Hello everyone.

Welcome back to Epic Realm's Action Adventure Channel.

Before we get started on this new season, I want to do a quick check-in.

How is everyone feeling about Control

Alt Destroy? That ending threw me for a loop, but it was so good, right? If you need more virtual

reality adventures in your life, might I recommend the Other World trilogy by Jason Siegel

and Kirsten Miller? I know I talked about it before, but it is worth

mentioning again. It's an amazing series that will keep you on the edge of your seat. But I know,

we are here for podcasts. And this season, it's time for us to leave Earth entirely. Yes, that's

right. We're going back to space. Our next show is The Vela, starring Robin Miles, and written by Yun Ha Lee, Becky Chambers, River Solomon, and S. L. Huang.

Buckle up because you are in for a fun ride with soldiers for hire, missing refugee ships, and a galaxy-destroying environmental crisis. Well, that last part

actually sounds horrible, but it will be entertaining. So let's go. I'm your host, Faith McQuinn,

and this is the Vela, episode one. Former Corporal Asala Siku lay prone on the rooftop of Kayam's largest hydrogen processing factory,

the pat of her finger, just grazing the trigger of an 18100 B sniper rifle.

The spotting stats flickered through her eyepiece, measuring distances and wind speeds, a

translucent overlay of her vision that she barely noticed even as she absorbed it all.

Her cheeks stayed welded against the stock of the rifle, as if both woman and weapon

were carved from a single chunk of iron, and even her breath didn't shift the rifle's sights more than a hair.

Lines from an old anonymous poem layered themselves gently through her waiting mind.

The sand so red, a sky so blue, but not the blue of home.

The sky on Chaim was blue above her now.

Always blue.

...