in an undesirable direction which ends up sparing the ship from calamitous impact with a runaway warpskipper. There can be stories about a ship activating a malfunctioning warp drive and finding themselves dipping too deep into subspace, and the changes that unfold upon the ship and its crew in the months to follow. Or there might be a tale of a ship picking up a spectral hitchhiker, unwittingly passing through the point in space where a ghost met a gristly end, alone for centuries, now latching onto the first physical vessel to pass by and become their new anchor into the living universe.
A lot can happen on a long voyage through the depths of space, and people from all worlds find these odd tales to be strangely captivating. The twist is: which one really happened and which one did not? At the end of each episode Baker727483 invites viewers to connect to the Holonet and cast their votes on which of the episode's two tales was true. The show ends with a review of the previous episode's stories, a reveal of the percent breakdown from viewer votes and a reveal on which tale was the taller of the two; the results of the current episode are likewise shared at the end of the next, affording viewers on starships themselves time to watch the episode and cast their votes along the relay network back to Titan. Baker727483 loves to ham up the big reveal in his flat & dry manner, and will compliment viewers on an overwhelmingly successful vote. The catch there is: space is really weird, and it's not extremely obvious which tales are actually fictitious. A lot can happen up there.
Both of our rival salvage companies- both Timberwolf Reclamation & Demolition and Red Raven Towing & Salvage- have had encounters with the unknown dramatized on episodes of Beneath The Stars: Tales from the Void. As they generally work with the lost and derelict remnants of sentient life's journeys between worlds they both frequently find themselves, for lack of a better description, untangling points of intense emotional resonance. Contrasting this, part of the fun of a crew's story making its way onto Beneath The Stars is the dramatization, with crews and their friends watching what liberties the production studio takes in recreating their tales, with actors portraying them and their likeness in an inevitable but amusing degree of imperfection. It's always funny until it's you being reenacted, though, and everyone gets their turn.
An episode featuring Timberwolf retold their report of dismantling a fairly recent-looking shipwreck just inside the band of Pluto's orbit, cutting it down for ease of transport. The crew's heavy machine operator, Jack, set about the routine duties of working the Ermine's robotic arm and laser cutter, when something began to interfere with his controls. Bryce and Mahnoor reported a crackling, almost inaudible signal coming across the comms channel, like a voice pleading for help. Clayton, the crew's linguist, decoded the voice as being an uncommon Europan dialect, wearily begging "don't cut me", "don't take me away". Emily insisted on suiting up and boarding the ship to oust whatever pranksters are interfering with their operations- she returned to the Ermine shortly thereafter, pale-faced with her cyberoptic lenses clicking uncontrollably, insisting the team just pack up and go. The Timberwolf crew reported the ship data as salvaged and left it where it was.
Red Raven's episode highlighted an encounter they had with a lost cruise ship. While they were finishing up a salvage job they'd been dispatched by Carol to tow a nearby ship in distress back to the nearest stardock for repair. They had enough fuel so they decided to accept the call, as the ship was not far from their location. They arrived to find a ship that looked generations out of date, adrift but still showing their lights on. Slug, Keera, Doc and Clover boarded the ship while Amy, Lydia, Haley and Bell fastened the Jackrabbit's magnetic top deck beneath the drifting ship to tow and haul. The boarding party insist they met with the ship's captain, observed the ship's passengers sitting in the hallways, asking when they'd arrive at their destination port; they requested help from the cruise ship's crew, who agreed but never showed up where they were asked to be. When the Red Raven crew reassembled on the Jackrabbit II they began the routine work of towing the cruise ship to stardock, but when they radioed in their approach at Outpost 381 the control tower informed them their tow cables were adrift in space above them, and that no vessel accompanied them on their arrival. Carol denies issuing the dispatch order. Scarlet insists this is why she prefers to stay firmly on the ground in the crew's Titan office.
