Brotherhood of the
BLACK FLAG

Black Flag Character Interviews

These interviews have been extracted and condensed from the Character Chat thread from The Webcomic List forums.

Interview with Bonnie Anne Talon

First off, what planet are you from?
I wasn't born on a planet. I was born on a space ship

Um... What's the biggest fashion mistake you ever made?
The real dreisal-fur coat I wore during boarding parties when I was 13. I was getting tired of my bloodthirsty kid 'kill, kill, kill' role so I switched to faux-sophistocate 'this is so boring daddy, could you please just finish them off so we can go home' and it was gastly. The news clips from then make me cringe. The pearls were kind of nice though. I still have them in my locker.

What's your favorite food?
:shrug: Food. It's fuel. I usually let the autochef pick the menu.

Baseball or football? (No, not that stuff the Americans play... real football)
Just a minute... oh! They're sports. Football looks fun, I wonder if we could adapt it to zero G? But why does the audience kill each other and not the players? Isn't that backwards?

What is your favorite color?
Green.

What is your quest?
Quest? I'd really like a ship of my own someday. It won't be easy. They don't like to elect women officers.

What is the flight velocity of a sparrow carrying a coconut?
According to these figures a sparrow does not have the weight bearing capacity to lift a coconut. So the answer is zero. I love trick questions. Ask me another one.

What's the webcomics character you like the least and why? Go on, speak openly.
Er. Me. It just makes me uncomfortable when the crew show me in those kinds of situations. My father says its an... um... 'normal release of natural male frustrations due to the inbalance of the sexes and the resulting limited opportunity for healthy recreational intercourse' and that it won't effect the way they treat me. But he usually has his hand on his rapier hilt when he says that.

How far have your travels taken you?
Are we counting the two furthest apart points, or total distance covered? Two points is... 482 light years. Total distance covered... um... still calculating. Maybe we should go on and come back to that later?

What's your favorite way to travel?
When my father let me take out the Treasure and it was just him and me, so I could pour on an extra g or two and make her just dance through deepspace. That was wonderful!

If you were rich, what would you do with the money? If you are already rich, what are you doing with the money?
Wealth is an illusion.

What's your opinion on Einstein's Theory of Relativity?
It was pretty clever thinking for a primative. I know most people rave over Dimentional Harmonics, but if you consider that Einstein came that close to quantum when he didn't even have a computer... wow!

Why do submarine sandwich shops offer another sandwich for free if you don't like their sandwich?
Why wouldn't they? They can recycle the rejected sandwitch, and all it costs is a bit of energy, right?

Are you married?
Married? Just a minute... oh! Archaic name for permanent exclusive personal contract. No, no personal contracts at all, actually. I think my father has been scaring everyone away.

What place in the world would you most want to live?
Which world? Not that it matters. I'd just like to live on any world for a while, to see what it's like.

:If you had to turn a person into a hat, would you wear him sometimes or give him away?
What's the point of turning someone into a hat if you didn't wear it afterwards? I mean, all that work to skin him and cure and shape the leather and all that? Unless you are giving him to one of his mates as a sort of extended revenge?

Have you ever considered the daffodil?
No. I had to ask Brand what one was, but the pics he sent are quite pretty, so I'm willing to consider them now. Do you know if any varieties have been adapted to environments with inconstant gravitational effects?

What kind of stuff do you have?
You mean, things, not data? Well, I'm wearing my dagger, a handblaster, and the ear-ring father gave me on my eighteenth birthday. Then there's the pearls, a dimond and emerald necklace with matching bracelets I took a fancy to a couple years back, a couple handcrafted hair clips, and a scarf that belonged to my mother that's real sardisalis silk -- those in my locker. There's two fur blankets and a hand woven tapestry throw on my bed. Um... Do my boots count? What about the space armor in bay 3 on the bridge... it's customized for me.

If you were trapped on a deserted island, could I have your stuff?
I'll do you a deal. If you can beat me in a fair fight you can have everything but the dagger, the earring, and my mother's scarf, even if I'm not trapped on a deserted island.

For those of you able to travel through time: What scientific principles were used to achieve this?
I'm not travelling through time.

Of course there are the people who think subspace capable ships must be travelling through time because their ability to get somewhere faster than light does cause people to see the things they do in reverse order -- seeing us arrive in one place before we can be seen to leave the other, for example, but that's what they call the observer's fallacy. Using the Cardston-Deightscherg equations it is possible to prove that the currently popular Ching sphere (or gobstopper) model of the universe does not allow any particle to be present at two events in the reverse order of any other particle, so no time paradox has occured, no matter when participating particles might arrive at some third event.

Or to be less technical, I could drop into subspace, take a short cut across the universe and arrive somewhere 25 light years away in, say, six months, and then look through a telescope, and see my father before he met my mother. But what good does that do me if I'm twenty five light years away? If I get in a ship and head back to where my father is, I will appear to travel forward through time, and will arrive one year after I left home, not fifty years before. So it is not possible for me to shoot my grandfather and prevent my own birth.

What are the politics like where you live? Here on Earth in 2007 A.D., things are rather messed up. Corruption and lies run rampant, in the U.S. and elsewhere. How is it when and where you are?
Well, it's a small community and our politics are pretty basic. My father is the elected captain of the Penzance, and he retains his office until someone else is voted into his place. He's a great captain, one of the best pilots in the galaxy, and one of the founding members of the Brotherhood -- who would dream of even suggesting he be replaced? And everyone seems happy enough with our first and second officers too.

Technically speaking, section watch heads are elected also, but that's usually just a technicality. We do vote, but there isn't really enough of a choice to make it worthwhile. My father is head of navigation (that is, the highest rated navigator on the ship), and because he has a lot of experience in security too, and his position of captain means he traditionally stands first watch, that makes it kind of obvious that he's going to be First Comp., our head of security is Second Comp, and our head of communications is Third Comp. And the same thing goes for the other three sections. Pretty basic.

The only interesting election I can think of recently was the one they had over on the Jolly Roger after Stede died. Instead of electing either the first or second officer as captain, they voted in someone I'd never heard of before. But it's not my ship and I have no idea what sort of politicking was involved.

Having problems with people lying sounds... odd. I know lots of people who tell lots of fun lies. I don't know why that would make them ineligible for election. I mean, it's what they do that counts, not what they say, right? And if you have access to ship secrets, you have to lie, don't you, or it's treason?

By corruption do you mean people trying to bribe crewmates to vote for them, or intimidate them by threatening them with the arena? My father would never allow that sort of thing.

Is the 'Hokey-Pokey' REALLY what it's all about?
I think it's actually all about 'turning yourself around'.